Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512808285

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Gazing Toward Jerusalem: Space and Perception in Pearl
3. Reading Signs: Purity’s Eyewitness in History
4. Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside
5. The Framing of the Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
6. Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Seeing the Gawain-Poet

Seeing the Gawain-Poet Description and the Act of Perception Sarah Stanbury

Ujljl University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

University of Pennsylvania Press M I D D L E AGES S E R I E S Edited by Edward Peters Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History University of Pennsylvania

A complete listing of the books in this series appears at the back of this volume

Copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stanbury, Sarah. Seeing the Gawain-poet : description and the act of perception / Sarah Stanbury. p. cm. — (Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3109-0 ι. Gawain and the Grene Knight. 2. Visual perception in literature. 3. Patience (Middle English poem) 4. Purity (Middle English poem) 5. Pearl (Middle English poem) 6. Description (Rhetoric) 7. Rhetoric, Medieval. I. Title. II. Series. PR1972.G353S7 1991 821'.I dc20 91-27295

Frontispiece: Gawain and the Lady. London, British Library (B. L. M S . Cotton Nero A.x. art. 3). By permission of the British Library.

For John В. St anbury

Contents

Acknowledgments

ι. Introduction 2. Gazing Toward Jerusalem: Space and Perception in Pearl Seeing in the Garden The Vision of the New Jerusalem The Reader and the Interpretive Gaze 3. Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History Anagogical Images: Imitation in the Age of Grace The Parabolic Scenes: History and Vision 4. Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside The Ship to Tarshish: A View from the Decks The Whale: Blind Sight and Labyrinthine Interior The Woodbine: Perception as Comic Drama

ix

ι 12 17 21 33 42 43 50 71 73 80 87

5. The Framing of the Gaze in Sir Gawain and. the Green Knißht

96

The Interpretive Gaze: The Position of the Spectator The Interpreter's Gaze: The Framework of Judgment

98 107

6. Conclusion The Focused Gaze in Ricardian Narrative The Poetics of Sight in English Mysticism Ocular Skepticism and Medieval Narrative

116 117 127 133

Works Cited

141

Index

151

Acknowledgments

with my interest in descriptive poetics in medieval literature when I was a graduate student at Duke University. At that time, in seminars in iconography with Karla Langedijk and in discussions with A. Leigh DeNeef and others, I first worked through many of the ideas that are developed here, thinking and talking about images, the medieval catalogue, and iconographic questions. To Leigh DeNeef I owe a special debt for guiding me through my dissertation on the Gawam-poct with practical wisdom ("Don't be so hard on other critics! One day they might read your work") and extraordinary critical acumen. Many friends and colleagues have also helped me with this manuscript, and I am grateful to them. I would like to thank Sheila Conboy, James Dean, Huston Diehl, Cheri German, Harriet Spiegel, Peter Travis, and Susan Ward, all of whom read parts of this study at various stages, and C. David Benson for a small but highly visible suggestion. Others have given me support for this book in less tangible ways through a variety of gifts that I think of jointly as faith, hope, and charity: belief in my work; conviction that my ideas could be brought surely together as a book; and remarkable and continuing generosity over many years. To mention just a few: Ross Arthur, Kathleen Ashley, Robert Blanch, Charles Blyth, John Fyler, Lynn Staley Johnson, Kathryn Lynch, Nadia Medina, Diane Mowrey, and Derek Pearsall. There are many more I haven't named. I hope they all know that I owe them one. Thanks are due as well to Jerome Singerman and Mindy Brown of the University of Pennsylvania Press for their encouragement and help. I owe particular gratitude to Judith Ferster and Julian Wasserman, readers for the Press, for the care they gave to the manuscript. Their detailed, probing, and learned comments on each page of the manuscript gave me guidance through the final drafts. Their readings offer a model of intellectual support. Thanks, finally, go to my family—to my children Jeremy and Lydia, for being there, and to my husband, Robert Smith, for technological mastery of the computer, and for his critical sensibility and ear for claritv.

THIS BOOK BEGAN

χ

Acknowledgments

Parts of this study have appeared in articles: some of the material from Chapter 2 is reprinted from "Visions of Space: Acts of Perception in Pearl and in Some Late Medieval Illustrated Apocalypses," Mediaevalia 10 (1984): 134-158 and from "Space and Visual Hermeneutics in the GawainPoet," The Chaucer Review 21 (1987): 476-489 (copyright © 1988 by The Pennsylvania State University; reprinted by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press). Sections of Chapter 4 are included in the essay, "In God's Sight: Vision and Sacred History in Purity,'" in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poe^ ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngman Miller, and Julian Wasserman (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1991). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint.

ι. Introduction

probably offers no more impressively fictional persona than the Gawain-poet. Not only have scholars attempted to establish a geographical locus, a time, and a cultural milieu for the writer of the poems in British Library Cotton Nero A.x., but they have also created a single author out of what could possibly be four separate poets. All we have are texts, the four poems bound together in one small, unimpressively illustrated vellum manuscript. In yoking these narratives to a single author and then in searching for—and hearing—that poet's voice, we are creating a fiction out of the fabric of fiction; yet this creation of an author is not only convenient (though more than one reader has remarked that it would simplify the lives of scholars and of librarians if the "Gawain"- or "РеагГ-poet had a name) but also reasonable, since the texts share many parallels in language, in mode, in image systems, and even in thematic concerns. The claim for a single author for these poems rests also on the fact that they are bound together in a single surviving manuscript, all share one dialect, and all seem to have been written within a few years of each other. 1 A. C. Spearing summarizes: "But ultimately, to establish probabilities in such a case, we can only fall back on the principle of economy, or Ockham's razor. It is easier to believe that. . . within a rather small dialect area, there lived one great poet than to believe there lived two, or three, or four." 2 The more subjective evidence offered by similarities in imagery, theme, and style also argues in favor of single rather than multiple authorship and helps as well to create a sense of authorial presence, a sense of a writer confronting and working through difficult issues.3 Pearl, Purity, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight share patterns of imagery, such as the recurrent pearl, and also patterns of spatial representation, patterns we confront most immediately in the four texts' many descriptions of enclosed spaces. Each of the Cotton Nero poems is marked by a thematic awareness of human crisis and transition, transition that is realized as both spatial and MIDDLE ENGLISH POETRY

2

Introduction

temporal progress as well as spiritual change. The narratives share a comic recognition of human limitation. In each of the texts, human action is poised—and found wanting—against judgment, a juxtaposition that comments, in some of the poems directly, on the processes of penance, spiritual realignment, and salvation.4 Of the stylistic techniques that link the poems to a single author, perhaps none is more remarkable than the precision of his descriptive art, a feature shared by the four narratives and one that controls both the substance of the imagery and the portrayal of human experience. The literary technique John Burrow calls "pointing," the creation of elaborately detailed scenes, is a feature of Ricardian narrative and one that Gawain-poet scholars have repeatedly noted.5 Laura Hibbard Loomis, for example, notes the poet's habit of close visual observation and exceptional sense of form, proportion, and design.6 Charles Moorman similarly describes the poet as "a man singularly conscious of the changing face of physical nature and particularly of its destructive menace, of storms at sea and boiling inland waters and frozen forest wastes."7 Yet "pointing" suggests a more complex literary production than a poet at work in his library creating a three-dimensional natural landscape, or what we as post-Romantic readers might recognize and even dismiss as "realism." Much of the discussion of the poet's descriptive technique has in fact relied on an impressionistic critical vocabulary that calls it "exuberant" or "lavish" or "naturalistic" without looking closely at the aesthetic of these narratives in relation to the stories they tell and their thematic concerns or in relation to the poet's own time. Descriptions in the Cotton Nero poems do far more than enumerate catalogues or visualize landscapes. In these poems description becomes a powerful narrative tool for dramatizing the limitations of human experience, an effect that is created in part by structuring descriptive passages according to the mechanics of perception. Descriptions in the Cotton Nero poems are constructed not only according to the organizing principles of the poet's imaginative eye—the poet at work in his library—but according to the ocular horizons of eyewitnesses in the narrative. This "eyewitness" technique, which structures many of the descriptive passages in all of the poems, is perhaps most consistently employed in Pearl, where all of the locations are presented as constructs of the narrator's visionary, and visual, imagination. A brief look at two stanzas from the beginning of the visio illustrates this technique:

Introduction

з

Fro spot my spyryt |эег sprang in space; My body on balke Jjer bod in sweuen. My goste is gon in Gode3 grace In auenture J?er шегиаукз meuen. I ne wyste in J^is worlde quere J>at hit wace, Bot I knew me keste {эег klyfe3 cleuen; Towarde a foreste I bere {зе face, Where rych гоккез wer to dyscreuen. (61-68) 8 From the first, the narrator describes his placement in space in meticulous detail. After presenting the paradox that his spirit should "spring" free while his body falls inert, the narrator describes the experience of being quite literally dazzled, entranced by vision such that he has no knowledge of where he is beyond what he can see. In this paradisal landscape where the Pearl dreamer then wanders before spotting the Maiden, the details of the terrain continue to be organized according to visual principles, presented with an awareness of the complex spatial relationships among objects. The poet uses a technique of moving repeatedly from the general to the particular that he employs in his descriptions of space in the other Cotton Nero poems: Dubbed wem alle {ю downe3 syde3 Wyth crystal klyffe3 so cler of kynde. Holtewode3 bry3t aboute hem byde3 Of Ьо11ез as blwe as ble of Ynde; As bornyst syluer {эе lef on slyde3, Pat {)ike con trylle on vch a tynde. Quen glem of glode3 agayn3 hem glyde3, Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle f>ay schynde. (73-8O)9 Beginning with a panoramic view of the cliffs, the description moves rapidly to the leaves on the trees, and more particularly to their motion fluttering on the branch, illuminated by the motion of clouds. This passage attains an extraordinary ocular verisimilitude, for it reproduces sensory experience not only by listing, seriatim, the details of the landscape—the technique of enumeration that is the chief tool of the medieval poet en-

4

Introduction

gaged in descriptio loci—but also by mimicking the experience of the observer looking at the leaves fluttering on the branches above him, his gaze caught by the dual motions of leaves and clouds. By placing the eye of the viewer significantly apart from the leaves he is watching, the passage also conveys a sense of distance; the figure "[a]s bornyst syluer" describes the motion of leaves in the wind as seen from some remove. In this short passage in Pearl, the poet creates a small perspective drawing. No viewer is mentioned, yet the description creates its own audience by locating the dreamer in the narrative, a technique that forces attention on the very act of perception. Point of view is thus constructed through visual lines and is shaped through a process of "focalization," a term I take from Mieke Bal, which she uses to denote the relationship between an object and an act of sight that locates a viewer in the text. Focalizing, according to Bal, can be distinguished from point of view or narrative perspective, which, she argues, "do not make an explicit distinction between, on the one hand, the vision through which the elements are presented and, on the other, the identity of the voice that is verbalizing that vision."10 The description, in Pearl, carefully focalized by the dreamer, becomes not simply a precisely realized scene but also a perceptual frame that marks and signifies the fictional viewer's epistemological horizon: what is seen is what is known. It illustrates, for example, the dreamer's suspension of mourning and submission to sensory apprehension and delight, as well as his faith in face-value meaning for which the Maiden will later chide him, "I halde J)at iueler lyttel to prayse / Pat 1еиез wel jDat he se3 wyth узе" [I hold that jeweler little worthy of praise who fully believes what he sees with his eyes] (301—302). The description of the valley, tied as it is to an act of sensory reception, defines the condition of the dreamer in terms that will be central to the Maiden's discourse on the gulf between letter and spirit. The technique of progressive intensification that the poet exploits in this description of the valley in Pearl was identified by Alain Renoir in his short but important essays on description in Gawain.11 Renoir was the first to examine the "cinematographic" quality of description in Gawain, where the poet draws "a single detail out of a uniformly illuminated scene which is then allowed to fade out in obscurity."12 Renoir also pointed out the importance of description as a correlative to the psychological state of Gawain himself. The description of the Wirral, for instance, with its crackling icicles and birds "piping for pain of the cold," exists not as a piece of literary decoration, but as a graphic realization of the knight's distress.

Introduction

5

Following Renoir's lead, other readers of the Cotton Nero poems have repeatedly pointed out that the landscapes comment, often antithetically, on the emotional condition of the reader or of characters within the narratives. Most of these discussions of description have confined their comments on the relationship between the world described and the character in the poems to emotion, or to the ways that the setting reflects a character's emotional condition. Spearing, for example, writes of the garden in Pearl: "The landscape provides an objective correlative to the emotions of the reader"; while Edward Wilson argues, "The beauty of the topography of the "erber" is in contrast to the narrator's own sad mood, and to some extent provides a consolation for it." Discussing the landscape in Gawain, Larry Benson writes, "The apparendy realistic scenes are actually finely wrought objective correlatives for Gawain's own emotion."13 These "objective correlatives" of landscape or even of ornamental objects and interior spaces, such as the holy vessels in Purity or the whale's stomach in Patience, can exist in the poetry only because there is a textual spectator whose emotions are reflected in the objects or places he perceives.14 In Pearl the dreamer's grief mediates the scene; the condition in which the reader confronts the physical setting of the erber is set from the first by the jeweler's mournful elegy. And in Gawain the knight's cold and distress, sleeping in his armor while icicles crackle overhead, vivifies the bitter Welsh December. Our experience of place is further defined by the fact that the jeweler, Jonah, Gawain, and the series of biblical eyewitnesses in Purity see within precisely defined spatial frames. It is not sufficient to say that the reader views a scene that reflects the distress of characters in the poetry, since those characters see for us and establish our lines of sight. Description in the Cotton Nero poems is in fact at the center of a complex interpretive process that engages both the pilgrim in the poem and the reader of the text. On the one hand, characters choose to act according to what they know, their choices constrained in part by those sensory fields detailed through description. On the other hand, the audience, which sees through the focalized gaze of the fictional witness, also brings to the text a broader view, one that can visualize a wider panorama than the pilgrim can see and, on a thematic level, one that can guess at consequences and at the moral or spiritual ramifications of a character's choices. Descriptions in the Cotton Nero poems, engaging as they do the acts of a series of interpreters, lend themselves to what I will call a visual hermeneutic. In this process we balance the eyewitness account against the credibility of the viewer and filter it through our "preunderstanding"—our

6

Introduction

set of assumptions about semantic or symbolic meanings, about genre and poetic style, or about the moral or theological values asserted in the narrative. Places and objects seen and described, whether based intricately on literary models, such as the erber, the Earthly Paradise, and the New Jerusalem of Pearl, or based on a naturalistic sensory ontology, as with the winter landscape of Gawain, must finally be understood through a composite lens; "meaning" does not reside, intact and immutable, within the object described, but accumulates with a rich interpretive texture as those places and things are observed, entered, used, and understood in the narratives. In the four chapters that follow, ordered according to the position of the poems in the manuscript, I offer readings of each of the Cotton Nero poems in which I explore the construction of descriptive detail through ocular reception, the acts of vision that record and structure accounts of what is seen. For its methodology, this study of the visual poetics of the Gawain-poet is indebted to a complex set of discourses in point of view and narrative perspective. A careful tracking of those debts might result, in fact, in a history of the critical heritage of Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction,15 and would include the theories of reception as articulated in hermeneutics and narratology. More particularly, this book owes important debts to studies of interpretive modes, such as Judith Ferster's analysis of Chaucerian hermeneutics,16 and to studies that have explored medieval images and their perception, such as those by V. A. Kolve (Chaucer and the Imagery ofNarrative), Barbara Nolan (The Gothic Visionary Perspective), and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (.Romanesque Signs).171 also owe a large debt to works in the visual arts, particularly studies by a number of art historians who have understood the represented image or form as a mode of thought. A few of the scholars whose work has shaped my thinking most deeply over the years include Erwin Panofsky, Otto von Simpson, and Ε. H. Gombrich. 18 My study of point of view in the Gawain-poet, addressing as it does the moment of reception and interpretation of the image by a viewer in the text, could perhaps be said to yoke Booth with Gombrich, though we would have to include in this schematic harness a place as well for studies in symbolism and iconology. This yoking, however inexact its debts, nevertheless has generated a methodology for exploring description as an interpretive mode articulating the alliances between symbolism and spectatorship.

Introduction

7

The readings that follow, discussing as they do texts constructed according to differing narrative programs (dream vision, homily, romance), draw on a wide variety of primary materials; for I try throughout to ground my discussion of ocular point of view in medieval aesthetic principles, even though each text has dictated a unique set of critical terms. In Chapter 2 on Pearl, for instance, I explore the aporia between the dreamer's visual ontology and the Maiden's discourse on other ways of knowing. The principles of describing the dreamer's sensory itinerary, I argue, are shaped in part by the visual rhetoric of Franciscan mysticism, by the ocular programs of illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts, and by the visual and experiential language of late medieval travel literature. In Purity, a set of homilies based on a historical and eschatological design and one in which the goal of seeing is a visual one, to stand "in the sight o f " God, my approach is both epistemological and semiotic. The long descriptions in Purity of the Flood, of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or of Solomon's holy vessels either imply or locate an eyewitness within a historical program, and illustrate the developing percepts, as readers of signs, of a series of prophets. Purity is the one poem in the Cotton Nero manuscript that does not attach description to a single spectator; it is also unique in its explicit uses of description for didactic purposes, as if the process of learning to interpret signs were a process of learning to see and to organize images. Patience, although it continues the historical and homiletic program of Purity, shares with Pearl and Gawain a central organizing gaze (Jonah's), even though, unlike Pearl, it allows the gaze of its central spectator, often comic and complexly fallible, to oscillate with other points of view. Chapter 4 on Patience explores these intersections between vision and the descriptive scene, with close attention to the intricately structured spatial paradigms— interior (enclosure), liminal (threshold), and transitional (labyrinth)—established by multiple lines of sight. In this chapter I pay particular attention, in fact, to spatial design, and discuss as well some pertinent medieval models of structural ordering that can offer insight into the poem's visual plan. In the section on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I also examine the control of description through vision and through the precise definition of an ocular point of view, though Gawain's descriptive mediations are particularly concerned with the act of interpretation. The poem's romance plot, in other words, depends on ambiguities, veiled symbols, hidden identities, and uncertain ends; and it also depends on brilliant and paradoxically obscure visualizations. Chapter 5, "The Framing of the Gaze in Sir

8

Introduction

Gawain and the Green Knight" while it addresses only a select group of the many descriptions in the poem, works to define a visual poetics for the romance by examining the ways in which descriptions are constructed and repeatedly resignified by the viewer in the text. While each of these chapters might be said to adopt a slighdy different critical methodology, in all of them I am chiefly concerned with the moment of perception: what is seen, how its properties are organized and placed spatially, who is seeing and from what precise visual vantage the viewer is positioned. While I hope that these readings will contribute to our appreciation of the poems' technical artistry and mastery of spatial representation, I am even more interested in the figuration, at the moment of vision, of a crisis of knowledge: How can description be understood as an epistemological mode?19 In that sense, I hope that these readings will contribute in their broadest application to our understanding of late medieval attitudes toward what can and cannot be known. By looking at the visual strategies through which description both constructs and is constructed by the gaze of the viewer in the text, these studies as a group articulate a "visual poetic" centered in issues of knowledge—in the reliability of the image, in the juxtapositions between sensory ontology and other ways of knowing, in the fragmentary nature of experience. The visual poetics of these narratives reveal an ocular skepticism that is shared, I believe, with many of the poet's fourteenth-century contemporaries, who were wresding with challenges to the scholastic order in all areas of thought. In this sense of a shared epistemological context, I hope the methodologies in this study for writing about description will prove to be applicable as well to other medieval narratives. Chapter 6, in conclusion, raises a set of questions based on just such a speculation: How can the Gamw'w-poet's visual poetics serve our readings of description and ocular process in works of other contemporary poets? To what extent is the poems' descriptive praxis embedded in a dualistic tradition of ocular epistemology that on the one hand uses sight as the purest metaphor for knowledge and on the other hand manifests a profound distrust for sense perception? These questions, which I address through a discussion of dualistic attitudes toward sight chiefly as expressed in contemporary writings of English mystics, are intended to be speculative rather than definitive. I hope that this final chapter will suggest an expanded poetic context for understanding medieval attitudes toward vision and contribute to our understanding of the ways those attitudes can be expressed in various descriptive grammars.

Introduction

9

Notes ι. Scholars have traditionally dated the poem near the end of the fourteenth century, though this dating has been challenged by a study that places the poem in the mid-fourteenth century; see W. G. Cooke, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Restored Dating,"Medium Aevum 58 (1989): 34-48. 2. A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Port: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 37. 3. See William Vantuono, "Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, and Gawain: The Case for Common Authorship," Annuale Mediaevale 12 (1971): 37—69, for an analysis of similarities in diction, subject matter, and imagery. Arguments have been made for including St. Erkenwald in the canon, though Larry Benson, "The Authorship of St. Erkenwald," JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 393-405, has argued convincingly against its inclusion. For a computer analysis that concludes that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Purity were written by a common author, see R. A. Cooper and D. A. Pearsall, "The Gawain Poems: A Statistical Approach to the Question of Common Authorship," Renew of English Studies 39 (1988): 365-85; see also their response (Review of English Studies 41 [1990]: 102-3) to the argument by William McColly and Dennis Weir that computer analysis fails to confirm common authorship ("Literary Attribution and LikelihoodRatio Tests: The Case of the Middle English Pearl-Poems," Computers and the Humanities 17 [1983]: 65-75). 4. The human conflict in the poems and the thematic sources for the poems in the Augustinian exegetical tradition is explored by Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the Gawain-Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), esp. 211-223. Several readers have explored the interpretive problems created by the poems' use of oppositions, although most readers argue that interpretation is extratextual, a process that principally engages the audience. See, for instance, John M. Ganim, "Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" PMLA 91 (1976): 376-384, and the similar chapter in his book, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55-78; Robert W. Harming, "Sir Gawain and the Red Herring: The Perils of Interpretation," in Acts ofInterpretation: The Text in its Contexts, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1982), 5-23; and see W. A. Davenport, The Art of the Gawain -Poet (London: Athlone Press, 1978), 197-200. 5. J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the GawainPoet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 69-75. Burrow takes the term poynt from Gawain, line 1009, and from Troilus and Criseyde 3.497. 6. Laura Hibbard Loomis, "Gawain and the Green Knight," in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger S. Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), rpt. in Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 20. 7. Charles Moorman, ed., The Works ofthe Gawain-Po^i (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1977), 14.

ίο

Introduction

8. "From that spot my spirit sprang there in space; my body rested in sleep on the bank. My spirit was gone in the grace of God in adventures where marvels exist. I did not know where in the world it was, but I knew that I was placed where cliffs rose above. I turned toward a forest, where there were rich rocks to descry." All citations from Pearl, with permission of Oxford University Press, are from the edition by Ε. V. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). In my translations of the Cotton Nero poems, I have maintained the verbal inconsistencies of the texts and have tried, for the most part, to render them literally, even at the expense of narrative coherence. 9. "The hillsides were all adorned with crystal cliffs, naturally brilliant. The bright woods about them are set with tree trunks as blue as Indian hues; the leaves, that quiver densely on each branch, slide like burnished silver. When patches of sky glide against them they shone with a shimmering sheen." 10. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 100; see also 100—114. 11. There have been several important studies of the poet's affective visual narrative and the rhetorical affiliations of his descriptive technique. See, in particular, Alain Renoir, "Descriptive Techniques in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Orbis Litterarum 13 (1958): 126—132; and also "The Progressive Magnification: An Instance of Psychological Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,'" Modema Spr&k 54 (i960): 245-253; and Derek Pearsall, "Rhetorical Descriptio in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" Modern Language Review 50 (1955): 129—134; see also Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962; rpt. Archon Books, 1973), 115-124. The relationship between vision and interpretation, however, has been largely unexplored, particularly as a thematic concern of all four narratives. 12. Renoir, "Descriptive Techniques," 127. 13. A. C. Spearing, "Symbolic and Dramatic Development in Pearl," Modern Philology 60 (1962): 103; Edward Wilson, The Gawain-Poet, Medieval and Renaissance Authors (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 12; and Larry Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 168. 14.1 use "he" throughout, for in the Cotton Nero poems the viator is almost exclusively male. 15. The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nded. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). To the second edition is appended a bibliography listing works that take up issues raised by The Rhetoric ofFiction between 1961 and 1982; Booth also appends a somewhat wry afterword discussing the assimilation of his ideas by the critical culture. 16. Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 17. Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery ofNarrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).

Introduction

π

18. The works I am referring to include Otto von Simpson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, Bollingen ser. 48 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); and Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art ofthe Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1939; rpt. New York: Icon, 1972), and Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; rpt. New York: Icon, 1971). It may be argued that Ε. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956) defined for the visual arts a rhetoric equivalent to Booth's rhetoric of fiction and has had an equally profound intellectual posterity; see Murray Krieger, "The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E . H . Gombrich Retrospective," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 181-194. 19. See the discussion of visionary epistemology in Kathryn Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1-45.

2. Gazing Toward Jerusalem: Space and Perception in Pearl is A STORY of a journey to Jerusalem. Like popular narrative accounts of actual pilgrimages—526 accounts of journeys to Jerusalem have survived from the period 1100 to 1500—Pearl's itinerary culminates in a sacred city and also takes its pilgrim to that holy city through an exotic land of marvels. The diaries and narratives in which pilgrims logged their impressions are filled with details of exotic experiences; and as Donald Howard has shown in his discussion of pilgrimage narratives, they record graphic visual details of distant places.1 William von Boldensele, a German Dominican whose record of his 1332-33 pilgrimage to the Holy Land was a major source for John Mandeville's mid fourteenth-century Travels, dwells at length on elephants, on the Dead Sea, and on the wonders of bananas.2 Of the pilgrimage accounts surviving from 1100 to 1300, many to be sure are little more than itineraries of places visited. Yet in the fourteenth century, which Howard labels the great age of pilgrimage narrative, accounts of travels to the Holy Land came to describe the sights, delights, and curiosities of travel as they struck the imagination of the pilgrim. Pilgrimage narratives became personal records, recounted as direct experience—"I saw," "I heard"—and describing new places in the language of wonder. In Pearl, of course, the narrator's journey to the heavenly city is an allegorical fiction cast in the conventional modes of a dream vision and a journey to the Otherworld. Nevertheless, the dream is recorded in the rhetoric of discovery.3 Like the pilgrims' diaries, Pearl offers a visual record of experience, centering the perception and interpretation of what is seen on a single fictional witness, the narrator/jeweler recording his dream. Recounting his vision, the narrator repeatedly describes his encounters with the strange and the marvelous in sensory terms and consistently organizes descriptions according to his own eyes, senses, and emotions. When he first describes the transformed valley, he describes the paradox of being "lost" in a place that nevertheless offers vivid sensory cues: "I ne wyste [knew] in {sis worlde quere {5at hit wace, / Bot I knew me keste jier PEARL

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

13

klyfe3 cleuen [rose aloft]" (65-66). Being "lost" allows for a new kind of knowledge, one marked by the certain grasp of sensory phenomena. All the dreamer can know of his location is his placement in relation to a set of spatial properties—in this case, the cliffs that rise above him. If we understand Pearl to be not just a dream vision but also a work of travel literature—in fact a pilgrimage narrative—it can help us account not only for the treatment of specific images, in particular the image of the New Jerusalem, but also for the extraordinary control the narrator's senses exert over the poem's presentation of spatial relationships. Much as the poet's contemporaries were delighting in actual discoveries of the wonders of the East, РеагГs narrator also becomes a pilgrim, one self-consciously engaged in the discovery of new worlds. The descriptions of the paradisal landscape and the New Jerusalem are not simply visions but precise visualizations, recording a process of apprehension through the fiction of an imaginary extraterrestrial world. The methodology of that process is as significant for understanding the poem as are the artifacts described.4 The dream in Pearl is a visual drama in which the details of the landscape are optically coherent, focused according to the visual resolution of a fictional viewer. Terms for sight, such as "I saugh," "I loked," appear every few lines in the description of the New Jerusalem, which is described as a visual apotheosis that imitates a vision: "As John )эе apostel hit sy3 wyth sy3t, / 1 sy3e jjat cyty of gret renoun" (985—986).5 Even the dreamer's final act, and the one that awakens him from his vision, is described as a response to sensory and especially visual stimuli, for he tries to ford the stream when "[d]elyt me drof in узе and ere" (1153). Throughout the poem, references to the narrator's faculties of sight and hearing reiterate that Pearl is a record of a private experience, one known subjectively on the level of sensation. Through descriptions of things that are seen and through references to sight itself, the poet centers the Pearl narrator in a visual and sensory scenario, tying descriptive detail to the narrator's fictional acts of perception. In this chapter, I examine the poet's sensory map of his pilgrimage by looking at the relationships between description and eyewitness in several of the poem's lavish descriptive passages. In its presentation of a series of focused or focalized descriptive scenes, I will argue, the text of Pearl reveals and communicates acts of perception. Pearl is a poem in part about sight; yet sight in this poem is enacted throughout by its twin valences, sight as sensory faculty and as spiritual metaphor, vision and visionary, and perception itself is realized as a complex and multivalent experience. Through the

14

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

subjective voice of the dreamer, Pearl dramatizes the aporia between visual experience and other ways of knowing, such as the instruction by doctrine the Maiden provides. In contrast with other texts that have been suggested as models for PearFs genre, Pearl is singular in its use of visual perception to structure the narrative.6 Indeed, Pearl resists easy categorization by genre, for although it has been called a dream vision,7 a vision of the Otherworld, 8 and also a "carefully structured poetic account of a spiritual itinerary culminating in an ecstasy of mystical contemplation," 9 it remains strikingly original, especially in its sensory reification of the New Jerusalem and in the termination of its vision through, paradoxically, the stimuli of sensation, marked by the dreamer's account of sensory excess, "[d]elyt me drof in узе and ere." The narrator's physical presence in the text is not only intrusive but also volatile, finally subverting, as he wills to cross the stream, the very visionary system that controls what he sees. A brief look at the debate about Pearl's visionary system can help to outline some of the mystical and contemplative patterns that the descriptive itinerary of the poem both replicates and resists. Readers have attempted to identify the poem's spiritual mode, relating the narrator's transitional experience to contemplative methodologies that would have been widely known in the poet's time. Augustine, Aquinas, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Bonaventure, who all offer contemplative programs that demonstrate the ways sensory perceptions can aid in the process of spiritual ascent, divide the experience of spiritual realignment into stages, normally three. Augustine divides the spirit hierarchically into memory, understanding, and will, stages that arguably conform to the states of the dreamer in Pearl as he moves in spirit from the erber to the paradisal landscape to the New Jerusalem.10 The dreamer's spiritual progress also corresponds in suggestive ways to the stages of the history of the world as they were widely understood in the Middle Ages, the lex naturalis or law of nature (the garden), the lex scripta or law of scripture (the debate), and the tempus gratiae or time of grace (the New Jerusalem).11 The dreamer moves from a world of nature through scriptural indoctrination into a revelation of the Heavenly City, a gift of grace at the end of history. The mystical itineraries of Hugh of Saint Victor and of Saint Bonaventure also map stages of understanding, but are particularly interesting for understanding Pearl in the way they address the apparent contradictions inherent in using sensory experience to understand something that is incorporeal. Hugh of Saint Victor describes three levels of cognition: cogitation, meditation, and contemplation. 12 In the stage of contemplation, the mind

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

15

"comprehends all with clear vision" [manifesta visione comprehendit], attaining perfected sight that can be compared to the dreamer's clear and scripturally authorized vision of the Heavenly City. 13 In his Itinerarium mentis in deum, Bonaventure details in a carefully schematized narrative the steps one can take from apprehension of natural form, realized as God's vestigia or traces in the corporeal and especially natural world, to a spiritual vision of God. Like Hugh, Bonaventure also describes the ascent as a threefold process, or a movement through corporeal, spiritual, and divine realms. As Louis Blenkner points out in his study of the application of these contemplative strategies to Pearl, Bonaventure also says that in mystical ascent we move from without to within to above, a progression that applies aptly to the Middle English poem. 14 The dreamer's progress can be mapped as a movement from without the erber to the vision above, the New Jerusalem that descends from the sky. Indeed, of the mystical treatises available to the poet of Pearl, Bonaventure's Itinerarium may be its closest analogue. In addition to offering an account of spiritual ascent that proceeds by gradations and transitions, the Itinerarium also offers one of the best known and most concise manuals on the use of sensible form in spiritual ascent. Bonaventure maintains that the contemplative must first learn to see and delight in God's creation before he can proceed upward to the next stage of the hierarchy: "Therefore, from visible things the soul rises to the consideration of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God" (Itin. 1.13, 46—47).15 The process of contemplation begins with the "first way of seeing," the consideration of things in themselves, which reveal information about weight, number, and measure (Itin. i.n, 44-45). Yet the Itinerarium does not, like Pearl, culminate in a clear and ecstatic vision of God or the Heavenly City. Rather, Bonaventure says that the contemplative progresses from sight of corporeal things to a sight of inner verities, effectively transcending reliance on sensory faculties. The condition of our lives is one of being a viator от wayfarer {Itin. 7.2, 96—97), and when we have reached "peace" we have arrived "as in an inner Jerusalem" ("tanquam in interiori Hierosolyma" [Itin. 7.1, 96-97]) apprehended only metaphorically through the darkness of "supreme illumination": 'Thus our mind, accustomed as it is to the opaqueness in beings and the phantasms of visible things, appears to be seeing nothing when it gazes upon the light of the highest being. It does not understand that this very darkness is the supreme illumination of our mind, just as when the eye sees pure light, it seems to be seeing nothing" (Itin. 5.4, 82—83).16 Instead of constructing a vision of Jerusalem or of suggesting that we can see the city, Bonaventure

i6

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

uses Jerusalem as a metaphor, "as in an inner Jerusalem," for a spiritual state. In the final state of mystical transport we abandon the senses and "ascend to the superessential gleam of the divine darkness by an incommensurable and absolute transport of a pure mind" (Itin. 7.5,100-101).17 PearFs use of a visionary who continues throughout the poem to visualize and respond to sensory forms dramatizes the conflicts of human perception even more poignandy than it illustrates mystical transport and consolation. This fact may account for the poem's originality and resistance to easy classification by genre. The dreamer's serial perceptions of focused scenes describe not only objective correlatives of his spiritual progress but also his infatuation with physical forms, a condition for which the Maiden faults him early in her discourse. She scolds the dreamer for believing what he sees, or more specifically for believing that she is a corporeal being to whose side of the stream he can cross: I halde J?at iueler lyttel to prayse Pat 1еиез wel £>at he se3 wyth узе. (301-302)18 Refining her critique of the dreamer, she goes on to explain that reliance on sight or one's "one skyl" is a point of pride: 3e setten hys worde3 fill westernays Pat 1еиез шфупк bot зе hit вузе. And J)at is a poynt о sorquydry3e, Pat vche god mon may euel byseme, To leue no tale be true to try3e Bot |)at hys one skyl may dem. (307-312)19 This argument is an exhortation to what we might call ocular skepticism. Her terms, that he should not entirely trust what he sees and also that he should have faith in things even if he cannot see them, echo the Chaucerian commonplace most precisely articulated in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women: "But God forbede but men shulde leve / Wel more thing then men han seen with ye" (Legend of Good Women F, 10-12).20 Her complaint also sets forth the dreamer's central epistemological dilemma in terms that would have been very familiar to a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century reader. In the Maiden's analysis, the dreamer's perceptual problem is one of relying

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

17

on experience rather than authority. Authority here is not, of course, the validation given by books, but the authority of Scripture, the one book, or the validation of faith. Nevertheless, by centering perception on the dreamer, together with the primary interpretation of what is seen or heard, the poet exploits a technique of narrative engagement that subverts the Maiden's text on ocular skepticism without offering an alternative epistemological model, dramatizing rather a crisis of interpretation. The method of the dreamer's visionary process is vision itself, a faculty that is finally selfconsuming when sense impressions seduce him to attempt to ford the stream, and he awakens.

Seeing in the Garden In spite of the Pearl Maiden's suggestion that the dreamer discredit visual perception in favor of knowledge of God to be gained through faith and Scripture, the vision in its entirety progresses as a dynamic between sensory perception, interpretation, and reaction—principally a joyful yearning that leads the dreamer both physically and metaphorically upward. In Pearl, in fact, the dreamer's spiritual progress mirrors his sensory, and chiefly visual, itinerary. The narrator's record of focused descriptive scenes, his attention to sensory detail, and his suspended recognition of his location are specular acts, serving to center reception and interpretation of the visionary landscape self-reflexively on the viewer. 21 But the process of perception is itself dynamic and transitional, even though the dreamer's submission to sense perception at first precludes an active search for consolation. Through the mechanics of visual sensation and an altering perception of the dimensions of his fictive physical space, the dreamer reveals his spiritual condition even as his acts of sensory perception themselves prompt a system of change. The use of focused description to reveal and define the spatial relationships between the dreamer and his locations appears not only in the paradisal landscape, but also in the erber, as the narrator immediately establishes that the garden is a circumscribed space in which he is the central figure. This enclosed space serves both as the locus of the jeweler's spiritual change and as a metaphor for his spiritual stasis. The narrator at the first encloses his own troubled spirit within an enclosed garden, mourning the loss of a tiny pearl that paradoxically seems to enclose or subsume both the emotional and physical space of the poem. When the jeweler/dreamer enters the erber, he crosses into what was for the Middle Ages one of the most familiar

i8

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

images of enclosed space, that of the hortus conclusus, the enclosed Eden of the Fall (Deduit), a garden of earthly delight. But this garden, structured around mementos of mourning, is the place of the jeweler's spiritual transition; and in fact, as the imagery of decay and regeneration in the description suggests (lines 29-36), the garden, though structured as a fixed space, belongs to the realm of mutability. The experience the narrator relates, however, is one of physical stasis, where his acts of sensory perception in the erber oppose either physical or spiritual change. In contrast to the ensuing description of the paradisal landscape, the description of the erber includes few focused visual impressions, and instead is descriptively characterized by lists, such as the short catalogue of flowers, "Gilofre, gyngure and gromylyoun, / And pyonys powdered ay bytwene" (43—44) [gillyflower, ginger and gromwell, and peonies scattered everywhere between], and by diffuse sense impressions, such as the vague "odour" (58) that finally precipitates his swoon. The few specific visual details that the erber section provides serve to frame and define this space less in relation to the narrator's senses than in relation to cosmic or temporal dimensions.22 Flowers of the erber, for instance, shine against the sun. It is August, a temporal location the poet reinforces by an allusion to pastoral activity, the reaping of grain, outside the garden in the realm of mutability. Within the garden, sense impressions are dominated by emotions, the dreamer's psychic torment. Grain is cut (40), the pearl trundles down the hill (41), flowers cast shadows (42), he collapses (57); the vertical motion is downward. 23 When the narrator embarks on his journey through a visionary realm, the split between his physical stasis, asleep on a grave in an enclosed garden, and visionary motion repeats the very structural incongruities of the erber itself. Presented entirely as an eyewitness account and with minute attention to visual detail as recorded through natural perspective, the spatial construction of the dreamer's account of the earthly paradise as he becomes a pilgrim to Jerusalem undergoes a subde but important shift. By detailing juxtapositions in the dreamer's visual focus, imaginary motion, and physical stasis, the description of the paradisal garden communicates, as does description in the erber, that the dreamer's understanding of spiritual verities parallels his perception of space: what he believes permanent is in fact transitional. No longer the fixed and central figure in a walled garden, the dreamer looks up as well as down and moves linearly, "as fortune fares," across a changing terrain. Whereas the descriptive frame of the erber, an enclosed garden that evokes the "imprisoned" pearl [spenned, 53], seems

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

19

metonymic for the narator's own spirit, home of warring emotions, the "fyrce skylle3 {5at faste fa3t" (54), the spatial system of his dream expands dramatically. In his dream he gives himself over to fortune and the grace of God: Fro spot my spyryt {?er sprang in space; My body on balke jjer bod in sweuen. My goste is gon in Gode3 grace In auenture {эег тегиаукз meuen. (61-64) 24 The dreamer now moves in a horizontal direction, never knowing quite what he will find around the next cliff or bend in the river. In contrast to the vertical and circular axes that shape the erber, this horizontal plane in the paradisal garden dramatizes the dreamer's enhanced sensory responsiveness as well as his release from the earlier emotional self-absorption and physical stasis. Just as the addition of a horizontal plane reflects the dreamer's motion, an altered construction of vertical dimensions also indicates the developing perceptual acuity of his eye. In the erber the spatial axes repeatedly reveal vertical and especially descending motion, yet in the earthly paradise the dreamer's gaze and his very steps move both up and down in response to his wondering appraisal of sensory forms. Governing the composition of the text's spatial relationships, his gaze reveals a methodology of perception that mirrors his mind. For example, his initial awareness of his spirit's location in a place "[эег klyfe3 cleuen" indicates an altered perception of himself in relation to the space he inhabits. Suddenly he is a small figure surrounded by cliffs that rise above him. No longer focusing exclusively or even myopically on mementos of his personal loss, he perceives the relationships and agencies of light, as his eye seems to follow patterns of illumination. He first notices the cliffs rising above him gleaming luminously. When he takes a closer look, he perceives how the trees and leaves that adorn the cliff sides take their beauty from the movement and reflection of light: Quen glem of glode3 agayn3 hem glyde3, Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle {зау schynde. f>e grauayl {?at on grounde con grynde Wern precious регкз of oryente:

20

Gazing Toward Jerusalem Pe sunnebeme3 bot bio and blynde In respecte of f»at adubbement. (79-84) 25

The careful visual focusing in this magnificent descriptive passage not only locates the fictional observer—the dreamer—but it also comments on his processes of enhanced perception, suggesting that perception of the world (Bonaventure's vestigia) is metonymic for the psychic or moral life. 26 The dreamer's gaze is led by motion and reflection, for his account of the gravel of pearls has a visual analogue in the leaves moving against the illuminated background of the sky. In contrast to the references to light in the erber, which describe illumination only through shadows and reflection ("Per schyne3 fill schyr agayn £>e sunne" [28]; "Schadowed Jjis worte3 [plants]" [42]), The dreamer's gaze moves in all directions, perceiving the varying illuminations of leaves and pebbles against a backdrop of still greater brilliance. The pattern of upward and downward glances that characterizes the dreamer's gaze in lines 79 to 84 is repeated and amplified in stanza 10 when he looks at the gemstones lining the riverbed and compares them to stars: In ]эе founce Jjer stonden stone3 stepe, As glente [шгз glas Jjat glowed and gly3t, As stremande sterne3, quen stroke-men slepe, Staren in welkyn in wynter ny3t. (113-116) 27 In an even clearer reference to the analogues between the objects of this world and celestial bodies, this passage repeats the pattern of the dreamer's gaze—although the vividly realized image of "stremande sterne3" is only a long simile—with emphasis on the gaze of the fictional viewer. Strode is translated as swampy and overgrown land, and according to Gordon's note, "would probably carry with it also, pictorially, a suggestion of the dark, low earth onto which the high stars look down." 28 The sense of great distances between heaven and earth is also enhanced by the verb slepe, for the stars stremande, or streaming with light, and staren, or staring, assert power and motion independent of human concerns. Paradoxically, however, the fact that the stars "stare" while people sleep also emphasizes the act of sensory perception; because the viewers are asleep, we are even more aware of an imaginative eye that looks simultaneously up at the celestial

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

21

motion, horizontally at the sleepers, and literally down at the pebbles in the pool. The topography of the dreamer's paradisal landscape is thus vastly more complex than that of the erber in which his body literally lies, for it contains a vertical axis of trees and cliffs, and (in a simile) stars, as well as a horizontal plane that transforms as the dreamer moves through the valley. Spatially complex as it is, however, the description of the valley is as systematically tied to the senses and perceptual system of a single consciousness as is the description of the erber. The description of the landscape thus suggests that the dreamer who sees should also interpret; yet his interpretive skills or inclinations seem suspended, a silencing that itself offers a partial reading of his stance as an interpreter of sensory forms. His role as visionary in a sensory drama seems in part to comment on the processes of sensory awakening, on the psychic drama of the soul's progressive discovery of divinity through the tuning of the outer senses to the world. Like Bonaventure's Wayfarer in the Itinerarium, he embarks on a spiritual pilgrimage, the first steps of which involve rediscovery of sensory harmony; and if the dreamer simply records those perceptions with little interpretive commentary, that record itself glosses a process, that of learning how to see.

The Vision of the New Jerusalem In the final four stanza groups of Pearl, the dreamer returns to direct sensory apprehension after the twelve groups spent in verbal debate with the Maiden. His record of the New Jerusalem, of the Lamb within, and of the procession of the virgins thus recalls, by a simple structural parallel, the descriptions of the garden and landscape at the beginning. The dreamer's emotional and visual frameworks immediately appear to be radically altered. As he describes the City, not only are his physical senses suspended, at least at first, but he is also bodily at a remove from the object of vision. The perspective of the dreamer's gaze contrasts sharply with his angle of sight in the erber, where he is the central presence in the garden. His vision of the New Jerusalem, where the Lamb, the City, and his Pearl are all removed from himself, on one level testifies to his enhanced intellectual understanding of death and redemption. With the stream the boundary between the world of creatures and the rule of eternity is clearly set, and God's kingdom, the Heavenly City, awaits the just man. Yet the process by which the vision of the Heavenly City is recorded

22

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

also dramatizes a crisis, the dreamer's separation from the perfect proportions and harmony he perceives. During his vision of the New Jerusalem, the dreamer records two very different responses to his vision. After he has surveyed the building rising in elevation, brilliant with its own light, and has visually penetrated to the throne at the center, he stands astonished, as still "as a dazed quail." He is enraptured; he feels no bodily sensations, "naw£>er reste ne trauayle." Later, however, after he watches the procession of virgins, his emotions change. He sees not simply the edifice of the city but also the mystery that yokes eternity with human pity. He is stricken with delight. He first grieves at the bleeding Lamb—"alas, {303t I, who did f>at spyt?" (1138), then rejoices at the hundred thousand virgins. Finally, when he spots his "lyttel quene" among the company, delight driving in through his "eye and ear" gives way to frenzy, and he rushes into the stream. Nowhere in Pearl is the reader more aware than in these two scenes of the dreamer's bodily relationship to space. Led by the Pearl Maiden, he stands on a hill across a stream as he watches the New Jerusalem descending from the sky, just as John watches in the Book of Revelation. Because the poet makes repeated references to the dreamer's emotional responses to what he sees during these three stanza groups that comprise the vision of the New Jerusalem, the reader is regularly reminded that the vision is being recorded by an eyewitness, a human eye-of-the-beholder who sees, but does not enter. When the Maiden promises him a vision, she expressly states, in fact, that it is a purely optical experience. He may not inhabit the space he will see: Pou may not enter wythinne hys tor, Bot of {эе Lombe I have J?e aquylde For a sy3t f)erof {шгз gret fauor. (966—968)29 When the dreamer spies the City, he also reiterates the visual nature of his experience, even emphasizing visionary authority. He sees as John saw: As John £>e apostel hit sy3 wyth sy3t, I sy3e J)at cyty of gret renoun. (985-986)30 As John deuysed [described] 3et sa3 I f>are. (1021)31

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

23

As John hym \vryte3 3et more I sy3e. (1033) 32 In the next group the dreamer describes how his sight passes through the wall of the city, thus again reminding us of his position on the other side of the stream: Ригз wo3e and won my lokyng 3ede, For sotyle cler no3t lette no ly3t. (1049-1050) 33 These references to sight thus create an emphatic sense that describing is a focalized, self-referential activity; even though the description is first offered as a visual artifact, with litde account of his response to what he sees, the dreamer never permits his reader to forget his presence. He stands on one side of the stream, describing what exists Actively in another place. Although he continues to refer to his own senses as organizers of his vision, "I wat3 war of a prosessyoun" (1096), "I loked among his meyny schene [fair company]" (1145), "f>en sa3 I |эег my lyttel quene" (1147), as the vision progresses, the dreamer increasingly describes his emotional responses: An-vnder mone so great merwayle No fleschly hert ne my3t endeure, As quen I blusched vpon {?at bayle, So ferly jierof wat3 )эе fasure. I stod as stylle as dased quayle For ferly of f>at frelich fygure, Pat felde I nawfter reste ne trauayle, So wat3 I rauyste wyth glymme pure. (1081-1088) 34 References to sensation remind us that the dreamer's body is fixed in space, thus rendering this transformation of his emotions all the more poignant. This is initially a spiritual apotheosis, and the dreamer, "rauyste wyth glymme pure," recalls Dante at the summit of Paradise: "for my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more through the beam of the lofty light which in itself is true" (Par. 33.52-54).35 Yet when the dreamer witnesses the bleeding Lamb, his spiritual eye penetrating to the center of the

24

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

Christian mystery, his gaze turns to his "lyttel quene" and he is overwhelmed by the "luf-longing" that tempts him to ford the water. He yearns to join not the Lamb, not Christ, but his Pearl. A look at medieval illustrated Apocalypses, which pictorialize a dream vision narrative that culminates, as does Pearl, in a vision of the New Jerusalem, can add to our appreciation of the poet's descriptive achievement in this section of the narrative. The dreamer's desire to join his "lyttel quene," the desire that fractures the boundary between time in aevo,36 the visionary moment, and time in the world of creatures describes a crisis, dramatized through the technique of focalized description, that is centered in the experiences of allegiances torn between sensory truth and spiritual abstraction. A similar crisis is depicted as well in the illustrated Apocalypses. As several scholars have convincingly aigued, the Pearl- poet may well have known the illustrated cycles.37 He was even more likely to have been familiar with commentaries on the Apocalypse. Illustrated Apocalypses were extremely popular in England in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, many of them evolving into fashionable picture books for wealthy patrons.38 Features of some Apocalypse manuscripts that also appear in Pearl include a bleeding Lamb, a City that is twelve furlongs (not the 12,000 furlongs of Revelation 21.16), a river that separates John from the New Jerusalem, and an angel-guide who leads and directs the visionary throughout.39 Pictorially, perhaps the most important feature the Apocalypse books share with Pearl is the treatment of the New Jerusalem, for both texts record the city graphically, either visually or verbally. This similarity is a persuasive argument that an Apocalypse manuscript or manuscripts may have afforded a source for Pearl, an argument that is further bolstered by the fact that Pearl's description of the New Jerusalem has no analogues in Middle English narrative. Critics have often condemned the description of the City, especially the first part with the catalogue of gems, for its simple recapitulation of the biblical text,40 yet they have not sufficiendy recognized the originality of this section, detailing as it does a city that is most often cited as a spiritual abstraction.41 Even in the few English texts where the Heavenly City is apprehended and described, the accounts are briefer and more allusive, such as the descriptions in The Vision ofTundale and in Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, which is actually taken from Ezekiel's vision, and not from Revelation at all.42 The protracted description in Pearl, which details both the exterior construction of the City and its interior—including river, trees, virgins, and Lamb—visualizes a place and

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

25

an event that were most often understood in medieval scriptural exegesis to reflect a spiritual ideal. Even though the description is clearly indebted to a pictorial tradition, in breaking with poetic conventions in its reification of the City, the description invites us in particular to examine the processes of perception that generate its images. Perhaps the most important similarity between Pearl and the illustrated Apocalypses, and the one that is most suggestive for understanding Pearl's attention to eyewitness experience and visual epistemology, is the treatment of the visionary himself. In the illustrated cycles, Saint John becomes an important character, more involved with the images of his vision than is the passive observer in the biblical text of Revelation. He is, as Barbara Nolan has shown, an emotionally responsive witness to the End, engaged passionally in the experience of observing and recording what he sees.43 Not only John's emotional responses but also his spatial relationship to his vision, as conveyed by his placement graphically on the page, contribute to his role as a commentator on visionary experience in many of the Apocalypse manuscripts. In the Cloisters Apocalypse, an early fourteenthcentury Continental manuscript that was based on a thirteenth-century English source and shares many features with several other manuscripts, John dominates spatially, even when he is placed to one side of the panel. In size he is usually greater than or equal to his angel-guide and is often larger than the figures he observes. This spatial dominance augments a commentary on visionary experience, for John in the illustrations, like the Pearl dreamer, lends individual scenes spatial coherence and ties the construction of spatial relationships to an act of fictional perception. In many manuscripts, John's placement on the page suggests that he mediates at an intersection of multiple levels of time. In the early pages of the Cloisters Apocalypse, John is often shown outside the scene entirely, standing in the margin and looking in through a door at the Court of Heaven44 (Figure 1). The text of Revelation describes a door open in Heaven; yet the use of the device predominandy in the early folios of the manuscript initially sets the Evangelist at a remove from his vision. The distance is further magnified by the graphic design of the page, which, though traditional, evokes three separate but simultaneous operations of time. The elders worship in rectangles; Christ in majesty sits in a mandorla, a sign of eternity; and John stands without in the realm of mutability.45 Similar graphics in other Apocalypse manuscripts also place John within a design that depicts the simultaneous operations of multiple levels of time, even as the design illustrates the evangelist's separation or even

Figure ι: The Court of Heaven. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1968 (MS. 68.174, fol. jv). By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

G a z i n g T o w a r d Jerusalem

27

Figure 2: The Court of Heaven. Cambridge, Trinity College (MS. R. 16. 2, fol. 4). By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. exclusion from the events he sees. In a page depicting the C o u r t o f Heaven in the Trinity Apocalypse, a thirteenth-century English manuscript that was seminal in the development o f the English Apocalypse cycles, John stands without, separated in his o w n rectangle from the C o u r t o f Heaven, which itself is made o f units o f rectangles and circles 46 (Figure 2). His enclosure resembles a church, which announces John's role as a prophet o f G o d . T h e illustrated cycles, portraying as they d o both the human witness and the sacred realm that he knows through sound and sight, share with Pearl an interest in the sensory processes o f visionary experience. Their similar spatial use o f an eyewitness in an encounter with images from the Apocalypse continues as John, like the Pearl dreamer, moves t o change his dimensional relationship with what he sees, becoming spatially engaged. Led t o the N e w Jerusalem by his angel-guide, John becomes not only a prophet but also a pilgrim o n a spiritual quest. In the Cloisters and the Trinity manuscripts, the pilgrim's visionary achievement is illustrated in the final folios. First he is led by the angel up the hill, where he sees the City descending from the sky. T h e n he looks d o w n in reverence, his sight penetrating t o the center o f the mystery as he sees Christ and the L a m b in a mandorla, the worshipers, and the river and trees o f life. Trinity also

28

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

illustrates the optical miracle of the City, for the New Jerusalem is depicted in both elevation and projection. The lavishly gilded illustration of the City in projection pictures John's comprehensive and penetrating vision as he witnesses the foursquare City while his sight encompasses the Lamb, the river of life, and the angel with the measuring rod. These scenes from the Cloisters and Trinity Apocalypses depict the New Jerusalem as a spatially coherent and complex structure; and like Pearl, both attempt to portray that structure according to the view of a textual witness as they depict the reaction of the viewer as well as his optical process that sees through the walls to a simultaneous perception of the Lamb and the river of life. Also like Pearl, however, the final folios of many Apocalypse cycles frequently depict a scene of crisis, John's turn after his vision of the City to worship the angel, and the angel's redirection of John's affections to God. In the Trinity Apocalypse the angel's command, "Worship God!" touchingly illustrates the conflict between human and divine love. As John bends to the angel, the angel tenderly raises his chin to God. Human gesture is then supplanted by a gesture of worship, for at the right John kneels and folds his hands in prayer while the object of his devotion sits separated by a rectangle and mandorla in a pose of benediction. This conflict between human and divine love is illustrated even more strikingly in a scene from a thirteenth-century French Apocalypse where John worships the angel after he has seen the wedding of the Lamb (Figure j). 47 This scene illustrates the second of two similar scenes in Revelation, where John falls down to worship at the feet of the angel who has shown him his vision. The first time comes after the angel tells John, "Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb" (19.9); the second follows John's vision of the New Jerusalem (22.8). Both times the angel commands John, "Worship God!" This episode was understood by some medieval commentators on the Apocalypse to illustrate the conflict between faith and the seductions of the senses, a conflict powerfully dramatized in the concluding scenes of Pearl. The Berengaudus commentary, a gloss of Revelation that was often used in the illustrated Apocalypses,48 explains that John worships the angel only after those times that he has seen the union of Christ with his Church: But when he comes to the place, where he says that the angel showed him how the bride was joined to Christ, where he says: because the marriage feast of the Lamb came, he wanted to adore the angel. And when he showed him how Holy Church, after the resurrection, will be joined to Christ, and will reign with him eternally, he wanted to adore the angel. . . . Wherefore St. John

G a z i n g T o w a r d Jerusalem

29

Figure 3: Saint John Worshiping the Angel. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale (Fr. 403, fol. 36). By permission of the Bibliotheque Nationale. wanted to adore the angel twice, because the two unions of Holy Church with Christ were shown to him. 49 T h e image o f union, this commentary suggests, the yoking o f man with G o d in the marriage o f Church and Christ, inspires a human desire that repeatedly needs to be redirected to G o d . T h e dreamer's turning t o his Pearl Maiden, w h o has been his angel-guide, may find its source in the image from Revelation and in the available commentaries, for it follows a pattern similar to John's and indicates a like frailty before a symbol o f union. T h e symbol o f spiritual marriage is made even more powerful in Pearl by the poet's dressing o f his Pearl Maiden in white as for a w e d d i n g 5 0 and by the conflation o f t w o separate scenes from R e v e l a t i o n — t h e N e w Jerusalem and the vision o f the 144,000 virgins. T h e dreamer's vision is thus one o f fusion, but finally o f a spiritual w e d d i n g t o which he has not yet been invited. A l t h o u g h the aim o f visionary experience, as medieval mystical handbooks describe with varying methodologies, is fusion with G o d and loss o f self, Pearl finally pictures

3o

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

separation. The dreamer's mortality, his inhabitation of the human world, permits him to transcend the suspension of his bodily senses—"as still as a dazed quail"—and to be inflamed by love; yet his very capacity for human love causes his exclusion from the Heavenly City. The conflict between human and divine love, described through the Pearl dreamer's sudden shift from the image of the Lamb to the image of the Maiden, is also illustrated in the Apocalypse illustrations of John's turn to the angel. These representations are strikingly suggestive, in fact, of the dreamer's turn to the Maiden at the end of Pearl, for they use an image from erotic iconography to denote the sensuous bond between John and his angel-guide. Chucking John under the chin, the angel uses a gesture that conventionally signifies human love, and more often even an erotic interchange. A commonplace in illustrations of lovers in medieval ivories, the gesture even appears in one of the Cotton Nero illustrations to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the Lady, standing by Gawain's bedside, chucks him lightly on his beard (see Frontispiece). How the visual language of erotic love can be appropriated by sacred images is a complex semiotic problem, and one that has been addressed in relation to this gesture by art historian . Leo Steinberg in his study of the sexuality of Christ. In his excursus on the chin-chucking gesture in Madonna and Child paintings, where the hand of the infant cups the chin of the mother, Steinberg argues that the use of the motif derives from Canticles 2.6, "his left hand is under my head and his right hand shall embrace me," words that medieval commentators took to signify the spiritual marriage or coitus between Christ and his Church.51 The appearance of the chin-chuck in Madonna and Child paintings emphasizes Christ's humanity through Christ's use of a gesture from the iconography of eros: Steinberg writes, "No Christian artist, medieval or Renaissance, would have taken this long-fixed convention for anything but a sign of erotic communion, either carnal or spiritual."52 When it appears in the French Apocalypse (Figure 3) and in other illustrations of Saint John and the angel, the gesture of the touched chin would certainly evoke this rich system of conventions. Similar to the dreamer in Pearl, yearning to join his Maiden/daughter as soon as he sees the Lamb, John turns from the static perfection of his heavenly vision to a human likeness close at hand. That this temptation is inherent in the process of mystical rapture is suggested by the French Apocalypse master's use of the chin-chuck. The angel receives John's worship with a gesture of eroticized tenderness, but then directs the Evangelist's gaze to the Majesty above.

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

31

The illustrated Apocalypses as they evolved in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries thus share with Pearl an interest in human, sensory processes and desire through their picturing of locations as they are seen and experienced serially by an eyewitness. The complex relationship between the seer and visionary truth is further illustrated in the Apocalypse cycles through the vitae of John that often accompany the visionary sequences.53 In these lives of John so often appended to the illustrated Apocalypses—appearing before and after the visionary sequence—John is portrayed as active, engaged in life, whereas in the scenes describing his vision he becomes principally an observer, standing to one side of the page or beyond its border. Yet it is in this life that John is prepared for a vision of another level of union. The Book of Revelation is about union, the Berengaudus commentary repeatedly suggests: union as revealed by the concordances of the Old Testament with the New, union as shown by the revelation at the eschaton of the whole history of the world, and union as signified by the marriage of Christ with His Church. St. John in the vita, like the dreamer in Pearl, prepares for a vision of union at the coming End by confronting death. He is condemned, boiled alive, and cast out on Patmos from the human community. It is there, in isolation, that he has a vision about anagogical death and eternal life, and he returns to the world. By appending a vita to the text of Revelation, compilers of such illustrated Apocalypses as Trinity thus effectively place visionary and transcendent experience within the framework of temporality. In Pearl, this conflict between the world of vision, in aevo, and the world of quotidian reality is expressly illustrated as the dreamer awakens, but it is also the principal subject of his meditations in the poem's final section. These passages describe the dreamer's brusque awakening; his disappointment on finding himself cast out from the place of joy; his grudging concession that even if he has to be an outcast from paradise, at least his Pearl should reside within it; his rankling sense that if he had just been content with the vision he could have seen even greater mysteries. Finally, in the last stanza, he remarks—astonishingly—how easy it is to be a good Christian. Even as the narrator tells of his reconciliation with his lot, he describes again the experience of loss, although here it is a vision that is lost rather than his daughter. Most critics of Pearl have understood the poem to be finally a Christian comedy, reading in the ending consolation and reconciliation, the altar of the sacramental eucharist replacing the grave of human loss.54 In the final stanzas, however, the narrator repeatedly refers to the bitterness of his loss

32

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

rather than the joy of consolation. In the penultimate stanza he even tells himself that his expulsion from paradise was his own doing, forgetting that residence in paradise is not possible for the living, and certainly not part of the Maiden's intent when she led him to the vision: To pat Ргупсез paye hade I ay bente, And 3erned no more ]эеп wat3 me gyuen, And halden me ]эег in trwe entent, As }эе perle me prayed jjat wat3 so Jjryuen, As helde, drawen to Godde3 present, To mo of his mysterys I hade ben dryuen; Bot ay wolde man of happe more hente Pen mo3te by ry3t vpon hem clyuen. Perfore my ioye wat3 sone toriuen, And I kaste of kythe3 jsat laste3 aye. (1189-1198)55 This system of causalities is technically accurate; that is, the dreamer correctly blames his own desire for excessive joy for his expulsion from his paradisal dream. The causal system that casts the dreamer from his visionary state is larger than the question of will or cupidity that the dreamer here cites, however, for it is the system or condition of humanity itself, the Fall that the dreamer's expulsion from a visionary paradise recapitulates.56 Human grief may be, of course, a consequence of cupidity; yet it does not follow that the dreamer's greed direcdy causes his fall from Paradise. Even at the end, the narrator still seems to believe that he could have stayed in the visionary realm; he still is unwilling to accept that the condition of living in the world is a condition of exile. The final stanza of Pearl, though it expresses reconciliation with bereavement and a comfort with the consolations provided by Christian ritual, "J)e forme of bred and wyn" (1209), thus fails to be fully convincing, for up to the last stanza the poem's brilliandy focalized descriptions have embodied desire and loss, even as the poem has posed mystical union as an eschatological ideal for the human pilgrimage. In Pearl the approach to visionary union as well as separation from that union are both realized spatially through the medium of the eyewitness, the dreamer, who is set in a complex perceptual relationship to the series of events he records. The value of looking at the illustrated Apocalypses for understanding the dreamer's development in Pearl lies in a tension between sensory ontology and the

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

33

promises of Scripture, linear temporality juxtaposed to the eschaton where time ends. As Theodore Bogdanos points out, Pearl differs markedly from the text of Revelation in giving the New Jerusalem a "concrete topography," 57 noting that the dreamer's spatialized city contrasts to John's sequential and spatially incoherent perception of objects and events, described in Revelation with the reiterated "I saw." For his description of a city with a complex topography, the poet seems to be drawing instead on the pictorial traditions of Apocalypse illustrations that depict a city in both projection and elevation, and even more important, that describe the city's concrete dimensions as they are perceived by an eyewitness who is himself led by an angel-guide. Furthermore, in addition to sharing with Pearl an interest in visionary apprehension as a process, the illustrated Apocalypses also dramatize the visionary moment, in aevo, against a backdrop of human works, the scenes from John's vita that are often depicted before and after the visionary sequence. Within the visions themselves, the illustrated cycles and Pearl also record a similar paradox, the impulse to human love that in the cycles inspires John to worship the angel and that in Pearl tempts the dreamer both before and after his doctrinal instruction to try to join the Maiden.

The Reader and the Interpretive Gaze The crisis of fusion and separation that is created in Pearl by the vision of the New Jerusalem involves not only the dreamer but also the reader in a complex visual hermeneutic. By creating a visual system that includes a spatially complex city and an eyewitness recording that scene, the poet establishes vision as an act of interpretation; the dreamer is both respondent and interpreter, his very reactions to his vision prompting the engagement of a second interpreter, the reader, who knows all that he knows, and more. This interactive interpretive process can be illustrated, for instance, when the dreamer spies the Lamb with His wound and grieves, "Alas, {503t I, who did {?at spyt?" (1138). By phrasing the question, the dreamer locates himself, in this case, as both a physical and an emotional witness, experiencing the direct impact of the Christian tragedy. Yet the question also illustrates his own subjective placement in this vision, suspended from history, Scripture, and an iconographic tradition that tell the Christian again and again "who did jjat spyt," and indeed, make knowledge of the answer critical to an anagogical understanding of the image at all. The reader, of

34

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

course, supplies the answer, or at least recognizes how the dreamer, in his very lack of knowledge, has a suspended historical consciousness. The rhetoric of questioning itself invites the engagement of the reader; this question in particular illustrates the experience of contemplative union as well as the dramas of crisis and separation, for the voice of the dreamer locates his physical presence, separate from the scene he witnesses, identifies the gap between his emotional union and intellectual understanding, and by asking a question that we answer, invites us as readers to formulate his position and our own. And what is the role of the reader who approaches the New Jerusalem through the eyes of the dreamer? A reader in the fourteenth century would certainly be familiar with Pearl's depiction of the New Jerusalem from the description of the city in Revelation; and a fourteenth-century reader might well be acquainted both with commentaries on Revelation that frequently accompany the illuminations in picture books and with an exegetical tradition in which the images of Revelation are read as historical and prophetic signs. A method of reading a pictorial Apocalypse cycle is described in a late medieval Prologue to an Apocalypse in Magdalene College, Cambridge. According to this poem, our encounter, seriatim, with the pictures and words of the manuscript will lead us through a process of interpretation, a process that has our own salvation as its end: Who redes J)is boke of ymagerie Hit will hom counfort & make redie, And vndirstonde hor witte to clere, By {)es beestis purtreyed here; And ful knowyng of mykel treuth Pat now is hidde, hit is grete reuth; What J)ei by-meenen in hor kynde, Waytnas {ю gloose & зе shal fynde Hit is as keye Jjat wil vnloken Po dore J?at is fill faste stoken; Pis keye were gode men to fynde, To make hom se |)at now ben blynde; God gif vs grace J^at sight to haue, To reule vs ri3t we may be saue. 58 In this text, seeing and reading are conflated, even transposed, as equivalent processes, such that one "reads" the book of imagery and "witnesses" the

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

35

gloss. The pictures, "f>es beestis purtreyed here," make us desire to unlock their meaning, which the gloss provides, as if, in an image appropriate to the text of the Book of Revelation ("I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door!" [Rev. 4.1]), the gloss were a key to a door. Understanding the full meaning, we see who were formerly blind; and with that sight or knowledge we have the means to hasten our salvation. The description of the New Jerusalem in Pearl does not afford such a precisely articulated hermeneutics, however. Whereas the Magdalene Apocalypse Prologue describes how an encounter with both image and text in an Apocalypse cycle can lead to an incremental growth in understanding, Pearl uses material from the Apocalypse cycles and the text of Revelation to depict, in verbal form, a visual encounter in which visual images function not as "hidden" signs that a verbal key can unlock but as concrete and sensuous perceptions. There is no gloss; or more precisely, there is only the extratextual gloss that the reader may provide, educated perhaps in a tradition of reading the events of John's vision as signs of the history of the Church and of the world to come. The dreamer's principal activity, however, is one of reaction to scenes as they are recorded on a stricdy sensuous and perceptual level. This is not to suggest that we as readers stand in critical scorn of the dreamer for his repeated failures in understanding, though some critics seem to have found themselves in this position.59 The brilliant topography of the dreamer's visual pilgrimage should keep us from such easy dismissals or cancellations, since the textual space we inhabit as we read the poem is principally constructed of the dreamer's visual universe. The dreamer's pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem is actualized as a journey to a city, and his spiritual education occurs in counterpoint to his encounter with visual and Actively physical form. The dreamer's vision of the city is a powerful dramatization of the experience of not knowing or of seeing that which cannot be fully grasped. If Pearl is intended to describe a contemplative methodology in which the dreamer uses the physical beauties of the world to lead him to anagogical truths, then that process must be said to be a failure. The dreamer never attains the kind of blind vision Bonaventure and the English mystics celebrate as the goal of contemplative experience, nor does he understand intellectually the spiritual content of his dream. The vision the dreamer does attain, including his preparatory sensory pilgrimage through the Earthly Paradise, describes instead an epistemological system, sensory processes in linear time, that frames its perceptions through the body.

36

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

Notes ι. Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 17-52. 2. Account edited by C. L. Grotefend in Die Edelherren von Boldensele oder Boldensen (Hanover, 1855); see Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 29-31. 3. On the basis of descriptions of the Dead Sea given in Purity, it is clear that the Cotton Nero poet was familiar with Mandeville's travels. The poet's use of Jerusalem, here the New Jerusalem of the spiritual journey, and his detailed record of the pilgrim's visual and sensory experiences on that journey also suggest that he may have known not only Mandeville's account, but also others of the many pilgrimage narratives describing a journey to a sacred city. For a fuller discussion of Pearl's uses of Jerusalem and of motifs from travel literature, see my essay,"Pearl and the Idea of Jerusalem"Medievalia et Humanistica 16 (1988): 117—131. For a discussion of the influence of Mandeville on Chaucer and on the Gawain-poet, see Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (1954; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971), 221-227. 4. Although many studies have focused on the plight of the narrator, few have looked at the mechanics of his perceptual process. For studies of the narrator, see in particular Charles Moorman, "The Role of the Narrator in Pearl" Modern Philology 53 (1955): 73-81; Elton Higgs, "The Progress of the Dreamer in Pearl," Studies in Medieval Culture 4 (1974): 388-400; Larry Sklute, "Expectation and Fulfillment in Pearl," Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 663-679; A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), ш-129; and S. L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, "The Spatial Argument of Pearl: Perspectives on a Venerable Bead," Interpretations 11 (1979): 1-12. Among studies that explore the processes of the narrator's perception of his vision, my argument owes a particular debt to John Finlayson, who maps the visionary realm as an objective correlative to the dreamer's spiritual growth ("Pearl: Landscape and Vision," Studies in Philology, 71 (1974): 314— 343). Theodore Bogdanos also discusses the narrator's perceptual methodology, but with particular attention to the multivalent symbolism of images (Pearl: Image of the Ineffable [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983]); see, for example, 27, 33~34, 42-43,103· 5. See lines 979,1021,1032,1033,1035,1049,1083,1143,1145,1147, nji. Citations from Pearl are from the edition by Ε. V. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953)· 6. In early scholarship on Pearl, debate centered around its affiliations with elegy, allegory, or Christian consolatio, with the question of genre for many years being the principal topic of inquiry. More recent studies have tended to look at PearPs debt to popular devotional or iconographic traditions in the poet's time, such as the cult of the Magdalene or the interest in apocalyptic themes and images. See, for example, the Pearl chapter in Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the GawainPoet (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1984), esp. 148-161; the Pearl chapter in Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 156-204; and Muriel Whitaker, "Pearl and Some Illustrated Apocalypse Manuscripts," Viator 12 (1981): 183-196.

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

37

7. See, for instance, Constance Hieatt, "Pearl and the Dream-Vision Tradition," Studia Neophilobgica 37 (1965): 139-145. 8. As a vision of the Otherworld, Pearl is part of a long tradition that includes the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter, the sixth-century Latin Visio sancti Pauli, the enormously popular twelfth-century Vision ofTundale, which was translated in the late Middle Ages into German, French, Italian, Icelandic, and English, and that naturally includes Dante's Divine Comedy. РеагГs relationship to these traditions is discussed by Thomas C. Niemann, "Pearl and the Christian Other World," Genre 7 (1974): 213-232. 9. For a discussion of PearFs theology, see Louis Blenkner, "The Theological Structure of Pearl" Traditio 24 (1968): 43-75; rpt. in The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays, ed. John Conley (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 221. See also A. P. Baldwin, "The Tripartite Reformation of the Soul in The Scale of Perfection, Pearl, and Piers Plowman," in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), 136-149. 10. See the discussions in Blenkner, 228, 251; and in Finlayson, "Landscape and Vision," 336. 11. See the discussion in Chapter 3 of the ages of the world in Purity's historiography. Hugh of Saint Victor, one of the most important medieval historiographers, describes the stages of the world in De Sacramentis, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina (Paris 1844-1864) (PL), 176.346; see Hugh of Saint Victor on the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy, 1954), 185-186. See also Blenkner, 235. 12. PL, 175.116—117. Hugh recognizes the [»wer and importance of sensory images, and delights in the paradox that profound spiritual truths can be revealed in minute natural organisms. See the discussion in Bogdanos, 7; see also Blenkner, 227; and John Gatta, "Transformation Symbolism and the Liturgy of the Mass in Pearl," Modern Philology 71 (1974): 248, discussing РеагГъ sacramental view of reality and debt to Scholastic valorization of the senses as a mode of spiritual perception. 13. PL, 175.177; cited in Blenkner, 228. 14. "Secundum hunc triplicem progressum mens nostra tres habet aspectus principales. Unus est ad corporalia exteriora, secundum quem vocatur animalitas seu sensualitas; alius intra se et in se, secundum quem dicitur spiritus·, tertius supra se, secundum quern dicitur mens" [In keeping with this threefold progression, our mind has three principal ways of perceiving. In the first way it looks at the corporeal things outside itself, and so acting, it is called animality or sensitivity. In the second, it looks within itself, and is then called spirit. In the third, it looks above itself, and is then called mind] (Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 1.4, 40—41, ed. and tr. Philotheus Boehner [St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1956], 41). All subsequent translations and citations from the Itinerarium are taken from Boehner's edition. See also Blenkner, 228—229; and see the discussion of Bonaventure in Chapter 6. 15. "Ex his ergo visibilibus consurgit ad considerandum Dei potentiam, sapientiam et bonitatem. . . ." 16. "Quia assuefactus ad tenebras entium et phantasmata sensibilium, cum ipsam lucem summi esse intuetur, videtur sibi nihil videre; non intelligens, quod ipsa

38

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

caligo summa est mentis nostrae illuminatio, sicut, quando videt oculus puram lucem, videtur sibi nihil videre." 17. "[A]d superessentialem divinarum tenebrarum radium, omnia deserens et ab omnibus absolutus, ascendes." 18. "I hold that jeweler little to praise who fully believes what he sees with his eyes." 19. "In believing nothing but what you see, you misinterpret his words. And that is a point of pride, which ill becomes each good man, to believe no tale can be trusted but that which his own reason can judge." 20. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 588.1 discuss the visual imagery of the Prologue in my article, "Cupid's Sight in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women," Centerpoint 15 (1981): 95—102. 21. Finlayson discusses the relationship of the dreamer to his locations, but sees this relationship as stricdy progressive; in the erber his "inability to see the divine truths made concrete in the physical phenomena around him indicates his earthbound state of spiritual blindness" ("Pearl: Landscape and Vision," 320), whereas in his vision of the New Jerusalem "there is emotional involvement in what is observed, to the point of an attempt being made to join the throng in the Heavenly City" (336). Finlayson draws parallels between Pearl and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, arguing that "the purpose and meaning of Pearl lie . . . in the dramatic, imaginative creation of the mystical experience" (336). 22. On the paucity of sensory images in the erber, see, for instance, Patricia M. Kean's argument that the erber is a "frame into which a series of closely interwoven images and scriptural references are fitted, all of which work together to establish and elaborate the theme of mortality and regeneration" (The Pearl: An Interpretation [London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1967], 34). Only a few readers have discussed the description as a construct of the narrator's perceptual processes; see Finlayson, who points out that the dreamer "observes the natural phenomena which surround him, but sees them only as objects; he is in a natural landscape bursting with reminders of the cyclical process of death, re-birth and due season, but cannot, because of his grief, see it as Nature" (319); and Johnson, who notes that the description of the erber is important in the sequence of the narrator's visionary transitions (180—205). 23. On the use of the erber in a commentary on decay and regeneration and on the relationship of this terrestrial image with the Maiden's argument, see especially Kean, 31-85; Edward Vasta, "Immortal Flowers and the Pearl's D e c a y J E G P 66 (1967): 519-531, rpt. in Conley, 185-202; and C. A. Luttrell, "Pearl: Symbolism in a Garden Setting," Neophilologus 49 (1965): 160-176, rpt. in Sir Gawain and Pearl: Critical Essays, ed. Robert J. Blanch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 60-85. 24. "From that spot my spirit sprang there in space; my body rested in sleep on the bank. My spirit was gone in the grace of God in adventures where marvels exist." 25. "When patches of sky glide against them, they shone with a shimmering sheen. The gravel that crunched on the ground was made of precious Oriental pearls. The sunbeams were dusky and dim by comparison with that adornment." 26. See the discussion of this passage in Chapter 1.

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

39

27. "In the bottom there stood bright stones that glinted and gleamed like fire through glass, like streaming stars, when earth [marshland]-men sleep, stare in the heavens on winter nights." 28. Gordon, 52. 29. "You may not enter within his casde, but from the lamb I have obtained a sight of it for you through great grace." 30. "As the aposde John saw it with sight, I saw that city of great renoun." 31. "As John described, I also saw there." 32. "As John himself writes I saw even more." 33. "Through the wall and the dwelling my gaze passed, for the clear transparency could not hinder any light." 34. "Human hearts might not survive such a great marvel under the moon, as when I gazed upon that wall, the form was so marvelous. I stood as still as a dazed quail, in amazement of that noble figure; I was so ravished with the pure gleam that I felt neither rest nor toil." 35. "[C]he la mia vista, venendo sincera, / e piu e piii intrava per lo raggio / dell'altra luce che da se e vera." Citations and translations are from the edition by John D. Sinclair, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: III. Paradiso (rpt. 1972; New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). 36. The term aevum came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to denote the time the spirit exists in the visionary moment. For a discussion of the term, see Nolan, Gothic Visionary Perspective, 38—40. 37. Rosalind Field, "The Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl," Modern Language Renew 81 (1986): 7—17; and Whitaker, 183—196. 38. For a general study of the development of the English Apocalypse, see George Henderson, "Studies in English Manuscript Illumination," Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 30 (1967): 17-137 and 31 (1968): 103-147. See also Peter Brieger, English Art: 1216-1307, Oxford History of English Art 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 159-170; and Nolan, 54—83. 39. The reduction in the size of the New Jerusalem is the most persuasive argument offered to demonstrate that the poet was familiar with commentaries on the Apocalypse. The use of twelve furlongs appears, for instance, in both Bede's Explanatio Apocalypsis {PL, 113.196) and in the Berengaudus commentary. For a discussion of illustrated Apocalypses that depict a wounded lamb, see Field, 11—13. 40. See, for instance, Ian Bishop, Pearl in its Setting: A Critical Study of the Structure and Meaning of the Middle English Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 37; Finlayson, 333; and Kean, 210. Both Finlayson and Kean justify the poet's use of a "mere catalogue" by arguing that the description reveals the inadequacy of the dreamer's spiritual state. 41. For Bonaventure, the New Jerusalem is a contemplative goal: "Quibus adeptis, efficitur spiritus noster hierarchicus ad conscendendum sursum secundum conformitatem ad illam Ierusalem supernam, in quam nemo intrat, nisi prius per gratiam ipsa in cor descendat, sicut vidit Ioannes in Apocalypsi sua" [These things attained, our spirit, in as much as it is in conformity with the heavenly Jerusalem, is made hierarchic in order to mount upward. For into this heavenly Jerusalem no one enters unless it first comes down into his heart by grace, as St. John beheld in the

4o

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

Apocalypse] (Itin. 4.4,74-75). See also/й». 7л, 96-97. In the New Testament, the New Jerusalem is a complex image, both an eschatological event and symbol of Christian residence, the city where all Christians are fellow citizens: see Phil 4.3, Luke 10.206, and esp. Rev. 21.27. For a discussion of the City in Scripture, see James Calvin De Young, Jerusalem in the New Testament: The Significance ofthe City in the History ofRedemption and in Eschatology (Kampen: J. H. Kok, i960), 117-127. For a discussion of the two cities, heavenly and earthly, see my essay, "Pearl and the Idea of Jerusalem" Medievalia et Humanistica 16 1988: 117-131; see also Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 24-25; and Spearing, The Gawain Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 114. 42. Tundale first sees the Earthly Paradise and then, from the top of a second wall, the greatest joy, God's face and all the saints and bishops. See Das Mittelenglische Gedicht über die Vision des Tundalus, ed. Albrecht Wagner (Halle: Niemeyer, 1893), 120, lines 2082-2234. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, trans. Dom Gerard Sitwell, O.S.B. (London: Burns Oates, 1953), vol. 2, sec. 25, follows the Augustinian tradition of using Jerusalem metaphorically as the city of peace, though he does briefly describe the soul's encounter with the city in graphic terms taken from Ezekiel 40: " . . . you have come very near to Jerusalem. You have not yet reached it, but by the gleams of light that escape from it you will be able to see it in the distance before you come to it" (210). Through the New Jerusalem, Hilton explores the perceptual shifts effected through inner "sight": "This city signifies the perfect love of God, and it is set on the hill of contemplation. To the soul that has had no experience of it but that strives for it with desire it seems only small, six cubits and a palm in length.... He sees that there is something which surpasses the attainment of all human effort, as the palm goes beyond the six cubits, but he does not see what this is. But if he is able to get inside the city of contemplation, he sees much more than he saw at first" (Scale, vol. 2, sec. 25, 211). 43. Nolan, 64-66. 44. See the discussion in The Cloisters Apocalypse, vol. 2, ed. Florens Deuchler, Jeffrey M. Hoffeld, and Helmut Nickel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971), 10, and volume 1 for facsimile illustrations. 45. Discussing the central west portal at Chartres, Nichols argues that the tympanum with its similar fusive composition of elders, Majesty, and parishioner creates a "biaxial narrative structure" in which linear time coalesces with the eschaton (Romanesque Signs, 42). 46. Trinity, produced in England in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, is a lavishly illustrated book which served as a prototype for later versions. It was unique in its use of a French text and commentary, in its insistence on the concordance of Old and New Testaments, and on its optimistic view of the triumph of the Church. See Peter A. Brieger's commentary in The Trinity College Apocalypse (London: Eugrammia Press, 1967), 5. 47. Johnson argues that Pearl is based on the noli me tangere episode, the encounter of Mary Magdelene with Christ, with Mary's desire to touch Christ a direct parallel with the dreamer's desire to join the Maiden (The Voice ofthe GawainPoet, 148-161). The episode from the Apocalypse offers a more direct parallel with

Gazing Toward Jerusalem

41

Pearl·, certainly the popularity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of both the noli me tangere and of the worship of the angel from Revelation attest to a fascination with the corporeal processes of spiritual perception. 4 8 . The date of the commentary (PL, 1 7 . 7 6 3 - 9 7 0 ) is uncertain. It has been placed variously in the ninth and the twelfth centuries, with most recent scholarship supporting the later date. For a discussion of the commentary, see Brieger, ed., Trinity College Apocalypse, 5-6; R. Freyhan, "Joachism and the English Apocalypse," Journal ofthe Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 18 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 2 1 1 - 2 4 4 ; and Nolan, 6 7 - 7 1 . 49. Trans. Brieger, Trinity College Apocalypse, 52 (fol. 27V). Trinity contains a French condensation of the Berengaudus commentary. 50. Gordon's note on biys, line 197, points out that the Bride of the Lamb also arrays herself in "bysse" in Rev. 19.8. 51. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1 9 8 3 ) , 3 - 5 , 1 1 0 - 1 1 6 . 52. Steinberg, 113. 53. An innovation of the Trinity Apocalypse, the vitae of John also occurred in most of the later English cycles; see the discussion in Brieger, Trinity Apocalypse, 6. 5 4 . See Johnson, Voice ofthe Gawain-Poei, 1 6 2 , 1 7 7 . See also Bishop, 9 2 - 9 3 ; John Conley,"Pearl and a Lost T r a d i t i o n J E G P : Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology, 5 4 ( 1 9 5 5 ) : 2 3 2 - 2 4 7 , rpt. in Conley, ed., Middle English Pearl, 5 0 - 7 2 ; Blenkner, "Theological Structure of PearF'; and A. C. Spearing, "The Gawain-Poet's Sense of an Ending," in Readings in Medieval Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 8 7 ) , 2 1 3 - 2 1 5 , who says the final two stanzas of Pearl provide a "subtle and consoling closure." Theodore Bogdanos has provided an important dissenting voice, arguing instead that the dreamer experiences a "process of symbolic alienation" that reflects "the poet's radical sense of man's spiritual alienation and the inaccessibility of divine reality to him" (Pearl: Image of the Ineffable, 145). 55. "Had I always bent myself to that Prince's pay and yearned for no more than was given to me, and held myself there in true intent as the lovely pearl asked me— quite probably, drawing to God's presence, I would have been led to more of his mysteries; but men would always take more happiness than might be theirs by right. Therefore my joy was soon torn from me and I was cast out from the eternal regions." 56. See Bogdanos, 144. 57. Bogdanos, 115. 58. Magdalene College, Cambridge, MS. 5, in Secular Lyrics of the XTVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 5 2 ) , 9 3 — 9 4 . 59. See, for example, Spearing, The Gawain Poet, 1 6 7 - 1 7 0 ; and Kean, The Pearl, 2 1 3 , 2 2 7 — 2 4 2 ; and the discussion in Bogdanos, 1 4 3 — 1 4 4 .

3. Reading Signs: Puritf s Eyewitness in History

READERS OF PURITY have repeatedly remarked on the poem's rich descriptive texture, seeing its lavish use of concrete and sensuous imagery as an argument for common authorship of the Cotton Nero poems. Much of the power of these descriptions also resides in their replication of perceptual processes. Like the descriptions in Pearl, descriptions in Purity conform to direct visual experience and operate as sensory cues, directing spectators both within and outside of the narrative to interpret what they see according to their lines of sight. Purity is, of course, profoundly different from Pearl in its narrative system, offering as it does a series of stories linked by homiletic commentary rather than one narrative linked by a single consciousness, the mind and sensory field of the dreamer. Nevertheless, descriptive passages individually establish a complex visual hermeneutic, directing textual eyewitnesses as well as readers in a visual process that is preparatory to eschatological vision, the sight of God on his throne. In this chapter I offer a reading of the processes of spectatorship in Purity. This study of description is in many ways methodologically similar to the discussion of Pearl, but it includes as well an exploration of the idea of vision in apocalyptic history: Specifically, how is Purity's visionary eschatology, insistendy reiterated through the promise of the "sight" of God enthroned, juxtaposed to vision in Old Testament time? This contrast, I argue, is realized through the representation of much more homely kinds of vision—and specifically through the focused descriptive scenes that illustrate the biblical stories. The poem's highly detailed descriptions, such as the storm at sea, Solomon's vessels, or the ruins of the twin cities, attain verisimilitude not only through enumeration of detail but also through visual framing and focusing, techniques of spatialization that create an implied audience even when there is no textual witness actually present. By establishing a link between the reader and the spectator in the text and then by placing the witnessed scene within a homiletic and specifically

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

43

eschatological framework, descriptive passages in Purity invoke vision as both an end and also a graphically enacted process, the "sight" of God we can attain by learning to see in this life. Serially, the Old Testament exempla and the following commentaries can thus be seen to serve a larger visual design, in which ocular vision becomes metonymic for the spiritual "vision" mankind has gained through time. Presented within a clear historical framework that moves from Noah to Belshazzar, that is, the homilies offer both directives and commentary on the ability of textual eyewitnesses to interpret visual signs in each of these periods. In several of the homilies, for instance, descriptions coincide with personal confrontations or reflect direct eyewitness experience; such is the case with the holy vessels, which are offered as a paradigm of correct perception, seen by Daniel and misconstrued by Belshazzar, or with the ruins of Sodom, which are shown as a visual sign to Abraham. Other descriptions, such as the long account of the Flood, reflect instead the visual field of a spectator, carefully placed on the verge on the waves as an intimate witness to God's anger. In both mediated and unmediated descriptions, however, visual focusing coerces the engagement of the reader as an important witness and interpreter and dramatizes the development of mankind's ability to read visual signs.

Anagogical Images: Imitation in the Age of Grace The importance of visual images to Purity's homiletic program is suggested in the opening lines, which establish a correlation among visual imagery, verbal ornament, and the creation of poetry itself. Purity is designed to instruct, as the narrator declares from the outset. He opens his poem with an invocation to cleanness, a virtue that inspires praise, and compares her to her "contrare" filth, a vice that enmeshes its flatterer in "kark and combraunce huge" (4). 1 In his celebration of cleanness, the narrator immediately establishes a connection between hortatory rhetoric and the perception of form: Clannesse who-so kyndly cow{?e comende, And rekken vp alle {эе resoun3 f>at ho by ri3zt aske3, Fayre forme3 my3t he fynde in forjiering his speche, And in J)e contrare kark and combraunce huge.

(1-4) 2

44

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

The terms "fayre forme3" for furthering speech have been translated variously as "fair themes," "beautiful forms," and "fair fables." 3 Elsewhere in the poem the term "form"—used both as a substantive and a verb—always has a concrete meaning. The sons of Adam are "J)e fayrest of forme and of face als" (253); the hand that mysteriously writes on the wall at Babylon is "non oJ>er forme bot a fust" (1535). In the opening passage, however, formes might denote either visual or verbal forms, descriptive images or rhetorical ornament to embellish poetry.4 The contextual ambiguity of this word thus suggests a complex relationship among the things described (forme3), the stylistic colors (formes f ° r furthering or amplifying speech) employed to describe them, and the instructional function of the narrative. Cleanness is a virtue allied with truth "kyndly" and "by ri3t"; those who recognize it and seek to promote it as a law of nature, "kyndly," will be gifted with eloquence and/or fair images to support their narratives, whereas those who seek to praise filth, "Jje contrare," will find only difficulty. Images or forme3 prompted by the praise of cleanness, this introductory passage subsequendy indicates, can further the attainment of the beatific image, the sight of God on his throne that rewards the clean soul: "I»e hajjel clene of his hert Ьарепез ful fayre, For he schal loke on oure lorde wyth a loue chere." As so sayt3, to J)at sy3t seche schal he neuer Pat any vnclannesse hat3 on, auwhere abowte. (27-30) 5 By presenting them both as fruits of clean behavior, the poet establishes a connection between speech and salvation. Formes suggests an even more direct relationship between language and salvation; for the speech the poet is describing is homiletic rhetoric, as he indicates by contrasting those who praise cleanness or those who use language correcdy with the hypocritical priest, or those who pervert language. The poet's introductory comment on language and its images thus describes correct speech both as a product of our actions and as an agent for salvation. Fayre formes for concretizing language connect two very different kinds of vision; produced by virtuous behavior, they also can serve to attain the sight of God. In addition to describing the imagistic and linguistic power conferred by the praise of cleanness, Puritf s long introduction also establishes an important correlation between behavior and the perception of visual form,

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

45

a correlation that subsequently guides our reception of focused descriptive passages. In his rendition of Matthew's parable of the wedding feast, the poet dwells at length on the guest's dirty clothes to emphasize their symbolic importance as signs of the guest's spiritual uncleanness. The use of the image of garments to signify the state of the soul is of course a medieval commonplace; Purity's wedding guest in improper attire recalls Piers Plowman's Haukyn, whose coat is soiled with the seven deadly sins. Nevertheless, Puritys elaboration of the parable establishes a curious dissonance between spiritual affairs and the visual terms in which they are described. Our clothes, whose lining is our love (170—171), are our deeds; if these clothes are "clean," we may look on our Lord with a glad face (28). This protracted and graphic description of the actions of the soul suggests that spiritual behavior, and ultimately salvation itself, are processes effected by modeling; the wedding guest must conform to a model or ideal of decorous dress, just as the Christian must conform to a set of behaviors. The emphasis on Christian behavior is actually heightened by the apparent dissonance between tenor and vehicle in the poet's treatment of the parable. A clean soul, like a clean garment, can in effect be "put on," as the poet suggests from the outset, "to £>at sy3t seche schal he neuer / Pat any vnclannesse hat3 on" (29-30), by the Christian who models his behavior to accord with the custom of a divine court. The ways in which images or visual forms can serve in spiritual edification are also developed in Purity's exhortation to purity, the central homily on cleanness that, I will argue, describes the art of recognizing signs and thus offers a touchstone for reading the text's preceding and following Old Testament parables. In this homiletic interlude, placed between the Old Testament parables of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Nebuchadnezzar, the poet explains that the process of cleaning our souls to come into the sight of God is one of recognition and imitation—of recognizing God's works in the world and then of modeling our behavior to accord with our perception. In the Christian era the image should be a visual cue, the poet suggests. Images and objects, such as the pearl and the vessel, participate in a complex allegory in which they both signify spiritual things—the soul— and also instruct, as sanctified objects, how to attain spiritual cleanness. Our salvation depends upon our willingness to recognize the miracle of transformation represented by these visual signs, a miracle that is repeated in God's assumption of human form and in our penitential assumption of spiritual perfection.

46

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

In Purity's central homily these processes of spiritual apprehension and imitation are illustrated both directly and obliquely. The poet opens the homily with a discussion of spiritual mimicry, which he follows with an illustrative example from the Roman de la Rose. Just as the lover observes and conforms to the desires of his beloved, so the Christian must become like Christ, "confourme |)e to Kryst" (1067): To se |jat semly in sete and his swete face, Clerrer consayl con I non bot jjat Jrou clene worjje. For Clopyngnel in J?e compas of his clene Rose, Per he ехроипез a speche to hym J) at spede wolde Of a lady to be loued: 'Loke to hir sone Of wich beryng jjat ho be, and wych ho best louyes; And be ry3t such in vch а Ьогзе, of body and of dedes, And fol3 f)e fet of J)at fere f>at {юи fre haldes. And if {эои wyrkkes on J?is wyse, {эаз ho wyk were, Hir schal lyke |3at layk j?at lyknes hir tylle.' (1055-1064)6 The spiritual objective the poet is describing is a visual one, "to se {jat semly in sete," as is the process of his analogy, looking to the beloved. In this analogy sight is a metaphor for the state of the soul; just as we can attain our beloved if we watch her and model our actions on her own, we can be saved if we become like Christ. The use of visual imagery insists on the importance of sensory forms themselves. After death and purgation we may actually "see" the Godhead, an eschatological vision that will be effected by ways in which visual experiences transform our behavior in this life. Another image in the homily that comments direcdy on an idealized, Christian apprehension of visual form is contained in the Nativity episode that follows the example from the Roman. Explicidy offered as illustrations of cleanness, the immaculate conception, and nativity also illustrate the miracle of instantaneous spiritual recognition, for both the ox and the ass immediately worship the child: "J)ay knewe hym by his clannes for kyng of nature" (1087). The beasts here participate in Christian transformation, for they witness a literal birth that they instandy recognize as a spiritual event. This episode, which the poet uses to illustrate perfect cleanness, thus also

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

47

illustrates how the faithful can perceive divine form as it appears in physical, visual shape. Yet another example of the way recognition should lead to imitation is provided by the exhortation's oblique allusion to the supper at Emmaus. As the poet suggests with the reference to the Roman de la Rose and the Nativity, visual images are moral cues, inviting first recognition and then interpretation. Describing Christ's purity of touch, the poet explains how Christ can miraculously break bread with his hands: So clene wat3 his hondelyng vche ordure hit schonied, And gropyng so goud of God and man Ьо{зе Pat for fetys of his fyngeres fonded he neuer Nau{>er to cout ne to kerue wyth knyf ne wyth egge. Бофу brek he |эе bred blades wythouten, For hit ferde freloker in fete in his fayre honde, Displayed more pryuyly when he hit part schulde Penne alle j)e toles of Tolowse mo3t ty3t hit to kerue. (1101-1108) 7 It has long been recognized that this episode refers to the supper at Emmaus. On the day of the entombment two of Christ's disciples meet him on the way to the village of Emmaus. Only when Christ breaks bread with his hands do they recognize him: "When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight. They said to each other, 'Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?'" (Luke 24:?o-32). 8 Most readers have suggested that the appearance of this episode in Purity is eucharistic, a reference to the sacramental process of redemption.9 Although the Emmaus episode may be, as Edward Wilson says, "often in art and exegesis interpreted as a eucharistic feast," 10 it is even more often understood in exegesis to illustrate the apprehension of divinity, the same process of miraculous recognition described repeatedly throughout Purity's central homily. 11 Gregory, whose commentary In Evangelia established an influential tradition for interpreting the Emmaus episode, explains that Christ is only outwardly visible to the disciples when they love and doubt:

48

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History Behold, you have heard, beloved brothers, that to the two disciples walking in the way, not yet believing but still speaking about him, the Lord appeared. But he did not show them a figure which they might recognize. Thus he did outwardly, with the eyes of the body as was happening inwardly—with the eyes of the heart. For as the disciples within themselves were both loving and doubting, so the Lord was outwardly present, but he did not show them who he was. H e exhibited his presence to those who were speaking about him, but he hid a recognition of him from those who were doubting. 1 2

In a later commentary that follows in Gregory's tradition for interpreting the Emmaus episode, a precise analogy is established between the disciples' love and miraculous recognition and the Christian's love that will lead him to the beatific vision: We also, my brothers, are often enkindled when we hear Christ speaking in the scriptures. But if through contemplation or some revelation we taste his sweetness more openly, how much more ardent do we then become? And when, the cloud being removed, he will give himself to be seen by us forever face to face, then by how much more will we be ardent in his love? 1 3

This analogy between the pilgrims to Emmaus and the individual contemplative establishes a series of incremental contingencies: the more we contemplate divinity, the more we love, until we attain the beatific vision when we can love God in unveiled apprehension. In medieval English literature the Emmaus episode is also interpreted as an epistemological crux, an incident to illustrate the aporia between perception and recognition. In Piers Plowman the breaking of bread reveals the difference between works and appearances; the disciples fail to recognize Christ by his clothes, yet do so by his "werkes" (B.n.230-231). 14 In the medieval cycle plays the Emmaus story, known as the episode of the Pilgrim, is also occasionally dramatized. In these plays the apocryphal conceit referred to in Purity, in which Christ breaks bread more cleanly than if he had used a knife, "Jjenne alle |зе toles of Tolowse," is used to dramatize the miraculous recognition.15 In the Shrewsbury play, for example, the second disciple explains to the aposdes how he recognized Christ in the breaking of the bread: "Pat hit was Crist ful wel we knewe, / He cutt oure bred withouten knyfe."16 In the Chester version of the Emmaus story Luke and Cleophas, the two disciples, bemoan that they were unable to recognize Christ before he broke the bread; despite all his teaching on the road they do not know him until this visual and gestural sign: "By breaking of bread I knew his face / But nothing ther before." 17

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

49

In Purity the homiletic reference to Christ's ability to break bread would surely recall these common exegetical and dramatic traditions. As with the Nativity, the Emmaus episode shows how Christ exemplifies perfect cleanness in his birth and in the works of his hands; and it also shows how Christ can be recognized in the instantaneous action of faith. The reference to Emmaus in the homily in Purity thus offers a model of miraculous visual recognition that itself can lead to the highest vision, the sight of God on his throne, promised in the homily as the reward for cleanness obtained by penance. I have discussed this brief reference in detail, for it illustrates a central theme in this section of the poem; like the allusions to Clopinel and to the Nativity, it describes instantaneous recognition of Christ, knowledge of God in the era of grace. Taken together, these references describe a method of spiritual apprehension and change based on the imitation of Christ, a method that contrasts remarkably with the processes of spiritual metamorphosis oudined in the poem's Old Testament stories. Throughout this exhortation as a whole, which is physically and thematically central to the text of Purity, the poet abandons the system of episodic narrative that he employs throughout the rest of the poem, presenting instead of long scriptural parables a sequence of brief images and allusions that self-reflexively instruct on how they should be received. Interrupting the chronological sequence of Old Testament parables, the exhortation also employs a strikingly different narrative mode in that biblical and literary episodes, such as the Nativity and Emmaus, are alluded to in rapid sequence rather than described in leisurely descriptive narratives. Symbols, which appear in the Old Testament narratives only in disguised form, also are explicated in the exhortation and freely applied to the behavior of the Christian. Christ, after whom we should model ourselves, is polished "als playn as f>e perle seluen" (1068); the clean soul is brighter than beryl or pearls (1132); and Mary's womb is a kest or chest (1070). The homily on Christ, with its dense matrix of conventional symbols and brief scriptural allusions, thus curiously interrupts Purity's narrative structure. This juxtaposition of narrative modes can perhaps be best understood within the historical system of the poem as a whole; that is, the imagistic mode of the homily, with its repeated allusions to visual models for Christian behavior, refers to the Christian in the present era, the Age of Grace, a temporal period distinct from the eras of Old Testament history. Even though the world's surface textures and seductions may ambush our recognition of God, in this era (tempusgratiae), the homily suggests, Christ

5о

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

can be known as directly perceived truth. Through the parabolic mode of Scripture and the interpretive eyes of witnesses in history the Christian age is figured; but in the present age, symbols are unveiled before the Christian congregation, each member of which is an eyewitness.

The Parabolic Scenes: History and Vision In the highly descriptive Old Testament parables that precede and follow the digressive homily describing how we are to use Christian models and signs to effect our own spiritual purification, the poet presents a series of stories from Scripture that collectively illustrate the perceptual failures of the unclean, God's spiritual outlaws. At the same time, these episodes use focused description to dramatize a process of intuitive change through history, in which God's chosen are increasingly given visual signs and are expected to interpret and respond to them. That is to say, in their dramatization of linear scriptural history the parables also reenact an epistemological history, one whose insistent eschatological promise is itself a visual sign, the sight of God on his throne. In terms of the continuum of Christian history, the central homily on Christ stands midway in this process of divine access, for the Christian can interpret the signs and parables of Scripture and use them for his or her future salvation. This concern with linear epistemology may in itself account for the homily's peculiar shift in narrative and descriptive modes. In the present the promise of biblical history is fulfilled, for Scripture itself becomes a hermeneutic sign that can lead to the ultimate in both signs and signifiers, God on his throne. Whereas the visio in Pearl ends with a vision of God in the form of the Lamb, Purity opens with a specific directive leading to a similar vision of divinity. This promised vision of the sight of God, based on the sixth Beatitude, "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God," appears not only at the beginning of the poem but also throughout, providing an explicidy visual structural framework for each of the separate Old Testament homilies that form the narrative. The poem even ends in a prayer for God to send us grace, so that we see and may be seen, "Pat we may serue in his sy3t jjer solace neuer Ыуппез [ceases]." Following each of the major homilies, the poet comments on the effects that sin can have on our attainment of the sight of God, pointing out that there is a direct equation between human action and a final visual reward; after the episode of Flood the poet moralizes that any sin can keep

Reading Signs: 'Purity's Eyewitness in History

51

us from the sight of God, "On spec of a spote may spede to mysse / Of f>e sy3te of J?e souerayn J>at sytte3 so Ьузе" (551-552). After retelling the story of the destruction of Sodom, he remarks similarly on the relationship between clean behavior and the sight of God: "To se J)at semly in sete and his swete face, / Clerrer counsayl con I non bot f>at {x>u clene worjje" (1055-1066). In the homily on Christ that interrupts the series of parables, the poet also describes the reward for cleanness as the "sight" of God, here explaining how the Christian may attain this vision of God on his throne through the sacrament of penance. The poet turns the promise into a question about how we may attain this vision, "How schulde we se, {зеп may we say, {)at syre upon throne?" (1112), which he answers by describing the practice of shrift. The promised vision of God on his throne in Purity, a visual goal that frames the acts of vision enacted in each of the parables, is an iconographic detail that has a special place in late medieval eschatological theory. An understanding of the use of this image can help us understand the poet's complex representations of vision, not just in this text, but also throughout the Cotton Nero poems. The sight of the enthroned deity described in the use of the sixth Beatitude in Purity refers to the beatific vision, the immediate, unveiled vision of God available to the purified soul after death. That Purity's image of God on his throne refers to the beatific vision rather than to the mystical vision of God that can occur in this life, such as the seeing of God "spiritually in his glory" that Hilton describes in the Scale ofPerfection (1.12),18 is evident from Purity's use of an iconographic motif, God enthroned, that often depicts the beatific vision in the visual arts, and from Puritys being based on the sixth Beatitude, which medieval scriptural exegesis explains as a direct reference to the face-to-face vision of God. Augustine, for example, explains that the vision at the Resurrection will fulfill the promise of the Beatitude: "He does not say what we shall see; but what but God, that the promise of the Gospel may be fulfilled in us, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God?" 19 Throughout his work, in fact, Augustine repeatedly asserts that the reward for the just after purification will be to see God. 20 When this vision will be available, however, after death or not until Judgment Day, was a recurring topic of debate in the Middle Ages, particularly in the early fourteenth century.21 In 1334 Pope John XXII espoused Saint Bernard's opinion that souls must wait for this vision until Judgment, generating disputes between some Franciscans who supported Bernard and the Pope and Dominicans who supported the popular traditional view, that

52

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

the sight of God is immediately available after death. An answer to the question was furnished in 1336 by Pope Benedict XII in his constitution "Benedictus Deus," in which he states, "By this edict which will prevail forever," that after death and purgation the vision can be beheld, before the resumption of our bodies and the general judgment: 'The same vision and enjoyment without any interruption . . . exist continuously and will continue even up to the last judgment and from then even unto eternity."22 In Purity, the repeated reference to the Beatitude and to the promise that the clean soul will be rewarded with a sight of God implies that the beatific vision will be directly available after death. Direct, unmediated vision of God is the way of the End, the summum bonum. In Purity this direct vision contrasts with the imperfect ways of seeing or knowing God in the time before Christ. Biblical history as outlined in the poem's progressive Old Testament narratives—stories of the Flood, of Abraham, Lot and Sodom, and of Belshazzar—offers not only a series of moralizing exempla on the virtues of spiritual cleanness, but also an explication of a historical process, the developing and unfolding knowledge of God that culminates in the beatific vision, the sight of God on his throne. The arrangement of Purity's historical parables has been noted by critics, who have pointed out that the application of the historical tales to judgment in this life is illustrated by the movement of history through the ages of natural law, scriptural law, and the time of grace in which judgment is at hand.23 The thematic implications of the beatific vision and the relationship of this image to the poem's historical and narrative structures have not been explored, however.24 The sight of God, a reiterated promise, stands in juxtaposition to other visual encounters or confrontations in the poem, encounters such as the greeting of the angels by Abraham and Lot, the unclean guest before the Lord at the wedding feast, or of Belshazzar before his people. Each of the exempla, from both the Old and the New Testaments, in fact contains an important confrontation among or between characters in which the act of visual perception plays a crucial narrative role. Together these visual encounters form a system of oblique or analogous references to the promised vision of God and dramatize the developing relationship between mankind and God in Christian history. In its presentation of the epochal divisions of history and, as I am suggesting, of mankind's developing ability to interpret divine signs, Purity is generally consistent with medieval historiography and apocalyptic eschatology. Describing the epochal divisions of time, Hugh of Saint Victor, an influential twelfth-century historiographer and exegete, repeatedly ex-

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

53

plains that the age of grace is the age of direct revelation, an epoch that completes a historical process of growth in spiritual intuition.25 Hugh shares with several medieval historiographers the belief that not only is history linear, progressing relentlessly from the creation to the eschaton, but that history also mirrors the spiritual growth of the individual and reveals an increasing knowledge of God. 26 A central thesis of Joachim of Fiore's two visionary apocalyptic treatises, the Liber Concordiae and the Expositio in Apocalypsim, is that human understanding of the Scriptures has progressed through time. 27 Saint Bonaventure expresses a similar view of linear time, though he alters Joachim's trinitarian view of the three eras of history by dividing time into four ages: the time of nature, the time of law, the time of the prophets, and the time of the revelation of grace. The last age, tempus ßratiae, will be characterized by wisdom and mercy: "the redemption of man, the difiusion of gifts, and the opening of the Scriptures."28 In Hugh of Saint Victor's scheme, history falls into a similar epochal division, though Hugh makes a detailed analogy between the development of an individual's knowledge and the growth of knowledge of God throughout time, ontogeny's recapitulation, as it were, of phylogeny, an analogy that applies pertinendy to the treatment of human understanding of signs in Purity. From the Fall to Abraham we were in the lex naturalis when we learned our own weakness through our inability to rule ourselves. In the first epoch, the era of natural law, people were able to understand only what they sensed, Hugh says, but later learned to use visible objects as interpretive signposts to spiritual vision. Hugh describes this myopic vision of the pagans in the first era of natural law: 'This is so because the eyes of the infidels, who see only visible things, despise venerating the sacraments of salvation, because beholding in them so much that is contemptible in visible species, they do not recognize the invisible virtue within and the fruit of obedience."29 The second era, the time of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, was the lex scripta or the age of written law when we became readers of symbols that instructed us about Christ. In the final epoch, the tempus ßratiae or time of grace, Christ is revealed as direcdy perceived truth.30 The developmental view of history that, within a progressive linear framework, describes a theory of the development of spiritual knowledge can help us understand the structure of Purity, for the parables describe scenes of face-to-face encounters and ensuing acts of interpretation and judgment that are juxtaposed to the direct perception of God illustrated in

54

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

the Emmaus reference and promised, in the central homily and throughout the poem, as the reward for cleanness. In the parable of the wedding feast the guest stands unfittingly dressed before the Lord, a visual encounter that the poet explicitly contrasts to the vision of God that we may have when our spiritual "limbs" are well attired (175): Which arn J?enne ]эу wede3 {эои wrappe3 J)e inne, Pat schal schewe hem so schene, schrowde of |эе best? Hit arn £>y werke3 wyterly Jjat JDOU wro3t Ьаиез, And sy{)en alle {зуп oJ)er 1утез lapped ful clene; Penne may {юи se J?y sauior and his sete ryche. (169-176) 3 1

In the account of Lucifer's fall, the "falce fende" (205), like the unclean guest, also errs in the way he looks on his lord, performing an ocular act that inverts the iconographic system of the beatific vision. Whereas the purified soul turns his eyes up to God, Lucifer "Ьузе in f>e heuen" looks on himself and he sees his own beauty, "se3 no3t bot hymself, how semly he were" (209). Within the long Old Testament parables that follow the exempla of Lucifer and Adam, the poet divides and interprets historical epochs according to familiar medieval schemata, describing first the era of natural law and then the era of scriptural law, as Charlotte Morse has shown. I would also like to suggest that the episodes contained within these epochs serially illustrate an evolving, developmental relationship between mankind and God, and that each parable uses focalized description to illustrate this changing methodology. With the highly detailed description of the Flood, the first of these long parables, the poet creates a highly focalized scene, even though no eyewitness is technically present. In this parable, in fact, the poet seems to use description as a poetic of exclusion, aligning the viewer's gaze with the doomed rather than with the saved, Noah inside the ark. From the outset, the visual alignments in this scene seem to offer a commentary on our ability—or failure—to interpret signs and "read" visual messages. The poet makes it clear that the Flood occurred in the age of nature, for he describes the "law" of the time as the dictates of nature itself. The process of conformity to this law is even described with a visual metaphor, "look-

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

55

ing" to nature: "Per wat3 no law to hem layd bot loke to kynde" (263). In this era, God speaks to Noah directly by giving him a set of verbal commands and by making Noah a pawn of his power, an act graphically realized in the wonderful description of the storm as a force of nature. Knowledge of God in this epoch is realized as willing obedience to verbal commands and natural precepts. The enclosed ark, guided by God, tosses about on the wild flood, the culminating image in a long description that emphasizes the power of the hand of God, the willful misdirection of the doomed, and the obedience of Noah. One of the most dramatic moments in the description of the Flood is conveyed in a passage that suggests, by analogy, the beatific promise. People rush to high hills, creatures clamber on pillars, and the beasts "cryed for care to £>e kyng of heuen" (393). Creation looks upward to God, but there of course receives no vision or redemption. The poet's commentary on access, and particularly visual access, to God is furthered as well through his techniques of spatializing. Through a technical control of the visual field in the description of the Flood, the poet guides the reader's perception and understanding of the scene. In this extraordinary description the poet controls perspective to direct our gaze to the verge of the floodwaters, giving us a panoramic view that is reminiscent of pictures in medieval illustrated Apocalypses, which I discussed in Chapter 2, where John in illustrations of the Last Judgment looks on a scene of vast destruction. The breadth of the scope in Purity's Flood, as in these scenes from the Last Judgment, emphasizes the power of the hand of God, an effect created in part by the poet's—and the reader's—sweeping dispassionate gaze. People and beasts clamber to the last dry hilltops; the valleys are brimful to the hill's edges; the waves, divinely empowered, hurl into houses and carry off the occupants; and finally all breathing life, "alle Jjat spyrakle inspranc" (408), comes to rot in the mud. In contrast to this scene of destruction, the subsequent description of the ark, a rudderless craft: that tosses on the Flood, commands a central position in the visual frame. We "see" the ark from precisely the same perspective—the crest of the waves—from which we view the destruction of the Flood, a consistency in point of view that comments on God's double power to destroy and to preserve. The twelve-line description of the ark tossing on the waves also dramatizes obedience to divine decree: Pe arc houen wat3 on Ьузе wyth hurlande gote3, Kest to kythe3 vncouJ>e {зе clowde3 ful nere;

56

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History Hit waltered on Jje wylde flod, went as hit lyste, Drof vpon |эе depe dam—in daunger hit semed, Withouten mast of>er myke oJ?er myry bawelyne, Kable о|зег capstan to clyppe to her апкгез, Hurrok, oj^er hande-helme hasped on гсфег, OJjer any sweande sayl to seche after hauen. Bot flote forthe wyth J?e flyt of }эе feile wynde3; Whederwarde-so f>e water wafte, hit rebounde. Ofte hit roled on rounde and rered on ende; Nyf oure lorde hade ben her lode3mon, hem had lumpen harde. (413-424) 32

Visual focusing in this passage, and in the description of the Flood as a whole, comments on both Noah and on the rewards for sin by establishing a tension between what we see and what our gaze cannot penetrate, the wood of the ark. In the reader's sweeping and panoramic gaze the sinners appear small, even as the ark occupies a central position. Yet the description of the ark specifically as an enclosed craft, subject to God's decree, comments as well on Noah's unmediated covenant. Unlike the description of the floodwaters, the description of the ark on the waters dramatizes divine ordination through an absence of vision, that of Noah who does not look out or that of our own eyes that cannot see within. The juxtaposition of the panoramic with the particular, of the exposed sinners with the enclosed saved, also illustrates the poet's subsequent paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm, which describes the mirrored relationship between God's sight and our own. Rewarding the pure man by giving him sight to see His face, God also punishes the unclean by expulsion: "Sende3 hym a sad sy3t, to se his auen face, / And harde honyse3 J>ise of)er and of his erde йетез" (595—596).33 The visual poetics of the Flood description thus enact in paradoxical form God's punitive and redemptive sight. Outcast from grace, the sinners are exposed to the narrative witness, the reader, as they are to the eye of God, whereas Noah, who has followed the precepts of natural law and kept his body pure, is hidden from our sight in a set of images that emphasizes both his direct access to divinity and his faith. Implicit in the visual dynamics of the description of the Flood is the reader's inclusion in—and exclusion from—this scriptural event. In our location outside the ark, we participate only marginally in the drama of Noah's private contract; and although we are shown the destruction of the

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

57

sinners, we are excluded from the moment of Noah's salvation. While our point of view emphasizes Noah's unique covenant with God, it simultaneously suggests our exclusion; we have not yet come into the sight of God. In his drama of exclusion and destruction the poet not only includes scriptural players, but also the audience who participates in a reenactment of biblical history. The lines of sight in this description are similar to those in the prefatory parables, which show destruction as acts of expulsion: Lucifer and his angels fall from the sky; Adam is ejected from Paradise. As participatory visual drama, these scenes thus collectively anchor the audience's view to the scenes of destruction. Even though the ark offers a sign of God's salvation—enclosed and inclusive—we ourselves, this description seems to show, are still excluded from divine grace. 34 In the poem's subsequent Old Testament parables, the poet gives instructions for reading and interpreting history in descriptive scenes that increasingly engage a textual viewer—and the audience—as an eyewitness to signs of salvation. Unlike the Flood, the stories of Abraham, Lot, and Belshazzar occur in Hugh of Saint Victor's lex scripta-—when, according to Hugh, we learned to read the signs of our own salvation. Not only do the parables of Purity follow a scriptural chronology, but they also describe a changing relationship between God and his people, one that is mirrored or dramatized in episodes of visual confrontations. Several episodes involving visual confrontations occur in the Abraham/Lot section of the poem, and in these episodes the language and imagery of sight define both the sin and an ideal of behavior. Lynn Staley Johnson makes the point that a common exegetical explanation for Sodom was that its sin was visual cupidity, a sin of the eyes, and the poet uses this episode to dramatize the second in a triad of sins, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life. 35 Eye imagery and references to human encounters in this section are also consistent with the poem's structural and thematic use of visual motifs in the poem as a whole. Clear-sightedness marks the just man, just as sight is given to those who can interpret divine signs. Abraham, who will be the father of his people, can "sende toward Sodomas f)e sy3t of his узеп" (1005); unlike Lot and Lot's wife, Abraham, God's chosen, is allowed to look on the ruins of the cities. In contrast, the Sodomites' sexual deviance, unguided by sight, "unstered wyth sy3t," is a failure of vision; and their punishment for harassing the angels is to be blinded "as blynde as Bayard" (886). For her visual cupidity Lot's wife is, of course, turned to salt. Lot as well is engaged in a visual drama when he encounters the angels:

58

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History As he stared into |эе strete, {эег stout men played, He вузе |эег swey in asent swete men tweyne. Ful clene \vat3 j?e countenaunce of her cler узеп. (787-792) 36

Like Abraham who hastens to serve a supper to God at Mamre, Lot reacts properly to a visual sign, again disguised divinity. Lot stands face to face and eye to eye with God's angels—divine agents who "spye" for God—and sees the angels' clear eyes with his own. In addition to his use of eye imagery to describe polar spiritual states, the poet also uses visual acuity to describe his characters' interpretive skills. In spite of the clarity of Lot's sight, the scope of his vision is limited. Indeed, Lot's salvation hinges on his refusal to look on the ruins of the city. Guided by angels and not by God himself, Lot is also not instructed in the interpretation of symbols. References to Lot's presence before and after the description of the destruction of Sodom emphasize that he has been denied vision. Lot not only refuses to look on the cities but he also refuses to see his wife once she has turned: "Pay slypped bi and sy3e hir not f)at wern hir samen-feres [companions]" (985). In contrast, when Abraham later sends "toward Sodomas jje sy3t of his узеп" to witness the destruction, he engages in an act of vision that has been denied Lot. Chosen by God to fill the world with his progeny, Abraham has also been chosen to hear God's "adyng" (688), God's purpose, which includes, in addition to an explanation of His intention to destroy the cities, the subsequent vision of Sodom's ruins. As with the Flood, God's justice again takes the form of saving one from the many 37 and is also recorded graphically, in this case through the description of the Dead Sea. Unlike the description of the Flood, however, which is controlled by the reader's gaze, the description of the destruction of the cities is focused according to Abraham's vision. Its signatory value is also expressly stated. Following the description, the poet moralizes that the ruins are "signs and tokens," still to be believed; and within the description itself he alludes not only to the sea's symbolic power but also to its continuous corrosive presence, for "dede3 of dc^e duren J)ere 3et" (1021). The description thus speaks to a double audience, to Abraham the eyewitness in Scripture as well as to the reader of the homily who is immediately engaged with the tableau through the passage's insistent sensory rhetoric. The explication following the description of the remains of the cities,

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

59

in fact, makes explicit the didactic function of visual signs.38 The Dead Sea, legacy of the cities, offers "signs and tokens" to believe in still, and "witness of that wicked work." If we model ourselves on cleanness, we may come in God's court to see his face: Alle jDyse ar teches and tokenes to trow vpon 3et, And wittnesse of f>at wykked werk, and J?e wrake after £>at oure fader forjjerde for fylj^e of Jsose ledes; Penne vche wy3e may wel wyt {)at he f)e wlonk louies. And if he louyes clene layk f)at is oure lorde ryche, And to be couf)e in his courte jjou coueytes {эеппе, To se {5at semly in sete and his swete face, Clerrer consayl con I non bot J>at |x>u clene worf>e. (1049-1056) 39 The goal again is to "see" God, but with this biblical episode the poet explains the purpose of his parable—and of Scripture itself. The Dead Sea, which is a real, geological presence as well as a scriptural event, is also a visual and verbal sign of the hand of God. The ability to interpret that sign, Purity's homiletic program insists, is necessary before we have access to direct vision of divinity. This added complexity in the visual field as well as in the signatory value of the scene depicted dramatizes the affective power of the parable. Not only does Abraham, chosen to witness a divine sign and chosen to be the father of a race, view a scene of epochal and epistemological importance, but the audience also simultaneously participates in Abraham's vision, sharing with the prophet this sign of God's anger. As in the Flood, the scene's principal witness is the reader; unlike the Flood, however, the destruction of Sodom adds a scriptural witness whose presence emphasizes the redemptive importance of this moment from Scripture. The destruction of the cities is thus focalized by a double gaze—of Abraham and of our own eyes, for whom the Dead Sea remains a "sign" and a "token." In Puritys final parable describing Belshazzar's idolatry, the poet also identifies a single reader of signs—in this case Daniel—and again describes a complex series of visual encounters and acts of interpretation. Belshazzar, whose own palace recalls the perfect proportions of Jerusalem, poses before his god and his people in a posture suggestive of man before the face of

6o

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

God. Belshazzar kneels before his wooden gods set on high (1345). Later at his feast he himself is set above, sitting on the dais with his concubines as he assumes the pose of sovereign before his people (1399). The final section of the last parable, which contains the episodes of the holy vessels and the writing on the wall, involves multiple levels of interpretation, however, for even as Belshazzar sets himself as a God on his throne, he is a flawed interpreter of visual ornament—the holy vessels— and of verbal signs, the writing on the wall. The poet makes a clear distinction between Belshazzar, who is maddened by the writing on the wall, and Daniel, who reads and understands the meaning of the signs. Daniel later describes Belshazzar's inability to read the message, pointing out that the king is blind before visual signs: Bot J)ou, Ваказаг, his barne and his bolde ayre, Se3 j)ese syngnes with sy3t and set hem at lyttel, Bot ay hat3 hofen {эу hert agaynes j)e Ьузе dry3tyn, With bobaunce and with blasfamye bost at hym kest, And now his vessayles avyled in vanyte vnclene, Pat in his hows hym to honour were heuened of fyrst. (1709-1714)40 "Bot" at the beginning of this passage contrasts Belshazzar with Nebuchadnezzar, who set himself as a god before his people even though he was given no signs from God. Belshazzar, on the other hand, has been given, as a sign he cannot read, not only the writing on the wall but also the vessels themselves that proclaim in their form the handiwork of God. Indicating, as Daniel points out, Belshazzar's failure to interpret the meaning of a visual sign, the holy vessels also reveal their sanctity through the visual rhetoric of the description in which they are presented. In the scene in which the vessels are brought before the court, the poet creates a complex interpretive scenario by establishing multiple points of view while presenting the description itself as seen from a single spiritual framework. Brought in to serve Belshazzar's concubines, the vessels are visible to Belshazzar, to his mistresses, to his "bolde baronage" seated in the great hall, as well as to Daniel and the reader. Reversing the pattern of imagery used to portray the Dead Sea, Solomon's vessels are described at length in a celebration of consecrated ornament. Like the Dead Sea, they also are a visual sign, brought before and abused by Belshazzar, who is blind to their

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

61

sacramental function. Through a protracted elaboration of visual ornament in this lengthy description of the vessels, the poet emphasizes their signatory value, although that value eludes the idolators at Babylon: For J?er wer bassynes fill bry3t of brende golde clere, Enaumaylde wyth азег, and eweres of sute; Couered cowpes foul clene, as casteles arayed, Enbaned vnder batelment, wyth bantelles quoynt, And fyled out on fygures of ferlyly schappes. t>e coperounes of |зе couacles {Dat on f>e cuppe reres Wer fetysely formed out in fylyoles longe; Pinacles py3t Jjer apert |Dat profert bitwene, And al boiled abof with braunches and leues, Pyes and papeiayes purtrayed withinne, As J?ay prudly hade piked of pomgarnades. (1456-1466) 41 The description, of which the above citation is only a short segment, is a leisurely amplification of the biblical account with material borrowed from John Mandeville's account of the marvels of the Orient. Incorporating images from earlier descriptions in the poem, the description creates an ornamental and ordered ekphrasis of Solomon's handiwork. Arrayed in the likeness of nature, the cups reverse the pattern of imagery used in the poem's earlier parables. In the accounts of Flood and the destruction of the cities, the poet describes the judgment for human sin against the body's pure vessel by showing nature as "bowls of the wrath of God" (Rev. 16.1). In the description of the literal vessels to be used in the service of God, nature also appears, but in similitude and in ornament. This shift from literal to figurative imagery corroborates the poem's portrayal of historical progress, its movement from the age of nature to the age of Scripture, in which God reveals himself through signs. The stories in which Solomon's vessels appear are similar to the earlier narratives in employing a parabolic mode, but differ in their focus on single artifacts that contain symbols of divine judgment even as they function as agents of God's wrath. When Belshazzar pollutes the vessels by using them to serve his concubines, he is effectively employing them as "vessels of the wrath of

62

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

God." In his rendition of this biblical story the poet dramatizes how man in the age of the prophets becomes an interpreter of signs, reading divine law not only in God's act of intervention but also in artifice crafted by human hands in God's service. As a poetic enactment of the changing revelation of God to man throughout history, Purity expresses a developmental view of history that is consistent with such statements as the following by Hugh of Saint Victor: But it must be known that the order and plan of the divine dispensation demanded this—that just as from the beginning following through time the advent of the Savior approached nearer and nearer, so always the effect of salvation and the knowledge of truth increased more and more. Because of that the signs of salvation had to be changed one after the other through the succession of times in order that when the effect of divine grace increased to salvation, at the same time sanctification might appear more evident in the visible signs. 42

"Visible signs," the holy vessels reveal sanctification in both their ornamentation and in their function, although that purpose is neither recognized nor fulfilled by Belshazzar's courtiers. Crafted with science sent by God, Solomon's vessels recall the king's dictum, "Thou hast ordered all things in measure, number, and weight": Salamon sete him seuen зеге and a syj)e more, Wyth alle £>e syence £>at hym sende ]эе soverayn lorde, For-to compas and kest to haf hem clene wrc>3t. (I453-I455) 43

Although the Biblical account says little about the ornamentation of the vessels (Jer. 52.17—26), their appearance in Purity as "casteles arayed" connects the idea of Solomon's vessels with his temple and, by extension, with the Last Judgment. Serving the blasphemous feast in Babylon, itself a city that mimics the perfect proportions of Solomon's temple and of the New Jerusalem, Solomon's vessels with their crenellated ornamentation suggest the opposing cities, the city of man and the City of God. Abused at a feast of the flesh to serve wine to Belshazzar's concubines, the basins also call up analogously the vessels of the eucharist.44 The implicit image of communion links individual behavior with universal judgment; the Christian's fate at Judgment Day depends on literal and figurative vessels in this life. "Visible signs" of sanctification in their ornament, the vessels also offer

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

63

a paradigm of perception and interpretation through the visual organization of their descriptive images. The descriptions of the covers and the candelabra carry the viewer's gaze upward in contemplation, from bottom to top, from ornamental "vnder batelment" to the basin lids adorned with fruit in "JDC formes of flaumbeande gemmes." The description emphasizes as well the mimicry of the metalworkers' art. The covers to the cups are in the likeness of casdes, "as casteles arayed," among the pinnacles of which are portrayals of birds "as i f " they were pecking pomegranates. The candlesticks, similarly, are decorated with gold branches and birds who appear to beat their wings, "as f)ay with wynge vpon wynde hade waged her fyjjeres" (1484). This emphasis on similitude, on the vessels' replication of nature, in a description that both carefully controls perception and that itself comes to signify perceptual selection—Belshazzar's failure of interpretation on the one hand, Daniel's interpretive reading on the other— offers a visual commentary on the mimetic act that the Christian should perform, the act described in the poem's central homily where the poet moralizes, "confourme ]эе to Kryst." The vessels offer a paradigm of celebratory form, one that suggests the proximities between our world and God's world, the world of art and the world of nature, the human city as it should imitate God's City. Their use and misuse thus not only mirror the viewer's ability to recognize divine signs and divine handiwork, but also the very process of spiritual modeling. The description of the holy vessels, a perceptual and visual cue to spiritual mimesis and to the modeling of our behavior according to Christ, must also be understood as it stands in juxtaposition to other descriptions in this parable. Belshazzar's court, a "palace of pryde," is an antitype to the perfect proportions of the New Jerusalem suggested in the poem by Noah's Ark as well as by the cup's gleaming casde decorated with gems. Like the ark, which is "kyndely sware," and the Heavenly City, which according to Revelation "stands foursquare, and its length is as great as its breadth" (Rev. 21.16), Babylon parodies perfect proportions: For f)e Ьоигз wat3 so brod, and so bigge alee, Stalled in J)e fayrest stud f>e sterre3 anvnder, Prudly on a plat playn, plek al{?er-fayrest, Vmbesweyed on vch a syde wyth seuen grete wateres; With a wonder wro3t walle, wruxeled ful Ызе, Wyth koynt carneles aboue, coruen fill clene,

64

Reading Signs: Punty"s Eyewitness in History Troched toures bitwene, twenty spere lenj)e, And {)iker Jjrowen vmbejxmr with ouerjjwert palle. Pe place J) at plyed {эе pursaunt wythinne Wat3 longe and fill large, and euer ilych sware, And vch a syde vpon soyle helde seuen myle, And Jje saudans sete sette in |эе myddes. (1377-1388)45

A twelve-line description, this short sketch of Babylon precedes the lengthy description of the holy vessels. The different lengths devoted to the descriptions of Babylon and of the holy vessels inside Babylon itself, and in the likeness of castles, clearly places the visual emphasis on the vessels, in the likeness of castles. A similar contrast is created between Solomon's handiwork and the vessels that serve Belshazzar's feast: Burnes berande f>e bredes vpon brode skeles, Pat were of sylueren sy3t, and seves ^erwyth; Lyfte logges j?erover and on lofte coruen, Pared out of paper and poynted of golde; Вгсфе baboynes abof, besttes anvnder, Foles in foler flakerande bitwene, And al in asure and ynde enaumayld ryche; And al on blonkken bak bere hit on honde. (1405-1412) 46 Unlike the description of the holy vessels, this description is visually haphazard, proceeding as it does from the top to the bottom and then to the middle. We see first the tops "on loft coruen," then the beasts below, and then the birds in the middle. The impression of disorder is heightened by the placement of figures on the ornament, for on top of the decoration are baboons, a favorite medieval symbol for hypocrisy. Furthermore, whereas the holy vessels are crafted from precious materials, Belshazzar's ornament is made from paper, and not "of casteles arayed" but of little "logges," the Middle English term for "tent" or "hut." In contrast with Solomon's gold work, Belshazzar's paper subtleties offer a not-so-subde commentary on his spiritual currency, an evaluation that Chaucer in The Parson's Tale indirectly supports in his condemnation of paper subtleties, extravagance of "sembla-

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

65

ble wast, so that it is abusioun [shame] for to thynke" (444-445). 47 In contrast to Solomon's vessels, Belshazzar's vessels convey disorder and insubstantiality. In their imitation of nature, artifice is more evident than mimesis; and in their descriptive system, confusion replaces orderly perception. With this description of Belshazzar's platters, the poet uses the technique of the directed gaze to comment on the relationship between the viewer and the object perceived, demonstrating again how the viewer's perception of a scene also governs its reception and ultimately its meaning. In this case, the direct witnesses in the narrative are the celebrants at Belshazzar's court whose spiritual shortcomings and disordered perceptual processes take on graphic form in the platters they behold and use. Yet even though the descriptions of Belshazzar's palace and his platters precede the description of Solomon's vessels, our understanding of them is finally conditioned by their subordination ornamentally to the latter depiction, one which establishes a model for both decorative ornament and the process of orderly perception. The parishioner whom the last parable literally addresses is finally the reader singled out to understand this elaborate visual sign. Signifying the multiple meanings of baptism, the eucharist, the human body, and divine judgment—the vessels of the wrath of God— Solomon's cups and ewers surpass Belshazzar's platters to dramatize in visual ornament how the Christian interprets signs to effect his own salvation. That this story from Scripture should, like the poem's other parables, aid the audience in its own spiritual alignment, is of course inherent in the poet's choice of a homiletic mode: these stories are intended explicitly to teach. Less obvious is the poet's use of a complex historical chronology that repeatedly juxtaposes the direct, unmediated, and nonsymbolic vision available to man in the present time with knowledge of divine law in the past, the eras of nature and of Scripture. On the one hand, the parables have a simple and exemplary function, for their order suggests that Christian history is recapitulated on the level of a personal eschatology. A reading of scriptural history's linear progress toward the eschaton, the narrative directs, teaches us how to understand sin and redemption as we prepare ourselves for our coming end. Yet the repeated epistemological concern of the parables, their dramatization of our developing relationship with God and with God's law and their thematic and imagistic use of vision as a sign of knowledge of God, suggest that they also describe two, paired processes. In one of these the reader learns to use scriptural signs; in the other, that

66

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

knowledge or skill leads us to our sight of God and to a full awareness of our own presence in his gaze, as the final line says, "Pat we may serue in his sy3t J)cr solace neuer Ыуппез [ends]" (1812). In essence, the reader or the audience not only is instructed on a set of behaviors but also on the reading of Scripture itself—the very parabolic process of the poem. The Dead Sea, the writing on the wall, and the holy vessels are visual signs given to Abraham, to Belshazzar, and to Daniel. To the reader in the present era, they are also direct scriptural signs in a visual poetic, and through the reader's exegesis they lead to the sight of God.

Notes ι. All citations from the text are from the edition by J. J. Anderson, Cleanness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977). Although most recent critics have called the poem Cleanness after the substantive used in the text, I prefer the title Purity, the choice of earlier readers, for the following reasons: (a) it is understandable as a Modern English word; (b) it conveys a broader range of moral and theological resonances; (c) it is easier to say. 2. "Whoever could praise cleanness naturally and consider all the arguments that she demands might find fair forms for furthering his speech, and in the opposite, great trouble and difficulty." 3. Cf. Robert J. Menner, ed., Purity, a Middle English Poem (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920; rpt. Archon Books, 1970), 67η.; D. S. Brewer, trans., Cleanness, ed. Israel Gollancz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1974), 1; and John Gardner, intro. and trans., The Complete Works ofthe Gawain Poet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 149. 4. Sandra Pierson Prior offers support for this supposition through her argument that the "on [one] forme" linking the first and last Beatitude in Patience also refers to grammatical form ("Patience—Beyond Apocalypse," Modem Philology 83 [1986]: 341-342). 5. "The man clean of heart is very blessed, for he shall look on our lord with a loving face. It might be said no one who has any filth, anywhere, shall ever achieve that sight." 6. "To see that seemly one and his sweet face, I know no clearer counsel but that you be clean. For Clopinel, in the compass of his sweet Rose, gives a speech to one that would succeed with a desired lady: 'Look first to her bearing and her desires—everywhere, in body and in deed, and follow in the footsteps of the one you esteem. And if you proceed in this way, even if she is resistant, the behavior that is like her own will please her.'" 7. "His touch was so clean that it repelled all filth, and the grasp of both God and man was so good that, because of the skill of his fingers, he never tried to cut or carve with knife or sword blade. Therefore he broke bread without blades, for in his fair hands, indeed, it behaved more readily, showed more precisely when he would part it, than all the tools of Toulouse might contrive to carve."

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

67

8. "Et factum est, dum recumberet cum eis, accepit panem, et benedixit, ac fregit, et porrigebat illis. Et aperti sunt oculi eorum, et cognoverunt eum: et ipse evanuit ex oculis eorum. Et dixerunt ad invicem: Nonne cor nostrum ardens erat in nobis dum loqueretur in via, et aperiret nobis Scripturas?" (Biblia Sacra, iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, ed. A. Colunga and L. Turrado, 4th ed. [Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Christianos, 1965]). 9. See, for example, T. D. Kelly and John T. Irwin, "The Meaning of Cleanness·. Parable as Effective Sign,"Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973): 250; and Wilson, The GawainPoet, Medieval and Renaissance Authors (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 74-75. 10. Wilson, 74. п. For a detailed discussion of the patristic and vernacular treatments of Emmaus, with particular attention to the use of the image as a sign of spiritual pilgrimage, see F. C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire: A Study ofTheme and Genre in Medieval Literature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971). For several exegetical discussions of Emmaus, see the Glossa Ordinaria, PL, 114.352; Ambrose, In Lucam, in J.-P. Migne, ed. Patroloßiae cursus completus, series latina (PL) (Paris, 1844—1864), I5.i847ff; and Augustine, Sermon 234, PL, 38.1115. 12. Gregory writes, "Ecce audistis, fratres charissimi, quia duobus discipulis ambulantibus in via, non quidem credentibus, sed tarnen de se loquentibus Dominus apparuit, sed eis speciem quam recognoscerent non ostendit. Hoc ergo egit foris Dominus in oculis corporis quod apud ipsos agebatur intus in oculis cordis. Ipsi namque apud semetipsos intus et amabant et dubitabant, eis autem Dominus foris et praesens aderat, et quis esset non ostendebat. De se ergo loquentibus praesentiam exhibuit, sed de se dubitantibus cognitionis suae speciem abscondit" (Homiliae in Evanßelia 23, PL, 76.1182В; trans. Gardiner, 24). 13. Radulphus Ardens states: "Nos quoque, fratres mei, cum audimus Christum in Scripturis loquentem, ardentes saepe sumus. Sed, si per contemplationem, vel per aliquam revelationem ejus dulcedinem apertius gustamus, quanto magis ardentiores efficimur? Sed quando ipse remota nube dabit se nobis facie ad faciem in aeternum videri, quanto magis, fratres, tunc erimus ardentissimi in amore ejus?" (PL. 155.1861В; trans. Gardiner, 46). 14. See also the discussion of this episode in D. W. Robertson, Jr. and Bernard F. Huppe, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 141. 15. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 329-330. 16. Cited in Woolf, 330. 17. Christ Appears to the Disciples, in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 632. 18. Walter Hilton, The Scale ofPerfection, trans. Dom Gerard Sitwell (London: Burns Oates, 1953), 18. 19. "Nec expressit quid videbimus; sed quid nisi Deum? Ut inpleatur in nobis promissum evangelicum: 'Beati mundicordes, quonian ipsi Deum videbunt. . .'" (De Civitate Dei, ed. J.E.C. Welldon [London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1924], 2o.2i.e). 20. See esp. De Videndo Deo, Prol. 3,15.37 (PL, 33.598, 612); and Epist 14.7 8.20, 9.21,22.51 (PL, 33.605,606,620). For a discussion of the vision of God in the writings

68

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

of Augustine and Saint Bernard, see Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine ofthe Summum Вопит (New York: Longmans Green, 1932), 319— 358. 21. See the New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Catholic University of America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), vol. 2, s.v. Beatific Vision. 22. "Нас in perpetuum valitura constitutione auctoritate apostolica definimus. . . . eadem visio et fruitio sine aliqua intercisione al. intermissione seu evacuatione praedictae visionis et fruitionis continuata exstitit et continuabitur usque adfinaleiudicium et ex tunc usque in sempiternum" (Enchiridion Symbolorum, 32nd ed., ed. Henrico Denzinger [London: Herder, 1921], 216—17, trans. Roy J. Deferrari as The Sources of Catholic Dogma [St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1957], 197-198)· 23. See especially Charlotte Morse, The Pattern of Judgment in the Queste and Cleanness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 133—138. 24. Kelly and Irwin, "The Meaning of Cleanness," note that the image of the beatific vision in Purity is structurally important, though they do not explore the uses of the motif in the poem (233η.). 25. Hugh's vision of history is chiefly expounded in De Sacramentis·, see also the discussion above in Chapter 2, n. 11. 26. For a general discussion of the ages of the world, see R. W. Southern, "Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing," Transactions ofthe Royal Historical Society, 5Ü1 ser., 21 (London, 1971), 159—179; see also Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages (Seatde: University ofWashington Press, 1981), 12-20. 27. Liber Concordiae Novi et Veteris Testamenti (Venice, 1591), 5.48, 5.118, and 5-i.uflF; andExpositio inApocalypsim (Venice, 1524), fol. 5г. col. 2, and fol. 11, col. 2. See also Morton Bloomfield, "Joachim of Flora: A Critical Survey of His Canon, Teachings, Sources, Biography, and Influences," Traditio 13 (1957): 264-265. 28. "Et sic tempora Scripturae distincte ad numerum duodecim consurgunt, quia in quolibet horum quatuor principalium temporum tria specialia tempora continentur tribus personis in Trinitate respondentia. Tempus naturae est tempus conditionis rerum, purgationis scelerum, vocationis patrum; Legis est tempus lationis legum, prostrationis hostium, promotionis iudicum; prophetiae est tempus unctionis regum, revelationis prophetarum, restaurationis principum; gratiae est tempus redemptionis hominum, difiusionis charismatum, reserationis Scripturarum" (Collationes in Hexaemeron 3.2.3.12, ed. R. D. Delorme [Ad Claras Aquas, Florence: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1934], 161-162). 29. "Hoc propter quod infidelium oculi (qui visibilia solum vident) sacramenta salutis venerari despiciunt, quia in eis tantum quod foris est contemptibile in specie visibili cernentes, invisibilem virtutem intus et fructum obedientiae non agnoscunt" (De Sac. 1.9.3, PL. 176.319-320). 30. De Sacramentis 1.1.3,1.3.3,1.8.3.и, 1.10.4.6-7,1.11.1-8, and 1.12.1. 31. "Which are the clothes you wrap yourself in, that show off so dazzlingly, of the best fabrics? They are the works, surely, that you have done. . . . And after all your other limbs are cleanly clothed, then you may see your Savior and his noble seat."

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

69

32. "The ark was hurled on high with whirling streams, thrown to unknown regions near the clouds; it rolled on the wild flood, went as it chose, drove on the deep water—it seemed in danger, without mast or boom crutch or good bowline, or cable or windlass to clip to her anchors, or rudder-band [bilge?] or hand-helm hitched to the rudder, or any billowing sail to seek for a haven. But it floated forth with the strife of the cruel winds; wherever the water flowed, it rebounded. Often it rolled around and reared on end; if our Lord had not been her helmsman, it would have gone badly for them." 33. "Sends him a solemn sight to see his own face, and severely denounces these others and sends them from his land." 34. Common exegetical traditions linking the ark with the Church would also further this image's redemptive significance. See, for example, Hugh of Saint Victor's explanation that the ark prefigures the Church and the body of Christ and that Noah prefigures Christ, in De Area Noe Morali, PL, 176.617-680: "Ingredere ergo nunc si secretum cordis tui, et fac habitaculum Deo, fac templum, fac domum, fac tabernaculum, fac arcam testamenti, fac arcam diluvii, vel quocunque nomine appeles, una est domus Dei. In templo adoret psalma Creatorem, in domo veneretur filius patrem" (621-622); "Restat nunc ut videamus, quae sit area Ecclesiae, vel ut expressius loquar, ipsa Ecclesia area est, quam summus Noe, id est Dominus noster Jesus Christus, gubernator . . ." (629). 35. Johnson, The Voice of the Gawain-TW, 117-130. 36. "As he gazed into the street where bold men played, he saw two handsome men come in together. . . . the expression in their clear eyes was perfecdy clean." 37. Kelly and Irwin, "The Meaning of Cleanness," 258-260, discuss the importance of the motif of separation—of the one from the many, of the good from the bad—to the narrative and thematic systems of the poem; see also S. L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, "The Significance of Thresholds in the Pearl-Poet's Purity," Interpretations 12 (1980): 114-127. 38. Anderson, in a note to Cleanness, remarks that the Dead Sea also is used as an example and a warning in CursorMundi 288iff., after Wisdom 10.7 (90η.). 39. "These are all signs and symbols that still can be believed, and witnesses to those wicked deeds and the destruction that our Father carried out afterwards, because of the filth of those men. Then each man may well know that he loves right conduct; and if our noble Lord loves clean conduct, and if you then want to be known in his court, I can give you no clearer counsel but to be clean." 40. "But you, Belshazzar, his child and his bold heir, saw these signs with your eyes and gave them little credit, but always you have hurled your heart against the high Lord, thrown boasts at him with pride and blasphemy. And now his vessels, first raised in his house to honor him, are profaned through unclean vanity." 41. "For there were bright basins of clear burnished gold, enameled with azure, and ewers to match; cleanly covered cups, shaped as castles, fortified under battlements with cleverly made cornices and filed out in figures of marvelous shapes. The tops of the covers that rise on top of the cups were elegantly formed in long pinnacles, pinnacles placed there and jutting out skillfully. And all was embossed above with branches and leaves. Magpies and parrots were portrayed within, just as if they had pecked proudly at pomegranates."

70

Reading Signs: Purity's Eyewitness in History

42. "Sed sciendum est quod divinae dispensationis ordo et ratio hoc proposcit, ut sicut ab initio, procurrente tempore, magis ac magis adventus salvatoris appropinquavit; sic semper magis ac magis effectus salutis cresceret, et cognitio veritatis. Propter quod et ipsa signa salutis per successionem temporum; alia post alia mutari debuerunt, ut cum effectus gratiae divinae in salutem cresceret, simul quoque et ipsa santificatio in ipsis signis visibilibus evidentior appareret" (De Sac. 1.11.6, PL, 176.345)· 43. "Solomon spent seven years and some time more, with all the wisdom that the sovereign Lord sent him, to measure and contrive how to have them cleanly made." 44. The complex symbolism of these vessels is discussed by Charlotte Morse, "The Image of the Vessel in Cleanness," University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1971): 202—216. 45. "For the city was so broad and so big also, placed in the fairest place under the stars, proudly on a wide plain, the fairest plot in the world, surrounded on each side by seven great waters: with a wondrously great wall, ornamented high up with elegant battlements above, cleanly carved, pinnacled towers between of the length of twenty spears, and paling laid crosswise densely all about. The place enclosed within the precinct was long and very large, and everywhere likewise square, and each side upon the earth encompassed seven miles, and the sultan's seat was set in the middle." 46. "Servants were carrying the roast meats on large platters that looked like silver, and with them stews; huts [tents; houses] were raised over them and were ornamentally cut on the tops, pared out of paper and tipped in gold. Fierce baboons above, beasts below, birds in foliage fluttering between, and all richly enameled in azure and indigo; and all was borne in hand on horseback." 47. For an explanation of the tradition of decorating dishes with paper subdeties, see Robert W. Ackerman, "'Pared out of Paper': Gawain 802 and Purity 1408 "JEGP: Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 56 (1957): 410—417.

4. Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside WHICH FOLLOWS PURITY in the Cotton Nero manuscript, is also a homily based on the Matthean text of the Beatitudes, and one in which an exemplary narrative follows an introduction setting forth a moral point. In spite of this continuity in its frame and plan, Patience establishes a different relationship between its text and its audience. Patience, like Pearl, is an intimate narrative; whereas Purity can be characterized by its broad historical sweep, its large cast of major biblical personages, and an impersonal, often formal narrative persona, Patience tells the story of one minor prophet, whose role in Scripture and exegesis is small. Jonah is as well a man of small, or at least human moral fiber. Most of Purity's characters, on the other hand, are one-dimensional figures who either follow God's decrees or rebel against them. It is through the juxtaposition of these good and wicked characters or groups of characters that the poet develops his homily in Purity, describing the opposing behaviors of those who correcdy and incorrectly interpret God's law. The story the poet tells of Jonah, however, does not offer characters whose virtues are polarized. Instead, Patience is a psychomachia, a human drama of one man whose struggles to love and obey God are repeatedly ambushed by his own sloth and hubris. Flawed, irascible, and above all human, Jonah nevertheless cuts a much more sympathetic figure than the characters in Purity, with perhaps the exception of Abraham. Whereas Purity, by describing characters who fail or succeed in reading divine messages, offers methodologies for interpreting God's law, Patience, a complex fabric of interactive dialogue and description in a sequential narrative framework, enacts instead a participatory drama. PATIENCE,

Although Patience's single focus on the life of an imperfect prophet sets up an affective relationship between the text and the reader that differs markedly from the one established in the preceding homily, the two poems share important continuities, similarities that make the sequential placement of the texts in the Cotton Nero manuscript seem more than coincidental. 1 In addition to continuing a series of chronological Old Testament

72

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

stories, Patience also shares images and thematic concerns with the preceding homily. Certainly no reader of these poems could overlook their vivid descriptions of storms at sea, Purity's flood and Patience's gale when Jonah attempts to escape his mission to Nineveh. More subtle and important continuities between these descriptions, however, appear in their thematic attention to the problem of human response to divine decree and in their manipulation of descriptive focusing and spatial relationships to dramatize this interpretive dynamic. As in Purity and Pearl, perceptual acts define or describe the limits of human understanding, although Patience centers perception chiefly on a single character. Descriptions—such as those of the storm, of the rigging of the ship, of the interior of the whale, or of Jonah's woodbine—are carefully focalized to detail the sensory and moral horizons of a spectator, horizons also framed by God's sight. Although the image of the beatific vision is less important for Patience than for Purity, where God's sight is a controlling metaphor for salvation, the poet structures Patience as a dialectic between, on the one hand, Jonah's actions in places where he believes himself secluded or alienated from God's sight and, on the other, God's penetrating sensory acuity, seeing Jonah in the hold of the ship to Tarshish, hearing him in the belly of the whale, and watching him inside the bower of vine leaves. Descriptions in Patience are contoured by perceptual limits, spatial boundaries that the prophet repeatedly sets as a screen or a decoy between himself and God. The poem's visual poetics thus engage Jonah—and the reader— in a process of interpretation not unlike that in Pearl and Purity: description reflects the physical boundaries of the prophet's world as his voice parlays, interprets, and attempts to subvert God's commands. In his descriptive treatment of spatial relationships, the poet also uses motifs that share striking continuities with images in the other Cotton Nero narratives. The ship, the whale, and the woodbine each present an image of an enclosed space, a motif that appears as a controlling image in each of the Cotton Nero narratives.2 These enclosures, in a dialectic between interior and exterior,3 are relational spaces, locations defined and ordered by the physical placement of Jonah, their chief inhabitant and viewer. In each of them, Jonah is engulfed in darkness, a condition dramatically paralleling his failures to perceive larger orders of creation and power. 4 Each one temporarily inhabited by Jonah, the enclosed spaces of Patience differ from Purity's symbolic vessels, the longer homily's important images of enclosure, not only by important variations in symbolic function but also in their relationship with figures in the text who use them. For

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

73

whereas the exempla in Purity are grounded on a shared symbolic motif, the vessel, images based on a similar structure of containment appear in Patience as essential narrative components (ship, whale, woodbine), without which there would be no story. Taking their shape according to the gaze of a viewer or viewers within them, the enclosing spaces of Patience establish referential frameworks, structures that offer sensory cues to Jonah, who has to choose between God's fixed and often apparendy irrational law and the phenomenal messages conveyed by places he can smell, touch, and see.

The Ship to Tarshish: A View from the Decks The exemplum section of Patience, the Jonah story, is episodic, as is the biblical narrative. Each episode is a small drama involving the prophet's interaction with God. Readers have disagreed over the narrative structure of the exemplum, differing chiefly on issues of thematic emphasis: Some readings, exploring the poem's presentation of man's relationship with God, argue that the poem falls into two parts, each initiated by a command of God and followed by scenes of Jonah's response to that command. Other readings, dividing the exemplum into a fivefold structure, argue that Patience is a penitential poem whose thematic purpose is realized in a repeating narrative pattern in which a prayer is followed by a manifestation of God's mercy and judgment.5 The most overdy simple of all the Cotton Nero poems, Patience has in fact been subjected to a surprisingly wide variety of interpretations, having been understood as a typological drama of the life of Christ,6 a parable of the contemplative life,7 a penitential manual,8 or an exemplum on preaching intended for preachers and clerics.9 Other readers, however, have explored the poem's visual and interpretive tensions, examining how the narrative controls the "confrontation between the human and the more than human"10 through its perceptual strategies and its juxtaposed spatial images.11 The importance of this approach for our understanding of the visual poetics of Patience, and indeed of the Gawain-poet in general, lies in part in its implicit assessment that images mediate between the reader and Jonah, who perceives them; that is, description is an act rather than an artifact, a process controlled not simply by an omniscient narrator but also shaped by spectators in the text, the most important of whom is of course Jonah. By exploring Jonah's relationships not just to God's verbal commands but also to the physical spaces around him, these studies also have contributed to our understanding of

74

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

the specific images—ship, whale, and woodbine—the poet uses for his spatial ground. The poem's images of enclosure, each one convincingly described as part of a realistic tableau, are what Erwin Panofsky might call "disguised symbols"; for even as they echo with conventional symbolic rhetoric they represent space in a coherent fashion. Our understanding of the homily, andfinallyof the narrator's definition of patience, is controlled, however, not through the subservience of naturalistic form to symbol— which is the way Panofsky understands the relationship between images and symbols in fifteenth-century Flemish painting.12 Rather, the importance of Patience's spatial descriptions resides in the intersection of dual systems of meaning, one symbolic and the other mimetic. In his descriptions of the whale and the woodbine, and to a lesser extent of the ship, the poet invokes the apparatus of conventional typological symbolism, implying, for example, that the whale is a symbolic hell as well as a figurative church. Nevertheless, the operations—chiefly those of Jonah but also of the sailors in the first episode of the exemplum—of perception, sensation, and response to these places control the action of the narrative, effectively establishing a set of perceptual and highly personalized lenses that shape both what is seen and what is understood. In the description of the ship on which Jonah takes refuge in his flight from Nineveh, the poet creates a complex spatial system that is as multidimensional as the Otherworld in Pearl, as discussed in Chapter 2. The poles are set by God in his heaven and by Jonah sleeping in the hold, and the axis between these poles is set by the fluid interactions of a series of nonhuman and human intermediaries—the winds, the waves, the fragile body of the ship, and the sailors. Both description and dialogue are carefully modulated to serve in the construction of a zoned theater, a series of stages each marked by the viewpoint of a single witness or group of witnesses. The central "zone" in this section of the exemplum is the hold of the ship. Huddled by the "hurrok," a term whose meaning is not entirely clear, Jonah hides inside in his fear of the storm. Yet even while he is enclosed within the ship, his presence controls the events that occur with the winds, the waves, and the sailors. His position being literally andfigurativelycentral to the action of the episode, Jonah is nevertheless isolated from the sailors both by his choice of place and by his acts, namely, sleep. In the staging of this episode, the poet effectively controls point of view by describing the absence of the significant and necessary witness, Jonah himself. Jonah's position encased within the ship also establishes the motif of

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

75

enclosure, an image central to Purity as well, as the controlling spatial image for this poem, for the motif is repeated in the subsequent episodes of the whale and the woodbine. Within the hold of the ship to Tarshish, Jonah becomes a figure of the alienated or despairing self, and the ship's interior becomes a concrete spatial referrent for human cupidity: He wat3 flowen for ferde of j?e flode lotes In-to Jje Ьо|эет of J?e bot, and on a brede lyggede, On-helde by |эе hurrok, for jje heuen wrache, Slypped vpon a sloumbe-selepe, and sloberande he routes. (183-186) 13 Snoring in a deep sleep in the bottom of the boat for his fear of the vengeance ("wrache") of heaven, Jonah puts himself at the farthest distance he can from God, his enclosure becoming by its axial polarization an antitype to heaven, his sleep the inverse of divine vigilance. His enclosure within the ship thus becomes a symptomatic and symbolic hell, a figure that is implied direcdy when the poet describes him as "Ragnel in his rakentes" [the devil in his chains]. Jonah's choice of a bed beside the "hurrok," an uncertain nautical term that in modern Northern dialects refers to the area in the stern of the boat and in Middle English may refer to a ship's bilge or rudder-band,14 may also comment on his spiritual malaise. If hurrok, as one study of Middle English nautical terms indicates, is intended to signify a rudder-band, a handle-shaped band used to keep a rudder in position, the image could denote Jonah's forfeiture of will. This reading is inviting, since "steering the heart," the poet's paraphrase for the eighth Beatitude, patience ("Pay ar happen [blessed] also })at con her hert stere" [27]) carries nautical connotations. In the context of the homiletic frame, Jonah's slumber by a rudder would apdy comment on his refusal to heed God's spiritual guidance. To equate the ship with a place of purgatory—its hold the devil's prison with Jonah a too-deserving cargo—is too simple, however, for the image exploits a multivalent symbolism that engages the reader as an interpreter of a paradoxical set of meanings even as it invites us to "see" the ship through Jonah's eyes and senses. Throughout medieval scriptural exegesis, the image of a boat with Christ as helmsman recurs as a common metaphor for the Christian Church, based perhaps on frequent New Testament references to Christ as a navigator. 15 Rabanus Maurus offers the

76

Patience ·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

commonplace explanation: "God himself is both Savior and governor of the ship of the Church, because through his spirit he rules and governs it until he leads it to the port of eternal salvation."16 Within this symbolic tradition, Jonah's sleep in the ship's bottom becomes a cameo of spiritual sloth and alienation, even though the ship itself suggests that Jonah is never fully cut off from God's mercy. The enclosure image in this first episode of the exemplum in Patience is thus built on figural polarities—heaven and hell, the obedient spirit and the body that, sleeping, has denied the spiritual life—even as it suggests the operations of transition or spiritual mutation. The transitional role of the ship to Tarshish in Jonah's spiritual improvement, implied in part by this rather well-known exegetical and symbolic tradition that repeatedly "reads" ships as symbols of the Church under divine guidance, is even further established by the dynamic presentation of transitional space according to shifting points of view. The enclosures of this episode, along with the enclosures described by the whale and woodbine, are marked by descriptions of entrances and expulsions, transitional moments that can perhaps be understood through Victor Turner's analysis of ritual transitions in culture. According to Turner, rites of passage, such as investitures, are usually characterized by the neophyte's adoption of a liminal status in which he or she becomes a "threshold person," stripped of status, identity, and residence, even of clothing, attributes that are given in new form when the neophyte emerges from the rite with a new social identity.17 In his transitions into and out of the ship, and particularly later into and out of the whale, Jonah becomes such a liminal man, changing his status as he crosses each threshold. At the same time, however, these entrances and exits punctuate a discourse between points of view, a dynamic that itself dramatizes the subjective nature of interpretation and the limited fields of our own understanding. Because it is Jonah's disobedience that leads to the storm, which in turn leads to to his secret "roosting," "jowked in derne" (182), in the bottom of the boat out of fear of the roaring of the flood, Jonah centralizes the first episode of the exemplum. Nevertheless, the events occur according to a complex and interactive narrative plan, one that is structured by entrances and exits and crossings of thresholds, each spatial transition marking an important shift in Jonah's status. Through his use of threshold space and concomitant shifts in point of view, the poet is able to give the ship a complex three-dimensional structure, creating of the ship a zoned theater for dramatizing the interaction of multiple lines of sight.

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

77

When Jonah steps on board he becomes, in crossing that threshold, the liminal man—a neophyte stripped of his identity and home. As Jonah's status changes on boarding the ship, the narrative suddenly shifts its point of view. Describing the boarding, "then he tron on |x> tres, and {эау her tramme ruchen" (101), the narrative swings from the general to the particular, focusing suddenly on the events and actions—the sailors ("J)ay") preparing their gear as Jonah steps on the boards—that coincide with Jonah taking his imagined refuge. This narrative transition effects a radical shift from an account of passage across a completely undifferentiated landscape, "{rns he passes to {5at port his passage to seche" (97), to Jonah's highly particularized view, chiefly upward, at the ship's rigging; it also emphasizes Jonah's acts of perception, particularly his upward gaze, which creates the illusion that sense perception itself can stabilize or appear to fix a moment in time. It is not simply the poetry that generates the picture of motion caught in action, but the senses of the spectator, Jonah, whose apparent stasis as observer further preserves the descriptive moment. The visual poetics in the description of the rigging of the ship thus call attention not just to Jonah's escapism, but also to the illusory reifications of sense perception. The step into change that the boarding of a ship almost certainly signifies is obscured by a descriptive visualization of the scene as a paradigm of human power and control. In the descriptions of the rigging of the ship, as well as in the subsequent description of the storm at sea, the poet also controls the mechanics of perception to guide interpretation of the text, establishing zoned and interactive dramatic fields that collectively subvert any monolithic interpretive view. Description is not a product of an omniscient and absent narrator, but a set of perceptions generated by the gaze or gazes of characters in the text. 18 Through an intensive use of active verbs, "cachen," "fasten," "we3en," "swenges," verbs that capture the sailors' purposeful and skilled control of the ship, the description conveys as well the full force of Jonah's escapism: Then he tron on {ю tres, and {эау her tramme ruchen, Cachen vp {эе crossayl, cables {эау fasten; \Vi3t at {эе wyndas we3en her ankres, Spynde spak to {эе sprete {эе spare bawe-lyne, Gederen to {эе gyde-ropes, {эе grete с1о{э falles, Pay layden in on ladde-borde and {эе lofe wynnes.

78

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside F"e blyjje brejje at her bak J)e bosum he fyndes, He swenges me f)ys swete schip swefte fro jje hauen. (101-108) 19

A harmonious picture of technological control, a faultless sequence of action and response, the account of the sailors' preparation of their ship for departure recalls, by antithesis, Jonah's failure to respond to God, an interaction in which a command was specifically not carried out. The description thus comments in a complex and allusive way on the larger scope of Jonah's actions, offering an imagistic commentary that the subsequent narrative commentary goes on to affirm. Paraphrasing the same lines of Psalm 96 that appear in Purity, the narrator's voice enters to remark on how foolish it is of Jonah to think he could escape the eyes and ears of God: "Hit may not be J?at he is blynde J)at bigged [made] vche узе" (124). Thus even while the picture of action and response evoked by the description of the ship comments analogously on Jonah's failed mission, this small and apparently complete visual world is also a screen set against and obscuring God's world; the description itself stands as a symptom of Jonah's spiritual error in visualizing a small universe humanly empowered and complete without the agency of God. In the description of the storm that immediately follows the allusion to the ninety-third psalm, God's voice and agency do enter the poem. In the perceptual construction of this description the point of view modulates between that of God and that of the sailors (as well as of Jonah) on board the ship, a modulation that reveals the ordering of things under God's aegis, even though a hierarchical system of agencies is not apparent to Jonah. After God calls the winds, the sound begins, the storm blows on the water, the sea roars, the waves rise; and finally wind, sea, and ship meet: An-on out of )эе ηοφ-est J)e noys bigynes, When bojje breves con blowe vpon bio watteres; R03 rakkes |эег ros with rudnyng an-vnder, Pe see sou3ed fill sore, gret selly to here. Pe wyndes on f)e wonne water so wrastel to-geder Pat }эе wawes fill wode waltered so Ызе And efte busched to J?e abyme, ^at breed fysches Durst nowhere for Г03 arest at J?e bothem.

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

79

When f>e breth and f>e brok and J)e bote metten, Hit wat3 a ioyles gyn j?at Jonas wat3 inne. (137-146)20 The principal witness of this panoramic view is the reader, allowed to see a system of agencies descending from God's decree. This view contrasts markedly with the view of the sailors, however, who, like Jonah, see chiefly the ship: Pen hurled on a hepe |зе helme and )эе sterne; Fürst to-murte mony гор and f>e mast after; Pe sayl sweyed on |эе see, {эеппе suppe bihoued Pe coge of f>e colde water, and {эеппе |эе cry ryses. 3et coruen {jay |эе cordes and kest al {jer-oute, Mony ladde {эег forth lep to laue and to kest, Scopen out J)e scajjel water {5at fayn scape wolde, For be monnes lode neuer to 1и{эег, |je lyf is ay swete. (149-156)21 In this description of the ship's foundering as first its ropes and mast break and then the sail collapses on the waves, the point of view remains fixed, focused according to the sailors' gaze. The passage thus superimposes a new and focused view of events onto the previous panorama. Even more important, the sailors' view of the tempest contrasts with the account immediately preceding of God's agency in calling the storm, orders that are carried out so swiftly that "Jjenne wat3 no torn (эег bytwene his tale and her dede" (135), and also with the earlier description of the preparations. The confusion pictured as the sailors cut the cords, bail the boat, and lighten the ballast in an attempt to save the ship thus recalls, by a neat structural parallel, two pictures of imposed order, one human and the other divine. Taken sequentially, the varying pictures of order and confusion as the narrative shifts from the ship (as Jonah perceives it) to the storm (as first God and then the sailors see it) draw attention to the act of perception itself. Controlled and directed by the literal or implied eyewitness within the text, these descriptions set up exclusive perceptual frames; both views of the ship encompass a human and limited reference, even as the account of the storm gives a picture of hierarchical agencies. This, then, is the consequence of Jonah's refusal to preach in Nineveh; his willful disobedience and severance from God is figured imagistically as his acts of perception that record only

8o

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

phenomenal appearances, fragile material structures and events controlled either by men—the sailors—or by the misfortune of bad weather.

The Whale: Blind Sight and Labyrinthine Interior The visual poetics of the first part of the exemplum in Patience thus set up frameworks of reference that collectively describe a cosmos composed of multiple spheres of apparent control—or at least of points of view. Structured as they are according to perceptual logic, these frames also dramatize the fragmented and episodic nature of human experience. In the description of Jonah's temporary residence within the whale the poet continues to exploit the possibilities of relational space. In this section of the exemplum, designated as a new division by an illuminated capital in the manuscript, much more attention is given than in the account of his time aboard the ship to Jonah's perception of interior space. Trapped in the whale's belly, Jonah is again enclosed in a dark interior, yet in this description the poet lingers, in some of the most evocative poetic images in Middle English, on the depiction of sensory experience. In this enclosure Jonah is not asleep, but alert to the sensations of touch and smell as he "glydes" in, rolls about ("relande"), and gropes ("fathme3") in a stomach that, in its grease and sorrow, stinks like hell. The description is long and detailed and, as readers have pointed out, utterly unlike the account in the Vulgate, which says only Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights (Jonah 2.1). Jonah's long prayer, an admission of God's power over nature and of his place in that hierarchy, closely paraphrases the prophet's prayer in the Vulgate; but the description of the experience of interior space seems to be, in the absence of any apparent source, the poet's own creation. 22 How can we understand the effect and the intent of this thirty-six-line descriptive cadenza? The description draws us, in part, away from its account of sensory experience by allusive and contradictory references to Christian imagery. Jonah glides into the beast "as mote in at a munster dor," as a speck of dust into the doors of a cathedral, but within finds a place that stinks as the devil, "savoured" as hell. The account of the space Jonah traverses inside the whale also suggests church architecture, at least according to Jonah, who believes the gut to take the shape of a cross, "a rode {5at hym {503t." (270)23 The allusions to the devil, to hell, to a cross, and the "munster dor" in this description evoke, as numerous scholars have noted, the figural Jonah, the Jonah of Matthew 12.38-41 who is a type of Christ:

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

81

A n evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh . . . repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, something greater than Jonas is here. 24

Jonah, encased in the whale's belly very much as he is earlier enclosed in the hold of the ship, resides in spaces that contain the dual allegories of hell and temple, allegories that repeatedly place his human drama within a larger Christian cycle of repentance and salvation. Nevertheless, important as this symbolic system of references may 25 be, it is consistently subordinated to a descriptive program that commands our interest by telling of the horrific and the grotesque through graphic sensory imagery. The tactile representation of Jonah's encounter with the whale's interior is generated in part through the use of verbs; Jonah's body "glydes," "relande" or reeling in until he "blunt" or comes to a stop inside the stomach. By emphasizing Jonah's motion, the poet fragments his description of the whale's interior, presenting it episodically, reflexive to Jonah's physical senses. In the description of Jonah's motion through the gut, for instance, the narrative is built of verbal units that match movement with an olfactory or tactile sensation: He glydes in by {зе giles |эигз glaymande glette Relande in by a гор, a rode f>at hym {x>3t, Ay hele ouer hed hourlande aboute, Til he blunt in a blok as brod as a halle. (269—272)26 Each unit is constructed of three components: verbal, substantive, and metaphoric. These are arranged in a repeating pattern that first presents Jonah's will-less motion, then a portion of the whale's anatomy (gills, gut, a cavern), andfinallythe space as Jonah or the narrator senses or imagines it: "glaymande glette," "a rode jjat hym {503t," "as brod as a halle." By denoting each stage of Jonah's journey into the whale through references to perception, either tactile or imaginary, the poet generates a spatial picture that is both episodic and incoherent, both to the reader and the viewer in the text. Lacking an orderly picture of the whale's interior, Jonah grasps it as sensory referents to his own blind movement in the dark. What the description conveys, above all, is fragmentation and self-reflexivity; Jonah can know only what he can touch and smell as space turns radically in on him.

82

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

In its construction according to a series of perceptual frames, each marked by Jonah's bodily sensation of a spatially incoherent structure, the description's sensory poetics graphically evoke a drama of contingency and alienation. Willfully severed from God, Jonah is visually cut off from a spatial construct he can understand, resident of an interior whose outline and structure he cannot even see. The description thus builds on the perceptual dynamics of earlier scenes, such as the moment when Jonah boards the ship and watches the preparations for departure, even as it narrows the prophet's visual field even further. Even apparent order, such as the picture of the ship's rigging, is denied him. Even though the description of the whale's interior constructs space through accounts of a series of sensory encounters and does not resolve those frames into a spatially cohesive picture, the episode as a whole attains a graphic and symbolic coherence through its labyrinthine form. For Jonah, the most insistent feature of the whale's interior is its indeterminacy either as knowable or as fixed space. Groping in the dark interior, Jonah is also stumbling in a place of insecure footing, a posture dramatized in his fall— perhaps an evocative figum of Satan's fall from heaven, "hele ouer hed hourlande aboute" (271)—and then in his exploratory stance as he "fathme3 [gropes] aboute" (273) and "lurkkes and laytes" (277), looking for a place of safety. First falling or reeling and then groping through the whale's gut, Jonah's progress is marked by a mazelike wandering: And ferine he lurkkes and laytes where wat3 le best In vche a nok of his nauel, bot nowhere he fynde3 No rest ne recouerer bot ramel ande myre, In wych gut so-euer he got3, bot euer is God swete. (277-280)27 Its labyrinthine configuration signifying Jonah's spiritual chaos, the whale's gut also paradoxically implies the potential of spiritual transition or even redemption. In part the implications of the whale's salvific role are contained within the Christological imagery that grounds the poet's metaphors: Jonah's passage "as mote in at a munster dor" and his own impression of the gut as a "rode" or a cross implicate both the spectator and Jonah himself in a process of reading in this punishment, which appears to defy any order or coherence, the imagery of the Church with its redemptive icons. This system of symbolism, contrasting sharply with sensoryfieldof the imagery, dovetails with the gut's evocation of a maze; medieval labyrinths,

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

83

common decorative motifs in Gothic churches, were built as unicursal designs, and like the whale's interior, led inevitably to a center and then out again. Whereas the endless corridors of sixteenth-century labyrinths or their classical prototypes, such as the maze Theseus follows to the Minotaur, exploit the idea of our uncertain wandering in the deceptive ways of the world, 28 medieval labyrinths, at least those in the visual arts, graphically enact the linear journey of the Christian life. According to Penelope Doob, one reason they were placed in medieval churches was as "a sign of hell made extricable through the labors and unicursal footsteps of Christ-Theseus—a sign of redemption as well as a warning to those who will not follow Christian doctrine."29 Boccaccio, in his commentary on The Divine Comedy, describes the conventional form of the unicursal labyrinth as he remarks on the epic's spatial design: This [Cretan] labyrinth was not made as we design ours, that is, with circles and windings of the walls, through which anyone who goes without turning around infallibly arrives at the middle, and then, following the windings without turning, comes outside; but there was, and still is, a mountain all excavated within, made with square chambers so that each chamber has four doors, one in each side, each door leading to a similar room, so that a man who enters grows bewildered and doesn't know how to get out. 3 0

The whale's interior in Patience incorporates some of the spatial bewilderment Boccaccio sees in Dante's fiction, even though it (like Dante's penitential maze) leads to a center or corner and then out. In counterpoint to Jonah's spiritual chaos, pictured through his fragmented sensory contact with the whale's interior, the description thus imposes a system of iconographic order, one whose redemptive text Jonah will privately enact through the unfolding of his own transitional and penitential drama. If the whale's gut, which evokes a sensory nightmare even as it describes motion that can only lead to a higher good, suggests contrasting spatial orderings, one subjective and partial and the other unitary, the episode as a whole is built on a set of spatial planes, each of which reflects a single point of view. Similar to the preceding descriptions of the ship, which establish a complex interrelationship between the interior space of the ship and the larger set of hierarchies that are empowered by God, the episode of the whale also encloses one space within another, defining Jonah's private drama through acts that occur within a larger set of contexts. The whale within whose interior Jonah resides, itself swims in the sea, or more specifically, between the sea floor and the surface of the waves:

84

Patience ·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside A wylde walterande whal, as wyrde pen schaped, Pat wat3 beten fro pe abyme, bi pat bot flotte, And wat3 war of pat \vy3e J)at pe water so3te, And swyftely swenged hym to swepe and his S W 0 I 3 opened. (247-250)31

This passage and the scene's further elaboration in the subsequent lines present some puzzling discontinuities, principally in their shift from a cool account of the sailors' reaction to Jonah—"Now is Jonas pe jwe jugged to drowne"(245)—to the amplified account in the following lines of the voracious whale.32 What we may experience as a violation in tone also involves a sudden transition in point of view, for it takes us from the sailors' experience of closure to a broader view of the whale's domain where Jonah appears insignificant, even pitiful: "wyth pe mon in his mawe malskred [petrified] in drede— / As lyttel wonder hit wat3, 3if he wo dre3ed [suffered woe]" (255—256). This disruptive shift in angle of vision forges a new set of spatial compass points and reinterprets the sailors' assumption that Jonah is safely dead. For Jonah, diminished as prey of the whale and still to be diminished further (shortly to be described as a speck of dust, a "mote in at a munster dor" [268]) will play out his drama on a larger stage than the sailors or even he can see. Its immediate tangents include the waves and the sea bottom (248; 253—254), which together encompass the whale's oceanic domain. But this stage itself exists within God's sphere; for the poet interrupts the narrative to remind us that Jonah's safety depends on God's intervention: For nade pe Ьузе heuen-kyng, ригз his honde my3t, Warded pis wrech man in warlowes gutte3, What lede mo3t lyue, bi lawe of any kynde, Pat any lyf my3t be lent so longe hym with-inne? (257-260)33 Even as the systems of Jonah's residence grow more complex, we are reminded that all is under God's ordination. The sailors, Jonah, and even the whale each sees according to a separate line of sight, whereas God, "pat syre pat syttes so Ызе" (261), guides the entire drama (257). Characteristic of the treatment of space in this poem is a coalescence of multiple viewpoints. In this sense the descriptive field of Patience differs

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

85

somewhat from that of the other Cotton Nero poems, with perhaps the exception of Gawain, as we shall see, where point of view in the challenge episode and at the arrival at Hautdesert similarly oscillates. In the episode of the whale in Patience, God's providential sphere in effect encases the whale swimming with Jonah in its maw, but does not disempower it; even as we as readers are reminded by references to God that the whale and the prophet are vassals in God's court, we are simultaneously seduced through graphic sensory detail to participate in the unfolding drama. And with the description of the whale's swallowing of the prophet, as with the account of the disengorging of Jonah, spit promptly onto bare ground, "he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye" (338), we also see Jonah, who appears rather small and insignificant, through transitional moments. Not only does his wandering or falling through the whale's gut describe transitional motion, but his entrance to the whale also gives an account similar to the account of his entrance and exit from the ship, one that reiterates his liminal status. By building a complex spatial system to introduce God's order and the whale's domain, the poet builds his scene on the poetics of transitional process; the sailors feed Jonah, feet first, to the whale; the whale swallows him up; the whale swings and sweeps, "swenge3 and swayues" to the sea bottom, itself moving in a place of surging currents, of "rydelande strondes." The spatial poetics of the scene thus subvert the implications of simple or static ordering suggested by the poet's apostrophe to God's providential design in lines 257—260. A failure to perceive that the design exists is, of course, at the heart of Jonah's troubled relationship with God; yet the poet's sympathetic and graphic description of the ship and the whale as Jonah might have seen them valorizes the philosophic gap between a perceptual methodology and spiritual absolutes, suggesting further that this aporia between the temporally sequential, spatially fragmented world we sense and the hierarchical, ordered, and unitary cosmos of Scripture is central to Jonah's crisis of faith. This is not to suggest that the poet is using description to condemn the world and its pleasures. Through its perceptual ordering the poem demands we take a sympathetic view of Jonah's dilemmas. Yet we would be also misreading the text, of course, if we saw it as a celebration of sensory empiricism. Jonah's condition of exile—from man as well as from God— results from his failure to see God's ordering, or how God "steers" the ship or the whale. In the prayer, a biblical paraphrase, that Jonah utters in the whale's belly, he finally (if briefly) acknowledges that the cosmos is spatially complex and temporally simultaneous, apparently recognizing that his

86

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

actions may lead to a permanent residence in God's court. Drawing on a similar store of evocative sensory imagery throughout the episode, the prayer coalesces the previously fragmented descriptions of space into a unitary design perceived and described through a single vision: Pe grete flem of ]эу flod folded me vmbe; Alle (эе gote3 of f>y guferes and groundele3 рошкз, And J>y stryuande streme3 of strynde3 so mony, In on daschande dam dryue3 me ouer. (309-312)34 Through memory, Jonah reconstructs his experience in the whale to accord with a recognition of complex space. Going beyond the chaotic darkness of the whale's gut, he describes the currents that surround the flood, and then delivers an extraordinary, self-conscious analysis of his own spiritual and physical position in relation to God. Using the fish as physical sign of his spiritual location, he defines himself through sensory terms, his voice, though unclear (307), heard by God, but his form cast out from God's "cler узеп" (314): And 3et I sayde as I seet in f>e se boJ)em; "Care-ful am I, kest out fro {эу cler узеп And deseuered fro {эу sy3t, 3et surely I hope Efte to trede on Jjy temple and teme to J>y seluen." (313-316)35 In direct juxtaposition to Jonah's solitary residence on the bottom of the sea is God's court in Heaven, the vision promised as well in Purity's use of the sixth Beatitude. In the process of describing a complex and hierarchical cosmos, Jonah also anatomizes his own process of recognition by explaining that his awareness of God's agency has evolved, and that his earlier belief that he was cast out from God's sight occurred in response to his physical location, "as I seet in jje se bojjem," a half-line addition to the Vulgate, which says only, "Et ego dixi, Abiectus sum a conspectu oculorum tuorum" (Jon. 2.5). "And 3et I sayde as I seet in ]эе se bo^em" is a memorial reference, in which Jonah tells God what he thought before; sitting in the whale, Jonah reconstructs that moment of insight and uses it to meditate on the surprising coalescences between physical and spiritual locations, crying out that he is "bound" by the depths, "f>e abyme byndes ]зе body jjat I byde

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

87

inne" (318). What Jonah's prayer describes is the methodology of penance in a contiguous and hierarchical cosmos. Through the reformation of the will that can follow understanding, his prayer suggests, we can move between the sea bottom (despair, the bound soul, the mystics' dark night) and God's court. Even though Jonah's recognition of principles of ordering will be short-lived, his prayer offers an impassioned, even elegiac lament about his physical and spiritual prison.

The Woodbine: Perception as Comic Drama In the episode of Jonah and the "wod-bynde," the poet again employs an imagery rich in polyvalent symbolism to describe an enclosing space. The description of Jonah's bower within the woodbine elaborates extensively on the spare account found in the Vulgate: "And the Lord God appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant" (Jon. 4.6). 36 Whereas the Vulgate details only those properties of the "hedera" that provide for the prophet's comfort (a shade over his head, protection from discomfort), Patience endows its woodbine with features, described with some attention, that do not pertain in any obvious way to Jonah's bodily comfort. The woodbine becomes a space, in fact a little hut ("logge"), whose architectural design is rendered with some specificity: For hit wat3 brod at {эе boj?em, bo3ted on lofte, Happed vpon ау|эег half, a hous as hit were, A nos on f>e η ο φ syde and nowhere поп е11ез, Bot al sehet in a scha3e {>at schaded ful cole. (449-452)37 The description is quite detailed. The woodbine is broad below, vaulted above, and except for the door implied in the "nos" projecting on the north side, entirely enclosed. These features, which belong to no known source and have no direct narrative consequence, give a sensory record of Jonah's perception, even though at the same time they invite us to "read" the woodbine through a symbolic methodology. Vaulted ("bo3ted") above and entered by a single door, the woodbine becomes architectonic, a substantial and apparendy fixed residence, "a hous as hit were." As a

88

Patience ·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

structured dwelling with a lofty ceiling and a spacious, walled interior, this building can even evoke a place of worship—or even the interior of a church. At the same time, however, the woodbine poses an alternative reading through the imagery of binding; a "lefsel of love," this is a place of lovesnares, idolatry, and narcissism. The plant identified in the Vulgate as "hedera" was variously glossed and translated, with Augustine arguing that the vine was a gourd (Cucurbitas) and Saint Jerome arguing that it was an ivy {hedera).38 In calling the plant a woodbine rather than an ivy, the poet would seem to be emphasizing its quality of luxury. As described by the encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus, for instance, ivy was connected with death, perhaps due to iconographic traditions that lingered from classical funerary monuments.39 The woodbine, on the other hand, is poetically associated with love, a point that Bartholomaeus (in Trevisa's translation) explains: "A vyne hatte vitiis and haj) Jjat name of viciendo 'byndynge,' for it is ybounde.... And in fewe trees kynde is more outward }эап in j?e vyne; f)ay growej) withouten ende. . . . and byclippeth hem and holdej? wif> her armes as it were by affecioun of matrimonye."40 In Patience the poet leaves little doubt that the woodbine represents the seductive delights of the world, for even before Jonah capers beneath it, it is described as a "lefsel of love," a bower or, literally, a leafhall of love. In its resistance to a single classification or system of meaning the woodbine, like the ship and the whale in the poem's earlier episodes, contains not only the good and the bad, de bono and de malo, but a continuum, sustaining within its own imagery a sliding system of value. Linked to the poem's other interiors by shared and ambivalent symbols, the woodbine also evokes the enclosures of earlier episodes through its construction according to perceptual dynamics, which serve to dramatize and mediate its symbolic oppositions. Yet the persistent references to Jonah's eyes and senses subordinate structure to apprehension; that is, significance resides principally with the signifier, Jonah himself. Even as the description invokes opposing conventional symbolism—a bower of concupiscence, a temple for spiritual rectification—itfixesmeaning through Jonah's actions and interpretive processes. The principal terms for recording Jonah's responses to the woodbine are simply verbs for sight. The poet establishes a system of causalities in which Jonah's sense of sight plays a principal role. When he builds his bower out of hay and fern, it is so that he can keep watch ("for-to wayte") on Nineveh in the valley to see what will become of it. While he sleeps, God

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

89

builds the woodbine over his head, so that when he awakens he looks up to see green leaves: "loked alofte on J?e lef {5at lylled [shimmered] grene" (447). Jonah's gaze on the leaves generates its own effects, for as he looks at them he sees how they wave in the breeze and protect him from the sun. This observation then leads him to a state of delight in which he frolics alone in the bower even as he looks toward Nineveh: he lies "lokande to toune," waiting to see what will happen to Nineveh, even as he delights in his enclosed space: "euer he la3ed as he loked {)e löge alle aboute" (461). Jonah's gaze is thus not fixed entirely on the woodbine above and around him. He builds his hut from the first to keep watch on Nineveh, and even as he delights in God's replacement structure he keeps his eye—when he is not sleeping—on the city: "lys loltrande [lounging] jjer-inne lokande to toune" (458). This double gaze, one within and one without on the city he has left, broadens the context of perception and response, for his gaze on the city in this drama of judgment signifies the complexity of his visual relationships. Delighting in the woodbine, Jonah accepts God's gift as miraculous and permanent; yet looking out from beneath its leaves at Nineveh, he hopes for destruction, allowing and even expecting God to demonstrate his destructive power as long as it does not harm him. The ironies generated by the description of the woodbine as a seductive interior from which, on the "est half of pc Ьузе place" (434), Jonah watches for indications of God's acts of judgment on another place of residence are complex and provocative. By centering Jonah as the observer in a multidimensional scene, the poet visually and interpretively links Nineveh with the woodbine, suggesting that the two episodes continue the same story about God's power to destroy or save. In a similar manner, the episode's temporal dimensions are expanded to include the past (Jonah's own history as prophet to Nineveh) even as Jonah's continued watchfulness, waiting to see what will happen next ("for-to wayte on fiat won what schulde worjje after" [436]) is subordinated to a nonreflective infatuation with a present moment. This layering of spatial and temporal frames in the woodbine episode, an episode rich in ironies, results in a curious narrative disjunction between Jonah's experience of delight and the drama of God's judgment and power in which Jonah is participating. Jonah even seems to forget what he is looking for as he watches Nineveh—as indeed he forgets other things, such as even the need to eat. Yet beyond the woodbine is Nineveh, and behind his delight in the present is the temporal scope of his own prophetic actions. Positioned at the center of narrative and description in this episode,

90

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

Jonah again enacts the drama of the small man, the individual who believes first in what he sees close at hand. In this response the woodbine episode recalls the poem's earlier homiletic sections, for the descriptions of the ship and of the whale, like the woodbine, structure space descriptively according to the contiguous physical relationships of observers, especially Jonah, within the text. Where the description of the woodbine chiefly differs from the poem's earlier enclosures, however, is in its movement to comedy. Within the woodbine Jonah becomes something of a buffoon whose comic status is indicated first by his inappropriate laughter and later by his petulant complaint to God. As a narrative event preceding closure, the poem's shift to a comic mode is unexpected and unsettling; it would be more consistent with the expectations of medieval narrative to maintain a consistent tone or to use comedy and laughter to redirect narrative commentary on human affairs, as at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, where Troilus laughs from the eighth sphere. Yet the comedy at the end of Troilus is certainly not directed at Troilus, who becomes the observer rather than the observed. The comic ending of Patience, or more precisely, the sporadically comic events preceding God's final homily on patience and mercy, leave little doubt that Jonah is cupidinous, petty, petulant, and remarkably unreformed in spite of his extraordinary lessons in God's providence. Yet when we laugh at Jonah it is, I believe, with a momentary discomfort, since the actions that make him laughable make him most human. That is not to say that only in the final episode of the exemplum does Jonah become truly human, but rather that in his responses to the woodbine, conveyed with careful reference to sensory process, Jonah acts out a comic drama that comments, as one reader remarks, on "the human tendency to place self at the center of the universe."41 Jonah's impassioned attachments and hyperbolic rhetoric make him funny; and though these excesses may be consistent with conventional personifications of sin (pride, sloth, wrath), we read them first as ordinary human weaknesses, even as comfortingly familiar. Dependent on Jonah's reactions to the spaces he perceives, the comedy in this episode is ultimately governed by the same visual poetics that structure Jonah's spatial relationships with the woodbine and the city in the valley. Jonah's seduction by the woodbine involves a series of responses to the impressions of his senses; his observation of the cooling green canopy first persuades him to lie within looking toward Nineveh, then causes him to lose his appetite for food, then to wish the woodbine placed at his home, "on Ьезе vpon Effraym сфег Ermonnes ЬШез" (463), and so on. In other

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

91

words, Jonah's attachment to the woodbine is not just precisely documented, but is also replicated through a descriptive program that organizes detail according to ocular logic. This manipulation of the visual field is what causes our uneasy identification with Jonah, though in fact we have no choice; the episode shapes its reality according to a single line of sight, coercing our eyes to follow Jonah's and teasing our reactions into at least partial alignment with his. If the woodbine and the poem's other enclosing spaces, the whale and the ship, seem finally to be symbolically inexact or even incoherent, that fact is due in part to the persistent construction of space according to perceptual logic, a system that foregrounds experience even as it diminishes formal or externally imposed meanings. And although spatial enclosures in each episode of the homily quite clearly incorporate antithetical symbolism, such as the whale's dual connotations of hell and temple, this system of conventional signs is subordinated to a perceptual semiotics that repeatedly shows Jonah in a state of bewilderment, delusion, avoidance, and even sleep. The poynt or quality of patience, a virtue the poet repeatedly likens to "steering the heart," would seem to comprise not only the virtues the narrator describes at the beginning and that God oudines at the end, that is, endurance or patient suffering, forebearance (being not so hastif), but also the ability to act correcdy, to steer the heart, in a world where signs often are indeterminate. 42 In this theater of conditional action, the enclosures that structure each episode of the homily offer a rich stock of imagery, for each spatial frame offers a small stage for dramatizing the condition of being cut off, isolated, alienated from God. The poem's enclosures are narrative props in a homily on a virtue, to be sure, but in that role they also destabilize conventional symbolism. H o w are we as readers to relate Jonah, his acts of disobedience, petulance, temporary reformations, to these partially allegorized places he inhabits? Most readers have argued that the poem's Christological symbolism dovetails with its contradictory de bono and de malo symbolism of place and that both operate together to transfer the interpretive burden to the reader, who sees in each of Jonah's failures a redemptive possibility, Everyman as a potential yet failed Christ. Certainly in each episode of the homily we hear the errors of Jonah's logic and correct for them. Yet at the same time the poem's persuasive visual rhetoric undermines most of the simple or absolute moral responses we might make to Jonah. By consistendy structuring space according to the visual reference of a viewer or viewers in the text, the poem subdy gives precedence to that view. As a result, we perform

92

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

several acts of reading with each episode—on the one hand, recognizing Jonah's errors and supplying the corrective and, on the other, sharing his phenomenological construction of reality in which meaning is taken first from objects close at hand. The visual poetics ofPatience thus do not always comfortably fit their homiletic frame, for the poem's most successful and memorable story is not how to be patient but how difficult it is to attend to God in his apparent absence. Even as they serve the homily by showing how patience is in part the art of learning to read's God's messages in visual signs, the poem's lengthy descriptions create a visual logic that makes Jonah's responses to the things he sees seem simple consequences of his humanity.

Notes ι. One important continuity between the texts, and one that has been generally overlooked, is their similar exploitation of the framework of history to comment on epistemological issues. Using a historical framework in part to illustrate the processes of access to and interpretation of God's word, Purity's chronological parables dramatize the period between the Flood and the Babylonian exile. Patience continues this historical progression by retelling a story that in the Vulgate follows closely on the stories of Daniel and Belshazzar. For a discussion of history in the poem, see Jay Schleusener, "History and Action in Patience," PMLA 86 (1971): 959— 965; Schleusener discusses the poet's interest in history as providential plan, though he limits his discussion to Patience. See also Sandra Pierson Prior, "'Patience— Beyond Apocalypse," for a discussion of the disjunctions between the poem's eschatological themes and its representation of the present (Modem Philology 83 [1986]: 337-348). 2. For pertinent discussions of the motif of enclosed space, see S. L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, 'The Pearl Poet's City Imagery," Southern Quarterly 16 (1978): 297-309; Cary Nelson, The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 25-49; and Laurence Eldredge, "Sheltering Space and Cosmic Space in the Middle English Patience," Annuale Mediaevale 21 (1981): 121-133. For discussions of medieval allegorical traditions that shed light on the treatment of enclosures in the Gawain-poet, see especially Charlotte Morse's discussion of the vessel in Purity as a sign for the human body in The Pattern of Judgment in the Queste and Cleanness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), esp. 129-199; and John Friedman, "Figural Typology in the Middle English Patience," in The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981), 99-129. 3.1 take the phrase "dialectics of inside and outside" from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics ofSpace, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 211. 4. In his chapter, 'The Semiology of Space in the Middle Ages," Jesse Gellrich

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

93

argues that a chthonic conception of all space as sacred informs medieval aesthetic theory, manifesting itself in architecture, painting, music, and in the Scholastic summa: "What did not change from at least the time of the ancient fertility rituals performed at the sites on which some medieval cathedrals were later built is the sacrality of space in which every dark corner is charged with significance, the part an embodiment of the whole, the sign projected as the signified" (The Idea ofthe Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985], 71). 5. See R. J. Spendal, 'The Narrative Structure of Patience" Michigan Academician 5 (1972): 107-114, who also summarizes the debate; see also William Vantuono, 'The Structure and Sources of Patience," Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 401—421. 6. For discussions of the figural Christ, see Friedman, "Figural Typology"; Schleusener, 965η; Malcolm Andrew, "Jonah and Christ in Patience" Modern Philology 70 (1972-73): 230—233; and Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the Gawain-Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 3-36. For a general review of the arguments that treat Jonah as a negative exemplum, see James Rhodes, "Vision and History in Patience," Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 2—3. 7. T. D. Kelly and John T. Irwin, "The Way and the End Are One: Patience as a Parable of the Contemplative Life," American Benedictine Review 25 (1974): 33—55. 8. Johnson, 6,13,15, 23. 9. Ordelle G. Hill, 'The Audience of Patience," Modern Philology 66 (1968): 103-109. ю. A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Port.-Л Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 74. п. See, for example, Laurence Eldredge, "Sheltering Space"; and Enoch Padolsky, "Steering the Reader's Heart in Patience ," Revue de l'Universite d'Ottawa 53 (1983): 169-180. 12. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; rpt. New York: Icon, 1971), 1: 140-148. 13. "He had fled for fear of the roaring of the sea into the bottom of the boat, and lay on a plank, huddled by the hurrock [rudder-band; bilge], because of the wrath of heaven; he slipped into a deep sleep, and snores, slobbering." Citations from the text are from the edition by J. J. Anderson, Patience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969). 14. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poetns of the Pearl Manuscript, York Medieval Texts, 2nd ser. (London: Arnold, 1978), and J. J. Anderson adopt the reading "rudder band" following Bertil Sandahl, The Ship's Hull: Middle English Sea Terms 1 (Uppsala: Lundequistska bokhandeln; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 126-127. William Vantuono, ed., The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition: Volume 2: Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, vol. 6, The Renaissance Imagination (New York: Garland, 1984), 216-217, disputes this reading, however, citing evidence for reading the term as an altered form of thurrock or bilge. 15. For a general study of biblical ship imagery, see Earl Hilgert, The Ship and Related Symbols in the New Testament (Assen: Royal Vangorcum, 1962); see also F.

94

Patience: The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

Cabrol and H. Ledere, Dictionnaire d'Archeoloßie Chretienne et de Liturgie (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ane, 1935), s.v. navire. 16. "Dominus ergo navis ecclesiae, ipse Salvator est, qui et gubernator; quia per Spiritum suum ipse earn regit atque gubernat, donee earn ad portum salutis aeternae perducat" (De Universe 22.39, PL, 111.554); see also Isidore of Seville, Etymobßiarum 19.1, PL, 82.66ifF., and Hilgert, i36ff. 17. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1969), 94-95. See also Bachelard's discussion of the threshold space as a metalinguistic category, 211-231. 18. Spearing gives an excellent discussion of the poet's use of description to create small dramatic scenes (The Gawain-Port, 82). 19. 'Then he stepped on deck and they attend their gear, hoist up the squaresail, fasten cables, weigh the anchors swiftly at the windlass, fastened the spare bowline smartly to the bowsprit; they gather the guy-ropes, the great cloth falls, they laid in oars on the port side and win the luff. The good wind at her back finds the belly of the sail, it swings this sweet ship swiftly from the harbor." 20. "Immediately the noise begins out of the northeast, when both winds blew upon the dark waters; rough storm clouds arose, with a red glare beneath them, the sea roared violently, a great wonder to hear. The winds on the dark water wrestled so together that the waves rolled about madly, so high, and again plunged to the abyss that nowhere for the upheaval did the terrified fish dare rest on the bottom. When the wind and the sea and the boat met, it was a joyless craft that Jonah was in." 21. 'Then the tiller and the stern fell in a heap; first many ropes broke and then the mast. The sail collapsed on the sea; then it is time for the boat to drink the cold water, and then the cry rises. Yet they cut the lines and threw them all out; many lads lept forth to bale and to cast—those who would eagerly escape bail out the treacherous water, for even if man's burden be never so wretched, life is always sweet." 22. David Williams points out that the prayer also resembles Psalm 68, which was often illustrated with pictures of Jonah ('The Point of Patience," Modern Philology 68 [1970]: 134); see also Friedman, esp. 9. 23. Anderson, Andrew and Waldron, and others have read rode as "road" after OE rod, though the OED lists the first appearance of "road" ("an ordinary line of communication used by persons passing between two places") in 1596. In the other Cotton Nero poems rode means "cross." 24. "Generatio mala et adultera signum quaerit: et signum non dabitur ei nisi signum Ionae prophetae. Sicut enim fuit Ionas in ventre ceti tribus diebus, et tribus noctibus, sic erit Filius hominis in corde terrae tribus diebus et tribus noctibus. Viri Ninivitae surgent in iudicio cum generatione ista, et condemnabunt earn: quia poenitentiam egerunt in praedicatione Ionae. Et ecce plus quam Ionas hie." 25. For a detailed discussion of the figural imagery of the whale, see Friedman, "Figural Typology." 26. "He glides in near the the gills through slimy filth, reeling in by a gut, which seemed like a cross to him, always tumbling about heel over head until he stopped short in a cavern as broad as a hall." 27. "And then he lies low and looks for the best shelter in each nook of his

Patience·. The Dialectics of Inside/Outside

95

navel, but nowhere does he find either rest or safety from muck and mire, in each gut wherever he goes; but God is always sweet." 28. Three classical sources for medieval labyrinth lore are Pliny, Virgil, and Ovid, all of whom, according to Penelope Doob, use a terminology rich in ambiguities: "Central to classical depictions of labyrinths, then, are these concepts: the labyrinth is a vast, dark, confusing building, its numberless passages creating 'irremeabilis' or 'inextricabilis error,' indiscoverable and irretraceable windings and 'ambages' (windings, circumlocutions, ambiguities)," "The Labyrinth in Medieval Culture: Explorations of an Image," Revue de l'Universite d'Ottawa 52 (1982): 210. 29. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 128. 30. Boccaccio, II Comento allaDivina Commedia, ed. Domenico Guerri, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1918), 2,108; trans, and cited in Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, 41. 31. "As fate then ordained, a wild, wallowing whale that was driven from the depths swam by that boat, and was aware of that man who was falling into the water, and swiftly swung to swoop him up and opened his gullet." 32. See discussions in A. C. Spearing, "Patience and the Gawain-Voct" Anglia 84 (1966): 311; and Friedman, 105. 33. "For if the high king of heaven, through the might of his hand, had not guarded this wretch in the warlock's gut, what man might believe, by any law of nature, that any life could be lent him, so long within?" 34. 'The great flow of your flood folded about me; all the currents of your whirlpools and bottomless deeps, and your many restless sea streams in one dashing flood drive over me." 35. "And yet I said as I sat in the sea bottom: Ί am full of woe, cast out from your clear eyes and cut off from your sight, yet surely I hope to walk again in your temple and belong to you.'" 36. "Et praeparavit Dominus Deus hederam, et ascendit super caput Ionae, ut esset umbra super caput eius, et protegeret eum (laboraverat enim); et laetatus est Ionas super hedera laetitia magna." 37. "For it was broad at the base, vaulted [curved] above, closed in [blessed?] on both sides, as if it were a house; a door on the north side and nowhere else, but completely enclosed in a thicket that shaded coolly." 38. See the discussion in Johnson, 18-19. 39. Of the edrea Trevisa translates Bartholomaeus Anglicus: "f>e shadaue {jerof is noyeful and greuous and strong enemy to colde and most leef to serpentes. And Ьгекф wallis and graus; ^erfore wonder it is f>at it was in worschip amonges men in olde tyme" (On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, "De Proprietatibus Rerum" [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 2, 945). 40. Trevisa, 2,1068-1072; see also Johnson, 241η. 41. Johnson, 22. 42. See the similar argument in Rhodes, 10.

5. The Framing of the Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Arthur's hall at Camelot, the tale undergoes a series of subtle narrative shifts. The poem first slows into a leisurely and protracted description of the Green Knight, a rhetorical cadenza that ends in the knight's caustic challenge to the court to produce "]эе gouernour of J)is gyng." With the verbal assault hanging in the air, the narrative pauses again. In a twenty-two-line hiatus the text describes the dynamics of visual evaluation that fill the silence that falls in the hall, when "al stouned at his steuen and stonstil seten / In a swoghe sylence {зигз |эе sale riche" (242-243).1 The Green Knight casts his eyes over the knights, rolling his eyes up and down as he tries to identify Arthur among his company. The court, in turn, performs a reciprocal ocular act. As the Green Knight stares at them they edge close, "lokyng on len{?e," as they try to assess the nature of this apparition, "fantoum" or "fayry3e," "selly" [marvel] or "auenture." The length of this passage gives the scene an extraordinary temporal verisimilitude; time seems to hang suspended as the knight's verbal challenge rings in the air. Through its attention to visual actions and interactions, the episode also recasts the preceding entrance, description, and challenge in an interpretive mode. The knight's demande is followed by his attempt to evaluate and isolate; and the court's response is to question, evaluate, size up its interlocutor. This narrative hiatus presents us suddenly with two sets of eyes, mutually gazing, mutually exclusive as each works with discrete intent, one to isolate an individual and the other to assess identity and purpose. Both, however, are interpretive; and for both actions the poet uses the same word, studie, to designate the nature of the gaze. Even though each party adopts a different ocular gesture, the Green Knight scanning the court, the court scrutinizing him, their reciprocal poses "studying" each other bring the text to a temporary halt on questions of identity, of meaning, of the relationship between visual cues and literal sequelae. We are forced to take account at this moment of what is not

A F T E R T H E G R E E N K N I G H T ' S ABRUPT ENTRANCE

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knißht

97

known. In addition, the narrative interpolation as visitor and courtiers gaze at each other rephrases, even deconstructs, some of the romance's own narrative certainties. Since the Green Knight is unable to identify Arthur among his knights, his challenge addresses as well the poem's festal hierarchies: Camelot is perhaps not as ordered, its structure not as coherent and apparent as we are led to believe in the opening stanzas of the poem. In turn, the court's collective scrutiny of its visitor offers a reinterpretation of the long description preceding the Green Knight'sfirstchallenge. For while their stare conceals some perfectly logical questions (what it might mean for a man to be such a color; what, in the absence of information about the nature of the marvel, he might be expected to do) it also redirects the interpretive process. In spite of a description that lingers on the most minute of visual details, we in fact still lack necessary and meaningful information: Why is he green? What will he do? These are not simple questions, and only one is clearly answered. The knights' uncertainty about what he might do, "what he worch schulde" (238) is settled when he challenges the court to a beheading game. The nature of the green man (magical, illusory, or marvelous in origin) and the meaning inscribed in his color are questions that the text—and an army of modern interpreters—never fully answers. And, we might ask, why should the text provide such answers? The knights' uncertainties about the green man are self-reflexive, describing their own efforts at contextualizing him more than defining him. Nevertheless, meaning is radically redefined, even subverted, when it is reshaped as a set of questions posed by viewers in the narrative. The acts of gazing, particularly in this passage where the gaze is reciprocal or mutual, set up an exclusive interpretive frame where meaning is channeled through visual epistemology—through knowledge gained through the sense of sight. How we as readers understand the Green Knight depends on multiple acts of viewing that occur within the narrative; in this description, as throughout the Cotton Nero poems, to interpret the image we must also read the gaze. The contextualizing of an event according to the perceptual horizons of textual eyewitnesses is not peculiar to the challenge episode. Sir Gawain and, the Green Knißht is throughout an emphatically visual poem. The poem luxuriates in visual detail, describing people and their dress (the Green Knight, Guenever, the Lady, the arming of Gawain), the passage of the seasons, architectural detail, decorative furnishings, and natural scenery. In addition, this text, like the other Cotton Nero narratives, also pays close attention to the eyes of viewers within the narrative. Where it differs

98

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

markedly, however, is in its repeated emphasis on the returned gaze. As they "look" ("studie," "sc," "gly3t" [glanced], "totes" [peeps]), characters adopt a wide variety of visual postures that range from non-reciprocated stares, ceremonial or iconic and worshipful gazes, to evaluative mutual gazes, as in the Green Knight'sfirstchallenge, and to reciprocal and erotic glances. The Green Knight stares at the court, rolling his red eyes (304), and later surveys them with the detached head (446); the court observes him (233) and the ax they keep as trophy (479); Gawain studies Sir Bertilak upon his arrival at Hautdesert (842), and Bertilak's court in turn examines him (87off); and throughout the temptation scenes Gawain and the Lady glance, peep, and gaze at each other (941, 970,1185,1476,1658,1761). What is the role of these visual acts, many of them reciprocal, in controlling description and in structuring interpretive frames in the text? I believe this question is crucial for understanding a text that subtly yet persistendy eludes clarification, for it allows access to the poem through a system of perceptual lenses rather than a single monocular focus.2 Here as well as regarding the other Cotton Nero narratives, the question rests on the assumption that textual visual acts are significant; that is, when a text describes a scene or a person and then places a character within the narrative as spectator to that description, the horizon of meanings inhering in the description is narrowed to a perceptual reference, yet is also multiplied as that reference is subjected to the reader's gaze. The witnessed scene, the Green Knight observed and evaluated by the court, oscillates between two views, not in mirrored reciprocity but, like Russian nesting dolls, encased within a series of graded boxes. Outside the text, as readers, our relationship with that eyewitness must be partially assured, for the scene (or person or action) is signified by the mere presence of a witness. Even if we do not share the viewer's premise, as in the challenge scene in which, after all, we have already identified Arthur at the high table, the operations of that gaze must partially deflect our own. The Green Knight's gaze turns festival to spectacle: we are not simply present among the members of the court participating in a Christmas holiday but also intrude, spectators looking in on ourselves.

The Interpretive Gaze: The Position of the Spectator Gawain includes several episodes in which, as in the challenge scene, the narrative lingers on acts of gazing. In addition, the text also constructs

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

99

descriptive scenes according to the ocular logic of spectators in the text without necessarily referring specifically to acts of vision. A look at these passages, both those in which the narrative oscillates between gazes and those in which the description follows the perceptual logic of an implied viewer, can help us understand how the poet structures space and images to control interpretation—both the interpretive processes of spectators in the text and also the interpretive field that we as readers, who see the objects described and also the textual viewers, bring to the poem. My exploration of the text's spatial construction according to visual processes is indebted to Alain Renoir's classic essays on Gawain, which describe the poem's acts of vision as "cinematographic," the drawing out or foregrounding of a visual detail as the background fades. At the same time, according to Renoir, the narrative suppresses reaction and commentary, allowing the reader to respond direcdy to a visual scenario: discussing the beheading scene, Renoir says, "it is significant that the reader's emotional reaction to the episode is the result of an entirely visual experience. From the line where the Green Knight prepares himself for the trial to the line where his head rolls on the floor, the poet neither glosses the action nor allows his protagonists to vent their feelings."3 Nevertheless, the placement of viewers within the scene channels and directs our interaction with the episode; and if we as readers respond visually, we react not only to the beheading but also to the members of the court who kick the head when it rolls near their feet. The bloody violence of the blow is somehow softened, domesticated in a response, an interpretation that alters our reading of the action. Yet that interpretation, far from providing closure, opens further questions about meaning, since the court's response may well seem at variance with our own and hence inappropriate. If its response emotionally deflects us, where does it leave us? Somehow outside of Camelot's festive artifice? With Gawain, for whom the consequences of the blow will not be entirely comic? Without doubt it leaves us slighdy uncertain about the position we should take, unclear about the nature of the scene enacted before our eyes, whose visual realism has provoked a response paradoxically suggesting that this is not nature (in this case, murder), but a game (football?) within a ludic structure. The interpretive process, far from finite, thus becomes a hermeneutic circle. The textual reaction, even when it is oblique, as in this passage where the response is gestural rather than verbal, writes against a single meaning, opening rather than closing an interpretive dialogue. A visual interaction that partially "reads" its own descriptive matrix

ioo

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

occurs even earlier in the poem in the account of Guenever. As in the beheading episode and in the first challenge scene, the intrusion of eyes upon the scene provides a retrospective reconstruction, one that shifts the direction of the gaze from a direct interaction between subject and reader by the intrusion of watchers within the scene: Whene Guenore, fill gay, grayfjed in J)e myddes, Dressed on f>e dere des, dubbed al aboute, Smal sendal bisides, a selure hir ouer Of tryed tolouse, of tars tapites innoghe, Pat were enbrawded and beten wyth £>e best gemmes Pat my3t be preued of prys wyth penyes to bye, in daye. Pe comlokest to discrye Per glent with узеп gray, A semloker Jaat euer he sy3e Soth mo3t no mon say. (74-84)4

Centered in the scene, "in f>e myddes," Guenever is also centered in the middle of an ornamental matrix, framed as it were by the silks and canopies that surround her. The description reverberates with iconic schemata, for her position echoes familiar tableaux of the Virgin in her canopied niche. As readers, we first respond to the scene according to the immediate if subtle direction of this familiar framework, one that places us in an unmediated and even reverential posture: we watch from below among the worshippers. Yet from this pose we are shordy deflected by a commercial rhetoric and by references to visual transactions. Although the value system of the description isfirstinscribed by its debt to sacred illustration, that first imposition of meaning is altered by the addition of a value system based on money.5 The silks are not only embroidered with gems, they are decorated with gems of quantifiable value: "Pat my3t be preued of prys wyth penyes to bye." And not only Guenever's ornament constitutes part of the exchange. She herself carries a price. She is finally subject to judgments of value, the most beautiful to describe, the fairest queen any man might see. The brief description of Guenever thus incorporates two systems of perception, sequential and mutually exclusive. At the end, in the "wheel," the descriptionfinallyinvokes ocular judgments among its monetary assessments by calling on an imaginary group who, looking at her, would think

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

101

her the fairest. Yet that unspecified witness has already been placed below, looking up at her on the dais; and thus the second and judgmental gaze is also retrospective, the eye comparing her at the end the same as the eye iconically gazing at the first. Creating not only a transition but a change in ocular transaction, this shift, as John Ganim has described the process, effects a "disorientation" of narrative: "The poet's rhetorical strategy, then, seems to follow a definite pattern. We are given a description, a mood, a passage, which presents or suggests a certain system of values. Then we have a transition, perhaps as brief as a line, which warns of a change. After this, we have another scene, mood, or passage, which causes us to revise or contradict or question the first statement."6 Applying this assessment of the poet's rhetorical strategy to the description of Guenever, I would go further to suggest that the disorientation in the description is created in part by a shift in perceptual relationships between subject and viewer. From being the object of a reverential gaze, Guenever becomes the object of a collective, judgmental scrutiny, an evaluative finale that finishes with a comment on her eyes, "узеп gray," the only part of her body that is even mentioned, juxtaposed to the eyes of her audience. The mention of the glance or glint of her eyes, "f>er glent," however, also includes Guenever among the viewers: not only is she seen, but she also looks back. The disorientation created by the passage is thus caused by a complex, reciprocal superimposition of ocular interpretation onto apparently fixed assessments. Although overtly telling us that Guenever is the fairest queen, the "fitt" ends by trading certainties for evaluations, its spectral and worshipful audience challenged visually to test her worth. The disorientation created by the perceptual shift in the description of Guenever is subtle. The passage is short and its narrative function obscure, since Guenever neither acts, nor, at this point in the narrative, is acted upon. Yet the description is paradigmatic of a narrative process throughout the Cotton Nero Poems, in which the audience is engaged as an interpretive agent. In that sense the description is interactive; what may seem to be an ornamental passage, merely a conventional, descriptive embellishment to a lavish set piece, invites us—in fact, requires us—as visual participants, to see from composite and even contradictory points of view. While the superimposition of monetary assessments on an initially iconic gaze in the description of Guenever subdy revalues, even commercializes, the object of that gaze, at this point in the narrative the interpretive role of the spectator in the text is unclear. The audience is technically "friendly"; that is, the collective spectators, a composite of the members of

юг

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Arthur's court and the narrator, belong to a single community. With the intrusion of the Green Knight, as we have seen, the interpretive communities multiply, a complexity that the poem realizes through its manipulation of reciprocal gazes. Another episode in which the interactive engagement of spectators with an object of the gaze has an important relationship with the narrative's story line occurs in Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert. In this episode the recognition of identity is the literal and figurative task at hand—for both Gawain and the members of Bertilak's household. Nevertheless, as in the description of Guenever, the dynamics of the interpretive process are concealed by the description's lush ornament. Lingering on the ritual of dismounting and disarming, on Gawain's greeting by his host, on his ensconcing in his chamber where his chair is draped in cushions and quilted coverlets and he himself is dressed in a brown mantle and then fed from rich stews placed on a lavishly set tresde, the episode encompasses nearly a hundred lines. Although the description chiefly reflects the point of view of Gawain, it is clear throughout that he is not simply the observer but also the observed. Oscillating between regards, the text first details the court's collective and highly ritualized welcome. The scene is crowded with knights kneeling to Gawain, opening the gates, seizing the saddle and stabling the horse, thronging to greet him: Kny3tez and swyerez comen doun f>enne For to bryng £>is buurne wyth blys into halle; Quen he hef vp his helme, ]эег hi3ed innoghe For to hent hit at his honde, fie hende to seruen; His bronde and his blasoun Ьо)эе |эау token. Pen haylsed he ful hendly {ю haj)elez vchone, And mony proud mon {)er presed J?at prynce to honour. (824-830)7 Certainly the scene, recalling another very different style of entrance, the Green Knight's arrival at Camelot, plays a part in the poem's elaborate system of balances.8 Yet the pageantry of Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert also evokes a devotional schema; as Robert Harming has pointed out, "the tableau, on a Christmas Eve, is too reminiscent of the adoration of the shepherds or Magi to be accidental."9 One could even argue that this scene, echoing the Green Knight's earlier arrival at Camelot and even the description of Guenever, reproduces one of the most familiar tableaux in late

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

103

medieval painting, in which a space is crowded with viewers whose collective gaze is fixed, often ceremonially, on a person or object of devotion. This echoic frame of reference, coupled with the scene's own decorous lassitude, suspends interpretation, or rather superimposes a formal system of adoration onto what is in fact the meeting of strangers. For the time being at least, the mutual identities of guest and host can remain hidden from each other, suspended by the ritual of greeting. Yet the questions of identity are only suspended, not submerged. The attention to visual detail makes the scene highly interactive, as at each point Gawain is confronted by either a group or an individual who attends to his physical comforts. First he is greeted by a porter (813), then by the nobles who greet him once he crosses the drawbridge, then by Sir Bertilak, and then by the servants in the chamber who, gazing on him, marvel at his elegance. The scene's lavish description is built on precise, if shifting, lines of sight in sequential descriptive frames. This very emphasis on acts of vision implies that the textual spectators are evaluating what they see, even if their visual skepticism is wholly—if temporarily—absent, any questioning replaced, almost eagerly, by a willingness to accept visual appearances as reality. For instance, when greeted by his host, Gawain gazes at him ("gly3t," 842), and considers him ("J)u3t," 843,848), finding his host a bold knight, one well-suited to be lord of the casde; he finds, that is, his host's appearance entirely consistent with the rank he wishes to assign him. When, a few lines later, the servants in the chamber have fitted Gawain with new robes, they marvel at a perfect specimen: Sone as he on hent, and happed gerinne, Pat sete on hym semly wyth saylande skyrtez, t>e ver by his uisage verayly hit semed Welne3 to vche ha})el, alle on hwes Lowande and lufly alle his lymmez vnder, Pat a comloker kny3t neuer Kryst made hem J)03t. (864-870) 10 In spite of the apparent mutual suspension of judgment, the gazes of Gawain and the servants are in fact interpretive and evaluative, acts of vision that provoke subjective commentary couched in qualifiers: "hit semed," "hem J)03t." Indeed, the placement of the phrase, "hem Jx>3t" in the twoword "bob" intensifies the qualifier, further pointing to the court's subjec-

io4

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

tive judgment. Thus even though the scene is constructed principally on the recounting of visual detail, its technical display, coupled with qualifiers that tie description to perception, merely suspends significant questions about identity. Only later will the court explicitly come to question Gawain's identity and even manners. It will be very much later, indeed at the end of the narrative, before Gawain even comes to inquire about his host's identity. When the court questions Gawain at the conclusion of the arrival episode, its interrogation imposes a significant narrative shift. From the privacy of Gawain's chamber, with its intimate account of his dress and his meal, the scene in effect expands to turn Gawain into a spectacle, a figure viewed and evaluated by the members of Bertilak's court. Finally Gawain is subjected to an overtly scrutinizing gaze: "Penne watz spyed and spured vpon spare wyse / Bi preue poyntez of Jjat prynce" (901-902). 11 Recalling the descriptions of Guenever and of the Green Knight at Camelot, both of which end in acts of visual evaluation, the leisurely account of Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert concludes with a similar disorientation as viewers within the text challenge the tone and assumptions of the preceding scene. In addition, the court's interest in discovering who its guest is centralizes the very question of identity. What is significant is not only his name, but also his deportment as the perfect knight. The description of the courtiers' delighted response to his presence dramatically recasts the preemptive interpretations earlier in the scene and opens rather than closes the possibilities of further investigation. The long scene describing Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert thus uses shifting perceptual frames to control and finally to comment on the dynamics of interpretation. The conclusion of the scene in the court's discreet interrogation of Gawain, who is "spyed and spured," observed and interrogated through discreet questions, "preue poyntez" (902), fits this episode neady into a larger interpretive game, one in which the total picture is concealed from Gawain and from the reader until the end. Within the scene, the responses of the knights and of the servants to Gawain, and of Gawain to his host, suggest furthermore that vision, paradoxically, can in fact thwart interpretation. Even though the text's descriptions serially invite Gawain, and the reader, to interpret what they see, through their lush visual rhetoric they conceal a larger picture. Up to this point I have discussed only a selection of the poem's many descriptive scenes that are complexly mediated by visual interactions within the text. These scenes, such as the account of the Green Knight's arrival at Camelot, Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert, and the short description of

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

105

Guenever, in which two figures or groups of figures look at each other, differ from focused descriptions in the other Cotton Nero poems, for the shifting lines of sight generate an extraordinarily complex mimesis of vision as uncertain ground of knowing. Gawain also includes many scenes with a single spectator, yet even in those descriptions the poet modulates the interpretive process through Active acts of perception. In fact, only one description in the poem, that of the passage of the seasons, is independent of a gaze, and that absence may be largely ascribed to the broad temporal and spatial scope of the subject matter. In scenes such as Gawain's journey to Hautdesert, his ride to the Green Chapel, or his vision of the Castle Hautdesert, the description records the percept of a single gaze, in these cases, Gawain's. In these episodes, scenes that Alain Renoir uses to pinpoint his discussion of the poem's psychological and sensory realism, the world described is concentrated through a single lens, Gawain's eye and senses, at first appearing as an unmediated record of actual experience. This construction of scenes according to the mechanics of perception is nowhere more apparent than in the description of Casde Hautdesert, which is described precisely according to the visual reference of Gawain as he rides progressively closer and then scans the building from its foundations upwards.12 Even if the description superimposes contrasting modes, appearing first of all as fortress and then as "deceptive objet d'art," as Robert Harming suggests,13 it is unified as the perception of a single visual reference that takes in reality not according to a thematic schema but according to ocular and psychic logic. Another description in which visual perception superimposes contrasting readings and controls the processes of interpretation occurs in the well-known description of Gawain's trek across the Wirral. In this account the magical terrors we hear of first, of "wormez" and "wodwos," of dragons and trolls, arefinallysubordinated to real physical dangers. The description creates one of the most vivid naturalistic scenes in Middle English poetry: For werre wrathed hym not so much |?at wynter nas wors When jje colde cler water fro £>e cloudez schadde, And fres er hit falle my3t to )эе fale ефе; Ner slayn wyth |эе slete he sleped in his yrnes Mo ny3tez |эеп innoghe in naked rokkez, Per as claterande fro f)e crest |эе colde borne rennez, And henged Ьезе ouer his hede in hard iisse-ikkles. (726-732)14

io6

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Gawain's sequential engagement in this episode first with mythical beasts and then with icicles hanging portentously over his head effects a narrative dislocation or disorientation similar to those created elsewhere in Gawain and in other texts in the Cotton Nero manuscript, such as the description of Guenever or the beheading episode, or the description of the whale's interior in Patience or the woodbine in Purity.15 In this case it is a romance convention, that of a knight encountering the strange and the marvelous, that is replaced, or even subverted, by a sensory ontology; a matter-of-fact recognition of the damp and cold replaces what is initially a mythic framework. Like the description of Guenever, which superimposes a commercial value system on an iconic schema, the description of the journey through the Wirral also superimposes a second reading, one that moves from myth to measurable value. Yet whereas the relocation of meaning in the description of Guenever, and also in the two accounts of arrivals, is partially generated by the intrusion of textual spectators, in the description of the Wirral the shift is created through the changing sensory engagement of Gawain, the single textual spectator, with the terrain. Nevertheless, Gawain himself assumes the position of central interpreter, becoming a kind of camera obscura where nature is transmitted with pinpoint accuracy onto his sensory screen. The "wodwos" and "etaynez" are given no textual substance, neither described nor placed in space. Sleet and ice, however, are positioned directly and literally in relationship to Gawain, who sleeps in armor penetrated by sleet as above him "clatter" cold streams with their frozen icicles. Winter, the poet describes and also tells in a commentary on Gawain's thoughts, is far worse than trolls and giants. A shift in the subject matter from the mythical to the physical relocates the narrative focus from traditional romance formulae to a subjective ontology. Gawain's position, physically centered in the scene's second part, also frames the scene according to a sensory epistemology. This shift is also marked by a dramatic change in the rendition of space. In the first part of the scene (715-723) Gawain is a traveler in exotic lands, "contrayez straunge," where space is undifferentiated and unmarked by known boundaries. In the second part (726-732), however, space closes narrowly in on him. The effect of this shift: is to mark experience as contingent on space and vice versa; the narrative effects a modal translation in which meaning is inscribed chiefly through the senses of sight, touch, and hearing. As a solitary witness, or as the single figure within a descriptive scene, Gawain thus interprets by defining spatial boundaries, serving a focalizing role similar to that of Pearl's dreamer or of Patiences Jonah in the whale.

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

107

Since the description details only those natural properties that Gawain can sense, it centers him in the frame, suggesting an equivalent linear construction of text and experience. That is, the description fragments experience into discrete shots in which the world presented matches the processes of perception; what we can know, the poem seems to say, is at each moment partial, subject to our own sensory processes.

The Interpreter's Gaze: The Framework of Judgment The descriptions of the casde, of Gawain's ride across the Wirral to the bank at the head of the drawbridge, and then of his entrance and welcome within, are part of a linear narrative constructed episodically, one in which each part involves complex ocular shifts. These visual realignments, in fact, at many points mark narrative divisions or create them. Gawain's leisurely gaze at the castle ends, of course, when he crosses the drawbridge, but the transition is also marked by a shift from his scrutiny to a mutual gazing in which he is, as we have seen, also studied by the residents of Hautdesert. Other shifts in perspective that mark even more significant narrative realignments occur in the Green Knight's entrance into Hautdesert, where the eye of the beholder moves from a leisurely excursus of Camelot to an intensive study of the entrant, and in the alternating bedroom/hunt sequences with their radical shifts from intimate interior focus to an exteriorized view of action and motion. By contributing to a fragmentation of the narrative into discrete frames, the poem's visual poetics emphasize the transitional nature of Gawain's experience. Episodes, often defined by sudden shifts in perceptual relationships, are also often delineated by physical entrances, such as the Green Knight's arrival at Camelot, Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert, the Lady's appearance at Gawain's bedside, or Gawain's arrival at the Green Chapel. Like Patience, Gawain is a poem of entrances, some with noisy fanfare, some stealthy, but each entrance initiating an important new element of the narrative. We could even suggest that enclosures, so important to the spatial rhetoric of the other Cotton Nero texts, are realized in Gawain chiefly through the image of the threshold, vestibular spaces that, in the crossing, mark textual transitions as well. For instance, Castle Hautdesert, which initially appears impenetrable, a fortress protected by a deep moat and a wall, which "wod [stood] in |эе water wonderly depe, / Ande eft a fill huge he3t hit haled [rose] vpon lofte / Of harde hewen ston . . . " (787-789),

io8

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and, the Green Knight

isfinallyfully accessible, as we see in the elaborate description of Gawain's entrance, through the letting down of the bridge and the opening of the gates. This scene exploits a threshold space to generate multiple viewpoints converging on a point of entrance. The coalescence of the crossing of thresholds with radical shifts in ocular points of view and with the introduction of major narrative transitions recurs throughout the poem, so that we can describe Gawain as a sequence of liminalized episodes, or as a narrative punctuated so as to dramatize processes of psychic or moral change. This periodization of the narrative through perceptual shifts not only remarks on the seductive nature of sensory experience, but also sets up a suggestive relationship between individual perception and salvation, linear temporality and Christian eschatology. The text's very disorientations, in other words, posit a connection between acting in a world where our principal source of information is sensory and immediate and acting in one where our actions will bear consequences at the end of time or text. Examples of this epistemological doubling occur throughout the text; in fact, an immediate effect of sudden shifts in ocular point of view is to demonstrate how each action or percept can be subject to multiple judgments—that there is not a single monocular view. The bedroom/hunt offers perhaps the poem's most dramatic sequence of shifts in ocular and spatial frames. Following immediately upon the description of the hunt of the deer, for instance, the Lady's entrance into Gawain's bedchamber effects a transition on all narrative levels, from the scene's juxtaposed renditions of sound, of space, and of ocular point of view. In the preceding hunt scene the landscape is broad and undifferentiated, encompassing the dale, the hills and the deep valleys; the scene is peopled with an unspecified number of hunters slaughtering an equally unspecified number of deer; the air is filled with noise of the "Ьузе home" so loud that "wyth such a crakkande kry as klyffes haden brüsten" (1166). The simultaneous activity in the bedchamber focuses point of view, silences sound, and constricts the undifferentiated dales to a curtained interior space. The "crakkande kry" of the hunting horns is excluded by the "littel dyn" at Gawain's door as the Lady enters, and a sweeping panorama of the hunt is exchanged for an intimate ocular game, in which Gawain first feigns sleep and then "vnlouked his y3e-lyddez" (1201). This set of contrasts, repeated with variations throughout the hunt/ temptation sequence, sets up a complex and superimposed perceptual system, for the two scenes, which occur simultaneously, are described sequen-

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

109

tially and create exclusive frames.16 More precisely, the bedroom scene narrows the perceptual frame to an intimate interior, in which action occurs through mutual or veiled glances. Gawain is oblivious to the hunt outside, attentive to a plot that he canfirsthear and then see. The bedroom scene, in fact, initially plays out as a game of the eyes, a highly descriptive interchange between seeing and being seen. When Gawain hears the "litde din" at the door, he peeks warily from under the curtain, "wayte3 warly" (1186) at the Lady, who is suddenly framed, like Guenever in Arthur's court, by a single gaze that engages us as well: she is "loflyest to beholde" (1187). Thus, though Gawain is clearly the quarry, he is also the one who controls the look, a paradox that gives this scene extraordinary dramatic tension. What Gawain knows, this bedroom scene suggests through its dramatic foreclosure of space and highly narrowed line of sight, is contingent on sensory information given him at a moment in time, even though his actions occur within a complex spatial and temporal framework, itself highly visualized in the brilliandy detailed hunting scenes. Nevertheless, the hunts outdoors hint portentously at a larger eschatological system, for death and even dismemberment are implicit in their externalized scenes of ritual violence. Gawain, curtained within the bed, is literally oblivious to that view; what he can know at any moment, the text's episodic structure tells us, is partial and imperfect, merely a piece of a story. Yet there is a story, one ultimately written by Gawain's own choices. In the making of those choices, however, space figures knowledge; Gawain's perceptual horizons, feeling the rain, seeing the apparently impenetrable castle, sleeping curtained in his bedchamber, emerge as spatial analogues for his epistemological frame. This spatial fragmenting according to ocular logic marks experience as processive and liminalizing. It also valorizes sensory experience; even though its drama of judgment echoes a scriptural judgment story, the Apocalypse story in which time coalesces, the poem's fragmentary perceptual mode imitates a sensory ontology. Naked in the bedchamber, Gawain dramatizes the limits of perception; vulnerable, physically cloistered and isolated from larger frames of action and implication, his decisions (how to maintain his courtesy, whether to take the green girdle, whether or not to be seduced) are made in the absence of visible tokens of his own identity and signs about consequences. This absence of explanations, of signs offering clear directions, is reenacted in each of the poem's descriptive episodes. Gawain is in many ways a fourteenth-century detective fiction. At the end of the tale, Sir Bertilak, like a modern Hercule Poirot explaining the plot for our benefit,

no

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

explains how the pieces of the story fit together, revealing the identities of the players (his wife, himself), the motive (Morgan's jealousy), and the weapon (the green girdle). Throughout, however, we—along with Gawain—lack this information, and experience the narrative seriatim, with no clearer sense of identities or motives than Gawain has himself. Although similar in this regard to French romances, among medieval English narratives Gawain is exceptional in its thorough and consistent technique of narrative postponement. Gawain is repeatedly confronted with the new, with situations where his eye provides the chief interpretive focus, since we as readers have little further information to supply. Gawain is thus a narrative of repeated interpretive relocations, a dynamic generated in scenes where Gawain provides the single point of view and also in those where a description is reevaluated through the eyes of textual spectators. Description is consistently dependent on these visual interchanges and not only serves an ornamental function but also takes a narrative role in constructing the text's perceptual framework. Description plays a part in the poem's deflection of a unitary scheme, for what is described is also seen through the gazes of textual spectators who subvert a single or monolithic view. Even at the end, when all is revealed and unmasked, as the poem comically echoes judgment dramas in which all is revealed in the fullness of time, characters continue to look and assign meanings that redefine previous interpretations. The green girdle is a repository of this visual ambiguity; as one reader has shown, the girdle is assigned no less than four meanings in the last quarter of the poem,firstby the Lady who claims it has magical properties, then by Gawain who curses it as a sign of "cowarddyse and couetyse" (2374), then by the Green Knight who praises it as a "pure token" of Gawain's adventure (2395—2399), and finally by the courtiers at Camelot, who adopt it as a sign of their brotherhood.17 R. A. Shoaf explains how the image's labile interpretive horizons reflect the text's larger system of narrative transpositions: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem concerned with covenants (pacta) if there ever was one, explores the margin between signs and sacraments. The poem moves from a theory of inherent value, evinced chiefly in the pentangle, to a theory of ascribed value, evinced chiefly in the green girdle."18 The ascription of meaning to the green girdle is also visual; and as such it reflects one of the text's most insistent processes. Although R. A. Shoaf suggests that the poem moves from conventional to arbitrary signs, the process of resignifying, a process controlled by perceptual dynamics, occurs

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

hi

from the very beginning of the narrative. The girdle in effect offers a paradigm of a process repeated on many levels of the narrative. Unlike the pentangle, which disappears after the first arming, the girdle remains highly visible; it is the last garment Gawain puts on after arming to ride to the Green Chapel (2034), the blazon clearly apparent to the Green Knight after his blow, a sign that Gawain explains he will frequently see on his ride back to Camelot (2433), and the knotted baldric that Gawain displays and the court adopts at the end of the story. The poem's ending in the courtiers' laughter as they adopt the sign creates yet another dislocation, again generated in part through visual realignments. In this case the ascription of value involves a visual signifying where the thing seen is interpreted, given an arbitrary and conventional meaning. Fittingly, the narrative ends in an act of ocular interpretaton. The lace that Gawain wears, as he says to the Green Knight, so "I schal se hit ofte" (2433), is adopted, even in the manner of its slantwise knotting, by a group that assigns it a radically different value. The conclusion of the poem in this comic reception, puzzling to many readers, is nevertheless consistent with the poem's repeated visual realignments. The conclusion suggests a continuation of the narrative's most insistent process, that in which a shift in point of view coalesces with interpretive change. Thus in spite of the poem's move to closure through its cyclic return to Camelot and its explanations of the mysteries of its plot, the poem finally resists unitary definition or a fixed sense of an ending. Even in conclusion Gawain creates a new community of interpreters whose point of view challenges the text's, and the hero's, own tokening. All narratives, by definition, involve a recounting of events in time, a process that may well include shifts between motion and stasis and changes in scene and points of view. Yet in Gawain these shifts are marked by an extraordinary attention to the visual processes of figures within the text. This technique of visual periodization occurs throughout the other Cotton Nero texts, yet not with the dramatic complexity of Gawain, a single sequential narrative peopled by a large cast of dramatis personam. Gawain includes several starring roles as well as crowd scenes. Whereas Purity and even Patience oscillate between the regards of characters within the text, of God, and the eye of the narrator, in Gawain, as in the dream in Pearl, the direction of the narrative is governed by the changing perceptions of a textual human eye. Yet whereas the ocular focus in Pearl belongs exclusively to the dreamer, in Gawain the view repeatedly shifts, chiefly between Gawain's single gaze and the regard of groups, such as the collective gazes

ii2

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

of the court at Camelot or at Hautdesert as they survey their respective visitors. Point of view also shifts modally, as for example in the oscillation between the intimate reciprocated gazes of the Lady and Gawain in the bedchamber and the collective focus on the quarry in the simultaneous hunts outside. These shifts clearly serve a narrative function, whether, as Donald Howard suggests, they give us a "ritual balance of incidents" and hence tame the narrative's own ominous potentialities19 or whether they provide us with a more specific set of moral parallels, as readers of the temptation/hunt sequence have suggested. Nevertheless, they also disrupt the linear progress of the narrative. Even if we can say that shifts in point of view generate thematic cohesion, they also break the narrative into sequential frames, a fragmenting that also controls our experience of thematic logic. On one level, the logic of this narrative fragmentation rests in its mimesis of human experience in time, where our present actions are conditioned by interpretations of past events and by hazards about the future. Gawain's episodic construction imitates such an experiential view of reality. At each point what is known is defined by visual access, and that view is itself subjected to repeated reevaluations, either by the eyes of a single spectator or by a collective reinterpretive scrutiny. The view of Guenever, of the Green Knight, or of Gawain by the knights and servants at Hautdesert, reevaluated as these descriptions then are by the gazes of spectators within the text, each sequentially reflects a discrete shot that in its visual framing excludes any unifying view. These scenes at each point in fact offer a concentrated distillation of the present moment in which past and future imperatives are shaped chiefly by Gawain's simple contract to present himself at the Green Chapel at the appointed hour. Where Gawain differs from the other Cotton Nero poems is in its emphasis on reciprocal gazes, in which description not only is shaped by a focalized view, but also by an interactive visual drama. Where Pearl, Purity, and even Patience may be said to share apocalyptic concerns that are realized through visual imagery and metaphor—"seeing" God, seeing the New Jerusalem ofRevelation—Gawain, also concerned with judgment at the end of a story, seems to suspend the ending behind a succession of theatrical scrims, in front of which the present plays itself out. The system of reciprocal gazes that structures description also simultaneously structures this drama: we know and see what Gawain sees; we watch as others watch him, returning his evaluative look; and we know that there will be a conclusion,

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

113

not foregone, at the Green Chapel, that depends in part on seeing, on determining what is true or safe or dangerous and on choosing wisely.

Notes ι. "They all were astonished at his voice and sat stone still in a dead silence through the rich hall." Citations, with permission of Oxford University Press, are from Norman Davis's revision of the edition by J.R.R. Tolkien and Ε. V. Gordon (1925; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 2. The poem's ambiguities are attested to by the wealth of scholarship debating meaning, from studies of individual motifs, especially pentangle and girdle, to speculations about the poem's thematic purpose—Christmas game, Garter poem, study of spiritual circumcision. Several studies have focused particularly on the text's concerns with interpretation itself; see especially John Ganim, "Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," PMLA 91 (1976): 376-384; and the similar chapter in his book, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55-76; Kathleen Ashley, "'Trawthe' and Temporality: The Violation of Contracts and Conventions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" Assays 4 (1987): 3—24; and Robert W. Harming, "Sir Gawain and the Red Herring: The Perils of Interpretation," in Aas ofInterpretation: The Text in Its Context, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1982), 5-23; and Lois Bragg, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Elusion of Clarity," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985): 482-488. 3. "Descriptive Techniques in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Orbis Litterarum 13 (1958): 131; see also "The Progressive Magnification: An Instance of Psychological Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Moderna Spräk 54 (i960): 245-253. 4. "Queen Guenever, very lovely, was set in the middle and adorned on the precious dais, decorated everywhere, with thin silks around her and a canopy overhead of fine Tolouse fabric and many tapestries of Tharsian silk, embroidered and set with the best gems that might be proven of value for buying with money any day. The fairest lady to describe, she glanced with gray eyes; no man might truly say he ever saw one more beautiful." I follow Tolkien and Gordon's spelling of "Guenever." 5. For a general study of mercantile values in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see Jill Mann, "Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Essays in Criticism, 36 (1986): 294—318; see also R. A. Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, University of Florida Monographs, Humanities No. 55 (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1984). Neither of these studies discusses the description of Guenever. 6. See Ganim, "Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness," 380. 7. "Knights and squires then came down to bring this man with joy into the

ii4

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

hall. When he raised his helmet, many hurried there to take it from his hand, to serve the noble man. They took his sword and his shield. Then he greeted each of the knights graciously, and many superb men pressed forward to honor that prince." 8. The poem's oppositions and balances have been described frequently; some important studies include Donald Howard, "Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" Speculum 39 (196+): 425-433; A. Kent Hieatt, "Sir Gawain: Pentangle, Luf-Lace, Numerical Structure," Papers in Language and Literature 4 (1968): 339-359· 9. Hanning, 20. 10. "As soon as he took one and was dressed in it, it fit him becomingly with flowing skirts. By his appearance, it seemed to each of the knights he was truly like spring, his limbs under it lovely and glowing in colors, so that they thought that Christ had never made a more handsome knight." 11. "Then he was tactfully observed and interrogated by discreet questions of that prince." 12. For discussions of the superimposition of the mythical on the natural, see the discussions by Ganim, "Disorientation, Style, and Consciousness," 381; and Ashley, π. 13. See the discussion of the castle description in Chapter 6. 14. "For fighting did not bother him so much, the winter was worse, when the cold, clear water fell from the clouds and froze before it could fall to the faded earth; almost killed by the sleet, he slept in his armor more than enough nights among the bare rocks, where clattering from the mountain top the cold stream runs and hung over his head in hard icicles." 15. Hanning, in reference to the description of the casde, details the superimposition of perspectives, suggesting that the process of interpretation belongs chiefly to the reader: "But the unmediated juxtaposition of the perspectives introduces the problem of interpretation into the description without offering grounds for a solution" (9). 16. For a discussion of the contrasts, see, for instance, H. L. Savage, "The Significance of the Hunting Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 27 (1928): 1-15; Savage makes detailed parallels between the nature of the bedroom interaction and the type of quarry pursued. J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 86—88, finds such parallels "rather unconvincing," as does A. C. Spearing, The Gawain Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 217, both of whom read the scenes as instead offering a general parallel and contrast between two very different sorts of hunts. For an allegorical reading, see W.R.J. Barron, Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 1-35; and for an argument that the paired scenes are built on a doctrine of philosophical realism, see Gerald Morgan, "The Action of the Hunting and Bedroom Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" Medium Aemm 56 (1987): 200—216. 17. Ralph Hanna III, "Unlocking What's Locked: Gawain's Green Girdle," Viator 14 (1983): 289-302. See also A. C. Spearing's chapter, "The Gawain-Foet's Sense of an Ending," in his book, Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cam-

The Gaze in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

115

bridge University Press, 1987), 195—215, for a discussion of the girdle and pentangle as signs that are resignified in the narrative; SunHee Kim Gertz, "Translatio studii et imperii·. Sir Gawain as Literary Critic," Semiotica 63 (1987): 185—203, esp. 199— 202; Geraldine Heng, "Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," PMLA 106 (1991): 503-6; and for a discussion of the girdle and medieval semiotics, see Ross G. Arthur, Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). 18. Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle, 29; see also Ashley's discussion of the poem's "generic indeterminacy" and its resignification of the green girdle, 16—19. 19. Howard, "Structure and Symmetry," 433.

6. Conclusion

of the Cotton Nero manuscript, either for the first time or with the familiarity of a long association, it is difficult, I believe, to skip over description for the plot. Descriptions in the poems of the G»TJw'w-manuscript are built with a rich and seductive texture that holds the eye and ear. And description, as the previous chapters on the four poems have demonstrated, is also very much part of the plot. The ocular referentiality of descriptive scenes marks a consistent habit of tying a scene to a spectator/iwfor whose spiritual change is central to the story. In this sense, description in these poems, complexly mimetic of ocular processes, is fragmentary rather than unitary; one could even argue that description periodically arrests the narrative by leading the reader with the viewer in the text into a series of blind passages. The poems' use of intertextual observers and their replication of visual and sensory experience provide us with a mirror of sensory process; but that mirror paradoxically fragments the totality of the picture. What is seen is only a view. All description, of course, can only reproduce a view. The achievement of description in the poems of the Gflmww-manuscript, however, lies in the clear articulation of a spatially complex visual frame in which the viewer's gaze, either directly or implicitly, jostles with other lines of sight. This consistent practice of tying description to a textual spectator generates, I believe, an important set of terms for joining these poems in single authorship. We may, in fact, talk about the visual descriptive practice of these poems as a habit or a technique or a skill; it appears consistently throughout all four of the poems of the Cotton Nero manuscript—so consistently that it fills in some of the features, those that reveal both a particular poetic virtuosity and a certain cast of mind of a Gawain-poet. The extent to which the achievement of the poet's visual poetics can be said to be representative of descriptive praxis in medieval verse in general, however, poses a fascinating and complex question, one for which I can provide only some speculations, for to address the question fully would require a separate book altogether. A further and even more far-ranging WHEN WE READ THE POEMS

Conclusion

117

question concerns the relationship between the poet's use of the textual focalizer and late medieval attitudes toward the reliability of visual information, or even more particularly toward the problematic tension between visual sensation and knowledge. These questions are also very large, since sight has consistently appeared as a potent metaphor for knowledge since the classical era and is discussed as an epistemological problem in a wide variety of medieval discourses—mystical, philosophical, scientific, and literary, to name a few. In order to suggest a larger contextual framework for the poet's representation, through description, of vision as a commentary on what is and is not known, what can and cannot be apprehended through the senses, in this chapter I will try to identify some of the terms through which sight is intellectually problematized in the thought of the Gawainpoet's contemporaries. A look at some of the writing of fourteenth-century English mystics, who were writing in a tradition with which the poet was well acquainted, can be useful in providing such a context, for in these writings terms for sight/insight are used in complex and often contradictory ways and seem to play out a highly ambivalent relationship between sensory and spiritual knowledge.

The Focused Gaze in Ricardian Narrative In the section of Ricardian Poetry that he devotes to "pointing," a term meaning "to describe in detail" taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and from Troilus and Criseyde, John Burrow distinguishes between "light" pointing, or description that just briefly illuminates a moment, and "heavy" pointing, the protracted description of a complicated scene and also the ornamental and mannered piling up of descriptive substantives and epithets as derived from the rhetorical ornatus.1 As Burrow notes, the term "point" is an interesting and important one, for it is one of the few terms offered as literary criticism by fourteenth-century English poets, and reveals, though without detailed explanation by either Chaucer or the Gawain-poet, an awareness of description as a particular poetic device. A look at some of the ways fourteenth-century English poets structure description through—or not through—a viewer's gaze can help refine and define pointing even further. The Gawain-poet's repeated alignment of the descriptive or pointed scene with the look of a spectator sets the scene in place; as the chapters in this study delineate, description in all four of the Cotton Nero poems becomes complexly spatially ordered through a strate-

ii8

Conclusion

gic construction of ocular lines, and the "meaning" of the scene in turn becomes embedded not only in the image but also in the structure of the description and in the process of apprehension. Burrow says that a love of pointing is a feature of Ricardian narrative; can we extend the definition of pointing to suggest that it has as an important feature a technique of structuring scenes according to an ocular point of view? For the purposes of comparison, I have chosen passages from fourteenth-century English narrative poets that develop topics from the rhetorical descnptio bei, the description of place, and that appear in some of the Gawain-poct's best known descriptions: the locus amoenus from Pearl and the casde from Gawain. I also look as well at an ekphrastic description in Chaucer and a scene of the hunt from The Parliament ofthe Three Ages in an effort to characterize some technical strategies for ordering space in the descriptive piece, though I repeatedly return to a comparison with scenes in the Gawain-poet. One of the most familiar topics from dream vision poetry to appear in the Cotton Nero poems is the description of the locus amoenus, the enchanting Otherworld of perpetual spring.2 This topic appears in Pearl, after the dreamer falls asleep in the garden where he has lost his pearl. Though the elements of the Earthly Paradise, such as the crystal cliffs, the woods, the stream, the jewels, and the singing birds, are conventional, the poet places them carefully to create a complex and visually coherent scene. The poet uses a technique that John Bender in his study of Spenser's description calls "focusing," which he identifies as a characterizing feature of Spenser's narrative art. According to Bender, focusing occurs when "imagined visual experience is presented in forms analogous to our most elemental processes of perception," and when "encrusted images and metaphors accumulate around a complex visual phenomenon." Bender distinguishes Spenser's focused descriptions from Chaucer's descriptions, which are characterized instead by "spatial incoherence" and a subordination of visual detail to idea.3 Bender further defines Spenser's descriptive technique in terms that can be useful for a medieval descriptive aesthetic, for a refinement of focusing that he calls "scanning" is similar to Renoir's "progressive intensification," a category that encompasses visual effects obtained through the impression of motion, or of a sweeping view of a scene that moves from the general to the particular.4 For example, scanning can particularize the type of pointing in GawairCs description of the knight's departure in January

Conclusion

119

from Castle Hautdesert to find the Green Chapel, where the relative motions of mist, cloud, and water work to establish a system of spatial relationships that locate the fictional viewers, Gawain and his guide: t>ay ЬоЗеп bi bonkkez f)er Ьозег ar bare, Pay clomben bi clyffez J)er clengez j?e colde. Pe heuen watz vphalt, bot vgly J?er-vnder; Mist muged on {зе mor, malt on {эе mountez, Vch hille hade a hatte, a myst-hakel huge. Brokez byled and breke bi bonkkez aboute, Schyre schaterande on schorez, f>er |эау doun schowued. (2077-2083)5 In this passage, which certainly conveys the knight's sense of his own insignificance in a world of formidable natural and supernatural powers, the description moves from the general to the particular, uses motion to focus attention on the relationships among elements of the landscape, and conveys a sense of ocular placement. The viewer is clearly the traveler, looking up at the high clouds and at the mist hugging the moors. The image of the mists forming hats on the mountaintops, far from domesticating the scene, narrows and magnifies the visual field while it adds a surreal touch of horror: Gawain and his guide are very small voyagers in a world of giants. In this scanned scene from Gawain, which is characteristic of the poet's spatialized descriptive praxis, details of the landscape are carefully controlled and presented as they might be seen by the fictional travelers, a technique of spatial focusing that centers sensory experience and also its understanding and interpretation on the spectator in the text. This kind of focalized description, which, as we have seen, is typical of pointing in the Cotton Nero poems, is not prescribed at all in the medieval poetic manuals used in the fourteenth century, such as the treatises by John of Garland, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and Matthew of Vendome. Studies of the rhetorical traditions have argued that the Gawain-poet was dependent on them for his choice of descriptive subject matter and also for a theory that the purpose of description is to convey praise or blame, which is, according to Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendome, the purpose of description.6 The rhetorical manuals are not concerned, however, with description as a record of an imagined visual process. Matthew of Vendome, who devotes nearly half of his treatise to description, does not offer examples of focused descriptions, nor does he suggest a direct relationship between description and the

i20

Conclusion

fictional viewer. 7 The success the poet achieves in mimicking perceptual processes suggests a technical development of effectio and notatio, the elaboration of a scene by describing its outer appearance or its inner qualities, that is never explained by medieval rhetorical texts.8 Does the Сддодаи-poet's development of a visually focused descriptive poetic represent a significant departure from his fourteenth-century English contemporaries? Bender's differentiation of Chaucer's "spatial incoherence" from Spenser's techniques of scanning and focusing, techniques that can be applied as well to the Gawain-poct, gives us at least a set of technical terms with which to talk about description at the hands of different poets, even though Bender's statement that Chaucer's descriptions are spatially incoherent overlooks a number of extraordinary exceptions, among them the complexly visualized description of Troilus as he rides past Criseyde's window in Book II of Troilus and Criseyde. Bender is not alone, however, in his analysis of Chaucer's visual aesthetic. An argument similar to Bender's is advanced by Claes Schaar in his study of description in Chaucer. Comparing Chaucer's interest in the role of the observer in descriptions with Dante's, Schaar writes: Instead of this emphasis on the observer . . . we are more used to finding, in literary descriptions in Dante's age and later, a highly disinterested attitude on the part of the narrator. Keeping almost wholly in the background, he describes to us a landscape, a casde, the interior of a hall.... He [Chaucer] gives a detailed account of what is before him, but does not refer to his mind and senses as organizers of the descriptive pattern. 9

What both Schaar and Bender seem to be discussing are the technical operations of description, which may be associated with an act of observation but not directed by the senses of that observer. This technique can be seen in many of Chaucer's most topical descriptions, from the portraits of the General Prologue to the descriptio veri of The Book of the Duchess. In many of Chaucer's descriptions, that is to say, the organization of images does not necessarily call attention to a viewer within the narrative—to the relative spatial positions of viewer and viewed, to the angle or perspective of an eyewitness, or to the immediate emotional impact a scene described might make upon an observer. 10 An example of this particular kind of arrangement of images occurs, for instance, in the lengthy descriptions of the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana in The Knight's Tale. Though the narrator repeatedly mentions a spectator, it is never clear who is looking, for there is no literal or embodied witness to the scene. The narrator's

Conclusion

i2i

refrain, "ther saugh I," places him imaginatively in the temples, as if he were there. Nevertheless, in spite of the authorial presence of an eyewitness who repeatedly mentions how things look, the description catalogues features without fully establishing a sense of space that embodies the image and eyewitness within the same frame. This spatial disjunction, which marks a significant difference from the descriptive praxis of the Gawain-poet, is furthered by a shift from ekphrasis to description of reality, as if the gods and their companions painted on the wall were living presences: The statue of Venus, glorious for to se, Was naked, fletynge in the large see, And fro the navele doun al covered was With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas. A citole in hir right hand hadde she, And on hir heed, fill semely for to se. A rose gerland, fressh and wel smellynge; Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge. Biforn hire stood hir sone Cupido; Upon his shuldres wynges hadde he two, And blynd he was, as it is often seene; A bowe he bar and arwes brighte and kene. (The Knight's Tale, 1955-1966)11 Do living doves flutter around her head? Is the garland real, a corona of living flowers placed on the head of a statue, or is it merely so lifelike that it seems to exhale its fragrance? Whatever the answer, the statue assumes a graphic naturalism that disrupts the conventional boundaries of art, even though the relationship of the scenario to space is never fully clarified. Venus floats in the "large see," an image drawn from the traditional iconography of the goddess, without any clear ocular relationship to a visual eye and with little spatial grounding. Writing of the descriptions of art within the amphitheater, V. A. Kolve argues that Chaucer offers a visual realization of thematic disorder. Scene piled on scene without any indication of spatial relationships results in a "serial imagining that the reader/auditor performs confidently enough in each of its stages, but which is chaotic and uncertain in relation to the space he is asked to imagine as containing it." 12 Spatially indeterminate as it is, description moves away from the textual witness rather than toward him, even though the narrator reminds us repeatedly that he is recounting what

122

Conclusion

he saw. The way we read or "see" this passage is ultimately shaped by our recognition of its iconographic coherence rather than by our sense of its conformity to the logic of sensory apprehension or by its effect on the textual spectator or focalizer. Descriptions of place in Chaucer, like descriptions of person, can also maintain an independence from an implied or literal viewer. For instance, in the description of the Earthly Paradise into which the dreamer ventures in The Book of the Duchess, the delights of the garden, which is topically affiliated with the locus amoenus in Pearl, are related by catalogue rather than by scanning or focusing, even though the description follows a highly focused account of the narrator's room. The scene is also curiously static, even though the narrator purports to be chasing after a whelp through a wood that teems with life. In contrast to the descriptio veris in Pearl, where the visual field narrows to the dual motions of leaves and clouds, the description of the visionary landscape in The Book of the Duchess details flowers, grass, trees, and beasts of the wood with equal emphasis and with little attempt at spatial placement. The physical relationship of the narrator to the scene is panoramic rather than particular; after he takes off after the whelp he is hardly mentioned at all until, 48 lines later, he spots the man in black sitting beneath an oak. The pleasance in The Book of the Duchess thus seems to stand as a backdrop to the action rather than as a tangent to the dreamer's imagination. It evokes a familiar topic—so familiar, in fact, that the narrator can remark, "Hyt ys no nede eke for to axe / Wher there were many grene greves, / Or thikke of trees, so fill of leves" (416—418). This oblique apology, a rhetorical occupatio, separates the speaker from the dreamer; whereas the landscapes described by the Gawain-poet, such as the Otherworld, storm, woodbine, or wilderness, recreate the ocular and sensory experience of an eyewitness, this scene in Chaucer conveys its topical affiliations. Of the emotional impact of the paradisal setting on the character seeing the scene, we are given very little information. This is certainly not to suggest that acts of vision play only a minor role in Chaucer's poetry. As V. A. Kolve has lucidly demonstrated in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, occular perception is central to many of Chaucer's tales and is often—as in The Franklin's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, and The Knight's Tale—the single event on which the action rests. Certainly Chaucer uses visual experience and the responses of his characters to the things that they see to explore moral questions. Yet Chaucer often seems more concerned with the relationship between perception and action than

Conclusion

123

he is with visual perception as a dramatization of a character's understanding. Unlike the Pearl dreamer in the Otherworld, Jonah in the woodbine, or Gawain in the Wirral on his way to Hautdesert, characters in Chaucer are not so much entangled within or trapped by place as they act upon it. The rocks in The Franklin's Tale become iconic markers of the action; they are hardly described at all (we know only that they are black and grisly), yet they nevertheless control the action and guide the conflicted decision making of characters in the tale. 13 The pear tree in The Merchant's Tale or even the bed in The Manciple's Tale, though more specifically props for human folly, are also objects of place that provide a ground for multiple perspectives, even though they are not centered as focused descriptive images. In each case, as with the rocks in The Franklin's Tale, the action hinges on acts of vision—what is seen and what is not seen—though the image itself is important primarily as it impinges on the angular internal relationships among the characters in the narrative. Apart from Chaucer, we can also find numerous examples of pointing in descriptions of place that are organized by catalogue rather than by relational scanning. For instance, a comparison between the description of the casde in Sir Orfeo, an unusually descriptive Middle English verse romance, and the casde in Gawain reveals above all different concerns with visual point of view. The casde that the pilgrim Orfeo encounters seems to float in space, even though it is represented as his perception. We do not see Orfeo getting closer as he approaches the casde, nor do we see where he is positioned in relation to the walls and battlements. The casde rises from the plain much as the pigments coloring an illustrated fortress might lie on an illuminated page: He com into a fair cuntray, As bright so sonne on somers day, Smothe and plain and all grene, Hille no dale was ther non y-sene. Amidde the lond a castel he sighe, Riehe and real and wonder heighe. (327-332) 14 In spite of references to the sense of sight, there is little in this description to convey any information about Orfeo's physical placement. With its crystal, its gems and its gilding, this casde recalls the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse:

124

Conclusion All the utmast wall Was clere and shine as cristal. An hundred tours ther were about Degiselich and bataild stout. The butras com out of the diche, Of rede gold y-arched riche. The vousour [vaulting] was avowed [adorned] all Of ich maner divers aumal Within ther wer wide wones All of precious stones. The werst piler on to biholde Was all of burnist gold. (Sir Orfeo, 333-344)

In contrast to the description in Sir Orfeo, we can look at the description of the casde in Gawain. Modeled after the latest in fourteenth-century decorated fashion, this ekphrastic verbal picture differs not only in its representation of architectural style but also in spatial resolution. We know where the knight sits on his horse as he looks at the apparition, whose walls rise from the moat that has stopped his progress: "Pe burne bode on blonk, t^at on bonk houed / Of |je depe double dich J>at drof to ]эе place" (785-786). The description of the castle also follows the natural movement of Gawain's eye as his gaze progresses from the stern fortification that rises from the moat to detail the cornices and masonry and then up to observe the turrets rising above. The description of the chimneys is extraordinarily skillful in conveying a sense of distance: Chalkwhyt chymnees f>er ches he тпозе Vpon bastel rouez, {)at blenked fill quyte; So mony pynakle payntet watz poudred ayquere, Among J)e castel carnelez clambred so f>ik, Pat pared out of papure purely hit semed. (798-802)15 "Chalkwhyt," "poudred," "blenked," and the image "pared out of papure" all convey the visual experience of Gawain as he looks up at towers that are very high above him. 16 As a rendition of Gawain's visual horizon, this description, an act of perception, depicts the seductive appeal of visual surfaces and the illusionist tricks of the senses themselves. Close across the

Conclusion

125

moat he describes hard stone and the detail of cornices, but at the distance above he sees substance transmuted by the illusion of distance to powder, to a surface of chalk, and to ornaments of paper. In the poems of the alliterative tradition, description, and especially description of natural scenery, has been justly praised for concreteness, a visual specificity and clarity that is conveyed by a dense vocabulary of substantives.17 Yet as Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter point out in Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World, concretizing by substantives does not necessarily impart spatial coherence to alliterative poetry—or any other poetry, for that matter: Its character is in a rich and luxuriant, often indiscriminate accumulation of substantives, an arbitrary concreteness of reference which can break through to a kind of illusory realism, like some early fifteenth-century Italian examples of advanced International Gothic, through sheer weight of sensory allusion, even though there may be no visual coherence or ordering of scene. 18

The "illusory realism" that Pearsall and Salter contrast to "visual coherence" can be seen side by side in the alliterative poem, The Parliament of the Three Ages, which is the final poem I would like to look at. The opening description of the pleasance uses one of the most familiar narrative topics in Middle English poetry and employs it without any attempt at visual focusing. The destriptio veris, like the similar description in The Book of the Duchess, is organized as a catalogue rather than a view, in spite of its list of concrete particulars: There the gryse was grene, growen with floures— The primrose, the pervynkle, and piliole [penny-royal] |эе riche— The dewe appon dayses donkede full faire, Burgons & blossoms and braunches full swete, And the mery mystes full myldely gane galle; The cukkowe, the cowschote [wood-pigeon], kene were Jjay bothen, And the throstills full throly threpen [scolded] in the bankes. (9-1+)19

When the hunter/narrator stalks his prey, however, the rendition of space alters dramatically. He becomes engaged. The narrative pays minute attention to the relative placement of poacher and prey: Bothe my body and my bowe I buskede [arrayed] with leues, And turnede to-wardes a tree & tariede there a while;

126

Conclusion And als I lokede to a launde a littill me be-syde, I seghe ane hert with ane hede, ane heghe for the nones. (22-25)

The ensuing densely specified description of the stag's crown of antlers is then placed in space, the object of the poacher's intense interest, as he watches, hidden by leaves. The detailed description of the rack also contains a strong visual coherence that calls attention to the hunter's physical placement and his emotional engagement. The tines are attached to the beam, and the "royals," the second branching of the ander, rise from the middle. The dramatic visual organization of the poaching scene, however effectively it rivets our attention on the narrator at the outset, is allowed to lapse in The Parliament of the Three Ages. After he enters the dream, the narrator no longer provides an active organizing eye; unlike the dreamer in Pearl, this visionary does not rise in spirit actively to continue his pilgrimage. The following descriptions of Youth, Medill Eide, and Eide, however elaborately detailed, follow a descriptive program that lacks the spatial coherence and visual organization of the poaching scene. They are creations of an omniscient narrative gaze, and bear litde overt relationship to either the personality or the physical placement of the sleeping poacher. And the dissociation between vision and visionary continues. At the end of the poem the dreamer is roused by a hunting horn and then goes home, all in a short, eleven-line coda, without reflecting on the content of his dream and without again remarking on the hunt of the stag. Although the reader may feel that it is the opening of the poem that is most engaging, and may remember the hunt of the stag—the poacher enduring the clouds of gnats in his eyes, crouching in silence beneath the crabtree as the two deer silently approach—long after he has forgotten the three allegories of the dream with their rhetorical and topical affiliations, the descriptions of youth, middle age, and old age are by far the more characteristic of alliterative poetry. The portraits of the three ages may be elaborate, but the detail is a surface luxury that is created by a rich vocabulary of synonyms and by attention to detail.20 Even these descriptions are unusually elaborate and sustained for alliterative poetry. As Pearsall and Salter point out, in many of the alliterative narratives of the fourteenth century, description of place or of person plays a decidedly minor role, especially in tales based on Latin sources.21 Where description in the four alliterative poems of the Gawain manuscript seems to differ from pointing in this work, as well as in other fourteenth-century narrative poems, is not in any precise technical innova-

Conclusion

127

tion in a spatial or visual poetic; where pointing in the poems of the Cotton Nero manuscript does seem to depart, however, is in the consistency with which description is constructed as a visual design and with which the image ties a spectator to processes of perception. Unlike The Parliament of the Three Ages, where the narrative point of view shifts abrupdy, the poems of the Gawain manuscript, particularly Pearl, Patience, and Gawain, maintain a remarkably consistent visual point of view and connect their descriptive scenes to the visual field of a single spectator. In Purity, which differs from the other three works in recounting a series of stories rather than a single narrative, the point of view naturally changes; yet even there most of the descriptions are visually coherent and reflect the optical field of a spectator or a crowd within the text. To return to the question, then, of the extent to which the Gawainpoet's visual poetic can be said to be representative of pointing in late medieval English narrative, even this very brief glance at Ricardian descriptive style readily demonstrates that multiple visual strategies were available for organizing description according to an implied, literal, or absent viewer, and among these strategies was a technique for structuring a visual scene according to the sequential and spatial logic of perception. As the descriptions of the statue of Venus in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and of the castle in Sir Orfeo illustrate, however, the official and even expressly reiterated presence of a textual spectator before a highly detailed scene does not necessarily invoke a visual organization of images. The dynamic that occurs with a visualized poetic, in contrast, is the creation of a spectator. That is to say, a visual organization of images implicidy locates a spectator, imaginary or fictional, and sets up an ocular hermeneutic. This refinement of pointing that organizes images according to a complex ocular plan also locates the image within a hermeneudc circle; it is a way of invoking interpretation, or of forcing or coercing narrative into an interpretive mode. It is not exclusive to the Gawain-poct, and in fact can offer a strategic set of terms for shaping our reception of visualized descriptive scenes in other texts. Where the Cotton Nero poems are exceptional, I believe, is their consistent adoption of a visual poetic as a pervasive mode of thought.

The Poetics of Sight in English Mysticism In the precision and consistency with which the poems of the Cotton Nero manuscript develop a Ricardian visual poetic that ties pointed scenes to textual spectators and uses description as a mode of thought, they may

128

Conclusion

well occupy a distinctive place among English narratives of their time. Yet in their interest in visual apprehension—in eyewitness experience and the multiple translations involved between sensation and judgment—they share in one of the great concerns permeating late medieval thought and aesthetics. A recognition and celebration of the role of the senses in leading to spiritual "vision" is at the heart of Franciscan spiritualism, with its appeal to private piety. The role of direct experience in the hierarchy of knowledge is also important in the writings of Duns Scorns and William of Ockham, both Franciscan clerics who were to exert an important influence on the intellectual life of Oxford at the time of the Gawain-poct.22 Even the study of visual perception itself was assuming a new importance in the later Middle Ages. By the end of the fourteenth century, the study of optics, defined and valorized by such optical theorists as Bacon, Grosseteste, and Pecham, was recognized as a major metaphysical science and was established as part of the arts curricula of several universities.23 A thorough study of the problematic role of sensory experience, especially vision, in theories of knowledge would have to take account of these many disciplines.24 Such an undertaking is not within the scope of this study. A look at the highly ambivalent treatment of sight as both a metaphor for knowledge and a faculty for spiritual understanding in the writings of fourteenth-century English mystics can help illustrate, however, some of the dualisms at the heart of late medieval epistemology and provide a larger context for understanding the Gawain-poet's creation through description of a visual mode of thought.25 In the mystical treatises and the poems describing the spiritual pilgrimage to God that proliferated in the later Middle Ages, sight becomes the primary metaphor and symbol for spiritual knowledge. Sight also becomes, paradoxically, both first task of the viator and his or her most deceptive faculty, the physical sense that must be stilled, whose "doors" must be closed, before true spiritual vision can occur. In the mystical treatises and poems of the visionary quest, discourse concerning sight and the use of visual images is fraught with contradictions. Sight is the object of knowledge and the method for its attainment; sight also represents the deception of the physical, seduction by the world of forms. These two attitudes toward sensory perception are exemplified, on the one hand, by Franciscan mysticism, influenced by Saint Augustine, which located the first step of the journey to God in the world of nature, and on the other hand by the English mystics who turned to the via negativa, rejecting the use of sensory faculties as even a preliminary step in the

Ganclusion

129

pilgrimage. Yet even among the English mystics, metaphors for sight and sensory impressions in general occur again and again, as the experience of turning from the world is described as a physical and sensory process. Both forms of mysticism, however, recognize the potency of images and of visual experience, and most often describe the goal of mystical rapture as visual apotheosis. In the Franciscan literature of the late Middle Ages the operations of physical sight and of spiritual vision are as pervasive as they are ambiguous. Franciscan piety, with its appeal to privately felt experience, is exemplified and imagistic even as it exhorts us to look beyond corporeal existence. Several important Franciscan penitential manuals are structured around an ocular metaphor. The Oculus sacerdotis of William of Pagula was an influence on Peter of Limoges, who wrote the popular Oculus moralis, which exists in over eighty manuscripts. Peter constructs a complex metaphor of ophthalmology, envisioning in this conceit the priest as an eye doctor, skilled in the mechanisms of spiritual sight.26 In the Meditations on the Life of Christ, a tremendously popular work that, according to John Fleming, had "an immediate and profound" influence on popular lyric poetry, vernacular drama and on iconography in the visual arts,27 the reader is invited to engage in the text and to embark on his or her own spiritual pilgrimage through the visual image. The speaker adopts the tone of a guide instructing the reader to be led by the visual imagination, and repeatedly exhorts the reader to "see" the images of the vita Christi and to think on those images as meditative icons.28 In spite of its structural reliance on a series of closely described events from the life of Christ that the reader in turn is invited to visualize, the Meditations also contains an attack on imaginatio in which it is argued that in contemplation "one must be deaf, dumb, and blind; see nothing at all, hear nothing at all, take no pleasure in any sort in speaking."29 The Meditations does not attempt to temporalize the processes of vision by suggesting that in the early stages of contemplation one uses optical forms, whereas in the latter one transcends them. Instead, the contradiction appears to reside comfortably within the structure of the work itself. John Fleming argues, in fact, that the willingness to embrace this contradiction is a central aspect of Franciscan mysticism: "For the Gothic audience of the late medieval period . . . the Franciscan conjunction of an imaginative fiction operating within the world of sensible objects with a profound inner spirituality which sought to transcend the corporeal world proved altogether particularly satisfying."30

i30

Conclusion

In the writings of the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure (1221—1274), however, the transactions between image and spiritual knowledge are outlined more systematically. One of the most comprehensive compilers of medieval thought on sensory psychology and on the role of sense perception in spiritual illumination, Bonaventure espouses a light metaphysics and sensory epistemology that are essentially Augustinian and Neoplatonic. The contemplative scheme Bonaventure describes in the Itinerarium (The Mind's Road to God), his little treatise that was one of the most influential spiritual texts of the Middle Ages, outlines a system of contingencies between experienced reality and divinity, a system that seems in many particulars to be echoed in the Pearl dreamer's series of visions.31 The contemplative moves through an orderly series of steps, the first of which involves following the vestigia, or the footsteps of God in nature. The divisions of the mind correspond to the orderly process of contemplation. The mind is divided into three hierarchical aspects (aspectus), one that looks at the corporeal world, another that looks inward and is called spirit, and another that looks above itself and is called mind. These three aspects in turn are each subdivided in two, so that the total stages "whereby we ascend from the lowest to the highest, from external things to those that are within, and from the temporal to the eternal are six: sense, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and illumination of conscience [synderesis]."32 At the beginning of the Itinerarium, Bonaventure outlines the orders of natural forms, warning us to alert our senses to their reception: Therefore, whoever is not enlightened by such great splendor in created things is blind; whoever remains unheedfiil of such great outcries is deaf; whoever does not praise God in all these effects is dumb; whoever does not turn to the First Principle after so many signs is a fool. Open your eyes, therefore; alert the ears of your spirit, unlock your lips, and apply your heart that you may see, hear, praise, love and adore, magnify, and honor your G o d in every creature, lest perchance, the entire universe rise against you. 3 3

Although Bonaventure reiterates that all five of the senses must operate in the reception of nature, he relies on metaphors or analogies of sight in most of his discussion of images. He even describes the goal of mental pilgrimage itself in visual terms. On the sixth day of the Itinerarium, the mind meditates on the Trinity: For if an image is an expressed likeness, then when our mind contemplates in Christ the Son of God, W h o is by nature the image of the invisible God . . . it has already reached something perfect. 34

Conclusion

131

Elsewhere Bonaventura explains that sight is one of the most important senses because it is immediate.35 In visual perception the thing seen enters into direct contact with the eye through light, which is transmitted from all corporeal form. Sight and touch, which both involve direct contact between object and sensory organ, are the two senses that will function after the Resurrection because they participate in the perfection of the soul. The influence of Bonaventura on popular piety in his own time and in the fourteenth century was, according to John Fleming, profound and incalculable. Even before his death, his writings were translated and circulated in a widening arena of influence, an influence that was felt in England as well as on the Continent. Numerous works were ascribed to him, "pseudo-Bonaventure," including the Meditations on the Life of Christ. Jean Gerson, the nominalist chancellor of the University of Paris at the end of the fourteenth century, said that the Itinerarium was of greater value than all other books ever written.36 Thus it is curious that English popular piety, as formalized in mystical treatises, should in the fourteenth century turn away from the vestigia tradition, certainly a cornerstone of Bonaventure's mystical epistemology. In the writings of the English mystics, the idea that one should follow God's footsteps in nature is rarely found. 37 Instead we arc urged to turn away from the world, to reject the pictorial imagination and shun our senses for the misleading information they might provide. The anonymous author of The Cloud ofUnknowing writes, "{jerfore leue {jin outward wittes, & worche not wij) hem, пефег wi{)-inne ne wi)>outen."38 Walter Hilton, in The Scale ofPerfection, similarly warns against the senses: "By the deliberate immoderate indulgence of its senses on trivial things the soul is much hindered. . . . So you must shut these windows and bar them. . . ," 39 Passages such as these by Hilton and the Cloud author are commonplace in the English mystical handbooks, and would imply that English mysticism is explicitly antisensory or exemplary. Divinity is found not through observation nor intellection, but through a turning away, through emptying ourselves of the world to receive God as love. In reality, however, the writings of the English mystics are full of images and metaphors of the senses, and especially of sight. Theirs is a sensory epistemology turned inward; rather than contemplating the world, the English mystic visualizes an interior morality and reifies the idea of contemplation. Sijt becomes both process and goal, even as the contemplative is expressly instructed to turn away from nature and the distraction of meditative images. The mystic does not see with the eye of the sense, but with the "eye

ij2

Conclusion

of the heart," an image that has its origins in pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine.40 Hilton writes in the Scale: "We, reformed by the acquisition of virtues, the eyes of our soul opened, see as in a mirror the heavenly joy. We are transformed into His image and pass from the knowledge of faith to that of the intellect, from desire to fruition."41 Sin clouds "the eyes of your soul,"42 with which one strives to "see" God: "that which unites Jesus to a man's soul is good will and a great desire to possess Him and to see Him spiritually in His glory."43 For the Cloud author, "seeing" God is itself oxymoronic, the paradox of blind vision. A cloud stands between us and God, yet it is in this cloud that we find Him, for we must try to know God in a "blind beholdyng vnto j?e nakid beyng of God himself only."44 Sight becomes, in fact, an image for the meditative process. In one text, the term sijt actually translates contemplatio and, according to Wolfgang Riehle, is often textually interchangeable with understandyng or cmwyng. It is among the English mystics that the gerund biholdinjj attains the specialized meanings of speculatio, contemplatio, and meditatio.45 This interior sight and blind vision praised by the English mystics describes an epistemological dualism that appears in varied forms throughout medieval thought, and that certainly seems a central part of the Gawainpoet's visual poetic. The turning inward of the spiritual process, in which sensory imagery describes both the process and goal of contemplation, can even be said to suggest a new and troubled awareness of the twin worlds of faith and empirical knowledge. Fourteenth-century English mysticism is in some points surprisingly similar to nominalist epistemology; for both acknowledge, either implicitly or explicidy, that much of what we know is the fruit of discourse between our senses and the world of forms, and both separate the domain of faith from that process.46 Knowledge of God, who is unknowable by the intellect, is a matter of faith or of his will. Knowledge of the world, on the other hand, is the human domain, accessible to the operations of a sensory ontology.47 The very potency of that sensory information is acknowledged in the mystics' creation of an interior sensory terrain that orders and subordinates the faculties of sense—taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight—in the service of God. Stridently anti-intellectual and anti-empirical, English mysticism nevertheless generates an interior sensory epistemology. In the four poems of the Cotton Nero manuscript, of course, the dualism that both joins and splits faith and sense impressions is not realized through the creation of an interiorized sensory terrain. It is actualized through the visual process itself, however. What the visual poetic of

Conclusion

133

Gawain, Patience, and Pearl dramatizes, above all, is the separation of faith from sensation, a split that is realized through the precise ocular referentiality of descriptive scenes. Descriptive focusing identifies a visual perception as a unit or horizon of thought. Implicit in this descriptive mode are far-reaching questions about sensory entitlements and exclusions: How much can we know beyond what we can see? Can we trust what we see as a reliable source of information?

Ocular Skepticism and Medieval Narrative In late medieval narrative poetry, even in poems whose descriptive praxis is not specifically characterized by a focused visual poetic, questions about the operations and the reliability of vision often assert the same troubled centrality that sight adopts in the mystical texts. In the poems of the visionary quest in particular, but also in many other narrative works, such as several of The Canterbury Tales, the operations of sight become not only a major thematic concern, but also a structuring device. Patricia Eberle has argued that the Romance ofthe Rose, for which Jean de Meun proposed the tide LeMirouer aus Amoureus, has as its heart Nature's discourse on optics, and should be understood as a complex optical instrument designed to supplement Guillaume's dream vision of love with a series of lenses or perspectives.48 Of medieval visionary poems that develop sight as both an experiential mode and metaphor of knowledge, however, Dante's Comedy certainly would occupy a central position. Dante's journey to the Inferno and ascent to a vision of Paradise are enacted as a visual drama in which images of eyes and references to the operations of sight recur every few lines. Sight often defines the conditions of the sinners and the penitents, as in Inferno 17.46, where the usurers' eyes brim with pain. Most of the references to sight, however, describe the experience of Dante the pilgrim, illustrating both his direct and often impassioned engagement with the sights of his vision and also the process of his visual education, as he learns to turn away from the tortured shapes of spiritual deformity. Virgil instructs Dante in how to see, indicating that Dante's own direct vision of the scenes of Hell is more valuable than Virgil's narration of events. Reaching the second round of Hell Virgil advises Dante, "Look well, therefore, and thou shalt see things which would discredit my telling of them" [Pero riguarda ben, si verderai / cose che torrien fede al mio sermone] (Inf. 13.20— 22). Virgil scolds Dante for his pity, however, when Dante weeps at the

134

Conclusion

sight of the damned. When Dante weeps on seeing the diviners "so contorted that the tears from the eyes bathed the buttocks at the cleft" [la nostra imagine di presso / vidi si torta, che Ί pianto delli occhi / le natiche bagnava per lo fesso] (Inf. 20.22-24), Virgil rebukes him for having pity on such a sin: "Art thou too as widess as the rest? Here pity lives when it is quite dead" [Ancor se' tu delli altri sciocchi? / Qui vive la pietä quand'e ben morta"] (Inf. 20.27-28). Virgil not only leads Dante to witness a serial array of visual images but also instructs him on the art of seeing and interpreting those images. In the Purjjatorio and in the final cantos of Paradiso Dante's sight is perfected and transformed, but in a transformation that suggests the sequential and even oppositional operations of sight/Sight. Like the English mystics, Dante the poet tries to describe the experience of "blind vision" and to suggest that the pilgrim, now blinded by light (Purg. 32.10-11), has been previously blinded by a world he leaves behind: "I go up hence to be no longer blind" [Quinci su vo per non esser piu cieco] (Purg. 26.58). Achieving the beatific vision, the pilgrim's sight is redirected in a visual apotheosis where he can look at the "living ray" and not be dazzled. Led through his ecstatic vision by attention to visual form, the pilgrim finally surpasses those sights to direct his gaze upward to the Trinitarian rainbow.49 In other medieval narrative poetry, visual experience rarely attains the complex structural and metaphoric centrality it holds in The Divine Comedy. Nonetheless, an interest in the paradoxical relationship between sight and spiritual knowledge appears repeatedly throughout medieval literature, often attaining the status of a comic commonplace. Transactions between the perception of sensible form and determinate action are often complex, belabored, and fraught with danger. Things that are seen do not necessarily carry determinate meanings; in fact, they are likely to accrue meanings in the process of interpretation, a perilous dialectic. This crisis of interpretation, in which visual information jockeys for high stakes with other modes of received knowledge, is repeatedly problematized in the four Cotton Nero poems, explicidy shaping the dilemma of the dreamer in Pearl, of Jonah, of Purity's Belshazzar, and (though less explicitly) of Gawain; it is also a central and expressly articulated issue for Chaucer, whose favorite polarities—experience and authority—frequently are realized through an optical metaphor. Chaucer repeatedly separates visual, sensory empiricism from other approaches to knowledge, such as the avenues of faith or of written authority, yet suggests that sensory data, although it may be literally

Conclusion

135

accurate, is often of limited value. 50 For instance, Almachius in The Second Nun's Tale sees with his outer eye, but is spiritually blind. 51 Chaunticleer, after his escape from the fox, decries his own blindness; yet the truth he cannot see is generated not by ocular perception, but by a dream, to whose veracity he is metaphorically blinded by his wife's false arguments. The Merchant's Tale also offers a commentary on the limitations of ocular perception, for while January is misled about May's deception because he does not rely on what he sees, the vision is only a fornication in a pear tree. 52 January's attack of blindness is, of course, a metaphor—or hysterical symptom—for his emotional stupidity. His perfected sight is still circumscribed by his inner spiritual horizon; and at his most visually lucid, his sight restored, he sees only a sexual transgression. The theme of ocular skepticism, important to the fabliau plot of The Merchant's Tale and central as well to the arguments of the narrator in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and of Saint Cecilia in The Second Nun's Tale, is also the basis for the maiden's remark in Pearl: "I halde {5at iueler lyttel to prayse / Pat 1еиез wel jiat he se3 wyth yj)e." Like Chaucer, the Gawain-poet points out the folly of relying exclusively on the senses. Visual information should not be entirely trusted, nor should it form a single basis of belief. Also like Chaucer, the Gawain-poet recognizes and writes about the potency of visual experience. The drama of characters in the Cotton Nero poems is, to a large degree, generated by their struggle in choosing between visual, sensory information and truths learned from Scripture or learned through faith. Unlike Chaucer, however, the Gawain-poet realizes this conflict consistently at the level of eyewitness experience. The dreamer in Pearl, like other wanderers, pilgrims, and prophets in the Cotton Nero poems, not only records his visual experiences but is also trapped within them, his understanding a construct of his own sensory boundaries. The pilgrims themselves tend not to be ocular skeptics but rather credulous followers of a visual text, cherishing the world, its textures, and its rich and seductive surfaces.

Notes ι. J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the GawainPoet (New Haven, C T : Yale University Press, 1971), 69-78. Burrow cites Curtius's discussion of descriptive mannerism: "In manneristic epochs, the ornatus is piled on indiscriminately and meaninglessly. In rhetoric itself. . . lies concealed one of the seeds of Mannerism. It produces a luxuriant growth in Late Antiquity and the

136

Conclusion

Middle Ages" (Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen ser. no. 36 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953], 274). 2. The imagery of the Otherworld is discussed extensively by H. R. Patch, The Other World according to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). See also Curtius, 183-202. 3. John Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 46—53. 4. Bender, io5ff. 5. 'They turned by hillsides where boughs are bare, climbed cliffs where the cold clings. The heavens were high, but threatening underneath; mist drizzled on the moor, melted on the mountains. Each hill had a hat, a huge cloak of mist. Brooks boiled and foamed over banks about, dashing and breaking whitely on the ground where they pressed down." 6. See, for example, Derek Pearsall, "Rhetorical Descriptio in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Modern Language Review 50 (1955): 129-134; see also John Finlayson, "Rhetorical 'Descriptio' of Place in the Alliterative Morte Arthure," Modern Philology 61 (1963): ι—11; and Jane Baltzell, "Rhetorical 'Amplification' and 'Abbreviation' and the Structure of Medieval Narrative," Pacific Coast Philology, 2 (1967): 32-39. 7. In medieval rhetorical treatises, descriptio was subsumed under amplificatio, the chief purpose of which was the reiteration of the sententia. See, for example, Matthew of Vendome, trans. Ernest Gallo, Matthew ofVendome: Introductory Treatise on the Art of Poetry, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 118, no. 1 (1974), 4.d, 73. The preceptive grammarians had little to say about visual focusing, except that the writer should include details before, during, and after the event. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, for example, suggests that the story of Satan's fall, the creation, the fall of man, and the redemption of Christ could serve as ocular demonstrations of sin and redemption; see The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, ed. Ernest Gallo (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 4.C.2, and Gallo's discussion of classical sources on 178. 8. See Warren Ginsberg, "Place and Dialectic in Pearl and Dante's Paradise," ELH 55 (1988): 731-753, for a discussion of the linkage between geography and inventio, especially in debate poetry. 9. Claes Schaar, The Golden Mirror: Studies in Chaucer's Descriptive Technique and its Literary Background (Lund: Gleerup, 1955), 2—3. 10. In A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), D. W. Robertson argues that this lack of surface coherence in Chaucer's descriptions serves as a function of narrative intent: Chaucer's interest is not "in the 'surface reality' but in the reality of the idea. The details are arranged, just as they are in Romanesque and Gothic art, with a view to developing the idea and not with a view to rendering a photographic image" (248). Robertson distinguishes "iconographic" from "realistic" description, and argues that not only individual passages, but also the whole of The Canterbury Tales "exhibits a typical Gothic disregard for spatial coherence" (258). 11. Citations from Chaucer are taken from the edition by Larry Benson, The Riverside Chattcer, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Conclusion

137

12. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 121. The pictures of Mars, Venus, and Diana are potently destructive, and their malignant power is mirrored in the form of the descriptions, Kolve argues. 13. Several critics have recognized the crucial role of controlling narrative images in The Canterbury Tales, and have designated their function by various terms. Charles A. Owen, Jr., identifies those images that "perform a symbolic and unifying function" in the text as "controlling images," in 'The Crucial Passages in Five of The Canterbury Tales," JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 52 (1953): 294-311; rpt. in Discussions of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Charles A. Owen, Jr. (Boston: Heath, 1962), 29; John Leyerle, "The Heart and the Chain," in The Learned and the Lewed, ed. Larry D. Benson, Harvard English Studies, no. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 113—14-5, calls them "poetic nuclei;" and Kolve terms them "narrative images," by which he means "symbolic images integral to the action that encloses them, in fiction that is itself neither symbolic nor allegorical in nature" (72). 14. Citations from Sir Otfeo are from Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B. Sands (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). 15. 'There he saw many chalk-white chimneys that gleamed very whitely upon the tower roofs. So many painted pinnacles were scattered everywhere, clustered so densely among the casde's embrasures, that it seemed perfecdy pared out of paper. 16. Robert Harming examines this passage, but argues that in its "trompe I'oeil insubstantiality" it forces interpretation by juxtaposing embellishment against heroic action. According to this reading, the casde's upper stories do not appear real or substantial, as seen by Gawain, but as "mere ornament, or mock casde" ("Sir Gawain and the Red Herring: The Perils of Interpretation," in Aas oflnterpretation: The Text in Its Contexts, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk [Norman, O K : Pilgrim, 1982], 8-9).

17. See, for example, Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 69-71; and Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 177. 18. Pearsall and Salter, 177. 19. Citations from The Parliament of the Three Ages are taken from the edition by Μ. Y. Offord, Early English Text Society, 246 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).

20. See Turville-Petre, 70. 21. Landscapes and Seasons, 179. 22. For studies of the influence of nominalist thought on the development of late medieval thought—most particularly on the decline of scholasticism and the rise of empiricism—see, for instance, Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). A summary of revisionist thinking in the reevaluation of nominalism is set forth by William J. Courtenay, "Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion:

138

Conclusion

Papersfrom the University of Michigan Conference, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 51-56. For studies of the influence of nominalism on late medieval poetry, see David C. Steinmetz, "Late Medieval Nominalism and the Clerk's Tale Chaucer Renew, 12 (1977): 38-54; Russell A. Peck, "Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions," Speculum 53 (1978): 745-760; Kathryn L. Lynch, "Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer's Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The Clerk's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 41-70; see also Sheila Delany, Chaucer's House of Fame: The Poetics ofSkeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), esp. Chap. 2. 23. According to David Lindberg, John Pecham's Perspectiva communis was a text for regular lectures at the University of Vienna from as early as 1390 and also in 1390 was required for the M.A. degree at Prague; by 1338 Pecham's Perspectiva, Alhazen's De aspectibus, and Bacon's Perspectiva were recorded in the library of the Sorbonne; and by 1431 optical texts were required for the B.A. degree at Oxford (Theories of Vision fromAl-Kindi to Kepler [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 120—21). See also Lindberg's A Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Optical Manuscripts, Subsidia Mediaevalia, no. 4 (Toronto, 1975). 24. A comprehensive study of the relationships among optics, visionary epistemology, and visual metaphor and experience in late medieval poetry has yet to be written, though the groundwork for such a study has been laid, especially by Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age ofOckham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics, 12S0-134S (New York: E. J. Brill, 1988). Studies of medieval faculty psychology and of imagery have also made important contributions; see especially E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg, 1975); Joseph A. Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's Comedy (New York: Greenwood, 1968); Robert L. Montgomery, The Reader's Eye: Studies in Didactic Literary Theory from Dante to Tasso (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and the section "Audience and Image" in Kolve, Chaucerandthelmagery ofNarrative, 9-58. See also Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 3—83; and Judith Neaman, "Sight and Insight: Vision and the Mystics," Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter 5 (1979): 27-43. For studies that apply medieval optical theory to poetry, see Patricia Eberle, "The Lovers' Glass: Nature's Discourse on Optics and the Optical Design of the Romance of the Rose," University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 241-262; and Linda Tarte Holley, "Medieval Optics and the Framed Narrative in Chaucer's Troilus and CriseydeThe Chaucer Renew 21 (1986): 26—44. 25. For discussions of the relationship between nominalism and late medieval mysticism, see Steven Ozment, "Mysticism, Nominalism, and Dissent," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Papers from the Univ. of Michigan Conference (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 67-92; and Oberman, Harvest, esp. 326-331. 26. See John V. Fleming, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), 173-174. See also L. E. Boyle, 'The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Works of William of Pagula," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5, no. 5 (1955), 81-110.

Conclusion

139

27. Fleming, 246. 28. The Meditations had a wide popular appeal as well as a powerful influence on contemplatives. For an English rendition see Nicholas Love's early fifteenthcentury Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. James Hogg and Lawrence F. Powell (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1989). For an illustrated translation of a medieval Italian version, see the Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Rosalie B. Green and Ira Ragusa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); for invitations to the reader to visualize the scenes of Christ's life, see esp. 309, 320, 333. 29. As cited in Fleming, 246. 30. Fleming, 248. 31. See discussion of Bonaventure in Chapter 2. 32. "Iuxta igitur sex gradus ascensionis in Deum sex sunt gradus potentiarum animae per quos ascendimus ab imis ad summa, ab exterioribus ad intima, a temporalibus conscendimus ad aeterna, scilicet sensus, imaginatio, ratio, intellectus, intelligentia et apex mentis seu synderesis scintilla" (7tin. 1.6, 40-43). 33. "Qui igitur tantis rerum creaturarum splendoribus non illustratur caecus est; qui tantis clamoribus non evigilat surdus est; qui ex omnibus his effectibus Deum non laudat mutus est; qui ex tantis indiciis primum principium non advertit stultus est.—Aperi igitur oculos, aures spirituales admove, labia tua solve et cor mum appone, ut in omnibus creaturis Deum tuum videas, audias, laudes, diligas et colas, magnifices et honores, ne forte totus contra te orbis terrarum consurgat" (Itin. 1.15, 48-49). John Gardner, intra, and trans., The Complete Works of the Gawain Poet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 83, cites this passage at length, claiming that it contains "the whole religious scheme of Gawain." See also Itin. 4.3, 200-201. 34. "Si enim imago est similitudo expressiva, dum mens nostra contemplatur in Christo Filio Dei, qui est imago Dei invisibilis per naturam . . . iam pervenit ad quandam rem perfectam" (Itin. 6.7, 94-95). 35. Itin. 2.3, 52—53; Breviloquium 2.9.5, in Opera Theologica Selecta (Quaracchi: Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 1949—) 5, 50; and IV Sent. 3.2.1.3.6, in Opera Omnia (Quaracchi: Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882-1902), 1018. For a discussion of Bonaventure's theory of light and visual perception, see Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure, trans. Dom Illtyd Trethowan and Frank J. Sheed (Paterson, NJ: Saint Anthony Guild Press, 1965), 317-319. 36. See Fleming, 212. 37. English mysticism in this regard can also be distinguished from German mysticism, which generally sought to celebrate the Creator through the signs in creation. For an important discussion of mystical imagery and metaphor, see Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), esp. 24—33 and 67-68. 38. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book ofPrivy Counselling, ed. P. Hodgson, Early English Text Society, o.s., 218 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944); seen. 42, section 70, 124. 39. Walter Hilton, The Scale ofPerfection, trans. Dom Gerard Sitwell (London: Burns Oates, 1953), 1.78, 122.

I4-0

Conclusion

40. See Riehle, 123. 41. Scale 1.9,13—14. 42. Scale i.ij, 22. 43. Scale 1.12,18. 44. The Cloud of Unknowing, sections 8, 9. 4$. For sijt as a translation for contemplatio, see Deonise Hid Diuinite, and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to the Cloud ofUnknowing, ed. P. Hodgson, Early English Text Society, o.s. 231 (London: Oxford University Press, i9$8). For contemplative metaphors for sight, see Scale 1.3,88; and the Form of Living in English Writings ofRichard Rolle Hermit ofHampole, ed. Η. E. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 188, 4off. For these citations and others, see Riehle, 123-124. 46. See Ozment, p. 69; see also the discussion of this epistemological dualism in Kathryn L. Lynch, "The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision: The Argument of Form," Genre 21 (1988): 287-288. 47. For a discussion of late medieval "particularist ontology," see John J. Murdoch, 'The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature," in Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages, ed. Laurence D. Roberts, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 16 (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York, 1982), 171-213; see also Lynch, "Griselda," $7-61. 48. Eberle, 'The Lover's Glass," 244-24$. 49. For a general discussion of late medieval light metaphysics and of Dante's treatment of visual rays, see Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition, $6—90. $0. On Chaucer's skepticism, and on skepticism as a concern of the fourteenth century, see Delany, 1—2, 6-21. $1. James Dean points out the epistemological conflict in The Second Nun's Tale and how it is realized through the "ocular-proof-as-truth" and "inner eye" themes ("Dismanding the Canterbury Book," PMLA, 100 [198$]: 748). $2. Peter Brown argues that Chaucer introduced new material from optical science to develop the themes of inner blindness and visual deception ("An Optical Theme in The Merchant's Tale," Studies in the Аде of Chaucer, Proceedings 1 [1984]:

231-243)·

Works Cited

Ackerman, Robert W. "'Pared out of Paper': Gawatn 802 and Purity 1408 "JEGP: Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 56 (1957): +10-417. Ambrose, In Lucam. Vol. 15 of the Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina (PL). Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844-1864. Andrew, Malcolm. "Jonah and Christ in Patience." Modern Philology 70 (1972-73): 230-233. Arthur, Ross G. Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Ashley, Kathleen. "'Trawthe' and Temporality: The Violation of Contracts and Conventions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Assays 4 (1987): 3—24. Saint Augustine. De CivitateDei. Ed. J.E.C. Welldon. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1924. . De Videndo Deo. PI, 33. . Epist. 147· PL, 33. . Sermon 234· PL, 38. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory ofNarrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1985. Baldwin, A. P. "The Tripartite Reformation of the Soul in The Scale of Perfection, Pearl, and Piers Plowman." In The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe, 136-149. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984. Baltzell, Jane. "Rhetorical 'Amplification' and 'Abbreviation' and the Structure of Medieval Narrative." Pacific Coast Philology 2 (1967): 32-39. Barron, W.R.J. Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Bede. Explanatio Apocalypsis. PL, 113. Bender, John. Spenser and Literary Pictorialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Bennett, Josephine Waters. The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville. 1954; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971. Benson, Larry. Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965. . "The Authorship of St. Erkenwald." JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 393-405. Biblia Sacra, iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam. Ed. A. Colunga and L. Turrado. 4th ed. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Christianos, 1965.

142

Works Cited

Bishop, Ian. Pearl in Its Setting: A Critical Study of the Structure and Meaning of the Middle English Poem. Oxford: Blackwell, 1968. Blanch, Robert J., ed. Sir Gawain and Pearl: Critical Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Blenkner, Louis. "The Theological Structure of Pearl." Traditio 24 (1968): 43-75. Bloomfield, Morton. "Joachim of Flora: A Critical Survey of His Canon, Teaching, Sources, Biography, and Influence." Traditio 13 (1957): 264-265. Boccaccio, Giovanni. II Comento alia Divina Commedia. Ed. Domenico Guerri. 3 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1918. Bogdanos, Theodore. Pearl: Image of the Ineffable. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983. Saint Bonaventure. Collationes in Hexaemeron. Ed. R. D. Delorme. Ad Claras Aquas, Florence: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1934. . Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. Ed. and trans. Philotheus Boehner. Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1956. . Opera Omnia. Quarrachi: Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882-1902. . Opera Theologica Selecta 5. Quaracchi: Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 1949-. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. BorrofF, Marie. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic andMetrical Study. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Rpt. Archon, 1973. Boyle, L. E. "The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Works of William of Pagula." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5, no. 5 (1955): 81—no. Bragg, Lois. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Elusion of Clarity." NeuphilologischeMitteilungen 86 (1985): 482—488. Brieger, P. English Art: 1216-1307. Oxford History of English Art, no. 4, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957. Brown, Peter. "An Optical Theme in The Merchant's Tale." Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1 (1984): 231-243. Burrow, J. A. A Reading ofSir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. — . Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain-Ρο^ί. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Ed. Larry Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Clark, S. L., and Julian N. Wasserman, "The Pearl Poet's City Imagery." Southern Quarterly 16 (1978): 297-309. —. "The Significance of Thresholds in the Pearl- Poet's Purity." Interpretations 12 (1980): 114-127. . "The Spatial Argument of Pearl: Perspectives on a Venerable Bead." Interpretations π (1979): 1-12. Cleanness. Ed. J. J. Anderson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. Cleanness: An Alliterative Tripartite Poem on the Deluge, The Destruction of Sodom, and the Death ofBelshazzar, by the Poet 0/"Pearl. Ed. Israel Gollancz. Trans. D. S. Brewer. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1974.

Works Cited

143

The Cloisters Apocalypse. 2 vols. Ed. Florens Deuchler, Jeffrey M. Hoffeld, and Helmut Nickel. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling. Ed. P. Hodgson. Early English Text Society o.s., 218. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. The Complete Works ofthe Gawain Poet. Trans. John Gardner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Conley, John, ed. The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. . "Pearl and a Lost Tradition." JEGP: Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 54 (1955): 232-247. Cooke, W. G. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Restored Dating." Medium Aevumtf (1989): 34-48. Cooper, R. A. and D. A. Pearsall. "The Gawain-Poems: A Statistical Approach to the Question of Common Authorship." Review of English Studies 39 (1988): 365-385. . Letter to Editor. Renew ofEnglish Studies 41 (1990): 102-103. Courtenay, William J. "Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion." In The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion. Ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman. Papers from the University of Michigan Conference. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series, no. 36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. 3 vols. Ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939; rpt. 1972. Davenport, W. A. The Art of the Gawain-Poet. London: Athlone Press, 1978. Dean, James. "Dismantling the Canterbury Book" PMLA 100 (1985): 746-762. Deferrari, Roy J., trans. The Sources ofCatholic Dogma. St. Louis, MO: Herder Book Co., 1957. Delany, Sheila. Chaucer's House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Denzinger, Henrico, ed. Enchiridion Symbolorum. 32nd ed. London: Herder, 1921. Demise Hid Diuinite, and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to the Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. P. Hodgson. Early English Text Society o.s., 231. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. de Young, James Calvin. Jerusalem in the New Testament: The Significance of the City in the History ofRedemption and in Eschatology. Kampen: J. H. Kok, i960. Dictionnaire dArcheologie Chretienne et de Liturgie. Ed. F. Cabrol and H. Ledere. Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ane, 1935. Die Edelherren von Boldensele oder Boldensen. Ed. C. L. Grotefend. Hanover, 1855. Doob, Penelope. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. . "The Labyrinth in Medieval Culture: Explorations of an Image." Revue de l'Universite d'Ottawa 52 (1982): 207—218. Eberle, Patricia. "The Lovers' Glass: Nature's Discourse on Optics and the Optical

144

Works Cited

Design of the Romance of the Rose." University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 241-262. Eldredge, Laurence. "Sheltering Space and Cosmic Space in the Middle English Patience." AnnualeMediaevale 21 (1981): 121-133. Emmerson, Richard Kenneth. Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study ofMedieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature. Seatde: University of Washington Press, 1981. Ferster, Judith. Chaucer on Interpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Field, Rosalind. "The Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl." Modern Language Renew 81 (1986): 7-17. Finlayson, John. "Rhetorical 'Descriptio' of Place in the küxtcraxiwc Morte Arthure." Modern Philology 61 (1963): 1-11. . "Pearl: Landscape and Vision." Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 314-343. Fleming, John V. An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977. Freyhan, R. "Joachism and the English Apocalypse." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18 (1955): 211-244. Friedman, John. "Figural Typology in the Middle English Patience." In The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach, 99-129. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981. Ganim, John. "Disorientation, Style and Consciousness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." PMLA 91 (1976): 376-384. . Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Gardiner, F. C. The Pilgrimage ofDesire: A Study of Theme and Genre in Medieval Literature. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971. Gatta, John. "Transformation Symbolism and the Liturgy of the Mass in Pearl." Modern Philology 71 (1974): 243—256. Gellrich, Jesse. The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Geoffrey of Vinsauf. The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine. Ed. Ernest Gallo. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Gertz, SunHee Kim. "Translatio studii et imperii: Sir Gawain as Literary Critic." Semiotica 63 (1987): 185—203. Gilson, Etienne. The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure. Trans. Dom Illtyd Trethowan and Frank J. Sheed. Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1965. Ginsberg, Warren. "Place and Dialectic in Pearl and Dante's Paradiso." ELH 55 (1988): 731-753· Glossa Ordinaria. PL, 114.352. Gombrich, E . H . Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. Gregory. Homiliae in Evangelia. PL, 76. Hanna, Ralph, III. "Unlocking What's Locked: Gawain's Green Girdle." Viator 14 (1983): 289-302. Hanning, Robert W. "Sir Gawain and the Red Herring: The Perils of Interpreta-

Works Cited

145

tion." In Acts ofInterpretation: The Text in its Contexts. Ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, 5-23. Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1982. Harvey, E. Ruth. The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg, 1975. Henderson, George. "Studies in English Manuscript IUumination."/оигяя/ of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 17-137; 31 (1968): 103—147. Heng, Geraldine. "Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." PMLA 106 (1991): 500-514. Hieatt, A. Kent. "Sir Gawain: Pentangle, Luf-Lace, Numerical Structure." Papers in Language and Literature 4 (1968): 339—359. Hieatt, Constance."Pearl and the Dream-Vision Tradition." StudiaNeophilologica 37 (1965): 139-145. Higgs, Elton. "The Progress of the Dreamer in Pearl." Studies in Medieval Culture 4 (1974): 388-400. Hilgert, Earl. The Ship and Related Symbols in the New Testament. Assen: Royal Vangorcum, 1962. Hill, Ordelle G. "The Audience of Patience." Modern Philology 66 (1968): 103—109. Hilton, Walter. The Scale ofPerfection. Trans. Dom Gerard Sitwell. London: Burns Oates, 1953. Holley, Linda Tarte. "Medieval Optics and the Framed Narrative in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." The Chamer Review 21 (1986): 26—44. Howard, Donald R. "Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Speculum 39 (1964): 425-33. . Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Howard, Donald R., and Christian Zacher, eds. Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Hugh of Saint Victor. De Area Noe Morali. PL, 176. ———. Hugh of Saint Victor on the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis). Trans. Roy J. Deferrari. Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy, 1954. . De Sacramentis. PL, 175,176. Isidore of Seville. Etymologiarum. PL, 82. Joachim of Fiore. Expositw in Apocalypsim. Venice, 1524. . Liber Concordiae Nävi et Veteris Testamenti. Venice, 1591. Johnson, Lynn Staley. The Voice ofthe Gawain-Pof*. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Kean, Patricia M. The Pad: An Interpretation. London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1967. Kelly, T. D., and John T. Irwin. "The Meaning of Cleanness: Parable as Effective Sign." Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973): 232-260. . "The Way and the End are One: Patience as a Parable of the Contemplative Life." American Benedictine Review 25 (1974): 33—55. Kirk, Kenneth E. The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Вопит. New York: Longmans Green, 1932. Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery ofNarrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984.

146

Works Cited

Krieger, Murray. "The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An Ε. H. Gombrich Retrospective." Critical Inquiry п (1984): 181-194. Leyerle, John. "The Heart and the Chain." In The Learned and the Lewed, ed. Larry D. Benson, 133-145. Harvard English Studies, no. 5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Lindberg, David. A Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Optical Manuscripts. Subsidia Mediaevalia, no. 4. Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 1975. . Theories of Vision fromAl-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Loomis, Laura Hibbard."Gawain and the Green Knight." InArthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger S. Loomis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Love, Nicholas. The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. Ed. James Hogg and Lawrence Powell. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik Amerikanistik, 1989. Luttrell, С. Α. "Pearl: Symbolism in a Garden Setting ." Neophilologus 49 (1965): 160— 176. Lynch, Kathryn L. "The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision: The Argument of Form." Genre 21 (1988): 287-288. . "Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer's Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The Clerk's Tale." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 41-70. . The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Mann, Jill. "Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Essays in Criticism 36 (1986): 294-318. Matthew of Vendome. Matthew ofVendome: Introductory Treatise on the Art of Poetry. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 118, no. 1. Philadelphia, 1974·

Mazzeo, Joseph A. Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's Comedy. New York: Greenwood, 1968. McColly, William, and Dennis Weir. "Literary Attribution and Likelihood-Ratio Texts: The Case of the Middle English Pearl-Poems." Computers and the Humanities 17 (1983): 65-75. Medieval Drama. Ed. David Bevington. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Trans. Rosalie B. Green and Ira Ragusa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Middle English Verse Romances. Ed. Donald B. Sands. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Das Mittelenglische Gedicht über die Vision des Tundalus. Ed. Albrecht Wagner. Halle: Niemeyer, 1893. Montgomery, Robert L. The Reader's Eye: Studies in Didactic Literary Theory from Dante to Tasso. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Moorman, Charles. "The Role of the Narrator in Pearl." Modern Philology 53 (1955): 73-81. Morgan, Gerald. "The Action of the Hunting and Bedroom Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Medium Aevum 56 (1987): 200-216.

Works Cited

147

Morse, Charlotte. "The Image of the Vessel in Cleanness.'" University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1971): 202—216. . The Pattern of Judgment in theQueste and Cleanness. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Murdoch, John J. "The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature." In Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages, ed. Laurence D. Roberts, 171—213. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 16. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York, 1982. Neaman, Judith. "Sight and Insight: Vision and the Mystics." Fourteenth Century English Mystics Newsletter $ (1979): 27-43. Nelson, Cary. The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. Ed. Catholic University of America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Nichols, Stephen G., Jr. Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Niemann, Thomas C. "Pearl and the Christian Other World." Genre 7 (1974): 213232. Nolan, Barbara. The Gothic Visionary Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Oberman, Heiko. The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Owen, Charles Α., Jr. "The Crucial Passages in Five of The Canterbury Tales." JEGP: Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 52 (1953): 294-311. , ed. Discussions of the Canterbury Tales. Boston: Heath, 1962. Ozment, Steven. "Mysticism, Nominalism, and Dissent." In The Pursuit ofHoliness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, 67-92. Papers from the University of Michigan Conference. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. Padolsky, Enoch. "Steering the Reader's Heart in Patience." Revue de l'Universite d'Ottawasi (1983): 169-180. Panofsky, Erwin. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; rpt. New York: Icon, 1971. . Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. London: Oxford University Press, 1939; rpt. New York: Icon, 1972. The Parlement of the ThreAges. Ed. Μ. Y. Offord. Early English Text Society, 246. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Patch, H. R. The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Patience. Ed. J. J. Anderson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969. Pearl. Ed. Ε. V. Gordon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition. Volume 2, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. William Vantuono. Vol. 6, The Renaissance Imagination. New York: Garland, 1984. Pearsall, Derek. "Rhetorical Descriptio in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Modem Language Review so (1955): 129-134.

148

Works Cited

Pearsall, Derek, and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Peck, Russell A. "Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions." Speculum 53 (1978): 745760. The Poems ofthe Pearl Manuscript. Ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron. York Medieval Texts, 2nd series. London: Arnold, 1978. Prior, Sandra Pierson. "Patience—Beyond Apocalypse Γ Modern Philology 83 (1986): 337-348.

Purity, A Middle English Poem. Ed. Robert J. Menner. New Haven, СГ: Yale University Press, 1920; rpt. Archon Books, 1970. Rabanus Maurus. De Universe. PL, 111. Radulphus Ardens. PL, 155. Renoir, Alain. "Descriptive Techniques in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Orbis Litterarum 13 (1958): 126-132. . "The Progressive Magnification: An Instance of Psychological Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Moderna Sprdk 54 (i960): 245-253. Rhodes, James. "Vision and History in Patience." Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): ι—13. Riehle, Wolfgang. The Middle English Mystics. Trans. Bernard Standring. Boston: MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Robertson, D. W., Jr. A Preface to Chamer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Robertson, D. W., Jr., and Bernard F. Huppe. Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951. Rolle, Richard. English Writings ofRichard Rolle Hermit ofHanpole. Ed. Η. E. Allen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931. Sandahl, Bertil. The Ship's Hull: Middle English Sea Terms. Vol. 1. Uppsala: Lundequistska bokenhandeln; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Savage, H. L. "The Significance of the Hunting Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." JEGP: Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 27 (1928): 1—15. Schaar, Claes. The Golden Mirror: Studies in Chaucer's Descriptive Technique and its Literary Background. Lund: Gleerup, 1955. Schleusener, Jay. "History and Action in Patience." PMLA 86 (1971): 959-965. Secular Lyrics oftheXLVth and theXVth Centuries. Ed. Rosseil H. Robbins. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952. Shoaf, R. A. The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. University of Florida Monographs, Humanities No. 55. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984. Simpson, Otto von. The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept ofOrder. Bollingen Ser. 48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and Ε. V. Gordon. 2nd ed. by Norman Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Sklute, Larry. "Expectation and Fulfillment in Pearl." Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 663-679.

Works Cited

149

Southern, R. W. "Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series. London, 1971. Spearing, A. C. The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. . Medieval Dream Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ———. "Patience and the Gawain-Voa." Anglia 84 (1966): 305-29. —. Readings in Medieval Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. . "Symbolic and Dramatic Development in Pearl." Modem Philology 60 (1962): 1-12. Spendal, R. J. "The Narrative Structure of Patience." Michigan Academician 5 (1972): 107-114. Stanbury, Sarah. "Cupid's Sight in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women." Centerpoint 15 (1981): 95-102. . uPearl and the Idea of Jerusalem." Mediepalia et Humanistica 16 (1988): 11741· Steinberg, Leo. The Sexuality ofChrist in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Steinmetz, David C. "Late Medieval Nominalism and the Clerk's Tale." Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 38-54. Tachau, Katherine A. Vision and Certitude in the Age ofOckham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics, 12SO-134S. New York: E. J. Brill, 1988. Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation ofBartholomaeus Anglicus, "De Proprietatibus Rerum." 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Trinity College Apocalypse. Ed. Peter Brieger. London: Eugrammia Press, 1967. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Press, 1969. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. The Alliterative Revival. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977. Vantuono, William. "Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, and Gawain: The Case for Common Authorship."AnnualeMediaevale 12 (1971): 37—69. . "The Structure and Sources of Patience." Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 401421. Vasta, Edward. "Immortal Flowers and the Pearl's Decay." JEGP: Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 65 (1967): 519—531. Whitaker, Muriel. "Pearl and Some Illustrated Apocalypse Manuscripts." Viator 12 (1981): 183-196. Williams, David. "The Point of Patience." Modern Philology 68 (1970): 127-136. Wilson, Edward. The Gawain-Poet. Medieval and Renaissance Authors. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976. Woolf, Rosemary. The English Mystery Plays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. The Worfa of the Gawain-Рой. Ed. Charles Moorman. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1977.

Index

Ackerman, Robert W., 70 n.47 Alliterative poetry, eyewitness techniques in, 125-27 Ambrose, In Lucam, 67 η.π Anderson, J. J., 66 n.i, 69 n.38, 93 nn.13-14, 94 n.23 Andrew, Malcolm, 93 n.6 Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, 93 n.14, 94 n.23 Apocalypses, illustrated: interpretation of images in, 34-35; PearPs relationship to, 24-31; pictorial traditions of, 25, 26-28, 40 n.44, 40 n.46, 55; visionary in, 25-31; worship of angel in, 28-30 Aquinas, Thomas, 14 Arthur, Ross, 115 n.17 Ashley, Kathleen, 113 n.2,115 n.18 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 67 n.11, 88; beatific vision in, 51; contemplative methodologies of, 14; sight in, 128,132 Authorship of Cotton Nero A.x., 1-2, 9 n.3, 116 Babylon, described in Purity, 63-64 Bachelard, Gaston, 92 n.3 Bacon, Roger, 128 Bal, Mieke, 4 Baldwin, A. P., 37 n.9 Balzell, Jane, 136 n.6 Barron, W. R. J., 114 n.16 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, 88 Beatific vision, 51-52; in Purity, 44,50,51-51 Beatitudes: in Patience, 66 n.4, 75; and sight of God in Purity, 50-52, 86. See also Sight Bender, John, 118,120 Bennett, Josephine Waters, 36 n.3 Benson, Larry, 5, 9 n.3 Berengaudus, Expositio super Septem visiones libri apocalypsis, 28-29, 31, 41, n.48. See also Apocalypses, illustrated

Bevington, David, 67 n.17 Bishop, Ian, 39 n.40, 41 n.54 Blenkner, Louis, 37 n.9, 41 n.54 Bloomfieid, Morton, 68 n.27 Boccaccio, Giovanni, II comento alia Divina Commedia, 83 Bogdanos, Theodore, 33,36 n.4,37 n.12, 41 n.54 Bonaventure, Saint: contemplative methodologies compared to Pearl, 14, 15-16, 2 0 21; Heavenly Jerusalem in, 15—16, 39 n.41; historiography of, 53; images of sight in, 130-31 Booth, Wayne, 6 Borroff, Marie, 10 n.n Boyle, L. E., 138 n.26 Bragg, Lois, 113 n.2 Brewer, D. S., 66 n.3 Brieger, Peter Α., 39 n.38, 40 n.46, 41 n.48 Brown, Peter, 140 n.52 Burrow, John, 2,114 n.16,117,118,135 n.i Cabrol, F., and H. Leclerc, 93 n.15 Casde, description of, 123—24 Chaucer, visual description in, 16, 120-23, 134-35; paper subdeties in, 64. See also Skepticism, ocular Chin-chuck, 28-30 Clark, S. L., and Julian N. Wasserman, 36 n.4, 69 n.37, 92 П.2 The Cloud of Knowing, 131 Conlev, John, 41 n.54 Cooper, R. Α., and D. A. Pearsall, 9 n.3 Courtenay, William J., 137 n.22 Dante Alighieri, 83; treatment of sight in, 23, 133-34 Davenport, W. Α., 9 n.4 Dead Sea, 58-59, 69 n.38 Dean, James, 140 n.51 Delanv, Sheila, 138 n.22, 140 n.50

152

Index

Denzinger, Henrico, 68 η.22 Demise Hid Diuinite, 140 n.45 Description, visualizing techniques of: cinematography, 4, 99; descriptio loci, 4; ekphrasis, 61; enumeration, 3-4; focalizing, 4 , 23, 7 2 - 7 3 ; focusing, 118; narrative perspective, 4; objective correlative, 5; pointing, 2 , 1 1 7 - 1 9 , 1 2 3 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 ; point of view, 4 , 8 0 , 1 0 8 , ш - 1 2 ; progressive intensification, 4 - 5 , 1 1 8 ; scanning, 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 1 2 0 , 123. See also Eyewitness technique De Young, James Calvin, 40 n.41 Doob, Penelope, 83 Duns Scorns, John, 128

Eberle, Patricia, 1 3 3 , 1 3 8 n . 2 4 , 1 4 0 n . 4 8 Eldredge, Laurence, 92 n.2, 93 п.н Emmaus, journey to: and idea of pilgrimage, 67 n.n; and miraculous recognition, 47-49 Emmerson, Richard Kenneth, 68 n.26 Enclosure, motif of: symbolism of, 74, 91; ark and, 5 6 ; erber and, 1 7 - 1 8 ; in Gawain, 1 0 7 - 8 ; in Gawam-poct, 7 2 - 7 3 ; in Heavenly Jerusalem, 22—31; holy vessels and, 5 9 - 6 6 ; ship and, 7 5 - 7 6 ; labyrinthine form of, 8 2 - 8 3 ; in whale; 8 0 - 8 7 ; in woodbine, 87-91

Eucharist: in Pearl, 32; in Purity, 47, 62 Eyes, images of in Gawain-poet: 5 7 - 5 8 , 7 8 , 1 0 1 ; 1 0 8 - 9 . See also Gaze; Sight Eyewitness technique, and alliterative poetry, 1 2 5 - 2 7 ; common techniques in Gawain-poet, 2 , 5 - 8 , i n — 1 2 , 1 1 6 — 1 7 ; as epistemological mode, 6 - 8 , 1 2 7 - 2 8 ; and medieval poetry, 1 1 7 - 2 7 ; —in Patience, 7 2 - 7 3 ; and ship, 7 6 - 8 0 ; and whale, 8 1 - 8 7 ; and woodbine, 8 8 - 9 2 —in Pearl, 2 - 4 , 3 2 , 1 2 - 1 4 , 35; in erber, 1 7 1 9 ; in Heavenly Jerusalem, 2 2 - 2 8 ; in Otherworld, 19-21 —in Purity, 4 2 - 4 3 ; and beatific vision, 5 1 5 2 ; and description of Flood, 5 4 - 5 7 ; and holy vessels, 6 2 - 6 3 —in Gawain, 9 7 — 1 0 7 , 1 1 1 - 1 2 ; in arrival at Hautdesert, 1 0 2 - 4 ; and beheading game, 9 9 ; and castle, 1 2 4 - 2 5 ; and journey to Green Chapel, 1 1 8 - 1 9 ; and Wirral, 1 0 5 - 7 . See also Description; Interpretation

Ferster, Judith, 6 Field, Rosalind, 39 n.37 Finlayson, John, 3 6 n . 4 , 37 n.io,

38 n . 2 1 , 1 3 6

n.6

Fleming, John,

129,131,138 n . 2 6 , 1 3 9

n.27,

NN.29-30

Flood, description of in Purity, 5 4 — 5 6 ; and allegory of ark, 69 n.34 Freyhan, R., 41 n.48 Friedman, John В., 92 n.2, 93 n.5, 94 nn. 22, 25

Ganim, John M.,

9 n.4,101,113

nn.

2, 6 , 1 1 4

n.12

Gardiner, F. C., 67 n.n Gardner, John, 6 6 n . 3 , 1 3 9 n.33 Gatta, John, 37 n.:2 Gaze: in Gawain, 1 0 0 — 1 0 2 , 1 0 2 - 4 , 1 2 4 — 2 5 ; of Gawain, 1 0 5 - 7 , 1 0 8 - 9 , 1 1 2 ; in Gawainpoems, 7 , 8 , 1 0 5 , H I — 1 3 , 1 1 6 ; of Green Knight, 9 6 - 9 8 ; in Chaucer, 1 2 0 - 2 3 ; IN Parliament of the Three Ages, 1 2 6 - 2 7 ; in Patience, 7 8 - 8 0 , 8 8 - 8 9 ; in Pearl, 1 9 — 2 1 , 2 1 — 2 8 ; in Purity, 6 3 - 6 6 . See also Description; Eyewitness technique Gellrich, Jesse, 92 n.4 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 119 Gerson, Jean, 131 Gertz, SunHee Kim, 115 n.17 Gilson, Etienne, 139 n.35 Ginsberg, Warren, 136 n.8 Girdle, green, as visual sign, 110-11 Glossa ordinaria, 67 n.n Gombrich, Ε. H., 6 Gordon, Ε. V., 20, 41 n.50 Green chapel, 1 1 8 - 1 9 Gregory, Emmaus commentary of, 4 7 - 4 8 Grosseteste, Robert, 128 Guenever, description of, 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 , 1 0 6 Hanna, Ralph, III, 114 n.17 Hanning, Robert W., 9 n . 4 , 1 0 2 , 1 0 5 , 1 1 3 114 n . 1 5 , 1 3 7

n.2,

n.16

Harvey, E. Ruth, 138 n.24 Hautdesert, Gawain's arrival at, 102-4 Henderson, George, 39 n.38 Heng, Geraldine, 115 n.17 Hermeneutics, visual, 5-6. See also Eyewitness technique; Interpretation Hieatt, A. Kent, 114 n.8

Index Hieatt, Constance 37 n.7 Higgs, Elton, 36 η.4 Hilgert, Earl, 93 n.15, 94 n.16 Hill, Ordelle G., 93 n.9 Hilton, Walter, Scale of Perfection: Heavenly Jerusalem in, 24-25, 40 n.42; sight in, 131-32,51 Historiography, and ages of world in Pearl, 14; in Purity, 50, 52-53, 61, 65. See also Hugh of Saint Victor History and structure of Purity and Patience, 7, 71, 92 n.i Holley, Linda Tarte, 138 n.24 Howard, Donald, 12,114 n.8,115 n.19 Hugh of Saint Victor, 14-15, 69 n.34; historiography of, 37 n.n, 52-53,57, 62. See also Historiography Hunt, in Gawain, 108-9 "hurrok," 74, 75 Interpretation: visual modes of, 5-6, 33-35, 43-50,134-35; in Gawain, 7, 96-98, 99, 101-2, 103-7,108—11; in Patience, 72-73, 77-80, 91-92; in Pearl, 21, 33-35; in Purity, 43-50,57,59-66. See also Eyewitness technique Isidore of Seville, 94 n.16 Jerome, Saint, 88 Jerusalem, Heavenly, 63,123; described in medieval texts, 15-16, 40 nn.41-42; in illustrated apocalypses, 27-28; in Pearl, 13, 21-31, 33; in New Testament, 40 n.41; size of, 39 n.39 Joachim of Fiore, historiography of, 53 John, Saint, in illustrated apocalypses, 25-31 John of Garland, 119 Johnson, Lynn Staley, 9 n.4,36 n.6, 38 n.22, 40 n.47,41 n.54, 69 n.35, 93 n.6, 93 n.8, 95 nn. 38, 4 0 - 4 1 Kean, Patricia M., 38 n.22, 41 n.59 Kelly, T. D., and John T. Irwin, 67 n.9, 68 n.24, 69 n.37, 93 n.7 Kirk, Kenneth E., 67 n.20 Kolve, V. Α., 6, i2i, 122,137 n.13,138 n.24 Krieger, Murray, 11 n.18 Labyrinth: as described by Boccaccio, 83; and whale's interior in Patience, 82-83

153

Lamb, 33 Lindberg, David, 138 n.22 Loomis, Laura Hibbard, 2 Love, Nicholas, 139 n.28 Luttreil, C. Α., 38 n.23 Lynch, Kathryn L., 11 n.19, 138 n.22, 140 n.46 McColley, William, and Dennis Weir, 9 n.3 Mandeville's Travels, and pilgrimage narratives, 12; as source for Gawain-poet, 36 n.3, 61 Mann, Jill, 113 n.5 Matthew of Vendome, 119 Mazzeo, Joseph Α., 138 n.24,140 n.49 Meditations of the Life of Christ, 129,131 Menner, Robert J., 66 n.3 Montgomery, Robert L., 138 n.24 Moorman, Charles, 2,36 n.4 Morgan, Gerald, 114 n. 16 Morse, Charlotte, 54, 68 n.23, 7° n.44, 92 П.2

Murdoch, John J., 140 n.47 Mysticism: in Bonaventure, 14-16, 130—31; English, 131-32; in Hugh of Saint Victor, 114; in Pearl, 14-16; sight in, 128-33 Neaman, Judith, 138 n.24 Nelson, Cary, 92 n.2 Nichols, Stephen G., Jr., 6, 40 n.41 Niemann, Thomas C., 37 n.8 Nolan, Barbara, 6, 25, 36 n.6, 39 n.36, 40 n.43, 138 n.24 Nominalism, medieval, 137 n.22 Oberman, Heiko, 137 n.22 Ockham, William of, 128 Optics, medieval, 128, 138 n.24,140 n.52. See also Sight Otherworld: in Book of the Duchess, 122; as descriptive topic, 118; in Pearl, 3 - 4 Owen, Charles Α., Jr., 137 n.13 Ozment, Steven, 138 n.25,140 n.46 Padolsky, Enoch, 93 n.n Panofsky, Erwin, 6, 74 Parliament of the Three Ages, 125-27 Patch, H. R., 136 n.2

154

Index

Patience: and Gawain-poems, 7, 71; critical interpretations of, 73; Jonah in, 72-80, 83-89; location in manuscript, 71; ship in, 73-80; whale in, 80-87; use of verbs in description in, 77-78; woodbine in, 8 7 91 Pearl: conclusion of, 31-32,35; crisis of union in, 22, 28-33, 4 0 n.47; dreamer in, 12, 16-23, 25-31, 130; erber in, 17-18; eyewitness technique of, 2 - 4 , 7; genre of, 1 4 - 1 6 , 3 6 n.6; Heavenly Jerusalem in, 2 1 33; and illustrated apocalypses, 2 4 - 3 1 ; maiden in, 16-17, 40 n.47; as mystical itinerary, 1 4 - 1 6 ; and ocular skepticism, 16-17, 135; Otherworld in, 118; reader's interpretation of, 33-35 Pearsall, Derek, 10 n.n, 136 n.6 Pearsall, Derek, and Elizabeth Salter, 125, 126,137 nn. 17-18 Pecham, John, 128 Peck, Russell Α., 138 n.22 Pentangle, hi Peter of Limoges, 129 Piers Plowman, 48 Pilgrimage narratives, 12-13 Point of view. See Description; Eyewitness technique Prior, Sandra Pierson, 66 n.4, 92 n.i Psalm 96, 78 Purity: Emmaus allusion in, 4 7 - 4 9 ; eye imagery in, 57-58; formes in, 4 3 - 4 4 ; and Gawain-poems, similarities to, 7, 42,50, 7 1 - 7 2 , 1 1 2 , 1 2 7 ; and medieval historiography, 52-54; nativity reference in, 46; and parable of wedding feast, 54; structure of, 45-50; title of, 66 n.i; Old Testament parables in, 52,54-61 Rabanus Maurus, 75-76 Radulphus Ardens, 67 n.13 Renoir, Alain, 4 - 5 , 99,105, 118 Revelation, book of, 22, 29 Rhetorical manuals, description in, 119-20, 136 П.7 Rhodes, James, 93 n.6, 95 n.42 Ricardian descriptive style, 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 Riehle, Wolfgang, 132,139 n.37 Robertson, D . W., Jr., 136 n.io Robertson, D. W., and Bernard F. H u p p e , 67 n.14

Rolle, Richard, 140 n.45 Roman ck la Rose, 46,133 Sandahl, Bertil, 93 n.14 Savage, H . L., 114 n.16 Schaar, Claes, 120 Schleusener, Jay, 92 n.i, 93 n.6 Ship, description of in Patience, 7 4 - 7 8 Shoaf, R. Α., п о , 113 n.5,115 n.18 Sight: and beatific vision, 50-52; in Bonaventure, 130-31; in Chaucer, 134-35; Dante's images of, 23,133-34; and medieval epistemology, 8 , 1 1 6 - 1 7 , 1 2 7 - 3 5 ; in medieval mysticism, 127-33; skepticism about, 133-35; terms for in Gawain, 98. See also Eyes; Eyewitness technique; Gaze Signs, visual: in Gawain, 109-11; of Heavenly Jerusalem, 35; in Purity's, exhortation to purity, 7 , 4 5 - 5 0 ; in Purity's Old Testament parables, 54-66 Simpson, O t t o von, 6 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: castle described in, 124-25; chin-chuck in, 30; conclusion of, hi; critical interpretations of, 110,113 n.2; enclosure motif in, 107; Guenever described in, 100-102; and eyewitness technique, 7, 97-107; fragmented narrative in, 107,111-13; Gawain's gaze in, 1 0 2 - 4 , 105—7, 109-11, 124—25; Green Knight's gaze in, 96-98; Renoir's theories of description in, 4 - 5 , 99, 105, 118; spectator's gaze in, 96-98, 9 9 , 1 0 1 , 1 0 2 - 6 , 108, in—12; threshold space in, 108; time in, n o , ш - 1 2 SirOtfeo, 123—24 Skepticism, ocular: in Chaucer, 134-35; in medieval poetry, 8,133-35; in Pearl, 1 6 - 1 7 Sklute, Larry, 36 n.4 Southern, R. W., 68 n.26 Space, construction of: in Chartres West Portal, 40 n.45; in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, 121-22; chthonic conception of, 92 n.4; in Gawain, 106-13; in illustrated apocalypses, 25; and liminality, 18—19, 24— 28, 76-77, 82-85, 107-8; in The Parliament of the Three Aßes, 125-26; in Patience, 7, 73, 74-78, 81-87, 89-90; in Pearl, 3 - 4 , 17—21, 22—28; in Purity, 55—57 Spearing, A. C., 1,5, 36 n.4, 93 n.io, 94 n.18, 95 n.32,114 n.16,114 n.17

Index Spendal, R. J., 93 n.5 Spenser, Edmund, 118, 120 Stanbury, Sarah, 36 n.3, 38 n.20, 40 n.41 Steinberg, Leo, 30 Steinmetz, David C., 138 n.22 Storms, descriptions of, 54-56, 76-80 Subdeties, paper, 64-65 Tachau, Katherine Η., 138 n.24 Trevisa, John, 95 n.39 Turner, Victor, 76, 94 n.17 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 137 nn. 17, 20 Vantuono, William, 9 n.3, 93 n.14

15 5

Vasta, Edward, 38 n.23 Vessels: holy, in Purity, 60-66; as image of enclosure, 73 Virgin Mary, 100 Vision ofTundale, 24 Von Boldensele, William, 12 Whitaker, Muriel, 36 n.6, 39 n.37 William of Pagula, 129 Williams, David, 94 n.22 Wilson, Edward, 5, 47, 67 nn.9-10 Wirral, description of, 105-7 Woodbine, description of, 87-91 Woolf, Rosemary, 67 nn.15-16 Writing on the Wall, 44, 60

University of Pennsylvania Press MIDDLE AGES SERIES Edward Peters, General Editor

F. R. P. Akehurst, trans. The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir. 1991 David Anderson. Before the Knight's Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio's Teseida. 1988 Benjamin Arnold. Count and Bishop in Medieval Germany: A Study of Regional Power, II00-I3S0-1991 J. M. W. Bean. From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England. 1990 Uta-Renate Blumenthal. The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchyfrom the Ninth to the Twelfth Century. 1988 Daniel Bornstein, trans. Dino Compagni's Chronicle ofFlorence. 1986 Betsy Bowden. Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation. 1987 James William Brodman. Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier. 1986 Otto Brunner (Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton, eds. and trans.). Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria. 1991 Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. Emperor ofCulture: Alfonso X the Learned ofCastile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance. 1990 David Burr. Olm and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins ofthe Usus Pauper Controversy. 1989 Thomas M. Cable. The English Alliterative Tradition. 1991 Leonard Cantor, ed. The English Medieval Landscape. 1982 Anthony K. Cassell and Victoria Kirkham, eds. and trans. Diana's Hunt. Caccia di Diana. Boccaccio's First Fiction. 1991 Brigitte Cazelles. The Lady as Saint: A Collection ofFrench Heliographie Romances of the Thirteenth Century. 1991 Willene B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn, eds. Beasts and Birds ofthe Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy. 1989 G. G. Coulton. From St. Francis to Dante: Translations from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221-1288). 1972 RichardC. Dales. The Scientific Achievement of the Middle Ages. 1973 Charles T. Davis. Dante's Italy and Other Essays. 1984 George T. Dennis, trans. Maurice's Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy. 1984 Katherine Fischer Drew, trans. The Burgundian Code: The Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad and Additional Enactments. 1972 Katherine Fischer Drew, trans. The Laws of the Saltan Franks. 1991. Katherine Fischer Drew, trans. The Lombard Laws. 1973 Nancy Edwards. The Archaeology ofEarly Medieval Ireland. 1990

Margaret J. Ehrhart. The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature. 1987 Patrick J. Geary. Aristocracy in Provence: The Rhone Basin at the Dawn of the Carolingtan Age. 1985 Julius Goebel, Jr. Felony and Misdemeanor: A Study in the History of Criminal Law. 1976 Avril Henry, ed. The Mirour ofMans Saluacioune. 1987 J. N. Hillgarth, ed. Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe. 1986 Richard C. Hoflmann. Land, Liberties, and Lordship in a Late Medieval Countryside: Agrarian Structures and Change in the Duchy of Wroclaw. 1990 Robert Hollander. Boccaccio's Last Fiction: "II Corbaccio." 1988 Edward B. Irving, Jr. Rereading Beowulf. 1989 C. Stephen Jaeger. The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939-1210. 1985 William Chester Jordan. The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians. 1989 William Chester Jordan. From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Senonais in the Thirteenth Century. 1986 Ellen E. Kittell. From Ad Hoc to Routine: A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy. 1991 Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, eds. Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History. 1972 Barbara M. Kreutz. Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. 1991 Jeanne Krochalis and Edward Peters, ed. and trans. The World ofPiers Plowman. 1975 E. Ann Matter. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. 1990 Maria Rosa Menocal. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. 1987 A. J. Minnis. Medieval Theory of Authorship. 1988 Lawrence Nees. A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court. 1991 Lynn H. Nelson, trans. The Chronicle ofSan Juan de la Репа: A Fourteenth-Century Official History of the Crown of Aragon. 1991 Charlotte A. Newman. The Anglo-Norman Nobility in the Reign of Henry I: The Second Generation. 1988 Thomas F. X. Noble. The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825. 1984 Joseph F. O'Callaghan. The Cortes of Castile-Leon, 1188-1350. 1989 William D. Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours. 1989 Kenneth Pennington. Pope and Bishops: The Papal Monarchy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. 1984 Edward Peters. The Magician, the Witch, and the Law. 1982 Edward Peters, ed. Christian Society and the Crusades, 1198-1229. Sources in Translation, including The Capture of Damietta by Oliver of Paderborn. 1971

Edward Peters, ed. The First Crusade: The Chronicle ofFulcher ofChartres and Other Source Materials. 1971 Edward Peters, ed. Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe. 1980 Edward Peters, ed. Monks, Bishops, and Pagans: Christian Culture in Gaul and Italy, S00-700.

1975

Clifford Peterson. Saint Erkenwald. 1977 James M. Powell. Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213-1221. 1986 Donald E. Queller. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 1201-1204. 1977 Michael Resler, trans. EREC by Hartmann von Aue. 1987 Pierre Riehe (Jo Ann McNamara, trans.). Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne. 1978 Jonathan Riley-Smith. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. 1986 Joel T. Rosenthal. Patriarchy and Families ofPrivilege in Fifteenth-Century England. 1991 Barbara H. Rosenwein. Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century. 1982 Steven D. Sargent, ed. and trans. On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy. 1982 Robert Somerville and Kenneth Pennington, eds. Law, Church, and Society: Essays in Honor of Stephan Kuttner. 1977 Sarah Stanbury. Seeing the Gawain -Poet: Description and the Act of Perception. 1991 Susan Mosher Stuard, ed. Women in Medieval History and Historiography. 1987 Susan Mosher Stuard, ed. Women in Medieval Society. 1976 Ronald E. Surtz. The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (14S1-IS34·). 1990 Patricia Terry, trans. Poems of the Elder Edda. 1990 Frank Tobin. Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language. 1986 Ralph Turner. Men Raisedfrom the Dust: Administrative Service and Upward Mobility in Angevin England. 1988 Harry Turtledove, trans. The Chronicle ofTheophanes: An English Translation of anni mundi 6095-630$ (A.D. 602-813). 1982 Mary F. Wack. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries. 1990 Benedicta Ward. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, iooo121S. 1982. Suzanne Fonay Wemple. Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, soo900. 1981

This book has been set in Linotron Galliard. Galliard was designed for Mergenthaler in 1978 by Matthew Carter. Galliard retains many of the features of a sixteenth century typeface cut by Robert Granjon but has some modifications which give it a more contemporary look. Printed on acid-free paper.