Chaucer's Prayers 9781843845591, 9781787449145, 1843845598

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In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer’s Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ writings within Chaucer’s corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities and approaches prayer as part of Chaucer’s broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insights challenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry’s relationship to religion.

Cover image: Portrait of Chaucer holding a rosary found in a copy of Thomas Hoccelve’s Regiment of Princes (1410–11). It appears in the margin near stanzas praising Chaucer and interceding for his salvation. © The British Library Board, MS Harley 4866, fol. 88.

CHAUCER’S

PRAYERS Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion

Megan E. Murton

is Assistant Professor of English at The Catholic University of America.

M EGA N M U RT ON

CHAUCER’S PRAYERS

I

as steeped in communal, scripted acts of prayer as Chaucer’s England, a written prayer asks not only to be read, but to be inhabited: its ‘I’ marks a space that readers are invited to occupy. This book examines the implications of accepting that invitation when reading Chaucer’s poetry. Both in his often-overlooked pious writings and in his ambitious, innovative pagan narratives, the ‘I’ of prayer provides readers with a subject-position that can be at once devotional and literary – a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Chaucer uses this uniquely open, participatory ‘I’ to implicate readers in his poetry and to guide their work of reading. N A C U LT U R E

Megan E. Murton

Chaucers Prayers ppc TJI-02.indd 1

16/03/2020 11:30

CHAUCER STUDIES XLVII CHAUCER’S PRAYERS

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261-9822

Founding Editor Professor Derek S. Brewer Editorial Board Professor Helen Cooper Dr Isabel Davis Dr Robert Meyer-Lee Dr William T. Rossiter Since its foundation, the series Chaucer Studies has played a highly significant role in the development and promotion of research on Chaucer and his many cultural contexts. It is an ideal forum for the publication of work by both younger and established scholars, comprising innovative monographs and essay collections together with indispensable reference books. Chaucer scholarship just would not be the same without it. Professor Alastair Minnis Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University

The publisher welcomes new proposals for the series; monographs are particularly encouraged but volumes of essays will be included when appropriate. All submissions will receive rapid, informed attention. They should go in the first instance to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director, at the following address: Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK

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

CHAUCER’S PRAYERS WRITING CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN DEVOTION

MEGAN E. MURTON

D. S. BREWER

© Megan E. Murton 2020 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The right of Megan E. Murton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2020 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978 1 84384 559 1 eISBN 978 1 78744 914 5 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover image: Portrait of Chaucer holding a rosary found in a copy of Thomas Hoccelve’s Regiment of Princes (1410–11). It appears in the margin near stanzas praising Chaucer and interceding for his salvation. © The British Library Board, MS Harley 4866, fol. 88.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vii viii

Introduction: Prayer as Performance Practices of Prayer in Late-Medieval England

1 12

1 Praying to Mary “An ABC to the Virgin”: Performance and Prevenience Marian Invocations: Forming Readers

27 29 37

2

Praying in Suffering The Man of Law’s Tale: Explanations and Encounters The Knight’s Tale: Philosophy and Petition The Franklin’s Tale: Devotional Uncertainties

59 60 70 82

3

God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde Praying to Love Rejoicing in Love Keeping the Faith

91 94 107 115

4

Praying about Poetry The Book of the Duchess: The Poet as a Reader The Parliament of Fowls: The Poet as a Craftsman Reader and Poet in The House of Fame The Retraction: Writing Cooperation

127 128 132 135 147

Conclusion: Praying with Chaucer, Performing Chaucer

161

Bibliography 165 Index 179

Acknowledgements

T

his book began in my surprise at how much I enjoyed Chaucer’s “ABC to the Virgin,” combined with my nagging sense that I was missing something important about his Retraction. In moving from those starting-points to a finished product, I have benefited from the help of many mentors and friends. I am deeply grateful to Helen Cooper for her enthusiasm and support at every stage of this project. Her encouragement to keep thinking about the pagans was fundamental to the shape it eventually took. In the early stages I also benefited from the generous comments of Barry Windeatt and Elizabeth Robertson. Nicholas Watson, besides giving me invaluable advice in this project, was the first to introduce me to Chaucer as an undergraduate; my fascination with the Retraction began in his seminar class. This work has also been greatly enriched by feedback and encouragement from David Lawton, Eleanor Johnson, Jason Crawford, Jill Mann, and the anonymous readers for the press. I would also like to thank my colleagues at The Catholic University of America, especially in the English Department. Working with people whom I count as my friends is a delight, and their moral support and practical advice helped immeasurably with my work on this book. Special thanks are due to my department head, Ernest Suarez, and to Taryn Okuma, Greg Baker, and Lilla Kopár. I am also grateful to Kevin White, a colleague in the School of Philosophy, for his keen appreciation of Chaucer and his generous willingness to read my work. Many students at both Cambridge and Catholic have sharpened my thinking about Chaucer over the years. I am grateful to those who kept coming back to me for more study of Chaucer, and especially to those whose particular questions and interests led me to new insights about his prayers: Erik Gravel, Veronica McGraw, and Rachel de Rosset. I also owe a great debt to Jane Maschue for her tireless help in the final tasks of preparing this manuscript. This project finds its deepest roots not in Chaucer, but in the love of books and reading that my parents and siblings gave me as a child. The hours they spent reading aloud to me taught me how to imagine my way into a story. To my parents, I am also grateful for many years of supporting my education and career as it took me around the country and the world. And finally, I am thankful for the support and love of the new family that came into being while this book was being written: my husband John, my “wal / Of stiel” (Troilus II, 479–80), and little Dominic, who helps us see everything anew.

Abbreviations BL ChauR DIMEV EETS JMEMS MED e.s. n.s. o.s. OED PMLA RES SAC

British Library The Chaucer Review Digital Index of Middle English Verse Early English Text Society Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Middle English Dictionary Extra Series New Series Old Series Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Languages Association Review of English Studies Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Introduction: Prayer as Performance

T

he distinction between prayer and ordinary speech is strongly marked in the poetry of late-medieval England. A striking example occurs in the dream-poem Pearl, when the dreamer, speaking to the Pearl-maiden, refers to the Virgin Mary as “þe quen of cortaysye.” The moment he utters these words, the maiden interrupts their conversation in order to pray: “Cortayse quen,” þenne sayde þat gaye, Knelande to grounde, folde vp hyr face, “Makelez moder and myryest may, Blessed bygynner of vch a grace!” Þenne ros ho vp and con restay, And speke me towarde in þat space.1

This passage clearly signals the shift from conversation to prayer and back again. When she begins to pray, the Pearl-maiden falls to her knees and lifts up her face, indicating by her change in posture that she is suspending her interaction with the dreamer to speak to someone who is not physically present. Her deliberate reversal of these gestures at the end of her brief prayer, as she stands up and turns back to the dreamer, marks her resumption of their dialogue. What happens while she is kneeling does not follow the norms of human communication. The Pearl-maiden utters a string of epithets that praise Mary as queen, as virgin mother, and as fount of grace, but her purpose is not to convey certain facts to her addressee; the act of reaffirming these traditional descriptors of Mary serves relational, rather than informative, ends. To speak these words is to celebrate Mary’s exalted holiness and to acknowledge the speaker’s dependence on Mary’s grace, such that this act of prayer enables the Pearl-maiden to draw near to the Virgin. As she comes before her addressee in humility and reverence, she adopts a spiritual stance that is at once mirrored and reinforced by her physical gesture of kneeling. The Pearl-maiden’s prayer constitutes a re-orientation of herself, body and soul, toward an addressee who is unseen but powerfully present. Although the prayer is spoken to Mary, its placement within a poem gives it a much wider audience, and readers of the poem might respond to it on mul1

Pearl, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, 5th edn (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 53–110 (lines 432–38).

2  Chaucer’s Prayers

tiple levels. One response would focus on characterization: the prayer offers a glimpse into the inner life of a blessed soul, which could in turn provide a context for interpreting the maiden’s words and actions throughout the poem. On another level, the prayer represents an exemplary model of Marian piety that readers might be moved to imitate. Nor are readers limited to a second-hand imitation of this prayer: they could pray it, joining their own voices with the Pearl-maiden’s in praise of Mary. The medieval practice of reading texts aloud, often to a listening audience, facilitates the transition from reading the poem to praying the embedded prayer. A reader who has already been ventriloquizing the Pearl-maiden’s voice whenever that character speaks could readily make a shift into prayer along with that voice. Indeed it might be difficult for a pious fourteenth-century reader not to do so. Listeners, meanwhile, could silently participate in the prayer, as they would in prayers offered in liturgical worship; both the poet and his audience were accustomed to the idea that one act of prayer could be shared by many participants even if not everyone’s lips were moving. The Pearl-maiden’s prayer thus marks a porous moment in the poem, a moment in which one can slip, perhaps not even consciously, from reading or hearing a character’s words to joining the character in voicing those words. The reader’s encounter with the Pearl-maiden and her prayer is mediated by the dreamer. This figure stands within the dream, where he converses with the Pearl-maiden and overhears her prayer, but also outside it, for he claims to have experienced this dream and written it down as this poem. This claim means that everything that happens within the frame of the dream, including the Pearl-maiden’s praise of Mary, is meant to be taken as unfolding inside the dreamer’s own mind: he dreams someone else’s prayer. This moment that reveals a glimpse of the maiden’s interiority reveals something of the dreamer’s as well, because his imagination is what constructed this prayer and projected it into her voice. In this way, readers who join the Pearl-maiden in praising Mary are also joining the dreamer in imagining the devotional life of a blessed soul; both his voice and hers already sound in this passage before readers add their own. Encompassing and directing the voices of the dreamer and the maiden is, of course, that of the poet. As a dream-poem, Pearl foregrounds the poet’s own imaginative activity as what generates the text and the poet himself as the figure through whom readers encounter it, calling attention to the highly mediated nature of this prayer. Its placement in a dream-poem therefore makes this passage a porous moment in more than one sense. It invites readers to align themselves with the one who dreams and writes these words as well as the one who speaks them, such that participating in this prayer means sharing not only in a character’s religious devotion but also in a poet’s imaginative work. This book examines such porous moments of prayer as they occur in the works of the Pearl-poet’s contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, whose writings prominently feature prayer and frequently exploit its capacity to shift the terms



Introduction  3

of a reader’s engagement with a poem. Chaucer shared with the Pearl-poet a culture steeped in communal, scripted forms of prayer, in which the pronoun “I” marks out a space where many voices are welcome, even urged, to insert themselves. This openness to participation means that a prayer embedded in a poem can serve not only as a window onto its speaker’s soul, but also as a door for readers to walk through. By imaginatively projecting themselves into the “I” of prayer, readers can step inside both the act of prayer itself and the poem that contains it; in so doing, they closely align themselves with a praying voice and become implicated in his or her world, whether it be a dreamscape or a spatio-temporal setting such as ancient Troy. While prayers embedded within poems engage and channel the reader’s imaginative involvement, introductory and concluding prayers lead readers into and out of poems, directing their interpretive energies as they make the transition from their lived reality to a narrative world and back again. Many framing prayers use first-person plural pronouns to enlist readers in the task of making these transitions, and those who join their voices to the “we” and “us” of these prayers become partners in the work of telling the story. Plural pronouns issue an overt invitation to participate, but that invitation is present, though implicit, in prayers that use the pronoun “I.” This book traces how Chaucer uses acts of prayer to invite his readers into subject-positions within or alongside his writings, and argues that the “I” or “we” of these prayers marks out a space that can be both devotional and literary: at once a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Examining Chaucer’s prayers means devoting close attention to his most pious writings, such as “An ABC to the Virgin,” and vindicating his often-overlooked achievements as a devotional poet. The scope of this study, however, extends beyond Christian forms of prayer, because most of the prayers found in Chaucer’s writings are addressed to pagan deities. These pagan prayers are innovative as well as numerous: Chaucer was the first Middle English writer to represent acts of prayer by pagan characters, as well as the first to call upon the Classical deities in formal poetic invocations.2 It is reasonable to assume that, whereas Chaucer envisaged his “ABC” as a devotional tool for use by pious readers, he did not imagine his readers actually praying along with a prayer such as Arcite’s petition to Mars in The Knight’s Tale.3 This study recognizes the real difference in Chaucer’s England between the familiarity and practicality of Christian prayer and the alterity and exoticism of pagan prayer, but it does not approach them as two fundamentally different kinds of utterance. My focus is not on the theological framework that undergirds an act

2

3

Alastair Minnis identifies Chaucer as the first English poet to write Classical invocations in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 174. Chaucer’s innovation in writing pagan prayers has gone unnoticed. Of course, Chaucer’s own notions of how his readers would respond to different types of prayer do not necessarily hold for modern-day readers, who might find Christian prayers imaginatively remote as well.

4  Chaucer’s Prayers

of prayer, but on the performance of that act: I examine how the words of a prayer speak a self into being, and how those words invite appropriation by multiple voices. I maintain that a written prayer asks for a particular type of reading, in which one aligns oneself with the praying “I” and imagines what it would be like to be this “I” and to pray this prayer. This imaginative work may be oriented toward the goal of assimilating oneself to the prayer and becoming its “I,” such that the prayer works a profound transformation of the speaking self. As a later section of this introduction will show, the work of prayer is repeatedly described in these terms in the theological tradition familiar to Chaucer. He could presume that no medieval reader would approach a pagan prayer with that goal in mind, but nevertheless, in writing such prayers Chaucer is asking his readers to align themselves, however partially and with whatever reservations, with the praying “I.” His decision to foreground acts of prayer in each of his three completed pagan narratives suggests a particular interest in imagining, and enabling his readers to imagine, what it would feel like to pray as a pagan. This imaginative work is central to the act of prayer: whether Christian or pagan, the “I” of prayer offers readers a subject-position to occupy, a space to inhabit either inside or alongside a poem. Chaucer’s Prayers explores the implications of accepting that invitation and reading Chaucer’s poetry from the vantage-points offered by prayers. In tracing the open, participatory “I” of prayer in Chaucer’s writings, this book builds upon recent work that has reconsidered the nature of first-person voice in late-medieval writing more broadly. Sarah McNamer, for instance, has shown that the “I” of affective meditations is not to be identified with their historical authors but instead to be seen as an empty space waiting for readers. These texts are “intimate scripts,” asking to be performed rather than read, and the performance that they enable is efficacious: to act out certain emotions is to take a step toward feeling them sincerely.4 McNamer’s argument resonates with critical approaches to medieval religious lyric. Unlike post-Romantic lyric, which centers on the expression of an individual poet’s own thoughts and feelings, the religious lyric of Chaucer’s day is oriented toward collective practical utility. It is, in Douglas Gray’s words, “not an object for other people to admire, but for them to use.”5 To use a lyric is to perform it, that is, to align oneself with its “I” and consciously adopt the subject-position it offers. While both McNamer’s work and a recent study by Eleanor Johnson show that lyrics are not the only late-medieval devotional writings that ask to be performed as intimate scripts, lyric is most relevant to this book because of the way in

4

5

Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 12, 17. Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 60. See also Christiania Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas Duncan (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 96–119.



Introduction  5

which it foregrounds the pronoun “I.”6 This pronoun marks the reader’s place in the script, and inhabiting the “I” enables a performance that can, in turn, transform the speaking self. An “I” that invites the reader’s participation is prominent in medieval devotional writing but not confined to that context, and other critics have begun to reconsider the workings of first-person voice in self-consciously literary writings, including Chaucer’s poetry. An example is A.C. Spearing’s recent work, which detaches the “I” of medieval poetry from the fictional personality of a narrator and recasts it as a space open to readers. Spearing contends that the first-person singular in Middle English texts “may refer to a fictional individual, a speaker or narrator distinct from the author” but that it usually does not, instead serving as “an anonymous and unobtrusive channel of narration or discourse.”7 To say that the “I” is a channel is not to dismiss it as unimportant, however. Spearing argues that this pronoun encodes a distinctively “textual subjectivity,” as opposed to a personalized narratorial subjectivity, with which readers align themselves as they encounter a text.8 The purpose of textual subjectivity is to draw readers inside texts and establish a sense of “proximality and experientiality,” as if readers were themselves experiencing the events recounted in a narrative or the feelings voiced in a lyric.9 Spearing compares this open “I” to a camera lens in a film: it does not represent one person’s perspective, but provides a spatio-temporal point of view from which events can be experienced.10 Spearing’s multiple studies on this topic encompass a range of late-medieval writings in several genres but keep returning to Chaucer’s works; The Canterbury Tales in particular serves as a crucial testing ground for his theory because it so prominently features embedded narrators, whose personalities have long been seen as central to the work’s meaning.11 His dismantling of narrator-driven readings of the Tales sharpens insights from earlier criticism that had begun to challenge assumptions about the pilgrim-narrators as the crucial determiners of each tale’s meaning.12 Spearing’s contribution is not merely to shift attention away from narratorial 6

7

8 9 10 11

12

Eleanor Johnson, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). A.C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 13–14. A fuller version of the argument recapitulated at the beginning of Medieval Autographies can be found in Spearing’s earlier book Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), especially 1–36. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, 31. Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 14. Ibid., 22. Textual Subjectivity has a chapter on The Man of Law’s Tale and Medieval Autographies addresses the Wife of Bath’s Prologue; see also Spearing’s discussion of The Physician’s Tale in “Narration in Two Versions of ‘Virginius and Virginia,’” ChauR 54.1 (2019): 1–34. See, for instance, Donald Howard’s discussion of “unimpersonated artistry” in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 231, as well as Helen

6  Chaucer’s Prayers

personalities, but also to shift it toward readers and the techniques that facilitate their imaginative engagement with written text. He shows the textual subjectivity encoded in the pronoun “I” to be an important strategy, used by Chaucer and other late-medieval poets, for engaging readers in their works. While Spearing takes the “I” as a vantage-point for readers to occupy as they encounter the text, David Lawton approaches this pronoun as the locus of what he calls “public interiorities.” This term carries something of the paradoxical force of McNamer’s “intimate scripts”: both critics are evoking how texts can engage their readers in ways that are intimately personal yet also widely shared and available to others. Lawton describes public interiorities as texts waiting to be occupied and reimagined by their readers: they “evoke or confer a subject position,” such as “resignation before Fortune, or courage in the face of persecution,” that different readers may “use and interpret […] differently.”13 Lawton associates public interiorities with a “shared first person” that asks to be “inhabited” by readers.14 His term for this act of inhabiting is “revoicing,” a process that may be spoken or written and that makes the pre-existing text “contingently one’s own without losing its echo.”15 Even as they invite constant reinvention by individual speakers and writers, public interiorities remain importantly collective; revoicing is at once a personal appropriation and an alignment of the self with a wider community. Lawton makes it clear that public interiorities are present in both secular and sacred texts, but focuses on the former, approaching Chaucer’s rich intertextuality as a revoicing of literary sources. His study explores what is at stake in that revoicing when it occurs specifically in the vernacular, not only in Chaucer’s own works but also in fifteenth-century poets’ subsequent revoicing of Chaucer. Where prior criticism has emphasized authority and deference in describing these literary relationships, Lawton foregrounds the inventiveness that comes with inhabiting prior texts. In so doing he also foregrounds the pronoun “I” as the reader’s point of access to public interiorities. Aligning themselves with that pronoun enables readers to participate in texts in ways that can be generative and new. These recent studies are not responding directly to each other, but their work converges in significant ways that suggest a new critical approach to first-person voice in late-medieval writing. Lawton’s “public interiorities,” Spearing’s “textual subjectivity,” and McNamer’s “intimate scripts” all point to the ways in which texts ask for an active, participatory kind of reading. Indeed reading is not the best term for the act these critics describe: they

13

14 15

Cooper’s emphasis on the juxtaposition of genres, rather than personalities, in The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983). David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 9.



Introduction  7

propose that the writings they study ask to be performed, occupied, inhabited, and revoiced. Their work further converges on the insight that this invitation to step inside a text is often localized in the pronoun “I,” which marks out the space for readers to occupy. These points of convergence are the more significant because they emerge from work on different genres, revealing that the open, participatory nature of the “I” is a feature of late-medieval textuality that cuts across categories of secular and sacred. Examining the work done by the “I” offers a way to nuance these categories and explore how they overlap and interchange with each other in medieval literary culture.16 Spearing and Lawton both acknowledge connections between secular and sacred in their work, but neither focuses on them. Spearing, for instance, describes medieval lyrics as being “like most written prayers […] intended not to express the distinctive feelings of the individual writer but to be available for occupation by many different users.”17 This passing reference to prayers treats them as a point of comparison for lyric texts, but Spearing does not address the substantial convergence of these two categories: many medieval lyrics are indeed prayers. Lawton, meanwhile, emphasizes the importance of prayers, especially Psalms, as “the definitive form of public interiorities” in Chaucer’s world, but positions Chaucer’s poetry as subverting the model they provide.18 He describes the voice of prayer as defined by “univocality,” as it draws multiple voices into unity and subordinates the Many to the One, while Chaucer’s writings show a “developing proclivity for multiplicity and polyphony.”19 Lawton’s emphasis on polyvocality participates in a long critical tradition that sees Chaucer as committed to destabilizing meaning and cultivating ambiguity. That tradition has set Chaucer’s poetry apart from other forms of medieval textuality, especially devotional writing, and has positioned him as a uniquely secular poet, a move that reinforces the division between secular and sacred in medieval literary studies. Lawton, however, goes on to acknowledge the dominance of this critical tradition and even sounds a note of caution against his own interpretation when he states, “I suspect that in Chaucer scholarship we (and I) have reached the point of overemphasizing the polyphonic.”20 This comment opens a door to the present study, which maintains that Chaucer is more interested in the unitive voice of prayer than critics have recognized. While I do not deny that Chaucer’s work includes the polyphonic effects that Lawton and others have described, I propose that these effects are not the only interesting aspect of his experimentation with voice across his corpus. He insistently returns to the

16

17 18 19 20

Barbara Newman calls attention to these dynamics in Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 16–17. Lawton, Public Interiorities, 63, see also 19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 55.

8  Chaucer’s Prayers

open, participatory voice of prayer, and does not treat it merely as a cultural practice against which he can react: on the contrary, prayers permeate his poetry, from the lyric “ABC to the Virgin” to the Retraction to his Canterbury Tales. The “ABC” indeed constitutes a point of direct contact between Chaucer’s poetry and his devotional context, for in this lyric prayer Chaucer makes his own contribution to the expanding corpus of prayers composed in Middle English during his lifetime. The Retraction, too, culminates in a first-person prayer for salvation that is not limited to Chaucer himself; it could be prayed by any medieval reader, and thus marks another point of intersection between Chaucer’s writings and the devotional practices of his world. One task of this book is to explore the implications of these and other moments in which Chaucer writes as a devotional poet, providing his readers with scripts for acts of prayer that they can perform, and through which they can be formed as Christians. Not all of Chaucer’s prayers are available for such immediate devotional use, of course, and this book examines a range of ways in which prayerful passages engage readers. Not only are many of Chaucer’s prayers pagan, but all except the “ABC” are connected to larger poems, which means that they present readers with an “I” that already has a referent within the text, whether a character or a narratorial figure. Such prayers might seem to be distanced from the reader’s voice and limited to performing certain kinds of literary work, such as contributing to characterization or introducing and concluding poems. I contend, however, that the “I” of prayer retains its participatory openness even when it is spoken by a fictional character or positioned in a narrative frame. In these instances the “I” invites readers into a space that can be a devotional posture but is also a vantage-point on, or in, a story. A prayer made by a character, for instance, invites readers to speak with that character’s voice, aligning themselves with her and imagining their way into her narrative world and her encounter with the divine. Even pagan prayers ask readers to undertake this imaginative work of inhabiting a character’s utterance, and in so doing, they enable an intimate encounter with religious alterity. The act of inhabiting may go further in the case of a Christian character’s prayer; as in the Pearl-maiden’s prayer of praise to Mary, these utterances have the capacity to break out of the narrative frame and become devotionally useful to a pious reader. If some prayers break the frame, many of Chaucer’s prayers are positioned precisely on the frame, and these prayers are more than conventional gestures. I show that they involve readers in the work of making transitions, namely the crucial and difficult transition between the world of the poem and the lived reality of the audience. Framing prayers often construct this work as simultaneously devotional and literary, integrating the task of reading into the practice of devotion. Praying and reading indeed become fully intertwined in the most fraught conclusion in all of Chaucer’s corpus, the Retraction, which I take as a script for an act of prayer that forms a reader for all of Chaucer’s works.



Introduction  9

Attending to the prayerful nature of the Retraction provides a fresh perspective on this much-debated passage, and this book reconsiders a number of other familiar critical cruces as well. Prayerful passages have often been recognized as central to the interpretation of Chaucer’s poems, but I reframe their importance by attending to their participatory, performative qualities. Passages such as Troilus’s hymn in Book III, the closing prayer of Troilus and Criseyde, the Prioress’s prologue, and the invocations to The House of Fame have often been discussed and debated as if they were speeches designed to convey propositional content, rather than prayers inviting, or even demanding, the reader’s participation. The aim of this book is to explore what it would mean for a reading of Chaucer’s poetry to accept that invitation: that is, what it would mean to approach the “I” of prayer in his works as a space to inhabit and a perspective from which to view his poems. This approach entails a participatory mode of reading, in which prayerful passages are treated not so much as text to analyze but as scripts to perform, calling for acts of imaginative projection in which readers try on new subject-positions within or alongside poems. Because they create spaces for readers to inhabit, prayers serve as a means of inscribing readers into poems. In writing prayers, then, I propose that Chaucer is inviting us into his writings, and our participation in these acts of prayer forms us – imaginatively, affectively, even devotionally – as readers of his poetry. This study’s point of departure is “An ABC to the Virgin,” Chaucer’s only free-standing lyric prayer and therefore his only prayer that is uncomplicated by any larger narrative context. The “ABC” presents itself not primarily as a poetic artifact but as a script for devotional performance, and it constructs that performance as pre-emptive and reiterative. The prayer’s repeated petitions for mercy are shadowed by an anxious awareness that the sinner needs mercy even in order to be capable of requesting it. The script thus foregrounds the pre-emptive nature of Mary’s grace: the gift that is requested is always already being given, in order that the request can be made. Chaucer further highlights the reiterative quality of prayer through abecedarian form and kaleidoscopic imagery, features that make the performance of this prayer feel as though it is always starting over again. I show that the “ABC” engages in self-conscious reflection on the nature of prayer as a performance that aims to transform the self, while at the same time offering itself as a script to be used by anyone seeking such transformation. The “I” of the “ABC” is caught up in a circular process in which receiving Mary’s mercy makes it possible to ask for more mercy and thus to become more capable of receiving it; this process is, for Chaucer, the work of Marian prayer. To align oneself with this “I” is to enter into this work and ultimately to become the model penitent that this prayer scripts. Chaucer’s other two Marian prayers, the prologue prayers of the Prioress and Second Nun, also offer penitential postures that readers can inhabit, but

10  Chaucer’s Prayers

they do so in connection with specific narrative contexts. The second part of Chapter 1 turns to these prayers and examines how they involve readers in work that is both devotional and literary. Although these prayers have often been read as personalized utterances by fictional Canterbury pilgrims, I maintain that they invite participation from readers, and moreover, that to align oneself with the “I” of each of these prayers is to be formed not simply into a worthy recipient of Mary’s mercy, as in the “ABC,” but also into an ideal reader of the subsequent tale. Each prayer anticipates the central concern of its tale, focusing on a form of human frailty that will be miraculously overcome in the tale and scripting a devotional performance in which the “I” acknowledges that weakness and professes humble faith in Mary’s power to overcome it. Readers formed by these opening prayers are equipped to see the miraculous events of each tale as spiritual realities in which they have a stake, such that these narratives, despite their remote settings, can speak powerfully to the faithful in fourteenth-century England. The work of prayer in Chaucer’s Marian prologues is the work of forming a self, but here the self is both a penitent and a reader: the act of praying leads into, and subtly guides, the act of reading a narrative. The second chapter turns to prayers that are fully embedded in narrative worlds, discussing the three Canterbury Tales that feature prayers uttered by characters: The Man of Law’s Tale, The Knight’s Tale, and The Franklin’s Tale. These tales show Chaucer imagining different kinds of work that prayer might do and different ways in which it might form selves in relation to the divine, both within and beyond Christianity. Chaucer’s interest in religious alterity has often been noticed, but I show that this interest centers not on the content of pagan belief, as critics have assumed, but on forms of devotional practice. The beliefs affirmed by the characters in these tales are remarkably consistent: pagans and Christians alike profess faith that the world is ruled by divine providence, but they struggle to reconcile this belief with the fact of innocent suffering. None of these characters can explain that fact, but all of them pray about it, and their prayers offer them various alternatives to the sterility of philosophical discourse. I show that in The Man of Law’s Tale, prayer enables Custance to assimilate herself to the pattern of Christ and thus to recast her suffering as triumph, while in The Knight’s Tale prayer enables the characters to assert their wills and strive against suffering in a way that their hostile gods respond to; only in The Franklin’s Tale does prayer offer no hope of redress. As they align themselves with the “I” of prayer in each of these tales, readers find themselves responding to the problem of innocent suffering in a range of ways, from the exemplary Christian fortitude of Custance to the fideistic resignation of Dorigen. All of their prayers, moreover, are characterized by some degree of alterity, for even the Christian Custance lives in a distant and heroic past. An effort of imaginative projection is required for readers to inhabit the “I” of prayer in these tales, and those who make that effort will ultimately encounter religious difference not as an alien set of beliefs professed



Introduction  11

by others, but as an experience in which they can share. These prayers encourage a reading of these tales that privileges shared affective and imaginative experience over philosophical abstraction. My third chapter turns to Chaucer’s most ambitious pagan narrative, Troilus and Criseyde, a work punctuated by significant acts of prayer. While in The Knight’s Tale and The Franklin’s Tale Chaucer uses prayers to offer his readers imaginative routes into pagan alterity, in Troilus he goes further: the prayers in this poem work to narrow and finally to collapse the distance between pagan characters and medieval Christian readers. The form of paganism practiced by Troilus is the courtly love-religion, a metaphorical discourse that Chaucer represents as an actual faith, in which the God of Love is a genuine deity and courtly metaphors of grace and mercy are given theological weight. Chaucer repeatedly relies on acts of prayer to draw readers into Troilus’s unique faith, beginning in the poem’s opening lines when he explicitly enlists readers in a prayer to Love, thus securing their participation in the religion that Troilus will soon begin to practice and pre-emptively overcoming their sense of pagan alterity. This prayer forms a reader who is prepared to share imaginatively in Troilus’s devotional practice by inhabiting the acts of prayer that mark each stage of his spiritual journey as a devout servant of Love across the poem’s five books. This chapter challenges an influential critical reading that takes both Troilus’s and the narrator’s prayers as elements in a sustained ironic critique of Troilus’s love. Such readings lean most heavily on the poem’s ending, which seems to mark a stern detachment from the hero’s love and love-religion, but I argue that Troilus’s devotion to Love is recuperated by a final prayer that recasts his faith in fully and explicitly Christian terms and makes it available to Chaucer’s readers. Prayers constitute a complex apparatus for guiding reader response in this poem, drawing readers into an imaginative alignment with Troilus that outlasts the concluding moralization. Introductory and concluding prayers have a special significance in Troilus, and my fourth chapter further examines Chaucer’s use of prayer at transitional moments, focusing on his dream-poems and his Retraction. These works are linked by a self-conscious concern with the task of defining Chaucer’s identity and vocation as a vernacular poet, a task in which prayers play a central role. The most prominent prayers in the dream-poems are the formal Classical invocations, which put Chaucer’s poetic skill and ambition on display and make implicit claims to authority that prior criticism has recognized. I read these invocations alongside other, less strongly foregrounded acts of prayer in which the “I” speaks not as a confident poet but as an anxious or naïve reader, whether of a book or a dream. A focal point in this chapter is The House of Fame, the poem widely regarded as Chaucer’s fullest exploration of his own poetics, which features a sequence of prayers that not only perform the role of poet but also ventriloquize the voices of readers, whose unpredictable responses become part of Chaucer’s own work of poetic making. This recognition of the poet’s dependence on readers leads, however, to a crisis that brings Fame to

12  Chaucer’s Prayers

an abrupt end. I locate the resolution to this crisis in another much-contested ending, the Retraction at the conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, discussed in the chapter’s final section. While critics have taken the Retraction as an evaluative statement about Chaucer’s literary output, I show that this passage is not a statement but a script: it projects itself into the voices of readers as a prayer they are to make for and with Chaucer, and for themselves. I argue that this prayer is designed to form Chaucer’s readers into a community united around the shared work of interpreting poetry and the shared goal of salvation. In this passage, then, Chaucer does not pass final judgment on his poetry so much as he guides its reception. The Retraction is his ultimate use of prayer to form his readers, both because its scope extends over his entire corpus and because it is most likely his last. Readers who accept the invitation to pray the Retraction find that praying for Chaucer’s salvation also means praying for their own: the final clauses of the Retraction, with their insistent first-person singular pronouns, offer a petition for salvation that any late-medieval reader could use. In this way, the Retraction prayer transcends its literary context to become, like the “ABC,” fully and immediately available for devotional performance by Chaucer’s readers, and it urges them to undertake that performance. While the middle chapters of this study discuss prayers that are distanced to varying degrees from the devotional practices Chaucer could assume in his audience, both the Marian prayers of the first chapter and the Retraction of the final chapter mark points of intersection between Chaucer’s works and his surrounding devotional culture. This introduction concludes with an overview of that culture, focusing on devotional practices prevalent among laypeople in late-medieval England and looking briefly to the theological tradition in which they are grounded, in which prayer is seen as a performance that forms the self.

Practices of Prayer in Late-Medieval England The common modern-day assumption that the most genuine prayer is a spontaneous utterance, an outpouring to God using whatever words come to mind, was not the view taken by Chaucer and his contemporaries.21 Late-medieval England was a culture profoundly invested in scripted prayer, as evidenced not only by the numerous surviving prayer texts composed in both Latin and English and prose and verse, but also by the growing popularity of Books of Hours. The most prominent and authoritative script for prayer was the Latin

21

Rachel Fulton contrasts modern and medieval perceptions of scripted prayer in “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 81.3 (2006): 700–33. See also Joseph Sterrett, “Rereading Prayer as Social Act: Examples from Shakespeare,” Literature Compass 10.6 (2013): 496–507 (501–2); and Roy Hammerling, “Introduction: Prayer – A Simply Complicated Scholarly Problem,” in A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1–27 (9).



Introduction  13

liturgy, which Books of Hours made accessible to laypeople. The centerpiece of these books, the Little Office of Our Lady, was a pared-down version of the Divine Office that, though still in Latin, was more practical for private lay use. The popularity of the Little Office suggests that many laypeople were eager to form devotional habits that connected them to corporate liturgical worship and to the practices of vowed religious.22 Books of Hours also provided laypeople with a physical space in which to copy further prayers, and the annotated pages that Eamon Duffy examines in Marking the Hours reveal that even when late-medieval laypeople looked beyond the liturgy, they continued to value scripted prayers. Duffy describes this approach to prayer as “essentially ventriloquial” and characterizes a good prayer, one worth copying from a friend and recommending to another, as more similar to “a well-tested cookery recipe than an eloquent poem that perfectly captures one’s feelings.”23 This analogy conveys the practicality of prayer scripts, but it obscures the fact that many of them are indeed eloquent poems; poem and prayer are not fully distinct categories in late-medieval England. In drawing a contrast between them, Duffy assumes that poetry is defined by being emotionally expressive (“perfectly captures one’s feelings”), but late-medieval religious poetry is better characterized as emotionally formative. McNamer’s work on affective meditations, which overlap substantially with both lyrics and prayers, has demonstrated that these writings are not “intimate effusions” of the author’s personal feelings but rather “intimate scripts,” in that they are “intended to be inhabited and performed by those who requested and used the prayers.”24 The devotional practices of late-medieval laypeople were, then, at once intimate and scripted. Even in their private prayers, away from the context of communal worship, laypeople were eager to use the words of others to speak to God. Far from compromising sincerity, reliance on scripts could be a form of training, in which one consciously sought to benefit from the wisdom and experience of others in building one’s own habits of piety.25 To illustrate these ideas, I turn to “Jesu that hast me dere iboght,” a fourteenth-century text, attested in ten manuscripts, that sits precisely at the intersection of lyric, affective meditation, and prayer and shows an exceptional self-consciousness about the dynamics of inhabiting a script.26 Its open “I,” 22

23

24 25

26

On laypeople’s use of Books of Hours, see Roger Wieck, “Prayer for the People: The Book of Hours,” in A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 389–440; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 209–32. Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 104–05. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 17. See Rodney Delasanta, “Penance and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 93.2 (1978): 240–47 (243). DIMEV 2915. Text quoted from R.T. Davies, Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), no. 45; see also his discussion of the manuscript contexts

14  Chaucer’s Prayers

with which readers are to align themselves, begins by asking Jesus to inscribe a devout response to the Passion on her heart:27 Jesu, that hast me dere iboght Write thou gostly in my thoght, That I mow with devocion Thinke on thy dere Passion. (1–4)

The request that Jesus write on the speaker’s heart is repeated in subsequent stanzas, each of which begins with the words “Write how” and goes on to recapitulate the events of the Passion in full and agonizing detail. The text’s content aligns it with the tradition of affective piety, which emphasizes the deliberate cultivation of empathy for Christ’s suffering as a “salvatory mental stratagem” that can “facilitate repentance and moral reformation” in those who practice it.28 In this particular text, the project of sharing in the Passion of Jesus is presented as an act of writing: For thogh my hert be hard as stone Yit maist thou gostly write theron With naill and with spere kene, And so shullen the lettres be sene. (5–8)

In this act of “gostly” writing, Jesus will use as his pen the very “naill and spere kene” that pierced his own body. The remarkable suggestion that the instruments of the Passion will become the same instruments with which Jesus writes on the speaker’s heart positions this “I” as a full participant in the Passion. To perform this script is to be inscribed with that story, and to be thus inscribed is to share what Christ suffered. The purpose of this shared suffering is a transformation of the speaker’s stony heart into a fit dwelling-place for Christ, a goal evoked near the poem’s conclusion: Let this prayere a chaine be To draw thee down of thy se, That I mow make thee dwelling In my hert at thy likinge. (129–32)

The prayer, and the shared experience of suffering that it scripts, leads to a new intimacy with Christ, who is pictured as descending from heaven to dwell within the speaker’s softened heart. In “Jesu, that has me dere iboght,” the conceit of writing on the heart foregrounds the power of written text to effect this kind of inner transformation:

27

28

(324–25). Though this “I” can be inhabited by any user, I use female pronouns in acknowledgment of McNamer’s argument that to inhabit an affective script is “to feel like a woman” (Affective Meditation, 3). Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” 100.



Introduction  15

words written on a page become devotion inscribed on a heart. The premise that underlies this text and many others like it is that performing a script can change a person, as he or she internalizes the model of devotion that the script offers. A prayer script can thus be understood as a kind of mask that, when worn long enough, reshapes the face beneath it. This process may well be slow, awkward, and at least initially, artificial: according to McNamer, affective meditations assume that “emotions can indeed be willed, faked, performed through the repetition of scripted words” and that “through such manifest fakery […] compassion can be brought into being.”29 Even the Reformation did not immediately uproot this assumption about the transformative power of inhabiting scripts, for Ramie Targoff describes the Book of Common Prayer in terms that apply readily to fourteenth-century devotion: “premediated prayers could penetrate the inner self, shape personal voice, and inscribe the printed words on the page upon the innermost parts of the spirit.”30 The imagery of inscription shared by Targoff and by “Jesu, that has me dere iboght” underscores this continuity in the practice of scripted prayer. Users of such prayers recognize a gap between the “I” of the script and themselves, but the work of prayer is to close that gap, achieving a more and more genuine inhabiting of the “I.” The process can never be complete in this life because the self is always reverting to its fallen state of rebellion against God, so the script must be used repeatedly. The work of transformation is resumed each time the user takes up the text and aligns herself with its “I.” Mere repetition is not enough, however: prayer also requires grace, divine agency coming in from the outside to complete its work, and indeed to enable that work in the first place. In “Jesu, that has me dere iboght,” dependence on grace is foregrounded in the repeated plea “Write how,” which opens each new stanza with a reminder that it is Jesus, not the speaker, who is able to write on the sin-hardened human heart. This element of petition is central to the devotional performance scripted here: the script itself incorporates an admission that no one can perform it adequately and frames the speaker’s attempts within a repeated, overarching request for Jesus’s help. This kind of gesture is common in late-medieval devotional writing, leading Christiania Whitehead to describe a “poetics of anxiety,” in which speakers often worry that they cannot “‘feel’ adequately” and “bounce the initiative […] back towards the divine addressee,” asking God to help them cultivate the desired devotional experience.31 Petitions for divine aid in performing devotional scripts make it difficult to draw a sharp dividing line between prayers and other devotional texts, such as lyrics and affective meditations. Such a strict categorization would in any case be misleading, because it would obscure the insight that the 29 30

31

McNamer, Affective Meditation, 13. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 13. Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” 106.

16  Chaucer’s Prayers

performances scripted in texts such as “Jesu, that has me dere iboght” do not present themselves as strictly human endeavors. The work of transforming the heart is begun, sustained, and completed by God. This reliance on supernatural agency is significant because it distinguishes prayer from the performative acts discussed by contemporary performance theorists. William Orth has argued that several prayers in Chaucer’s writings anticipate the insights of performance theory, in that they reveal the fragility and provisionality of performative gestures, but his interpretation does not fully acknowledge what these prayers themselves say about the primacy of God’s own initiative and his power to overcome human weakness.32 In the tradition Chaucer inherited, prayers do not claim to be performances that constitute a certain reality, whether in the very moment of performance itself or by soliciting a divine response; rather, they are performances that are always already responding to an initiative that rests with God. This inherent circularity, which Chaucer takes as his theme in his “ABC to the Virgin,” means that prayer’s work of transforming the self is not a human task, but a divine one with which humans cooperate. Even when prayers register a sense of weakness and lack on the part of the human speaker, they also rely on God’s power to make good all insufficiencies so that the act of prayer can become transformative. Sustained by reiteration and animated by grace, the performance scripted in a prayer promises to transform the one who performs it. In this way, written prayers script not only acts of devotion, but also selves. The extra-liturgical scripts for prayer available in Chaucer’s day fall along a wide spectrum from lengthy, elaborate and self-conscious lyrical texts such as “Jesu, that has me dere iboght” and Chaucer’s own “ABC,” to shorter, simpler, and more urgently practical petitions. Duffy describes the latter prayers as “instrumental” in their focus on concrete, worldly results, and mentions relief from toothache, the favor of powerful people, and “safety in childbirth, journeying, and battle” as typical petitions.33 This example is taken from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours owned by John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury: Lorde ih[es]u crist her me and have mercy up on me to day evy day and on derstondande my prayer and out frome me all infirmities sekenesses and sorwys and all fantesies of the devyll that the have no power for the noye me nyeth ne day waking ne slepyng, but all my amys [enemies] commanded and drede me and fle forme me.34

Taking this orientation toward discrete worldly results a step further, some prayers even offer a guarantee of the desired result, especially if certain ritual gestures or actions are performed. Duffy describes such texts as “straddling 32

33 34

William Orth, “The Problem of the Performative in Chaucer’s Prioress Sequence,” ChauR 42.2 (2007): 196–210. Marking the Hours, 104–5. Quoted in Duffy, Marking the Hours, 76; see MS Fitzwilliam 40–1950, fol. 50.



Introduction  17

the dividing line between magic spell and petitionary prayer,” but in fact any prayer can be given this semi-magical treatment.35 Whitehead mentions a “starkly powerful” lyric accompanied by a “rubric specifying the numbers of years of relief from purgatory that result from its recitation,” which shows that even texts that promote affective transformation can still be presented as a “mechanical” means to a measurable end.36 The implication that a person can control God, obliging him to grant certain benefits in return for speaking certain words, earned this approach to prayer repeated condemnation from the Church, which in turn suggests how wide its appeal must have been.37 These examples show that not all late-medieval prayers acknowledge the inner transformation of the self as the aim of prayer. This aim, however, does not have to be explicitly mentioned in order to be present. A substantial tradition of theological thought, extending from the Church Fathers through the late Middle Ages, sees the transformation of the speaker as implicit in, and essential to, even the most urgently practical petitions. The idea of prayer as a re-writing of the self recurs throughout the works of patristic and medieval thinkers, who insisted that the point of prayer is not to tell God about our needs, which of course the omniscient deity already knows, but rather to remind ourselves of our own need for God. Aquinas, for instance, explains that the act of prayer is necessary “ut nosipsi consideremus, […] ad divinum auxilium esse recurrendum” [“that we ourselves may be reminded of the necessity of having recourse to God’s help”], and thus “recognoscamus eum esse bonorum nostrorum auctorem” [“recognize in Him the Author of our goods”].38 Inherent in the act of asking God for something is an acknowledgment of one’s dependence on him. Indeed, Aquinas reasons that because the act of petitioning God involves love of him as the highest good, humility in admitting one’s needs, and faith in his ability to provide, petitionary prayer is itself a meritorious act.39 The idea that a petition is not only a request, but also an implicit affirmation of belief and trust in the addressee, underlies a syntactic structure common to many medieval prayers. The liturgical prayer Agnus Dei provides a compact example of it: a vocative address (Agnus Dei) is followed by a relative clause praising the addressee for a certain attribute or act (qui tollis peccata mundi), leading into a petition (miserere nobis).40 In this 35

36 37 38

39 40

Duffy, Marking the Hours, 93; for further discussion of prayer and magic see Duffy, Stripping, 266–98. Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” 99. Duffy, Marking the Hours, 93. Summa Theologiae, edited by Institute of Medieval Studies (Ottawa), 5 vols (Ottawa: Collège Dominicain d’Ottawa, 1941–45), II II. 83. 2. English translation from The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd rev. edn, http://www.newadvent.org/summa (accessed 10 June 2019). Summa, II II. 83. 15. Douglas Gray mentions this structure as a common feature of verse prayers, but without acknowledging its liturgical roots; see Themes and Images, 4.

18  Chaucer’s Prayers

prayer, asking Christ to have mercy follows, both syntactically and logically, from the affirmation that he is the one who takes away the sins of the world, such that praise and petition are fully intertwined. This commonly used prayer structure calls attention to the fact that asking God for something means affirming his power and benevolence, the praiseworthy qualities that make him both willing and able to grant petitions. The Agnus Dei thus makes clear what is at stake in any act of petition: simply to ask God for something is to enact a humble, trusting dependence on him and to praise his power and goodness. Aquinas’s emphasis on prayer as an act of remembering one’s need for God can be traced back to the writings of Origen, author of the first patristic treatise on prayer, who describes this act as a practice of “recollection of the God in whom we believe,” through which the faithful may strive to become more attuned to God’s presence.41 Augustine similarly associates prayer with the act of remembrance, which he sees as both individual and communal. Explaining how prayer differs from ordinary speech, which serves to teach or remind the addressee, he states that in orando Deo, quem doceri aut commemorari existimare non possumus, id verba valeant, ut vel nos ipsos commonefaciamus, vel alii commoneantur doceanturve per nos [in praying to God whom we cannot suppose to be taught or reminded, words are for the purpose either of reminding ourselves or that others may be taught or reminded through us].42

Augustine imagines the words of prayer having an instructive, formative impact on not only their speaker but also all those who listen, such that one person’s act of prayer can enable a community to re-orient itself toward God. Aquinas echoes Augustine’s distinction between normal speech and prayer: while rhetoricians seek to persuade, in prayer, non intendimus quod animum Dei flectamus, qui semper ad bonum est paratus, sed ut nostrum cor sit in oratione ad Deum elevatum [we do not intend to bend God’s will, which is always prepared to do good; rather, it is in order that our heart be elevated to God in prayer].43

41

42

43

Origen’s Treatise On Prayer, trans. Eric George Jay (London: SPCK, 1954), 8.2. See also 14.1–5, 33.1–6. De Magistro, Patrologia Latina 32, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1845), cols 1194–219 (ch. 7). English translation from Concerning the Teacher (De magistro) and On the Immortality of the Soul (De immortalitate animae), trans. George G. Leckie (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938), 27. “Commentary on 1 Timothy 2: 1–5,” in Commentary on the Letters of St Paul to the Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, ed. John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón, trans. Fabian Larcher (Lander, Wyo.: Aquinas Institute, 2012), 261–66 (262).



Introduction  19

The aim of prayer is not to convince the deity to grant a favorable outcome, but rather to lift the heart to God and to achieve a renewed closeness to him. The idea that prayer fosters a sense of closeness to God is also acknowledged by Augustine, who imagines the speaker of a prayer drawing near to God “in ipsis rationalis animae secretis, qui homo interior vocatur” [“in the very secret spaces of the rational soul, which is called the interior man”].44 Even the simplest prayer can foster this kind of encounter by reminding its speaker of his need for God. This reminder, and the closeness to which it leads, is the work that prayer does in this theological tradition – provided, of course, that it is said sincerely. The dangers of insincere prayers were widely recognized, drawing on Jesus’s warnings against religious hypocrisy.45 Insincerity is dangerous precisely because sincerity is powerful: a sincere prayer, simply by being said, does something to its speaker, restoring him or her to humble reliance on God’s goodness. A striking feature in these discussions is their indifference to the matter of prayer being answered. Even when addressing prayer in its petitionary aspect, this tradition approaches the utterance of a prayer not as a stimulus awaiting a divine response, but as an action in and of itself, with immediate transformative effects on the speaker. These thinkers view prayer as what J.L. Austin would call a speech-act, a way of doing things with words. The speech-act as defined by Austin is achieved simply in saying the words, not in any effects that follow from them: speaking itself is doing. Thus the speech-act of warning is accomplished in uttering a warning, regardless of whether it is heeded, and the speech-act of arguing is accomplished in making an argument, regardless of whether it convinces anyone.46 Augustine and Aquinas approach prayer in precisely this way, maintaining that it does important work just in being said, quite apart from its being answered. To speak a prayer is to remind oneself, and perhaps also others, of the need for God and to restore speaker and listeners to a proper state of trust and dependence on the deity. Though Austin mentions prayer as a kind of speech-act, he overlooks this restorative work and instead defines it with reference to its expectation of an answer: he considers it an “exercitive,” a category of speech-act defined as “the giving of a decision in favour of or against a certain course of action, or advocacy of it.”47 Austin sees prayers as exercitives in the latter sense, such that what prayer “does” is advocate with the addressee for the desired outcome. This account makes 44 45 46

47

De Magistro, ch. 1, col. 1195; Concerning the Teacher, 4–5. See Matthew 6:1–4 and 23:27–28. Austin introduces these examples in the course of distinguishing the perlocutionary effects of utterances, which are unpredictable consequences (some but not all people will heed a warning, or be convinced by an argument), from their illocutionary force, which is a conventional aspect of language. The latter is his concern. See How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard in 1955, ed. J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 102–03. Ibid., 154.

20  Chaucer’s Prayers

petition the entire substance of prayer and disregards its heart-transforming work within the speaker. Patristic and medieval theological writings suggest a different view of prayer as a speech-act, in which its work goes well beyond advocacy. Prayer is indeed a way of doing things with words, but what it does is nothing less than speak a new self into being, a self that is newly centered on God and approaches him in humble faith and trust. Aquinas and Augustine’s understanding of prayer as transformative is elaborated more fully in a source closer to Chaucer in time and space, Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum Religiosorum. Edmund, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury and was canonized shortly after his death in 1240, composed this treatise in the early thirteenth century, and by Chaucer’s lifetime it was circulating widely in several translations into both Anglo-Norman and Middle English.48 Its chapter on the Pater Noster offers an insightful analysis of what a person is really doing when he or she prays this prayer, the most authoritative script for prayer in the Christian tradition. The core of Edmund’s Pater Noster chapter is a careful exposition of the prayer’s language, proceeding phrase by phrase and word by word in order to elucidate the inner transformation that this prayer effects as it is said. His exposition of the opening phrase, Pater noster qui es in caelis, details how uttering these words involves the speaker in a complex act of positioning himself in relation to God: Parfyt love is conteynet in this word, Pater: for whi? everi Creature loveth kuyndeliche his ffader. Certeyn hope is understonden in this word Noster: for whi? yif he beo ure, then mowen we homeliche seyen and hopen that he is holden to us. Studefast bi-leeve is understonden in this word Qui es: for whi? whon we seyen Qui es, we leeven that god is, whome we never seyen […] Soth Mekenesse is understonden in this word In celis: for whi? whon we thenken that he is heiy, and that we ben lowe, thenne beo we meke.49

For Edmund, a single word said in prayer has the power to affirm a relationship between speaker and addressee: simply calling God Pater affirms “Parfyt love” of him, while noster affirms that he is truly ours and “holden to us.” Even the grammatical function words qui es have unexpected significance,

48

49

Nicholas Watson, “Middle English Versions and Audiences of Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum Religiosorum,” in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honor of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 115–31 (115–16). Speculum S. Edmundi, in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church, and His Followers, ed. Carl Horstmann (London: Swan Sonnenschein and New York: Macmillan, 1895), vol. I, 241–64 (252). Horstmann prints two Middle English versions of Edmund’s text; my quotations are from the Vernon manuscript version unless otherwise noted. I have slightly adjusted the spellings in Horstmann’s edition to be consistent with the conventions used for Chaucer’s works: for instance, y is substituted for yogh, th for thorn, and u and v are regularized.



Introduction  21

as they constitute an affirmation of faith that God exists despite being unseen, while the words in caelis affirm God’s exalted holiness and foster a state of “Mekeness” in the speaker. A relationship of loving reliance on God is thus established in course of saying the Pater noster’s first line, which Edmund sees as the foundation of the whole; he explains that he devotes such close attention to these words because they “techen us hou we schullen preyen, and wyuche we schulen ben in preyere.”50 The phrase “wyuche we schulen ben in preyere,” rendered as “what oure-selfe sall be in prayere” in the Thornton manuscript, makes it clear that Edmund understands praying as an activity that shapes the self of the one who engages in it.51 His task in the Pater Noster chapter is to explain this work of forming a self by inhabiting a scripted prayer. He clarifies that readers are not to speak all the words of his treatise, but to remember them as they perform the actual script: “sey onliche the bare lettre [with mouthe] and thenk in thin herte of that I haue put here uppon everi word.”52 These instructions make explicit the connection between words spoken by the lips and transformation effected in the heart, for as readers say the “bare lettre,” their hearts reiterate everything that is at stake in each word. The popularity of Edmund’s treatise, and particularly of his chapter on the Pater Noster, which circulated independently of the Speculum as a whole, suggests that late-medieval laypeople were eager for instruction in the heart-transforming work of prayer.53 Edmund teaches them how the Pater Noster, the basic prayer learned by rote in childhood, is in fact a complex lesson in how to pray and in “what our-selfe sall be in prayere.” He expounds the text of this prayer as the script for a performance that transforms the self, shaping the speaker into a meek and steadfast child of God. Chaucer’s familiarity with this approach to prayer is evident in The Parson’s Tale, which contains the only explicit discussion of what prayer is and how it works in Chaucer’s corpus. Based on two thirteenth-century Dominican texts, Raymond of Pennaforte’s Summa de paenitentia and William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis, this tale draws upon the same long tradition that shapes Edmund’s thought. Indeed Chaucer’s sources are chronologically much closer to Edmund than to Chaucer himself, making this tale “conservative” in its vision of orthodoxy.54 The tale’s discussion of prayer begins with the commonplace statement that the Pater Noster is the ideal prayer, which “comprehendeth in it self alle goode preyeres” (X 1041), and then, in a gesture of humility not found in his Latin source, Chaucer resigns “the exposicioun of this hooly 50 51 52 53

54

Ibid., 252. For the Thornton version, see Horstmann, Yorkshire Writers, 219–40 (232). Ibid., 253. Watson mentions its independent circulation in “Middle English Versions and Audiences,” 117. Richard Newhauser, “The Parson’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), vol. I, 529–613 (531–32).

22  Chaucer’s Prayers

preyere, that is so excellent and digne,” to “maistres of theologie” (X 1042).55 Edmund’s Pater Noster chapter undertakes just such an “exposicioun,” but whether or not Chaucer knew of that work, Raymond’s Summa gave him an account of the prayer that resonates with it. Following this source, The Parson’s Tale describes the reverence and humility with which this prayer should be performed and urges readers to inhabit it wholeheartedly. The Pater Noster “moste be trewely said, and in verray feith,” which means that “a man shal putten his wyl to be subget to the wille of God” (X 1044); the speaker of the prayer must consciously embrace the submission to God that is scripted in the clause Fiat voluntas tua. When it is uttered wholeheartedly, and “with greet humblesse,” and when it is “continued with the werkes of charitee,” then this prayer “avayleth […] agayn the vices of the soule” (X 1045–46). To avail against the vices of the soul is to reform the soul, effecting an inner transformation that roots out habitual sins and liberates the speaker to pursue “werkes of charitee,” works that The Parson’s Tale presents as a continuation of the act of prayer itself. The Pater Noster’s power to overcome spiritual vice is indeed the reason why this prayer is mentioned in The Parson’s Tale in the first place. Prayer is relevant to this confessional manual because it constitutes a part of Satisfaction, which follows Contrition and Confession as the third part of penance. Chaucer lists prayer alongside “wakynges” and “fastynges” as a type of “bodily peyne” (X 1037) that provides satisfaction for the debt of sin. Like the physical disciplines with which it is categorized, prayer is envisaged as a form of training that defeats vice and restores the soul to God. This context further underscores the centrality of inward transformation, as distinct from the granting of petitions, as the primary purpose of prayer in the theological tradition Chaucer draws upon. The training provided by prayer must, of course, be undertaken repeatedly as sin keeps reasserting itself, and so must the act of verbal confession. Gregory Roper’s reading of The Parson’s Tale situates confession as a kind of speech-act, proposing that “by speaking themselves […] into the role of a sinner, penitents gain a distance from that ‘I’” and from the sinful self to which it refers, and in this way, “speech itself – this penitential kind of speech – becomes regenerative, re-creating, re-forming a self.”56 According to Chaucer’s account in The Parson’s Tale, prayer forms a necessary complement to the penitential speech-act Roper describes: after the sinful self has been articulated and rejected, prayer is a way to speak the new self into being, the one who rejects vice and submits to God’s will with 55

56

All quotations of Chaucer’s writings are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, repr. 2008) and are cited parenthetically in the main text. Gregory Roper, “Dropping the Personae and Reforming the Self: The Parson’s Tale and the End of The Canterbury Tales,” in Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of The Parson’s Tale, ed. David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000), 151–75 (163–64).



Introduction  23

humility. While Edmund focuses on explaining how this new self is written into the text of the Pater Noster, Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale positions this prayer within a larger penitential process. What both share is a sense of the prayer’s power to transform: those who strive to fully inhabit this script will be formed into true children of God. Chaucer prefaces his discussion of the Pater Noster with a general definition of prayer, again adopted from Raymond’s Summa, that distills centuries of theological thought into a discrete set of characteristics: And ye shul understonde that orisouns or preyeres is for to seyn a pitous wyl of herte that redresseth it in God and expresseth it by word outward, to remoeven harmes and to han thynges espiritueel and durable, and somtyme temporele thynges; of whiche orisouns, certes, in the orison of the Pater Noster hath Jhesu Crist enclosed moost thynges. (X 1038)

Prayer is both an internal state and an external utterance, a “pitous wil of herte” and a “word outward”; it makes petitions, primarily for spiritual goods; and the supreme example of it is the Pater Noster.57 The core of this definition is the clause “a pitous wil of herte that redresseth it in God,” which names the “herte” as the locus of prayer and uses the verb “redresseth,” which often refers to acts of atonement and redemption, to evoke prayer’s work of restoring the self to God.58 This definition not only signals Chaucer’s familiarity with the theological tradition that I have been outlining but also provides a useful heuristic for this study; I use the features listed here to identify passages in Chaucer’s poems that constitute acts of prayer. I take “word outward” as a requirement that a prayer be said or sung aloud and that it employ direct discourse in speaking to its addressee. The criterion of direct discourse excludes from this study the subjunctive asides, such as “God yeve thee sorwe!” (Tales, IX, 15), that pepper Chaucer’s writings and function primarily as interjec-

57

Chaucer’s definition is closely based on Raymond of Pennaforte’s Summa, which reads as follows:



Est autem oratio pius affectus mentis in Deum tendens, plerumque ne animus pigritetur, in vocem prorumpens. Vel sic: Oratio est congeries vocum ad aliquid impetrandum in Deum tendentium. Item non debent peti in oratione temporalia, saltem principaliter, sed spiritualia, aeterna et ad salutem pertinentia. [Now prayer is a pious movement of the mind directed to God which breaks out in speech, frequently so that the heart might not grow lazy. Or thus: Prayer is a collection of vocal sounds directed to God entreating Him for something. Now, temporal matters ought not to be requested in prayer, at least not principally, but things which are spiritual, eternal, and which are pertinent to salvation.]







58

Latin text and English translation from Newhauser, “The Parson’s Tale,” 556–57. See MED, s.v. “redressen” (v.), senses 1d and 2. In a literal sense, Chaucer’s verb phrase “redresseth […] in” means that the words are directly addressed to God (sense 3d), but the restorative connotations of the verb’s primary meaning remain present.

24  Chaucer’s Prayers

tions.59 My one significant modification to this definition is to include prayers addressed to saintly intermediaries as well as those directed to deities. This modification is warranted because the Virgin Mary is Chaucer’s most frequent addressee of prayer across his writings. It is worth noting that Chaucer’s focus on Mary, as well as his use of language from the sung prayers of the liturgy, distances him decisively from Lollard views on prayer. Although Lollards upheld the long-standing tradition of affirming the Pater Noster as the best prayer, they diverged sharply from the late-medieval mainstream in their disregard for other written prayers, especially those not directly based on Biblical precedents.60 Liturgical prayer was included in this critique, and was particularly decried for obscuring the meaning of words by setting them to music.61 Although Wyclif himself cautiously affirmed the usefulness of the Ave Maria on the grounds that its language was drawn directly from the Bible, his followers strongly objected to all prayers to saints, including Mary, as a denigration of God’s honor.62 This dismissal of contemporary practices of prayer was grounded in a conviction that “prayer of good life was more effective than a repetition of words.”63 This commonplace Lollard phrase redefines prayer as good deeds and dismisses conventional prayer as empty words, suggesting that Lollards did not see the performance of scripted prayer as a speech-act with the power to transform the speaker. Chaucer’s composition of new prayer scripts, especially ones addressed to Mary and steeped in liturgical sources, shows him participating in the contemporary practices of prayer that Lollards rejected. Much recent criticism

59

60

61

62

63

Kevin Fleming treats such utterances as prayers in his unpublished dissertation “Chaucer’s Prayers in the Dream Visions and The Canterbury Tales” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Houston, 1999) and provides a full list of them in his appendix (342–61). For Wyclif’s praise of the Pater Noster, see “Controversial Tracts XVIII De Precationibus Sacris,” in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford, 1869–71), vol. III, 219–29 (221). In the same volume, see also his tract on the Pater Noster (93–110). There is another tract on this prayer printed in The English Works of Wyclif hitherto unprinted, ed. F.D. Matthew, 2nd edn, EETS o.s. 74 (London, 1902), 197–202. Wyclif’s critique of non-Biblical prayer scripts, or “singuler preieris maade of synful men” (“De Precationibus Sacris,” 221), is primarily aimed at indulgenced prayers composed by friars but calls into question the very practice of writing prayer scripts. For similar statements see also his “Controversial Tracts XXVII on the Seven Heresies,” in Select English Works, ed. Arnold, vol. III, 441–46, and “Tractatus de Pseudo-Freris,” in English Works, ed. Matthew, 294–324. See Wyclif’s tract “Of Feigned Contemplative Life,” in English Works, ed. Matthew, 187–96 (191–92). Among Wyclif’s English writings are two tracts on the Ave Maria; see Select English Works, ed. Arnold, vol. III, 111–13, and English Works, ed. Matthew, 203–8. The latter is more confident about its value. Anne Hudson describes the vehement opposition to such prayers that arose after Wyclif in The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 313. Hudson, Premature Reformation, 311.



Introduction  25

has explored his possible links to and sympathies with the Lollard movement, but when it comes to prayer, Chaucer’s approach remains firmly traditional.64 The discussion of prayer comes almost at the end of The Parson’s Tale and leads smoothly into the Retraction, the prayer that concludes both the Canterbury Tales and, most likely, Chaucer’s literary career as a whole. That career may also have begun in prayer, if the traditional view of the “ABC” as an early work is correct, but whether or not these two prayers form the chronological bookends of Chaucer’s corpus, they begin and end the present study. The “ABC” scripts an act of prayer that stands in isolation from any larger poetic context, and this relative simplicity makes it a useful starting-point; the Retraction, meanwhile, marks a moment of culmination, a prayer that enfolds both Chaucer’s work of writing and ours of reading within the larger pursuit of salvation. Despite their evident differences, these two passages share one crucial quality: of all the prayers Chaucer wrote, they are the two that most insist on their direct accessibility to the reader’s own voice and their immediate devotional utility, distinct from any narrative context. The middle section of this book examines how the rest of Chaucer’s prayers work in relation to such contexts and shows how Chaucer uses prayer to involve readers in narratives and guide their responses. To say that prayer serves these purposes is not, however, to reduce it to a literary device stripped of devotional significance; in their different ways, both the Retraction and the “ABC” emphatically rule out such a reduction. The Retraction shows that the work of forming a reader, far from being a strictly “literary” use of prayer, is ultimately inseparable from the transformative devotional work that defines prayer in the theological tradition known to Chaucer. As for the “ABC,” it casts its reader as the performer of a devotional act, fully conflating the task of reading and that of praying. Even as it serves as a script for performance, this lyric prayer also engages in self-conscious reflection on how one inhabits a script and how prayer effects transformation, questions that underlie many other prayers that Chaucer includes within and alongside his narratives. The first chapter’s discussion of the “ABC” both establishes a foundation for the study of these other prayers and provides a coda to this introduction, complementing Chaucer’s abstract treatment of prayer in The Parson’s Tale with a concrete example of a prayer script he composed.

64

For a compact overview of criticism connecting Chaucer to Lollardy, see Frances McCormack, “Chaucer and Lollardy,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 35–40.

1 Praying to Mary

I

n the same passage in his Regiment of Princes in which he canonizes Chaucer as the “firste fyndere of our faire langage,” Thomas Hoccleve also presents his late “worthi maister” as a Marian poet.1 Asking Mary to serve as Chaucer’s “advoket” in heaven, he implies that she owes Chaucer her assistance because of the special devotion he showed her in his writings: As thou wel knowest, o blissid virgyne, With lovyng hert, and hye devocioun In thyne honour he wroot ful many a lyne; O now thine helpe and thi promocioun, To God thi sone make a mocioun, How he thi servant was, mayden marie, And lat his love floure and fructifie.2

This description of Chaucer as Mary’s “servant,” working to promote her honor with a “lovyng hert” and “hye devocioun,” is echoed by John Lydgate: translating Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, Lydgate inserts Chaucer’s “ABC to the Virgin” rather than prepare his own rendition of Deguileville’s abecedarian prayer, and he introduces this insertion with words of praise for the eloquence and “ful devout entencioun” of the Chaucerian text.3 An emphasis on Chaucer’s Marian piety is also evident in the famous portrait that accompanies Hoccleve’s praise of Chaucer in some manuscripts, in which Chaucer points at the text with one hand and holds a rosary with the other.4 The early tradition of representing Chaucer with a rosary invites readers, as William Quinn has said, to “picture Chaucer at his beads” and to 1

2 3

4

Quotations from Hoccleve’s Works, ed. Frederick Furnivall, vol. 3, EETS e.s. 72 (London: Kegan Paul, 1897), lines 4978, 4983. I have lightly adapted the spelling conventions of this edition to be consistent with those used in the Riverside, for instance by omitting accent marks and normalizing u and v. Regiment of Princes, 4984, 4985–91. The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. Frederick Furnival, 3 vols, EETS e.s. 77, 83, 92 (London: Kegan Paul, 1899, 1902, 1904), lines 19,751–90 (19,786). The cover of this book features the portrait found in BL MS Harley 4866, fol. 88. See also BL MS Royal D 17 vi, fol. 93v, and a similar depiction, including the rosary, on the first folio of BL MS Additional 5141, an eighteenth-century poetic compilation. David Carlson argues that it is relatively true-to-life in his “Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54.4 (1991): 283–300.

28  Chaucer’s Prayers

imagine him participating in the devotional culture of his day.5 Indeed he was more than a participant, he was a notable contributor: both in his Parson’s Tale and in his Marian writings, Chaucer added to the expanding corpus of vernacular devotional literature being produced in late-medieval England. While both Hoccleve and Lydgate foreground Chaucer’s creative investment in devotional and especially Marian poetry, modern critics often marginalize his religious writings and approach him as a detached commentator on the religious practices of his world. Studies that address his Marian writings have proposed that even when Chaucer engages with highly emotional forms of Marian devotion, he disapproves of them, whereas he approves of restrained, doctrinally correct formulations of her role.6 The critical project of inferring Chaucer’s opinion of various strands of Marian piety has especially high stakes in the violently anti-Jewish Marian miracle story that forms The Prioress’s Tale, a work that has dominated critical discussion of Chaucer’s pious writings.7 The present chapter, however, begins with the observation that to read Chaucer’s Marian poetry with an eye to inferring his attitude toward contemporary religious practices is already to make an interpretive decision: it is to approach these writings as statements about piety, whether affirming or critical, that demand analysis, rather than as acts of piety that demand participation. I propose that it is important to recognize the performative aspect of these texts, which prominently feature acts of prayer to the Virgin that readers are invited to inhabit and to treat as scripts for their own devotional use. The demand for a performative reading is most insistent in “An ABC to the Virgin,” Chaucer’s only free-standing prayer, but it has rarely been acknowledged in criticism. William Quinn has noted “the unavoidable and perhaps irresolvable problem that simply reading [the “ABC”] as a performative event poses for a significant number of modern Chaucerians” and has suggested that whether or not the problem can be solved, the nature of this text as “a script to be recited” should at least be acknowledged in the critical conversation.8 With no larger narrative context to complicate its status as a script, the “ABC” is 5

6

7

8

William Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere: An ABC as Artifact and Critical Issue,” SAC 23 (2001): 109–41 (110). Quinn’s article includes images from BL MS Harley 4866 and from BL MS Additional 5141. Examples include Sherry Reames, “Mary, Sanctity, and Prayers to Saints: Chaucer and Late-Medieval Piety,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 81–96; Sumner Ferris, “The Mariology of the Prioress’s Tale,” The American Benedictine Review 32.3 (1981): 232–54; Alfred David, “An ABC to the Style of the Prioress,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text and Its Contexts, 700–1600: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honor of E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth Kirk (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 147–57. There are 81 main entries for The Prioress’s Tale, compared to 21 for The Second Nun’s Tale and five for the “ABC,” in The Annotated Chaucer Bibliography: 1997–2010, ed. Mark Allen and Stephanie Amsell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). The critical debate surrounding it will be discussed further below. Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere,” 115, see also 109–17.



Praying to Mary  29

a special case among Chaucer’s prayers, but its uniqueness makes it foundational rather than marginal. This chapter begins with the “ABC” and attends closely to its performative dynamics, examining how it constructs the work of prayer as pre-emptive, reiterative, and transformative. I then turn to the prologue prayers of the Second Nun and Prioress in order to show how the work of prayer, when undertaken in conjunction with a narrative, can be oriented not only toward the speaker’s salvation but also toward his or her reading.

“An ABC to the Virgin”: Performance and Prevenience Critical reception of “An ABC to the Virgin” has long been prejudiced by the notion that this text is an early work. The only direct evidence to support this conclusion comes from a rubric in Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition: Speght states that the “ABC” was commissioned by Blanche of Lancaster, which means that it must have been composed before her death in 1368.9 Although the authority of this rubric is highly uncertain, for decades it lent support to critical dismissal of the “ABC” as a work of juvenilia and a slavish translation undertaken on a patron’s orders.10 Recent criticism has begun to vindicate the poetic sophistication of the “ABC,” but the evidence available for determining the poem’s date remains inconclusive.11 Its use of the decasyllabic line suggests lateness, but a notable absence implies earliness: because the “ABC” lacks the Dantean influence that decisively shapes Chaucer’s other Marian prayers, despite its very similar themes and concerns, it may date from before Chaucer had read Dante.12 In the “ABC” he relies on a French source, an abecedarian prayer in Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, which he adapts freely rather than translating closely.13 Source studies have established that even though many of Chaucer’s alterations to Deguileville are small in scale,

9

10 11

12

13

Speght’s rubric and the date are discussed in Laila Gross’s explanatory note to the Riverside edition (1076). Quinn overviews this reception history in “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere,” 109–17. Juliette Dor takes poetic sophistication as evidence of a late date in “L’ABC de Chaucer: Traduction et Transformation,” in Guillaume de Digulleville: Les Pèlerinages Allégoriques, ed. Frédéric Duval and Fabienne Pomel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 401–23 (413). On these grounds, Patricia Kean dates the poem to “before [Chaucer] came under Italian influence” in her Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, Vol. II: The Art of Narrative (London: Routledge, 1972), 197; see also Piero Boitani, “‘His desir wol fle withouten wynges’: Mary and Love in Fourteenth-Century Poetry,” in The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 177–222 (196). Georgia Ronan Crampton lists several “near echoes” of Dante in the “ABC,” but acknowledges that they are commonplaces that do not provide firm evidence of influence; see “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” Medium Aevum 59 (1990): 191–213 (212 n. 38). See Dor, “Traduction et Transformation”; Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer”; Helen Phillips, “Chaucer and Deguileville: The ‘ABC’ in Context,” Medium Aevum 62 (1993): 1–19.

30  Chaucer’s Prayers

they have far-reaching effects, particularly in terms of tone: the French prayer is serenely confident of Mary’s aid, while Chaucer’s prayer is fraught and anxious.14 Helen Phillips has argued compellingly that this difference results from a practice that she calls “redistribution,” in which Chaucer integrates images and episodes from Deguileville’s larger narrative into the text of his prayer.15 While the French prayer stands as an island of serenity in a pilgrimage beset with dangers, Chaucer folds the sense of danger, and with it the tension and dynamism of the narrative, into the moment of prayer itself. This change, which Phillips takes as a sign of how attentively Chaucer read Deguileville, acquires a new kind of significance when the “ABC” is approached not as a poem, but as a script. The “ABC” scripts a devotional performance that aims to provide not comfort, as in the source, but transformation: the prayer itself has a narrative momentum, and it presents readers with an “I” who is in motion and always aware of his progress on a journey toward salvation. To align oneself with the “I” of Chaucer’s prayer is not only to ask for Mary’s mercy but also to embark on a process of becoming capable of receiving such a gift. The need for this transformation comes into sharp focus in the final lines, which praise Mary’s generous mercy while anxiously recognizing an obstacle to it: Now, ladi bryghte, sith thou canst and wilt Ben to the seed of Adam merciable, Bring us to that palais that is bilt To penitentes that ben to merci able. Amen. (181–84)

Mary is both able and willing – “canst and wilt” – to show mercy to sinners, but she can only grant it to those who are capable of receiving it. Wordplay calls attention to this presentation of mercy as a two-way street, in which Mary’s “merciable” nature must be met by a human nature that has become “to merci able.” These lines establish that the work of prayer in the “ABC” consists not only of asking for Mary’s mercy, but also of re-making the self of the speaker, forming him into someone who is able to receive what Mary has and wants to give.16 This transformative work does not proceed in the linear fashion of Deguileville’s pilgrimage narrative, however. The “ABC” instead presents the transformation of the self as a circular process, in two senses: it has no beginning because it is always pre-empted by Mary’s own generosity, and it never ends because the petition for mercy must always be

14

15 16

The heightened tension of Chaucer’s version is discussed in Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” 194–97; Phillips, “Chaucer and Deguileville,” 1; Dor, “Traduction et Transformation,” 409. Phillips, “Chaucer and Deguileville,” 1. Since the prayer is addressed to a woman it will be convenient to use male pronouns for the speaker, but I do not mean to imply that the “I” is gendered; rather, it is a space open to all readers.



Praying to Mary  31

reiterated throughout earthly life. To inhabit the “I” of this text is to become “to merci able” by repeatedly requesting a gift of mercy that is always already being given. The opening stanza of the “ABC” presents Mary’s mercy as a pre-emptive gift that enables the act of prayer itself. Addressing Mary as “Almighty and al merciable” (1), the speaker asks her for mercy specifically as a remedy against his own inability to pray: To thee I flee, confounded in errour. Help and releeve, thou mighti debonayre, Have mercy on my perilous langour. (5–7)

The speaker’s confounding “errour” is “langour,” the sin of spiritual lassitude.17 The same word appears in The Parson’s Tale’s discussion of Accidie, or Sloth: one form of Sloth is “undevocioun, thurgh which a man […] hath swich langour in soule that he may neither rede ne singe in hooly chirche, ne heere ne thynke of no devocioun” (X 722–23). Those who inhabit the “I” of the “ABC” thus begin the work of prayer by admitting their utter inability to do this work; if they suffer from “langour,” then they cannot even “heere” or “thynke” about “devocioun,” much less adequately perform this script. Deguileville’s speaker does not suffer from spiritual lassitude, but critics have overlooked Chaucer’s introduction of “langour” in favor of a more glaring alteration to the source in this stanza, the potentially heterodox address to Mary as “Almighty” (1).18 It is important, however, to interpret this word in the context of the subsequent lines, for Chaucer’s prayer does not make Mary omnipotent: on the contrary, it immediately recognizes a limit on the salvific power of her mercy, namely the speaker’s own capacity to receive it. Far from being “to merci able,” the “I” of the “ABC” begins in a state of “perilous langour” that leaves him unable to perform the work of prayer. This work can only begin if it begins with Mary, and in this way, her mercy is not only the object of the prayer but also its necessary pre-condition. Even to ask for mercy, the spiritually slothful speaker will already need to have received some measure of it. The pre-emptive quality of Mary’s mercy is further emphasized in the way the “ABC” re-imagines the Last Judgment, the moment in which sinners traditionally rely on Mary’s intercession to mitigate the wrath of God the Father. While many devotional lyrics contemporary with Chaucer invoke Mary’s aid at the judgment seat in their concluding lines, the “ABC” makes this moment

17

18

This identification of the “errour” as “langour,” an identification encouraged by syntax and rhyme, is more persuasive than Alan Fletcher’s claim that the “errour” mentioned here should be taken to refer to heresy; see “Chaucer the Heretic,” SAC 25 (2003): 53–121 (57–63). For discussion see Helen Phillips, “‘Almighty and al merciable queene’: Marian Titles and Marian Lyrics,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 83–99 (95– 97); Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” 194; Boitani, “‘His desir,’” 195.

32  Chaucer’s Prayers

a recurring focal point and consistently presents Mary’s final gift of mercy as dependent on, and indeed pre-empted by, gifts of mercy throughout earthly life.19 In the C-stanza, for instance, the prospect of future judgment leads the speaker directly back to his present-day need for mercy: But merci, ladi, at the grete assyse Whan we shule come bifore the hye justyse. So litel fruit shal thane in me be founde That, but thou er that day correcte [vice], Of verrey right my werk wol me counfounde. (36–40)

To escape condemnation, the speaker needs Mary’s help not only in the future, “at the grete assyse,” but also, and more crucially, “er that day,” while he still has time to bear fruit. If he is to be saved then, he must already be in the process of being saved now. Chaucer’s “I” does not consider the possibility of an eleventh-hour intercession by Mary that could overcome a lack of good works during earthly life. Deguileville’s speaker has no doubt of Mary’s future intercession, asserting his confidence with a pun: the French speaker dreads damnation unless the Virgin is literally “assise” (seated) at “la grant assise” (Chaucer’s “grete assyse”), but as long as she is physically present, he will have nothing to fear.20 Even when, in a later stanza, Deguileville’s speaker regrets his failure to bear fruit (“a nul bien je ne m’afruite”), he never presents such fruit as a prerequisite for Mary’s aid in the Last Judgment.21 Chaucer, in contrast, sustains a double view of Mary’s mercy as both future and present, both a final intervention and a process of formation that is always already underway. This understanding of mercy as formative is further developed in the R-stanza, which recasts the Last Judgment as motherly discipline: Redresse me, mooder, and me chastise, For certeynly my Faderes chastisinge, That dar I nought abiden in no wise, So hidous is his rightful rekenynge. (129–32)

Instead of the conventional contrast, drawn in the French source, between Mary’s gentleness and God’s sternness, these lines establish a subtler distinction between Marian discipline and divine punishment.22 Both figures chastise the speaker, but in different senses: for Mary “chastise” is a verb placed in 19

20

21 22

See, e.g., “Eadi be Thou hevene Queen” (DIMEV 1162); “Lady I thank thee with heart swith mild” (DIMEV 3023); “Now shrinketh rose and lily flower” (DIMEV 3797); see also discussion in Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 121–24. Deguileville’s text is quoted from Le Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, ed. J.J. Stürzinger (London: Nichols & Sons, 1893), 10,947–48. Ibid., 11,082. Ibid., 11,085–96.



Praying to Mary  33

parallel with “redresse” to indicate an active process of correcting and reforming, whereas the Father’s “chastisinge” is a noun, a definitive act described as a “rightful rekenynge.”23 The contrast between a kind mother and a harsh father here becomes a contrast between two kinds of chastising, formative and punitive. Mary’s association with the former is affirmed in the next petition, “Beth ye my juge and eek my soules leche” (134); the speaker asks her to be his judge, only to conflate that role with her rehabilitative role as the healer of sinful souls. In this stanza’s presentation of judgment, Mary’s mercy is presented not as averting God’s wrath at the final hour, but as preparing sinners for that hour throughout their earthly lives. Much as the “I” must have already received mercy in order to request it in his prayer, he must have already received mercy in life in order to ask for it after death. In this way, the request for mercy is continually being pre-empted in the “ABC,” such that Mary’s mercy is always already at work transforming sinners into penitents. In emphasizing these pre-emptive dynamics, the “ABC” makes it impossible to separate the petition for mercy from its granting: to ask for Mary’s mercy is to have received it, and to receive it is to be enabled to ask for it. The sinner caught up in this circular process often experiences anxiety, as each of these judgment scenes has shown, but he also experiences moments of hope. One such moment comes in the V-stanza, in which the speaker imagines Mary leading him upward into paradise: Virgine, that art so noble of apparaille And ledest us into the hye tour Of Paradys, thou me wisse and counsaile How I may have thi grace and thi socour, All have I ben in filthe and in errour. (153–57)

While the equivalent lines in Deguileville simply ask Mary to clothe the sinner with her grace, Chaucer evokes a more protracted, effortful process of renewal, in which the “I” must learn how to attain her “grace” and “socour,” and Mary herself must teach him.24 Far from assuming that he can benefit from what Mary has to give, the “I” of the “ABC” once again emphasizes his need to become a fit recipient of her gifts. In this stanza, however, the process of transformation is well underway: the present perfect of “have I ben in filthe and in errour” confidently asserts that the speaker has left sin behind. His reference to a past state of “errour” echoes the first stanza, in which the spiritually slothful “I” is “confounded in errour” (5), and thus heightens the sense of progress. The “I” remains dependent on Mary’s mercy until he attains salvation, but he can hope to move away from sin and trace her upward path.

23

24

See MED, s.v. “chastisen” (v.); sense 1 is formative and sense 2 is punitive. See also “redressen” (v.), senses 1–3, especially 2. Deguileville, Pèlerinage, 11,121–26.

34  Chaucer’s Prayers

The sense of hope is affirmed in the stanza’s closing lines, which return to the moment of judgment only to frame it as the gracious intercession of a courtly lady: Ladi, unto that court thou me ajourne That cleped is thi bench, O freshe flour, Ther as thi merci evere shal sojourne. (158–60)

The terms “court” and “merci” resonate with legal and amorous layers of meaning in both French and English, but Chaucer adds a distinctively English wordplay on “bench,” which refers both to a courtroom and to “a turf-covered mound used as a seat.”25 Calling Mary a “freshe flour” highlights the latter sense, such that these lines re-imagine Judgment Day as an intimate garden conversation with a beloved lady. This stanza culminates in one of the most reassuring lines in the “ABC,” the statement that “merci evere shal sojourne” with Mary. This confidence in future mercy is possible because the “I” knows that he is already being formed by Mary’s mercy in the present, even as he prays: his petitions are always pre-empted by gifts of mercy, such that to ask for mercy is to be receiving it and thereby becoming “to merci able.” The speaker’s transformation does not follow a linear trajectory from spiritual sloth to salvation, however; Chaucer foregrounds not only the pre-emptive dynamics of prayer but also its reiterative quality. The act of prayer scripted in the “ABC” seems always to be starting over again. On one level, a reiterative momentum is inherent in the text’s abecedarian form, which imposes a sharp boundary between stanzas and gives the prayer a listlike structure emphasized in its manuscript presentation, which features a large capital at the start of each new stanza.26 Each stanza is also a new syntactic unit, making each feel like a fresh beginning. The “ABC” shares these basic features of abecedarian form with its source, but Chaucer heightens the sense of separation between stanzas in his version. Beginnings of stanzas in the English text typically mark a turn back to the source, as Chaucer keeps Deguileville’s first word whenever there is an English equivalent with the same initial letter and then tends to drift away from the source as the stanza unfolds, only to jump back to it with the beginning of the next one.27 The task of translation and adaptation thus starts anew in each new stanza, weakening the potential for continuity across them. When Chaucer does change the initial word, he makes it weightier: as Crampton has noticed, “he tends to supply a noun or important adjective when the source gives him a preposition or an 25

26

27

See MED, s.v. “bench(e),” n., senses 2 and 4, and discussion by David, “ABC to the Style,” 152. For the equivalent lines in the source, see Deguileville, Pèlerinage, 11,121–32. On the visual manuscript presentation of the “ABC,” see Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere,” 118–29. Stanzas beginning with the same word in French and English are F, G, I, K, M, N, O, R, T, V, X, Y, and Z.



Praying to Mary  35

adverb.”28 This practice reinforces the list-like tendency of the abecedarian form in that it provides each stanza with a more strongly marked beginning. The resulting stanzas feel self-contained, like beads on a string, and indeed several critics have insightfully compared the “ABC” to a rosary.29 Just as rosary beads represent distinct prayers bound together into a whole, each lettered stanza of this script makes a new beginning within a single act of prayer. Not only is this reiterative momentum inherent in the prayer’s overall form, Chaucer also cultivates it on a smaller scale. Even within the stanza, the prayer always seems to be starting over because it constantly introduces, and then quickly drops, new strands of imagery. In the B-stanza, for instance, after opening with several lines praising Mary’s “Bountee” (9), Chaucer provides a rapid-fire sequence of images: Haven of refut, of quiete, and of reste. Loo, how that theeves sevene chasen mee! Help, lady bright, er that my ship tobreste! (14–16)

The image of the haven evokes Mary as maris stella, but rather than develop the nautical imagery, Chaucer reaches back to Deguileville for the image of the speaker being chased by the seven deadly sins.30 In the French prayer, they carry him off the path to salvation until Mary restores him, but instead of developing this miniature narrative, Chaucer abruptly returns to the nautical imagery, now casting the “I” as a ship that is about to break in pieces. This image resonates with the earlier appeal to Mary as the haven where the ship can be repaired, but each of the three lines also stands alone, offering a concise and distinct picture of what it looks like to turn to Mary for mercy. The accumulation of these distinct images implies that this gesture must be repeated over and over. This kaleidoscopic approach to imagery is also evident in the way Chaucer expands the range of titles and epithets by which Mary is directly addressed, a technique that fifteenth-century aureate poets would imitate and take further.31 The Latin liturgy is the primary source for this material, as William Rogers has shown; for instance, Chaucer adds several regal titles for Mary, such as “blisful hevene queene” (24), “queen of comfort” (77), and “hevene queen” (149), closely derived from the liturgical epithets regina coelorum and regina 28

29

30

31

Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” 204, who notes stanzas A and C as examples; see also B, L, Q, and S. Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere,” 126; Phillips, “Chaucer and Deguileville,” 94; Georgiana Donavin, “Alphabets and Rosary Beads in Chaucer’s An ABC,” in Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook, ed. Scott Troyan (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 25–39 (31–32). William Rogers discusses the liturgical roots of the maris stella image in his chapter on the “ABC” in Image and Abstraction: Six Middle English Religious Lyrics (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1972), 82–106 (98). Later aureate developments are discussed in relation to the “ABC” in Phillips, “‘Almighty and al merciable.’”

36  Chaucer’s Prayers

misericordie.32 In addition to these lofty titles, Chaucer adds humbler forms of address such as “flour” (4, 159), “lady bright” (16), “ladi deere” (17), and “Crystes blisful mooder deere” (28), while carrying over from Deguileville such titles as “Glorious virgine” (4), “Noble princesse” (97), and “verrey light of eyen that ben blynde” (105).33 For some critics, the effect of this dizzying array of titles is to “fragment the figure of Mary,” rendering her less coherent and even undermining her personhood and authority.34 This reading, however, takes Marian titles as cues for visualizations of the Virgin rather than as direct addresses to her in the context of a prayer script. Crampton more accurately captures their performative force when she says that these titles evoke the “incantatory, conjuring impulse of litany.” Much as a litany calls upon saint after saint, the “ABC” insistently renews its address to a single figure, and in so doing, it “keeps refocusing her at shifting angles,” always approaching the same Mary but always in a new way.35 Chaucer’s many titles for the Virgin contribute to his prayer’s reiterative momentum by constantly re-launching the process of petitioning her. Just as this process has no discernible beginning, in that it is always pre-empted by Mary’s own generosity, it also has no clear ending, in that its work of transforming the self can never be complete in this life. The “ABC” invites users to join in this circular process, asking them to constantly renew their address to Mary and their petitions for the mercy that transforms them into fitting recipients of mercy. The echo that links the first and last lines of the “ABC” further encourages the reiteration that defines the work of prayer. The “I” concludes by acknowledging his need to become “to merci able” (184), an idea that leads right back to the opening praise of Mary’s pre-emptively “merciable” nature (1), thus positioning him to offer the entire prayer again. According to the “ABC,” the work of prayer always does have to begin again, because Mary’s mercy is not a discrete gift, granted in moments of crisis and supremely at the Last Judgment, but a source of transformation throughout earthly life. Because the speaker will never be finished needing it, he is never finished asking for it. The circular dynamics of this mercy are integrated into the very structure of the “ABC,” but they are equally important to the Marian prayers of the Second Nun and Prioress, in which Chaucer draws upon a passage from Dante’s Paradiso that concisely articulates the workings of Mary’s prevenient grace.36 This passage, which he also uses in a prayer in Troilus and Criseyde, seems to have powerfully resonated with Chaucer’s thinking about prayer, and he 32 33 34

35 36

Rogers, Image and Abstraction, 97. Deguileville, Pèlerinage, 10,894, 11,037, 11,049. Phillips, “‘Almighty and al merciable,’” 87; see also Dor, “Traduction et Transformation,” 412. Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” 194, 198. Boitani, “‘His desir,’” 303 n. 36, points to lines 67–68 of the “ABC” as a possible anticipation of Dante’s formulation of prevenient grace: “For whan a soule falleth in errour / Thi pitee goth and haleth him ayein.”



Praying to Mary  37

may indeed have been drawn to it precisely because it offers a clear doctrinal account of the circular momentum he had already created in the “ABC.” If Chaucer’s three Marian prayers imply a particular interest in prevenient grace, they also suggest a preference for high-style, continental models of Marian devotion, an observation that resonates with the long-held critical assumption that Chaucer is more concerned with literary sophistication than devotional practice. The literariness of these prayers, however, does not make them any less prayerful. While it is important to appreciate how finely crafted an aesthetic object the “ABC” is, it is more essential to recognize that it insistently presents itself as something other than that: not just a poem, nor even a poem that reflects on the nature of prayer, but a script. Even as it calls attention to the circular dynamics of prayer, its purpose is not to explore or comment upon those dynamics but to draw readers inside them. It asks readers to inhabit its “I,” and to embrace the cycle of asking for a mercy that they have already received, and receiving it so that they can ask anew. It promises, moreover, that this circular process will form its users into “penitentes that ben to merci able” (184), because making petitions for Mary’s mercy means that one is receiving it, and receiving it now means that one will be able to receive it on the Last Day. This circular process of transforming the self, in which Mary’s mercy is both the means and the end, is how Chaucer presents the work of prayer in his “ABC.”

Marian Invocations: Forming Readers Piero Boitani has suggested that the prologue prayers of the Second Nun and Prioress can be read “as lyrical prayers, isolated from their narrative contexts,” and his is one of several studies that approach them in those terms and examine them alongside the “ABC.”37 These prayers are indeed detachable from their narrative contexts, but in this chapter I detach them only from the Canterbury frame narrative, without isolating them from their respective tales. Support for this practice comes from the manuscript record, which reveals that these prologue-tale units circulated independently of the Canterbury sequence, severed both from the pilgrimage narrative and from their narrators. Appearing in isolation from the Tales framework in six manuscripts, always accompanied by its prologue, The Prioress’s Tale is equaled only by The Clerk’s Tale in the frequency with which it was excerpted, while The Second Nun’s Tale, also with its prologue, appears in two anthologies of pious narrative that also contain the Prioress’s.38 This evidence reveals that early readers perceived these 37

38

Boitani, “‘His desir,’” 206; see also Edmund Reiss, “Dusting off the Cobwebs: A Look at Chaucer’s Lyrics,” ChauR 1.1 (1966): 55–65; Reames, “Mary, Sanctity, and Prayers”; and Kean, The Art of Narrative, 186–209. For details of independent manuscript circulation of all the Tales, see Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Routledge, 1993), 321–25. Carol Meale discusses the excerpt-

38  Chaucer’s Prayers

prologue prayers as more tightly bound to their subsequent tales than to their fictional speakers, and this chapter focuses on that relationship between prayer and narrative. This approach is one the prayers themselves also invite, since both are invocations that explicitly mention the subsequent tales and request Mary’s help in telling them well. The specific request for help in the task of storytelling might seem to limit each prayer to a narratorial voice, whether or not that voice is identified with a fictional pilgrim, but I argue that both prayers open out to other voices and indeed demand readerly participation. These prologue prayers operate in tandem with their tales, scripting devotional performances in which the speaker professes reliance on Mary’s grace in order to overcome a particular obstacle that will prove central to the narrative that follows. To align oneself with the “I” of these prayers is therefore to be formed not only into a worthy recipient of Mary’s mercy, as in the “ABC,” but also into an ideal reader of the subsequent tale. My approach of emphasizing the connections between these prologues and their tales while minimizing their connections to the larger Canterbury frame is fairly uncontroversial in the case of the Second Nun. The reference to a “lyf […] of Seynt Cecile” in both versions of the prologue to The Legend of Good Women (F 426, G 416) establishes that this text existed as a free-standing work before the Canterbury project.39 Neither the prologue nor the tale shows signs of having been revised for inclusion in the Tales, and the designation of the Second Nun as its narrator does little to shape its meaning; she is among the least characterized of Chaucer’s pilgrims, being all but invisible in the General Prologue and silent in the links. In the case of the Prioress, however, bracketing off the frame narrative and the General Prologue portrait is a much more contentious move, though for that very reason it is all the more worthwhile. Much critical discussion of The Prioress’s Tale still works within the parameters established a century ago by G.L. Kittredge’s dramatic reading of the Tales, according to which “the stories are merely long speeches expressing, directly or indirectly, the characters of the several persons.”40 This mode

39

40

ing of these two tales in her “Women’s Piety and Women’s Power: Chaucer’s Prioress Reconsidered,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. A.J. Minnis, Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 39–60 (57–58). Manuscripts in which The Prioress’s Tale appears are Cambridge CUL MS Kk. 1. 3; Oxford Bodleian MS Rawlinson C. 86; London BL MS Harley 1239, 2251, and 2382; Manchester Chetham’s MS 6709. All but the first two are collections of religious material, and the last two also include The Second Nun’s Tale. The DIMEV makes it possible to trace the circulation of the prologues with their tales; see entry 3970 for the Prioress and 5405 for the Second Nun. See Florence Ridley’s discussion of the tale’s date and independent composition in the Riverside notes (942). G.L. Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915, repr. 1970), 155. The continued application of this approach to the Prioress is noted in Linda Georgianna, “The Protestant Chaucer,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 55–69 (64).



Praying to Mary  39

of reading has been criticized for assuming that naturalistic character psychology is Chaucer’s aim and has been widely displaced by the recent consensus that, in Elizabeth Scala’s words, “the stories do not exist for the sake of the pilgrims, the pilgrims are mere focalizers for the sake of the stories.”41 The persistence of personality-driven readings of The Prioress’s Tale likely has something to do with the subtlety of her General Prologue portrait, with its nuanced satire that invites close attention to her character.42 A more important factor, however, is the anti-Jewish prejudice and violence in her tale. Critics have debated Chaucer’s use of this inflammatory material, especially the question of whether or not he subjects it to ironic critique, but the present chapter aligns itself with recent attempts to move beyond the entrenched terms of this debate.43 Both sides have tended to read the tale through the lens of the Prioress’s General Prologue portrait, but I adopt a different interpretive lens: the tale’s own prologue, which provides an obvious yet neglected context for the story.44 In this prologue and the Second Nun’s, Chaucer develops a Christian form of invocational prayer that invites readerly participation, and thus offers his readers a subject-position to occupy as they prepare to read each tale. In recognition of the fact that Chaucer eventually chose to place these prayers in the mouths of two nuns, I will use female pronouns when referring to their speakers, but I do not suggest that he wrote them for women; in each one, the “I” is open to all. The work of prayer in these prologues is the work of forming a self, and here that self is both a penitent and a reader.

41

42

43

44

Elizabeth Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 3. On the satire of the portrait, see Jill Mann’s classic study Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 128–37. For an overview of responses to the portrait, see Stephen Spector, “Empathy and Enmity in the Prioress’s Tale,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 211–28 (213–14). Particularly thorough surveys of this debate can be found in William Quinn, “The Shadow of Chaucer’s Jews,” Exemplaria 18 (2006): 299–325 (299–303); and Michael Calabrese, “Performing the Prioress: ‘Conscience’ and Responsibility in Studies of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 66–91 (74–76). Calabrese’s study is also an example of the attempt to move beyond that debate, as is Helen Barr’s “Religious Practice in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” SAC 32 (2010): 39–65. A rare precedent for my approach of distancing the prologue-tale unit from the General Prologue portrait is found in Meale, who argues that “the Tale in effect works against the depiction of the Prioress in the General Prologue” in “Women’s Piety and Women’s Power,” 60. See also Megan Murton, “The Prioress’s Prologue: Dante, Liturgy, and Ineffability,” ChauR 52.3 (2017): 318–40. The typical emphasis on the General Prologue portrait can be seen in, for instance, Orth, “The Problem of the Performative”; M.L. Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality: Absorbing Antisemitism in Chaucer’s Prioress,” ChauR 43.2 (2008): 197–214; and Spector, “Empathy and Enmity.”

40  Chaucer’s Prayers

Forming Writer and Reader Both of these prologue prayers conform to Beverly Boyd’s description of Chaucer’s Marian poems as works of “collage,” built from multiple sources both poetic and liturgical; the liturgy, of course, is itself a collage of Scriptural passages recombined in new ways.45 An aesthetic of collage works on multiple levels in the Second Nun’s prologue, which places an act of prayer between two expository passages, a discourse on idleness and an analysis of St Cecilia’s name. The prologue as a whole, like any collage, appears miscellaneous but also suggests continuities among its materials, and one such continuity is the idea of work. After warning against “Ydelnesse / That porter of the gate is of delices” (VIII 2–3) and praising “hire contraire […] leveful bisynesse” (4–5), the narrator takes her own advice, announcing her intention to translate Cecilia’s life as a way to avoid the dangers of idleness. She presents her translation as “feithful bisynesse,” a meritorious form of labor that prevents “confusioun” (VIII 23–24), a term that was synonymous with sin in the “ABC” (18). These opening lines establish a context for the prayer to follow: since translating this story is an antidote to sin, asking for Mary’s help in this task means asking for her help in doing the good works incumbent upon every Christian. By positioning storytelling as one instance of the universal work of virtue, the prologue narrows the gap between the narratorial “I” and the reader. Only the former is responsible for writing the story, but all should engage in “feithful bisynesse.” As the Invocatio ad Mariam begins, the distinction between the “I” and the reader continues to be effaced. This move is not typical of invocational prayer, which tends to identify the “I” closely with the person telling the story, as in this prayer’s first few lines: And thow that flour of virgins art alle, Of whom that Bernard list so wel to write, To thee at my bigynnyng first I calle Thou confort of us wrecches, do me endite Thy maydens deeth (VIII 29–33)

These lines parallel several of Chaucer’s Classical invocations and present an “I” that can only refer to the person who is about to “endite” the story of Cecilia. However, the appeal to Mary as “confort of us wrecches” addresses the Virgin in terms relevant to all sinners, underscoring this solidarity with the plural pronoun “us.” This universal focus is sustained across the next six stanzas of this eight-stanza prayer. Throughout this long middle section, in which the task of writing is never mentioned, the “I” praises Mary and requests her mercy in terms open to any speaker. The fifth stanza, for instance, models a penitential posture similar to that of the “ABC”: 45

Beverly Boyd, “Our Lady According to Geoffrey Chaucer: Translation and Collage,” Florilegium 9 (1987): 147–54 (148).



Praying to Mary  41 Now help, thow meeke and blisful faire mayde, Me, flemed wrecche, in this desert of galle; Thynk on the womman Cananee, that sayde That whelpes eten somme of the crommes alle That from hir lordes table been yfalle; And though that I, unworthy sone of Eve, Be synful, yet accepte my bileve. (VIII 57–63)

The prayer’s openness to appropriation is signaled by its flexible gender references: within this stanza, the speaker both aligns herself with the Canaanite woman of Matthew 15 and describes herself as an “unworthy sone of Eve.” This “I” does not, then, refer to an individual with a particular gender identity but serves as a place-holder for anyone who wishes to use the prayer. The fact that Chaucer did not change the phrase “sone of Eve” after assigning this prologue-tale unit to a female speaker affirms the universality of its requests for mercy, which would be at home in any free-standing prayer. If this prayer initially seemed limited to the voice of a writer about to “endite” Cecilia’s story, that work has been aligned with, and now absorbed into, the universal work of forming a self who is able to receive grace. Several deliberately unspecified references to “work” keep this prayer broadly focused on the transformation of sinful selves rather than the task of translation. Directly after requesting that Mary “accepte my bileve,” the speaker turns from faith to its complement, works: And, for that feith is deed withouten werkis, So for to werken yif me wit and space That I be quit fro thennes that most derk is! (VIII 64–66)

Pointing back to the opening discourse on idleness, this petition is ready to be inhabited by any speaker concerned to perform meritorious good works and to secure salvation. The request that Mary help in the performance of these works is familiar from the “ABC,” as is the anxious allusion to damnation for those whose faith bears no fruit. Only after an additional stanza expanding on this petition for salvation does the speaker turn back to the task at hand, though still without any overt reference to writing: “Now help, for to my werk I wol me dresse” (VIII 77). By foregrounding a broad spiritual understanding of work as a complement to faith, this prayer makes itself available to many voices. The “I” who speaks here is not so much a writer who needs Mary’s help translating a text as a sinner who needs Mary’s grace to perform good works and attain salvation. In this way, despite the prayer’s invocational purpose, its “I” opens out to readers, such that the prayer can be used by anyone who wants to request Mary’s mercy. Not only does the penitential posture scripted in this prayer resemble that of the “ABC,” the Second Nun’s prayer also shows the same emphasis on the circular workings of Mary’s mercy. While Chaucer builds

42  Chaucer’s Prayers

this circularity into the very structure of his “ABC,” in this prologue prayer he offers an explicit theological account of it, drawn from Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin in the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso: Assembled is in thee magnificence With mercy, goodnesse, and with swich pitee That thou, that art the sonne of excellence Nat oonly helpest hem that preyen thee, But often tyme of thy benygnytee Ful frely, er that men thyn help biseche, Thou goost biforn and art hir lyves leche. (VIII 50–56)

Chaucer reverses the order of the two Dantean tercets he borrows here. Dante first describes how Mary’s grace anticipates the act of prayer and then lists her exalted attributes, but Chaucer puts the attributes first and places prevenient grace at the climax of the list, using the construction “swich pitee / That” to present this grace as the ultimate manifestation of Mary’s pity, mercy, and goodness.46 Although Mary’s “benygnytee” is so great that it can pre-empt prayer, it does not make prayer obsolete; this grace comes “er men thyn help biseche” and enables them to seek the help they need. The resonance of these ideas with the “ABC” underscores the openness of this prayer, which reaches beyond the remit of a typical invocation and makes itself available for use by any reader seeking Mary’s grace. This openness to participation is sustained even in the final stanza, where the work of writing at last returns to the foreground. As in the prayer’s beginning, the “I” of this final stanza is aligned with the translator, but now her petitions are addressed to the reader, who is asked to forgive and correct the story’s failings: Yet preye I yow that reden that I write, Foryeve me that I do no diligence This ilke storie subtilly to endite, For both have I the wordes and sentence Of hym that at the seintes reverence The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende, And pray yow that ye wole my werk amende. (VIII 78–84)

The “I” describes her work of writing in terms that make it difficult to distinguish from the work of reading: “I” is the subject of the verb “write” in the first line, but later that verb is reserved for the author of the Latin source. The “I” describes herself as merely following (“folwen”) the “wordes and sentence” of this existing text, as if she is simply reading it. The concluding 46

See Paradiso 33, 13–18. In what follows this text will be quoted from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), and cited in-text by canto and line number.



Praying to Mary  43

request that readers “amende” her work elides the distinction between writing and reading still further, inviting readers to take up her work as their own, and thus participate in its salvific “bisynesse.” This presentation of writing as a collaborative process encourages readers to be full participants in this prayer even when the “I” speaks as the creator of the text. Readers can thus share in the speaker’s work, in both senses of the term: the work of telling the story, and the good works needed for salvation. Those who accept the invitation to inhabit this open “I” will find themselves joining in the writer’s task and sharing in her dependence on Mary’s mercy to accomplish it. A similar sense of solidarity and shared endeavor is established in the Prioress’s prologue prayer. This prologue forms part of a diptych of prayers framing the tale, and the concluding petition to the English child martyr Hugh of Lincoln is especially overt in demanding participation. This final prayer uses plural pronouns to enlist the audience, both the inscribed one of pilgrims and the actual one of readers, in the act of prayer: O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also With cursed Jewes, as it is notable, For it is but a litel while ago, Preye eek for us, we synful folk unstable, That of his mercy God so merciable On us his grete mercy multiplie, For reverence of his mooder Marie. Amen. (VII 684–90)

This prayer adopts the structure of a liturgical collect, with an opening address, a clause describing a relevant attribute of the addressee, a petition, and a final clause that reinforces the petition.47 In keeping with the traditional role of the collect in “collecting” and uniting the various petitions of the congregation, this prayer attempts to unify the audience in a corporate act of devotion. This attempt seems to succeed, as the typically contentious pilgrims are so “sobre […] that wonder was to se” (VII 692) in response to this tale. Their reaction has been interpreted satirically, as Chaucer’s subtle invitation to reject the Prioress’s “urge to conflate history and spark feeling” or to react against the “awe-ful quietism” her tale provokes.48 It is doubtful, however, that a satirical interpretation of the pilgrims’ reactions would have been available to Chaucer’s first readers, especially in light of the particular devotion to Hugh of Lincoln practiced among his associates and patrons.49 Regardless of wheth47

48

49

See Aquinas’s discussion of the structure of the collect in Summa, II II. 83.17. The final clause sets this type of prayer apart from the simpler structure of address, attribute, and petition exemplified in the Agnus Dei and discussed in the Introduction. Respectively: Calabrese, “Performing the Prioress,” 76; and Shannon Gayk, “‘To wondre upon this thyng’: Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 138–56 (152). Evidence for this devotion is presented in Roger Dahood, “The Punishment of the Jews, Hugh of Lincoln, and the Question of Satire in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Viator 36 (2005): 465–91. The question of when satire becomes too subtle to be perceived by the audience is

44  Chaucer’s Prayers

er other elements of the tale point toward a satirical reading, this final prayer offers itself as a script for the audience – both within the fictional pilgrimage framework and presumably outside it – to use in connecting this tale to their own devotional practice. This final moment is not, however, the only one that guides the reader’s response to the tale. While the final prayer is designed to direct readers to a saint’s cult, channeling their reading into an extra-textual practice of devotion, the prologue prayer is designed to involve them in the work of telling this tale, and specifically, in the challenge of using human language to praise Mary. Unlike the final collect, the Prioress’s prologue prayer seems to be a fully individualized utterance; the phrase “quod she” (VII 454) in its first stanza issues an emphatic reminder that the Prioress is speaking these lines and that the work of telling this story is hers.50 Whereas the Second Nun spoke of written work, the Prioress presents her task as one of verbal storytelling (VII 463), and even as singing: “Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye” (VII 487). These comments integrate her prologue more fully than the Second Nun’s into the pilgrimage frame story, in which all tales are delivered orally. Even so, Chaucer’s early readers did not hesitate to excerpt this prologue-tale unit from the Tales, and that practice opens up a new perspective on this tale for modern readers who are accustomed to reading it as part of a larger whole. If the praise and anxiety articulated in this prayer do not have to be read exclusively in terms of the Prioress’s own spirituality as inferred from the General Prologue portrait, then these features can instead be read with attention to how they present the work of telling the tale, and how they position readers as having a stake in that work. Even though the Prioress’s prayer foregrounds the work of storytelling more than does the Second Nun’s, making three distinct references to it across only five stanzas (VII 463, 473, 487), what dominates this prayer is praise of God and the Virgin Mary. From the outset, plural pronouns ensure that the

50

addressed by Lee Patterson in “‘The Living Witnesses of our Redemption’: Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” JMEMS 31.3 (2001): 507–60. While Patterson sees “self-restraint” in Chaucer’s “willingness to allow the tale to speak for itself” (543), he notes that for other readers, such subtlety makes a satirical reading impossible to maintain. Both this “quod she” and, especially, the later one (VII 581), have often been read as attempts by Chaucer to distance himself from the Prioress’s voice; see, e.g., Miriamne Krummel, “Globalizing Jewish Communities: Mapping a Jewish Geography in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50 (2008): 121–42 (135); Richard Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement: The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Corporeal Hagiographics of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” in Textual Bodies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation, ed. Lori Hope Lefkovitz (Albany: State University of New York, 1997), 75–99 (92); Roger Ellis, Patterns of Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 79. Sumner Ferris, however, offers a cogent reconsideration of the “quod she,” proposing that it indicates revision of the prologue-tale sequence for inclusion in the Tales, in his “Chaucer at Lincoln (1387): The Prioress’s Tale as a Political Poem,” ChauR 15.4 (1981): 295–321 (316–17).



Praying to Mary  45

reader participates in this offering of praise: God is called upon as “O Lord, oure Lord” in the first line (VII 453) and later Mary is described as the one who “getest us the lyght […] / To gyden us” (VII 479–80). By involving readers in its acts of veneration, the prayer also implicates them in its anxiety as to whether such praise is possible in human language. This anxiety builds to a climax in the prayer’s final two stanzas. In the penultimate one, borrowed from Dante’s Paradiso by way of Chaucer’s prior borrowing of the same material in the Second Nun’s prologue, the Prioress enumerates Mary’s exalted attributes only to place them beyond the reach of human language: Lady, thy bountee, thy magnificence, Thy vertu and thy grete humylitee Ther may no tonge expresse in no science For somtyme, Lady, er men praye to thee Thou goost biforn of thy benygnytee And getest us the lyght, of thy preyere, To gyden us unto thy Sone so deere. (VII 474–80)

Chaucer’s reliance on his own prior work can be seen in his ordering of the material, which again reverses the order of Dante’s tercets, and in his similar transition between the two sections; here, the conjunction “For” introduces the lines on Mary’s prevenient grace, again implying that this grace is the seminal example of her goodness.51 In this version, though, Chaucer adds the idea that Mary’s goodness is so great as to be inexpressible: the line “Ther may no tonge expresse in no science” is not found in Dante or the Second Nun. By asserting the inability of human language to “expresse” fitting praise of Mary, this line implies that the prayer cannot possibly succeed in its aim of praising her. Any reader who accepts the invitation to participate in this prayer will therefore find herself confronting the problem of articulating the ineffable. Ineffability has rarely been recognized as the central problem of this prologue, however.52 The prayer has instead been read as evidence of the Prioress’s own approach to faith, which is typically described as sentimental and anti-intellectual; she is seen as unequal to the challenge of praising Mary and uninterested in rising to meet it. Such readings place particular weight on the imagery of infancy in the concluding stanza of the prologue prayer:

51

52

Robert Pratt argues that Chaucer relied upon his earlier version when writing the Prioress’s prologue in “Chaucer Borrowing from Himself,” Modern Language Quarterly 7 (1946): 259–64 (259–61). For further discussion, see Howard Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 206–8; and Laurel Broughton, “The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), vol. II, 583–647 (586). A rare exception is Donald Fritz, “The Prioress’s Avowal of Ineptitude,” ChauR 9.2 (1974): 166–81.

46  Chaucer’s Prayers But as a child of twelf month oold, or lesse, That kan unnethes any word expresse, Right so fare I, and therfore I yow preye, Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye. (VII 484–87)

Different readings of the prologue are united in seeing this passage as indicative of the speaker’s spiritual and intellectual immaturity. C. David Benson, for instance, has described the Prioress as “avoid[ing] personal responsibility for [her] art by declaring that without Mary’s help its expression is only that of a year-old child,” while Marie Borroff suggests that she “imaginatively retreats or regresses” to infancy, and Merrall Price diagnoses her with “psychosexual developmental issues” including an oral and anal fixation.53 These interpretations all posit a reader who, rather than joining in the prayer and becoming implicated in the challenge of articulating Mary’s surpassing goodness, maintains critical distance and condemns the Prioress for her linguistic and intellectual shortcomings. They also share the assumption that comparing oneself to an infant is infantilizing in a strictly pejorative sense, amounting to a willed embrace of ignorance and weakness. I propose, however, that recognizing the full extent of this passage’s debt to Dante reveals that this imagery of infancy carries a very different resonance, pointing instead to spiritual ambition. Shortly after the passage on Mary’s prevenient grace that Chaucer borrows twice over, Dante introduces his final moment of inarticulate wonder in terms suggestively similar to the Prioress’s final stanza: Omai sara piu corta mia favella, pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante che bagni ancor la lingua alla mammella. (33, 106–8) [Now, even in the things I do recall my words have no more strength than does a babe wetting its tongue, still at its mother’s breast.]54

This intertextual link, which has been almost entirely overlooked by critics, makes it difficult to read the Prioress’s imagery of infancy as a self-­infantilizing gesture.55 For Dante, the infant’s inarticulacy evokes the overwhelming chal53

54

55

C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 135; Marie Borroff, “‘Loves Hete’ in the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 229–35 (231); Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality,” 199. English translation from The Divine Comedy, in The Portable Dante, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 3–585 (582). Henceforth this translation is cited parenthetically by page number. Boitani notes the intertextual connection but goes on to endorse a typical view of the Prioress as “indeed like a baby […] and incapable of speaking” in “‘His desir,’” 213. Meale, quoting Boitani, begins to explore the potential for this Dantean connection to undermine satirical



Praying to Mary  47

lenge of expressing the transcendent: the speaker finds himself reduced to the state of a pre-verbal child not due to a personal failing, but due to the incommensurability of human language and heavenly reality. Far from implying incompetence, the imagery of infancy that Chaucer found in the Paradiso signifies ambition, for language only becomes inadequate when it reaches beyond the human. Dante’s reference to the breast lends further support to this reading of infancy as ambition, for as Carolyn Collette has shown, nursing at Mary’s breast was a “widespread, popular spiritual trope of enablement” in which humble dependence on Mary was seen as a source of strength.56 Nursing imagery also features in the Prioress’s prayer, which mentions “children […] on the brest soukynge” in its first stanza (VII 457–58) and identifies the child in the final stanza as a nursing infant by specifying his age as “twelf month oold, or lesse” and noting his inability to form words (VII 484-85).57 The image of the infant resonates across the Prioress’s prayer and signals both an embrace of human weakness and a spiritually ambitious desire to transcend that weakness through reliance on divine strength. Chaucer makes this meaning available even to readers who do not hear the Dantean echo, among whom would be his earliest readers in medieval England. He introduces the borrowed image of the inarticulate infant with lines that evoke a humble awareness of human frailty: My konnyng is so wayk, O blisful Queene, For to declare thy grete worthynesse That I ne may the weighte nat susteene. (VII 481–83)

The speaker’s “konnyng” is only presented as “wayk” relative to the Virgin’s “grete worthynesse,” such that the problem lies not in the speaker herself but in the enormous “weighte” she attempts to carry. These lines provide a framework for the subsequent comparison to “a child of twelf month oold, or lesse, / That kan unnethes any word expresse” (VII 484–85), signaling that the speaker is limited not by her own weakness or immaturity but by the fundamental lack of proportion between human abilities and transcendent realities. This lack of proportion is the same difficulty Dante faces in Paradiso 33 and can only be overcome through the supernatural aid requested in this prayer’s final line: “Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye” (VII 487). This prayer’s final stanza, then, is not a gesture of self-infantilization made by one particular Pri-

56

57

readings of the prologue in “Women’s Piety and Women’s Power,” 55–56; see also Murton, “The Prioress’s Prologue.” Carolyn Collette, “Chaucer’s Discourse of Mariology: Gaining the Right to Speak,” in Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr., ed. Robert R. Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 127–47 (135). See the etymological notes to the OED, s.v. “infant” (n.). Chaucer’s Middle English gave him no specific word for this early stage of life; the MED shows that “babe” (n.) and “child” (n.) referred to broader age ranges than they do now, while “infancie” (n.) and “infantil” (adj.) were not current until well into the fifteenth century.

48  Chaucer’s Prayers

oress, but a gesture of humility before the transcendent in which any member of Chaucer’s audience might participate. Those who align themselves with the “I” of this prologue prayer join in offering praise to God and Mary while acknowledging the limitations inherent in human language as a medium of such praise. To perform this script, moreover, is to be formed into a certain kind of reader for the tale to follow: one who is both committed to praising Mary and keenly aware of the ultimate impossibility of doing so. The prologue prayer thus primes readers to bring to the tale a sense of anxiety about the capacity of language to serve as a medium of Mary’s praise. This anxiety is emphatically not cultivated by the Second Nun, whose prologue prayer is directly followed by an etymological study of Cecilia’s name that presents language as replete with spiritual significance that humans can access and interpret. “Cecilia” signifies many things, from “‘hevenes lilie,’ / For pure chaastnesse of virginitee” to “‘the wey to blynde,’ / For she ensample was by good techyne” (VIII 87–88, 92–93), and each new way of breaking the name into component morphemes yields a new perspective on the saint’s holiness. The prayer that precedes this etymological analysis takes for granted the ability of human language to speak of the transcendent, but it is not entirely without anxiety. In the Second Nun’s prologue prayer, the project of forming a reader for the tale focuses on the problem of physicality. The Second Nun: Physicality and Immanence The Second Nun’s Tale is set in a heroic world of early Christianity where the divine is immanently present to believers; Elizabeth Robertson has shown that this tale presents material objects as “conduits of the divine” that catalyze spiritual transformation within the tale’s human characters.58 The flower wreaths worn by Cecilia and Valerian after the latter’s conversion are one example, emitting a perpetual “soote savour” that initiates the conversion of Valerian’s brother Tiburce by instantly transforming his heart (VIII 229, 251–52). Valerian’s own conversion also proceeds through sensory experience, for although he is shown a book containing a basic affirmation of faith, its propositional content seems less significant than the fact that the book is held by a shining “oold man” and inscribed with letters of gold (VIII 201–02). The tale thus presents a world in which, according to Robertson, “the divine is wondrously apprehended through the senses rather than comprehended by the mind.”59 Along with this divine immanence, however, comes a suspicion of anything that is merely physical, such as the idols of the Roman persecu-

58

59

Elizabeth Robertson, “Apprehending the Divine and Choosing to Believe: Voluntarist Free Will in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale,” ChauR 46.2 (2011): 111–130 (113); see also a similar reading in Katherine Little, “Images, Texts, and Exegetics in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale,” JMEMS 36.1 (2006): 103–34 (118–25). Robertson, “Apprehending,” 112.



Praying to Mary  49

tors. On trial before the prefect Almachius, Cecilia dismisses his gods as mere stones and castigates him for failing to perceive them as such: “Ther lakketh no thyng to thyne outter yen That thou n’art blynd; for thyng that we seen alle That it is stoon – that men may wel espyen – That ilke stoon a god thow wolt it calle I rede thee, lat thyn hand upon it falle And taste it wel, and stoon thou shalt it fynde, Syn that thou seest nat with thyne eyen blynde.” (VIII 498–501)

Almachius’s peculiar kind of blindness means that he both can and cannot see, physically seeing the statue but not perceiving its inert materiality; Cecilia suggests that he have recourse to another sense, touch, to help him realize its lack of any immanent spiritual presence.60 The idol exemplifies a brute physical reality that threatens to ensnare human beings in material things, alienating them from the divine rather than bringing them into contact with it. The tale’s ambivalent view of the physical centers on the human body. At the end, when Cecilia is martyred, her body becomes the site of a prolonged miracle in which she lives for three days with her “nekke ycorven” (VIII 533), continuing to teach her followers. Her body’s miraculous endurance, which parallels the miraculous permanence of the flower wreaths that never rot or fade (VIII 228), illustrates the triumph of divine power over physical frailty and makes her body into another conduit of divine presence. At the tale’s beginning, however, Cecilia’s body was a site of anxiety. The story begins with her wedding, a moment that would traditionally initiate her into a life defined by the bodily experiences of sex and childbearing, but Cecilia asks God to preserve her chastity: And whil the organs maden melodie, To God alone in herte thus sang she: “O Lorde, my soule and eek my body gye Unwemmed, lest that I confounded be.” (VIII 134–37)

Cecilia’s prayer evokes a special, exclusive intimacy with God that is not compatible with human marriage. Much as the private song of her prayer clashes against the organ music at her wedding, the hair shirt that she wears against her skin forms a stark contrast to her outward bridal finery (VIII 132–33). Cecilia makes no overt protest against her wedding but instead transforms the institution of marriage from within, re-directing her husband’s desire for her body into a desire for understanding that leads to his conversion.61 The tale thus takes the threat of sexual desire seriously and responds to that threat by 60

61

On the ambiguity of Almachius’s sensory perception, see Little, “Images, Texts, and Exegetics,” 122. Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, 188–94.

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channeling desire toward the divine. Urban similarly converts the sexual to the spiritual in the prayer he utters upon meeting Valerian. Addressing Christ, he describes Valerian not as Cecilia’s husband but as her offspring: “The fruyt of thilke seed of chastitee / That thou has sowe in Cecile, taak to thee!” (VIII 193–94). Instead of consummating her marriage and bearing children, Cecilia carries a “seed of chastitee” that bears spiritual “fruyt” in the form of converts. Urban then describes Valerian’s conversion: “For thilke spouse that she took but now Ful lyk a fiers leoun, she sendeth here, As meke as evere was any lomb, to yow!” (VIII 197–99)

Conversion is so dramatic a transformation that it can only be described as a change in body, from fierce lion to meek lamb; having redefined sexual reproduction as spiritual conversion, Urban now turns back to the physical to present conversion as re-embodiment. The tale thus balances a suspicion of the body against a sense of its potential – realized most fully in Cecilia’s martyred body – to figure forth divine power and become a locus of God’s presence on earth. The Second Nun’s prologue prayer engages with both elements of this ambivalent attitude toward human embodiment; indeed, part of its work is to form a reader who shares this attitude. A strongly negative view of the body, emphasizing its dangerous potential to alienate humanity from God, is expressed in the penultimate stanza of the prayer, just before the concluding address to the reader. The body is here rejected as a prison, in terms that anticipate Cecilia’s asceticism: And of thy light my soule in prison lighte, That troubled is by the contagioun Of my body, and also by the wighte Of erthely lust and fals affeccioun. (VIII 71–74)

The wordplay on “light” creates an equivalence between Mary’s illumination and the weightless freedom of the spirit; the suggestion of a soul soaring upwards is starkly contrasted with the gross “contagioun” of the body and the “wighte” of its lusts. While this stanza prepares readers to share Cecilia’s scorn of bodily desires, the prayer as a whole does not present human embodiment as only or necessarily a hindrance to faith. Its opening stanzas, focused on the Incarnation, offer a positive view of human physicality that anticipates the tale’s portrayal of material things as conduits of the divine. The incarnate Christ is the supreme example of such a conduit, and by extension, so is the body of his mother Mary, within which Christ took on human flesh.62 As it praises Mary for her physical role in the Incarnation, this prayer draws read62

On the liminal status of Mary’s body, see Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement,” 75–85.



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ers into an optimistic perspective on human embodiment as a locus of divine immanence, which in turn prepares them for the climactic miracle of the tale. Drawing on the first lines of Dante’s Paradiso 33, the prologue prayer initially presents the Incarnation as a logical paradox: “Thow Mayde and Mooder, doghter of thy Sone” (VIII 36). In Paradiso 33, the line “Virgine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio” (1–2) initiates a set of tightly-constructed paradoxes through which Dante evokes the Incarnation’s dizzying incomprehensibility, but Chaucer’s next line turns away from the source to focus on the actual human body “[i]n whom that God for bountee chees to wone” (VIII 37–38). The physical reality of this indwelling is then explored with arresting physical concreteness: “no desdeyn the Makere hadde of kynde / His Sone in blood and flessh to clothe and wynde” (41–42). Describing the Incarnation with imagery of clothing is traditional, but Chaucer enriches the image by combining “clothe” with “wynde,” a verb used both for swaddling a baby and for shrouding a corpse, such that the image evokes the full span of human life.63 “Wynde” also creates a sense of temporal extension: to clothe is a discrete action, but to wind requires multiple gestures and thus presents Christ’s becoming human as a process unfolding in time. This idea of process is further developed in the next stanza’s adaptation of the Matins hymn Quem Terra:64 Withinne the cloistre blissful of thy sydis Took mannes shap the eterneel love and pees That of the tryne compas lord and gyde is. (VIII 43–45)

Whereas the Latin hymn opens by presenting Christ as the lord of the “tryne compas,” Chaucer instead foregrounds the spatial and temporal parameters of the Incarnation: his stanza begins with the “cloistre” of Mary’s sides as the physical place where God “took mannes shap,” a verb phrase that again implies a temporal process. Abstract language describing the divine nature – “eterneel love and pees” – comes only after this concrete evocation of a body taking form inside a womb. Chaucer’s foregrounding of visceral imagery aligns these stanzas with the “Incarnational poetic” that Cristina Cervone has traced in Middle English writings, in which certain texts “encod[e] the concept of the Incarnation within linguistic and rhetorical forms.”65 By presenting the Incarnation not primarily as a dazzling paradox but as an insistently phys-

63

64

65

Cristina Cervone identifies “cloth, clothing, or enwrapment” as one of three “image groups” that recur in Middle English writings characterized by an “Incarnational poetic”; see Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writings and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 4–5. The Latin text reads “Quem terra, pontus, aethera / colunt, adorant, praedicant / trinam regentem machinam, / claustrum Mariae bajulat.” See Sherry Reames, “The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), vol. I, 491–527 (503). Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 3.

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ical and temporal event, this prayer figures forth, in its very language, the idea of the Word made flesh. The Second Nun’s prayer thus represents human embodiment as both tainted by sin and hallowed by the Incarnation. Moreover, because both views are placed within a script for prayer, it does more than simply point ahead to a similar tension in the tale: the prayer invites readers to align themselves with the “I” of the prayer and to participate in both its celebration and denigration of the body. Keeping distinctively invocational elements to a minimum in order to facilitate this participation, the prayer offers each reader a subject-position to occupy with respect to his or her own body, leading him or her to value physicality inasmuch as it is shared by Christ and to dismiss it inasmuch as it represents alienation from the divine. Inhabiting this prayer means adopting these conflicting attitudes and sharing imaginatively and affectively in the tension about embodiment that will define the subsequent narrative. Readers formed by this prayer are prepared to celebrate God’s immanent power in the miraculous endurance of Cecilia’s physical body, and at the same time, to celebrate the triumphant release from physicality that comes in her eventual death. In this way, the Second Nun’s prologue prayer scripts a performance that is at once devotional and literary: even as it trains readers in how to view their own bodies, it also prepares them to encounter Cecilia’s martyred body and to grasp the ambivalent statement about physicality that this tale makes. The Prioress: Language and Ineffability While the concerns about physicality emphasized by the Second Nun also resonate in The Prioress’s Tale, the focal point of the latter is language.66 This tale features a boy who praises Mary by singing the Latin liturgical hymn Alma redemptoris mater despite his inability to understand the meaning of the words and, ultimately, despite having had his throat cut. Whereas the prologue prayer shows anxiety as to whether human language can articulate transcendent truth, this boy has no doubt about his own capacity to praise the Virgin. Even though he cannot parse the Alma, simply knowing that it was written “in reverence / Of Cristes mooder” (VII 537–38) is enough for him to feel confident about singing it in Mary’s praise, as he explains in his post-mortem speech: “This welle of mercy, Cristes mooder sweete, I loved alwey, as after my konnynge; And whan that I my lyf sholde forlete, To me she cam, and bad me for to synge This anthem verraily in my deyynge.” (VII 656–60)

66

For discussion of the Prioress’s concern with physicality, see Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality”; and Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement.”



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The phrase “as after my konnynge” concedes that his knowledge was limited, but this limitation is mentioned only to be dismissed, for Mary’s command that the boy continue his song after death indicates that it has been pleasing to her despite his ignorance of Latin. The tale thus models a wholehearted embrace of linguistic inability that many critics have read against late-medieval controversies over the rote learning of Latin prayers, a practice that could be seen either as an act of pious innocence or of culpable ignorance.67 Critics tend to align the boy with one or the other of these possibilities in accordance with how they read the Prioress’s own piety.68 These readings, however, overlook the fact that a childish ignorance of Latin is not the narrative’s main example of linguistic inability. What makes this story worth telling is not that a boy sings a hymn he cannot parse grammatically, but that he continues to sing it after his throat has been cut and his vocal cords severed. It is Mary who miraculously enables the boy to resume his song after death, laying “a greyn upon [his] tongue” (VII 662) as if to emphasize her agency in placing the song back in his mouth. When he explains this miracle in his post-mortem speech, the boy traces Mary’s power in this matter back to Christ himself: But Jesu Crist, as ye in bookes fynde, Wil that his glorie laste and be in mynde, And for the worship of his Mooder deere Yet may I synge O Alma loude and cleere (VII 652–55)

In this miracle, divine grace overcomes human weakness: Christ wills that he and his mother should be praised, and so, even in this extreme case, he enables the boy to accomplish that will and give fitting praise. This climactic gift of praise responds directly to the anxiety about language that was cultivated in the prologue prayer. While the prayer draws on Dante to evoke the human inability to speak of ineffable holiness, registering uncertainty as to whether it is possible for any human being to praise Mary adequately, the tale spectacularly resolves that uncertainty: it shows that no human weak67

68

See, e.g., Barr, “Religious Practice in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale”; J. Stephen Russell, “Song and the Ineffable in the Prioress’s Tale,” ChauR 33.2 (1998): 176–89; Katherine Zieman, “Reading, Singing, and Understanding: Constructions of the Literacy of Women Religious in Late Medieval England,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 97–120. Readings emphasizing ignorance and facile sentimentality include Orth, “The Problem of the Performative”; Spector, “Empathy and Enmity”; and Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality.” The main defender of the Prioress’s piety is Mary Madeleva, “Chaucer’s Nuns,” in A Lost Language and Other Essays on Chaucer (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1951), 27–60 (33–42), but see also Timothy Spence’s defense of her affectivity as rhetorically decorous in “The Prioress’s Oratio ad Mariam and Medieval Prayer Composition,” in Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook, ed. Scott Troyan (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 63–90. Helen Barr offers evidence for both readings and argues that Chaucer makes it impossible to choose between them in “Religious Practice in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.”

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ness, not even death, can compromise the act of praise, because God himself makes this act possible. This resolution, moreover, is anticipated within the prologue prayer itself. Its first stanza, paraphrasing Psalm 8, places the initiative in acts of praise not with the human speaker but with the transcendent addressee. The passive grammatical constructions of this stanza present humans as the mouthpieces of praise that begins with God: For noght oonly thy laude precious Parfourned is by men of dignitee, But by the mouth of children thy bountee Parfourned is, for on the brest soukynge Somtyme shewen they thyn heriynge. (VII 455–59)

Praise is “parfourned” by human voices, which are positioned as its instruments or vehicles rather than its originators. Even the one active construction in these lines, “shewen they thyn heriynge,” limits the activity of the nursing babies to that of showing God’s praise, though Chaucer could have used “heriynge” as a verb to signify an active production of praise. The stanza thus suggests that God’s praise is a given reality, existing outside and above the human beings who serve as channels for its expression. Indeed, the first two lines – “O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous / Is in this large world ysprad” (VII 453–54) – present God’s name as already spread across the earth, even before the stanza has introduced any mouths to speak it. With this emphasis on divine initiative comes a radical leveling of ordinary human hierarchies, as “men of dignitee” and suckling infants are presented as equal mouthpieces of God’s praise.69 In this way, the prologue prayer presents praise, much like the grace requested a few stanzas later, as prevenient: just as Mary “goost biforn” human prayer, obtaining in advance the “lyght” that will enable her petitioners to pray (VII 478–79), the first stanza describes God as pre-emptively putting his own praise in human mouths so that they can honor him. The performance of praise evoked in this stanza is almost always read negatively, as an embrace of passivity that “elides human agency” and indulges in “mindless ventriloquism.”70 Stephen Russell, for instance, reads the Prioress’s statements of ineffability as abdications of responsibility and argues that the act of “performing laud” is the opposite of praising God; having accepted that no one can truly praise God, one instead performs laud in order to as-

69

70

In my reading, these lines do not suggest a contrast between men and babies, as some critics have asserted; see Borroff, “‘Loves Hete,’” 230, 233; Zieman, “Reading, Singing, and Understanding,” 107. Respectively: Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement,” 88; and Patterson, “‘Living Witnesses,’” 514. See also Louise Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and The Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 69–115 (90–94); Zieman, “Reading, Singing, and Understanding,” 107; Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality,” 205.



Praying to Mary  55

sert a fruitless desire or intention to praise.71 Louise Fradenburg finds that the foregrounding of divine agency in this stanza and throughout the prologue means that “the speaking subject is scarcely a speaking subject at all.”72 These readings assume that dependence on the divine amounts to a subordination of the human, but the text does not support that assumption. Just after the stanza adapted from Psalm 8, the Prioress begins her own offering of praise with the words “Wherfore in laude, as I best kan or may” (VII 460); the conjunction “Wherfore” presents this decision to offer “laude” to the best of her human abilities as a direct consequence of what she has just said about God being the source of his own praise. What this apparently illogical transition implies is that her agency and God’s are not locked in a zero-sum game in which divine action leaves no room for human action. The emphasis on God’s agency does not negate human efforts so much as it brings assurance that these efforts will be met with – or rather, anticipated and enabled by – divine help. If God can make good the deficiency of language even in the extreme case of a baby who cannot yet speak, then he can equip adults who want to articulate praise, whether those adults be “men of dignitee,” or the Prioress, or the reader. Those who utter prayers of praise can rely on their addressee to help them do so, and indeed to already be helping them before they say a word. The Prioress’s opening stanza thus points to prevenient divine agency as the solution to the problem of articulating praise in language. The same solution is represented within the tale, and this congruence between prologue prayer and narrative action is underscored by a verbal echo. A narratorial aside just before the miracle points back to the prologue’s first stanza: O grete God, that parfournest thy laude By mouth of innocentz, lo, heere thy myght! […] Ther he with throte ykorven lay upright, He Alma redemptoris gan to synge So loude that al the place gan to rynge. (VII 607–08, 611–13)

The direct address to God and the verb “parfournest” link this passage to the opening paraphrase of Psalm 8, reasserting its point about divine initiative in human praise. Instead of babies the Prioress here mentions “innocentz,” a broader category that accommodates both the boy and the infants of her opening stanza and confirms the equivalence of the two: neither the dead boy nor the pre-verbal infants can speak, but God performs his “laude” through them nonetheless. This timely reminder of the prologue prayer reinforces its formative work of preparing readers for the tale. The prayer draws the reader into a subject-position defined by anxiety about the limitations of language but 71 72

Russell, “Song and the Ineffable,” 183–84. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism,” 94.

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also by confidence in pre-emptive divine assistance. The reader who inhabits this subject-position has a stake in the tale’s central miracle, a moment that resolves linguistic anxieties with a dramatic affirmation of God’s power to enable fitting praise from anyone, regardless of whether they know Latin or can even speak at all. The Prioress provides several more overt models of reader response, such as the affective outpouring by the abbot and monks within the tale (VII 670–76) and the final prayer (VII 684–90), but the prologue prayer is a subtler and more powerful means of involving readers in the narrative. Inhabiting the enabling passivity of that opening prayer primes readers to be moved by a miracle that affirms how the weakness of human language is made good by God. The prologue prayers of the Second Nun and Prioress have substantial similarities in the ways in which they form a reader: focusing respectively on physicality and language, both of them foreground a sense of human limitation and failure, balanced by faith in God’s power to overcome these weaknesses and indeed to transform them into manifestations of his glory. In so doing the prayers instill a mixture of anxiety and hope that each tale will resolve spectacularly in its final miraculous event. My focus on these similarities differs from the contrastive approach taken in previous studies that have examined these works side-by-side, typically casting the Second Nun as an intellectual foil to the Prioress’s sentimental piety.73 My reading indeed positions the Prioress as the more intellectual of the two, because her prologue engages with more ambitious questions about the capacities of human language. The Second Nun’s etymological excursus implies a certain confidence in the ability of language to convey spiritual truth, but this discussion of language is kept separate from the task of prayer; the prayer itself simply assumes that language is an adequate tool for speaking to and about God. In questioning that assumption, the Prioress’s prayer shows a sense of self-consciousness that more fully responds to the ideas about language found in the Dantean source common to both prayers. As Chaucer engages more deeply with the ineffability topos in Dante’s final canto, he crafts a prayer that both poses a question about human language and answers that question by emphasizing the pre-emptive divine agency that operates in prayer. This idea, also present in the “ABC,” finds its fullest and most explicit articulation in the Prioress’s prologue. If the “ABC” showed that petitions for mercy are always already being granted, because mercy is needed even for a petition to be made, then the Prioress’s prologue shows that praise is always already being offered, because humans could not offer it unless God or Mary put it in their mouths. These prayers emphasize the generative circularity of prayer as an utterance: 73

See, e.g., Quinn, “The Shadow of Chaucer’s Jews,” 306–19; Zieman, “Reading, Singing, and Understanding,” 106–11; Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style, 131–46; Jim Rhodes, Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 179–210.



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a prayer does not travel in a straight line from human speaker to divine addressee, but begins with the addressee and works to transform the speaker. A pre-emptive gift of mercy or praise is what enables human beings to ask for that very mercy or offer that very praise; in this way, the act of prayer does not express what a person has to say to God, so much as it forms a person who is able to say what should be said. Instead of viewing Chaucer’s Marian prayers as theological statements to be evaluated for their degree of insight, much less as speeches to be probed for clues about the psychology of fictional pilgrims, this chapter has approached them as public interiorities for readers to inhabit and has examined what that inhabiting entails. In the case of the “ABC,” it entails praying rather than reading the text, which in turn means participating in the circular dynamics of prayer as an utterance that is always pre-empted by its addressee and requires continual reiteration. In the case of the two prologue prayers, inhabiting the “I” means taking up a subject-position that is not only devotional, but also literary: readers who perform these prayers are both practicing Marian piety and preparing themselves for the work of interpreting the tales. Each of these prayers forms a reader for its tale, inviting an imaginative and affective investment in problems of language or embodiment that the tales will miraculously resolve. At the same time, the two prologue prayers involve readers in the work of storytelling itself. The Second Nun’s prayer explicitly asks readers to “amende” the tale and positions its reading and its writing as forms of salvific “bisynesse” (VIII 84). The Prioress, meanwhile, emphasizes that her tale is told “in [Mary’s] reverence” and even calls it a “song” (VII 473, 487), conflating it both with the Alma redemptoris and with the Psalmic opening of her prayer. To join in this prologue prayer, then, is to join in an act of praise to Mary that extends throughout the entire tale. Praying these prayers is part of telling and reading these stories; they engage readers on both a devotional and a literary level at once and permit no separation between the two. Chaucer’s use of prayer to guide readerly involvement is not limited to explicitly pious works, however. The next chapter turns to narratives of varying degrees of religious alterity and examines how Chaucer uses the open, participatory voice of prayer not only to script Christian piety, but also to enable encounters with religious difference.

2 Praying in Suffering This chapter examines how Chaucer uses acts of prayer to offer readers imaginative routes into religious alterity in The Man of Law’s Tale, The Knight’s Tale, and The Franklin’s Tale. The first of these tales is typically regarded as one of Chaucer’s “religious tales” and the other two as pagan “philosophical romances,” but these familiar critical categories obscure the fact that both piety and philosophy are important concerns in all three of these narratives.1 Acts of prayer and philosophical speeches feature prominently in each of them, and this chapter traces how Chaucer juxtaposes these two types of utterance and contends that prayer plays the more central role in his creative engagement with religious alterity. Chaucer’s interest in representing different religious worlds is widely recognized, but critical discussions have focused almost exclusively on his pagan settings and have privileged philosophical discourses as Chaucer’s primary representations of non-Christian belief. Rhetoric of intellectual freedom and experimentation has dominated these critical readings: pagan settings are described as “free of the specific assumptions and prohibitions of Christianity,” or as affording Chaucer an opportunity to re-open questions that had been “foreclosed by Christian dogma” in his own world.2 It is remarkable, however, how little Chaucer actually does with this freedom to depart from Christian tenets. All three of the tales addressed in this chapter, Christian and pagan alike, pose the same question of why a supreme providential deity allows innocent people to suffer, and all three answer it in the same 1

2

A notable exception that examines the three tales together, along with Troilus, is Helen Phillips, “The Matter of Chaucer,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 65–80. The category of “religious tales” is discussed in Derek Pearsall, “Chaucer’s Religious Tales: A Question of Genre,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 11–19, and the term “philosophical romances” is used in A.C. Spearing, “Classical Antiquity in Chaucer’s Chivalric Romances,” in Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Ridyard (Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South, 1999), 53–73 (55). Quotations from, respectively, Phillips, “The Matter of Chaucer,” 68, and Spearing, “Classical Antiquity,” 53. The association of pagan narratives with intellectual freedom is a critical commonplace; see also, e.g., Robert Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel: Love and Fortune in The Knight’s Tale,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 31 (2005): 59–82 (62); Melissa Rack, “‘I nam no divinistre’: Heterodoxy and Disjunction in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Medieval Perspectives 25 (2010): 89–102 (101); Brenda Schildgen, Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2001), 2–12.

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orthodox but unsatisfying way, pointing out that humans cannot expect to understand God’s mysterious purposes. Chaucer does not avoid the Christian notion of a providential deity in The Knight’s Tale or The Franklin’s Tale, nor does he limit himself to complacent affirmation of it in The Man of Law’s Tale; indeed, arguably he “goes further and risks more” when he raises questions about providence in this Christian setting.3 I propose that the different religious worlds of these tales come into focus not primarily in how the characters think, but in how they pray. In prayer, characters set aside the pursuit of rational explanations for their suffering and instead turn to the divine in search of hope and redress. The most obvious way in which prayer might relieve suffering is by successfully petitioning for release from it, but in each of these tales, Chaucer shows that more is at stake in prayer than a mere request. The act of making a request involves positioning oneself in relation to the divine, and this relationship takes distinctive forms in each of these three religious worlds. Chaucer represents diverse ways in which prayer can provide an alternative to the sterility of philosophical discourse and enable characters to confront their suffering constructively. At the same time, he also uses acts of prayer to draw readers into that confrontation. To read these tales is to imagine what it would be like to face pain and injustice in the terms available to an Athenian, an ancient Breton, or a late Roman Christian. This imaginative work can be undertaken even by a reader who would never consider actually praying to a god such as Mars, as long as the reader is willing to align herself with the “I” of prayer and to imagine what it would feel like to be that “I.” Acts of prayer do this work of drawing readers inside remote religious worlds not only in pagan narratives but also in The Man of Law’s Tale; its heroine is a Christian, but she lives in a distant past of persecution and miracles. To inhabit her prayers is to project oneself into the devotional practice of an early hero of the faith. In foregrounding prayers, Chaucer invites readers to engage with the unfamiliar religious worlds of these tales not by evaluating truth-claims but by participating in devotional practice. Readers who accept this invitation will find themselves imagining their way into various forms of religious alterity and experiencing them as lived realities in which they can share.

The Man of Law’s Tale: Explanations and Encounters While all of these tales juxtapose philosophical speeches against petitionary prayers, in The Man of Law’s Tale each kind of utterance is associated with a particular speaking voice: respectively, the narrator and the heroine, Custance. A large proportion of Custance’s direct discourse consists of prayer, and the narrator’s longest interventions in the tale are speeches explaining the work3

A.C. Spearing, “Narrative Voice: The Case of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” New Literary History 32.3 (2001): 715–46 (741).



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ings of divine providence. Much prior criticism has emphasized the contrast between the humble piety of Custance’s petitions and the self-important bombast of the narrator’s remarks, often arguing that the tale is meant as a satire on the Man of Law.4 The difficulty with this reading is that the tale does not present readers with a unified narratorial figure who can be treated as a character comparable to Custance, as A.C. Spearing has shown; the narratorial voice comes in and out of focus, serving more as a local effect than as a consistent presence throughout the tale.5 Even if the tale did present a sustained and coherent narratorial figure, moreover, the relationship of this figure to the Man of Law described in the General Prologue would remain debatable, because this tale’s introduction and prologue raise questions about its integration into the Canterbury frame.6 In what follows I use the term “narrator” with due caution, as a “shorthand expression” for the local impression of a speaking voice in this tale, an impression that is strongest in moments of sustained commentary on the narrative action.7 I read these moments alongside Custance’s prayers, reframing the contrast others have drawn between the Man of Law and Custance as a contrast between two kinds of discourse: rational and devotional. While the tale affirms the validity of both, it shows rationalist explanations of how providence governs earthly events to be sterile in comparison to prayerful encounters with God in the midst of those events. No speech can explain why Custance suffers so much, but her prayers render that question irrelevant. For Custance, the act of prayer itself transforms suffering into triumph even before any petitions are answered, because prayer enables her to treat suffering as an opportunity to align her life with Christ’s. The question of why God allows the innocent to suffer underlies this entire tale but is only once posed explicitly, by a minor character. The Northumbrian 4

5 6

7

Satiric readings that emphasize Custance as a foil to the narrator include Ann Astell, “Apostrophe, Prayer, and the Structure of Satire in The Man of Law’s Tale,” SAC 13 (1991): 81–97; and Gania Barlow, “A Thrifty Tale: Narrative Authority and the Competing Values of The Man of Law’s Tale,” ChauR 44.4 (2010): 397–420. Other satiric readings include Elizabeth Allen, “Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble with Reading,” English Literary History 64.3 (1997): 627–55 (640–41, 647); Graham Caie, “Innocent III’s De Miseria as a Gloss on The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100.2 (1999): 175–85; and Kathryn Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” ChauR 33.4 (1999): 409–22. A few critics seek to vindicate the Man of Law against satiric readings; see George Keiser, “The Spiritual Heroism of Chaucer’s Custance,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 121–36; and Gerald Morgan, “Chaucer’s Man of Law and the Argument for Providence,” RES 61.248 (2010): 1–33. Spearing, “Narrative Voice.” Several features of the tale’s introduction raise doubts as to whether it was designed for a Man of Law, or indeed for inclusion in the Canterbury Tales; see discussion in A.S.G. Edwards, “Critical Approaches to The Man of Law’s Tale,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 85–94; and Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, 107, 116–17. Spearing, “Narrative Voice,” 736.

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constable whom Custance converted to Christianity wonders aloud at his new God’s purposes when the innocent Custance and her infant son are condemned to death by exposure on the sea: “O myghty God, if that it be thy wille, Sith thou art rightful juge, how may it be That thou wolt suffren innocentz to spille, And wikked folke regne in prosperitee?” (II 813–16)

His plea for an explanation is left hanging, never answered by any voice within the world of the tale. The only semblance of an explanation comes in the narrator’s first long speech about providence, prompted by the first of Custance’s two sojourns on the sea. He remarks that, “as knoweth clerkis” (II 480), God often Dooth thyng for certein ende that ful derk is To mannes wit, that for oure ignorance Ne konne noght knowe his prudent purveiance. (II 481–83)

These lines acknowledge the question of what “ende” Custance’s innocent suffering could possibly serve, but only to side-step it: “mannes wit” cannot expect to grasp something as lofty as God’s “prudent purveiance.” This response, then, is not so much an answer as a declaration that the question is unanswerable. The context of these lines strongly discourages further speculation, for this hint of a “why” question is buried amongst a litany of “how” questions about the practicalities of Custance’s survival. Pondering how Custance escaped being killed at the Syrian wedding feast, how she avoided drowning, and how she had enough to eat and drink during the three years she spent on the sea, the narrator gives each of these questions the same answer: God made it possible (II 470–504). Throughout his speech, repeated appeals to Biblical precedent establish a pattern in which divine providence always preserves the faithful, and a heavy use of rhetorical questions emphasizes the obviousness of this pattern. Those who wonder how Custance survived need only ask themselves questions such as, “Who kepte Jonas in the fisshes mawe?” (II 486). The effect of this passage, and a parallel one later in the narrative (II 932–45), is to provide a definitive account of providence that rules out all further questions by implying that everyone already knows, or should know, all that there is to say on this subject. This discourse is heavy-handed, but the explanation it offers is logically sound and compels assent from readers who affirm the premises on which it is based, namely a belief in God’s direct providential intervention in history, which Helen Cooney calls “immanent justice,” and a belief in Scripture as a reliable witness to that history.8 The fact that Custance herself understands 8

Helen Cooney, “Wonder and Immanent Justice in the Man of Law’s Tale,” ChauR 33.3 (1999): 264–87 (267).



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divine providence in the same terms shows that the narrator’s account cannot be dismissed as mere grandstanding by a self-important Man of Law. Mining her own life for precedents of God’s saving power, Custance reasons that the God who defended her from a false murder charge will also protect her at sea: “He that me kepte fro the false blame While I was on the lond amonges yow, He kan me kepe from harm and eek fro shame In salte see, althogh I se noght how. As strong as evere he was, he is yet now.” (II 827–31)

Custance does not “se […] how” God will protect her, but much as in the narrator’s earlier speech, questions of “how” are subsumed in a confident assertion of God’s power to save, as proven by past examples. Both of the two main speaking voices in this tale thus articulate the same belief in providence as immanent justice, and both argue from this belief that it is reasonable to expect God’s continued protection of the innocent Custance. Their speeches offer a coherent account of how providence guides the course of her life, and even though this account stops short of explaining the purpose behind her sufferings, it provides a reason for doing so: God’s purposes are beyond human comprehension. The answer to every question about the mechanics of Custance’s survival is simply, God made it so, and the answer to the question of why she must suffer is simply, God knows. The search for explanations leads to God and ends abruptly when it reaches him. The tale’s account of providence is both rationally coherent and unimpeachably orthodox, but it remains deeply unsatisfying. It fails to engage even with the anguish the constable feels on behalf of Custance, much less with the agony Custance herself endures. Custance pushes beyond this shallow explanation in moments of prayer, in which she confronts the reality of her suffering and treats it as an opportunity to encounter the divine. Her focus on encounter is evident even in her most urgently petitionary prayer, spoken aloud before the Northumbrian court that has condemned her to execution on a false murder charge. Custance asks for rescue in her final words, but spends most of the prayer humbly approaching the throne of God: “Immortal God, that savedest Susanne Fro false blame, and thou, merciful mayde, Marie I meene, doghter to Seint Anne, Bifore whos child angeles synge Osanne, If I be giltlees of this felonye, My socour be, for ellis shal I dye!” (II 639–44)

Adopting the familiar liturgical structure of direct address followed by relative clause, she invokes God specifically as the savior of Susanna, who also faced “false blame.” Unlike the precedents listed in the tale’s discursive explanations of providence, however, this one does not prove a general point

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about God (God saved Jonah, so he is capable of saving Custance); in prayer, the appeal to precedent allows Custance to make a specific, urgent claim on God’s character (You are the one who saved Susanna, so save me). As she calls upon God for “socour,” Custance imagines him surrounded by his heavenly court and a host of singing angels, envisaging a spectacle of holy splendor that makes the power of any earthly court seem negligible. Her appeal to this higher court, in which God is judge and Mary is Custance’s advocate, implies judgment on the pagan court that would falsely condemn her.9 In this way, even before she utters her petition in the closing line, Custance’s prayer enables an empowering encounter with God and his saints that affirms her as vindicated before the only court that truly matters. God answers by vindicating her before the earthly court as well, smiting her accuser and issuing a counter-accusation: “Thou hast desclaundred, giltelees, / The doghter of hooly chirche in heigh presence” (II 674–75). The smiting hand answers the petition for “socour,” while the voice affirms the more fundamental concerns of Custance’s prayer, her innocence before God and his “heigh presence” with her. The prayer’s miraculous answer saves her life and prompts the conversion of the Northumbrians, but the prayer itself does important work as well: in the act of praying, Custance’s terror and suffering are transformed into a spiritual triumph that cannot be overturned by any human verdict. Each time she prays, Custance focuses primarily on encountering God and the saints within her suffering, rather than seeking release from it. In her first prayer, uttered the first time she is set adrift on the sea, she does not even ask for rescue; assuming she will drown, she requests only, “Me fro the feend and fro his clawes kepe, / That day that I shal drenchen in the depe” (II 454–55). What matters is not earthly survival but salvation, and the rest of this prayer shows Custance embracing her mortal danger as a means to that greater end. She approaches her ordeal as an opportunity to meditate on the Passion, addressing her opening words to Christ’s cross: “O cleere, o welful auter, hooly croys, Reed of the Lambes blood ful of pitee, That wessh the world fro the old iniquitee.” (II 451–53)

Custance describes the bloodied cross as “cleere” and “welful,” treating it as a site not of pain and death but of health and life. Her evocation of Christ’s blood washing the world clean of sin neatly reverses an earlier speech by the Sultan’s mother, who declared that Custance would need more than a baptismal font’s worth of water to “wasshe awey the rede” after the Sultan and his followers were killed (II 356).10 Whereas the Sultaness exults in the violent 9

10

Nancy Black discusses the two courts in Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2003), 132. This reversal is noted in William Woods, “Custance as God’s Merchant in The Man of Law’s Tale,” Enarratio 7 (2000): 84–107 (91).



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power of bloodshed, Custance celebrates Christ’s subversion of that power. The cross, which she acclaims as a “Victorious tree” (II 456), embodies a victory achieved precisely through the willed and patient endurance of suffering, and Custance’s focus on that ultimate victory transforms her own experience in this moment. A cruel and undeserved punishment becomes an opportunity to align herself with Christ, and her journey in the rudderless boat becomes a kind of Passion, which she can endure faithfully to win eternal salvation. This endurance is not to be confused with passivity, a quality some critics have seen in Custance; indeed Susan Schibanoff locates Custance’s passivity specifically in prayers, reading them as expressions of Custance’s total subjugation to “male power, divine and human.”11 This prayer shows Custance submitting to suffering not because she is a victim of a transcendent patriarchy, but because she believes that submission makes her Christ-like and thereby grants her a share in Christ’s triumph over pain and death. Even as prayer enables Custance to pursue this encounter with Christ, it also allows her to align herself with the wider community of Christians and with the Church as an institution. Her description of the cross as an “auter” alludes to the transubstantiation of wine into Christ’s blood at the altar during the Mass, a sacrament that unites Christians both with Christ and with each other. Custance could hardly be more physically remote from other Christians, but this reference to the sacrament suggests that she does not perceive herself as alone. She is still part of the sacramental body of the Church, which she visualizes in her closing address to the cross as “Flemere of feendes out of hym and here / On which thy lymes feithfully extenden” (II 460–61). This image of a cross extending its limbs over men and women evokes either a roodscreen in a church or a congregation crossing themselves, as Custance herself did at the beginning of her prayer (II 449).12 With these words, Custance positions herself alongside both Christ in his Passion and her fellow Christians in their commemoration of and sacramental participation in Christ’s victorious death. This emphasis on community counters her isolation on the sea while also reminding medieval readers of their own closeness to Custance as fellow members of the body of Christ. Fourteenth-century Christians would not face the extreme trials Custance endures, but they can still claim their share in Christ’s Passion and victory through the sacraments. Custance’s references to that communal Christian identity make her devotion accessible to readers; those who inhabit her prayer find themselves already inscribed within it, as the “hym and here” over whom Christ’s cross extends its protection. Custance’s

11

12

Susan Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Anti-feminism, and Heresy in The Man of Law’s Tale,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59–96 (89). Others who emphasize passivity include Edwards, “Critical Approaches,” 90; Allen, “Chaucer Answers Gower,” 642; and R. James Goldstein, “Future Perfect: The Augustinian Theology of Perfection and the Canterbury Tales,” SAC 29 (2007): 87–140 (102–14). The latter possibility is suggested in the Riverside note to II 461.

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prayer transforms isolation into spiritual community and mortal danger into a means of sharing, with that community, in Christ’s redemptive victory. These transformations occur within the act of prayer itself, through which Custance transcends the need for an explanation of her suffering, and even the need to request deliverance from it. Custance’s second sojourn on the sea offers her a different route into the Passion: this time she is a mother, accompanied by her infant son, and the prayer she makes as she embarks shows her aligning herself with Mary at the foot of the cross. Both of them are mothers forced to watch their innocent sons suffer, and Custance emphasizes a sense of solidarity with the Virgin. She begins by addressing Mary as “Mooder” (II 841) and imagining Mary’s maternal agony at the crucifixion: […] “thy child was on a croys yrent. Thy blisful eyen sawe al his torment; Thanne is ther no comparison bitwene Thy wo and any wo man may sustene. “Thow saw thy child yslayn bifore thyn yen, And yet now lyveth my litel child, parfay!” (II 844–49)

These lines show Custance finding strength, as Jill Mann has said, “not in the bland assurance of a divine plan, but in her imagined identification with another woman’s pain.”13 Mary, however, is more than just another suffering woman, or even another suffering mother; she is the definitive example of the faithful Christian sharing in the agonies of Christ in his Passion. Her suffering was often treated as an affective model for devout Christians meditating on the Passion, who were encouraged to imagine the scene through Mary’s eyes.14 Custance’s repeated references to Mary’s “eyen” and the horrors they witnessed allude to this practice. Not only does she visualize the scene from Mary’s perspective, she also compares her own maternal suffering to the Virgin’s, a move urged in the planctus tradition. Spoken in Mary’s own voice, the planctus expresses a strident grief that is grounded in maternal care for Jesus’s body.15 Some examples adopt a confrontational tone, as Mary emphasizes the unique intensity of her pain and commands other mothers to be grateful for their children’s lives.16 Custance meekly denies that her “wo” could compare to Mary’s agony in seeing her “child […] on a croys yrent,” though of course 13 14 15

16

Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 2nd edn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 109. See Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” 116–17. McNamer discusses the late-medieval development of the Marian planctus in Affective Meditation, 155–67. See, e.g., “Of all women that ever were born,” (DIMEV 4148). This lyric is discussed in McNamer, Affective Meditation, 168–69; and Robert Correale, “Chaucer’s Custance and the Sorrowing Mary: The Man of Law’s Tale (MLT), 841–854,” Marian Library Studies 26 (1998–2000): 285–94 (292).



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to deny the comparison is also to suggest it. With due humility and deference to the exceptional quality of Mary’s experience, Custance’s prayer links her own pain in Maurice’s suffering with Mary’s before the cross. Since suffering with Mary means suffering with Christ, moreover, Custance’s alignment of herself with the Virgin is a way of sharing in the Passion. Her second trial on the open sea thus becomes another way of encountering the suffering Christ, this time through his sorrowful mother. In the Marian prayer, however, the emphasis on patient endurance of suffering is not the whole story, and the final stanza abruptly shifts the terms of address. Instead of aligning herself with Mary as a fellow mother, Custance humbly defers to Mary as the Queen of Heaven, praising her with a series of exalted titles reminiscent of Chaucer’s “ABC”: “Now, lady bright, to whom alle woful cryen, Thow glorie of wommanhede, thow faire may, Thow haven of refut, brighte sterre of day, Rewe on my child, that of thy gentillesse Rewest on every reweful in distresse.” (II 850–54)

This litany of praise builds up to an urgent petition specifically for Maurice, “my child,” rather than for Custance. The encounter with Mary that Custance pursues in this prayer is therefore twofold, involving both an experience of maternal solidarity and a subject’s humble petition to a powerful queen. In fact both parts of the prayer balance closeness and distance: there is distance within their closeness as mothers because Custance acknowledges that Mary’s maternal pain was vastly greater, and there is intimate closeness even within this exalted praise of Mary, because Mary is the one “to whom alle woful cryen,” the “haven” for those who need “refut.” Instead of making her remote from human pain, the Virgin’s lofty status enables her to do something to redress it, which is why this expansive praise of Mary culminates, at the stanza’s end, in a request. The desperate wording of Custance’s plea, which uses the word “rewe” three times in two lines, shows an urgent concern for rescue that was absent when only her own suffering was at stake. While Custance herself is prepared to embrace maternal suffering as an opportunity to draw close to Mary and thus to Christ, for Maurice she wants only deliverance. She approaches Mary in a posture of desperate dependence and begs her to show her characteristic mercy to this innocent child. Custance is so troubled by the injustice of her son’s suffering that she explicitly discusses it in a speech that follows this prayer. Addressing her words to Maurice, she asks questions that echo the constable’s earlier query about why God permits innocent suffering: “O litel child, allas! What is thy gilt, That nevere wroghtest synne as yet, pardee? Why wil thyn harde fader han thee spilt?” (II 855–57)

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However, whereas the constable’s question expects an answer that never comes, Custance’s questions forestall further inquiry, containing their own answers: her child has no “gilt” because he has not committed “synne,” and his father Alla has condemned him to death simply because Alla is “harde,” even “routhelees” (II 857, 863). Custance is not looking for answers so much as lamenting injustice. Some have noticed that her words point toward a “suggestive resemblance between the suffering of [her] son and that of Christ,” which in turn implies that God himself is a cruel father who forced his innocent son to suffer.17 Alla’s name, resembling the Arabic word for God, would seem to invite this line of thought, but the tale does not pursue it.18 Chaucer examines this theme of divine and paternal cruelty more fully in The Clerk’s Tale, a work that has significant plot parallels to The Man of Law’s Tale but that approaches the question of innocent suffering in fundamentally different terms: it does not include philosophical discussions of providence and depicts no acts of prayer.19 In The Man of Law’s Tale, the possible analogy between the human father and God is never explicitly acknowledged, and Custance shows no interest in abstract speculations about divine justice; the fact that her questions about Maurice’s suffering contain their own answers shows her disregard for further rational explanation. The prospect of her infant son’s death brings Custance close to posing the “why?” question that never troubles her in her solitary trials, but even now, she responds to suffering not with analysis, but with prayer. Her acts of prayer, moreover, constitute a certain kind of response to the constable’s question: instead of answering it, they challenge its terms. Philosophical discourse approaches innocent suffering as a fact to be reconciled with the fact of divine providence and worries over the apparent incompatibility of these facts. Suffering thus becomes a problem to solve, but prayer treats it as an experience to embrace because it enables an encounter with Christ and the saints that leads to salvation. Custance’s prayers thus displace the unanswerable “why” question with a “who” question. What matters to her is not why God lets her suffer, but who can come alongside her in her pain and transform it into victory. The interpersonal, non-propositional nature of this response to the problem of suffering is no reason to dismiss it. Helen Phillips finds in The Man of Law’s Tale a characteristically Chaucerian pattern in which “narrative closure is not accompanied by fully adequate philosophical address or closure of the […] questions raised.” In keeping with this pattern, Phillips sees the tale’s “happy ending” as a de facto “justification of God’s ways to man,” in which a tale’s worth of innocent suffering is swept aside because it resulted in the conver-

17 18 19

Cooney, “Wonder and Immanent Justice,” 280; see also Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 105. Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy,” 417. Although Griselda briefly breaks the Stoical silence in which she suffers to bless her child (IV 556–60), she never prays.



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sion of the English and the elevation of Maurice to emperor of Rome.20 What is true of the ending is also true of the resolution of each crisis throughout the tale; every time, a miracle brings an end to Custance’s suffering and reasserts God’s immanent justice, repeatedly deferring any explanation of why that suffering happened in the first place. Phillips regards this narrative resolution as less complete than the resolution that could be provided by a robust philosophical argument. For Jill Mann, however, the opposite is true: There is, of course, no final answer to the “why” of suffering on a metaphysical level, and Chaucer does not try to give one […] The Man of Law’s Tale “answers” the question […] only on the emotional, experiential level of Christianity itself, by locating God in the suffering.21

Mann recognizes the legitimacy of dismissing rational explanation and instead “locating God in the suffering,” but she presents God’s presence in suffering primarily as a source of emotional comfort to Custance. Custance’s prayers reveal that it brings her something more: not just the assurance that God has also known pain, but also the promise that anyone who endures pain with patience and faith in Christ will ultimately defeat it. The act of prayer enables Custance to transcend her suffering by aligning it with Christ’s Passion, an event that does indeed locate God “in the suffering,” but only temporarily, as a step on the way to eternal joy. For Custance, then, the point of identifying with Christ is not primarily to feel less alone in her pain but to align her life with the redemptive arc of his story. These prayers that conform Custance’s life to the pattern of Christ’s have the potential to resonate powerfully with Chaucer’s medieval readers. Some might be moved to emulate her acts of prayer, or even to “appropriate” them, as Astell suggests; recognizing this possibility, John Hirsh excerpts her Marian prayer for inclusion in an anthology of Middle English devotional lyrics.22 The Marian prayer is the most readily excerpted from the narrative because its petition for mercy on a child is so widely applicable, whereas the other two mention mortal dangers – drowning at sea, execution on a false charge – that few in Chaucer’s audience would expect to encounter. The extraordinary nature of Custance’s life, much of which is spent on the margins of Christendom in conditions of isolation and violent persecution, imparts a sense of alterity to her devotion. She is a heroine of the faith, living in the remote world of early Christianity where extreme dangers go hand-in-hand with spectacular miracles; her world is distant to a fourteenth-century reader, and its exoticism

20 21 22

Phillips, “Matter of Chaucer,” 70. Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 105. Astell, “Apostrophe, Prayer, and the Structure of Satire,” 91; and see John Hirsh, ed., Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads, and Carols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 179–80.

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and primitivism are central to the tale’s appeal.23 Regardless of how apt they are for immediate use by readers, however, Custance’s prayers provide access to this heroic past by inviting readers into the devotional practice of one of its heroines. Those who inhabit the “I” of Custance’s prayers will find that imagining what it feels like to pray as Custance means imagining how they might approach a moment of pain as an opportunity to encounter Christ and to share in his Passion and glory. This imaginative experience is what The Man of Law’s Tale offers as its ultimate response to the question of why God allows Custance to suffer. This tale invites readers to set aside intellectual speculations about God’s mysterious ways in order to join in Custance’s prayerful encounters with Christ.

The Knight’s Tale: Philosophy and Petition The Knight’s Tale contains a philosophical account of divine providence remarkably similar to that of The Man of Law’s Tale, and it similarly shows this account to be inadequate as a response to the experience of suffering. Much criticism has examined the tale’s three philosophical speeches as representations of pagan philosophy, showing how Chaucer draws on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to represent his characters as “noble pagans” who lack Christian revelation but come close to affirming orthodox truths.24 With respect to providence, they come very close indeed. Not only Theseus, often regarded as the wisest of the Athenian pagans, but also both Palamon and Arcite assert the existence of a transcendent providential order while admitting that they cannot fully grasp it or adequately reconcile it with the apparent randomness of earthly events. Critical emphasis on the propositional content of Athenian pagan belief has, however, obscured a more interesting aspect of this pagan setting: the stark contrast between the characters’ quasi-Christian speculations about divine providence and their decidedly polytheistic, astrological devotional practices. Experiences of undeserved suffering prompt these pagan characters to think about a providential God, but never to pray to one. When they turn from philosophy to prayer, they address cruel and arbitrary planet-gods and attempt to secure their help through persuasive tactics and hard-nosed negotiation. Their stridently petitionary and self-assertive prayers enable them to strive against suffering in a way that their hostile gods respond to, but even at their most successful, these prayers prove tragically unable to mitigate suffering. 23

24

Elizabeth Robertson discusses the evocative primitivism of the tale in “The ‘Elyvssh’ Power of Custance: Christian Feminism in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale,” SAC 23 (2001): 143–80. Alastair Minnis introduces the term “noble pagans” in Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982), 108; for his reading of The Knight’s Tale, see 108–43. See also Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel”; and Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 247–81.



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The Athenian pagans’ surprising grasp of providence is revealed in the parallel speeches of Palamon and Arcite early in the tale. Both characters feel that they have been treated unjustly, and their suffering prompts them to articulate concepts of providential governance. Arcite makes his speech when, liberated from prison but banished from the sight of his beloved Emily, he finds that his freedom has brought him only misery. This suffering yields insights into the limitations of human desire and the superior wisdom of a providential God. He asks, “Allas, why pleynen folk so in commune On purveiaunce of God, or of Fortune, That yeveth hem ful ofte in many a gyse Wel bettre than they kan hemself devyse?” (I 1251–54)

Humans are incapable of knowing what is truly best for them; echoing Boethius, Arcite goes on to compare humanity to a drunk who wants to go home but does not remember the way (I 1261–67).25 He contrasts human ignorance with the “purveiaunce of God,” and in so doing – though without quite using the word “providence” – Arcite affirms faith in a transcendent power, possessed of benevolence and wisdom, that guides human lives. The fact that he conflates this “purveiaunce” with “Fortune” need not be seen as a mistake, as some have suggested, but rather as an intuition of the Boethian insight that what people call Fortune is part of God’s providential design.26 Despite these insights, however, Arcite’s speech does nothing to help him bear the suffering of his exile. His argument implies that this experience serves a mysterious divine purpose and will somehow lead to greater felicity, but he fails to draw that consoling conclusion. Instead he ends by re-stating his woes: “Thus may we seyen alle, and namely I, That wende and hadde a greet opinioun That if I myghte escapen from prisoun Thanne hadde I been in joye and parfit heele, Ther now I am exiled fro my wele.” (I 1268–72)

With the words “and namely I,” he turns from abstract insights into the order of the world back to his own misery, ending with the same complaint with which he began. Robert Stretter argues that this return to complaint keeps “the experience of frustration and disorientation” in the foreground and invites sympathy, but even a sympathetic reader can see the disjunction between Arcite’s philosophical insights and his emotional experience.27 His grasp of 25 26

27

See Boece, III. pr. 2: 82–88. Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 73, blames him for this apparent mistake. For Boethius’s argument subsuming Fortune into Providence, see Boece, IV. pr. 6: 178–328. Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 73.

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providential wisdom remains detached from the lived reality of his suffering and powerless to relieve it. Palamon’s speech traces a similar path from lament to insight and back to lament. For him, however, providence is even less than the remote abstraction it was for Arcite; it is an intriguing possibility that he wishes rather than believes to be real. Palamon begins by blaming his continued imprisonment on the “crueel goddes that governe / This world with byndyng of [their] word eterne” (I 1303–04), suggesting a polytheistic, deterministic worldview that owes more to astrology than to Boethius.28 Yet determinism would rule out Palamon’s insistence on divine justice, which he voices in a question virtually identical to the constable’s in The Man of Law’s Tale: “What governance is in this prescience, / That giltelees tormenteth innocence?” (I 1313–14).29 Rather than accepting divine “prescience” as an inescapable decree, Palamon asks why the world is not better governed and insists that the gods ought to punish only the guilty and spare the innocent. Unless he had a concept of divine justice, he would have no grounds for calling the gods to account in this way.30 His plea for “governance” and Arcite’s notion of the “purveiaunce of God” (I 1252) indicate that both knights have a conception of providence, though Palamon is both more explicit about presenting it as an alternative to the arbitrary rule of “cruel goddes” and less confident about its existence. The tale indicates that he is right to be doubtful, for subsequent scenes depicting the petty selfishness of the gods prove to readers that the powers who rule this world are indeed cruel and indifferent to human welfare.31 For Palamon, divine providence is an appealing speculative construct that he cannot affirm as true and that does nothing to mitigate his pain. Like Arcite, he concludes his speech by abandoning his insights and reasserting the one thing he does know, his own experience of suffering: “The answere of this lete I to dyvynys, / But wel I woot that in this world greet pyne ys” (I 1323–24). If any character in The Knight’s Tale articulates an understanding of providence that speaks meaningfully to human pain, it would seem to be Theseus. Many critics have praised his concluding speech as a pinnacle of pagan wisdom and a moment of philosophical resolution.32 Theseus begins with a 28

29 30

31 32

The tale’s astronomical presentation of the gods is discussed in detail by Douglas Brooks and Alastair Fowler, “The Meaning of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Medium Aevum 39 (1970): 123–46; and J.D. North, “Kalenderes Enlumyned Ben They: Some Astronomical Themes in Chaucer,” RES n.s. 20.78 (1969): 129–54. See also Jill Mann, “The Planetary Gods in Chaucer and Henryson,” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honor of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 91–106 (93). For the constable’s question, see Tales, II 813–16. See John Finlayson, “The Knight’s Tale: The Dialogue of Romance, Epic, and Philosophy,” ChauR 27.2 (1992): 126–49 (136); and Thomas McAlindon, “Cosmology, Contrariety, and The Knight’s Tale,” Medium Aevum 55 (1986): 41–57 (52). See I 2438–52, 2663–90. See, e.g., Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 71–72; Minnis, Pagan Antiquity, 121; Charles Muscatine, “Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” PMLA 65.5 (1950): 911–29 (922).



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resounding affirmation of providential order, which he attributes to a divine “Firste Moevere” (I 2987). This supreme god governs the world through his “faire cheyne of love”: “For with that faire cheyne of love he bond The fyr, the eyr, the water, and the lond In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee.” (I 2991–93)

Although Theseus is initially more confident and articulate about providence than either of the young knights, his speech soon falls into a familiar pattern: much like Palamon and Arcite, he proves unable to connect abstract insights about providential order to the concrete reality of undeserved suffering, in this case Arcite’s accidental death. One problem with Theseus’s speech is that it misrepresents the world he inhabits, in which the ultimate source of order among the squabbling gods is the malevolent Saturn, whose intervention can hardly be seen as the work of a “faire cheyne of love.” His speech is not only inaccurate, it is also internally inconsistent. Theseus soon introduces death as an element of the First Mover’s perfect order, but rather than explaining how Arcite’s death has a place within the “faire cheyne of love,” he spends much of his speech emphasizing death’s brutal inevitability. He belabors this point with a long list of things that die (I 3017–34) and asserts the futility of striving against what cannot be escaped (I 3039–40). By this point Theseus’s speech has shifted decisively away from the transcendent Boethian vision of the opening and into a materialistic, Stoic framework; the speech ends up being “mechanistic rather than metaphysical,” in that it examines the world below without connecting that world to higher causes.33 The Stoic material that forms the bulk of the speech is what Chaucer found in his direct source, a speech by Teseo in Boccaccio’s Teseida.34 By combining this material with an opening section on Boethian cosmic love, Chaucer renders Theseus’s speech philosophically incoherent and undercuts its ability to offer a compelling explanation of Arcite’s arbitrary death. In this way, Theseus asserts the existence of providence more boldly than the two knights do, but his speech never realizes its potential to offer a transcendent consolation. Providence remains an abstract postulate remote from human lives, and philosophical explanations of divine governance remain sterile as a response to human suffering. 33

34

Dinah Hazell, “Empedocles, Boethius, and Chaucer: Love Binds All,” Carmina Philosophiae 11 (2002): 43–74 (63). Other critics who emphasize the disharmony between the Boethian opening and the remainder of the speech include Rack, “Heterodoxy and Disjunction,” 91–92; Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 69–76; and V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (London: Arnold, 1984), 139–49. A few, however, have argued for the speech’s internal harmony; see Minnis, Pagan Antiquity, 125–31; and Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique, 278–81. See Boccaccio, Teseida XII, 6–19, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia (Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia), ed. and trans. Vincenzo Traversa (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Subsequent references to this text are cited by part and stanza number.

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If Theseus’s speech offers no superior insight, however, it does at least culminate in action. He cannot explain Arcite’s death, but he can take steps to ameliorate the pain of those who mourn, namely by arranging a marriage between Palamon and Emily. Although some critics have seen Theseus as a practitioner of “realpolitik” who seeks only an advantageous political alliance, his action is grounded in moral principle rather than mere self-interest.35 He articulates the key principle at the mid-point of his speech, explaining that, given death’s inevitability, “Thanne is it wisdom, as it thynketh me, To maken vertu of necessitee, And take it weel that we may nat eschue And namely that to us alle is due.” (I 3041–44)

Theseus here advocates a Stoic “wisdom” and “vertu” that centers on accepting death and taking it well. In the case at hand, that means being thankful that Arcite died with a good name and uniting Palamon and Emily in marriage, which Theseus presents as a way to “make of sorwes two / O parfit joye” (I 3071–72). Setting aside his initial assertion that providence governs all things for the best, Theseus now takes it upon himself to make the best of things, and in so doing he locates the response to suffering on the human rather than the divine plane. For Theseus, then, undeserved suffering is a fact to be accepted and mitigated, when possible, by good human governance. Theseus defines the opposite of his Stoic wisdom as “wilfulnesse” (I 3057), an attitude that refuses to accept suffering as an inevitable part of life and instead chooses to complain about it or strive pointlessly against it. Willfulness defines the outlook of Palamon, Arcite, and Emily: the two knights complain about suffering, drowning their own insights in lament, and all three of these characters strive vehemently against it. Their striving occurs specifically in acts of prayer, which show all three of them responding to actual or potential suffering not with Stoic resignation, but with passionate resistance. Chaucer presents these prayers as a form of action that constitutes an alternative to Theseus’s practice of “vertu”: if virtue seeks to conform human desire to what happens in the world, these stridently petitionary prayers seek to conform the world to human desire. The tale shows acts of prayer to have real power, as they produce concrete results that lead directly to the story’s dénouement. The prayers also constitute a narrative climax in their own right; though his typical approach in The Knight’s Tale is to condense and streamline his source, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Chaucer considerably expands

35

Marc Guidry, “The Parliaments of Gods and Men in the Knight’s Tale,” ChauR 43.2 (2008): 140–70 (161). See also John Fyler, “Pagan Survivals,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 349–59 (356).



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these three prayers and presents them as one of his narrative’s four sections.36 Theseus’s Stoic virtue may have the last word in this tale, but acts of willful prayer dominate and drive the narrative and present a different kind of response to the reality of undeserved suffering. In these strongly foregrounded acts of prayer, Chaucer presents his readers with a robustly imagined version of pagan devotional interiority and invites them to step inside it. This invitation means that the encounter with pagan alterity in The Knight’s Tale is not confined to an analytical evaluation of pagan belief, as prior criticism has been quick to assume. The analytical approach is described compellingly by John Fyler when he imagines “the medieval writer or reader looking back on the pagan past” and attempting to “discriminate between what is to be accepted and what rejected (or escaped), what incorporated and what refused as alien to the healthy and specifically Christian mind and soul.”37 Speeches invite this careful work of discrimination, but prayers resist it, because they do not articulate propositions to accept or reject; the reader’s task when faced with an act of pagan prayer is not to argue with it, but to experience it. Chaucer asks readers of The Knight’s Tale to participate imaginatively in the work of pagan prayer, which he presents as fundamentally driven by human will and oriented toward persuasion. For Athenian pagans, the purpose of praying is to convince a god to help a petitioner escape suffering and achieve what he or she desires. The persuasive aim of these prayers is evident even in their opening gestures, in which all three speakers emphasize personal closeness with their divine addressees. Palamon and Arcite express a sense of solidarity grounded in shared experience, for both knights are suffering from love-pangs, a pain the gods have also felt. Palamon, asking Venus for Emily’s hand in marriage, reminds her of the suffering she endured for love of Adonis (I 2224–25), while Arcite, asking Mars for victory in the tournament, reminds the god of his desire for Venus (I 2383–86). In mentioning these events from the gods’ personal histories, the two knights are aligning their own suffering with that of their addressees, but not in the way that Custance did. She saw that alignment as the main work of her prayers, but for the knights it is only an initial rhetorical move; the point of mentioning divine love-pangs is not to encounter the gods within one’s human suffering but to secure divine sympathy for it and, consequently, divine aid in escaping it. Emily also begins by emphasizing a sense of closeness to her addressee, which in her case is grounded in years of faithful service as one of Diana’s maidens. She mentions that Diana intimately knows

36

37

Chaucer not only expands each one’s length but also brings them into sharper focus by omitting shorter prayers and references to prayer. Boccaccio, in contrast, depicts prayer by Arcita in Teseida III, 82–84; IV, 52–53, 75–77; X, 94–99, while in Teseida VII, 22, both of the young knights are said to pray at every temple before offering their main petitions to their patron deities. Fyler, “Pagan Survivals,” 352.

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her “herte” and her “[d]esire to ben a mayden al [her] lyf” (I 2300, 2305) but makes no overt appeal to divine sympathy, even though Diana’s identity as Proserpina, the forced bride of Pluto, could enable the goddess to understand the pain of unwanted marriage. Emily approaches her goddess strictly as a source of deliverance, not solidarity, mentioning their personal closeness only because it implies that Diana is obligated to help her: “Syn thou art mayde and kepere of us alle, / My maydenhede thou kepe and wel conserve” (I 2328–29). For the knights as well, establishing a personal connection is ultimately a way to create a sense of obligation, such that the addressee owes the prayer a hearing, and indeed a favorable response. Closeness to the divine is not an end in itself but a means to the end of persuasion, which in turn is a means to achieve one’s desire. The main body of each prayer shows the human speaker carefully building a case for why the deity should grant his or her request, and all three rely on a common repertoire of negotiating tactics. All promise lifelong service, with the two knights offering further sacrifices and devotions; Arcite is most expansive in his “avow” to maintain “eterne fir” in Mars’s chapel and cut off his hair and beard (I 2413–14).38 These promises establish an alignment of both parties’ interests that is essential to a successful negotiation. The characters know that their deities “want the promised commodities of sacrifice, acknowledgement, and worship,” and so they can attempt to leverage those divine desires in order to achieve their own will.39 A complicating factor in their negotiations, however, is their awareness that each god wields limited power to achieve the desired outcome. The two knights find themselves in an especially difficult position: they both need help from both Mars and Venus in order to win the tournament and win Emily’s hand, but they each choose just one deity to petition. Turning this potential weakness into a strength, each presents his choice in flattering terms calculated to further incline the addressee to help his cause. Arcite emphasizes martial prowess as the only possible means to his desired end and affirms Mars as the sole source of this prowess: “And wel I woot, er she me mercy heete, I moot with strengthe wynne hire in the place, And wel I woot, withouten help or grace Of thee ne may my strengthe noght availle.” (I 2398–401)

His repeated phrase “wel I woot” marks each step in his logic and underscores the necessity of praying to Mars as the only one who can help him. Palamon, meanwhile, speaks dismissively of military victory and of Mars himself, assuring Venus that her power trumps his:

38 39

For the other promises of service, see I 2234–36, 2330, 2379–81. Alexandra Cook, “‘O swete harm so queynte’: Loving Pagan Antiquity in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale,” English Studies 91.1 (2010): 26–41 (36).



Praying in Suffering  77 “For though so be that Mars is god of armes, Youre vertu is so greet in hevene above That if yow list, I shal wel have my love.” (I 2248–50)

This appeal to divine competition is well-calculated, for the later scene of heavenly strife will show that Venus cares very much about her power as compared to that of Mars. For these characters, the task of prayer is to convince the divine addressee to lend his or her power to the achievement of human desire. As part of this desire-driven approach to prayer, the characters take steps to protect their own interests from the gods’ inevitable shortcomings. Even as they flatter their addressees, they take care to leverage limited divine power as fully as possible, improving the chances of a favorable response by praying at the precise hour of the day when the planet associated with their addressee is at its greatest astrological influence.40 Knowing that their requests may still be denied, they also make back-up petitions in an attempt to mitigate the effects of failure. Palamon asks to be allowed to die if his prayer is not granted (I 2255–56), while Emily requests that, if she “shal nedes have oon of hem two,” she be given whoever desires her most (I 2324); only Arcite has no contingency plan. In recognizing the deities’ own self-interest and the constraints on divine power, these characters see prayer as a delicate negotiation with entities who, though more powerful than humans, are willful and finite, much like their human petitioners. This self-assertive, transactional approach to prayer involves a certain deliberate ignorance on the part of the Athenian pagans, all of whom close their eyes to aspects of the divine nature that do not bode well for their negotiations. Indeed Chaucer makes this blindness literal: his characters utter their petitions with representations of the divine nature directly before their eyes, in the form of murals that are original to Chaucer’s version of the story.41 Directly before each prayer Chaucer includes a lengthy description of the relevant mural, thus exposing each character’s tendency to focus on certain aspects of the divine nature and disregard others. Venus’s mural, for instance, draws upon the Garden of Pleasure in the Roman de la Rose, presenting a view of the goddess consistent with Palamon’s courtly love discourse (I 1918–54). At 40

41

The tale’s astronomical presentation of the gods has received much attention. The most detailed treatments are Brooks and Fowler, “The Meaning of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale”; and North, “Kalenderes Enlumyned.” In the murals depicting Mars and Venus, Chaucer re-purposed some material from Boccaccio’s descriptions of these deities’ houses in Teseida VII, 29–37 (Mars) and VII, 51–62 (Venus). Boccaccio also includes lengthy glosses on Mars and Venus as, respectively, the irascible and concupiscible appetites, but it is unclear whether Chaucer’s text included them. Boitani provides English translations of the glosses in Chaucer and Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977), 198–210; and for discussion of Chaucer’s access to them see Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, 113–16; and Kenneth Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–59.

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the same time, however, it also shows a darker and crueler side of Palamon’s patroness; he has only to notice such personifications as “Force” and “Lesynges” (I 1927) to realize that Venus is unconcerned with justice and stops at nothing to see lust satisfied.42 If Venus is an anarchic power, so too is Mars, who is presented as the patron of all violence, not just chivalric combat. His mural shows “Conquest, sittynge in greet honour” (I 2028) alongside such gruesome scenes as “The sowe freten the child right in the cradel” and “The cook yscalded, for al his longe ladel” (I 2019–20). These depictions of random bloodshed reveal “to whom Arcite really prays,” while also foreshadowing his ugly and inglorious death after the tournament (I 2690–93).43 While some of the negative details in both murals are derived from Boccaccio’s descriptions of the gods’ houses in the Teseida, in both cases Chaucer adds material that further emphasizes the destruction and chaos associated with these deities.44 The murals thus issue a reminder that these gods have powers and interests that extend beyond the knights’ requests: Venus’s remit is not confined to the idealized longing that motivates Palamon’s petition, nor Mars’s to the chivalric victory sought by Arcite. As they assert their own wills and try to negotiate divine support, the two knights disregard the larger and more ominous picture that literally looms over them as they pray. The disparity between the deity being prayed to and the deity seen in the mural is most pronounced in the case of Diana.45 This goddess is more than just the patron of maiden huntresses: the mural shows her looking down at Pluto’s “derke regioun,” with a “womman travaillynge” at her feet (I 2082– 83), evoking her further identities as Proserpina, a maiden ravished and forced to become Pluto’s wife, and Lucina, patroness of childbirth. Diana’s mural thus aligns the goddess with the transition from maiden to wife to mother, a point further emphasized by the mural’s depiction of a moon, evoking her association with instability and change (I 2077). Emily is well aware of the goddess’s threefold nature and briefly mentions it in her prayer, alluding to “tho thre forms that thou hast in thee” (I 2313), but ironically, this phrase appears shortly after her assertion that she does not want “to ben a wyf and be with childe” (I 2310). Emily is attempting to invoke one aspect of Diana’s identity as a protection against the other two, but the mural illustrates the actual range of the goddess’s power and foreshadows Emily’s own impending change from 42

43 44

45

This “darker vision of love” also shapes the tale’s portrayal of Cupid; see Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 66–67. Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, 86. For instance, in Venus’s mural Chaucer expands Boccaccio’s list of Classical figures who endure tragedy due to love; see The Knight’s Tale I 1941–46 and Teseida VII, 62. The examples of random, non-military violence in Mars’s mural are original to Chaucer; compare The Knight’s Tale I 1995–2026 and Teseida VII, 29–37. For a detailed source study of these passages, see Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, 83–95. This mural, moreover, is completely Chaucer’s invention; in Teseida VII, 88, Emily’s prayer is immediately followed by Diana’s appearance, with no description of the goddess’s house.



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maiden to wife, and presumably to mother.46 Like the two knights, then, Emily tries to establish an alignment of her interests with her deity’s and ignores whatever aspects of that deity’s identity do not serve her purposes. By the tale’s conclusion, however, they all will be reminded that their gods are larger than their prayers: Arcite will become the victim of random, unchivalric violence, Emily will become a wife, and even Palamon, whose prayer is perhaps the most successful of the three, will find that love comes at the price of a suffering greater than he anticipated. In each case, the act of prayer is riskier than the characters realize, for even when a petition is granted, divine power cannot be contained by, or made subservient to, human will. This approach to prayer as a transaction driven by human willfulness does not, however, constitute the only model of pagan devotion found in The Knight’s Tale. Near the beginning, while both knights are still imprisoned and before their philosophical speeches, Palamon thinks that Venus has appeared to him and makes a brief petition to her. This prayer suggests a different paradigm for interactions between humans and gods: [He] seyde, “Venus, if it be thy wil Yow in this gardyn thus to transfigure Bifore me, sorweful, wrecched creature, Out of this prisoun help that we may scapen.” (I 1104–07)

He concludes with a back-up request: if “destynee” has determined that he must remain in prison, he asks Venus to have “compassion” on his “lynage,” the royal house of Thebes (I 1108–11). These petitions are well-suited to Palamon’s circumstances but hardly to his addressee, the goddess of love. He nevertheless prays to Venus in this instance because he believes that she has appeared to him, a miracle that he takes as implying special favor. He explains that her “wil” to “transfigure” herself before him is what provides the impetus for his prayer; he is responding to the generosity of a goddess who has already, pre-emptively, reached out to him in compassion. In this brief moment, pagan prayer converges with Marian prayer and positions the human petitioner in a relationship of trusting dependence on a figure who has already demonstrated loving concern. Readers, of course, are aware even before the prayer begins that Palamon is looking not at Venus but at Emily, and this knowledge undermines his prayer from the outset. This initial, misdirected prayer stands in telling contrast to the later prayers that begin not in pre-emptive divine mercy, but in the human speaker’s will to achieve a certain outcome. Including an alternative approach to prayer, even an abortive one, underscores the strictly transactional nature of the three most prominent acts of prayer. Those later prayers, moreover, are the ones that reflect an accurate understanding of the divine nature as represented in this tale. Palamon is gravely mistaken in his 46

Brooks and Fowler read the prayer as a “psychological allegory” expressing her reluctance to undergo this change in “The Meaning of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” 127.

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idea that Venus might feel a benevolent concern for suffering humanity; her “wil,” a term that in his early prayer refers to her supposed desire to show him generosity, is subsequently revealed to be a petty self-will that insists on its own way and sulks when denied (I 2665).47 Palamon’s first prayer thus exemplifies a form of devotion that has no place in the religious world of ancient Athens: this is not a world in which gods pre-emptively appear to suffering humans to offer their merciful aid. Prayer is instead defined by willfulness in this tale. John McCall’s claim that “the pattern for many pagan prayers” in Chaucer’s writings is “my heart’s desire or death!” does not account for the variety of Chaucer’s representations of pagan prayer, but the pattern he describes does hold for the three main prayers of The Knight’s Tale.48 The same strident self-assertion that motivates these petitions also shapes the characters’ responses to the divine revelations they receive directly after praying. Palamon and Arcite’s signs have been described as “mean and misleading,” but the young knights are misled as much by their own desires as by the whims of the gods.49 Arcite, for instance, hears “Victorie!” (I 2433) and concludes that he will both win the tournament and marry Emily, when in fact only the former has been promised. This revelation invites Arcite to project his desires onto a single word and see them affirmed by it. Palamon’s even more vague revelation also provides him with an opportunity to conclude that he will get what he wants: after his prayer “the statue of Venus shook / And made a signe, whereby that he took / That his preyere accepted was that day,” even though there will be a “delay” (I 2265–68). Instead of reporting what he actually saw, these lines emphasize Palamon’s interpretive activity of “taking” the sign in a way that conforms to his desires. Even Emily, who is given the unique privilege of a face-to-face encounter with her deity, is so intently focused on her desired outcome that she cannot grasp what Diana tells her. Diana bluntly announces that Emily’s petition to remain a virgin is denied: “Thou shalt ben wedded unto oon of tho That han for thee so muchel care and wo, But unto which of hem I may nat telle.” (I 2349–53)

As Emily anticipated in her prayer, it is her destiny to marry one of these men, though Diana does not reveal which one, nor does she acknowledge Emily’s back-up petition to marry whoever loves her more. This revelation offers lim47

48

49

The two scenes of divine squabbling (I 2438–52, 2663–90) reveal the narrow self-regard of the tale’s gods. For discussion see, e.g., Cook, “‘O swete harm,’” 35; Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 75; Minnis, Pagan Antiquity, 141. McCall, Chaucer Among the Gods (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 157. Minnis, Pagan Antiquity, 136; see also Cook, “‘O swete harm,’” 36; and Alastair Minnis, “‘Goddes Speken in Amphibologies’: The Ambiguous Future of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies 55 (2001): 23–37 (30).



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ited but clear information, yet Emily still finds it confusing and responds by asking, “What amounteth this, allas? / I putte me in thy proteccioun, / Dyane, and in thy disposicioun” (I 2362–64). Minnis’s reading of this response as an expression of “perfect faith” meant to “impress even those who cannot share it,” namely medieval Christian readers, overlooks how strange Emily’s perplexity is.50 She has been given unambiguous information but cannot grasp what it “amounteth” to, so she responds by repeating her request for “proteccioun” and insisting that Diana could still rescue her from marriage. This confusion reflects the willful nature of Emily’s prayer: if the aim of prayer is neither more nor less than the achievement of one’s desire, then the only recourse when a petition is denied is to repeat it. The stridently petitionary model of prayer practiced in this tale is shown to have a limited capacity to relieve suffering even when the petition is granted. Although Emily’s petition is the only one that is flatly denied, neither of the knights’ prayers produces an outcome that conforms to the speaker’s desires. When Palamon and Arcite’s competing petitions are both granted and a conflict between Mars and Venus breaks out, Saturn’s concern as mediator is to placate divine egos, not to mitigate human pain; accordingly, he arranges for Arcite to die accidentally after his victory, leaving Palamon to marry Emily. In this way, both gods have kept their word and granted their petitions, and both knights get exactly what they asked for, as distinct from what they actually wanted. The tragedy of Chaucer’s Athenians is that even when they succeed in persuading the gods to grant their requests, their prayers still fail to alleviate suffering. This tragedy is felt most acutely by Arcite, whose technically successful petition brings him only death. In the tale’s darkest irony, moreover, Arcite is also the only character who grasps the futility of a practice of prayer driven by human desire. As he contrasts the wisdom of divine providence with the folly of humanity in his early philosophical speech, Arcite explains that people are so incapable of discerning true goods that they do not even know what to ask for when they pray: “We witen nat what thing we preyen heere” (I 1260). His later prayer provides a concrete illustration of this principle: in praying for victory, he thought he was requesting Emily, but in fact he was asking for his own painful and arbitrary death. Arcite’s tragic fate ultimately enables a happy ending for Palamon and Emily, but that happiness comes about precisely not through prayer, when Theseus steps in to redress the pain these willful petitions helped to cause. The marriage of Palamon and Emily is achieved through Theseus’s Stoic virtue, which sets aside both philosophical speculation about providence and petitionary prayers to the gods in order to make the best of things on a purely human level. The tragically limited prayers of these three pagans invite readers to imagine their way into the religious world of ancient Athens. While the characters’ philosophical speeches articulate, albeit with doubt and hesitation, a 50

Minnis, Pagan Antiquity, 113.

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notion of providential governance that approximates the orthodoxy affirmed by Chaucer’s medieval audience, their prayers are at once more obviously pagan and more imaginatively compelling. Speeches demand an analytical response, in which readers assess the extent to which they can agree with pagan truth-claims, whereas prayers ask for a participatory reading, in which readers imagine what it would be like to address the divine in pagan terms. In this tale, that means imagining the act of prayer as a hard-nosed negotiation with a finite, and quite possibly indifferent, deity. Some of Chaucer’s readers would no doubt find their way from this imaginative experience to the kind of absent-center reading of the The Knight’s Tale that some modern critics have proposed, in which the tale’s purpose is to expose the inadequacy of paganism and the “bleakness of the world without Christian religion.”51 This interpretation locates the tale’s meaning in a truth that remains outside the tale itself, but even so, it derives all its force from the imaginative encounter with paganism enabled by the characters’ prayers; any insight the reader might reach into the benefits of Christianity can only follow from her vicarious experience of pagan alterity and its “bleakness.” In this way, the work of inhabiting Athenian prayers can strengthen a reader’s Christian piety, but importantly, it does not have to. Another possibility, suggested by Cook, is that readers might revel in the thrill of participating imaginatively in an exotic form of devotional practice.52 Prayers invite readers inside the devotional interiority of pagans, enabling an intimate encounter with religious difference, but they cannot dictate what conclusions the readers who accept this invitation will ultimately reach. It is in this sense, then, that Chaucer’s pagan narratives can be described as open-ended works: not that they re-open philosophical questions closed by Christian orthodoxy, but that they offer imaginative experiences of religious difference without stipulating where those experiences must lead. This open quality is even more pronounced in The Franklin’s Tale, Chaucer’s most underdetermined religious setting.

The Franklin’s Tale: Devotional Uncertainties The religious world of The Franklin’s Tale is difficult to define. The story is set in Brittany in some vaguely past age before the coming of Christianity, as signaled by narratorial comments contrasting “oure dayes” of “hooly chirches feith” against “thilke dayes” of “hethen folk” (V 1132–33, 1293). Even so, not all readers have perceived this tale’s setting as strictly pagan: it has been

51

52

Peter Camarda, “Imperfect Heroes and the Consolations of Boethius: The Double Meaning of Suffering in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Medieval Forum 1 (2001): n.p. See also Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 156–57, for a discussion of this reading, as well as Carl Curtis, “Biblical Analogy and Secondary Allegory in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale,” Christianity and Literature 57.2 (2007): 207–22. Cook, “‘O swete harm.’”



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described as a “hybrid” of paganism and Christianity or as implicitly Christian.53 A key passage in such readings is the “Christmas miniature,” in which the characters greet each other with “Nowel” at the time of the winter solstice (V 1255); this episode has been taken as “a pivotal part of the Christian subtext” of the tale.54 Other evidence, such as the feast in honor of Janus (V 1252) and Aurelius’s references to Apollo and Diana, points toward a pagan setting, but the fact that multiple interpretations are possible suggests a deliberate vagueness on Chaucer’s part. Almost no information is provided about Breton religious practices, and there is no explicit statement of religious difference as in The Squire’s Tale (V 17–18). Within this minimalist religious setting, Chaucer represents characters with differing views of the divine: Dorigen is a Boethian monotheist, while Aurelius’s mechanistic worldview is grounded in astrology. Both versions of paganism fall within the “natural theology” that scholastic thinkers affirmed as being accessible to human reason unaided by Christian revelation.55 The insights of natural theology are regarded as incomplete but not incorrect, and both of these characters state beliefs about the world and the divine that a medieval Christian reader could also affirm. Even as Dorigen and Aurelius approximate orthodox beliefs, however, neither of them adopts a practice of prayer that enables a meaningful response to the experience of suffering, whether by consciously embracing it as Custance does or by stridently resisting it as the Athenian pagans do. On the contrary, Dorigen and Aurelius struggle to make the transition from talking about the divine to talking to a deity, and both seem to doubt whether prayer is even possible. Their doubts, moreover, are borne out in the narrative, which shows their prayers to be futile and relies on the virtue of generosity as its primary means of resolving suffering. The question central to all three of these tales – how can a providential God allow the innocent to suffer? – is here posed by Dorigen, who is tormented by fear that the sharp black rocks along the Breton coast will wreck her husband’s ship as he comes home (V 865–93). This fear leads her to wonder why

53

54

55

The term “hybrid” is used by A.C. Spearing in “Classical Antiquity,” 66. Critics who perceive an implicit Christianity in this tale include R.D. Eaton, “Narrative Closure in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” Neophilologus 84 (2000): 309–21 (320); John Fyler, “Love and Degree in the Franklin’s Tale,” ChauR 21.3 (1987): 321–37 (332–33); Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, repr. 2010), 239; and Fyler, “Pagan Survivals,” 356–57. B.S. Lee, “Apollo’s Chariot and the Christian Subtext of The Franklin’s Tale,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 36.1 (2010): 47–67 (55). Minnis outlines which theological tenets were considered accessible to the natural reason of pagan thinkers in Pagan Antiquity, 31–60. The term “natural theology” is used in Michael Wright, “Isolation and Individuality in the Franklin’s Tale,” Studia Neophilologica 70.2 (1998): 181–86 (182), though he applies it only to Dorigen; other critics who praise Dorigen as exceptionally insightful are Spearing, “Classical Antiquity,” 57–58; and Schildgen, Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews, 80.

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the “Eterne God” who “ledest the world by certein governaunce” (V 865–66) chose to give these rocks a place in his well-ordered creation: “But, Lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake, That semen rather a foul confusion Of werk than any fair creacion Of swhich a parfit wys God and a stable, Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?” (V 868–72)

These rocks serve no purpose other than to cause accidental death, and Dorigen cannot reconcile their existence with her understanding of God as “parfit,” “wys,” and “stable” in his ordering of creation. Observing how closely Dorigen’s view of God converges with Christian orthodoxy, one critic proposes that she “sounds like an inquiring Christian” and that a reader would initially assume the tale to be set in a Christian world.56 This claim, however, reads too much into Dorigen’s monotheism, which remains within the bounds of natural theology. For instance, her speech avoids the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo by juxtaposing “foul confusion” and “fair creation,” language reflecting the pagan belief that the world was made by ordering primal chaos.57 Her later statement that God made man “lyk to [his] owene merk” (V 880) need not be taken as a reference to the creation story of Genesis, because Classical tradition affirmed rationality as the trait that made humans godlike.58 The moment in which she sounds the most Christian is when she describes God’s love using the term “chiertee” – “Thanne semed it ye hadde a greet chiertee / Toward mankynde” (V 881–82) – but tellingly, she speaks with great hesitation here, stopping short of asserting that God truly does love humanity. The speech shows her to be a monotheist who is fluent in philosophical discourse and desperate to understand how a providential God could permit evil. She even knows the official answer to her question: “I woot wel clerkes wol seyn as hem leste, By argumentz, that al is for the beste, Though I ne kan the causes nat yknowe.” (V 885–87)

Dorigen repeats the familiar assurance that providence governs “al […] for the beste” in ways that humans cannot expect to understand, but once again, this affirmation rings hollow. Her remark that “clerkes wol seyn as hem leste” dismisses this answer as mere words, a kind of verbal game that clerks like to play; she knows that it fails to speak meaningfully to her anxiety for her husband.59 56 57

58 59

Wright, “Isolation and Individuality,” 181. Kathryn Hume, “The Pagan Setting of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and the Sources of Dorigen’s Cosmology,” Studia Neophilologica 44 (1972): 289–94 (292). Boethius mentions this idea in his Consolation; see Boece, II. pr. 5: 128–29, 133–35. Spearing, similarly, finds a conflict between “knowledge” and “experience” in this speech; see his “Classical Antiquity,” 58.



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Having taken philosophical inquiry as far as it can go, Dorigen then makes a tentative shift from argument to prayer. If she cannot reconcile the rocks with divine providence, she can perhaps ask for her husband’s protection from them: “But thilke God as made wynd to blowe As kepe my lord! This is my conclusion. To clerkes lete I al disputison. But wolde God that alle thise rokkes blake Were sonken into helle for his sake!” (V 888–92)

She presents the exclamation “kepe my lord!” as her “conclusion,” a word that in Chaucer’s English was still a technical term referring to the conclusion of a formal logical argument.60 Dorigen thus enfolds her plea for Arveragus’s safety into her philosophical speech, positioning it as part of that discourse rather than as a different kind of utterance altogether. Her hesitant phrasing further indicates that she is not quite praying here. Instead of speaking directly to God, she mentions him in a subjunctive aside; she is not asking God to “kepe” Arveragus so much as she is expressing a wish that he do so. She also wishes that God would sink the rocks underground, but again relies on a subjunctive construction – “wolde God that” – and stops short of directly asking him to. While it is not difficult to grasp what Dorigen wants, it is significant that she speaks about God rather than directly to God in these lines. Her reliance on oblique phrasing implies uncertainty as to whether she can even address this transcendent creator, much less expect him to care about Arveragus’s safety. Dorigen’s God thus remains distant from her both intellectually and devotionally: she can neither understand his purpose for making the rocks nor ask him for protection against them. Her philosophical insights may bring her “as close to the Christian position as is possible for the good pagan, guided only by natural theology,” but she remains far removed from Christianity in her devotional practice.61 Dorigen’s oblique petitions differ not only from Custance’s transformative encounters with the divine, but also from the urgent requests of Chaucer’s Athenian pagans, who were at least confident in their ability to win a hearing from their gods. Readers who share in Dorigen’s anxious and hesitant plea will experience pagan prayer as a shout into a void, directed to a deity who remains inscrutable and may or may not be listening. On the opposite end of the pagan theological spectrum is Aurelius, a polytheist who fully identifies the divine with the natural order: the deities he invokes are not so much personal entities as immanent forces that he seeks 60 61

See MED, s.v. “conclusioun,” sense 3. Wright, “Isolation and Individuality,” 182; other critics who praise her level of insight include Spearing, “Classical Antiquity,” 57–58; and Schildgen, Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews, 80.

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to bend to his purposes. His aim is to enlist their help in the task Dorigen has set him – the removal of the black rocks from the coastline – so that she will be honor-bound to satisfy his desire after his years of love-longing. Like Dorigen’s, his petitionary prayer is absorbed into a philosophical speech, but Aurelius’s speech is grounded in natural philosophy, especially astronomy. Addressing Apollo as the literal sun, Aurelius asks him to exert his influence over his sister Lucina, the moon, in order to cause a miraculously high tide that will submerge the rocks (V 1045–70). His plan is fully consistent with medieval astronomical science: he explains that the moon “folweth” the sun “ful bisily” because of a natural “desir” to be lit by its light, and the moon in turn influences the sea, which “desireth naturelly / To folwen” the moon, such that sun and moon jointly control the tides (V 1049–53). Even his identification of planets as deities is a medieval practice, for astrology affirmed the existence of planetary gods while subordinating their power both to the Christian God and to human free will.62 When Aurelius references Classical mythology he subsumes it into his understanding of the divine as immanent in nature: he mentions Proserpina only to associate her with a literally below-ground underworld where he asks that the rocks be sunk, as a back-up petition if the high tide does not occur (V 1071–76). Aurelius’s quasi-pantheistic version of paganism reflects the medieval idea that pagans invented their gods by deifying forces of nature, especially planets, in an attempt to explain how the world works.63 He may sound more obviously pagan than Dorigen, earning him censure from some critics, but in terms of medieval natural theology his scientific view of the divine is no less legitimate than Dorigen’s Boethian, providential view.64 In the underspecified religious world of this tale, both characters are dependent on human reason to infer truths about the divine, and both reach insights that medieval readers would acknowledge as valid, albeit incomplete in comparison to Christian revelation. Whereas Dorigen hesitates even to petition her transcendent, impassive God, Aurelius commands his immanent deities with a confidence that verges on the bossy. His prayer is not so much a petition as a plan of action for the gods to follow, expressed in imperative constructions that he insistently repeats: “Do this miracle, or do myn herte breste” and again, “dooth this miracle for me” (V 1056, 1065), followed by “Preye hire […] / I seye, preyeth your suster” (V 1066–67). Though Aurelius also employs some of the negotiating tactics seen in The Knight’s Tale, such as promising future service (V 1077) and imploring the deity to show “compassioun” (V 1079) on his

62 63 64

Minnis, Pagan Antiquity, 40–47. See ibid., 14, 32; McCall, Chaucer Among the Gods, 5–9; Kolve, Imagery of Narrative, 150. Gerald Morgan dismisses Aurelius’s beliefs as “erroneous” in “Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Moral Argument of The Franklin’s Tale,” ChauR 20.4 (1986): 285–306 (289); see also Jamie Fumo, “Aurelius’s Prayer, Franklin’s Tale 1031–76: Sources and Analogues,” Neophilologus 88 (2004): 623–35 (626).



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love-pangs, these are fleeting gestures in a prayer that focuses on explaining a plan and demanding divine cooperation with it. This attempt to control and manipulate the natural order aligns Aurelius’s prayer with the practice of “natural magic,” which posits that “natural powers could be harnessed” to serve human ends.65 Indeed, as Jamie Fumo has shown, Aurelius’s prayer is partially based on a magical incantation found in the tale’s probable source, Boccaccio’s Filocolo.66 Chaucer minimizes magical practices in comparison to Boccaccio, who revels in the elaborate occult rites through which the magician fulfills the lover’s challenge.67 Chaucer’s magician does nothing similarly exotic or showy, and although he is initially introduced as a student of “magyk natureel” (V 1125), his craft is soon downgraded to mere sleight of hand; he does not make the rocks disappear, but only creates the “illusioun” or “apparence” that they have (V 1264–65).68 In reducing the role of the magician and repurposing material from his spell to write a prayer for Aurelius, Chaucer frames Aurelius’s devotional practice as a version of magic. Imperiously commanding the gods to act in certain ways to achieve the ends he desires, Aurelius speaks more as a would-be magician attempting to control natural forces than as a devout petitioner requesting help. This mode of address follows from his understanding of the gods as natural forces to be channeled rather than persons to be addressed. Like Dorigen, then, Aurelius stops just short of petitionary prayer, though for the opposite reason: Dorigen’s God was so transcendent as to be beyond petition, whereas Aurelius’s gods are so immanent as to be beneath it. There is, however, one moment in which Aurelius addresses Apollo as a personal entity and adopts a recognizable petitionary stance before his god. He asks Apollo for pity in language that echoes Marian prayer:

65

66

67

68

Corinne Saunders, “Subtle Crafts: Magic and Exploitation in Medieval English Romance,” in The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, ed. Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, and Judith Weiss (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 108–24 (110). Fumo, “Aurelius’s Prayer,” 627–28. It is likely that Chaucer based this tale on the Filocolo version of the story, not the Decameron one; see Robert Edwards, “The Franklin’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), vol. I, 211–65 (212–14); as well as John Finlayson, “Invention and Disjunction: Chaucer’s Rewriting of Boccaccio in The Franklin’s Tale,” English Studies 89.4 (2008): 385–402 (386–87). Chaucer’s source material from the Filocolo is edited and translated in Edwards, “The Franklin’s Tale,” 220–39; for the magician’s rites, see 224–29. The description of the magician’s astrological knowledge in V 1261–96 has been taken as implying that he does indeed practice natural magic. Saunders, for instance, sees this “technical language” as an indication that he creates the illusion precisely through “the exploitation of natural forces,” in “Subtle Crafts,” 111–12. On the other hand, Fyler, “Pagan Survivals,” 357, finds the magician’s jargon “confused” and suggests that it is “meant to suggest […] self-delusion.” Given that the passage in question shows the magician using astrology simply to determine the opportune “tyme” at which to create his illusion (V 1263, 1270), it seems that manipulation of natural forces is not in question.

88  Chaucer’s Prayers “Lord Phebus, cast thy merciable eighe On wrecche Aurelie, which that am but lorn. Lo, lord! My lady hath my deeth ysworn Withoute gilt, but thy benignytee Upon my dedly herte have som pitee.” (V 1036–40)

It is not unusual for a courtly lover to address his lady in such terms, as Aurelius does in his earlier plea to Dorigen (V 967–78). In his prayer, however, the language of petition is distinctively Marian, referring to “merciable eighe,” “benignytee,” and “pitee,” and it is directed to Apollo, not Dorigen. The passage thus invokes the Christian hierarchy of mediation only to subvert it: Christians pray to a human woman in order to win favor before God, whereas Aurelius asks a deity to help him win a human woman’s favor.69 Aurelius’s pagan version of mediation positions a god as a means to the strictly human end of sexual fulfillment, making Apollo subordinate to Dorigen and casting the god in an instrumental role that the rest of the prayer defines in scientific detail. His courtly language ultimately points past the sun-god to the person whose “pitee” is the real object of his prayer, and Apollo remains a physical entity whose natural motion can be exploited to secure that object. To align oneself with Aurelius in this act of prayer is to approach the divine as a force to manipulate for the achievement of human desire. Both of the tale’s two distinct versions of pagan prayer prove equally inadequate in relieving human pain. Aurelius’s blustering commands and Dorigen’s hesitant wishes gesture toward a similar underlying uncertainty about how petitionary prayer works, and indeed whether it is possible at all. The characters’ doubts about divine responsiveness to prayer are borne out in the narrative, which shows both of these acts of prayer to be futile. Nothing in the tale suggests that Arveragus’s safe return, narrated anticlimactically in a single line (V 1089), should be seen as an answer to Dorigen’s indirect petition for his safety, and her other wish, to see the rocks sunk underground, never comes to pass. Her prayer has no tangible effect on the external world, nor does it enable her to recast her own experience of suffering into one of faithful endurance and hope, as Custance did. Her tentative requests to an inscrutable God are followed by the narratorial statement “Thus wolde she seyn” (V 894), identifying her entire discourse as a repeated pattern of behavior that seems not to ease her anxieties so much as to feed them. She finds no relief until her “freendes” intervene (V 895), taking her away from the sea and distracting her in a pleasure-garden. Similarly, Aurelius’s love-pangs are relieved not by his petition – the rocks remain, neither covered by a miraculous tide nor sunk underground – but by his brother, who takes him to a magician who can create the illusion that the rocks have been removed. Human intervention, motivated by compassion, is what relieves suffering in the world of ancient Brittany, 69

Fumo, “Aurelius’s Prayer,” 632.



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while prayer is presented as empty words, providing neither transformation within the experience of suffering nor tangible effects to relieve it. The tale thus seems to offer an essentially humanist response to the problem of innocent suffering, celebrating the power of human compassion and distancing divine intervention. Like the other two tales, The Franklin’s Tale exposes the hollowness of an abstract, philosophical approach to suffering, but uniquely, this tale finds no alternative in devotional practice; what it offers instead is virtuous behavior. The characters strive to treat each other “gentilly” and “frely” (V 1605, 1608), and their self-denying generosity is what drives the tale’s neat conclusion, in which a chain reaction of generous deeds resolves the crisis of Dorigen being required to commit adultery in order to keep her word to Aurelius. First Arveragus shows “gentillesse” (V 1527) in putting Dorigen’s fidelity to her pledged word to Aurelius above her fidelity to him as her husband; Aurelius then shows an answering generosity by releasing Dorigen from her promise even though hiring the magician cost him a fortune; and finally the magician waives his fee even though he has done the work. The final question, “Which was the mooste fre, as thynketh yow?” (V 1622), encourages readers to believe that the only matter left unresolved in this story is which character’s generosity was the greatest. Many critics have found this resolution suspicious in its tidiness, noting that it brushes aside difficult questions about the relationship of “gentilesse” to class, gender, and most importantly for the present chapter, religion.70 Some have seen the self-denying generosity practiced by the characters as an implicitly Christian virtue, a “divine generosity,” while others propose that the hand of divine providence should be seen as orchestrating the tale’s happy ending.71 Like absent-center readings of The Knight’s Tale, these interpretations are possible but not directly supported by the text, which offers no evidence for attributing the ending to providence or associating the characters’ virtue with a Christian theology in which God himself practices self-giving generosity. Noting this lack of evidence, Helen Phillips suggests that “a secular code, chivalry, substitutes for Christian rules here in this curiously God-free ancient Brittany.”72 For Phillips, then, the minimalist religious setting and humanist virtue of The Franklin’s Tale amount to an embrace of secularity. By this ac70

71

72

Questions relating to both class and gender are addressed in Phillips, “Matter of Chaucer,” 72, 75; and Eaton, “Narrative Closure,” 316–20. Discussions of gender, focusing on the problems posed by Dorigen’s absence from the tale’s ending, are Francine MacGregor, “What of Dorigen? Agency and Ambivalence in the Franklin’s Tale,” ChauR 31.4 (1997): 365–78; and Finlayson, “Invention and Disjunction,” 385–95. A reading that does not see her absence as problematic is Cathy Hume, “‘The Name of Soveraynetee’: The Private and Public Faces of Marriage in The Franklin’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 105.3 (2008): 284–303. Lee argues for “divine generosity” in “Apollo’s Chariot,” 62, while Morgan appeals to an implicit providence in “Moral Argument,” 305. See also Fyler, “Love and Degree,” 333; and Fyler, “Pagan Survivals,” 357. Phillips, “Matter of Chaucer,” 72.

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count, the tale responds to the recurrent question of how God can allow the innocent to suffer by dismissing notions of providential order and justice and placing hope in human goodness. What Phillips’s account of a “God-free” ancient Brittany overlooks, however, is the tale’s emphasis on devotional practice. Chaucer adds both acts of prayer to his version of the story with no precedent in his source, and their inclusion – even though they go unanswered – makes it clear that neither Aurelius nor Dorigen sees ancient Brittany as a place from which the divine is absent. On the contrary, they insist upon positioning themselves and their world in relation to the divine. Not only does each of them adopt a philosophical account of how God or the gods govern the world, but neither is content with intellectual explanations: they long for, and actively pursue, divine intervention in their lives to redress their suffering. Both characters are troubled by doubts as to whether the deity would be interested in helping them or can even hear their words, yet they still utter prayers. Even though no divine action is required for this narrative to reach its resolution, Chaucer makes a point of showing these Breton pagans orienting themselves toward the divine and striving, despite their anxieties, to pray. These prayers establish a sense of devotional uncertainty and invite readers inside it. Readers are free to conclude that this unsettling experience points them back to the reassuring stability of Christian devotional practices, but that conclusion, like the conclusion that the hand of providence guides the tale’s ending, comes in from outside the tale. What the narrative itself offers is an opportunity to imagine what it might be like to pray in ancient Brittany, a world where humans have no knowledge of the divine beyond the minimal insights of natural theology. This imaginative experience is a powerful way to engage with religious alterity precisely because it must remain open-ended and underdetermined. Chaucer’s pagan prayers reveal that the freedom he finds in his pagan settings, and especially in the vague religious world of The Franklin’s Tale, is the freedom not to think different thoughts about God, but to invite readers inside different kinds of devotional experience. While readers might argue back against a pagan philosophical speech, they cannot argue with a pagan act of prayer; what they can do is imagine how it would feel to pray that prayer. By stepping into its “I,” they can try on a subject-position that places them in a different religious world and in a different kind of relationship to the divine. By foregrounding acts of prayer in each of these three Canterbury Tales, Chaucer enables his readers to encounter devotional alterity, and he privileges that shared experience over the response of evaluation and judgment prompted by speeches. The next chapter examines his project of facilitating shared experience with pagan characters in Troilus and Criseyde, a poem in which Chaucer uses a coordinated system of narratorial and character prayers to systematically erode the distinction between Christian reader and pagan hero.

3 God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer accords a unique prominence to prayer. Troilus’s characteristic action throughout the narrative is to pray, and elaborate narratorial prayers mark each transition, including the beginning and ending, such that “the whole poem is bracketed within the act of prayer.”1 These prayers have received much critical attention, particularly in the “moralizing” interpretation that dominated twentieth-century discussions of Troilus, in which “the love of Troilus and Criseyde is seen to become progressively subject to a moral critique, largely implicitly and ironically conveyed.”2 For D.W. Robertson, the most influential proponent of this reading, Troilus’s prayers to the God of Love are idolatrous, and all the more flagrantly so when they echo Christian piety; the reader’s task is to perceive this implied critique of the poem’s hero and to reject his misguided devotion to Love in favor of the true Christian faith.3 The fact that the narrator also prays to Love exposes his excessive sympathy with the pagan hero, which readers should recognize and avoid.4 This reading excludes imaginative alignment with Troilus in favor of ironic distance and, ultimately, condemnation. Some recent criticism, however, has seen value in sympathizing with Troilus, arguing that readers are meant to enter into the poem’s evocation of love and to feel what the

1

2

3

4

Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 302. Barry Windeatt, summarizing the consensus that he intends to challenge, in “Troilus and Criseyde: Love in a Manner of Speaking,” in Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. Helen Cooney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 81–97 (81). D.W. Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy,” English Literary History 19.1 (1952): 1–37 (15, 17–18, 21, 27–28). For a recent Robertsonian reading of the poem, see Gerald Morgan, The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde, 2 vols (London: Edwin Mellon Press, 2005); prayers are discussed most fully in chapter 6, 255–89. William Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees’: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared to Dante,” ChauR 34.1 (1999): 87–106 (95–101). Franke’s reading overlaps with, but also qualifies, Winthrop Wetherbee’s discussion of the narrator’s “idolatrous and desperate attachment to his love story” in Chaucer and the Poets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 232; see also Wetherbee, “Dante and the Poetics of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Stillinger (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 243–66.

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characters are feeling.5 For these critics, prayers mark affective high points, illustrating the “intensity” and “revelatory power” of this love relationship.6 Whether the poem’s prayers are taken as parodies of true Christian piety or eloquent celebrations of love as emotional experience, they have been recognized as crucial passages that lay claim to transcendent significance for human love. The debate has revolved around whether their claims should be credited or dismissed. What has not been considered in these discussions is the unique voicing of prayer. Even recent readings that emphasize imaginative participation in the narrative have not recognized that an invitation to participate is present in a special way in acts of prayer, due to their open and flexible voicing. Both sides of the critical debate read the prayers for their propositional content, assuming that readers proceed first by understanding this content and then by responding with rejection or approbation. Prayers, however, are not primarily concerned with making statements; they are performances rather than propositions. When Troilus prays, he performs the role of a disciple of Love, a performance that, in turn, affirms his devotion to Love and forms him more deeply in that faith. As for the narrator, his prayers not only perform a devotion to Love that resembles Troilus’s but also explicitly enlist the reader in that performance alongside him: in acts of prayer the narrator casts himself as a fellow reader and frequently uses pronouns that include readers in his utterances. Even as the thematic importance of prayerful passages in Troilus has been widely recognized, the ways in which readers might participate in these acts of prayer and the implications of doing so have been overlooked. Chaucer’s foregrounding of prayer throughout this work makes it important to revisit Troilus with new attention to the distinctive voicing of this utterance, and this chapter accordingly examines how readers are invited to inhabit the prayers in this poem and what follows when they accept that invitation. This chapter does not, however, assume that every reader must necessarily accept that invitation or that it is unproblematic to do so. There are other aspects of the poem that encourage readers to distance themselves from Troilus and his devotion to Love. Despite its high level of formal polish, Troilus contains inconsistencies that cannot easily be reconciled; in particular, this poem invites readers both “to care and not to care” about the story, offering cues for a skeptically detached reading at some points and an emotionally invested

5

6

See, e.g., John Hill, “The Countervailing Aesthetic of Joy in Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 37.3 (2005): 280–97; Jessica Rosenfeld, “The Doubled Joys of Troilus and Criseyde,” in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine Léglu and Stephen Milner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 39–59; Jill Mann, “In Defence of Francesca: Human and Divine Love in Dante and Chaucer,” Strumenti Critici 28.1 (2013): 3–26 (20–26). Mann, “Defence of Francesca,” 23–24; see also Hill, “Countervailing Aesthetic,” 288–89.



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one at others.7 These tensions are grounded in a clash between theme and plot: Chaucer has his Troilus articulate an idealized vision of human love as a transcendent good, but he does so in the context of a love story that, as readers know from the outset, ends in betrayal and tragedy. The resulting poem bears the marks of “a poet at war with his own material,” unable to change the facts of his narrative but determined to explore ideas that run counter to them.8 The state of Troilus criticism, divided between ironic readings that criticize love and sympathetic ones that celebrate it, therefore stems from conflicts that Chaucer inscribed into the poem itself.9 This chapter takes tensions between sympathy and detachment, and between an idealizing and a tragic vision of human love, as given components of the poem that no critical argument can definitively resolve. My contention is that the complex structure of prayers woven throughout this poem is a feature that works to promote idealization of love: these passages not only voice a transcendent vision of what human love can be, but also enlist readers in voicing it, urging them to imaginatively inhabit Troilus’s faith in Love as it develops across all five books. The purpose of these prayers is to form readers who take Troilus’s devotion to Love seriously and thus become invested in the idea of human love as transcendently significant. Even though Troilus himself finally dismisses his love for Criseyde as a transient earthly pleasure, I argue that an affirmation of love as a transcendent good has the last word in the poem, as the final prayer offers readers an opportunity to recuperate the faith in Love that they have shared with the hero and to voice that faith in explicitly Christian terms.

7

8

9

Howell Chickering, quoting T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” applies the phrase “to care and not to care” to Troilus in “The Poetry of Suffering in Book V of Troilus,” ChauR 34.3 (2000): 243–68 (243). On the tension between sympathy and detachment in this poem see also Alcuin Blamires, “The ‘Religion of Love’ in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Visual Art,” in Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Karl Höltgen, Peter Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1988), 11–31 (14); and Lawrence Besserman, “Biblical Analogies and the Language of Love in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” in Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 84–112. David Wallace, Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 67. Elizabeth Salter insightfully analyzes these inherent difficulties in “Troilus and Criseyde: A Reconsideration,” in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C.S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), 86–106; reprinted in Critical Essays on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and His Major Early Poems, ed. C. David Benson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 92–109; citations refer to the reprint edition. See also Windeatt, “Manner of Speaking,” 81–82; and A.C. Spearing, “A Ricardian ‘I’: The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. A.J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 1–22 (4–5).

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Praying to Love Four of Troilus and Criseyde’s five books begin with formal Classical invocations, a type of prayer that Chaucer was the first to write in English.10 In their conscious imitation of Latin poetry, these prayers align Troilus with a prestigious literary tradition, a gesture that Chaucer makes even more overtly when he orders the completed poem to pay homage to “Virgile, Omer, Ovid, Lucan, and Stace” (V 1792).11 Any invocational prayer lays claim to an exalted literary status for the poem and the poet, but that claim is uniquely foregrounded in one of Chaucer’s unfinished poems, Anelida and Arcite. This work begins by invoking the muse “Polymya”, who is imagined sitting among her sister muses on Mount Parnassus in the shadow of “the laurer which that may not fade”; the “I” acclaims her as a “vois memorial” and implores her to help him rescue his story from oblivion (15–19). Polymya is not always associated with memory, but in making that association here, Chaucer presents the poem as a work of commemoration and emphasizes its participation in a venerable tradition.12 The image of the unfading laurel affirms the eternal vitality of that tradition, further suggesting the lofty status of any work that perpetuates it. The “I” of this opening prayer remains tightly aligned with the poet, whose task it is to preserve and transmit the story; unlike the open, proximate “I” of most written prayers, this invocational “I” would seem to remain remote from readers and closed off from their participation. While Anelida bears out that expectation, Chaucer’s invocational prayers in Troilus subvert it and work precisely to collapse the distance between poet and reader. These prayers are spoken by a narratorial “I,” which I will refer to as the narrator in this chapter but will treat as a flexible voice rather than a coherent character, but their alignment with the narrator does not, in Troilus, prevent the invocational prayers from opening out to the reader’s participation as well.13 A claim 10 11

12

13

A.J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 174. Spearing discusses this gesture in “A Ricardian ‘I,’” 8. Michael Alexander outlines how Chaucer’s claim to Classical authority is filtered through Dante in “Dante and Troilus,” in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Rosalynn Voaden et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 201–13 (203–05). The Riverside glosses “Polymya” (Polyhymnia) as the muse of sacred song, but Philippa Hardman has shown that Chaucer was relying on Fulgentius’s view of Polymya as the muse of memory; see “Chaucer’s Muses and His ‘Art Poetical,’” RES 37 (1987): 478–94 (480– 81). This chapter’s approach to the narrator is grounded in arguments by Spearing, “A Ricardian ‘I,’” and David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 76–90. Spearing gives an overview of the history of debate on the Troilus narrator in “A Ricardian ‘I,’” 1–7. Recent criticism has largely embraced Spearing and Lawton’s view of the narrator as “the voice of performance” (Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, 89) rather than as a character who develops throughout the poem, but a significant exception is Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 92–121. See also Marianne



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to Classical prestige remains implicit in the high style of these passages, but their task is to align reader and narrator in a shared response to the story. In the invocation to Book I, that response is one of empathy, which is presented as an essential component of storytelling: the narrator maintains that he cannot recount the story properly unless he keenly feels Troilus’s “double sorwe” (I 1). Invocational prayers often focus on poetic craft, but this one dispenses with that concern in a brief opening petition, “Thesiphone, thow help me for t’endite” (I 6). Its primary request is for an infusion of the appropriate emotions, a priority signaled in the choice of a Fury, not a Muse, as the addressee: To the clepe I, thow goddesse of torment, Thow cruwel Furie, sorwynge evere in peyne, Help me, that am the sorwful instrument, That helpeth loveres, as I kan, to pleyne (I 8–11)

Thesiphone is both “cruwel” and “sorwynge evere in peyne,” constantly suffering even as she brings suffering to others; in this she resembles the narrator, who weeps as he writes the “woful vers” that will spread his woe to his audience (I 7).14 He serves as the “sorwful instrument” who expresses the suffering known to all lovers, but because he is not a lover himself (I 15–21), he needs Thesiphone to help him feel the pain he must communicate. Noting how unusual it is that the opening prayer “invoke[es] a principle not of control but of sympathetic participation,” Barbara Nolan suggests that this invocation subtly grounds the poem in a Christian ethic of compassion.15 More immediately, however, what it does is level the distinction between the narrator and the reader. The task of storytelling belongs exclusively to the narrator, but the task of responding sympathetically is common to both, and it is the latter task that this invocation foregrounds. As Eleanor Johnson has shown, this prayer is the first indication that the Troilus narrator’s “primary relationship to his poem [is] as a reader.”16 In highlighting this readerly role, Chaucer undermines the claims to status and authority that invocational prayer would traditionally make and replaces them with a sense of solidarity with readers, much as he did in the Marian invocation of the Second Nun. By casting the narrator as a fellow reader who wants to have the proper response to the story, this prayer invites participation by any reader who shares that desire. Readers

14

15

16

Børch’s argument for a middle way in “Poet and Persona: Writing the Reader in Troilus,” ChauR 30.3 (1996): 215–28. This presentation of the Fury as being sorrowful as well as vengeful is unusual. Howard Schless, Chaucer and Dante, 103–05, argues that it is most likely derived from Book III, metre 12 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in which the Furies mourn Eurydice’s death; see Boece, III. m. 12: 36–37. Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique, 205; on the Christian element, see 206–07. Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory, 110. See also Børch, “Poet and Persona,” 222.

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are free to refuse the invitation, but those who accept it will find that it guides their approach to the poem, positioning the act of reading as a way of sharing in a collective emotional experience.17 The other three invocations in Troilus similarly emphasize affective participation in the story by narrator and readers alike. Book III contains an elaborate opening prayer that culminates in a formal petition to Venus and Calliope, both of whom the narrator asks for aid in poetic craft. From Venus, however, he also requests a taste of the lovers’ joy: “Ye in my naked herte sentement / Inhielde, and do me shewe of thy swetnesse” (III 43–44). As in Book I’s invocation, this petition implies that the narrator cannot do justice to the story without an infusion of “sentement” that will enable him to imaginatively experience its events alongside the characters. When the emotional tenor of the poem shifts from joy to sorrow at the beginning of Book IV, the invocational prayer again asks for an appropriate emotional state. The narrator now prays to all three Furies, as well as “cruel Mars” (IV 25); none of these are figures associated with poetic eloquence, so their role in helping him “fyne” the book (IV 26) is to help him feel the pain and sorrow that he must describe. Although Book II’s invocation asks only for technical help with “ryme” (II 10), the framing of this petition again emphasizes emotional participation. Describing himself as buffeted by the “blake wawes” of Troilus’s sorrow, the narrator announces that this book will bring a shift: “But now of hope the kalendes bygynne” (II 1, 7). His palpable relief at the turn in the story anticipates Troilus’s own release from suffering, creating an equivalence between his experience of narrating these events and Troilus’s of living through them. The fact that his petition is directed to Cleo, a muse whom Fulgentius associated with beginnings, strengthens this equivalence: both the narrator and Troilus are approaching “a very important new beginning.”18 All four invocational prayers thus serve as what Johnson has called “affect-shepherding moments,” in that they model an emotional response to the story in which readers can share.19 Prayers are not the only such moments, but of all the forms this narratorial “shepherding” can take throughout the poem, prayers are unique for their ability to not only model a response but also enlist the reader in voicing it. This openness to the reader is not inherent in invocational prayer, which often privileges the narratorial voice and imbues it with unique status and au17

18

19

An example of a reader who refuses is Adam Davis, who finds that these lines impose an “ironic distance” through presenting a “gross excess of emotion […] the effect of which is to separate our sympathies from the narrator,” in his “The Ends of Fiction: Narrative Boundaries and Chaucer’s Attitude toward Courtly Love,” ChauR 28.1 (1993): 54–66 (58). Hardman, “Chaucer’s Muses,” 481. Cleo/Clio is commonly associated with history, but Hardman shows that Chaucer was here relying on a “Fulgentian mythographic interpretation of the Muses,” in which they form a sequence that begins with Cleo. Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory, 109. Others who discuss the narrator’s methods of guiding reader response include Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, 83–89; Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, 77–87; and Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,’” 92–101.



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thority, but in Troilus the “I” of the invocations can be inhabited by any reader who wants to feel the story deeply. Readers who participate in these prayers are, in turn, formed by them: the prayers lead readers to invest themselves in the story and commit themselves to experiencing the volatile emotions of love alongside Troilus. In Book I, this invitation to participate is issued not only in the invocation to Thesiphone but also, and more insistently, in a second prayer that follows it. Whereas the invocation made itself open to readerly appropriation, this second prayer, addressed to Love, is projected directly into readers’ mouths. The narrator emphasizes that he is scripting the prayer for his readers, not for himself; he is only a humble servant of lovers, and his “unliklynesse” makes him afraid to pray to Love in his own voice (I 16). The narrator’s advertisement of his own outsider status serves to accentuate the collective identity of his readers as “ye loveres” (I 22), an identity this prayer insists that they perform. A series of second-person imperative verbs dictate the list of petitions they must make: “preieth […] / And ek for me preieth […] / And biddeth ek […] / And biddeth ek” (I 29–43). This structure is based on the liturgical model of the bidding prayer, in which a congregation makes a series of petitions for specific groups such as the poor, the sick, and the dying.20 Adapting that form to its amorous content, this prayer singles out groups such as happy, sad, and despairing lovers, while also adopting Christian terms such as “hevene,” “solas,” “grace,” and “charite” and imbuing them with distinctively amorous connotations (I 31, 42, 49). In so doing, the prayer works within the metaphorical system that C.S. Lewis famously termed the “religion of love.”21 Despite some critical challenges to Lewis’s claims about courtly love, his insight that the language used in fin’amors overlaps extensively with religious language is a sound one, and it dovetails with recent approaches to courtly love as an essentially linguistic and discursive phenomenon.22 The “loveres” who are to 20

21

22

C.S. Lewis notes its liturgical structure in “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” Essays and Studies 17 (1932): 56–75; reprinted in Critical Essays on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and His Major Early Poems, ed. C. David Benson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 8–22 (15); citations refer to the reprint edition. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936, repr. 1958), 2. The primary objection is to Lewis’s criterion of adultery; studies that critique this aspect but affirm other elements of Lewis’s analysis include E.T. Donaldson, “The Myth of Courtly Love,” in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), 154–63; and Francis Utley, “Must We Abandon the Concept of Courtly Love?” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 3 (1972): 299– 324. Jill Mann provides an overview of courtly love’s critical history and notes its linguistic character in “Falling in Love in the Middle Ages,” in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 88–110 (88–96). On courtly love as a discourse, see also David Burnley, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England (London: Longman, 1998); Helen Phillips, “Love,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 281–95 (290); and Larry Benson, “Courtly Love

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perform this prayer would be fluent in this discourse and familiar with its religiously inflected vocabulary; moreover, they would be used to approaching it as a form of public interiority available for their inhabiting and revoicing. This availability is especially evident in love lyrics, which present an “I” open to anyone who wants to sing along and perform the role of a lover. In replacing the open “I” of courtly love lyric with an imperative “you,” this prayer makes that act of revoicing mandatory, obliging readers to begin their encounter with Troilus by performing this script and positioning themselves as courtly lovers praying for, and sympathizing with, their fellow lovers. To describe this prayer as “sacrilegious” and therefore necessarily “ironic” is to miss the point that it is precisely a performance, an act of imagination that readers undertake as they begin to read the poem.23 The fact that it applies Christian terminology to amorous concerns does not make it a threat to the faith but simply aligns it with the familiar discourse of fin’amors. What the reader who performs this courtly version of a bidding prayer does not yet know, however, is that for Troilus the metaphorical “religion of love” will indeed become a literal faith. This literalizing is only possible in a pagan setting such as ancient Troy, where Love can be treated as a real deity: this god even appears in the narrative as Cupid, who becomes angry at Troilus’s disdain for lovers and retaliates by shooting him and making him fall in love with Criseyde (I 206–09). Chaucer adds this passage without precedent in his source, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and in so doing he makes it clear that Love is no mere figure of speech or abstract noun in the world of ancient Troy. Having foregrounded the supernatural origins of Troilus’s love, Chaucer then represents his hero responding to the experience of love as “a problem of quasi-theological belief,” as Jamie Fumo has shown.24 Beginning in Book I, the hero’s prayers chart his developing understanding of who Love is and show him reinvesting the conventional Christian vocabulary of fin’amors with spiritual meaning, albeit of a specifically pagan kind. The role of the bidding prayer is to prepare readers to identify imaginatively with Troilus’s pagan piety. By commanding them to perform an act of devotion in the religion of love, this prayer secures their sympathetic involvement with the hero’s faith

23

24

and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages,” in Contradictions: From Beowulf to Chaucer: Selected Studies of Larry D. Benson, ed. Theodore M. Andersson and Stephen A. Barney (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 294–313. Davis, “The Ends of Fiction,” 58, 60; see also Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,’” 93–94. Jamie Fumo, “The Ends of Love: (Meta)physical Desire in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” in Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming, ed. Robert Epstein and William Robins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 68–90 (70). Fumo’s interpretation informs this chapter’s argument at many points. Other critics who discuss Troilus’s literalizing of the “religion of love” are Alfred David, “The Hero of the Troilus,” Speculum 37 (1962): 566–81; and Marilyn Reppa Moore, “Who’s Solipsistic Now? The Character of Chaucer’s Troilus,” ChauR 33.1 (1998): 43–59.



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before they fully realize what they are sympathizing with. It initially seems that Chaucer is doing nothing more than asking them to perform the role of “loveres” (I 22) in preparation for reading a poem about fin’amors, but readers will soon see that religious metaphors for love do not remain metaphorical in this poem. For Troilus, being a lover means being an earnestly pious disciple of Love, and the bidding prayer enlists readers in the practice of this piety even before the story begins. The reader’s induction into Troilus’s pagan piety proceeds gradually in the scene after the hero has been struck by Cupid’s arrow. Retreating to his room, Troilus initially gives voice to his feelings by singing a song, closely based on a Petrarchan sonnet, that expounds the conventional contradictions of fin’amors: joy and sorrow, hot and cold, life and death, and so on. Chaucer gives this song a full-stanza introduction that marks it off strongly from the surrounding narrative and emphasizes its lyrical status, as does its rubric “Canticus Troili.” As a love lyric, this text belongs not only to Troilus but also to anyone who wishes to perform it, and it particularly invites performance from the courtly lovers whom Chaucer has inscribed in the poem as his audience. A distinctive feature of this lyric is its theological focus, signaled in several changes Chaucer makes to the opening lines of his Italian source. Petrarch’s sonnet begins with “S’ amor non è” [“If it is not love”], posing the question of whether the speaker is currently in love, but Troilus’s more abstract queries are whether love itself exists and what its nature is:25 “If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo?” (I 400–2)

Troilus’s version thus shifts the emphasis from emotional experience to “existential reality and theological absolutes,” making it more universal in scope than its source.26 His questions, moreover, are addressed directly to God: the phrase “per Dio” in Petrarch’s second line is replaced with the vocative address “O God” in Troilus’s first line. This change could indicate that Troilus is singing to “God” about his own experience of love; however, an editorial decision to capitalize Love, readily justified by the fact that Love is referred to as a “he” in the second line, would instead suggest that “love is God here,” as Jamie Fumo has proposed.27 The impression that Troilus is singing not only about love but actually to a God of Love is strengthened by what happens

25

26

27

Petrarch’s Sonnet 132 and its modern English translation are quoted from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The “Rime Sparse” and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 270–71. Fumo, “The Ends of Love,” 74. Noel Kaylor, “Boethian Resonance in Chaucer’s ‘Canticus Troili,’” ChauR 27.3 (1993): 219–27, argues that this difference reflects the subtle influence of Boethius on Chaucer’s translation of the Italian. Fumo, “The Ends of Love,” 74.

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immediately after the song. In a seamless transition from singing to praying, Troilus “turns and speaks to the God of Love as if he had been there all along.”28 If the song is addressed to Love, then a deity truly has “been there all along,” and Troilus’s first lyric is both a lover’s meditation on the paradoxical nature of his emotional experience and a believer’s meditation on the nature of the divine. Readers who approach this passage prepared to participate in the former find themselves drawn into the latter as well; in aligning themselves with the voice of a lover, they find that they are also aligning themselves with a pagan devotee of Love. In the prayer that directly follows his song, Troilus shifts from thinking about Love to submitting himself to Love. His prayer finds a precedent in the Filostrato, but Troilus is far more earnestly pious than Boccaccio’s Troiolo. Chaucer’s hero comes before his god in reverent humility: And to the God of Love thus seyde he With pitous vois, “O lord, now youres is My spirit, which that oughte yours be. Yow thanke I, lord, that han me brought to this.” (I 421–24)

Echoing Christ’s words on the cross as he commends his soul to his “lord,” Troilus goes on to offer his service both to the deity and to Criseyde (I 431–34). The Italian passage begins with a similar statement of humble submission, but only Chaucer’s hero states that the god has a right to his soul (“oughte yours be”), a change that creates a stronger parallel between Troilus’s submission to Love and Christ’s to God.29 Troiolo’s submission is less abject and leads quickly into a petition in which he begs the god to deliver him from his agony of longing. His petition refers to “salute” [“salvation”], but the context makes it clear that this word is a euphemism for the sexual consummation that will relieve his suffering.30 Whereas Troiolo remains focused on this erotic goal, Troilus sees religious devotion as an end in itself. He spends most of his prayer humbly offering his service and asks only that the God of Love be gracious enough to accept it: his one petition is “if my service or I / May liken yow, so beth to me benigne” (I 430–31). Chaucer also omits the apostrophes to Criseida that follow the prayer in the Italian, again shifting the passage’s focus from the lady and the erotic pleasure she represents to the deity and the total devotion he demands.31 In this way, the discourse of fin’amors that was 28

29 30

31

Thomas Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 185. Besserman discusses this change in “Biblical Analogies,” 99. Il Filostrato, Part I, stanza 39, line 4; Troiolo’s prayer occupies stanzas 38 and 39. Text and translation here quoted from Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone, trans. Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis (New York: Garland, 1986); subsequent references will cite this edition of the Filostrato by part, stanza, and (where relevant) line number. Filostrato I, 43.



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amorous for Troiolo becomes devotional for Troilus. Being a lover means being a humble devotee of Love, and readers who have joined in the bidding prayer and in Troilus’s song find themselves imaginatively participating in this faith. The poem has drawn them in slowly, inviting them to revoice the discourse of fin’amors before giving that discourse a new significance. As readers align themselves with Troilus in his theologically ambitious song and then in his humble prayer, they share in his earnestly pious religion of love. Troilus’s official conversion, facilitated by Pandarus, confirms the devout literalism of his faith in Love and brings it into closer parallel with Christian devotion. Troilus performs an act of contrition, for which Pandarus provides the script, that closely echoes the language of sacramental confession familiar to Chaucer’s medieval readers: “Now bet thi brest, and sey to God of Love, ‘Thy grace, lord, for now I me repente, If I mysspak, for now myself I love.’ Thus sey with al thyn herte in good entente.” Quod Troilus, “A, lord! I me consente, And preye to the my japes thow foryive, And I shal nevere more whyle I live.” (I 932–36)

Beating the breast is a gesture made during corporate confession in liturgical worship, and “good entente,” or true contrition, is a requirement of sacramental confession, as is Troilus’s concluding promise not to repeat the sin.32 These echoes make it easy to recognize the public interiority Troilus is here performing as that of the penitent sinner. The scripted nature of this act of prayer, with Pandarus giving Troilus words to which he declares his consent, only makes it more similar to the penitential postures that Chaucer’s readers were used to adopting themselves, and therefore more open to their imaginative participation. As the provider of the script, Pandarus serves as “a kind of priest of love,” teaching Troilus his “catechism.”33 A crucial point in his instruction is a doctrine of grace, a term that often serves as a euphemism for a lady’s sexual favor in courtly discourse but that Pandarus here uses in a distinctively theological sense.34 When Troilus reveals that Criseyde is the lady he loves, Pan-

32

33

34

On the practice of beating the breast, see Evelyn Vitz, “The Liturgy and Vernacular Literature,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 2001), 551–618 (563). On contrition and the promise not to repeat the sin, see The Parson’s Tale (X 86–87, 106–07, 303–05). Respectively, Eugene Slaughter, “Love and Grace in Chaucer’s Troilus,” in Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1954), 61–76 (67); and David, “The Hero of the Troilus,” 572. On the ambivalences of “grace” in Chaucer’s language of love, see Alcuin Blamires, “Love, Marriage, Sex, Gender,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 3–23 (8–9); and Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique, 217–19.

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darus rejoices that his friend’s love has fallen “in a worthy place,” and adds, “The oghte not to clepe it hap, but grace” (I 895–96). By opposing “grace” to an arbitrary “hap,” Pandarus implicitly defines the former as referring to a benevolent divine purpose that has guided Troilus’s love. He also presents grace as an instrument of conversion, describing Troilus as one of the many sinners who have felt the “grace of God that list hem to hym drawe” (I 1005). Here, grace is a pre-emptive and unmerited gift that brings sinners to God, even those “[t]hat erren aldermost” (I 1003), transforming them into fitting servants of the deity. These words echo the language of prevenient grace in Chaucer’s prayers to Mary and anticipate Troilus’s appropriation of Marian language in a later prayer. Giving the term “grace” its full theological weight, Pandarus’s religious instruction thus presents Troilus’s conversion as a gift from a benevolent deity to an undeserving sinner. This understanding of love as a gift of divine grace is not otherwise voiced by Pandarus; he may serve as Troilus’s priest of love, but he does not practice the faith himself. Instead he treats pious words as a means to an erotic end. His priorities are clear even in the stanza directly after the penitential prayer he scripts for Troilus, as he expresses his hope that “the goddes wrathe” has now been “apesed” by Troilus’s confession, so that Troilus can soon be “esed” and find “comfort” from his lady (I 939–45). His language, though politely indirect, identifies sexual pleasure as the goal motivating the performance of repentance, and that goal is never far from Pandarus’s mind. Troilus, by contrast, is content with his pious submission to the God of Love, striving to become a worthy servant of his deity (I 1079–85) but giving no thought to the practical actions he would need to take in order to pursue his affair, such as telling Criseyde that he loves her. Pandarus manages these matters on Troilus’s behalf, and his busy efforts not only drive the narrative along but also enable Troilus’s idealism; Troilus is able to maintain his pure-hearted devotion to Love precisely because someone else is busy wooing his lady and arranging their tryst.35 Pandarus’s pragmatic focus on the logistics of love reveals that, for him, love is an eminently human concern, and religious language is a way of talking about it that achieves certain human ends. In his first conversation with Troilus, the language of confession and conversion enables Pandarus to jolt his friend out of melancholy and encourage him to hope, a first step toward the fruition of love. Troilus, however, takes him at his word when he describes love as a gift of divine grace and urges humble submission to Love himself. What was for Pandarus a rhetorical strategy becomes for Troilus an earnestly practiced faith.

35

The link between Pandarus’s activity and Troilus’s passivity is noted in Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,’” 94–95; and Stephen Justice, “Chaucer’s History-Effect,” in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Late Medieval England, ed. Andrew Galloway (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 169–94 (180).



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Pandarus’s rhetorical, rather than devotional, approach to religious language is evident when he invents a second confession scene, complete with another penitential prayer, as part of his effort to persuade Criseyde to reciprocate Troilus’s love. This fictional anecdote serves two immediate purposes in their conversation: it enables Pandarus to explain how he knows about Troilus’s secret love without revealing that Troilus told him, and it answers Criseyde’s question about Troilus, “Kan he wel speke of love?” (II 503). Pandarus claims to have overheard Troilus praying: “He seyde, ‘Lord, have routhe upon my peyne, Al have I ben rebell in myn entente, Now, mea culpa, lord, I me repente! “‘O god, that at thi disposicioun Ledest the fyn by juste perveiaunce Of every wight, my lowe confessioun Accepte in gree […]’” (II 523–29)

The prayer itself is not unlike Troilus’s actual confessional prayer, in that it addresses a benevolent and gracious deity and humbly begs forgiveness for past crimes. Both of these prayers also rely on penitential concepts and vocabulary, in this case notably the Latin phrase “mea culpa,” that would resonate with Chaucer’s readers. Pandarus does not significantly misrepresent Troilus’s devotion, but he deploys that devotion as a rhetorical showpiece intended to convince Criseyde of her lover’s worthiness. Chaucer departs from his source in having Pandarus invent a confessional prayer to prove this point; in Boccaccio’s version, Pandaro claims to have overheard Troiolo making an eloquent lament to Love, culminating in a petition for relief from the pangs of desire.36 By replacing the source’s lament with a reprise of the earlier confession scene, Chaucer invites a comparison of the two penitential prayers and calls attention to the contrast between Troilus’s earnest piety and Pandarus’s canny rhetoric.37 The latter’s invention of a prayer of repentance reveals that, for him, the real audience of Troilus’s penitence is not Love but Criseyde, and its true purpose is to illustrate his ability to “wel speke of love” and thus persuade her to reciprocate his affections. The contrast between Troilus and

36

37

See Filostrato II, 57–60. Chaucer’s Pandarus does use the word “pleyne” when introducing this passage (II 522), but its content closely mirrors that of Troilus’s earlier confessional prayer. This contrast is denied in Moore’s reading of Troilus’s prayers as rhetorical acts; focusing on the first one, she takes it as an attempt to convince “the God of Love, and Criseyde, to be well-disposed to his devotion and to be persuaded to extend themselves on his behalf” (“Who’s Solipsistic Now,” 46). Her reading misrepresents Troilus’s own prayer to Love, which is not overheard by Criseyde and does not seek to persuade, but it aptly describes Pandarus’s imitation of Troilus at prayer. It is Pandarus who brings (a fictionalized version of) Troilus’s faith to Criseyde’s ears and uses it for persuasive ends.

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Pandarus is therefore not only a matter of idealism versus pragmatism, but also a matter of faith: both are fluent in the discourse of the religion of love, but only Troilus speaks it with true devotion. Like her uncle, Criseyde views the religion of love as a rhetorical phenomenon. Jamie Fumo aptly describes Troilus’s beloved as an atheist, noting that she never professes faith in a God of Love or approaches love in spiritual terms.38 In keeping with this characterization, Criseyde never prays; instead, when left alone with the news of Troilus’s love for her, her first action is to list the pros and cons of reciprocating his affection (II 703–808). Her rational deliberations combine with shifting emotions and chance events to “enclyne” her, as the narrator puts it, toward love in a slow and incremental way (II 674).39 Dabney Bankert likens this process to Augustine’s gradual conversion to Christianity and contrasts it to the dramatic Pauline conversion experienced by Troilus, but the deeper contrast that Bankert’s reading obscures is that only Troilus’s conversion is in fact religious in nature.40 For Criseyde, loving Troilus does not involve such actions as submitting herself to the authority of a god, thanking a god for his grace, or praying to a god for help. She tends not to use the language of the religion of love, and when she hears it used by others, she responds on a rhetorical rather than a devotional level. Criseyde’s approach to the religion of love can be seen most clearly in her reaction to the “Troian song” (II 825) sung by her niece Antigone. This song opens with precisely the kind of pious submission to Love that Troilus professes: She seyde, “O Love, to whom I have and shal Ben humble subgit, trewe in myn entente, As I best kan, to yow, lord, yeve ich al For everemo myn hertes lust to rente.” (II 827–30)

The fact that these words are voiced by a woman demonstrates that this posture of humble service to Love is available to both genders, but Criseyde never adopts it. What catches her attention is the song’s later stanzas, in which the focus shifts from praise of Love himself to praise of the human lover, the “welle of worthynesse, / Of trouthe grownd, mirour of goodlihed” (II 841– 42), and then to a critique of those who denigrate love (II 855–68). The final couplet, “Al dredde I first to love hym to bigynne, / Now woot I wel, ther is no peril inne” (II 874–75), speaks directly to Criseyde’s situation as a woman 38 39

40

Fumo, “The Ends of Love,” 79–80. For a close reading of Criseyde’s incremental process of falling in love, see Jill Mann, “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 2003), 93–111 (93–105); see also Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique, 236–43. Dabney Bankert, “Secularizing the Word: Conversion Models in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 37.3 (2003): 196–218.



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who is hesitant to love. Her first response is to investigate the song’s claims: she asks Antigone who wrote it and learns that its author, a noble woman, truly experienced all the joy the song promises (II 876–82). She then wonders aloud, “Lord, is ther swych blisse among / Thise loveres, as they konne faire endite?” (II 885–86). Her use of the word “Lord” is emphatic rather than vocative, exemplifying the kind of vaguely religious verbal filler that, as many critics have noticed, peppers the dialogue of all the characters in Troilus.41 Criseyde’s question, moreover, is strictly rhetorical and needs no answer, for in asking it Criseyde reveals that she has already been moved by the song’s “faire” words about the “blisse” of love, words that she then chooses to “prenten in hire herte” (II 900). Instead of appropriating Antigone’s song and positioning herself as a “humble subgit” of Love, Criseyde keeps the song at arm’s length and subjects it to analysis, weighing up the accuracy of its statements and the beauty of its language. Her detached, analytical response to this song illustrates how her experience of falling in love differs from Troilus’s not only in being gradual, but also in being secular. She moves toward love in a process that is influenced by the rhetorical power of religious language, but in which she recognizes no role for the God of Love. In her reading of Criseyde as an atheist, Fumo suggests that the two lovers possess two halves of one truth: Criseyde sees only the earthly transience of love, whereas Troilus sees only its transcendent potential, and both of their beliefs are affirmed by the poem’s ending.42 Fumo focuses on the content of what these characters believe about love, but the voicing of their beliefs is equally significant. Criseyde speaks in ways that are embedded in specific narrative contexts and closed off from readerly appropriation; she most often speaks in conversation with other characters, and even her monologues, the pro-con analysis of love (II 703–808) and speech outlining plans for returning to Troy (IV 1254–414) are highly situational and logistical. The one exception is her set-piece lament against “blake nyght” just after the consummation scene (III 1429), which forms a pair with Troilus’s lament against “cruel day” (III 1450). On the only occasion when Criseyde speaks the discourse of fin’amors in a way that readers might appropriate, it is precisely in order to emphasize the transience that defines her view 41

42

Louise Wejksnora thoroughly catalogues all such remarks in an appendix to “Classical Gods and Christian God: Religious Allusions and the Moral of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde” (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York University, 1986), 464–506. Several critics have argued that these remarks represent more than mere filler. Richard Neuse argues that they establish a Christian subtext in his “Troilus and Criseyde: Another Dantean Reading,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: Subgit to alle Poesye: Essays in Criticism, ed. Richard Shoaf and Catherine Cox (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 199–210 (201–02), whereas Timothy Arner proposes that they expose the slipperiness of language in “For Goddes Love: Rhetorical Expression in Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 46.4 (2012): 439–60. Fumo, “The Ends of Love,” 81.

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of love. Her pattern of speaking in practical and situational ways means that her atheism remains at an imaginative distance from readers, whereas Troilus’s devotion to Love is consistently voiced in songs and prayers that invite participation. Chaucer’s audience is, moreover, already accustomed to inhabiting the amorous and penitential discourses on which Troilus relies. Chaucer thus makes it easy for his readers to align themselves with Troilus’s faith and difficult for them to join in Criseyde’s atheism; both may be partially correct, as Fumo maintains, but only one is made available for readers to share. That sharing, moreover, goes beyond mere sympathy with Troilus’s beliefs, for readers are invited to re-voice those beliefs as they inhabit his songs and prayers to Love. In so doing, they participate imaginatively not only in a love relationship, as they might when reading any romance, but also in a unique pagan religion of love. Chaucer’s choice to represent Troilus’s pagan devotion in terms that readers can so readily revoice was not obvious or inevitable. His practice in Troilus departs not only from what he found in his source but also from what he did in his other Classical romance, The Knight’s Tale: the Athenian characters in this tale speak like courtly lovers and pray to pagan gods, but love and religion remain distinct in their world. Troilus’s piety does, however, resemble Palamon and Arcite’s in one atypical prayer in the first half of Book III, which offers a revealing point of contrast to his usual devotional practice. Not coincidentally, this prayer occurs immediately after Pandarus tells Troilus that he has made all the arrangements for him to consummate his love: that is, it comes at the moment when Troilus confronts the fact that his love is not just about devotion to a god, but also about sex with a woman. Evidently panicked at the thought of consummation, Troilus makes a lengthy prayer that begins by addressing “blisful Venus,” whom he asks to “enspire” him during the coming night (III 712). The choice of Venus rather than Love as addressee is fitting because she is more closely associated with the act of sex. Troilus promises her his faithful service (III 713–14), much as he did earlier to Love, but as the prayer continues it becomes both more assertive in tone and more urgently practical in content. Troilus spends a stanza detailing potentially negative astrological influences and asking Venus to mitigate them, concluding with an appeal to her own love of “Adoun, that with the boor was slawe” (III 721). This tactic of reminding the deity of his or her own love-pangs is also used by Palamon and Arcite, but Troilus takes it further: the remainder of his prayer runs through a list of gods and their lovers, covering most of the pagan pantheon at a frantic pace that slides into bathos (III 722–35). Heightening the comic effect, Troilus repeatedly highlights awkward details in the divine love stories he summarizes, such as the fact that Apollo’s beloved Daphne turned herself into a tree to escape him (III 726–27), and he ends by appealing to inauspicious figures, Diana and the Fates (III 731–35). The hectic pace and chaotic content of this prayer undercut its seriousness, and indeed the whole episode is played for laughs. As soon as the prayer is finished, Pandarus mocks



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Troilus’s panic, asking him, “Thow wrecched mouses herte, / Artow agast so that she wol the bite?” (III 736–37). Humor distances this prayer from Troilus’s other acts of devotion and from the petitions of Palamon and Arcite that it superficially resembles, but most importantly, humor distances it from the reader’s voice. To find an act of prayer funny is to adopt a stance of critical detachment from it, which precludes inhabiting it. Instead of drawing readers inside Troilus’s devotion, this passage represents that devotion in terms that invite readerly judgment, though not of a harshly condemnatory kind. Much like a later moment of light humor, Troilus’s faint at Criseyde’s bedside, the prayer pokes gentle fun at the pious idealism with which Troilus approaches love by showing his nervousness about the act of sex.43 In this way, the prayer shows Chaucer pursuing local effect at the expense of overall consistency. His usual practice in this poem is not to depict Troilus as being earnestly, even laughably, pious in his devotion to Love, but rather to involve readers in that devotion. This one exception reveals the boldness of Chaucer’s overarching strategy in Troilus, in which he repeatedly invites readers to join imaginatively in a pagan character’s prayers to the God of Love, and thus to inhabit an alien form of religious devotion. Readers who have accepted that invitation and have established a habit of aligning themselves with Troilus’s faith in the poem’s rising action are prepared to join him in affirming new insights about Love as the story reaches its climax in Book III.

Rejoicing in Love Of the poem’s five books, Book III is the one most carefully structured around acts of prayer, which mark its beginning, its climactic central scene, and its ending. The two prayers spoken by Troilus voice an increasingly expansive sense of Love’s power and goodness, while the opening narratorial prayer anticipates this development in Troilus’s devotion and involves readers in it in advance. While the narrator makes a brief petition for aid in poetic composition (III 43–48), his prayer is dominated by praise of Venus, and the terms of this praise reveal an unusual conception of the goddess’s nature and role. He begins by addressing her as a benevolent astrological power, the “blisful light” of the “thridde heven” whose influence is “veray cause of heele and of gladnesse” (III 1–2, 6). In the next stanza, however, Venus becomes something greater than one planet among others, as the narrator extols her all-encompassing power:

43

Troilus’s faint has been read as evidence of his effeminacy, but Gretchen Mieszkowski argues persuasively that it demonstrates his idealism in “Revisiting Troilus’s Faint,” in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 43–57.

108  Chaucer’s Prayers In hevene and helle, in erthe and salte see Is felt thi myght, if that I wel descerne, As man, brid, best, fissh, herbe, and grene tree Thee fele in tymes with vapour eterne. God loveth, and to love wol nought werne, And in this world no lyves creature Withouten love is worth, or may endure. (III 8–14)

In its bold claim that Venus’s “myght” extends from heaven to hell and throughout all creation, and even to God himself, this stanza conflates the goddess with a Boethian conception of cosmic love. This divine love that suffuses the created order, bringing harmony at every level and sustaining all living things from people to animals to plants, is described in Book II, metre 8 of the Consolation of Philosophy, a passage that underlies both this prayer and the concluding prayer by Troilus. Chaucer split one instance of Boethian prayer in Boccaccio’s Filostrato into these two passages that bracket his central book: he moved Boccaccio’s loose adaptation of the metre to the beginning and into the narrator’s voice, then reached back to Boethius to write a closer adaptation for his Troilus at the end of Book III.44 The narrator’s praise of Venus’s power “in hevene and helle, in erthe and salte see” thus finds an echo in Troilus’s later praise of the Love that “of erthe and se hath governaunce” and “his hestes hath in hevene hye” (III 1744–45), because both are based on Boethius’s “Terras ac pelagus regens / Et caelo imperitans amor” (II m. 8: 14–15).45 Both prayers also acknowledge the binding power of cosmic love in the human sphere. The closing stanzas of the narrator’s prayer expound how every form of harmony among human beings, from national unity to friendships, is made possible by the bonds of love, which are described as a “lawe […] in universe” (III 36–38).46 While Boethius attributes this universal law to “amor,” Chaucer’s narrator aligns it with Venus, identifying this goddess with a transcendent Love. Even as the narrator’s prayer reimagines Venus in terms of Boethian cosmic love, it does not neglect her familiar role as patron goddess of sex. The third stanza recounts how she made Jove “amorous […] / On mortal thing” and “in a thousand forms down hym sente / For love in erthe” (III 17–20). The language in which Jove’s affairs are described has an incarnational ring, and indeed there is a medieval tradition, exemplified in the Ovide Moralisé,

44 45

46

See Filostrato III, 74–89. Here and subsequently, Boethius’s Latin is quoted from Philosophiae Consolationis, in Boethius: Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 130–435. In the Boece, Chaucer renders these lines as “love, that governeth erthe and see, and hath also comandement to the hevene” (II m. 8: 15–16). See II m. 8: 22–30.



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of interpreting Jove’s seductions as allegories of the incarnation of Christ.47 Pointing to this hint of the incarnation and other subtle clues, some critics have argued that the Book III invocation presents a Christianized Venus, but its Christian echoes are faint in comparison to its debt to Boethius.48 This prayer contains Jove’s unruly sexuality not by positioning it as incarnational, but rather by conflating it with the cosmic love that animates creation: his various affairs are described as “effectes glade, / Thorugh which that thynges lyven alle and be” (III 15–16). This description evokes an abstract lifeforce rather than a physical act of sex, but the latter is acknowledged in the stanza’s bluntly colloquial final words, “and whom yow liste he hente” (III 21).49 Even this reference to sexuality is, however, muted in comparison to the eroticism of Chaucer’s portrayals of Venus in The Knight’s Tale and The Parliament of Fowls.50 This prayer acknowledges Venus’s association with sexuality, but without casting her as sordid or even as particularly sensual; on the contrary, it presents sexual love as one aspect of a universal cosmic love that governs creation and sustains all living things. Aligning oneself with the “I” of this prayer therefore means celebrating a Boethian vision of cosmic love and recognizing sexuality as an element of it. Much as the Book I bidding prayer scripted readers’ participation in Troilus’s religion of love even before the hero converted, this opening prayer anticipates a coming development in Troilus’s pagan devotion to Love and secures the reader’s imaginative participation in it in advance. That development is prompted by the sexual consummation that occurs in Book III, which marks both a new stage in Troilus and Criseyde’s romance and a new kind of religious practice for Troilus. His earlier nervousness about sex implied some tension between physical intimacy and religious idealism, but that tension evaporates in the consummation scene itself, as Troilus re47

48

49 50

For instance, the Ovide Moralisé explains that Jove’s appearance as golden rain signifies Christ “Quant il en la vierge honoree / S’aumbra sans lui violer” [“when He incarnated Himself in the blessed virgin without violating her”], and his form as a bull signifies how Christ “Por l’amour d’umaine nature / Se vault descendre et abessier,” and “D’umaine forme so couvri” [“for the love of human nature, wanted to descend and lower Himself” and “covered himself with a human form”]. Quotations from Book VI, lines 867–69 and Book I, lines 5114–15, 5121 in Ovide Moralisé, ed. C. de Boer, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe reeks, vols 15, 21, 30.3, 37, 43 (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1915–36). Translations of this text are my own. James Wimsatt makes a case for Chaucer’s familiarity with the Ovide Moralisé in “The Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Seys and Alcyone,’” Medium Aevum 36 (1967): 231–41 (239). Christianizing readings include Peter Dronke, “L’Amor che Move il Sole e l’Altre Stelle,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3.6 (1965): 389–422 (419–20); Derek Brewer, “Chaucer’s Venuses,” in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck, ed. Juliette Dor (English Department, University of Lièges, 1992), 30–40 (38–39); Sumner Ferris, “Venus and the Virgin: The Proem to Book III of Troilus and Criseyde as a Model for the Prologue to the Prioress’s Tale,” ChauR 27.3 (1993): 252–59. Alcuin Blamires, “The ‘Religion of Love,’” 24, emphasizes the harshness of this final word. Brewer, “Chaucer’s Venuses,” 39.

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sponds to sex just as he responded to Cupid’s arrow in Book I: by praying to Love. The prayer Troilus speaks while caressing Criseyde echoes the narrator’s opening prayer in affirming sexual love as part of a higher and transcendent love, but in this case that higher love is not Boethian. This prayer makes a passing reference to love as a “holy bond of thynges” (III 1261), but otherwise Boethian cosmic love is reserved for Troilus’s next prayer, at the book’s conclusion. During the consummation scene, the higher love to which Troilus links his sexual love is in fact Christian charity: his prayer begins, “O Love, O Charite!” (III 1254). The abstract term “Love” is expansive enough to encompass the specifically Christian notion of “Charite,” but in the context of this prayer Troilus’s “Love” has a narrower reference: it must be taken as referring to Cupid, God of Love, because the next line addresses “Thi moder, ek, Citheria the swete” (III 1255). Troilus goes on to describe Venus as the “wel-willy planete” and finally calls on Hymen, god of marriage (III 1257–58). Christian charity would seem to have no place in this pagan pantheon of love deities; indeed Cupid, son of Venus, gives his name to the cupiditas that is traditionally contrasted with Christian caritas. Troilus’s opening words, a double address to Cupid and to Charity, provocatively imply that the love presided over by the pagan god is not inherently at odds with a love defined by generous self-giving, and the rest of his prayer bears out that implication. This prayer shows Troilus grasping the full meaning of the language of grace that he has always used as part of his religion of love. In the next stanza he seems to begin the prayer anew as he addresses himself to “Benigne Love, thow holy bond of thynges” (III 1261), a phrase that gestures toward Boethius but also, with the word “Benigne,” evokes a Marian register. That register dominates the remainder of the prayer, in which Troilus praises Love’s generous grace: “For noldestow of bownte hem socouren That serven best and most alwey labouren, Yet were al lost, that dar I wel seyn, certes, But if thi grace passed oure desertes.” (III 1264–67)

The undeserved “grace” here attributed to Love closely resembles the prevenient grace celebrated in Chaucer’s Marian prayers. The next stanza describes how this overflowing generosity was shown to Troilus, who was the “leest” deserving of Love’s grace, yet now finds himself immeasurably blessed (III 1268–71). Both his humility and his happiness are superlative, even to the point of being beyond the reach of language, for the prayer abruptly ends when he proclaims that he “kan namore; but laude and reverence / Be to thy bounte and thyn excellence!” (III 1273–74). Both in their vocabulary and in their emphasis on ineffability, these lines resonate with the prayer to Mary in the Prioress’s prologue, and they show Troilus reaching a deeper understanding of the generous gift of Love’s grace.



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An even more striking similarity between this passage and Chaucer’s Marian prologue prayers, however, is their common source, the prayer to the Virgin in Paradiso 33. While the Second Nun and Prioress are given Dante’s lines describing the workings of prevenient grace, Troilus is given the immediately preceding lines, which contain a vivid metaphor of wingless flight: “che qual vuol grazia ed a te non ricorre, / sua disïanza vuol volar sanz’ali” (33, 14–15). In Troilus’s prayer, Chaucer renders these lines as “Whoso wol grace and list the nought honouren, / Lo, his desir wol fle withouten wynges” (III 1262– 63).51 The metaphor encapsulates Troilus’s exultation at the sheer generosity of Love’s grace and its power to save those incapable of saving themselves. Noting this Dantean echo, Piero Boitani has proposed that Chaucer deliberately omitted this metaphor of wingless flight in Marian prayers because its appearance in Troilus gave it an “erotic connotation” that he wished to avoid in pious contexts.52 If piety is kept carefully separate from eroticism in the prologue prayers, however, the two are inextricably mingled for Troilus. Few medieval readers would have been able to identify any of Chaucer’s Dantean borrowings, much less trace which tercets he used where, but they could hardly miss the Marian tenor of the prayer Troilus makes as he embraces Criseyde. In ascribing to Love the same kind of overflowing benevolence that medieval piety ascribed to the Virgin, Troilus opens himself up to charges of blasphemy. Even if Love’s grace works like Mary’s, it works to a different end, and particularly in the context of the consummation scene, the use of the word “grace” to refer to the woman’s sexual favor cannot be forgotten. Nor are readers encouraged to forget this layer of meaning, for directly before the prayer, Chaucer describes Troilus and Criseyde’s physical intimacy in a passage that is both lyrically beautiful and remarkably explicit (III 1184–253). While in Robertson’s moralizing reading this scene marks the height of Troilus’s amorous idolatry and imposes a stark ironic distance between reader and character, more recent criticism has proposed that readers are meant to share in the joy of this moment.53 Readers cannot fully share in this joy, however, unless they embrace its religious dimension, inhabiting Troilus’s prayer to Love and joining in his awestruck gratitude at Love’s generosity to him. His delight in the physical consummation of his love is inseparable from his delight in affirming Love as “Charite” and giving thanks for Love’s abundant “grace.” The latter term is no mere euphemism in Troilus’s usage; he reinvests it with theological weight, using it to refer to a radically undeserved divine generosity. For readers, sharing imaginatively in this act of prayer means see-

51

52 53

Musa’s Modern English translation reads, “who seeks grace without recourse to you / would have his wish fly upward without wings” (580). Boitani, “‘His desir,’” 218. Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy,” 27; see also Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 80–83. For readings that advocate participation in Troilus’s joy, see Phillips, “Love,” 285–87; Hill, “Countervailing Aesthetic”; Rosenfeld, “Doubled Joys,” 43, 49–50.

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ing love through Troilus’s eyes, as an overwhelming gift that one can only marvel at and receive with thanksgiving. While the book’s central prayer shows Troilus’s immediate response to the consummation, Book III’s final prayer embodies the new habit of piety that he forms after this event. This sung prayer is a repeated performance: it is introduced with a stanza recounting how Troilus would “ful ofte” take Pandarus “by the hond” and lead him into the garden to indulge in praise of Criseyde, “[a]nd thanne he wolde synge in this manere” (III 1737–43). The hymn that Troilus so frequently “wolde synge” follows its Boethian source in praising Love’s binding power in creation, but it also takes a significant step beyond the source in petitioning Love to use that power to bind together the hearts of human lovers. Making that petition allows Troilus to position himself and Criseyde as participating in, and sustained by, a higher Love. This vision of continuity between human love relationships and cosmic love is written into the structure of the prayer’s opening stanza, which uses anaphora on the name “Love” and a list of parallel clauses to celebrate the presence of the same Love at every level of creation: “Love, that of erthe and se hath governaunce, Love that his hestes hath in hevene hye Love, that with an holsom alliaunce Halt peples joyned, as hym lest hem gye, Love, that knetteth lawe of compaignie, And couples doth in vertu for to dwelle, Bynd this acord, that I have told and telle.” (III 1744–50)

With each relative clause modifying Love, the focus narrows, moving from the wide sweep of earth, sea, and heaven, to alliances between nations, to couples, and finally to this particular couple, “this acord” between Troilus and Criseyde. As he turns to his own love, Troilus shifts from praise to petition, asking that Love extend his binding power over them. The final line, which contains the main clause of this stanza’s single sentence, is the only one that has no precedent in Boethius’s Book II, metre 8. Troilus’s next two stanzas resume a close adaptation of that metre, describing how Love binds the elements, guides the sun and moon, constrains the sea, and holds all things together (III 1751–64). Boethius, however, places this material about the natural order at the metre’s beginning and does not turn to the human sphere of alliances and couples until the end.54 Troilus’s more convoluted sequence, moving from “erthe and se” to humanity and then back out to planets and elements, reinforces the message that one and the same Love operates throughout creation. Human sexual love is not a separate category, for the Love that orders the heavens can also bind the “accord” between Troilus and Criseyde. In asking 54

Chaucer writes a scrupulously faithful translation, retaining the difficult clausal structure of the Latin, in his Boece, II. m. 8.



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Love to do this, Troilus presents human love not only as the gift of a gracious deity, but also as a means by which humans can participate in the divine Love that orders creation. He wants this transcendent Love to be immanently present in his union, joining him and Criseyde in a stable and harmonious bond with each other and with the entire created order. The idea that human love participates in a higher cosmic Love finds some precedent in the Boethian source for Troilus’s hymn: though Boethius shows more interest in cosmic order than human relationships, he does state that Love “coniugii sacrum / Castis nectit amoribus” (II m. 8: 24–25), a phrase Chaucer translates as “knytteth sacrement of mariages of chaste loves” in his Boece (II m. 8: 23–24). Troilus’s approximation of this phrase – “couples doth in vertu for to dwelle” (III 1749) – does not mention marriage, and this omission can be seen as a pointed reminder, apparent to any reader familiar with Boethius, of the immorality of Troilus and Criseyde’s relationship.55 Those who emphasize their failure to marry, however, overlook the fact that Troilus and Criseyde’s unmarried status is a fixed element of the plot: if they were to marry, Criseyde could not be sent away to the Greek camp, and the story could no longer be a tragedy of betrayed love. It is true that Chaucer’s idealizing portrayal of their love sits awkwardly with its extramarital status and the consequent betrayal, but this is one of the “problems” that, as Elizabeth Salter put it, Chaucer “created for himself” in the way he chose to tell this story.56 Avoiding the word “marriage” in Troilus’s hymn is one way in which Chaucer skirts around this problem, and arguably, representing the consummation scene as a clandestine marriage ceremony is another.57 Even as he avoids the word, however, Chaucer does not avoid the concept of marriage in Troilus’s hymn: the “lawe of compaignie” that enables couples to live in “vertu” is an approximation of it, and the request that Love “bynd” the lovers shows that Troilus sees their love as enduring.58 The hymn’s first stanza thus presents Troilus and Criseyde’s sexual love as being sealed and confirmed through its participation in a transcendent cosmic Love. The prayer’s fourth and final stanza, which has no precedent in Boethius, takes the further step of associating this Love with the benevolence of a divine creator:

55

56

57

58

John Frankis sees the characters’ lack of access to the sacrament of marriage as central to the poem’s tragedy in “Paganism and Pagan Love in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979), 57–72 (67–70). Salter, “A Reconsideration,” 106; see also Derek Brewer, “Love and Marriage in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Modern Language Review 49.4 (1954): 461–64. On clandestine marriage in Troilus, see H.A. Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 217–42; and John Maguire, “The Clandestine Marriage of Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 8.4 (1974): 262–78. Windeatt, Guides, 104, suggests that Chaucer reformulates the reference to marriage in terms that he “would think consistent with the outlook of an ancient pagan.”

114  Chaucer’s Prayers “So wolde God, that auctour is of kynde, That with his bond Love of his vertu liste To cerclen hertes alle and faste bynde, That from his bond no wight the wey out wiste.” (III 1765–68)

The Love that binds elements and planets might seem like an impersonal force of nature, but this stanza presents Love as personal, for his characteristic action of binding is willed and deliberate. These lines also position Love in relation to a supreme “auctour […] of kynde,” though the precise nature of that relationship remains unclear, obscured by the ambiguous pronoun “his.” If “his bond” refers to Love’s bond, then Love is the willing servant of the supreme God, binding all things in accordance with God’s will; if, on the other hand, “his bond” refers to God’s bond, then Love becomes difficult to distinguish from God. The two entities are either in harmony with each other or they are ultimately one and the same, but Troilus is less concerned with specifying this relationship than with praying for the binding of all hearts. Phrasing his requests indirectly, in the subjunctive, Troilus states his wish that God “wolde” that Love “liste” to encircle every human heart and bind each one “faste.” He continues with more specific requests: “And hertes colde, hem wolde I that he twiste To make hem love, and that hem liste ay rewe On hertes sore, and kepe hem that ben trewe!” (III 1769–71)

As in a bidding prayer, Troilus acknowledges the various needs of distinct groups, namely “hertes colde,” “hertes sore,” and “hem that ben trewe.” This form of prayer assumes an addressee who knows the specific circumstances of individuals and takes care to give each person what he or she needs. The “auctour of kynde” is therefore no distant creator, but one who is intimately concerned with the needs of his creatures, a quality that distinguishes Troilus’s God from the remote “Eterne God” whom Dorigen petitioned in similarly indirect terms (V 865). Although Troilus’s only direct petition in this prayer is the first stanza’s imperative “Bynd this acord” (III 1750), the final stanza’s set of oblique requests builds on that petition and extends it to all: Troilus wants not only himself and Criseyde, but all of humanity, to participate in divine Love. Even as he looks beyond his own relationship, Troilus also looks beyond Love to a greater God. Whether Love is the instrument of this God’s benevolent will or is finally indistinguishable from God himself, Troilus’s hymn affirms that participation in Love also means harmony with God. The final stanza’s hopeful vision of a Love that binds every heart re-writes the poignant ending to Boethius’s metre, in which Philosophy laments that Love does not truly bind the human heart: in Chaucer’s translation, “O weleful were mankynde, yif thilke love that governeth hevene governed yowr cor-



God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde  115

ages” (II m. 8: 25–27).59 Many critical readings take the Boethian original as the norm against which Troilus’s hymn should be measured and find that Troilus falls short, whether because he “substitutes a generalization of his idolatrous lust” for Boethius’s harmonious cosmic love or because he treats as actual fact the universal binding of Love that Boethius presents as a distant ideal.60 Troilus, however, is making a petition, not an assertion, and to accuse him of stating false claims about Love is to read his prayer as if it were an argument. This passage does not seek to persuade readers that Troilus’s beliefs about Love’s nature and power are true, but to involve them in affirming those beliefs as an act of joyful praise. The prayer’s openness to readers is advertised by another use of the rubric “Canticus Troili,” which again serves to set these stanzas off from the surrounding text and mark them as a lyrical passage available for revoicing by others. Troilus’s first Canticus was a love song that led into an act of pagan devotion while marking some separation between the two, but this time the singing and the praying happen at once, making the passage a sung prayer, or hymn. Its petitions place the speaker – Troilus, and whoever chooses to join him – in a posture of awe, gratitude, and dependence before both Love and God. Readers must adopt this posture along with Troilus if they are to share the joy that defines Book III, because this joy stems from something more than mere sexual fulfillment: it is grounded in Troilus’s reverent awe for Love and for a creator who ordains that the world be bound by Love. Readers, of course, know that Troilus’s petition that Love unite him and Criseyde in an enduring bond will not be granted, but this dark foreknowledge is suppressed in Book III.61 Before sharing in Troilus’s sorrow they must participate in his joy, the double joy of both experiencing reciprocated love and participating in the transcendent goodness of Love and of God himself.

Keeping the Faith The first stanza of the poem announces that the story will follow Troilus “fro wo to wele, and after out of joie” (I 4), but even as Troilus’s emotional trajectory doubles back on itself, his spiritual trajectory does not. Despite growing evidence to the contrary in the final books, he continues to believe that human love is a lasting bond that participates in the divine order of creation; what 59

60 61

Boethius’s text reads, “O felix hominum genus, / Si vestros animos amor / Quo caelum regitur regat” (II. m. 8: 28–30) [“O happy race of men, / If the love that rules the stars / May also rule in your hearts!”]. Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy,” 28; and Windeatt, Guides, 205, respectively. Not all readers would agree; for an interpretation that places a dark cloud of irony over the consummation scene, see Winthrop Wetherbee, “The Descent from Bliss: Troilus III, 1310– 1582,” in Chaucer’s Troilus: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stephen Barney (London: Archon, 1980), 297–317. Those who argue that irony should not be allowed to blunt the exuberance of Book III’s central scene include Salter, “A Reconsideration,” 102–5; and Hill, “Countervailing Aesthetic.”

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unfolds in Books IV and V is not a loss of this faith but a test of it. The test begins with the announcement of Criseyde’s exchange for Antenor, which provides a forceful reminder that their relationship, however transcendent its significance, remains vulnerable to the whims of Fortune. In the lament he utters after hearing of the exchange, Troilus protests this fact, insisting that Love’s binding power ought to place him and Criseyde beyond Fortune’s reach. He can accept that it is Fortune’s “manere / To reve a wight that most is to hym deere” (IV 284–85), but he believes that Love should provide true permanence: “O verrey lord, O Love! O god, allas! […] Syn ye Criseyde and me han fully brought Into youre grace, and both oure hertes seled, How may ye suffre, allas, it be repeled?” (IV 288–94)

Troilus’s rhetorical question implies that, once Love creates a bond by bringing lovers “fully / Into [his] grace,” Love is obligated to maintain that bond. The “seled”/“repeled” rhyme implies that such a union, though not marriage, carries the binding force of law; Troilus suggests that Love would be denying his own nature as the one who binds all things in his “grace” if he were to allow lovers to be parted. As he continues his lament, Troilus refuses to consider that human love might be transitory. He goes on to address other lovers, who he hopes will “fynde ay love of stiel” (IV 325), a lasting bond, and further suggests that if his own love comes to an end, it will only be because he was “unworthi” (IV 329), not because love itself does not last. Pandarus attempts to comfort him by asserting that love is temporary and suggesting that he pursue a new woman to put his “casuel plesaunce” with Criseyde “out of remembraunce” (IV 419–20), but Troilus categorically rejects this suggestion and the view of love on which it is based. For Pandarus, love is a human experience subject to time and change, while for Troilus, it is a lasting bond that partakes in the transcendent order of the universe as ordained by God. Unwilling to attribute his loss of Criseyde to human love’s inherent transience, Troilus later explains it as a matter of destiny; even then, however, he resists his own conclusion, showing a determination to believe that love can and should endure. In the famous soliloquy that Chaucer adapted from the Prisoner’s speech in Book V, prose 3 of the Consolation, Troilus maintains that all events, including his loss of Criseyde, are predestined (IV 960–1078). He begins his speech with the assertion that losing Criseyde is his “destinee” (IV 959) and concludes on the same idea, affirming that events foreknown by God “mowe nat ben eschued” (IV 1078). While in the Consolation Philosophy soon corrects the Prisoner’s argument with a speech vindicating free will, Chaucer’s Troilus has no one to help him see his way past determinism. His argument gives him no reason to hope for relief of his suffering, and yet immediately after his speech, he prays:



God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde  117 Thanne seyde he thus, “Almyghty Jove in trone, That woost of al thys thyng the sothfastnesse, Rewe on my sorwe: or do me deyen sone, Or bryng Criseyde and me fro this destresse!” (IV 1079–82)

Troilus’s petitions for pity, release, or death defy the argument he has just made, according to which all things are foreknown by an omniscient God, and being foreknown, must occur, leaving Troilus with no hope of changing his situation and no reason to pray. The contradiction is heightened by the fact that this prayer is addressed to Jove, a pagan stand-in for the all-knowing “God” referenced throughout the speech; Troilus even includes a clause describing Jove as the one who “woost of al thys thyng the sothfastnesse,” emphasizing the very quality of omniscience that, according to his own argument, predetermines events and renders prayer pointless. This self-undermining prayer seems like a moment of folly, compounding Troilus’s failure to make the full Boethian argument in which determinism is discredited. Troilus’s decision to pray is, however, an authentically Boethian gesture: Boethius, too, turns aside from rational discourse at the conclusion of the Consolation and embraces petitionary prayer, implying that this kind of utterance brings a form of consolation that rational philosophical discourse cannot.62 The end of his speech shows Troilus making a similar turn from argument to devotion. His prayer, however illogical, shows him resisting the despair that threatens to engulf him and upholding his belief that human love can and should endure. Indeed the fact that he addresses Jove, rather than Love, shows the firmness of this faith: his hymn presented human love as participating in God’s harmonious order, and Troilus here reaffirms that belief by addressing his petition for the preservation of love to the supreme deity. The joyful confidence of Book III gives way to a stubborn insistence in Book IV, but Troilus maintains faith in his religion of love. During his agonizing wait for Criseyde in Book V, Troilus confronts painful doubts not only about his lady, but also about his deity. He again prays to the God of Love as the power who binds human hearts, asking him to “[d]estreyne [Criseyde’s] herte as faste to retorne / As thow doost myn to longen hire to see” (V 596–97). Much as he did in his hymn, Troilus here asks Love to bind him and Criseyde together, and thus again affirms Love as the transcendent power who can seal and preserve their union. At the same time, however, this prayer also shows Troilus considering a more narrowly mythological view of his deity, signaled in this prayer’s opening address to “Cupide” rather than his usual Love (V 582). He calls upon this god in terms that evoke the vengeful archer of Book I more than the holy bond of Book III: “Wel hastow, lord, ywroke on me thyn ire, / Thow myghty god, and dredefull for 62

For discussion see Megan Murton, “Praying with Boethius in Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 49.3 (2015): 294–319 (298–307).

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to greve!” (V 589–90). He then positions Cupid in a pantheon of selfish and vindictive gods, like that of The Knight’s Tale, when he concludes his prayer by begging the god not to be “cruel” to him as Juno is in her vendetta against the Thebans (V 599–602). These lines show Troilus addressing his deity as one of many gods and reveal a note of doubt within his faith: he has begun to entertain the possibility that the Love whom he has approached in terms of generous mercy, cosmic harmony, and a supreme God might actually be Cupid, the petty wielder of arrows. Despite this doubt, though, Troilus continues to petition his god as a power who binds hearts and can confirm him in his bond with Criseyde. His faith in the love that he praised in his Boethian hymn is being severely tested, but he has not yet abandoned it. Troilus’s final prayer shows that he has not given up on the belief that human love partakes in a higher divine order. Having found out about Criseyde’s betrayal, Troilus turns to the supreme God and requests an opportunity to avenge himself on Diomede in battle: “‘Now God,’ quod he, ‘me sende yet the grace / That I may meten with this Diomede!’” (V 1702–03). The word “grace,” earlier used in reference to the radically unmerited generosity of Love, now refers darkly to vengeance, but Troilus regards this vengeance as something more than a personal quarrel between himself and Diomede. It is ultimately a matter of divine justice: “O God,” quod he, “that oughtest taken heede To fortheren trouthe and wronges to punyce, Whi nyltow don a vengeaunce of this vice?” (V 1706–08)

Troilus here poses the perennial question of divine justice that troubled the characters discussed in the previous chapter: given that God should uphold “trouthe” and punish “wronges,” why is this justice not evident in earthly events? For Troilus, however, this question is moot, because he has already suggested a way in which God might indeed “don a vengeaunce of this vice,” namely by allowing Troilus to fight Diomede and making Troilus the instrument of divine justice. Rather than demanding an explanation, then, Troilus’s question lends force to his petition, insisting that God has an obligation to grant him the “grace” of battle because doing so is consistent with God’s nature. He could not make this appeal to the divine nature if he shared Pandarus’s approach to love as “casuel plesaunce” (IV 419), for in that case Criseyde’s turn to Diomede would be inconsequential and there would be no “trouthe” at stake. In posing this question and petitioning for vengeance, then, Troilus upholds the same beliefs he proclaimed joyfully at the end of Book III, still affirming human love as a lasting bond, willed by a supreme God. In Book III God was the one who wills that Love bind hearts, but in Book V he is the one who sees justice done when those bonds are broken – or rather, the one who ought to see justice done. The modal verb sounds another note of doubt: God ought to be concerned about the “trouthe” and “wronges” of lovers, but Troilus cannot be certain that this is the case. He ardently wants to believe



God of Love and Love of God in Troilus and Criseyde  119

it, however, showing a determination to uphold his faith in the transcendent significance of human love even after his own love has proven to be all too earthly and transient. For readers, inhabiting these final desperate prayers means accompanying Troilus through an agonizing test of faith. Windeatt has proposed that in the final books Troilus displays a “heroism of the heart” as he steadfastly suffers for his love, but it is important to recognize that his suffering and his heroism involve the soul as well.63 The pain with which readers empathize is not just that of a betrayed lover, but also that of a believer confronted with his deity’s silence and inaction. This ordeal represents a kind of martyrdom, even though Troilus’s desire to literally die for love is not fulfilled; he meets Diomede in battle but is denied the climactic resolution of either killing or being killed by him (V 1758–64). Troilus can nevertheless be seen as a martyr for Love because he could bring an end to his agony if he would simply recant, abandoning his beliefs about Love and God to view his relationship with Criseyde as a mere transient pleasure, as Pandarus so often urges him to do. Troilus, however, can no more abandon faith in Love than he can cease to love Criseyde herself: whereas Pandarus finally declares, “I hate, ywis, Cryseyde” (V 1732), Troilus finds himself unable to “unloven” her for a moment, even if he tries (V 1698). He cannot unlove, and nor can he disbelieve; despite being confronted with love’s transience and even admitting doubts about Love’s nature, he never renounces his faith in Love and God. His sheer determination to believe that Love binds human hearts in accordance with the will of a supreme God is evident in his final prayer’s insistence that God ought to care about the betrayal of love, even though Troilus can present no evidence that God does. If the heroically faithful women depicted in the Legend of Good Women, a text explicitly presented as a counterpart to Troilus, can be called “Seintes […] of Cupide” (Tales, II 61), then so too can Troilus.64 As a saint of Cupid, faithful to his beloved and to Love himself, Troilus perseveres in the faith through pain and unto death. Troilus’s legend, however, does not end with his death; Chaucer offers a glimpse of his afterlife that complicates the portrayal of both his love for Criseyde and his faith in Love. Chaucer borrowed the account of Troilus’s soul ascending to the eighth sphere not from the Filostrato but from Boccaccio’s Teseida, the source of The Knight’s Tale, though he omits it from that poem and pointedly refuses to comment on the fate of Arcite’s soul.65 In Troilus he similarly avoids specifying the soul’s final destination – Troilus goes “Ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle” (V 1827) – but he does allow his hero a post-mortem insight. Troilus’s ascent begins “ful blisfully,” as he gazes on the 63 64

65

Windeatt, Guides, 278. This is the title given to the Legend in The Man of Law’s Prologue; for discussion of title variants see the notes in the Riverside, 1179. See Tales, I 2809–14.

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stars “with ful avysement” and hears their “hevenyssh melodie” (V 1808–13), enjoying a vision of harmony that gestures back to his praise of cosmic order in Book III. When he turns his gaze to the earth “that with the se / Embraced is” (V 1815–16), the image of an embrace similarly evokes his hymn’s vision of all creation, including earth and sea, ruled by Love.66 In the second half of the same line, however, his thoughts take a turn that has been described as “a sudden volte-face.”67 More than just a shocking turn, it is indeed a moment of apostasy, in which Troilus repudiates not only his love but also his religion of love. Having endured a kind of martyrdom for Love, Troilus finally concludes that he had nothing worth suffering for after all. Still gazing downwards, Troilus “fully gan despise / This wrecched world,” condemning it as mere “vanite” in comparison to the “pleyn felicite / That is in hevene above” (V 1816–19). The stark contrast that Troilus now draws between heavenly perfection and earthly vanity contradicts the beliefs he held in Book III, when he affirmed that a divine creator extends the same bond of Love throughout the universe, from the heavenly spheres to the human heart. This belief affirms human love as an integral element of divine order and accords value and dignity to his love for Criseyde, whereas he now pronounces a sweeping condemnation of “al oure werk that foloweth so / The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste” (V 1823–24). In dismissing all human “werk” precisely because it is centered on desire for things that do not last, Troilus finally acknowledges the reality of earthly transience that he refused to admit during his life. However, he does so with an angry vehemence that has the effect of attenuating rather than strengthening the force of his rejection. These lines suggest not cool detachment but bitter disappointment, and this bitterness suggests how much it costs Troilus to abandon his faith. Even as he rejects his religion of love in favor of a philosophy of contemptus mundi, the terms of Troilus’s apostasy imply his profound and continued investment in the religion he now denies. Troilus’s abrupt disappearance to the unspecified place where Mercury sends him (V 1827) does nothing to resolve this hint of attachment to the religion of love. Readers who have become imaginatively involved in Troilus’s faith might share this sense of attachment, even as the account of Troilus’s ascent gives them no reason to continue valuing what Troilus is now determined to reject. The subsequent discourse from the narrator enthusiastically endorses contemptus mundi and urges readers to adopt the hero’s newfound beliefs.68 The shift into a hortatory mode is marked by a direct address to the audience of 66

67 68

E.T. Donaldson notes this echo in his influential essay “The Ending of Troilus,” in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), 84–101 (100). Phillips, “Love,” 282. Several critics have suggested that “lingering attraction” similar to what I suggest for Troilus also binds the poet or narrator to the story even as he rejects it; see Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 235, as well as Salter, “A Reconsideration,” and Donaldson, “The Ending of Troilus.”



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“yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she / In which that love up groweth with youre age” (V 1835–36), the same community of lovers whose fluency in the discourse of fin’amors was assumed in the Book I bidding prayer. At this point, however, instead of scripting their participation in the religion of love, the narrator urges them to turn away from “worldly vanyte” (V 1837), including human love. His exhortation then becomes explicitly Christian, as he advocates abandoning earthly lovers in favor of the true love of Christ, who died on the cross “right for love / […] oure soules for to beye” (V 1842–43). These stanzas set out a template for reader response, in which sharing Troilus’s detachment from earthly concerns is the first step toward embracing a better kind of love, one that remains poignantly unavailable to the pagan hero. These instructions for a proper Christian response to the story of Troilus are clear and categorical, but they have still proven difficult for many readers of the poem to follow. Proponents of an ironic, moralizing reading have eagerly embraced them, arguing that this rejection of human love is to be given full credence and read back into the poem as a whole.69 Others have countered that readers should be reluctant to dismiss the story of Troilus and Criseyde’s love, because the narrator’s final remarks cannot overturn the imaginative and emotional investment the story has invited them to make. Helen Phillips, for instance, points to the “sheer, irreducible substantiality of the preceding five books” and asserts that “meaning in literature inheres more in how we travel than in where we arrive,” ultimately arguing that Troilus makes an implicit case for the value of human love, regardless of what is said at the end.70 The narrator’s exhortation to exchange human love for the love of Christ exists in tension with the story itself, serving both to conclude that story and, at the same time, to reject what the story valued most highly. If the reader’s imaginative investment in the narrative is one obstacle to heeding the call to contemptus mundi in these stanzas, another is their voicing. Troilus’s voice is entirely absent from the passages recounting his ascent into the spheres; his thoughts are reported in the third person, with no words spoken aloud nor even an internal monologue by the hero. As a result, this moment feels remote and highly mediated, in contrast to the reader’s direct and intimate encounters with Troilus’s devotion to Love as voiced in songs and prayers throughout the poem. Readers inhabited that devotion, but they are simply informed, second-hand, of Troilus’s contemptus mundi. The fact that the narrator repeats this view and urges readers to agree with it reinforces rather than reduces the sense of distance. The narrator’s words are spoken 69

70

See, e.g., Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy,” 36–37; Gerald Morgan, “The Ending of Troilus and Criseyde,” Modern Language Review 77 (1982): 257–71; Thomas Martin, “Time and Eternity in Troilus and Criseyde,” Renascence 51.3 (1999): 166–79; Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees.’” Phillips, “Love,” 283. For similar views, see Bonnie Wheeler, “Dante, Chaucer, and the Ending of Troilus and Criseyde,” Philological Quarterly 61.2 (1982): 105–23 (115–16); and Rosenfeld, “Doubled Joys,” 54.

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down to readers from a place of authority, dispensing instructions for them to follow rather than inviting their participation. His exhortation cannot represent a “lyrical, true, Christian poetry of prayer,” as Nolan has suggested it does, simply because it does not enable revoicing as actual lyrics and prayers do.71 Because both Troilus’s post-mortem ascent and the narrator’s exhortation keep the reader at arm’s length, as an observer and listener rather than an active participant, these passages cannot offer the kind of imaginative experience offered through both Troilus’s and the narrator’s prayers. Prayers form a reader who is aligned with Troilus and invested in his religious devotion to Love, but Chaucer offers nothing comparable to help readers align themselves with the hero in his final rejection of that faith. However clearly and categorically it is expounded, contemptus mundi remains a position imposed on readers, in contrast to the religion of love that was extended to them as an invitation. The call to despise the world is, moreover, only one of the poem’s many concluding maneuvers, and it does not have the last word. In the poem’s very final stanzas, the narratorial voice opens back out to include the voice of the reader and invite one last act of participation. Instead of telling readers how to respond to the poem, the last two stanzas offer readers a response – an act of prayer – in which they can share. Unlike the bidding prayer of Book I, which was projected into the voice of readers and distanced from that of the narrator, this prayer unites the voices of readers with that of the narrator. The prayer has a full-stanza introduction in which the narratorial voice undergoes two shifts: first it becomes more tightly aligned with Chaucer himself, as the “I” sends the completed book to his real-world contemporaries Gower and Strode (V 1856–59), but then in the final three lines it becomes the open “I” of religious devotion. These lines effect a strongly-marked transition from poem to prayer and emphasize the latter’s availability for revoicing: And to that sothfast Crist, that starf on rode, With al myn herte of mercy evere I preye, And to the Lord right thus I speke and seye. (V 1860–62)

The phrase “right thus” also appears in the introduction to Troilus’s first song (I 397); this promise of exact verbal accuracy positions the words as a script and reinforces the invitation to readers to inhabit them. Anyone is able to become this “I” who prays to Christ for mercy, and this openness to appropriation will be confirmed in the first-person plural pronouns used within the prayer itself to draw readers alongside the narrating “I” into a shared Christian identity. This prayer is the most powerful of the many concluding gestures made at the end of Troilus, and not merely because it is the final one: more significant than having the last word is enlisting readers in voicing that word.

71

Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique, 245.



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Their performance of this prayer resonates with their prior performances of many others in this poem, especially Troilus’s prayers in Book III that gave fullest expression to his faith in Love. Now that the hero himself has turned away from that faith, the final prayer offers readers a way to recuperate his beliefs about Love within a Christian framework. This single-stanza prayer falls into two halves, the first of which is a tercet borrowed from Dante’s Paradiso that comprises the ABA section of the rhyme royal stanza.72 Uniquely in Chaucer’s writings, these opening lines praise the Triune God in the language of visionary ecstasy: Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive. (V 1863–65)

Chaucer’s translation remains very close to the Italian, from which he borrows both forms of the word “circumscrive” (circunscrive), a term virtually unattested elsewhere in Middle English.73 The repetition of the word draws attention to the ineffable nature of God as the one who encircles all and cannot himself be encircled, evoking a traditional description of the deity as a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.74 The stanza’s first two lines, counting 1-2-3 and then 3-2-1, perform this gesture of encirclement, moving from one to three to one in a way that mirrors the nature of a God who is both three and one. The language of these lines thus enacts the Trinitarian mystery that the lines describe, such that readers who pray these words are enabled to articulate the Triune nature of God in human language. Even as these three lines evoke the distinctively Christian view of God as Trinity, they also echo Troilus’s pagan devotion. In his hymn to Love that concludes Book III, Troilus asks God to send Love to “cerclen hertes alle and faste bynde” (III 1767), describing Love’s bond precisely as an act of encirclement. When this image reappears in the final prayer, God himself is the encircler of all things and Love is not explicitly mentioned, but a notion of divine love is implicit in the reference to the Trinity, the three persons of which are united by love. This Trinitarian love is what ultimately binds creation, as Dante comes to see at the very end of the Paradiso, when he briefly glimpses “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (33, 145) [“the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (585)]. While few if any of Chaucer’s medieval readers would have known the Dantean source of this Trinitarian imagery, the theology would be familiar and would indeed represent a striking 72 73

74

See Paradiso 14, 28–30. In the MED entry for “circumscriben” (v.), these lines are the earliest supporting quotation; there are only two additional quotations, from the mid- and late fifteenth century. This description appears, for instance, in Jean de Meun’s portion of Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Jean Strubel (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992), 19,133–36.

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turn to the familiar in a poem that has avoided unequivocally Christian devotional language. By addressing the Triune God specifically as the one who encircles all things, this prayer takes up the concept of God’s encircling Love from Troilus’s hymn and re-frames it in orthodox Christian terms. Noting this connection between the two prayers, Winthrop Wetherbee takes it as exposing “the fatally circumscribed spirituality of Troilus,” but this reading treats the two passages as doctrinal statements and overlooks their prayerful, performative nature.75 In acts of prayer, similar language does not prompt comparative evaluation of propositions so much as it creates an echo. These lines script a devotional performance that reverberates with resonances of Troilus’s hymn: in revoicing this praise of the Trinity, therefore, readers also revoice, as a more distant echo, Troilus’s earlier praise of cosmic love. As the prayer shifts from praise to petition in its second half, it continues to resonate with Troilus’s devotion to Love. The closing requests for mercy revisit his Marian prayer in Book III: Us from visible and invisible foon Defende, and to thy mercy, everichon, So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy, digne, For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne. Amen. (V 1866–69)

Troilus applied the Marian adjective “benigne” to the God of Love and described Love’s grace as a radically unmerited gift, and now this final prayer restores “benigne” to its Marian context and delves more deeply into the circular workings of grace. Chaucer’s Marian prayers all foreground this circularity, making petitions for mercy while also acknowledging that even in order to ask for it, one must have already begun to receive it. In these lines, that property of circularity is evoked through convoluted syntax: the plea that Jesus would “make us” worthy of receiving his mercy (“to thy mercy […] digne”) is stretched across two lines and interrupted by the phrase “for thi mercy,” an appeal to the same mercy that the speakers are, by their own admission, not yet fit to receive. This petition for a pre-emptive mercy is mediated by Mary, for the appeal to Jesus’s own mercy is reinforced, in the final line, with an appeal to his love of his mother. While E.T. Donaldson has read this concluding appeal to the love of a human woman as an oblique vindication of Troilus and Criseyde’s love, what it more compellingly vindicates is Troilus’s devotion to Love himself, which can now be seen as anticipating this final plea for mercy.76 These lines resound with echoes of Troilus’s prayer to Love in the consummation scene, making that earlier moment of prayer present in this final one. In this way, readers who inhabit the poem’s concluding prayer undertake a devotional performance that resonates with both of Troilus’s 75 76

Wetherbee, “Dante and the Poetics of Troilus,” 263. Donaldson, “The Ending of Troilus,” 101.



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prayers from Book III, such that it becomes something more than the orthodox act of Christian devotion that it might appear to be in isolation. This passage scripts both an act of prayer and, at the same time, an act of reading, as readers look back on Troilus’s devotional practice and recognize how it reaches toward their own praise of the Trinity and reliance on prevenient mercy. In creating this sense of continuity between pagan and Christian prayer, the final stanza validates both Troilus’s religion of love, which emerges as a glimpse of Christian truth, and the reader’s participation in it, which ultimately leads them back to a Christian act of prayer. The poem’s ending thus “turns from the God of Love to the Love of God,” as Bankert has said; but while Bankert attributes this turn to the narrator’s agency and locates it in his exhortation to readers, I propose that the turn is effected by the readers themselves, and that it does not occur until they perform the prayer found in the final stanza.77 Readers who have spent the duration of the poem imaginatively inhabiting the religion of love alongside the pagan Troilus ultimately return to a familiar Christian devotion, and this return does not involve a harsh repudiation of Troilus’s faith. On the contrary, it reverberates with echoes of his pagan devotion: as readers praise a God who encircles all created things and appeal to a benign source of unmerited mercy, they are revoicing not only the script Chaucer gives them in the final stanza but also the earlier prayers of Troilus. This prayerful ending thus works precisely against the “distancing” that some critics have perceived at this poem’s conclusion.78 Troilus’s ascent marks a literal distancing of earthly life and love, but rather than following him away from the story, readers who pray the final prayer are able to recapture the joy they shared with the hero and recast it in Christian terms. This distinctively Christian joy remains, of course, unavailable to Troilus, who after death abandons intimations of Trinitarian love and Marian grace in favor of a strictly pagan contemptus mundi. His loss of faith compounds the tragedy of his loss of love, but the concluding prayer enables Christian readers to transform Troilus’s pagan “tragedye” into their own divine “comedye” (V 1786, 1788). This Christian turn distances them only from the Troilus of the post-mortem ascent, and returns them to the Troilus who loved and prayed throughout the poem’s five books. His devotion to Love, though it ends in tragedy and disillusionment, contains the seeds of a comic vision of God’s love as a cosmic force and a source of generous mercy. The fulness of that vision can be enjoyed by Christian readers, and Troilus remains present in their enjoyment; as they occupy the plural pronouns of the final prayer, they discover that praying to the Trinity still involves praying with Troilus. 77 78

Bankert, “Secularizing the Word,” 199. Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 235. Wetherbee describes a progressive movement away from the story and its errors, while Franke uses the word “distancing” to indicate a more decisive break away from poetry itself in “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,’” 99.

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Although ending with a prayer, particularly one that uses first-person plural pronouns to include the reader, is hardly unusual in medieval literature, the prayer in the last stanza of Troilus is exceptional for its complex relationship to the poem it concludes. This prayer relies on the work done by many earlier prayers, in the voices of both Troilus and the narrator, that readers have been encouraged to inhabit. Chaucer has used these utterances to form his readers, inviting them to share imaginatively in the hero’s devotion to Love and to become invested in his faith in Love’s transcendent goodness. Readers who have accepted this invitation throughout the poem will find in its concluding stanza a Christian response to the story that affirms and completes Troilus’s pagan piety, rather than demanding a repudiation of the story or its hero. This poem is exceptional among Chaucer’s writings for its coordinated apparatus of narratorial and character prayers that guide readers’ responses as the story unfolds while also managing their transitions into and out of the narrative world. Its opening and closing prayers stand out as particularly important components of this apparatus; they are the prayers most explicitly projected into the reader’s own voice, and their placement gives them a powerful influence over the reader’s experience. Performing the initial prayer sets the terms of the reader’s engagement with Troilus’s pagan faith, while performing the final one enables readers to bridge the gap between their imaginative alignment with paganism and their lived reality as medieval Christians. The next chapter further examines Chaucer’s use of prayer to lead readers through the complexities of beginnings and endings, including the ending of his poetic career in the Retraction. These framing prayers, poised at what Vincent Gillespie has called “the anxious interface between the fictive world and the real world,” serve as sites for Chaucer to perform his own identity as a poet, as well as forming his readers.79

79

Vincent Gillespie, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: Compact Imaginations in Chaucer and Medieval Literary Theory,” in Shakespeare between the Middle Ages and Modernism: From Translator’s Art to Academic Discourse, ed. Martin Prochàzka and Jan Čermàk (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, 2008), 11–39 (31).

4 Praying about Poetry In his dream poems, Chaucer uses acts of prayer to perform different versions of his own identity as a poet. Meta-poetic concerns have long been recognized as central to these writings, and indeed to dream poetry as a genre: since dreaming is a subjective experience that can only be recounted by the “I” who experiences it (or claims to have experienced it), dream poetry always involves the poet writing about himself. If the “I” of any dream poem is both a dreamer and a poet, the “I” of Chaucer’s dream poems is also often represented as a reader. He reads, dreams about what he read, and then wakes up to write a poem that can, in turn, be read and generate a new dream and poem; this “reciprocal association between books and dreams” is a “signature characteristic” of Chaucer’s dream poems and an important part of their reflection on what it means to be a poet.1 In these works Chaucer represents the poet’s task as “the writing of reading,” as Martin Irvine puts it, positioning the dream as an intermediary state in which the reading of an old book first begins to become the writing of a new one.2 Focusing on Chaucer’s three free-standing dream poems, this chapter examines how acts of prayer serve as focal points in this exploration of reading and writing as aspects of poetic identity.3 Chaucer repeatedly turns to prayer to effect transitions in these texts, such as the transition into the liminal space of the dream, a crucial moment that marks the beginning of the process of poetic creation. In the special context of a dream poem, the first-person pronoun is necessarily aligned with the voice of the dreamer throughout the text, such that acts of prayer spoken by this “I” might seem to be unusually distanced from readerly appropriation. The “I” of prayer 1

2

3

Jamie Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 40. A.C. Spearing describes this feature as Chaucer’s “major innovation” in Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 58, but Fumo traces it to French models in Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, 41. Martin Irvine, “‘Bothe text and gloss’: Manuscript Form, the Textuality of Commentary, and Chaucer’s Dream Poems,” in The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Honor of Judson Allen, ed. Charlotte Morse, Penelope Doob, and Marjorie Woods (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 81–119 (108). His other dream poem, the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, does not contain acts of prayer, though it does contain petitionary speeches discussed in Barry Windeatt, “Plea and Petition in Chaucer,” in Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry, ed. Gerald Morgan (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 189–216. The Prologue is also discussed briefly below in connection to The House of Fame.

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in Chaucer’s dream poems does include readers in a different way, however, because this “I” often performs the role of reader in addition to, or instead of, the role of poet. Although all three of Chaucer’s dream poems portray “the writing of reading,” they differ in which verb receives the emphasis. In The Parliament of Fowls, for instance, a formal invocation foregrounds the poet’s craft of writing, while in The Book of the Duchess the dreamer’s prayer casts him as a naïve and enthusiastic reader. In The House of Fame, Chaucer’s self-representation is more complex and his questions about the relationship of reading and writing more ambitious. While still grounding his work of writing in a response to prior texts, in this poem Chaucer adds an anxious awareness that his own writing will, in turn, be read in ways that he cannot predict or control. Fame is widely recognized as the work in which Chaucer undertakes his most searching exploration of his own poetic art, and this chapter traces how that exploration unfolds across a series of prayers that Chaucer uses to perform not only an authoritative poetic “I” but also a confused, anxious readerly “I.” Shifting between these roles provides him with a way to explore the interdependence of writing and reading, but that exploration culminates in a crisis: the poem’s abrupt end portrays the poet left speechless, overwhelmed by the voices of readers. Resolution to this crisis comes not in Fame itself, I argue, but in another meta-poetic prayer, Chaucer’s Retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales. This chapter concludes with a reading of this crucial passage, which has been much discussed but almost never recognized as prayerful. I show that it scripts several interconnected acts of prayer that ask readers to join their voices to Chaucer’s and to become his partners both in the work of poetic making and in the pursuit of salvation. Chaucer’s exploration of poetic identity culminates, I argue, not in the fragmentation of Fame but in the unity of the Retraction, in which Chaucer and his readers pray with a single voice.

The Book of the Duchess: The Poet as a Reader In The Book of the Duchess, an act of prayer effects the transition from reading to dreaming on a literal, somatic level: the “I,” an insomniac on the verge of dying “for defaute of slep” (5), reads about the god Morpheus, prays to him for sleep, and immediately falls asleep and dreams. The “I” of this prayer is an eager but somewhat inept reader. He has never before heard of Morpheus nor even of polytheism, for he expresses astonishment at the notion of a god “that koude make / Men to slepe” and protests that he “knew never god but oon” (235–37). Taking a comically literal-minded view of this unfamiliar pagan god, he goes on to court Morpheus’s favor by promising him a feather-bed and bedroom furniture set, which he describes in elaborate detail (250–62). The god of sleep is a minor character in the story that he had been reading, the tragic tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, but the dreamer’s excitement about Morpheus leads him to fixate on this figure, thus reducing a powerful story of love



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and loss to a cure for his own insomnia. The cure is successful in enabling him to sleep and dream, and the passage as a whole seems to be nothing more than a “comic transitional moment,” used to launch the dream and thus to “get the poem started.”4 I propose, however, that this prayer serves a further purpose: it enables Chaucer to perform a certain kind of poetic identity, and both its transitional function and its humor are important to that performance. This prayer is the act that enables a reader to become a dreamer and hence a poet, and it shows Chaucer grounding the poetic process in a naïvely enthusiastic reading of old books, while also registering the danger of such reading. This prayer is prompted not only by the figure of Morpheus but also by Alcyone’s prayer to Juno, which the dreamer consciously imitates. Her prayer is motivated by her grief and anxiety at her husband’s long absence, an emotional state with which the dreamer profoundly sympathizes (95–100). In desperation Alcyone prays to Juno, begging the goddess to show “mercy” (108) and to bring Ceyx home safely, or at least to bring news of him. She then makes extravagant promises of service and sacrifice in return for a favorable response, concluding with a back-up petition for sleep and a “certeyn sweven” in which to learn of her husband’s fate (119). This last petition is instantly granted, as she falls down in a “dede slep” (127) and learns that Ceyx is dead. The “I” explicitly places his own prayer to Morpheus in parallel with Alcyone’s when he states his hope that Morpheus will enable him to “slepe sone / As did the goddesse quene Alcione” (263–64). This imitative prayer shows the dreamer responding to the story of Ceyx and Alcyone by projecting himself into it and joining in Alcyone’s devotion, as if he is “trying out a role in a fictional world,” as Martha Rust has described it.5 This kind of reading involves a close alignment between reader and character: the “I” starts by sharing in Alcyone’s sorrow, then connects it with his own suffering due to sleeplessness, and finally follows her lead in resolving it through prayer. His request to Morpheus for sleep does not, then, represent a narrowly selfish response to the narrative, but instead shows his close affective and imaginative involvement with Alcyone in her own act of prayer. This kind of involvement is precisely what acts of prayer embedded in narratives invite, and this “I” takes up that invitation eagerly. Indeed, he goes beyond it: not only does he identify himself imaginatively with a character, placing himself in the text, he also appropriates her pagan devotion for his own use, bringing the text into his life. His prayer differs significantly from Alcyone’s, however. She combined pleas for mercy with bargaining tactics, but the latter make up the entire sub4

5

Respectively: Barry Windeatt, “Courtly Writing,” in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 90–109 (98); Irvine, “‘Bothe text and gloss,’” 103. Martha Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 24–25.

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stance of the dreamer’s utterance. He comes before Morpheus in a spirit of negotiation: rather than making a petition, he proposes a deal, and then spends almost his entire discourse detailing what he can offer the god in exchange for sleep. Though it is clear that he is making a request, he stops just short of phrasing it as a petition, and he also avoids direct address to Morpheus. The passage drifts ambiguously from thought to speech: I wolde yive thilke Morpheus Or hys goddesse, dame Juno, Or som wight elles, I ne roghte who – “To make me slepe and have som reste I wil yive him the alderbeste Yifte that ever he abod hys lyve.” (242–47)

The discrepancy between the “I wolde” of reported thoughts and the “I wil” of direct speech just a few lines later implies a shift from thinking about offering a gift to actually making the offer, but the exact location of this shift is unclear, an ambiguity editors had to resolve arbitrarily when inserting the quotation marks. Even when the “I” speaks, moreover, he does not quite speak to Morpheus. Initially unsure whether to approach Morpheus, Juno, or someone else, he then uses third-person masculine pronouns that suggest he has chosen Morpheus but that address the god only obliquely. The result is an elaborately indirect act of prayer. The context makes it clear that the “I” means to pray for sleep, as Alcyone did, but what he actually says is a promise spoken into the ether. This indirectness is one feature of the prayer that registers discomfort with the idea of praying to a pagan god, and that same discomfort is at the heart of this passage’s humor. The dreamer’s exaggerated surprise at the notion of polytheism first establishes a comic tone, and the humor is perpetuated by his stringently literal concern with which bedroom accessories might interest Morpheus. The dreamer even explains that his discourse belongs somewhere between earnest and game, introducing his prayer with the words, “And in my game I sayde anoon / (And yet me lyst ryght evel to pleye)” (238–39). He does not wish to “pleye” because his sleeplessness is so grave a condition, and yet he describes his appeal to Morpheus as being made in “game,” as a joke. The indirect framing of the prayer and its notes of humor work together to defuse its alarming proximity to paganism, but this passage nevertheless raises the question of what it means for a medieval Christian reader, aware of no god “but oon” (237), to imitate a pagan character’s prayer. Given the prominence Chaucer accords to pagan prayers throughout his writings, this question is a pressing one: he recognizes that inviting an emotional and imaginative investment in pagan story, and especially acts of pagan devotion, is a risky endeavor. As a response to Alcyone’s narrative, then, this indirect prayer to Morpheus performs not only a close imaginative and affective alignment with a character but also a self-conscious awareness of religious difference as



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a complicating factor in that alignment. Its humor implies anxiety about the reader’s imaginative involvement with Classical story, querying what forms his involvement should take and how far it can properly extend. The attempt to laugh off these awkward questions only highlights how powerful the act of reading can be: it can collapse, if only momentarily, the reader’s sense of religious alterity. In the context of Duchess, this imaginatively engaged mode of reading is validated by the fact that it is generative: it is what makes new poetry. The dreamer’s prayer, though hedged by comedy and indirection, leads directly to a gift of sleep and thereby to the dream that becomes the poem. This progression suggests that an enthusiastic reading of an old book can produce new writing almost spontaneously. This representation of the poetic process finds a parallel in the first book of Fame, when the “I” becomes so absorbed in describing the murals in the Temple of Venus that he ends up re-telling the story of Dido in his own way and finally proclaiming himself its “auctour” (314). In Fame this moment occurs within the dream alongside other representations of poetic making, but in Duchess the performance of imaginatively engaged reading is what generates the dream, and thus the poem as a whole. Only two passing references acknowledge that the “I” of this poem is not only a reader but also a figure for the poet: he states at the beginning that he “made this book” (96) and at the end he “awakens […] a writer rather than a reader” as he declares that he will put his dream into rhyme.6 In between these two moments, Chaucer chooses to obscure the work of writing, and instead of presenting himself as a poet, he performs the role of a reader who eagerly involves himself in stories. This performance comes into focus in the transitional prayer that launches the poetic process and positions that process as a seamless extension of an imaginatively engaged reading. Taking on this humble readerly role proves to be an enabling move for Chaucer in Duchess, and not simply in that it enables deference to a patron; his relationship to John of Gaunt calls for delicacy, but not necessarily for the self-deflating humor of this readerly “I.”7 The naïve enthusiasm of this prayer enables Chaucer to ground his poetic identity in a particular kind of reading: a wholehearted imaginative involvement with the world of a book, which may generate some discomfort but more importantly generates new poems.

6 7

Fumo, Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, 96. Readings that interpret the narrator’s ineptitude in terms of the class disparity between poet and patron include Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, 70; and Minnis, Oxford Guides, 130– 34. Helen Cooper draws a useful distinction between being tactful and being self-deprecating in her discussion of the dreamer in “Chaucerian Poetics,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), 31–50 (41–45).

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The Parliament of Fowls: The Poet as a Craftsman Whereas the “I” of Duchess turned to reading on one occasion “to drive the night away” (49), the “I” of The Parliament of Fowls introduces himself as an inveterate reader: “Of usage – what for lust and what for lore – / On bokes rede I ofte” (15–16). The poem ends with a return to this habit of reading, which the dreamer hopes will provide material for future writing: I hope, ywis, to rede so som day That I shal mete som thyng for to fare The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare. (697–99)

These two references to reading bracket a poem that otherwise foregrounds the work of writing that Chaucer effaced in Duchess. Parliament does not present poetry as being almost spontaneously generated from imaginative engagement with existing texts; instead, it foregrounds the deliberate craft that goes into the making of a poem. A specifically writerly identity is performed in the poem’s invocational prayer, which is placed not at the beginning, as would be conventional, but at the point of transition from reading to dreaming. This is the same moment at which the “I” prayed in Duchess, and in both cases this crucial juncture marks the beginning of the poetic process. While in Duchess Chaucer uses an act of prayer to ground poetic making in enthusiastic reading, in Parliament his prayer shows him self-consciously performing the role of poet. His performance, moreover, defines that role in very narrow terms: the “I” of this prayer is a poet only insofar as he is a craftsman of language, and he carefully avoids making any claims about the truth or authority of his poem’s content. Parliament’s invocation is addressed to Venus, and although this goddess appears in the dream that follows, the dreamer makes no appeal to her special authority to preside over this particular poem. Indeed he hardly even acknowledges her association with love, the central topic of both his dream and his poem. The invocation to Venus in Troilus provides an illuminating contrast: in that prayer the “I” asks the goddess for a gift of “sentement” to enable his “naked herte” to feel the joys of love (III 43), a petition that only Venus could grant, and then makes a separate petition to Calliope, muse of eloquence, when he asks for help in writing (III 45–48). In Parliament, however, the speaker asks only for help in poetic craft and directs that petition to Venus, whom he addresses by her astrological name Cytherea: Cytherea, thow blysful lady swete, […] Be thow myn helpe in this, for thow mayst best! As wisly as I sey the north-north-west, Whan I began my sweven for to write, So yif me myght to ryme, and endyte! (113–19)



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This modest request for “helpe” and then for “myght to ryme, and endyte” focuses on the technical work of writing poetry, namely making rhymes and selecting appropriate words.8 Neither of these tasks is one with which Venus would normally be associated, and the only hint of a rationale for the choice of addressee comes in the introductory clause to the petition, “As wisly as I sey the north-north-west,” an emphatic construction meaning “As assuredly as I saw you north-northwest.”9 The dreamer invokes Venus, it seems, because she is visible in the sky at the time of writing, such that she is already presiding over the act of composition by means of her astrological influence.10 By this logic, the “I” could have invoked any planetary god, drawing upon whatever form of divine “myght” was currently available for aid in his pursuit of his craft; no inherent connection between the deity and the task of writing this poem is implied in the terms of the petition. In framing his request in this way, the “I” accords Venus a strictly limited role in his writing process, casting her as a generic source of divine power to help him “ryme” and “endyte.” These two writerly tasks define poetic identity as it is performed in this prayer, and the “I” neither requests nor acknowledges inspiration from Venus in the actual content of his dream or his poem. The possibility of inspiration is nevertheless raised by the terms of the invocation’s initial address to the goddess. Before the petition, the “I” describes Venus with a relative clause that presents her as the source of his dream: Cytherea, thow blysful lady swete, That with thy fyrbrond dauntest whom the lest And madest me this sweven for to mete. (113–15)

The claim that Venus made him dream this dream comes close to positioning the “sweven” as a revelation from the goddess, but the choice of verb is significant. “Made” places the dream within a cause-effect chain, suggesting that Venus did not grant the dream as a special revelation so much as she caused the speaker to dream by means of her astrological influence.11 Both the name Cytherea and the later reference to her appearance in the “north-north-west” (117) further emphasize her specifically astrological identity here. As a planet, Venus can be seen as benevolent, threatening, or both at once, and these lines 8

9 10

11

While “endite” could also refer to taking dictation, in this context, and in Chaucer’s typical usage, it refers to the act of composition; see OED, s.v. “indite” (v.), sense 3. MED, s.v. “wisli” (adv.), sense 2c. This astronomical reference has caused some scholarly consternation because it does not accurately reflect Venus’s actual position in the skies over London, though the problem may simply reflect a textual corruption of “north-the-west” to “north-north-west.” For a thorough discussion of the astrological element of the poem, see Larry Benson, “The Occasion of The Parliament of Fowls,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 123–44 (141–43). The verb “make” carried a causal force in Middle English; see MED, “maken” (v.), sense 13.

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capture that ambivalence: she is both a “blisful lady swete” and the despotic wielder of a “fyrbrond,” a symbol of lust’s overwhelming power.12 To attribute the dream to this astrological Venus is to position it as the effect of a cause that is divine, but not quite supernatural, for as a planet Venus is part of the physical universe and its chain of causality. Nor is she the only cause of the dream, which also owes something to mental pre-occupation. Explaining that hunters dream of hunting, judges of cases, knights of fighting, and so on (99–105), the dreamer speculates that his bedtime reading of the Somnium Scipionis caused Scipio Africanus to appear in his dream: Can I not seyn if that the cause were For I hadde rede of Affrican byforn That made me to mete that he stod there. (106–08)

The construction “made me to mete” appears both here and, one stanza later, in the invocation’s attribution of the dream to Venus (115). This repeated phrase foregrounds the dream’s natural causes: the planet Venus made him dream, his prior reading made Africanus appear as guide, and the experience as a whole is a product of his mental and physical interaction with the world, not a revelation from a higher realm. In attributing the dream to Venus’s causation, but not quite to her inspiration, this prayer raises the possibility of revelatory dreaming only to lay it aside. In so doing, the prayer also lays aside an opportunity to cast the poet in the prophetic role of vates, a version of poetic identity that is uniquely available in dream poetry. Instead of presenting himself as the vessel of a transcendent truth, the “I” of Parliament performs the humble role of craftsman, shaping a dream into a poem that may, in turn, generate more dreams and more poems. This emphasis on craftsmanship is in keeping with the formal achievements of Parliament itself, in which Chaucer handles both the rhyme royal stanza and the concluding roundel with easy confidence. Though less formally polished, The House of Fame shows Chaucer directly confronting the notions of revelatory dreaming and vatic poetics that he carefully avoided in Parliament. Fame has traditionally been seen as an earlier poem than Parliament, largely due to the technical proficiency of the latter, though Helen Cooper has argued for a revised chronology that positions Fame later in Chaucer’s canon.13 This chapter places Fame in final position because its exploration of Chaucer’s poetic identity is most complex and ambitious, but

12

13

The firebrand appears as a symbol of lust in Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of Le Roman de la Rose, 3422–24; in Chaucer’s translation, 3706–09. Ambivalent medieval portrayals of Venus are discussed in Theresa Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and Medieval Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially 11–41. Helen Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour,” in New Medieval Literatures 3, ed. David Lawton, Wendy Scase, and Rita Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39–66 (63–65).



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my argument does not require it to be chronologically late. Parliament could be an early stepping-stone to Fame, or it could reflect a later side-stepping of the tensions that Chaucer did not resolve in Fame.14 These tensions center not just on vatic poetics, but also on the figure of the reader: while all three of Chaucer’s dream poems present the poet’s task as “the writing of reading,” in Fame Chaucer considers not only his own reading of old books, but also how others will read him.

Reader and Poet in The House of Fame Chaucer’s anxiety about the reading and misreading of his own work in Fame finds an echo in his final dream poem, the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Although the Prologue post-dates Fame in both of its two versions, it provides a useful introduction to the earlier poem because it confronts the problem of misreading more explicitly, albeit more simply, than Fame does.15 In the Prologue’s climactic scene, the God of Love castigates the dreamer for translating the Roman de la Rose and writing Troilus and Criseyde, works that he declares “heresye” because they discourage people from loving (F 330, G 256). The “I,” whose alignment with Chaucer is especially close in this poem because he is presented as the author of Chaucer’s works (F 417–30, G 405–20), protests that this was not his intention: “Algate, God wot, it was myn entente To forthere trouthe in love and it cheryce, And to be war fro falsnesse and fro vice By swich ensaumple; this was my menynge.” (G 461–64; cf. F 471–74)

His statement in his own defense is ignored, and he escapes the god’s wrath only by asking for mercy.16 The Prologue thus stages a confrontation between a poet and an angry reader whose interpretations matter even if, or especially if, they contradict the poet’s own intentions. The “I” is left in the uncomfortable position of being held responsible for the ways in which others have misread his works, and anxiety about this very prospect is also central to Fame. The confrontation between poet and reader that is presented as an external drama in the Prologue is internalized within the “I” of Fame, such that the first-person voice speaks both as poet and as reader. Prayers serve as focal points for performing these roles throughout the poem: the “I” of prayer in

14

15

16

The latter reading is proposed by Stephen Knight as grounds for placing Parliament later than Fame in “Classicizing Christianity in the Dream Poems,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 143–55 (155). Both the F and G versions of the Prologue list Fame among Chaucer’s completed works; see F 417, G 405. On his plea for mercy see Windeatt, “Plea and Petition in Chaucer.”

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Fame sometimes speaks with the authoritative voice of a poet confident in his own imaginative powers, but sometimes with the anxious voice of a poet worried about his reader’s responses. Sometimes, moreover, the “I” of prayer speaks as a confused reader, whose struggle to read his dream mirrors and anticipates the reader’s struggle to interpret the poem. The performance of these various roles culminates in a crisis that shuts down the poem. Although no resolution to this crisis is offered in Fame, the crisis itself justifies the poem’s reputation as Chaucer’s ars poetica, the work in which he undertakes his most ambitious exploration of his own poetic identity.17 The critical conversation about Fame has recognized two prayers as crucial moments in this exploration: the invocations to Books II and III, both based on passages from Dante’s Divine Comedy. The “I” of these prayers is a confident poet who boldly subverts Dante’s vatic poetics, displacing the Italian poet’s claim to convey transcendent truth with a vindication of human imagination. In each case, Chaucer’s changes to Dante are small but pointed, preserving the overall shape of the prayer while divesting it of claims to revelatory authority. In Book II he adapts Dante’s invocation to Memory in the Inferno: O Muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate; o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi, qui si parrà la tua nobilitate (2, 7–9) [O Muse! O high genius! Help me now! O memory that wrote down what I saw, here your true excellence shall be revealed! (9)]

In addressing “memory” (mente) as the power who “wrote down what I saw” (vidi), Dante positions the “I” of his prayer as the transcriber of a vision that memory has already recorded. The authority the “I” claims here is dependent on the prior authority of the vision itself, and his use of the verb “saw” supports the core authorizing claim that Dante upholds throughout the Comedy, namely that his experience was no mere dream, but a revelation. In his version of these lines, Chaucer also defines the work of poetic making as the faithful transcription of material contained in the poet’s mind. The difference is that the “I” of Fame transcribes material generated by his own imagination, not revealed in a vision. This change is signaled by a change in addressee from memory to “Thought”: O Thought, that wrot al that I mette, And in the tresorye hyt shette 17

Discussions of Fame as an ars poetica include Cooper, “Four Last Things,” 52–66; Katherine Zieman, “Chaucer’s Voys,” Representations 60 (1997): 70–91; Carol Martin, “Authority and the Defense of Fiction: Renaissance Poetics and Chaucer’s House of Fame,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville, Fla: University Press of Florida, 1998), 40–65; and Gillespie, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets, 25–39.



Praying about Poetry  137 Of my brayn, now shal men se Yf any vertu in the be To tellen al my drem aryght. Now kythe thyn engyn and myght! (523–28)

In medieval psychology, “Thought” refers to the imaginative faculty or “creative imagination,” and a distinction was maintained between the sensory experience that was stored in the memory and the imaginative experience that belonged to the domain of thought.18 The term “engyn,” used a few lines later when the petition is made, is a synonym for “Thought” that shares a common root with Dante’s term “ingegno,” or “genius.”19 The “high genius” that Dante’s invocation locates outside the “I,” in the Muses, is therefore located within the “I” in Chaucer’s version, as the speaker’s own imaginative faculty. In Fame, then, the “I” paradoxically invokes himself, petitioning his own “Thought” to deploy its (that is, his own) “engyn and myght” to help him to tell his dream “aryght.” He describes the dream as “al that I mette,” avoiding the verb “saw” by which Dante positions his dream as a vision of a higher reality; as Cooper has said, “dream and poem are created in the poet’s own mind, and Chaucer will claim no authority beyond that.”20 Chaucer’s “I” performs this poetic identity grounded in human imagination in an invocational prayer that ceases even to be an invocation in the sense of calling upon (invocare) a higher power, because it recognizes no role for such a power in the writing process. In asking “Thought” to help him tell his dream “aryght,” this “I” defines his task as that of using his own mind to do justice to an imaginative vision that is uniquely his. The invocation to Book III initially seems to pose less of a challenge to vatic poetics, in that it makes a petition to the god Apollo rather than to the speaker’s own imagination, but the terms in which the petition are framed continue Book II’s confrontational response to Dante. His invocation to the Paradiso makes a request in keeping with Apollo’s status as the god of poetry and prophecy, asking him for aid in conveying a vision of the heavenly realm.21 Chaucer’s “I,” in contrast, no sooner asks for Apollo’s help than he disclaims any interest in “art poetical” and states that he only hopes the god will be able to make his “lyght and lewed” verse “sumwhat agreable” (1095–97). To invoke Apollo’s aid for such a modest goal is to undercut the very idea of making an invocational prayer. Not only does Chaucer’s 18

19

20 21

Cooper, “Four Last Things,” 56. Ruth Evans makes a complementary argument that “Chaucer deliberately avoids presenting his own memory as an ‘auctoritee’” in this passage in “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame,” SAC 23 (2001): 43–69 (59); see also Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees,’” 91. “Engyn” is used to describe the creative imagination in The Second Nun’s Tale’s taxonomy of human mental faculties: “memorie, engyn, and intellect” (VIII 339). Cooper, “Four Last Things,” 56. Paradiso 1.13–27.

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version of the prayer set aside a concern with poetic eloquence, it makes no claim to transcendent significance. Dante’s “I” wants to give readers some glimpse of his vision of heaven – “l’ombra del beato regno / sengato nel mio capo” (1.23–24) [“the shadow / of that high realm imprinted on my mind” (392)] – but Chaucer’s “I” only wants to describe the House of Fame, which he presents as a figment of his own imagination: “help me to shewe now / That in myn hed ymarked ys” (1102–03). The image “ymarked” in his head is not the shadow of an external reality but simply a mental image for which he makes no special claim. If Dante’s “I” is an inspired seer trying to do justice to an ineffable reality, this “I” is a self-consciously humble poet trying to “descryve” something he dreamed up. The choice to invoke Apollo for such a humble task, especially while also disclaiming any pretension to poetic skill, makes the Book III invocation as self-undermining as the Book II one. Critics have described it as a “subversion of the exalted Dantean enterprise” and a deflation of Dante’s “poetic pretensions” through which Chaucer “mock[s] himself and Dante.”22 Dante’s invocations give Chaucer a point of departure for performing a very different version of poetic identity: his “I” is at once more modest, since he makes no claim to transcendent insight, and bolder, since he instead grounds his poetic vocation in the creative power of his own imagination. Reading these two invocations against their Italian source could imply that Chaucer’s project of articulating an ars poetica in Fame consists of dismantling vatic poetics and grounding poetry in the realm of contingent human experience rather than that of transcendent truth, and several critics have argued versions of this claim.23 Chaucer’s response to Dante, however, is only one facet of his exploration of poetic identity in Fame. For a fuller picture of this exploration, the two invocations that draw upon Dante must be read against other prayers, especially the sequence of opening prayers in Book I, in which 22

23

Respectively, Nicholas Havely, “Muses and Blacksmiths: Italian Trecento Poetics and the Reception of Dante in The House of Fame,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. A.J. Minnis, Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 61–81 (72); and Glenn Steinberg, “Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production: Humanism, Dante, and the House of Fame,” ChauR 35.2 (2000): 182–203 (195–96); see also Schless, Chaucer and Dante, 69. Jamie Fumo disagrees, maintaining that Chaucer does not repudiate vatic poetics here so much as he “remind[s] us of the essentially deconstructive and precarious nature of vatic triumph,” in “Chaucer as Vates? Reading Ovid through Dante in the House of Fame, Book 3,” in Writers Reading Writers: Intertextual Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of Robert Hollander, ed. Janet Smarr (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 89–108 (93). Fumo’s reading is unusual in its claim that “vatic triumph” is what Chaucer is attempting in Fame. Most critics regard this poem as a pointedly un-transcendent vision, a position argued compellingly by Katherine Lynch in Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 61–82. See, e.g., Cooper, “Four Last Things”; Franke, “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees’”; Sarah Powrie, “Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus as Intertext in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” ChauR 44.3 (2010): 246–67.



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the “I” performs a growing sense of anxiety about his own reading of his dream and the reader’s interpretation of his poem. This anxiety launches the entire poem, the first line of which is a brief, exclamatory prayer: “God turne us every drem to goode!” (1). This “us” is a rare instance of first-person plural in a dream poem, a genre that is uniquely centered on the “I,” and its function is to inscribe readers in this miniature petition. The first move of the “I” in Fame is therefore to align himself with readers in a shared dependence on God when interpreting dreams. This petition is followed by a catalogue of all types of dream, a passage that offers both a compact guide to medieval dream lore and a critique of that lore as a set of unverifiable distinctions, for the “I” maintains that there is no basis for distinguishing prophetic dreams from the physical effects of imbalanced humors or indigestion. Chaucer thus begins Fame by undercutting the authority and interpretive coherence of dreams, and also of dream poetry as a genre. The plea “God turne us every drem to goode!” is the dreamer’s only response to this confusion, and he repeats it at the end of his inconclusive discussion: For I of noon opinioun Nyl as now make mensyon, But oonly that the holy roode Turne us every drem to goode! (55–58)

Though it is little more than an interjection, this short, repeated prayer unites speaker and readers in a state of desperate confusion about dreams and turns for help to a God who is specifically Christian, as signaled by the rhyme with “roode” that is used both times the prayer appears (2, 57). The repetition of this prayer underscores the impossibility of making sense of dreams, thereby sharpening the passage’s critique of dream poetry itself. The dreamer is not, however, prepared to give up on the challenge of interpretation; he circles back to this petition not only because dreams are so confusing, but also because it is so important to make sense of them. Even if dreams do not permit reliable interpretation, they nevertheless must be interpreted, and some reading that tends “to goode” must be sought. Whereas the plural “us” of this opening prayer aligns dreamer and reader in the same state of confusion about dreams, the invocation to Book I, which directly follows it, presents an “I” who is distinct from readers: his task is to recount the dream, and their task is to interpret it. The “I” here performs the role of poet, but his performance is not confident and self-assertive as in the other two invocations. Instead it is tinged with interpretive anxiety, much like the opening miniature prayer. Though labelled “The Invocation” in a rubric applied by the Riverside editors, this passage is not an invocational prayer in the usual sense. Only its first part makes the typical request for aid in poetic composition, and it frames that request in strangely indirect terms. Addressing his readers rather than a deity, the “I” announces that he is about to pray to the god of sleep:

140  Chaucer’s Prayers But at my gynnynge, trusteth wel I wol make invocacion, With special devocion, Unto the god of slep anoon. (66–69)

In the aside “trusteth well,” the “I” assures readers that the proper forms are being observed, a nervous gesture that undermines the claim to poetic authority that an invocational prayer would typically make. This self-conscious “I” never quite makes the shift into direct discourse that would be required in order to fulfill his promise and “make invocacion.” When he eventually articulates a petition to Morpheus, it is framed in the third person, preserving his primary orientation toward the readers: And to this god that I of rede Prey I that he wol me spede My sweven for to telle aryght Yf every drem stonde in his myght. (77–80)

As in Duchess, Chaucer here turns to Morpheus as the addressee of a prayer placed at the transition into the dream, and the terms in which this god is addressed are similar in the two poems. He is a god known through reading – in Fame, “this god that I of rede” – and he is treated with comic literalism: the “I” of Duchess promises him a bed, while the “I” of Fame spends the substantial middle section of his prayer describing the god’s physical dwelling place “in a cave of stoon” where he “slepeth ay” (70, 74).24 In both prayers, moreover, the “I” avoids addressing speech directly to Morpheus. The “I” of Duchess does not directly address anyone in his oblique petition, but the “I” of Fame speaks to readers, addressing them in the second-person aside “trusteth well” while relegating Morpheus to the third person. The grammatical awkwardness of the passage in Fame embodies a sense of ambivalence about the act of invocational prayer and the confident, authoritative poetic identity that this act traditionally performs. This “I” performs the role of poet insofar as he takes responsibility for the telling of his dream, but he does so with marked diffidence and with a nervous focus on his readers. In the lines that follow, this orientation toward readers becomes more explicit, as the prayer gives way to a blessing on good readers and a curse on bad ones. Just after his indirect request to Morpheus, the “I” turns abruptly from petition to benediction, and from Morpheus to an apparently monotheistic deity: And he that mover ys of al, That is and was and ever shal, So yive hem joye that hyt here Of alle that they dreme to-yere. (81–84) 24

See also Duchess 153–85 for a more elaborate description of this location.



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The sentence continues with a list of expansive blessings upon all those who “here” the dream. As if suddenly realizing that not all of his audience will deserve these benefits, the “I” then amends his blessing to apply only to good readers, those who “take hit wel and skorne hyt noght” (91). He then calls down evils on the heads of those who misread: And whoso thorgh presumpcion, Or hate, or skorn, or thorgh envye, Dispit, or jape, or vilanye, Mysdeme hyt, pray I Jesus God That (dreme he barefot, dreme he shod) That every harm that any man Hath had syth the world began Befalle hym […]. (94–101)

This curse is a “potential” speech-act that will not be activated “until the relevant situation arises,” that is, until someone misreads; it is meant as a deterrent against the acts of reading it describes.25 The excessive vehemence of wishing “every harm” that anyone has suffered “syth the world began” on bad readers makes the passage humorous, but as in Duchess, comedy gestures toward a deeper discomfort. In these lines the “I” performs a growing anxiety centered on readers: he begins with the nervous assurance that he knows how to make an invocation and builds up to sweeping curses on those who misread his dream, though he has already admitted that no one can be sure what constitutes a correct interpretation of a dream. With this anxiety comes an increasingly explicit Christian frame of reference, seen in the appeal to the First Mover for blessings and then to “Jesus God” for curses. At the same time, the “I” also moves toward a closer alignment of his own voice with that of his hypothetical readers. He imagines a positive response, but then he actually begins to ventriloquize various hostile responses, enumerating how readers might hate his dream, scorn it, envy it, or jape about it. This “I” anticipates a conflict with readers like the one dramatized in the Prologue to the Legend, and he enacts both sides of that conflict in the passage marked “Invocation,” speaking as poet when he indirectly petitions Morpheus and then as reader when he describes misinterpretations of his text. Fame’s first invocational prayer thus presents an “I” who cannot perform his own role as poet without also imagining, with slowly-dawning panic, the reader’s task of interpretation and its unpredictability. For this “I,” the awareness of misinterpretation has become part of poetic making.

25

Leslie Arnovik, “‘Whoso thorgh presumpcion … mysdeme hyt’: Chaucer’s Poetic Adaptation of the Medieval ‘Book Curse,’” in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Paivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (New York: De Gruyter, 2000), 411–24 (416).

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The elaborate opening of Fame thus shows Chaucer relying on the act of prayer to perform a poetic identity centered on anxiety about interpretation. Both the repeated exclamatory prayer for God’s help in reading dreams and the subsequent invocational prayer that devolves into curses on bad readers establish that it is essential to interpret well, yet impossible to know whether one is doing so. If the later two invocations in Fame cast the poet as a figure who boldly follows his own imaginative vision, these opening prayers qualify that apparent confidence and show the poet keeping a nervous eye on readers. Chaucer’s response to Dante’s vatic poetics therefore consists not of a self-assured celebration of secular imagination but of the anxious and contested authority of a poet attempting to “tellen […] aryght” (527) a vision that is his own, grounded in nothing outside himself that could provide a framework for, or a constraint upon, interpretation. This poet recognizes that his vision cannot remain strictly his own, for readers will inevitably become his partners in realizing it, in ways that he cannot fully predict or control. Recognizing his dependence on readers, the poet anticipates and voices their responses to his text, inscribing them into this invocational prayer and into his own work of writing. This interpretive anxiety resurfaces at several transitional moments within the dream, each marked by another act of prayer. At the conclusion of Book I, the dreamer steps outside the Temple of Venus and finds himself in a vast desert. Terrified, he prays to Christ: “O Crist,” thoughte I, “that art in blysse, Fro fantome and illusion Me save!” And with devocion Myn eyen to the hevene I caste. (492–95)

Worried that the desert is a “fantome” or “illusion,” an image intended to deceive him, he prays for Christ’s protection from such interpretive traps. This prayer complements the opening petition that dreams be turned “to goode” by registering how easily the strange sights of the dream world might turn to bad; it remains, however, unclear how one might distinguish between a “fantome” and a reliable image, just as it was unclear how dreams caused by bodily functions could be distinguished from prophetic visions. As in his opening plea “God turne us every drem to goode!” (1), in this short prayer the “I” again presents himself as threatened by the inscrutability of dreams and dependent on supernatural help to avoid the dangers they pose. This time the “I” performs the role of confused reader precisely at the point of transition from the Temple of Venus, filled with the legible images of Dido’s story, to a new, unknown landscape that exceeds his interpretive capacities. The dreamer’s subsequent arrival at the House of Fame, another new location that requires his interpretation, is a similar transitional moment that is also marked by prayer. This time it is the eagle who positions the dreamer as a confused reader and makes an indirect petition on his behalf: “And God of heven sende



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the grace / Some good to lernen in this place” (1087–88). This blessing casts the dreamer as a reader whose role is to learn “some good” from the dream, although the vague word “good” leaves the content of his learning unspecified, just as in the opening plea “God turne us every drem to goode!” (1), and in the dreamer’s later comment that he hopes to learn “som good” in the House of Rumor (1998). Reading well is presented as a divine gift, such that in Fame, what comes from God is not the dream itself, as in Dante, but a “good” reading of it, whatever that may be. The short prayers in Fame thus complement the invocational prayers by repeatedly positioning the “I” as a reader who is confused and uncertain, but not content to rest in that state; his reading must somehow, with God’s help, lead him to some good. While these short prayers are usually overlooked in favor of the Dantean invocations, one critic who attends to the different types of prayers found within Fame is Sheila Delany. Observing that each of the poem’s three books begins with a Classical invocation and that the two completed books both end with Christian prayers about interpretation, Delany posits a “progression […] from invocation to prayer – from Classical to Christian deity, from public to private mode of address” in Fame, and she argues that this progression effects a “movement from traditions that are relative, feigned, or flawed to a truth which is absolute, eternal, and perfect.”26 Delany sees the relative truth of poetry as aligned with Classical pagan gods and the absolute truth of faith with the Christian God, such that the shift from pagan invocation to Christian prayer amounts to a shift from the contingent domain of poetry to the transcendent one of faith. Although she uses the term “progression,” this term implies more continuity between poetry and faith than Delany’s argument actually posits; she finds in Fame a “poetics of skeptical fideism” that consists of radical skepticism toward poetry countered by fideistic trust in Christianity.27 While Delany rightly calls attention to shifts between Christian and pagan prayer in Fame, her reading approaches the Christian prayers as if they were assertions of transcendent truth – “a truth which is absolute, eternal, and perfect,” as she describes it – and overlooks their performative nature. These prayers do not assert divine truths, but instead perform a total reliance on God in the work of interpretation. This work, in turn, culminates not in a transcendent truth-claim but simply in “som good” that can be taken from the poem, and the nature of that good remains wholly unspecified. Rather than enabling an escape from the uncertainties of poetry, these prayers present those uncertainties to God and ask for his help in navigating them. Moreover, whereas Delany sees Christian prayers as gesturing away from the realm of poetry in general and from the world of this dream-poem in particular, these prayers are better described as generating the dream and the 26

27

Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1994), 86. Ibid., 22–35.

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poem: they are placed at the ends of books, but these moments are transitions, not conclusions. The prayer at the end of Book I is promptly answered by the eagle’s arrival, enabling the dreamer to continue his journey and learn more, and similarly, after bestowing his blessing at the end of Book II, the eagle leaves the dreamer with a new place to explore and interpret. The positioning of these prayers implies that the act of reading does not lead outside the text to a realm of pure truth, but deeper into the dream and the poem, to see and read more and keep trying to turn the experience “to good.” Even in the Proem, the plea that God would “turne […] every drem to goode” (1) is what launches the poem, whereas in a poetics of skeptical fideism this prayer would seem to jump ahead to the fideistic conclusion and short-circuit the poetic process before it has begun. The pattern that emerges in Fame is that each prayer for interpretive aid is followed by fresh material to interpret, such that the process of reading becomes fully intertwined with the process of poetic making. Instead of mapping the pagan and Christian prayers of Fame onto the realms of poetry and faith, therefore, I suggest that they show the “I” performing, respectively, the roles of poet and reader. The movement back and forth between these two kinds of prayer is also a movement back and forth between those roles, by means of which Chaucer suggests their interdependence. Both are marked by anxiety, as the reader worries about his task of interpretation and the poet worries about how his work will be read, particularly in the invocation to Book I. That passage, moreover, shows the impossibility of drawing a clear distinction between poet and reader, for as the poet anticipates readerly responses he also begins to ventriloquize readers, making their interpretations part of the poem itself. The interpretive anxiety performed in the prayers of Fame means that this “I” is engaged in “the writing of reading” in a sense different from that of Duchess and Parliament: he writes not primarily about his own reading, reinventing the old books he peruses, but about the readings and misreadings his own work will receive. One part of his poetic task, foregrounded in the second and third invocations, is to tell his dream “aryght,” that is, to do justice to his own imagination, but the other prayers reveal an awareness that this alone is not enough: a poet must also reckon with readers, who approach the poem with their own limitations and agendas. In Fame, therefore, Chaucer places poet and reader not in the kind of hierarchical relationship assumed by traditional models of poetic authority, but in a complex partnership, in which the poet’s imaginative work cannot ultimately be disentangled from readers’ interpretations, which are anticipated and enfolded into the poem itself. The bold declaration of creative autonomy in the Dantean invocations is only half of the story Fame has to tell about Chaucer’s conception of poetic identity; the other half is a persistent anxiety about interpretation, also performed in prayers, that becomes part of the process of poetic making. Chaucer’s exploration of poetic identity does not reach a neat conclusion in this poem. Near the end of Book III the dreamer proceeds from the House



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of Fame, where the literary tradition is exposed as the product of Fame’s arbitrary judgments, to the even more chaotic House of Rumor, where every scrap of speech spoken on earth assumes the shape of the person who spoke it and tells itself to other personified utterances, which Chaucer calls “tydynges” (1957). What happens in this house is a madly sped-up, oral version of “the writing of reading,” in which a tiding is no sooner told than it is re-told: Whan oon had herd a thing, ywis, He com forth ryght to another wight, And gan him tellen anon-ryght The same that to him was told. (2060–63)

In the House of Rumor, every tiding is both a hearer and a teller – or in bookish terms, both a reader and a writer – and they engage in both of these activities almost at once. Chaucer here imagines a virtually instantaneous process of literary transmission, in which a story is no sooner heard/read than it is “anon-ryght” retold/rewritten. The choice to represent this process as an oral one signals its vernacularity, and the House of Rumor can be seen as a space in which Chaucer imagines the consequences of writing specifically in the vernacular.28 As tidings circulate, they also change, for each transmission brings distortion and “encres” (2074); the result is a giant game of telephone that never ends, for there is no return to the original tiding and no assessment of the changes that have been made. The tidings perform in their oral terms the kind of misreading that has provoked anxiety throughout Fame, and in depicting tidings flying out of the windows of the House of Rumor and “streght to Fame” (2111), Chaucer suggests that these acts of misreading are fundamental to the literary canon that was represented in Fame’s House. Seemingly authoritative texts are thus exposed as products of the chaotic House of Rumor, where every reader is a writer and every writer is merely another reader. Using imagery of irrepressible orality, this House levels the distinction between writing and reading, dismantling the possibility of a poetic identity distinguishable from a readerly one. The poet, therefore, is a figure who has no place here. This exclusion of the poet is enacted in the poem’s abrupt ending. After a buildup of expectations, in which the tidings in the House of Rumor gather around a mysterious figure, the poem stops just as that figure is about to be introduced: Atte laste y saugh a man, Which that y [nevene] nat ne kan; But he semed for to be A man of gret auctoritee. (2155–58)

28

Zieman, “Chaucer’s Voys,” 84; Powrie, “Anticlaudianus as Intertext,” 259.

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Critics have debated who this man might be, and in light of his “gret auctoritee,” most candidates have been authors. Vincent Gillespie identifies him simply as “the author-figure,” but a number of more specific figures have been proposed: he could be Dante, speechless after Chaucer has so thoroughly demolished his authority; Christ, the ultimate Author who alone can transcend the limitations of human reading and judgment; Chaucer himself, who in reducing poetic making to whirling rumors has silenced his own voice as poet of this work; or the Host of the Canterbury Tales, waiting to inaugurate a new kind of poetic making based on the oral reports of pilgrims, who are mentioned among the tidings (2122).29 Only if the man is Christ can he possess an authority uncompromised by the contingencies of Fame and Rumor. Most critical interpretations conclude that his authority is illusory – hence the crucial “semed for to be” – and that his silence indicates that he, as the auctor, has “nothing left that he can say” after Chaucer’s deconstruction of received ideas about the nature of poetic authority.30 As Gillespie has put it, Chaucer seems to have declared the death of the author centuries in advance of Roland Barthes.31 Gillespie maintains that Chaucer embraces the author’s demise and centers his poetic practice on readers, and he is not the only critic to propose that Fame’s alternative to traditional models of poetic authority is to shift that authority to the reader.32 The poem’s abrupt ending has been read as a confirmation of the reader’s ascendancy: when Chaucer “resigns closure of the poem and its meaning to readers,” this act can be seen as the culmination of his project of articulating an ars poetica.33 However, if Fame shows Chaucer recognizing the interdependence of poet and reader, then this ending represents an abdication, not a culmination. A transfer of authority to the reader does not resolve the problem that the poem has identified, because it abandons the challenge of showing how poet and reader can cooperate to create meaning. Laurel Amtower’s claim that Fame expresses “the conviction that readers play a pivotal role in completing the poetic agenda” captures the sense of partnership between poet and reader that 29

30 31 32

33

Gillespie, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets,” 32. Dante is proposed by Cooper in “Four Last Things,” 66; Powrie similarly takes this man as a representative of the vatic poetics that Chaucer undermines in Fame, but she identifies him as Alan of Lille in “Anticlaudianus as Intertext,” 266. The man is taken as Christ in David Lyle Jeffrey, “Authority and Interpretation in the House of Fame,” in Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2003), 87–110 (108–10). David Lawton proposes that he is Chaucer himself in Public Interiorities, 37–38. Many critics propose that this man is a preview of the Host and that the ending of Fame points ahead to the Tales; see, e.g., Gillespie, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets,” 37–38; Cooper, “Four Last Things,” 63; Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, 88–89; Zieman, “Chaucer’s Voys,” 86–88. Cooper, “Four Last Things,” 66. Gillespie, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets,” 25. Ibid., 37–38; for a fuller argument see Laurel Amtower, “Authorizing the Reader in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Philological Quarterly 79.3 (2000): 273–91. Martin, “Authority and the Defense of Fiction,” 49.



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Chaucer strives to articulate in this poem, but rather optimistically concludes that he succeeds.34 Amtower’s reading does not account for the radical leveling of the distinction between poet and reader in the House of Rumor: in the chaotic world of tidings, there can be no “poetic agenda” for readers to complete. The poem ends when it becomes clear that it will not succeed in modeling cooperation between poet and reader. Its incompletion thus marks a defeat, an admission that, as Spearing suggests, Fame has “too painful a point, in its exploration of problems concerning Chaucer’s own life as a poet, problems which he was unable to resolve.”35 These problems, however, exist at the level of theory, not practice. Even a comparatively late date for Fame places it before the Tales, which demonstrates that being unable to articulate his ars poetica did not stop Chaucer from writing poetry. Nor did it stop him from thinking about how poet and readers can work together to make meaning. Even though Chaucer does not articulate a successful theoretical model of this cooperation in Fame, he scripts an act of cooperation in the Retraction, a passage that unites poet and reader in an act of prayer that is oriented toward both interpretation and salvation.

The Retraction: Writing Cooperation The Retraction, a short paragraph of prose at the end of the Canterbury Tales, might be the most-discussed passage in Chaucer’s corpus, but it is almost always discussed in the same terms. Critics approach it as a literary statement and focus on examining what exactly it says about Chaucer’s poetry, overlooking the fact that any statement this passage makes is embedded within an act of prayer. This critical blind spot is surprising because prayer is strongly foregrounded in the text of the Retraction itself: it opens with a request for prayer, and its famous list of Chaucer’s writings is tightly interwoven with another act of prayer that insists upon the reader’s active participation. One critic who registers the devotional aspect of the passage is Ian Johnson, who argues that the Retraction should be read not as “a ‘literary’ ploy” but as a “serious spiritual transaction,” in which Chaucer prays for his salvation and thereby “puts himself in the way of grace.”36 Johnson, however, focuses on Chaucer’s prayer for himself without acknowledging that the Retraction also scripts an act of prayer in which readers are to participate. This call for participation is foregrounded in a recent study of prayerful endings that asks “what it would mean for our scholarship if we took seriously the ethical demand placed on us as readers by those medieval authors who conclude their texts

34 35 36

Amtower, “Authorizing the Reader,” 282. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, 88. Ian Johnson, “The Ascending Soul and the Virtue of Hope: The Spiritual Temper of Chaucer’s Boece and Retracciouns,” English Studies 88 (2007): 245–61 (257).

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with a request for prayer.”37 This chapter does take that demand seriously, approaching the Retraction not as a statement for readers to analyze but as a script for them to perform. By closely examining its shifting strategies for engaging readers in the act of prayer, I show that those who accept Chaucer’s invitation to pray the Retraction will find themselves praying both with and for Chaucer, and also for themselves. In so doing, they will find in this passage not a final verdict on his poetry, but a script for a performance that forms them as readers of that poetry. Approaching the Retraction as a prayer opens up a way to move beyond entrenched critical debates about this passage. One debate that has now been resolved concerns textual authenticity; proposals that either the text itself or its positioning at the end of the Tales was the work of a scribe have been discredited based on compelling manuscript evidence.38 Even the rubric found in many manuscripts, “Here taketh the makere of this book his leve,” may well have originated with Chaucer.39 Given that the text of the Retraction is authentic, there remains the much-discussed question of whether it constitutes a sincere utterance by Chaucer himself or a performance of piety by his pilgrim persona. Several critics have proposed that this passage shows Chaucer the pilgrim responding to the penitential discourse of The Parson’s Tale, but it is not clear how a reader might determine whether this act of penitence belongs strictly to the character or also to the poet. This uncertainty generates cautious phrasing, as seen in Rodney Delasanta’s claim that it is “wholly appropriate that Chaucer the pilgrim – perhaps, too, Chaucer the poet – should himself be moved to formal penitential posture” after the Parson speaks.40 Even if the words of the Retraction can be attributed to Chaucer the poet, there is the 37

38

39

40

Katy Wright-Bushman and Hannah Zdansky, “Religion in/and/All over Medieval Literature,” Religion & Literature 46.2/3 (2014): 53–74 (67). The compelling manuscript evidence for the Retraction’s authenticity is discussed in Stephen Partridge, “‘The Makere of this Boke’: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Author as Scribe and Compiler,” in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 106–53. For the consensus view that it is authorial, see also Peter Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” Exemplaria 3.1 (1991): 135–58 (138); and Olive Sayce, “Chaucer’s ‘Retractions’: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition,” Medium Aevum 40 (1971): 230–48 (230). Manuscript evidence lends no support to Douglas Wurtele’s “hypothesis of the interpolated middle,” according to which the Retraction begins and ends in the Parson’s voice and shifts into Chaucer’s voice in its middle section, argued in “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Viator 11 (1980): 335–59 (342). The textual tradition also gives no grounds for doubting that the passage’s placement at the end of the Tales is authorial, a doubt Matthew Wolfe raises in “Placing Chaucer’s ‘Retraction’ for a Reception of Closure,” ChauR 33.4 (1999): 427–31. See Partridge, “‘The Makere of this Boke,’” 114–29. In BL MS Harley 7334, the rubric is “Preces de Chaucer,” foregrounding the passage’s prayerful nature; Partridge discusses it in “‘The Makere of this Boke,’” 118. Delasanta, “Penance and Poetry,” 242–43. Other readings that emphasize the link to The Parson’s Tale include Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exem-



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further question of whether or not they are sincerely spoken. Olive Sayce points to the conventional character of the Retraction’s language as evidence of its artificiality, but her argument overlooks the fact that conventional language is a ubiquitous feature of medieval prayer that can neither prove nor disprove claims about a speaker’s sincerity.41 Chaucer could be parroting familiar forms because he finds it expedient to assume the persona of a pious poet, or he could be inhabiting them with wholehearted devotion, and the text would be the same in either case. In what follows I refer to the “I” of the Retraction as “Chaucer,” but whether the voice that speaks in this passage is the genuine voice of Chaucer the historical man or the voice of a persona constructed to represent him is both unknowable and, I suggest, unimportant. What matters more is the other voice that speaks in the Retraction, the one that has gone unheard: the reader’s – that is to say, ours. Whether or not one agrees with Johnson’s view that in the Retraction the Tales “deventriloquises itself into Chaucer’s own voice,” it is demonstrable that this passage ventriloquizes its readers, scripting two acts of prayer for them to perform: first a brief prayer of thanksgiving to make on Chaucer’s behalf and then a petitionary prayer to make along with Chaucer.42 The Retraction’s second word is the verb “preye,” used in its generic Middle English sense of requesting or asking: “Now preye I to hem alle that herkne this litel tretys or rede” (X 1080). The “litel tretys” is a more appropriate description of The Parson’s Tale than of the Tales as a whole, indicating that the scope of this passage is initially very narrow. Readers or listeners are asked to respond to the “tretys” by offering a prayer of thanksgiving: “that if ther be any thyng in it that liketh hem, that therof they thanken oure Lord Jhesu Crist, of whom procedeth al wit and al goodnesse” (X 1080). Without quite giving readers a word-for-word script, this sentence prescribes the content and the addressee of a prayer they should make: they should thank Christ for whatever has pleased them in the “tretys” and acknowledge him as the source of all “wit” and “goodnesse.” An approving reaction to the text does not mark the end of the reading process, but only a step toward this act of prayer. The next sentence anticipates that some things will “displese” readers and asks them to be generous in excusing any flaws as the results of ignorance rather than malice, for the “I” assures readers that he “wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if [he] hadde had konnynge” (X 1081). These words present the treatise as

41

42

plum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14, 23; and James Dean, “Chaucer’s Repentance: A Likely Story,” ChauR 24.1 (1989): 64–76. Sayce, “Chaucer’s ‘Retractions.’” Many critics have contested her reading and pointed out that conventions can indeed be genuinely meant; see, e.g., Melissa Furrow, “The Author and Damnation: Chaucer, Writing, and Penitence,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 33.3 (1997): 245–57 (251); Delasanta, “Penance and Poetry,” 243; Wright-Bushman and Zdansky, “Religion In/And/All Over Medieval Literature,” 67; and Wurtele, “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” 340. Johnson, “Ascending Soul,” 254.

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the imperfect product of a fallible human author, but without yet suggesting an intention to repudiate any writings. At this point it seems that Chaucer’s “literary sins are merely venial,” readily excused by a charitable reader and easily counter-balanced by the good to be found in his work.43 The initial prayer request is followed by a detailed prayer script that expands and develops this appeal to the reader’s charity, but first comes the only sentence in the Retraction that makes a literary-critical statement rather than prescribing an act of prayer. Quoting St Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chaucer proclaims his authorial intention and, in the same breath, broadens his focus to encompass all that he has written, indeed all that is written: “For oure book seith, ‘Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine,’ and that is myn entente” (X 1082). This statement is at once definitive, because it applies to all written material, and vague, because it leaves the crucial term “doctrine” unspecified. Whereas in modern English “doctrine” primarily refers to an abstract, propositional truth, and particularly to formal statements of the tenets of faith, in Middle English its meaning and usage remained closer to that of its Latin root doctrina, or “teaching.”44 As Catherine Brown has demonstrated, “doctrine” meant “teaching” in a sense that was “actively verbal as well as nominal in the Middle Ages,” referring to “a process as well as a product.”45 In declaring that his intention is to provide doctrine, then, Chaucer is not promising that each one of his poems conveys some discrete propositional truth, but rather promising to engage readers in a process of teaching and learning through his poetry. There are many ways in which a text might teach, however, and this assurance of doctrine does nothing to tell readers how they might determine whether they have learned the right thing, or even if there is a single right thing to learn from each text. The vagueness of this Pauline dictum proved fruitful to the medieval writers who often quoted it to justify reading and writing morally questionable material. In Romans 15:4, Paul himself was concerned with justifying the relevance of the Hebrew scriptures to the Christian faith, so in its original context, the phrase “all that is written” refers not literally to everything but only to what is known as the Old Testament. From the twelfth century onwards, however, medieval writers began using these words to justify engaging with writings that might seem suspect, especially compilations of pagan literature.46 Chaucer’s own tongue-in-cheek quotation of this verse at the end of 43

44

45

46

Jamie Fumo, “The God of Love and Love of God: Palinodic Exchange in the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women and the ‘Retraction,’” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn Collette (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 157–75 (161). For the primary modern sense, see OED, s.v. “doctrine” (n.), sense 2b. In the same entry, sense 1, “the action of teaching or instruction,” is marked “obsolete.” Catherine Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectics, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. For a discussion of the gradual expansion of the sententia’s reference, see Kevin Brownlee et al., “Vernacular Literary Consciousness c. 1100–1500: French, German, and English Ev-



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The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII 3440–43) reveals how clearly he grasped its potential to excuse anything and everything.47 Paul’s words indeed became “the traditional hermeneutic, moral and artistic carte blanche used in the Middle Ages over and over again to justify reading or writing what one wishes.”48 In light of the quotation’s history, Chaucer’s use of it amounts to an admission that the teaching in at least some of his works may be difficult to discern; after all, if “doctrine” were transparently present in “al that is written,” then writers such as Chaucer would hardly need to specify that this was their intention. The promise of “doctrine” thus sets a challenge to readers: Chaucer assures them that teaching is present in his works but leaves it to them to locate it. The Retraction’s next sentence complicates this search for “doctrine,” as Chaucer goes on to “revoke” most of his works on the grounds that they are “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees” (X 1084). This revocation would seem to contradict the Pauline dictum: Chaucer first states that he wrote everything in the service of doctrine, but then rejects the great majority of his writings as sinful. As Peter Travis has shown, this apparent contradiction has generated much of the critical debate on the Retraction, with some critics privileging the guarantee of doctrine and reading the passage as a vindication of Chaucer’s works, while others privilege the revocation and read the Retraction as a stern dismissal of poetry. Because both of these conflicting views are “anticipated” in the text itself, neither can find unqualified support.49 Faced with this seemingly intractable interpretive problem, Travis is one of several critics to look to the figure of the reader for resolution. What initially seems like a contradiction can be reframed as a tension between the author’s intention and the reader’s interpretation: regardless of Chaucer’s own “entente” to provide “doctrine,” some readers may indeed interpret his writings as so many “enditynges of worldly vanitees,” and Chaucer cannot ignore that response. Travis accordingly proposes that “inadequate readings [are] the cause of Chaucer’s Retraction” and that the passage provides a corrective to such readings in the form of its doctrinal guarantee, which “enables a reconstructive process” of re-reading.50 Jamie Fumo, reading the Retraction alongside the confrontation with the God of Love in the Prologue to the Legend of Good

47

48 49

50

idence,” in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 422–71 (436). Alastair Minnis notes its association with compilations of pagan text in Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), 205. Chaucer’s uses of this phrase are discussed in Megan Murton, “Chaucer’s Ethical Poetic in the Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer’s Poetry: Words, Authority, and Ethics, ed. Clíodhna Carney and Frances McCormack (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 48–60. Johnson, “The Ascending Soul,” 255. Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” 137; see also his overview of both camps (136–41). Ibid., 155.

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Women, comes to a similar view: she maintains that both texts “balance an expression of authorial intention with an awareness of readers’ powers to shape meaning and the dangers of misinterpretation.”51 In her comparative study of authorial apologies, Anita Obermeier sees Chaucer deploying a conscious strategy in which he “take[s] responsibility for writing his works but not for his readers reading them.”52 For these critics, the Retraction carefully qualifies its statement of authorial “entente” by revoking works with seductively “worldly” content that might distract readers from the search for “doctrine.” This act of revocation, moreover, is not as stark and categorical as it initially sounds to modern readers. In keeping with its Latin root revocare and its Middle French cousin revocquier, Chaucer’s word “revoke” means “recall,” not necessarily in the sense of withdrawing but also in the sense of calling to mind or remembering.53 It follows that revoking various writings need not mean “unwriting” them so much as reviewing them.54 Chaucer’s use of the plural “retracciouns” (X 1084), moreover, alludes to Augustine’s “Retractiones,” which is a review rather than a rejection of prior writings, and this allusion further mitigates the sense of condemnation in these lines.55 Instead of outright rejecting certain titles, Chaucer acknowledges that they are prone to being misread, or perhaps that they have already been misread: Travis proposes that the revoked works “have not been read aright,” and Rosemary McGerr suggests that in these works Chaucer “has not made clear this intent of ‘doctrine,’” in that he has “not sufficiently emphasized the need for the reader’s active engagement.”56 Critics who take the Retraction as a literary-critical statement thus converge on the insight that the apparent contradiction in this passage reflects the gap between authorial intention and readerly interpretation. Chaucer himself can only control the former, but he can try to guide the latter by reminding readers that “doctrine” is there for them to find, while also identifying texts in which this task might be particularly difficult. Prior critics have thus positioned the Retraction as an attempt to establish cooperation between poet and reader, and that model of cooperation points toward a resolution of the tension that I have argued Chaucer was unable to resolve in Fame. I do not dispute these interpretations, but I propose that they do not go far enough in recognizing the centrality of the reader to this passage. 51 52

53

54

55

56

Fumo, “Palinodic Exchange,” 162. Anita Obermeier, The History and Anatomy of Auctorial Self-Criticism in the European Middle Ages (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 219. Jason Herman, “Intention, Utility, and Chaucer’s Retraction” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Arizona, 2009), 148–49. Derek Pearsall suggests “unwriting” as a possible interpretation in “Chaucer’s Religious Tales,” 14. On the parallel to Augustine, see Rosemary McGerr, “Retraction and Memory: Retrospective Structure in the Canterbury Tales,” Comparative Literature 37.2 (1985): 97–113 (97–98); see also Herman “Intention, Utility, and Chaucer’s Retraction,” 150–51. Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” 155; McGerr, “Retraction and Memory,” 112.



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The Retraction does not merely point toward readers as essential partners in making literary meaning, it asks to be performed by readers, providing them with words they are to speak and a subject-position they are to occupy. Chaucer first begins to put words in his readers’ mouths in the Retraction’s opening sentence, when he instructs them to offer thanksgiving to Christ for all that “liketh hem” in the “litel tretys” (X 1080), but this initial request is phrased indirectly, addressing readers with the third-person “hem.” It is not until the pivot-point of the passage, in which Chaucer turns from his promise of “doctrine” to his act of revocation, that he speaks to readers directly. He does so precisely in order to ask for their prayers: “Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes” (X 1083). The verb “preye” governs the rest of this long sentence, in which Chaucer offers detailed instructions for the prayer readers are to make on his behalf: […] that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; / and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns: as is the book of Troilus; the book also of Fame; the book of the XXV. Ladies; the book of the Duchesse; the book of Seint Valentynes day of the Parlement of Briddes; the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne. (X 1083–85)

Chaucer’s much-discussed act of revocation is deeply buried within the complex grammar of this sentence. The verb “revoke” is in a subordinate clause modifying “translacions and enditynges,” nouns that are dependent on the prior noun “giltes,” the object of the verb “forgive,” which is in a subordinate clause dependent on the verb “preye.” What the syntax foregrounds is Chaucer’s need for forgiveness, stated strongly at the beginning and reasserted at the end, after the list of works has trailed off: “and many another book, if they were in my remembrance, and many a song and many a leccherous lay, that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne” (X 1086). This sentence also foregrounds readers’ capacity to help Chaucer attain forgiveness through their prayers. The famous revocation is buried as a parenthetical aside in the text of a prayer for mercy that Chaucer begs his readers to make on his behalf. At this point begins another sprawling sentence, the final one of the Retraction, and one in which the relationship between Chaucer’s voice and the reader’s becomes more complex. Until now, Chaucer has been putting words in his readers’ mouths, but when he turns to the writings that he does not revoke, he makes a prayer of thanks in his own voice: But of the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere books of legends of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun, / that thanke I oure Lord Jhesu Crist and his blisful Mooder, and alle the seintes of hevene, / bisekynge hem that they from hennes forth unto my lyves ende sende me grace to biwayle my giltes and to studie to the salvacioun of my soule. (X 1087–89)

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Whereas the Retraction’s first sentence asks readers to thank Christ for what pleased them, here Chaucer offers his own thanks – “thanke I oure Lord Jhesu Crist” – for the works of “moralitee and devocioun” that he has produced. This prayer is not quite in direct discourse, however, because it addresses Jesus, Mary, and all the saints in the third person, as “hem” and “they,” rather than with the second-person “you.” Calling attention to these odd pronouns, Travis has proposed that they signal Chaucer’s continued focus on his readers throughout this last sentence, in which he “is still addressing his readers, keeping his eyes on us all the way to the final Amen.”57 Chaucer is not only looking at readers, however; he is still putting words in their mouths and insistently asking them to pray for him. There is no need to repeat the explicit second-person address to the reader from the preceding sentence, because the fact that Chaucer avoids using “you” for Mary and Christ means that there is an implied “you” here that still refers to readers. This sentence therefore continues the previous sentence’s request for prayers. In so doing it also gestures back to the first sentence, which stipulated that prayers of thanks for good attributes of Chaucer’s writing were to be offered by readers. Chaucer’s unconventional use of pronouns thus enables him to position this sentence both in his own voice and in the reader’s. Where before readers were asked to pray for Chaucer, now they are invited to pray with him as well. That invitation has gone unnoticed in critical readings of the Retraction; even Herman, whose study is one of the few to acknowledge Chaucer’s request for the reader’s prayers, finds that the text provides “a kind of modeling of the action it requests” but stops short of recognizing that its last two sentences script an actual prayer for Chaucer and his readers to make together.58 Any reader who is so inclined can pray these words of thanks and petition with Chaucer, giving the Retraction the performative reading that it requests. As readers pray for and with Chaucer, they might find that they are simultaneously praying for themselves. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century readers could not fail to notice that the prayer they are making for his soul is also one they can and should make for their own souls. The only content specific to Chaucer in the final sentence is the list of writings for which he is thankful, which is dispatched quickly; the majority of this long and loosely-structured sentence consists of a plea for grace and salvation that could be inhabited by any penitent sinner. Like the “ABC,” this petition relies on the concept of prevenient grace as “a necessary precondition to sincere repentance,” requesting gifts of grace first in order to feel contrition and then in order to undergo the sacramental process of confession:59

57 58 59

Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” 150. Herman, “Intention, Utility, and Chaucer’s Retraction,” 191. Goldstein, “Future Perfect,” 139.



Praying about Poetry  155 […] bisekynge hem that they from hennes forth unto my lyves ende sende me grace to biwayle my giltes and to studie to the salvacioun of my soule, and graunte me grace of verray penitence, confessioun and satisfaccioun to doon in this present lyf (X 1089)

These twinned appeals for grace are sealed with a clause appealing to “the benigne grace of hym that is kyng of kynges and preest over alle preestes, that boghte us with the precious blood of his herte” (X 1090). Alongside its abundant references to grace, the sentence is also heavily loaded with first-person singular pronouns (my guilts, my soul, send me, grant me), and its final clause makes it clear that the salvation of the speaker is the prayer’s aim: “so that I may been oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved” (X 1091). These pronouns that signal its focus on the particular fate of Chaucer’s soul paradoxically also heighten the prayer’s universal relevance, however, for anyone could inhabit this “I” and pray for salvation in these terms. The “I” of these final clauses transcends the specific context of a prayer about Chaucer’s writings to become fully open to readers, much like the “I” of a lyric prayer. The Retraction’s final sentence thus blurs the line between joining Chaucer in a prayer for his own salvation and praying for one’s own salvation; in so doing, it moves toward a communal model of prayer, in which a singular pronoun is a space for everyone to inhabit. The preeminent model of communal prayer in Chaucer’s world was the Latin liturgy, and the Retraction’s final words are a direct quotation from it: “Qui cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto vivit et regnat Deus per omnia secula. Amen” (X 1091). This line constitutes the “formulaic doxology which concludes all collects addressed to Christ,” and by quoting it, Chaucer aligns the Retraction with the collective prayers of corporate, public worship.60 These prayers allow for no distinction between praying for oneself and for the parishioner in the next pew, or indeed for a fellow Christian in a far country, because their purpose is precisely to unite all the faithful in one act of prayer. Chaucer’s decision to end on an untranslated borrowing from a liturgical collect marks the culmination of the gradual process occurring throughout the Retraction’s final sentence. If that sentence erodes the distinctions among Chaucer’s own voice praying for himself, the reader’s voice praying for Chaucer, and the reader’s voice praying for himself or herself, those distinctions are lost altogether in the familiar tag-line of the “Qui cum Patre.” The conventionality of this phrase heightens the demand for a performative reading, for Chaucer’s audience would be accustomed to hearing and praying these very words in corporate liturgical worship. In this way, the Retraction joins the reader’s voice with Chaucer’s in a performance of prayer that foregrounds their solidarity as sinners in need of Christ’s grace for salvation.

60

Vitz, “The Liturgy and Vernacular Literature,” 605.

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This performative element makes the Retraction something more than a statement about the need for cooperation between poet and readers. This passage not only warns readers about “worldly vanitees” that require careful reading in order to serve the end of “doctrine,” it also forms readers who are able to take up the challenge of reading those poems. To pray the prayer scripted here is to invest oneself both in Chaucer’s salvation and in one’s own, and these investments have implications for the act of reading. Caring about Chaucer’s salvation means showing him charity, and a charitable reader will approach his work generously, looking for interpretations that can achieve his stated aim of providing teaching. Caring about one’s own salvation means looking for opportunities to derive spiritual benefit from reading, and thus again entails a wholehearted cooperation with Chaucer’s “entente” of “doctrine.” The Retraction therefore scripts not only an act of prayer for salvation but also, and inextricably, an act of reading that seeks to realize Chaucer’s stated goal of engaging readers in a process of teaching and learning through his poetry. The claim that the Retraction forms a reader who is charitably oriented toward salvation and “doctrine” might seem to lead directly to a familiar moralistic reading of this passage, but it does not, due to the richly underspecified nature of the term “doctrine.” In naming “teaching” as his intention, Chaucer promises readers the opportunity to learn from his works without defining how the learning process should unfold or even specifying exactly where it should lead. The two contrasting lists into which Chaucer divides his works might appear to pass a moral judgment that pins down this process of interpretation, but in fact they leave the process open. This openness is possible because “doctrine” is capacious enough to encompass both Chaucer’s “worldly vanitees” and his works of “moralitee and devocioun”; any text can, and will, provide teaching to a reader who is determined to learn. Moreover, the wider context of prayer for salvation means that the interpretation of Chaucer’s works is only important as a means to that end, so any reading that proves to be conducive to salvation is a good one. The Retraction does indeed place the burden of responsibility for interpretation on readers, but it also helps them shoulder it, by inviting them into an act of prayer that guides their process of reading and ultimately orients it toward salvation. Readers are of course free to turn down this invitation to pray, and two fifteenth-century examples show that even Chaucer’s earliest readers were not uniform in their responses to it. Thomas Hoccleve, for one, seems to have welcomed the call to pray for Chaucer’s soul and to read his works with one eye fixed on the goal of salvation. He writes his own prayer for Chaucer, addressed to Mary: As thou wel knowest, o blissid virgyne, With lovyng hert, and hye devocioun In thyne honour he wroot ful many a lyne; O now thine helpe and thi promocioun,



Praying about Poetry  157 To God thi sone make a mocioun, How he thi servant was, mayden marie, And lat his love floure and fructifie.61

This stanza both celebrates Chaucer’s achievements as a Marian poet and demonstrates how fully Hoccleve has internalized the Retraction’s script. He rejoices in the fact that Chaucer used his poetic skill to the Virgin’s glory; in so doing he echoes Chaucer’s own act of thanksgiving to Christ, Mary, and all the saints for his works of devotion, performing the very act of prayer the Retraction enjoins upon its readers. Hoccleve also follows the script when he prays for Chaucer’s salvation, asking Mary to intercede with Christ on Chaucer’s behalf. In asking specifically for Mary’s prayers, rather than for her mercy or grace, Hoccleve uses his own act of prayer to secure further prayers on Chaucer’s behalf. He even provides the Virgin with a basic script for her intercession, suggesting that her “mocioun” before Jesus should mention that Chaucer was her servant and should request that his love for her bear fruit, in the form of his salvation. In this way Hoccleve not only takes up the Retraction’s invitation to pray for Chaucer’s salvation, but also replicates that invitation: he both offers a prayer for Chaucer himself and calls for further intercessions for Chaucer, much as the Retraction itself does. A contrasting example is Thomas Gascoigne’s account of Chaucer’s deathbed repentance in his Dictionarium theologicum. Because this anecdote dates from decades after Chaucer’s death, its historical accuracy is doubtful, and it is generally viewed not as a truthful account of why Chaucer felt he had to write the Retraction, but as an invention inspired by the Retraction itself.62 As such it reveals Gascoigne’s interpretation of this passage as a moment of stern judgment and dismissal: Chawserus ante mortem suam saepe clamavit, “vae mihi, vae mihi quia revocare nec destruere iam potero illa quae male scripsi de malo et turpissimo amore hominum ad mulieres sed iam de homine in hominem continuabuntur. Velim. Nolim.” Et sic plangens mortuus. [Chaucer before his death often cried, “Woe is me, woe is me because I will not be able to revoke or destroy those things I wickedly wrote about wicked and sinful love of men for women, but soon they will be passed on from man to man, willy-nilly.” And lamenting in this way, he died.]63

61 62

63

Regiment of Princes, 4985–91. Among the few critics who have taken it as an actual historical account are Wurtele, “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” 343–50; and Furrow, “Author and Damnation.” The latter also makes the tendentious claim, based on this anecdote, that Chaucer went on to destroy many manuscripts of his writings before his death. The Latin text is taken from Wurtele’s edition of the relevant passage from Gascoigne in “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” 358–59. The English translation is from Furrow, “Author and Damnation,” 252.

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It is evident that Gascoigne takes seriously the Retraction’s focus on salvation, and that he sees Chaucer’s own salvation as tightly bound up in his writings and in how they are read. Gascoigne, however, either overlooks or deliberately turns down Chaucer’s invitation to join him in an act of prayer and to take on the subject-position of a charitable reader pursuing salvation as he engages with Chaucer’s writings. Instead Gascoigne reads the Retraction as Chaucer’s own performance of guilt and his final verdict on the value of his works, a verdict that is uncompromisingly harsh and dismissive. Poetry turns out to be antithetical to salvation, for “those things [Chaucer] wickedly wrote about wicked and sinful love of men for women” finally damn him. Gascoigne includes this anecdote in his Dictionarium as an example of “repentance that comes too late, after penitence can no longer be fruitful”; the example immediately before Chaucer is Judas Iscariot.64 Although Gascoigne’s story has not gained widespread acceptance as historical fact, nor have many sympathized with his stark view of the depravity of Chaucer’s writings, a number of critics share with him a basic assumption: that the Retraction’s purpose is to make a statement about Chaucer’s literary output. These readings overlook the Retraction’s nature as a script for prayer. This passage presents itself as a prayer for readers to pray for and with Chaucer, and also for themselves, since its “I” is open to any sinner in need of grace. In scripting this act of prayer, the Retraction also forms a reader – or rather, it forms a community of readers united around the shared work of interpreting poetry and the shared goal of salvation. This act of forming his readers constitutes Chaucer’s fullest response to the crisis he explored in Fame. In that work Chaucer registered the importance of readers in realizing the meaning of a poem, but he did so with anxiety. Instead of cooperation, Fame depicts an adversarial relationship, in which readers might approach poems with malicious motives such as “hate, or skorne, or […] envye” (95), and in which recognizing the shaping power of readerly interpretation, as figured in the House of Rumor, leaves no room for a distinctively poetic identity. The poem’s abrupt termination suggests that Chaucer was finally not able to articulate how cooperation between poet and reader might work, at least not in the abstract terms he was using in Fame. The Retraction does not complete the ars poetica begun in Fame, but in its own practical rather than theoretical terms it models a way of resolving the crisis that brought that poem to an end: it uses the act of prayer to script cooperation between poet and reader. The Retraction unites the voice of the poet with that of his readers in a performance of prayer that orients them toward the common goals of salvation and “doctrine,” thus replacing the anxious rivalry Chaucer imagined in Fame with charity and solidarity. If Chaucer’s dream poems show that writing and reading poetry are intertwined processes, the Retraction enables poet and reader to work together in pursuit of salvation as they write and read. In so 64

Furrow, “Author and Damnation,” 252.



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doing it positions both writing and reading as acts with eternal significance, but what it does not do is state exactly what that significance is. Instead, in the Retraction Chaucer seeks to form readers who will prayerfully undertake to find it for themselves.

Conclusion: Praying with Chaucer, Performing Chaucer Chaucer’s final statement about his writings turns out to be so tightly intertwined with an act of prayer that the two cannot be separated: the Retraction asks to be prayed, not read, and to pray this text is to be formed into a certain kind of reader of Chaucer’s works. This intertwining of the literary and the devotional has a particular significance in the writings of Chaucer, because he is so often seen as the most secular of medieval English poets. There is a long-standing critical tradition of describing him as uninterested in transcendent truth-claims and urbanely detached from, even skeptical of, the religious beliefs and practices of his world.1 This tradition extends all the way back to the Reformation: much as the sixteenth century recast England’s founding poet as a proto-Protestant, modern-day readers tend to remake him in their own post-Christian image, and these readings are two facets of the same secularizing approach.2 To see Chaucer as prophetically secular is to make him an exceptional figure, standing apart from, and indeed above, his contemporaries. This too is a critical tradition, dating to the fifteenth-century poets who lionized Chaucer as the inimitable founder of English Poetry. Much recent criticism has worked against Chaucerian exceptionalism in its various forms, moving toward a deeper embedding of Chaucer and his works in their contemporary contexts, but secularity is one respect in which Chaucer is still often seen as unique. This book’s reading of the Retraction challenges that idea, proposing that Chaucer did not draw a sharp dividing line between poetic creativity and religious faith. The Retraction’s final clauses transcend their literary context to script a prayer for salvation that any medieval reader could inhabit, and crucially, inhabiting that prayer sends the reader back into the poetry, enabled to navigate its “worldly vanitees” in search of the “doctrine” that Chaucer has promised is there (X 1082–84). Nor is the Retraction the only moment of intersection between Chaucer’s works and the devotional culture in which he and his readers participated. In the “ABC” Chaucer joins the ranks of poets, largely anonymous, who composed lyric prayers for others

1

2

This tradition is surveyed in Megan Murton, “Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars,” SAC 38 (2016): 75–107 (75–80). For discussion see Georgianna, “The Protestant Chaucer.”

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to use, and the fact that this text is a poetically sophisticated adaptation of a French source does not make it any less practically useful. Chaucer’s two Marian invocations and the concluding prayer in Troilus are also scripts inviting the reader’s immediate devotional use. The fact that they are connected to larger poems does not make them unavailable to readers, but rather ensures that the performances they script are at once devotional and literary. Readers who step into the open “I” or “we” of these prayers position themselves both in relation to a narrative and in relation to Mary or God: these prayers ultimately configure the work of reading as devotional work. The project of tracing devotional engagement in the writings of Chaucer is concentrated in the opening and closing chapters of Chaucer’s Prayers, which discuss his most elaborate and strongly foregrounded scripts for Christian prayer. In approaching this most apparently secular of Middle English poets as a religious writer, these chapters complement recent studies that have examined the literary qualities of late-medieval devotional writing in English.3 In so doing this book contributes to a growing recognition that the devotional can be literary, and the literary devotional; the two do not operate as distinct categories of writing in this period. Applying this insight to Chaucer’s own corpus means recognizing not only that he does write devotional poetry, but also that his explicitly pious works cannot be treated as special cases and relegated to the margins of critical discussion. Chaucer’s Prayers models a more integrated approach to the religious writings by repeatedly considering them alongside works that have traditionally been viewed as secular. This means reading the Retraction alongside dream poems in Chapter 4, and The Man of Law’s Tale alongside pagan romances in Chapter 2. Chaucer’s use of the open, participatory voice of prayer cuts across an assumed divide between religious and secular writings and reveals new connections and conversations among his works. If this book seeks to nuance a prevailing view of Chaucer as secular, it also complicates the common perception of him as ironic. This critical cliché is so persistent in part because it finds support in his writings, which often adopt stances of critical detachment; Chaucer frequently shows self-consciousness about his craft, reminding readers that his narratives are constructed objects that could have been shaped differently, that he is only the latest in a series of writers to shape this material, and that every shaping brings the possibility of distortion. His experiments with narrative framing in his early writings develop into the supremely self-conscious frame narrative of the Tales, with its community of inscribed narrators and readers that insistently call the reader’s attention to their work of storytelling and interpretation. Chaucer’s tendency to stand back from his own poetry with analytical detachment encourages his readers to do the same, and modern-day critics have responded enthusiastically to that encouragement. One reason why the ironic Chaucer has been so 3

Examples include Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation; and Johnson, Staging Contemplation.



Conclusion  163

congenial to literary critics may be the fact that he resembles them: moments of detachment and self-commentary show Chaucer doing the work of a critic within his own writings. These moments, however, are balanced by others in which Chaucer insistently calls for his readers’ imaginative and affective participation in his narrative worlds. This book emphasizes the latter – the passages in which Chaucer invites us not to step back, but to step inside, and not to evaluate, but to participate. Prayers are not the only way in which Chaucer invites such participation, but they do have a special importance in his pagan writings, the focus of this book’s middle two chapters. As the first English poet to depict pagan characters engaged in acts of prayer, Chaucer goes to innovative and extraordinary lengths to draw readers into the devotional lives of these characters. He imagines, and asks readers to imagine, what it might feel like to pray as a pagan, and he does so in different ways across his multiple pagan settings. Pagan prayer can be stridently self-assertive, as in The Knight’s Tale; it can be a desperate shout into a void, as in The Franklin’s Tale; it can even converge with Christian devotional practice, as in Troilus. The medieval reader’s intimate engagement with these forms of alien devotional practice might be followed by critical detachment and reaffirmation of Christian norms, but then again, it might not. It is notable that in the one instance in which Chaucer explicitly guides readers through the transition from a pagan narrative world back to their own Christian world, he emphasizes continuity rather than rejection; the act of Christian prayer that concludes Troilus offers not an alternative to Troilus’s devotion so much as a culmination of it, enabling readers to enfold Troilus’s veneration of a pagan God of Love into their own prayer to the Trinity. Prayers in pagan narratives thus show Chaucer encouraging his readers to inhabit different versions of the lived experience of religious faith. He also relies on prayer to involve readers in an exemplary version of their own faith when he chooses to structure the story of Custance around her acts of prayer. Recognizing these invitations to an intimate imaginative involvement in Chaucer’s narrative worlds is important because prior criticism has so strongly emphasized his gestures of detachment. It would be a naïve interpretation that overlooked his self-consciousness and self-distancing, but it would be a drily cynical reading that disregarded Chaucer’s interest in helping readers imagine their way into distant and exotic narrative worlds. In calling attention to the latter, Chaucer’s Prayers issues a reminder that the work of reading Chaucer consists of imaginative and affective participation as well as critical detachment. For Chaucer’s twenty-first-century readers, of course, fourteenth-century England is itself a distant and exotic world, and Chaucer’s Christian prayers may feel as remote and strange to some readers today as his pagan prayers did to his earliest audience. Even present-day readers who are practicing Roman Catholics find themselves removed from Chaucer’s devotional culture by more than six centuries of change, which has occurred on both sides of the

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Protestant-Catholic divide. These elements of alterity in Chaucer’s Christian prayers make it all the more important to take them as scripts for our performance. A performative reading recognizes the distance between the “I” of the text and the reader’s own self and embraces the conscious effort of closing it through an act of imaginative projection; this act is artificial and may not eliminate the sense of a gap between reader and text, but it can narrow that gap. This is the imaginative work that Chaucer asks medieval readers to undertake in acts of pagan prayer, and modern readers might treat his Christian prayers similarly: as invitations into devotional practices that feel unfamiliar or even alien, but which we can inhabit, however partially and temporarily. When we encounter prayers in our reading of Chaucer, the question that matters is not whether we would be prepared to actually pray them, pursuing a complete alignment with the “I” in which the devotional experience scripted in the text becomes inscribed on our own hearts. The question, rather, is whether we will try inhabiting them, and if we do, how that performance of prayer will form us as readers of Chaucer’s poetry. This question comes into sharpest focus in the Retraction, a passage that makes explicit what is at stake in the invitations to prayer that occur throughout Chaucer’s work: all of them invite us to align ourselves with subject-positions, and accepting that invitation will influence our reading of the poetry. In one sense, then, Chaucer’s prayers represent a form of control, in which the author gives readers spaces to inhabit within or on the edges of poems, and thereby guides our imaginative involvement and directs our interpretive efforts. On the other hand, however, Chaucer’s prayers also grant his readers enormous agency in shaping the meaning of his poetry. He gives us the scripts, but we are the ones who perform them, deciding how far our imaginative participation will go and, most importantly, determining where exactly that participation will lead. The “I” of prayer opens up a space for us to occupy, and once we step inside, it is for us to discover how the poem looks from that vantage-point. Chaucer himself does not specify what we will see; he simply invites us into acts of prayer, and thus into his poems and into his own work of writing.

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Index ABC to the Virgin, An  3, 8–9, 12, 16, 25, 27–37, 41–42, 56–57, 67, 154, 161 Agnus Dei  17–18, 43 n.47 Alcyone  128–130 Anelida and Arcite 94 Antigone  104–05 Apollo  86–88, 106, 137–38 Aquinas, Thomas  17–20, 43 n.47 Arcite  71–81, 106, 119 Astrology  72, 77 n. 40, 83, 86–87, 106–07, 132–34 Augustine  18–20, 104, 152 Aurelius  83, 85–90 Boccaccio, Giovanni Il Filocolo 87 Il Filostrato  98, 100, 103, 108 Teseida  73–75, 77 n.41, 78, 119 Boethius  70–73, 83, 84 n.58, 86, 95 n.14, 99 n.26, 108–110, 112–115, 117–118 Book of the Duchess, The  128–132, 140–41 Calliope  96, 132 Canterbury Tales, The Franklin’s Tale, The  10, 59–60, 82–90, 163 Knight’s Tale, The  10, 59–60, 70–82, 86, 89, 106, 109, 118–19, 163 Man of Law’s Tale, The  10, 59–72, 162 Parson’s Tale, The  21–23, 25, 28, 31, 101 n.32, 148–49 Prioress’s Prologue and Tale, The  9, 28–29, 36–39, 43–48, 52–57, 110–11 Retraction, The  8–9, 11–12, 25, 128, 147–162, 164 Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale, The  9, 29, 36–43, 45, 48–52, 56–57, 95, 111, 137 n.19

Ceyx 128–29 Christ (Jesus)  10, 13–15, 18–19, 50–53, 61, 64–70, 100, 109, 121–22, 124, 141–42, 146, 149, 153–55, 157 Clio (Cleo)  96 Collect  43–44, 155 Confession  22–23, 101–03, 154 Criseyde  103–06, 116-19 Cupid  78 n.42, 98–99, 110, 117–19 see also Love (God of) Custance  10, 60–70, 75–76, 83, 85, 88, 163 Dante (Alighieri)  29, 123, 146 Paradiso 33  36–37, 42, 45–47, 51, 53, 56, 111 Invocations  94 n.11, 136–38, 142–44 de Deguileville, Guillaume  27, 29–36 Diana  75–76, 78, 80–81, 106 as Lucina  78, 86 Dorigen  10, 83–90, 114 Edmund of Abingdon  20–23 Emily  71, 74–81 Gascoigne, Thomas  157–58 God Christian  12–13, 15–24, 31–33, 48–52, 54–57, 60–64, 67–70, 123–25, 139, 141–44 Monotheistic  70–73, 83–91, 99–100, 114–19 see also Christ (Jesus), Love (God of), Providence, Trinity Grace  1, 11, 15–16, 33, 118, 143, 154–155 of Love  97, 101–02, 116 Prevenient  9, 36–37, 42, 45, 110–11, 124, 154 Hoccleve, Thomas  27–28, 156–57 House of Fame, The  9, 11–12, 128, 135–47, 158

180  Index Hymn  9, 51–53, 112–15, 117–18, 120, 123–24 see also song Invocation  3, 9, 37–42, 52, 94–97, 109, 128, 132, 134, 136–44 Jesu, that hast me dere iboght  13–16 Jove  108–09, 117 Juno  118, 129–30 Legend of Good Women, The  119, 127 n.3, 135, 151–52 Liturgy  12–13, 24, 35, 40, 155 Lollardy  24–25 Lord’s Prayer – see Pater Noster Love (God of)  11, 91–93, 97–126, 135, 151, 163 see also Cupid Lyric  4–5, 7–9, 13–17, 25, 29–37, 69, 98–100, 115, 122, 155, 161 Mars  3, 60, 75–78, 81, 96 Mary (Virgin)  1–2, 8–10, 24, 27–48, 50–54, 56–57, 64, 66–67, 69, 79, 87–88, 102, 109 n.47, 110–11, 124, 154, 156–57, 162 Morpheus  128–30, 140–141 Muse  94–96, 132, 136–37 see also Calliope, Clio (Cleo), Polyhymnia Natural theology  83–86, 90 Origen 18 Ovide Moralisé 108–09 Palamon  70–81, 106 Pandarus  101–04, 112, 116, 119

Parliament of Fowls, The  109, 128, 132–35 Pater Noster 21–24 Paul (St)  104, 150–51 Pearl 1–2 Peraldus, William  21 Performance  1–16, 21–25, 28–31, 38–41, 48, 52–57, 92, 94 n.13, 98–102, 112, 123–26, 129–144, 148–49, 153–59, 162–64 Petition  15–20, 22–23, 33–37, 43, 60–64, 67, 70, 74–81, 86–88, 95–97, 100, 112, 114–15, 117, 124, 129–133, 137, 139–43, 154 Petrarch 99 Polyhymnia (Polymya)  94 Prologue to The Legend of Good Women see The Legend of Good Women Providence  10, 60–63, 68, 70–74, 81, 84–85, 89–90 Raymond of Pennaforte  21–23 Song  49, 53, 57, 104–06 Canticus Troili  99–101, 112–15, 122 see also hymn Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewsbury  16 Thesiphone  95 Trinity  123–25, 163 Troilus  9, 11, 91–126, 163 Troilus and Criseyde  9, 11, 90–126, 132, 135, 153, 162–63 Venus  75–81, 96, 106–10, 132–34, 142 as Cytherea  132–33 Vernacular  6, 11, 145 Wyclif, John  24

CHAUCER STUDIES I II

MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, J. A. Burnley III ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu IV CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins V CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N.R. Havely VI SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow VII CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, edited by B. A. Windeatt VIII CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis IX CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, edited by James I. Wimsatt X CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani XI INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved XII CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David Wallace XIII CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton XIV CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport XV CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson XVI EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden XVII THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr XVIII CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis XIX THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt XX CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles XXI CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen XXII CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl XXIII CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, Anne Laskaya XXIV CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly XXV MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler XXVI CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, Laura F. Hodges XXVII CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch XXVIII SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale wtih Mary Hamel

XIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV XLV XLVI

THE MANUSCRIPT GLOSSES TO THE ‘CANTERBURY TALES’, Stephen Partridge FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN: CONTEXT AND RECEPTION, edited by Carolyn P. Collette CHAUCER AND THE CITY, edited by Ardis Butterfield MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec IMAGES OF KINGSHIP IN CHAUCER AND HIS RICARDIAN CONTEMPORARIES, Samantha J. Rayner COMEDY IN CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO, Carol Falvo Heffernan CHAUCER AND PETRARCH, William T. Rossiter CHAUCER AND ARRAY: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works, Laura F. Hodges CHAUCER AND FAME: Reputation and Reception, edited by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall CHAUCER’S DECAMERON AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Frederick M. Biggs CHAUCER’S BOOK OF THE DUCHESS: Contexts and Interpretations, edited by Jamie C. Fumo MOBILITY AND IDENTITY IN CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES, Sarah Breckenridge Wright