Chaucer's Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio 9781442672918

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CHAUCER’S QUEER POETICS: REREADING THE DREAM TRIO

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SUSAN SCHIBANOFF

Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada isbn-13: 978-0-8020-9035-5 isbn-10: 0-8020-9035-4

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Schibanoff, Susan Chaucer’s queer poetics : rereading the dream trio / Susan Schibanoff. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8020-9035-5 isbn-10: 0-8020-9035-4 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. Book of the Duchess. 3. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. House of fame. 4. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. Parliament of fowls. 5. Homosexuality and literature – England – History – To 1500. I. Title. pr1933.s35s35 2006

8219.1

c2006-901472-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Jean My best reader

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: ‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 3 PART 1 1 Anti-Courtly Polemic in the Chaucer Escape Narrative and the Queer Decoy 27 2 Courtliness and Heterosexual Poetics in the Book of the Duchess

65

PART 2 3 What Dante Meant to Chaucer: The Hermaphrodite Poetics of the Divine Comedy 101 4 The House of Fame: Geffrey as Ganymede

152

PART 3 5 Disorderly Nature: Aristotle, Alan of Lille, and Jean de Meun

199

6 ‘imaked ... in Fraunce’: Nature’s Queer Poetics in the Parliament of Fowls 258 Au revoir: Queer Poetics and Chaucer’s Englishness 305

viii Contents

Notes

309

Works Cited Index 351

325

Acknowledgments

Even singly authored books must be collaborative efforts, and I have the pleasure of thanking many people for their roles in this volume. My first acknowledgment is of those colleagues who provided early publication outlets as I made one more career shift from writing feminist approaches to writing queer studies approaches to medieval literatures. Fine readers all, Glenn Burger, Steve Kruger, Francesca Canade Sautman, Pam Sheingorn, and Bonnie Wheeler motivated me to think about what contribution I might make to opening another frontier in medieval studies. I would also like to thank the University of Minnesota Press for allowing me to include in chapter 5 a brief section from my ‘Sodomy’s Mark: Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, and the Medieval Theory of Authorship,’ Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 28–56. Another set of fine readers, Carolyn Dinshaw, Tom Hahn, Elaine Hansen, and Seth Lerer, supported my efforts to secure the internal and external funding necessary to write this book. At the University of New Hampshire, I wish to thank Burt Feintuch, director of the Center for the Humanities, for continuing help with this project. The Office of the Vice-President for Research and Public Outreach and the English Department also provided continuing aid. I am especially grateful to Marilyn Hoskin and the College of Liberal Arts for finding the funds time and time again to underwrite my work and to Shelly Lieber, chair of English, for taking a personal interest in it. My friends and family have been vital in the last few years of this project as its demands grew larger and larger and they saw less and less of me. They are quite possibly more relieved than I am that at last ‘the book’ is done, but they never complained, and I deeply value their love

x

Acknowledgments

and their understanding that writing this book has been my life, not simply my job. Faith Brown and Jennifer Silpe understood the importance of scholarship – the life of the mind – without my ever having to explain it. The friend and colleague with whom I began discussing literature forty years ago in graduate school, Achsah Guibbory, always had more faith that this project would see publication than I did. To Joan Coldwell and Ann Saddlemyer go my thanks for doing all the driving and almost all the cooking in Tuscany, which left me free to think about Chaucer and Italy. When I got home, Jim Schibanoff helped to clarify my thinking by asking me questions about Dante that I still could not answer. Early in the project and long before I had a publisher, my parents, Mary and Michael Schibanoff, said the words that every author loves to hear: ‘Where can we buy your book?’ At the University of Toronto Press, Suzanne Rancourt expertly guided my manuscript to acceptance, and I thank her for sparing me the details of that harrowing process. Catherine Frost answered my questions about the esoterica of house style promptly and with good humour and grace. Her copy-editing of the manuscript was both sensitive and rigorous. Managing editor Barbara Porter must have been an acrobat or a catherder in a previous life. She coordinated the production of this book flawlessly. Jean Kennard read every word every time and unfailingly supported me every inch of the long trail. She improved the text during its lengthy evolution just as surely as she has enriched my life over the last thirty years.

CHAUCER’S QUEER POETICS: REREADING THE DREAM TRIO

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Introduction: ‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’

When James Lorimer remarked in 1849 that there was ‘nothing French about Chaucer’ (97), he meant it as a compliment, and first and foremost this book examines why it was one of the most positive things you could say in the Victorian era about Geoffrey Chaucer. Lorimer’s praise resonates with the evolving notion that Chaucer’s art progressed through three sequential periods or phases, French, Italian, and English. To say that there was nothing French about Chaucer was to say that he had advanced from being a courtly poet to being a thoroughly English writer. It also said much more. As I establish in this study, ‘French’ was a coded term for precious, weak, effeminate – in a word, queer. ‘English’ meant virile, healthy, wholesome – in another word, natural, that is, presumptively heterosexual. Denying Chaucer’s Frenchness helped to construct the Chaucer who fathered English literature, a figure ‘revered for his generative powers,’ Carolyn Dinshaw notes (‘Touches’ 82), as well as one whom ‘presumptive heterosexuality has dominated absolutely,’ in Glenn Burger’s words (‘Queer Chaucer’ 160).1 By 1979 Paul Ruggiers asserted that there was ‘no particular value in addressing ourselves at length to the old question of three periods of Chaucer’s artistic development.’ This ‘theory is no longer under serious discussion,’ Ruggiers proclaimed (160). Still so familiar that Ruggiers had only to allude to it, the ‘theory’ tells a story that every modern student of Chaucer has heard at one time or another: Chaucer began his poetic career imitating French courtly verse but, after exposure to the great trecento poets during his travels to Italy between 1368 and 1378, he developed a uniquely English style in which he wrote about English subject matter.2 Indeed, as Ruggiers claimed, the concept of Chaucer’s French, Italian, and English periods that underlies Lorimer’s

4 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics

compliment is effectively dead, debunked as artificial, arbitrary, and inaccurate. Yet, as I argue in this book, traces of tripartite Chaucer remain deeply inscribed in the critical traditions that continue to inform the ways in which we read his verse, especially the dream trio, Chaucer’s three major early visions, Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowls. Even the conventional order in which I have listed these three poems derives from the nominally abandoned notion of the three phases of Chaucer’s artistic development. Modern companions and guides to Chaucer studies continue to devote separate chapters to Chaucer’s French and Italian influences rather than to conceive of them as interrelated continental influence, despite the fact that readers acknowledge the extent to which French literature shaped the work of an Italian author like Boccaccio.3 Likewise, Chaucer continues to be isolated as an English or Ricardian poet (e.g., Simpson, ‘Writers’), even though Richard and the Ricardians happily ‘consumed’ the fashionable international court culture (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 16). The aspect of tripartite Chaucer that I specifically examine in this book is what I call the ‘escape’ or ‘liberation narrative.’ This narrative fleshes out the bare bones of Chaucer’s three periods of artistic development into the inspiring story of how he freed himself from bondage to puerile French verse to become the father of English poetry. The liberation narrative has had such a powerful effect on Chaucer criticism that the twentieth-century tradition is stocked from beginning to end with metaphors of incarceration and freedom. For instance, writing in 1905, George Kittredge postulated that after Chaucer’s ‘French Period,’ during which the English poet ‘was dominated by French culture,’ he entered a ‘Period of Transition’ when he ‘was reading and assimilating Italian poetry, was achieving emancipation from French fashions’ (Date 38–9). John Tatlock soon echoed Kittredge’s diction in describing how Chaucer ‘left the French house of bondage behind’ and ‘became emancipated’ in Troilus and Criseyde (Development 38). In 1950, commenting on ‘the most important thing which ever happened to Chaucer as a writer’ (by which he means Chaucer’s 1373 Italian trip), Tatlock reworked the liberation trope into the assertion that the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch ‘above all freed [Chaucer] from the domination of French poetry of his day, elegant and charming but limited,’ for it lacked ‘power and originality’ (Mind 26, 33). In 1991 Lee Patterson reformulated the escape trope into the thesis of Chaucer and the Subject of History that, by means of ‘the writings of the ancients and of their trecento inheritors,

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 5

Dante, Petrarch, and the unacknowledged but all the more ubiquitous Boccaccio ... Chaucer prised himself loose from an imprisoning court ideology’ (59). Such expressions of the escape tale encode the nineteenth-century Whig concept of poetic maturation as increasing freedom from constraining literary influences.4 They also reflect nineteenth-century efforts, such as Jacob Burckhardt’s, to tease out all the possible freedoms, even those produced in reactions against despotism, that led to the Italian renaissance.5 But, even on those few occasions when it is appropriate and accurate to discuss Chaucer’s literary influences by national origin, the trope with which this consideration is most commonly accomplished inflects the model of Chaucer’s development with patriarchal, heterosexist or presumptively heterosexual, and nationalistic prejudices, so that the effete French poetry from which Chaucer escaped comes to represent the threat of emasculation, and the English poetry that he developed emblemizes normative masculinity. The crucial liberators in this tale are the so-called muscular and natural Italian trecento authors. My particular concern in this book is to explore the ways in which the interrelated biases of francophobia and homophobia silently drive the Chaucer escape narrative in readings of the dream trio even by those who would decry such prejudices. For American readers, the name most often associated with the escape narrative is that of the revered Harvard scholar, Kittredge.6 But Kittredge did not invent the narrative, even if his famous volume of lectures, Chaucer and His Poetry (1915), ‘perhaps the most enduring piece of scholarship on Chaucer’ (Donoghue 1), articulated its terms and tropes definitively for the twentieth century.7 Nor did an Englishman codify the developmental model that underlies the narrative, or so thought Frederick Furnivall, the late Victorian founder of the Chaucer Society, who despondently credits the new tripartite Chaucer chronology to a German professor of Latin, Bernhard ten Brink. Patriotic chagrin over England’s failure to invent the modern three-part Chaucer rings loudly in Furnivall’s 1873 essay, ‘[Recent] Work at Chaucer’ (167–72). Furnivall laments that ten Brink’s 1870 publication on the ordering of Chaucer’s works, which ‘appeared suddenly and most unexpectedly ... one morning,’ ‘carried off from England the main credit of the reform or re-creation of Chaucer.’ Furnivall’s grudging admiration of ten Brink’s discovery of the ‘true order of succession’ of Chaucer’s works stems from the fact that the German scholar pulled it off ‘single handed ... without ever having seen a Chaucer manuscript or heard of a Chaucer Society, and with no better

6 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics

books at hand than hundreds of Englishmen had had on their shelves for many years past.’ Furnivall’s concluding praise of the German professor once again exposes the nationalistic bent of late Victorian Chaucer studies: ‘Alone he beat us, and beat us well, on our own ground. All honour to him for it!’8 Ten Brink’s recreation of Chaucer, Furnivall continues, involved clearing out the ‘sham works’ from the canon and then ordering the genuine poems correctly, thus making clear the ‘great poet’s development of mind and life.’ The true chronology that ten Brink worked out revealed the ‘first great distinction’ in Chaucer’s works: the contrast between ‘the early and poorer ones when he was under French influence and the later and finer poems written after he had come under Italian influence, had read Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, had visited Italy in 1372.’ This watershed year divides the ‘earlier and poorer’ poems such as the Book of the Duchess from the ‘later and finer’ ones such as the House of Fame. Ten Brink envisioned the ‘third and greatest period of Chaucer’s life’ to include the works between 1385 and 1400, most notably the Canterbury Tales. Furnivall had little more to say about ten Brink’s scheme of Chaucer’s tripartite development and proceeded to modify it slightly to account for Chaucer’s short poems, lumping some of them together in a fourth period of ‘decline’ that followed the third period of ‘greatest’ works. The irony of ten Brink’s achievement sans English resources could not have been lost on Furnivall, who notes that the Chaucer Society was founded in 1868, ‘first, from the conviction that it was a mean and unpatriotic thing of Englishmen to have done so little as they had for their great poet’s memory.’ In fact, Englishmen (and Scots) had done a considerable amount for (or to) Chaucer by the time ten Brink published his study in 1870; they had enunciated the central assumptions and biases that underlie ten Brink’s Chaucer chronology organized along the fault line between French and Italian influence. The emergence of the paradigm that underlies the Chaucer escape narrative took place during an especially tense period in the historically difficult relationship between England and France: the early decades of the nineteenth century in which the Napoleonic wars again pitted the two countries against one another. This book is not intended to chart the long and troubled connections between what Jeremy Black terms ‘natural and necessary enemies,’ England and France, starting with the ways in which Chaucer’s England, involved in almost constant warfare with France (Hanly 150–1), con-

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 7

structed a ‘kind of proto-Orientalist discourse’ to define the French as Other – effeminate, duplicitous, arrogant, seductive (Williams 10–11). Yet it is worth noting that the ancient British stereotype of the French as decadent and unaccustomed to freedom rekindled when modern Chaucer criticism was forming and flared anew in the nascent model of Chaucer’s artistic development.9 Early nineteenth-century British propaganda encouraged patriotic identification with manliness and freedom by constructing an external enemy, the French, with polar opposite attributes, effeminacy and servility (Cottrell 265–8), the French revolution notwithstanding. According to Stella Cottrell, British broadsheets warned that if the French were to conquer England, they would rule with the same authoritarian government they used at home to control the French propensity to frivolity, instability, and immorality, and they would endanger British masculinity and sports. ‘“Would Frenchmen be fit for any of our manly games? Could Frenchmen join us in a Match at Cricket, for instance,”’ one broadsheet from 1803 asks (qtd in Cottrell 266). The early to mid-nineteenth century is also the crucial period of development in England’s articulation of an ideology of nationalism (Pearsall 289). In 1818 William Hazlitt adumbrated antipathy to France in the Chaucer tradition as he anticipated ten Brink’s notion of Chaucer’s watershed trip to Italy, ‘where,’ Hazlitt notes, ‘[Chaucer] became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and excellence of the great Italian poets and prosewriters, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccace; and is said to have had a personal interview with one of these, Petrarch’ (277). By implication, Chaucer’s earlier French influence was inferior. Also in 1818 Thomas Campbell injected an overtly Francophobic and covertly homophobic note into this model of Chaucerian development. The allegorical poetry that Chaucer wrote in the earlier part of his career, Campbell observes, was indebted to the ‘new and allegorical style of romance, which had sprung up in France in the thirteenth century, under William de Lorris.’ Echoing contemporary broadsheet propaganda about manly British sports, Campbell charged that Chaucer’s early poetry, ‘often puerile and prolix,’ was influenced by this French ‘gymnasium of rather too light and playful exercise for so strong a genius.’ Fortunately, Campbell concludes, Chaucer ‘was afterwards happily drawn to the more natural style of Boccaccio’ (290–1). In 1837 the anonymous author of an article in the Edinburgh Review (64:520–3) narrated the story of Chaucer’s artistic development in terms of the emergence of English nationalism and verse after the Conquest. The literature of the Normans, the writer begins, lacked ‘freshness and

8 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics

simplicity’ and was at once ‘rude and affected.’ The Conquest necessarily imposed this overripe verse upon Saxon England and ‘crushed’ the native ‘infant literature,’ the language of which was ‘ridiculed as barbarous.’ The resulting English product during the period of French dominance was ‘feeble and wretched,’ ‘languid and unhealthful.’ Not until the ‘national spirit was once more formed’ did a ‘national bard’ arise. That would be Chaucer. Though Norman by descent, the anonymous critic concedes, Chaucer had sufficient national spirit to resist all ‘the foreign and French adulterations’ that conspired to ‘smother’ his native impulse and to thwart his becoming ‘the poet of the people.’ Despite ‘the contagion of a foreign and artificial muse,’ there sprung up in England a ‘poetry especially robust, catholic and manly.’ Although the anonymous writer attributes virility to the ‘vigorous, simple, and truthful’ English national spirit by nature, Chaucer’s manly verse also got a boost from Italian influence: ‘in [Chaucer’s] easy and muscular play, as it were, with his subjects, he may have found an example in Boccaccio.’ Nevertheless, the writer asserts that even though Chaucer borrowed ‘largely from the early Italian poetry,’ he ‘took no models of which Nature was not the Original’ and was ‘at once a national poet formed by national circumstances, and appealing to a nation!’ (314–16). Well before the mid-nineteenth century, individual motifs of the Chaucer escape narrative had developed and gradually begun to amalgamate into antithetical clusters that set England against France. Nature and the natural were associated with Chaucer’s verse and opposed to the ‘delicate’ (read ‘artificial’ and ‘degenerate’) passions of French poetry in John Dryden’s neoclassical critique of 1700, a commentary that also famously regards Chaucer as ‘the Father of English Poetry’ (164). Alexander Pope reiterated this view in dubbing Chaucer ‘the first taleteller in the true enlivened natural way’ (173). Chaucer’s reputation as a ‘natural’ or unaffected poet grew apace and was assimilated to his characterization as ‘manly’ and ‘wholesome’ or ‘healthy,’ the last three terms functioning as virtual synonyms in nineteenth-century Chaucer commentary. For instance, Hazlitt viewed Chaucer as a poet who ‘attended chiefly to the real and natural,’ a predilection that stemmed from his ‘stern and masculine’ poetical temperament, which stood in stark contrast to Spenser’s ‘effeminate’ artistic disposition (277). However, Samuel Taylor Coleridge appreciated Chaucer’s happy disposition, yet it was a ‘manly cheerfulness’ that Coleridge detected (288). Against Chaucer’s

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 9

wholesome, virile, natural verse was pitted decadent French poetry. At mid-century, Lorimer, who stressed Chaucer’s Germanic roots and praised ‘his poetry of reality,’ characterized Chaucer as ‘the healthiest man that ever was,’ a poet possessed of ‘vigour’ and a ‘masculine air.’ It was this wholesome manliness that preserved him from taint when he came in contact with ‘grossness and immorality,’ to wit, French influence. In Chaucer, there is ‘no morbid gloating over impurity, or lingering around vice.’ In a word, Lorimer concludes, ‘there is nothing French about Chaucer’ (97). As antipathy to decadent – unmanly – French verse grew in Chaucer criticism, Italian poets were increasingly drafted to play the crucial role of liberators. Earlier readers had grouped Chaucer with the French, Italian, and Spanish vernacular writers who had purified and enriched their respective mother tongues,10 but by 1700 Dryden had narrowed the analogy to link Chaucer’s amplification of ‘barren’ English specifically to the work of the great Italian trio, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch (161). Boccaccio’s so-called muscular and natural style was readily appropriated to account for the improvement that ten Brink detected in Chaucer’s verse after the English poet’s Italian trip. Dante, however, proved more difficult to recruit into the tale of Chaucer’s liberation. Just as many Victorian readers noted the differences between what they regarded as the first great Italian poet and the first great English poet as noted their similarities. James Lowell, for instance, compiled an extended comparison of Chaucer and Dante in which he argued (inaccurately) that Dante had died only seven years before Chaucer was born and, so far as they were both shaped by the same culture of books, ‘there could have been no essential difference between them.’ Nevertheless, while stressing the similarities between Dante and Chaucer, Lowell simultaneously differentiated them, as in his remark that ‘Dante represents the justice of God, Chaucer his lovingkindness’ (136–7). If substantive differences between Dante and Chaucer hindered their direct assimilation to one another, a way to yoke the two as liberator and liberated was devised that had the additional advantage of granting Chaucer the agency of his own emancipation: Dante, especially, and the three trecento writers more generally, inspired in Chaucer the desire to free his verse from any constraining French influence. Kittredge addressed the matter directly in his famous 1915 volume of lectures. He stipulated that Chaucer’s French period and Italian period were essentially different in nature: French poetry had enslaved Chaucer, while

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Italian poetry liberated him. Kittredge explained that the adjectives ‘French’ and ‘Italian’ (as well as ‘English’) were not at ‘actual parity’: ‘Chaucer’s French period is French in a sense in which his Italian period is not Italian, and his English period is English in still a different signification.’ In the French period, Kittredge explains, Chaucer was ‘literally under the control of French methods and French conventions,’ whereas in the Italian period, ‘Chaucer was nobody’s disciple.’ Instead, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio emancipated his imagination: ‘They enlarged his horizons. They awoke him to consciousness of power that was his own’ (Chaucer 27). Subsequent twentieth-century readers adopted this view of Italian influence on Chaucer as a matter more of inspiration and imagination than of actual literary models. In 1926 John Manly argued that Chaucer’s poetic development was a ‘process of gradual release from the astonishingly artificial and sophisticated art with which he began and the gradual replacement of formal rhetorical devices by methods of composition based upon close observation of life and exercise of the creative imagination.’ Chaucer’s ‘astonishing advance’ from the ‘thin prettiness’ of the Book of the Duchess, written under French influence, to the Canterbury Tales cannot be attributed to ‘mere vegetative growth,’ Manly insisted. Chaucer’s great debt to the Italians, especially to Dante, he continued, was not for the new materials and models they offered him to imitate, but for the stimulation of Chaucer’s ‘powers of reflection by forms and ideals of art different from those with which he was familiar’ (386–7). The alterity of Italian literature shocked Chaucer out of bondage to his French masters, a point that was re-argued by Mario Praz in 1927 and continues to be pressed today (Ginsberg 20). In his effort to ‘explain what[,] aside from genius[,] made the poet of the greater Canterbury Tales,’ Kittredge’s successor at Harvard, John Lowes, repeats the accumulated motifs of the Chaucer escape narrative that I have been tracing, and I conclude this brief history with Lowes’s comments in the Israel Gollancz lecture of 1927. Lowes begins with the commonplace that Chaucer started his poetic career as a ‘follower of the contemporary French school of poetry’ but soon ‘balked’ at its allegorical love visions because they ‘were thick sown with artifices.’ Chaucer turned a ‘cold shoulder’ on this genre, Lowes asserts, because ‘it was obviously as barren of interest to Geoffrey Chaucer as interminable subtilizings about love – specially when nothing comes of them – have been and are to any normally constituted Anglo-Saxon.’ Artificial and ‘barren’ love-talk that comes to ‘nothing’ and has never appealed to the

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 11

‘normal’ Anglo-Saxon codes Lowes’s antipathy to French fashion in both heterosexist and nationalistic terms. Even before the English poet went to Italy, Lowes continues, Chaucer began to enrich the sterile French love vision, a form ‘relatively empty of content,’ and to load its ‘every rift with ore.’ Once Chaucer had visited Italy and read Dante and Boccaccio, he found ‘for the first time among his moderns architectonic powers which in the case of Dante were supreme‘ (‘Memory’ 463–5). In the years since Victorian and early twentieth-century readers constructed the escape narrative, Chaucer’s French influence has undergone radical re-evaluation, most notably by Charles Muscatine, who argues that in French verse Chaucer found not emasculating sterility but the means by which to create the energizing dynamic tension that plays throughout the verse of his entire career.11 As celebrated as Muscatine’s Chaucer and the French Tradition has been, however, heterosexist and at times homophobic francophobia became so naturalized in Chaucer studies that it continues to haunt the field, particularly in assessments of the dream trio. As I explore in this book, these prejudices extend into patriarchal readings of Chaucer’s poetic as the formative action of the male agent upon female matter, an aesthetic that the Chaucer enslaved to effete French tradition in the Book of the Duchess was unable to practise, hence his failure to produce anything but a weak and inchoate poem. However, once liberated by the Italians, such readings assert, Chaucer developed the manly control over subject matter that allowed him to compose the lively and natural Parliament of Fowls in anticipation of the Canterbury Tales. Beyond uncovering the interested nature of the Chaucer tradition as it derives from overlapping spheres of empire, nation, and sexuality, my project in this book is to offer a counter-narrative to the escape tale. I focus specifically on the dream trio because the trajectory of Chaucer’s entire career has been mapped onto these three poems, and therefore they provide a manageable microcosm in which to reread the large issue of the formation of Chaucer’s poetic. In recent years, the critical tradition surrounding Chaucer’s dream poems has split into two camps. John Ganim observes that these works support both ‘the “conservative” tradition in Chaucer criticism – an emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, and didactic elements in the poetry – and a more recent “radical” movement – a concern with demythologizing and critiquing the moderate Chaucer of institutionalized scholarship and common readers.’ The dream poems have resisted new critical analysis possibly because of their formal difficulty. At the same time, Ganim adds, readings of Chaucer’s

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visions anticipated Bakhtin’s novel theories of heteroglossia in1968 and the carnivalesque in 1981 (‘Dreams’ 464, 469–70). The ‘conservative’ critical resistance surrounding Chaucer’s visions that I shall dissect in this book takes the form of their persistent deployment to document Chaucer’s liberation, and the ‘radical’ new readings that I propose draw not upon Bakhtin but upon queer theory. Against the story of how Chaucer fled the bondage of courtly verse, in my first two chapters I argue that the Chaucerian narrator of the Book of the Duchess adopted the stance of the weak, puerile, and loveless poet – the ‘queer’ poet12 – as a way of inoculating his courtly superior, the Black Knight (the historical John of Gaunt’s alter ego), against the contemporary moral censure, anti-courtly polemics, that still causes prejudice towards French verse in the modern Chaucer tradition. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the House of Fame. In this instance, I first address the fact that the escape narrative drafted Dante to play the role of Chaucer’s liberator based upon now outmoded readings of the Divine Comedy. Views of the Divine Comedy have changed among Italianists and even among Chaucerians, yet the antiquated notion of the poem as the sublime expression of the supremely self-assured heaven-bound lover of Beatrice persists in the modern escape narrative. Instead, I reread the Divine Comedy as the pilgrim narrator’s anxious search for a poetic with which to accomplish the daunting twin projects of the poem, writing the vernacular and writing heaven. To ennoble the lowly mother tongue, Dante’s narrator dreams himself Ganymede, then Achilles, as he works his way towards adopting a hermaphrodite aesthetic. The narrator of the House of Fame also faces the task of writing the vernacular, of ‘romancing’ the Aeneid, but he fails in the project when he again takes on the role of queer foil that he assumed in the Book of the Duchess. This failure forces acknowledgment of deviant poetics, first Dante’s and Fame’s and Rumor’s next, and the poem ends by dismissing traditional authority without firmly substituting an alternative model. My final two chapters reread the Parliament of Fowls through a queered view of the one source it names, Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature. The escape trope co-opted Alan’s Nature to represent Chaucer’s freedom from effeminate courtly verse, yet I argue that the Plaint’s Nature is neither willing nor able to exclude sexual deviance from her realm. By extension, in the Parliament Nature validates the queer poetic that the Chaucerian narrator adopted in the Book of the Duchess and then interrogated in the House of Fame. Aside from deconstructing some of the major biases that I first began

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 13

to encounter in my reading about Chaucer forty years ago, some of which, unexamined, made their way into my own earlier writing and teaching about the poet’s works, my aim in this book is to understand the implications of the genial, stand-offish, and self-deprecating Chaucerian narrator still so beloved among readers today. Contra Lorimer and the other architects of the escape narrative, rather than label these the quintessential qualities of an Englishman, I am going to suggest that there is, indeed, something quite ‘French’ about Chaucer’s narrator if by ‘French’ the modern Anglo-American stereotype of ‘sissy’ is evoked. I shall argue that there is something ‘queer’ about this narrator in the sense that Chaucer developed his impish and rotund speaker as an exaggerated or camp version of the courtly figure that became so despised in Victorian England. In that respect, my study also contributes to an understanding of why England has continued to be France’s best enemy ever since the Conquest. I also use the word ‘queer’ throughout this book to indicate the nonnormative but nevertheless influential medieval poetic that privileged passive reception.13 Evoking the title of Carolyn Dinshaw’s groundbreaking Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, which reveals the gendered corollary between sexual and literary activity in the Middle Ages, my ‘queer poetics’ focuses attention on the deep-rooted heterosexism of our most basic modern thinking about Chaucer’s art; at the heart of the escape trope lies the contention that Chaucer developed ‘virile’ artistic control over his literary sources. This assertion, I shall establish, correlates to the heterosexual, indeed, heterosexualized, poetic of the Middle Ages. It articulates the medieval belief that a masculine authorial principle acted upon inchoate female matter to produce art. Alternatively, I call this heteronormative poetic ‘Aristotelian,’ ‘hylomorphic,’ ‘scholastic,’ ‘paternal,’ ‘phallic,’ ‘patriarchal,’ or ‘generative,’ and, as this constellation of synonymous descriptors suggests, I am pointing to the distant but still firm nexus among presumptively heterosexual paradigms of cosmological, biological, and artistic creation in the Middle Ages. The Greek philosophical concept of hylomorphism drove both ancient and medieval theories of creation, and it motivates much of the modern Chaucer tradition, as I shall demonstrate in the course of this book. The intervention into Chaucer studies that I wish to accomplish here first and foremost requires connecting such common medieval poetic terms as ‘making’ and ‘devysing’ with this ancient source. Dante made the classic medieval analogy between poetics and hylomorphic embryology in Purgatorio 25, which I discuss later in this introduction and

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again in chapter 3, as if his readers required no explanation. Modern readers, who no longer subscribe to the theory of biological generation that Dante did, find his analogy difficult, bizarre, even embarrassing, even if we bespeak his legacy when we use common tropes such as the ‘gestation’ or ‘birth’ of a poem. As I shall argue in the chapters to come, hylomorphic thinking also silently informs the specific formulation of the modern concept of Chaucer’s escape, his artistic development through French, Italian, and English periods. This persistent heterosexualized model of artistic creation is so ingrained in the Chaucer tradition that, aside from references to Father Chaucer, it is virtually invisible. Indeed, the model has established such a silent norm that it is common to refer to Chaucer’s deviations from it in terms other than those of a gendered genealogy. For instance, the Chaucer who purports to receive rather than to make (father) poetry is the ‘compilator,’ the scribe of the work he records, not the mother, or, as I shall argue, the ‘queer’ poet. Therefore, in the remainder of the introduction I explicitly reveal the background and terms of the heterosexualized poetics of the Middle Ages. Queer Poetics: Reproduction Tropes and Medieval Aesthetics Coined from the Greek words, hyle- (matter), and morph- (form), hylomorphism denotes the ancient Greek philosophical concept, adopted into medieval scholastic thought, that all substances (natural or physical bodies) are composed of both matter and form, as W.A. Wallace explains (237–8). A house, for instance, is composed of bricks or boards (matter) arranged in a certain design (form). The matter of a statue is its marble, the form its shape as a horse or a man. Further, form is to be understood as both in the statue as its horse shape as well as the causative principle that determines and actualizes the undetermined, passive, and purely potential matter (the marble) to take the form of the horse. In truth, form acts upon matter twice to produce the statue of the horse, first to produce the substantial form of marble, second to produce the accidental form of horse. Hylomorphism operates as a logical construct; for the form of a house or statue cannot be separated from its matter, yet it is the genderized hierarchical separation between form and matter in philosophical thought that had enormous impact on aesthetic theory. Joseph Mazzeo observes that it is a central assumption of Greek Platonism and Aristotelianism that not only the artificial world but the natural world may be understood in the hylomorphic terms of form and

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 15

matter and that the universe was formed by analogy to the production of the statue or other art work (160). Greek and subsequently medieval thought also expressed the processes of embryology in hylomorphic terms and explained these processes by means of analogues to art. As I discuss next, the masculinized theory of hylomorphism informed concepts of both natural generation and artificial production, which Greek thought analogized to one another, and gave rise to what I term the ‘paternal’ or ‘patriarchal’ poetic of the Middle Ages in which the author ‘fathered’ the poem by forming passive and inchoate matter into the verbal artefact.14 Plato’s account of the origin of the cosmos in the Timaeus employs the basic assumptions and metaphors of hylomorphic theory that Aristotle would develop, rationalize, and transmit to the Middle Ages. First, Plato privileges form, the causative principle, over matter. Plato envisions the genesis of the universe not as a random or mysterious event but as the deliberate construction of a formative agent, the demiurge, literally translated as the ‘people’s worker’ (7–8). To create the universe, the demiurge gave form to matter.15 Although the demiurge could not create ex nihilo and required matter to make the world, matter is associated with the binary antitheses of form’s perfection. Plato’s matter is ‘primitive,’ ‘disorganized,’ lacking proportion, measure, and homogeneity and requires the formative action of the creator-god to elevate its primitive chaos to the ‘state of greatest possible perfection’ (73). Second, Plato implicitly associated the superior formative agency with the male, specifically the father,16 and he characterized this paternal agency as both procreator and creator, father and craftsman, thereby linking the hylomorphic product of nature with the product of art. Third, in all articulations of hylomorphic creation, including Plato’s, the hierarchical relationship between form and matter must remain fixed and static. Plato’s perfecting demiurge is both the builder or other craftsman, who works according to a plan to induce order into the ‘receptacle of being,’ the imperfect, indeterminate matter, and simultaneously the father who generates the world through this process of fabrication: ‘When the father who had begotten [the world] perceived that the universe was alive and in motion, a shrine for the eternal gods, he was glad and planned to make it still more like its pattern’ (Timaeus 51). Although the ‘organic’ metaphor of the poem as the poet’s ‘immortal child,’ which Diotima employs in Plato’s Symposium,17 seems far removed from the ‘inorganic’ trope of the poem as a constructed object, Plato’s yoking of paternity with poetic making reveals the association between

16 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics

nature and art in early Greek hylomorphic theory. Aristotle’s repeated analogy between fetation and fabrication strengthened this association into the virtual identification between the two that underlies the medieval heterosexualized aesthetic of the poem as an artefact sired by the poet. The hylomorphism of Plato’s Timaeus privileged the causative principle of form over the material principle and associated the formative process of determining and actualizing with biological fathering, whereas mothering was linked to receptivity and nurturing. Plato’s masculinization of the formative principle in the Timaeus remained implicit, and hylomorphic theory could not deny that all substances, even woman, contained matter and form. As a physical body, a woman must contain matter and form; indeed, it is woman’s form that defines her as female. Yet Plato’s association of the female with receptivity and the male with form in the Timaeus gave Aristotle the framework in which to develop a comprehensive statement of sex-polarity.18 In his highly influential embryological treatise, The Generation of Animals, Aristotle rationalized Plato’s implicit association of the male with form by asserting that while woman had form, she did not have it fully enough to possess the causative formal principle to the same extent that man did (1184). Aristotle thus fully transformed hylomorphism into what Charlotte Witt calls a ‘gendered normative theory’ (129). Form is explicitly associated with male, the superior gender in Aristotle’s Greece, matter explicitly with female, the inferior gender. These normative associations are founded upon the initial privileging of active over passive, determinant over indeterminate, actualized over potential, Witt explains.19 Further, they characterize Aristotle’s explanation of the critical biological process in generation, spermatogenesis. Like many of his predecessors,20 Aristotle did not grant the testicles an organic function in the production of male sperm. Instead, Aristotle believed that they served the mechanical role of a counterweight that enabled the seminal passages to achieve the tautness necessary for ejaculation (Gen. of Animals 1114).21 While most earlier Greek embryological writers located the source of male sperm in the entire body (panspermia or pangenesis), in the brain (encephalogenesis),22 or, like the Hippocratic author of ‘The Seed,’ in both (317–19), Aristotle found its origin in the blood (haematogenesis). Blood underwent a series of digestions or ‘concoctions’ in what Dale Martin calls the ‘refinery process’ (91) until it reached the purest state capable of reproducing human life. In turn, blood was produced from the body’s nourishment in its most

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 17

highly concocted or residual form. Male seed was thus the final product formed from the body’s nourishment, ‘the ultimate gain drawn from the nutriment,’ Aristotle declared in the Generation of Animals (1126). As Dante’s Statius later phrased it, semen is the ‘perfect blood, which is never drunk by the veins’ but, ‘further digested ... descends where silence is fitter than speech’ (Purg. 25.37–44). Nourishment provided the raw material for sperm, but its formative principle resided in heat. Aristotle maintained that this heat plays the critical formative role in male spermatogenesis by concocting or ‘digesting’ the blood into its most purified state, sperm. Excluding the very old and the very young, Aristotle asserted, men possess sufficient heat to produce sperm. Because of their defective forms, however, women do not possess the necessary heat to form generative sperm; the ‘coldness of her nature’ renders woman ‘as it were an impotent male’ (Gen. of Animals 1130). Aristotle’s hylomorphic concept of spermatology employed the well-known ‘thermal prejudice’ of Greek physiology (Sissa), the Hippocratic tenet that the male body is naturally hotter than the female body,23 but Aristotle deployed this notion to assert that woman lacks the necessary heat to form blood into sperm.24 Instead, woman’s imperfect distillation of blood produces catamenia, menstrual fluid. The secretion of this impure seminal fluid, Aristotle insists, categorically excludes the possibility that woman also produces the purest seminal fluid, sperm. Because it is defective in form, catamenia cannot generate human life, but serves as the passive matter upon which sperm works to form the fetus. Male sperm alone possesses the active, formative principle of generation; menstrual fluid is the passive material that awaits the motion, dynamis, and imprint of what Dante would later call ‘perfect blood.’ Anthony Preus remarks that Aristotle’s estimation of the female’s passive role in generation is ‘one of the more famous of [his] wrong guesses’ (8n11).25 It also proved to be a wrong guess that had enormous influence.26 To explain why it is in the female that parturition takes place, Aristotle employed one of the habitual correspondences he made between natural procreation and artificial creation. The female supplies the matter of generation, Aristotle explains in Generation of Animals, whereas the male who ‘supplies the working or treatment’ of the material stands nearby, just as ‘the carpenter must keep in close connexion with his timber and the potter with his clay’ (1134). Male semen is no more a material part of the fetus as it develops than the carpenter is a material part of the house or other object that he builds: ‘just so no material part comes from the

18 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics

carpenter to the material, i.e., the wood in which he works, nor does any part of the carpenter’s art exist within what he makes, but the shape and the form imparted from him to the material by means of the motion he sets up ... In like manner, in the male of those animals which emit semen, nature uses the semen as a tool and as possessing motion in actuality, just as tools are used in the products of any art, for in them lies in a certain sense the motion of the art’ (1134). Throughout the Generation of Animals, Aristotle links procreation – fathering – to painting, sculpting, modelling, and other arts and crafts. As part of what Preus calls Aristotle’s ‘general tendency to draw analogies between the workings of art and the workings of nature’ (12), these same comparisons appear in The Physics, and elsewhere. For instance, although Aristotle distinguishes artificial products from natural products in The Physics, he nevertheless equates the sculptor who models bronze into a statue with the father who begets a child by identifying each as the formative causes of its respective artificial or natural product (129–31). Even if Aristotle’s assertion that art sometimes imitates nature implies the priority of nature (e.g., Physics 121, 173), in fact, Aristotle looked to art to explain what otherwise mystified or disturbed him about nature, particularly the role of the fathering semen in procreation. (As I explore in chapter 5, ‘unruly’ nature was a problematic concept for Aristotle and subsequent medieval authors such as Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun.) Preus observes that Aristotle’s ‘trust in the general analogy between natural and artificial generation’ led him ‘to suppose that the fact that the artist does not become a material part of his product shows somehow that the natural generator does not become a material part of his product either. The carpenter analogy is explicitly used in this way: he makes the bed, but neither he nor a part of him becomes a part of the matter of the bed’ (12). Art not only explained nature for Aristotle, but allowed him to maintain the basic tenet of normative hylomorphism – the superiority of the formative cause, the male agent, and the inferiority of the material cause, the female recipient. Ancient Greek hylomorphism underwent changes as it was assimilated into medieval thought, yet it retained its essential feature of fixed active (male) and passive (female) roles.27 Logically, it could not be otherwise; for, by definition, hylomorphic theories of creation and production mandated the heterosexual action of a superior formative principle upon inferior matter. Plato’s account of abstruse cosmic creation in the Timaeus could assert the immutable roles of agent and matter

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 19

in hylomorphic theory with impunity, yet when Aristotle applied hylomorphism to the biology of reproduction, empirical observation threatened to undermine the fixed roles of agent and matter. Specifically, female offspring (or males who resemble their mother) suggested that the female principle could play something other than a passive, material role in generation. To explain why males do not always generate males, Aristotle did not attribute dynamis to the material principle. Instead, he crafted explanations that retained the essential passivity of matter and the essential agency of form. Females are generated, Aristotle argued, when passive female matter became too inert and thereby resisted the imposition of male form or when, owing to age, disease, or other extenuating factors, male form lacked the full force and ability to shape matter into its own masculine likeness. Extreme inertia on matter’s part led to monstrous offspring (Gen. of Animals 1189–91). Hylomorphic theories of art could not be challenged on similar empirical grounds, yet the tenacity and ingenuity with which Aristotle defended the static roles of matter and form in biological discourse undergirded the poet’s fixed role as agent in patriarchal aesthetics. Beyond this immutable feature, however, medieval expressions of hylomorphic literary production vary from construction tropes, such as that of the Anglo-Saxon shaper or scop, to physiological tropes, such as that of the fathering poet. To the modern mind, construction is an inorganic process quite removed from the organic process of reproduction, yet the yoking of art and nature by both Plato and Aristotle made artisan and father interchangeable tropes for the poet in hylomorphic medieval literary theory.28 The medieval locus classicus of the inorganic hylomorphic or heterosexualized concept of verbal art occurs at the opening of the Poetria Nova as Geoffrey of Vinsauf cautions poets not to make too hasty a start on a poem. Instead, Geoffrey suggests that they follow the example of the prudent builder, who does not rush into building a house but first plots the successive steps of the construction in his mind: ‘as a prudent workman, construct the whole fabric within the mind’s citadel; let it exist in the mind before it is on the lips’ (17). Geoffrey’s recommendation that the poet first build the poem mentally (‘in the mind’) before building it physically (‘on the lips’) is less important here than the fact that he images the poem as a ‘fabric,’ that is, individual parts put together by the artifex, the fabricator or maker.29 In acting upon his raw materials, assembling stones or timbers into a house, Geoffrey’s poet-

20 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics

builder traces a long history back to the father-craftsman of ancient Greek cosmology and embryology, as do the related medieval figures of the poet as artisan (sculptor, coiner, smith, mason, and the like). The embryological passage spoken by Dante’s Statius in Purgatorio 25, which I quoted earlier and shall return to in chapter 3, tropes the same heterosexualized literary action in organic and clearly patriarchal terms. Ostensibly, the Silver Latin poet Statius answers Dante’s question about the status of the body in purgatory – ‘how,’ the pilgrim asks, ‘is it possible to become lean when there is no need of nourishment?’ (Purg. 25.20) – through an account of conception and reproduction that, via Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, ultimately draws upon Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. But, situated in the six cantos of the Purgatorio that discuss poetry and following closely upon the poet Bonaguinta de Lucca’s association of poetic production with childbirth in Canto 24, Statius’s embryological exposition also analogizes the act of procreation to the act of writing, the father to the literary maker. After Bonaguinta figures Dante as the midwife of the ‘new rhyme,’ Statius offers the more traditional hylomorphic concept of the poet as the paternal agent that acts upon passive female matter to sire verse. Statius begins by explaining how male semen is concocted from the body’s residual nourishment – the ‘perfect blood never drunk by the thirsty veins.’ This blood, so perfectly digested as to be ‘active,’ able to transmit human form, unites with its imperfect counterpart, female semen, which is ‘fitted to be passive.’ The formative masculine element operates on the material female element, ‘first coagulating, then quickening that to which, for its material, it has given consistency,’ that is, the embryo. Having established how body and soul come together before birth, Statius moves on to explain how body and soul relate after death and finally to answer Dante’s original question. Yet Statius has accomplished his main task in the Purgatorio, which is to displace Bonaguinta’s feminized trope of the poet as midwife with the traditional figure of the poet as the paternal agent, as I discuss more fully in chapter 3. Related to the Aristotelian trope of fathering are other common medieval organic hylomorphic figurations of the poet drawn from agriculture – such as Quintilian’s plow or plowman inseminating the field that I shall discuss in chapter 2 – and from apiculture, specifically, the refinery process of mellification by which bees make honey from nectar, analogized to literary production most famously in ‘Epistle 84’ of Seneca the younger. While Seneca’s predecessors, Horace and Lucretius, emphasized the importance of the poet’s collecting the ‘nectar’ of his verse

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 21

from a variety of sources, Seneca privileged the process by which the poet, like the bee, concocted these sources into a ‘different thing’: ‘We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came’ (279). Seneca argues that, analogous to the bee’s natural gift that enables it to metamorphose nectar into honey, the human author has the capacity to change the form of multiple sources and make something original from them, just as our bodies convert the nourishment that we ingest in order to make use of it.30 Although Seneca likens the author’s transformation of source materials to the body’s digestion of food, he also implies the peptic process of spermatogenesis by which the (male) body further concocts its nutrients into the formative agent of reproduction: sperm. In the first of his analogies arguing for creative rather than servile imitation, Seneca reveals the heterosexual trope of paternity that underlies both his apian and peptic metaphors: the author’s final product should resemble its sources but not copy them exactly, he urges ‘just as a child resembles his father, and not as a picture resembles its original, for a picture is a lifeless thing’ (281). Nominally an argument for creative imitation, on a deeper level Seneca’s hylomorphic mellification trope reinforces the concept of the poet as paternal agent. The classical apian model of poetic imitatio survived into the Middle Ages with its connection to paternity intact, as Petrarch’s formulation of it in his ‘Letter 23’ to Boccaccio evidences: ‘An imitator must take care to write something similar yet not identical to the original, and that similarity must not be like the image to its original in painting where the greater the similarity the greater the praise for the artist, but rather like that of a son to his father ... [S]eeing the son’s face, we are reminded of the father’s, although if it came to measurement, the features would all be different ... It may all be summarized by saying with Seneca, and Flaccus [Horace] before him, that we must write as the bees make honey, not gathering flowers but turning them into honeycombs, thereby blending them into a oneness that is unlike them all, and better’ (302–3). Thomas Greene observes that Petrarch practises what he advocates in ‘Letter 23,’ in that the relationship between Petrarch’s text and his

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subtext, Seneca’s ‘Epistle 84,’ approximates the subtle play of resemblance between son and father that Seneca describes (96), yet this is also to observe that Petrarch fathers his text by ingesting Seneca’s writing and concocting it into his own literary offspring. The hylomorphic model of literary production that informs Petrarch’s ‘Letter 23’ privileges the writer’s transformative act of ‘fathering’ the past over his absorption or replication of it. Harold Bloom would later discuss this model in terms of ‘the anxiety of literary influence,’ yet a medieval reader would be familiar with a poetics that employed hylomorphic agricultural, reproductive, apiary, and artisan tropes of the literary maker. Perhaps the most institutionalized form of hylomorphic poetics in the Middle Ages began to appear in the Aristotelian or scholastic prologue, the accessus ad auctorem, of the early thirteenth century. A.J. Minnis notes that scholastic literary attitudes became so widespread that it is possible to talk about them as a singular ‘medieval theory of authorship” even if this theory was neither ‘homogeneous,’ ‘narrowly monolithic,’ nor ‘static’ (Theory 2). At this time, western scholars consistently began to adopt the discourse of Aristotelian causality to think and talk about literature: ‘The “Aristotelian prologue” was based on the four major causes which, according to Aristotle, governed all activity and change in the universe. Hence, the auctour would be discussed as the “efficient cause” or motivating agent of the text, his materials would be discussed as the “material cause,” his literary style and structure would be considered as twin aspects of the “formal cause,” while his ultimate end or objective in writing would be considered as the “final cause”’ (Minnis, Scott, and Wallace 5). Hylomorphic theories of verbal creation and artistic production such as this one are patently masculinized, and it should go without saying that they are heterosexualized, yet their heterosexualism has gone more or less unexamined in literary history, largely, I suspect, because the reproductive trope is so deeply embedded in aesthetics that we can find almost no other way of talking about art. Indeed, in writing this book, I have had to stop and scrutinize all the presumptively heterosexual organic metaphors that I have commonly employed to discuss literary history, the ‘genesis’ of a poem, the ‘flowering’ of a tradition, and so forth. Yet there were alternative models and metaphors of art available in the Middle Ages if only because, in Martin’s phrase, ‘all ideological systems ... contain contradictions’ (82). All systems, that is, contain inconsistencies, gaps, spaces that harbour contrary ideologies; they may even require or create such alien ‘others’ for differentiation. For in-

‘There is nothing French about Chaucer’ 23

stance, Rhonda Knight demonstrates that in the gaps of a medieval ideological system like sodomy, conventionally associated in the moral tradition with both biological and artistic barrenness, lies the contrary ideology of sodomy as a ‘procreative force in a historical context’ (61). The alien poetic that I name in my title, ‘queer poetics,’ is one of those contradictions harboured in the gaps of the dominant aesthetic; for it represents itself as a passive, receptive model of art that implicitly challenges hylomorphic, heterosexual art. Even if viewed suspiciously from time to time as ‘romantic,’ it thrived in the Middle Ages, specifically in the genre of vision, as I shall explore in chapter 2. Nevertheless, queer poetics cannot be recruited to articulate Chaucer’s escape from anything nor to document his development into the English ‘father’ poet. As I shall argue in this book, however, it is the aesthetic that Chaucer’s narrator first employed in the Book of the Duchess, interrogated in the House of Fame, and naturalized in the Parliament of Fowls.

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PART 1

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1 Anti-Courtly Polemic in the Chaucer Escape Narrative and the Queer Decoy

George Kittredge’s characterization of the Book of the Duchess as one of the ‘pretty visions’ (Chaucer 54) that Chaucer wrote while under the thumb of his French masters has not gone uncontested, yet the premises of this traditional view remain embedded in subsequent readings of the poem. These premises also form part of the larger anti-courtly polemic that drives the Chaucer escape narrative. Before I reread the Book of the Duchess in chapter 2, I explore here anti-courtliness in two views of the poem from the later twentieth century, Ian Robinson’s in Chaucer and the English Tradition (1972) and Lee Patterson’s in Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991). I choose these two readings in part because they are situated on opposite shores of the great ‘reforming’ divide in Chaucer criticism: the mid-1980s (Trigg 196–7). Robinson’s reading is neo-conservative, firmly rooted in the old patriarchal Chaucer tradition. Though denying ‘an explicit methodological or theoretical program,’ Patterson describes his work as ‘very much a book of the 1980s,’ a decade in which literary scholars were asked to ‘“think socially”’ (423) – implicitly, to think class – and Patterson does think Marx explicitly as he reads the Miller’s Tale (248–52). Nevertheless, both Robinson and Patterson implicate the court as a site of emasculation, and both stage Chaucer’s definitive escape from the effete and effeminating court and its French poetry to a masculine and securely heterosexual world and verse. My first project in this chapter is to historicize Robinson’s and Patterson’s commentaries by placing them in the context of a medieval anti-courtly polemic, the episode of the pulley-shoe in Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History. I turn next to Elaine Hansen’s feminist analysis of the poem in Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Hansen rereads courtliness as the new medieval

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ideal of a kinder and gentler or ‘feminized’ masculinity, an ideal, she argues, that stood opposed to patriarchal standards of manliness. In these conflicting norms lies the ‘problem’ of courtliness as Hansen defines it. Courtliness was a problem not because it emasculated men but because it trapped them in the cross hairs of patriarchal aim at effeminacy. Hansen thus rewrites the Chaucerian escape trope to account for what she finds to be incompatible ideals of masculinity: Chaucer’s heterosexual man must desire woman, but must also flee her. In Hansen’s view, absolute freedom is never possible for Chaucer’s men. Instead, they continuously repeat the cycle of attraction and flight: ‘Like the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s subsequent fiction feeds on and cannot escape the specter of Woman’s and women’s presence’ (86). My second undertaking in this chapter is to argue that Hansen’s model of Chaucerian escape is rooted in one particular medieval narrative resolution of the problem of male feminization, the version that preserves gender difference by sacrificing heterosexual union or, indeed, a woman herself at times. By Chaucer’s time, however, an alternative resolution of the problem of male feminization caused by courtliness had developed. It emerged in works in the vernacular that promoted heterosexual passion and its likely aftermath: marriage, lineage, dynasty. I identify one such resolution in an early vernacular romance, the anonymous Roman d’Eneas, in which courtly and patriarchal ideologies of masculinity collaborated in order to enable heterosexual union. I locate this collaboration in a medieval narrative strategy that utilized the erotic triangle not to bond men against women, as some feminist readings like Hansen’s argue, but to unite the heterosexual courtly male and his female beloved through – and against – the spectre of the queer male other. This narrative tactic employs the queer decoy, the overtly deviant male figure, to deflect patriarchal aim from the merely feminized (or courtly) heterosexual man who loves woman. In identifying the role of the queer decoy in Chaucerian narrative, I am contributing to recent efforts by feminist readers to recognize ‘triadic configurations’ in literature (Cotille-Foley 156) beyond the one elucidated by René Girard and Eve Sedgwick. In a wider sense, though, I want to peel back further the ‘heteronormative veneer’ of courtly love, as Jane Burns terms it (‘Who Needs It?’ 48). Burns traces how early feminist readers exposed the gender dynamics of the androcentric paradigm of ‘courtly love’ first named by Gaston Paris in 1881 (Hult 200). In their analyses, the myth of the courtly lady’s superiority gave way to the realization that the domna vanishes as homosocial relations between

Anti-Courtly Polemic 29

heterosexual men come to the fore. Next, Burns continues, readers began to detect how elite women and men subvert or renegotiate the dominant heteronormative system of courtly love (47). Building upon the work of Mark Jordan and others, William Burgwinkle has taken the further step of documenting the irrepressibility of queerness in courtly love texts and posing the end question of whether or not such texts constitute ‘a failed ideological experiment in imposing seamless models of (hetero)sexuality and gender’ (Sodomy 7). My focus is similar. In identifying the way in which the heterosexual courtly liaison has initially been produced through the deviant male figure in the Roman d’Eneas, I illustrate a central thesis of queer theory that, in Glenn Burger’s words, ‘the perverse is already an integral part of the dominant’ (‘Pardoner’ 1152). My effort in this book will be to trace the emergence of a perverse poetic in Chaucer’s dream trio. This chapter concludes by discussing two examples of the queer decoy in the Canterbury Tales. These instances occur not in romance but in fabliau tales that date from the end of Chaucer’s career; they involve non-aristocratic narrators, one a churl and the other a member of the merchant class, who invent decoy characters and appropriate courtliness for their own ends. In the process, they mock what is now recognized as a major agenda of the medieval courtly code: class distinction and regulated heterosexual union. But Chaucer’s first experiment with making the narrator the queer decoy occurs in the Book of the Duchess. As I shall argue in chapter 2, this device accomplishes the straightforward goal of naturalizing the courtliness of an aristocratic male whose heterosexual union with woman is sanctified in marriage. Whatever its narrative deployment, however, the queer decoy relieved the pressure on men to escape from the court, and, by extension, it undercuts the presumption of the emancipation narrative that both Chaucer and his fictional male characters would ‘naturally’ yearn to break out of their courtly prisons. Chaucer’s ‘Break-Out’ Robinson’s reading of the Book of the Duchess envelopes the Chaucer liberation narrative within a larger account of the emancipation of medieval literary history. Entitled ‘Chaucer’s Ways Out’ (1), the inner narrative comprises the first part of Chaucer and the English Tradition, which discusses the dream visions. Throughout this opening section, Robinson searches for evidence that Chaucer either wanted to or did ‘break out’ of the ‘courtly prison’ (41). The first of his major poems, the

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Book of the Duchess, demonstrates why Chaucer desired to escape the constraints of courtly poetry: the available (by which Robinson means ‘courtly’) ‘ways of speaking of love and death’ were ‘insufficient.’ These inadequate models made it impossible to write a love-elegy and reveal Chaucer’s problem in the Book of the Duchess: only ‘by abandoning what might be called the “poetry” of the poem’ and by talking ‘as one blunt Englishman to another’ can Chaucer write ‘effective and moving’ verse, the few lines at the end of the poem in which the narrator ‘forces the Black Knight to state his grief with a plainness remarkably unlike any of the previous literary artifice’ (16–17). The ineffectual and unmoving ‘“poetry” of the poem’ that Chaucer must abandon to accomplish his goal is, not surprisingly, the French love lyric, which Robinson counterpoises to the vigorous and affective native tradition of ‘blunt’ English. In an excursus on medieval literary history, Robinson constructs the larger emancipation narrative that provides the context for Chaucer’s struggle for artistic freedom. This account first traces the degeneration of the initially vital French love lyric into the ‘prettified’ (25) verse that causes the narrator’s plight in the Book of the Duchess. Robinson divides medieval verse into two contiguous ages, that of heroic poetry followed by that of love poetry. The earliest French lyric, troubadour poetry, ushered in the second age. ‘The new thing with the troubadours,’ Robinson asserts, ‘is simply the celebration of heterosexual emotion.’ For Robinson, troubadour poetry evidences ‘real passion,’ and his attraction to the simplicity and vitality of this verse is evident (18). Robinson also lauds the revolutionary implications of troubadour poetry, which, he maintains, by its very existence announced that ‘“[heterosexual] love has been missing from our civilization: here it is, what are you going to do about it?”’ (20). To make this ‘criticism of life’ explicit, Robinson continues, troubadour poets had to ‘come indoors’ and enter the courts, the only venue for the poet of love, and therein lay their demise as the vigorous proponents of real passion. The ‘attempt to civilize the passions, to make them live at court, ran the danger of emasculating them’ (20). Robinson implicates the ‘whims of one lady,’ Eleanor of Aquitaine, for compelling the domestication of the lyric. Eleanor’s court became ‘a sort of European finishing school’ and ‘forcing house’ (28) that nearly refined ‘the original troubadour passion completely out of poetry’ (33). The perfect expression of the effete ethos of Eleanor’s court, Robinson maintains, occurs in the lais of Marie of France, which are ‘so beautiful and so small’ that one cannot ‘imagine a literature growing out of them.’ Theirs is not

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the ‘smallness of a seed,’ Robinson explains, but of something ‘finished and final,’ that is, something moribund, not seminal (33). Robinson’s critique of the court lyric, which echoes Lowes’s comment that ‘nothing’ comes of these poems, went no further. But in the same year, 1972, Paul Zumthor redefined the nothingness of courtly lyric as the self-referential expression of male desire. Subsequent readers extended this line of thought to argue that the courtly lyric creates and celebrates a bond between male authors through linguistic competition (Gaunt, Troubadours 102; S. Kay; Kendrick, Game 184) and that ‘despite its heterosexual presumptions, the courtly affair was, in a variety of ways, an affair between men’ (Burns, ‘Who Needs It?’ 39). Normative poetry is re-established in Robinson’s narrative of medieval literary history, however, and it provides the template with which to recognize Chaucer’s ‘way out’ of prison. The exemplary breakout occurs in Jean de Meun’s part of the Romance of the Rose, written some forty years after Eleanor’s death. Its ‘great step towards freedom’ is to return to the ‘criticism of life’ – and of love – that the troubadours’ initial celebration of heterosexual emotion constituted (33). If the new thing of the courtly poetry written by the troubadours was the celebration of this emotion, Jean de Meun’s new thing in the Romance of the Rose was to insist that courtly love compete with other kinds of love. It is Jean’s critique of courtly love that Chaucer echoes, however briefly, in the blunt talk at the end of the Book of the Duchess. As enlightened as Robinson’s analysis of Jean’s breakout may appear to be on the surface, in fact it reinscribes the benighted values of his earlier account of troubadour verse. Thanks to the influence of Eleanor and her female cohorts, in Robinson’s account the poetry of courtly love has come to represent the sexually aberrant verse that Jean must challenge, contain, and ultimately displace with the poetry of ‘real passion’ (18). If Chaucer had not yet escaped from the ‘courtly prison’ in the Book of the Duchess, Robinson concludes, the final bluntly English lines of the poem showed him to be larger than the forces that constrained him, on his way to becoming a ‘real poet,’ that is, like Jean de Meun, one who dared to speak of love ‘in ways that would have been displeasing to the ladies of Queen Eleanor’s day’ (41). Although Chaucer did not actually break out in the Book of the Duchess, his few lines of prosaic English there chart his eventual escape. Robinson’s literary history is, at best, breezy and impressionistic. His association of good poetry with masculine heterosexual potency (seed) and bad poetry with aberrant non-reproductivity (something finished

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and final), woman (Marie of France; Eleanor and the ladies of her day), and the French court is patently biased. One might easily dismiss ‘Chaucer’s Ways Out’ as a period piece had its premises not jumped across the divide to reappear in ‘reformed’ Chaucer. In Chaucer and the Subject of History, Patterson historicizes the court lyric differently than does Robinson, basing his account primarily on ‘The Court of Cupid,’ chapter 4 of Richard Firth Green’s Poets and Princepleasers. Yet the critique of the court that emerges in Patterson’s version of the escape narrative sounds familiar. Patterson contextualizes the Book of the Duchess in the late fourteenth century, a period in England that he finds preeminently influenced by the ‘deprofessionalization’ of both poetry and writing per se (56). Literary activity in Chaucer’s day was no longer the province of a ‘particular group of specially trained men,’ the court author no longer a member of the ‘special group of professional poets,’ Patterson explains (56). Instead, literary activity was taken over by amateurs and became the ‘preserve of the court as a whole’ (56). Patterson identifies a number of these new amateur English poets from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and cites the Book of the Duchess as evidence of the transition from professional to court poetry. ‘It is possible,’ Patterson suggests, ‘that the rather inept lyrics ascribed to the grieving Black Knight in the Book of the Duchess really were written by John of Gaunt’ (57), the historical figure whom most modern Chaucer scholars take to be the alter ego of the knight. The first sign of this new literary court culture is the poet Jean Froissart, who entered the service of Edward III’s Hainaulter queen, Philippa, in 1361. (In R.F. Green’s words, the queen’s ‘household poet’ was obliged to practise the ‘new fad’ of courtly verse [105].) The next sign is Chaucer (50). Courtly makyng greatly vexed Chaucer, Patterson continues, because Chaucer ‘found the court to be deeply unsatisfactory as a place both to write and to be read.’ Patterson turns to the prologue to the Legend of Good Women to evidence how problematic the historical Chaucer found his role as court poet. The Chaucerian persona who narrates the Legend is called upon the carpet by an angry God of Love, who displays ‘unmistakable affinities to Richard II.’ Denouncing the sophisticated depiction of eroticism in Troilus and Criseyde as ‘a simplistic attack on love per se’ and demanding that it be rewritten, the God of Love ‘seeks to govern both the production and the reception of the text’ and insists that Chaucer’s poetry ‘signify a monolithic, self-identical meaning, that it rehearse and celebrate but never analyze much less criticize court values.’ This is the very kind of ‘absolutism’ that Troilus and Criseyde resists, Patterson maintains (58).

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Patterson concludes that in the Legend of Good Women Chaucer exposes courtly makyng as ‘ideologically and discursively imprisoning’(59). The project of Chaucer and the Subject of History then becomes the construction of yet another narrative of Chaucer’s escape, an account of how Chaucer ‘prised himself loose from an imprisoning court ideology’ (59), a captivity first evidenced in the ‘inept lyrics’ that Chaucer may have been constrained to include in the Book of the Duchess (50), and ‘came to be the father of English poetry’ (48). Although Patterson subsequently qualifies the possibility and nature of Chaucer’s autonomy, the salient point here is that he terms it an ‘escape’ (61) and thus invokes even as he revises the tradition of emancipated Chaucer. Similarly, Thomas Hahn observes, ‘at the same time that [Patterson] critiques the genetic-teleological tendencies of progressive, positivist historical writing, [he] follows that paradigm, and reproduces its closures, in his own analysis’ (6). Patterson’s Chaucer, a marginal figure whose anomalous position in society creates his subjectivity or ‘sense of selfhood’ (39), does ask readers to think anew, to ‘think socially,’ about the poet, and Patterson’s brief against the court lyric emanates from his belief that this elite hothouse verse never had to compete in the ‘open market’ and therefore never developed the depth that Chaucer’s verse did. Yet the various characterizations of court poetry in the first chapter of Chaucer and the Subject of History launch a different attack; for they are drawn from the same stock of tropes that supplied Robinson earlier with his complaint that the troubadour lyric had been gelded. Patterson does not implicate Eleanor of Aquitaine in the ruination of the court lyric, but his depiction of the complaint codes it as conventionally feminine – it is elegant, it is passive, it declines to analyse – whereas the Troilus is marked as masculine by virtue of its ‘complex contextualization’ of eroticism and its ‘poet’s heroic desire to forge a vernacular literary tradition equivalent to those of classical Rome and trecento Italy’ (59). The further qualities that Patterson attributes to the complaint – coldness, inertness, petrification – code it as solipsistic and barren relative to the turbulent, teeming eroticism of the Troilus. No matter that the love affair of Troilus and Crisedye comes to naught, Patterson suggests. To have loved and lost is better than never to have loved at all. As he reminds readers, the lover and mistress of the complaint never consummate their passion: men ritualistically beseech, women formulaically decline. Despite his erotic pretence, the narrator of the complaint forever forestalls carnal engagement, never, in the larger sense, acknowledges the ‘mutual interdependence of subjectivity and history’ (61).

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This differentiation of the complaint from the Troilus traces some of the larger temporal differences between any lyric and any narrative, yet Patterson associates the solipsistic aspects of the complaint with historically specific circumstances: the failure of court verse to engage with anything beyond itself manifests the ‘suffocating narcissism of court makyng’ (61) in late fourteenth-century England. Patterson’s allusion to the Ovidian myth of Narcissus to frame our understanding of the fatally flawed nature of court lyric resonates with Robinson’s characterization of the domesticated troubadour lyric as sexually aberrant. Narcissus was Ovid’s beautiful youth who spurned Echo’s love and preferred his own image. In medieval usage, Mark Jordan remarks, this myth warned that the refusal of heterosexual love springs from self-love, which is a queer love, that is, the ‘love of a body for another of the same kind’ (183). Like non-reproductive self-love, the narcissistic court lyric does not replicate itself. In Patterson’s estimation, it is too fragile to be anything but ‘ephemeral’ (52), a pronouncement that recalls Robinson’s comment that the domesticated troubadour lyric was too ‘small’ to generate new poetic life. The consequences of Chaucer’s breaking free of such queer writing thus become perfectly clear: Chaucer’s literary afterlife as the ‘father’ of English poetry was contingent upon his siring the vigorous poetic legacy represented by the Troilus and, later, the Canterbury Tales, not the fragile court lyric of the Book of the Duchess. To become the fatherpoet, Chaucer had to escape the role of court poet. Homophobia, Francophobia, and the Invention of the Pulley-Shoe Commenting on feminist approaches to Chaucer, Burger remarks that reading the poet only ‘along the axis of gender can ... unwittingly perpetuate a dangerous and anachronistic conceptual dominance of “the heterosexual” in Chaucer criticism’ (‘Queer Chaucer’ 161). Patterson’s emancipated Chaucer suggests that reading the poet only along the axis of social class runs the same risk unless the construction of class itself is interrogated for its ideological baggage. As I outlined in the introduction, the escape narrative of the nineteenth century associates the court with a barren narcissism, in John Lowes’s words, with ‘interminable subtilizings about love’ that come to ‘nothing’ and hold no interest for ‘any normally constituted Anglo-Saxon’ (‘Memory’ 463). The deviant other is always the French or francophile court, a characterization so deeply embedded that it usually passes without scrutiny. My effort to reread Chaucer, then, best starts with probing the con-

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struction of the court as the perverse villain in the Chaucer escape narrative. The association of this institution and, by extension, its art and culture, with effeminacy traces back to the Norman Conquest, when England and Wales were subordinated to a people who claimed descent from the Trojans, a race traditionally linked with sodomy (Burgwinkle, ‘Hero’ 9–11; Goodich 4–5;). I can offer only one example here of the homophobic Francophobia in the anti-courtly polemic that emerged in this period. It occurs in the episode of the pulley-shoe (souliers à la poulaine) from Book 8 of the Ecclesiastical History by Orderic Vitalis (1075–142). Born in England shortly after the Conquest to a French father and Saxon mother, Orderic was sent to Normandy in 1085 to become a child oblate at the Benedictine abbey of Saint Evroul, where, excepting several trips home to England and other brief intervals, he spent the rest of his life as a monk writing his immense chronicle. However, Marjorie Chibnall notes that Orderic’s early education by two Saxon priests in Shrewsbury helped to foster in him a lifelong sympathy for the depredation that his native land had suffered when his father’s people invaded England, especially the brutal enslavement of the Welsh (10). Orderic later termed his removal to Normandy at age ten an ‘abandonment’ by his father, and he compared his traumatic arrival in a land whose language he could not speak to Joseph’s arrival in Egypt (Chibnall 9–11). Orderic’s pronounced Anglophilia in the History also springs from motivations beyond nostalgia for his natal land. Intermittently throughout Book 8, England is pressed into service as the idealized foil against which Orderic narrates the disasters that have overwhelmed once ‘proud Normandy’ (227) and the injuries done to the sons of the Church there when Robert (Curthose) became duke upon the death of his father, William I, in 1087. Orderic repeatedly blames Robert’s ‘weak and indolent’ ways for the disorder in Normandy (115). In contrast, Robert’s brother, William Rufus, who had become king of England on their father’s death, ‘reigned securely over the whole of England and firmly repressed the rebels everywhere by his royal judgments’ (147). Duke Robert was so ‘weak and ineffectual’ (147) that evil men stalked Normandy unopposed. They ‘sorely abused Holy Church’ and her monasteries; ‘monks and nuns suffered great privation’ (147). Further, Robert’s passivity and ineptness encouraged sodomy to stalk the land openly: ‘In such times as these,’ Orderic laments, ‘sodomy walked abroad unpunished, flaunting its tender allurements and foully corrupting the effeminate, dragging them down to Hell’ (147). Not only did sodomy begin to plague Normandy,

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Orderic charges, but it made its way north to infect England, despite William Rufus’s firm hand. Orderic identifies the channel of transmission as the court and the vector as the foppish Fulk le Rechin, Count of Anjou, a ‘man with many reprehensible, even scandalous, habits’ that eventually gave way to ‘pestilential vices’ (187). Fulk was engaged by the weak Robert to subdue the rebellious Manceaux. In return, Robert awarded Fulk the bride that he so desired, a young girl whom Fulk married as his third wife, even though, Orderic reports, ‘two former wives were still living’ (187). The episode that Orderic next narrates suggests that the count’s obsessive interest in women threatened to make him degenerate into one, a paradoxical ‘domino theory of the self’ (Levine 126) that emerges from the common conflation of excessive heterosexuality with homosexuality, or at least with sodomy, in the Middle Ages and later (Boswell, Christianity 229–30; Epp; Goldberg 111; Hansen, Chaucer 63; B. Smith 180). In the economy of medieval homophobia, Fulk’s interest in women led him to prettify himself as if he were one. Thus, to disguise his deformed feet and mask his bunions, Fulk invented footgear with an elongated toe known as the ‘pulley-shoe’ (187). Orderic implies that Fulk performed this act of vanity to please his new young wife. The invention had disastrous consequences, for it ‘encouraged a new fashion in the western regions’ of Normandy, and soon rich and poor like clamoured after the pulley-shoe (187). Orderic contrasts the honourable men of old, those satisfied with serviceable shoes that fit the foot and who would have ‘utterly rejected as filth’ this new fashion, with the men of his age who found it ‘sweet as honey’ (187). Fulk’s detestable invention of the pulley-shoe wreaked yet further havoc. Its corruption spread north across the channel; for one Robert, ‘a certain worthless fellow at King Rufus’s court’ (187), got wind of the new fad and began to stuff the elongated toe of the pulley-shoe so that it bent upwards into the curved shape of a ram’s horn. This ‘frivolous fashion’ also proved infectious and soon ‘was imitated by a great part of the nobility’ in England (189). Having documented the contamination of the English court by the Norman court, Orderic launches a lengthy tirade against the globalization of sodomy that accompanied new-fangled fashions for men: ‘At that time effeminates set the fashion in many parts of the world: foul catamites, doomed to eternal fire, unrestrainedly pursued their revels and shamelessly gave themselves up to the filth of sodomy. They rejected the traditions of honest men, ridiculed the counsel of priests, and persisted in their barbarous way of life and style of

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dress. They parted their hair from the crown of the head to the forehead, grew long and luxurious locks like women, and loved to deck themselves in long overtight shirts and tunics’ (189). In the days of Pope Gregory, William the Conqueror, and other ‘pious leaders,’ Orderic continues, men wore ‘decent clothes well-adapted to the shape of their bodies’ (189) and knew how to ride and run. Now ‘wanton youth is sunk in effeminacy [“femineam mollitiem”]’ (189). Courtiers curled their hair to appeal to women, and they wore scorpion-shaped shoes and sleeves so long and wide ‘that they are almost incapable of walking quickly or doing any kind of useful work’ (189). Orderic concludes his lament by situating his efforts to rebuke the shameful effeminacy of his day in their larger context, which includes, most notably, God’s punishment of ‘the undisciplined herd’ with the scourges of disease, wars, and unjust rulers. Following God’s example, ‘learned and good men’ of Orderic’s era ‘exhort the transgressors’ to reform. Were Persius, Plautus, and other satirists alive now, Orderic wagers, they would have more than enough matter to criticize and expose. As it was, however, abundant scholars ‘composed long laments about the sins ands sorrows of the age,’ and it is their example that Orderic follows in his work as he recounts how ‘men in northern parts adopted the foolish fashions of pulley-toes and long and flowing hair and garments that sweep up all the filth on the ground for no useful purpose’ (191). Orderic’s tirade against masculine sartorial excess raises a familiar alarm over the erasure of gender distinction and physical difference (Burns, Courtly Love 24, ‘Refashioning’ 116–17). Yet it also constructs the French court as the agent of contamination that threatens to pervert England in the same way that the escape narrative imagines the court forcing Chaucer’s degradation. Both inventions employ an epidemiological approach that identifies patient zero and traces the vector of transmission. Corruption comes from abroad – France – to infect the favoured nation, England. Its agent is an effeminate man (Count Fulk) or woman (Eleanor of Aquitaine) of the elite class. It spreads from a specific person to another specific person, Fulk to Robert, Froissart to Chaucer, within the institution of the court. Such perversity could never have happened in the past, when strong and virtuous men scorned womanly ways and told the truth, as did Pope Gregory, William the Conqueror, the troubadour poets, and the pre-Chaucerian English professional historians who satirized the court for its frivolous ways. But the contamination does not go unchecked. God chastises, learned men and

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monks like Orderic protest, and red-blooded poets like Chaucer break away from court poetry to healthier, securely heterosexual, pursuits. Francophilia and the Book of the Duchess Homophobic caricature like Orderic’s account of the pulley-shoe played other roles in medieval culture, as I shall discuss later in this chapter, yet it principally demonstrates how the medieval court was constructed as deviant, and this construction emerged again in the antithetical clusters that set ‘natural’ England against ‘perverse’ France, forming the grid for the modern Chaucer tradition and its major product, the escape narrative. Before I leave this subject, I want to examine what can happen to heterosexual norms when the court of Chaucer’s era is privileged rather than derogated. Although the minority position in the Chaucer tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Francophilia does exist, as, for instance, in William Calin’s The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England, which argues that Chaucer is indebted to the Frenchdominated court for whatever is best in his poetry. In Calin’s reading of the Book of the Duchess, the feminized attributes of the poem’s protagonist, the Black Knight, constitute virtue, not vice, and the metaphorical love quarry that the narrator seeks and finds is this man. Calin observes that ‘it would be possible to quote a dozen books on Chaucer that allude to the alleged artificiality, formalism, exaggeration, thinness, conventionality, and artifice of the French tradition.’ Beyond the tendency of positivist literary history to denigrate the source material in order to praise the progressive aesthetics of the adaptor, English ‘national pride’ lies behind this scorn for the verse of Chaucer’s French predecessors, Machaut, Froissart, Deschamps, and others (275). In making this claim, Calin implicitly proposes to read the Book of the Duchess without such Francophobia and its constitutive homophobia. Indeed, one finds nothing about emasculated court lyrics and effete French courtiers in Calin’s Book of the Duchess. Calin does not deny the feminine qualities of the Black Knight and of his poetry, but he finds in both urbane courtliness, not degeneracy. The knight’s problem is grief for his lost wife, not pulley-shoes, Calin suggests. The disturbed party in Calin’s Book of the Duchess is the clerkly narrator cloistered in his bedroom at the outset of the poem. If not specifically English, he hails from outside the court. His problem is that he is a ‘solitary, foolish, melancholic’ man. His loveless state and deadly torpor symptomatize sexual as well as artistic acedia that integration into the

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court will cure. The first step towards this cure occurs in the hert-hunt at the beginning of the narrator’s dream: ‘the hard riding to the hounds in quest of a “hert” – a stag but also the human heart – ... is, in Freudian terms, an image of sexual arousal; it is a desire which, although not consummated, is given free reign and expressed in an active sanguine manner, in contrast to the melancholic torpor of the frame.’ The hunt’s real significance, Calin continues, is that it leads the narrator to the Black Knight, the ‘genuine object of his quest’ (283). When he overhears the Knight’s lyrical complaint, the potent verse that creates the aura of ‘courtliness, urbanity, and beauty’ in the face of death (286), his cure begins. The Knight’s poetic talents make an ‘unusually powerful impression on the eavesdropping narrator’ (287), and this encounter, Calin argues, initiates the narrator’s restoration to health by bringing him into contact with the larger world, the court and community. It is here that the narrator learns to ‘react to the Other as a subject, not an object’ through ‘speech’ and ‘genuine communication’ (283). The court resolves the narrator’s problem by, in a word, civilizing him through the verbal arts. It is important to note that it is not the poem’s aristocratic female figure, Whyte, who serves as metonym for the court in Calin’s reading, but its elite male poet and his verse commemorating her. When the narrator’s phallic ‘hard riding’ leads him to the Black Knight, not to female quarry, heteronormativity collapses. Homosocial if not homoerotic, yet highly effectual, Calin’s Black Knight is a far cry from the ‘normally constituted Anglo Saxon’ that Lowes imagined the Chaucer who fled the court to be, and, by the end of the Book of the Duchess, so is Calin’s narrator. The Problem of Courtliness and a New Chaucer Escape Narrative Commenting upon French-German literary relationships, Stephen Jaeger notes that a ‘network of nationalistic prejudices’ surrounds this subject: ‘a good many Frenchmen are persuaded or can be persuaded that whatever is elegant, urbane, courtly and refined in Germany must have been imported from France. The corresponding prejudice in Germany is that whatever is effeminate, overrefined, unmanly in Germany must have been imported from France’ (270). Substitute ‘England’ for ‘Germany’ and Jaeger’s comment aptly sums up the dynamics of the opposed readings of the Book of the Duchess that I have recounted in this chapter. As Jaeger’s remark implies, medieval courtesy is at the heart of both Francophilia and Francophobia, and each tells only half of the

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story about it. One sees in the courtly figure of the Black Knight all the progressive civilizing trends of medieval Europe, while the other sees in the same figure the degeneration of a once heroic age into detestable softness. In conflict are medieval ideals of masculinity, and, within those ideals, the norm of heterosexuality itself is contested: what constitutes ideal masculine heterosexual behaviour? In a feminist analysis of Chaucer, Hansen takes both views of courtesy into account to articulate what she terms the ‘problem of male feminization’ and to reconfigure the escape trope accordingly. First outlined in her 1989 article on the Legend of Good Women and elaborated upon in Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, the problem of male feminization, Hansen explains, is that courtliness valorizes male behaviour at odds with patriarchal ideals. Men are therefore ‘caught in the consequent contradiction as they try to establish stable gender identity’: ‘Whereas patriarchy devalues the culturally feminine and insists on the difference between men and women as well as the power of the former over the latter, the heterosexual union idealized by the laws of Cupid values traits associated with femininity such as irrationality, self-sacrifice, submission, and service, and thus diminishes in theory both the difference and the power differential between male and female’ (‘Feminization’ 61). Hansen rewrites the Chaucer escape narrative in terms of these incompatible ideals of masculinity. As she reads the Book of the Duchess, two figures are trapped between conflicting masculine norms: the Black Knight as courtly lover and the narrator as courtly poet. The Black Knight is ‘womanlike: receptive, irrational, and secluded in the private world of dream and lyric.’ Because he has undergone the role reversal to which the male courtly lover was subject, the Black Knight ‘represents himself as rendered passive and imprisoned by love and the lady’ (Chaucer 62–3). Like the male courtly lover, the poet of courtly love is also trapped by feminization. Hansen argues that the fourteenth-century English court poet was ‘feminized’ not simply because he was compelled to write fashionable French lyric, but because he was a marginalized figure always careful not to offend his superiors and forever subject to the power of readers and patrons to misinterpret his writing. In the narrator of the Book of the Duchess, Hansen finds Chaucer’s self-projection as that feminized court poet. Like Ovid’s Alcyone, about whom he dreams, the narrator suffers from ‘epistemological uncertainty’ (Chaucer 62). The most prominent action in Hansen’s Book of the Duchess is the joint escape from this prison of feminization by Knight and narrator. Their newfound freedom is manifested in their return from irrationality, iner-

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tia, and incomprehension to reason and action. The passive and irrational knight rides back to the business of his world; the epistemologically uncertain narrator reconstructs meaning and discourse and returns to ‘his audience and his craft.’ What emancipates knight and narrator from the danger of ‘being permanently trapped in the negative feminized state’ is the ‘deaths of two loving and good women,’ Alcyone and Blanche. Alive, the historical woman is threatening and dangerous; dead, she provides the material res that narrator and knight collectively shape into idealized fictions of woman until their ongoing conversation recreates Whyte as realistic ‘flesh-and-blood’ wife (Chaucer 72). Thus, in Hansen’s view, the Book of the Duchess consoles men not for the death of women, but by the death of women, which liberates them from their feminization. Nevertheless, Hansen concludes, because it is first and foremost woman that medieval men had to flee, not the metonymic court or lyric poetry, Chaucer was bound to stage the cycle of male imprisonment and escape repeatedly in his poetry: ‘like the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s subsequent fiction feeds on and cannot escape the specter of Woman’s and women’s presence, just as it inscribes but cannot guarantee her, and their, absence’ (86). In fact, escape is illusory for Chaucer’s men. Since Patterson and Robinson find no redeeming value in the court, their Chaucer escapes it and its poetry with impunity. Such absolute liberation is not possible in Hansen’s view, however, because her version of the escape narrative recognizes the court’s code of masculine behaviour as a new progressive ideal that theoretically disrupted gender hierarchy and that aristocratic medieval men promulgated in spite of its conflict with patriarchal ideals dedicated to preserving the status quo. Male feminization cannot be the ‘problem’ that it is in Hansen’s paradigm unless the courtly ideal were powerful enough to lay a claim upon aristocratic men at least equal to that of the opposing ideal of patriarchy. The double bind that both compels and condemns courtliness frustrates narrative resolution other than temporarily and violently through the erasure of woman, who must always return. In the remainder of this chapter, however, I identify a medieval narrative strategy that accommodated both patriarchal and courtly ideals of masculine behaviour and thus ‘unproblematized’ male feminization, releasing the pressure for escape. At the heart of this strategy is the queer male other, a literary figure who facilitated rather than threatened the emergence of the courtly lover, I shall argue. The basic elements of this resolution of the double bind appear in two pilgrims depicted in Chaucer’s General Prologue: the Squire and the Pardoner.

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Curialitas and Chaucer’s Unproblematic Squire A test case for evaluating the double-bind concept of problematic feminization that I have been examining is Chaucer’s pilgrim Squire of the Canterbury Tales. This fashionable courtier should be at high risk for patriarchal condemnation. In the General Prologue, not only is the Squire decked out in revealing clothing in order to attract female attention, including the exceedingly short tunic that Orderic railed against in the History centuries earlier, but Chaucer suggests that this young man curls his hair to beautify himself. He sings, dances, paints, and writes to the same amorous end, and he loves so ‘hoote’ (‘hotly,’ 97) that he sleeps not a wink at night. Further, when the Squire narrates his tale on the pilgrimage, he is excessively deferential about his skills, first pleading inability to speak well of love, then promising not to rebel against the host’s request for such a tale, and finally excusing himself should he speak amiss (4–8). Compared with the Squire, Chaucer’s Black Knight is purposeful and manly. Nevertheless, this highly feminized male figure evokes no evident disdain within the Canterbury fiction nor any significant modern critical notice of his ‘imprisonment’ to women. Ian Robinson merely remarks upon the ‘charming naïveté’ of the Squire’s ‘perfect’ tale (181), Patterson notes with approval that the Squire’s ‘snobbish’ version of ‘gentilesse’ is forced to compete with bourgeois varieties (Chaucer 324), and, almost in an aside, Hansen spends a short paragraph contrasting the Squire’s ‘immature’ strategy of restoring proper gender difference in his tale to the successful tactics of the Legend of Good Women (Chaucer 268). The apparent lack of perception that the Squire is enslaved to women and thereby emasculated invites a reconsideration of Hansen’s conceptualization of the problem of male feminization. Her model of the problem, which situates courtliness and patriarchy as unalterably opposed camps with irreconcilable codes of male behaviour, is ultimately based on the traditional explanation of courtly love as a female invention. That is, ‘the love-talking ladies of the laity’ (Donaldson 161) – Marie of Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and others – tamed the patriarchy by forcing male poets to write about feminine subjects. It is the legacy of these ladies and their feminized love courts, of course, that threatened to imprison and emasculate Chaucer, the escape narrative warns. In the mid-twentieth century, however, historians began to question the idea that medieval women invented courtly love or necessarily gained anything from it.

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For instance, John Benton questioned whether such love courts really existed and whether the supposed ur-text of courtly love, Andreas Capellanus’s treatise on the ars honeste amandi, was not ironic. In any event, Benton doubted that Andreas was the chaplain at Marie’s court of Champagne (‘Court’) and proposed that ‘courtesy was created by men for their own satisfaction’; it was ‘a social code in which a man increased his honor by being polite’ (‘Clio’ 35). Georges Duby also maintained that courtly love was not a ‘female invention.’ Instead, it was a ‘man’s game’ adopted as a matrimonial strategy by the twelfth-century feudal aristocracy in France. To keep their patrimony intact, elite families allowed only the oldest son to wed, Duby argued (‘Model’ 259). Restricted from marrying, the younger sons (juvenes) forced into celibacy by family custom posed a sexual threat to aristocratic women; courtly love resolved this danger through its ritualized, regulative code of behaviour, which preached submission to a lady and, by extension, to her lord (‘Love’ 60). Duby’s argument that primogeniture restricted the juvenes from marriage in the region of Champagne has been challenged (Evergates), but his larger point that courtly love served rather than threatened the prince reverberates in Stephen Jaeger’s rather different account of the origins of courtliness, the most recent extensive exploration. Jaeger does not explicitly address questions of gender, but his investigation exposes the fact that patriarchy, in the form of empire, fostered the development of the ‘courtier bishop,’ the figure that later amalgamated with the courtly lover of romance. He contends that the anti-courtly forces of the later Middle Ages, the ultraconservative clergy, do not represent the entire patriarchy, but a particular segment of it. Indeed, another constituent of the patriarchy, the secular aristocracy, stood to gain much from courtliness, particularly from those aspects that took the form of male feminization. Jaeger’s work thus complicates and realigns the terms of the conflict over courtliness and provides the conceptual framework in which to see how the queer male validated the courtly male in medieval narrative. Jaeger traces the new ideals of courtliness, curialitas, in medieval western Europe to the institution that ‘both was and regarded itself’ as the continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, German imperial courts (257). By the tenth century, he argues, the lay investiture system by which Ottonian emperors granted bishoprics in the imperial Church to the courtiers they favoured had produced the figure of the ‘courtier bishop,’ the cleric who had gained his high office by service as a young man at the royal court. In contrast to the warrior knight, valued for his

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aggressive and even boorish ways, the ambitious cleric who hoped to attract royal attention had to cultivate a set of ‘civilized’ virtues that conflated Christian morals with the ideals of Ciceronian statesmanship. The vitae of these bishops, Jaeger notes, praise not the asceticism of the fledgling cleric at court, but his physical beauty, quickness of mind, fluid speech, fashionable attire, and elegant manners, as well as his wisdom, discretion, prudence, gentleness, patience, affability, and humility (28). If the secular dimensions of his role called for physical beauty and stature, the requirement of mansuetudo, ‘gentleness of spirit, a placid, benevolent passivity shown to friends and enemies alike’ (36), devolves from the classical virtue celebrated by Cicero in De officiis. This civic virtue of ‘aristocratic deference,’ Jaeger observes, differs from ‘Christian self-denial’: ‘the [latter] is based on the individual’s conviction of his true wretchedness; the [former] on the individual’s sensitive awareness of his own greatness’ (37). Jaeger argues that the prototype of medieval courtesy evident in the topoi of these vitae originated in the demands of the bishop’s office and in the realities of the cleric’s service at court. The rising cleric had to assert himself, of course, but he could not ‘reach for the sword in the face of insult,’ as the warrior could. Instead, he relied on his wits and a strategy of self-deference, a ‘calculated underplaying’ of skills and accomplishments that would much later be called sprezzatura, to make his way and gain the emperor’s favour (39). Jaeger attempts to elucidate the path by which the constellation of virtues cultivated by the ‘courtier bishop’ of the tenth century made its way into the twelfth-century secular romances written by clerics such as Chrétien de Troyes to instruct the laity in courtesy. At most, Jaeger can say that the cult of refined or ‘courtly’ love so evident in these same romances was ‘connected with the ideal of courtliness’ that he traces to the German imperial courts and therefore ‘could form an amalgamation’ with it (267). More pertinent to my concerns, Jaeger defines the way in which the courtliness that was cultivated and transmitted by the worldly clergy, the ‘high aristocracy in state service’ (262), bishops and abbots, drew the fire of conservative clergy and the monastic world during the period of the Gregorian reform. Forbidden by Gregory VII in 1075, lay investiture, the practice Jaeger finds at the heart of the ‘civilizing wave’ of curialitas, ‘was one of the main targets of Church reformers.’ Jaeger situates Orderic’s attack in the History in this reform movement, not in Francophobia, as I did earlier. Although Orderic clearly sympathized with his native England, his diatribe is also part of what Jaeger calls the ‘clerical rebellion against courtliness,’ which took the form of

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castigating ‘new-fangled courtly ways’ for infecting the warrior class and sapping the virtue and strength of the men of bygone days who were necessary to the defence of the realm: ‘there was a widespread feeling among the clergy that the lay nobility, the inheritors of a once glorious heroic tradition, were in danger of being corrupted by a frivolous, effete courtly culture’ (193). Opposed to the reactionary response to curialitas by clerics such as Orderic, whose ‘ultra-conservative mentality always equates restraint with cowardice and sees heroism and manhood threatened by the advance of civilization’ (195), stands the corrective to the conservative polemic: the positive representations of courtliness authored by the clerical poets of the twelfth-century romance. Jaeger believes that scholars have been slow to recognize the clerical authorship of romance and even slower to recognize that these cleric-poets ‘did not reflect the customs of the knighthood but created them in order to spread the civilizing influence of curalitas’ (234). Aided by the rising literacy of the laity, romance became a vehicle used by the forward-looking portion of the clergy to instruct its audience in an ethical ideal that had its deep roots in Christianity and classical culture. Even if by the thirteenth century clerical opponents had destroyed lay investiture, which formed the ‘institutional basis’ of curialitas, Jaeger concludes, the proponents of courtliness had left their enduring mark: ‘One bequest from the twelfth century that did remain vital in the midst of this transformation of intellectual and social life was the veil of idealizing the writers of romance cast over the life of the knight. Courtly ideals maintained themselves in romance like a cocoon that has given up the life in it and waits for a new occupant, an event that occurs in the life of ideas and literary forms, if not in that of butterflies. The revitalizing of courtliness that occurred in the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries nourished and expressed itself regularly in the idiom of courtly romance’ (255). If clerical poets spread courtliness as a civilizing influence, the curialitas that developed ‘hand in hand with empire’ was also a class marker. It preserved imperial power over the secular aristocracy, as Konrad von Megenberg’s advice in a mid fourteenth-century emperor’s household book evidences: ‘It behooves the ministers of the emperor, then, to be all the more courtly – that is, resplendent with good manners – in the same degree that the emperor’s court is exalted above the courts of all secular powers’ (qtd in Jaeger 264). Although Duby stresses the social utility of the courtly model not to courtier bishops of the tenth century but to twelfth-century aristocratic families, he argues more widely that

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courtliness was a class marker as well: ‘The guest at court entered into the game of love ... in order to show that he was one of the privileged few who shared in the profits of seigneurial exploitation and who was exempt from the oppression that weighed on common folk. In this way he clearly demonstrated the distance that separated him from the villein, who was summarily dismissed as living a life of ignorance and bestiality. The practice of courtly love was first and foremost a criterion of distinction within masculine society’ (‘Model’ 256). Refined behaviour distinguished the knight not only from the villein, Duby maintains, but from other people at court: the cleric and the parvenu merchant, the new middle-class ‘man with money’ who was intruding into the formerly enclosed world of the aristocracy. At the same time, the discipline imposed by courtly love on the young knight ‘reinforced the rules of the ethics of vassalage’ and therefore supported ‘the rebirth of the state’ in later twelfth-century France (‘Love’ 61–3). To serve the prince’s wife was ultimately to serve the prince. Toril Moi also argues that secular courtliness and patriarchy colluded rather than collided in at least one important respect. However different the figure of the courtly lover and the warrior may have appeared to be on the surface, they had a deeper underlying commonality: the goal of both was to preserve the power of the aristocracy. Moi explains that the new cult of Venus did not undermine the power of the aristocracy but reinscribed and preserved it. She further argues that the feminized practices and virtues associated with courtliness were selected because of their ‘inaccessibility to the lower class.’ Wealth was required to attire oneself fashionably, and leisure, a function of wealth, was necessary to woo the beloved in a properly dilatory fashion. Orderic had earlier revealed what the new fashionable attire of male courtiers demonstrated – not their inability to accomplish utilitarian labour when wearing such garb but their lack of any need to toil in such a way. Paradoxically, Moi observes, the feminization of the aristocracy came to signal its ‘“natural” right to power’ and to legitimize its right to rule those who lacked the money and time to engage in courtly behaviour (17–19). When Chaucer cast the warrior and courtly lover as the father-son pair of Knight and Squire in the General Prologue, he depicted both their superficial difference and the deeper tie that binds these two figures and elevates them above the other pilgrims. Nothing could be more dissimilar than the outward appearance of the sober Knight, said to have just returned from more numerous campaigns than historically he could have undertaken and still attired in the tunic rust-marked from his chain

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mail, and the fashionably dressed Squire, who engages in round-theclock amorous pursuits. Yet no evident tension exists or develops between these two men so divided by age and attire but allied in bloodline and power. Indeed, the collusion rather than collision of what each represents is underscored in the fact that the apparently frivolous Squire has already begun to distinguish himself in ‘chyvachie’ (85), and it is further manifested in the closing image of unity in which the Squire exhibits proper filial respect by carving before his father at the table. If the Squire’s courtly pursuits appear to be trivial compared with his father’s endeavours, they nevertheless initiate him into displaying the same power over other men by virtue of the leisure and wealth that his father exhibits through arms and conquest. The work of Benton, Duby, Jaeger, Moi, and other recent historians and critics has encouraged readers to look beyond the superficial opposition of courtliness and patriarchy to find their underlying bond and to rethink the ‘problem’ of Chaucer’s courtly men. For instance, Elizabeth Keiser observes that Chaucer does not necessarily problematize the feminization of elite males such as the Squire: ‘My reading of romance literature and scholarship on gender symbolics in medieval texts leads me to believe that late medieval courtly culture’s association of women with the sphere of aesthetic refinements is generally positive, so that the elite male who – like his fictional exemplars such as Sir Gawain, or Chaucer’s young Squire, or his Knight in Black – demonstrates his skillfulness in matters requiring artifice and delicacy and cultivated taste for elegance does not problematize his masculine virtue but rather elevates himself ’ (149). This is not to say that the status of actual medieval women rose along with that of the feminized aristocratic male. Indeed, Duby explicitly denies it (‘Love’ 59), although, as I noted at the outset of this chapter, recent rereadings of the courtly model now detect more positive and diverse roles for women in literary settings. Nor, Keiser observes, is it to discount altogether the possibility that ‘clerical propaganda and ascetic ideals’ might still ‘taint’ the new ideal of elite masculinity. The traditional association of ‘self-consciously aesthetic selfpresentation, marked by a feminine conformity to up-to-date fashionable standards of dress’ with ‘erotically charged effeminizing relationships between males’ could shadow courtliness, and Keiser turns to the Squire and the Pardoner in the General Prologue for an example of the way in which a man’s attention to personal appearance could either serve as a ‘class-marked sign of virtue’ or signal ‘dubious sexual preference and practice,’ respectively. ‘Both men are visibly feminized – one positively

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and the other negatively,’ Keiser notes (148–9). The Pardoner’s negative feminization, she continues, stems from the erotic duet (‘Com hider, love, to me’) that the Pardoner croons with the degenerate Summoner in the General Prologue (672–3), whereas the Squire’s positive feminization is a function of the lack of any overt suggestion of homoeroticism on his part. Implicit in the Pardoner’s negative feminization, the charge of sodomy always trumped feminization as a male virtue. At the same time, however, the trump perversely accommodated non-normative conceptions of masculinity that remained this side of sodomy. In fact, I contend that Chaucer’s Squire remains untainted not because his feminization is positive – devoid of homoerotic overtones – but that his feminization is positive because this always potential suspicion has been displaced elsewhere, namely, onto the characterization of the Pardoner. That is, Chaucer appropriates the queer other in the person of the Pardoner in order to differentiate unacceptable effeminacy from acceptable feminization and thus to authorize the Squire’s feminized markers of power. Without the figure of the Pardoner in the General Prologue, the fashionable Squire is more vulnerable to suspicion; with him, the Squire is immune. The form of the Prologue, a series of verbal portraits rather than a continuous narrative, cannot engage the Squire and Pardoner in any direct interaction with one another, and they do not fully illustrate the strategy of deflection that Chaucer employs in other instances. Nevertheless, in the Prologue’s Squire and Pardoner, one can detect the basic outlines of how the queer foil validates the courtly male. When two such Chaucerian figures do operate together in a narrative situation, the feminized male achieves heterosexual union with a woman who is not erased from the narrative, as I shall illustrate in the final section of this chapter. The imbrication of courtliness, homoeroticism, and homophobia in the General Prologue that I have been discussing reflects their historical development during the high Middle Ages. John Boswell notes that the rise of courtly love in the years 1050–1150 coincided with an ‘efflorescence of gay culture,’ which was manifested in the outpouring of ‘a body of gay literature’ the likes of which had not been seen since the first century AD and would not recur until the nineteenth century (Christianity 239). Concomitant with the appearance of both courtly and homoerotic literature during the high Middle Ages, the renewal of classical homophobic satires and the appearance of medieval diatribes against sodomy, such as Orderic’s in the History, constitute part of what R.I.

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Moore calls the ‘persecuting society’ that formed in twelfth-century western Europe. Boswell sees the increased homophobia of the thirteenth century as a general backlash of intolerance against the relative openness of high medieval culture, yet, just as I have been arguing that patriarchy and courtliness colluded as well as collided, so homophobic diatribe not merely condemns courtliness but enables it. Eneas and His Queer Other Although neither Boswell nor Jaeger considers the idea, ultra-conservative clerical tirades against foppish effeminacy may have fostered rather than hindered the new courtly ideal of masculine behaviour by clearly isolating an acceptable form of male feminization from its detested counterpart caricatured in satire and bemoaned in complaint. One could hardly confuse Chrétien’s courtly Lancelot with Orderic’s mincing Count Fulk of the pulley-shoes. Deliberate or not, the validation of the courtly hero by anti-sodomy polemic is suggested in the fact that the deviant foil made its appearance in the precursor of Chrétien’s Arthurian romances, the romans antiques, adaptations of Latin texts into French verse. Specifically, the anonymous Roman d’Eneas (c. 1156), which rewrites Virgil’s Aeneid, adds to its source both a 2,000-line passage detailing Eneas’s courtship of Lavine and two bluntly homophobic diatribes aimed at Eneas. In chapter 4, I return to the subject of the romance Aeneid and the problem it caused the narrator of the House of Fame, but here I focus upon the specific accusations of Eneas. Simon Gaunt observes that the Eneas’s augmentation of Virgil’s text ‘is one of the key early manifestations of what modern critics call “courtly love”’ (Gender 76). Within this heterosexual expansion occur the two homophobic tirades against Eneas assigned to Lavine and her mother (Amata) that are more vituperative than anything Orderic wrote on the subject. Amata attempts to dissuade her daughter from marrying Eneas by slandering him as a ‘sodomite,’ an accusation with orientalist overtones (Delany, ‘Geographies’ 237). Angered and hurt by Eneas’s apparent disinterest in her, Lavine lampoons fashion-conscious young men as the Ganymedes whom the Trojan hero beds: ‘“I see well that [Eneas] has no care for women, and no need for such pleasures. Never since he knew that I would love him has he deigned to look in this direction. Since he saw me at the window where I have made my feelings known to him, he would not stop there for any price: he is sick at heart at seeing me. Eneas would have prized me much more if I had split my clothes and

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if I had hose breeches and tightly tied thongs. He has plenty of boys with him, and he loves the worst of them better than me. He has their shirts split. He has many of them at his service, and their breeches are often lowered: thus they earn their wages”’ (238). Such discourse in the Roman d’Eneas, Gaunt maintains, does more than attack homoeroticism. It regulates male homosocial bonds by ‘imposing normative models of heterosexuality and gender on all men: every man will regulate carefully his homosocial bonds if he is concerned they may be perceived as homosexual, and thereby transgressional.’ Women in the Roman d’Eneas are forced into the role of making sure that ‘the hero stays on the straight and narrow,’ Gaunt adds, and it is no accident that their coercive discourse of homophobia coincides with the death of Eneas’s male companion and close friend, Pallas, and with the beginning of Eneas’s heterosexual passion for Lavine (Gender 81). Yet Amata’s homophobic attack on Eneas is clearly discredited as vicious and unfounded, motivated by the ambition she has expressed from the outset of the Roman to marry her daughter to Eneas’s rival, Turnus, and Lavine’s outburst that I have just quoted occurs too late in the narrative to function in the reader’s mind as heterosexual coercion of Eneas.1 Well before Lavine accuses Eneas of preferring boys to women, the Eneas-poet has directly informed the audience that Eneas was ‘most happy’ to read the amorous letter Lavine has sent him. Eneas conceals his love in public, but in the private retreat of his tent that night, he suffers a 200-line attack of amorous anguish over Lavine. The passage begins with an account of heterosexual Love’s power over Eneas that rivals Love’s hold on the male protagonist of any subsequent courtly romance: ‘love for the king’s daughter had thrown him very quickly into great confusion. He did not care to eat, and went to bed early in the evening. He delighted much in thinking much about her, and recalling in his heart how the maiden had looked at him and sent kisses to him ... Cupid, the god of love, his blood-brother, held him in his power; he did not let him sleep that night, but made him sigh many sighs. He tossed and stretched, turned over and back very often. He had no sleep that night. Love had thrown him into great agitation; Love was making him brood; Love was making him sweat, and then grow chilled, and swoon, and sigh, and quake. Love goaded him and excited him, and he trembled so that he could not rest’ (233). Indeed, Eneas loves Lavine so intensely that, ironically, he risks becoming a woman too, as he himself suggests when he complains that Love would not treat even a ‘vile chambermaid’ (233) with the insolence

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with which he treats Eneas. But Lavine’s subsequent homophobic tirade against Eneas authorizes his courtly – feminized – response to love by differentiating, hence segregating, it from what it borders closely upon, contemptible effeminization. Within the Roman d’Eneas, the homophobia of anti-courtly polemicists like Orderic shields courtly behaviour, enabling Eneas to exhibit the conventionally feminine traits of passivity, indecision, and self-doubt unproblematically. It does not coerce or police his heterosexuality so much as it allows Eneas to express his deep passion for a woman with impunity. Courtly love does not paralyse Eneas. The Eneas-poet confines the hero’s amorous anguish to off-duty night-time hours, and the Roman proceeds straightforwardly to Eneas’s defeat of Turnus, the marriage of Lavine, and the foundation of a new dynasty. Narratively, the homoerotic Eneas that Amata and Lavine conjure up shields courtly Eneas from accusations of perversity and authorizes his heterosexual passion. This authorization of courtliness through accusations of homosexuality would recur in romance, most notably in Marie of France’s Lanval.2 The narrative strategy of the Roman d’Eneas differs from the way in which Chaucer legitimized the Squire’s courtly appearance and behaviour in the General Prologue; for the latter materializes the queer alter ego as a distinct figure, the Pardoner. Yet in both instances this mode of authorization at once served the interests of the aristocracy, whose power was naturalized through such feminized markers, and of the ultra-conservative clergy, who had opposed the worldly curialitas associated with investiture and, by extension, the new ideal of masculine behaviour. When defended in this way, feminization did not trap the courtly male between conflicting ideals of masculinity. Therefore, the Squire’s courtliness is not perceived as problematic; the courtly Eneas need not flee woman because his feminization has been clearly demarcated from hers. Indeed, the narrative resolves in the heterosexual union of Eneas and Lavine. Although the problem that Hansen finds indelibly inscribed in the new masculine ideal might be unresolved in certain texts and lead to the rejection of heterosexual love – the male’s escape, the erasure of woman – I have argued here that there was also a medieval literary resolution that obviated such flight. In the next chapter I shall read the Book of the Duchess in the light of this narrative strategy, but before doing so I examine two instances of narratives in the Canterbury Tales that employ queer decoys, both integrated into the erotic triangle plot. Both examples occur in fabliau-style tales narrated by non-courtly men, the

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Miller and the Merchant, who have no evident investment in courtliness. Indeed, the Miller mocks the effete manners of his social superiors, and the Merchant decks out his tale in romance trappings partly to distance it from his own circumstances, yet each validates the ‘courtly’ figure in the tale he tells by pairing him with a queer Other. Chaucer’s highly developed sense of irony is at work here. At the same time, however, the Miller and Merchant witness the recognition that markers of power can take the feminized form exhibited in courtly behaviour. However much these pilgrim narrators burlesque the figure of the elite male who spends entire days and nights wooing and winning his beloved, they perceive no need to effect his escape from woman at the end of the tale. Instead, the humiliation of the queer Other relieves the tensions in the plot. ‘Joly’ Absolon as Queer Decoy In the General Prologue, as I have discussed, the queer decoy takes the static form of the foil character who immunizes the Squire, but it functions dynamically both in the erotic triangle of the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer’s best-known fabliau, in which two young clerks, ‘sweete’ Nicholas and ‘joly’ Absolon, vie for old John the carpenter’s wife, Alisoun, and in the triangle of the Merchant’s Tale of the January-May couple and the amorous squire, Damian. The decoy model of triangulation that I identify in these tales differs from the concept of erotic triangulation that Eve Sedgwick has based upon Girard’s formulation of the threesome in the novel.3 The core idea of Sedgwick’s model is that two heterosexual men achieve homosocial bonding with one another through their pursuit of the same woman (21–7). One male lover learns and practises heterosexual desire through imitation of, or rivalry with, his counterpart rather than through direct interaction with the female beloved. Displaced into a peripheral role, the female figure both regulates and legitimizes this bonding. There are obvious Chaucerian examples of the kind of erotic triangle that Sedgwick discusses, most notably in the Knight’s Tale. Arcite learns of Emily’s existence only through Palamon’s passion for her, and most of the Knight’s narrative focuses upon the intense, eventually violent, rivalry between the two men as they make their way from prison to their chance confrontation in the woods and finally to the tournament that Theseus sets up between them to determine which one shall marry Emily. Emily remains unaware of the young mens’ escalating passion for

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her, and, when at last she does learn of it and of the bridal role that Theseus has assigned her, she first rejects marriage altogether and then resignedly accepts her fate. As Susan Crane observes, Chaucer generates ‘illogicalities’ around both Emily and her sponsoring goddess, Diana, that do not exist in Boccaccio’s more coherent presentation in the Teseida, particularly Emily’s ‘imponderable’ desire ‘not to love or be loved’ (170–1). In contrast to the homosocial bonding of Palamon and Arcite that illustrates Sedgwick’s concept of the erotic triangle, the rival lovers of the Miller’s Tale, Nicholas and Absolon, neither form nor break a bond with one another as they woo Alisoun, nor does the competition between these two men for the same woman reduce her to a mere object, as readers sometimes argue (Hansen, Chaucer 225; Lochrie 288–9; Pugh 52). Indeed, Alisoun retains a high profile throughout the Miller’s Tale, and her illicit sexual bond with Nicholas becomes potentially stronger, not weaker, at the conclusion of the tale. The implication is that her gullible husband John has lost whatever credibility he might have had; hence, his future control of his wife is seriously impaired. Alisoun is free to romp again with Nicholas or with any other man without fear of her husband’s interference. Further, Absolon is no more aware that he has a male rival for Alisoun than John recognizes that Nicholas has plotted with Alisoun to cuckold him. After the first window scene in which Alisoun presents her posterior for Absolon to kiss, he returns in the second window scene to take revenge upon her, but by chance he brands Nicholas, who replaces Alisoun in order to get in on the jape. Rather than facilitate male homosocial bonding through and against woman, then, the erotic triangle of the Miller’s Tale enables the union of a feminized man and a woman by using the decoy figure, the queer other, to mark and maintain the gender differences between the two members of the heterosexual pair. In contrast, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde does not mask the courtly male’s feminization by means of a foppish screen character. Even if, as Richard Zeikowitz argues, Pandarus and Troilus are homoerotically attracted to one another in the earlier part of the narrative, Pandarus plays the role of lord, Troilus of submissive vassal (48). Reluctant to join heterosexual love’s ranks at the opening of Chaucer’s poem, Troilus faints in the consummation scene at the centre of the poem (3.1092), and no one shields him from scrutiny. Criseyde openly questions his manliness (3.1126), and Pandarus outright labels his friend’s swoon the result of his lack of a ‘mannes herte’ (3.1098). Neither charge about

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Troilus’s heterosexual credentials is ever deflected, even if his warrior status remains secure. Notably, the Troilus ends in the rejection of woman, Criseyde’s ruined reputation, and the removal of the courtly male, Troilus, to the eighth sphere. The erotic triangle of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale promotes heterosexual union, albeit a disorderly union, by doubling the figure of the male lover and making Absolon, the queer decoy, more proximate to woman than Nicholas, whose own feminized behaviour pales in comparison and thereby evades censure. Indeed, the ruse is so successful that it has become conventional to celebrate the ‘wholesome sexuality’ and ‘lusty naturalism’ of the Miller’s Tale (Howard, Idea 241; Muscatine 230), even though, by medieval standards, the effeminacy of its protagonist, Nicholas, the man who woos and wins Alisoun, mocks male involvement with women and even though, as I shall explain, the Miller himself intends to suggest such mockery. The opening portrait of Nicholas constructs him as feminized, in part through the repetition of ‘sweet’ and ‘sweetly’ four times in the space of fourteen lines (3205–19): this ‘sweete clerk’ (3219) strews his room with ‘swoote’ herbs (3205); he himself is as ‘swete’ as is the licorice root and the spice zedoary (3206); and at night he plays the psaltery and sings so ‘swetely’ that his chamber resounds with the melody. Chaucer does not reserve ‘swete’ exclusively to describe women, yet on the sole two occasions in the Canterbury Tales prior to the Miller’s Tale that Chaucer applies this adjective (or adverb) to people, it refers to a woman, Emily of the Knight’s Tale. This initial description of Nicholas also labels him ‘hende,’ a quality that Chaucer attributes to Nicholas another ten times in the course of the Miller’s Tale. ‘Hende’ has several meanings in Middle English, including ‘handy, at hand,’ ‘skilful, clever,’ and a cluster of significations, ‘pleasant, courteous, gracious,’ that are courtly attributes (Donaldson 17–19). When Nicholas later gropes Alisoun’s ‘queynte,’ he proves himself ‘handy’ in yet another sense, but in the opening portrait of him, ‘hende’ signifies the gracious and courteous qualities of a man who in a few lines is likened to ‘a mayden meke for to see’ (3202). Although the Miller says that Nicholas looks like a maiden, he never describes his actual physical attributes or his attire, but it is primarily through this technique that the Miller paints Nicholas’s rival, ‘joly’ Absolon, as the more memorably – negatively – feminized male of the pair. When Absolon says that he can eat no more than does a ‘mayde’ (3708),4 the Miller has prepared us to see him literally as a woman. ‘Joly’ can designate a lively attitude and behaviour – spirited, playful, cheer-

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ful – but it also denotes physical attractiveness, prettiness, as it does when the Miller describes Absolon’s hair as ‘joly’ (3316). Further, this kind of male physical beauty was typically associated with sexual deviance in the Middle Ages. Like his biblical namesake, Absolom, whose effeminate portrait Chaucer might have read in Peter of Riga’s Aurora (Besserman 34), and like the Pardoner, Absolon has pretty blonde hair that shines like gold. Like the Squire’s hair, Absolon’s is curled, and Absolon takes care to primp his tresses so that they spread out like a broad fan across his shoulders. The Pardoner’s hair also reaches his shoulders (GP 678), a fashion condemned as ‘effeminate’ by John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1342 (qtd in Hamilton 60). Absolon’s rosy complexion and eyes ‘greye as goos’ (3317) also mark him as a man with the prime physical attributes of woman, specifically, the romance heroine. Having effeminized Absolon’s body, the Miller’s portrait next establishes Absolon’s unmanly concern for fashionable attire – his shoes carved with ‘Poules wyndow’ (3318), elegant red hose, the tight tunic of light blue, and the blossom-white surplice. The portrait ends with a list of Absolon’s social skills, including playing the fiddle, singing in a high treble voice, and dancing. And, of course, Absolon was somewhat squeamish about farting and fastidious in his speech. For modern readers, Absolon’s effeminacy raises suspicions – for some, certainties – about his sexuality. Macklin Smith ‘can only with difficulty imagine [Absolon] paired with a real woman’ (18n21), and Patterson is sure that this ‘narcissistic, inefficient dandy ... plays at lovemaking without understanding how to do it’ (Chaucer 260). Such perceptions raise the question of why Chaucer, via the Miller, constructed the rival lover in the erotic triangle of this fabliau to be so overtly feminized. While the sources and analogues for the individual details of Absolon’s effeminacy have been identified, none of his physical descriptors occurs in the extant fabliaux that resemble the Miller’s Tale (Benson and Andersson 6–87). None of the rival lovers in these related tales is a man whose physical features and fashionable attire make him as proximate to woman as do Absolon’s. Indeed, the sources and analogues of the Miller’s Tale that utilize the rival lovers characterize them primarily by occupation – a priest, a merchant, and a smith, for instance. Hansen argues that Absolon’s homology to woman manifests the general anxiety that Chaucerian men experience about their lack of distinction from woman, and she also notes the more traditional view that Absolon’s squeamishness about farting anticipates the ironic joke that Alisoun will play upon him in the window scene (Chaucer 229–31).

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A less remarked-upon effect of the close proximity of Absolon’s ‘joly’ body, raiment, and manners to woman, however, is that it mutes Nicholas’s own effeminacy. So evident in the opening portrait, Nicholas’s likeness to the sweet maid fades when the plot and heterosexual plotting of the Miller’s tale start up. Indeed, Nicholas frequently is taken to be the masculine antithesis to Absolon (e.g., Frese 143–7),5 and I have remarked earlier that this perception is, in part, produced by the construction of Absolon as the queer decoy who draws fire and thereby distracts attention from Nicholas’s feminization. This raises the further question of what narrative purpose is served by exposing and then shielding Nicholas from the gender scrutiny that Absolon undergoes throughout the tale. The answer involves a consideration of what Helen Cooper calls a neglected but important ‘source’ of the Miller’s Tale: the Knight’s Tale (98). The Knight’s Tale is a source of the Miller’s Tale in the sense that in order for the latter to parody the Knight’s narrative of rival lovers, Palamon and Arcite, the Miller must first create obvious parallels between the two tales by reducing the three competing wooers of the analogues to two: Nicholas and Absolon. Having achieved the basic similitude that parody requires, the Miller next must create difference between his rival lovers and the knight’s, and that difference is accomplished by the satirical exaggeration that reveals truth as the narrator sees it. Despite the Knight’s attempt to associate Arcite with Mars, the Miller suggests through Nicholas’s maidenly ‘sweetness’ that Arcite’s obsession with Emily softens this warrior and diverts him from worthy martial exploits, eventually locating him in the wrong place at the wrong time as Saturn’s ‘infernal fury’ causes Arcite’s fatal fall from his horse. Nicholas also suffers from deliberately positioning himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when Absolon readies to strike a blow with the hot poker during the second window scene. In the same way, Absolon’s outright effeminacy burlesques Palamon’s venereal nature to reveal that Palamon’s devotion to Venus is precisely what makes him the loser in the battle for the actual woman in the text: Emily. Palamon is no more effective in winning Emily than is Absolon in wooing Alisoun. Yet the Miller’s satire takes aim incidentally at Palamon and Arcite, for the Miller’s larger target is the extended delay of heterosexual consummation in the aristocratic genre of romance. The ‘cherles tale’ that the narrator apologizes for in the Miller’s Prologue (3169) directly homes in on one of the key class markers of courtly love, the ritualization, hence regulation, of passion. The Miller’s satiric fabliau demands sexual per-

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formance and gratification early in the plot. But it also requires comically feminized male lovers whom courtliness has softened. The Miller’s solution to his narrative problem is to distinguish between kinds of effeminacy, Nicholas’s and Absolon’s. Nicholas is ‘sweet’ but nevertheless manly enough to make love to Alisoun to her apparent satisfaction, whereas Absolon’s more overt effeminacy stigmatizes him as the heterosexual lover whose excessive interest in women has paradoxically ‘homosexualized’ him into the effete dandy. His ineffectuality with women is mocked in Alisoun’s crude rejection of him in the first window scene of the Miller’s Tale. Nicholas thus accomplishes one part of the Miller’s burlesque, mocking the glacially slow tempo of romance through the more immediate sexual gratification of fabliau, and Absolon accomplishes the other, the lampooning of the courtly lover as the ‘pretty’ – ‘joly’ – boy. At the same time, Absolon decoys audience attention away from Nicholas’s questionable virility in the opening portrait. The different means by which the Miller constructs the feminized portraits of Nicholas and Absolon anticipate the eventual roles of these two men in the burlesque of the Knight’s Tale. Nicholas is lightly feminized through the adjectives and the adverb by which the Miller characterizes his actions as sweet. And even though the Miller likens Nicholas to a maiden, it is by virtue of the young clerk’s quality of meekness, an attribute earlier ascribed to the Knight himself: ‘and of his port [the Knight] was as meeke as is a mayde’ (GP 69). The opposite of a proud and overbearing manner, meekness is the respectable mark of gentility that Nicholas, of course, will prove not to possess. In contrast, Absolon’s feminization is a function not of narrative characterization, the adjectives with which the Miller chooses to describe the rival lover, but of Absolon’s very body and of the fictionally conscious choices he has made to dress in vain and womanish ways. Absolon’s blonde hair, grey eyes, rosy complexion, and high falsetto singing voice imply that there is something essentially deviant about his masculine body, just as the Pardoner’s blonde hair and, by implication, tenor (or higher) voice create the narrator’s suspicion that the Pardoner may be a gelding or a mare. Further, Absolon’s hair and attire are created from the conventions of medieval homophobic diatribes; in the History, for instance, Orderic rails against the indecent habit of courtiers who curl their long hair with irons and wear tight tunics (189). And Absolon’s carved or windowed ‘St Poules’ shoes recall Count Fulk’s pulley-shoes. These are the signs of men who have given themselves up to the ‘filth of sodomy,’ Orderic warns. When the Miller invokes these

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same signs, as well as constructs Absolon’s ‘joly’ body to suggest his physical deviance, he calls upon medieval homophobic images of the negatively feminized man, the man who loves women so much that he becomes one, to suggest both why Absolon will attempt to woo Alisoun and why he will fail. If the Miller fashions his tale to satirize courtliness by exposing the deviance at the heart of a code in which men subject themselves to women, he ironically fails to achieve his goal. In actuality his tale accommodates the feminized lover Nicholas’s desire for Alisoun. However facetiously, Nicholas can be ‘sweet’ and meek yet at the same time the effectual lover whose red-hot sexual performance is not so much punished as advertised by Absolon’s branding of him. Indeed, it is easier to see the Miller’s Tale as a relaxation of strict patriarchal norms in the name of promoting heterosexual union than as an enforcement of those norms. The Miller’s homophobia is palpable – deep, dense, and convoluted in the ways that medieval homophobia was. Nevertheless, without ‘joly’ Absolon and the queerness that he represents, the Miller could not produce the heterosexual romp of ‘sweet’ Nicholas and Alisoun that his satirical fabliau demands sooner rather than later. In having the Miller hoist with his own petard, Chaucer did not necessarily voice blanket approval of the fashionably feminized man. As I have noted, Troilus and Criseyde satirizes courtliness and ultimately cures the male protagonist of his lover’s malady. Instead, the Miller’s ironic validation of courtliness helps to stage the conflict over ideals of masculinity that occurs in Fragment A of the Canterbury Tales. The first two pilgrims portrayed in the General Prologue, the Knight and his son, the Squire, are socially superior to the others on the journey, and each subscribes to a version of courtliness that the Miller mocks. That the last laugh is on the Miller for ironically validating the heterosexual prowess of ‘sweet’ Nicholas suggests that Chaucer was prepared to defend the new ideal of masculinity among the nobility when it came under attack by men like the Miller. Further, the fact that dandy Nicholas strikes so many readers as ‘natural’ testifies to what the subsequent chapters of this book argue: from his earliest dream visions, Chaucer perfected the narrative device of queer decoy to inoculate the courtly male figure. Men Who Marry Late: January as Queer Decoy A different version of the queer decoy occurs in the Merchant’s Tale, whose narrator ostensibly sets out to revenge himself not upon the

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chattering knightly class but upon his shrewish wife. In the process, however, this ‘man with money’ displays his aspirations to court when he tells a tale about a ‘worthy knyght’ (1246) and his lack of refinement when he stars his social superior as the cuckold in a fabliau. To effect the requital upon his own spouse, the Merchant triangulates desire among a Lombard knight, his new young wife, and his squire. The knight, January, is related to ‘men who don’t marry’ in medieval secular literature, a motif, Burgwinkle argues, that exposes the failure of courtly romance to impose a seamless model of heterosexuality (Sodomy 7). Burgwinkle’s marriage-dodgers, however, are young men; January is old, the senex amans, and he does marry finally. The dilatory husband who has been ‘wyflees’ (1248) for sixty years as the narrative opens, January offers no overt explanation for his tardiness. In the Clerk’s previous tale, also set in Italy (Saluzzo), the marquis Walter resists marriage, too, until his people coerce him into accepting his responsibility to produce an heir. But Walter voices an explicit, albeit unpersuasive, reason for avoiding marriage. He informs his people that he does not wish to give up his freedom for the ‘servage’ of marriage (147), and it is presumably this anxiety about the yoke of wedlock that motivates Walter’s choice of lowly Griselda as wife as well as the prenuptial contract that she never disobey him in any way nor even ‘grucche’ (354) about anything he might wish to do. Griselda agrees, and, ‘nat longe tyme’ (442) after she is married, she bears a daughter, followed, in four years, by a son. January explains why he wants to marry, but not why he has been wifeless for so long. The Merchant’s remark on the subject raises a larger question than it answers: ‘sixty yeer a wyflees man was hee, / And folwed ay his bodily delyt /On wommen, ther as was his appetyt, / As doon thise fooles that been seculeer’ (1249–51). This enigmatic passage has attracted much critical attention, but it has focused almost exclusively upon whether the final remark about secular fools reveals Chaucer’s earlier intention to assign the tale to a clerical narrator rather than to the Merchant. The more basic question this short passage prompts has escaped interrogation: What does it say about January’s sexual proclivities? Does it say that January has always followed his bodily delight in women, for whom he had an appetite? Or that January has always followed his bodily delight in the women for whom he had an appetite? Specifically, is ‘ther as was his appetyt’ a non-restrictive or restrictive clause? Both F.N. Robinson’s and Benson’s texts punctuate it as a non-restrictive clause, and some translators render the passage accordingly: ‘And sixty years a wifeless man was he, / And followed ever

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his bodily delight / In women, whereof was his appetite, / As these fool laymen will, so it appears’ (Nicholson 411).6 Other editors and translators make the clause restrictive: ‘For sixty years a happy bachelor, / And used to take his sexual pleasure in / Whatever women pleased his appetite, / As is the habit of these fools of laymen’ (Wright 314).7 While both of these readings imply that January has eschewed marriage for lust’s sake, the non-restrictive clause of the Riverside editions exposes, however fleetingly, the Merchant’s reassurance that January’s passion is for women, not, presumably, for men. But even the restrictive clause evinces the Merchant’s concern to advertise January’s heterosexual credentials and thus to allay the predictable suspicions about his long bachelorhood. January himself discourses at length about his ability to satisfy his new young wife and to father an heir. Just as the Wife of Bath’s heterosexual subjectivity is revealed to be an act ‘produced in and by discourse,’ Carolyn Dinshaw argues (Getting Medieval 128), so is January’s natural appetite denaturalized as the discourse about it piles up in the first half of the Merchant’s Tale. As I shall argue momentarily, the Merchant’s agenda calls for queering January. January’s natural desire to pay the marital debt to May and to sire his heir is further denaturalized when he employs artificial means, aphrodisiacs, on his wedding night. His wife lies ‘stille as stoon’ (1818), a gloss, Thomas Ross suggests (212), on January’s flaccidity. Later, it is May’s ‘eggyng’ of the blind January that stimulates him to want to ‘pleye’ in his garden alone with her (2134–6). But nothing, evidently, manages to produce January’s heterosexual agency.8 While Griselda of the Clerk’s Tale conceives in ‘nat longe tyme’ after her wedding to Walter (442), if May is actually pregnant at the end of the narrative, as the image of January stroking her womb suggests, the biological father is more likely to be Damian than January, whose lovemaking May rates as not ‘worth a bene’ (1854). None of this makes impotent old January a queer, but all of it queers his sexuality. When his sight is restored and January sees his wife ‘swyved,’ he responds not like the man bested by a rival lover but roars and cries ‘as dooth the mooder whan the child shal dye’ (2365). January is not simply feminized, but maternalized in ironic fashion. He gestates no child of his own but metaphorically becomes mother to the wife who is young enough to be his child. Predictably, January’s lack of heterosexual agency opens the door for Damian to triangulate – and thus to normalize – the queered eroticism of the Merchant’s Tale. In conventional courtly fashion, Damian’s first sight of May on her wedding day has ‘ravysshed’ him (1774). It drives

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him ‘ny wood’ (1775); he ‘almooste swelte and swoon’ (1776). But nearly going mad and almost fainting remain just short of total collapse, and the Merchant needs Damian to stay this side of paralysis; for it falls upon the lovesick squire to effect the heterosexual union necessary to the plot of the Merchant’s Tale, which has been dedicated to exposing the sexual duplicity of wives. The Merchant’s investment in Damian’s heterosexual agency is fully revealed when, breaking the fictional boundary between the narrator and the characters he creates, the Merchant directly addresses Damian and attempts to rouse him from his love stupor by focusing his attention on the problem of how to communicate his ardour to May in a way that prohibits her rejection of him: Now wol I speke of woful Damyan, That langwissheth for love, as ye shul heere; Therfore I speke to hym in this manere: I seye, ‘O sely Damyan allas! Andswere to my demaunde, as in this cas. How shaltow to thy lady, fresshe May, Telle thy wo? She wole alwey seye nay. Eek if thou speke, she wol thy wo biwreye. God be thyn helpe! I kan no bettre seye.’

(1866–74)

Thinking both about May herself and about how to overcome her reluctance revives Damian from his near-swoon and from the sexual passivity it betokens. Indeed, Damian’s solution to write to May represents his heterosexual agency, the pen inscribing his words to her figuring the erect phallus that January lacks. When Damian rises from his bed the next morning, he combs his hair and preens himself in feminized fashion, yet he is ready to proceed to the denouement of the Merchant’s Tale in which he ‘swyves’ May in the pear tree after she climbs up into it upon the stooped back of old January. To differentiate the feminized but virile Damian from the queered January, the Merchant employs crudely graphic language in his description of this climactic scene: ‘And sodeynly anon this Damyan / Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng’ (2352–3). Unlike the Miller’s agenda, the Merchant’s aim is not to ‘quite’ romance and to avenge himself upon his social superiors, even if Damian’s performance mocks courtly behaviour. Instead, after bemoaning the ‘passyng crueltee’ (1225) of his own wife, the Merchant sets out to tell of ‘wyves cursednesse’ (1238). At the heart of woman’s evil, for both the

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Merchant and the medieval discourse of misogyny, is heterosexual infidelity. The plot therefore calls for heterosexual adultery, and logically the Merchant turns to the genre of fabliau for a ready narrative template of wives falsing their husbands. Within his choice of fabliau, however, the Merchant’s selection of a knight and a squire to play the respective roles of husband and lover are not generically predetermined. On the contrary, as Helen Cooper remarks, ‘the characters of knight, lady, and amorous squire, the trappings of gardens and gods, and the parody of a happy ending all suggest that what one is reading is really a romance’; in sum, she concludes, ‘the literary treatment of the story pulls against its fabliau subject matter at every juncture’ (203). This tension serves the purpose of distancing the merchant from the tale he tells. He has assented to the Host’s request to tell a tale about the ‘art’ (subject) that he knows, the woe that wives cause in marriage, but beyond that the merchant insists he can and will say nothing about his own situation: ‘of myn owene soore, / For soory herte, I may telle namoore’ (1244–5). Accordingly, he sets his tale in Italy, distant enough to be distinct from the Merchant’s own England yet not so foreign as to be utterly exotic, and he specifies the area as Lombardy, since the Lombards involved in international trade and finance would have been an English merchant’s professional rival. Further, the Merchant casts his alter ego, the husband figure who must be duped in order to witness female duplicity, as a rich knight, therefore from a social class above the merchant’s. The Merchant’s final attempt to distance himself from January, as I suggested earlier, is to denaturalize his sexuality. At the same time, the queering of January camouflages the feminization of Damian, whose role as the lady May’s rival lover requires him to be at once courtly and virile, which he most certainly is. Damian’s abrupt transition from the lovesick squire of romance to the red-hot lover of fabliau exposes his functional necessity in this tale of female adultery that the Merchant labours to distance from himself. To compete plausibly with the aging husband knight, Damian cannot be a cowherd; he must be a courtly young squire, and to effect the tale of wifely infidelity, his heterosexual agency cannot falter in the way that January’s does. The Merchant cannot problematize Damian’s courtliness without jeopardizing the personal goal to which he has dedicated his narrative. Heterosexual union is a necessity in the Merchant’s Tale for both similar and different reasons than it is in the Miller’s Tale. The Merchant’s Tale requires May to commit adultery in order for the Merchant to take revenge upon his own ‘cursed’ wife, while the Miller’s fabliau insists

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upon heterosexual union in order for the Miller to requite both the genre of romance and the elite social class with which it was associated. Although for different reasons, both tales require a ‘courtly’ lover whose virility cannot be compromised when the critical moment of consummation arrives, as Troilus’s is, and both narrators utilize an effeminate or queer foil character to produce the courtly figures’s heterosexual efficacy. The erotic triangles in the Miller’s Tale and the Merchant’s Tale function differently than the ones that Eve Sedgwick describes. Their effect is not simply to unite two men in homosocial bonds through the mediation of woman, but to achieve heterosexual union through the mediation of the queered male other. That both Chaucerian examples I have discussed in this section are rooted in the third estate may suggest a social-class backlash against the elite genre of romance, yet at the same time the Miller and the Merchant go a long way towards normalizing the courtly male, even small-town mock figures like Nicholas and Damian. Unlike Trolius, they sing and dance and write love letters and in the end do not forsake sexual involvement with woman. If the queer decoy was a device with which Chaucer negotiated the conflicting interests of the liberal nobility, the conservative clergy, as well as the third estate, this figure not only authorized the pilgrim Squire, Nicholas, and Damian, but it allied them, narratively at least, to the Pardoner, Absolon, and January, all vilified characters but figures who nevertheless had become integral to the production of the new ‘civilized’ heterosexual male. Gaunt makes a similar observation about the way in which the ‘heterosexual is produced in opposition to the homosexual’: in Eneas, ‘homosexuality is within culture as well as excluded from it, because it is a crucial element in the definition of the dominant model of sexuality’ (Gender 85). In the next chapter, I shall argue that the queer foils of the Canterbury Tale that I have discussed here find their first corollary in the Chaucerian persona of the Book of the Duchess. Escapism and Chaucer Criticism I have argued in this chapter that even though source study and literary history, especially Muscatine’s groundbreaking examination of Chaucer and the French tradition, disprove the notion of Chaucer’s sudden break with French literature, the escape trope persists in the Chaucer tradition. I have shown how the nineteenth-century fiction of Chaucer’s emancipation continues to serve as a template for reading the Book of the

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Duchess, and I have pointed to the parallels between the modern trope of liberated Chaucer and the anti-courtly polemic that accompanied, even facilitated, the development of courtliness itself. I have argued that courtly and patriarchal ideologies, for all their apparent differences, had common interests, among them the maintenance of class distinction and the promotion of heterosexual union, an agenda that could express itself in narrative through the pairing of the male and female lovers against the third member of the erotic triangle, the queer male other. In this narrative pattern, men like Eneas who love women like Lavine are not compelled to escape. Indeed, their normative position is created by their heterosexual involvement with woman and authorized by the contrast that the spectre of the deviant male other provides. And in the hands of fictional churls and parvenus such as Chaucer’s Miller and Merchant, respectively, the same narrative triangle could be manipulated to mock class distinction and muddy lineage. In the next chapter, I explore how Chaucer employed a version of the narrative device of the queer foil as early as his first major dream poem, the Book of the Duchess. My main premise is that the escape trope itself is an escapist fantasy in the sense that it figures Chaucer as a medieval writer who yearned to flee the court and its artistic preoccupations for the purer (masculine, English) literary pursuits of his mature years. Instead, I shall present Chaucer as a writer who successfully negotiated the court, in particular, the issue of male feminization as it materialized in his first major literary task, the eulogy of Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, in the Book of the Duchess. My reading is rooted in the historical circumstances of this poem. The task of eulogy, I believe, gave rise to the Chaucerian narrator’s adoption of the role of love’s heretic, the diffident outsider to heterosexual love. This queer guise normalizes the feminization of the fictional character who must emerge as the real ‘hero’ of the Book of the Duchess: Whyte’s husband, the Black Knight, the historical John of Gaunt’s alter ego in the poem. Chaucer does not construct his narrator as the queer foil through the sartorial excess and dandified manners lampooned in homophobic satire but by casting him as the ‘nervous narrator’ whose anxious torpor goes ‘against kind,’ against nature (Windeatt xvi). Chaucer may not have invented the nervous narrator but may have found him in the courtly poetry of his French contemporary, Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–77), yet Chaucer uniquely deployed this figure as the queer foil in his first major dream vision.9

2 Courtliness and Heterosexual Poetics in the Book of the Duchess

Chaucer scholars generally accept the fact that the death of John of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, on 12 September 1368 occasioned the Book of the Duchess. Even if there is no corroborative evidence for the note, apparently written by John Stowe, in the Fairfax manuscript that Gaunt requested Chaucer to write a poem commemorating Blanche, Chaucer himself referred to the poem as ‘the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse’ in the prologue to his Legend of Good Women (418) and as ‘the book of the Duchesse’ in the retraction (1086) to the Canterbury Tales (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 80; Wilcockson 996). Further, the poem’s eulogy of ‘Whyte,’ an anglicized form of ‘Blanche,’ its reference to ‘Johan’ of ‘Ryche hil,’ that is, Richmond (Gaunt was Earl of Richmond until 1372), its word play on ‘long castel’ (‘Lancaster’), and other oblique references connect the poem to Gaunt and his first wife, who died in the plague (Wilcockson 976n1314–29). It may even be that the poem was written for the specific event of an anniversary commemoration of Blanche’s death (Condren). Though there may not be wide consensus on what the poem ultimately means, there is common agreement that the operative genre of the Book of the Duchess is elegy or eulogy with the formal characteristics of the dream vision and that the original if not the immediate cause of the poem was the death of Blanche. Robert Edwards observes that ‘the Book of the Duchess is the most historically contextualized of Chaucer’s early narrative poems’ (Dream 65). Many readers complicate this generic classification of the poem, however, in order to plumb its interpretive depths. For instance, Peter Travis recognizes the elements of the roman-à-clef and of the elegy in the Book of the Duchess, but within these nominal programs he teases out Chaucer’s profound meditations upon the ‘mystery of linguistic signs’ to argue that

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‘uninterpretability’ is central to the elegy’s ‘strategy of consolation’ (‘White’ 5). My approach to the Book of the Duchess also complicates its eulogistic program, but initially in a more historical way. My central premise builds upon Charles Muscatine’s observation that the narrator’s task in the Book of the Duchess is not simply to praise the deceased Blanche of Lancaster in the figure of Whyte, for there is a second ‘elevated object’ of narration in the poem, the Black Knight, or Black, alter ego of Blanche’s surviving husband, John of Gaunt (104). But the job is more complex than even Muscatine suggests. The narrator must give his poetic attention not merely to two persons of higher rank than his own, but to two persons whose different sexes preclude simple praise of them as equally his social superiors. The narrator negotiates the class difference between himself and his betters by eschewing overtly dominant roles in the poem, including that of consoling the knight. The gender disparity between the historical Blanche and Gaunt, however, taxes Chaucer to devise a method of praising Whyte that does not diminish Black. The latter task is complicated by the fact that Chaucer’s homage to Gaunt must construct him as the courtier, a figure, as discussed in chapter 1, vulnerable to charges of perverse feminization in the complex code of late medieval masculinity. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the eulogistic strategy of the Book of the Duchess casts the narrator in the passive role of the queer other in order to praise Whyte and simultaneously to enhance his social superior, the Black Knight, as well as to elevate him to the pre-eminent position of courtly maker in the poem. This making figures what I termed in the introduction a ‘hylomorphic’ poetic, and it is assigned to Black, the man in the poem who has successfully wooed and wed, not to the man whose loveless state remains oddly – queerly – unexplained: the narrator. My larger argument is that the Book of the Duchess does not incarcerate the knight or narrator in the ‘French house of bondage.’ Instead, the poem normalizes courtliness by using the narrator’s queer poetic receptivity to define – that is, to produce discursively – the knight’s artistic efficacy. In making the argument that a dialectic between queerness and heteronormativity lies at the heart of this poem and its exposition of Chaucerian poetics, I am alluding to Simon Gaunt’s observation that a dialectic between homosexuality and heterosexuality is at the root of many medieval texts. Gaunt further notes that the homosexual-heterosexual dialectic must be muted to produce dominant culture (‘Straight Minds’ 158). However, the narrator’s queer poetic that produces the knight’s hylomorphic poetic in this first poem of the dream trio does not vanish

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in the same way. Queerness thrives in medieval texts, whereas overt same-sex eroticism appears much less frequently. Indeed, Tison Pugh remarks, some stories cannot be told without the queer (11). Thus, it requires ‘men who don’t marry’ (Burgwinkle, Sodomy 138–69) to tell the story in several of Marie of France’s lais. In Chaucer’s writing, men who marry late (January) or reluctantly (Walter) as well as women who resist love (Criseyde) and decline marriage (Emily of the Knight’s Tale) are integral to narrative development. Just so, after queer poetics plays a central role in the Book of the Duchess, it does not disappear but emerges front and centre in the subsequent two visions as Chaucerian narrators struggle to understand its enigmatic relationship to culture and nature. Class, Gender, and Pedagogy Readers have long recognized the delicacy demanded by the event that occasioned the Book of the Duchess. C.S. Lewis suggested that Chaucer used the distancing device of the dream vision for the poem in order to write tactfully about his patron’s intimate loss, the death of his first wife (168). Not everyone accepts the idea that John of Gaunt was actually Chaucer’s patron, yet most would acknowledge the obligation that Chaucer the poet had to negotiate the disparity in social class between Gaunt and himself. An exception is Paul Strohm, who maintains that the narrator of the Book of the Duchess and the Black Knight are ‘two speakers who – whatever the Black Knight’s social superiority – are both gentlepersons’ and inhabit a ‘social edifice large enough to contain gentlepersons and aristocracy alike’ (‘Politics’ 107). (Yet in Social Chaucer Strohm concedes that, while Chaucer quietly promotes himself as a ‘fit interlocutor – at once a gentleperson worthy of intimacy and friendly exchange’ with the Black Knight, he also shows himself to be a ‘person of discretion who can be trusted not to forget aspects of social difference’ [135].) Another exception is Elaine Hansen, who elides the class disparity between the two men by suggesting that their homosocial bonding against woman overrides their social difference; she further argues that the narrator effects the Black Knight’s ‘talking cure’ (Chaucer 71). However, no such ‘cure’ demonstrably occurs in the poem1 – most certainly not the narrator’s cure of the Knight. As the arguably second most powerful man in England after the Black Prince, Gaunt was Chaucer’s social superior in every way. This fact all but precludes readings of the Book of the Duchess in which Chaucer’s persona functions as the authority figure who consoles the Black Knight when this solace involves teaching his social better to accept the law of kind –

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that Whyte ‘ys ded’ – or chastising him for his failure to get over his earthly attachment to her.2 Such ‘narrator-centred’ readings strike A.J. Minnis as ‘working against the power structure of the poem’: For it is the Man in Black who must ultimately be recognized as dominant; his claim on our attention is to be recognized as far surpassing the dreamer’s, and anyone who thinks otherwise may well be judging the poem a failure, at least as far as its original purpose (in so far as we may presume to infer that) is concerned. Thus, the ‘external’ identification of the Man in Black with Gaunt dictates and delimits the sphere of ‘internal’ operation of this his main persona. The narrator may, technically speaking, have dreamed up the Man in Black, but [the latter] is no narrator surrogate, his origins being a lot more distinguished, in terms of social and emotional status – and indeed of literary creativity as well ... Chaucer has, so to speak, bestowed his finest garments upon his superior; what is left for his own persona looks far less attractive. (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 134)

Yet historicist readings like Minnis’s elide the gender complications of the Book of the Duchess by implying that the poem’s sole tension lies in its contrast between a socially inferior narrator and a superior knight. This knight-centred approach fails to appreciate the greater tension that the competing demands of class and gender create for the narrator. He must not merely present himself as subordinate to both knight and lady, as Muscatine suggests when he observes that two elevated objects of narration exist in the poem; he must find a way to elevate Whyte that simultaneously allows Black to remain at the centre of the poem. In pedagogy, this chapter contends, Chaucer found the way to negotiate these demands. By ‘pedagogy’ I mean not teaching per se but two opposed medieval theories of learning that informed the institution of courtly love and the genre of the Book of the Duchess, the dream vision. I correlate these theories, respectively, to what I term the two schoolroom scenes or settings of the poem: an inner one in which the Knight learns both the art of courtly love and of poetry and an outer one in which the narrator vicariously absorbs the material that the Knight has learned. Given their disparate conceptual origins, the two scenes of education differ fundamentally from one another and enable Chaucer to accomplish the complex panegyric involved in celebrating both Whyte and Black. Drawing upon a popular model of education as instruction (literally, a building in or upon) or infusion (a pouring in), the dream vision, that is,

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the narrator’s poem, images the speaker as a passive learner subordinate to both his superior teachers, Whyte and Black. Founded upon a different medieval model of knowledge acquisition, ultimately scholastic in origin, courtly love assigned active, albeit disparate, roles to both teacher and learner, lady and knight. The Chaucerian narrator depicts the relationship between Whyte and Black as courtly rather than marital, not because Chaucer was enslaved to an elitist fad that he desired to escape but because the queer distribution of power in the scholastic model of education underlying courtly love could accommodate the two elevated objects of narration in the Book of the Duchess. In the inner schoolroom scene, the lyric that the knight constructs at the heart of the Book of the Duchess evidences his active poetic stance even as his lady instructs him in the art of love; at the same time, the loveless narrator’s apparent lack of artistic efficacy serves as the foil that deflects censure from Black’s loveservice. I begin by examining the dream vision as an instructional genre and briefly tracing its origins in popular medieval concepts of learning before I explore how Chaucer utilized the genre to create the narrator’s subordination to Whyte and Black in the outer schoolroom scene of the Book of the Duchess. Memory, the Master, and the Literary Vision Well known to Chaucer from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, dit amoreux by Machaut and Froissart, and other works, the medieval vision narrative was enormously popular and influential as well as Chaucer’s preferred genre in his earlier career. Kathryn Lynch appropriately calls it the ‘genre of the age’ and by a conservative count calculates that over 225 visions were composed between the sixth and fifteenth centuries, nearly 90 per cent of which were written after 1100 (Dream Vision 1). Modern scholarly nomenclature for this variable genre is inconsistent, at best; medieval visionary poems might be philosophical, religious, or amorous. Further, as Helen Phillips argues, the literary vision is rarely about dreams or visions per se, and ‘some of the most profound literary visions never explicitly describe their narrative as a dream,’ including Boethius’s Consolation and Dante’s Comedy (7–8). Indeed, A.C. Spearing observes, the genre is so numerous and versatile that ‘there is some doubt whether the dream-poem can be considered an independent literary genre’ (Dream-Poetry 2). Even though Spearing warns that it is unlikely that we shall establish

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the dream poem as a ‘completely “distinct literary kind,”’ he identifies a minimal set of features that characterize the didactic function of the literary vision: ‘an ideal and often symbolic landscape, in which the dreamer encounters an authoritative figure, from whom he learns some religious or secular doctrine, and so on’ (3–4). These authoritative figures range from personified abstractions (e.g., Reason, Philosophy, the God of Love) to historical people (e.g., Virgil). Often the authoritative figure acts as the dreamer’s guide, one of whose most common functions is as ‘instructor,’ James Wimsatt notes (Literary Background 80). The progress of the dream poem, then, frequently charts the uneven progress of the learner, the dreamer-narrator, and this strikes some readers as a ‘weaker’ narrative line than those of other medieval genres, as it appears to Windeatt in his estimation of Chaucer’s dream poetry: ‘Most of Chaucer’s other writing involves a stronger narrative line than the dream poetry. By contrast, at the opening of the dream poems there is no familiar story or tale to be heard anew. Instead, the experience of the “I” of the poem is to unfold, and the structure of the poem will embody his progress, and perhaps his confusions. Structure may consequently be a very real and immediate reflection of the dreamer’s progress, when the way ahead is not necessarily clear either to him or the reader’ (xii).3 Phillips refines this basic set of characteristics to differentiate the mode of teaching in the dream poem (whether or not the author acknowledges the dream) from that in another type of visionary literature, the mystical vision. In the latter, God’s truth is made directly apparent to the mystic, who grasps the revelation immediately, she notes, whereas the ‘truth’ or teaching of the dream poem is learned more slowly, sometimes comically or not at all, by the dreamer, whether he is the bereaved narrator of Boethius’s Consolation, the pilgrim Dante, or the lovelorn narrators of the dit amoreux. Dreamer-narrators, Phillips continues, present themselves more as the surrogate of the reader, ‘who advances through an experience which came to him from some source external to his own active control,’ than of the author writing the vision. Thus, she concludes, ‘all dreamer-narrators have a tendency to seem stupid to some extent, for the encounter between dreamer and dream, or dreamer and authority figure, is a structure which splits the didactic enterprise into two, into the learning function and the teaching function’ (13–14).4 This split between the learning and teaching functions in the didactic enterprise of the dream vision resonates in the memorial structure of

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many examples of the genre. The teaching, or reading, lodged in the waking narrator’s memory is retrieved and replicated within the dream in the form of the master who authored it or of the guide or other authority figure capable of expounding upon it. Explicitly or implicitly, the dream proper begins in an act of reminiscence in which the dreamer recalls a specific text or a general set of precepts or teachings that has been impressed upon his memory and thus has a quasi-material dimension. These memory impressions manifest as statues, pictures, or other images set in an architectural structure, a castle, wall, and the like, usually in the ‘ideal landscape’ of the dream that Spearing mentions. Of Chaucer’s known sources, Guillaume de Lorris’s first part of the Romance of the Rose and Dante’s Divine Comedy evidence the connection between memory and the master in visionary literature. At the opening of Guillaume’s Romance, the dreamer-narrator first comes upon an enclosed garden in his dream. On the outside wall he sees depictions of Avarice, Envy, Old Age, Poverty, and others, all vices that would bar him from love; inside the garden walls, he encounters those figures who personify love’s virtues, Leisure, Courtesy, Riches, and so forth. Structured as an artificial architectural device for recollection that Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers (Book), most notably, have explored, the Romance-dreamer’s memory functions as the initial and internalized metaphorical master. This troped figure is soon to be doubled and replaced by the first actual schoolmaster of the dream, the God of Love, who amplifies the lessons of love encoded in the compressed form of the personified memory images. Before he expounds upon these lessons, Guillaume’s master of love commands his student to listen to and to ‘remember’ his rules; for ‘a master wastes his effort when the disciple does not turn his heart toward retaining what he hears so that he might remember it.’ (Chaucer expanded Guillaume’s pedagogical metaphor in his translation of these lines of the Romance: ‘The maister lesith his tyme to lern, / Whan that the disciple wol not here; / It is but veyn on hym to swynke / That on his lernyng wol not thinke’ [2149–52].) Given at the outset, Master Love’s instruction then serves as the blueprint for the remainder of Guillaume’s first part of the Romance: ‘this romance portrays [Love’s teachings] well,’ the dreamer observes (59). Dante’s Comedy textualizes the narrator’s memory more overtly than does Guillaume’s Romance, even if it includes no formal memory building or other architectural device analogous to Guillaume’s garden walls. While Yates argues that the entire Comedy can be ‘regarded as a kind of memory system’ (95) for recollecting vices, their punishments, and the

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like, I focus instead on the text as trope for the master: preceding his visionary experience, the pilgrim Dante has internalized the memory of Virgil’s text, which is manifested within the vision as the figure of Virgil, the master who further expounds upon what Dante has learned from this teacher through ‘long study’: ‘O glory and light of other poets, let the long study and the great love that has made me search thy volume avail me. Thou art my master and my author’ (Inf. 1.82–5). As I explore in the next chapter, Virgil is but the first of his masters whom Dante encounters in the Comedy. Readers have long observed that the literary vision I discuss in this chapter, the Book of the Duchess, as well as the House of Fame and Parliament of Fowls, utilize the sequence of old books, experience, and dreams as a structural device, and Marshall Stearns argues that Chaucer virtually originated ‘the mention of a book in love-vision literature’ even though the ‘opening lines of the Roman de la Rose may have suggested it to him’ (31). However, Robert Payne correctly traces Chaucer’s device to earlier sources, including Dante’s Comedy: ‘the kind of structure Chaucer produces in these [dream-vision] poems can easily enough be seen as an exten[s]ion of traditional structural principles. Dante, starting also from rhetorical theory and the practice of the “regular” poets, produced in the Commedia a structure which could generally be described in the terms I have been using: old books (especially Virgil), experience, and vision’ (117). My point is related to but different from Payne’s. The structural device of ‘memory and the master’ that I have identified – and also find common to the Comedy, Guillaume’s Romance, and, as I shall demonstrate next, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess – is situated in the dreamer’s internalized teaching, the book recalled in the dream, later displaced by the externalized teacher of the vision, the authority figure or other guide. The effect of this structure is to occlude the dreamer-narrator’s authority and agency. Carruthers argues that medieval people did not simply ‘have’ memories but actively constructed them in the elaborate formal devices of artificial recollection (Craft), and Chaucer was familiar with these devices (Howard, Idea 147–8). When Chaucer’s Troilus recalls the departed Criseyde (5.565–81), he imaginatively fabricates a memory structure of clearly defined loci associated with different aspects of the beloved. Troilus himself is the master-builder of this recollection device, and he crafts it with a deliberation that signals both control and recognition of the finality of his loss (Schibanoff, ‘Prudence’). In the Book of the Duchess, however, Chaucer represents the narrator as

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lacking any role in the construction of the memory chamber of famous love stories through the use of passive verbs. In his dream, the narrator’s room seemingly transforms on its own within this chamber. It was wondrously ‘depeynted,’ the windows were finely ‘yglased,’ the glazing was ‘ywrought’ with the story of Troy, and the walls were ‘peynted’ with text and gloss of the Romance of the Rose (321–34). Here memory appears in the medieval neuropsychological aspect of an impression made upon the brain or an image somehow lodged therein by reading or some other rote process, not as a device crafted by the narrator. Chaucer’s representation of memory in this vision thus coincides with the popular medieval image of learning as the passive reception of knowledge, or ‘in-struction.’ Devolved from the ancient concept of leaning as infusion, which I next discuss, such instruction figured prominently in medieval pedagogy and structures the fictional image of learning in the Prioress’s Tale. Medieval Images of ‘In-struction’: The Prioress’s Tale Derived from Latin lira (‘furrow’), the etymology of ‘learner’ reveals the long-standing popular notion that the student’s mind is incised and implanted with seeds of knowledge that grow to fruition in their passive medium. This image contrasts the activity of the teacher with the receptivity of the learner and, as such, figures the former as masculine, or masculinized, the latter as feminine, or feminized. Several forms of this image occur in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, a defence of the Trivium composed in 1159. John deploys various popular metaphors of the receptive student whose teachers ‘stock youthful minds’ and of himself as ‘drinking in, with consuming avidity, and to the full extent of [his] limited talents, every word that fell from his [teacher’s] lips’ (95). He also speaks of the way in which his teacher, Bernard, ‘inculcated’ (literally, ‘trampled in’) grammatical lessons and made ‘every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing’ (68). Bernard’s teaching, John continues, seeks to ‘impress upon the minds of hearers’ the precepts the teacher values, and John ironically dares the logicians whom he opposes to ‘teach [him], and if at all possible, to make [him] like themselves’ (85). Behind these popular medieval images of learning, which remain embedded in pedagogical terms such as ‘instruction’ and ‘information,’ lies an ancient tradition rooted in the earliest didactic and epic writers who invoked the muses. In calling the muses, the ancients asked to be infused, literally ‘poured in,’ with knowledge, not with poetic skill. As

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Ernst Curtius observes, didactic and epic writers first invoked the muses to declare their poetic mission; Hesiod signals the ‘pedagogical vocation of his didactic poetry’ by calling the muses, and at the beginning of the catalogue of ships in Book 2 of The Iliad Homer invokes the muses ‘not only because they bestow inspiration but also because they know all things’ (228–9). Similarly, Curtius observes, in the Georgics Virgil asks the muses not for poetic art, but for the knowledge of the ‘causes of things,’ that is, knowledge of the laws of the cosmos (230). Ancient images of learning as infusion or as drinking from the muses’s lips posited the direct corporeal transfer of knowledge from active teacher to passive student, and the agency of the master continued in popular medieval images of instruction for good reason. Stephen Russell notes that the master was indispensable in the early years of grammar school, which were devoted to learning Latin: ‘there simply was no learning without words ... [and] more than this, there were no words without the master, because the words were in a dead language inaccessible except through the good offices of the teacher’ (Trivium 18). John Gardner also comments on the difficult obstacles the autodidact faced in the Middle Ages: ‘Whereas a modern writer can easily bone up on philosophy, biochemistry, psychology, or whatever he may please, having available large libraries of books, a medieval poet had to learn arcane matter by rote under a teacher or from manuscripts linguistically and otherwise obscure, as well as virtually unobtainable except by professionals, since knowledge at the time tended to be prized as occult, the property of jealously guarded “masters”’ (130). The dominance of the master and subservience of the student, whose job is to memorize, is apparent in Chaucer’s fictional, though accurate, representation of elementary education in the Prioress’s Tale. Set in an Asiatic city, this miracle of the virgin recounts the martyrdom of the clergeon, a seven-year old schoolboy. As the Prioress’s young scholar sits in school studying his primer, he overhears the older children singing the Alma redemptoris mater as they ‘lerned’ (519) – memorized – their antiphoner, or chantbook of the divine office, Beverly Boyd explains (68). He listens until he himself has memorized the first verse. Too young to know any Latin yet, the clergeon becomes intently focused upon learning the entire Alma redemptoris. He does not ask his own master to teach him, for he fears that he will be beaten ‘thries in an houre’ (542) if he neglects his assigned course of study, the primer. Instead, he searches for a surrogate teacher and finds one in an older classmate. Agreeing to substitute as master, the older boy secretly teaches

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the younger until the latter has the Alma redemptoris ‘by rote’ (545). Subsequently, the little clergeon sings the song every day on his way to and from school as he passes through the Jewish ghetto, which, the Prioress recounts, bestirs Satan to incite the Jews to murder him for his irreverence. This vignette of elementary education in the Prioress’s Tale reveals not only the primacy of rote memorization in the pedagogy of a fictional medieval elementary school, but the subservience of the student to the master, whose actual ‘chief educational tool,’ Donald Howard observes, was the rod (Chaucer 24). When the young clergeon wisely decides not to ask for instruction in the Alma redemptoris from his own master, the plot of the Prioress’s tale does not demand that the boy find an alternative instructor. The clergeon might just as well have learned the entire Alma redemptoris as he acquired the first verse, by overhearing it at school. Indeed, the surrogate master’s presence must be silently dispensed with when the clergeon is murdered on his way home from school and his mother can find no trace of him. Despite the awkwardness it causes in the plot, Chaucer employs the substituted teacher to suggest the centrality of the master’s agency in the educational process. And when the young clergeon is murdered for singing the Alma redemptoris, the popular image of the passive student coalesces with the religious image of the young martyr. Chaucer assigns the role of the passive learner to the dreamer in the Book of the Duchess as part of the poem’s eulogistic strategy. Wolfgang Clemen finds that no ‘definite instruction’ occurs in the Book of the Duchess (25), but that is because he looks for the wrong master. Clemen expects Chaucer’s poem to feature the didactic figures of French love-visions, the God of Love or other personified abstractions, who instruct the poet in the rules of courtly love, while in the main body of the poem, Chaucer restricts the cast to two non-allegorical characters, the Black Knight and the narrator. However, Alfred David correctly identifies the Man in Black as the ‘instructor of the poet,’ a role that Chaucer diplomatically transferred from himself to his social superior (12). David never specifies what lesson the Man in Black teaches the poet, nor does he recognize that Chaucer constructed a second and, in fact, prior instructor in the poem: Whyte. With a few exceptions (e.g., Hardman), neither have readers recognized the importance of memory – that is, mnemonics – in the Book of the Duchess; instead, they have stressed the role of imagination (Edwards, Dream 94). I shall also argue that readers have not understood the way in which Chaucer represents the ‘craft’ of artificial memory in

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neuropsychological terms as a passive experience. I begin with the outer schoolroom scene of the Book of the Duchess; here Chaucer presents the narrator as a foreigner to love, unable to sleep, hence to dream, and therefore an outsider to courtly poetry as well. Indeed, Chaucer’s narrator makes no claim to any kind of poetry at all. As a reader, he is nevertheless a student of both love and poetry, but his schooling, which begins in mnemonic reading, requires actual instructors, who materialize first in the person of the Black Knight and vicariously, through Black’s recollected tutelage, in the figure of Whyte. Reading and the Narrator’s Memorial Education in the Book of the Duchess The Book of the Duchess opens by rewriting the Paradys d’Amours, an early poem by Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1404), in a way that pointedly emphasizes the difference between the narrators of these two dream visions. Froissart’s narrator suffers sleeplessness because he is tormented by love. ‘I can only be amazed that I am still alive, when I am lying awake so much. And one cannot find a sleepless person more tormented than myself, for as you well know, whilst I am lying awake sad thoughts and melancholy often come to torment me. They bind my heart tightly, and I cannot loosen them, for I do not want to forget the fair one, for love of whom I entered into this torment and suffer such sleeplessness’ (41). Chaucer’s narrator also begins the poem by describing his insomnia. But he carries on at much greater length than does his French counterpart, fearing that this ‘defaute of slep and hevynesse’ may cause his death (1– 29). When he finally comes to analyse the reason for his insomnia, at first he says he does not know it and then guesses that his insomnia, a ‘sicknesse’ (36) that he has suffered for eight years now, can be healed by only one ‘phisicien’ (39), whom he avoids naming, a subject he promises to talk about later, but never does. Readers have typically felt free to resolve the enigma of this opening section of the Book of the Duchess by identifying the dreamer’s malady as unfulfilled love. For example, John Lawlor asserts that ‘the Dreamer is himself an unhappy lover’ (637) in part because Lawlor sees courtly love as the ‘natural starting-point of inquiry’ (628; emphasis mine) into the Book of the Duchess and assimilates Chaucer’s narrator to his French counterparts. Similarly, Dorothy Bethurum argues that because the convention of the narrator as sorrowing lover is so widespread in the courtly poetry of Machaut and Froissart and because the Book of the Duchess is the

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most ‘dependent’ of Chaucer’s poems upon the courtly tradition, it ‘is natural, then, that in ... [Chaucer’s] first poem, the narrator should be the sorrowing lover’ (‘Point of View’ 513; emphasis mine). This assumption of the narrator’s past heteroseuxal love affair is not natural, however, but naturalized. Minnis warns that ‘the character and circumstances of one Chaucerian narrator should not be extrapolated reductively to another’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 115), nor, by extension, should the circumstances of French narrators be mapped onto Chaucerian ones. But Minnis himself cites four early lyrics in which Chaucer does speak in persona amantis to support his claim that the narrator of the Book of the Duchess is also a lover, albeit an unrequited one, who states his predicament obliquely in order not to upstage the Man in Black: ‘by minimizing his persona’s individual importance as a lover and concentrating on feelings which the Man in Black will both share and surpass, Chaucer has set in motion that strategy of deference which will dominate the entire text’ (105). The Book of the Duchess does model elaborate strategies of deference – actually, displacement tactics that ultimately exonerate courtliness – but there is no evidence that the narrator’s insomnia is caused by unrequited love, which, in any event, would not prepare him to participate in the Black Knight’s grief over the loss of fulfilled love. Barbara Nolan makes a more convincing case that, if we respect Chaucer’s silence about his narrator’s malady rather than script it as unrequited love, the larger aesthetic implications of the Book of the Duchess emerge. For Nolan, this silence ultimately reveals the Chaucerian concept of the poet as bricoleur, one who finds ‘his materials as if by chance, piecing them together in astonishing new ways,’ as opposed to the poet of his French exemplars, whose credentials must include amorous experience (‘Art’ 206). By separating ex silentio ‘the narrator’s insomnia from the usual theme of lovesickness,’ Chaucer stresses the ‘disjunction ... between the teller and his poetic matter,’ Nolan maintains (210). She concludes that this disjunction essentially democratizes art, allowing non-aristocratic poets – Chaucer’s narrator – to write about matters such as refined love, elite subjects beyond their ken and experience. More important, I maintain, this disjunction constructs the narrator as the queer love-poet, one whose unexplained lack of amorous experience deprives him of subject material and opposes him to the normative love poet, the Black Knight, who possesses the material of his amorous experience to form into verse. Separating the narrator’s insomnia from lovesickness reveals his actual

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problem in the Book of the Duchess: unlike Froissart’s narrator, whom he deliberately evokes, Chaucer’s narrator lacks the conventional matter of the dit amoreux to narrate. Further, the ‘first mater’ (43) to which he wishes to return, his sleeplessness, has been stripped of meaningful content by the narrator’s failure to connect it to anything traditional in the genre in which he works. The narrator is a love-poet without portfolio, so to speak. He does not find his material ‘as if by chance,’ as Nolan suggests. He turns to reading books not only to ‘drive the night away’ (‘Art’ 49), but to provide himself a text with which to flesh out a lovepoem that is queerly going nowhere fast for lack of subject matter. As lovers themselves, the narrator’s French counterparts need not consult books to learn about love, even though they occasionally read within their poems. In the Book of the Duchess, however, the book metonymically becomes the narrator’s teacher and anticipates the appearance of this student’s literal master, the knight. Not surprisingly, Chaucer’s narrator chooses to read ‘a book / a romaunce’ (47–8), specifically the ‘tale’ of Ceyx and Halcyone, which unites the themes of love, death, and grief in Halcyone’s efforts to determine the fate of her beloved husband, who has perished at sea. As Susan Crane remarks, although the term ‘romaunce’ resists easy definition in the Middle Ages, Chaucer and his contemporaries did attribute generic significance to it, and in the Book of the Duchess, ‘romaunce’ primarily denotes a work in French and, as the designation ‘book’ (9) specifies, a written work. Critics generally assume that Chaucer’s narrator reads Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘romaunce,’ Le Dit de la Fonteinne Amoreuse (c. 1360), another major French source for the Book of the Duchess. Machaut’s poem also opens with a sleepless love-poet narrating the story of Alcyone’s grief over the loss of her beloved husband, Ceyx. The Chaucerian narrator’s reference to the story as a ‘tale’ also recalls the original version of Ceyx and Halcyone in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, later allegorized in the Ovide moralisé (Minnis, ‘Note’; Phillips and Havely 52n48; Wilcockson 967n48; Wimsatt, ‘Sources’). Thus, lacking his own love experience to narrate, Chaucer’s would-be love-poet turns to the writings of two authorities on the matter of love, Machaut and Ovid, as if to study the subject to which he remains an outsider. As Lynch observes, from the start the Book of the Duchess calls attention to the narrator’s ‘unsuitability as a conventional visionary guide’ (Philosophical Visions 42). As well, I observe, it calls attention to a narrator who queerly occludes the reasons for this unsuitability. Chaucer constructs the introductory (waking) section of the Book of the

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Duchess to demonstrate the narrator’s lack of experience in two traditionally interrelated areas, love and poetry, and the opening of his dream repeats and amplifies that deficiency immediately. After reading the ‘romaunce’ of Seys and Alcyone, in which the god of Sleep, Morpheus, and, on Frossart’s invention, his son, Eclymplasteyr, impersonate the drowned Seys and inform Alcyone of her husband’s death, the Chaucerian narrator fails to register any observation on the significance of the tale proper and instead marvels over his new-found knowledge that there are gods who can cause sleep. He promptly offers Morpheus not only a richly attired feather bed, but a bedroom to match, as well as public rooms painted in pure gold and hung with tapestries if the god will grant him sleep. Forthwith, the narrator drowses and falls asleep, yet he also fails to observe any coincidence between his offer and its apparent result: he simply says that he ‘nyste how’ (272) he grew so sleepy. The narrator expands the theme of his own ignorance when he next comments that he subsequently experienced ‘so wonderful’ a dream that he is certain ‘no man had the wyt’ (277–8) to interpret it, even if he simultaneously exposes his acquaintance with conventional medieval authorities on dreams when he asserts that even Joseph and Macrobius could not read it correctly. Similar ignorance on the narrator’s part occurs in the opening proper of his dream. Set on the conventional May morning, the dream begins with the narrator waking to the melodious sound of bird song. Traditionally, the mating urge signified by springtime birdsong parallels the heterosexual amorousness of the narrator of a dit amoreux and motivates him literally to move into the dream landscape, as happens with the narrator of Froissart’s Paradys d’Amours: ‘There was a great sound of birdsong for the birds were singing without ceasing, as they do on a beautiful early summer’s day in the month May. I, who was in love indeed, took great delight in the birds, and so wandered about up and down until I came upon a stream, around which there were many bushes and shrubs ... nightingales were singing their hearts out with one accord, so that even if someone had never felt inclined to love before he would have to begin. In order to hear the birds better, I sat down beneath some hawthorn boughs all covered in blossom. Love, who by his dominion controlled my heart and my body, then made me think a lot about my life and my youth, my joys and miseries, and made me feel the pains of love’ (42). After hearing the birds sing, Froissart’s narrator composes his own lyric, a complaint that his lady scorns him, addressed to Love but overheard by two female personifications, Plaisance and Esperance.

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These women accuse the narrator of defaming their lord, Love, and the remainder of the poem stages the dreamer’s discussions with a series of allegorical figures who instruct him in the properly humble love-service he must practise in order to attain his lady’s favour, which he eventually does secure before dream’s end. Likewise, birdsong at the opening of Guillaume’s Romance of the Rose, details of which Chaucer borrowed for the corresponding section of the Book of the Duchess, urges young people to love, Guillaume’s dreamer remarks (81–3). In contrast to the well-established connection between birds and heterosexual love in the French tradition (Wimsatt, Literary Background 13– 20), the avian song that the narrator of the Book of the Duchess hears neither resonates with his own amorousness nor incites him to it. Indeed, it seems to lead nowhere. As Nolan remarks, the dreamer ‘does not respond directly to the usual implications of birds for love’; instead, ‘the narrator turns to describe his chamber and to remark particularly on the painted windows and walls’ (‘Art’ 219), upon which he sees figures from the story of Troy and text and gloss of the Romance of the Rose. Through this contrast between a live avian performance represented viva voce and the chamber windows that textualize the most famous ancient love story of the Middle Ages, Chaucer reiterates his earlier characterization of the narrator as one who does not experience love directly in the present but who seeks to learn about it at arm’s length by consulting his memory. The mnemonic images that the narrator sees on his chamber walls – pictures and text of more ‘romaunces’ like the one he turned to in the waking section of the poem for subject matter – function within the dream as impressions made upon the dreamer’s mind to remind him of what he has read about love. If the narrator has thus been ‘in-formed,’ he next requires a master to model both the experience of love and the ways in which to write about it. This guide materializes forthwith in the person of the Black Knight, whose unequivocal involvement in heterosexual love, even if it initially involved service to a domna, has been set up to emerge as normative. From Memory to the Master The transition from memory to the master takes the form of the harthunt that the narrator hears passing by his chamber and hurries to follow (354–86). This section of the Book of the Duchess has resisted easy interpretation. As an aristocratic activity, the hunt generally sets the

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stage for the introduction of the Black Knight, although readers have searched for the more specific implications of the chase if only because it appears to be the first event that awakens the narrator from his stupor. He hears the sound of the hunting horn and responds to it by riding out to join the hunt. If ‘hert’ (deer or hart) is considered to be a pun on ‘herte’ (heart), then the hunt may signify the chase of love, a common enough trope in the dit amoreux and the Romance of the Rose. But who is chasing whom in the Book of the Duchess? The narrator’s distance from the experience of love precludes his role in the amorous pursuit. He has no beloved to chase, nor is he the object of pursuit. ‘Heart-hunting’ has also been read as a trope for the therapeutic consolation that the narrator will tender the Black Knight, although figuring an aristocrat’s psychic or emotional state as a commoner’s quarry especially ignores the power structure of the Book of the Duchess. Instead, ‘heart-hunting’ encodes a different activity, which is suitable to the narrator’s station and humble role in the poem and in which he had already been engaged before he left his chamber to join the chase: recollection.5 Carruthers explains that metaphors of hunting, fishing, and tracking game are conventional for recollection in classical and medieval thought: ‘the crucial task of recollection is investigatio, “tracking down,” a word related to vestigia, “tracks” or footprints.”’ One of the earliest and most common quarries of such metaphorical hunts are birds. ‘Feathered thoughts’ and ‘winged memories,’ Carruthers remarks, flock copiously in the Psalms, Virgil, and in medieval works, including Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. To recollect one’s winged memories, it is necessary to catch, coop, and pigeonhole them. According to Plato, pigeons represent knowledge; our ‘pigeon-coops’ are empty when we are young, but gradually we stock them with the birds that represent retrievable knowledge (Carruthers, Book 20, 246–7) Although Chaucer also associates birds with thoughts and memories in the Book of the Duchess when the narrator awakes to birdsong in his textualized memory chamber, the subsequent hunt that the narrator follows pursues the hart, not birds. As a pun on ‘heart,’ however, the hart-hunt also tropes recollection; for Aristotle included a role for the heart in the physiology of memory, Carruthers observes, and the metaphorical use of heart for an organ of memory continued well into the Middle Ages and beyond. Although Carruthers does not instance the Book of the Duchess, she cites Chaucer’s frequent use of the phrase, ‘by heart,’ as an echo of the Latin verb for recollection, recordari, which

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encodes memory as heart, cor (Book 49). Whatever the multivalent hunt may signify about the aristocratic milieu of the Black Knight, it also figures the narrator’s deeper engagement in recollection. Even if some macabre French chase-of-love poems both slay and dismember the quarry, the hart eludes the hounds in the Book of the Duchess, not simply, as Minnis argues, because its death would be tasteless in an elegy (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 121), but because the hunt defines more clearly the nature of the narrator’s search and indicates the limits of his ability to educate himself about the ways of love by reading and recalling classic texts – Ovid, the Troy story, the Romance of the Rose. Like the hart, experience in both love and poetry eludes the narrator, and he requires a master to teach him both. Accordingly, at this point in the poem, the recollection represented by the hart-hunt begins to modulate into more overt instruction. The hounds who chased the hart are displaced by the ‘whelp’ (389), who materializes before the narrator to lead him to the master in the Book of the Duchess, the Black Knight. Fittingly, the narrator’s pose of the follower – now of a puppy no less – segues into his reception of the lesson in poetry and love that lies at the core of the Book of the Duchess. This central episode rewrites the section of the Fonteinne Amoureuse in which Machaut’s narrator-poet eavesdrops on a nobleman (traditionally identified as Machaut’s patron, Jean, Duke of Berry), who sings a lengthy lament about unrequited love. Ostentatiously seating himself at his ivoryinlaid writing desk and taking up his writing implements, the poet records what he hears, and, when the lord later requests him to compose a poem about his sorrow in love, the poet hands him his own lyric. Throughout Machaut’s poem, the narrator is conspicuously identified as a professional poet, who manages in a graceful way to compliment both his lord and himself by playing the thinly disguised subordinate role of scribe. In a similar fashion, the narrator of the Book of the Duchess overhears the Black Knight’s love lament, yet nowhere does he reveal himself to be a poet, nor does the knight request the narrator to compose any verse. Instead, after the knight departs and the dream ends, the narrator represents himself as one who will try (‘fonde,’ 1332), in time, to record what he has heard and seen in his dream. Disavowing overt agency, Chaucer’s narrator assumes the guise of the passive writer who copies out the material transmitted to him in his vision, which includes the lyric poetry composed by the Black Knight, whose interaction with the dreamer constitutes part of what I term the ‘inner schoolroom’ scene of the Book of the Duchess. In this core scene,

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the Black Knight himself is first represented as a passive writer who transcribes his experience memorially. Like the narrator’s humble pose, which elevates Black, Black’s initially subordinate stance pays homage to his tutor in love and verse, Whyte. Yet Whyte is an instrumental, not efficient, cause of her student’s learning. She motivates Black, but he alone effects the poem’s finest lyric verse in praise of her as he achieves the status of father-poet, which correlates to his role as husband. For this inner schoolroom episode, Chaucer ultimately draws upon a scholastic theory of learning that underlies the theory of courtly love as an educational program, which I next examine. Scholastic Intellection and Courtly Love As I have discussed earlier in this chapter, popular medieval images of learning derived from what James Collins terms the ‘refueling’ model of education in which the transmission of knowledge from master to student could never be a ‘purely discarnate, abstract affair’ (xiv–xv). Indeed, images such as drinking from the master’s lips depicted education as the direct material, even corporeal, transfer of knowledge from an older male teacher to a receptive younger male student in a necessarily intimate physical relationship. These images need not overtly suggest pederasty, a practice always associated with ancient education,6 but they problematize the status of the traditionally male student in the Middle Ages. In contrast, Thomas Aquinas explicated a model of learning that granted agency to the learner without stripping it from the teacher. Although the binaries of active and passive in scholastic thought resisted the distribution of power fundamental to Aquinas’s theory of learning, Aristotle’s scattered comments on intellection provided a solution. Aquinas developed and rationalized Aristotelian ideas on learning into a scholastic model, never easily imaged, that shared agency between teacher and learner. Destabilizing agency in this way potentially queered Aristotle’s model of intellection, yet ultimately made it possible for medieval men to attend the female-led school of courtly love with relative impunity.7 It is this model of learning that Chaucer put into play in the inner schoolroom scene of the Book of the Duchess, in which a woman educates a man. Aristotle rejected the popular pedagogical idea that the boundary between the informing teacher and informed student was permeable and somehow accommodated direct transmission or transfer of knowledge, as if the student were the impregnated vessel that gave birth to the

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master’s ideas, the blank tablet that bore his script. Aristotle’s model of learning is philosophically more complicated than the deposit theory of education allowed largely because it conceptualized the intellect as a power comprising both passive and active components and without parallel among the unidimensional causes of generative theory: the active male formative principle and the passive female material principle. Aristotle never unified his pronouncements on teaching into a formal treatise but dispersed them throughout the Physics, Metaphysics, Posterior Analytics, On the Soul, and other works (Spangler vii–viii). Taken singly, certain of Aristotle’s observations resonate with popular medieval representations of learning.8 However, Aristotelian theories of causality and intellection prevent the teacher’s simple domination of the learner because Aristotle attributes to the mind an active as well as a passive component, that is, an abstractive (reasoning) as well as a receptive capacity. The existence of this active intellect requires Aristotle to qualify the way in which the teacher acts upon the learner so that it differs fundamentally from the popular deposit theory of learning that is rooted in early concepts of biological reproduction, which, in Aristotle’s thinking, consisted of (male) sperm acting upon (female) menses to form the fetus. In Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of reproduction, the male principle acts as the primary efficient cause of generation, whereas in his theory of intellection, the teacher can act only instrumentally upon the learner’s mind. The teacher cannot form the student’s passive intellect into learning or, as the popular concept imaged it, infuse or impress it with knowledge. The learner’s active intellect, which abstracts universals from the particulars that the passive intellect receives, is responsible for the acquisition of knowledge. As an instrumental cause, hence motivated by something himself, the teacher in some way activates the student’s intellect, which, in turn, moves of its own accord from potency to act. Aristotle thus stages the relationship between master and student as playing out in a series of actions and reactions. In Aristotle’s incompletely explicated model of learning, agency circulates between teacher and student, and each must play reciprocal roles to achieve their common goal. The brainchild of learning results from the cooperative interaction of dual agents, teacher and learner, whereas the agency causing the corporeal child must be unilateral: the father. Aquinas’s treatise on education, ‘The Teacher,’9 adapted Aristotle’s queer model of intellection to a Christian context. The teacher initiates the process of learning by setting signs (words) before the learner, because ‘the mind needs a mover to actualize it through teaching, as is

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said in [Aristotle’s] Physics’ (25). These signs motivate the learner’s active intellect to cause their likeness, the intelligible species, to exist in the possible, or passive, intellect, and the active intellect ‘uses these intelligible forms to produce in itself scientific knowledge’ (20). The teacher is ‘in a certain sense a cause of the intelligible species, in so far as he offers [the learner] certain signs of intelligible likenesses, which [the learner’s] understanding receives from those signs and keeps within itself’ (25–6), but the teacher is only the mediate or instrumental cause of learning: ‘through the instrumentality, as it were, of what is told [the learner], the natural reason of the pupil arrives at a knowledge of the things which he did not know’ (17). The learner’s agent intellect, or reason, is the direct cause of knowledge: ‘the [teacher’s] signs are not the proximate efficient cause of knowledge, but [the learner’s] reason is, in its passage from principles to conclusions’ (20). As Aquinas explicates the interrelationship of master and student in ‘The Teacher,’ he takes care to dispel more authoritatively than does Aristotle the popular concept that the teacher somehow transmits knowledge directly to the learner (21), insisting that man, teaching from without, does not ‘infuse’ the intelligible light in the learner; for only God speaks ‘within us’ (25). Aquinas’s repeated denials that knowledge somehow passes directly from teacher to student, an erroneous idea that he attributes to Averroes in ‘Can One Man Teach Another Man?’ (Summa Theologiae 1a.117.1), witnesses a recurring anxiety about the popular image of teaching that had long figured intimate corporeal relationships between men, both erotic and non-erotic. But if Aquinas’s denial that learning involved material transmission ruled out the ancient justification of pederasty, his theory of intellection ruled in a queerly heterosexualized model of education, women teaching courtly men, or at least inspiring them to learn, with agency unequally parcelled out between them. The resulting instability of agency lies beneath what readers sense now when they question whether the domna’s power is a myth or wonder why courtly texts so often fail to coerce heteronormativity in their male protagonists. Superficially, however, the scholastic model of courtly education supported traditional gender hierarchy, for it could position the female beloved as teacher without subordinating the male lover. The domna inspires the lover to improve, which he typically accomplishes by learning the social graces and martial arts, yet she is never shown to be the direct or actual cause of his learning. She does not literally instruct the lover in the art of jousting, or even the arts of dancing or painting or

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writing. Indeed, she is often distant or absent during the period in which the lover educates himself. Her beauty serves as the catalyst that moves her admirer, but otherwise the lover’s actual improvement occurs outside her purview. Either the male lover is represented as somehow teaching himself the necessary arts or he is given a male tutor. For instance, Chaucer’s pilgrim Squire, who hopes to ‘stonden in his lady grace’ (GP 88), seems to have learned the social arts on his own while he apprentices in the art of war abroad in Flanders and northern France. Troilus’s courtly education occurs at home in Troy, with Criseyde nearby, yet it is Pandarus who literally advises the lover in the art of rhetoric and the customs of refined love. I return to the inner scene of education in the Book of the Duchess to view the way in which Chaucer employed the scholastic model of shared agency to meet the complex eulogistic demands of a poem that must celebrate two elevated persons whose different sexes demand hierarchy: Whyte and Black. The Inner Schoolroom Scene: Making the Poetic Maker At the heart of Chaucer’s poem lies the Black Knight’s poetic reconstruction of his earliest experience with Whyte, whom he first adored as the distant beloved and eventually married. Representing the courtly period of their relationship allows Chaucer to eulogize Whyte most fully, for in this premarital phase she could be represented as Black’s peer without jeopardizing his agency: she is Black’s teacher in the school of Love and of poetry, but even though she governs her student, she remains the instrumental, not efficient, cause of his learning. Black alone writes – and rewrites – the verse that eventually wins her heart and later eulogizes her. I showed in chapter 1 how the Chaucer escape narrative stigmatizes this verse as barren and narcissistic and enlists it to witness the emasculating effects of the court on its poets. Yet, as I argue now, against the background of the narrator’s passive – queer – aesthetic, Black’s poetic emerges as generative in ways that medieval readers would have comprehended, and it is further normalized by the mediated way in which Whyte motivates it. Black prefaces his account of Whyte’s tutelage with a brief discussion of his enrolment in the school of Love many years before. He stresses intellect more than feeling in this education. As soon as he had any ‘wyt’ or ‘understondyng’ to ‘comprehende’ (760–2) what Love was, the Knight put himself in his service. This service preceded the Knight’s actual devotion to anyone, and it occurred so long ago that the Knight was like a ‘whit wal or a table,’ tabula rasa, ‘redy to cacche and take’ whatever

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men might wish to compose – ‘make’ – on it (780–1). The verb ‘make’ connotes phallic agency, the pen that inscribes the waiting blank page. Even though he might have studied (‘kend’) either ‘arte’ or ‘letre,’ the Knight continues, because Love came first in his thoughts, he never forgot it and chose it as his ‘firste craft’ (787–91). In Love’s school, that is, Black was the impressionable student, the blank slate ready for inscription, imaged by popular medieval concepts of learning. As influential as his next educator – Whyte – was, however, she never scripted Black with the same direct agency, but played the instrumental role assigned to the teacher in scholastic theories of learning. Black’s earlier troping of himself as the ‘whit wal’ ready for inscription pointedly contrasts to his subsequent relationship with his beloved Whyte; she motivates but never dominates him. Black soon had need of both the arts and letters that he had overlooked earlier. One day, he recounts, his dedicated service to the abstract idea of love suddenly evolved into his attraction to an actual woman, the fair Whyte, whom he spied among a group of ladies and instantly loved. At this time, Black explains, he was both ‘ryght yong’ and had much to ‘lerne’ (1090). This love for Whyte was a great undertaking, ‘empryse,’ for one with his ‘yonge childely wytte’ (1093–5), yet Black immediately set about learning to honour and worship her as best he could. Although Whyte remained unaware of Black’s love for her, she became instrumental in motivating her would-be lover’s self-improvement. This included Black’s effort to avoid his former sin of idleness (798) by trying his best to learn ‘to make songe’ (1157). Black’s choice of the word ‘make,’ which he repeats four times in the space of fourteen lines (1157–71) as well as earlier (e.g., 463, 474, 487) to indicate his mode of literary composition, associates his poetic process with phallic agency. As I explored in the introduction, the ultimate source of this aesthetic is the ancient hylomorphic theory of creation and reproduction that privileges masculine formative action. The paternal poetics of the medieval ‘makar’ resonate again in Black’s image of Tubal’s discovery of the art of song as his brother, Jubal, hammered out notes upon the anvil.10 Even though Black deprecates his art compared with that of the biblical smith and his brother, he assimilates his poetic ‘making’ to the phallic and generative action of hammers striking anvils: But, for to kepe me from ydelnesses, Trewly I dide my besynesse To make songes, as I best koude, And ofte tyme I song them loude;

88 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics And made songes thus a gret del, Althogh I koude not make so wel Songes, ne knewe the art al, As koude Lamekes sone Tubal, That found out first the art of songe; For as hys brothres hamers ronge Upon hys anvelt up and doun, Therof he took the firste soun.

(1155–66)

Black repeats the first song he thus constructed from his ‘felynge’ (1172), a six-line lyric beseeching God that Whyte take him as her knight (1175–81), and he next recounts how he graduated to fabricating verse that he addressed directly to Whyte to tell her of his love. His first approach to the master/mistress of his love failed miserably. Black admits that he forgot words in his ‘tale’ (1209) to Whyte; his fear of misspeaking eventually ground his performance to a halt, and he stood mute with head hung before his lady. Once Black recovered, he did manage to request his lady’s grace, but Whyte dismissed his feeble efforts, and Black retreated to his bed to mourn. His passion for her did not abate, however, and in another year Black again tried to communicate his feelings to Whyte. This time Black passed the test, and Whyte gave him a ring in token of her acceptance of him. Their hearts became one, and they passed many years in blissful union. The self-improvement that occurs in Black during his love-tutelage to Whyte materializes as his gradual mastery of the expression of love through lyric verse. The inner schoolroom scene of the Book of the Duchess charts Black’s progress from his earliest practice piece, the sixline lyric he fashions, to his first clumsy performance before Whyte, and finally to the successful effort that he makes to articulate his devotion to her. However, the full development of Black’s education is not revealed to the audience until after Whyte’s death. It occurs in the section of the poem that contains both Black’s lament, which the narrator overhears after the whelp has led him to the grieving knight, and Black’s eulogy of Whyte, which the narrator evokes by asking him what he has lost. In Black’s lament for his lost love that the narrator overhears, Nolan observes, Chaucer ‘indulge[d] himself in direct imitation of the French love poets,’ giving the knight the most elegant verse in the Book of the Duchess: ‘all the best poetry – that is, refined, artificially structured, thoroughly subjective, Frenchified verse – belongs to the Knight’ (‘Art’ 219); Minnis concurs (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 134). Nolan goes on to

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argue that in giving the Black Knight the best poetry, Chaucer meant to criticize the value of such art to reckon with mortality by contrasting it to the narrator’s gentle, though insistent, pressure on the Knight to state his loss prosaically, which constitutes the ‘talking cure’ of the poem. I argued earlier in this chapter that such a narrator-dominant reading of the Book of the Duchess not only assumes the Knight’s otherwise unstated consolation but ignores the power structure of the poem. Chaucer created a dual tribute – to Black as poet and to Whyte as the ‘teacher’ of his verse – in part by assigning the narrator a passive and receptive poetic role that serves as the foil to enhance Black’s creative agency. Chaucer gave the best lines to the Black Knight to praise his poetic virility directly and, through the poetry that he creates, also to honour his teacher, Whyte, not to question the value of his courtly ethos. Black’s early efforts at poetic making reach maturity in the verse that he performs before the narrator in the present time of the poem and that the narrator transmits to the larger, external audience of the Book of the Duchess. In the poem’s longest single internal lyric lies the heart of the dual eulogy of the Book of the Duchess: Black’s portrayal of Whyte that first describes her physical characteristics (effictio) and then the quality of her love and of her other virtues (notatio). The physical portrait follows the conventional head-to-toe order, enumerating the beauty of Whyte’s hair, eyes, neck, face, hands, limbs, and body (817–960) before it proceeds to defining her inner virtues and qualities (961–1087). Chaucer critics have long been at pains to recognize both the traditional as well as the innovative aspects of this portrait of Whyte. For instance, Clemen remarks that ‘convention has the strongest hold’ in this section of the Book of the Duchess and that Chaucer’s artistry here consists of following as many rhetorical rules as possible in order to create Whyte as an ideal of female beauty. Nevertheless, Clemen continues, this conventional portrait also achieves individuality and thus reveals a ‘mystery of Chaucer’s art’: ‘For while [Chaucer] loves to borrow extensively and to imitate, yet he can convey something quite individual by selecting, transposing, and making trifling changes and additions’ (55). This triumph in the description of Whyte is correctly attributed to Chaucer, not to Black; for Black’s poetic achievement is defined in medieval terms, not modern ones of originality and convention. The terms of the latter’s success inhere in the technical name given to the physical portrait in medieval rhetorical treatises: effictio. Classified by Geoffrey of Vinsauf as a figure of thought, effictio denotes a verbal portrait of corporeal features (Baldwin 305). Its derivation from

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the Latin verb effingo, ‘to form, fashion,’ however, reveals its connotative meaning of an actual construction through words, that is, the verbal making of the body that the poet takes as subject, not merely the imitative description or transcription of a body from nature. This is especially true when the body in question is female and beautiful and the poet male, frequently her lover or would-be lover. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely note that ‘images of Nature or God as artisan are often associated with descriptions of female beauty: the idea of Nature as craftswoman, producing creatures in each species from the ideal pattern or form of that species, is ancient’ (90). These artisan images correlate to the authorial function of the effictio-writer, who is understood to shape the body of his beloved from the matter of language just as Nature forms them from non-verbal matter. Addressed to the writer, the model exercise of how to describe a woman’s beauty that Geoffrey of Vinsauf offers in his Poetria Nova demonstrates the way in which the author of the effictio is assimilated to the penultimate formative agent, Nature, creative vicar of God: ‘Let the compass of Nature first fashion a sphere for her head; let the colour of gold give a glow to her hair, and lilies bloom high on her brow ... Let her teeth be snowy, regular, all of one size, and her breath like the fragrance of incense. Smoother than polished marble let Nature fashion her chin – Nature, so potent a sculptor ... So let the radiant description descend from the top of the head to the toe, and the whole be polished to perfection ... Have gold encircle her slender fingers, and a jewel more splendid than gold shed its brilliant rays. Let artistry vie with materials in her fair attire; let no skill of hand or invention of mind be able to add aught to that apparel’ (36). The writer of Geoffrey’s model effictio does not simply transmit in words the perfection of the female subject, but, like the artisan Nature, constitutes the portrait of female beauty from the appropriate material, the stock of conventional motifs of female physical perfection that catalogues like Geoffrey’s provide. But the writer of notatio, ethopoeia, or the description of inner qualities (Baldwin 305; Murphy 21) functions according to a different aesthetic. In the words of the pseudo-Ciceronian rhetorical treatise, Rhetorica ad Herennium, the notatio-writer draws forth (‘protrahi’) what already exists and ‘sets [it] before our eyes’ (394). In the notatio, the subject’s inner characteristics are taken to pre-exist in a way that his or her physical features do not, and the writer’s rhetorical task is to uncover and transmit those non-corporeal qualities to the audience. In sum, the writer of effictio draws, whereas the notatio-writer draws forth. Edwards argues that Chaucer used the effictio in Troilus and Criseyde

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ultimately to reveal ‘the power of language to constitute subjectivity and desire.’ When Troilus first sees Criseyde in the temple, Edwards continues, Chaucer’s effictio of her emphasizes how the ‘male gaze constitutes its object of desire’: ‘Troilus looks at Criseyde, but Chaucer’s technique emphasizes what and how he sees ... what Troilus sees is an object within his own economy of desire first created by language (‘devising’) and then preserved by memory and will within the lover’ (‘Narrative’ 326). The same could be said of the Black Knight’s discovery of Whyte in a group of ladies and of his framing of her as the ideal beloved. Yet in this effictio, it is the writer, Black, not prior language, that receives the credit for constituting the corporeal object of his desire. Language per se does not constitute Whyte’s subjectivity and Black’s desire; Black’s poetic efficacy does. Echoing the assimilation of the writer’s creative agency to Nature’s generative power in the Poetria Nova and elsewhere, Chaucer has Black introduce two images of artisan Nature into the centre of his effictio of Whyte that emphasize his generative poetics, just as his reference to Tubal and Jubal appropriates their artisan status. Black first credits Nature with making Whyte’s pure gaze (870–2); by extension, Black remakes that gaze in his effictio of her. Black’s second allusion to Nature occurs strategically just after his own professions of humility. Black protests that he lacks both ‘Englyssh and wit’ (898) to explain the beauty of Whyte’s face and then varies this apology by claiming that his ‘spiritis’ (natural abilities) are too dull to ‘devyse’ so ‘grete a thynge’ as Whyte’s beauty is (900–2). ‘Devyse’ has a wide semantic range in Middle English, including ‘tell,’ ‘narrate,’ ‘describe,’ ‘compose,’ and ‘construct.’ Black’s ironic self-deprecations, of course, point to the very aesthetic that Chaucer associates with his verse: verbal construction or ‘making.’ And the allusion to the divine artisan, Nature, immediately after Black’s humility topoi assimilates Black as poetic creator to Nature as procreatrix of life. Whyte is the chief example of Nature’s handiwork just as, by implication, her verbal portrait is the chief example of Black’s poetic prowess: For certys Nature had swich lest To make that faire that trewly she Was hir chefe patrone of beaute, And chefe ensample of al hire werke And moustre.

(908–12)

The parallel between Black’s generative poetics and Nature’s power to forge life itself becomes even more overt in the lines following Black’s

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allusion to Whyte as Nature’s chief pattern (‘moustre’) for beauty. His constitution of Whyte in words enlivens her to the extent that Black thinks that he sees her alive again: ‘For be hyt never so derke / Me thynketh I se hir evermoo’ (913–14). This apparent revivification is the ultimate compliment to the power of Black’s poetics, just as Whyte’s capacity to motivate her beloved is Chaucer’s chief tribute to her. Black’s poetic efficacy, his seeming ability to ‘make’ life itself, also emerges in sharp relief to the narrator’s passive poetics so apparent in the opening reading-dreaming sequence of the poem. These contrasting modes of verbal artistry in the Book of the Duchess correspond, respectively, to the classic antithesis between the rational and romantic writer that Quintilian outlined, and they associate the courtly Black Knight with heteronormative figures such as the pilgrim Knight of the Canterbury Tales, warrior par excellence. The Father-Poet and the Queer Poet: ‘Agaynes Kynde’ The two basic medieval models of literary authority in the Book of the Duchess were adumbrated in Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory 10.3.15 (234– 6). Quintilian differentiates the ‘romantic’ writer from the ‘rational’ or ‘practical’ writer (Ziolkowski, ‘Inspiration’ 18). Like the student seated at the master’s feet who drinks in the words that fall from the master’s lips, Quintilian’s romantic writer passively waits for external inspiration, ‘[lying] back with eyes turned up to the ceiling ... in the hope that something will present itself.’ In contrast, the rational writer ‘acquire[s] the power of writing’ by his own efforts, purposefully turning his thoughts to what is necessary to accomplish the task. Quintilian’s metaphorical connection of the rational model of authority with the ‘deep ploughing [that] makes the soil more fertile for the production and support of crops’ figures the writer as the father. Quintilian heartily recommends this paternalistic model of writing and claims that nature also recommends it: ‘It is thus that nature herself bids us begin and pursue our studies once well begun.’ By implication, Quintilian’s dreamer, who sits back and waits for inspiration to shower upon him, goes against nature, a stigma that persisted into medieval thought unless, of course, poetic receptivity was normalized in a Christian sacred context, typically a visionary experience in which God inspired the male writer or spoke through him. Chaucer’s best-known literary father is the pilgrim Knight of the Canterbury Tales. His paternity is literally evident in his son, the Squire,

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who travels with him, and it is troped in his positional primacy: his is the first portrait in the General Prologue; his is the first narrative in the Tales. Initially, this battle-scarred warrior, who narrates an epic tale of conquest and marriage in classical antiquity, seems to have little in common with the Black Knight, who inhabits the dream world of the Book of the Duchess and crafts courtly lyrics in honour of his beloved Whyte. Yet both are authority figures in their respective fictional worlds, and both employ a corresponding paternal poetic as marker of their intertwined social and literary power. The ‘fatherly auctoritas’ (Lerer 58) of the pilgrim Knight’s patriarchal aesthetic is immediately evident. To be sure, he retells a familiar tale, the story of Theseus, Palamon, Arcite, and Emily ultimately from Statius’s Thebaid and available to medieval readers in several vernacular versions, most notably Boccaccio’s Teseida. At the very outset of his narration, however, the Knight’s phallic metaphor of plowing indicates that he shall imprint his own stamp on this material: ‘I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere, / And wayke been the oxen in my plough’ (886–7). Throughout the tale, the Knight’s ‘famous predilection for occupatio’ (Shoaf 88), abbreviation, reminds readers of the hylomorphic aesthetics at work, the narrator’s concept that his art involves imposing form on existing literary matter. Metonymically, the tale itself recounts the imposition of form on matter – heterosexual marriage on the Amazon Emily – and afterwards the Knight’s audience exhibits a properly filial response to this master narrative. Good students all, they agree that the Knight’s story is ‘worthy for to drawen to memorie’ (MilPro 3112). Anticipating the change of tone to come in the Miller’s tale, the Host concludes with an off-colour compliment that crudely exposes the Knight’s phallic poetic: this first tale has ‘unbokeled ... the male’ (3115; opened the pouch, bag) well, Harry jests. The Knight’s patriarchal poetic is violent, heavy-handed; it cuts matter to fit, just as the plot of his tale forces Amazonian women to conform to western patriarchal expectations. So the pilgrim Knight ‘cuts people’ for a living (Shoaf 88). The Black Knight’s aesthetic is defter, his approach to Whyte deferential. His reference to the hammer and anvil of Tubal and Jubal reminds readers that his aesthetic also resonates with the hylomorphic force of the artisan, and Chaucer reinforces the image of the Black Knight’s poetic agency when he assimilates it to the procreative agency of Nature. In subsequent chapters, I shall explore how the troubled status of this procreatrix in medieval thought emerges in Chaucer’s poetry, but here it is enough to note that whatever ambiguity arises from

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the Black Knight’s accommodation to a female maker is displaced by the narrator’s ‘unnatural’ angst and passivity. Chaucer does not create the narrator as queer foil to the Black Knight by the traditional means of sartorial excess or foppish behaviour. As I discussed in chapter 1, homophobic diatribes dating back to Orderic’s History implicated men’s exterior fashion as a sign of physical perversity and effeminization, and Chaucer himself created the dandy par excellence in the figure of squeamish Absolon in the Miller’s Tale. Rather, the queer foil that Chaucer constructs in the Book of the Duchess involves the figure of the poet, for it is this guise that normalizes the courtly Black Knight’s ‘natural’ making of the effictio of Whyte that stands at the heart of the poem. In contrast, the narrator claims to ‘make’ nothing, but represents himself as recording what he receives in his vision. Contingent upon memory and the master, Chaucer’s dreamer is Quintilian’s romantic writer. Complementing the Chaucerian narrator’s passive poetic is his anxious and humble personality. The phenomenon of the ‘nervous narrator,’ as Windeatt terms it (xvi), is not Chaucer’s invention; the ‘distress of the dreamer’ is a topos (Russell, Vision 239). Spearing notes the ‘common dream-personality’ of ‘comic indignity’ that developed in the fictional narrators of French visions in the fourteenth century. He instances the lack of dignity in the timid narrator of Froissart’s Paradys d’Amours, who sings a complainte against cruel love and the humiliation of the narrator called on the carpet by his lady and sentenced to compose a poem in Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre. Such ‘real or assumed social inferiority of the poet’ assumes a ‘central importance’ in Chaucer’s dream poems, Spearing concludes (Dream-Poetry 44–5).11 Even if they share the undignified behaviour and express the selfdenigration that betokens their social subordination, however, the French narrators and the dreamer of the Book of the Duchess are essentially different in two critical respects: the latter is unexplainedly loveless and dares not represent himself as a poet. After Chaucer’s narrator undergoes the didactic experience of the poem, he terms himself not a ‘maker,’ like the knight, but merely one who in time will try to ‘put’ his dream into verse as best he knows how (1331–3), the emphasis falling on his humble efforts at replicating his recollection.12 French vision poems denigrate the narrator’s personality, but not his individual poetics. I noted earlier that the poet-narrator of Machaut’s Fonteinne Amoureuse ostentatiously surrounds himself with the trappings of the professional author: an ivory-inlaid desk stocked with writing implements. Although

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all the narrators of vision poems are feminized to an extent by their receptivity, Froissart and Machaut demonstrate the poetic efficacy of their alter egos through internal lyrics. The narrator of Froissart’s Paradys delivers a complainte, while the narrator of Machaut’s Jugement composes a love-lyric on demand; both are self-assured court performers who advertise the poetic wares of their creators. As I have argued in this book, heterosexual love and poetry are not accidental partners in the Middle Ages, and however timid the French narrators may be, they possess the requisite experience, the ‘mater’ of love, from which to fashion verse and thus to aggrandize their roles as ‘makers.’ Kevin Brownlee observes that ‘for Machaut, love service and poetic service are conflated in such a way as to present the poete’s fundamental “lyric” experience as the activity of poetic composition’ (Identity 15). In contrast, the narrator of the Book of the Duchess has no materia to shape into the finished product of literary art. Edwards remarks that Chaucer’s invention was to create a ‘fictional self in the guise of the failed lover who still remains a poet’ (Dream 58). There is no warrant to conclude that the narrator of the Book of the Duchess is a failed lover, but he is indisputably an outsider to love. This loveless narrator is Chaucer’s peculiar persona, and his lack of heterosexual preoccupation constitutes his non-normative stance. Indeed, as I have shown in this chapter, the ‘queer’ artistry of the dreamer resides in his apparent attempt to father a poem outside a heterosexual context, an effort doomed to failure, as the sleepless narrator acknowledges when he reaches for the book that supplies him the love-matter that his life lacks. The narrator’s sleeplessness, not his poetic, is explicitly labelled ‘agaynes kynde’ (16), against nature, yet to the extent that his potentially fatal insomnia represents the anxious outcome of the narrator’s failed artistic efforts, those attempts are also implicated as unnatural. In constituting the narrator’s poetic to be deviant in this way, Chaucer creates the foil that shields the Black Knight’s love-verse from any moral censure implicit in its assimilation to a female maker, Nature. Instead, the generative phallicism of Tubal’s hammers rings throughout Black’s courtly effictio of Whyte. The contrast that Chaucer develops between the two men ultimately reconfigures Sedgwick’s erotic triangle as the union of the heterosexual couple, Black and Whyte, over and against the queer narrator. This view challenges readings of the poem that have developed since Hansen’s feminist analysis that the bonding of knight and narrator occurs at woman’s expense and reconstructs ‘meaning and discourse’ in

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the poem (Chaucer 72). For instance, Gayle Margherita finds the Book of the Duchess to be the ‘story of generative collaborations between men’ – specifically, the knight and narrator – whose homosocial co-creation of verse requires the ‘abjection’ of woman (82–8). Louise Fradenburg pushes this reading further to argue that the death of Alcyone in the Book of the Duchess signals that ‘the heterosexual couple comes to a dead end. Hopefulness emerges not in anticipation of enduring hetero coupledom or reproductivity, but in anticipation of the male-male couple formed later by the narrator and the Man in Black’ (94). I maintain, instead, that the operative bond between the two men is neither homosocially heterosexual nor homosexual, but queer; they are a ‘couple’ in the respect that one’s queerness normalizes the other’s courtliness. In the narrative triangle of the Book of the Duchess, then, this male pair forms ultimately to reconstitute the binary opposition of the loveless narrator to the heterosexual couple (Black and Whyte) and correspondingly of queer poetics to hylomorphic poetics. From Panegyric to Panic In the first part of this book, my specific goal has been to interrogate the traditional reading of the Book of the Duchess as either harbinger or evidence of Chaucer’s breakout from the courtly prison. I have located the deep source of this conventional reading in the anti-courtly polemic that originated in the Middle Ages, and I have argued that to view the Book of the Duchess as Chaucer’s own anti-courtly polemic, no matter how coded, is to ignore the power dynamics of Chaucer’s relationship to the court in general and to John of Gaunt in particular. My contention has been that Chaucer took pains to eulogize courtliness, both Gaunt’s and Blanche’s, and that he used the elegiac occasion of Blanche’s death to do so. I have argued, as well, that Chaucer used the narrator’s queerness in love and in poetry to produce discursively the knight’s normative position as courtly lover and father-poet and also to produce the heterosexual couple, knight and lady, as the pre-eminent pair of the erotic triangle. Implicit in my argument has been the central tenet of queer theory: the perverse is an integral part of the dominant even if it is all too often suppressed, invisible. To create panegyric in the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer exposed queerness. It would be easy to say that he exploited it for political or personal gain. But that would ignore what happened in the poem traditionally seen as the sequel to the Book of the Duchess, the

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House of Fame, a work that did not shove queer poetics back in the closet after its job was done but advanced it to centre stage, where it panics the narrator, who must confront it. With the spotlight on queer poetics, even such naturalized figures as Nature herself, who slips by unexamined in the Book of the Duchess, begin to reveal that they are not seamlessly heterosexual. As I shall explain in chapters 3 and 4, the escape narrative reads the House of Fame in the context of the three great Italian trecento poets, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. I shall argue, however, that Dante is the most relevant to the Chaucerian poem. It is his successful effort to theorize the mother tongue in the Divine Comedy and elsewhere that provides the context in which to read the narrator’s failed attempt to vernacularize the Aeneid. Instead of the traditional view that Dante liberated Chaucer from the courtly prison, I shall argue that the Italian writer’s hermaphrodite aesthetic lies behind the narrator’s poetic crisis in the House of Fame. When this loveless narrator’s project of transforming classical epic into a vernacular romance fizzles out, he imagines himself Dante’s Ganymede in the eagle’s grip.

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PART 2

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3 What Dante Meant to Chaucer: The Hermaphrodite Poetics of the Divine Comedy

In Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, Warren Ginsberg remarks that almost every recent reader ‘who asks, with Piero Boitani, what Dante meant to Chaucer, answers by saying, in effect, “just about everything”’(29).1 Even if the protean Dante Alighieri has proved notoriously difficult to assimilate to Chaucer, in the escape narrative Dante functions as the supreme author of heaven and hell, lover of Beatrice, the master poet who freed Chaucer from his French prison. The project of this chapter is a rereading of the traditional Dante of Chaucer studies in the light of the new Dante who has emerged in Italian studies. I begin by looking at Chaucer’s journeys to Italy, where he is said to have discovered Dante’s work. With conventional reticence, Chaucer mentioned none of his Italian trips in his writing, but they came to define the pivotal point in his artistic career as the travelogue of Chaucer’s ‘Grand Tour’ morphed into the liberation narrative. Chaucer went to Italy as many as three times, first to Milan in 1368, then to Genoa and Florence in 1372–3, and in 1378 again to Milan. The 1368 visit to Lombardy to attend Duke Lionel’s wedding to Violante, daughter of Bernabo Visconti, is putative, but Chaucer’s next Italian trip, which began in December 1372 and concluded in May 1373, is documented (Crow and Olson 35). Just before he began his twelve-year stint (1374–85) as controller of customs, responsible for collecting the export tax on English leather and wool, much of which was shipped to Italy (Florence in particular), Chaucer himself travelled to Genoa and to Florence. Accompanied by two Italians who resided in England, Chaucer first went to Genoa to arrange an English port for the Genoese to use; he then went to Florence on secret business for the king, probably to arrange a loan for Edward III from Florentine bankers, the Bardi and

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others, or to purchase ships for the English monarch (39–40). Between May and September 1378, numerous records confirm, Chaucer again travelled to Italy, to Milan on ‘business concerning the War,’ another diplomatic mission to seek Bernabo’s financial aid for Richard II in England’s continuing conflict with France (53–61). Although Dante was hardly forgotten – indeed ten Latin commentaries had been written on his Divine Comedy between 1320 and 1380 – he had died over a half-century before Chaucer’s first certain visit to Italy, in 1373, and both Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) and Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) were near the end of their lives. There is no record that Chaucer met either of them. Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio’s name in any of his poetry, yet he stages a fictional encounter between Petrarch and the Clerk of the Canterbury Tales in which the latter obtains and then retells the Italian poet’s story of Griselda. This account led to the early legend of Chaucer’s own personal meeting with Petrarch, who had put his poetic talents in the service of the Visconti by 1368 and did attend Lionel’s wedding in Milan. The myth died out as the liberation narrative grew and biographical studies of Chaucer increased in accuracy.2 Few readers now hypothesize Chaucer’s personal acquaintance with Petrarch or Boccaccio; readers imagine, instead, that Chaucer came into contact with and possibly acquired copies of or read all three trecento poets’ works as a result of the Italian travels. In the escape narrative, Chaucer’s several trips to Italy provided him more than just new grist for his creative mill. Indeed, they became Chaucer’s Grand Tour, the source of his poetic coming of age. Earlier readers rhapsodized about the liberating effects of Italy upon Chaucer’s soul and deployed two of its three great trecento authors to chart the vector of Chaucer’s breakout from the courtly prison. For instance, alluding to the spell that Italy cast upon Goethe, Henry Sedgwick observes that ‘even the common man of little soul knows well how his first visit to Italy touched his heart and lifted it high,’ and, he continues, ‘Chaucer must have felt this more deeply, more delicately, than they’ (88). What Italy sparked in Chaucer, however, was neither delicacy nor elegance; both, Sedgwick asserts, Chaucer had already learned in the ‘old courtly romantic school.’ Instead, in Boccaccio Chaucer found a kindred spirit who encouraged his taste for ‘rollicking stories that made raffish university students shout for joy’ (110). Sedgwick’s Boccaccio is the ‘manly’ figure celebrated by nineteenth-century readers of Chaucer, and his poetic masculinity encompasses both his interest in the raucously mundane as well as his espousal of popular language, the vernacular.

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Dante proved harder to incorporate into the liberation narrative. Sedgwick stresses the differences between Dante and Chaucer – Dante’s supreme utterance of his passionate convictions about ‘God and right and wrong’ and his transcendent interest in establishing God’s kingdom on earth find little resonance in Chaucer, he observes. But Sedgwick then implicitly aligns Dante with Boccaccio as both the champion of the vernacular and the poet of realism and raw power, unlike fussy, undemonstrative, and Latinate Petrarch: ‘what [Chaucer] valued most in Dante is his power of presenting a fact, all raw and red, or all soft and beautiful, as God had made it, and next, the dramatic episodes of Francesca da Rimini, of Ugolino, of Ulysses, and so on’ (91). Pairing Dante with Boccaccio and opposing both to fastidious Petrarch is a construction that persists in modern articulations of the liberation trope as it plays out in examinations of Chaucer’s response to Italy. The most extensive study of Chaucer’s Italian influence to date, David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity, pits democratic, communal Florence, associated with Boccaccio, against despotic court-centred Milan, associated with Petrarch, and then aligns Dante with Boccaccio on the side of the angels. Chaucer’s 1373 visit to Florence occurred near the end of the city’s uniquely famous period, its ‘“democratic episode”’ of 1343–78, Wallace observes. In opposition to the hierarchical power of Lombard despots in neighbouring Milan and Pavia, the Visconti, and later the papacy, he explains, Florence developed and celebrated its associational ideology of laterally extending power (24). Wallace goes on to argue that it was not the fundamental political differences between Florence as a merchant capitalist oligarchy and Milan as a centralizing feudal monarchy that affected Chaucer but the poetics expressive of the two different realms, associational and absolutist, respectively. Fictionalizing a group of people who leave Florence during the plague in order to preserve the city’s associational polity until it could be re-established, Boccaccio’s Decameron articulates the Florentine lateral vision of power, whereas Petrarch, who had left Florence for Milan and put himself in the service of the Visconti absolutist state, authored works that participated in ‘a cultural mission more commonly associated with court poets and notaries: the legitimation and mystification of Visconti power’ (47). In sum, Petrarch represents Chaucer’s early subservience to the court; Boccaccio points the way to Chaucer’s breakout. Wallace’s concept of the ultimate liberation of Chaucerian poetics, however, involves the normalization of the narrator of the Canterbury Tales as conjugal, that is, heterosexual. Here, too, Boccaccio points the

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way, while Petrarch’s self-representation in his letters evokes the queerly aloof narrator of Chaucer’s earlier court poetry. Even if Petrarch had once written love-lyrics, the older man who tied his wagon to Lombard despots and to the court had virtually nothing to do with women in his letters, Wallace observes. Petrarch wrote to a woman on only one occasion. His letters thoroughly ‘exclude the erotic,’ and Petrarch himself noted his inability to imitate the ‘natural man’ by planting seeds that sprouted in his garden rather than shrivelled and died (Chaucerian Polity 340–5). Not only does Wallace’s Petrarch shun women and love in his letters, but his absolutist fiction can do nothing more than imagine a man dominating a woman, ‘subjugation rather than conjugality’ (343) – witness his tale of Walter and Griselda. In the Knight’s Tale, Wallace argues, misogynous and woman-shy Petrarch guides the way: like Petrarch, Duke Theseus refuses to ‘countenance any form of political felaweship,’ most notably rejecting the ‘wifely counsel’ that would temper masculine absolutism (4). Nor does Wallace find an example of ‘wifely counsel’ in Boccaccio, at least none in any of his works that Chaucer surely knew, even if the associational poetics of the mixed-sex brigata in the Decameron headed Chaucer in the right direction. Instead, the exemplary wife was provided by an earlier Italian writer, the lawyer Albertano of Brescia (active 1226– 51), whom Wallace views as a proto-Florentine and Boccaccian advocate of civic humanism (218). ‘Dedicated to nurturing a fragile city-state culture in his native Lombardy while protecting it from the ruinous effects of magnate violence,’ Albertano gave Chaucer the specific ‘tool or weapon’ of wifely eloquence in the figure of Prudence in his Liber consolationis et consilii. Prudence resists and controls male anger and violence through rhetoric, Wallace argues, and when Chaucer reworked Albertano’s treatise as the tale of Melibee, he assigned it to his narrative persona on the Canterbury pilgrimage (5). In Chaucer’s attraction to Albertano’s Prudence, Wallace finds the harbinger of the most eloquent wife of the Canterbury Tales – the Wife of Bath – as well as of Chaucer’s figuration of his narrative persona as the ‘putative husband for the Wife of Bath’ (66). She constitutes the ‘body of material,’ the ‘felaweship,’ about which he shall write: ‘the meeting of Chaucer and the Wife represents that union out of which the Canterbury Tales will come to fruition’ (82). Troping the marriage of his poetic alter ego to his most rhetorically effective female character, Chaucer normalized the earlier woman-shy narrator of the dream poems, Wallace concludes. Thus, the unassuming narrator of the Melibee, who emphasizes

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henpecked husbands rather than ‘masculinity fully formed,’ Burger comments (‘Mapping’ 69), proves himself ‘willing to claim paternity, to own himself the makere’ of the Canterbury Tales (Wallace, Chaucerian Polity 66).3 On the continuum that Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity plots from the alienated (Latinate), hierarchical, absolutist, Francophile, courtly, womanabsent poetics of Petrarch to the locally rooted, lateral, associational, non-courtly, conjugal (heterosexual) vernacular aesthetics inspired by Boccaccio and to some extent by Albertano, Dante finds his traditional place in Chaucer studies with Boccaccio.4 Elsewhere Wallace observes that all three ‘crowns’ of Florence had Francophile tendencies and phases, and he complicates the clear boundaries of what constitutes the ‘court,’ while Boccaccio’s return to Latin in his later years further questions his opposition to Petrarch (Early Writings 28–34; ‘Italy’ 229). But Chaucerian Polity couples Dante and Boccaccio with Chaucer as, respectively, liberators and liberated and further suggests that the Chaucerian narrator’s ‘marriage’ to the Wife of Bath bespeaks Chaucer’s legacy to the heterosexual poetics associated with progressive Boccaccio, Albertano, and Dante. Yet, even as Wallace reinscribed the general outlines of the escape narrative in positioning Dante with Boccaccio and Albertano as the ‘conjugal’ poets of natural, heterosexual love who emancipated the English poet from his subordination to absolutist courts and the queerly bachelor aesthetics of a Petrarch, a new Dante was emerging in Chaucerian Polity. This Dante registered the impact of significant recent work on androgyny, sexual paradox, and gender confusion in Italian studies.5 In 1986 Wallace had drawn the contrast between the anxious and awkwardly self-conscious narrator of Chaucer’s House of Fame, who ‘tries on the poet’s toga for the first time,’ and his counterpart, Dante, the master poet, whose ‘magisterial terzine’ make Geffrey’s couplets sound like a ‘nervous squeak’ (‘Continental Inheritance’ 23, repeated in ‘Italian Inheritance’ 41). In Chaucerian Polity of 1997, however, Wallace’s Dante began to look much more like the neurotic narrator of the House of Fame. Plagued by sexual anxiety and poetic doubt, this new Dante worries as he makes his appeal to Apollo to inspire him that he will ‘end up as a “vagina” rather than as a “vaso,” an upstart skinned for presumption rather than a vessel of divine power’ (250). Even if not universally accepted, a new Dante has begun to appear elsewhere in Chaucer studies. No longer appearing in the guise of the master poet, this Dante searches for answers that he does not find. For

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instance, Warren Ginsberg focuses upon the ways in which Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury poetics’ of irony and allegory translate Dante by way of Boccaccio’s construction of him. Ginsberg’s Dante, whose yoking of contrary attitudes in the Comedy signals ‘the abiding irresolution that frustrates [his] intent to unify himself as poet and poem’ (11) is framed by Teodolinda Barolini’s understanding of the fundamental paradox that characterizes the Comedy’s mode of speaking, the ‘truth that has the face of a lie’ (Undivine Comedy 58–9). Richard Neuse, who elucidates ‘the ways in which Dante speaks in and through The Canterbury Tales’ (ix), imagines a pilgrim Dante who suffers from ‘existential anxieties’ even at the end of the Comedy and argues that ‘the quest of the Comedy must risk fraud, error, failure because ... it must accept the ambiguity of all images and the radical instability and duplicity of the poet’s language.’ Both the Canterbury Tales and the Comedy conclude on an open-ended note, Neuse argues: ‘there is no final definitive tale’ in Chaucer’s poem, and Dante’s ‘quest for the human image is never finished’ (70–87). By implication, the Dante of the Comedy and the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales are less the masters – self-proclaimed fathers, makeres – than the subjects of their poetic material. The reading of the Divine Comedy that I develop next in this chapter as the backdrop for my analysis of the House of Fame in chapter 4 builds upon some of the motifs that cluster around the new Dante: anxiety, paradox, gender confusion. I start from recent studies of Dante’s lifelong obsession with poetics to argue that, despite his insistent and imaginative early efforts to identify himself with the father poet, Dante ultimately rejected this figure and embraced the enigmatic, unstable, and deviant models of the hermaphrodite and the sodomite in order first to write the vernacular and ultimately to write heaven, the two major projects of the Comedy. Dante’s queer new poetic identity, I shall argue, grew out of his initially unresolved attempt to valorize the vernacular, gendered female in an era in which scholastic literary theory devalued the feminine principle of literary production as passive material cause. The vernacular was associated with the female in at least two respects: as the mother tongue, it was the native language of men and women alike, and it remained the language of women, for the better part unlettered (Cornish; Wogan-Browne et al. 120–2). Dante’s paradoxical project, I shall argue, was both to ennoble the volgare and to find an elevated place for it in a patriarchal literary theory that resisted this accommodation.6 I focus on Dante’s poetics with an eye towards traditional readings of Chaucer’s House of Fame as an ars poetica. I first examine Dante’s Convivio

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and De vulgari eloquentia, which reveal the inherent threat that an ennobled vernacular posed to hylomorphic poetics, and then I explore the way in which Dante negotiated the problem in the Comedy. This chapter closes with a brief discussion of the medieval reception of Dante’s Comedy, a response, I argue, that resists and rewrites his queer authority and contextualizes the reading of Chaucer’s response in the House of Fame that I develop in the next chapter. Dante’s Obsession: The Father-Poet and the Mother Tongue before the Comedy In a review essay on Dante and medieval poetics, Zygmunt Baranski remarks that while the ‘medieval fascination with the interplay between writing and reflection on writing achieved some of its most notable and original results in Dante’s oeuvre,’ only recently have readers begun to examine ‘Dante’s obsession with the ars poetica’ (5–8). One of these readers, Steven Botterill, notes the relentless probing of authority, literary and otherwise, in all Dante’s work but especially in the Divine Comedy, which is ‘obsessed with authority on the thematic level’ (168). My specific interest here is Dante’s obsession with devising a workable vernacular poetic, which is evident in the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia, both written in the years immediately preceding Dante’s composition of the Inferno, c. 1304–7. These early works display Dante’s creative deployment of the conventional scholastic concept of literary authority, but the Convivio also reveals the problem that Dante again confronts in the Comedy: how to ennoble the ‘mother tongue’ when hylomorphic literary theory relegated the female principle to an inferior material role. Before the Comedy, Dante’s most overt examination of literary authority occurs in the Convivio (The Banquet), a ‘feast’ of knowledge cast in the form of an auto-commentary on several of Dante’s vernacular lyrics. The Convivio also stakes Dante’s claim as father poet. In the fourth book of the Convivio, this claim develops in the form of an etymological analysis of ‘author’ (autore in Italian). Although modern linguists derive ‘author’ and its variant forms, ‘auctour’ and the like, from the Latin verb, augere (to augment, increase), medieval etymologists claimed a more complex and nuanced heritage for the word, evidenced in the traditional etymology Dante offers: ‘This word, namely “auctor” without the third letter c, has two possible sources of derivation. One is a verb that has very much fallen out of use in Latin and which signifies more or less “to tie words together,” that is, “auieo” ... Insofar as “author” is derived and comes

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from this verb, it is used only to refer to poets who have tied their words together with the art of poetry ... The other source from which “author” derives, as Uguccione attests in the beginning of his book Derivations, is a Greek verb pronounced “autentin” which in Latin means “worthy of faith and obedience.” From this comes the word which we are presently treating, namely “authority”; hence we can see that authority means “pronouncement worthy of faith and obedience”’ (162). Also known as ‘Dante’s dictionary,’ Hugutio of Pisa’s Great Derivations (Liber de derivationibus verborum, 1197–1201) contains a third etymon as well, ‘augere,’ ‘to augment or expand,’ Albert Ascoli notes (‘Author’ 54). According to Hugutio, this third type of authority belongs to the political ruler who enlarges his kingdom, whereas the authority that derives from autentin and commands faith and obedience is the province of classical philosophy. By implication, Dante’s reference to Hugutio acknowledges three traditional medieval realms of authority – political, philosophical, poetic – and Ascoli argues that Dante allusively creates this ‘triple constellation’ to imbue his poetry with political and philosophical legitimacy. Ascoli further maintains that it is not poetry per se that Dante justifies but vernacular poetry: ‘the basic, and extremely ambitious project of the [Convivio] as a whole [is] the appropriation of a philosophical and ultimately political authority for Dante’s own vernacular poetry’ (55). Written in the vernacular during the early years of Dante’s exile from his native Florence, the Convivio was to have contained fifteen books in which the author commented upon his own canzoni, the vernacular and secular love-lyrics that comprise Dante’s earlier work, the Vita Nuova. Of the four books that Dante completed, the first serves as an introduction, the second and third provide Dante’s commentaries on three of his lyrics, and the fourth examines the nature of nobility and authority. Robert Harrison remarks that the Convivio exhibits the ‘tendency to edit the self’ shared by all of Dante’s major works as well as the poet’s inclination ‘to instruct his readers how [his] poetry came into being and how it should be read.’ By making his own vernacular poems worthy of commentary, Harrison continues, ‘Dante quietly assigns them a virtually unprecedented auctoritas for “modern” works’ (34). The self-promotion implicit in Dante’s autocommentaries served the political and philosophical goal of advancing the Italian language, Dante’s radical lifelong project (Baranski 10–11). A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott observe that ‘no one worked harder’ at becoming an authority than Dante, and ‘his selfpromotion was inextricably intertwined with the promotion of the Italian language’ (Minnis, Scott, and Wallace 374).

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By virtue of the type of autocommentary Dante writes in the Convivio, the academic accessus ad auctorem that I described in the introduction, he claims a superior variant of the poetic authority derived from auieo, one also greater than that of the philosopher or prince. Minnis and Scott note that ‘the Convivio begins with an Aristotelian “extrinsic” prologue about causality ... and proceeds to apply an impressive amount of erudition to matters allegedly raised by the canzoni’ 377). Implicit in the scholastic prologue is the concept of authority that derives not from the triple constellation of etymons Hugutio names, but from the fourth, although usually primary, medieval origin that Hugutio does not cite: agere, ‘to act or perform.’7 Minnis explains how the principal etymon, agere, assimilated the other three: ‘According to medieval grammarians, the term [auctor] derived its meaning from four main sources: auctor was supposed to be related to the Latin verbs agere “to act or perform,” augere “to grow” and auieo “to tie,” and to the Greek noun autentim “authority.” An auctor “performed” the act of writing. He brought something into being, caused it to “grow.” In the more specialized sense related to auieo, poets like Virgil and Lucan were auctores in that they had “tied” together their verses with feet and metres. To the ideas of achievement and growth was easily assimilated the idea of authenticity or “authoritativeness”’ (Theory 11). Thus, as agens, prime or motivating cause, the poet or author ‘fathers’ the work, acting upon the material cause of subject matter to vitalize it with literary form by binding its words together, both actions that imbue the work with authenticity and authority. As Minnis comments, the medieval definition of ‘authority’ was circular – an author’s work was worth reading, and a work worth reading had to be by an author (Theory 12). Dante never openly names agere as an etymon of ‘author’ in the Convivio. Yet through a subtle display of knowledge evident in the work’s controlling trope of the banquet, he claims several types of authority for the Convivio, including paternal agency, while he appears to deny them. Ostensibly, the food at Dante’s feast is philosophical knowledge, ‘the bread of the angels’ (4), and with mock humility Dante casts himself at the opening of the Convivio as one who does ‘not sit at the blessed table, but having fled the pasture of the common herd, gather[s] up a part of what falls to the feet of those who do sit there’ (4), namely, philosophers and other educated men. For all those other men who do not sit at the philosopher’s table, Dante shall prepare a humbler banquet, a commentary of ‘bread made with barley’ to accompany the ‘meat’ of his poetry (32). Yet such simple fare is accorded sublimity and its provider a high status indeed when, at the end of Convivio 1, Dante allusively compares

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himself to Christ feeding the 5,000 with five barley loaves and two fishes and filling twelve baskets with the leftover bread (John 6:5–13): ‘This commentary shall be that bread made with barley by which thousands shall be satiated, and my baskets shall be full to overflowing with it’ (32). Early in the Convivio, well before he discusses it in Book 4, Dante claims an authority far beyond that accorded the philosopher by Hugutio, for the poet’s writing is as worthy of faith and obedience as are Christ’s words and actions. Not only does Christ-like Dante provide ‘bread’ to the point of superfluity, but he purifies this nourishment in the manner of the servant at the banquet who ‘customarily take[s] the bread placed on the table and cleanse[s] it of any impurity’ (6). By this Dante means that he shall justify the use of the vernacular in a commentary for which Latin would be the traditional language. At the same time, Dante subtly shifts the register of reference from gospel accounts of Christ’s feast to classical and medieval embryological treatises, which explain the genesis of male sperm as the concoction – purification – of leftover or superfluous food. As I explained in the introduction, to Aristotle and his medieval followers spermatogenesis was an alimentary process by which superfluous ingested nourishment was concocted by the heart into blood, then further distilled by the seminal vessels into its purest form, the male seed, which contained the principle of motion, dynamis, that served as the efficient cause of generation. As Dante would later figure it in the Divine Comedy, male semen is the ‘perfect blood ... never drunk by the thirsty veins and ... left like food thou removest from the table’ (Purg. 25. 37–9; emphasis mine). From the very outset of the Convivio, then, Dante subtly lays claim to the kind of heterosexualized literary authority that causes or generates a text, just as male semen is the agent of foetation. Indeed, Dante’s bread ‘baskets’ are full to overflowing with the masculinized dynamic literary authority that generates the vernacular Convivio. Dante then tries to assimilate the volgare to the moving cause of the Convivio: himself. As he generated the Convivio, Dante analogizes, so the vernacular moved his parents to generate him: ‘This vernacular of mine,’ Dante remarks, ‘was what brought my parents together, for they conversed in it, just as it is the fire that prepares the iron for the smith who makes the knife; and so it is evident that it has contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being’ (31). However, the Aristotelian causal theory that Dante calls upon to aggrandize his own poetic role precludes his full enhancement of the

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vernacular. The way in which the vernacular caused the union between Dante’s parents differs fundamentally from the way in which Dante as efficient cause generates the Convivio, in the same way that, as I explained in chapter 1, Aristotle’s theory of intellection differed from his model of generation. ‘It is not impossible,’ Dante explains, ‘according to the Philosopher, as he says in the second book of the Physics, for a thing to have several efficient causes, although among them one is principal; thus the fire and hammer are the efficient causes of the knife, although the smith is the principal one’ (31). Like the smith’s fire and hammer, the vernacular must play a subsidiary productive role, not the principal formative role of the smith or of the poet-fabbro – Dante – that this craftsman traditionally analogizes. Nevertheless, as instrumental matchmaker in the union of his parents, the volgare here enjoys a more elevated (active) role than the totally subordinate (passive) position to which Dante had earlier consigned it in the Convivio. In that earlier passage, Dante enumerates the various reasons why ‘contemptible’ men of Italy celebrate another vernacular and despise their own. The second reason Dante gives for this linguistic perfidy is the ‘disingenuous excusing’ of writers who blame their literary faults on the native language in which they work and meanwhile praise the language that they have not been required to use. These writers rationalize their shortcomings, Dante continues, by ‘accus[ing] and blam[ing] their material [‘materia’] that is, their own vernacular,’ just as craftsmen blame a poor product ‘on the material [‘materia’] furnished for their craft, or on their tools’: ‘For example, a bad smith blames the iron supplied to him, and the bad lute player blames the lute, thinking to throw the fault of the bad knife or the bad music on the iron or the lute, and to remove it from himself’ (27). From its relatively privileged instrumental role, analogous to the fire that the smith uses to forge the knife, the vernacular descends here into the inert role of material cause, the iron formed into the knife. In yet another passage in the Convivio, the mother tongue slips even lower down the scale when Dante tropes it as the spurned mate, whose husband commits adultery by trafficking in other languages.8 If Dante’s efforts to find an honourable place for the mother tongue in scholastic literary theory go from bad to worse in the Convivio, there is one prophetic exception. In yet another passage in the Convivio, Dante tropes the native volgare as the language that is in a man’s mind first, as proximate as the relative who is ‘nearest’ to the father, namely, the son. This new relationship between the vernacular and Dante rearranges the traditional binary opposition between female and male, wife (mother)

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and husband (father), into the same-sex identification of the son with his nearest relative, his father. ‘A thing is nearest to the extent that of all things of its kind it is most closely related to another thing,’ Dante explains in the Convivio, and ‘thus of all men the son is nearest the father’ (29). Like the first-born son, who is so proximate to the father as to be an intrinsic part of him, the second self who inherits all because of his similarity to the father, the native vernacular exists within Dante: ‘And so a man’s vernacular is nearest to the extent that it is most closely related to him, for it is in his mind first and alone before any other; and not only is it related to him intrinsically but accidentally, since it is connected to those persons who are nearest to him, that is, his kin, his fellow citizens, and his own people ... The cause mentioned above, that that is more closely related which first exists alone in all the mind, induced people to adopt the custom of making the firstborn [sons] sole heirs, since they are the closest, and, because the closest, the most loved’ (29–30). Drawing upon the idea that the mother tongue is, in fact, a universal language, the natural or native language spoken by men and women alike, Dante attempts here to elevate the vernacular by associating it, however unclearly, with the realm of fathers and first-born sons. Yet a masculinized volgare resisted assimilation into Dante’s otherwise traditional hylomorphic poetics, and associating the mother tongue with men ran the risk of degrading them, figuratively equating them with unlettered women. Governed by its dominant alimentary metaphor of paternal literary authority, Dante’s Convivio searches but fails to find a noble place for the mother tongue in traditional theory, yet it points the way towards the radical solution that Dante would reach in the Comedy. Written in the same years as the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia (Of Eloquence in the Vernacular) also attempts to position the poet in the traditional role of the father and to enhance the vernacular. It is even less successful in reaching this accommodation. Indeed, most of the work’s energy goes to Dante’s novel self-aggrandizement as father-poet. Like the Convivio, De vulgari opens with Dante’s claim to paternal literary authority as the one who ‘concocts the sweetest possible mead’ from both his own thinking and ‘more potent ingredients,’ and it subsequently embeds Dante’s claim to paternal poetic agency within his role as one who ‘bind[s] words together’ (3). Nevertheless, the two works differ radically in tone and approach. Rather than enhance the vernacular by masculinizing it in a filial trope, the Latin De vulgari makes its bold and novel claim outright that the vernacular or native language, espe-

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cially Italian (Tuscan), is always nobler than any artificial language, including Latin. The work begins, Ascoli observes, not with the mock humility of the Convivio but with the narrator’s claim of ‘autonomous originality and modernity simultaneously’ (‘Author’ 57). ‘I find,’ Dante asserts as the De vulgari opens, ‘that no one, before myself, has dealt in any way with the theory of eloquence in the vernacular’ (3). However, as the De vulgari moves from its first book, which touts the ‘illustrious, cardinal, aulic [courtly] and curial’ vernacular ‘that is called Italian’ (45) to its second book, which privileges the canzone as the noblest expression of the high or tragic style, and as Dante cloaks his claim to paternal agency within his self-figuration as one who ties up ‘bundles’ of words to form the De vulgari, the vernacular ultimately becomes passive material acted upon by the poet. At the opening of chapter 8 in Book 2, which Ascoli calls the ‘decisive’ chapter on poetic authority in De vulgari (‘Author’ 63), Dante takes the pose of one who has ‘gathered the sticks and cords for our bundle’ (69), which the time has come to put together, and he closes this chapter by declaring that he has made it ‘plain enough ... what this bundle we are preparing to tie together may be’ (73). The bundle, as Dante elaborates in the course of chapter 8, is the vernacular canzone, and the canzone, Dante continues, is defined as ‘an act of singing [canenda], in an active or a passive sense’ (71). With the introduction of the terms ‘active’ and ‘passive’ into the discussion, Dante’s argument reverberates with concepts of medieval speculative grammar, which Marianne Shapiro calls ‘one of the prizes of Aristotelian method’ (136), and segues from the realm of poetic authority derived from auieo to that derived from agere. The canzone is active insofar as it is ‘something created by an author, so that there is an action,’ and passive insofar as ‘this creation is performed, either by the author or by someone else’ (71). That is, only the person who composes and never the person who merely performs the canzone can claim creative agency. ‘The proof of this,’ Dante concludes, ‘is the fact that we never say “that’s Peter’s song” when referring to something Peter has performed, but only to something he has written’ (71). Ascoli observes that while Dante offers no formal etymology, it is clear that the ‘“autore” of the “cantio” is ... the medieval “actor” from “agere” (to do, to make), whose name stresses his direct agency in constructing the work’ (‘Author’ 63). Through a second etymological association, Dante links the named ‘autore’ of the canzone with another named poet, Virgil. Dante translates Italian canzone into Latin cantio, which derives from the same

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root as cano, ‘I sing,’ the initial verbal phrase of the Aeneid that evidences the work’s ‘active’ aspect: ‘cantio has a double meaning – one usage refers to something created by an author, so that there is action, and this is the sense in which Virgil uses the word in the first book of the Aeneid when he writes “arma virumque cano”’ (71). One derived from auieo and the other from agere, the two types of poetic authority that Dante invokes in the works preceding the composition of the Comedy are thoroughly informed by the heterosexualized concept of verbal art as artefact that stresses the agency of the artisan who shapes or orders material into its final form. Although both artisanautores spring from the same conceptualization of poetry as the product of masculine action upon feminine matter, in the Convivio as well as in De vulgari Dante presents himself as Aristotelian agens more elusively than he tropes himself as the word-binder, embedding the former identity in the latter, as I have discussed earlier. At the same time, Dante’s self-presentation as efficient cause is more imaginative, elaborate, and ultimately more useful than is his alternative poetic pose. It is as the ‘active’ autore of the canzone that Dante links himself to the ancient poet whom he would soon elect to mentor him through much of the Comedy; that association, John Scott maintains, caused Dante to abandon the De vulgari and begin the work in which he fully exploited his identification with Virgil (‘Convivio’ 113). A better explanation for Dante’s failure to complete the De vulgari as well as the Convivio, however, lies in the apparent inability of either work both to enhance the mother tongue and to assimilate it into traditional hylomorphic theory. The De vulgari was no more successful than the Convivio in theorizing the nobility of the vernacular. At the same time as Dante asserts the superiority of the ‘natural’ volgare to ‘artificial’ Latin, he not only feminizes but infantilizes the vernacular as the language that children ‘learn without any formal instruction, by imitating [their] nurses’ (3) and finds no way to model its elevated position in the traditional poetics of the De vulgari. It would require a radical reconfiguration of Dante’s literary theory, particularly of his own role as maker, to accommodate the mother tongue, and in both the Convivo and the De vulgari, as I have shown, Dante continued to position himself, however subtly, as the father-poet. In the Comedy, I next argue, Dante surrendered the heteronormative guise of father-poet for a deviant poetic identity. The first poetic that the pilgrim-poet encounters in the Inferno, that of the sodomite Brunetto Latini, also fails to accommodate a female literary principle and Dante

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must reject it as non-productive. Yet this perverse literary model ironically prefigures the queer poetic of the vernacular that Dante eventually subscribes to in the Purgatorio, and Brunetto’s infernal aesthetic will ultimately be redeemed as Dante writes heaven in the Paradiso. Dante’s obsession with authority and the vernacular primarily manifests itself in the numerous metaliterary sites of the Comedy, and I shall focus here upon those that thematize the necessity of a disorderly literary authority – a queer poetic – for the vernacular poet who would write heaven. These sites include the pilgrim Dante’s interactions with his poet-guides, Virgil and Statius; his numerous invocations and addresses to the reader that have long intrigued critics (e.g., Auerbach, Spitzer); his self-induction into the school of classical poets, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil, in the Inferno; his controversial meeting with his ex-mentor, the rhetorician Brunetto Latini, in the Inferno; and his enigmatic encounter with a contemporary poet, Sordello, in the Antepurgatory. I shall also explore Dante’s interactions with the vernacular writers, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guido Guinizelli, and Arnaut Daniel, in the so-called cantos of the poets, Purgatorio 21–7, in which, Christopher Kleinhenz observes, ‘poetry, if not the main topic of discussion, always looms large’ (‘Virgil’ 41). Finally, I shall pay particular attention to the densely packed intertextual episode in the Purgatorio in which the pilgrim Dante dreams himself the Ganymede of medieval Ovidian homoerotic verse and awakes to find himself the Achilles of Statius’s Achilleid. Infernal Writing in the Comedy: Pederasty, Sodomy, and the Mother Tongue After the pilgrim’s initial meeting of Virgil, Dante’s next encounter with literary figures in the Comedy occurs in Canto 4 of the Inferno. As Virgil and Dante approach Limbo, the first circle of Hell reserved for virtuous heathens and the unbaptized, a communal voice hails Virgil as the ‘lofty poet’ (80) and welcomes him back to the group. For Dante’s benefit, Virgil names and ranks the four shades who have greeted him: first Homer, the ‘sovereign poet,’ who ‘comes before the other three as their lord’ (86–7), next Horace, Ovid third, and Lucan last. Virgil rejoins his group, and the five poets talk among themselves before turning to invite Dante to join their circle. Because they are in Limbo, the realm of ‘grief without torment,’ the shades can show no emotion; when they first approach Dante and Virgil, ‘their looks were neither sad nor joyful’ (85). But when the group turns to acknowledge Dante with a ‘sign of greeting’

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(98), Virgil breaks out in a smile, and Dante’s pleasure is almost palpable as he narrates how the poets showed him the ‘still greater honor’ (100) of making him the ‘sixth among those high intelligences’ (102). Once enrolled in this august company of the great poets of antiquity, Dante talks with them of the ‘things that were fitting for that place and of which it is well to be silent now’ (104–5), subjects, that is, reserved to poets as lofty as Dante and his classical companions. As part of his larger project of divulgazion – the translation of classical culture into the Italian vernacular – in the Comedy, Dante represents his communication with this group of ancient authors as taking place in Italian rather than Latin,9 even if he shields what was actually said, yet one of the understood bonds among these men is their Latinity,10 an aspect of their association soon to come under scrutiny in the Comedy. William Franke observes that from the Convivio on, Dante had endeavoured to vulgarize the clerical knowledge ‘theretofore reserved largely for sterile fruition by the few learned in a dead language’ (7). Dante’s assertion that he belongs among the great poets of antiquity evokes the bemused comment from one modern reader that Dante cannot be accused of false modesty (Durling 82–3). Yet Inferno 4 does more than boast. It introduces the view of classical poetry as a communal activity as well as a homosocial one. In what David Wallace terms the ‘sixth of six’ topos (Chaucerian Polity 80–2), which, I have noted, he finds in Chaucer, the six male poets – Virgil, Homer, Horace, Lucan, Ovid, and Dante – stroll along together talking of poetry among themselves until they reach the castle that houses other noble pagans. In actuality, later in the Inferno, Dante expresses contempt for Lucan and Ovid rather than community with them, in one reader’s view because Dante cannot appropriate them to Christianity (Brownlee, ‘Dante’ 101). And while Dante may not have known the most famous classical female poet, Sappho, it remains true that he masculinizes the community of ancient poets in Inferno 4 by associating it with Apollo, ‘that lord of the loftiest song who flies like an eagle’ (96–7), whereas Dante’s sole subsequent reference to Homer and the ancient poets in the Comedy feminizes the group by singling out Homer as the one whom the Muses suckled above all the others (Purg. 22.101–2). In short, Dante constructs this early encounter with literary figures to indicate poetry’s origins in male homosociality. Further, in its autobiographical dimension, Inferno 4 thematizes learning: Dante is invited to join the great classical poets of antiquity because he has studied them and learned the craft of poetry from them. Indeed,

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when Dante refers to Limbo’s homosocial community of writers as the ‘noble school’ (‘la bella scola,’ Inf. 4.24) and to Virgil as his ‘good master’ (‘buon maestro,’ Inf. 4.31), he tropes himself as Virgil’s prize student. In the Purgatorio, Virgil acknowledges his role as Dante’s teacher (‘dottore,’ 21.22) by figuring his guidance of Dante through hell and purgatory as his schooling (‘mia scola,’ 21.33) of the pilgrim. Although Dante later refers to Saints Dominic and James and to his ultimate guide, Saint Bernard, who replaces even Beatrice, as masters (Par. 12.85, 25.64, 32.2, respectively), outside Paradise Dante honours Virgil alone by naming him his ‘dolce pedagogo’ (gentle schoolmaster, Purg. 12.3).11 While Virgil’s role as teacher prefigures the sacerdotal function of the explicitly Christian instructors of the Paradiso (Hatzfeld 78), Virgil’s scola finds its counterpart in Hell – and in the poet Dante’s autobiographical past – not in heaven. The characterization of poetry as an ancient male homosocial practice shared by teachers and students in Inferno 4 anticipates the ‘fleetingly reconstructed classroom’ scene of Inferno 15 in which Dante encounters his historical ex-mentor, Brunetto Latini, whom he has positioned among the sodomites, including the grammarian Priscian (Barkan 59). The textual evidence for Brunetto’s mentorship of Dante lies in the pilgrim’s statement that ‘from hour to hour [Brunetto] taught [him] how man makes himself immortal’ (Inf. 15.84–5). Julia Bolton Holloway finds it improbable that the historical Latini officially instructed Dante, for Latini’s other duties would have left him little time for teaching. Yet Dante’s friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti, is also considered a disciple of Latini, and it is likely, Holloway concludes, ‘Latini and Dante’s relationship was informal – shall we say like that of Plato to Socrates and of Cicero’s circle in Tusculum? – consisting of hour-long conversations in Florentine piazzas’ (‘Tesoretto’ xvii). This historical relationship between Dante and Latini thus parallels the fictive relationship in the Comedy between Dante and Virgil, whom the pilgrim has also adopted as an unofficial mentor (dottore), and, as I shall argue shortly, the contained interaction between teacher and pupil in the ‘classroom scene’ of Canto 15 serves as a foil for Dante’s more extended interaction with Virgil. Controversial ever since Dante wrote it, the classroom scene still fascinates readers (e.g., D’Antoni), occasions review essays and bibliographies (Contrada, Pezard), and garners the historical Brunetto more attention than he might otherwise receive (Holloway, Latini; R. Kay, ‘Sin[s]’). The superficial problem is that, were it not for Dante’s Inferno, we would not hear of Brunetto’s homosexuality (Armour, ‘Paterine’) –

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even though, Boswell comments, we would not know of the heterosexual love between Paolo and Francesca da Rimini either were it not for Dante (‘Dante’ 67) – and sodomy is a sin that Brunetto condemns harshly in his Il Tesoretto.12 Readers have found it difficult to believe that Dante would be so perfidious as to ‘defile’ his former mentor, a man he still reveres, by inventing such an accusation (Frecerro, ‘Image’ 66). A final piece of allegedly ‘incontrovertible evidence’ against Brunetto’s homosexuality, Peter Armour asserts, is that Brunetto was a ‘family man,’ with two or three sons and a daughter (‘Pessimist’ 2).13 The underlying anxiety no doubt results from the prospect of Dante’s guilt by association with Brunetto and from the long-standing more general resistance to any sexual interpretations of the Comedy (Ahern, Psaki). Until recently, most readers have stripped Brunetto’s sin of any literal sexual valence and interpreted it as an intellectual vice of one sort or another: ‘professional perversions’ (Ferrante, Vision 161) that led Brunetto and his fellow sodomites to direct their talents to sterile, ‘unnatural ends’ (R. Kay, Essays 18, ‘Sin[s]’ 28). In turn, many of these readings themselves have flattened the contours of an immensely suggestive scene.14 I look next at a more recent interpretation, by Bruce Holsinger, that reinstates sexuality in the passage, not so much because I find it necessary to expose Dante’s ‘open secret,’ but because Holsinger’s analysis restores the level of complexity – and ambivalence – to this scene that other readers now detect (e.g., Camille, ‘Pose’) and that I shall also claim. Rather than insist upon Dante’s ‘erotic purity,’ Holsinger wonders what would happen if we read Dante’s consignment of his master to the realm of the sodomites as the ‘quintessential premodern meditation on the closet,’ that is, not as the poet’s condemnation of Brunetto but as his ‘anxious attempt to distance himself from his master’s sodomitical desires’ that nearly fails because of ‘his own homoerotic desire’ (248). To accomplish such a reading, Holsinger establishes the overall context for Dante’s sexualized interaction with Brunetto and the sodomites. ‘More than one scholar,’ Holsinger begins, ‘has seen Brunetto’s eager fingering of Dante’s hem (lembo) (Inf. 15.24) as the initial step in his “cruising” of the pilgrim,’ an ‘eroticized progression that concludes with Brunetto’s graphic description of the sodomite Andrea de’ Mozzi, the noble Florentine bishop with “sinfully distended muscles” (“protesi nervi,” 15.114)’ (249). ‘Nervus’ conventionally refers to the penis (Adams 22, 25, 38, 224). Before Brunetto reaches that ‘erotic crescendo,’ Holsinger continues, he images Dante the pilgrim as a barren fico, fig, which can also

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signify the vagina and anus in classical sources and thus calls into play ‘the close association between figs and male-male sexual practices ... [that] informs Priscian’s Grammar, one of the most popular grammatical texts in the medieval schoolroom.’ Ventriloquizing through Brunetto, Dante the poet presents Dante the pilgrim ‘as an object of male homoerotic desire, the fico to be desired but never tasted by the Fiesolans’ (250–1). And how does Dante the pilgrim react to being ‘cruised’ by Brunetto? Here Holsinger’s reading suggests a level of ambivalence sufficient to account for the pilgrim’s simultaneous attraction to and condemnation of Brunetto that has so puzzled readers. When, in the next canto, Dante says he wishes to throw himself ‘down among them’ (Inf. 16.47) – the sodomites – he not only identifies his desire with Bruentto’s but ‘comes very close to abandoning his visionary quest for Beatrice in favor of the company of the sodomites,’ Holsinger observes (252). As the pilgrim pointedly remarks, he believes that Virgil, his ‘teacher’ (‘dottore,’ 16.48), would not have prevented him from joining the sodomites. But fear of the fire restrains Dante, fear of being ‘burnt and baked’ (16.49). Furthermore, Holsinger concludes, the pilgrim’s epic poem disallows ‘his self-abandonment to sodomitical pleasure just as the Aeneid demanded its hero’s abandonment of Dido’ (252). But, for Holsinger, the pilgrim Dante remains an ‘insistently queer subject’ (246) whose deep-seated homoerotic desire will surface repeatedly in the Comedy until, in the Paradiso, ‘perverse bodily practices’ are universalized and ‘the intimacy between perversion and salvation’ is fully revealed (265–9). Once uncovered, the literal sexual valences of Inferno 15 that form the subject of Holsinger’s perceptive reading enrich Dante’s wider use of sexual tropes in the area that concerns me here: poetics. Ferrante argues that ‘it is Dante’s technique to begin with the sin named and move into larger implications.’ In Brunetto’s case, Ferrante continues, ‘the same perverted thinking that allows the indulgence of [his] sexual appetites permits the abuse of [his] professional position’ (Vision 161–2); Barolini maintains, as well, that Brunetto’s actual sodomy correlates to the figurative sterility of ‘predicating the eternity of [his] soul upon a text’ (Poets 229). Holsinger’s reading suggests that such correlations also extend to the pilgrim Dante. When the pilgrim identifies himself with Brunetto’s sexual sin, his homoerotic desire is manifested in Dante’s intellectual pursuits – the perverse literary practices of the Latin past that are characterized as homoerotic in Inferno 15. Anticipated in the male homosocial relationships of the ‘bella scola’ that has admitted Dante to its

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ranks in Inferno 4, these poetic practices attract Dante and will continue to do so throughout the Comedy. Yet Dante’s quest to theorize – hence to justify and to valorize – the vernacular demands that he ultimately abandon an exclusively masculine, even male-male, poetic, just as his epic poem disallows his joining the ranks of the sodomites with Brunetto. Throughout the ‘schoolroom’ scene, however, the pilgrim indulges himself in an extended homoerotic intertextuality in which he intermingles fragments of Brunetto’s text, the Tesoro, with his own text and that ends with Brunetto’s attempt to inscribe his text on Dante. To Holsinger such intertextuality forges a ‘confused identification’ between Dante and Brunetto that recalls to readers the sin for which the master had been condemned to the Inferno: sodomy (249). Dante further implicates himself in perverse poetics in the schoolroom scene by figuring his body as the instrument rather than agent of his own text. As I explored in chapter 2, this passive aesthetic retained its association with pederasty in the Middle Ages. It is the ‘dear and kind paternal image’ of Brunetto ‘fixed’ in Dante’s memory that scripts his current verse in praise of the man who taught him how to make himself eternal through poetry (Inf. 15.84–5). Holsinger observes that Dante rewrites a classically heteroerotic image from the Aeneid – Aeneas’s looks and words ‘fixed’ in Dido’s bosom – to represent the ‘productive effects’ of Brunetto’s imagine upon his writing (249). Near the end of his intertextual encounter with Brunetto, Dante acknowledges his continuing queerly instrumental relationship with his former teacher by writing what Brunetto has told him of his future: ‘that which you tell me of my course I write’ (Inf. 15.88). In Holsinger’s view, Brunetto’s words become Dante’s ‘ink and inscribe the pilgrim’s corso on the text of his life’; putting his textual body at his former teacher’s disposal, Dante enmeshes himself in a homoerotic web of poetry, pedagogy, and pederasty, ‘the extraordinary constellation of sodomy and knowing, poetics and hermeneutics’ (248). Yet, no matter how attracted Dante is to Brunetto and the bella scola, as I shall explore shortly, in the Purgatorio Dante’s quest to devise a poetics of the vernacular causes him to suppress the scriptive desire that characterizes his interactions with pedagogi past and present. The larger implications of Brunetto’s sodomy, which complement those of Dante the pilgrim’s homoerotic desire, fall into two interrelated categories: Brunetto’s informal role as mentor and his vernacular linguistic practices – specifically his choice to write the work he names in Inferno 15, the Tesoro, in the non-native vernacular of French.15 Brunetto’s

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instructional role evokes the traditional association of teachers of grammar with sodomy, a linkage Dante highlights by including, among the sodomites in Inferno 15, the quintessential grammarian for the Middle Ages: Priscian. When Boccaccio later glossed Inferno 15, he noted that ‘since there is no evidence to indicate that Priscian was guilty of this vice, it would appear that the author is making Priscian represent teachers of grammar, who seem to be commonly tainted with this vice – perhaps because the young men they teach are so easily accessible’ (qtd in Singleton 1:270). Yet Brunetto’s sin as teacher comprises not only pederasty but the figurative lack of fructification in his parting instruction to his former protégé: ‘Let my Treasure, in which I yet live, be commended to thee’ (Inf. 15.119–20). Lillian Bisson observes that ‘though [Brunetto] tells Dante to follow his own star, Brunetto’s parting comment is, “Read my book.”’ What Brunetto really desires is that Dante perpetuate his master’s fame, Bisson continues, and this constitutes Brunetto’s intellectual or figurative sodomy: ‘On an intellectual level [Brunetto] disobeys God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. Herein lies his sodomy: he is violating the mentor-student relationship by making it an instrument for his own satisfaction and pleasure rather than making himself the selfless vehicle through whom his disciple can pursue truth and achieve a greater good’ (12). Richard Kay largely agrees with Bisson that Brunetto’s textual dominance – ‘read my book’ – is at the heart of his professional offence: ‘As is often the case with advisers who seek to live through their advisees, Brunetto tends to maximize his own influence on Dante and to exclude that of all others. Brunetto himself would have been the best guide in Dante’s work, he seems to say, but since he is no longer available, Dante should follow his star to the goal that Brunetto had foreseen, and in default of the master himself, the Tresor will guide him’ (Essays 17). In poetic terms, however, it is not Brunetto’s frustration of Dante’s pursuit of ‘truth’ and the ‘greater good’ per se nor his claim of exclusivity as guide that constitutes the master’s intellectual sodomy, but his attempt to impose his own text upon his student, to inscribe it upon Dante’s corso. Rather than instruct Dante to ‘read my book,’ Brunetto should encourage Dante to ‘rewrite my book’; for in hylomorphic poetics, it is through such rewriting that new texts are generated. Behind Brunetto’s failure to contribute to Dante’s poetic creativity lies his own failure to increase and multiply his native vernacular, Italian. The one text that Brunetto names in Inferno 15, his Tesoro, he wrote in French

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rather than in his mother tongue. André Pezard contends that Brunetto’s condemnation for sodomy stems from this linguistic transgression. Just as sodomy frustrates procreation, Pezard maintains, so does Brunetto’s renunciation of his ‘mother tongue’ frustrate that language’s efforts to expand and multiply (302). If Dante desires to and nearly does succumb to Brunetto’s textual dominance, he nevertheless leaves his former master behind – at least he rejects his infernal poetic throughout the Purgatorio – and in his ongoing relationship with his other teacher, Virgil, Dante achieves the stance that models his ideal poetic. Bisson remarks that in Inferno 15 Dante ‘begins to define his poetic mission by juxtaposing two of the masters to whom he had apprenticed himself: Brunetto Latini and Virgil. He distances himself from the former while aligning himself with the latter’ (8). Poetically, Dante ‘aligns’ himself with Virgil not by allowing himself to be inscribed with the master’s text but by mastering Virgil and the Aeneid. In part, Dante chooses a pagan text, the Aeneid, as his exemplar for the Comedy because he must rewrite it for a Christian audience, and he chooses Virgil as his literary mentor because he must leave him behind as he ascends to Paradise. Further, he rejects Brunetto not only because this mentor accepted rather than rewrote ancient texts (R. Witt 58–9) and precluded Dante’s rewriting, but because Brunetto himself did not increase and multiply his native vernacular when he wrote the Tesoro in French. Dante does not suddenly upstage Virgil at the end of the Purgatorio, readers have observed (Barolini, Poets 202; Whitfield 73–4). The master’s lessening of authority begins much earlier in the second canticle, for instance, Virgil’s admission that his discourse may not ‘relieve [Dante’s] hunger’ (Purg. 15.76). Indeed, I have noted that, as early as Inferno 15, Dante rewrites a heteroerotic image from the Aeneid, ironically enough, to figure Brunetto’s ‘productive’ effects upon him, yet Dante has already begun to enact a new model of literary productivity while still attracted to the infernal one. Unlike Brunetto, who would have his French text live on and direct his former protégé, Virgil is deliberately designed to have a disappearing textual influence on the pilgrim narrator. Even if Dante might continue Virgil by inventing his conversion and salvation, as Dante arguably fabricated Statius’s Christianization (Kleinhenz, ‘Celebration’ 31–2), to perpetuate Virgil’s power would be to undercut the point that poets must rewrite the past rather than be written by it. In Jeremy Tambling’s words, Dante’s poetic project in the Comedy is not to prolong the life of Virgil’s text but to create his own new text by

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taking ‘a poet dead for the past 1300 years, who wrote in Latin, not Italian, and revaluing his work, not by simple critical reading, but by revision, re-writing. [Dante] initiates thus a sense that what is of the past ... must itself be re-written: the past cannot be accepted as a single univocal authority, to play tradition to his individual talent’ (6). Whereas Brunetto’s text would extend its own life through Dante, Virgil’s text is made to surrender its authority. In this respect, Brunetto remains in hell as the representative of sodomitical poetics, while Virgil moves ahead with Dante into Purgatory and is increasingly co-opted into his student’s construction of a new poetic. The nature of Brunetto’s sin against the vernacular, however, is both echoed and elucidated in the last encounter between Dante and another poet before the pilgrim begins his penitential ascent of the mountain, Purgatory. Sordello’s Sin: The Barren City In the Antepurgatory, reserved for negligent eleventh-hour penitents and divided from Purgatory proper by a cliff, Virgil and Dante come upon the duecento Italian poet Sordello. Virgil seeks help from him in navigating their ascent of the mountain, for, having left Hell, Virgil is now upon unfamiliar territory. Indeed, from cantos 6 to 9 in the Purgatorio until Dante and Virgil enter Purgatory proper, Sordello assumes the role of guide. Sitting with the regal, disdainful bearing of the couching lion, Sordello not only ignores Virgil’s question, but fails to recognize him, both signs of Virgil’s diminished authority in this area that straddles Hell and Purgatory proper. Instead, Sordello questions Virgil about his national identity. When Virgil names Mantua (in its Latinized form, Mantova) as his birthplace, Sordello springs to life and embraces Virgil, naming himself as ‘Sordello of thy city’ (Purg. 6.72). This embrace signifies a political unity missing in Dante’s contemporary Italy, and because he serves as an emblem of such harmony, critics have argued, Sordello is endowed with a regal bearing and made the pilgrim’s temporary guide. Yet in what immediately follows the embrace – Dante’s (commonly mistaken as Sordello’s) famous diatribe against the political divisiveness of Italy – lies the explanation for Sordello’s condemnation to Antepurgatory. Dante’s invective indicts those rulers who have abandoned their responsibilities in his native land. In a series of related metaphors, he tropes the negligent princes as pilots who have deserted their ships, riders who no longer sit in the saddle. The result of such negligence

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Dante figures in gendered terms: without proper masculine control, Italy has turned into a brothel, just as the riderless horse, gendered female, becomes ‘untamed and savage’ (Purg. 6.98). But the real danger of such negligence, Dante rails at ‘German Albert’ (the Emperor Albert of Saxony, who never came to Italy), is not that either Albert or Italy has become a harlot, but that Italy is rendered a companionless widow. Echoing Lamentations 1:1, ‘How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is the mistress of the Gentiles become as a widow,’ Dante calls upon Albert to perform his conjugal duties as male companion: ‘Come and see thy Rome, that weeps, widowed and solitary, and cries night and day, “Caesar, my Lord, why dost thou deny me thy companionship”’ (Purg. 6.112–14). Dante shows no concern that Albert and other negligent rulers pilot other ships, ride other horses, and serve as companions to other women. His passionate complaint, inflected with the biblical overtones of Lamentations, is that Italy is not fructified by its rightful rulers and thus is rendered barren, unpeopled. As adulterers, Albert and the other indicted princes sow their seeds elsewhere, yet the effect of their harlotry on Rome and Italy is sodomy’s effect: the lack of issue that Dante attributes to improper political management. Sordello’s relevance to Dante’s invective against negligent rulers lies not merely in the fact that the historical Sordello also wrote a minor criticism of princes, but that, linguistically, Sordello exemplifies the vice of negligence that Dante condemns in princes. Scott explains that Sordello was an Italian who wrote in another country’s ‘illustrious’ vernacular, Provençal, and that Dante targets such ‘“wicked Italians”’ who desert their native language (Purgatory 115). The whole of the eleventh chapter of the Convivio 1, Scott continues, attacks ‘“the loathsome and evil [Italians] who consider this precious vernacular to be base, which, if it is any base, is so only in the fact that it issues from the harlot mouth of these adulterers”’ (11.21; trans. in Scott, Purgatory 115). In Convivio 1.10.5, Dante characterizes the love of one’s native tongue as a ‘natural’ love. As Cesare Vasoli and Domenico De Robertis paraphrase these passages in the Convivio, ‘those who prefer a foreign vernacular to their own are guilty of adultery toward their own language and, therefore, “traitors”; and their mouth is that of a harlot because it is servile and despicable, since it basely praises a foreign language to which they are not bound “by the natural love for one’s native tongue” (X.5)’ (78; trans. in Scott, Purgatory 115). Like Albert and other rulers who neglect their conjugal duties to Italy and embrace other countries, Sordello commits linguistic adultery by

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writing in Provençal rather than in the Italian vernacular. It was not Dante’s unequivocal antipathy to the French, a misconception in any case (R. Cooper), but Sordello’s adulterous lack of a ‘natural love’ for his native tongue that draws Dante’s ire. It causes the ‘unnatural’ consequences that Dante laments in his political tirade of Purgatorio 6: as the widowed city becomes barren of people, so the Italian vernacular cannot multiply without Sordello’s amorous companionship. Like Brunetto, who traffics in languages other than his native Italian, Sordello frustrates the flowering of his native language by turning his favour to Provençal. That Sordello is in Antepurgatory rather than in Brunetto’s Hell may reflect the fact that the ‘unnatural’ consequences he causes are solely intellectual rather than both intellectual and physical. By the same token, other than Brunetto, Sordello is only one of two contemporary poets denied entrance to Purgatory by Dante. The other, Bertran de Born, has misused his seed in a different fashion, as Dante’s trope indicates: Bertran is condemned to the eighth circle of Hell as a ‘sower of schism and discord’ (‘seminator di scandalo e di scisma,’ Inf. 28.35). Dante’s dramatization of infernal writing in Hell and Antepurgatory draws upon both a homosocial and homoerotic paradigm of textuality that runs counter to the conventional model of heterosexualized scholastic authority in which the poet generates literary offspring. The classical poets reproduce themselves not by ‘fathering’ Dante but by teaching him, as Brunetto does. In Brunetto’s case, this relationship is figured as the pederastic scriptive relationship in which the master inscribes the student’s body. Ultimately, Dante reclaims this homoerotic model of textual production. Indeed, Dante will reinstate pederastic poetics to model his literary relationship with his new male mentors in the Paradiso. ‘Dottore’ Virgil remains the revered guide until the last possible minute in the Purgatorio, even if his authority must diminish. And while Dante condemns Brunetto to the burning sands of Hell, he also honours his former mentor in his title of address, ‘ser Brunetto’ (Inf. 15.30). What Dante does explicitly reject as he enters the middle realm of the Comedy is the pedagogue’s traditional medium, Latin, as well as use of the non-native vernacular. In the respect that both Latin and foreign vernaculars fail to multiply the native language, the effect of their use is as sterile as the burning sands of sodomy in Inferno 15. As Dante leaves Hell and the Antepurgatory, he appears ready to abandon what he has defined as unnatural linguistic practices – those that do not increase the native vernacular – and adopt ‘natural’ ones, but the poetic that Dante develops in the Purgatorio bears little resemblance to the traditional

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hylomorphic paradigm of art that mimics the medieval model of generation. Indeed, infernal poetics has already anticipated the queer vernacular aesthetic that emerges in the Purgatorio as the pilgrim-poet dreams himself Ganymede and wakes as Achilles. Dreaming Himself Ganymede, Waking as Achilles As early as Inferno 15, Dante prepares the way for the Comedy’s new queer poetic of the vernacular by imagining the regendering of his textual production from a same-sex practice to one that includes the feminine: the pilgrim envisions that he shall give the sodomitical text he has transcribed from Brunetto to a woman, Beatrice, to read. In constructing a female reader of his text, Dante creates the binary opposite to himself as reader and thus apparently signals his intent to refashion the image of his own art in Inferno 15 as the product of an intertexualized homoerotic encounter into the conventional medieval figuration of the male author who writes to and for a woman, either a female patron or beloved, and presents the text to her on bended knee at court. As reader of a male text, woman reconstitutes the binary opposition of scholastic art by functioning as the passive recipient of masculine artistic agency, for reading in the Middle Ages was figured as the imprinting of the text on the ‘page’ of the reader’s memory. To read, in a sense, was to be written, and in projecting his role as Brunetto’s writing surface onto Beatrice, Dante appears ready to heterosexualize his poetic practice. Yet Dante imagines not simply that Beatrice will read his text, but that she will co-write it: ‘That which you [Brunetto] tell me of my course I write and keep with another text for comment by a lady who will know, if I reach her’ (Inf. 15.88–90). In envisioning Beatrice as a commentator on his verse, Dante invokes the queer model of courtly love that I discussed in chapter 2, yet he expands it to accommodate the beloved as more than merely an instrumental cause, for poetic agency is shared between a male and a female co-creator. If Dante appears to leave behind the homosocial and homoerotic writing of the Inferno, the trajectory he plots does not follow a certain path to a conventional poetic. In Dante’s actual passage into Purgatory, which coincides with his departure from Sordello in the Antepurgatory, a similar ambiguity hovers over his future course. Falling asleep, Dante dreams of Ganymede. As he wakes, he thinks of Achilles, and Virgil soon explains to Dante that St Lucy has transported him to Purgatory proper, leaving Sordello behind. Purgatorio 9 thus marks an important transition between the enclosed,

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static kingdom of Hell, imaged by Dante as an inverse cone, and the open, ascending terraces of the mountain of Purgatory. Dante draws attention to the difference between the two realms by announcing that he now rises to ‘a higher theme,’ and thus readers should not be surprised if he ‘sustain[s] it with greater art’ (Purg. 9.70–2). The actual transport scene, however, maintains both realms in superb equipoise. As St Lucy carries Dante aloft to Purgatory, the pilgrim dreams that he is Ganymede seized and borne aloft by the golden eagle. Dante’s fictively real and imagined raptures momentarily yoke the pagan and Christian worlds, Dante’s former homoerotic poetic identity with one that now includes, however unclearly positioned, a feminine element. Although readers of Dante have long insisted upon interpreting the pilgrim’s identification with Ganymede as an allegory of spiritual rather than physical rapture, two features of Dante’s passage resist that view. First, Dante specifically refers to the Ganymede of classical myth, who was borne aloft to the ‘supreme conclave’ (Purg. 9.24), that is, to Jove, whose cup-bearer he became. Holsinger argues that Dante’s narration of the Ganymede episode deliberately resonates with Orpheus’s account of boys beloved by gods in Metamorphoses 10 (255), Orpheus himself enjoying such love with Thracian youths. Dante not only ‘dreams himself Ganymede,’ as Leonard Barkan phrases it (62), but sings himself Orpheus. Even failing a deliberate echo of Ovid’s pederastic Orpheus, Dante’s Ganymede nevertheless evokes the cup-bearer of the popular medieval ‘Debate between Helen and Ganymede,’ the figure who defends samesex coupling on grammatical grounds – hic with hic – and thus links male homoeroticism with language in its written form. When Dante the pilgrim dreams that he stands in Ganymede’s place and an eagle with golden feathers swoops down, snatches him, and carries him aloft, at the least he fantasizes his own intertextual involvement with the infernal poetics that informed the coupling of his text with Brunetto’s writings in Inferno 15. Further encouragement to read the Ganymede passage in Purgatorio 9 literally rather than allegorically lies in the fact that the fictively real counterpart to the eagle’s transport of Dante – St Lucy’s carrying him aloft – already signals the pilgrim’s spiritual rapture. To read Jove’s eagle as replicating Lucy’s textual function prematurely resolves the tension that Dante constructs in this passage between his different realms of cultural background and identification, antique and biblical. That resolution occurs later as the pilgrim wakes from dreaming himself Ganymede and figuratively assimilates himself to Achilles: ‘Even

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as Achilles started up, turning his awakened eyes about him and not knowing where he was, when his mother carried him off sleeping in her arms from Chiron to Scyros, whence later the Greeks took him away, so I started, as soon as sleep left my eyes, and turned pale, like one that is chilled with fear’ (Purg. 9.34–42). The reference is to the Achilleid of Statius; the fictional Statius, soon to appear in the Purgatorio, will lay claim to his epic by way of apologizing for its incompleteness (Purg. 21.19). The episode on Scyros occurred early in the Trojan war. In Statius’s narration, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, attempting to prevent her son’s muster into the Greek forces, took him to the island of Scyros and there tried to convince him to disguise himself in women’s clothes and hide at court among the daughters of King Lycomedes. To persuade Achilles that the ‘sexual ambiguity’ (‘ambigui ... sexus’) that would be caused by his cross-dressing need not ‘weaken’ him, Thetis cites the examples of Jupiter, Hercules, Bacchus, and Caenus. (Jupiter disguised himself as Diana to gain access to Callisto, whom he raped; Hercules spun wool for Omphale in recompense for murdering Iphitus; Bacchus forced his followers to wear female attire; and Caenus, a woman transformed into a man by Neptune, valiantly battled against the centaurs, who eventually overcame him.) Thetis further argues that the protective bath she has given Achilles in the waters of the Styx will guard him against the dishonour of ‘safe robes’ (529). However, Achilles stands firm. The ‘thought of his sire and his great teacher,’ Chiron, who has tutored him relentlessly in the manly arts of warfare, makes him ‘ashamed to soften [himself] in this garb’ (529). What, Statius asks, finally made Achilles abandon his elite training as a warrior? The sight of one of King Lycomedes’ daughters, Deidamia, enraptures the ‘ungentle’ youth (531), and Thetis seizes the moment to urge her son again to don female garb; for it will enable him to ‘join hands in sport’ (533) with Deidamia and her sisters. Paradoxically to modern readers but not to classical or medieval writers, as I noted in chapter 1, the heterosexual passion that enthralls Achilles instantly begins to feminize him. The very thought of being near his beloved princess evokes unmanly, coy behaviour from the spartan Achilles so hardened by his experiences in Chiron’s boot camp: ‘he is softened, and blushes for joy, and with sly and sidelong glance repels the robes less certainly’ (533). Thetis quickly capitalizes upon the opportunity and completes Achilles desired transformation not merely by cross-dressing him and teaching him feminine demeanour, but by partially transsexualizing his muscular anatomy: ‘His mother sees [Achilles] in doubt

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and willing to be compelled, and casts the raiment o’er him; then she softens his stalwart neck and bows his strong shoulders, and relaxes the muscles of his arms, and tames and orders duly his uncombed tresses, and sets her own necklace about the neck she loves; then keeping his step within the embroidered skirt she teaches him gait and motion and modesty of speech’ (533). Achilles becomes passive and pliant matter in Thetis’s hands: ‘Even as the waxen images that the artist’s thumb will make to live take form and follow the fire and the hand that carves them, such was the picture of the goddess as she transformed her son’ (533). Only when Achilles eventually rapes Deidamia does his heterosexual passion begin to prove his manhood, Statius goes on to narrate. Soon after Achilles sexually assaults Deidamia, who continues to love him, Statius claims, Odysseus makes his way to Scyros and recalls Achilles to the masculine world of war. Achilles leaves Deidamia and Scyros, emblematic of the feminine side he must suppress, to achieve his masculine destiny as Greek hero against the Trojans. To involve himself with a woman is to become all but a woman in a warrior culture, Statius suggests, yet his hero escapes total dishonour, thanks to Odysseus’s intervention. Holsinger sees in Dante’s use of Statius’s cross-gendered Achilles a means of expressing the feminization that the pilgrim experiences after his fantasized homoerotic ravishment as Ganymede and then a means of ‘escaping its emasculating implications by allying himself with the misogynist violence’ that Achilles commits in the rape of Deidamia before he joins the Greeks (257). Yet Achilles’ confused gender – the ‘puzzle of his sex’ (ambiguus ... sexus) that baffles those who behold him (535) – is more relevant to the new poetic identity that Dante is inventing for himself than is Achilles’ feminization; for Thetis’s cross-gendering of her son gives him the functional form of the hermaphrodite. Although Achilles’ ‘ambiguous sex’ remains submerged in the dream that Dante experiences as he awakes in purgatory, it is the hermaphrodite who comes to figure openly the new vernacular poetics, which one of Dante’s contemporary Italian lyrics poets first begins to articulate in Purgatorio 24. In Purgatorio 24, on the terrace of gluttony, the pilgrim Dante and Virgil encounter Bonagiunta da Lucca, a thirteenth-century notary and poet who, on the glossator Benvenuto’s testimony, knew Dante and addressed poems to him. A ‘brilliant orator in the mother tongue’ (‘luculentus orator in lingua materna’), according to Benvenuto, as well as vernacular poet, Bonagiunta is positioned to contrast with the linguistically negligent Sordello of the Antepurgatory. Benvenuto also explains

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why Dante situated Bonagiunta among those who must fast in Purgatory, turning the Luccan’s penchant for wine into a wry poetic compliment: Bonagiunta had a ‘great facility in finding rhymes but [was] more adept at [finding] wines’ (Singleton 2:2.561n20). It is to Bonagiunta that Dante assigns what Barolini calls the second of Dante’s ‘autocitations’ in the Comedy (Poets 40), the poet’s quotations of his own previous lyrics. Two of these autocitations occur in the Purgatorio and one in the Paradiso, but none occurs in the Inferno because, Barolini argues, the textually ‘governing principle’ of the first canticle is misuse, distortion, misquotation (Poets 4). It is also significant that Dante assigns only one of his three autocitations to another poet – Bonagiunta. The episode opens with Bonagiunta enquiring of Dante whether he is the one who ‘brought forth’ (‘fore trasse’) the ‘new rhymes’ of ‘the sweet new style,’ beginning with ‘Ladies that have intelligence of love,’ the first of the three canzoni from Dante’s early vernacular work, the Vita Nuova (Purg. 24.49–51). Significantly, this lyric marks Dante’s turning away from Provençal literary forms to the native Italian genre, canzone, that Dante discusses in the Convivio, as I noted earlier in this chapter. John Freccero maintains that Bonagiunta’s verb, ‘fore trasse,’ ‘unmistakably suggests childbirth’ and that there is considerable emphasis on the newess of the poem and its style (‘Wounds’ 204). Barolini offers one reason for Bonagiunta’s implication that this canzone is Dante’s first-born poetic offspring by recalling Dante’s comments about the genesis of the poem in the Vita Nuova: ‘my tongue spoke as though moved by itself, and said “Donne ch’avete inteletto d’amore.”’ On this occasion alone, the first poem written in the ‘new style,’ Barolini continues, does Dante ‘chronicle the birth of a poem, a birth that is described as a quasi miraculous event, a creation ex nihilo’ (Poets 44). When Dante describes the genesis of this privileged poem again in the Purgatorio, however, he shifts the register of his metaphor from divine to carnal: ‘I am the one who, when Love breathes in me, take note [‘noto’], and in that manner which he dictates within go on to set it forth’ (Purg. 24.52–4). The verb noto, John Freccero maintains, grounds Dante’s account in the mundane world of material generation: ‘The forcefulness and syntactic isolation of the verb “noto,” etymologically, “I mark,” seems to highlight the moment of inscription; given the analogy with procreation, it would seem to correspond with the moment of conception, recalling Jean de Meun’s playful references to “nature’s stylus” in the sexual act’ (‘Wounds’ 204). To Bonagiunta is given the privileged role not only of introducing

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Dante’s new poetry and new style, his first fully vernacular lyric by virtue of its language and genre, but of prompting Dante’s articulation of his new poetic. In keeping with his plea at the opening of the second canticle that ‘poetry rise again from the dead’ (Purg. 1.7), Dante apparently abandons the sodomitical poetic of the Inferno and replaces it in the Purgatorio with a regenerative aesthetic that fructifies Dante’s native vernacular. The contrasting poetics of the two canticles parallel as well as contribute to larger thematic patterns of the Inferno and the Puragtorio, as Jeffrey Schnapp characterizes them. Poetry ‘died,’ Schnapp explains, partly by becoming implicated in crimes against nature, such as Brunetto’s sodomy, and by being overtaxed with the burden of depicting an ‘ugly, soulless, truly “dead” world.’ In the Purgatorio, Schnapp continues, poetry is ‘born again’ in several senses, including through the vernacular writers who give rebirth to literary language in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (‘Introduction’ 198–9). Canto 25, Statius’s ‘embryological lesson,’ is traditionally read as a gloss on the new procreative vernacular poetics of Canto 24, an interpretation, I argue next, that fails to see the way in which Statius’s explanation of conception exposes the oddity of Canto 24’s poetic that was prefigured in Dante’s assimilation to Achilles. But first I return to the point at which Virgil and Dante meet Statius, in Canto 21. The Missing Mother and the ‘Scandal’ of Purgatorio 25 Rather than dismiss Virgil in the Purgatorio because he is not a Christian, Dante supplements him with Statius. Although historically there is no evidence that Statius was a Christian, Dante constructs him as a convert, and he becomes the pilgrim’s guide through the central section of the Purgatorio known as the ‘cantos of the poets.’ Statius introduces himself as one who sang both of ‘Thebes and then of great Achilles’ and apologizes for ‘fall[ing] by the way with the second burden’ (Purg. 21.91). In having Statius characterize his failure to complete his Achilleid as a ‘fall[ing] by the way,’ Dante suggests that the story of Achilles’ refuge on Scyros is also a ‘turning away,’ or perversion, of the straight course the hero’s life resumes when he leaves the island to take his place among the Greek forces. It is to that same ‘straight’ course that Dante himself appears to be headed as a poet, and Statius emblemizes this pivotal point in Dante’s poetic progress to the Paradiso. If Statius perverted the story of Achilles, his apology atones for it, just as he atones for his sin of prodigality in Purgatory when Virgil and Dante

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meet him. In this transition from sin to redemption, Statius at first fails to recognize Virgil, who queries him about his former life. Statius explains that although he was not yet a Christian,‘still without faith’ (Purg. 21.87), he received great honour and accord for his poetry, which originated with Virgil. Statius so reveres Virgil, he continues, that he would have consented to a longer stay in Purgatory could he have lived in Virgil’s time. Of the several ironies in this non-recognition scene, uppermost is that if Statius had lived in Virgil’s pre-Christian era, he could not be in Purgatory, just as Virgil himself can only visit the realm, not achieve redemption there. Equally ironic is Statius’s subsequent revelation that his misreading of Virgil’s Eclogues as a prophecy of Christ’s birth motivated the most important transition in his life: his conversion to Christianity, a conversion Virgil himself could not make because he died a few years before Christ’s birth, whereas Statius was born a few years after it. As Statius further explains, the reason that Christian preaching so appealed to him was that it echoed Virgil’s prophecy: ‘and thy words I have just spoken were so in accord with the new preachers that I formed the habit of visiting them’ (Purg. 22.79–81). Although Statius received baptism before he wrote the Thebaid, he says, he kept his religious conversion quiet and played the pagan. Fear caused him to be ‘a hidden Christian long making show of paganism’ (Purg. 22.90–1), for which failing in Dante’s poem he spends 400 years on the fourth terrace for sloth before serving 500 years on the fifth terrace for prodigality. Nevertheless, in response to Dante’s question about the status of the body in the afterlife – ‘how,’ the pilgrim asks, ‘is it possible to become lean where there is no need of nourishment?’ (Purg. 25.20) – non-Christian Virgil must defer to Statius for a complete answer. In doing so, Virgil passes the mantle to Statius. It is at this point that Statius comes into his own and moves beyond the role he has shared with Virgil as one of the two most important poetic guides of Dante to the pre-eminent, and paternal, position. Just as Virgil’s Eclogue fathered Statius’s conversion, Statius now claims paternity for Dante, advising his ‘son’ (‘figlio’) to ‘heed and receive [his] words’ that shall enlighten him about the eternal life (Purg. 25.34–6). Although he should not divulge his knowledge of the Christian afterlife to Virgil, Statius confides to Dante, he suffers his presence in order not to refuse Dante’s request. So Statius begins to answer Dante’s question about the condition of the body in Purgatory with an examination of the relationship of body and soul on earth, specifically with a description of conception and reproduction that, as Freccero phrases it, ‘amounts to a

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lesson in medieval embryology.’ In the midst of six cantos in the Purgatorio that discuss poetry more or less exclusively, Freccero continues, Statius’s embryological ‘digression’ (Purg. 25.37–108) has been the scandal of Dante criticism for its ‘apparent irrelevance’ and ‘reputed technical aridity’ (‘Wounds’ 204). This passage ultimately draws upon the masculinized account of human reproduction given by Aristotle in the Generation of Animals (MinioPaluello 68), the same account, I have argued, that supplies the controlling trope of the Convivio. Statius begins by explaining how male semen is concocted from the body’s residual nourishment – the ‘perfect blood which is never drunk by the thirsty veins’ but ‘left like food thou removest from the table.’ This blood, so completely digested as to be ‘active,’ able to transmit the human form, unites with its imperfect counterpart, female semen, which is ‘fitted to be passive.’ In this union, the formative masculine element operates on the material female element, ‘first coagulating, then quickening that to which, for its material, it has given consistency,’ that is, the embryo. In what Patrick Boyde calls a ‘dense and allusive summary’ (272), Statius next describes the development of the embryo from its plant-like existence to its animal-like condition and finally to its human state, which begins in about the sixth month of pregnancy. Finally, in a passage that Boyde believes contains ‘perhaps the single most important doctrinal statement in the Comedy’ (279), Statius meshes Aristotelian embryology with Christian thought to explain how God inspires the intellective soul, the hallmark of humanity, in the foetus: ‘Open thy breast to the truth that follows and know that as soon as the articulation of the brain is perfected in the embryo the First Mover turns to it, rejoicing over such handiwork of nature, and breathes into a new spirit full of power, which draws into its own substance that which it finds active there and becomes a single soul that lives and feels and itself revolves upon itself’ (Purg. 25.67–75). Having established how body and soul come together before birth, Statius moves on to explain how body and soul relate after death and finally to answer Dante’s original question. Although in the afterlife the shade-body is not a real body, Statius informs Dante, it can still feel pleasure and pain and, in the case of the gluttonous, still experience the passion of hunger that emaciates the body. Statius’s embryological account displays Dante’s technical knowledge of contemporary conflicts between science and theology (Boyde 276–8; Mazzeo 163–4), yet the larger question of its thematic function in the

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poetry cantos of the Purgatorio concerns me here. Earlier embarrassment about the apparent irrelevance and aridity of this passage, still reflected in John Sinclair’s apologetic characterization of it as Statius’s ‘long and difficult exposition’ delivered ‘in the scholastic fashion of the time’ (333), has inspired recent critical effort to elucidate the connections between Canto 25 and the rest of the Purgatorio. Typically, such readings claim that Statius’s embryological passage offers an analogy to the poetic process Dante articulates in Purgatorio 24 (e.g., Franke 221; Wetherbee, ‘Dante’ 89). Thus, Freccero reads Statius’s discussion of conception and reproduction in Canto 25 as a gloss on Canto 24, ‘where the subject is literary creation and conception.’ Dante’s reborn poetic of Canto 24, Freccero continues, is amplified in Canto 25: ‘More than that, [Statius’s discussion] seems to suggest strongly an analog between the act of writing and the act of procreation. Dante begins with the clinically obvious and proceeds to explain its metaphysical significance ... As the soul is inspired in the fetus, so the inspiration of the poet comes from God. The body, however, is the work of parenthood. In the same way, the poetic corpus is sired by the poet, who provides the vehicle for God’s message’ (‘Wounds’ 202; emphasis mine). Karla Taylor accepts and elaborates upon the analogy that Freccero draws between the act of writing in Purgatorio 24 and the act of procreation in Purgatorio 25. Parallel to the birth of the poem in Canto 24, Taylor argues, in Canto 25 ‘a human being is created out of the conjunction mother and father, grows through the stages governed by nature, and at last receives an immortal soul breathed into it by God’ (Chaucer 44). More significantly, however, Taylor’s paraphrase reveals the odd asymmetry between Cantos 24 and 25 that raises a critical question: where is the female principle of generation – the mother – in Canto 24, which is widely accepted as a description of Dante’s poetic process? Statius’s embryological lesson in Canto 25 clearly establishes mother and father as passive and active forces, ‘another’s blood’ and semen, respectively, but Canto 24 does not imply a female principle of generation in the way that its verb, ‘noto,’ implies a male principle. Similarly, when Freccero declares that the ‘poetic corpus is sired by the poet,’ Dante is troped as the father, but left unanswered is the question of who the mother is in this heterosexualized paradigm of verbal creativity. In contrast, the conventional scholastic literary accessus that I described in the introduction has a symmetrical relationship to Statius’s embryological lesson, for it names both the textual mother (the ‘matter,’ material cause or pre-existing verbal artefact, such as Virgil’s Aeneid)

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and father (the formative cause that shapes matter into a new textual product). Taylor identifies the unstated female principle of literary generation in Purgatorio 24 as Dante’s native vernacular: ‘Dante’s poetry [is] born of his mother tongue and his poetic forefathers’ (Chaucer 44). Madison Sowell follows suit: ‘the act of (male) writing on a (female) page constitutes a double-entendre and parallels the image of Dante working with the mother tongue to father a new text’ (‘Poetics’ 469). Dante’s Convivio appears to validate this identification of the ‘missing mother’ as the native volgare, although, as I have discussed, in this earlier work Dante tropes the female principle of literary generation in scholastic rather than familial terms: the mother tongue, which writers blame for their poor verse, is the material cause, the poet, fabbro, is the efficient cause. When we look more carefully at Bonagiunta’s childbirth trope in Purgatorio 24, however, a different conjunction of male and female principles of literary generation emerges. It conflicts rather than coincides with the binary opposition that these principles assume in the passage from the Convivio just mentioned and in Statius’s paradigm of procreation, for both male and female are located within Dante. In his question whether Dante is the one who ‘brought forth’ (‘fore trasse’) the new canzone, Bonagiunta employs a term used to describe the midwife’s role in childbirth. If Dante functions as midwife, then he can deliver only the poem that he sires upon his mother tongue, that is, upon himself. Dante’s assimilation of both male and female literary principles within himself evokes his earlier attempt in the Convivio to ennoble the mother tongue by associating it, however unclearly, with the father by arguing that the native volgare is as intrinsic to a man as is his first-born son. Dante’s two models of vernacular literary production differ subtly but significantly from the configuration that the contemporary physicianexegete, Dino del Garbo (d. 1327), devised to banish a homosexual motive and confirm a heterosexual cause for ‘Donna me prega’ (A lady asks me), the vernacular love-lyric by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1259–1300). In his Latin commentary on ‘Donna me prega,’ Dino insists upon the heterosexual propriety of the lyric by specifying a woman as the male poet’s inspiration, or moving cause, yet that female principle remains external to the male auctor and never pre-empts his prerogative. As I explored in chapter 2, based upon the scholastic theory of intellection, courtly love employed a distinctly segregated, often aloof or even absent, female instrumental cause that avoided compromising masculine autonomy. Similarly, in Dino’s analysis of ‘Donna me prega,’ the female beloved

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motivates but otherwise does not participate in the construction of the lyric. She inspires Cavalcanti’s literary effort, and presumably her female sex motivates his choice of the vernacular to answer her request, even if the lyric immediately turns its attention to educated men, just as Dino’s commentary moves on to affirm the superiority of man over woman: ‘The author [“auctor”], wanting to determine the question of love’s passion, first sets down the cause that moved him to treat of love. The efficient cause [“causa ... mouens”] is the woman or lady who asked him. There are two reasons that this is attributed to a woman or a lady: the first is that this kind of passion, which is love, about which he is speaking, usually concerns a woman. And even if sometimes it concerns a man, it is more rare since such love is bestial and thus against nature [“preter naturam”]. Therefore, here it is only going to be about a woman’ (trans. in Cornish 171).16 In contrast, by replacing the scholastic material cause of literary generation – the text or ‘matter’ that exists outside the poet – with the mother tongue, which is internal to the male poet, Dante appears finally to have resolved the conflicting roles of the volgare apparent in his earlier writings on the subject. At the same time, his assimilation of the mother tongue to the father poet radically disrupted the conventional scholastic concept of textual reproduction. His new aesthetic does not represent a conventional heterosexual poetic, what Alison Cornish calls the ‘collaboration between a man and a woman in the production of vernacular literature’ (177), nor does it merely masculinize human and poetic conception, as Giuseppe Mazzotta suggests (216). The real ‘scandal’ that Statius’s embryological lesson of Canto 25 forces readers to recognize is Dante’s oddly dual role as both mother and father of vernacular verse, the master/mother figure that Rachel Jacoff describes (‘Models’). Not until Purgatorio 26 does this poetic receive its defining name via the poet Guido Guinizelli’s expiation of his sin: ‘ermafrodito’ (hermaphroditism).17 The Hermaphrodite Poetics of the Purgatorio I commented earlier that Dante’s waking dream as Achilles on his entrance to the Purgatorio anticipates the odd poetic that begins to emerge in Canto 24; for the episode in Achilles’ life that the dream elides is his existence on Scyros as anatomically double-sexed, both male and female. Capable of raping Deidamia yet endowed with a ‘softened’ or female physique, Achilles fits within what Joan Cadden terms ‘the widely recognized medieval category of hermaphrodite.’ Cadden ex-

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plains that to the medieval mind, the hermaphrodite could be narrowly construed to mean ‘a person who possesses the genitalia proper to both sexes’ or widely constructed to mean the ‘manly woman’ or ‘womanly man.’ In either event, Cadden continues, the ambiguous sexuality of hermaphroditism led to its frequent association with ‘homosexual acts and desires’ in medieval culture (‘Medicine’ 63). Alternatively, hermaphroditism could be represented benignly as a condition resulting from a natural cause rather than as a sin, although, Cadden notes, this was the exception rather than the rule (Meanings 203). On the symbolic level, with certain restrictions, hermaphroditism could enjoy a positive connotation, as it did in the figure of the nurturing mother-Jesus that Caroline Walker Bynum has most notably explored (Jesus). As I next discuss, Purgatorio 26 evidences Dante’s association of sodomy with hermaphroditism, yet I shall argue that Dante simultaneously employs hermaphroditism in a positive way to figure the productive poetics of the Purgatorio adumbrated in Canto 24 and fully celebrated in Canto 26, the last of the ‘poetry cantos.’ Nevertheless, the close proximity and unstable borders between sodomy and hermaphroditism in medieval thought both link and differentiate the barren poetic of Dante’s past in the Inferno and the fruitful new vernacular poetic of the Purgatorio. Canto 26 introduces two vernacular poets: the Italian writer, Guinizelli, whose verse the poet Dante imitated as early as the Vita Nuova, and the Provençal writer, Arnaut Daniel, whom Dante explicitly credits as his model in De vulgari eloquentia (Wilhelm, ‘Dante’). The pilgrim meets Guinizelli and Daniel among the lustful, who are divided into two groups of people shouting aloud their sins: ‘the new people [cry] “Sodom and Gomorrah,” and the others, “Pasiphae enters into the cow, that the bull may hasten to her lust”’ (Purg. 26.40–2). Confused by this public proclamation of sin, Dante asks Guinizelli to reveal both his identity and that of the other people in the crowd so that he may ‘note it on [his] page’ (Purg. 26.64). The newly arrived group, Guinizelli explains, ‘offended in that for which Caesar in a triumph once heard them call “Regina” against him, therefore they go off crying “Sodom” ... in self-reproach’ (Purg. 26.76–9). Behind Guinizelli’s explanation stands Suetonius’s Vita Caesarum, which narrates how Caesar was mocked as ‘queen’ not merely for having a sexual relationship with King Nicomedes of Bythnia but for acting as Ganymede-like ‘cup-bearer’ to him, that is, as passive sexual partner. The sin of his own group, Guinizelli continues, is exemplified by Pasiphae’s

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lust for the bull: ‘But because we observed not human law, following appetites like beasts, we repeat at parting, to our disgrace, her name who made herself a beast in the beast-like timber’ (Purg. 26.83–7). Pasiphae is another queen – an actual one, wife of King Minos – guilty of sexual transgression, Joseph Pequigney observes, because she hid herself inside the wooden cow constructed by Daedalus in order to have sexual relations with the bull (33). Guinizelli brackets this exemplification of his group’s sin with two explicit namings, first of the sin itself (‘our sin was hermaphrodite’ [‘ermafrodito’], Purg. 26.82) and then of himself (‘I am Guido Guinizelli,’ Purg. 26.9). Dante’s categorization of so-called unnatural sexuality as a species of lust in Purgatorio 26 is standard scholastic practice in the Middle Ages. For instance, Thomas Aquinas includes four categories of unnatural acts – masturbation, bestiality, intercourse in unnatural positions, and homosexuality – in his discussion of lust in Summa Theologiae (2.2, q.154, a.12, ad 4), and medieval penitential manuals commonly list vices contra naturam under the cardinal or deadly sin of luxuria. Yet the relationship Dante creates between the sodomites and hermaphrodites, which he associates with bestiality by virtue of the fact the latter cry out ‘Pasiphae,’ is peculiar in one important respect. As noted earlier, hermaphrodites were often construed to be homosexual in the Middle Ages, but Dante clearly contrasts the hermaphrodites and the homosexual sodomites, the ‘queens,’ in Purgatorio 26: Guinizelli’s group of hermaphrodites walks to the right, while the homosexual sodomites walk in the opposite – sinister – direction. Joseph Pequigney argues that the contrast Dante means to draw between the two groups of unnatural sinners is that one, the hermaphrodite, is heterosexual, the other homosexual (36); Charles Singleton (2:2, 637n82) and John Boswell (‘Dante’ 71–5) agree. Supporting this thesis is the seemingly inappropriate choice of Pasiphae as emblem of the hermaphrodites. Although her sin was against human law, as Guinizelli confesses his sin of ermafrodito to be, Pasiphae was not, in fact, a hermaphrodite. But however unnatural her vice was, it was heterosexually oriented – she copulated with a bull – and it is presumably to mark their heterosexuality that Dante’s hermaphrodites cry out her name in expiation of their sin. More significantly in terms of Dante’s purposes, Pasiphae’s heterosexual desire resulted in a generative act. Her union with the bull produced the minotaur, part human and part animal. Pequigney concludes that the effect of Dante’s ‘use of the myth of hybridization is to

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parody, criticize, and undermine the Thomistic conception of unnatural bestiality’ (33), yet its more important purpose within the Divine Comedy is to draw a contrast between the ‘dead’ sodomitical poetics of the Inferno and the productive new vernacular aesthetic of the Purgatorio – the hermaphroditical poetic that emerges in Canto 24 and receives its name in Canto 26. In Purgatorio 26, no poet marches among the sodomites; pederastic poetry remains bound in Hell with Brunetto and others. But both Guinizelli and Daniel, whom Dante will praise the most highly of all the vernacular poets in the Divine Comedy, march rightwards with the hermaphrodites. That Dante both names hermaphroditism as a sin and groups it with sodomy in Purgatorio 26, while simultaneously marching it in the correct rather than corrupt direction and linking it to his most valorized vernacular poet, demonstrates what Cadden calls the medieval ‘tolerance of sexual ambiguity and gender mixes’ on the abstract levels of symbolism and metaphysics. Symbolic androgyni such as the mother-Jesus or the alchemical hermaphroditus, Cadden notes, ‘are invested with significant positive value’ (Meanings 209). Typically, however, such ‘hermaphrodites’ are males who assign to themselves positive female characteristics, specifically the maternal characteristics of nurturance, which, Caroline Bynum observes, medieval men do from ‘a sense (not without ambivalence) of a need and obligation to nurture other men’ (‘Imagery’ 168). Women who arrogated positive male qualities, even on the symbolic level, were far more vulnerable to censure, as evidenced by, I shall argue in chapter 5, Alan of Lille’s ‘lesbian’ Nature. Nevertheless, actual or physical hermaphrodites, who, Albertus Magnus warned, could take both passive and active roles in sexual intercourse, were regarded as dangerously disruptive of social order as well as fraudulent in their bodies.18 Because Guinizelli and Daniel must atone for their sin of hermaphroditism, the implication is that they are, or have been, bisexual. As Peter Cantor (d. 1192) advises in his remarks on sodomy, De vitio sodomitico, the Church allows the hermaphrodite ‘to use the organ by which (s)he is most aroused or the one to which (s)he is more susceptible,’ but should ‘(s)he fail with one organ, the use of the other can never be permitted.’ Instead, Peter warns, ‘(s)he must be perpetually celibate to avoid any similarity to the role inversion of sodomy, which is detested by God.’19 Thus, while Guinizelli’s and Daniel’s hermaphroditism has evidently failed to avoid the appearance of sodomy, Dante may simultaneously employ the concept of ‘celibate’ or symbolic hermaphroditism, the maternalized father figure, to signify the vernacular

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poetic that unites the poet’s long-standing masculine authority with his new feminine aspect, the mother tongue. This dichotomy between the detestable hermaphroditism that fails to avoid ‘any similarity’ to sodomy and the laudable hermaphroditism of the maternalized male that does steer clear of such resemblance operates in the pilgrim’s encounter with Guinizelli, who evidences his sinful hermaphroditism in presenting himself to Dante as his literary ‘cupbearer,’ or male passive partner in whom Dante has left his ‘mark’: ‘Thou leavest such a trace [“vestigio”] and so clear in me by that which I hear tell as Lethe cannot destroy or dim’ (Purg. 26.106–7). Bruce Holsinger remarks that ‘the specifically homoerotic connotations of ermafroditi clearly inform the poet’s presentation of the scriptive relationship between [Guinizelli] and Dante’ (261–2).20 At the same time, however, Dante figures the vernacular poet Guinizelli as the laudably maternalized male, the poetic father who mothered Dante’s literary existence. In the recognition scene that follows Guinizelli’s naming of his sin and of himself, Dante compares his joy on hearing the name of Guinizelli, his poetic ‘father’ (‘padre mio,’ Purg. 26.97–8), with the joy of Thoas and Euneus on saving their mother, Hypsipyle, from Lycurgus’s avenging sword. The comparison invokes Statius’s Thebaid 5, which narrates the story of how Hypsipyle’s negligence caused the death of Lycurgus’s son, Archemorus, and thus creates a triad of mythical and figurative parentson pairs: Lycurgus and Archemorus; Hypsipyle and Thoas (the Younger) and Euenus; and Guido and the pilgrim Dante. By linking himself with Thoas and Euneus, Dante associatively feminizes his metaphorical father figure, Guinizelli, whom he wants to run forward to embrace, as Thoas and Euneus embrace their mother on rescuing her from Lycurgus, but is blocked by the fire that separates them. That Dante’s desire to embrace Guinizelli might have both filial and homoerotic connotations, the latter suggested by the fact that it is the purgatorial fire between them that prevents such an embrace, underlines both how close and how far the distance is between the hermaphroditism that resembles sodomy and that which does not. In Inferno 16, the fire also prohibited Dante’s embrace of Brunetto Latini. The proximity and unstable boundary between benign and perverse hermaphroditism may have caused anxiety to both Dante’s commentators and his followers, yet it is a tension that Dante ultimately leaves unresolved in the Purgatorio. A comparison with Statius’s characterization of his literary ancestors clarifies Dante’s departure from norms in his figuration of Guinizelli as

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his double-sexed progenitor. Statius first names the specific text that ‘kindled the fire’ of poetry in him: the Aeneid (Purg. 21.94). Conventionally, he tropes this text as the passive female recipient of Virgil’s scriptive activity and thus figures the Aeneid, but not Virgil, as his ‘mother’ and ‘nurse’ in poetry (Purg. 21.97–8). Statius subsequently tropes Virgil’s scriptive activity in masculine terms as fructifying seed. In explaining his conversion to Christianity, Statius likens Virgil’s prophecy in the Eclogues of a ‘new race’ descending from heaven to the words later ‘sown by the messengers of the eternal kingdom’ that impregnated the world and made it ‘everywhere big with the true faith’ (Purg. 22.72–7). In Statius’s characterization, Virgil remains the masculine progenitor who sows his literary seed, or makes his mark, on the female text, whereas in Purgatorio 24 and 26 Dante evolves a model of the vernacular poet that annexes maternal activity to the paternal role. This realignment works to find a place for the newly valorized feminine principle of the mother tongue where none existed in conventional literary theory. Because it altogether excluded woman as a significant category, Latin poetry, the work of the father and the literary province of males, readily lent itself to homoeroticizing, to the pederastic substitution of boy for woman as pagina, as the schoolroom scene of Inferno 15 evidences. But in making a place for the category of woman in his new vernacular poetic, Dante did not so much buttress conventional homosocial poetics against homoeroticism as he created the new figure of the hermaphrodite male poet, ironically a figure always already suspected of homosexuality. The final and best vernacular poet of the Divine Comedy, Daniel, the one who surpassed everyone in ‘verses of love and tales of romance’ (Purg. 26.118), Guinizelli testifies, comes closest to being implicated in just this suspect category. Dante’s description of Daniel fails to shield him completely from the appearance that he somehow illicitly uses both male and female organs. As ‘a better craftsman of the mother tongue’ (‘miglio fabbro del parlar materno,’ Purg. 26.117) than all others, Daniel is troped as craftsman,21 ergo masculine, for ‘fabbro’ is a trope derived from scholastic poetics that Dante applies only to male poets and to God in the Comedy as well as in the Convivio. Yet Daniel’s tool is figured not as the masculine pen, hammer, or chisel but as the mother tongue. Daniel walks with Guinizelli among the hermaphrodites, not the sodomites, but surely Dante was aware of the unstable boundary that he constructed between the sodomitical poets of the Inferno and the hermaphrodical poets of Purgatorio. While the sodomites and hermaph-

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rodites move in opposite directions around one another in Canto 26, at regular intervals the two groups give one another hasty kisses and brief greetings, as when ‘one ant touches muzzle with another’ (Purg. 26.35) before they hurry on in their expiatory circling. On the literal level, left unanswered – as well as unexplored by modern readers – are the questions of whether Dante had grounds on which to represent Guinizelli and Daniel as bisexual and whether the intermittent kisses signal their homoerotic desire or function as penance for their transgression. In failing or refusing to resolve such ambiguities, Dante readies his readers to enter Paradise, the supernatural realm in which unnatural phenomena become the norm and in which the poet who would write heaven must practise what from an earthly perspective appears to be both sodomitical and hermaphroditical poetics. Writing Heaven If Dante grappled with finding a noble place for the mother tongue in his model of vernacular poetics in the Purgatorio, he faced the ultimate poetic challenge of writing heaven in the Paradiso. As Dante describes the task at hand in the Paradiso, he must pass ‘beyond humanity,’ a journey that ‘cannot be set forth in words,’ and he warns readers early on that they risk ‘bewilderment’ unless they follow him carefully through Paradise to his final vision of the incarnation (Par. 2.1–6). The single most difficult task of the Paradiso is to represent in the human medium of language the non-representable divine, a goal that Dante achieves, in Freccero’s judgment, ‘without falling either into unintelligibility or into silence’ (‘Introduction’ 211). As Dante further describes his task, the realm that he depicts in the Paradiso is ‘where God rules immediately,’ and thus ‘natural law’ (‘la legge naturale,’ Par. 30.122) has no effect, a situation that presents Dante with both the challenge and the opportunity of writing beyond nature. His most significant response to heaven’s suspension of natural law, I shall argue, is to reinstate the unnatural poetics of the Inferno. Jacoff surveys some of the ways in which Dante’s suspension of natural law informs his linguistic practices in the Paradiso. Natural phenomena are presented in unnatural ways, for instance, when Dante images a snow storm in which the flakes defy gravity and move upwards. But perhaps the most notable instance of Dante’s attempt to represent the divine occurs in his invention of new words or of new meanings for words: ‘Many of the neologisms proclaim the poet’s freedom to refigure gram-

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mar: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and even numbers are converted into verbs that stretch to communicate extraordinary states of being or of activity appropriate to the paradisal condition or to the divine. Many of these verbs use the prefix “in” to suggest the permeability of normal boundaries; others use the prefix “tras” (hapaxes such as “trasumanar,” “trasmodare,” “trasvolare”) as a marker of the excess, the going beyond, associated with paradisal privilege’ (Jacoff, ‘“Prefaces”’ 221). Of especial interest here is Dante’s penchant for inventing reflexive verbs, many of which combine a noun (and pronoun) with the prepositions ‘in’ (in) or ‘tra’ (beyond), for instance, indiarsi (to ingod oneself, Par. 4.28) and trasmodarsi (to pass itself beyond all limits, Par. 30.19). As transitives, reflexive verbs confuse and collapse the boundaries between subject and object, or the agent and recipient of an action, which become one and the same. In the reflexive construction, ‘he feeds himself,’ for instance, the subject and object, or agent and recipient, are the same person, simultaneously active and passive vis-à-vis the feeding. Brenda Schildgen maintains that Dante’s use of reflexive neologisms, in which ‘the actor, the undergoer, and the action disintegrate into one another,’ endows postlapsarian humanity with what only God, as prime agent, experiences: the lack of ‘self-awareness or alienation from the self’ (113). Although Schildgen concludes that Dante’s innovative linguistic attempt to restore humanity to its paradisal unity of mind and body can succeed only momentarily, since the poet ultimately cannot transcend human language and its limitations, the effect of Dante’s reflexive neologisms intimates the Paradiso’s larger project of interrogating the scholastic categories of active and passive that undergird both conventional medieval gender roles and poetics, which I next consider in turn. Neologistic grammar that collapses the conventional division between the ‘active’ male gender and the ‘passive’ female gender abounds in the Paradiso, specifically, the coupling of masculine nouns with feminine adjectives and vice versa as well as the use of feminine pronouns to refer to male characters and vice versa. These are types of the ‘unnatural’ use of language that Alan of Lille made the signature linguistic vice of his Plaint of Nature, as I shall discuss in chapter 5. Thus, Dante’s Boethius is described with female pronouns, God with feminine adjectives (‘ultima salute’), and the female Piccarda with masculine adjectives. Although Dante valorizes maternalized men in the Purgatorio, women may exhibit masculine attributes with impunity in the Paradiso. Joan Ferrante comments that the confusion of sexes in the Paradiso ‘indicates simply that

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there is no essential distinction of sex in eternity – man can be spoken of as female, woman as male, all are saved’ (Woman 141–2). However logically it may follow, more striking in Dante’s eternity is the lack of any essential distinction of sexuality. In replacing Beatrice in Paradiso 31 with a male guide, Bernard, Holsinger argues, Dante recuperates the male homosocial desire condemned in the Inferno and suggests that both homosexual and heterosexual love lead to God: the ‘pilgrim’s final approach to God entails an eroticized triangulation of desire ... in which the homoerotic interpenetration of his own body and desires with those of Christ are at least as crucial as his love and desire for Beatrice’ (266). The last of Dante’s male guides to be named ‘dottore’ (Par. 32.2), Bernard recalls the Latin world of pedagogy in the Inferno as Dante reinstates the Inferno’s pederastic poetic. The deviant aesthetic solves the specific theoretical conundrum contained within the conventional problem of heaven’s inexpressibility: heaven itself undermines the binary scheme that underpins the heterosexualized scholastic poetic analogized in Statius’s embryological lesson in Purgatory. Just as the hierarchical opposition between efficient and material literary causes cannot be fitted to the figure of the fabbro who writes in the mother tongue, so this conventional scholastic paradigm of creativity cannot be assimilated to the poet who would write heaven for the simple reason that the material cause of his subject is both immaterial and superior to him. Lacking a material cause, Dante can no more ‘father’ the Paradiso than the carpenter can craft a chair without wood or the sculptor can create a statue without marble or stone. On the pragmatic level, Dante resolves the problem of an immaterial subject by creating what Freccero calls ‘anti-images,’ which, for instance, figure the spiritual inhabitant of heaven as ‘the pearl on the white brow’ (‘Introduction’ 212–13). Thus, Dante represents looking at an immaterial spirit in Paradise as seeing nothing, white on white. At the same time, he effectively renders his immaterial cause material by associating it with separately concrete and visible images, brow and pearl. Similarly, Dante renders himself an ‘anti-poet,’ or a writing subject, and resolves the logical impasse he faces as he attempts to write Paradise: he ascribes agency to his immaterial materia, heaven, which imprints itself on Dante, the receptive material cause, who subsequently writes himself and simultaneously writes heaven. Ultimately, Dante the writer ‘is his own best text’ (Chiampi 184). As Dante phrases it in the opening canto of the Paradiso, his task is to show forth – to make a sign of (segnata) – the ‘blessed kingdom imprinted in [his] brain’ by God (Par. 1.10). Through-

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out the pilgrim’s experience in Paradise, God functions as the stamp, Dante as the sealing wax who records his maker’s impressions. To write heaven, Dante thus returns to the deviant interscriptive poetic of the Inferno. Barolini attributes Dante’s ‘poetics of paradox,’ represented in the opposing terms of ‘scribe’ and ‘poet’ that Dante applies to himself in the Paradiso, to the Christian rhetoric of humility. Reversing roles with his subject, Dante declares that he is made the scribe (‘scriba’) of his material (‘matera’), which writes him, yet he is also the poet who writes the ‘poema sacro.’ Since Dante restricts the term ‘scribe’ to himself (Par. 10.27) and the term ‘poem,’ which he uses twice in the Paradiso (23.62 and 25.1), to the Comedy, ‘it would seem that – paradoxically – only a scribe can write a poem,’ Barolini observes. This paradox Barolini contextualizes in what Millard Meiss terms the ‘principle of polarity’ (462) in Christian thought, by which humility implies sublimity, as in the evangelist’s promise that ‘whoever shall become humble exalts himself’ in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:4). In humbling himself as God’s scribe, Dante exalts both divine art and his own art, Barolini concludes: ‘The exaltation of divine art at the expense of human art paradoxically leads to the exaltation of that human artist who most closely imitates divine art, who writes a poem to which heaven and earth contribute, and who by way of being only a scribe becomes the greatest of poets’ (Poets 270–5). Although Dante does function as both scribe and poet in writing the final cantica, and although he disingenuously claimed in the Inferno that his job of scribe was impossible (De Fazio), his performance is not paradoxical, because his opposed roles are sequential rather than simultaneous. As he formerly experienced heaven on his pilgrimage, Dante represents himself as scribe and sealing wax; as he now writes about that remembered experience, he becomes the poet. Dante makes this temporal distinction between roles clear twice at the opening of the Paradiso: ‘so much of the holy kingdom as I was able to treasure [“tesoro”] in my mind shall now be matter [“matera”] of my song’ (Par. 1.10–11; emphases mine); ‘O power divine [Apollo], if thou grant me so much of thyself that I may show forth the shadow of the blessed kingdom imprinted in my brain thou shalt see me come to the chosen tree and crown myself then with those leaves of which the theme [“matera”] and thou wilt make me worthy’ (Par. 1.22–7; emphases mine). Also in Paradiso 1, Dante offers more specific and relevant contexts in which to view his poetic roles than that of Christian humility. The first of these contexts, for the scribal wax

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seal image, occurs in Dante’s reference to the ‘treasure’ (‘tesoro’) in his mind (quoted earlier), which invokes Brunetto’s Tresor and hence the ‘imagine paterna’ of Brunetto affixed in the young Dante’s memory. In the Inferno, Dante troped himself as Brunetto’s writing surface, pagina, in Holsinger’s words, ‘letting Brunetto’s words become his ink and inscribe the pilgrim’s corso on the text,’ just as in writing the Paradiso Dante figures himself as the sealing wax imprinted by God. To model his relationship to God in the writing of the Paradiso, Dante thus returns to the homoerotic scriptive relationship between himself and his teacher, Brunetto, in the Inferno. But the writing of the Paradiso involves more than Dante’s past inscription by God; it also includes his current poeticizing or ‘showing forth’ of what has been imprinted on the treasury of his brain. For this role Dante constructs a second internally resonant context through his reference to the satyr Marsyas in his invocation to Apollo at the opening of Paradiso 1. The part-animal, part-human Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical contest, and, when he lost, Apollo flayed him for his presumption. When Dante invokes Apollo to ‘come into my breast and breathe there as when thou drewest Marsyas from the scabbard of his limbs’ (Par. 1.19–20), he does more than acknowledge the risk he runs in attempting to write heaven. Not only does Dante’s identification with the ravished Marsyas recall his imagined rapture as Ganymede at the threshold of Purgatory, but his description of Marsyas’s body in both anatomically male and female terms – ‘della vagina de le membre’ – recreates the musician in the image of the hermaphrodite. As Marguerite Waller comments, ‘the same body, that of Marsyas, is characterized by both the sexually connotative terms “la vagina” and “le membre,” usually understood as each other’s opposites.’ This ‘new conception between the relationship of male and female,’ Waller continues, ‘enacts a “going beyond” human sexuality’ appropriate to heaven (242). If the hermaphrodite anticipates the paradisal realm in which the confusion of genders is common, the hermaphrodite artist more specifically recalls the ermafroditi of Purgatorio 26 and Dante himself as the lyricist of Purgatorio 24. But here Dante extends the trope of bisexuality beyond figuring vernacular poetics to representing the poetics of writing heaven on earth, which requires two opposite aspects of the writer: the passive Dante who is written by God in heaven, and the active Dante who uses the inscription on his body as the material cause – matera – of his poem on earth: ‘so much of the holy kingdom as I was able to treasure in my mind shall now be matter of my song’ (Par. 1.8–9). At first the

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receptacle, the treasure chest of God’s imprint, Dante himself becomes the material cause of the Paradiso that he authors and thus simultaneously mothers and fathers the final cantica. His textualized body links the maternal and paternal aspects of Dante’s poetic performance so that, like Marsyas, the sacred poet becomes congruent with the vernacular poet. In the figure of the hermaphrodite adumbrated in Dante’s dream of Achilles, fully developed into a trope of the vernacular writer in the Purgatorio’s poetry cantos and emblematic of the sacred writer in the Paradiso, Dante’s two major projects in the Comedy – to write heaven and to write the vernacular – become one. The Return to Sodomitical Poetics My rubric, the ‘return to sodomitical poetics,’ calls attention to Dante’s deliberate revival of the pederastic past, which he invoked and appeared to reject in the Inferno, as the model for the human-divine scriptive relationship in the Paradiso. Although the trope of the inscribed body, the human writer stamped by the divine, was conventional enough in medieval literature and was used especially by religious women writers, Dante figures his passive scriptive relationship to God with what must surely be a deliberate echo of his inscription by Brunetto. Holsinger notes that it is the first appearance of the word ‘tesoro’ since ‘the pilgrim watched his beloved teacher run to catch up with the other sodomites’ (265). The repetition of the pederastic trope thus creates a startling parallel: Dante is first taught the pagan past by the pedagogue Brunetto and later taught the Christian future, Paradise, by God. If Dante meant to align Brunetto with God, the daring parallel serves to represent heaven’s alterity, its ‘otherness’ from human concerns and comprehension. In self-consciously presenting the pagan past as different in the ‘schoolroom scene’ of the Inferno, Dante began his apprenticeship in the cultural reflexivity that would culminate in his ability to represent the unknowable Christian future in heaven. As Dante’s twin goals of writing the vernacular and writing heaven unite in hermaphroditic poetics, so his large cultural project in the Divine Comedy of translating the pagan past into Christian terms relies upon deviant aesthetics. It might be counter-argued, however, that Dante’s return to the poetics of sodomy in the Paradiso cannot be dangerously transgressive, cannot run the risk of tainting the divine with an anathematized eroticism, because heaven suspends natural laws and supersedes sexuality. Unnatural sexuality can pose no actual threat nor, indeed, have any real mean-

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ing in a realm beyond both nature and sexuality. Heaven operates on the abstract level of symbolism and metaphysics, which tolerated gender mixes and confusion in the Middle Ages, Cadden comments, provided ‘they did not reflect back down upon the world of concrete biological and social existence’ (Meanings 209). Yet it is also true that while, as Bynum phrases it, ‘the female (or woman) and the feminine are not the same’ (‘Imagery’ 167), the homosexual and homosexuality were the same in the Middle Ages. The same men who held actual women in low regard frequently cultivated the feminine or maternal side of themselves, particularly when such cultivation manifested itself in a reflected representation of the mother-Jesus in heaven. But other than Dante, there seem to be few examples in which medieval writers who condemned an actual sodomite, as Dante represented Brunetto to be in the Inferno, also troped sodomy as a positive aspect of themselves, as Dante does in his scriptive relationship to the divine in the Paradiso. Dante, Boccaccio, and the Interested Vernacular Dante’s work attracted devotees almost immediately in the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance. Robert Hollander comments that no poem has ever provoked so many exegetes to comment upon it, and so quickly, as has the Comedy, for ‘Dante’s commentators hardly waited for him to die before dissecting him’ (‘Dante’ 226). Nevertheless, Dante was anything but a conventional and comfortable figure to those who followed him. In 1335 Dominican friars in Florence were prohibited from possessing the poem (D. Wallace, ‘New Author’ 445). If the rapid appearance of commentaries suggests the canonization of Dante or of his Comedy, Hollander continues, the commentators, in fact, do not ‘read the poem to which many of them have devoted their lives, but only the potential poem which Dante graciously did not write, a poem that would have been as reducible as traditional allegorical fables and as uninteresting’ (‘Dante’ 228). The commentary that one of Dante’s sons, Pietro Alighieri, wrote is a case in point; for it reduces the Comedy to a work that ‘show[s] what men ought to do in this world and what they should avoid’ (D. Wallace, ‘New Author’ 478). Similarly, the commentaries flatten Dante’s innovative but apparently disturbing poetic stances in the Comedy into the conventional formulations of scholastic authority found in the accessus ad auctores and, indeed, in other works by Dante such as the Convivio and De vulgari. Despite Dante’s anxious and intricate quest to devise an ultimately deviant po-

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etic self-representation in order to write the vernacular and to write heaven, trecento commentaries (including the one I have just quoted by a man whom Dante literally fathered, Pietro Alighieri) cast the author of the Comedy as the uncomplicated and unchallenged agens of the work. Dante, Pietro laboriously explains, is the ‘efficient cause’ of the Comedy, the agent that ‘moves the subject matter’ in such a way as to achieve the work’s final cause or objective, showing men the rewards of virtue and the punishments of vice (D. Wallace, ‘New Author’ 478). To Guido de Pisa, Dante is the ‘activating cause’ [‘causa agens’] of the Comedy: ‘concerning the third question, that is, the activating cause, note that the moving cause [“agens”] or author of this book is Dante,’ and the material cause, taken allegorically, is nothing less than ‘man himself’ (470–2). The writer of the middle section of the Epistle to Can Grande della Scala, possibly but probably not Dante (Hollander, ‘Epistle,’ ‘Dante’ 234; H.A. Kelly), likewise approaches the Comedy’s author in the tradition of the accessus ad auctores as the agens, the motivating cause of the work, which is duly analysed in terms of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the pseudo-Aristotelian De Causis (trans. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace 459). Boccaccio had little apparent sympathy for the unconventional poetic that Dante invented to write the vernacular Comedy. In his ‘Expository Lectures on Dante’s Comedy,’ Boccaccio continued to construct Dante as the poetic father, the ‘efficient cause,’ of the Comedy, and he played upon the medieval etymology of Dante from dare (‘to give’) to figure the Comedy as the progeny – ‘fruitful effect’ – of this generative paternal cause (505–11). The heterosexualized discourse of causality necessarily, albeit monotonously, rings throughout these commentaries, for this scholastic genre of literary exegesis is founded upon the bedrock of Aristotelian hylomorphism. The fact remains, however, that readers evidently felt compelled to occlude Dante’s innovative poetics by introducing the author of the Comedy in the formulaic construction of the father poet. Dante’s use of the vernacular in the Comedy caused even admirers like Boccaccio some concern. Boccaccio, who wrote his lectures on Dante in Italian, felt compelled to question why Dante chose the volgare for the Comedy. Boccaccio’s answer, that Dante began the Comedy in Latin but shifted to the vernacular because he feared that noblemen no longer knew how to read Latin, Wallace notes, was less important than his question, which evidenced the growing power of the new Italian humanist vogue for the aristocratic and elite medium of Latin (‘New Author’ 457). If Boccaccio indeed still had two masters, Dante and Petrarch, after

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1350 he himself wrote largely in the learned language that Petrarch valorized. The appeal of Latin to the new movement made Dante’s concern about the volgare appear antiquated if not barbaric. In northern Italy, even women writers would soon shun the mother tongue for Latin in unprecedented numbers (Schibanoff, ‘Madonna’ 194). For two centuries beyond the mid-trecento, however, European literacy levels in general lagged behind the advanced standards of northern Italy (Herlihy). Not until some fifty years after Dante’s death and several decades beyond the time when Boccaccio had largely returned to Latin did Chaucer begin to confront issues raised by using the vernacular. Nevertheless, the mutual interest of Dante and Chaucer in the vernacular, David Wallace maintains, creates a ‘particular kinship’ between them that ran deep and close. Each was ‘engaged, at a critical juncture in the history of his particular language, at decisively enlarging the capacities of his lingua materna,’ and it therefore makes sense to ‘consider Chaucer to be Dante’s most authentic continuator as Trecento vernacular poet’ (‘Italy’ 232). In chapter 4, which develops my reading of the House of Fame, I pursue further Wallace’s observation concerning this connection between Dante and Chaucer, but not to argue that father-poet Dante ‘liberated’ Chaucer to write in his native vernacular rather than in French or Latin. If Dante freed Chaucer, it was to confront deviant poetics, not to escape the Francophile court. As Taylor remarks in a different context, ‘finding Italian literature ... did not solve Chaucer’s authorial problems so much as provoke them’ (‘Voice’ 52). I have argued in this chapter that Dante worked to find a position for the noble mother tongue in literary theory and that in the Comedy he was prepared to adopt a perversely double-sexed literary identity in order to achieve his goal. In the next chapter I contend that when Geffrey, the Chaucerian narrator of the House of Fame, undertakes the project of translating Virgil’s Aeneid into English, the sexual poetics of the vernacular engulfs him as well. Geffrey’s experience, however, reveals an ignoble aspect of the vernacular in its relationship to women and non-normative male readers. If, as David Wallace maintains, Dante and Chaucer promoted the glorious vernacular because it accurately mirrored the human condition of change and renewal (‘Italian Inheritance’ 53), it must also be said that the ‘human condition’ has never been disinterested and that the vernacular reflected humanity’s agenda for better and for worse. On the one hand, the vernacular democratized literacy. On the other, because it could reach a wider audience, especially women, the vernacular provided a new medium in which to coerce adherence to patriarchal

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norms (Schibanoff, ‘Taking the Gold,’ ‘Taking Jane’s Cue’; WoganBrowne et al. 120–2). As I discussed in chapter 1, the early vernacular courtly romance of Aeneas, the Roman d’Eneas, promoted a new medieval hero: the figure of the husband who perpetuated lineage and kept the family legacy intact. Similar promotional messages went out via later vernacular romances, the authors of which frequently took the guise of the heterosexual lover to assert their authority to prescribe heteronormative behaviour. For instance, in his Il Filocolo (c. 1336–8), an early work composed before Boccaccio had largely abandoned the vernacular for Latin, the author impersonated the lover who wrote in the volgare to ‘loving maidens’ not about distant Troy but about the love of Florio for Biancifiore. However, the stated purpose of this romance is not entertainment but regulation. Boccaccio explains to his female readers that his aim is to inform them ‘how much it pleases Love to make a single youth the master of [a woman’s] spirit, without extending vain desire to many ... it often happens that the pursuit of one love causes the loss of another, as when they say that whoever chases two hares sometimes catches one but more often loses both. Therefore, learn to love one man alone who will love you wholly, as did this wise maiden [i.e., Biancifiore] whom Love brought to her desired goal after long suffering’ (5–6). As I next explore, when tasked with the vernacular translation of the Aeneid in the House of Fame, Geffrey is implicitly obliged to transform the warrior Aeneas into the heterosexual hero, the courtly lover who subsequently becomes the husband married to the faithful – and fruitful – wife. To accomplish this project, however, Geffrey does not adopt the identity of heterosexual lover that Boccaccio and so many other medieval vernacular writers, including courtly authors, employed to authorize their roles as cultural policemen. Instead, Geffrey once again takes on the queer persona of love’s heretic that his counterpart used in the Book of the Duchess to legitimate the Black Knight’s courtliness. But this time the Chaucerian narrator’s deviant identity compromises his project, which should end in the procreative fecundity of husband and wife, whom the narrator has converted from classical to medieval figures. The narrator’s failure to effect lineage in his story brings the Dante who dreamed himself Ganymede to mind. The Grand Tour had indeed provided Chaucer a new context in which to envision his queer authorial pose, and that literary environment was not Boccaccio’s normative vernacular aesthetic but Dante’s hermaphrodite poetics.

4 The House of Fame: Geffrey as Ganymede

The central point of contact between the Dante whose hermaphrodite poetics theorized the noble mother tongue in the Comedy and the narrator of the House of Fame occurs in the episode at the opening of Book 2 of Chaucer’s poem in which the eagle bears the narrator aloft. After a nod to Dante, Chaucer’s narrator imagines himself Ganymede during the flight scene. I shall argue in this chapter that when Geffrey thinks himself Ganymede in the eagle’s grasp, he contextualizes his pragmatic vernacular project in Book 1 of the House of Fame within Dante’s theoretical poetic concerns in the Comedy. Specifically, Dante’s dreaming himself Ganymede at the opening of the Purgatorio, as the pilgrim-poet begins to resolve the problem posed by the mother tongue, glosses Geffrey’s failed effort to convert the Latin Aeneid into a vernacular romance in the opening book of Chaucer’s poem. Although Geffrey literally renders the ‘Ur-narrative of his culture’ (Boitani, Fame 194) into English, his translation falls short of accomplishing the implicit agenda of such medieval vernacularizations, the conversion of the classical warrior into the husband and father who founds a dynasty. My approach to the flight experience as physical rapture connoting the Chaucerian narrator’s anxiety about poetic deviance differs radically from the traditional interpretation of it as an allegory of poetic inspiration in which the eagle represents Thought. Developed from nineteenth-century views of the House of Fame, this allegorical reading still predominates, even though challenges to it have arisen. For instance, Sheila Delany argues that the defining feature of the flight scene is not inspiration but the garrulous eagle’s comic exposure of the limits of science (Poetics 69–86). Delany’s reading has been variously adapted so that we now have an eagle who ‘demythologizes verbal noise’ (Russell,

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Vision 186) or sounds the ‘subversive voice’ of the non-human other (Kordecki). To open up space for my queer reading of the flight scene, I first show how the allegory of inspiration has played the central role in the escape narrative as it has been mapped onto the House of Fame. I return to George Kittredge’s influential Chaucer and His Poetry to establish that its concept of the House of Fame as a poem that charts Chaucer’s ‘rapid and virile development’ from the servile imitator of French verse to the poet who ‘finds himself’ (73) depends upon reading the flight scene as an allegory of Dante’s liberation of Chaucer. As I noted in the introduction, Kittredge did not devise the Chaucer liberation narrative. Nor was he the first to associate it with the House of Fame. As early as 1845 the poem appealed to John Wilson (who used the pen name Christopher North) for its ‘bold and free spirit of invention’ and for standing ‘free from the suspicion of having been taken from other poets’ (62). By the turn of the twentieth century, this freedom was assimilated to Chaucer’s breakout from French influence. For instance, in 1907 John Tatlock praises the House of Fame, otherwise an artistic failure in his opinion, for having the ‘one quality which indicates great maturity, especially in a medieval poet – freedom.’ In this poem, Tatlock continues, Chaucer left ‘the French house of bondage’ far behind (Development 38). In the same year, Wilbur Sypherd credits the master poet, Dante, with Chaucer’s transformation from being the ‘mainly adaptive’ love poet of the Book of the Duchess (72) to being the superior ‘assimilative and formative’ author of the House of Fame (vi). But if Kittredge did not invent reading the House of Fame as Chaucer’s autobiographical ars poetica, he articulates it more fully than his predecessors and specifically locates Chaucer’s poetic liberation in the Dantesque flight scene. Kittredge insists that Dante’s influence upon Chaucer was qualitatively different from Chaucer’s French influence: the latter suppressed Chaucer’s talents, whereas the former ‘awoke him to consciousness of power that was his own’ (26). Although Kittredge repeatedly denies that the House of Fame is Chaucer’s ‘personal allegory’ (83, 99), he nevertheless traces the narrative of Chaucer’s putative artistic ‘emancipation from French fashions’ (73) across the three books of the poem and elides any meaningful distinction between the narrator Geffrey and the poet Chaucer. Book 1 of the House of Fame, in which the narrator visits the temple of Venus, Kittredge begins, signals to the audience that it is ‘to hear one more variation of the favorite theme of the love-vision’ (81). To escape this bondage to French convention, Kittredge continues, Geffrey ‘needs

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a conveyance,’ which arrives in Book 2. Not unexpectedly, this liberator is the Dantesque eagle: ‘Jove’s bird, decked out with a feather or two from Dante, stands ready to perform this service at the god’s command’ (86). Remaining passive throughout his guided tour of Fame’s palace in Book 2, Geffrey ‘gradually recovers his self-command,’ and ‘this recovery enables him to assert himself when they near the journey’s end’ (93). At the conclusion of Book 2 occurs the narrator’s self-assertion that evidences his newfound poetic power: when a bystander enquires if the narrator has come seeking fame, Geffrey answers that it suffices him ‘that no wight have my name in honde. / I woot my-self best how I stonde’ (1877–8). This statement evokes Kittredge’s admiration: ‘men in general are not so wise, or not so well-instructed’ (107). For Kittredge, Geffrey’s emancipator – the Dantesque eagle who seizes the narrator and conveys him out of French bondage – allegorizes the rapture of artistic liberation in the form of ‘an active intelligence working freely in a flexible and responsive medium’ (97). Book 3, an account of the narrator’s visit to the wicker House of Rumor, exhibits Chaucer the poet’s emancipation through his perfect mastery of verse: ‘there is not a superfluous line,’ Kittredge observes, and despite the raucous humour of its gambolling spirits, ‘they never break loose from [Chaucer’s] control’ (103). Beyond enabling Chaucer the poet to acquire artistic control, the Dantesque eagle has also inspired him to envision new material, English in subject. In the mention of ‘pilgrims, pardoners, and shipmen’ in Book 3, Kittredge ‘can almost descry the Canterbury Tales in the distance’ (102). Representing Chaucer’s reading of Italian poetry, Dante’s eagle is thus directly credited with the English poet’s rejection of effete French verse and with his assumption of the virile new style of poetic maturity and mastery that anticipates the work of his final period, the Canterbury Tales. The reading of the House of Fame articulated by Kittredge and reiterated by his disciple John Lowes (Chaucer 103–7) and others became so naturalized that its basic outline emerged repeatedly without attribution. Again and again, Dante was cast in the role of the poet who inspired Chaucer to break free from French convention. For instance, Laurence Shook, who reads the House of Fame as an ars poetica, finds Book 1 ‘preparing the stage for a dramatic escape from what may be called the temple of love tradition’; the agent of Chaucer’s liberation is the eagle, who represents ‘new inspiration.’ The ‘two moments of real importance’ for Chaucer’s ‘new poetic’ are precisely those that Kittredge admired as evidencing Chaucer’s recovery of self-command after his passivity in the

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eagle’s grasp, but Shook understandably feels no need to credit Kittredge with an observation that had been normalized into a commonplace (418). With myriad variations, readers have reinscribed Kittredge’s liberation narrative on the House of Fame for almost a century. A further example illustrates the influence of Kittredge’s view that Dante motivated Chaucer’s transformation from the poet of effete verse to the poet of vigorous and natural verse, that is, from the queer poet to the heteronormative father-poet. Wolfgang Clemen decries the overemphasis on Chaucer’s French and Italian influences (2), but he nevertheless proceeds to argue that the liberating effects of Chaucer’s Italian journey are already evident in Book 1 of the House of Fame; Chaucer’s love-vision there avoids ‘the rigidity or fussy pedantry ... so typical of his French contemporaries’ (70). Specifically, Dante may have stimulated Chaucer to leave behind the decorative and static French love-vision for the more robust plot of the House of Fame, with its conventionally Italian characteristics of drama, realism, accuracy: ‘Dante might certainly have opened Chaucer’s eyes to the possibilities of accurate, factual and vivid descriptions of events, a concentrated portrayal of dramatic situations, a particular type of realism, which enhanced rather than weakened the underlying thought’ (71). As the poem progresses, Clemen remarks, Dante’s inspiration further registers in ‘Chaucer’s longing for new material which should be taken from life itself’ (110). This search forecasts the Canterbury Tales. For despite their literary sources, Clemen asserts, these stories ‘spring in the main from Chaucer’s own experience and seek to seize and hold life’s colourful abundance’ (111). Clemen’s depiction of Chaucer’s new poetic practice as the domination of the teeming materia of life overtly rewrites Kittredge’s father-poet, the agent who induces order into inchoate matter. Fundamental to such traditional readings of the House of Fame as a liberation allegory is the reluctance to name the Ganymede story as the source of Chaucer’s flight scene, much less to consider its queer implications for both Dante’s and Chaucer’s poems. For instance, Sypherd wrestled at length with the classical exemplars of the flight scene in the House of Fame. He concludes that, if ‘such an episode as the Ganymede story’ was ‘at the very bottom of Chaucer’s representation, it formed surely but the slightest foundation for the treatment of the episode by Chaucer’ (87). ‘Later portrayals often nearer [Chaucer’s] own tastes’ provide better models, Sypherd asserts (90). One such model for the eagle closer to Chaucer’s ‘tastes’ even if there was ‘no considerable

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direct influence,’ Sypherd argues, are the female guides in the lovevision, ‘damsels in the service of Love’ who lead the hero to ‘his mistress or to the house of Love’ (94). Edgar Shannon took Sypherd to task for this bizarre assertion on the grounds that the Ganymede story from the classics provides the only parallel to the dual function of Chaucer’s eagle as Jove’s messenger and the hero’s guide (110). Nevertheless, like Sypherd, Shannon kept his eyes averted from the reason that the eagle bore Ganymede aloft to Jove. Sypherd silenced any discussion of the implications of Jove’s same-sex passion for Ganymede, while Shannon turned Chaucer’s use of the classical Ganymede story in the House of Fame into a variant of the liberation narrative: Chaucer’s visit to Italy, Shannon argues, introduced him to the ‘imaginative freedom of the Classics,’ which Chaucer ‘engraft[ed] upon the formality of the Middle Ages,’ that is, upon French verse, to produce the House of Fame (119). Earlier, Kittredge acknowledges the Ganymede story but quickly and decisively suppresses the connection between Jove’s beloved and Geffrey with the single observation that Geffrey’s statement that he is not Ganymede means that Geffrey ‘declines to identify himself’ with the classical eremenos (Chaucer 84). Like most subsequent readers, Kittredge insists that Dante’s influence registers upon Geffrey’s mind, not upon his body, freeing his imagination from its courtly confines to pursue new creative ventures. I showed in chapter 3, however, that it is by means of the pilgrim’s physical identification first with Ganymede and then with the hermaphroditical Achilles that Dante both figures the problem that confronts his efforts to ennoble the vernacular and points to its solution. It is through a corporeal association with deviant classical figures that the poet Dante represents his persona in search of a workable poetic. In this chapter, I shall argue that Chaucer expresses Geffrey’s poetic quandary through the narrator’s similar identification with Ganymede during the House of Fame’s flight scene. Although somewhat different from Dante’s predicament, Geffrey’s dilemma also arises from the task that faces him as a vernacular poet, and his rapture in the flight scene does not allegorize the liberation of his creative powers from French bondage but his assimilation to the troubled Dante, who dreamed himself Ganymede and awoke to find himself Achilles.1 David Wallace argues that the House of Fame grew from Dante’s motivation of Chaucer’s ‘dream of raising his own humble English “makynge” to the level of poetry,’ a hope that unravels over the course of the poem because of the ‘defects of a lightweight and recalcitrant medium’ (‘Con-

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tinental Inheritance’ 22). I maintain that Geffrey’s efforts at hylomorphic ‘makynge’ unravelled not because of the general deficiencies of his medium of native English. Rather, the Chaucerian narrator’s problem grew specifically from the vernacular tradition of the text that he attemptedto anglicize, the Aeneid.2 The difficulty is not only that a vernacular response to Virgil had to accommodate a woman, Dido, as Marilynn Desmond contends (127), but that it required expanding the role of Aeneas from Virgil’s imperialistic hero to that of the lover and then of the husband and founder of a dynasty. As I argued in chapter 1, the latter accommodation to medieval demands could render the hero vulnerable to the charge of unacceptable feminization. If the Chaucerian narrator succeeded in shielding the courtly protagonist of the Book of the Duchess, legitimizing Aeneas presented a challenge that the House of Fame’s Geffrey fails to meet, as his subsequent identification with Dante’s Ganymede in a wasteland ‘feld ... of sond’ (406) unpopulated by Nature glosses. Chaucer’s Eagle Flies the Coop Even if readers largely avoid the deviant implications of Purgatorio 9.28– 30, the episode in which Dante dreams that a golden-feathered eagle snatches and transports him, virtually no modern editor of the House of Fame fails to remark that Chaucer’s eagle invokes this passage. (Some editors further reference Virgil’s Aeneid 5.252–7 or Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10.155–61, accounts of the Ganymede scene that lie behind Dante’s.) Like most modern readers, medieval moralizers read Ganymede’s eagle as a symbol of contemplation rather than of homoerotic rapture and Ganymede’s flight as intellectual rather than physical experience (Steadman). Yet these continuing attempts to fix the meaning of this myth throughout the Middle Ages suggest that both the bird and the boy remained potentially transgressive figures who might fly the allegorical coop and return to their antique homoerotic setting in the GrecoRoman pasture from which medieval moralizers estranged them. The Ganymede of the medieval debate poem that I discussed in chapter 1 is a case in point. Forced to interpret the eagle’s import in Book 2 of the House of Fame, Geffrey decides that the bird has flown its allegorical cage. Chaucer’s eagle arrives on stage at the beginning of Book 2 brimming with allegorical potential. As Geffrey experiences the approach of and then seizure by the eagle, the narrator passes from astonished awe at its beauty to dread in its grip. But this heavenly visitor soon proves to be a different bird altogether from the messenger whose wondrous menace

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the narrator initially feared. Instead, the eagle is a garrulous busybody who squawks ‘Awak!’ (556), nags his human passenger not to be so timid, and grumbles about his weight. Furthermore, the bird speaks in a ‘mannes vois’ (556) and calls the narrator by his name, ‘Geffrey’ (558). David Jeffrey aptly remarks that this comic eagle does not live up to its exegetical reputation in the Middle Ages as a symbol of the intellect, contemplation, or the Word. ‘We should be careful’ about seeing the eagle as a biblical commentary on Chaucer’s poem, Jeffrey concludes, for ‘Geffrey’s eagle does not act like “The Word” at all’ (214). Nor does Chaucer’s eagle resemble its classical and Italian ancestors, who travel to earth to fetch Ganymede for Jove’s erotic pleasure. Ovid’s eagle is capable of bearing Jove’s thunderbolts (Met. 10.158), Virgil’s eagle is ‘Jove’s swift armor-bearer’ (Aen. 5.255), and Dante’s eagle is as ‘terrible as lightning’ (Purg. 9.29). Yet, forced to decide what the eagle may ‘sygnifye’ (587) – the obvious options being impending homosexual assault or spiritual rapture – Chaucer’s narrator makes the same choice as Dante did in the Purgatorio, homosexual predation, and he does so when he hears the eagle proclaim that he is Geffrey’s ‘frend’ (582). As soon as Geffrey hears the eagle’s declaration of amity, he begins to wonder if Jove will stellify him: ‘And therwith I / Gan for to wondren in my mynde: / “O God,” thought I, “that madest kynde – / Shal I noon other weyes dye? / Wher Joves wol me stellefye?”’ (584–7). Stellification, transformation into a constellation, implies fame but has a more explicit association in the context of the narrator’s thoughts. Of the four apotheosized figures that Geffrey next mentions – two biblical (Enoch and Elijah) and two classical (Romulus and Ganymede) – only one was stellified: Ganymede, whom Jove rewarded for his years of service on Olympus as cup-bearer (Geffrey’s ‘botiller’) by transforming him into the constellation Aquarius (Saslow 5). In short, as the eagle’s captive, Geffrey prepares to undergo a Ganymedean episode. What Geffrey imagines will actually happen to him is never specified, but he clearly anticipates a physical experience rather than a spiritual or intellectual one. The eagle disrupts Geffrey’s expectations, however: the bird informs the narrator that he thinks ‘amys’ (596) about himself. But the eagle disclaims Jove’s interest in the narrator with the important qualification that Jove will ‘not ... as yet’ (597–9) stellify Geffrey, and he leaves the suggestion hanging in the air that Jove may at some later date develop such interest.3 Regardless of Jove’s intentions, Geffrey’s thoughts of stellification clearly project his own imagined ravishment. By virtue of

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the fact that immediately before the bird arrives, the House of Fame resounds with a significant echo of the Divine Comedy in Chaucer’s first invocation of the Muses (523–8), Geffrey is associated with the Dante who dreamed himself Ganymede on the border between Inferno and Purgatory and awoke as Achilles, the figure emblematic of the pilgrim’s emerging hermaphroditical vernacular poetic. That the vernacular has something to do with Geffrey’s homoerotic fantasy is suggested in his command at the beginning of Book 2 that everyone who understands ‘Englissh’ (510) now listen to him. I next argue that vernacularizing Virgil’s Aeneid is explicitly the subject – and problem – of Book 1 of the House of Fame. If theorizing the mother tongue drove Dante to dream of the eagle, the practical matter of supplying the new perspective and content common to vulgarizations of the Latin epic drives Geffrey to dream of the ‘unnatural’ desert and its predatory bird. The Epic and Romance Aeneids The reading of the House of Fame as a liberation narrative that I outlined at the beginning of this chapter finds in Book 1 evidence of Chaucer’s continuing bondage to the puerile conventions and methods of the French love-vision. General, if not specific, resemblances have long been noted between Chaucer’s structuring of the narrator’s dream in the glass temple of Venus at the opening of the poem and visionary poems by Machaut, Froissart, and other French writers (Fyler, ‘Notes’ 977). Kittredge observes that the narrator’s announcement that he is to tell a dream signals to readers that they shall ‘hear one more variation on the favorite theme of the love vision,’ an idea ‘confirmed when they [find] the poet of Venus admiring a love-tale painted on the walls’ (Chaucer 81). Ian Robinson envisions Chaucer trapped in a ‘claustrophobic temple of love’ in Book 1 until ‘Jove’s eagle appears to rescue [him]’ (44–6). But within the thin walls of this French-inspired temple lies a perhaps unexpected text: the story of Troy from Virgil’s Aeneid, which the dreamer sees portrayed on the temple walls and paraphrases in the mother tongue throughout the better part of House of Fame 1. Geffrey’s paraphrase of the Aeneid differs from the original in its treatment of Dido, whom Virgil presents as a distraction in the hero’s progress from Troy to Rome. The Aeneid that Geffrey summarizes expands the Virgilian Dido’s lament over Aeneas’s betrayal and abandonment and follows it with a non-Virgilian condemnation of Aeneas’s treachery. Inspired by Ovid’s Heroides 7, which creates Dido’s anguished

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response to her abandonment from a female point of view (Desmond 34–44), Geffrey’s addition gives the Carthaginian queen a voice that Virgil denied her. Geffrey’s shaping of the story of Aeneas with its proDido bias is thus seen to reflect the influence of ‘romance’ or vernacular Aeneids such as the one that I discussed in chapter 1, the Roman d’Eneas (Bennett, ‘Fame’ 38). Christopher Baswell explains that the Eneas-poet might have found Ovid’s narration of the Fall of Troy in Metamorphoses 13, a text ‘dense with women’s splendor and anguish.’ Further, Baswell notes, the Heroides, from which Geffrey constructs Dido’s lament, almost exclusively features the desires of women, many of them connected to Troy, in a sympathetic fashion: ‘And Ovid’s Dido in the Heroides provides a particularly telling counterbalance to Virgil, for she reformulates the grandeur and tragic historical destiny of the Virgilian Dido in a character at once more intimate, more sentimental, and perhaps more accessibly human’ (Virgil 185). In all, Baswell concludes, the Ovidian-inspired romance Aeneid subverts its Virgilian original: ‘The romance Aeneid, far more than its Latin source, is the story of Aeneas and his women, or even the story of Aeneas’s women to the exclusion of Aeneas ... it can be seen as the untold Latin Aeneid: a completion, but also a subversion of Virgil’s narrative, tending to extend those very episodes, especially that of Dido, which for Virgil are the restraints keeping Aeneas from his fortune in Italy’ (Virgil 11). In the escape narrative, then, Geffrey’s feminization in Book 1 of the House of Fame, apparent in his Ovidian sympathy for and identification with Dido, thus rematerializes as the result of French influence, this time not lyric poetry but the French romance Aeneid, the Roman d’Eneas. Contrary to the traditional reading of Book 1 as displaying Geffrey’s subordination to the temple of love tradition or as revealing the narrator’s feminization by means of his identification with the Ovidian-inspired romance Aeneid, I find that something quite different occurs in the opening section of the House of Fame : Geffrey sets out to create an English equivalent of the French vernacular Aeneid, but fails in this project, just as he fails to create an epic Aeneid. Baswell notes that Book 1 evidences the narrator’s ‘notoriously wavering allegiances’ to Virgil and Ovid (Virgil 223). Geffrey himself acknowledges them when he famously tells his readers to consult either ‘Virgile in Eneydos / Or the Epistle of Ovyde’ (378–9) concerning what Dido wrote before she died. In signalling the confused lack of resolution between Virgil and Ovid in his own text of the story of Aeneas and Dido, the narrator also points to his failure to vernacularize the Aeneid.

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Central to understanding Geffrey’s failed project is the definition of what constitutes a successful romance Aeneid, which in turn requires identifying the characteristics that distinguish the classical from the vernacular Aeneid. Their major difference does not reside in their respective approaches to Dido, hostile or sympathetic, an illusory contrast, I shall argue, since both the epic and the romance versions devalue woman, even if the romance Aeneid gives female characters a voice. The pertinent distinction between the epic and romance Aeneids lies in what they privilege foremost in the aftermath of the Fall of Troy. In Virgil’s narrative, it is empire; in the medieval redaction, lineage. These distinctions relate to the contrast that Howard Bloch draws between the Old French epic, or chanson de geste, as a ‘virtual home for the aged childless ... genealogically sterile because of an almost universal lack of progeny,’ and the courtly novel which ‘will become a school for orphans’ (Etymologies 107). As I next discuss, the classical tradition had developed competing representations of Aeneas, one that cast him as a traitor and the other as a hero, but the new romance Aeneid of the Middle Ages transformed the Virgilian figure of the warrior, the man obsessed with his own lost father (Farrell 109), into the lover who becomes husband and dynastic patriarch. The Dual Aeneas: Empire versus Lineage in the Virgilian and Romance Aeneids Both the Virgilian and the romance Aeneids serve Eurocentric, patriarchal goals, yet they differ substantially in how they construe and reach those ends. Virgil’s poem seeks to recuperate the mixed reputation of Aeneas as part of its larger project of tracing the cultural origins of Rome to Troy through Aeneas and his male descendants, Romulus and Remus. Meyer Reinhold explains that from the beginnings of the mythopoetic tradition of Troy evident in Homeric poems, Aeneas had a dual reputation as both an inglorious traitor and a transcendent hero. It was Virgil who elevated the ‘ancestral hero of the Julian gens to the rank of national hero of the Romans – a “Roman” hero clothed with pietas and divinely guided on his mission of bringing a purified Trojan remnant to the promised land of Italy’ (196). In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles accused Aeneas of wanting to usurp King Priam’s power and have his house of Dardanus succeed to the royal power of Troy. This Homeric accusation led to the suspicion that Aeneas survived the sack of Troy because he had betrayed his country to the Greeks and was thus spared by the enemy. As part of his imperial historiography, Virgil rationalizes Aeneas’s survival by attrib-

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uting it to divine intervention, and his narrative traces the fortunes of the hero as he progresses westward to his eventual destination: Italy. In Virgil’s narrative, historical linearity and divine destiny are figured primarily in terms of geographical destination, Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Rome, threatened in Aeneid 4 by Juno’s shipwreck of the hero in what Lee Patterson terms the ‘dangerously regressive’ location of Dido’s luxurious realm, Carthage (Negotiating 171).4 Orientalism and anti-feminism fuel the twin challenges that Virgil’s hero must overcome to achieve his political purpose in Italy.5 Genealogy plays an important role as well in Virgil’s imperial historiography, although it is narratively subsidiary to the hero’s progress from place to place, east to west, as Aeneas translates the purified remnants of the Trojan race to Italy, where he subsequently ‘seeds’ the land with his descendants. In contrast, the Roman d’Eneas takes marriage as its subject (Huchet 19), and the poem’s stress on Aeneas’s lineage and on primogeniture validates concepts crucial to Norman and Anglo-Norman social structure, not to Virgil’s Augustan imperial historiography (Nolan, Chaucer 78–9, 96; Patterson, Negotiating 180). It presents Aeneas’s journey not as a linear movement from Troy to Latium, but as a return to Italy, the land from which Aeneas’s house of Dardanus had earlier been expelled to Troy. Whereas Virgil’s Aeneas is unaware and must be convinced that Italy, not Troy, is his ancestral homeland, Eneas unambiguously knows that Italy is the land of his forebears. In a passage that the Eneas-poet added to his Latin source, Eneas lays claim to this land by virtue of the line of genealogical descent from Dardanus through Tros and Anchises to Eneas. Characteristically, Eneas figures his national destiny to rule Italy in terms of patriarchal genealogy. As the former possession of his forefathers, Italy is Eneas’s grandmother and great-grandmother: ‘“My lords,” he said, “I wish to explain my right to you, so that you do not accuse me of wishing to conquer, out of pride, another domain or another land by force. My ancestor, who was called Dardanus, was born here [in Italy]. He left this land and established himself in ours [Troy] ... From his lineage issued Tros, who founded Troy and its fortress, and who gave it his name; my father was of his lineage. Troy lasted long, with great power, until the Greeks conquered her. The gods took me from there and sent me to this country where my ancestor was born. They have granted me all Italy, which is as it were my grandmother and greatgrandmother”’ (242). Simon Gaunt identifies this genealogical project of the Eneas as the primary distinction between the vernacular poem and Virgil’s national poem: ‘there is arguably far more stress laid on the

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foundation of a dynasty in the Eneas; the foundation of Rome does not seem to concern the poet as much as it clearly did Virgil’ (‘Epic’ 8). If Virgil’s Dido represents a dangerous distraction to the hero’s imperial mission, the vernacular Dido threatens lineage. In redacting Virgil’s poem, the Eneas-poet turns to Ovid’s Heroides to amplify Dido’s lament, and from Ovid’s poem he also takes the cue for his innovative shaping of the closing segment on Lavine. But it is the medievalized version of this text that the Eneas-poet uses: Ovid’s works with moral commentaries that makes Dido into the prime example of ‘foolish’ love, ‘fole amor.’ It is this foolish female desire that constitutes the threat to lineage for the Eneas-poet. In the fourteenth-century medievalized Metamorphoses, the Ovide moralisé 14.523, Dido’s foolish love for Aeneas, which leads to her suicide before she produces an heir, causes a genealogical crisis in her own land, ‘which was not subsequently passed on by her’ (24), a remark that echoes Dido’s own deathbed lament that the Eneas-poet earlier added to Virgil’s text: ‘Here have I thrown aside my honor and my power, and left Carthage without an heir’ (97). Counterbalancing the expansion of Dido’s role as the faithless wife at the beginning of the Eneas is one of the romance’s most noted divergences from the Aeneid: the prominent new role created for Lavinia at the end of the vernacular work. Daughter of King Latinus and fiancée of Turnus, Lavinia plays a silent role in the Aeneid, yet she is much discussed. Alarmed by prophecies that the arrival of the stranger, Aeneas, portends terrible war for his land, King Latinus seeks advice at the oracle of his father, Faunus. Faunus commands his son to ally his daughter Lavinia ‘in Latin wedlock’ not to Turnus but to the foreigner, Aeneas (Aen. 7.96–101). To avert war, Latinus consents, but Lavinia’s mother, Queen Amata, enraged at the prospect of her daughter marrying a stranger, excoriates her husband for breaking his ‘solemn pledge’ of Lavinia’s hand to his kinsman Turnus and thereby abandoning his ‘old love’ for his own people (Aen. 7.365–7). The Eneas-poet makes subtle but significant changes to this episode that mute the extent to which Aeneas represents the ominous stranger and Lavinia’s marriage is politically motivated to secure peace. Most notably, unlike her Virgilian counterpart, the vernacular Queen Amata does not object to Aeneas because he is a stranger, but because he will abandon Lavine just as he betrayed Dido, which would leave the land ‘unseeded.’ The subsequent love affair between Lavine and Eneas, which for many readers constitutes the most remarkable, even, as Baswell calls it, ‘audacious,’ innovation of the Eneas (Virgil 168), also functions to

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reinforce the vernacular poem’s obsession with lineage. In a 1,500-line addition to the Aeneid that utilizes Ovidian love psychology, the Eneaspoet probes the budding passion of Lavine for Eneas. The passages in which Lavine, challenged by Queen Amata to remain dedicated to Turnus, carries on an internal dialogue with Amors are heralded as the entry of innovative Ovidian love casuistry into medieval romance (Muscatine 13–19). However important Lavine’s unusual love debate may be to the subsequent history of romance stylistics, structurally it has no impact upon the course of events in the Eneas; rather, its conformity to that course is both its meaning and its message. In discovering her love for Eneas, Lavine complies with the marital union that her father, Latinus, has already decreed and that Eneas himself will later secure in defeating the spurned suitor, Turnus, in combat (Baswell, Virgil 171). Through her use of the sophisticated internal dialogues of Ovidian love psychology, Lavine models her cooperation with the Eneas-poet’s genealogical project to the new audience – women – of a new genre: vernacular romance. If Dido’s illicit passion demonstrates the dangers of female desire to lineage, a danger contained through her suicide, Lavine’s capitulation to the demands of what Eleanor Searle terms ‘predatory kinship’ acts to regulate the female audience (Desmond 107–8). In the House of Fame, Geffrey’s retelling of Dido’s lament also reveals the influence of Ovid’s Heroides, but when Geffrey couples Virgil’s Aeneid with Ovid’s Heroides, the result is not a ‘ludicrous, hybrid version’ (Kiser 123) in the sense that Virgil presents a hostile and Ovid a sympathetic view of Dido. Both texts devalue Dido, but for the very different reasons that I have just established. The Virgilian Dido threatens Aeneas’s function as the founder of a nation, whereas the Ovidian or romance Dido would undermine his role as the perpetuator of the legitimate family line, reflected in the fact that Dido leaves her own city, Carthage, and all its riches without an heir. In both the Virgilian and the Ovidian texts, Dido serves to regulate the performance of Aeneas, whose primary role in the epic Aeneid is to sustain his progress westward against her allure and found Rome and in the romance Aeneid to resist squandering his seed in an illicit relationship and secure a legitimate wife, Lavinia, with whom to further the family line. In short, the protagonist of the romance Aeneid is no longer simply Virgil’s martial hero but also the marital hero, husband, and, as important, the father. Virgil ends his epic on a military note in the long description of Aeneas’s defeat of Lavinia’s suitor, Turnus, while the romance Aeneid follows the hero well beyond

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that climactic event to the nuptial conclusion and its all-important aftermath, the passing of Aeneas’s realm to his son Ascanius and the descent of the dynasty from son to son until Romulus and Remus found Rome. The significance of this father figure to the success of the Eneas raises the subject of the interested nature of vernacular romance, a matter that I addressed briefly at the end of chapter 3. I remarked there that medieval vernacular literature often attempts to regulate male as well as female desire. In a poem like the Eneas, which models ideals of female behaviour through Lavine and warns against Dido’s dangerous conduct, the vernacular speaks to the unlettered, presumptively female, audience. Whether or not women actually read the work and whether or not they resisted and subverted it, in theory this vernacular text turned its gaze on the female reader. The same focus on the female audience appears in vernacular romance not dedicated to securing continuous lineage by promoting the figure of the faithful and fruitful wife, as, for instance, in Boccaccio’s Filocolo. Nevertheless, the Filocolo overtly pursues the same goal as the Eneas and countless other medieval vernacular texts seek without comment: the immasculation of the woman reader (Schibanoff, ‘Taking the Gold’). Within their often overt addresses to the woman reader, vernacular romances (and lyrics) also quietly seek to regulate male desire, specifically to direct it to heterosexual ends, often through the example of the narrator enamoured of the woman for whom he writes in the vernacular, as Boccaccio says he writes the Filocolo at the request of his beloved. In the Filostrato, Teseida, and other vernacular works, Boccaccio repeatedly uses the pose of the lover who writes in the vernacular in order to apprise his beloved of his virtues and thus to win (or win back) her favour. Indeed, he uses the guise often enough that subsequent readers have transformed Boccaccio’s fictional beloved, Maria d’Aquino, into his actual flame (Kirkham 21–75). Although the poet’s persona as lover tropes hylomorphic poetics, at the same time it provides the template for male characters in the work to pursue the female beloved and produces the vernacular work’s powerful and highly interested design on the male reader. To vernacularize the Aeneid successfully, then, Chaucer’s Geffrey must do more than render it into English. He must also change its content and agenda to model heteronormativity for both women and men. First and foremost, it is the generative figure of Aeneas as lover and then as husband that Geffrey must invent and valorize. Unlike Boccaccio and many romance poets, however, Geffrey himself does not impersonate

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the lover and then project that guise onto his alter ego within the work in order to authorize his double. Instead, Geffrey returns to the narrative device that the Roman d’Eneas itself had earlier used to normalize Eneas’s expanded heteroerotic role, the queer decoy that I discussed in chapters 1 and 2. As I showed earlier, the Eneas-poet circumscribed his use of this device; he does not cast himself in the narrative role of foil but creates the imaginary and deliberately unbelievable homosexual Eneas, crass lover of boys, to legitimate the heterosexual passion of the new romance Eneas. So, too, does Geffrey invent characters within his vernacular Aeneid that serve as queer foils to Eneas the lover and husband; yet Geffrey also goes beyond the internal boundaries of the fictional work to invent himself as a queer decoy. Ironically, this identification, I shall argue, leads to the eventual failure of his vernacular project in House of Fame 1 to culminate in lineage. Vulcan as Queer Foil Geffrey’s explicit reference to ‘Englissh’ at the opening of House of Fame 2 points to the nature of his attempted project in Book 1: to vernacularize Virgil’s text and produce a native version of the ‘romance’ Aeneid. Three major features of Chaucer’s redaction of Virgil in House of Fame 1 further imply this goal. First, the straightforward, chronological order in which Geffrey narrates Aeneas’s adventures employs the structure of the romance Aeneids like the Roman d’Eneas rather than Virgil’s ordo artificialis that begins in medias res. Chaucer might well have learned the ordo naturalis from rhetoricians rather than from writers of the vernacular romans antiques (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 188), yet Geffrey’s use of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis – in its narrow sense, the verbal depiction of a visual scene (Nichols 133) – to narrate his version of the Aeneid further aligns his project with the popular redactions of Virgil’s poem. In House of Fame 1, the adventures of Aeneas appear as a series of visual scenes painted on the walls of Venus’s temple of glass. As Geffrey walks around the temple, he describes these depictions sequentially to tell the story of Aeneas from the fall of Troy to the settlement of Italy. J.A.W. Bennett maintains that Chaucer’s temple of Venus is indebted to the temple of Juno built by Dido in Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid 1: ‘the scenes of the Trojan War that adorn Juno’s temple surely gave Chaucer the suggestion for depicting scenes from the Aeneid itself within Venus’s temple’ (‘Fame’ 9–10). But Geffrey’s ekphrases extend beyond the scenes of the Trojan war in

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Juno’s temple and resemble something closer to hand to the medieval reader: the material appearance of the popular, vernacular tradition of Virgil’s text, for the manuscripts of these romance versions were often lavishly illustrated. Baswell observes that ‘illustration of vernacular versions is occasionally so systematic that it may have been for some beholders the sole means of access to the Virgilian story.’ Indeed, some romance versions, including ones that circulated in England, Baswell continues, ‘almost tell the story without need for the accompanying text, rather like a present-day comic book.’ In contrast, illustrated medieval manuscripts of Virgil’s Latin Aeneid are both scarce, especially in England, and sparsely illuminated. ‘When Geoffrey Chaucer found himself dreaming an Aeneid in captioned pictures in the House of Fame,’ Baswell concludes, ‘his experience was not without precedent,’ and that precedent was the romance or vernacular version of the epic tale (Virgil 23). Baswell also identifies a third feature that associates Geffrey’s narration of the Aeneid with popular redactions: the emphasis allotted to the ‘tradition of Aeneas’s splendor and misconduct, of Dido’s voluntary generosity and erotic tragedy’ (Virgil 233). Like Delany, Baswell shapes his reading around the pitfalls that confront a narrator such as Geffrey who sets out to navigate the ‘competing strands’ and ‘inherent incompatibility’ of the conflicting medieval approaches to the Aeneid (Virgil 230). Given the compelling overall similarities between the romance Aeneid and Chaucer’s redaction as well as the evocation of Dante and the reference to ‘English’ readers in Book 2, however, I narrow my focus to the specific problem that awaits a narrator like Geffrey as he attempts to vernacularize Virgil’s epic and transform it from the tale of an imperialistic hero into a medieval celebration of the patriarchal founder of a dynastic line. The opening ekphrasis of House of Fame 1 signals Geffrey’s engagement in the matrimonial and dynastic preoccupations of the vernacular Aeneid tradition, because it depicts a familial trio: the goddess Venus with her husband, Vulcan, and her son, Cupid. At the same time, in the figure of ‘ful broun’ Vulcan, this family portrait forecasts Geffrey’s dilemma as he attempts to popularize Virgil and convert Aeneas from warrior to husband: in portreyture I sawgh anoon-ryght [Venus’s] figure Naked fletynge in a see, And also on hir hed, pardee, Hir rose garlond whit and red,

168 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics And hir comb to kembe hyr hed, Hir dowves, and daun Cupido Hir blynde sone, and Vulcano, That in his face was ful broun.

(132–9)

Readers disagree over whether Geffrey’s naked Venus reflects the moralized tradition of the two Venuses, one lascivious and the other benevolent, or whether it originates in Virgil’s ambiguous depiction of her as a single goddess who protects Aeneas and destroys Dido (Fyler, ‘Notes’ 979n30). At this point, however, Geffrey’s brief ekphrasis is concerned not to explore Venus’s dual nature but to locate her in the dysfunctional familial trio that includes her illegitimate son and her husband, a grouping that none too subtly hints at Vulcan’s connubial failing. Like his mythological spouse, Venus, Vulcan appears in two forms in ancient and medieval traditions. As figured, for instance, in Vitruvius’s De architectura 2.1 (trans. in Lovejoy and Boas 375), Vulcan, the legendary smith who forged wondrous arms and armour for the Olympians, is the founder of human civilization and the arts (Panofsky, Renaissance 179–82, Studies 35–67). Geffrey’s ekphrasis of Vulcan, however, draws upon the counter-tradition developed by Virgil (Aen. 8.387 ff.) and Ovid (Art of Love 2.561–92, Met. 4.171–89). It invokes the smith’s other reputation as the cuckolded husband, so loathsome and laughable that Venus fled from him to Mars’s embrace, an adulterous union giving birth to Cupid. Geffrey’s opening allusion to the birth of Venus – ‘naked fletynge in a see’ – further suggests Vulcan’s deficiencies; for Venus was born of the foam from the severed genitals of Saturn cast upon the sea, organs still so potent that they generated the goddess. The other Vulcan of Virgil and Ovid, however, failed to satisfy his wife sexually, leading to her numerous adulterous liaisons, including, most notably, the one with Anchises that produced Aeneas. Indeed, Vulcan’s sexual dysfunction in ancient and medieval tradition was familiar enough that Geffrey draws upon it to create his first queer foil that authorizes Aeneas’s subsequent heteroerotic dalliance with Dido in Carthage. The Vulcan whom Venus spurns as sexual partner belongs to the larger tradition of the smith despised and ridiculed by the Olympians. Son of Jupiter and Juno, Vulcan was cast from heaven because his lameness offended Jupiter (or, sometimes, Hera); alternatively, his physical deformity resulted when Jupiter angrily threw him down to earth. Venus often cuckolded her old and ugly spouse. Informed by Helios of the impending adultery of Venus and Mars, Vulcan crafted a wire net

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that bound the two lovers in flagrante delicto, but once again the Olympians derided Vulcan: several of the gods envied Mars’s plight, and Jupiter declared Vulcan a jealous fool for revealing his wife’s infidelity. Vulcan as the repulsive and possessive husband made his way via Ovid’s Art of Love into Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose. Like Ovid’s Venus, who belittles Vulcan’s rough hands ‘calloused from work at the forge’ in Art of Love 2.570 (147), Jean’s La Vielle justifies Venus’s adultery on the grounds of Vulcan’s foul appearance: ‘it was no great wonder if Venus gave herself to Mars, for Vulcan was so ugly and so blackened from his forge [‘charbonez de sa forge’] on his hands, his face, and his neck, that Venus would not have loved him for anything, even though she called him her husband (238).’ As Bennett observes, Geffrey’s ‘ful broun’ Vulcan in the temple of Venus reflects Jean de Meun’s Vulcan charbonez (‘Fame’ 20–1), and medieval commentators rarely sympathized with the cuckold. Both Ovid’s Art of Love 2.568 and the Roman d’Eneas give a further reason why Venus abhorred her husband and sought an adulterous affair with Mars: Vulcan’s unsatisfying performance as heterosexual lover. Ovid’s Venus not only despises Vulcan’s rough hands, but she derides ‘the limp of her husband’ (147). Nominally referring to Vulcan’s hereditary disability or to his injury when cast from heaven, the smith’s ‘wretched sidelong gait,’ as Ovid derides it in Amores 2.12.22, has sexual implications as well, since in ancient and medieval poetry a limp is a conventional attribute of the male homosexual (e.g., Wilhelm, Poetry 34, 120, 286). Following Ovid’s cue, the Eneas develops Venus more fully into the medieval mal mariée as the alluring spouse mismatched to a (hetero)sexually inept husband. After a seven-year period in which the Eneas’s Venus refused Vulcan her sexual favours because he entrapped her and Mars in the net, Venus agrees to allow Vulcan back into her bed if he will agree to make arms and armour for Aeneas. That night when Vulcan lay with Venus, he ‘did with her what he pleased, and all his desire as best he could’ (142; emphasis mine). Circumspectly, the Eneaspoet observes that Venus ‘made a great outlay’ – a great sacrifice – to attain arms for her son, Aeneas. Like Chaucer’s May in the Merchant’s Tale, who cares ‘not a bene’ for January’s love-making, Venus endures rather than enjoys Vulcan’s sexual performance. Echoing the medieval conflation of excessive heterosexuality with homosexuality that I discussed in chapter 1, John Gower’s Confessio amantis explains Vulcan’s lack of interest in love as the paradoxical result of a husband too entranced by his wife: ‘Just as a sick man hates his food, so the jealous man, in his fever, loses his appetite for love’ (240).

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The Roman d’Eneas also takes its cue for Vulcan’s inept heterosexual performance from Aeneid 8. Virgil tropes Vulcan’s impotence in terms of his artistic prowess, for Venus must fire her reluctant husband into action in the bed in order for him to act at the forge. In an ‘extraordinary scene’ (Boyle 156) of dense intertextuality, Virgil stages Venus’s inspiration of her husband to create arms and armour for her son, Aeneas, as a rewriting of Thetis’s inspiration of Vulcan (Hephaistos) to forge arms for her son, Achilles, in Homer’s Iliad 18.382–409. Virgil’s source text illuminates the way in which the Roman poet compromises Vulcan, for in Iliad 18, Hephaistos, the ‘renowned strong-armed one’ happily married to the ‘lovely goddess’ Charis (382), willingly aids Thetis in gratitude for her earlier rescue of him when his mother, Hera, cast him from heaven because of his lameness. Upon Thetis’s request, Hephaistos immediately turns to his bellows and forges a shield of great ‘skill and craftsmanship’ (388) redolent with images of heterosexual fecundity: marriages, ploughmen tilling fields, young male and female labourers harvesting grapes. This smith, Homer implies, is both a potent husband and artisan, despite his earlier fall from heaven. Virgil’s smith is neither. He plays the wife to Venus’s sexual overtures, and Virgil effeminates Vulcan’s artistic labour through a trope that queers his efforts at the forge. In contrast to Homer’s Thetis, Virgil’s Venus must seduce her spouse Vulcan into crafting armour for her illegitimate son, Aeneas. She manoeuvres Vulcan into ‘her golden nuptial chamber,’ an ironic reminder of how seldom husband and wife have been there together, and she breathes ‘divine love’ into her request for arms from Vulcan (Aen. 8.372–3). But Vulcan ‘falters’ (‘cunctatem,’ 8.387), hesitating to respond to his wife’s sexual overture, also an ironic reminder, perhaps, of why Venus initially strayed from her husband.6 When Vulcan does respond, Virgil characterizes his sexual reaction as that of the passive partner. From Venus, he receives the ‘wonted flame,’ which ignites the ‘sparkling streak of fire’ that courses through Vulcan until he is able to achieve the ‘desired embrace’ (8.389–92). Virgil’s description of Vulcan’s lovemaking is electrifying, appropriate for the fire god, yet it is Venus to whom the credit goes for creating the fireworks in her husband. Michael Putnam comments that in this most overtly erotic scene in the Aeneid, Virgil effects a striking role reversal in which ‘Venus takes her husband’s part, and ... [Vulcan] is the one who is poured into the lap of his wife, as if he were in part the passive object of her desire, to be molded to her wishes’ (171). Virgil himself glosses Vulcan’s sexual role reversal in bed as he narrates the smith’s subsequent performance at the forge. Like the

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housewife who rises early to start the fire and accomplish her domestic tasks, so does Vulcan, the Lord of Fire, leave Venus’s bed to fulfil his wife’s desire: ‘Then, so soon as repose had banished sleep, in the mid career of now waning night, what time a housewife, whose task it is to eke out life with her distaff and Minerva’s humble toil, awakes the embers and slumbering fire, adding night to her day’s work, and keeps her handmaids toiling by lamplight at the long task, that she may preserve chaste her husband’s bed, and rear her little sons: even so, and not more slothful at that hour, the Lord of Fire rises from his soft couch to the work of the smithy’ (Aen. 8.407–15). The Aeneid compromised the masculinity of the sexually hesitant Vulcan, but the Art of Love, the Roman d’Eneas, the Romance of the Rose, as well as other medieval texts overtly discredited the smith as the limp, ineffectual husband. It is the latter Vulcan whom Geffrey invokes as he begins to vernacularize the Aeneid. The Vulcan who forms the opening frame of Geffrey’s project thus emblemizes the threat to dynasty and lineage that romance versions of the Aeneid work to contain; his reluctance causes his wife to seek sexual pleasure elsewhere and to bear other men’s children, most notably Aeneas himself. At the same time, Vulcan acts in the role of the queer foil that I defined in chapter 1, since he authorizes Aeneas’s amorous dalliance in Carthage. In contrast to Vulcan’s disinterest in women, Aeneas’s involvement with Dido evidences the heterosexual inclination that will be necessary for the hero’s success as it is defined in the vernacular tradition, the propagation of a dynasty. The non-normative sexuality that Vulcan displays both drives the plot of Geffrey’s romance Aeneid and at least temporarily legitimates Aeneas’s passion for Dido. This strategy orders and advances Geffrey’s plot up to a critical point, and I next trace the progress of this initial section of his narrative, which along the way engages a second queer foil to Aeneas. Jupiter and Geffrey as Queer Foils Immediately after his introductory ekphrasis of Venus, Cupid, and Vulcan, Geffrey comes to the section of the temple with the engraved tablet of brass that records the opening lines of Virgil’s work: ‘I wol now synge, yif I kan, / The armes and also the man / That first cam, thurgh his destinee, / Fugityf of Troy contree/In Italye, with ful moche pyne / Unto the strondes of Lavyne’ (143–8). Aside from his much-noted disclaimer, ‘yif I kan,’ Geffrey paraphrases the first several lines of the Aeneid closely, preserving Virgil’s emphasis on Aeneas’s westward progress

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from Troy to Italy’s Lavinian shore. But if Geffrey’s rendition of the Aeneid’s opening replicates Virgil’s greater stress on national foundation than on lineage per se, the scribes of the Fairfax and Bodleian manuscripts of the House of Fame altered the emphasis on place to conform to the romance Aeneid’s preoccupation with patrilineal genealogy. Albeit in a Latin marginal annotation, the Fairfax and Bodleian scribes gloss Geffrey’s ‘Lavyne’ (148), the geographical name ‘Lavinium,’ as ‘Lavinia: filia regis Latini’ – ‘Lavinia: daughter of the king of the Latins’ (Fyler, ‘Notes’ 980n148) – thereby diverting attention from the founding of Rome to Aeneas’s dynastic marriage that assumes such importance at the end of the vernacular Aeneid. Geffrey soon follows suit in shifting his emphasis from empire to lineage. The six ekphrases (151–244) that constitute the narrator’s summary of Aeneas’s adventures up until the point at which Dido and Aeneas’s love affair begins adopt the romance Aeneid’s straightforward chronological order, starting with the fall of Troy, as well as its preoccupation with patriarchal genealogy. In the initial three ekphrases, Geffrey condenses Virgil’s narration of the details of the battle over Troy into a brief mention of Sinon and the Trojan horse and focuses instead on the fate of two male lines, one that ends in the Trojan defeat, another that survives by escaping Troy. The first and second scenes on the temple wall contrast the demise of Troy’s King Priam and ‘Polytes his sone’ (160), both slain during the sack of the city, to the survival of another Trojan ‘sone’ (165), Aeneas, who, on his mother Venus’s command, flees to safety, taking his father, Anchises, with him. Unlike the Eneas, in which readers learn of Eneas’s loss of his wife Creusa in a later flashback, Geffrey narrates this episode immediately in his third ekphrasis. Carrying Anchises on his back, Geffrey’s Aeneas escapes Troy with Creusa and their son, Ascanius. Creusa is suddenly lost in the chaotic retreat – Geffrey disclaims knowledge of how this happened – but the male trio survives. Creusa’s sole remaining function is to return as a spirit and direct Aeneas to flee the Greeks, seek his destiny in Italy, and preserve their son. By the end of Geffrey’s first three ekphrases, one Trojan male line is extinct, the other, disencumbered of Creusa, is intact. Geffrey’s next set of ekphrases turns its attention to two supernatural women, Juno and Venus, who cause Aeneas’s erotic delay with Dido and thus threaten the return of the three Dardanian men to their ancestral homeland. Geffrey selects just one Virgilian motive for Juno’s opposition to Aeneas, the one that resonates with his opening depiction of ‘ful broun’ Vulcan: the goddess opposes the Trojan hero because she

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still resents her husband Jupiter’s homoerotic liaison with another Trojan, Ganymede. Geffrey sees the scene in which Aeneas, his father, and his company of Trojans set sail for Italy, heading there ‘as streight as that they myghte goo’ (197). In the following scene, however, ‘cruel Juno’ (198) calls upon Aeolus to send a fearsome tempest that blows the Trojan fleet off course. The depiction is so realistic, Geffrey avers, that ‘evry herte myght agryse / To see hyt peynted on the wal’ (210–11). In Aeneid 1.12–33, Virgil offers multiple reasons for Juno’s hatred of Aeneas and the Trojans. Champion of Carthage, Juno had heard that descendants of Troy would one day destroy her city, and she had sided with the Greeks during the Trojan War as well. Further, memories of the instigation of that war galled her, for the Trojan Paris had awarded the apple to Venus, Aeneas’s mother, rather than to Juno. Finally, in an unrelated incident that preceded the war and Juno’s devotion to Carthage, another Trojan, Ganymede, aggrieved her by winning her husband Jupiter’s eye and heart. As Virgil concludes, Juno’s ‘hatred of the [Trojan] race’ stemmed in part from ‘the honours paid the ravished Ganymede’ (Aen. 1.28). Chaucer elsewhere wrote of Juno’s legendary propensity to a jealous anger that destroyed lineage. In the Knight’s Tale, Arcite rails against Juno because her jealous ire ‘[hath] oure lynage al fordo’ (1560). Arcite alludes to Juno’s instigation of the enmities between Thebes and Greece in revenge for Jupiter’s adultery with Semele and Alcmena, women of Thebes. Juno’s ‘olde wrath,’ as Chaucer calls it in Anelida and Arcite (51), had also been notably kindled over her husband’s same-sex adultery with the Trojan Ganymede, leading to her effort to destroy Aeneas and his lineage. As the Ganymede-speaker of the twelfth-century ‘Debate between Ganymede and Helen’ claims, Jupiter much preferred Ganymede to his wife: ‘“When Jupiter lies in the middle of his bed and divides his attention / between the two of us, turning now to Juno and now to me, / He prefers a boy’s game to a woman’s when he tries it: / Every time he is turned toward [Juno], he either argues or snores”’ (Stehling 117). Of the several reasons given in the Aeneid for Juno’s antipathy to Troy, the motivation of Geffrey’s Juno comes closest to the one that Virgil mentions last: her anger at her husband over Ganymede rather than her antipathy to Paris or her fear for Carthage’s future. Geffrey never explicitly names the source of Juno’s opposition to Aeneas, but alludes to it in identifying her as ‘daun Jupiteres wif,’ who all her life has hated ‘al the Troianysshe blood’ (199–201). As Jupiter’s wife, Juno has but one wellknown reason to hate Trojans: her husband’s same-sex adultery. In

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contrast, the Eneas-poet blames Juno’s antipathy to Trojans on Paris’s choice of Venus as the fairest woman, while a Virgilian Aeneid such as the Ilias ascribes it to both Paris’s choice of Venus and Jupiter’s choice of Ganymede (Friend 113). Chaucer’s narrowing of Juno’s impetus to her husband’s same-sex adultery creates an intricate reverse symmetry between Juno and her opponent in Geffrey’s paired ekphrases, Venus. As the mal mariée of ‘limping’ Vulcan, Venus turns to numerous other men, divine and mortal, including Mars and Anchises, who fathered Aeneas; as the scorned wife of a husband who preferred boy-love, Juno threatens Aeneas and his line through Aeolus’s tempest. However indirectly, both Jupiter’s same-sex passion for Ganymede and Vulcan’s sexual failures as a husband shape Geffrey’s plot in a way that these episodes do not affect Virgil’s Aeneid. Geffrey’s Juno opposes the Trojan Aeneas because of her husband’s homoerotic involvement with the Trojan Ganymede; Geffrey’s Venus champions Aeneas as the mortal son that her husband’s hesitant heterosexuality led her to conceive with Anchises. At the same time, both limp Vulcan and pederastic Jupiter authorize what the structural conflict between Juno and Venus is about to motivate in Aeneas: a display of his heterosexual credentials in the form of his liaison with Dido. Thus far, then, Geffrey shapes Aeneas’s westerly journey to leave behind the sexual deviance of the ancient world. Geffrey’s next set of ekphrases pits Juno’s legendary hatred of the Trojans against Venus’s maternal concern for her son’s safety. Juno stirs up a tempest to afflict Aeneas’s navy, and Venus begs Jupiter to save the flotilla of Aeneas ‘syth that he hir sone was’ (218). Jupiter quells the storm, Aeneas lands, and Venus sends him to Carthage to find his scattered navy. In Geffrey’s version, Venus also causes Aeneas to charm Dido, the queen of Carthage. As he narrates this episode, Geffrey continuously calls attention to his abbreviation of it–‘shortly of this thyng to pace’ (239), ‘shortly for to tellen’(242), ‘shortly at oo word’ (257) – and indeed he does condense his account. Virgil wove a complex web of motivation for the affair, including, in Aeneid 1, Venus’s concern to insulate her son against harm in Carthage and, in Aeneid 4, Juno’s effort to divert Aeneas from reaching Italy and establishing an empire that would rival Carthage. The Eneas-poet dispenses with Juno’s role in the affair, as does Geffrey, but in place of this excision of Juno’s imperial scheme, the Eneas-poet develops an elaborate description of Dido’s love madness that precedes the consummation scene in the cave. Geffrey does not follow suit.

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Instead, he compresses the love analysis into the compact statement that Dido ‘becam hys love and lat hym doo / Al that weddynge longeth to’ (243–4). Further, Geffrey underscores his already acknowledged truncation with a lengthy explanation of why he says so little about love: What shulde I speke more queynte, Or peyne me my wordes peynte To speke of love? Hyt wol nat be; I kan not of that faculte. And eke to telle the manere How they aqueynteden in fere, Hyt were a long proces to telle, And over-long for yow to dwelle.

(245–52)

The narrator’s insistence that he knows nothing of the ‘faculte’ of love – the field of learning about love – as he narrates one of the most famous western love stories strikes many readers as a classic example of Chaucerian irony and comedy, if not bathos, yet others have found a serious expression of Chaucer’s poetic and other concerns in the narrator’s disclaimer. In the traditional reading of the House of Fame as escape narrative, for instance, this passage functions as evidence of Chaucer’s liberation from one literary authority or another. Thus, Clemen thinks that Chaucer’s brevitas formula and the modesty topos in this passage reveal his rebellion against the ‘lofty phrases’ of the poets of courtly love (81). And feminist readers see in the passage evidence of the unstable gender role with which Chaucer plagues his narrator until resolution is reached through the death of a woman (Hansen, Chaucer 103). Desmond remarks that ambiguous sexuality resonates in Geffrey’s disclaimer (135). The way in which Geffrey has shaped his vernacular rendition of the Aeneid defines the nature of this ambiguity. By alluding to the reluctant or rejected heterosexuality of two husbands, Vulcan and Jove, Geffrey points to his own stance as love’s heretic. Closer to hand as an exemplar for Geffrey is the artisan figure of ‘ful broun’ Vulcan, who recalls the limping creator of arms hesitant to respond sexually to the wife who must fire his work at the forge. Positioned at the opening of Geffrey’s vernacularization, this allusion to Vulcan’s passive artistry resonates with Geffrey’s queer stance as the redactor of the Aeneid, the loveless poet who attempts to transform epic into romance. Jane Chance argues that Geffrey’s later identification with Ganymede and ‘Marcia,’ a feminized form of Dante’s ‘Marsyas,’ suggests, on one level, the ‘possibil-

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ity of Chaucer’s homosexuality’ and, on another, ‘his understanding of the passive, feminized role of the contemporary vernacular poet who must bear the weight of Latin tradition’ (71). Chaucer reveals, however, the specifically textual way in which Geffrey chooses to shoulder that weight: the narrator fashions himself into yet another queer foil that legitimates the medievalized Aeneas’s pre-eminent role as lover and ultimately husband, founder of the Roman dynasty. Virgil employs the spectre of unacceptable feminization not to legitimize Aeneas as lover but to motivate him to leave Dido and pursue his imperialistic destiny. Virgil’s narrative coerces Aeneas’s departure by voicing accusations of passive homosexual effeminacy about the lovesmitten hero. King Iarbas, the suitor whom Dido earlier scorned, complains to Jove that Aeneas has become ‘that Paris’ (Aen. 4.215), an obvious allusion to what Iarbas considers Aeneas’s theft of his beloved Dido. But Iarbas also means to suggest that Aeneas’s passion for Dido has turned Aeneas into the deviant Paris, the ‘little Ganymede,’ of ancient and medieval tradition (e.g., Hubbard 303; Wilhelm, Poetry 139, 167, 172, 186). Iarbas recounts to Jove how Aeneas, with his ‘eunuch train’ (‘semiviro comitatu’), goes about ‘with his chin and perfumed locks bound with a Lydian turban’ (Aen. 4.215–17). Jove heeds Iarbas’s warning that Aeneas’s heterosexual affair has turned him into a woman and directs Mercury to give ‘woman-crazy’ Aeneas the command to leave Dido and seek Italy. Neither the Eneas nor the House of Fame includes Iarbas’s derision of an effeminate Aeneas to prod the hero along to his imperialistic destiny. Instead, both employ narrative strategies of the shield to authorize Aneas’s heterosexual passion. As I discussed in chapter 1, the Eneas-poet invents a perverse alter ego for Aeneas in Queen Amata’s and Lavinia’s charge that the hero prefers men over women since he left Dido. Geffrey affirms Aeneas’s true heterosexuality by deflecting the threatening deviance that must be contained onto Vulcan, Jove, and ultimately himself. In doing so, Geffrey constructs himself as the queer artist, the loveless poet of love, the vernacularizer of the Aeneid who knows nothing about the faculty of heterosexual passion that he must celebrate in his protagonist. So he does not celebrate it. Although the Eneas-poet never overtly adopts the persona of lover, as Boccaccio and other romance-writers do, he authorizes Eneas’s passion by waxing eloquent upon the subject of heterosexual love madness; in contrast, Geffrey remains dead silent about it even as he calls attention to his reticence. The outcome of this silence becomes immediately evident as Geffrey’s narration resumes.

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From this point on readers have traditionally recognized the growing confusion in the direction and design of Geffrey’s account of Aeneas, a fundamental disorder that ultimately leads to the failure of Geffrey’s vernacular project. The Failure of Romance and the Field of Sand in House of Fame 1 The common perception of this confusion is that Geffrey abandons his Virgilian epic perspective on the story of Aeneas and adopts an Ovidian approach favourable to Dido. Readers traditionally argue that House of Fame 253–426, the section that follows Geffrey’s ekphrases, reflects Heroides 7, Dido’s long lament in the form of an epistle to Aeneas, and that this Ovidian influence accounts for Geffrey’s otherwise unanticipated empathy with Dido and his unprecedented antipathy to Aeneas in this section. Then, in an abrupt volte-face beginning at House of Fame 427, Geffrey returns to his Virgilian perspective and issues Aeneas a ‘full pardon’ for his disloyal treatment of Dido before swiftly launching Aeneas to Italy and bringing the narrative to a close (Fyler, ‘Notes’ 980n240–382). An obvious question surfaces regarding this conventional reading of Geffrey’s problems with narrative point of view: why does the narrator abandon Virgil to adopt an Ovidian approach to his subject matter and why does he then abruptly revert to a Virgilian perspective? A feminist reading sees the question in terms of the narrator’s feminization. For instance, Elaine Hansen finds that Geffrey’s Ovidian identification with Dido illustrates the threatening ‘woman inside’ all men. Even though – or perhaps because – ‘femininity as Dido represents it is so obviously integral to [the narrator’s] own nature and experience,’ Hansen argues, Geffrey attempts to escape it ‘as suddenly and completely as Aeneas sets sail for Italy’ (Chaucer 98). In fact, however, Geffrey does not abandon a so-called Virgilian perspective for an Ovidian one, only to revert to Virgil. The matter is made more complex by the existence of a third view, the perspective of vernacular Aeneids like the Roman d’Eneas that are so central to the narrator’s project. From Ovid, the Eneas borrows its love psychology but not its patriarchal agenda promoting marriage, lineage, and dynasty. Ovid barely mentions Aeneas’s marriage to Lavinia (Met. 14.570). As I have argued throughout this chapter, Geffrey’s effort has been to vernacularize Virgil from the beginning, that is, like the Eneas, to shift the emphasis, however subtly, from empire to dynasty, leadership in battle to successful fatherhood. He has normalized the new figure of the

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hero as husband by contrasting him with men who shirk their patriarchal duties as husbands, Vulcan and Jove, and finally with himself, the outsider to love. When Geffrey queers his own narrative stance, however, Chaucer stages the way in which this device compromises Geffrey’s ability to keep his vernacular redaction of Virgil on course and to continue exerting the ideological pressure of the romance Aeneid on its epic source. Geffrey’s narrative perspective does not veer from that of Virgil to Ovid back to Virgil, but slips from that of the romance Aeneid to its heteroerotic antecedent, Ovid, and finally to its ultimate source, Virgil. This final descent into epic becomes obvious in the reprieve that Geffrey offers Aeneas immediately after castigating his disloyalty to Dido: But to excusen Eneas, Fullyche of al his grete trespas, The book seyth Mercurie, sauns fayle, Bad hym goo into Itayle, And leve Auffrikes regioun, And Dido and hir faire toun.

(427–32)

Baswell observes that the ‘book’ to which Geffrey alludes is the ‘authoritative Latin Aeneid,’ which uses Mercury’s command to justify Aeneas’s departure from Dido, as neither Ovid nor the romance Aeneid does. With Dido absent, Baswell continues, Geffrey is ‘less involved and acknowledges the authority of the Virgilian text.’ Baswell concludes that it takes the weight of the Virgilian text to call away a narrator no less eager to abandon his ‘love-affair’ with Dido than is Aeneas (Virgil 236). I concur with Baswell’s reading of the narrator’s shifting view of Aeneas but see in Geffrey’s adoption of a Virgilian perspective the sign of his declining commitment to the dynastic agenda of the romance Aeneid. Geffrey does not vicariously fall in love with Dido; he tells us that he remains an outsider to such emotion. Instead, the extended delay of Geffrey’s Aeneas in Carthage betokens the narrator’s weakening narrative efforts to move the hero on to Italy to initiate the family dynasty with Lavinia that extends all the way down to the founders of Rome. When Aeneas does make Italy at the end of House of Fame 1, Geffrey mentions, incidentally, his marriage to Lavinia – Aeneas defeated Turnus and ‘wan Lavinia to hys wif’ (458) – and Geffrey fails to incorporate the romance Aeneid’s long conclusion that establishes and celebrates the fruitful couple’s lineage. In Geffrey’s vernacular romance there is a desultory marriage but no children, so to speak. In Baswell’s words, after

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Geffrey ‘races through the last eight books of the [epic] Aeneid in thirtyfive lines’ (Virgil 236), he reestablishes Aeneas as the epic hero. This slippage into a Virgilian conclusion signifies the failure of Geffrey’s vernacular project in House of Fame 1. Just before it fails, Geffrey’s thoughts run to Dante, the pre-eminent vernacular redactor of the Aeneid, to whom, along with Virgil and Claudian, the narrator refers readers who wish to know more about Aeneas’s trip to the underworld after his departure from Dido (449–50). Just after it breaks down, Geffrey again evokes Dante, this time to gloss his own inability to reform epic into romance. As his account of Aeneas concludes and Geffrey exits Venus’s temple, he imagines that he has been transported to a barren landscape, a wide field of sand as far as the eye can see. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely remark that Geffrey’s desert has become a ‘playpit for a wide range of interpretations’ ranging from despair over the failure of love in French visions to creative disenchantment to the expectation of new artistic possibilities imaged in the field’s spaciousness (145n482–8).7 As love’s heretic, however, Geffrey is not likely to despair from amour gone amiss. In his reading of the House of Fame as a liberation allegory, Clemen welds the themes of creative disenchantment and expectancy to argue that the desert scene ‘hints retrospectively at Chaucer’s disillusionment over the famous classical love-story’ of Aeneas and Dido and prefaces his ‘search for some escape’ from such subject matter (89), which the Dantesque eagle currently provides. Yet Geffrey’s fearful response to this setting, which registers in his prayer to Christ to save him from ‘fantome and illusion’ (493), deceptive dreams, does not suggest that this narrator envisions himself in the realm of creative potential either, which, in any event, a sterile desert hardly seems to portend. Rather, Geffrey’s emphasis falls upon the emptiness of the desert, which lacks town, house, tree, bush, grass, or plowed land (484–5). The mixture of the organic and inorganic, the cultivated and uncultivated, in Geffrey’s list might strike modern readers as incongruous, but medieval minds saw all of them as products of either the human craftsman or of the maker that Geffrey shortly names: Nature (490), God’s ‘artificer.’ Geffrey’s appeal to the God who ‘madest us’ (470) as he enters the desert episode anticipates his concern with God’s artifex in this scene, or rather, with her absence. Geffrey can find ‘no maner creature / That ys yformed be Nature’ (489–90). Both the missing formative agent and her absent human creations gloss Geffrey’s artistic failure to make Aeneas the warrior into the father who populates his new land.

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If Geffrey’s ‘unnatural’ field of sand bears little resemblance to the burning sands of the realm of the sodomites in the Inferno 15, it nevertheless aptly represents the barren outcome of his narrative. The Eneaspoet concluded his poem by generating a list of the hero’s descendants down to Romulus and Remus, but Geffrey’s account ends with no mention of the issue from the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia. Geffrey’s failure, it seems, stems from his poetic identity as the queer foil, outsider to love, unable to accomplish a celebration of heterosexual generation. His nervous dismay in the desert scene reflects his anxiety about his ‘unnatural’ poetics, and, as I argued earlier in this chapter, he soon anticipates homoerotic ravishment by the eagle’s Jove. Instead, the eagle comes to instruct Geffrey in natural poetics. The journey that the eagle initiates in House of Fame 2 will follow its own unruly path in House of Fame 3, however, taking Geffrey deeper and deeper within the poetic labyrinth until at last he reaches the queerness at its centre. The ‘Natural’ Poetics of Sound in House of Fame 2 The way into the labyrinth begins under the eagle’s tutelage. Earlier in this chapter I argued that upon the eagle’s appearance at the beginning of House of Fame 2, Geffrey associates himself with Ganymede and assumes that the bird has come to deliver him to the pederastic Jove who eventually stellified his beloved cup-bearer. The barren ending of Geffrey’s attempt to vernacularize the Aeneid prompts this assumption, and, reminiscent of Dante’s dreaming himself a hermaphroditical Achilles, Geffrey may expect to undergo a similar imaginative transformation that will resolve his paradoxical position as the loveless poet of love. But this eagle, who appears to serve the heteroerotic not the homoerotic Jove, offers no such solution. Instead, he comes to provide Geffrey with what he evidently lacks in his personal experience: the ‘love-tidings’ that make up the raw material of love poetry. An outsider to love, Geffrey knows this material only indirectly through books, and, alluding to the barren field of sand at the end of Book 1, the eagle observes that Geffrey’s second-hand knowledge of love accounts for the dessication of his poetry. The eagle’s proposed solution is to give bookish Geffrey firsthand knowledge of the matter of love poetry by transporting him to the House of Fame, ‘fame’ presumably referring here to the love tidings that furnish the stuff of poetry. The eagle explicitly informs Geffrey that he lacks direct involvement (‘parte,’ 628) in love as well as any knowledge of the subject through the ‘tidings’ or news of ‘Loves folke.’ All of Geffrey’s

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efforts to serve Jupiter’s blind nephew, Cupid, and Venus derive from books, and Jupiter sends his eagle to give Geffrey contact with what is lacking in his life, love-tidings. But if Geffrey expects that his visit to Fame’s realm will provide him with the quick poetic fix of a ready supply of love-tidings, he is disappointed once transported there. The problem he encounters is reflected in the answer that he gives to the curious bystander who asks Geffrey why he has journeyed to Fame’s palace. Geffrey unequivocally swears that he wants nothing to do with Fame’s rewards; he hopes that he alone shall have power over his reputation when he dies. But when his interlocuter presses him to state the reason he came to Fame’s realm if not to seek renown, Geffrey falters. He says that he knows only that the eagle delivered him to Fame’s realm to learn ‘new tydinges,’ maybe about love, he adds in an afterthought, but possibly about something else: ‘That wyl y tellen the, The cause why y stonde here: Somme newe tydynges for to lere, Somme newe thynges, y not what, Tydynges, other this or that, Of love or suche thynges glade.’

(1884–9)

Geffrey’s uncertainty about the reason for his visit to Fame’s house is understandable enough; for even though the eagle stated that the explicit purpose of the trip was to acquire love-tidings, the actual subject of love emerges sporadically in House of Fame 3 as it competes with numerous other matters. Indeed, of the nine groups of petitioners who seek Fame’s favour, only two, the sixth and seventh, mention love overtly. Both groups request renown as lovers, and Fame capriciously grants one request and denies the other. The subject of love-tidings does not expressly recur until the very end of the poem, when Geffrey at last encounters a group of men in a corner who tell ‘love tydynges’ (2143). Geffrey draws near to them and is swept up in a stampede that rushes towards the poem’s ultimate and most enigmatic figure, the man of great authority, at which point the poem breaks off. The scattered occurrence of love-tidings in House of Fame 3 has led readers to question the poem’s design and unity and to wonder if Chaucer meant ‘to leave love behind in the House of Fame rather than make new love-tidings his matiere’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 209). The question is moot, A.J. Minnis decides, because the poem simply

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‘stops’ as it appears to be on the verge of breaking some major piece of news about love. However, Minnis’s other observation about the relative absence of love-tidings bears investigation. He notes that in Book 3, ‘the problems of lovers are, in general, subsumed under broader categories’ (208) and resurface only in the sixth and seventh groups of petitioners just mentioned. Minnis does not specify the ‘broader categories’ that incorporate the problems of lovers, and I see the issue of the missing love-tidings in terms not of an occlusion caused by reorganization but of reappropriation: in Book 3, love themes and motifs from Book 1 recur in different contexts, shaped to serve different ends. For instance, the description of Aeolus in Book 3 (1571–82), based upon Aeneid 1.50–80, recalls the ekphrasis in Book 1 (198–208) in which Juno summons the god of the winds to sink Aeneas’s fleet because of her hatred of Trojans, specifically Ganymede and Paris. As discussed earlier, in Book 1 Juno commands Aeolus to wreak havoc on the Trojan Aeneas to avenge both her husband’s attraction to Ganymede and Paris’s insult in awarding the apple to another woman. In Book 3, Fame’s whims dictate which lovers Aeolus praises or slanders. So, too, do Virgil and Ovid, first mentioned in Book 1 as the narrators of Dido’s sorrowful end, recur in Book 3 dissociated from her: Virgil now holds up the fame of ‘Pius Eneas’ (1485), not of Dido, and Ovid, ‘Venus clerk,’ supports the ‘grete god of loves name’ (1489). If such shifts in context – and allegiances – in Book 3 suggest Fame’s caprice, they also betoken the intertextual relationship between Books 1 and 3 of the House of Fame. More broadly, they point to the literary question that confronted and, I have argued, stymied the narrator in Book 1: how does a medieval poet rewrite tradition? Specifically, how does this narrator convert a Latin epic into vernacular romance? Geffrey’s strategy focuses upon normalizing Aeneas’s heteroerotic passion by casting himself as the queer foil, but the eagle outlines a different solution. It lies not in the eagle’s overt proposal that the narrator learn lovetidings – for indeed few exist as such in Book 3 – but in the eagle’s implicit suggestion that the narrator must learn to reshape literary matter to serve his own ends, just as Aeolus, Virgil, and Ovid are recast from their initial roles in the account of the love affair of Dido and Aeneas in Book 1 to their new functions as Fame’s agents in Book 3. That is, it is not the material of love-tidings per se that the narrator requires first and foremost, but the formative capacity to shape them into his own literary products. The wider implication of the eagle’s proposed solution is that Geffrey

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become, if not literally the heteronormative lover, then its metaphorical equivalent: the father-poet who forms literary materia to his artistic ends. If he is to effect Aeneas’s transformation from classical hero to vernacular patriarch, Geffrey himself must practice the artistic correlative of ‘natural’ biological generation, hylomorphic poetics, not position himself as the queer outsider to love. This recommendation is suggested by the lecture on sound that follows the critique of Geffrey’s sterile poetic efforts and by the eagle’s announcement of their travel itinerary. Explicitly, the lecture is prompted by the eagle’s promise to take Geffrey to the realm of Fame, where he shall hear love tidings of every type, and by Geffrey’s disbelief that Fame could have enough spies to report all these tidings. The eagle’s ensuing talk on sound clarifies to the naïve Geffrey that Fame does not send out spies to gather these tidings, but rather that the tidings make their way naturally to Fame. Implicitly, however, the lecture models ‘natural’ poetics. Peter Travis argues that in Chaucer’s poetry ‘sound carries a discursive, and indeed political, charge’ (‘Noise’ 325), and so, I argue, the production of sound itself is politically and culturally coded in the House of Fame. In an apparent digression as scandalously technical as Statius’s lecture on embryology in Purgatorio 25, the eagle explains the scientific concept of what we now call sound waves, but the deeper lesson is that these sound waves are the tidings created and ‘naturally’ propelled upwards by the agency of the father-artist. Delany remarks that the eagle presents the operation of fame as ‘governed by natural laws and demonstrates the workings of those laws’ (Poetics 71). At the centre of this scientific lecture, she observes, is a theory of natural causation. The eagle first explicates the upward movement of tidings to Fame’s realm according to the Aristotelian physics of sound and the concept of natural place. Sound is broken air, the eagle explains, and because of its lightness, air naturally rises. Everything naturally seeks its proper place – light things rise, heavy things fall – and he specifically credits both Plato and Aristotle with the theory that like seeks like. The eagle’s explanation of natural place, attributed to Aristotle by late medieval philosophers (Grant 54), is ‘well within the orthodox tradition,’ Delany finds: ‘since air is a light substance, its nature is to rise; since sound is nothing but broken air, its natural tendency will be to rise until it arrives at Fame’s palace’ (Poetics 73). Sound, the eagle further explains to Geffrey, naturally rises, but it also travels according to the principle of primary and secondary (instrumental) causation. Borrowing an empirical analogy from Boethius’s De musica to concretize the invisible movement of sound (Phillips and Havely

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158n791–2), the eagle states that just as a stone dropped into water causes a series of concentric ripples that propel one another to the bank, so successive waves of sound boost one another up to Fame’s realm (789–803). Having buttressed his theoretical explanation of how sound makes its way to Fame’s realm with the palpable image of the stone in the pond, the eagle brings his exposition to a resounding conclusion, in which he repeats the word ‘kynde’ or ‘kyndely’ no fewer than eight times in under thirty lines (824–52) to make the rhetorical point that the operation of sound proceeds according to nature’s laws. Whether or not the eagle has made a convincing explanation of the operations of sound, his evident aim is to suggest that it is natural to think about sound – the tidings of fame – in the scientific terms of Aristotelian causality. The eagle’s nexus of science and nature in the operation of sound extends to poetry as well. Bennett sees this section of House of Fame 2 as Chaucer’s ‘“speculum naturale,” or poetical physics’ (‘Fame’ 52). Minnis argues that Chaucer assumes the connection between speech as sound, fame, and literature. Behind Chaucer’s linkage of speech and literature, Minnis continues, lie aphorisms such as Isidore of Seville’s maxim that by virtue of letters, books utter a voiceless speech. The eagle has suggested that as the agent of those letters, the writer causes the soundless sound, the text that is instrumental to fame. The writer’s action and the resulting text that effects fame or reputation are therefore as ‘natural’ as are the causal action of the stone and the resulting ripples in the pond. Minnis holds that Chaucer means to raise doubts about literature by linking it to speech; for Isidore’s etymological connection of ‘speaking,’ fando, with poetic fictions, fabulae, ‘sets them in stark opposition to the transmission of accurate reporting which was expected of history.’ Chaucer’s concern, Minnis concludes, is that some of these texts might report merely ‘spoken fictions’ and that ‘in poetry, as in fame, fact and fiction, truth and lies, are brought together’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 205–7). But the eagle’s analysis of how tidings reach Fame’s realm does not question the reliability of those sounds; instead, it repetitively emphasizes the ‘natural’ – ‘kyndely’ – process of their production and of their movement to Fame’s realm. The eagle’s aesthetic implication is that the poets who construct fame participate in nature, not that the tidings they make may be false. Making literary report, or fame, is a natural process, the eagle suggests, and in so doing he harks back to Aristotle’s ancient craftsman analogy and to the assimilation of artistic creation to biological procreation that I discussed in the introduction. This is the lesson

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that the eagle seeks to impart to Geffrey in order to rescue his poetic efforts from the barrenness emblemized by the field of sand from which the eagle initially plucked him. Once the eagle’s exposition of ‘natural’ poetics concludes, the desiccated landscape changes dramatically. Instead of the sterile desert associated with Geffrey’s queer poetic of Book 1, a verdant panorama appears before the narrator’s eyes as the eagle transports him to Fame’s realm: And y adoun gan loken thoo, And beheld feldes and playnes, And now hilles, and now mountaynes, Now valeyes, now forestes, And now unnethe grete bestes, Now ryveres, now citees, Now tounes, and now grete trees, Now shippes seyllynge in the see.

(896–903)

Sometimes read as a cosmic farting joke (Leyerle), the lecture that the eagle has delivered to Geffrey as he transports him to Fame’s court nevertheless serves to outline the dynamic process of causality that accounts for the creation and movement of sound waves and underlies an associated hylomorphic or ‘natural’ poetics. Implicit in the eagle’s lecture is a critique of the narrator’s earlier failure to vernacularize the Aeneid, his inability to prevent its slippage back into the preoccupations of the Latin epic. But if at the end of House of Fame 2 Geffrey expects to enter a literary arena teeming with familiar scholastic images of poets as artifices, men who metaphorically build, craft, sculpt, or otherwise actively make (or remake) the literary reputation of their subjects, as Tubal and Jubal hammered out song in the Book of the Duchess, he is in for a surprise. At the heart of House of Fame 3, the ‘natural’ poetic of sound outlined in Book 2 gives way to reveal one as queer as is Dante’s hermaphrodite aesthetic. Anticipating the poetic that lies at the centre of Chaucer’s poem is the literary artist, Orpheus, who stands outside Fame’s palace with its hall of remarkably inert writers. Orpheus and Queer Poetics in House of Fame 3 As Geffrey approaches Fame’s architecturally intricate palace at the opening of House of Fame 3, he sees in every one of its external niches ‘all maner of minstrels and gestors’ (1195). The first bard whom Geffrey

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spies on this exterior facade is Orpheus. Delany attributes the priority of Orpheus to the fact that in the Middle Ages he ‘represents poets at large and therefore poetry itself’ (Poetics 90). This Orpheus also represents queer poetics. Both Virgil and Ovid wrote about him, in Georgics 4 and Metamorphoses 10–11, respectively. It is impossible to know from which major tradition Chaucer’s Orpheus derives – Virgil or Ovid. John Fyler privileges Ovid (‘Notes’ 986n1203–6), and Chaucer’s sole comment about Orpheus – that he plays the harp ‘ful craftely’ (1203; ‘very artfully’) – supports Fyler’s choice, since Ovid presented the bard far more positively than had his predecessor, Virgil. Ovid also celebrated the homoerotic inspiration of Orpheus’s art. The difference in these two ancient presentations turns upon the issue of Orpheus’s conduct after his loss of Eurydice. Virgil’s Orpheus cleaves to his wife’s memory and refuses new love; Ovid’s Orpheus gives his love to boys. Virgil implicates Orpheus’s withdrawal from heterosexual love as the source of his failure as a poet, and readers often see Virgil’s figure as a symbol of barrenness and death (Morgan 202–5; Segal 59), a ‘portrait of the failure of the artist’ (Perkell, Truth 82–3). For Ovid, however, homoeroticism becomes the source of Orpheus’s successful art, an attribution all too often occluded as readers implicate Orpheus’s turn away from women in his dismemberment by the Maenads (W. Anderson 44–5; Calabrese 274; Leach; Otis 184–5). In Metamorphoses 10– 11, Ovid rewrote Virgil’s account of Orpheus to celebrate the bard as queer poet, greatly expanding the aftermath of Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice to accommodate what Sara Mack terms the ‘miniature Metamorphoses’(9), Orpheus’s inner narration of the tales of Ganymede, Hyacinth, Pygmalion, and others. Rather than the heterosexual desire of the father-poet for the female beloved, Ovid implies, same-sex eroticism motivates Orpheus’s art. Having given his love to ‘tender boys,’ Orpheus plucks their first ‘flower’ (‘et primos carpere flores,’ Met. 10.85). This is the harvest that inspires Orpheus to smite his lyre and generate a second crop, the verdant grove. Not only is disorderly passion poetically fecund, but it replicates its same-sex dynamic. One of the trees in the grove that Orpheus generates is the pine, formerly the boy Attis, beloved of Apollo, and the cypress, ‘now a tree, but once a boy [Cyparissus], beloved by that god who strings the lyre and strings the bow’ (Met. 10.107–8). The cameo appearance of Ovidian Orpheus outside Fame’s palace anticipates Geffrey’s encounter with the writers inside the palace. They too strike an unconventional literary pose in the context of the eagle’s metaphorical exposition of the ‘natural poetics’ of sound waves. In

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Bennett’s remark that the hall of writers occupies the ‘still centre’of the House of Fame (‘Fame’ 143), the operative word is ‘still.’ In this silent museum-like hall, ancient literary authority materializes in the form of motionless statues standing atop a double row of columns that line Fame’s court. The statue-writers support the fame of those about whom they have written. Literally, the famous subjects rest upon the shoulders of their authors, who divide into three groups: those who wrote about Jewish subjects (Josephus), Greek subjects (Statius, Homer, Dares, Dictys, Lollius, Guido delle Colonne, Geoffrey of Monmouth), and Roman subjects (Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian). Delany observes that several prominent subjects whose fame is borne up by these writers had differing, even contradictory, reputations. For instance, Statius, ‘that bar of Thebes up the fame / upon his shouldres, and the name / also of cruel Achilles’ (1461–3), wrote about the Greek hero in both the Thebaid and the Achilleid. In the latter work, which narrates Thetis’s attempt to keep her son out of the Trojan war, as discussed in chapter 3, Statius’s cross-gendered Achilles is less ‘cruel’ than he is in the Thebes story. Even more contested, of course, was the reputation of Aeneas, whose legendary fame as ‘pius’ is shouldered by Virgil (1484–5). However, the anti-Homeric writers represented by two other statues in the hall, Dares and Dictys, presented Aeneas as a treasonous opportunist who benefited from the fall of Troy, as noted earlier, and Ovid berated him for seducing and abandoning Dido. On these grounds, Delany maintains that the primary implication of the hall of writers in House of Fame 3 is that ‘historical authority’ is ‘revealed to be fully as contradictory as the literary authorities used in Book 1, or the cosmologies of Book 2’ (Poetics 95), and that this pervasive uncertainty throughout the House of Fame ultimately teaches the narrator that he cannot choose among alternatives but must transcend them in a fideistic ‘leap of faith’ (Poetics 122). Fame’s palace indeed images the unreliability of authority but its more dramatic impression comes from the contrast it makes between the silent hall of writers and the incessantly busy and noisy realm of Fame in which it is housed. The inertness of the hall’s occupants suggests their subordination to Fame in the same way as their architectural rendering as statues standing upon columns (Chaucer’s ‘pilers’) literally puts them in the service of supporting Fame’s palace. Michael Camille explains that the antique practice of placing statues atop pillars, revised for Christian use in the well-known statue colonne of gothic cathedral architecture, integrated the statue into the fabric of the building: ‘column-

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statues were architectonic members holding together the formal and iconographic unity of portal and facade and were in no way meant to be seen as autonomous “statues in the round”’ (Idol 199). Even medieval secular column-statues, such as those of the forty-seven French kings of the Great Hall of the Palais de Justice, upon which Laura Kendrick believes Chaucer modelled his hall of writers in the House of Fame, do not stand independently but support the roof vault (‘Palais’). Fame’s writers function in a similarly supportive way as they bear upon their shoulders the names of their subjects and presumably the weight of Fame’s palace itself, and it is to represent their submission to her edifice that Chaucer materializes them as column-statues. Chaucer’s writers do not crouch as humble caryatids; they stand ‘erect and exalted,’ Bennett observes, but they nevertheless ‘bear burdens on their shoulders.’ Although Fame operates autonomously within her palace rather than as a column support, Bennett continues, even she bears the coats of arms of two famous men, Alexander and Hercules, since Chaucer ‘recognizes that renown involves a sort of subservience’ (‘Fame’ 133). If Fame’s writers and, to a lesser degree, Fame herself are subservient to renown, this subordination raises the question of who or what determines the reputations that they support upon their shoulders. The writers in Fame’s hall are certainly not shown to do anything other than commit to permanence (uphold) a particular reputation of a controversial subject. The hylomorphic ‘makyng’ that the eagle’s poetical physics of sound troped is nowhere to be found within the hall that Orpheus graces, and if the eagle’s lecture was a lesson in ‘natural’ poetics for Geffrey, this instruction appears to have been displaced by a series of writers no more capable of converting Aeneas from warrior to father than Geffrey was. Presumably it is Fame who decrees the renown that these writers record about their subjects. Yet not even Fame herself is solely responsible for making the reputations that she hands on to the writers who record them. The search for the true artifex of renown must extend beyond Fame’s superficial agency to the furthest reach of her realm, the unruly House of Rumor, and there Geffrey encounters the queerest aesthetic of the House of Fame. Unruly Rumor Fame’s realm consists of two houses, the abode in which Fame herself resides and that in which Rumor lives. Minnis questions whether both houses are necessary and whether Chaucer is ‘guilty of repetition and redundancy’ in creating more than a single domain to which earth’s

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sounds rise (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 122). At first glance, it would appear that the structures are heterosexual opposites – one masculine, the other feminine – not duplicates, although, I shall argue ultimately, this contrast breaks down upon closer scrutiny. Drawing freely upon Virgil’s and Ovid’s accounts of the single house of Rumor (Aen. 4.173–90 and Met. 12.39–93, respectively), Chaucer shaped Fame’s structure to suggest masculine contours and Rumor’s to imply female ones. Fame’s abode is a tightly built fortress studded with towers and pinnacles that is mounted on a protruding, albeit impermanent, peak of ice (1116–95). Beyond the obvious phallic architectural features of this residence, its masculinity is marked by the numerous classical male poets and heroes stationed in it along with Fame. Chaucer relocated Rumor’s abode from Ovid’s mountain-top location to a valley beneath Fame’s castle and converted Ovid’s brass house into a whirling wicker basket with 1,000 or more leaky openings through which spew the multitude of inchoate squeaking, creaking sounds uttered by its numerous gibbering inhabitants (1925–85). Not only does Chaucer’s mutable structure exist at the will of Aventure (Fortune), ‘the moder of tydynges’ (1982), but the association of Rumor’s domicile with female reproductive anatomy becomes overt in Chaucer’s punning description of her house as ‘queynte’ (1923) and ‘quentelych ywrought’ (1925) as well as in the characterization of the house as a labyrinth or ‘Domus Dedaly’ (1920). In the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer also plays upon the medieval association of the labyrinth with the vagina and uterus (Delany, ‘Logic’; Dinshaw, Poetics 79). And the conventional analogy between woman’s permeable sexual organ and woman’s open mouth is evident in the racket of spoken sounds that bursts forth from the numerous openings of Rumor’s ‘queynte’ house. The oppositely gendered dimensions of the houses of Fame and of Rumor cast a new light over the debate concerning which is dominant and expose the queerness at the heart of House of Fame 3 as an ars poetica. Bennett associates class with gender to elevate the ‘grandiose temple of Fame with its self-contained life and action’ over the ‘inferior house of Rumour composed of commonplace materials and thronged with commonplace people’ (‘Fame’ 106–7; emphases mine). The plebeian Rumor is little more than Fame’s ‘Cinderella sister,’ he adds (115). Echoing scholastic hylomorphic theories of art, Bennet privileges action over matter, the masculine domain of Fame over the feminine domain of Rumor, and implicitly suggests that Rumor provides the inferior material cause of art, Fame the superior efficient cause. Yet in two significant respects Chaucer has queered the process by

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which reputations are made and passed on so that it bears little resemblance to the natural poetics that, the eagle earlier explained, govern the way in which sound waves form and reach Fame’s realm. First, the relationship between Fame’s masculine realm and Rumor’s feminine domain disrupts any simplistic hierarchy of the former over the latter. It is not simply, as Delany observes, that ‘Fame’s court could not exist without the House of Rumour, for there originate the events which Fame either commemorates or condemns to oblivion’ (Poetics 110). In the traditional concept of generation that underlies hylomorphic poetics, masculine agency requires matter upon which to act, but matter is always subordinate to the higher principle that induces order in it. In the House of Fame, however, Rumor’s ‘queynte’ house disrupts convention. Because her house is queerly both feminized and masculinized, it does more than provide the matter that Fame shapes, and it offers more than a ‘parable of women’s writing’ (Miller). Vice versa, Fame’s phallic fortress houses subservient male writers presided over by a woman.8 Indeed, as Kittredge remarks, Rumor’s uterine whirling wicker basket is ‘the factory’ where rumours are ‘compounded’ (Chaucer 106), and the factors, or ‘makers,’ are the connotatively feminine throngs of ‘commonplace people’ who mill about Rumor’s house. These feminized agents receive the multitudinous individual sounds – the tidings, whisperings, sayings, tales, and other verbal matter – that, the eagle explained, make their way ‘naturally’ from earth to the House of Rumor, and Rumor’s makers pass them along from one to another. In passing these sounds along, they ‘compound’ them; that is, they augment an individual sound and cause it to grow in an organic way until, ‘ful yspronge / And woxen more on every tonge’ (2081–2), it seeks its exit from Rumor’s maternal domicile and proceeds to the realm of Fame. In this respect, Minnis’s remark that ‘it is the whirling wicker which has the most right to be regarded as the dominant dwelling’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 213) rings true not because Rumor supplies material to Fame, since in conventional scholastic thought masculine agency necessarily depends upon a supply of passive matter that was never privileged. Rather, the agency of Rumor’s house figured in its incessant busyness grants it the dominance that Minnis perceives. At the same time, however, this dominance queers Rumor’s ‘queynte’ realm. Although the organic material, the twigs, that compose Chaucer’s house of Rumor assimilate it to the natural realm of the feminine, the house simultaneously functions as a factory, a domain of masculine making

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and shaping. In Rumor’s house, then, the traditional gender hierarchy that undergirds hylomorphism collapses, and it undermines as well the eagle’s so-called natural poetics that supplies it with sounds. Chaucer’s Fame similarly disrupts traditional gender difference in both her physical body and her actions. Specifically, Fame has the capacity to metamorphose from a petite figure into one so tall that her feet appear to rest on earth and her head in heaven. Through her masculine aspects, Fame distributes her favour: she supports with her muscular physique both the names and the armour of Hercules and Alexander. Geffrey calls explicit attention to this queerness. Although she is a ‘femynyne creature,’ Geffrey observes, she is an unnatural figure, or at least one ‘never formed by Nature’ (1365–6). Nevertheless, in an apparent self-contradiction near the end of the House of Fame, the narrator implicitly associates Fame with the goddess Nature herself. Tracing the trajectory of the compounded sounds that exit Rumor’s womb-like factory, Geffrey explains that these tidings make their way to Fame, who names them: Thus oute at holes gunne wringe Every tydynge, streght to Fame, And she gan yeve eche hys name After hir disposicion, And yaf hem eke duracion– Some to wexe and wane sone As doth the faire white mone– And lete hem goon.

(2110–17)

Phillips and Havely remark that ‘Fame begins to seem like an alternative Nature’ in this passage (211n2112–14). In giving Fame the authority to name tidings and to decree their lifespan, Chaucer assimilates the goddess to generative Nature, the ‘Natura procreatrix’ that developed from classical philosophy and Christian theology and vicariously functioned as creator in medieval poetry, most notably in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose. As I shall explore in the next chapter, medieval Nature’s heritage of agency from Aristotle’s physis constructed her as a hybrid – hermaphroditical – figure. By virtue of her grammatical gender, medieval Nature was a woman who wields the hammer of generation like a man, just as Fame’s shape-shifting in the House of Fame creates ambivalence about her physical gender. Minnis’s comments about Fame reflect this an-

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cient confusion. He contradicts his remark that Rumor’s whirling wicker basket, a ‘sort of “fame factory,”’ is the dominant dwelling when he later observes that Fame serves as the ‘chief executive’ of this factory, who chooses the ‘label for the products which her subordinate [Rumor] has compounded’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 213). Rumor’s dwelling cannot dominate Fame’s domicile if Rumor is subordinate to Fame. In fact, as they shape tidings into renown, both Fame and Rumor play active and passive (receptive) roles that interact with one another in complex ways that defy conventional Aristotelian-scholastic hierarchies. Fame’s and Rumor’s disorderly poetics contrast most obviously with the so-called natural (causal) process by which sound waves form and reach Fame’s realm. Further, Fame’s implicit assimilation to Nature undermines the traditional underpinnings of hylomorphic poetics, which is based upon the ‘natural’ hierarchical separation of active and passive, and leads to impasse at the end of the House of Fame. The poem’s abrupt ending just at the moment a ‘man of gret auctorite’ (2158) appears has long confounded readers. I conclude this chapter by arguing that Chaucer’s poem snarls in confused redundancy because it inserts the man of great authority into the labyrinthine structure that has no need of his agency, the house of Rumor. Accordingly, the much exercised question of the mysterious man’s identity is profoundly irrelevant. A Fish without a Bicycle: The Man of Great Authority The escape narrative associates the Chaucer who breaks out from courtly dominance with the unnamed man of great authority who emerges near the end of the House of Fame. Inspired by Dante, Chaucer is freed from vapid French convention (the house of love in Book 1) to develop the carnivalesque house of Rumor so pulsating with life and vitality that it requires the control that only a man of great authority, Chaucer himself, can supply to provide it with artistic order. Thus, Kittredge characterizes the poet who constructed the riotous house of Rumor, which adumbrates the Canterbury Tales, as one who refuses to allow the gambolling spirits he has evoked ‘to break loose from his control’ even as he himself breaks loose from French control (Chaucer 101). Lowes describes how the poet who creates the ‘irresistible gusto and elan’ of the last two books of the House of Fame ‘sweep[s] the narrative on with the controlled swiftness of a mill-race’ (Chaucer 116). Ian Robinson makes overt the association between the liberated Chaucer and the man of great authority, questioning whether this famous man may not be, ‘in final fancy,

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Chaucer himself on love,’ even if Robinson later disclaims any real possibility of knowing the man’s actual identity (46). James Winny refines this basic reading of the House of Fame as an escape narrative to identify the man of great authority as the ‘final element in the complex creative “engyn” which makes [Chaucer] a poet’ (111). Dismissing Rumor’s dynamic factory workers as suppliers rather than as makers, Winny explains that the late-arriving newcomer embodies a ‘vital impulse in the making of a poem.’ It is not difficult to see that for Winny the ‘function of his “gret auctorite” within the poem’ is nothing other than the masculine agency that Aristotle stipulated as necessary to induce form into inchoate feminine matter: ‘The undisciplined crowd of gossips and rumour-mongers, endlessly repeating stories about every kind of human activity, provide[s] the raw material of poetry; in itself indispensable, as the Eagle has made the dreamer realise, but needing form and purposeful organisation if its vital energies are to serve the poet’ (100, emphases mine). Against readings that would seek to identify liberated Chaucer or a host of other actual figures with the man of authority are those that argue for the irrelevance of such an approach on the grounds that Chaucer undercuts authority itself in various ways in the House of Fame. For instance, Delany finds the identity of the man of great authority superfluous, for no matter what his message, it ‘could only have intensified an already existing structural paradox. Chaucer has amply demonstrated the unreliability or ambivalence of traditional statements, and through continual ironic undercutting of conventional devices he has encouraged the reader to receive such statements with skepticism. It is difficult to imagine any figure of authority sufficient to overcome the impact of the rest of the poem, short of Christ himself – and neither the tone nor the subject matter of the poem suggests an apocalyptic vision’ (Poetics 108).9 Accepting the unreliability of authority in the poem, Minnis goes on to examine whether or not Chaucer’s subversion may best be understood in deconstructive terms, specifically Jacques Derrida’s differance, which Minnis defines as ‘the conflict of textual elements which refuse to yield cohesive, unitary meanings’: ‘Throughout the poem we are constantly encountering what Derrida calls aporias (impasses, dead ends), where our quest for meaning becomes blocked, leaving us with a tissue of inconsistencies, discontinuities, fissures, and lacunae; the possibility of coherent communication is thus denied.’ Minnis dismisses the idea that the House of Fame ‘ends in the [Derridean] absence of structure, the

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abandonment of a centreless void’ on the grounds that the labyrinth mentioned in the house of Rumor offers a ‘theoretically adequate reading model’ for Chaucer’s poem. No matter how confusing and contradictory its pathways, the labyrinth is nevertheless a ‘durable structure.’ After revealing the multiplicity of authoritative sources and the unreliability of authority figures, the ‘labyrinthine text stands as its own authority,’ Minnis concludes (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 220–1). The labyrinthine house of Rumor indeed usurps poetic power in the House of Fame but not by exposing the unreliability of a man or men of ‘great authority,’ whoever they may be. Rather, it renders such men profoundly irrelevant by disrupting the traditional sexual hierarchy that underwrites authoritarian poetics. If the labyrinth constitutes the house of Rumor, where all literature originates, as uterine, conventionally a passive receptacle, Rumor’s house also functions in masculine terms as an incessantly busy factory filled with plebeian makers. This oddly hybrid structure is hermaphroditical. The agency that the man of great authority represents serves a redundant generative purpose within it, that is, no purpose at all. Indeed, the house is spinning away and spewing its products long before this figure comes to the centre of its attention. In contrast, Chaucer’s tale of Ariadne in the Legend of Good Women privileges external male agency as necessary for the penetration of the labyrinth, also coded female by the descriptor ‘queynte’ (2013). Chaucer constructs Theseus as the hero, the man of great authority, by virtue of the metaphorical weapon, the ‘ax, or swerd, or staf, or knyf’ (2000), that he readies in order to penetrate to the centre of the female reproductive organs figured as the textual labyrinth. Much ado is made of Theseus’s performance in the labyrinth as he forces his way into its secret heart to slay the ‘monster’ with his ‘thyng’ (2139). In Rumor’s labyrinthine structure in the House of Fame, however, the man of great authority goes nowhere and does nothing. Instead, the hyperactive occupants of Rumor’s domain throng to him, presumably to take his tidings and act upon them. When the House of Fame breaks off just after the appearance of the man of great authority, it signals that whatever this figure may have to say, his presence contributes nothing necessary to the textual functioning of Rumor’s queer house. His saying nothing says everything about his irrelevance. To return to Minnis’s meditation on the viability of a Derridean reading of Chaucer, meaning does exist in the House of Fame; its way is not blocked, as I have argued in this chapter. What the poem deconstructs is the concept of how textual meaning is ‘naturally’ produced.

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Natural Solutions In the escape narrative, the man of great authority redeems the hesitant Geffrey, enslaved to the traditions of love poetry. Variously, he models the ‘way out’ for Chaucer or he represents the liberated Chaucer, inspired by Dante, who leaves the effete French temple of love behind and strikes out for the healthier realm of the English commons adumbrated in the house of Rumor. I have argued, however, that the queer poetic of the house of Rumor renders the man of great authority irrelevant. Rumor’s matrix-factory functions sufficiently on its own; it requires no Theseus figure to penetrate and master its depths. Where, finally, does this leave Geffrey, the loveless poet of love? Does it offer him an obvious way to resolve the problem that caused the failure of his vernacular project in House of Fame 1, a problem for which Geffrey, at least imaginatively, blamed himself when he dreamed that he was the sole creature in a barren desert somehow outside Nature’s realm awaiting seizure by Jove’s eagle? In a word, no. The experiences in Rumor’s labyrinth as well as in Fame’s palace offer no easy answer for Geffrey. In this respect, as an ars poetica, the House of Fame might seem to end in aporia or even to reject queer poetics and validate heteronormative poetics. But a difficult or elusive answer differs from a rejected answer. Rumor’s labyrinth, with its confusing pathways, endures; the singular man of great authority loses his standing. That is, the eagle’s ‘natural’ poetics, elucidated in order to supply the deficient Geffrey with love-tidings and the hylomorphic process to fashion such matter into art, offers no help at all, whereas Rumor’s ‘unnatural’ labyrinth contains dimly visible possibilities of new poetic models not founded upon heteronormativity. When, with Jesse Gellrich, readers find the ‘matter’ and ‘material’ of the House of Fame apparently too ‘insubordinate’ and ‘at odds’ with an overarching form (200), they sense that possibility even as they try to understand it in traditional hylomorphic terms. The House of Fame cannot offer a fuller exposition of alternative models, however, because it never comes to terms with the confusing figure that underlies all its statements about art: Nature. When the failed love-poet Geffrey dreams himself ‘unnatural’ in the desert scene, when the eagle assimilates his causal poetics of sound to nature, and when Geffrey labels Fame’s shifting physiology as ‘unnatural,’ we see a familiar Nature, the figure who enforces heteronormativity. But when an ‘unnatural’ Fame functions as an alternate Nature to name and decree life

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spans, we glimpse another Nature, a queer figure indeed. The two conflicting figures silently coexist in the poem, and in their irresolution lies the deep source of Geffrey’s poetic dilemma. From the initial problem encountered by Geffrey in House of Fame 1, Chaucer’s examination of poetic models gallops at a dizzying pace across the remainder of the work to arrive, finally, at a startling conclusion: the eagle’s so-called natural and orderly poetics of sound waves bears no resemblance to the disorderly aesthetics of the figure assimilated to Nature in the poem, Fame, and her colleague, Rumor, whose queer model of textual production not only engulfs the man of great authority but makes his literary contribution irrelevant. The plebeian occupants of the House of Rumor and its quotidian literary materials associate it with the mother tongue, and its hermaphroditical model of textual production evokes Dante’s vernacular poetic. But even though both the Comedy and the House of Fame subvert patriarchal poetics, they are, finally, different poems. Having theorized a hermaphrodite poetics of the vernacular, Dante’s narrator immediately puts it into practice in the Purgatorio’s cantos of the poets and beyond. In contrast, Chaucer’s Geffrey takes an unknown path at the end of the House of Fame. When the model of traditional literary authority ruptures, Geffrey drops out of sight. He does not return at the end of the poem to transform Aeneas into the generative father figure because he has glimpsed the fruitfulness of queer modes of art like Rumor’s hyperproductive labyrinth. Indeed, it is not obvious that Geffrey grasps the significance of Rumor’s house at all. In the concluding part of this book that now follows, I argue that Chaucer did not abandon the poetic concerns raised in the House of Fame. Instead, in the Parliament of Fowls, he clarified them by going to the heart of medieval poetics, its foundation on so-called natural principle, to examine nothing less than the nature of Nature. Her queerness fully exposed, Nature does return to make song at the end of the last poem in Chaucer’s dream trio.

PART 3

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5 Disorderly Nature: Aristotle, Alan of Lille, and Jean de Meun

The concept of the natural plays a central but largely silent role throughout the House of Fame. It is the unexamined norm that troubles Geffrey in the desert and flight scenes, and it underlies the eagle’s poetics of sound. Traditional functions of Nature are mapped onto Fame when she names tidings and decrees their lifespans, even though the aesthetic of both Fame and Rumor deviates from natural poetics, just as Chaucer’s poem disrupts traditional literary authority. In the Parliament of Fowls, the final poem of the dream trilogy, however, nature emerges as a fully personified figure that presides over the bird assembly. Chaucer is the first English poet to personify Nature, who has a long pedigree in the medieval Latin and vernacular literature before him. Chaucer acknowledges this tradition when he takes what for him is the unusual step of revealing the source of his depiction of Nature, the ‘Pleynt of Kynde’ (316), and it is therefore through the lens of Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature (c. 1160–70) that Chaucer asks readers of the Parliament to view his Nature. Therefore, this chapter examines the role that Nature plays in Alan’s Plaint as well as in its sequel, the Anticlaudianus (c. 1181–4), a work that Chaucer refers to by name as well (House of Fame 986). It also explores Alan’s distant source, Aristotle, and Alan’s continuator of sorts, Jean de Meun. My overall argument is that from its earliest conception as Aristotelian physis, Nature did not, indeed could not, exclude sexual deviance. Only morality did so. I shall contend in chapter 6 that Nature’s inclusiveness in the Parliament of Fowls ultimately derives from ancient physis. This figure does not anticipate Chaucer’s emerging naturalistic (or ‘realistic’) verse in the Canterbury Tales, as the escape narrative maintains, but embodies and endorses the queer poetics that, I have argued in this

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book, the narrators of the Book of the Duchess and House of Fame practise, the latter with the uneasiness reflected in the desert and flight scenes. In the Parliament, Nature presides over the avian assembly, which takes place on St Valentine’s Day, by tradition the day on which birds choose their mates for the year. The lower avian orders make their choices with dispatch, but the highest-ranking birds, the eagles (tersels), delay the process and prompt Nature’s intervention. For the better part of the day, three male tersels, one royal and the other two of less noble status, vie for the favour of the same female, the formel, who delays making her choice among these competing lovers. The plebeian birds attempt to solve the deadlock but fail. Nature then steps in to settle the issue and move the mating process along. Nature tells the formel that if she were Reason, she would advise her charge to accept the royal tersel. The formel declines to follow such counsel. Instead, she requests a ‘respit’ because she wishes to serve neither Venus nor Cupid ‘as yit’ (653). Nature grants her wish. Thus, unlike the rest of the birds, none of the male eagles finds a mate in the Parliament of Fowls. Cued by Chaucer’s overt reference to Alan’s ‘Pleynt of Kynde,’ readers frequently attempt to reconcile the actions of Chaucer’s Nature with those of Alan. Typically, these efforts either align Chaucer’s and Alan’s Nature or elucidate their disjunction. An instance of the former is George Economou’s study of the medieval goddess Natura, which identifies Nature’s primary roles in Alan’s Plaint as ‘vicaria Dei,’ ‘procreatrix of the sublunary world,’ and ‘pronuba,’ that is, vicar or deputy of God, generative mother of earthly life, and promoter of marriage, respectively (74).1 Economou finds that Chaucer’s Nature functions in precisely the same ways. Chaucer outright calls her the ‘vicaire of the almyghty Lord,’ Economou notes (379). Further, her role of presiding over the annual rite of bird-mating marks her as procreatrix, and the fact that the female birds have free choice of males signals that the mating ‘takes place within the marital state’ (143). When Economou confronts the issue of the formel’s apparent subversion of Nature’s function of procreatrix, he rationalizes it on the basis of the bird’s inexperience. The formel’s opting out of mating does not mean, he argues, that ‘Nature is not in control of the situation,’ that she fails to mandate procreation as a norm. Instead, it indicates that the naive formel misunderstands her suitors; because of their courtly language she thinks that they entreat her to Venus’s service, not Hymen’s. ‘Since she does not yet understand,’ Economou concludes, ‘she is allowed by Nature to take another year before mating, presumably in the hope that she will mature sufficiently to be equal to the occasion in the

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following year’ (147–8). In short, Chaucer’s Nature stays on the course of procreatrix and pronuba that Alan charted for his Nature even if the formel requires another year to get on board. Other readers contend, however, that Chaucer’s Nature strays off the course of Alan’s Nature. Hugh White argues that Chaucer compromises Alan’s Nature. Procreation is a ‘prominent concern’ of Nature in the Plaint as well as in the larger Nature tradition, White notes, and in Alan’s poem ‘there is no distance between Nature and Reason’ (‘Chaucer’ 166). But in Chaucer’s Parliament, he continues, Nature deliberately separates herself from Reason. She does so because her function in Chaucer is also to respect the freedom of the individual, which includes ‘irrational’ human behaviour such as the formel’s frustration of fertility and harmony. ‘Such “unnatural irrationality” has to be sanctioned by a Nature insistent on the freedom of the individual,’ White observes (168). He concludes that the Nature depicted in the Parliament participates in the strain of medieval thought that ‘understands the natural as not necessarily good, indeed as something that may conduce to vice.’ The Parliament thus exhibits Chaucer’s scepticism by ‘offering a view of Nature which asserts the goodness and rightness of the natural and then suggesting that this view does not really fit the work in question’ (157). A third view of the relationship between Nature in the Parliament and Nature in the Plaint aligns the two by seeing both as flawed. Jack Oruch argues that while Nature takes credit for the attraction between the sexes in the Parliament, she does ‘not ensure that ideal pairings will occur’ (28). Although she is God’s vicar, she knows that a ‘greater power’ is ultimately responsible for the birds’ mating. Her lack of reason partly causes the confusion and disorder that occurs in the Parliament. In seeing Nature as this ‘comic figure,’ Oruch does not suggest that she is the object of Chaucer’s personal satire, but that the medieval Christian tradition depicted Nature as defective by virtue of the Fall. Even for Alan, in many ways her most ardent champion, Nature is a ‘flawed heroine,’ Oruch notes (29). Alan represents this defect by tearing the fabric of Nature’s robe where man should appear. Oruch concludes that in the medieval Christian tradition and in Chaucer, Nature is ‘capable of only one sustained effective action in the fallen world – the promotion of stability and order through reproduction to offset the ravages of winter and death’; ‘she is not to be taken as the emblem of perfection and unity’ in Chaucer’s Parliament or its sources (34). The argument that I shall develop in this chapter diverges from both Economou’s reading of Alan’s Plaint as a valorization of Nature, procreatrix and pronuba, and White’s view that Alan’s Plaint ‘endows

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Nature with enormous power and authority’ (Nature 87).2 I shall also challenge Oruch’s argument that in the medieval Christian tradition upon which Chaucer drew for the Parliament, Nature sustains her promotion of stability and order through reproduction alone, when ‘reproduction’ is understood to be synonymous with heterosexuality. John Boswell has pointed out that the concept of Nature was narrowed to an equation with heterosexuality in scholastic thought of the thirteenth century (Christianity 314–15). Nevertheless, I shall argue that the much broader concept of Aristotle’s physis survived in works like Alan’s Plaint and compromised Nature’s ability to endorse only heterosexuality and the ‘natural’ poetics based upon it as normative.3 In the following chapter, I maintain that it is this so-called defect or flaw that Chaucer put to positive creative use in the Parliament. I shall begin this chapter by establishing the way in which Nature inextricably links poetry and perversion in Alan’s Plaint and then examine the inevitable implication of Alan’s narrator in this nexus. I explore Alan’s work in detail not only because Chaucer specifically calls our attention to it in the Parliament but because, Alexandre Leupin argues, the Plaint ‘represents one of the most significant attempts of the Middle Ages to account for all the inferences of this period’s poetics’ (59). Although I disagree with Economou’s contention that in the Plaint Alan ‘did more than any other writer to establish Natura as the most heroic figure in medieval personification allegory’ and instead shall argue that he perpetuated her ancient reputation as an ambiguous figure, I concur with Economou’s assertion that it would be ‘impossible, or at best foolhardy’ to undertake a study of Chaucer’s Parliament without a close look at its named source (72). In the latter part of this chapter, I shall examine two ‘sequels’ to the Plaint, Alan’s own Anticlaudianus and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose (c. 1267–78). Although the Anticlaudianus precedes the Romance by almost a century, I discuss the latter first because Jean’s attempt to sever the link between perversity and poetry through Nature’s demotion fails at the eleventh hour, whereas Alan’s second pass at the problem in the Anticlaudianus succeeds. The way in which Alan stages the Anticlaudianus-narrator’s escape from his perverse involvement with Nature involves measures, as I argue in chapter 6, that Chaucer noticeably failed to take in the Parliament of Fowls. Disorderly Nature and Sodomy in Alan’s Plaint Written in nine sections of alternating prose and verse, Alan’s Plaint opens with the narrator’s lament about sexual sins, specifically male

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same-sex copulation. Forthwith a goddess appears to the narrator. He describes her and her attire in great detail; her robe contains images of all creation, including the parliament of birds that lies behind Chaucer’s poem. Alan’s narrator fails to recognize Nature until she identifies herself in prose 3. In sections 4 and 5, Nature then complains to the narrator of humankind’s rejection of her laws. After Nature concludes her lament, Hymen (god of marriage) and the Virtues (Chastity, Temperance, Generosity, and Humility) appear and hear of the letter that Nature is writing to her priest and alter ego, Genius. In the letter, Nature requests Genius to excommunicate all those who break her law. Genius arrives, and Hymen delivers Nature’s letter. Genius then changes into his priestly robes, rephrases Nature’s condemnation of sinners, and pronounces anathema on all who engage in illicit love and reject Nature’s edicts. Although the narrator never indicated when his dream vision began, at this point he announces that the vision he has just seen as in a mirror leaves him in sleep, and the poem ends. The Plaint’s opening condemnation of perversity, which occurs again in Nature’s lament in sections 4 and 5, rests upon the prevailing medieval analogy between sexuality and grammar and introduces readers to the technical grammatical metaphors employed in this work to denounce male same-sex copulation. The narrator condemns the practice on the grounds that it requires one of the two male partners to play an inferior passive – or female – role in sexual intercourse. The first grammatical trope in the Plaint figures this transgression in terms of misaligned subjects and predicates (verbs): ‘The active sex shudders in disgrace as it sees itself degenerate into the passive sex. A man turned woman blackens the fair name of his sex ... He is subject and predicate: one and the same term is given a double application. Man here extends too far the laws of grammar’ (67–8). As Jan Ziolkowski glosses this grammatical figure, ‘a man should modify, through sexual intercourse, a woman, just as a predicate [verb] modifies a subject’ (Grammar 15). Too often, the narrator laments, men, who should be the active predicate by virtue of their biological gender, take the part of the passive female subject, overturning the laws of both nature and grammar. Alan’s narrator employs three additional metaphors in meter 1 to decry the male sodomite, both homosexual and heterosexual: the hammer and anvil, the plowshare and furrow, and the stamp or seal and the wax it imprints. In proper (that is, teleologically procreative) usage, the male sexual member (hammer) should strike the female sexual organ (anvil) and forge or coin a new artefact, just as the plowshare (penis) should prepare the furrow (vagina) for the entry of seed, and the signet

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should shape the wax into its own image. However, the Plaint asserts that in its perverse era too often the hammer strikes an anvil that has become any part of a man or woman’s body and ‘issues no seeds,’ the plowshare does not enter nutritive (female) earth, but ‘scores a barren strand,’ and the signet makes no mark on the wax, ‘imprints on no matter the stamp of a parent-stem’ (69). The mechanical metaphors that Alan assigns to his narrator in meter 1 appear to concretize the Plaint’s opening abstract figure of man the predicate modifying woman the subject. But the narrator’s imagery of hammers, plows, and stamps does not clarify so much as undercut his grammatical figure by revealing how the grammatical trope turns against its apparent task of extirpating sodomy and makes a place, however nominally despised, for sexual perversion. I take as my starting point Leupin’s observation that ‘one of [the Plaint’s] most prominent features is that the very discourse of censorship effects a return of repressed sodomy’ (72).4 This discourse, I shall argue, is specifically the grammatical discourse that takes its origin in nature; when it effects sodomy’s return, it anticipates Nature’s own perversion. In my discussion of the Plaint, I first explore the ironic turns and dilemmas that awaited Alan in medieval grammatical and poetic theory, which inextricably linked deviance with poetic production and enabled biologically non-reproductive sodomy to issue its mark. Sodomy’s Progeny The tool metaphors used by the narrator in meter 1 and later by Nature (prose 4 and 5) encode conventional medieval opposition to sodomy as non-procreative, hence ‘unnatural’: the hammer emits no sparks of life when struck on an illicit anvil, the plowshare delves into sterile sand in vain, the seal leaves no impression on its wax. While these mechanical metaphors focus attention on improper objects as receptacles – illicit anvils, infertile earth, resistant wax – their real animus is directed at the result of such copulation, an outcome that is nothing less than nothing. No progeny issues from these misaligned unions. The clear and conventional nature of the condemnation of sodomy in the Plaint’s mechanical metaphors contrasts sharply with the dense and unexpected argument against sodomy packed into its grammatical metaphors. To parallel the narrator’s argument from tools, his grammatical metaphor of sodomy should lead to the conclusion that the improper coupling of predicate and subject also produces nothing, in this case,

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meaningless discourse, the lack or absence of verbal meaning. Steven Kruger describes what should logically be the consequence of linguistic perversion for Alan: ‘The barrenness of perverse sexuality, and particularly homosexual activity, is affiliated with a linguistic barrenness, with the inability to produce the “fruyt” of meaning, and with an unproductive entrapment in the “chaff” of ungrammatical, nonsensical language’ (127–8). Yet, try as it might, the Plaint’s grammatical argument fails to reach the same ‘natural’ conclusion. Instead, under Nature’s aegis, the grammatical metaphor tangles itself and ironically attributes to sodomy the outcome of a product, albeit an aberrant one. When man becomes both subject and predicate, the narrator continues his critique of sodomy in meter 1, he becomes a ‘barbarian in grammar’ and ‘disclaims the manhood’ nature gave him. Grammar has no tolerance for man’s abdication. She does not find favour with him but ‘rather a trope.’ Yet such a transposition cannot really be called a trope (tropus), the narrator decides; it falls more correctly within the category of grammatical vice (vitium). In a striking oxymoron (as well as complex pun), Nature later categorizes vitium as the offspring of man’s perverted same-sex coupling: ‘he deflowers the flower of pulchritude by having it bloom into vice’ (135), ‘qui forme florem in uicia efflorendo deflorant’ (Häring 835). The narrator’s own mind, Nature warns, is subject to impregnation by the seeds of this potent vicious bloom: ‘if any herb from an evil seed should dare to sprout in the garden of your own mind, remove it by a timely use of the cutting hook’ (166). The oxymoronic statement that improper grammatical coupling bears the fruit of vice resonates loudly throughout Jeffrey Schnapp’s paraphrase of the opening of meter 1: ‘The unnatural conversion of one gender into another, Alan insists, is nonproductive. It yields a trope that is not really a trope, a figure that is not really a figure. What, then, might one call this grammatical nonentity? Alan’s response is that it belongs to that null grammatical category known as “verbal vices” or “defects of speech” ... these grammatical deviants ... were seen [in Latin and medieval rhetorical and poetic theory] as the progeny of licentious and indiscriminate verbal couplings, that is, as literary monsters’ (‘Solecisms’ 202–3; emphases mine). Schnapp’s paraphrase replicates the Plaint’s self-contradiction: ‘nonproductive’ verbal coupling ‘yields’ a ‘nonentity’ that is its monstrous ‘progeny.’ The false trope-that-is-not-a-trope may belong to the ‘null’ – invalid – grammatical category of vitium, but it is not the corollary of the non-existent issue, the absent result, of the action of hammer, plow, and stamp in Alan’s mechanical metaphors.

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Vitium is indeed something, a pseudo-trope, not a nonentity. In order for the Plaint to mount a parallel grammatical argument against sodomy on the conventional medieval grounds of non-procreativity, illicit verbal coupling would have to effect nothing, silence, or discourse lacking meaning, nonsensical babble. At most, the narrator can argue only that ‘vicious’ language leaves its audience ‘barren of the truth,’ a less obvious and asymmetrical lack of procreativity than the non-productivity of hammer and plow.5 When, instead, it produces something, the deviant offspring vitium, the Plaint’s otherwise straightforward argument snarls into self-contradiction. Technically speaking, it is Nature who fouls the Plaint’s moral logic against sodomy. Hic et Hic: Grammar and Disorderly Fertility While the grammatical argument appears to turn against the Plaint’s project by imputing a fecundity, however aberrant, to same-sex copulation, there are other ironic twists in the work, which, Mark Jordan observes, ‘is hardly a seamless representation of orderly fertility’ (72). ‘Everywhere we turn [in the Plaint],’ Jordan continues, ‘Nature’s rules seem to spawn their own violations in same-sex fertilities’; to Jordan, these irrepressible ironies point to the intended message of the Plaint: Alan attempts to ‘suggest the limits of Nature as a guide in morals’ (86–7). Nature cannot effectively argue against same-sex copulation because she is ‘too various and variable to enact convincing regulations’ against same-sex perversion. Her attempts to legislate orderly – married, heterosexual – reproduction on the basis of natural rules ‘must end in incoherence’ (80). Jordan concludes that what Nature needs is Christian scripture traditionally read, especially the Pauline condemnation of same-sex copulation: ‘Nature does not have the right word for this sin, much less the right myth. The right word would be “sodomy,” and the myth is the medieval reading of Genesis 19. Alan’s title by now has become a pun. The Plaint of Nature is not only a complaint against sexual sin, it is [Alan’s] complaint against Nature’s failure to speak satisfactorily about those sins’ (87). If, as Jordan implies, Alan’s Plaint makes a subtle plea to employ the moral term ‘sodomy’ and thus to discard the unreliable natural argument against same-sex copulation in favour of the more accommodating conventional one, the Plaint also reveals the even more compromised position of those who would condemn same-sex intercourse on grammatical grounds. Indeed, when Alan reaches for the abstruse figure of the male predicate modifying the female subject at the very opening of

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meter 1 to prove grammar’s opposition to same-sex copulation, he tacitly avoids the more rudimentary and better-known, hence more compelling, case that grammar makes for same-sex conjunction: nouns and their adjectives must be of the same gender, or hic with hic. As Ganymede phrases this law in the popular and influential ‘Debate between Helen and Ganymede’ that I discussed earlier, grammar insists on sameness, not difference, in the coupling of nouns and adjectives: ‘“Opposites always disagree; the right way is like with like. Man can be fitted to man by elegant conjunction. If you don’t know this, look at the gender of their articles [i.e., adjectives]: Masculine should be coupled with masculine by the rules of grammar”’ (113). Ganymede’s disputant, Helen, offers no rebuttal to this grammatical argument in favour of (male) same-sex copulation; indeed, none is available. Instead, the ‘Debate’ secures its victory over Ganymede by an act of allegorical fiat – and of circular logic: Reason steps in at the end and declares Helen the winner. Helen’s position is deemed the reasonable one because Reason has declared it so. Another near-contemporary of Alan, Gautier de Coincy, did attempt to refute Ganymede’s argument for same-sex copulation by logic rather than fiat, maintaining that even though Grammar couples hic with hic, ‘Nature curses this coupling’ (trans. in Boswell, Christianity 259n60). In other words, Ziolkowski explains, unlike Alan, Gautier takes care to differentiate regular grammar (the equivalent of Ganymede’s grammar) from Nature’s grammar, to note that there are ‘broad discrepancies between school grammar and natural grammar’ (Grammar 36). Yet, as Jordan has shown, in the Plaint Alan’s Nature does not, in fact, consistently ‘curse’ same-sex coupling, a failing that distresses Alan, and the discrepancies between Nature’s grammar and regular school grammar in the Plaint are far less broad than Gautier would portray them. Alan cannot appropriate Gautier’s solution because the Plaint has impugned too thoroughly Nature’s moral authority, which for Gautier is the source of Grammar’s moral authority. Based on a morally ‘variable and various’ Nature, Alan’s Grammar is even less able than Nature to enact regulations against same-sex copulation. Poetry and Perversion Nor can Alan find his way out of the grammatical conundrum by following what Jordan sees as Alan’s exit from the natural dilemma: to take refuge in the term ‘sodomy’ and condemn same-sex copulation on

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conventional grounds. As a moralist, Alan might dissociate himself from nature by resorting to scripturally based human law, but as a poet he cannot disentangle himself from grammar and its close associate, rhetoric. The conflicting metaphors from meter 1 that I have identified illustrate the double trap in which Alan the poet thus finds himself caught. As a writer, he is bound to grammar, and grammar is implicated by its own metaphorics in perversion. Elizabeth Pittenger notes that ‘even as Nature’s seminar seeks to eliminate the bad seeds of “perversion” the [grammatical] metaphorics plant them afresh’ (229). Errant hammers and plows make no mark, but illicit grammar does, and the latter mark, vitium, is inextricably bound to the stuff of poetry, the mark that Alan himself makes. Vitium, stylistic vice, and tropus, literary contrivance, Ziolkowski explains, were closely related in medieval thought: ‘the two were considered similar, in that neither conformed perfectly to accepted grammatical usage’ (Grammar 17). They were antonyms in the sense that the trope, the figure of speech in which a word is turned around from its proper signification, is deemed an excusably improper use of words, whereas the false trope Alan laments is judged an inexcusably improper use of words. As antonyms, however, each use of words implies and invokes its opposite, indeed polices the other to provide its own definition and demarcation. A necessarily fine line divides the creative use of words and the illicit use of words, the poet and the pervert.6 Alan generalizes this link between poetry and perversion in the parallel oppositional bond that he constructs between orthography, ‘straight’ or ‘proper’ writing, and falsigraphy, ‘false’ writing. In orthography, the pen (penis) inseminates the writing surface (pagina or vagina) with the seeds of meaning that bear the fruit of words on the page. Falsigraphy should leave no mark on the page, for in sodomitical writing the deviant pen would go astray and scatter its seed anywhere but upon its ‘proper’ recipient, pagina/vagina. Yet again Alan skews the conventional polarity between purity and perversion, orthography and falsigraphy. His errant stylus indeed makes a mark, and a poetic one at that. Falsigraphy is responsible for creating both analogia and anastrophe, rhetorical figures of inverted order recognized by Donatus, Quintilian, and others (Sheridan, Plaint 134n17). Like the difference between tropus and vitium, that between Alan’s orthography and falsigraphy is one of style rather than substance. The conventional boundaries between proper and perverse writing further collapse in the actions of Alan’s Genius, Nature’s alter ego, who

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configures the relationship between orthography and falsigraphy differently than does Nature herself. When Nature tires of the act of orthographic writing (generation) and decamps to ‘the delightful palace of the ethereal region’ (146), she enlists Venus as her replacement and bestows upon the Cyprian ‘an unusually powerful writing-pen’ (156). Nature also instructs Venus not to allow this pen to stray from orthography, the ‘path of proper delineation,’ into falsigraphy (156). Venus is to ‘concentrate exclusively in her connections on the natural union of the masculine and feminine gender’ (157) and avoid various grammatical vices. In due course, Venus’s writing does goes astray, and the Cyprian ‘destroys herself with the connections of Grammar’ (164). Ultimately, Venus gives up writing altogether. As Nature’s scribe, Genius also participates in the scriptive act of generation. When he tires of reproductive writing, however, he does not delegate it to a subordinate, but switches the pen from his right hand to his left, which signals his withdrawal ‘from the field of orthography to falsigraphy’ (217). Genius’s left hand comes to the aid of his right ‘as if it were helping a weary sister’ (216), Alan further writes. This sororal imagery, Pittenger notes, recalls the relationship between Nature and Venus, one sister aiding another fatigued by writing. Yet it also emphasizes how much closer Nature’s orthography is to Venus’s falsigraphy when the two types of inscription exist within Genius: ‘The two agencies are now compressed into one body, the secretary Genius, and then bifurcated into the agency of his scribal hands. Two opposed kinds of writing – orthography represented by Nature, and falsigraphy represented by Venus – are compressed into an image of a single body with opposing hands that produce orthography and falsigraphy and that are then represented as if sisters’ (Pittenger 235). Through Genius, Alan not only situates falsigraphy close to orthography, but allies it to himself the poet. The final figures that Genius’s left hand scripts into life are the classical writers Ennius, ‘who crossed the bounds of metrical practice in unrestrained license,’ and Pacuvius, who ‘place[d] the beginning of his discourse at a stage that points backward’ (217). Classical poets have come under Nature’s attack earlier in the Plaint for writing falsehoods, particularly for attributing the vice of homosexuality to the gods, yet here the tragic poet Pacuvius, praised by Cicero and Quintilian (Sheridan, Plaint 277n24), is condemned for wrong order, for beginning in medias res. Alan could not have missed the irony: the Plaint also begins at a stage that points backward. Alan is as much written by – the progeny of – falsigraphy as is Pacuvius.

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Genius’s Final Word The proximity between orthography and falsigraphy that Alan creates in Genius plays a central role in modern readings of the Plaint. Pittenger argues that it implicates both kinds of writing in a common materiality that stands over and against divine inscription, the transcendent Book (231). The forever potentially perverse materiality of writing makes even Nature vulnerable to falsigraphy; were it not for God’s guiding hand, Nature admits that her hand might stray off the page: ‘my writing-reed would instantly go off course if it were not guided by the finger of the superintendent on high’ (146). What lies beneath Alan’s bundling of straight and deviant writing into the hands of one figure, Pittenger implies, is the abhorrence of matter, which itself is the basis of a dualistic position Alan had to condemn. Although it appears paradoxical, Pittenger concedes, dualism licensed asceticism and non-procreative sexuality; both express contempt for matter. In its extreme disregard for matter, dualism licensed even sodomy. Alan thus finds himself trapped in a ‘perverse position’ and can only resolve his dilemma by searching for another exit, which Pittenger locates in transcendent reading (236–7, 240n31). Alan’s compression of orthography and falsigraphy into the single figure, Genius, prompts Leupin to reach a rather different conclusion: their forced coalescence emphasizes falsigraphy’s riotous triumph over orthography (108). I propose yet a third reading, the unresolved dilemma of orthography’s linkage to falsigraphy, which emerges from attending closely to the event that follows Genius’s two-handed writing and concludes the Plaint: Genius puts down his pen, ceases writing with either left or right hand, and speaks the final words of the work, the excommunication of those who break Nature’s laws. To pronounce this sentence, Genius changes his iridescent writer’s garb (ever changing in hue, like Nature’s own) into ‘priestly dress,’ leaving behind his role as the agent of creation and of mutability and taking on his sacerdotal role, a new function that Alan was the first to assign him (D. Baker; Knowlton, ‘Allegorical Figure Genius,’ ‘Genius as Allegorical Figure’; Scanlon). Genius transforms the discourse of the Plaint as well. Returning to the sins that both the narrator and Nature earlier condemned (Nitzsche 101), Genius reinvents the accusation of same-sex copulation as grammatical vice. Genius’s excommunication twice pronounces anathema on sexual sinners. Those who ‘block the lawful path of Venus’ (221) are first condemned. Next, he ‘who makes an irregular exception to the rule of

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Venus’ (221) is damned. In both instances, Genius invokes Venus, now reinstated in her role as Nature’s obedient vicar, and mutes the natural grammatical argument against sexual perversion. He does not silence the argument altogether, however, since it resonates faintly in Genius’s reference to ‘irregular exceptions,’ ‘exceptionem ... anomalam’ (Häring 878), to rules. The rules belong no longer to grammar or nature, but to Venus. Implicit in Genius’s echo of grammatical imagery is his return to the sin that preoccupied the narrator and Nature at the opening of the Plaint: same-sex copulation. As Genius guides the Plaint to its conclusion, he sidesteps the oxymoronic self-contradiction that vitiated the grammatical argument against same-sex copulation. Genius ascribes no evil progeny to sodomy, no linguistic fruit or vitium. Invoking Nature and the narrator’s laments, Genius rewrites them. He then takes one final step to assure that he has unequivocally erased the Plaint’s earlier ironic privileging of same-sex sodomy with fertility: Genius decrees that all who make irregular exceptions to the rule of Venus shall be deprived of her ‘seal’ (221), castrated. If Nature never finds the right word, ‘sodomy,’ much less the right myth, for the sin of same-sex copulation, Genius edits out the wrong words she has used for it, those that attribute fertile bloom to supposedly sterile vice. Genius’s correction of Nature, however, highlights his failure to resolve his own earlier contradictory stance as ambidextrous writer. When Genius puts down the falsigraphic pen, quits his role as poetartifex, dons priestly robes, and pronounces an anathema that rewrites Nature’s unreliable grammatical argument, he neither transcends nor solves the problem inherent in Alan’s linkage of true and deviant writing, orthography and falsigraphy.7 Escaping into a new oral discourse of morality, Genius the priest leaves the dilemma behind, deeply inscribed into the text of the Plaint and into poetry as well. Genius’s exit also strands another important figure, the narrator, and it is this abdication above all others in the Plaint that foregrounds the inextricable imbrication of orthography and falsigraphy. Forgetting Nature: The Plaint-Narrator’s Queer Aesthetics Alan’s literary model for the Plaint, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, opens with the lament of the exiled dreamer, who is surrounded by the Muses of Poetry busily dictating words to accompany his tears. As the dreamer writes, an awe-inspiring woman appears to him whom he fails to

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recognize. (Later he comes to understand that she is Philosophy.) The dreamer observes that Philosophy’s dress, the colour of which is obscured by ‘a film of dust’ (4), is torn. Immediately upon seeing the Muses of Poetry arrayed around the bedside of the ailing dreamer, Philosophy becomes angry and dismisses these ‘harlots of the stage,’ who ‘choke the life from the fruitful harvest of reason’ (4). She substitutes her own Muses to heal her mournful charge. As the Muses of Poetry dejectedly troop off, the dreamer’s tears are so thick that he can barely see Philosophy, who wipes his eyes clear and reminds him that she is his former nurse. Soon the narrator recognizes Philosophy, remembering in whose house he had been cared for since his youth, and the remainder of the Consolation stages an extended dialogue between the narrator and Philosophy on subjects such as fate, fortune, providence, true and false felicity, good and evil. When read as a psychological or moral allegory, the Consolation traces the narrator’s progress from an irrational to a rational – philosophical – response to the misfortune he has experienced. The inability of Boethius’s narrator to recognize his former nurse and tutor, Philosophy, represents his initial failure to view his exile philosophically, while his extended dialogue with Philosophy signals his gradual adoption of a new perspective on his changed circumstances. However, Kathryn Lynch argues that the Consolation-narrator never acquires a fully philosophical stance. He fails to grasp Philosophy’s hardest lesson that because evil is a deficiency of the good, it is non-existent. Boethius’s narrator does not totally understand that evil’s privative nature constitutes its own punishment; he continues to wish that evil receive more tangible retribution. In contrast, Lynch further contends, the narrator of Alan’s Plaint does learn this most difficult lesson at the end of the poem: Genius’s expulsion of sinners against Nature allegorizes the Plaint-narrator’s recognition that evil ‘simply cease[s] to be,’ lacking essence and existence in God’s realm (Dream Vision 104–5). Although Lynch makes a compelling case that both the Consolation and the Plaint allegorize the education of their respective narrators, it is difficult to conclude that both narrators attend the same school. Boethius’s Philosophy is not Alan’s Nature. When Boethius’s narrator fails to recognize Philosophy, it is easy to see that this forgetfulness allegorizes his irrational grief. It is harder to see what the Plaint-narrator’s inability to recognize Nature means. Mark Jordan comes closest when he interprets the narrator’s ignorance as some kind of perversion (72), which ultimately Nature is at a loss to cure because the case against

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perversion can be made only on moral, not natural grounds, and no one in the Plaint ever makes that case on moral grounds. Allegorically, Alan’s Nature herself thus comes to represent perversion, or at least she does so in relationship to Alan’s dreamer, whose efforts to educate himself, I shall argue, hinge upon finding his way to an orthodox tutor. The lesson that Alan’s narrator must learn takes the form not of the final wisdom that the Consolation offers concerning the privative nature of evil and the definition of true felicity, but of the first enlightenment that Boethius’s Philosophy offers the dreamer: he has followed false Muses of Poetry, ‘harlots of the stage,’ as Philosophy derides them. So, too, will Alan’s narrator come to understand that Nature constitutes for him a false – perverse – Muse of Poetry, whom he must put aside to follow his true muse, Genius. When Genius dons his sacerdotal robes, however, he ultimately fails his poetry student. As an allegory of the education of a poet, the Plaint draws upon medieval notions of nature and art not readily accessible to modern readers. The primary, but by no means only, significance of Latin natura (from nascor, to be born) is birth or genesis; accordingly, the central function of Alan’s Nature is to create life. Alan figures Nature’s role as procreatrix in the Plaint in several ways, which I have enumerated earlier in this chapter: she forges, she coins, she draws, she writes. The latter tropes – drawing and writing – devolve from the medieval nexus between nature and art, both regarded as generative processes. Gregory Stone explains in his discussion of Boccaccio’s ‘poetaphysics’ that the medieval understanding of the aesthetic concept that ‘art imitates nature’ is not that the poet makes artificial things that imitate natural things, as some readers hold (Hatton 89), but that the poet does what natura herself does: ‘The poet ... imitates nature’s giving birth to things, her leading things from invisibility to visibility. Poetry is imitatrix naturae only insofar as it does what nature has the power to do. Indeed, the proper verb by which to name the function of natura and, hence, the function of the poet, is agere ... to set in motion, to drive, to lead, to guide, to do, to perform ... The poet is an agent, not a mimic; poetry a matter of agency, not representation ... Poetry, like its grandfather (God), is a prime mover: not the passive portrayal of what is but the active setting in motion of what will be’ (44–5). For the poet to do what Nature herself does (‘to set in motion ... to do, to perform’) is to act in the orthodox Aristotelian role of efficient cause, yet this identifies part of the problem that Alan must confront in the Plaint: for Nature, personified female, to set in motion, to do, to per-

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form – to wield the hammer and stylus – is to act in a masculine, hence perverse, manner. There is a further problem with Nature that Alan must resolve as well. Nature not only acts as efficient cause, prime mover, but provides the material cause of generation: in the Plaint, she tropes herself as nurse and mother, traditionally passive roles. This leads to the odd situation in which the Plaint’s Nature, supposedly representing normative sexuality, ‘seems to be a hermaphrodite’ (M. Jordan 71), emblematic in the Middle Ages of deviant sexuality, as I noted in my discussion of Dante’s Achilles in chapter 3. Although I shall reclassify her deviance shortly, Alan’s Nature is indeed a ‘peculiar’ figure, to use Jordan’s descriptor. She serves as an even odder muse for the Plaint-poet, whose opening lament about perverse sexuality invokes this perverted figure whom he fails to recognize. I have noted Jordan’s argument that Nature’s ‘peculiarity,’ by which he means her inclusion of disorderly fertility, disrupts Alan’s Plaint. By extension, her perversion implicates the poet who dreams her into existence, and Jordan concludes that Alan’s poem disintegrates into incoherence because it attempts to launch a condemnation of sodomy on natural rather than conventional grounds. I qualify Jordan’s reading by contending that the Plaint allows Nature’s disruptiveness in order to contain it and that Alan attempted, however unsuccessfully, to straighten out the case against sodomy with an argument from nature as he regenders that figure towards the end of the work. What Alan confronts and rewrites in the Plaint is the troublesome Aristotelian concept of nature that gives rise to the inclusive – ‘perverse’ – Nature who appears in Alan’s poem. Although Nature and natural law had been extensively rationalized by Christian writers (White, Nature, ch. 1) and narrowed in scholastic thought (Boswell, Christianity 314–15), it was in the area of sexual behaviour that problems remained. In essence, Christian Nature was allowed to include morally unacceptable sexuality, provided that it was heterosexual and promoted procreation. Because it promoted procreation, for instance, polygamy was a legitimately natural practice, which even Augustine was forced to justify under certain circumstances (White, Nature 22). Yet the classical tradition, as I next argue, went far beyond the validation of heterosexual adultery to construct Nature herself not just as a model that included so-called unnatural sexuality but as a model of such sexuality, and it is this irrepressible ancient legacy that caused medieval Nature to resist Christian appropriation.

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Aristotle’s Ambiguous Physis In Metaphysics 5.4, Aristotle specifies seven definitions of physis, or nature, ranging from those that remain familiar to those that have become obscure.8 Still in common usage, ‘nature’ refers to the innate disposition of something, for instance, the inherent tendency of fire to rise; to this meaning I shall return later. More obscurely, nature for Aristotle also means genesis or growth, and I look first at this set of definitions. Nature is both ‘primary matter,’ the shapeless material ‘of which any nonnatural object consists or out of which it is made,’ as well as the ‘form or substance, which is the end of the process of becoming’ (1602), that is, of generation. In other words, matter is ‘natural’ in that it reaches its form, or final shape, through an internal process of growth. In contrast, artificial matter relies upon external motion to reach its end. A tree, so to speak, begets itself, but a chair is produced only through the action of the carpenter. Or, as Aristotle restates the distinction between nature and art in Physics 2.1: ‘men propagate men, but bedsteads do not propagate bedsteads; and that is why they say that the natural factor in a bedstead is not its shape but the wood – to wit, because wood and not bedstead would come up if germinated’ (115). Made things, Aristotle concludes, do not contain within themselves the principle of their own making, or genesis, while natural things do contain within their matter the self-reproducing principle of motion. R.G. Collingwood explains that since Aristotle held nature to be selfmoving, it would be illogical for him to hypothesize an efficient cause outside nature to account for the changes within it: ‘No doubt if there had been a time when nature did not yet exist, an efficient cause outside it would have been necessary to bring it into existence; but Aristotle follows the Timaeus in holding that there never was such a time. The process of the world is for him therefore exactly what Plato in the Timaeus said it could not be, namely, a self-causing and self-existing process’ (82). Aristotle’s nature thus includes matter and form, and the form of the thing is also the moving or efficient cause of its coming into being and acting as it does (Wicksteed and Cornford 104). In discussing the formal cause of a natural thing as if it were the moving cause or agent, Aristotle effectively fuses the two causes in the Physics and Metaphysics and further merges them with the material cause. As Carolyn Merchant paraphrases Aristotle’s concept of physis: ‘in natural objects as opposed to artificially created products, the material and efficient causes

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were united such that the material substratum had its principle of motion or change within it’ (11). In Physics 2.2, Aristotle acknowledges the potential confusion inherent in this definition of nature: ‘since “nature” is used ambiguously, either for the form or the matter, Nature, as we have seen, can be regarded from two points of view’ (121). Nature’s deeper ambiguity, however, is not that it can mean one thing or the other – matter or form – but that form, as Aristotle employs the term, means two things as well, the formal cause (the form of the thing produced) and the efficient cause (the motion that drives the process of development). Nature’s most problematic feature thus emerges: she contains within herself the two entities (the material cause and the coalesced formal-efficient cause9) that make her, grammatically female, self-sufficient in generation.10 While – and perhaps because – his physis implies a feminized view of reproduction, when Aristotle wrote of human and animal generation per se, he securely masculinized it. For instance, I showed in the introduction how Aristotle’s Generation of Animals fuses the formal and efficient causes and opposes them to the material cause: the male (whose sperm possesses the form and supplies the motion of generation) is deemed superior to and more divine than the female (who provides the matter, embryo). In Aristotle’s physis alone remain vestiges of the female world-soul of Plato’s Timaeus and, behind that, of an ancient matriarchal belief in Mother Earth as self-sufficient propagator of life, a woman, so to speak, who does not require men or who proclaims the radical irrelevance of the phallus. As I suggested in chapter 4, it is this same queer aura of generative self-sufficiency that hovers about Rumor’s wicker domicile in the House of Fame, and it hovers about Alan’s Nature too. The Plaint’s ‘Lesbian’ Nature and the Narrator’s Queer Poetics Nature in Alan’s Plaint carries with her the disruptive ‘ambiguities’ of Aristotle’s physis. But she is not, in fact, the hermaphrodite that Mark Jordan suspects her to be, a person who possesses the sexual organs of both male and female, thus ‘seem[ing] neither and yet both’ in Ovid’s estimation: a hermaphrodite ‘is no longer two [bodies], nor such as to be called, one, woman, and one, man’ (Met. 4.378–9). Instead, like physis, Nature is decidedly a woman, a female personification with a woman’s body,11 yet she is a woman who acts like a man by wielding the metaphorical masculine instruments of copulation: hammer and stylus. By classical and medieval standards, this makes Nature a lesbian, a

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woman who would perform as a man sexually through the use of a surrogate male phallus (Brooten 42; Murray, ‘Marginal’ 199). Joan Cadden remarks that ‘hermaphrodite anatomical features, transvestite acts, and homoerotic behavior became associated, even confused, in medieval language’ (Meanings 212), but the fact that Alan viewed Nature as a lesbian rather than as a hermaphrodite becomes clear from the ways in which he attempted to normalize her. If Alan regarded Nature as a hermaphrodite, he would have standardized her by resolving her gender as male or female. But Alan made no effort to do so, since Nature clearly begins and ends as physiologically female. Unlike Chaucer, who encourages readers to wonder whether what Robert Sturges calls the ‘(over-)sexed body’ (35) of his male Pardoner is simultaneously a mare (a woman), and unlike Dante, who ‘softens’ Achilles’ masculine physique, Alan raises no corresponding doubts that female Nature is also a man. Instead, Alan’s anxiety centres on the fact that as a woman, Nature exercises creative agency, hammering and writing like a man, and he enlists a traditional medieval remedy for such ‘lesbianism’: his Nature attempts to normalize her aberrant agency by disclaiming volition, attributing her power to a superior male who commands her to act for him. As vicaria dei, Nature does not function independently, but fulfils God’s will, a renunciation voiced by women visionaries at about the same time as Nature uttered it in the Plaint (Petroff 5–20; Voaden). Alan also avails himself of the neoplatonic strategy for containing Nature’s disruptive agency as formulated by the school of Chartres: Nature operates as a midwife who translates masculine Ideas into feminine matter, mediating between the supra- and sublunary worlds (Merchant 10). Referring to herself as such a ‘midwife’ (125), Alan’s Nature repeatedly denies that her masculine agency is volitional. Indeed, when compared with the source of her power, Alan’s Nature denies her agency altogether: ‘I most definitely declare that I am but the humble disciple of the Master on High. For in my operation I have not the power to follow closely in the footprints of God in His operations, but with sighs of longing, so to speak, gaze on His work from afar. His operation is simple, mine is multiple; His work is complete, mine is defective; His work is the object of admiration, mine is subject to alteration ... You can realise that in comparison with God’s power, my power is powerless; you can know that my efficiency is deficiency; you can decide that my activity is worthless’ (124). But Nature’s claim that her power is powerless, her efficiency deficient, does not suffice in the Plaint to normalize her deviance and

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nullify her threat. She remains the woman who acts sexually like a man, and her perversion serves to make palpable the condition of the narrator who dreams her into existence. Although her reading of the relationship between Nature and the Plaint-poet differs from mine in its conclusion, nevertheless Lynch also finds something perverse about their association. Lynch views Nature’s advent in the Plaint ‘as a clear response to a deficiency in the Dreamer’s psyche,’ and she locates the narrator’s insufficiency as an ‘infirmity of the reason’ that causes him to ask Nature ‘excessively literal questions.’ Like Boethius’s Philosophy, Lynch argues, Alan’s Nature begins curing the dreamer by ‘restructuring his soul’ so that reason rules it, which allows the dreamer to achieve a ‘new level of cognitive awareness.’ But Nature herself cannot completely heal the narrator. Genius must participate, and his appearance represents the dreamer’s full restoration to health, his attainment of the philosophical insight that enables him to comprehend the role that evil plays as part of God’s plan, an understanding, Lynch concludes, that Boethius’s narrator never achieves (Dream Vision 80–106). While Lynch identifies the Plaint -narrator’s malady as his limited philosophical insight, the figurative subtext of her diagnosis reveals that the underlying cause of the narrator’s deficient reason echoes what I have called Nature’s lesbianism. Manifesting itself in his ‘excessively literal questions,’ the narrator’s inadequate reason, Lynch observes, is a function of his masculine immaturity: ‘the Dreamer’s errors in questioning ... generally rise from a puerile literalism, a lack of judgment.’ As opposed to the dreamer’s puerile mind, Lynch further explains, the virile mind is capable of a ‘kind of penetration through the substantial nature of things to their exemplars or archetypes,’ and ‘it is just this penetration that Alain’s dreamer lacks’ (Dream Vision 85–6). Lynch suggests that Genius, however, does possess the narrator’s missing penetrative capacity. As the masculine god of imagination, ingenium, Genius takes over from Nature to ‘order and discipline the course of the imagination,’ and his appearance in the allegory signals the dreamer’s ‘new attitude about mankind – in fact, a much more masculine one, a sterner one – an attitude he has been moving inexorably toward from his first lament’ (Dream Vision 89–91). Lynch’s dreamer thus moves from puerile to virile, from a boyishly feminine superficiality to full masculine ability to penetrate. In troping the dreamer’s cure as a transition from sexual puerility to virility, Lynch associates female Nature with the dreamer’s unnatural passivity – his inability or unwilling-

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ness to ‘penetrate’ as a man should – and male Genius with masculine sexual agency. Lynch maintains that Nature exists in Alan’s Plaint not to cure the dreamer’s perversity, but to represent it. Just as he is a man whose puerile passivity feminizes him, she is a woman whose agency masculinizes her. As I noted earlier, the Middle Ages would have understood the womanish man as a male homosexual and the mannish woman as a female homosexual, and the fact that the male narrator dreams into existence a woman brilliantly allegorizes the narrator’s real problem as the Plaint phrases it in the opening meter: he is a ‘man turned woman’ who ‘blackens the fair name of his sex.’ Alan underscores the narrator’s projection of Nature as his queer alter ego in his handling of the medieval genre of the dream vision, in which, as discussed in chapter 2, narrators disclaim both authority and responsibility by presenting their poems as emanating from autonomous visions that they record and transmit to their audience. Had the Plaint -narrator simply dreamed Nature and memorialized her words and actions, reflected, as he says at poem’s end, in the mirror of his mind, such a conventional implicit disclaimer of poetic agency might have gone unremarked. But the Plaint -narrator ironically draws attention to his rhetorical subterfuge by anticipating Nature’s later words in his opening lament. Much of what the narrator complains about in meter 1 is echoed by Nature in prose 5. In particular, the narrator and Nature make the same flawed grammatical argument against sodomy as they bewail perverse human sexuality. When Nature repeats the Plaint-poet’s words, allegorically she reveals his ventriloquism and calls attention to the operative artifice of the dream vision; the audience is compelled to acknowledge that the narrator writes Nature, not vice versa. The narrator’s delayed demonstration that he constructs Nature is not merely a coy example of the medieval humility topos, but a rhetorical move with a perverse resonance. The exposure of the narrator’s feigned reticence about authority recalls the moment in meter 1 when the narrator imagined himself to lack agency altogether. In that meter, as part of his general complaint against same-sex perversion, the narrator laments that kisses lie fallow on the lips of maidens, and, given the context of a diatribe against sodomy, these kisses must be men’s, Mark Jordan observes (73). Nevertheless, the narrator wishes that such kisses were ‘planted’ on him, because they would generate the ‘honeycomb in [his] mouth’ (71) that medieval rhetoricians such as Matthew of Vendôme figured as eloquent poetry (Sheridan, Plaint 71n17).

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By desiring male kisses the narrator not only implicates himself in what he has already condemned in meter 1 and thus makes as compromised a case against sodomy as Nature does an incoherent one, but implicates his poetic as well by envisioning same-sex male amorousness to be artistically fertile. Like Nature, who presents something far short of ‘a seamless representation of orderly fertility,’ the narrator queers the dynamics of reproduction, in his case, poetic production. Perhaps worse, in this disorderly aesthetic, the narrator assigns himself the role of the receptive partner, in patriarchal thinking the passive female. In the opening of meter 1, right after the narrator implicates Venus for ‘unmanning’ men, for ‘chang[ing] “hes” into “shes,”’ incongruously he describes his grief that generates his ‘mournful ditty’ in a metaphor of parturition: ‘It is not a case of pretence begetting a show of grief or faked tears giving birth to deceit: it is not an act, but rather an ache, that is in labour or, rather, actually giving birth’ (67). Medieval religious men commonly figured themselves as maternal with impunity (Bynum, ‘Imagery’). But in a poem like the Plaint, which opens by railing against ‘unmanned’ men who have become ‘shes,’ the narrator cannot even figuratively transgender himself female, not to mention an impregnated female, without moral vulnerability. Rather, the narrator exposes that his poetic is as perverse as is the fallen humanity he laments, and his failure to recognize his aesthetic culpability in meter 1 anticipates his failure to recognize Nature herself. Once the narrator does understand who Nature is, she tropes the narrator’s perversely receptive poetics in a common image of impregnation: she images the narrator as the blank wax tablet that her speech inscribes (165). Because Nature’s own disorderly creativity is expressed through the metaphors of phallic tools – she wields hammers, plows, pens – rather than the sexual euphemism of fertilizing kisses, the narrator’s transgressive poetic is figured congruently: Nature is the masculine pen, the narrator is the feminine writing surface. Together, they enact a queer form of poetic reproduction in which the narrator’s desired abdication of agency emblemizes what he has singled out to be humanity’s worst sin against Nature: ‘the active sex ... degenerat[ing] into the passive sex’ (68). Gender Identity and Crisis in the Plaint Until prose 5 of the Plaint, Nature’s problematic legacy from the ancient coalescence of form and matter in Aristotelian physis allegorizes the

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narrator’s queer poetic. At the same time, however, Nature means something else in both ancient philosophy and in the Plaint: a person’s essential character, including sexual identity as male or female. In the guise of this more common definition, Nature interacts with the narrator to express his gradual assumption of his ‘natural’ masculine authority, the full development of which Nature cannot ultimately allegorize because of the paradox that her essential – grammatical – nature is female. But Nature can at least participate in the initial stage of the narrator’s masculine maturation. The earliest hint of this development occurs at the end of the opening section of the Plaint, prose 5. There, for the first time, the narrator reveals the poetic agency that so far he has disclaimed. When Nature’s grammatical complaint against sodomy in prose 5 echoes the narrator’s opening lament in meter 1, it becomes evident that he creates her verbally even if until this point he has figured himself as the passive receptacle of Nature’s words. By revealing his ventriloquism, the narrator begins to assume his ‘natural’ masculine authority, a process that leads to the appearance of Genius and culminates in Genius’s anathema that concludes the Plaint. Nature’s closing words to the narrator in prose 5 intimate the trajectory of his transition from feminized male, whose maternal heart resembles Nature’s and whose receptive memory is open to her imprint, to the vigilant warrior, whose virile agency materializes as the pruning hook that will root out any attempt to inseminate his mind with evil: ‘Hold fast under the key of your retentive memory what I shall discuss and shake off the drowsy torpor from your vigilant mind so that, moved with me by a mother-like heart, you may feel pity and compassion for men in danger of shipwreck and, armed with the shield of forewarning, may go forth to combat the monstrous army of vices and may, if any herb from an evil seed should dare to sprout in the garden of your own mind, remove it by a timely use of the cutting hook’ (166). This command, which concludes prose 5, is the last order that Nature gives to the narrator in the Plaint. In the process of making a man – a tool-wielder – of the narrator, Nature must make a conventional woman of herself, which, in Alan’s poem, first and foremost requires her subordination to him. Already evident at the end of prose 5 is Alan’s move towards re-establishing the hierarchy of male over female: the narrator gives his consent to hearing Nature’s counsel and teaching. The middle section of the Plaint, from prose 6 to prose 8, secures that ‘natural’ order. In prose 6, Lynch observes (Dream Vision 89), the narrator begins to take control of Nature by directing the course of her narrative. Under

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the politic veil of a request, the narrator first guides Nature to elaborate upon the vices and to delineate their subtle ‘shades of differentiation’ (169). As the narrator begins to assume his true, masculine nature by exercising his authority at the opening of prose 6, the Plaint correspondingly widens its exclusive focus to this point on the so-called unnatural sin, homosexuality, and takes up other vices. Although Nature would end this account of human immorality in prose 6 after her examination of avarice, the narrator prompts her to ‘attack the sons of Avarice with even deeper feeling’ (180). Nature accedes to his request and devotes meter 7 to a spirited excoriation of greed, which eventually segues into a condemnation of related vices that rambles on until the narrator ‘check[s] the unbroken course of the narration’ (193) at the end of prose 7 and directs Nature to return to the subject of Avarice, specifically to instruct him in strategies to avoid this sin. Her feminine excess curbed by the narrator, Nature does his bidding in a markedly succinct meter 8, one of the shortest sections of the Plaint. Remaining under this narrative restraint, Nature opens prose 8 with a continuation of the ‘specialised instruction’ (196) that the narrator requested. At this moment, with Nature’s ‘naturally’ feminine digressiveness checked by the narrator’s ‘naturally’ masculine poetic authority, the Plaint reaches the predictable allegorical crisis it has been headed for throughout its middle section: as a woman, Nature cannot logically represent the narrator’s assumption of masculine authority. The beginning of Alan’s resolution of this dilemma, and of the Plaint’s formal recognition of the narrator’s increasing authority, materializes in prose 8 in the appearance of the first major masculine character in the poem, Hymen, the god of marriage, who prepares the way for the poem’s ultimate model of masculine authority, Genius. Nature’s Apology Alan depicts Hymen as now young, now old, now tall, now short, at one moment coarsely dressed, at another sumptuously attired. These protean aspects of Hymen, which allegorize the accessibility of marriage to all men, stand in sharp contrast to his one unvarying feature in the Plaint: the unalterable image of masculinity that he projects. While Hymen’s chin may ‘now [sprout] its first down ... now ... run riot in a fleece of luxuriant beard’ (197), at no time does his face show signs of ‘feminine softness,’ for ‘the authority of manly dignity alone held sway there’ (196). To this end, Hymen’s hair is arranged ‘in orderly fashion to

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prevent it from appearing to degenerate into feminine softness by the vagaries of devious arrangements’ (197). Alan’s anxiety here about male hair style resonates with the diatribes against elaborate masculine coiffure in other twelfth-century texts such as Orderic’s Historia. Further, ‘as manly dignity demanded,’ Hymen’s face lacks ‘no grace of beauty’ (197). That is, marriage has no room for the perverse gender instability – men turned into women and, by extension, women turned into men – that the narrator and Nature have both condemned and themselves exhibited earlier in the Plaint. Hymen’s very appearance serves notice that such degenerate cross-gendering has no place in Nature’s realm and simultaneously that both Nature and the narrator have begun to act more ‘naturally’ as man and woman. Female Nature has subordinated her loquacious discourse to the male narrator’s authority, and, insofar as Hymen represents the narrator’s nascent masculinity, Nature makes an overt gesture of respect to male authority. Upon meeting Hymen, Nature first offers him a kiss and then, seating him on her right, ‘bestow[s] on him the honour of her right hand’ (198). Subsequently in prose 8, Nature also greets new female arrivals (the Virtues: Chastity, Temperance, Generosity, and Humility) with kisses, but not the public display of esteem with which she has welcomed Hymen. Nature’s expression of respect for the Plaint’s first major allegorical character who is male does not suffice, however, to secure the orderly fertility that the poem seeks to establish. When Hymen appears, his robe is so covered with the ‘black paint of age’ that its images of marriage have almost faded out. All that remains is a ‘faint outline’ of the ‘general joy’ and ‘sweet melody’ that attend nuptial ceremonies (197). Further, the Plaint suggests that the art of song itself withers away for lack of the wedding ceremony, symbolic of both heterosexual union and female submission. Hymen’s group of skilled musicians reflect the disordered fertility of their master’s realm by ‘[imposing] silence on their instruments’ as the god of marriage approaches Nature (198). It will require more than Nature’s acknowledgment of male authority for mute instruments to become artistically fertile again in the Plaint. Nature must take the more radical step of resolving her ancient ‘lesbian’ heritage. The anticipation of Nature’s heterosexualization occurs near the end of prose 8 in the appearance of Humility, the last of the four Virtues in Hymen’s retinue. As the ultimate conventional ‘womanly’ Virtue (Schibanoff, ‘“Madonna”’; Weber 42), the Virgin’s especial goodness, Humility betokens Nature’s admission of her failings and weaknesses

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and her acceptance of her female limitations. Humility also anticipates the end of Nature’s arrogant usurpation of the male phallus, her use of masculine tools. Immediately after Humility’s arrival, Nature makes a crucial speech in the Plaint in which she apologizes for creating errant man, who offends the Virtues and Hymen, and confesses that, although she can condemn the offenders, she lacks the strength and the power to expel them from her realm. Only Genius, ‘who serves [her] in a priestly office’ (206), Nature concedes, can banish bestial men from her realm. Nature can anathematize but not excommunicate sinners for the simple doctrinal reason, Guy Raynaud De Lage observes, that it would be inappropriate for a woman to perform an act reserved to the male clergy (92). On a more fundamental level, however, Nature’s concession is phrased in terms of her heterosexualization. Nature cannot perform this clerical task because it requires male phallic instruments, what she terms the ‘pastoral staff ’ (206) and ‘punitive rod of excommunication’ (208). Indeed, the most appropriate ambassador to request Genius’s aid is Hymen, god of heterosexual coition, whom Nature enlists at the end of her speech. Hymen’s response to Nature reflects the new modesty evident in her concession of limitations: he ‘humble[s] himself on bended knee and profess[es] obedience to the terms of the mission to be entrusted to him’ (206). In her final arrogation of male instruments in the Plaint, Nature picks up the pen and writes the supplicatory letter to Genius that Hymen shall deliver. Her letter serves a more crucial purpose, however, than enlisting Genius in her campaign to expel degenerate men from her realm. Allegorically, it functions as Nature’s ‘excommunication’ of the perversity that is her ancient heritage. Twice in the letter’s salutation, Nature refers to Genius as her ‘other self ’ (206–7). Because Nature figures her alter ego as both a man and a character distinct from her – Genius is literally at some distance from Nature when she writes – her emphasis falls more heavily upon the alterity than the similarity of her alter ego. Only at the point that Nature is preparing to relinquish her masculine role does she figure it as a discrete entity. From here on in the Plaint, Genius alone will wield the pen and other masculine instruments. Although Alan’s Genius serves Nature in an ancillary role as her chaplain, he is also her scribe, and by means of the latter guise Alan will give Genius control over Nature later in the Plaint. In her letter requesting Genius’s aid, Nature anticipates his ascendancy over her when she acknowledges that she ‘[succeeds] in [Genius’s] success and in like

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manner [fails] in [his] failure’ (207). In admitting what Winthrop Wetherbee calls the ‘radical dependence of her existence’ on Genius’s existence (Platonsim 114n111), Nature obliquely suggests that the outcome of her use of the masculine tools of creation is in some way contingent upon Genius’s scribal use of these instruments. The remainder of the Plaint labours to re-establish a heterosexual paradigm of procreation and, by implication, of artistic creativity through the ‘marriage’ of Nature and Genius. Such a union would require that Nature the bride surrender agency and Genius the bridegroom alone possess it. As the grammatically masculine ‘patron of generation and therefore of heterosexuality’ (Lewis 362), Genius is perfectly positioned to co-opt Nature’s formative role in procreation. The Odd Couple: Nature and Genius’s Epicene Marriage Derived from Latin gignere, ‘to engender,’ Genius acted ‘as a simile for the male seed’ in the classical period (Nitzsche 7–8, 9–20), the twin genii a euphemism for the testicles producing semen (Rose). From that root meaning, Genius accumulated numerous related associations with husbands and fathers, both literal and metaphoric, and, by extension, with virility, life, energy, and individual temperament. Genius took on various related meanings as well: tutelary spirit, priest of the family, birth god, and the like. His role as the life-spirit of human procreation expanded to give Genius power over artistic creation, and Genius became the patron saint of both poetry and male heterosexuality, or, Christine Battersby remarks, artistic creativity became ‘displaced male procreativity.’ (3). But it was Genius’s earlier and more circumscribed function as generation spirit that allied him to physis in its Aristotelian definition as the genesis of growing things and that prompts his appearance in the Plaint. David Brumble argues that Alan’s Nature and Genius share not an equal relationship, but an analogous one, in which Nature functions on the superlunary level as the procreatrix of all living things and Genius operates in the mundane world as the god of human generation: ‘God is mirrored by Nature, while Nature is mirrored by the world; God is the simple idea, Nature is that idea made multiform, the “world” is a composite of those ideas ready to be, and being, imposed upon matter. And this last, then, is the realm of Genius. For while Nature [exists in the ethereal region], Genius serves here below as the viceregent of Nature, upon earth, and just as Nature translates the Divine Mind into Forms, into laws of species for all creation, so Genius translates these laws to the

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individual. Nature provides the law writ large, Genius translates this law into those inclinations appropriate to each individual’ (‘Genius’ 314). Yet, while both Nature and Genius generate life in their respective realms, they do not generate analogously. Descended from physis, Nature serves as both mother and father of life, material and efficient cause. As the narrator phrased it early in the Plaint, Nature is at once the ‘mother of creation’ as well as the one who ‘[clothes] matter with form and [fashions] a mantle of form with [her] thumb’ (128). As a simile for the male seed, however, Genius serves only as the father, or efficient cause, of human generation, imposing form upon matter by drawing his images on vellum, the ‘pelt of a dead animal’ (216) that Nature supplies. When Alan stages the meeting between Nature and Genius at the end of the Plaint, he precipitates a clash between two strikingly opposite theories of creation and procreation, an older matriarchal one that finds the male phallus radically irrelevant and the patriarchal version of the classical and medieval worlds that deems the male phallus the formative, hence superior, force in conception. If Alan is setting the stage for the marriage of superlunary Nature and sublunary Genius at the end of the Plaint, as indeed he appears to be doing by positioning them in the same sphere, how can Genius wed Nature when medieval matrimony is understood to unite opposites and Nature already exercises the distinctive contribution, formative agency, that Genius would make to their union? In short, how can Genius marry the Nature who proclaims him redundant? As suggested earlier, Nature has already begun to resolve the problem in her letter to Genius in which she appears to relinquish her masculine attributes. Her act evidently raises the god of marriage’s hopes: Hymen orders the musicians in his entourage to tune their instruments and break the sterile silence that has prevailed throughout the Plaint. Alan gives over all of meter 9 to detailing how each instrument in Hymen’s band, artistically fertile again if not always harmonious, contributes to the overall medley that sets the stage for the Plaint’s most important event: the ‘marriage’ of Nature to Genius. In what Winthrop Wetherbee terms Genius’s ‘decisive entry into the poem’ in prose 9 (Platonism 202), Hymen’s musical instruments sound again, this time with joyful strains that applaud the arrival of Genius, ‘a shining new apparition’ (215) that materializes before Nature and her assembled company. Mark Jordan observes that ‘the appearance of Genius is by context the appearance of the bridegroom for the incomplete wedding feast. We have the guests, the music, and now the partner [i.e., Genius]’ (72). Or do we?

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Nature, it seems, is ready for the espousal. Upon Genius’s approach, she offers him kisses, and, as he speaks, Nature undergoes what Wetherbee terms a ‘transformation, described in terms delicately suggestive of a courtly midons to her lover’ (Platonism 205). As Genius writes, Nature stands by, admiring him; evidently, her use of the pen is finished. Indeed, we now learn that, on at least one previous occasion, superlunary Nature and sublunary Genius have joined together and that their union has generated a daughter, Truth.12 As Alan explains, Truth was not ‘spawned by the lecherous itch of Aphrodite,’ but was generated by a higher union: ‘[she] was entirely the offspring of the generative kiss of Nature and her son at the time when the eternal Idea greeted Hyle as she begged for the mirror of forms and imprinted a vicarious kiss on her through the medium and intervention of Image [icon]’ (218). In this genealogy of Truth, Alan accomplishes a bold rhetorical sleight of hand in which Genius, who now alone wields the calamus that inscribes figures – no longer of specific human beings but of truth itself – on the material pelt that Nature supplies, becomes associated with the ‘eternal Idea’ and its intermediary ‘Image,’ while Nature is associated with Hyle, matter that ‘begs’ for the induction of form. Wetherbee explains how Alan’s allusive interaction between God’s ‘subordinate principle,’ Genius, and Nature’s subordinate principle, matter, creates a parallel to the Annunciation in which Genius takes the role of Gabriel, the ‘angelic herald,’ and Nature plays the humble Virgin: ‘The description [of the birth of Truth] recalls the opening scene [of De mundi universitate] where Noys hails Nature as “uteri mei beata fecundit” [blessed fruit of my womb]. From this hinted comparison of Nature to the Virgin, Alan develops a natural analogue to the Annunciation. Every true creation is an incarnation of ideal reality, a type of this higher union in which God and Nature meet through their subordinate principles of Genius and matter. Genius is at once the angelic herald and the natural agent of this union: his calamus and his concern with sexuality ally him with the original office of Venus, while his relationship to the higher ratio, the aeternalis idea of creation, gives a virtually eucharistic significance to the conceptions he effects’ (Platonism 203–4). The office of Alan’s Genius becomes that of the secondary forms themselves, the transmission of Divine Wisdom into the sphere of Nature (Wetherbee, ‘Function’ 114). Genius provides formative agency, Nature contributes matter, and in this respect they reconsummate their mystical union in the Plaint. The union ‘revive[s] Genius’s memory of paradise lost’ and leads him to ‘reassume something of his true mascu-

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line authority,’ which brings the Plaint near to its conclusion, Wetherbee observes: ‘with this reassertion of Genius’s “manhood,” and the cosmic reestablishment of right relations between male and female, the poem reaches a tentative resolution’ (Platonism 205). Ziolkowski concurs in his reading of the end of the Plaint: ‘Genius, like a good husband, restores poise to Nature, who was in tumult at the beginning of the poem’ (Grammar 44). Yet Alan’s allusive depiction of Nature’s marriage to Genius through an implied comparison to the Annunciation carries another message that subverts rather than contributes to the re-establishment of ‘right’ relations between male and female. Three sets of analogous ternaries operate in this complex allusion. The first two sets, God-Genius-Nature and God-Gabriel-Virgin, derive from the Latin patriarchal world, pagan and Christian. The third set, Idea-Icon-Hyle, originates in Greek platonic thought.13 Only the first two sets (which associate Genius with Gabriel, God’s messenger and agent of conception, and Nature with the Virgin, who humbly serves as the material cause of conception) normalize the relations between male and female in the Plaint. The third set disrupts those relations. While the implied parallel between Hyle (hyle, ‘wood, matter’) and Nature further suggests the latter’s Marian role in conception, when taken together, Idea, Icon, and Hyle, all grammatically female in the Latin of Alan’s poem, present a deviant model of creation reminiscent of the ancient matriarchal one inherent in physis that the Plaint has laboured so assiduously to rewrite. More unsettling, perhaps, Alan’s poem, acutely sensitive to grammatical gender and its moral implications, parallels Genius with both the male Gabriel and female Icon. Compromised by his association with the fertile female kiss between Icon and Hyle, Genius is revealed to have a dimension other than that of the willing bridegroom, much less the ‘good husband,’ who will impress his calamus on pliant Nature’s materia to re-establish ‘right’ relations between male and female. The irrepressible irregularities of ‘natural’ grammar have erupted once more in the Plaint, this time to inscribe themselves upon the apparently heterosexual hero Genius himself as the Plaint draws to a close. Genius’s ambidextrous writing implicated by sororal imagery and homosexual association (his left hand that ‘limpingly’ withdraws from orthography to pseudography [217], ‘claudicatione recedens’ [Häring 876]), his figurative bridegroom’s role now bifurcated between masculine Gabriel and feminine Icon, it is small wonder that the kisses that Nature offers Genius after Alan’s hinted Annunciation analogy intimate something irregular about

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their passion. These kisses are not tainted by ‘illicit love,’ but ‘signify the embrace of a common [“promiscui,” Häring 877] love’ (219). Translating Latin ‘promiscui’ as ‘common’ in the grammatical sense of the epicene or common noun (promiscuum nomen), Sheridan renders Nature’s kisses ‘symbolic of the caresses of epicene attraction’ (Plaint 219). ‘Epicene’ is a sufficiently protean term that it resonates with the sexual irregularities of both ‘manly’ Nature and ‘limp-handed’ Genius in the Plaint. As Quintilian explained in his Institutes of Oratory, ‘there are irregular [“promiscua”] nouns of the kind called “epicene” by the Greeks, in which one gender appears as the other or in which in spite of being feminine or neuter in form indicates males or female respectively’ (1.4.24). Thus, the epicene Latin noun, pavo, peacock, refers to either the male or the female of the species; masculus pavo must be used to distinguish the male, femina pavo the female. When applied to the love of Nature and Genius, the designation ‘epicene’ recalls the ‘promiscuous’–‘mixed together’ – gender of each as it is revealed in the Plaint, a female Nature who arrogates male roles and a male Genius with an effeminate (left) side who is analogically associated with both masculine Gabriel and feminine Icon. At the least, Alan’s allusion to the epicene noun late in the Plaint recalls the unstable gender identities that both Nature and Genius have exhibited throughout the poem. Although Nature may now play the role of courtly midons to Genius, Genius falls short of being her always eager lover, much less her ‘good husband.’ As they have in the past, Nature and Genius will certainly mate again, her pliant materia accepting his inscription to produce more offspring like the daughter Truth they have previously generated. But the aura of same-sex and epicene allusions that surrounds Genius as the Plaint draws to a close serves to remind readers that queer fertile liaisons remain an ever present possibility in the world of the Plaint. Genius’s Escape into Morality and the Abandoned Narrator of the Plaint If Genius fails in his aspect of ‘good husband’ to Nature, unable or unwilling to maintain the orderly marriage of form and matter as an exclusive procreative paradigm, he has better success in his final role in the Plaint. Laying aside his ‘everyday robes’ (220), his role as Nature’s sexual partner, Genius puts on his priestly attire to deliver his resounding speech of expulsion. Notably, his condemnation of sexual sinners is

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based upon human moral law rather than upon nature: he expels ‘every one who blocks the lawful path of Venus’ (220; emphasis mine). Although Genius has rewritten Nature’s grammatical argument against perversion, he does not altogether suppress its unruliness, which resonates faintly in his subsequent anathema of those ‘who make irregular exception to the rule of Venus’ (220–1). Echoes of the failed grammatical argument against same-sex copulation notwithstanding, the applause that the attendant maidens offer Genius’s act of excommunication contains the Plaint’s imprimatur on his moral response to disorderliness. Genius’s performance as priest brings the Plaint to closure in a way that his action as Nature’s lover-husband could not. At the same time as Genius’s transformation into priest displaces his role as Nature’s sexual partner, it severs his relationship to another figure with whom Genius has been integrally allied throughout the latter part of the Plaint: the narrator, who has not been heard from since the arrival of Hymen in prose 8. In his last appearance, the narrator had begun to ‘husband’ Nature’s narrative, curbing its digressive excesses and guiding its subject matter. At this point, I have argued, the materialization of the god of marriage in part represents the narrator’s developing authority. Hymen, in turn, anticipates the figure of Genius, with whom he shares physical characteristics. The god of marriage thus serves as the intermediary who associates the narrator with the Plaint’s most developed figure of authority, Genius, who effects the patriarchal poetic of masculine form dominating feminine matter in his inscription of Nature’s pelt. But if Genius allegorizes the narrator’s maturation into the poet who masters subject matter to generate – father – art, the Plaint itself, Genius’s left-handed performance, which is less ‘impressive’ in its authority but productive nevertheless, calls up the fact that the immature feminized narrator was also represented as producing art, the sections of the Plaint leading up to prose 8. Just as Genius’s ‘queer’ writing effects something, not nothing, so the narrator’s earlier passive aesthetic has created something, not nothing. Alan’s resolution of the dilemma in which Genius and Nature are entrapped – their inability to condemn perversion on natural and grammatical grounds – is the escape into morality, as Mark Jordan has argued. But when Genius transforms himself from writer to priest, he perforce leaves the narrator behind. After Genius delivers his moral condemnation, the narrator, Jordan notes, is separated from this concluding judgment. Jordan speculates that the narrator has stood the mute observer during Genius’s rite of excommunication because for

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some reason ‘he is held back from judgment on deviant love – by Nature or by himself’ (76). More likely, the separation between the narrator and Genius occurs here for the same reason that it happens between Nature and Genius: Genius’s withdrawal into the clerical world of the priesthood perforce leaves the poet-narrator and Nature behind. As I have argued, Genius’s moral resolution of the problem of perversion cannot erase the deep inscription it leaves in the text – on both Genius and the narrator as writers and upon the narrative itself. Let No Man Render Asunder While the conclusion to the Plaint clarifies the form in which the narrator has cast the subject matter of his poem, its final effect is to question how securely he has wedded form to matter – indeed, how securely any poet can do so. After the maidens applaud Genius, the wax candles burn low, the narrator informs us that all that has transpired has been a dream, and the poem reaches its abrupt termination: ‘accordingly, when the mirror with these images and visions was withdrawn, I awoke from my dream and ecstasy and the previous vision of the mystic apparition left me’ (221). The narrator’s eleventh-hour specification of the genre of his poem as a dream vision instils an overall aesthetic pattern into his material that was lacking at the outset; it culminates the controlling measures the narrator earlier had begun to exert over Nature’s rambling speech and evidences a ‘right relationship’ between male and female, a proper ‘marriage’ in which masculine form gives shape to unruly feminine matter. Yet the narrator’s designation of how he has informed Nature’s material also forces the exposure of matter’s resistance to form and questions the extent to which procreation, as understood in the Middle Ages, explains poetic creation. Lynch comments that the Plaint-narrator’s ‘dream is not explicitly framed, as it would be in later poems’ (Dream Vision 218n9), such as Chaucer’s visions, in which the dreamers overtly tell us when they fall asleep and when they wake. In particular, when the narrator’s dream begins in the Plaint is debatable. Some readers maintain that the dream is already underway when Alan’s poem opens and continues until its end. Other readers conclude that the dream does not actually begin until the end of the poem, which marks the beginning of the narrator’s slumber. But Mark Jordan makes the plausible observation that the Plaint does frame the narrator’s dream, which begins in prose 3 as Nature approaches the narrator: ‘the narrator speaks precisely of falling

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into an “ecstasy” when he first gazes into Nature’s face, before she has even identified herself to him. It is tempting to think of all that occurs from that moment to the end of the poem as an ecstasy from which the narrator revives just at the end.’ If the narrator does not begin dreaming until prose 3, the moment when as yet unidentified Nature draws close to him, then, Jordan concludes, Nature’s subsequent teaching and Genius’s excommunication become ‘figures of the narrator’s fantasy,’ and he awakes at the end not yet having heard ‘the real teaching of Nature, if there is any’ (77). More important to my concern here, however, is the fact that the delayed beginning of the dream emphasizes Nature’s existence prior to the narrator’s imaginative recreation of her in his vision. That is, there appear to be the ‘real’ Nature of the Plaint, the Nature that Alan has created, and the narrator’s imagined Nature of his dream. The dream places the two Natures in a sequential relationship. Alan’s Nature becomes the material that the dreamer shapes into his imagined Nature. Imagination is both the place in which this moulding occurs and the agent that effects it. In medieval faculty psychology, imagination, visualized as one of the three (or five) cells in the brain, becomes more powerful in sleep and can call up from common sense (communis sensus) images or phantasms of absent things, the material of dreams, which may or may not lead the dreamer to higher truth. In medieval rhetorical theory, imagination (ingenium) is the creative force that shapes matter into verbal expression. Geoffrey of Vinsauf figures ingenium as the hand that moulds the lump of wax (Lynch, Dream Vision 38). The poetic dream vision yokes both kinds of medieval imagination and represents the place in which and the process by which imagination constructs a verbal artefact, each poet working according to his individual genius or predisposition. That the figure Genius occurs within the narrator’s vision in the Plaint is hardly coincidental: imaginatio, ingenium, and genius are integrally related. As Lynch explains, ‘genius, ingenium, and imaginatio ... form part of a nexus of concepts that express man’s participation in a universal impulse towards creation’ (99). Genius’s appearance at the end of the narrator’s dream has further significance. Etymologically related to genius, in its most basic sense defined as the male generative force, semen, that effects procreation by inducing form into female matter, ingenium effects artistic creation by an analogous process. Allegorically, the appearance of Genius near the end of the Plaint represents the narrator’s mature imagination, his masculine

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ability to order matter. The dream that begins in prose 3 and concludes just before the end of the Plaint thus figures the narrator’s poetic coming of age, his imaginative ability to transform the material he receives from ‘common sense,’ everyday waking life, into the finished product of his dream, in turn the verbal artefact of the poem. In short, the narrator fathers a poem that simultaneously encodes the heterosexual paradigm of art that produces it. Yet the clearly demarcated dream-within-the-poem undermines the Plaint’s larger project of modelling a heterosexual concept of art. It unsettles the neat binary upon which this concept is founded, the opposition of masculine form and feminine matter, and it nullifies the dynamic of authority that constitutes its process, the formative action of the superior agent upon inferior matter. When the narrator dreams Nature, his ingenium works upon Alan’s Nature as if the latter were Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s shapeless lump of wax that has resisted form and reforms it according to his individual genius. The Plaint’s Nature, in turn, earlier took shape in the same fashion. Alan’s ingenium refashioned his major exemplar, the Nature of Bernardus Silvestris’s De mundi universitate (1145–56), as if that figure were a malleable lump of wax. This successive rewriting is at heart a sequential unforming, or deforming, each previous father-poet’s effort to stamp his individual genius on matter rendered ineffective. While the medieval heterosexual paradigm of art always interrogates itself by offering up one man’s carefully wrought verbal artefact as the next man’s poetic grist, the clearly demarcated dream-within-the-poem of Alan’s Plaint draws especial attention to the way in which matter, Nature, can be reappropriated and thus resists final impression. Even though the narrator’s poem appears to have ‘married’ Nature to Genius, to have imaginatively rewritten her according to the dreamer’s individual inclination, she will escape this particular subordination. When Jean de Meun rewrote the Plaint within his Romance of the Rose, he focused his attention upon the containment of Alan’s Nature, but, as I next explain, he too failed to heterosexualize poetic theory securely. The (Anti-)Feminization of Nature in Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose The last quarter of Jean’s Romance, a prolonged allegorical narrative of the narrator-dreamer’s amorous quest for his beloved rose, encapsulates Alan’s Plaint of Nature. Jean incorporated Alan’s work into the Romance at

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the point that the dreamer’s pursuit of the rose has been frustrated by Shame, Fear, Jealousy, and others. The God of Love, whose army has come to the narrator’s aid, delivers a diatribe against those who refuse to serve his cause. In the section that recapitulates Alan’s Plaint, Jean’s Nature next appears, complaining about humankind’s sexual perversity as she confesses to her priest, Genius. Nature sends Genius to excommunicate all those in the God of Love’s retinue who refuse to further her work through procreation. Genius delivers a lengthy sermon that exhorts Love’s soldiers to pursue procreative sex and includes a ‘long diatribe against homosexuality’ (Arden 16). Here Jean’s direct use of Alan’s Plaint ends, and the Romance proceeds to its own conclusion. Venus takes over, and in due course Jean’s lover achieves his goal: he plucks the rose. Earlier readers focused upon Jean’s debt to Alan. More recent critics concentrate upon what they find to be Jean’s divergences from Alan, particularly in Jean’s deployment of the figures, Nature and Genius, which play such a prominent role near the end of the Romance (Huot 107; Tuve 272–90; Wetherbee, ‘Literal’ 265–6, Platonism 255–66). My concern here is not with the broad differences between the Romance and the Plaint, but with the specific ways in which Jean’s Genius labours to correct those unresolved aspects of Alan’s poem that leave sodomy deeply inscribed in the text of the Plaint and bind poetry to perversion, orthography to falsigraphy. Jean made two major moves in the Romance to clear it of the oxymoronic ambidexterity that Alan failed to remove from the Plaint. The first involves Nature, the second Genius. Most strikingly, Jean minimizes and simplifies Nature’s role in condemning homosexuality. He does so in part by conceding at the outset, as Alan did not, that Nature is too ‘variable and various,’ too wayward herself, to regulate human behaviour, sexual or otherwise. In allegorical terms, she is conventionally feminine in her actions and behaviour, as Genius’s speech in the middle of Nature’s confession emphasizes. While Genius grants that Nature has a valid complaint against humankind, he undercuts her ability to guide her human creations by observing that, as a woman, Nature is a ‘very irritable animal’ and by citing case after case in point of Virgil’s dictum that ‘no woman was ever so stable that she might not be varied and changeable’ (276). Genius’s anti-feminist ‘digression’ is anything but a departure from the main issue at hand: sidelining Nature’s moral authority. To such an unreliable and unstable – feminine – figure as Nature, Jean entrusts none of the arguments against same-sex copulation that

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Alan invested in her.14 Most significantly, Jean deletes her grammatical argument against homosexuality, affording Nature no chance to weaken the case against sexual perversity with grammatical metaphors that are so easily challenged by the counter-examples – hic with hic – that occur in the Ganymede-Helen debate poems and elsewhere. Instead, Jean prefabricates the case for her: Nature condemns sexually perverse man as a ‘lazy sodomite’ (317), ‘et pareceus et sodomites’ (Lecoy 77), sodomia already the prejudged sin that requires no further testimony against it, as Mark Jordan establishes. Jean supplies Nature the ‘right word’ against homosexuality and other sexual vices to preclude her speaking all the wrong words about them, the mixed messages that she uttered in the Plaint.15 Jean also removes the pen of creation from Nature’s hands, perhaps in response to Alan’s warning about Nature’s writing in the Plaint; when Nature tired of inscription there, she handed over the pen to Venus, who strayed from orthography to falsigraphy all too soon. The one allegorical tool of creation that Jean issues to Nature is the hammer (270–1), and it never misses its proper target, the anvil. Indeed, Jean limits the exposure of Nature’s activities at her forge and shifts attention to a discussion of Art’s inability to compete with Nature’s smithy: no matter how hard Art tries, she will ‘never catch up with Nature’ (272). Nevertheless, as Jordan has observed about the Plaint, Jean supplies feminine Nature with a conventionally masculine tool, the hammer, and thus, like Alan, produces something less than a ‘seamless representation of orderly fertility.’ Neither author can escape the ancient taint of perversity in making physis God’s agent of creation. Grammar traps them into attributing masculine agency, the hammer, to a female figure (natura). The point that I emphasize here, though, is that Jean works to contain the spread of the contamination of disorderly fertility into poetic theory. His Nature wields no pen; no errant writing occurs in the Romance. The only figure allowed access to the stylus, Genius, is male, as I discuss next, and Jean’s rewriting of the Plaint participates in the larger project or reordering male-female relationships. Jean’s demotion of Nature goes far beyond the Plaint, yet it takes its cue from the gender asymmetry that develops towards the end of Alan’s work. Wetherbee argues that Alan locates Genius’s final authority in the assertion of his superior masculine gender. In the kiss between Alan’s Nature and Genius just prior to the concluding excommunication, Genius ‘reassumes something of his true masculine authority,’ and, for Wetherbee, ‘with this reassertion of Genius’s “manhood,” and the cosmic re-establishment of right relations between male and female, the

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poem reaches a tentative resolution’ (Platonism 205). The traditional ‘right’ relationship between male and female, of course, mandates woman’s subordination to man, Nature’s submission to Genius. Jean not only further suppressed the authority of Alan’s Nature by submitting her to Genius’s charge, but elevated Genius into the sole prosecutor of homosexuality. Genius’s case against same-sex copulation comprises the second major revision that Jean made to straighten out the Plaint’s incoherent argument against it. Jean’s Genius as (Re)Writer The central measures Jean’s Genius takes to secure conventional fertility in the Romance are the expropriation of Nature’s pen and the overhaul of Nature’s most troublesome figurative device in the Plaint, the trope of writing for sexual reproduction. Before Nature confesses, Jean has already deprived her of the stylus as a metaphorical tool of generation, limiting her to the hammer and forge. After her confession, Jean continues to withhold the pen from her, barring her from writing out the excommunication and pardon that Genius is to deliver to Love’s army. Nature must dictate this text to Genius; after he records her words (320), she seals them, and Genius makes his way to Love’s barons to read Nature’s sentence aloud. In serving as secretary, Genius assumes the position of Nature’s textual intermediary and, if need be, her censor. Jean never discloses what Nature actually dictates to Genius; instead, he gives verbatim the text that Genius inscribes and reads out to Love’s assembly. Presumably, what Nature dictates in the Romance and what Genius records coincide, yet as Genius apparently moves beyond Nature’s text into his own sermon, his first task is to straighten out Nature’s deviant metaphor of textuality in the Plaint. The implication is that Jean’s Genius stands equally ready to correct Nature in the Romance should she stray into the disturbing selfcontradictions that Alan’s Nature did. When Jean’s Genius pronounces anathema on those who refuse to do Nature’s generative work, his sentence employs three of the Plaint’s metaphors for sexual intercourse: the hammer striking an anvil, the plow furrowing a fertile field, and the stylus writing on the tablet. As does Alan’s Nature, Jean’s Genius curses the perverse use of the plow and the hammer. He condemns those who would avoid the fecund earth to plow in the ‘desert land where their seeding goes to waste’ (324), ‘desert land’ recalling Alan’s ‘barren strand’ and the burning sands of Sodom. And

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Jean’s Genius condemns those whose hammers do not forge ‘as they justly should on the straight anvil’ (323), recalling the Plaint’s lament over hammers that do not strike the proper anvils. Those who prefer to flee Nature’s anvils and fallow fields ‘might as well be buried alive,’ Jean’s Genius opines (323). Jean’s Genius excoriates a further misuse of plow and hammer that resonates throughout Chaucer’s dream trio in the figure of love’s heretic and becomes central in Chaucer’s Parliament, namely, their lack of use. If for sixty years all men avoid their tools, the human race will perish unless God replenishes it, Genius warns. While Jean’s Genius echoes the Plaint so far, he parts company with Alan’s work in the remainder of his sermon; he rewrites the figure of stylus and tablet so that it coheres rather than conflicts with his other tool metaphors that promote orderly fertility. The deviant stylus in the Romance does not oxymoronically produce falsigraphy, the stylistic vitium of tropus, as it does in the Plaint. Instead, Jean’s Genius explains, the perverse pen fails ‘to write a letter or make a mark that shows’ (322), ‘por escrivre letre / ne por fere anprainte qui pere’ (Lecoy 87), when it inscribes a tablet other than Nature’s designated one. Like the plow that thrusts into ‘desert land’ (324),16 the errant pen produces nothing, not something, albeit a monstrous progeny, as Alan’s Nature misconstrues the matter. In rewriting the stylus metaphor, Jean’s Genius goes a long way towards untangling Nature’s snarled case against sodomy in the Plaint. Queer Poetics: Re-Membering Orpheus in Jean’s Romance However, Jean’s Genius does not altogether succeed in rewriting Alan’s errant Nature. He extirpates her troublesome grammatical argument, and he adjusts her stylus metaphor so that it does not attribute reproductive fecundity, however aberrant, to sodomy. Yet Jean’s Genius stumbles when it comes to his treatment of the classical bard, Ovid’s Orpheus, and for a brief moment, like his predecessor Nature in the Plaint, Genius allows sodomy – homosexual sodomy – to reinscribe its mark.17 Genius’s ironic mishap stems from the fact that, in Orpheus, Ovid coalesced two figures, the poet and the pederast, and try as they might, the medieval writers who inherited this intertwined figure had difficulty separating the poet from what medieval society viewed as the pervert. As established in chapter 4, Ovid troped the motivation of Orpheus’s art as both heteroerotic and homoerotic in Metamorphoses 10–11. Whatever Ovid’s own sexual proclivities were – efforts were made to ‘clear Ovid of the suspicion of homosexuality in the Middle Ages’ (Hexter 74–5) – the

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significant point is that during Orpheus’s phase as pederastic sodomite in the ‘mini-Metamorphoses,’ the bard was artistically productive. If Ovid found no conflict between artistic fertility and sexual deviance, medieval writers did find it, according to Kevin Brownlee, who contends that both Alan and Jean cordoned off Orpheus’s identity as pederast from his identity as poet. The Plaint, Brownlee elaborates, mentions Orpheus twice, ‘once as homosexual (VIII, 54f.), then as poet (XII, 102)’; furthermore, in the Romance, Jean’s ‘characterization of [the homosexual] Orpheus ... is such as to exclude the vates component of his identity,’ which identity, Brownlee concludes, Jean appropriates for himself (‘Song’ 207–8). But closer examination discloses that the separation between Orpheus the pederast and Orpheus the poet is far from absolute in either the Plaint or the Romance. In the Plaint, Nature opens her indictment of humankind’s perverse sexuality in prose 4 by contrasting her own song, which consists of ‘modulated strains,’ with the disordered ‘notes of mad Orpheus’s lyre’ (133). Man alone, Nature laments, ‘turns with scorn’ from her cithern to ‘run deranged’ to his. Man prefers mad Orpheus’s art to hers, Nature immediately adds, because ‘the human race, fallen from its high estate, adopts a highly irregular (grammatical) change when it inverts the rules of Venus by introducing barbarisms into its arrangement of genders’ (133). In other words, sexually perverse humankind chooses unnatural over natural art, the homosexual Orpheus’s lyre over Nature’s. To be sure, Ovid’s Orpheus is a pederast for a time, although Ovid never describes him as ‘mad.’ Alan’s Nature displaces Ovid’s characterization of the crazed Ciconian women who dismember Orpheus onto Orpheus himself. But just as Ovid’s pederast is also a bard, so the ‘homosexual’ Orpheus of Alan’s Nature in prose 4 is also an artist, albeit one who inspires a deranged response. Orpheus is not simply ‘the homosexual’ whose other identity as poet has been cordoned off, as Brownlee maintains (‘Song’). Nor, when Nature mentions Orpheus for a second time in the Plaint (prose 6), is he exclusively the poet, fully shorn of his ‘homosexual’ identity. Describing the power of avarice, Nature observes that if ‘money whispers in the judge’s ear,’ its voice would stifle even ‘the lyre of Orpheus, the song of Amphion, the muse of Vergil’ (176). Alan’s Nature echoes here the stifling of Orpheus’s song by the Ciconian women in Metamorphoses 11, which in turn recalls why these women so hated the bard: he shunned heterosexual love. This same commingling of poetry and perversion in the two appear-

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ances of Orpheus in the Plaint saturates the sole representation of Orpheus in the Romance by Genius. In his sermon, as he works himself up to pronouncing the sentence of castration on those who practise the ‘dirty, horrible sin’ of sodomy, of not plowing ‘straight’ (324), Genius characterizes all those who ‘do not write with their styluses ... on the beautiful precious tablets that Nature did not prepare for them to leave idle,’ those ‘who receive two hammers and do not forge with them as they justly should on the straight anvil,’ and those who ‘go off to plow in desert land where their seeding goes to waste’ as followers of Orpheus (324). Orpheus, Jean’s Genius then explains in a brief aside, ‘did not know how to plow or write or forge in the true forge’ (324), ‘ne sot arer ne escrivre / ne forgier en la droite forge’ (Lecoy 89–90). ‘May he be hanged by the throat,’ Genius imprecates (324). As the exemplar to those who misapply – rather than fail to use – their styluses, hammers, and plows, Genius’s Orpheus cannot help but recall Ovid’s lover of boys. In turn, Genius’s allusion to Ovid’s boy-lover in the context of metaphors of inscription ironically reinvokes Ovid’s bard, the poet whom Ovid has coalesced with the pederast. In the larger sense, Genius’s hapless reference to Orpheus muddies the attempt in Jean’s Romance to clarify the logic of Alan’s Nature. As Genius argued in correction of Alan’s Nature at the beginning of his sermon, the evil of sodomy is that it ‘fails to make a mark that shows,’ just as plowing in deserts is a non-productive waste of seed. Homoerotic Orpheus’s writing,18 however, did indeed make a mark in the miniMetamorphoses, and when Genius invokes this Ovidian figure later in his sermon, he unwittingly joins the ranks of those in Alan’s Plaint who promote queer fertility. Even so vigilant a scourge of non-procreative sexuality as Jean’s Genius cannot, it seems, sever the ancient connection of poetry and sexual deviance, of creative fertility and homoeroticism. The Ciconian women sought to dismember the sodomite Orpheus, yet Ovid prevailed by re-membering his pervert-poet for ages to come. Genius’s wish to castrate perverse writers like Orpheus – ‘may their styluses be taken away from them’ (324) – not only recalls but empowers Ovid’s bard by reminding us that homosexual Orpheus made a lasting mark indeed, as the queer poetic inscribed in Alan’s Plaint emerges anew in Jean’s Romance. In his later Anticlaudianus, Alan himself also rewrites the Plaint to suppress disorderly fertility. Like Jean, Alan recognizes Nature’s variability and contains her role in the creation of the new man, novus homo. Alan then goes beyond Jean, however, to dissociate poetry from perver-

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sion, an effort evident in his demotion of Grammar and in his renovation of Orpheus, both of which anticipate the heterosexualization of the narrator of his epic poem, the Anticlaudianus. Nature’s Demotion in Alan’s Anticlaudianus As its title indicates, Alan’s Anticlaudianus rewrites a text by the classical author, Claudian. Ralph of Longchamps, who glossed the Anticlaudianus in 1216, explains the work’s proclaimed adversarial response: ‘This book is called Anticlaudian by reason of the material, since the matter of the book is contrary to the beginning of Claudian’s theme. Whereas, in the beginning of his book, Claudian introduced vices for the perverting of Rufinus, in the beginning of this book virtues are introduced for the forming of a blessed man. Wherefore that man of whom this work treats is called Antirufinus, that is, contrary to Rufinus’ (Cornog 51). To use Lewis’s phrase, not only does the Anticlaudianus ‘reverse’ the Roman poet Claudian’s In Rufinum by describing the creation of the perfect man (99), but it reverses Alan’s own Plaint. In the Plaint, Nature laments man’s corruption and her creation of this most imperfect creature; in the Anticlaudianus, she sets out to rectify her former mistakes by constructing one perfect man, novus homo. But her project is soon taken over by Prudence, Concord, Reason, and others, who journey to God for man’s soul. They enlist Nature only to form man’s body. Led by Allecto, the vices mount an attack against the new man. The work concludes with the victory of the virtues and the restoration of the golden age. Thus, Nature herself stands ‘reversed’ or corrected in the Anticlaudianus, for Alan severely diminishes her authority and role. Alan abandons the worship of Nature’s power and scope, Wetherbee comments, ‘to concentrate on her limitations as a guide for man’s spiritual experience’ (Platonism 212). In the Plaint, Alan allots Nature the lion’s share of the work, first to reveal her identity; then to castigate man’s sins, especially his sexual vices; finally to confess that she has neglected her duties, delegated them to Venus, and decamped to more pleasant regions, from which she has returned to condemn the unnatural sex practices that have ensued. In the Anticlaudianus, her role is considerably foreshortened. Although Nature makes the opening speech of the Anticlaudianus, she does so to confess her failures of workmanship in the creation of humanity. Having accomplished her own demotion, Nature recedes, and more normative figures, such as Prudence, Reason, and Concord, take centre stage to devise the journey to God to acquire man’s soul, whose creation

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Nature cannot effect. She is called on stage again to provide man’s body. But the creation of novus homo, perfect man, and the restoration of the golden age in the Anticlaudianus is the triumph of Prudence, not Nature, Wetherbee further observes (Platonism 212). Bearing a ‘strong resemblance’ to Reason (62), it is Prudence who succeeds in achieving an erect stance before God and thus recovering the imago dei: ‘the homo novus exists in Prudentia herself once mind, will, and speech have become congruent again with the dignity implied by man’s upright carriage. This is the fulfillment of the profound and subtle relationship between the natural and the sacramental which is Alan’s constant theme’ (218). John Trout remarks that the epic Anticlaudianus must have a hero and until the creation of homo novus in the final book, it is Prudence who fulfils the role, not Nature (41). Alan’s circumscription of Nature is readily apparent in her opening lament in the Anticlaudianus, which, in one brief chapter, encapsulates and rewrites its lengthy counterpart in the Plaint. In the earlier work, I have argued in this chapter, Nature singled out man’s sexual vices, especially sodomy, and constructed an argument from grammar against them that snarled into self-contradiction. Alan does not allow Nature to repeat this mistake in the Anticlaudianus; she does not step out of character, so to speak, and attempt to appropriate Reason’s proper role. Nature laments man’s sins generally, which she attributes to her own failings, and she makes no effort to analyse or remedy human errancy. Instead, Nature proposes to redeem her mistakes by producing one perfect man, a project immediately taken out of her hands by Prudence on the stated grounds that ‘our skill ... does not realise the strength required for a work so great’ (59). When the soul of novus homo is provided by God, Nature – under God’s strict supervision lest she err – forms the body, and body and soul are joined by Concord. Unaware of the extent to which her role is minimal in this project, ironically Nature deprecates her participation in the creation of novus homo: ‘A new man, then, is formed. Mighty Nature is surprised at the power she has shown in dealing with this man and in her amazement can scarcely believe that the work she has done with her own hands is really hers’ (175). Once novus homo is formed, the Virtues, not Nature, instruct him in ‘natural’ masculine behaviour. For instance, Piety teaches him to maintain a ‘firm and constant mind’ to prevent the softness that would ‘feminise great deeds’ and cause the loss of ‘manly firmness’ (184). And Modesty offers counsel about appropriate masculine attire and hairstyle, ever the hallmark of high medieval anxiety about virility and courtliness:

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‘Lest hair, over-ornamented with excessive treatment, reach the level of feminine excess and rob his sex of its honoured position, or less it hang dishevelled, deformed by deep dirt and deprived of due attention, and show the youth too much of a philosopher, she insists on a style between both extremes and arranges the hair in a style of her own selection. She does not make the style of his dress shine with excessive splendour or degrade it with drabness: she observes the mean in all things’ (177–8). Allegorically, then, in the Anticlaudianus Alan abandoned his earlier doomed attempt to argue the strict gender roles that fuel his condemnation of sodomy on natural grounds and instead asserted them as Christian moral imperatives that require no proof. More to the point, Alan relinquishes grammar as a natural guide to human sexuality. Grammar does appear in the Anticlaudianus, but Nature does not invoke her, as she does in the Plaint. One of the seven Liberal Arts and daughter of Prudence, Grammar participates in constructing the chariot that will bear Prudence on her voyage to the court of heaven to seek man’s soul from God. She arrives first and builds the shaft. Put into the service of the poem’s spiritual theme, Grammar is given no ‘natural’ regulatory bearing on human sexuality, such as Nature disastrously endows her with in the Plaint. Her rules and precepts preventing the new man from making ‘mistakes in speech like a barbarian’ (181), Grammar instead functions within her conventional province of linguistic propriety. Indeed, along with Nature’s role, Grammar’s role is diminished in the Anticlaudianus. As Wetherbee remarks, Grammar is a humble and pallid figure, who is made to anticipate the poem’s spiritual theme and who lacks the normative role Nature accords her in the Plaint (Platonism 214). The Sanitized Orpheus of the Anticlaudianus Occasioned by Nature’s constricted role, Grammar’s hobbling parallels Alan’s selective treatment of Orpheus in the Anticlaudianus, and this in turn points to the way in which Alan renovates the poem’s narrator. I have argued in this chapter that in both Alan’s Plaint and Jean’s Romance Orpheus reveals the failure to suppress the ancient connection between perversity and poetry, a bond that Alan’s Nature is at a loss to sever by means of grammatical argument. When Alan’s Nature alludes to the ‘mad’ Orpheus, whose song is stifled, she evokes the Ovidian narrative of Metamorphoses 10–11, in which the bard, who has given his love to boys, incites the ire of the spurned Ciconian women to dismember him. In

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Jean’s Romance, I have further argued, Genius ironically ascribes artistic fertility to this same bard, whom he condemns. But in the Anticlaudianus, Alan makes neither mistake. The narrator, not Nature or Genius, invokes Orpheus again, this time to exemplify the power of the fifth Liberal Art, Music, who also aids in the building of Prudence’s chariot. In this instance, however, Alan sanitizes Orpheus. Alan normalizes the bard in the Anticlaudianus by transferring Orpheus’s ‘unnatural’ power to charm Nature, which occurs during his pederastic phase in the Metamorphoses, to the heterosexual Orpheus’s successful effort to petition Pluto, the god of the underworld, for Eurydice’s return. In turn, this effort serves to exemplify Music’s power to construct the second wheel of Prudence’s chariot in the Anticlaudianus: ‘While [Music’s] one hand bears a cithara, the other strikes chords, gives forth the sweet savor of sound, affording banquets to the ear, and to the eyes proems to sleep. By this music the Thracian seer commanded stones to become soft, woods to run, rivers to stop, wild beasts to grow gentle, quarrels to cease, and, having broken their severity, forced the Eumenides to tears, compelled Dys [Pluto] to become merciful and the Furies not to know their own wrath’ (87). Behind Alan’s unacknowledged conscription of Orpheus’s pederastic verse for the heteronormative goal of regaining Eurydice is the fact that the bard’s song that frees Eurydice from hell had long before been coopted for Christian use. This song was assimilated to Christ’s Word that saved mankind. According to the second-century Christian apologist, Clement of Alexandria, for instance, Orpheus’s song prefigured Christ’s saving Word, which Clement terms the ‘new song’ in his Exhortation to the Greeks, just as Orpheus’s reclamation of Eurydice anticipated Christ’s harrowing of hell (Irwin). John Friedman traces the way in which, after the patristic writers, the Orpheus-Christ analogy was widely promulgated by medieval moralizers of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and, later, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other works. Orpheus’s prefiguration of Christ continued to be argued on the Clementine basis that the pagan bard’s song anticipated the Christian saviour’s word, although, after the early patristic period, Orpheus became less Christ’s antitype than his analogue. By the later Middle Ages, Orpheus’s ‘best voice’ that secured Eurydice’s release from the underworld was assimilated to the new song of Christianity. In the fifteenth book of his Reductorium Morale (c. 1325–37), which moralizes Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pierre Bersuire allegorically equates Orpheus with Christ because the bard led Eurydice – for Bersuire, the human soul –

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out of hell: ‘and finally [Eurydice] went to the world below. Seeing this, Christ-Orpheus [Orpheus Christus] wished himself to descend to the lower world and thus he retook his wife, that is, human nature, ripping her from the hands of the ruler of hell himself; and he led her with him to the upper world, saying this verse from Canticles 2:10, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away”’ (trans. in Friedman 127). Medieval moralizers also domesticated Orpheus’s more problematic music, his ‘unnatural’ song that charms both flora and fauna into acting against kind. The Ovide moralisé, for instance, compares Orpheus’s musical enchantment of trees, birds and wild beasts with Christian preaching – by Saint Peter as well as Christ – that converted the heathen (Friedman 125). In the Anticlaudianus, however, Alan finesses the matter of Orpheus’s unnatural music, silently avoiding mention of its ‘mad’ effects upon human sexuality that Nature refers to in the Plaint. Alan was, after all, a poet, not a moralizer, and the Anticlaudianus sanitizes Orpheus through subtle means rather than through the bold fiat of allegoresis. Paralleling his normalization of the ancient poet Orpheus, Alan reforms his own alter ego, the narrator of the Anticlaudianus, whose initial poetic stance in the Plaint associates him with both the compromised figure of Nature and with sexually perverse man. Constructing the New Poet of the Anticlaudianus: Achilles’ Heel The Plaint-narrator’s development from puerility to virility suggests that a perverse poetic is the immature forerunner of a fully patriarchal concept of art and that the former naturally seeks to become the latter. Yet the ambidexterity of Genius, whose sororal limping left hand creates something rather than nothing, emblemizes Alan’s failure to expel queer art and its sodomitical practitioners, male and female, from Nature’s realm. In the Anticlaudianus, Alan again confronts the unruly world of Nature and attempts to resolve its challenge to patriarchal concepts of creation and procreation. It is true that the Anticlaudianus does not exhibit the same overt preoccupation with homoeroticism as the Plaint does. Alan abandons the elaborate grammatical argument against sodomy; neither the narrator nor Nature rails against ‘he’ turned into ‘she.’ Nevertheless, sexual orthodoxy drives the central allegorical action of Anticlaudianus, the concluding psychomachia in which novus homo, Alan’s redeemed perfect man, conquers his illicit desire to turn into a ‘she’ and thus secures the restoration of the golden age. Alan anticipates this defining feature of his new man near the end of

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the Anticlaudianus. After Phronesis returns to earth with the new man’s soul and Concord joins it to the body provided by Nature, the Virtues endow novus homo with their respective gifts. I noted earlier in this chapter that Modesty guards his all-important physical appearance of virile masculinity by stabilizing the new man’s gait and hairstyle. Piety then complements Modesty’s contribution by securing the new man’s spiritual virility. She instructs him to anoint himself with her unguent ‘in such a way that his firm and constant mind never stray from the right, lest, if the youth slacken in piety, he grow soft, the softness feminise great deeds and the weakened mind lose its manly firmness’ (184). Mentally and physically fortified against the degenerative conversion into femininity that the Plaint associates with homosexuality, the new man of the Anticlaudianus is next put to the test when he attracts the attention of Fame, who alerts the realm of hell to his arrival. Allecto and the Vices soon wage a fierce war against the perfect man. The Virtues come to his aid, and a lengthy psychomachia ensues between the two forces. The turning point in the battle comes when novus homo himself defeats Venus (211). James Simpson comments that ‘the desires of the body are entirely suppressed’ (Sciences 278). Enraged that the Virtues have begun to prevail against the Vices, Venus hurls a lighted torch at the new man, but Flight advises him to avoid Venus’s thunderbolt, ‘which comes down, dies in the air and loses it strength when there is nothing left to feed its hot flame’ (210). As the new man escapes, he shoots an arrow at Venus, and ‘it does not miss its mark’ (210). Mortally wounded, Venus explicates in her death speech the allegory of novus homo’s conquest of her. First she complains that her heat will no longer inflame Neptune below the sea and drive Bacchus to his orgies; she next bemoans the fact that her fire will cease to ‘“[blast] Jupiter like lightning, ravish[ing] the gods above of their divinity and driv[ing] many masters to slavery”’ (211). Venus’s allusion to Jupiter and Bacchus in the Anticlaudianus recalls the section of prose 4 in the Plaint devoted to Nature’s largely grammatical condemnation of those male sodomites who ‘converted Venus’s hammers to the function of anvils’ (136). As the Plaint-narrator must remind Nature, ‘the gods, too, have limped around the same circle of aberration,’ in particular, Jupiter and his sons, Bacchus, and Apollo: ‘For Jupiter, translating the Phrygian youth [Ganymede] to the realms above, transferred there a proportionate love for him on his transference. The one he had made his wine- master by day he made his subject in bed by night. Bacchus and Apollo, likewise, coheirs of their father’s wanton-

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ness, by inversion turned boys into women, not on orders from the divine power but by a trick of irreligious Venus’ (139). In the Anticlaudianus, when Venus bewails the death of her influence over Jupiter, who turns masters into slaves, and over his son, Bacchus, she echoes the ‘irreligious Venus’ of the Plaint who promoted the inverted love of the ancient gods. Allegorically, the implication is that the new man, with his secured masculinity, defeats the specific ‘wantonness’ of his own homoerotic desire. This implication is reinforced at the end of Venus’s death speech in the Anticlaudianus. In an allusion that puzzles modern readers, Venus laments the demise of her influence over men such as Achilles: ‘Now my arms lie idle, my arms through which Achilles, counterfeiting a girl in his degenerate clothes, was once overcome and yielded. The descendant of Alceus [i.e., Achilles], degenerate in arms, exchanges his staff for a distaff, his arrows for a day’s supply of wool, his quivers for a spindle and basely unsexed himself completely in womanish action’ (211). Venus refers here to the early episode in the Trojan war that, as argued in chapter 3, Dante used to anticipate his new hermaphrodite poetics: Thetis, Achilles’ mother, removes her son to the island of Scyros, where she attempts to convince him to disguise himself as a woman to avoid conscription. Both translators of the Anticlaudianus, James Sheridan and William Cornog, conclude that Alan’s Venus blunders in her reference to Achilles. Interpreting Venus’s remark that her arms once overcame Achilles to mean that it was Venus, not Thetis, who convinced Achilles to ‘hide in Scyros dressed as a girl,’ Sheridan believes that ‘Alan is mistaken in this reference,’ since ‘Venus has nothing to do with this’ (Anticlaudianus 211n6). Similarly, Cornog holds that if Venus’s reference implies that ‘Achilles wore girl’s clothes for any love-motive or plot,’ it is not ‘in accord with the myth,’ since Thetis hid her son in Scyros to keep him out of the Trojan war, not to provide him ready access to Deidamia (184n2). Yet the fullest account of Achilles’ adventure on Scyros, which occurs in Statius’s Achilleid, a popular text in the Middle Ages (Clogan 13; Slavitt ix), makes it is clear that Venus may properly claim victory over the most martial of the Greek heroes. In Statius’s narration, as noted in chapter 3, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, attempting to prevent her son’s muster into the Greek forces, takes him to the island of Scyros and there tries to convince him to disguise himself in women’s clothes and hide at court among the daughters of King Lycomedes. Achilles resists until the sight of Deidamia enraptures the ‘ungentle’ youth, and Thetis seizes the moment to urge her son again to don female garb, since it

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will enable him to ‘join hands in sport’ with Deidamia and her sisters (531). Despite Thetis’s influence on Achilles and her transformation of him, Alan makes no mistake in the Anticlaudianus: Venus has everything to do with Achilles’ desire for feminization. Only when, Statius continues, Achilles eventually rapes Deidamia does his heterosexual passion begin to prove his manhood. Soon after Achilles’ sexual assault of Deidamia, who continues to love him, Statius claims, Odysseus makes his way to Scyros and recalls Achilles to the masculine world of war. Achilles leaves Deidamia and Scyros, emblematic of the feminine side he must suppress, to achieve his masculine destiny as Greek hero against the Trojans. To involve himself with a woman is to become all but a woman in a warrior culture, Statius suggests, but his hero escapes total dishonour thanks to Odysseus. In Alan’s Anticlaudianus, however, no one rescues Achilles from effeminacy. Venus claims complete victory over him when she asserts that Achilles ‘basely unsexed himself completely in womanish action’ (211; emphasis mine). For Alan, Achilles cannot ‘resex’ himself, as he does in Statius’s epic. His desire for Deidamia emblemizes his ‘degenerate’ desire to lay down arms and become a woman, and such effeminacy links him to the boys turned into women by the two gods Venus names just before she alludes to Achilles: Jupiter and Bacchus. For Statius, Achilles’ infatuation with Deidamia is a detour on the hero’s route to proper masculinity; for Alan, the effeminization caused by Achilles’ excessive desire for Deidamia becomes an insurmountable roadblock to his heterosexuality, his fatal weak spot. It appears as if Alan searched for and found in the Scyros episode a prediction of Achilles’ well-known homoerotic involvement with Patroclus later in the Trojan war. Last in the Plaint -narrator’s opening list of examples that evidence the homosexual degeneration of his age is ‘the son of Peleus,’ Achilles, who no longer ‘belie[s] the actions of a maiden and so prove[s] to maidens that he is a man’ (72), and it is this triumph over Achilles’ heterosexual desire that Venus claims in her dying words in the Anticlaudianus. In turn, the new man’s defeat of Venus marks his rejection of the homoerotic desire that she evilly inculcates and, more widely, of the ancient Greek concept of the hero as a man who engages in sex with his warrior comrade. Quite the opposite of Dante, who prefigures his vernacular poetics in hermaphrodite Achilles, Alan’s novus homo altogether dissociates himself from the perverse hero. When C.S. Lewis observes that the Anticlaudianus is more intent on portraying novus

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homo as a gentleman than as a saint (103), he might better have said that for Alan, the gentleman, namely, the heterosexual man, is the saint who would redeem his corrupted era and usher in the golden age. Transcending Nature: The Liberal Arts and the Virgin Mary in the Anticlaudianus The major turning point in the psychomachia of the Anticlaudianus – the new man’s defeat of disorderly desire – is anticipated by two critical resolutions that Alan effects earlier in the poem. The first begins in his containment of physis, so troublesome in the Plaint, which Alan achieves not only by demoting Nature but by partially rewriting her. Perhaps because Nature’s ‘lesbian’ arrogation of the masculine tools of creation is such an essential feature of her literary heritage, Alan could not altogether suppress it but he does mute it. In her first appearance early in the Anticlaudianus, for instance, Nature calls for the ‘anvil’s aid,’ implying but not stating her use of the hammer (44). Nor does Alan deny that in Nature’s self-sufficient procreative process, she supplies both matter and form, yet insofar as possible Alan separates these two causes of generation that the Plaint coalesces in Nature. As Nature fashions a body for the soul of novus homo later in the Anticlaudianus, she seeks here and there among the four elements, represented as external to Nature, for the material that she ‘mints’ (174). Further, throughout the Anticlaudianus, Nature repeatedly places her artisan efforts below God’s and ‘regret[s] the mistakes [her] hands have made’ (54). However, although Alan chastens Nature, he never fully normalizes her. In acknowledging a higher power, Nature at the same time appropriates his masculine role of formal cause, as Reason observes: ‘“The Divine creates from nothing, Nature makes mortal things from some material”’(68). Indeed, Reason accepts the grammatical imperative that form (forma), like natura, is female and figures her as a ‘fair maid’ and daughter of God (64–5). As Book 1 of the Anticlaudianus draws to a close, Reason silently concedes the ancient concept of creation as the disorderly marriage of an odd couple, the fair maid and female matter, and witnesses the ceremony herself: ‘In [the second] mirror ... she sees the marriage of matter and form; she sees the kisses which the union shares; she sees what this temporary union toasts as it weds matter to form’ (63) When Reason acknowledges the same-sex fertility implicit in ancient physis, it is not because she approves it but because the Anticlaudianus is on the verge of transcending this ‘impossible’ ancient matriarchal idea

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and replacing it with an equally incredible, yet patriarchal, model of generation: the immaculate conception. Alan’s portrait of the most troublesome sister of the Liberal Arts, Arithmetic, signals this transition from Nature to the Virgin. Wetherbee observes that the ‘Virgin is clearly present in the description of the robe of Arithmetica,’ which includes a reference to ‘how a Virgin gives birth’ (Platonism 214). Grammatically female in Greek and Latin, Arithmetic nevertheless struck Alan as a masculine art. Rather than silently concede that a female personification could achieve success in a masculine arena, as he did with Nature, however, Alan avails himself of a traditional medieval way of finessing this difficulty. He employs what I have termed the ‘rhetoric of impossibility’ (‘“Madonna”’) that removes Arithmetic from the category of male or female: ‘This maiden shows the countenance of a careful person, the mind of a prudent one, the culture of an honourable one, the appearance of an attentive one and she bears the stamp of a person of restraint and with her man-like mind she transcends her sex ... A man by intelligence, a woman by sex, she surpasses a maiden in strength by a superabundance of power and by her skill. In one way a woman, in one way a man, in mental capacity she is not a “she” but a “he”’ (106–7). Although alarming and disgusting to Alan, ‘he’ may turn into ‘she’ in the Plaint because it is possible for men to degrade themselves completely into women, but a ‘she’ can only partially become a ‘he,’ because a woman cannot fully elevate herself to male status. Above woman, yet not a man, Arithmetic joins the ranks of the third – impossible – sex. For this reason, Arithmetic’s robe depicts the most exemplary female ‘impossibility’ in western culture: ‘in what way the maiden [i.e., the Virgin] gives birth and giving birth, remains intact: though single, she multiplies herself, begets from herself and remains virginal, merely counterfeiting the birth-process of a mother’ (105). Wetherbee comments that the Virgin Mary is also anticipated in Alan’s representation of Grammar as a virgin who lactates in order to nurse a host of infant scholars, and he detects a parallel between the elementary disciplines of arithmetic and grammar and ‘the creativity of a virgin nature’: ‘by contrast the elaborate strategies of logic and rhetoric, the presumption of geometry and astronomy, seems like a confusion and violation of something which only the pristine simplicity of language and number can adequately express’ (Platonism 214). I argued earlier in this chapter, however, that Alan’s difficulties with Grammar’s subversive potential in the Plaint – hic with hic – might well have discouraged his romanticization of the discipline’s simplicity in the Anticlaudianus. What

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Grammar does have in common with Arithmetic and, by extension, with the Virgin is that Alan depicts her as a type of the ‘impossible’ woman. Grammar nurses her infant scholars, and she also carries a whip to correct youthful faults: ‘Thus by blows she makes the milk more bitter, by the milk she makes the blows more mild’ (85). Through the reciprocal relationship between milk and the whip, ‘in one and the same action,’ Alan asserts, ‘[Grammar] is father and mother,’ a statement immediately qualified so that Grammar becomes more than the ordinary mother but only an honorary, stand-in father: ‘by the blows, she makes up for the father, by the milk she becomes the mother’ (85). In joining the ranks of the third sex along with Arithmetic, Grammar participates in Alan’s management of Nature’s unruly fertility by anticipating the advent of the Virgin’s miraculous fertility in Book 5. The Virgin, Alan emphasizes, far outshines her classical companions in the Anticlaudianus. Nature, Logic, Rhetoric, even Reason, are rendered mute and ineffectual in her presence: ‘here nature is silent, logic’s power goes a-begging, all the authority of rhetoric comes to naught, reason totters’ (153). Even more incredible than the ability of Arithmetic’s monad ‘by itself [to] beget a host of numbers from itself’ (104–5), which closely approximates physis’s self-sufficient fertility, is the Virgin’s wondrous divine gift: ‘as daughter [she] conceived her father and as mother [she] conceived her son’ (153). To unravel Alan’s oxymoronic knot, the Virgin is the mother of Christ, Christ is God, and therefore the Virgin is the mother of God (Sheridan, Anticlaudianus 153n48). And what distinguishes the Virgin’s fantastic fertility from that of her pagan and christianized counterparts, Alan immediately indicates, is also what valorizes it. In the explicit yet metaphoric language of the Song of Songs, Alan securely masculinizes the immaculate conception: ‘This is she who ... [kept] the honour of her virginity without losing the rights of a mother. In the bed of her womb the supreme Godhead prepared himself a guest-chamber’ (153). In ‘atoning for the crimes of the first mother,’ Eve, the Virgin also displaces the errant fertility of lesbian Nature and restores the ‘golden age’ (154) of patriarchal heterosexuality to earth. The Heterosexualized Poetics of the Anticlaudianus Structurally, the Virgin’s redemption of Nature’s lesbian fertility and novus homo’s defeat of homoerotic desire stem from the narrative persona that Alan created in the two prefaces to the Anticlaudianus, the

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prose and verse prologues. Ostensibly an apologia for the work and a request for corrective criticism, the prose prologue is also a brief poetic manifesto, which rewrites the opening meter of the Plaint. In that earlier work, I have argued, the narrator’s passive complaint about perverse ‘he’s turned she’s’ betokens his own puerile authority as Nature’s scribe; in the Anticlaudianus, however, the narrator immediately takes full control of the rhetorical situation by seeking audience comments and defining who is not qualified to offer them. He dares those who are ‘still wailing in the cradles of the nurses and ... being suckled at the breasts of the lower arts,’ those who are ‘just giving promise of a service in the higher arts,’ as well as ‘those beating the doors of heaven with their philosophic heads’ to show disdain for his work (40). Implicitly, the narrator claims that the Anticlaudianus proceeds from a mature mind and most appeals to the same, although the work is not wasted on the puerile: ‘in this work the sweetness of the literal sense will soothe the ears of boys, the moral instruction will inspire the mind on the road to perfection, the sharper subtlety of the allegory will whet the advanced intellect’ (41). Michael Wilks argues that Alan wrote the Anticlaudianus not for boys in general but for a specific young man, the fourteen-year old Prince Philip Augustus of France, son of the aging and ailing Louis VII, who promoted the coronation of his son as co-ruler in 1179, at which time Philip became the effective leader of France and shortly afterwards married Isabella of Hainault. Whether or not Philip’s coronation or marriage occasioned the Anticlaudianus, Wilks reasons, the poem’s ‘image of a harmonious marriage between two souls joined in the peace and concord of one body would serve the poet equally well either way’ (142). And whether or not the Anticlaudianus is a roman-à-clef in which the new man represents Philip – Simpson thinks not (Sciences 292) – the work thematizes masculine sexual maturity and marriage in its reformation of the Plaint’s poetics. If the puerile narrator of the Plaint struggles to achieve mastery over his poetic matter, to shape or ‘husband’ Nature’s rambling discourse, his virile counterpart in the Anticlaudianus adroitly asserts his agency in the prose prologue before the work proper starts. Under the guise of a plea to readers to notify him of faults and weaknesses in his poem, the narrator at the same time deploys the discourse of heterosexualized poetics to beg that the Anticlaudianus be returned to the ‘artificer’ who hammered it out on the ‘anvil’ in his ‘workshop’ (39). Unlike the Plaint, the narrator implies, no hammers will go astray in the Anticlaudianus and

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miss their proper targets. Even if the Anticlaudianus is flawed, the narrator continues, its faults are nevertheless licit rather than perverse failures on the part of the artist: ‘however much the irregularity of the artifact points an accusing finger at the ineptitude of the artist, however much the hand of the artisan leaves traces of ignorance in an ignoble product, let the work nevertheless beg forgiveness for its faults’ (39). The narrator of the Anticlaudianus may lack skill, he grants, but by means of his orthodox tropes of masculine agency, he signals that queer fertility plays no role in his poetics, and he ends his prose prologue on that note, inviting his audience to ‘enter the strait paths of my work’ (42). The succeeding (verse) prologue to the Anticlaudianus begins with the narrator’s demand for the accouterments of authority – ‘the pen of the author and the ornaments of the poet’ (43). In a thinly disguised traditional metaphor of heterosexual generation, his pen’s ‘fresh writing,’ the narrator continues, incites desire in the ‘aged parchment’ to leave its ancient hiding place and seek union. Matter unites with form and thus ‘renews itself’ with orderly fertility. In the brief epilogue to the Anticlaudianus, the narrator’s conventional apostrophe to his book figures the work not as a ‘fruit’ but as a living organism that the narrator has fathered into existence and to which he offers paternalistic advice in closing: ‘do not try to rival the poets of old but rather follow with reverence the steps of the ancients and let the lowly tamarisks take second place to the laurels’ (216). Immaculate Poetics If the Anticlaudianus employs traditional ancient and medieval concepts of heterosexual reproduction to figure the creation of verbal artefacts, the narrator’s depiction of the golden age at the end of the poem would seem to qualify his endorsement of this aesthetic. After novus homo defeats homoerotic desire and the Virtues secure the earthly kingdom, a new – but, in fact, ancient – fertility occurs. In this apparent paradise on earth, ‘no longer is the field reclaimed with hoe or scored by the ploughshare ... [trees] bear new fruit of their own accord ... the rose ... bears no suggestion of a mother-thorn but is brought into existence and comes forth spontaneously and proceeds to new growths without seed’ (216). Although fertility in the aetas aurea appears to be as novel as the new man, it is quite old indeed; for Alan has drawn upon Virgil’s Eclogues and other classical sources for his depiction of a reproduction that rejects the conventional concepts of agency and matter that comprise

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heterosexual poetics. The ‘new’ fertility is also old in the sense that it recalls a passage early in the Anticlaudianus that describes Nature’s realm: ‘Untroubled by the ploughshare, this land produces everything that wars against disease and, banishing the bane of harassing illness, restores our health. Without the extraneous aid of husbandman, content with Nature’s hand and favouring Zephyrus, the land bears and gives birth not indeed to common produce but to things wondrous and it prides itself on a progeny so large’ (47). This fecundity, in turn, recalls Nature’s legacy from ancient self-sufficient physis that proved so troublesome in Alan’s Plaint. Oddly, then, the golden age echoes the Plaint’s challenge to orderly fertility that the Anticlaudianus seems designed to overcome. Simpson also notes the peculiar resemblance between Nature’s selfadmittedly flawed realm in Book 1 and the supposedly paradisal aetas aurea of Book 9: the former ‘depicts a locus amoenus ... drawn from exactly the same traditions of the Golden Age’ as is the latter. If Nature’s inconsistent world is ‘restored’ in Book 9, how, Simpson asks, can the socalled victory of Nature at the end of the Anticlaudianus be regarded as permanent or stable? He concludes that the similitude vitiates the triumph of the new man in Book 9. For Simpson, ‘the beginning of the [Anticlaudianus] ... contains the critique of its ending.’ The poem’s true golden age occurs in its centre, Book 6, the section in heaven in which God creates the new man’s soul (Sciences 107–10). Other readers reach similar conclusions about the Anticlaudianus. Wetherbee observes that the ‘real resolution of Alain’s theme ... takes place in heaven’ (Platonism 217) rather than on earth, and Wilks holds that ‘the conclusion of the Anticlaudianus cannot be regarded as the final end. Perfect man is meant for heaven’ (157). So, too, does the Anticlaudianus reserve its articulation of the perfect – orderly – paradigm of creation for the middle section of the poem set in heaven, and this depiction serves to critique the queer fertility of Nature’s realm in Book 1 and its reflection in Book 9. The exemplary fecundity of heaven is anything but spontaneous or matriarchal. As revealed in the narrator’s apostrophe to the divine creator in Book 5, this fertility is both deliberate and patriarchal: it issues from the ‘Father on high ... sowing the seeds of things to come’ (147). Translating this trope into the discourse of Aristotelian causality, the narrator further addresses the creator as the ‘efficient cause, who brings a thing into existence, formal cause while you fashion it, final cause for its existence when you conserve it and confine it within definite limits’ (147). Because he is divine and

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constructed as masculine, God cannot be the conventionally female fourth cause, the material. Yet to suggest that a heterosexual dynamic operates to create the new man’s soul, God is provided with a female companion from the neoplatonic tradition: Nous, the divine intelligence. On God’s command, she searches among all the possible exemplars for a ‘new archetype’ (170) and finally finds what she has been sent to discover: a species that combines the beauty of Joseph, wisdom of Judith, patience of Job, zeal of Phineas, modesty of Moses, simplicity of Jacob, faith of Abraham, and piety of Tobias. Nous presents this form to God ‘to use as an exemplar in forming the soul’ (171), and God then takes a seal and ‘impresses on the pattern the appearance called for by the archetype’ (171). As God’s divine and eternal mind, Nous transcends matter and cannot serve as the material cause of creation. Nevertheless, she plays the wifely role of helpmate and avoids agency in the Anticlaudianus, a reflection perhaps of the more overtly maternal role Bernardus Silvestris assigned to Nous in his De mundi universitate. While Bernardus equates Nous with the second person of the Trinity, the Son, in his commentary on the Aeneid (Wetherbee, Platonism 123), in his De mundi, which begins with Nature’s entreaty to Nous to refine matter into a more orderly universe, Nous is constructed not only as female but as maternal. Echoing Elizabeth’s greeting to the pregnant Virgin in the Visitation, ‘blessed is the fruit of thy womb’ (Luke 1:42), Bernardus’s Nous hails Nature as ‘uteri mei beata fecunditas,’ ‘blessed fruit of my womb’ (Economou 65). The filial relationship Bernardus creates between the two maternal figures, Nous and Nature, is deeply rooted in neoplatonic thought. From Plotinus’s Nous, for instance, emanate two world souls: one to contemplate Nous and receive images of the ideas contained in Nous; the other (whom Plotinus calls nature) to pass on these images into the material world, to generate them in matter. Although Plotinus’s Nous transcends time and matter, she anticipates nature in the material world, a role Bernardus figures as maternal through the scriptural echo of the Visitation. Similarly, the Anticlaudianus suggests that female Nous provides the missing fourth material – maternal – cause of the new soul’s generation, and this implication normalizes the divine creative act as the product of a heterosexual union no less immaculate than the Virgin’s conception. While the heteronormative paradigm of creation that is established in the centre of the Anticlaudianus critiques the queer fertility of Nature’s realm that recurs at the end of the work in the aetas aurea, it valorizes the

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narrator’s poetic stance of father-artifex as it is articulated in the prologues and brief epilogue. Oddly, however, the narrator who normalizes God’s creation of the new soul has just abandoned his analogous earthly role as the father of his poem. As Phronesis approaches heaven in Book 5 of the Anticlaudianus, the narrator declares that he must lay ‘aside entirely the role of poet ... [and] appropriate a new speaking part, that of the prophet’ (146). Linda Marshall explains that the narrator exchanges poetic song for prophetic utterance in this section of the poem in accord with the medieval restriction of poetic myth, or narratio fabulosa, to the expression of the truths of nature, not of heaven. Christians must employ historical rather than fabulous narratives to mirror the divine, allegoria rather than integumentum, biblical rather than pagan mythical characters, Marshall continues, and it is the prophet, not the poet, ‘who must take account of history, for it is in events that God reveals himself, in theophanies foreshadowing and incarnating the mystery of fallen man’s redemption.’ Although the Anticlaudianus does not become historical narrative in Book 5, Marshall admits, there it does provide the historical revelation of God in the depiction of the garment of flesh that he wove for himself in the womb of the Virgin (5.483–6), and this, she explains, is the ‘means by which the Christian author is enabled to transcend philosophical myth to become a prophet inspired by metaphors more divine. Prudencia’s apotheosis and Alan’s prophetic vision are possible because of the Incarnation, because of God’s humbling himself in the hypothesis of man’s misery; the ascent of the mind to God is effected by contemplation of his miraculous decent into human suffering’ (93). This central Christian paradox of sublimity through humility enacted in God’s incarnation, echoed in the Virgin’s abasement in the Magnificat, also accounts for the way in which the narrator tropes his transformation from poet to prophet. Readers have commented upon the narrator’s grandiose claim to the elevated status of prophet in Book 5, yet sublimity is only part of the identity that he appropriates there. The other part casts him as ‘the pen in this poem, not the scribe or author, the writer’s silent page, the singer’s pipe, the sculptor’s chisel’ (5.146), in short, instrumental, even passively feminine, roles in artistic production that in the Plaint Alan condemned men so soundly for playing. Indeed, they remain despised roles in the Anticlaudianus, for they function as signals of the depths of abasement that the narrator is willing to suffer in imitatio christi. Yet, as the evangelist Matthew promised, ‘whoever humbles himself

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shall be exalted’ (Matt. 18:4). At the same time as the narrator descends into a despised poetic – indeed, because of his willingness to do so in order to represent the divine – he is exalted with agency that far exceeds his earthly artisanship. For not only does he ‘now pluck a mightier chord’ than he formerly did, but like the God who ‘sows the seeds of things to come,’ this narrator will be ‘the thorn bearing the rose and the reed bringing a potion of new honey’ (5.148). Through his abasement, Alan’s artisan-narrator is remade in the image of his creator as the organically seminal cause of the Anticlaudianus, and this figure rewrites the aberrant narrator of the Plaint. Nature Transcended Like his fellow Chartrians, renowned for their attempts to reconcile science with theology, especially causality with creation, Alan also searched for similarities between nature and grace. Alan’s probable teacher, Thierry of Chartres (Evans 2–5; R. Green 3–4), for instance, provided a point-bypoint comparison of the four causes and Genesis, and, as I have just noted, so too in the centre of the Anticlaudianus does Alan assimilate causality to the Creator. Yet I have argued in this chapter that, unlike other Chartrians, Alan was acutely uncomfortable with concepts of natura that the Middle Ages inherited from ancient philosophy. Unable to resolve Nature’s Aristotelian ambiguities, which Alan exposes in the Plaint, he abandoned her in the Anticlaudianus and poetically secured his sexually normalized paradigm of creation and, by extension, art, in heaven, not on earth. In contrast to Dante, who would later write heaven in the Paradiso only with the aid of a perverse poetic, Alan believed heterosexualized art is divine, not human. Alan thus seems to suggest that men like his narrator and even the novus homo must strive to accomplish in heaven what should, by his own logic, come naturally to them on earth. Alan’s abandonment of Nature in the Anticlaudianus anticipated Jean de Meun’s demotion of her in the Romance, although Jean did not attempt to resolve the ambiguities inherent in Nature by transcending them. Instead, the Romance testifies to the difficulty of dissociating queer fertility from poetic production without resorting to Christian normalization of art. Taken together, then, the Plaint, Anticlaudianus, and Romance witness the deep suspicion that Alan and Jean, two of Chaucer’s most important predecessors, harboured about both Nature herself and

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her implications for hylomorphic poetics. From this backdrop of determined, if largely unsuccessful, efforts to contain unruly Nature, the Nature of the Parliament of Fowls emerges triumphantly to orchestrate the queerest art of Chaucer’s dream trio, the birds’ concluding rondel ‘made in France.’

6 ‘imaked ... in Fraunce’: Nature’s Queer Poetics in the Parliament of Fowls

It is a commonplace of Chaucer criticism to find a harbinger of the major work of Chaucer’s so-called English period, the Canterbury Tales, not only in the milling crowd of gossips in Rumor’s wicker domicile at the end of the House of Fame, but more immediately in the raucous bird debate that Nature supervises in the final poem of the dream trio, the Parliament of Fowls.1 The Nature evoked in this convention of the Chaucer tradition is a narrow figure, not the expansively unruly Nature of Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun that I explored in chapter 5. Indeed, Nature’s unruliness is barely acknowledged in the escape narrative. Instead, she is deployed to represent Chaucer’s development of a ‘natural’ English style, which stands over and against French affectation. The ultimate purpose of this last chapter is to reread Chaucer’s Nature in the Parliament in order to show her affinity with her disorderly counterpart in Alan’s and Jean’s poems and to argue that, unlike these predecessors, Chaucer’s poem does not attempt to limit or banish Nature but through her endorses queer poetics. Frederick Furnivall’s brief statement in his ‘Work at Chaucer’ (1873) that the ‘Canterbury prologue and humorous Tales show us a new man ... whose existence was indicated before by that most comical birdjury scene in the “Parlament of Fowles”’ (175) stands at or near the head of a long tradition fundamental to our modern view of an ‘English’ Chaucer: colloquial, genial, humorous, diverse, and, if not actively anticourtly, then at least willing to poke fun at the artificiality of courtly verse – in a word, ‘natural.’ His legacy is evident in John Speirs’s remarks that by means of this debate, the Parliament ‘attains a maximum, a plentitude of dramatic English life.’ Speirs argues that, although Chaucer acknowledges Alan’s Plaint as the literary source of his Nature, the comic

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clashes between the various speakers, who employ the ‘same colloquial English idiom,’ are indebted to popular bird and beast fables. ‘The suppleness of life’ that the debate garners from these fables anticipates Chaucer’s English period, Speirs concludes: ‘the birds are a promise of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims; they are a company of English folk talking and disputing’ (48). In fact, verbally contentious birds in a garden of love setting figure prominently in several French love-visions (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 282), including the raucous cuckoo who onomatopoeically insults the noble avian lovers as ‘cuckolds’ in Jean de Condé’s Mass of the Birds (Windeatt 107), even if none of these visions serves as a specific source of the Parliament. Nevertheless, James Winny sketches out a model of Chaucerian development similar to Speirs’s: of Chaucer’s dream poems it is the Parliament alone that ‘takes a long imaginative stride towards a subject and a matching comic style incompatible with the traditions of the love vision.’ For this reason, Winny continues, ‘perhaps we come nearest to understanding The Parlement of Foules by looking forward from this midpoint of Chaucer’s career to its final accomplishment in The Canterbury Tales’ (141). Donald Howard concurs: the Parliament’s ‘humorous evocation of class differences, attitudes, and speech was – though [Chaucer] didn’t know it – the germ of The Canterbury Tales’ (Chaucer 316). Wolfgang Clemen articulates the same model through a different trope: ‘In Chaucer’s Parliament, then, we hear the first tones of that genial and also dramatic characterization which was to be the keynote of the Canterbury Tales’ (168). The Parliament’s pre-eminent modern commentator, J.A.W. Bennett, expands the origin of the Canterbury assemblage to include the House of Fame as well as the Parliament: ‘some of [the Parliament] concerns the relation of men and women not only to each other but to society: a concern that is ultimately to issue in the collective pilgrimage to Canterbury foreshadowed at the close of the House of Fame, where the poet begins to turn from his books to those “neyghebores that dwellen almost at thi dores,” and where “tidings of love” are to be sought amongst the crowd of shipmen, pilgrims, and pardoners that is to crystallize into the company at the Tabard’ (‘Parlement’ 23). So, too, does David Wallace argue that the ‘contest of impetuous, disparate voices’ in the Parliament echoes the ‘noisy, disorderly house of Rumour’ in the House of Fame and that both the birds’ debate and the milling gossip mongers anticipate Chaucer’s later move to the ‘open territory of the Canterbury Tales, with its shipmen, pilgrims, and pardoners’ (‘Continental Inheritance’ 28).

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Just beneath the surface of this commonplace reading lie the deeply inscribed outlines of the Chaucer escape narrative that I have been tracing throughout this book, for the bird jury in Nature’s realm of the Parliament that is seen to forecast the Canterbury Tales is associated with Chaucer’s adoption of a ‘natural’ style made possible by his liberation from the sterile conventions of artificial French love poetry. Later in this chapter I shall explore the significance of the debate in the context of the medieval literary concepts of Nature examined in chapter 5, but first I want to establish that the Chaucer escape trope is rooted in the structural fact that after the narrator tours and exits the temple of Venus in the Parliament, he comes upon the goddess Nature. In David Wallace’s allegorical reading of the sequence of the narrator’s perambulation, Nature ‘rescues’ the narrator from the ‘hothouse atmosphere of the temple of Venus, [in which] Chaucer himself becomes somewhat disgruntled and disaffected by the sheer weight of past writing on love.’ Wallace allows that Venus’s ‘house of art,’ an ‘art gallery’ that is ‘oppressive,’ has a continental, not simply French, foundation, and he warns against reading Nature as an ‘Englishwoman’ who prompts Chaucer to make a ‘declaration of English independence,’ but Wallace nevertheless sees the Parliament as a phase in the gradual development of Chaucer’s ‘self-assurance’ as an English poet that began in the House of Fame under Dante’s aegis (‘Continental Inheritance’ 27–9, 34). Stated more tersely, Ian Robinson’s reading of the narrative sequence is similar: ‘Having worked his way out of the palace of courtly art in the Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer felt himself free to do virtually anything’ (69). Complementing this view of the Parliament’s significance to Chaucer’s liberation, Marchette Chute recapitulates the familiar tale of Chaucer’s bondage to puerile French love poetry. ‘There are signs in the Parlement of Foules,’ Chute says, ‘that in spite of his success in handling the French conventions, Chaucer was already growing restless within the petty confines of the garden of love’ (130). A.C. Spearing reminds readers that, in fact, Nature’s park contains the garden of love and Venus’s temple and that Nature must be seen not simply as Venus’s opponent but as more inclusive than Venus. Nevertheless, Spearing maps the liberation rhetoric onto the realms of Venus’s temple and Nature’s park, opposing the former, an ‘enclosure’ of ‘love conceived as enslaving obsession,’ to the latter, in which love is formulated as ‘natural impulse’ and characterized by both ‘freedom’ and ‘freedom of expression’ (Dream-Poetry 99). J.A.W. Bennett observes that Chaucer did not grow ‘discontent with’ and ‘discard’ French convention in the Parliament. The poem’s major

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French source, the Romance of the Rose, also leads from the ‘soft poetical breezes wafted from the garden of the Rose’ to the ‘strong winds of thirteenth-century philosophy’ that held Nature to be the ‘true source of knowledge of love’ (‘Parlement’ 16). Like Spearing, however, Bennett cannot resist tracing the trajectory from the ‘new paths for the human spirit’ that poems like the Parliament map to ‘that special kind of Canterbury Tales contentment wherein, having seen all the varieties of human folly and self-deception, we come to an abiding sense of the worth and purpose of human love’ (193). An equally irresistible desire to date the composition of the ‘natural’ Parliament later than that of the House of Fame, thereby placing the Parliament chronologically closer to the Canterbury Tales, further reveals the construction of the Chaucer liberation narrative. As William Quinn remarks, determining the order of Chaucer’s dream poems makes a ‘significant interpetive gesture’ (197). Dating the Parliament: History and Desire During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Parliament gradually crept from a medial chronological position in the dream trio to its now widely accepted position as the final poem. In his ‘Work at Chaucer,’ Furnivall adopted Bernhard ten Brink’s chronology of the Chaucer canon, in which the date of ‘1373 (?)’ is given for the Parliament. Ten Brink placed the Parliament after Chaucer’s first certain visit to Italy (1372–3) in order to account for what he saw to be the superiority of this poem over the ‘earlier and poorer ones [that Chaucer wrote] when he was under French influence’ (173), to wit, the Book of the Duchess, which ten Brink dated 1369. Although ten Brink could not pinpoint the Parliament’s exact year of composition, his positioning of this poem at the beginning of Chaucer’s so-called second period, starting at the end of the Italian trip in 1373, securely cordoned it off from the supposedly inferior poetry of the first, French period. The putative composition date of 1373 also put the Parliament before the House of Fame, which ten Brink placed at the extreme limits of 1374 to 1385. Furnivall streamlined ten Brink’s chronology to position the Parliament at the beginning of Chaucer’s Italian period, 1373, and House of Fame at its end, 1384. Soon, however, historical readings began to challenge Furnivall’s chronology, specifically, his placement of the Parliament as much as over a decade before the House of Fame. In 1878 John Koch advanced a historical reading of the Parliament, which moved its composition later into Chaucer’s second (Italian) pe-

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riod (400–9). Modifying a previous suggestion by Thomas Tyrwhitt that the Parliament alludes to the marriage of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, Koch argued that the poem instead allegorized the protracted marital negotiations between Anne of Bohemia and Richard II, whose wedding eventually occurred on 14 January 1382. Partly on this basis, Koch proposed a date of 1381–2 for the Parliament. Koch further maintained that an astronomical reference in the Parliament supported this date in the early 1380s. In fact, if the poem’s allusion to Venus being seen at ‘North-northwest’ (117–18) is taken literally rather than metaphorically, it could refer to the planet’s position in April or May of 1374, 1377, 1382, or 1390 (F. Robinson 793n117). But since the generally accepted date for the prologue of the F version of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, which mentions the Parliament, is 1386–8, the planetary allusion was limited to one of the first three dates (1374, 1377, or 1382), and Koch’s allegorical reading of the poem privileged the last. John Tatlock commented in 1907 that Koch’s later date of 1381–2 for the Parliament was accepted virtually unanimously (Development 40). After Tatlock put his imprimatur on the 1381–2 date of the Parliament, Koch’s reading of the poem as an allegory of royal marriage mushroomed to include other potential brides and suitors and then went out of style, only to return. By 1934 John Lowes could parody such allegorical readings, which, he noted, ‘have been showered upon us in embarrassing profusion,’ as ‘a comedy (thus far) in three acts.’ Lowes much preferred John Manly’s explanation of ‘every detail’ of the Parliament in terms of its ‘central situation as a conventional demande d’amour ’ (Chaucer 124–5). F.N. Robinson reviewed the serious challenges to the marriage allegory reading made by Manly and others and concluded that ‘if [Koch’s] theories of allegory in the Parliament are rejected, the principal evidence usually relied on for dating the poem about 1381–2 disappears’ (791).2 Subsequently, however, Koch’s reading has been revived by Larry Benson, who argues that the Parliament commemorates the embassy that attempted to conclude Richard II’s marriage negotiations in 1380 (‘Occasion’). Benson acknowledges that he lacks historical proof for reinstating the allegorical reading, but his desire to date the Parliament in the 1380s rather than in 1373 is common in Chaucer studies. In part, the choice of the later date reflects a persistent urge to position the Parliament after the House of Fame, the date of which has settled around the years 1379–80. Usually without comment, Chaucer editions, handbooks, and anthologies of criticism are routinely arranged so that texts and

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discussions of the Book of the Duchess occur first, House of Fame second, and Parliament third. But the House of Fame offers ‘no precise indication of date,’ F.N. Robinson reminds readers, not even the ambiguous planetary reference of the Parliament, and ‘inferences drawn from the biographical and allegorical interpretations are all uncertain’ (779). Chaucer’s use of Dante in the House of Fame, as noted earlier, has prompted its placement after Chaucer’s first certain Italian trip of 1372–3. Ten Brink posited an extreme early date of 1374 and a late date of 1385 for the House of Fame; these dates mesh with a supposed allusion in lines 652–3 to Chaucer’s work as comptroller of the wool customs, a position he held from 1374 to 1385. Tatlock pinpoints the year to 1379. This specific date near the end of the decade of the 1370s, Tatlock argues, places the House of Fame well after Chaucer’s ‘emancipation’ from the ‘French house of bondage’ in 1372–3 and also accounts for a possible reference to Chaucer’s poem in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, the composition of which Tatlock dates 1379 (Development 40). The period 1379–80 is now generally accepted as the composition date of the House of Fame, even though the revised Riverside edition repeats Robinson’s caveats about the uncertainty of the textual, biographical, and literary evidence for it (Fyler, ‘Notes’ 978). Assigning the composition of the House of Fame to 1379–80 positions it before the Parliament, a sequence that reflects what many readers find to be the latter poem’s relative sophistication in terms of its meter and style (e.g., Brewer, ‘Parlement’ 2–3; Everett). Equally strong but unacknowledged support for placing the Parliament after the House of Fame in the dream trio comes from the fact that this chronology best shapes Chaucer’s artistic career into the narrative of his emancipation from French bondage and subsequent development into the unfettered English poet. I noted earlier in this chapter that the raucously uncourtly avian debate in Nature’s comic and disparate realm in the Parliament is traditionally viewed as anticipating the Canterbury Tales. Because of its so-called natural style, this debate is regarded as a better candidate for the role of the proximate predecessor of Chaucer’s English period than is the milling crowd of tale-tellers and rumour-mongers at the end of the House of Fame. Ironically, arranging the literary evidence of Chaucer’s liberation in this order undercuts the trope itself, however, as I next explain. The Problem of the ‘French’ Boccaccio A.C. Baugh’s argument that the Parliament was probably written post1378 because Chaucer could not have known the works of Boccaccio

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until after his Italian trip in that year (61) is not widely accepted, but it does draw attention to the specific source of the courtly ‘prison’ from which the Parliament supposedly depicts Chaucer’s (or his narrator’s) liberation: the Teseida. It is this Italian poem that supplied Chaucer with the details of Venus’s ‘hothouse’ temple of ‘enslaving obsession,’ against which readers traditionally oppose Nature’s realm in which the colloquial bird debate occurs. Recent editors have routinely cited Boccaccio’s Teseida as the origin of lines 183–294 in the Parliament, the long passage in which the narrator describes his coerced entry into the walled garden where he encounters Priapus, Venus, and Cupid and sees the lovers who had broken Diana’s bow in Venus’s temple (e.g., Brewer, ‘Parlement ’ 106n183–294; Phillips and Havely 242n183–210; F. Robinson 794n183– 294). And Bennett, who devotes a chapter to describing the ways in which ‘Chaucer set about grafting into his poem the stanzas from Boccaccio’s Teseida,’ notes that in Parliament 183–294, ‘Chaucer follows Boccaccio more closely and continuously than he elsewhere follows any other poet (outside the Tales)’ (‘Parlement ’ 80). Chaucer’s widely acknowledged source for the temple of love in Boccaccio’s poem thus raises a problem: the ubiquitous liberation narrative also drafts Boccaccio to play the role of the ‘manly’ and ‘muscular’ Italian poet who liberated Chaucer from such stifling French hothouses. To square Boccaccio’s role as emancipator with traditional readings of the Parliament, the Italian poet’s influence would have to begin with the narrator’s exit from the temple of Venus and entrance into Nature’s park in line 295, but there, everyone agrees, ‘the translation from the Teseida finishes’ (Brewer, ‘Parlement ’ 113n294). And shortly after that juncture, in line 316, Chaucer announces outright his source for Nature, the work discussed in chapter 5, Alan’s Plaint of Nature. The problem of the contradictory Boccaccio has seen various efforts at resolution, all tacit, none successful. When George Kittredge praises the Italians for awaking Chaucer ‘to consciousness of power that was his own,’ he specifically names the work in question, Boccaccio’s Teseida: ‘Boccaccio, in particular, did [Chaucer] the priceless service of stirring him to emulation. Here, in the Teseide and the Filostrato, were new and fine and congenial things’ (Chaucer 26–7). But when Kittredge briefly mentions the temple of Venus section of the Parliament indebted to the Teseida, he occludes its source and dismisses it as a ‘park, which proves to be a lover’s paradise with the regular landscape, and the usual conventions follow’ (Chaucer 60). In essence, Kittredge constructs two Boccaccios, the one he acknowledges as author of innovative works and liberator of

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Chaucer, and the other he does not acknowledge, who supplied the source of the ‘usual conventions’ and ‘regular landscape’ of Chaucer’s love-garden in the Parliament. The work of the latter Boccaccio is implicitly assimilated to the ‘pretty visions’ that Kittredge’s Chaucer and His Poetry consistently dismisses and creates, in essence, a ‘French’ Boccaccio. Kittredge finesses the problem of the contradictory Boccaccios, one Italian and the other French or at least Francophile, by neglecting to mention the direct source of Chaucer’s temple of Venus in Boccaccio’s Teseida. He then pronounces the Parliament peripheral to his main concern and moves on (Chaucer 60). Haldeen Braddy’s solution to the problem that this French Boccaccio presents to the liberation narrative is no less disingenuous even if more illogical. He claims that the temple of Venus section of the Parliament demonstrates both Chaucer’s traditional French phase and his innovative Italian period. Braddy first establishes the Parliament’s conventional nature in large part on the basis of the temple of Venus section, lines 183–294: ‘the Parlement, like the Book of the Duchess and House of Fame, is substantially French in style, particularly because it contains the usual personages of the goddess Venus, the attendant Cupid, and the important guide; and also because it employs such conventional descriptions as the colorful temple of Venus, the personifications of Delight, Youth, Flattery, and the like, and the dreamand vision-motive in which birds play a part’ (87). When Braddy goes on to document how the ‘entering wedge of Italian sources’ caused an ‘advancement in [the] narrative technique’ of the Parliament over Chaucer’s earlier dream visions, however, he points to the same temple of Venus section that he just claimed was an illustration of conventional French style, but the source of which he now attributes to Boccaccio: ‘in the Parlement we have what may be the earliest appearance of Italian influence in Chaucer’s work. Boccaccio’s Teseide provides Chaucer with sixteen stanzas of picturesque description, which decorative passages form some of the most attractive elements of this poem rich in color and significance ... In the Parlement, there is, to summarize our review, the old classical material, Ovid, and the Somnium Scipionis, the pervasive tone and atmosphere of French love-vision poetry, and the new Italian influence of Boccaccio and Dante’ (88–90).3 Perhaps no one wrestled as protractedly with the problem of the French Boccaccio and Chaucer’s Parliament as did Clemen, however. Although Clemen appears not to be heavily invested in the Italian liberation of Chaucer, his study depends enough upon this critical concept that the problem of the French Boccaccio must be resolved.

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Unlike other readers, Clemen does not simply imply or declare the French origin of Parliament, lines 183–294, and sidestep the inconvenient reality that an Italian poem is the direct source. Instead, under the rubric of ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’ (142–6), Clemen confronts the matter and claims the temple of Venus section as an example of the Italian liberation of Chaucer. First, however, Clemen reads the relevant stanzas of Teseida 7 as evidence that Boccaccio had freed himself from his French chains, the pre-eminent love allegory of the medieval period, Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose. Where Guillaume ‘sought to represent a love-story in an allegorical form by means of the interaction of chosen personified states of mind,’ Clemen argues, Boccaccio ‘presents this whole allegorical world merely as a charming and static picture, limiting himself to tracing the picturesque outlines of this peopled scene.’ Clemen means that Boccaccio converts the Romance’s personification allegory into the Teseida’s ekphrasis, a ‘charming and decorative picture.’ And ekphrasis, Clemen continues, signals that Boccaccio ‘has abandoned [the Romance’s] world of allegorical forms.’ In sum, by means of ekphrasis, the French Boccaccio escapes the courtly prison and takes Chaucer with him; for Chaucer, too, ‘introduces his love-garden as a picture.’ Further, this depiction represents Chaucer’s abandonment of the French love-allegory, which is now reduced to a mere prelude to the vital centre of the Parliament, the bird debate: ‘it is typical that this debate, the “drama” played out in the love-garden, is enacted by the various birds and not by the customary personified abstractions; in this way, a totally different world is introduced into Chaucer’s allegorical dream-poem.’ Chaucer’s ‘different world,’ Clemen comments not unexpectedly, is a ‘natural scene.’ Clemen’s argument that ekphrasis constitutes a more ‘natural’ mode of representation than does personification allegory has not attracted a large following. Indeed, many readers fail to notice the difference between the Romance and the Teseida and the latter’s offshoot, the Parliament, on this score. Analyses of the genre of the Parliament typically identify it as a conventional love-vision onto which has been grafted the demande d’amour of the bird debate, and, however inaccurately, readers commonly describe the Parliament’s temple of Venus section in terms of a traditional love-allegory (e.g., D. Baker; Bethurum, ‘Center’). Even if readers have not agreed that ekphrasis is somehow less stiff, formal, or conventional than personification allegory, Clemen’s assertion allows him to mount the argument that, with Boccaccio’s help, the Parliament

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‘completes a modification in the form of allegorical poetry which brought it near to disintegration.’ It also supports Clemen’s concluding comment on the dream trio that ‘in the Parliament we can already see the seeds’ of the Canterbury Tales (169), the very sort of genealogical reading that his Chaucer’s Early Poetry set out to avoid. I can only surmise that Clemen’s implication that static ekphrasis somehow enlivens moribund French personification allegory illustrates the pressure upon readers to grasp the chronological contiguity between Nature’s realm in the Parliament and the poem of Chaucer’s ‘natural’ English style, the Canterbury Tales, and to oppose both to the artifice of Venus’s temple. However, the opposition between Nature and Venus in the Parliament is a crucial but bogus prop of the liberation narrative. Close scrutiny of this critical commonplace reveals the escape trope’s construction at least as clearly as any of its other features. The opposition between Nature and Venus also serves to disguise related constructions in the Parliament, and my reading of the poem begins with an inquiry into them. Gender Conflict in the Parliament: Scipio and Africanus, Nature and Venus Kathryn Lynch observes that the most common critical strategy for reading the Parliament involves opposing Nature to Venus and allying Nature with Africanus, the figure who serves as the narrator’s guide early in the poem (‘“Bowe”’ 95). Africanus first appears in the narrator’s recapitulation (lines 29–84) of the work he has been reading, ‘Tullyus of the Drem of Scipioun’ (31), Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio,’ which occurs in the last book of Cicero’s Republic, although Chaucer would have known it from its preservation in Macrobius’s fifth-century commentary upon it. Chaucer does not quote Macrobius’s gloss, but restricts his summary to the narrative of the dream. In Cicero’s account, the Roman general Scipio Africanus the Younger or Minor (185–29 B.C.), victor of the Third Punic War, whom Chaucer calls ‘Scipio,’ recounts his arrival in Africa as military tribune in the fourth legion. He meets with the aged Numidian king, Massinissa, who was earlier befriended by Scipio’s adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus the Elder or Major (235–183 B.C.), and became his political ally. This meeting prompts Massinissa to recall the great deeds of Scipio Elder. King Massinissa talks late into the night in praise of Africanus, and Scipio then dreams that his grandfather appears to him. Africanus points out

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Carthage to Scipio and correctly predicts that within two years’ time the younger man will rise in rank and destroy the city, thus earning the name ‘Africanus’ from his adoptive grandfather. Then Africanus foretells that Scipio will travel as legate to Egypt, Syria, Asia, and Greece and finally go on to end a great war by destroying the Spanish city of Numantia. At this point, Africanus predicts, Scipio will be at the pinnacle of his career – ‘to you the senate, all good men, the allies, the Latins, will look’ (134) – but danger will also lurk in the family members who will conspire against him. Africanus advises Scipio that he must zealously protect the commonwealth against such treachery, since those who assist the fatherland go to a special place in heaven. Terrified at the thought of treachery by his kinsmen, Scipio enquires about the fate of his father, Paulus, who materializes in the dream to assure his son that he has passed to a life beyond death. Paulus counsels Scipio to remain on earth and fulfil the duty he owes to both family and country. The dream ends with a long lecture from Africanus on the universe, the harmony of the spheres, the nature of the soul, and other subjects, all aimed at teaching Scipio the importance of serving his country well, which is the only sure source of virtue and reward. The final piece of advice that Africanus gives Scipio is to detach himself from the body as much as possible. Those souls who ‘have given themselves up to the pleasures of the body’ and ‘who at the instigation of desires subservient to pleasure have broken the laws of god and men,’ Africanus warns, are condemned to fly around the earth after death for many ages of torment (137). After selectively summarizing Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio,’ the narrator of Chaucer’s Parliament himself falls asleep and dreams that Africanus comes to him in a vision just as he appeared to Scipio. For reading about him in the ‘olde bok totorn’ (110), Africanus promises to reward the narrator. He leads him to the entrance of a park walled with green stone, over which a dual inscription paradoxically forecasts both pleasure and danger to all those who enter this realm of love. Transfixed like a piece of iron between two magnets, the narrator cannot decide whether or not to enter the park. Africanus grabs the narrator and shoves him in. Africanus consoles him that the warning over the gate has nothing to do with the narrator because he has apparently lost his taste for love. Nevertheless, Africanus concludes, the narrator will find material to write about in the park. Africanus disappears from the narrator’s dream at this point, and the temple of Venus section of the Parliament commences. Readers typically argue that Chaucer’s summary of the ‘Dream of

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Scipio’ translates Cicero’s concern for commonwealth, which Africanus instructs Scipio to honour above all else in order to achieve reward in heaven, into regard for the ‘commune profyt’ (47, 75). Lynch points out that ‘arguably the most common critical strategy for unifying the Parliament consists of demonstrating the Chartrian Nature’s affinity for the common good; that is, Nature’s neoplatonic harmony with Africanus’ (‘“Bowe”’ 95). For instance, Spearing argues that the ‘freedom’ of Nature’s realm, as opposed to Venus’s ‘enslaving obsession,’ advances ‘common profit’: ‘This freedom, always combined with order, is enacted in the parliament, where every attitude is allowed freedom of expression. This is how the “common profit” of the Somnium Scipionis is achieved in Nature’s realm, which in one way encloses and in another way is homologous with the realm of human society. The cuckoo even uses the phrase “comune spede” (507), which means the same as “commune profit.” And the freedom of speech and choice includes a freedom not to choose, or at least to defer choosing’ (Dream-Poetry 99–100). However, as Lynch notes and Spearing admits, Nature’s world literally encloses rather than excludes Venus’s temple, a fact that is echoed in the ‘courtly birds’ venereal quest for personal satisfaction, a quest encouraged by both Nature and Venus.’ This quest, Lynch continues, constitutes a ‘sharp and disabling’ conflict with Scipio’s ‘glimpse of common profit’ and reveals the fundamental tension in the poem that readers frequently ignore, ‘the conflict between the public male world and the private female one’ (‘“Bowe”’ 94): ‘The key contrast ... is between the male-dominated civilization of Africanus (“culture,” in a word), with its world-transcending philosophy, and the female-dominated lovegarden of Nature and Venus (“nature”), with the painful ambiguities and complexities of living in a place where the perpetual replaces the eternal and where death and reproduction stand in for the survival of the personal-I outside time. Beginning with the law of the father – literally the grandfather – in the person of Africanus, its bookish, oracular vision of political grandeur and universal order capable even of containing and reforming “likerous folk” (line 79) gives way to an insomnium of feminine disorder and chaotic coupling’ (92). Lynch develops this key contrast in the poem to advance the Freudian interpretation of the Parliament that ‘full adult masculine sexuality’ involves repression of the feminine world of the maternal through adoption of the masculine view of woman represented by Africanus. But she concludes that the narrator is unable to take that perspective because, when Africanus’s ‘brief vision of universal harmony stands against the

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fertile chaos of Nature’s garden,’ it ‘loses.’ The narrator remains stymied on the ‘brink of commitment’ in much the same way as the formel eagle remains undecided about her choice of mate in the poem (‘“Bowe”’ 95–6). Lynch’s Freudian reading of the Parliament does not consider the possibility that, in Nature’s realm, non-normative sexuality is not only possible but, as I showed in chapter 5, likely. In other words, so-called full adult masculine sexuality, or heterosexuality, is not the sole path open to the dreamer. Nevertheless, Lynch’s view of the Parliament makes the valuable contribution of introducing the perspective of gender in a way that compels interrogation of the persistent opposition of Nature and Venus as the central structural contrast of the poem. The effect of Lynch’s gendered reading is to create a realignment that sets the composite world of Nature-Venus over and against the realm of Africanus. Lynch sees this contrast as an opposition between private female and public male domains, respectively. However, I next argue, perhaps not surprisingly about a poem that announces its indebtedness to Alan’s Plaint, that these otherwise opposed feminine and masculine worlds share a common factor: each is expansive enough to include queer sexualities. I return now to reread the nature of Africanus’s world, first outside Chaucer’s poem and then in the Parliament’s version of the ‘Dream of Scipio.’ The Continence of Scipio: Male Homosociality and the ‘Dream of Scipio’ The classical world offered Chaucer countless exemplars of male homosociality – Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, to name only a few famous pairs of male friends – but none was thematically better suited for a dream vision than Scipio Major, Chaucer’s Africanus, who appeared in two overlapping literary guises: historical and visionary. Livy and Valerius Maximus celebrated the historical figure, as did both Dante (Inf. 31.115–17) and Petrarch in his unfinished epic, Africa. In his other guise as the ‘oracular’ grandfather, Scipio Major appears in Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ and in Macrobius’s commentary upon it, which forms the basis of the dream of Scipio in the Parliament. Both figures were renowned for their continence, or heterosexual abstinence, and for their homosocial ties. When the prophetic elder Scipio of the ‘Dream of Scipio’ counsels his grandson to avoid the path of those souls who have become ‘slaves of the

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body,’ in Cicero’s words (137), and, in Chaucer’s summary, to eschew the ways of ‘likerous folk,’ he epitomizes the extensive reputation for continence that Roman historians attributed to him. On closer inspection, Scipio’s continence plays out in the formation of personal and then political ties with other men, frequently enemies whom he won over to Rome’s cause. In his Roman History 26.50, Livy recounts an example of Scipio Major’s famed homosocial continence following his conquest of the Spanish city of New Carthage (or Cartagena). Knowing that Scipio Elder relishes comely women, his men bring him as a trophy a captured ‘maiden of a beauty so extraordinary that, wherever she went, she drew the eyes of everyone’ (7:191). Scipio enquires into her background and learns that she was betrothed to a young Celtiberian chieftain named Allucius. When Scipio hears that Allucius is deeply in love with her, he sends for both the young man and the captive woman’s parents and addresses Allucius in more studied language than he had used towards the parents.‘As a young man,’ [Scipio Major] said, ‘I speak to you as a young man – to lessen embarrassment between us in this conversation. It was to me that your betrothed was brought as a captive by my soldiers, and I learned of your love for her – and her beauty made that easy to believe. Therefore, since in my own case, if it were only permitted me to enjoy the pleasures of youth, especially in a proper and legitimate love, and had not the state preoccupied my attention, I should wish to be pardoned for an ardent love of a bride, I favour what is in my power – your love. Your betrothed has been in my camp with the same regard for modesty as in the house of your parentsin-law, her own parents. She has been kept for you, so that she could be given you as a gift, unharmed and worthy of you and of me.’ (7: 191–3)

A further act of generosity on Scipio’s part concludes the episode. When the maiden’s parents and relatives learns of her capture, they go to Scipio with a large quantity of gold to ransom her. Scipio accepts the ransom but immediately turns it over to Allucius as a wedding present. Livy employs this episode of the captive woman in part to illustrate Scipio’s political savvy. In return for her release, Scipio requests that Allucius become a friend to Rome, and, indeed, pleased with both the gift and the honourable treatment he has received, Allucius convinces his Spanish tribe of Scipio’s generosity and goodness of heart and returns with a force of 1,400 soldiers to aid the Romans. By the late Middle Ages, however, the episode had become popular in both art and

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literature as an exemplum of moral probity rather than of political adroitness and was dubbed the ‘continence of Scipio.’ Castiglione included it as such in the Courtier, and quattrocento Italian painters took up the theme as especially apt for cassoni, marriage chests.4 Homosociality plays a prominent role in the ‘continence of Scipio’: the bond formed between the two young men, Scipio Major and Allucius (or ‘Albricius’), through the exchange of the captive woman forms the emotional crux of the narrative. Cristelle Baskins remarks that despite the ‘centrality of the Celtiberian princess and her inviolate chastity,’ the critical bond created in this episode is ‘not the marital but rather the martial bond between Scipio and Allucius’ (119). Scipio relinquishes the captive woman not out of compassion for her but out of respect for the man who had a prior claim upon her, which Scipio honours by giving her back as a gift to him. When Scipio ‘indulges’ his rival’s love, nominally he acknowledges Allucius’s erotic bond to his fiancée, yet the effect of this indulgence is to forge an emotional bond between the two men strong enough to motivate Allucius’s subsequent alliance with his former enemies, the Romans. On both a personal and a political level, violence between and among men is averted through the ‘traffic in women’ so central to the erotic triangle that Eve Sedgwick associates with male homosociality, as I discussed in chapter 1. In a similar fashion, I shall argue at the end of this chapter, homosocial bonding dissipates the potential aggression among the three male rivals who woo the formel in the Parliament. Scipio Elder’s proclivity for forming strong male friendships rooted in heterosexual abstinence as a political strategy surfaces again in his relationship with Massinissa, the Numidian prince whom Cicero used in the framing narrative of his oracular ‘Dream of Scipio.’ Initially an enemy of the Romans during the Second Punic War, in which Rome and Carthage battled for control of the Mediterranean, Massinissa is persuaded through Scipio Major’s friendship to come to the side of the Romans, and, in a later episode, Scipio Major averts Massinissa’s potential reunion with the enemy Carthaginians by appealing again to that bond. As Livy tells it, the latter incident revolves around Sophonisba, the enemy Carthaginian Hasdrubal’s daughter, who married Syphax, another Numidian prince won over by Scipio Elder. Syphax defects, and Livy excoriates Sophonisba as the cause of Syphax’s disloyalty to Scipio. At the point in the narration that Livy explodes against Sophonisba, however, both she and Syphax have been captured by Scipio, and Syphax has been paraded in front of the Roman camp in chains in anticipation of his and his wife’s deportation to Rome. But Sophonisba’s fate would

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be different. On the very day that Massinissa sees Scipio’s female prisoner, he falls hopelessly in love with her and, taking no counsel with Laelius, marries her. Scipio is repulsed, Livy relates, not because of the disloyalty that Massinissa’s wedding to an enemy signifies nor because of the political difficulty it creates, but because ‘in Spain, in spite of his youth, [Scipio] had himself never been smitten by the beauty of any captive [woman]’ (8:417). Control of his passion, continence, is the virtue upon which he prides himself most, Scipio tells Massinissa, and the Roman reminds the Numidian that this virtue most attracted Massinissa to join Scipio’s cause earlier in Spain. Scipio further editorializes that men like himself and Massinissa are more in danger from the ‘pleasures all about’ them than from ‘armed enemies’ (8:417) and that subduing heterosexual passion is a greater victory than conquering Syphax. On these grounds, Scipio pleads with Massinissa to give up Sophonisba. Scipio’s plea hits home: breaking into tears, Massinissa rededicates himself to Scipio and asks only that he might honour his pledge to Sophonisba that he would never allow her to fall alive into the hands of the Romans. Scipio then cements the bond he has reforged with Massinissa through their mutual continence by bestowing lavish public praise and riches on him. Heterosexual abstinence plays such a large part in Scipio’s winning back Massinissa not simply because, as the Roman claims, it is the pre-eminent virtue of leaders, but because it operates within triangular situations, such as the two that I have discussed here, to forge homosocial bonds between men that are the templates for political alliances. Suppression of heterosexual passion accompanies the suppression of male rivalry as the emotional intensity shifts from the divisions between men to their commonalities. Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ encapsulates the personal and political alliance between Scipio Major and Massinissa by making it the context in which Scipio Minor meets the now aged Numidian king. As Cicero’s dream opens, the younger Scipio’s ‘greatest wish’ is to meet Massinissa, ‘a king for excellent reasons most friendly to [Scipio’s] family’ (133). Massinissa’s fascination, however, remains focused upon the elder Scipio in Cicero’s account, and the narrative by Livy just discussed explains why. The very name ‘Scipio’ refreshes Cicero’s Massinissa, the ‘memory of that excellent and invincible man’ never leaves his mind (133), and so he talks late into the night to Scipio Minor of nothing else but the departed Roman general’s words and deeds. Scipio Minor then falls asleep and dreams of the man, his adoptive grandfather, who still makes such a potent impression upon Massinissa. The Parliament’s version of the ‘Dream of Scipio’ contains Cicero’s

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three major figures, the elder and younger Scipios and Massinissa, but it alters their relationships in significant ways. In the Chaucerian dream, Britton Harwood argues, Scipio Elder represses an unspecified homoerotic desire by ascending (and raising his grandson with him) to a vantage point above ‘brekers of the lawe,’ which includes the law of nature. Left as the trace of this sublimation, Harwood continues, is the display of male homosociality that Chaucer creates within his version of the ‘Dream’: The narrator connects with Macrobius in their common appreciation of Cicero’s book (109–12). Then, within that book, Scipio [Minor] and Masinissa ... take each other in their arms ‘for joie’ (38). A trace of (an abandoned) sexual aim may survive in Chaucer’s phrasing: Cicero’s book, he says, tells ‘al the blysse / That was betwix [Scipio and Massinissa] til the day gan mysse’ (39–40). The phrasing ‘blisse ... bitwix’ occurs in two other places in Chaucer’s works, both having to do with the happiness of husband and wife. That they talk until the day begins to fade (a change from Cicero, where they talk ‘in multam noctem,’ ‘until late at night’) anticipates Venus’s lying in rest (having sported with Riches) ‘til that the hote sonne gan to weste’ (266). Chaucer does not specify the reason for the joy between Scipio and Masinissa and says nothing of their relative ages. In Cicero, Masinissa is an old man, and the two are meeting for the first time. (Harwood 129)

For Harwood, a further trace of suppressed homoerotic desire exists in the concept of ‘common profit’ promoted in the younger Scipio’s dream. This ‘“social doctrine of brotherly co-operation”’ betokens the fact that men have relinquished their rivalries with one another and, in the unconscious of the Parliament, ‘common profit’ thus anticipates Freud’s view that ‘“homosexual object-choice not infrequently proceeds from an early overcoming of rivalry with men”’ (129). In fact, the homosociality that Harwood detects in Chaucer’s version of the dream owes its literary origin to Cicero’s ‘Dream’ and, beyond that, to Livy’s account of the relationship between Scipio Major and Massinissa that I have just discussed. Chaucer’s most significant alteration of Cicero, however, is to project onto Scipio Minor the friendship that both Livy’s and Cicero’s Scipio Major had enjoyed with the Numidian king. In extending this homosocial relationship to Scipio Minor, Chaucer brings it into the present of the dream and re-envisions its origin. As Harwood notes, Freud’s unidimensional model posits the origin of homosexual object-choice, which leaves its trace of homosociality in the

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dream, in the early overcoming of male rivalry, yet Chaucer’s dream hints at a different paradigm: homosociality does not emerge through the suppression of male rivalry over women, as it does in the erotic triangle situations of the historical Scipio Major, but exists in its own right. At least this is the impression that Chaucer creates by failing to explain why or when the emotional, if not erotic, joy between Scipio Younger and Massinissa blossomed. With its seemingly natural – unmotivated – origin rather than an artificial root in historical source or literary tradition, the ‘blisse ... bitwix’ these two men anticipates the same-sex friendship and eroticism that emerge in Nature’s realm in the Parliament and that ultimately her expansive poetic can include. But if the classical world offered Chaucer numerous exemplars of male homosocial relationships, equivalent female friendships lacked such readily available precedents for the single reason that women have historically been more vulnerable to coercive heterosexuality and deprived of Scipio Elder’s freedom to control their erotic lives. The first task in expanding sexual choice for women in the Parliament parallel to that for men in Scipio’s dream involves the suppression of male heterosexual aggression. In the temple of Venus, which I next explore, Chaucer both acknowledges and deflects that threat. Priapus as Inclusa and Female Sexual Autonomy At the conclusion of the Parliament’s dream of Scipio, Africanus thrusts the narrator into Nature’s park, at the centre of which stands the temple of Venus. In the ‘sovereyn’ (supreme) place within Venus’s temple the narrator finds the phallic god Priapus. By means of this figure adapted from the Teseida, Chaucer both confronts and contains the menace of male heterosexuality to women. This section of the Parliament constitutes one of Chaucer’s two renditions of Boccaccio’s temple of Venus in the Teseida; the other occurs in the Knight’s Tale 1918–66. Bennet comments that the Knight’s Tale offers a ‘briefer précis’ of Boccaccio’s temple of Venus in the Teseida (85). Most notably, in the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer omits the figure of Priapus while, in the Parliament, Chaucer expands and ironically reshapes Boccaccio’s depiction of the god. In Teseida 7.60, Boccaccio personifies Palemone’s prayer and sends it aloft to Venus’s temple. The passage recounts the specific episode from Ovid’s Fasti 6 in which Priapus attempts to rape Vesta (Hestia) and refers obliquely to the figure’s function as a garlanded fertility herm or garden

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god: ‘And she [i.e., Palemone’s prayer] saw that Priapus held the highest place there, in such a garb that anyone who wanted to see him could do so, as when, with its braying the most slothful of animals aroused Vesta whom Priapus desired not a little and towards whom he was advancing. She also saw garlands of many different flowers throughout the great temple’ (178). Boccaccio’s source, Fasti 6.319–49,5 explains this episode of Priapus’s lust more fully. The virgin goddess Vesta (Hestia) had lain down to rest when the ‘ruddy guardian of gardens,’ Priapus, on the sexual prowl for nymphs or goddesses, spied her. Priapus conceived a ‘wanton hope’ and attempted to sneak up upon Vesta, but old Silenus’s donkey, tied nearby at the stream, ‘uttered an ill-timed bray’ just as the god was ‘getting ready to begin’ (343–5). Vesta awoke, the crowd rushed to her aid, and Priapus fled. Ovid’s other version of Priapus’s attempted sexual assault and frustration, in Fasti 1.415–40, tells how the god pursued the nymph, Lotus, during the Bacchic festival: Priapus sneaked up upon the sleeping Lotus and drew the cover from her body, but Silenus’s ass brayed and warned the nymph. Terrified, Lotus ‘started up, pushed off Priapus, and flying gave the alarm to the whole grove.’ His ‘obscene part’ still far too ready, Priapus ‘was laughed at by all in the moonlight’ (333). In Metamorphoses 9.346, Ovid refers to this version of the Priapus episode, alluding to the nymph Lotus who turned into a shrub, the lotus tree, as she fled Priapus’s lust, and it is the attempted rape of Lotus that later visual artists such as Bellini painted in his ‘Feast of the Gods.’ According to Emerson Brown (260), the short account of Priapus in the Parliament demonstrates ‘Chaucer’s confidence that he can call the whole context [Ovid and Boccaccio] to mind with a brief allusion’: The god Priapus saw I, as I wente, Withinne the temple in sovereyn place stonde, In swich aray as whan the asse hym shente With cri by nyghte, and with hys sceptre in honde. Ful besyly men gonne assay and fonde Upon his hed to sette, of sondry hewe, Garlondes ful of freshe floures newe.

(253–9)

Although Chaucer does not give the nymph’s name, readers have typically identified Fasti 1, the Lotus episode, as the ultimate origin of Chaucer’s version, even though Chaucer’s direct source, Boccaccio’s Teseida, clearly calls upon the Vesta incident in Fasti 6. Brown observes

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that the ambiguous syntax of Chaucer’s reference to Priapus having ‘hys sceptre in honde’ when Silenus’s ass put him to shame leads to the bawdy association of sceptre and phallus (261). Chaucer’s tone may remind readers of Ovid’s more mocking depiction of Priapus in Fasti 1 than in Fasti 6. Yet in the latter part of the stanza, Chaucer creates a broader irony about Priapus than the double entendre of his sceptre and emphasizes Priapus’s role as an emblem more of successfully thwarted sexual aggression than of frustrated masculine libido. The final lines of Chaucer’s description (257–9) accomplish this irony by shifting focus from Ovidian narrative accounts of Priapus’s pursuit of nymphs to Priapus’s role as fertility god and garden herm. Emerson Brown suggests that in his references to Priapus’s garlanding, Chaucer may be alluding to the ‘Roman practice of using statues of Priapus, with gigantic phallus erect, to ward off thieves and to serve as scarecrows.’ For instance, Virgil’s Georgics 4.111 calls ‘guardian Priapus’ the ‘watchman against thieves and birds’ (227), a reference to the Roman custom of setting up wooden figures of Priapus with sickle in hand to protect gardens against human and avian pilferers. Further, the Virgilian Priapea, three lyrics spoken by the personified phallic scarecrow, testify to the ancient custom of bedecking the wooden herm with vegetation appropriate to the season: In spring I am covered with roses, in autumn with fruits, in summer with ears of corn: winter alone is to me a horrid plague. (481) Lo! ’tis I, O wayfarer, I, wrought with rustic skill, I, this dry poplar, that guard this little field thou seest in front and to the left, with the poor owner’s cottage and small garden, and that shield them from the wicked hand of thieves. On me in spring is placed a garland gay; on me, in the scorching sun, the ruddy corn; on me the luscious grapes with tendrils green; on me the olive, when wrinkled by winter’s cold. (481) On me in flowery spring is placed a garland gay; on me the soft ear of corn, when first ’tis green on the tender stalk, with yellow violets and milky poppy, pale melons and sweet-smelling apple, and blushing grape-clusters, reared beneath the vine-leaves’ shade. (483–5)

‘For these offerings,’ the Priapus of the last lyric explains, he ‘must now make full return, and guard the owner’s vineyard and little garden’

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(485). His weapons are obvious enough. The thief’s cross will be his phallus, Priapus threatens, referring to the substitution of the club projecting from his groin for the cross on which the slave might be crucified for stealing (483). Explaining his name as ‘red Priapus,’ the god of gardens notes that ‘these weapons, too, of mine, – but you will be silent – a little bearded goat and his horn-footed sister besmear with blood’ (485). The precedent for this Roman phallic herm is the Greek god Priapos, who ‘as guardian of orchards and gardens, was represented as having a massive penis in a state of readiness to penetrate a thief of either sex’ (Dover 105). Boccaccio’s Priapus stands in a temple bedecked with flowers that represent the fertility worship of this figure. But Chaucer’s Priapus, himself about to be festooned with garlands, evokes the guardian herm celebrated in the Priapea that receives the relevant seasonal offering from those whose gardens it is his duty to protect. This herm of Priapic verse is a far more menacing figure than is Ovid’s Priapus (Richlin 102– 22). Emerson Brown identifies the specific threat of the Parliament’s garden herm in his suggestion that the men who ‘gonne assay and fonde’ (257) – ‘tried and tried’ – to get garlands on Priapus’s head must get around the obstacle of the herm’s huge penis (227). The question revealing the larger irony about Priapus thus emerges: as guardian of the garden, why is Priapus not standing out in the actual park of Nature that the narrator has entered? Why is he contained within Venus’s temple of brass like the secular inclusa, the ubiquitous lady confined to the tower in medieval romance? Bennett quite rightly observes that if Chaucer’s Priapus were playing the part of the god of gardens in the Parliament, ‘he would stand in the park, not the temple,’ and he would not be shown in his most ‘notorious guise’ – ‘naked and lustful’ (‘Parlement’ 92). The Parliament’s Priapus, however, is not simply the garden god. Priapus plays the contradictory roles of menacing herm and of frustrated ravisher of maidens as Chaucer’s intricate depiction of him deepens into irony. Metaphorically, Priapus the herm stands guard against figures like himself, who would reap the harvest of maidenheads, Vesta’s or Lotus’s. Further, not only does Chaucer’s Virgilian herm stand ready to penetrate his Ovidian alter ego, but he is doomed to fail in his duty to protect the garden against external thieves, men (or birds) like himself. In the Parliament’s walled park full of trees, flowers, and fruits, the gate stands ‘al open’ (133), and the most obvious potential thieves, the birds, free to enter over its walls, occupy ‘every bow’ (190) of the trees. These birds have nothing to fear, because the watchman in this garden cannot

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see them. It is enclosed within Venus’s temple of brass, which is guarded by Dame Patience and by Dame Peace, who holds a curtain over the door (240). Helen Phillips and Nick Havely suggest that the curtain ‘presumably shields the open entrance from light and dust’ (245n239– 40), and Benson notes that Peace may be raising the ‘bed-curtain’ on the temple of Venus (Chaucer 998n240), which, ironically, would reverse Priapus’s lifting the bed cover on Lotus in Ovid’s Fasti. But the curtain also shields the birds in the garden from the sight of the scarecrow Priapus. The narrator alone sees Priapus, because he enters the temple. Chaucer does not blindfold the garden herm merely to increase the comic frustrations of this figure. Priapus’s enclosure in the temple strongly forged from brass also contains the threat of male sexual aggression that Priapus’s attempted rape of Lotus and Vesta represents. Seen from the angle of Priapus’s intended female victims, masculine sexual ‘frustration’ is their triumph over coerced heterosexuality. In Ovid’s Fasti, Lotus herself fends off Priapus’s assault, and Vesta raises the cry that sends Priapus running. Implicitly, Priapus in the Fasti testifies to woman’s control of sexuality as much as any other male figure that Ovid drew. Neither Lotus nor Vesta, nor their deflection of the rapist, is mentioned in the Parliament, but the temple that contains Priapus testifies to woman’s agency. It is a female structure – Venus’s – built from her signature metal, brass. Its door is guarded by two women, Dames Peace and Patience, and around the temple continuously dances a group of many women. In this last detail, Chaucer rewrote Teseida 7.57 to exclude men; Boccaccio’s group of dancers contains both ‘[male] youths and ladies’ (177). And over Boccaccio’s temple of Venus fly sparrows, traditional symbols of lechery, and doves; over Chaucer’s temple fly hundreds of pairs of doves, Venus’s birds as well as Dame Peace’s, but no sparrows. However, sparrows, which Chaucer associates elsewhere with masculine lechery (Schibanoff, ‘Jane’s Cue’ 837–9), do have their place in the Parliament. In the list of birds in Nature’s realm, Chaucer includes the sparrow and calls it ‘Venus’s sone’ (351). Nor is Venus’s temple the exclusive preserve of women. In addition to Priapus at its centre, Bacchus, a Thracian fertility god and later god of wine, sits beside the goddess. The association of wine and libido, Bacchus and Venus, was common (Brumble, Myths 342); for instance, the Wife of Bath comments that ‘after wyn on Venus’ must she think (464). Venus’s temple is woman’s space, nevertheless, and not simply in the conventional sense that it is the realm of heterosexual love. The standard reading of the Parliament, which privileges Scipio’s masculine world of ‘common profit’ over Venus’s

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feminine hothouse of love, does not allow readers to see the enclosed Priapus as an emblem of female containment of male heterosexual aggression. It also occludes the fact that when women can say no to men, they may say yes to one another, as the erotic play between Venus and her female porter, Riches, in a secluded corner of that female space suggests: And in a prive corner in disport Fond I Venus and hire porter Richesse, That was ful noble and hautayn of hyre port – Derk was that place ...

(260–3)

Full recognition of what transpires in this passage has emerged slowly. Acceptance of it as a gloss on female sexual autonomy has yet to come. Bennett is aware that Riches is Venus’s ‘portress,’ but he fails to comment upon their ‘disport’ (‘Parlement’ 99). Spearing understands that Venus and her porter are ‘engaged in erotic play’ (Voyeur 216), but he neglects to mention that Riches is female. Rosemarie McGerr acknowledges the ‘hints’ of female homosexuality in this passage, but she associates them with the ‘suggestions of sterility’ and ‘barrenness’ in Venus’s court (89). Harwood thinks that the erotic pairing of these two women is ‘accidental’ on Chaucer’s part (127), perhaps a random materialization of the subconscious same-sex desire that Harwood posits in the Parliament. And, most recently, Kathleen Davis contends that if this is sodomy between Venus and Riches, it witnesses the fact that ‘the parliament’s destabilization of Cicero’s and Nature’s closed model of politics in order to open debate must unhinge ... sexual relations’ (‘Alogic’ 179). However, I have argued that viewing Priapus as an inclusa figure allows the subsequent ‘disport’ of Venus and Riches to be read in its own right as one natural consequence of female sexual autonomy, just as the ‘blisse ... bitwix’ Scipio and Massinissa earlier emerged as a natural attraction between these two men. Both attest to the queer expansion of sexual and affectional ties for men as well as for women in the Parliament. Rereading Semiramis From this same vantage point, one can reread another critical piece of evidence marshalled in the standard interpretation that Venus inverts Scipio’s ‘natural’ world of ‘common profit’: the roll-call of lovers that appears as a series of ekphrases on the temple walls. To Boccaccio’s list

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of Callisto, Atalanta, Semiramis, Pyramus and Thisbe, Hercules, and Biblis, Chaucer added eleven names (Candace, Dido, Tristan and Yseut, Paris and Helen, Achilles, Troilus, Cleopatra, Scylla, and Rhea Silvia). Because Chaucer’s enlarged list draws some of its new entries from Dante’s Inferno, it is cited to witness the ‘woes’ of Venus-worship (Bennett, ‘Parlement’ 105) and the ‘tragic potential of par amours’ (Heinrichs 249). Commonly read in the de casibus tradition of lovers who met ill fates, the Parliament’s predominantly female catalogue is thus assimilated to moral diatribes against women, the stock-in-trade of the anti-feminist literary tradition that never lost its hold in the Middle Ages (Blamires, Pratt, and Marx 10). Yet the same women who appear as anti-feminist exempla were also appropriated for medieval defences of women, and thus it becomes critical to analyse tone and voice (Block, ‘Misogyny’ 7) and, I shall argue, structure. The Parliament’s catalogue of lovers is structured differently from the standard anti-feminist de casibus diatribe as, for example, Chaucer represents it in the Wife’s prologue and as Jehan Le Fèvre constructs it in the popular Lamentations of Matheolus (c. 1371). Both Chaucer’s fictional book of wicked wives in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Le Fèvre blame women for outrageous acts in love, the outrage at least partly constituted by the fact that these women took control of their own eroticism. Le Fèvre rails against Queen Semiramis because, having introduced a law that allowed women to take for husbands whomever they wanted, she married her own son; against Myrrha, Biblis, and the daughters of Lot, Canace, and Phaedra because they also chose incestuous partners; against Pasiphae because she ‘lay down under a bull disguised in a hollowed out wooden cow’; against Scylla because her ardour for Minos led her to kill her father; and against Dido because she also ‘went too far’ for her lover, Aeneas, by taking ‘destiny into her own hands’ and killing herself after Aeneas abandoned her. Ostensibly, Le Fèvre’s catalogue illustrates that women ‘burn more passionately’ than men, but in fact it indicts women who take their eroticism or, like Dido, their very lives into their own hands (191–2). The list of lovers in the Parliament overlaps that in the Lamentations in notable instances, and if Chaucer’s catalogue stood on its own, it would expose these women to the moral scorn that Le Fèvre heaps upon them and readers implicitly express when they oppose Venus’s ‘likerous’ devotees to Africanus’s contempt for earthly love in the Parliament. Yet before Chaucer’s narrator sees the ekphrases of the Semiramis group of lovers who died for their passion, he enters that part of the temple in which he observes on the wall the broken bows of the maidens who wanted to

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serve Diana, chaste goddess of the hunt: Callisto and Atalanta. Chaucer found this shortlist of Diana’s followers in the Teseida 7.61 and expanded it in an occupatio to the effect that the narrator saw the stories of many other maidens devoted to Diana whose names he does not know (287). Chaucer also made distinct the structural division between Diana’s followers and the Semiramis company: the ekphrases of the latter group appear ‘on that other syde’ (293) from those of Callisto, Atalanta, and their ilk. In contrast, Boccaccio describes the two groups as if they occur together in the temple. Chaucer’s modifications of the Teseida are subtle, but overt enough to create the impression that the two groups differ in some fundamental way. Chaucer’s independent comment that the women in Diana’s section of temple were ‘maydenes swich as gonne here tymes waste / In hyre servyse’ (283–4) explains the basic difference represented by the two sets of ekphrases on opposite sides of the temple. Both Callisto and Atalanta ‘wasted their time’ in Diana’s service in the sense that both were forced into heterosexual unions. As narrated in Metamorphoses 2.401–507, Callisto, an Arcadian girl who dedicated herself to Diana, caught the attention of Jove when she was hunting. Jove disguised himself as Diana and approached her. As Boccaccio comments in his auto-gloss on the Teseida, ‘thinking that he was really Diana, Callisto rose and went toward her, and according to their custom, kissed her’ (McCoy 203). Inflamed by the kiss, Jove dragged Callisto into a secret part of the forest and raped her, and when Diana discovered Callisto’s pregnancy, she drove her off and Juno changed her into a bear, Ursa Major. Another maiden, Atalanta, swift enough to outrun the fastest man, Ovid comments in Metamorphoses 10.561, was warned by an oracle not to marry. ‘For this reason,’ Boccaccio glosses the Teseida, ‘Atalanta set the following conditions so that no one would ask her to be his wife: Whoever wanted her as his wife must run a race with her. If he outran her, he would have her. If she outran him, then he ... would be killed. Many young men died in this test, since no one could win’ (McCoy 204). Eventually, however, with Venus’s aid Hippomenes tricked Atalanta by distracting her with three golden balls and won the race, subsequently taking her as his wife. Callisto’s story is one of the most pathetic in the Metamorphoses, Brumble comments (Myths 62). Sexually victimized by Jove and then ousted from her female community by Diana, Callisto emblemizes the more general injury of masculine disruption of female homosociality. Her fate turns upon a kiss, a sign of intimacy, if not eroticism, between two women that becomes the impetus for Jove’s heterosexual violence that ultimately breaks the female association. Also the object, if not the victim, of male

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trickery, Atalanta represents the manly woman coercively normalized into the wife. Unlike Lotus and Vesta, both of whom thwarted their would-be rapist Priapus and remained part of their female communities, neither Callisto nor Atalanta could fend off their pursuers, and each lost her sorority. Seen in this light, the women named in the Parliament’s subsequent Semiramis catalogue take on the new shading adumbrated in Christine de Pisan’s effort to recuperate Semiramis herself. By Christine’s and Chaucer’s time, in the pro-feminine discourse that amounted to ‘sites of resistance against patriarchy,’ Semiramis had become popular for her ability to accomplish conventionally masculine endeavours (Blamires 240). In her Book of the City of Ladies (c. 1405), Christine first praises Semiramis for successfully ruling and defending her country subsequent to her husband Ninus’s death and then turns to the more controversial issue of Semiramis’s incest. Christine explains that two reasons motivated Semiramis’s act. Neither stemmed from Venus’s victory over her. Instead, Semiramis took her son as husband in order to retain her own position; for had her son married another woman, Semiramis would have lost her status as queen and reverted to queen mother. Second, no man other than the king’s son was worthy of her. In other words, power, not lust, motivated Semiramis’s incest, and Semiramis exercised that power honourably and nobly. Christine further explains that Semiramis’s ‘great mistake’ is understandable in a time when ‘there was still no written law, and people lived according to the law of Nature, where all people were allowed to do whatever came into their hearts without sinning’ (40). Had Semiramis thought her act was illicit, Christine assures her readers, she would never have married her son. Christine’s testimonial to Semiramis concludes with her designation as the first stone to be set in the foundation of the allegorical city of women that Christine’s narrator is building. Modern readers may dismiss Christine’s rationalization of Semiramis’s incest as casuistic, yet Christine’s invocation of natural law resonates with Chaucer’s response to the ‘unnatural’ lovers in Venus’s temple of the Parliament. Rather than justifying their acts during a former age of Nature as necessarily innocent, however, Chaucer creates the realm of Nature within the present time of the Parliament and concatenates Nature’s first appearance to the ekphrases of the Semiramis company in Venus’s temple. Chaucer’s associative coupling of Nature and the Semiramis group represents a departure from the Teseida, in which the Semiramis catalogue precedes the entry of Palemone’s personified prayer into the deep recesses of the temple where, lying naked on a bed, Venus resides.

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As Boccaccio glosses it, this sequence displays Venus’s malicious power and her victories over Semiramis and the other lovers (McCoy 205). In contrast, Chaucer rearranges the narrative so that immediately after viewing the Semiramis ekphrases, the narrator returns to the ‘swoote and grene’ (296) place where he sees the ‘noble goddesse, Nature’ (303), not Venus. Preceded by and juxtaposed to Callisto, Atalanta, and other innumerable maidens coerced into heterosexual copulation, Chaucer’s Semiramis group is narratively annexed to Nature’s realm. Unlike Boccaccio, Chaucer does not explain the Parliament in elaborate marginal notes. One must assume that the novel context that Chaucer creates for the Semiramis group – juxtaposed on one side to the victimized maidens and on the other to Nature’s realm – signals a different meaning than that specified in Boccaccio’s glosses, even if modern readers insist upon reading Chaucer’s temple scene as if it also demonstrates the woes of Venus-worship. Yet in a way Chaucer did create a rudimentary gloss on this section of the Parliament in his reference to the literary source of his Nature, Alan’s Plaint of Nature (316). Identification of a source text is uncommon for Chaucer. Despite the dependence of the Parliament on the Teseida, for instance, Chaucer never acknowledges Boccaccio’s text, and the effect of naming Alan’s poem is to privilege its relationship to the Parliament over that of the Teseida. I argued in chapter 5 that of the three major literary treatments of Nature that Chaucer assuredly knew – Alan’s Plaint of Nature and Anticlaudianus, and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose – the Plaint most fully exposes Nature’s unruly expansiveness and least successfully limits it. It is in this poem that Nature’s ancient ‘lesbian’ heritage from Aristotle emerges, a legacy that Alan’s Genius fails to suppress. Alan corrected Genius’s failure in the Anticlaudianus, I further argued, although Chaucer’s only overt reference to this work occurs in the House of Fame (986), not to gloss Nature but to contextualize the narrator’s extraterrestrial journey in the eagle’s grasp. Chaucer’s evocation of the Plaint’s wayward Nature at the juncture between the ekphrases of the Semiramis group and Nature’s physical description in the Parliament cannot help but suggest the association not only between Nature and Venus, but between Nature and all the women in and around Venus’s temple. Nature’s Kiss Chaucer’s Nature can hardly be said to have constructed a city of women along the elaborate lines of Christine de Pisan’s allegorical structure, yet

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the traces of sorority in the temple of Venus that I detect preface the franker expression of female sexual autonomy that surfaces in the annual mating of the birds under Nature’s supervision. Readers have struggled to interpret one incident in particular. Before the formel declines to enter the mating game, Nature dotes upon the comely bird, blissfully gazing at her and kissing her beak: Nature held on hire hond A formel egle, of shap the gentilleste That evere she among hire werkes fond, The moste benygne and the goodlieste. In hire was everi vertu at his reste, So ferforth that Nature hireself hadde blysse To loke on hire, and ofte hire bek to kysse.

(372–8)

In the first extended feminist reading of the implications of Nature’s kiss and of the formel’s subsequent rejection of a mate, Elaine Hansen privileges the formel’s ‘indifference’ to heterosexuality. The formel’s ultimate threat to masculine identity and power, Hansen claims, may not be woman’s excess sexuality or lack (castration) that figure so prominently in the writings of western antifeminists, but ‘indifference to masculine desire, not loving any man at all’: ‘it seems highly possible that the formel might indeed be one of Diana’s many nameless followers, who wish never to love any man.’ For Hansen, the ‘likelihood’ that the formel cares for none of her male suitors and is indifferent to heterosexual love is ultimately more threatening than her mere delay of consenting to one of them because it ‘undermines the naturalization of heterosexuality and marriage.’ Moreover, Hansen asks, ‘why should the formel desire, instead of [the] divine adoration by one of her own sex, any of the three egotistical, scrappy eagles who care only for themselves?’ (Chaucer 127–8). Hansen’s exploration of the formel’s detached response to heterosexuality waved a critical red flag in front of A.J. Minnis, who specifies the nature of the ‘very deep waters’ into which he fears Hansen unjustifiably steered her reading. But Minnis is less worried by the suggestion that the formel was indifferent to heterosexuality than by Hansen’s apparent attempt to eroticize the relationship between Nature and the formel. He judges the latter ‘a dubious procedure’ on the grounds that ‘the poet [i.e., Chaucer] who kept homosexual male practices as critiqued by Alan of Lille well clear of his own text would hardly be interested in introducing or implying homosexual female desire in its stead’ (Minnis,

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Scattergood, and Smith 303–4). Minnis clinches his rejection of Hansen’s reading by asserting that Nature’s attention to the formel is maternal, not erotic. In making this assertion, Minnis evokes the critical tradition that denies Nature’s kiss any erotic dimension. For instance, Bennett implicitly analogizes Nature’s adoration and frequent kissing of the formel to Alan’s Nature kissing the lovely maiden Castitas or Chastity (‘Parlement’ 153), even though the two scenes are in no sense parallel, and, in terms of the allegory, Nature herself need not have chaste intentions in kissing Chastity. Readers have also argued that the prospect of the goddess Nature kissing a bird’s beak is too comic to support an erotic interpretation, although one might also extend that line of reasoning to dismiss any serious import to the ‘courtly’ male birds’ pursuit of the formel. Even opposite-sexed birds kissing and courting one another in human fashion is no less humorous than Nature’s attention to the formel, as evidenced by the amorous play of a rooster and his favourite paramour – Chauntecleer and Pertelote – in Chaucer’s mock-heroic Nun’s Priest’s Tale. In addition to finding Nature’s kiss amusing rather than erotic, Minnis claims that it is meant to be seen as maternal: ‘Nature treats her creation just as a loving and proud mother would shower kisses on her child’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 304). But Nature’s gazing with ‘blysse’ upon the formel suggests an erotic context much more strongly than a maternal one, for elsewhere Chaucer twice associates the act of looking and bliss with women who evoke sexual rather than maternal responses. In the long effictio of Alisoun’s alluring physical appearance, the Miller remarks that ‘she was ful moore blisful on to see / than is the newe perejonette tree’ (MilT 3247–8), and after the Syrian merchants of the Man of Law’s Tale see the ‘blisful mayden’ Constance, they report to the sultan, who immediately conceives the desire to marry the Roman maiden (MLT 172). Chaucer’s rhyming of Nature’s ‘blysse’ in gazing at the formel with ‘kysse’ tinges the kiss with erotic, not maternal, overtones. Critical concern about the nature of Nature’s kiss has outweighed concern about the formel’s possible indifference to heterosexuality, which may code asceticism just as readily as it codes same-sex eroticism. Or, as Bennett reads the formel’s detachment, it may simply indicate sexual immaturity: too young to be ‘ripe for love,’ the formel has not ‘reached the stage of life at which to refuse to wed, like Gower’s Rosiphelee, would be to refuse to acquiesce in Nature’s purpose of continuating society’ (‘Parlement’ 159–60). But a reading of the kiss as an

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expression of Nature’s same-sex attraction to the formel lays bare the construction of heterosexuality. Since Hansen made her tentative suggestion concerning female homoeroticism in the kiss scene of the Parliament, other readers have proposed it directly. For instance, Lynch finds that Nature cannot keep her eyes off the formel and ‘with a delicate homoeroticism “ofte hire bek to kysse”’ (‘“Bowe”’ 85). And Harwood freely talks about the way in which the Parliament, inverting same-sex desire, ‘brings females together rather than males’ (125). Yet these detections of female homoerotic attraction in the Parliament have not been anchored in considerations of the poem that Chaucer asks his audience to bear in mind as it approaches his Nature, Alan’s Plaint of Nature. The common practice of reading Alan’s Plaint as an uncomplicated diatribe, with Nature’s ‘strong attack on homosexuality’ at its centre (Loomis 187), has discouraged queer readings of Nature’s kiss in Chaucer’s Parliament. Even Hugh White, whose Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition is based on the premise that ‘Nature need not be on the side of the angels in the Middle Ages’ and is ‘not always a benign and reasonable figure, standing for proper moral order,’ fails to probe the implications of the kiss scene in the Parliament. White acknowledges that the Parliament’s Nature dissociates herself from Reason (line 632) in her ‘apparent awareness of the obligation she is under towards the irrational desire of individuals,’ represented by the formel’s failure to ‘fulfil the [procreative] purpose that Nature has apparently established for her.’ But White maintains a firm distance between the formel and Nature in his claim that the ‘formel is apparently the only bird whose will runs counter to Nature.’ The formel may stand for humanity, White observes, with its propensity to failure and lack of fulfilment in both artistic and sexual performance, yet White’s Nature oddly remains above the natural human condition that she allegorizes. White fails to consider any possible erotic connotation in the passage in which ‘Nature is described holding the formel on her hand, admiring her and kissing her.’ Instead, he cites it to evidence the fact that ‘the noble birds are at the pinnacle of Nature’s order’ (Nature 238–43). Even though White acknowledges that medieval Nature might not stand for ‘proper moral order,’ his disinclination to consider Nature’s queer inclusiveness in the Parliament may devolve from his reading of Chaucer’s source, Alan’s Plaint. A figure of immense power and authority, Alan’s Nature is ‘very much on the side of the good,’ White insists, even if she is not altogether blameless in her appointment of Venus as

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her sub-vicar, since this ‘corrupt figure’ has less than an absolute commitment to procreation (Nature 95–6). Nevertheless, in the Plaint, White observes, there is ‘no distance between Nature and Reason: to follow Nature is to follow Reason’ (238). In the Plaint, then, White fingers Venus as the villain; in the Parliament, it’s the formel. And Nature herself, although not blameless, is nevertheless sanitized, which allows her to represent procreation, plentitude, and ‘inseminative orthodoxy’ (91), that is, virtuous heterosexuality. In contrast, I argued in chapter 5 that Alan’s Nature is too morally variable and various ever to represent, much less to enforce, inseminative orthodoxy; evoking her ancient ‘lesbian’ heritage as physis, disorderly Nature snarls the Plaint’s case against sodomy. Alan could not sanitize Nature, I further argued, so that she excluded sexual deviance. Instead, in the Anticlaudianus, Alan abandoned the failed natural argument against sexual heterodoxy and adopted a conventional – moral – case against it. Yet it is Alan’s uncorrected work, the Plaint, that Chaucer cites as the context for the Parliament’s depiction of Nature, and the effect of this gloss is to invite readers to detect the disorderliness of the Nature who dotes upon the formel and allows her indifference to heterosexuality. Ultimately, deciding whether Nature’s feelings for the formel are homoerotic, as Lynch and Harwood maintain, or homosocial is neither possible, nor, I think, necessary. The more significant point to recognize is that Nature’s rule allows women comparatively wide latitude in the expression of sexual and affectional bonds. The same holds true for men in Nature’s realm. I next argue that Chaucer rewrote the ancient narrative motif of the ‘contending lovers’ and the associated courtly tradition of the demande d’amour in order that Nature might validate homosocial relationships among the competing male birds and effect a ‘common good’ other than procreation per se. Contending Lovers, Demande d’Amour, and Narrative Hoax Willard Farnham has traced the history of the ancient folk tale, ‘The Contending Lovers,’ which lies behind what he sees to be the ‘central incident’ of Chaucer’s Parliament, the ‘indecisive’ conclusion to the birds’ debate over which of the three royal male eagles most deserves the formel. Essential elements of the version of the folk tale that Farnham finds relevant to the Parliament include the rival claims of two or more noble male lovers for the female beloved; the attempt to adjudicate the dispute by a judge or sometimes the beloved’s father, who is perplexed

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and unable to reach a conclusion; the frequent transfer of the decision to the maiden herself; and the customary ending of the tale ‘with no lover chosen and the problem still unsolved’ (14), the problem being, of course, which suitor most deserves the girl. Throughout its long passage from the orient to Arabia to fourteenthcentury Italy, this type of folk tale took on new aspects, but, Farnham emphasizes, it remained ‘above all a problem tale with an indecisive ending’ (16). Because it raises a question that it does not intend to answer, ‘The Contending Lovers’ is essentially a ‘hoax tale,’ by which Farnham means a narrative ‘intended all along to provoke discussion among the readers or hearers, after great interest has been aroused in the claims of the lovers’ (10). As a hoax tale concerned with noble lovers, Farnham further explains, ‘The Contending Lovers’ narrative is an unsophisticated prototype of the courtly questione d’amore or demande d’amour ‘evolved by the folk long before the Middle Ages, and Chaucer could not but see the similarity’ (24). Strictly speaking, the courtly demande d’amour did not require the trick ending in which the decision about the question of love that the narrative raises and appears to try to answer is never reached. As Brewer notes, the demande was a courtly exercise in discussing love, a predecessor of the parlour game. The questions, which appeared in various literary genres, including lyric, took many forms, frequently asking who makes the best lover. Is a knight or a clerk (cleric) the better lover? Is a maid, a wife, or a widow the best mistress? Love questions unrelated to the contending lovers motif were also posed. While the essence of the demande is an interrogative ‘dilemma, in which choice must be made between different but apparently equal values’ (Brewer, ‘Parlement’ 11), the person to whom the question is posed often reaches a decision. For example, Brewer cites Deschamps’s poem consisting entirely of love questions, one of which queries a lady about which of two suitors she would accept: a well-dressed and handsome man, or a man who is poorly dressed and ugly but strong and bold. She chooses the second and thus resolves the dilemma. Perhaps the best-known demandes occur in Andreas Capellanus’s Art of Courtly Love, which proposes a series of twenty-one love cases, many of which present the dilemma of choice between apparently equal lovers. In each case, the Countess of Champagne resolves the question definitively (167–77). Chaucer knew the genre from Boccaccio, who wrote essentially the same demande d’amour, first as a narrative with a decisive ending in Il Filocolo 4.31–4 and then as a hoax tale in Decameron 10.5. Boccaccio’s

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stories lie behind the Franklin’s Tale, the account of a wife, Dorigen, trapped into committing adultery by the apparent fulfilment of her ‘impossible’ request that the coast be cleared of rocks. When the seducer, Aurelius, hires a magician to create the illusion of a rock-free coast, the distraught Dorigen is commanded by her husband to uphold her so-called vow to maintain his honour, but the contending male parties – husband, lover, and magician – resolve the crisis by magnanimously releasing their claims upon one another. Chaucer’s hoax tale ends with the question: which man was ‘mooste fre’? Menedon’s tale in the Filocolo also resolves in a cascade of male magnanimity. Hearing of the husband’s ‘great generosity’ (261) in commanding his wife to honour her so-called pledge, the lover, Tarolfo, in turn releases the wife from her obligation to him. Even without having coerced the wife’s sexual favours, Tarolfo plans to pay his debt to the magical gardener Tebano, who created the impossible January garden. Not to be outdone, Tebano refuses to take any payment from Tarolfo. Menedon’s narrative concludes by asking which of the three men showed the greatest generosity. Menedon’s demande d’amour is not a hoax tale, however, since Menedon proceeds to answer his own question. He decides that Tebano displayed the greatest liberality of all. But the queen, Fiammetta, final arbiter of the matter, reverses Menedon’s conclusion to argue that the husband showed the most liberality. In her argument, Fiammetta indicates that the wife’s vow was ‘null’ (264) for several reasons, including the fact that it could not take precedence over her earlier marital vow. The effect of Fiammetta’s long dissection of the oath’s invalidity and instability is to reiterate the wife’s unwavering intention not to submit to Tarolfo’s seduction and to remind the audience of her efforts to ‘get rid of him’ (255) and of her grief, shame, and ‘painful melancholy’ (260) when the impossible garden materializes. When Boccaccio revised this narrative in Decameron 10.5, however, it morphed into a classic tale of contending lovers with an indecisive – hoax – conclusion to the demande d’amour. Emilia recounts the tale of the husband-wife-seducer triangle (Gilberto, Dianora, and Ansaldo, respectively) and the magician who creates the January garden. Like Menedon’s tale, Emilia’s narrative ends in a cascade of generous acts, but it makes more explicit the intricate homosocial bonding that develops among the men as Ansaldo’s sexual desire for Dianora is displaced by strong affectional ties to the husband. Gilberto’s command to his wife to fulfil her so-called vow strikes Ansaldo as the husband’s solicitude for him: ‘Moved by Gilberto’s generosity, [Ansaldo’s] desire began to turn to

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compassion’ (242). Ansaldo releases Dianora from her ‘promise’ on the grounds that he could not possibly soil the honour of her husband, ‘who had compassion’ for Ansaldo’s desire for his wife (242). In turn, Gilberto develops a bond with Ansaldo; ‘a very close and loyal friendship joined [Gilberto] and Messer Ansaldo’ (242). The magician then joins the act and renounces his fee. Just as Scipio Elder’s desire for the captive woman in New Carthage was quenched by his compassion for her fiancé in Livy’s history, compassion for other men extinguishes Ansaldo’s ‘sexual desire’ for Dianora and leaves burning in his heart only the ‘fire of honest charity’ for her (242). N.S. Thompson remarks that this tale’s ‘centre of interest lies in the change of heart in a courtly lover ... who, by the magnanimous gesture of another, is moved to curb his desire’ (260). Surely, narrator Emilia argues, the ‘nearly dead lady,’ Dianora, and her husband, whose love for her was ‘already tepid through lost hope,’ displayed a generosity far inferior to that of Ansaldo, who ‘loved more passionately’ and ‘held in his hands the quarry he pursued so long’ but released (244). Despite Emilia’s effort to resolve the narrative in Ansaldo’s favour, however, it remains a hoax tale; for the fictional female audience of the Decameron takes up a long debate as to whether Gilberto, Ansaldo, or the magician displayed the greatest liberality. The King interrupts this debate and calls upon Fiammetta to silence their arguments by telling her story, and the next narrative of the Decameron begins with no resolution to Emilia’s hoax tale. Emilia’s tale is a ‘hoax’ in another respect as well: unlike its counterpart in the Filocolo, her narrative diverts readers’ attention from the wife’s null vow and from her attempts to avoid violence between the husband and seducer by keeping her attempted seduction quiet.6 Instead, Gilberto chides his wife for even listening to Ansaldo – not the act of an honest woman, he accuses – and, by the end of the tale, his desire for Dianora has cooled to the point that it suggests her complicity in the near-adultery. This occlusion of female resistance to seduction is further achieved through the shift of narrative interest to the nexus of male homosocial bonding at the end of the tale. The lack of resolution to the demande d’amour fixates audience interest on the question of which man acted most generously and compassionately towards his brothers, not on the ways in which the wife’s so-called oath did not, in fact, match her clear intention to thwart sexual predation. Like Decameron 10.5, Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale employs the double hoax. Readers have differed over which version of Boccaccio’s demande

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d’amour presents the closer analogue to, if not source of, Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. By far the most important parallel among the three stories is that both Decameron 10.5 and the Franklin’s Tale are hoax narratives that conclude with the same unresolved demande d’amour – which of the three men, husband, would-be seducer, or magician, was most liberal – that occludes the wife’s effort to resist heterosexual coercion. Both Boccaccio’s Dianora and the Franklin’s Dorigen intend to thwart sexual predation through their impossible conditions, although their resistance is all but forgotten in the celebration of male homosociality masked as a demande d’amour that ends these hoax tales. Not only the fictional characters themselves forget what the women wanted, but the fictional readers apparently do as well. Neither the internal audience of the Decameron nor Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims say a word about the wife. Only in the Filocolo does the narrator, Fiammetta, gloss the tale in a way that reminds the audience of the wife’s original desire to thwart seduction and, as the queen does so, she resolves the love dilemma. Like Decameron 10.5 and the Franklin’s Tale, the Parliament contains a hoax demande d’amour concerning contending lovers. It raises and fails to answer the question of which male suitor most deserves the formel. But, like the Filocolo, the Parliament then proceeds to a resolution that refocuses attention on the formel’s experience. Through this hybridity, the Parliament promotes both female choice and the ‘common good’ for the male characters. The latter does not eclipse the former. By ‘common good’ I refer not to the traditional definition of it in the Parliament as procreation, but to an associated form of this aspect of Nature’s function: preservation of the species. In fact, the homosociality that develops among the contending male lovers of the Parliament precludes violence and possibly death. No one dies in a battle over love in Nature’s realm. Nature’s Demande d’Amour and ‘choys al fre’ In the Parliament, the competition among the three male eagles dissipates the menace of heterosexual desire both to the formel and to the rivals themselves. The form that this rivalry is allowed to take – verbose speeches from each contending lover that ramble on for the entire day – represents a female strategy: Nature’s. Jack Oruch misunderstands Nature’s tactic when he comments that she misconducts the demande d’amour, a courtly ‘institution with which she is (quite properly) unfamiliar: ... [Nature] calls upon the royal tercelet to choose his mate, unpre-

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pared for the tercelet’s remark to the formel and the formel’s deepening blush. Not comprehending the behavior of either bird, she only manages to say, “Doughter, drede yow nought, I yow assure” (448) as if the tercelet had threatened the formel. Nature does nothing to prevent two more eagles from delivering long pleas to the formel without being called upon, nor does she react when the other birds break in with objections, cries, questions, and opinions’ (25–7). To buttress this claim, Oruch points to Nature’s literary history as a ‘flawed heroine’ (29) with serious limitations and argues that she is ‘not to be taken as an emblem of perfection and unity in the Parlement’ (34). I, too, have invoked Nature’s disorderliness, yet in the Parliament it does not compromise the outcome of her actions with regard to the three male eagles. Like the wives in Boccaccio’s contending lover tales who set ‘impossible’ conditions for their would-be seducers rather than alert their husbands and precipitate violence between the men, Nature successfully prevents male heterosexual desire from destroying the rival lovers themselves and from threatening the formel, whose fear is evident in Nature’s reassurance of her, ‘drede yow nought’ (448). By contrast, in a narrative like the Knight’s Tale, the contending lovers Palamon and Arcite come to blows over Emily and clash again in the judicial duel that Theseus sets up to regulate their violence. After the first tercel’s plea to mate with the formel and the formel’s alarmed response, Nature does nothing to prevent two more eagles from delivering long entreaties. These pleas ultimately generate a homosocial nexus among the male contenders that, in the other version of the demande d’amour that I have discussed, occurs only in the denouement of the tale. In those narrative conclusions, as well as in Livy’s incident of Scipio and Allucius, each man vies to be more generous than his brother as an epidemic of compassion and gratitude breaks out among them and their desire for the woman in contention recedes. In the Parliament, the contending lovers do not develop such altruism but they, too, become emotionally obsessed with one another to the extent that internecine violence is precluded as their avowed heterosexual desire for the formel dissipates. Hansen remarks that ‘what is most notable about the rivals is what they have in common: their self-interest and their desire to compete in a male homosocial arena ... Each talks only about himself ... The formel’s self-centered suitors incrementally reveal their overwhelming interest in out maneuvering each other; they spend proportionately longer and longer segments of their speeches arguing not so much for their own love as against the claims of the other two ... the suitors’

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motivation is not love or even lust for the formel but entry into a verbal competition with the other rhetoricians’ (Chaucer 121–2). Hansen maintains that the eagles’s verbal contest ‘barely’ controls their ‘physical aggression’ (Chaucer 121–2). Nevertheless, these contending lovers do carry on their debate all day without physical violence. None of them throws down the gauntlet and demands combat as a way of resolving the rivalry, which suggests that the emotional connections among and between them, however tense and constrained, disperse rather than disguise any inclination to force. In fact, it takes the young male eagle to remind his rivals that the traditional remedy to their debate is a physical contest, ‘batayle’ (539), the judicial duel like the one that Theseus sets up for Palamon and Arcite. Prompted that, if they were real men, so to speak, they would engage in battle against one another to determine the winner, all three suddenly hop to and declare in one voice, ‘al redy!’ (540). But this solution to the love dilemma of the Parliament’s demande d’amour occurs to the rival lovers as such an afterthought that it humorously underlines the extent to which their verbal contention has protected rather than threatened their physical existence. By means of the homosocial debate among the contending lovers that Nature allows, she preserves rather than sacrifices her three prize male specimens. Despite the impatience of the lower-order birds over the delay in their mating ritual caused by the contending lovers – a restlessness that erupts into their suggestions that the eagles find other mates, stay single until they die, or continue to serve the formel unrequited – Nature herself never censures the aristocratic birds for their long-winded absorption with one another or for their courtly rhetoric. Nature earlier indicated that she favoured the first eagle as the formel’s mate, but it is apparently equally acceptable to her if that pairing and a potential ‘batayle’ with rivals do not occur, since the ‘common good’ is served in both events. Avoidance of bloodshed and death contributes to the ‘common good’ as much as procreation does, even if it lies outside Nature’s traditional province of generation. As a further flaw of Nature in the Parliament, Oruch notes that she allows the lower-class birds to debate endlessly. Ignorant of the conventions and procedures of the courtly demande and unenlightened by Nature (herself unaware of how the institution should work), the birds must improvise, and they fail to reach a consensus concerning the most suitable mate for the formel, Oruch argues. He concludes that Nature belatedly acknowledges ‘that her confidence in the ability of the birds to reach a consensus has been misplaced’ in her statement that although

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she has heard all their opinions, ‘in effect yit be we nevere the neer’ to a resolution (26–7). As I have shown, however, the failure of a demande -narrative of contending lovers to resolve the love dilemma that it raises is the common hoax motif that Farnham traces back to the ancient origins of this type of folk tale. Further, I have suggested that in Chaucer’s other fully developed demande d’amour, the Franklin’s Tale, as well as in one of its two closest analogues, Decameron 10.5, the hoax serves to divert audience attention from the intentions and desires of the woman who has become the object of sexual pursuit. If the Parliament concluded at line 619 with Nature’s declaration that resolution of the love dilemma is ‘nevere the neer,’ Chaucer’s poem would raise but not answer the conventional question concerning which male contender is the worthiest. Audience attention would settle upon weighing the various alternatives, just as the Franklin’s Tale forces consideration of its three male characters in the final few lines and precludes interest in Dorigen. Like Menedon’s tale in the Filocolo, however, the Parliament proceeds beyond the hoax of irresolution. Adapting the ancient folk tale convention that cedes the authority of final arbitration to the beloved herself, the Filocolo elects a disinterested female judge, Fiammetta, to make the decision, just as the Countess of Champagne and other noblewomen adjudicate the love questions in Andreas’s Art of Courtly Love. Further, in two of Andreas’s cases, the female judges grant the right to decide to the woman in contention. The fourth case asks which of two men a woman should choose when the men are equal and court her in the same manner and at the same time; the countess rules that while the man who asks first should be given preference, in the event of simultaneous proposals, it should be left to the woman to choose the man she prefers (169–70). In the eleventh case, which asks whether the good and prudent man who first seeks a woman’s love or the more worthy man who does so later should be given preference, the judge, Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne, contravenes the countess’s rule about priority and declares that the woman should decide which man she prefers (171). The Parliament’s conclusion resembles the female-oriented resolutions of both Menedon’s tale in the Filocolo and the fourth and eleventh demandes in the Art of Courtly Love. Like Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, Nature recentres audience attention on the female in contention, the formel; like Andreas’s countess and viscountess, Nature transfers her authority to that female figure to resolve the love dilemma. Yet the differences

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between the Parliament and these analogues put in high relief the unconventional inclusiveness of Nature as it is grafted upon her conventional role as judge in the demande d’amour. Fiammetta calls attention to the wife but only as she simultaneously renders a decision in favour of the husband’s worthiness, and both of Andreas’s female judges partly prejudge the cases they appear to turn over to women to decide, since they stipulate the choice of one or the other contending male lover. Heterosexuality is compulsory; opting out is not an option. In her role as procreatrix and pronuba, however, Chaucer’s Nature has also committed herself to the principle that each female bird must consent to a male’s request for her as spouse, and her ancient variety further disposes her not to coerce a heterosexual choice but to allow ‘choys al fre’ (649). The formel’s conclusion that she wishes not to make a decision ‘as yit’ is indeed decisive, although readers routinely interpret her words to mean that, unresolved in her own mind about the best mate, the formel wishes to defer the choice until the following year. For instance, Kurt Olsson comments that the contest among the three tercels is ‘unresolved, largely because the formel defers the “eleccioun, / Whoso he be that shulde be hire feere” (lines 409–10)’ (18). In fact, however, the formel requests ‘respit’ (delay) this year in order to ‘avise me’ (648), literally to ‘bethink herself,’ and after that to have her ‘choys al fre’ (649). The formel then echoes her decision resolutely: ‘This al and som that I wol speke and seye; / Ye gete no more, although ye do me deye!’ (650–1). The formel’s ‘no’ means ‘no,’ for this year at least, which seems to be the time span with which the birds concern themselves. As an afterthought, the formel adds that she will serve neither Venus nor Cupid in any way ‘as yit’ (653). Although her words are traditionally taken to indicate that she wishes to defer choosing one of her three male suitors, it is significant that the formel stipulates that her selection must be ‘al fre,’ completely free. She does not attach to it the heterosexual qualification that every other use of ‘choice’ as a noun or verb in reference to the Parliament’s concluding event carries with it: to choose a mate of the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation. For instance, Nature has just used ‘choice’ as a qualified verb – ‘hym that she cheest’ (623), ‘to chese a make’ (631) – to refer to the formel’s ‘eleccioun’ (621) of the male who pleases her most.7 True, after the formel stipulates that her choice must be altogether unconstrained and Nature agrees, Nature still encourages the male eagles to be of ‘good herte’ (660) and to continue to serve the formel, since a year is not too long for them to endure. Readers might conclude that the

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formel’s choice is already overdetermined by the heterosexual St Valentine’s Day mating ritual in which it occurs. But it is also true that the kiss scene has already revealed that something less than ‘inseminative orthodoxy’ rules in the Parliament, a poem that invokes the work in which Nature was shown to be unwilling or unable to suppress same-sex fertilities, Alan’s Plaint. Under Nature’s queer rule, the formel’s ‘choys al fre’ cannot exclude options that are other than heteronormative, and this freedom extends to the poetics of the Parliament as well, for sexuality and art correlate as closely in Chaucer’s poem as they do in Alan’s Plaint. This brings me to the issue that I have deferred until now: the narrator’s role as the loveless poet. As I next explore, traditional readings of the Parliament suppress the narrator’s queer stance by arguing that a heteronormative Nature teaches him the art of heterosexual poetics. The Narrator and the Heterosexualized Poetic of the Parliament The Parliament begins with the narrator’s assumption of his customary role in the dream trio as love’s heretic. The opening lines of the poem raise the issue of the narrator’s heterosexual credentials and exaggerate his lack of experience in love to crisis proportions: The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge, The dredful joye alwey that slit so terne: Al this mene I by Love, that my felynge Astonyeth with his wonderful werkynge So sore, iwis, that whan I on hym thynke Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke. For al be that I knowe nat Love in dede, Ne wot how that he quiteth folk here hyre, Yit happeth me ful ofte in bokes reede Of his myrakles and his crewel yre.

(1–11)

As Africanus ushers the narrator into the temple of Venus, he reiterates the narrator’s ‘errour’ of not knowing Love: ‘It stondeth writen in thy face, Thyn errour, though thow telle it not to me; But dred the not to come into this place,

298 Chaucer’s Queer Poetics For this writyng nys nothyng ment bi the, Ne by non but he Loves servaunt be; For thow of love hast lost thy tast, I gesse, As sek man hath of swete and bytternesse.’

(155–61)

But even if the narrator has lost his taste for love and ‘canst not do,’ Africanus promises that ‘yit mayst [he] se’ (163); for even those who do not know how to wrestle, he continues, like to watch and judge the sport. That said, he unceremoniously shoves the narrator into the place where he shall find material to shape into verse, implying that somehow the narrator will learn the amatory skills that trope the hylomorphic literary skills of inducing form into matter. Africanus’s apparent solution involves the shock therapy of directly exposing the narrator to the model of heterosexual literary production represented in the garden. This, at least, is the gist of Olsson’s reading of the Parliament, which takes its starting point in the trope of hylomorphic fertility in the Parliament associated with heterosexual generation: For out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

(22–5)

The trope raises several questions for Olsson: ‘How specifically, is “al this” knowledge generated or harvested? ... Does the human agent – not referred to in the analogy – merely find it there, or, as seems more likely, does he cultivate what he discovers into knowledge?’ (13). The harvest trope also identifies the crucial issue in the Parliament, which is discovery or invention, Olsson maintains, for ‘poets obviously must find matter ... before they can do what the handbooks teach: give that matter a fixed order and adorn it.’ There are two obvious sources for this discovery, Olsson continues. The medieval poet can freely generate inventions, an idea anticipated in the House of Fame, ‘where the whirling wicker cage, the house of tidings, provides the unformed or deformed images,’ or the poet can find ‘matter already formed’ by previous authors (14). Even in the latter instance, the poet must reform previously formed matter into his own composition, the process by which, Olsson maintains, Chaucer generated the Parliament, shaping topoi, commonplaces, and other narratives into his own art. Olsson’s Nature provides the model for inducing form into matter:

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‘Africanus supplies the “mater of for to wryte,” and the images then recorded by the dreamer, but obviously judged and shaped by the poet, constitute the invention. The Nature who appears in the last fables [of the poem] is the “noble goddesse” of tradition. The dreamer gains access to the natural order as well as to things historical and contingent because of the “pleasaunce” of her rule. In the last fables, she lends a form and significance to what otherwise might be chaotic and meaningless’ (23). The chaotic and meaningless – unformed – matter to which Olsson refers exists in the temple of Venus section of the Parliament. The images of frustrated love, especially Priapus, that the dreamer finds there represent the ‘shadowy region of hyle or primordial matter, of “matter divorced from form” returning to “primordial chaos.”’ The solution to the problem represented by chaotic matter, instability and change, is to let Nature ‘“inform”’ it, Olsson maintains. In the next section of the Parliament, Nature imposes order on this ‘unstable matter’ in her benevolent mating of all the birds, at the same time modelling for the narrator the hylomorphic creative process (25–7). Nature’s action of kissing the formel, Olsson continues, represents the imposition of form on matter: ‘This action has as its counterpart in Alain’s sensible sphere [in his ‘Sermo de sphaera intelligibili’] the action of Form, who “kisses the subject with the godlike kiss of inherence”’ (28). After Nature models the creative imposition of form upon matter in the kiss, her lesson bears fruit in the narrator’s composition, the concluding rondel that Olsson finds to be at the ‘metaphoric center’ of the narrator’s dream: ‘Like Nature in relation to her creatures, the poet instills form in his creation; like Nature, he draws his matter to resolution. In his creative act, however, the poet does more than “find” or imitate Nature: he recreates her, as well as all things surrounding her, in a new composition (nova compositio). In the roundel he fashions, he offers a resolution not achieved or provided by the figures he invents for the “imaginable” universe of his second fable. Most important, he recreates a cycle of nature which, unlike the dance around the temple of brass, fructifies. Change in the setting of the parliament leads to new creation’ (32). Olsson’s reading of the Parliament as Nature’s affirmative modelling of heterosexual poetics ignores the source that Chaucer overtly names, Alan’s Plaint, and relies upon a less troublesome personification, Form, in a text that Chaucer most likely did not know and in any event did not cite, Alan’s ‘De Sphaero.’ The claim that Nature’s kissing the formel is a

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trope for the imposition of masculine form upon feminine matter, which, in turn, converts a narrator at least ‘indifferent’ to heterosexuality into a metaphorically successful father-poet, thus rests upon a phantom figure, Form. Olsson’s heterosexualized reading of the Parliament cannot account for other anomalies: if Nature’s kiss represents the imposition of form on matter, traditionally analogous to the marriage of male (agent) to female (matter), what does the formel’s resistance to form, male mate, signify? In the images of frustrated love in the temple of Venus, Olsson argues, matter remains free of form, and it is that primordial chaos that later, in her avian realm, Nature serves to ‘inform’ with her shaping kiss. If so, why does Nature’s kiss fail to ‘inform’ the formel, that is, to mate her with a formative male principle, one of the eagles? As Olsson sees it, the loveless narrator’s poetic problem is that he lacks both literary matter, love stories, and the pattern of inducing form into them. When his dream supplies him with matter and models its shaping in Nature’s kiss, this queer narrator is born again as the patriarchal poet who composes the concluding rondel. Yet however loveless the narrator has been, lacking both matter and formative power, the fact is that he is represented as producing the narrative long before he meets Nature. Olsson assumes that this queer poet would ‘naturally’ become the fatherpoet of the rondel. Why would he do so? As I have argued throughout this book, the narrator of Chaucer’s dream trio initially adopted his stance as the queer foil indifferent to heterosexuality for the functional reason of deflecting censure from courtly men. By the end of the Parliament, however, that need no longer obtains; in Nature’s inclusive realm, the aristocratic, courtly males enjoy protection ‘naturally.’ Nature never implicates them as mincing courtiers more interested in words than actions. Indeed, Nature encourages these courtly wordsmiths to continue their verbal love service for another year. Further, Nature’s same-sex kiss cannot model hylomorphic poetics, and it does not convert the narrator from queer poet to father-poet in the Parliament. Instead, in Nature’s kiss lies an endorsement of a model of poetic production other than the traditional hylomorphic one that Olsson discusses, and I turn to the birds’ rondel to illustrate the alternative pattern of literary creation that sounds the penultimate note in the Parliament. ‘imaked ... in Fraunce’: Queer Art and the Rondel The queer art of the rondel is anticipated in the grove of trees that the narrator sees first when he enters the park of Nature. The flora Chaucer

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creates there differ markedly from the stand of tall pines that encircles Boccaccio’s temple of Venus in Teseida 7.54:

The byldere ok, and ek the hardy asshe; The piler elm, the cofre unto carayne; The boxtre pipere, holm to whippes lashe; The saylynge fyr; the cipresse, deth to playne; The shetere ew; the asp for shaftes pleyne; The olyve of pes, and eke the dronke vyne; The victor palm, the laurer to devyne.

(176–82)

Some readers find a realistic lack of eroticism in Chaucer’s catalogue, noting the incongruous reference to coffins and death in a love park, for instance, and others claim the native English trees as evidence of Chaucer’s naturalism in the Parliament. Yet the literary precedent of Chaucer’s catalogue reveals the queer resonance of this passage. The ultimate source of a list of trees with descriptive or functional epithets occurs in Metamorphoses 10 (Harwood 122), the episode in the ‘miniMetamorphoses’ in which pederastic Orpheus, having lost Eurydice and given his love to tender boys, strikes his lyre and produces the grove of trees. The last tree in the Ovidian grove, the cypress, leads Orpheus to narrate the episode of Apollo’s love for Cyparissus and then to sing of other boys, including Ganymede, beloved by gods. Even if Chaucer had taken only the ‘victor palm’ (Parliament 182) from the catalogue in Metamorphoses 10, Harwood maintains, he likely recalled the Ovidian passage because of the poet Orpheus’s role in the production of the grove (122). Further, I shall argue as the conclusion to this chapter, the hint of Orpheus’s queer poetic sounded at the beginning of the narrator’s journey through Nature’s park echoes in the rondel the birds sing as his visit ends. The readers who commonly observe that this rondel has tenuous textual legitimacy are often the same ones who find that the Parliament lacks closure and harmony (e.g., Hansen, Chaucer 131). What their reservation means, though, is that only three late manuscripts, all written after the 1440s, include the text of this song. None of the early and more authoritative manuscripts gives the actual ‘wordes’ of the rondel that the narrator says will come in the next verse (678–9).8 However, the two stanzas in which the narrator announces that the birds are about to sing the rondel and that trope its poetic are never in any doubt. Julia

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Boffey remarks that ‘the narrator’s careful introduction to [the rondel] is preserved in all surviving copies’ (31): And whan this werk al brought was to an ende, To every foul Nature yaf his make By evene acord, and on here way they wende. And, Lord, the blisse and joye that they make! For ech of hem gan other in wynges take, And with here nekkes ech gan other wynde, Thynkynge alwey the noble goddesse of kynde. But fyrst were chosen foules for to synge, As yer by yer was alwey hir usaunce To synge a roundel at here departynge, To don Nature honour and plesaunce. The note, I trowe, imaked was in Fraunce. The wordes were swich as ye may heer fynde, The nexte vers, as I now have in mynde.

(666–79)

In these stanzas, the pun on the word ‘make’ (lines 667, 669, 677) – ‘make’ as mate or spouse and ‘make’ in the sense of the poet who forges verse – brings to mind the heterosexualized concept of art that I have discussed throughout this book and that surfaces in Olsson’s reading of the Parliament. Yet it must also remind readers that such hylomorphic ‘making’ necessarily cannot constitute the sole poetic model that the narrator tropes here. As many as four of the possible birds chosen to sing this so-called hymeneal are unmated: the formel and the three courtly eagles.9 Further, in the note that it was the annual custom for the birds to select from among themselves who would participate in honouring Nature through song, the word ‘chosen’ (673) emphasizes the same point, for it resonates with the formel’s ‘choys al fre’ as well as with those birds that did ‘cheese a make.’ In sum, the poetic of the rondel rejects compulsory heterosexuality just as surely as the formel holds off mating. A few spurious lines added to the rondel by a later hand underline the point that I am making, because they find it necessary to impose inseminative orthodoxy upon the heterodox art of Nature’s realm.10 These bogus lines restrict participation in the creation of the song to those birds who have elected to participate in procreation: ‘Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte, / Sith ech of hem recovered hath hys make, / Ful blisful mowe they synge when they wake’ (687–9).11

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However, Nature excludes neither the unmated formel and the contending lovers nor, by extension, the unmated narrator, love’s heretic, from participating in artistic creation. In Nature’s realm, indifference to heterosexuality, homosocial courtliness, same-sex eroticism, and heterosexuality are all compatible with poetic making, as the heterogeneous group of singers suggests.12 In Nature’s realm, the poet-narrator has no need to play the role of queer foil; by the same token, the queer art that he has created is validated in the rondel. In the closing lines of the Parliament, when the narrator wakes and states his wish to read further in order to ‘mete’ (find or dream) some thing ‘for to fare the bet’ (698–9), he acknowledges his desire to recreate in his conscious or unconscious life the experience that he has just undergone. If there is a liberating moment for the loveless poet of love, it is here in the realm of Nature. The Parliament’s song in honour of this goddess is set to a melody (‘note’), the narrator explains, ‘imaked ... in Fraunce’ (677). The actual English words of the song may fluctuate from manuscript to manuscript, but the sound that readers metaphorically hear from afar, the melody, remains unalterably French. Minnis interprets this attribution as a gloss on the tired clichés of Nature’s park, a region at once fruitful and barren – heaven to some, hell to others – all of which is ‘the standard fare of the French love-visions, of every major account of the bittersweet nature of fin’ amors.’ ‘Perhaps in that sense,’ Minnis concludes, ‘Chaucer has not travelled beyond France after all’ (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 289). As I have read the Parliament, however, the poem represents a broadening of both sexual and poetic norms as well as an endorsement of the queer poetics that the reticent narrator of the Canterbury Tales would go on to employ so successfully. It is no small irony that the tune of the concluding rondel of this liberated poem was made in the country that readers have so persistently constructed as Chaucer’s prison: France.

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Au revoir: Queer Poetics and Chaucer’s Englishness

I have argued in this book that various constructions and biases of the nineteenth century (and earlier) coincided to produce the model by which, largely without acknowledgment, we continue to read Chaucer in the twenty-first century. Nationalism, imperialism, sexism, heterosexism, Whig ideas of history mapped onto the artist’s development, Burckhardt’s concept of the Italian Renaissance as grounded in freedom, and related notions came together to give us the Chaucer who escaped the French courtly prison to become the father poet of the Canterbury Tales. The proof of my claim must rest in what I have already said in the preceding chapters and in the new readings that I have proposed for the individual poems of Chaucer’s dream trio and for some of their sources. Yet I also recognize the utility, if illusionary accuracy, of the larger paradigms that we create to try to understand an author’s entire oeuvre, and I imagine that readers will expect me to suggest an alternative to what I have worked to deconstruct in this book: the conventional place of the Canterbury Tales in Chaucer’s literary career. If, as I have urged, we cannot read the Tales as the ‘natural’/English culmination of Chaucer’s artistic development, how do we view it when we attempt to think about Chaucer’s poetry (and prose) as a whole? This question is especially important to those of us who work with classrooms full of new readers of Chaucer, who are often less intrigued by aporias, impasses, fissures, and the like than more seasoned readers are. I suspect that it is not enough to remember that the Tales is not, in fact, the chronologically final work of Chaucer’s career; the composition of its various bits and pieces ranges from the 1370s to Chaucer’s last years, and, even then, the poem is most likely not in the final state towards which Chaucer was slowly moving it. It also may not be enough to recall that, when Chaucer was writing the House of Fame and the

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Parliament of Fowls, he was also drafting the narratives that he would later assign to the Second Nun, the Monk, and the Knight. The desire to see the Canterbury Tales as something discrete and different, something final, if not something English, is probably too deeply entrenched to be dislodged by factual chronology, by reminders that the work’s tendrils spider across Chaucer’s career. Nor is it enough, I suspect, to recognize that the range of geographic reference in the Tales is vast and spills over well beyond contemporary English towns and cities to faraway European and Asian nations and back to ancient lands and kingdoms, real and imagined. Indeed, the supposedly Gallic Book of the Duchess, localized at the end at ‘ryche hil’ (1319) (Richmond, Yorkshire), is far purer in its English geography than is the majority of itinerant Tales. Derek Pearsall reminds us that only seven tales of the Canterbury collection are set in contemporary England (299n34). Further, the very basis of continuing aversion to Chaucer’s dream trio – its basis in court culture – has also launched the raft of readings of these visions as allegories of historical events in the English court, usually something to do with royal marriages. Nor, of course, has it helped much to identify the French sources that Chaucer used in the Tales, starting with the conventional spring opening of the General Prologue and extending into the exemplars for the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath, and others. All of this is to say what the Canterbury Tales is not, not what it is. What I have suggested in this book is that by taking ‘English’ and its traditional associated concepts of father poet and ‘natural’ art away from Chaucer, space opens up to appreciate the queerness of his poetics. Throughout, my argument has been that making Chaucer ‘English’ was a predetermined way to occlude this queerness, for the construct of ‘Englishness’ at heart has encoded a homophobic anti-courtly polemic in the Chaucer tradition. By ‘queer,’ I have loosely meant ‘non-normative,’ and some readers may find that I have defined the term too freely or object that I have employed it all. But I have used the wide calibration deliberately because it has forced me to come to terms with the odd aspects of Chaucer’s verse that I have read over or around for years, many of which I have laid out in this book as I have discussed the dream trio. I cannot fully foresee where this queerness leads in the Canterbury Tales. That is the subject for another book. But I can see the kinds of reevaluations and questions that thinking about Chaucer’s queer poetics prompts, and I can at least glimpse a way of recuperating the Englishness of the Tales without its objectionable baggage of ‘-isms.’ Along with

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Louise Fradenburg, my goal in suggesting such a vision is to help to ‘attentuate and complicate’ the traditional boundary between Chaucer’s seemingly more ‘social,’ ‘lively,’ and ‘various’ Canterbury Tales and his earlier poetry (79), a boundary that Susanna Fein also seeks to erase by noting that the ‘elyvyssh’ other world of the earlier Chaucerian dream visions pervades the supposedly ‘realistic here and now’ of the Canterbury Tales (332). But the basis for my interrogation of this conventional divide is the figure of the queer. For instance, when the Chaucerian narrator includes himself with the final group of five pilgrims in the General Prologue, readers traditionally note the irony of Chaucer’s self-placement among these thugs and rascals who travel together at the end of the pilgrim company. However, two of the five ruffians, the Pardoner and Summoner, are apparently singing a love duet to one another, so in a sense Chaucer has also included his persona among the circle of the sodomites as it exists in the Tales. In saying that Chaucer situates his persona among the ‘circle of the sodomites,’ I recognize the similarity of my claim to Burger’s location of ‘Chaucer within his queer nation in the Canterbury Tales’ (Queer Nation xvii). However, I have deliberately invoked Dante because the Pardoner’s and Summoner’s seeming homoeroticism expresses itself through verbal art – song – just as verbal artistry is constitutive of sodomy in the Divine Comedy. Sensitive to the nuances of deviance, recent readings of the Comedy by Bruce Holsinger, Joseph Pequigney, John Boswell, and others whom I have cited in chapter 3 suggest ways of thinking about Chaucer’s queer art that allow Englishness to play its part, even though in a radically different role than has been envisioned so far. If Chaucer’s goal was to write England in the Canterbury Tales, he took on as daunting and novel a project as Dante did when he set out to write heaven in the Comedy. Chaucer’s method of accomplishing such a project did not logically require colloquialism, drama, quotidian detail, and other so-called naturalistic literary devices. Even if it was home to Chaucer, England, after all, was no more ‘natural’ an entity than Dante’s heaven was. Instead, Chaucer wrote England by creating non-aristocratic characters in the Canterbury Tales who say they are English and who speak their Englishness in myriad ways. Even if what they voice is often cribbed from French and other foreign literary sources, including courtly ones, they say it in local English, which evidences Chaucer’s desire ‘to appeal to some sort of communal consciousness,’ as Peggy Knapp remarks (144). By creating themselves through a common language, such characters

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require – and leave only enough room for – a narrator to record what they say. That is, they leave room for the queer artist who wears passivity over his agency, who claims outsider status even as he stands at the centre of the work. If we want to think of the Canterbury Tales as culminating anything in Chaucer’s literary career, the queer poetics that Chaucer explored and eventually associated with ‘lesbian’ Nature in the dream trio may be the best place to start. In fact, Chaucer wrote England in one way or another throughout his career. The narrative pose that Chaucer first adopted to write the English courtier in the Book of the Duchess served him well, for he subsequently developed it to write the English commons and clergy, that is, the Canterbury Tales. Hylomorphic poetics, I have argued in this book, is a theory of singular agency, domination, subjection, and exclusion in the sense that, like the sculptor, the artist pares away unwanted material to stamp his individual genius on the resulting literary product. Queer poetics, a strategy of listening and of validation, however, is ultimately a Bakhtinian or carnivalesque poetic of open-ended inclusiveness.1 When we think of inclusiveness in medieval English literature, we most likely recall the ‘fair field full of folk’ in Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s willingness to give voice, literally, to the third estate in fictional characters such as the Miller, the Cook, and the Wife in the Canterbury Tales. But Chaucer’s expansion of community goes beyond Langland’s. It extends beyond class and gender to diverse sexualities that we have only begun to acknowledge, to the man who marries late or reluctantly, to the woman who would not marry at all, and most notably, of course, to the deviant Pardoner, verbal artist par excellence of the Tales.2 Chaucer found no precedent for developing the last figure in the works of the ‘manly’ Boccaccio, who supposedly liberated him from the court. Rather, the validation came from the ancient figure of an inclusive Nature who emerged in the centre of densely abstruse high medieval works. Chaucer explicitly invited his audience to read two of these texts, but few of us have done so and then only to narrow the Plaint to an uncomplicated condemnation of homosexuality. If summoned from anywhere, the model for the Pardoner came from Chaucer’s own early efforts to find a way to include the suspect courtier by positioning himself as the queer artist. In the broadest way, then, one might say that the court liberated Chaucer to be ‘English’ in the sense of being widely communal. Until recently, estimations of Chaucer’s sociality, associational polity, and the like have ignored the figure of the queer. Instead, queerness should be the litmus test of Chaucer’s ‘Englishness.’ If we put French back into the ‘father of English poetry,’ a newly inclusive Chaucer is born.

Notes

Introduction 1 In contrast, the fifteenth-century poets who constructed Chaucer as the father of the English language, the first to embellish rude English, implicitly or explicitly praise French as the fount of his fructifying golden dew drops of eloquence. As late as 1700 John Dryden overtly locates Chaucer’s linguistic paternity in the refined French language: Chaucer ‘first adorn’d and amplified our barren Tongue from the Provencall, which was then the most polish’d of all the Modern Languages’ (160). 2 Even P.M. Kean, who pays more attention to the influence of prior English verse on Chaucer than most other readers do, credits trecento Italian writers, Dante in particular, with giving Chaucer ‘the idea of a new importance and seriousness in vernacular poetry’ (1:23). 3 For example, Beryl Rowland and the separate chapters on France and Italy in P. Brown. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann also devote separate chapters to Chaucer’s French and Italian inheritances even though the writer of the former chapter, Ardis Butterfield, argues that Chaucer is ‘always “already” French’ and that his French reading is less a source or phase than ‘a habit of mind and of language’ (34). 4 Patterson defines the Whig account of literary history as ‘the optimistic story of the emancipation of the poetic imagination from the tyranny of imposed forms’ (Negotiating 23). 5 For instance, Burckhardt argues that the tools of despots, including banishment, bring out the best (individuality) or worst (servility) in the exile. In Dante, exile produced the ‘freedom from the constraints of fixed residence’ (145–6). Burckhardt’s work was first published in German in 1860. 6 Hyder Rollins comments that ‘with justice [Kittredge] has been called the

310 Notes to pages 5–13

7

8 9

10

11

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most widely learned literary scholar yet produced in America’ (xi), and although current readers can find Kittredge ‘patronizing’ and ‘simplistic’ (Saunders 16) as well as homophobic, his ‘marriage group’ criticism remains the basis of much teaching of Chaucer (Dinshaw, Getting Medieval 123–4). Acknowledging ten Brink’s 1870 study, which I discuss shortly, Kittredge articulated this model of Chaucerian development as early as 1905, when he determined the date of Troilus and Criseyde. But it was in Chaucer and His Poetry that Kittredge fleshed out the liberation model and reached a wider audience than he had in the 1905 Chaucer Society publication. For other instances of the ‘patriotic impulse’ behind Furnivall’s study of Chaucer, see Ward. In turn, the French had long considered the English (Saxons) barbarous. In chapter 1, I cite early instances of the counter-accusations of the English and French. In 1478 William Caxton praised Chaucer as ‘first foundeur & enbelissher’ of English (75); c. 1540 John Leland commented that Chaucer had both French and Italian vernacular writers as ‘renowned leaders’ to follow (92); and in 1598 Thomas Speght noted that Chaucer enriched ‘rude and barren’ English on the model of Italian, French, and Spanish vernacular writers (143). Muscatine’s study drew upon a continuous but minority tradition in Chaucer studies that opposes the idea that Chaucer, a servile imitator of French verse in his early poetry, desired to escape the house of bondage. This contrary view typically shows up in monographs that study Chaucer’s relationship to specific French poets (e.g., Fansler). David Halperin observes that ‘“queer” ... demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative’ (Foucault 62). Tison Pugh specifies that positionality: ‘the queer can never be heteronormative; homosexuality, on the other hand, can in fact be part of cultural normativity,’ as it is, for instance, among original audiences of the Iliad (4). Cf. Burger’s rationale for using the term ‘queer’ to resist hegemonic power (‘Queer Chaucer’ 156–7). Carolyn Dinshaw cautions that the concept of a ‘norm’ is a nineteenthcentury invention that threatens to freight a past text with the imposition of extrinsic categories. Instead, she works to discern both valued and denigrated terms and categories associated with the sexual, erotic, and amatory in the text itself, which has been my effort in this book as well. She goes on to argue that what cannot be categorized – the residue, sometimes suppressed, as is incest in the Man of Law’s Tale – is queer (‘Approaches’ 281).

Notes to pages 15–17 311 14 Likewise, in medieval thought God functioned as the father of the world. On the analogy between divine and human creation in the twelfth century, see Hanning. 15 Chaucer would later describe God as ‘thow yevere of the formes, that hast wrought / This fayre world,’ glossed in one mansucript as ‘Deus dator formarum’ (Legend of Good Women 2228–9). On the sources of this passage, see Moses (226–9) and Bryant (194–6). 16 On the gendered asymmetry of Plato’s dualism in the Timaeus and elsewhere, see Genova. 17 Susan Hawthorne also notes that Diotima ‘draws no hierarchy of distinction between poetry and the creation of objects’ (86). 18 Prudence Allen discusses Aristotle’s indebtedness to Plato (123). 19 C. Witt discusses the illogicalities in Aristotle’s so-called scientific and metaphysical theory that male and female bodies have an equal amount of form, which is what distinguishes them as male and female; that women are defective in form and hence play an inferior and secondary role in generation; and his suggestion that form is male and matter female. She argues that location of form in the male and matter in the female ‘is not an intrinsic feature of hylomorphism. The locations of the better principle and the worse principle reflect the value accorded to men and women in Aristotle’s culture’ (129). 20 For example, the Hippocratic Writer of ‘The Seed’ (318). 21 These counterweights were stones, which gave rise to the slang term ‘stones’ for testicles as early as the Middle Ages. Thomas Ross cites examples in Chaucer (211–12). 22 On early theories of spermatogenesis, see Needham and Meyers. 23 On thermos as a Greek biological term, see Boylan (‘Challenges’ 95–6). Page DuBois discusses the contradiction in early Greek thought between the concept of the cold female body, unable to concoct sperm, and the figuration of the female body as an oven for the embryo (125–6). 24 Galen followed Aristotle on this point to assert that the ‘female is less perfect than the male by as much as she is colder than he.’ But, Galen continues, the Creator made woman ‘imperfect and, as it were, mutilated’ for a ‘great advantage’: her inability to concoct nutriment fully leaves enough material from which to constitute the fetus (On the Usefulness of Parts 630). 25 Since the mammalian ovum was not discovered until 1827 by K.E. von Baer, Preus further deems Aristotle’s assumption of the material role of catamenia one of the ‘more pardonable’ of his wrong guesses (8n11), yet Maryanne Horowitz observes that Aristotle’s obvious difficulties in explaining empirically evident resemblances between mother and offspring occasions legiti-

312 Notes to pages 17–50

26

27 28

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mate scepticism about why Aristotle was not more open to ‘the possibility of female formative influence on embryos’ (186n9). Johannes Morsink argues that Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of the four causes was ‘a great analytical tool’ in physics and that his attempt to apply it to biology exhibits a ‘scientific rather than sexist prejudice’ (99). Given the need to identify a material and a formal cause, Morsink finds it natural that the menstrual blood would be identified with the material cause. One might more accurately say that Aristotle’s devaluation of the female contribution to generation exhibits both scientific and sexist prejudice. Even the so-called two-seed theorists, such as Galen, who posited the existence of female seed, nevertheless either denied altogether or downplayed its importance in generation compared with male seed (Blayney 230–6; Boylan, ‘Challenges’ 107, ‘Theory’ 63). Two-seed theorists generally viewed female seed as a necessary lubricant or helpmate for male seed rather than as a partner in generation. It is misleading to suggest that ancient writers who posited the existence of female seed ‘emphasized the contribution which the female makes to conception,’ as does Halperin (Homosexuality 139). Horowitz outlines the long-lasting negative social and political impact of Aristotle’s masculinization of procreation. Aristotelian hylomorphic generative theory also survived largely intact into the Middle Ages (Hewson 52–3). R.M. Jordan observes that the ‘inorganic conception of art’ that I identify as hylomorphic ‘does not sit well with the modern interest in vital inner relations and organic interpenetrations,’ but it is also true that medieval embryological theory might strike the modern reader as ‘inorganic.’ Jordan also discusses Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s ‘inorganic’ artisan trope (42–3). Mary Carruthers comments on the lack of distinction in medieval thought between the machine and the human being (Craft 22–3). I am using ‘maker’ not in the restricted sense of the medieval composer of ‘purely recreative’ verse who is seen to oppose the classical and humanist ‘poete’ (Patterson, ‘Man’ 118–19), but in the sense of the earthly fabricator who imitates the divine Maker (Hanning). The medieval trope of ‘eating the book’ instances the ingestion metaphor. Thus, a medieval magister likens reading the scriptures to eating ‘solid food’ (Reynolds 14).

1. Anti-Courtly Polemic in the Chaucer Escape Narrative and the Queer Decoy 1 In a related way, Christopher Baswell observes that the Eneas voices and contains the fear that Eneas will be ‘heterosexually unmanned’ by what the

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8

‘reader already knows ... that Eneas is deeply in love with Lavine’ (‘Men’ 163); William Burgwinkle contends that ‘everything’ the Queen says in her tirade ‘is meant to be discounted’ (‘Hero’ 38). In contrast, Raymond Cormier argues, less effectively I think, that Amata’s vilification of Eneas cannot be disposed of easily, and its net effect is to bring the Roman hero down to ‘a more realistic, human level’ (221–8). When Lanval, who has fallen madly in love with an invisible beloved, withstands the queen’s temptation of him, the queen accuses him of loving boys (112–13). As in the Eneas, the false charge redounds on the accuser, since the reader has already been reassured of Lanval’s heterosexual passion. Castle expands the model to include lesbian bonding (67–73), and Marjorie Garber provides a lucid summary of Castle, Girard, and Sedgwick before arguing that the logic of triangularity is bisexuality (424–30). In contrast, my argument is that the logic of this particular Chaucerian triangle is heterosexuality yet not heteronormativity, for the straight couple is contingent upon the queer other. This statement occurs in the parody of Canticles, during which Absolon plays the role of the bride (Kaske 487). However, other readers believe, with Hansen, that both Nicholas and Absolon exhibit the ‘same complicated lack of certain manliness’ (Chaucer 233), which becomes especially evident when Nicholas substitutes his male body for Alisoun’s female body in the second window scene. But Burger maintains that the ‘potentially effeminate behavior of both men’ is ‘“remasculinized”’ in the branding scene (Queer Nation 23). In contrast, I argue that the overt and graphic physical effeminization of Absolon differentiates him from Nicholas to the extent that it mutes whatever suggestion of homology emerges in the second window scene, which in turn allows Nicholas’s reputation as the red-hot lover to persist among readers. My point centres upon the bonding of Nicholas and Alisoun against both John and Absolon. Nevill Coghill gives a similar rendition: ‘Though always taking bodily delight / On women, such as pleased his appetite, / As do these foolish worldlings’ (Canterbury Tales 375). Cf. Hieatt and Hieatt, ‘He was a bachelor for sixty years, / and all that time followed fleshly pleasures / in women wherever his appetite led, / as do these fools who are not in clerical orders’ (243), and Morrison, ‘In Lombard once lived a prosperous knight / Who had satisfied his fleshly appetite / On women sixty years without a wife, / As do these fools of irreligious life’ (265). Sterility was typically imputed to the wife, not the husband, although

314 Notes to pages 60–81 January’s use of aphrodisiacs implicates him. On sterility and male impotence in the Middle Ages, see Brundage 135–40; Bullough 41–2; Cadden, Meanings 228–57; and Murray, ‘Male Sexuality’ 138–40. 9 David Lawton notes that the nearest analogue to the Chaucerian persona’s stance as love’s heretic lies in Oton de Grandson’s ‘uncharacteristic poem,’ Le Songe Saint Valentin. However, Lawton continues, French love poets typically do not disconnect their persona from the experience of heterosexual love. By contrast, Chaucer ‘disorients [the tradition] by destroying the connection between narrative and narrator, poem and poet: his persona is not a lover’ (53). James Wimsatt (Music 106–7) and A.J. Minnis, V.J. Scattergood, and J.J. Smith (134–5) identify other differences between Machaut’s and Chaucer’s narrators. 2. Courtliness and Heterosexual Poetics in the Book of the Duchess 1 The assumed consolation of the Knight is widely voiced and has expanded into the unsupported assertion that the Book of the Duchess is ‘full of cure’ (Coleman 176). 2 For example, Katherine Heinrichs proposes such a reading of the Book of the Duchess on the grounds that the ‘duke would not likely have been offended’ and notes that Machaut ‘preached against love-sickness to Charles of Navarre’ (233). Even if Gaunt were amenable to receiving such advice from an underling, the question remains of whether Chaucer would have been likely to offer it so baldly. Deanne Williams makes a number of fine observations about the denigration of Chaucer’s French influences in the Chaucer tradition and notes Chaucer’s continuing use of French throughout his career (22). However, her reading of the Book of the Duchess, which argues that Chaucer plays English rusticity off against French urbanity to ‘draft a blueprint for English vernacular identity,’ relies upon the narrator-dominant argument that the dreamer forces the Knight to abandon ‘discursive complexity’ and adopt ‘bluntly corporeal’ poetic language (27) 3 Robert Payne also observes that none of Chaucer’s visions has a ‘“plot” as we ordinarily understand that term in connection with fiction; the themes are not externalized in a formally linked sequence of action and character’ (121). 4 Larry Sklute makes the related comment that ‘like all visionary literature, the dream vision is a complexly subjective form’ in which the ‘poet takes a version of self, generally in a benighted state, and provides him with experiences ... intended to lead to some kind of understanding’ (23). 5 Edwards argues that the Book of the Duchess emphasizes imagination over

Notes to pages 81–94 315

6

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10 11 12

memory, including mnemonic techniques (Dream 94), although he does not note the uses of memory systems in the poem that I identify here. Discussing the ‘consistent Greek tendency to regard homosexual eros as a compound of an educational with a genital relationship,’ K.J. Dover notes the equivalence between the Spartan terms for ‘breathe into,’ ‘inspire,’ and ‘fall in love with,’ the erastes (adult male lover) being the one who ‘breathes into’ the eromenos (beloved boy). Dover further suggests that such instructive inspiration tropes or at least corresponds to insemination; for both anthropologists and psychologists consider the ‘possibility that injection of semen by the erastes was believed to transfer virtue,’ the semen itself carrying the essence of the adult man’s qualities in which the boy was being schooled (202–3). Peter Dronke discusses the ‘explicit identification’ of scholastic ideas of intellection with courtly love and stresses the way in which the female human beloved, emblematic of angelic or divine power, actualizes the male lover’s innate potential (70–84). My rather different emphasis falls upon the way in which scholastic theories of intellection granted the male lover the same active power that the female beloved possesses, represented in the courtly narrative as the male’s self-activation or self-improvement. For instance, Aristotle’s assertions that ‘it is a sign of the man who knows that he can teach’ (Metaphysics 1553) and that ‘by hypothesis, the [teacher] has the knowledge and the [taught] has it not’ (Physics 327) at least suggest the common view of learning as the material transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. Further, Aristotle argues, teaching occurs because the learner’s intellect can be acted upon, and he equates the teacher with the master-worker in a craft who knows why he acts to cause what he does (Metaphysics 1552–3). So, it would seem, Aristotle’s teacher acts upon the student to cause knowledge in him. When Aristotle likens the human mind in the initial process of learning to ‘a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written’ (On the Soul 683), he invites the conclusion that the teacher’s act is to provide that script, just as Aristotle’s formative male principle can be said to inscribe the female principle in generation. Aquinas’s writing on pedagogical subjects, ‘The Teacher’ (De Magistro), occurs in his ‘Disputed Questions on Truth’ (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate) and in ‘Can One Man Teach Another Man?’ (Summa Theologiae 1a.117.1). The reversal of these two brothers’ roles in Genesis is not peculiar to Chaucer (Benson, Chaucer 975n1162). Cf. J. Anderson 219; Sklute 23–4. In line 96, the narrator remarks that he ‘made this book,’ although

316 Notes to pages 94–106 Thynne’s 1532 edition is the only late textual witness for this line, and Benson advises that Thynne’s unique readings must be ‘used cautiously’ (Chaucer 1136). 3. What Dante Meant to Chaucer: The Hermaphrodite Poetics of the Divine Comedy 1 See Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer.’ 2 Thomas Speght’s biography of Chaucer in his 1598 edition suggests that Chaucer may have met Petrarch on his 1368 visit to Italy (Spurgeon 1:cvii). Thomas Warton’s 1774 history of English poetry asserts that Chaucer met Petrarch, and probably Boccaccio, at Lionel’s wedding (227). In 1818 William Hazlitt repeated the idea that Chaucer and Petrarch had a ‘personal interview’ (277), and in 1829 Walter Savage Landor staged an ‘imaginary conversation’ among Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (173–6). Mario Praz recounts the ‘battle royal’ waged in the pages of the Athenaeum in 1898 over the question of whether Chaucer met Petrarch (72). But the meeting of Chaucer and Petrarch had already come under suspicion in the midnineteenth century, as evidenced, for instance, in Nicholas Nicolas’s discussion of Chaucer’s biography (68). 3 In pairing Chaucer as writer with the Wife as textual material, D. Wallace develops the argument that Chaucer earlier positioned himself as ‘the sixth of six’ (GP 542–4), alluding to the topos that combines five classical authors with a sixth modern one. Making himself into that sixth poet, Chaucer ‘identifies himself as just the man that the Wife is looking for when she welcomes her sixth husband,’ Wallace maintains (Chaucerian Polity 80–2). If Chaucer does coalesce his self-figuration as poet and as husband, he heterosexualizes the ‘sixth of six’ trope that Dante had employed in a male homosocial context in the Inferno, as I discuss later in this chapter. 4 In contrast, in his lives of the three illustrious Florentine poets (c. early 1440s), Giannozzo Manetti argues that because Dante committed himself to the Republic and to the active life, he is different from (superior to) Boccaccio and Petrarch, who both ‘completely disregarded the Republic’ and spent almost their whole lives in the contemplative world of private leisure and study (101). 5 Carolynn Lund-Mead surveys work on sexuality in the new Dante (200–2). 6 Rita Copeland argues that in Dante’s efforts to theorize a place for the vernacular in a ‘hierarchy of languages’ in De vulgari eloquentia, Dante does not question the terms of that hierarchy but simply inserts the vernacular into the place that Latin normally held (80–4). In the Convivio, however,

Notes to pages 106–20 317

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8 9 10

11

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13

14

15

while Dante allows Latin the nominally powerful role of master, he actually transfers power to the vernacular, nominally the servant. Although Copeland considers the class implications inherent in the conflict between Latin and the mother tongue uninflected by gender, her analysis nevertheless complements mine in its effort to understand how Dante theorized a place for the vernacular. M.D. Chenu discusses the traditional etymologies of ‘author’ and ‘authority’ in the Middle Ages (81–6); Ascoli identifies the innovative etymologies of Hugutio and Dante (‘Vowels’). See the discussion of Sordello’s sin in the Divine Comedy later in this chapter. Dante would have known Homer only through Latin translations, not in the original Greek. When Virgil first speaks in the Comedy, Dante indicates his native language by having him declare that he was born ‘under Julius’ in Latin (‘sub Julio,’ Inf. 1.70). In Purg. 24.143, Dante refers to both Virgil and Statius as his teachers (‘dottori’), but never bestows the title on Statius alone. And although Dante commonly confuses the genders in the Paradiso, as I discuss later in this chapter, he never refers to his female guide, Beatrice, as ‘dottore.’ Instead, Beatrice acknowledges Virgil as Dante’s teacher (Inf. 5.123). According to Boccaccio, Dante himself eventually became a teacher of rhetoric or poetry (Bergin, Dante 210). ‘And among these sinners / Are most condemned / Those who are sodomites. / Ah! How they perish, / Those who against nature, / Are trapped in such lechery!’ (Holloway, ‘Il Tesoretto’ 143). Armour concedes that ‘some gay or bisexual men do marry and have children,’ but finds such a conjecture doubtful in Brunetto’s case when coupled with the lack of contemporary evidence for Brunetto’s homosexuality (‘Pessimist’). In this 1994 article, Armour renews the attempt to ‘clear Brunetto’s name’ that he began in his 1983 essay (‘Paterine?’). Vance is a notable exception. Although he strips Brunetto’s sin of sexual meaning on the questionable grounds that the historical Brunetto acquitted himself of the duty of paternity, his reading develops the ambiguities that exist not between Dante and Brunetto but between us – as men and women of letters – and Brunetto as rhetorician (‘Seed’). Brunetto’s major work, Li livres dou Tresor, an encyclopedic compendium of knowledge, is in French. It was quickly translated into Italian as Il Tesoro. Brunetto wrote his other major but shorter work in Italian and called it ‘Il Tesoretto,’ the ‘little treasure,’ to distinguish it from the longer, French work. On several occasions in the Italian poem, Il Tesoretto names itself ‘tesoro.’

318 Notes to pages 120–41

16

17

18

19 20

21

Conceivably, Brunetto’s reference to his tesoro in Inf. 15.119 could indicate either the French or the Italian work, but most critics maintain that Brunetto refers here to his major text, the French Tresor. Madison Sowell argues, however, that Dante means Brunetto to refer to both works (‘Tesoro’). Alison Cornish remarks that while Dino virtually attributes the authorship of the poem to the ‘donna,’ he later re-establishes the hierarchical relationship between the woman and the male poet by casting her as the student who asks to be taught and him as the master who can teach her (172). My discussion of courtly love and scholastic intellection in chapter 2 suggests that the role of teacher in this poem is more complicated than this, but I agree with Cornish’s general point that once Dino’s commentary heterosexualizes Guido’s lyric, it demotes the ‘donna’ and reaffirms the ‘natural’ order between man and woman (173). Those who discuss hermaphroditism in Purgatorio 26 at any length – Boswell (‘Dante’), Holsinger, Pequigney – confine themselves to its moral or scientific implications. Specific discussions of poetics such as Barolini’s (Poets), which probe the wider textual implications of Brunetto’s sodomy, do not analyse the metaphorical implications of hermaphroditism. Closest to the reading I develop here is Schnapp’s ‘Solecisms,’ which makes the general point that the hermaphroditism of Purgatorio 26 participates in Dante’s larger strategy of articulating ‘the intersection between the “feminine” world of vernacular lyric and the “masculine” world of Latin epic, the world of Beatrice and the world of Virgil’ (207) as he constructs his new hybrid literary genre: the Christian epic. However, Schnapp does not discuss why the poets Guinizelli and Daniel atone for their hermaphroditism or what it implies about Dante’s poetics. De animalibus 18.2.3 (trans. in Cadden, Meanings 212). Cadden further explains that Albertus’s warning about the bisexual ability of hermaphrodites undermines the assurances that his source, Aristotle, offered when the latter depicted the hermaphrodite as basically one sex or the other who accidentally – and secondarily – possessed the other sex’s organs. Verbum abbreviatum 138 (trans. in Boswell, Christianity 376). Holsinger reads the pilgrim’s comments about Daniel in Purg. 26.137–8 as referring to Guinizelli, yet his point about the homoerotic connotations of the scriptive relationship between the pilgrim and Guido does not require lines 137–8 as evidence. Rosa Maria Menocal argues that Dante actually damns Daniel with the faint praise of calling him a ‘craftsman’ (99–104), although this reading not only strains the literal meaning of the rest of the passage but underestimates the

Notes to pages 141–79 319 craftsman trope, since ‘fabbro’ is a term of utmost praise, which Dante applies to the ultimate craftsman, God, in Purgatorio 10.99. Boyde discusses the numerous positive connotations and denotations available to Dante and other medieval writers in troping God as craftsman (232–4), and Barolini makes a convincing case for the intensification of the poet Dante’s early admiration for Daniel in the Comedy. Although Dante rarely acknowledges influence, Barolini notes that, in De vulgari eloquentia, he ‘explicitly says he copied Arnaut in the composition of his sestina,’ and the Comedy, in turn, makes overt the De vulgari’s ‘implicit tribute to a master stylist’ (Poets 99–100). 4. The House of Fame: Geffrey as Ganymede 1 Jane Chance also argues that it is specifically Dante’s Ganymede in the Purgatorio that Chaucer evokes here to serve as both parallel and contrast to Geffrey (61). 2 Christopher Baswell stresses the hermeneutic difficulties that following the different strands of the classical and vernacular traditions of the Aeneid caused the narrator (Virgil).The argument I develop in this chapter is indebted to Baswell’s reading but differs in emphasis. I see Geffrey’s difficulties as arising from the narrative stance that he must adopt in order to convert Aeneas from warrior to lover. 3 In contrast, John Fyler reads the eagle’s phrase ‘“not ... as yet”’ to underline the ‘improbability’ of Jove’s stellification of Geffrey (Chaucer 44). 4 Both Sarah Spence and Georgia Nugent argue that Virgil complicates his presentation of ‘dangerous’ Dido by eliciting reader sympathy for her as well. 5 Not only Dido carries the stigma of the orient; Aeneas was initially compromised by his origins in Phrygia (Troy), which, in Orientalist tradition, is a ‘site of effeminacy’ (Delany, ‘Geographies’ 237). But Aeneas has moved westward, away from that site. Suzanne Akbari finds the the concept of a pre-New World ‘orientalism’ anachronistic, but both Kathleen Davis (‘Time’) and John Ganim (‘Orientalism’) indicate the ways in which the concept is justified. 6 Anthony Boyle reads Vulcan’s hesitation more widely as one of numerous moments of resistance to the movement towards Rome in the epic (156), but since Venus’s heterosexual seduction enables the epic’s eventual act of Romanization through Aeneas’s shield, Vulcan resists heterosexuality itself. 7 Howard Patch points out the resemblance of Chaucer’s desert to that in the Panthère d’amours attributed to Nicole de Margival and in other French love poems that use a desert to represent the lover’s despair. Fyler surveys the

320 Notes to pages 179–206 many other sources, including Dante’s Inferno, that have been suggested for Chaucer’s ‘feld ... of sond’ as well as various readings of the type of sterility that it represents (‘Notes’ 981n482–8). My reading focuses upon the ‘unnatural’ connotations of the Dantesque desert. 8 Chance recognizes that both the palace of Fame and the whirling house of Rumor were ‘feminized’ by Chaucer (59, 78–9), whereas my point is that they have also been masculinized. 9 Kay Stevenson surveys various readings of the conclusion of Chaucer’s poem and finds most persuasive those that argue for its inconsequentiality. Minnis surveys various historical candidates who have been suggested as the ‘man of great authority’ and finds them unconvincing (Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith 168–70). 5. Disorderly Nature: Aristotle, Alan of Lille, and Jean de Meun 1 Edgar Knowlton also surveys medieval Nature (‘The Goddess Nature,’ ‘Nature in Middle English,’ and ‘Nature in Old French’). 2 White subsequently tempers this view of Alan’s Nature with the concession that ‘there may be some implicit criticism of Nature’ and that ‘we are entitled to ask questions about the complicity of Nature with this corrupt figure [i.e., Venus] whose commitment to procreation is much less than absolute’ (Nature 94–5). Nevertheless, White argues that Nature in the Plaint stands for ‘moderation and restraint in sexual behaviour as well as inseminative orthodoxy’ (91). 3 Gary Cestaro maintains that ‘the older, broader idea of nature as all creation was still very much in reach of a thinker like Dante ... Dante is caught between an idealized eternally generative Natura and a more empirical appreciation for her immense variety’ (97). 4 Both Leupin and M. Jordan stress the failure of the Plaint to construct a coherent case against same-sex sodomy, as I do in this chapter. For opposing readings, see Herman 76–7 and Keiser 71–92. 5 Eugene Vance maintains that scholastic thinking characterized ‘bad metaphors’ as tropes that subvert truth and leave the listener ‘barren of the truth’ whereas ‘good metaphors’ had the potential to edify and fecundate the listener with the truth (245) . Yet ‘bad language’ is often ascribed agency and potency in medieval literary works. For instance, Cleanness snarls its charge of non-fecundity against the unclean language of the Sodomites and Babylonians by claiming, in Monica Potkay’s paraphrase, that their ‘filthy language can be just as efficacious as clean speech, but what it effects is sin’ (103; emphasis mine).

Notes to pages 208–35 321 6 Cf. Leupin: ‘the reader might easily believe that sodomic falsigraphy is no more than the avatar of what ancient rhetorical theory had long before termed poetic license. The principal figures of poetic license are all defects that Alan attributes to sodomic writing – metaplasms, barbarisms, linguistic vice and such. And true to fact, those vitia that condemn the mediocre poet are interpreted merely as so many signs of the master’s genius ... But the difference here is that the falsigraphic poet, far from deploring his improper (vitiosus) use of the language, revels in it’ (67). 7 Jane Nitzsche finds Genius’s roles as poet and priest or philosopher complementary (109–14), whereas I read Genius’s change of garb and medium (writing to speaking) as indicating a split in his function. 8 Collingwood summarizes Aristotle’s seven meanings: ‘origin or birth’; ‘that out of which things grow, seed ’; ‘the source of movement or change’; ‘the primitive matter out of which things are made’; ‘the essence or form of natural things’; ‘essence or form in general’; and ‘the essence of things which have a source of movement in themselves’ (80–1). A.O. Lovejoy and G. Boas identify sixty-six meanings of nature (447–56). See also Lovejoy. 9 Collingwood remarks that Aristotle’s fusion of the final (formal) and efficient causes differs from Plato’s concept, which keeps the two separate (84). 10 John Winkler explains that in colloquial language, ‘Phusis’ and ‘Natura’ meant ‘genitals,’ both male and female (app. 2), although the point I emphasize here is that, in ascribing the formative cause of generation to Nature, Aristotle gave her a male function. 11 Medieval manuscript illuminations typically endow Nature with a conventional feminine physique and female attire. For instance, see Economou (front cover illus.; Pierpont Morgan Library MS M. 132, f.118v), and Dahlberg (fig. 61). 12 Assuming that Nature and Genius are already married, Ziolkowski remarks that ‘their marital relationship dates from the early days of the universe’ (Grammar 44). 13 Ziolkowski notes Alan’s choice of yle rather than res for ‘matter’ and of ydea rather than forma for ‘form,’ but does not comment upon its significance (Grammar 44). Both res and forma are grammatically feminine. 14 Elizabeth Keiser takes the relative silence of Jean’s Nature’s on same-sex relations as evidence that the Romance articulates a lower level of homophobia than does the Plaint (131–2), whereas I maintain that Jean’s Genius reserves to himself the all-important task of condemning same-sex relations. 15 D. Kelly observes that the only sexual vice Nature names – sodomy – is polyvalent and includes homosexuality, virginity, and so on (113). As I argue

322 Notes to pages 235–72 shortly, however, Genius’s reference to Orpheus associates Jean’s scriptive metaphor for sodomy specifically with homosexuality. 16 Jean’s Genius aims his diatribe not only at perverse sexuality but at celibacy. He condemns love’s heretics, those who will not wield the plow, pen, hammer, as well as those who plow and forge incorrectly, that is, those who perversely ‘plow in the desert land’ (324) and who do not forge ‘as they justly should on the straight anvil’ (323). He cautiously skirts direct mention of incorrect writing through ambiguity: ‘May their styluses be taken away from them when they have not wished to write within the precious tablets that were suitable for them’ (324). 17 John Friedman recounts alternative endings to the Orpheus legend in classical poetry and asserts that Orpheus’s homosexuality is not ‘central’ to the myth (8–10), although Genius’s reference to Orpheus the poet in the context of metaphors of writing and a diatribe against sodomy calls to mind the pederastic bard. Brownlee identifies Ovid as the source of both Alan’s and Jean’s Orpheus (‘Song’). 18 Orpheus does not write, of course, in the Metamorphoses, but he sings. When Jean’s Genius refers to Orpheus as a writer, he reflects the fact that Orpheus’s verse manifested itself in written form to Ovid’s medieval readers. 6. ‘imaked ... in Fraunce’: Nature’s Queer Poetics in the Parliament of Fowls 1 The bird debate is taken to be the more immediate harbinger of the Canterbury Tales because the Parliament is commonly dated as the last of the dream trio, a convention that I examine later in this chapter. 2 Besides royal marriages, other historical occasions for the Parliament include English parliaments from 1376 on. Most recently, Michael St John proposes the Good Parliament of 1376. 3 Braddy concluded that the Parliament fits into what Kittredge called the ‘transitional period’ from French to Italian influence, but this does not account for his assignment of the same passages to both periods of Chaucer’s artistic development. 4 The continence of Scipio was a popular motif for Italian cassoni (marriage chests), Cristelle Baskins observes, because it signalled to the young men who were being encouraged to marry and have children that they must also avoid ‘unseemly preoccupation’ with domestic affairs and devote themselves to civic and political duties outside the feminized sphere of the house. Baskins further argues that the continent Scipio was inoculated against suspicions of homosexuality through classical and Renaissance accounts of

Notes to pages 272–308 323

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him as lustful and corrupt, possessing the ‘phallic potency’ that shored up his ‘normative heterosexuality against the lack of desire he demonstrates relative to the Celtiberian princess’ (120). Jane Chance notes that while the Fasti was not well known in the Middle Ages, its passage concerning Priapus and Lotus frequently appeared in mythographic manuals and commentaries, which commonly linked Priapus, god of gardens, with Hymen, god of weddings (98). In contrast, Robert Edwards argues that the wife ‘defer[s] the menace of desire’ through ‘improvisational guile’ by which she invites a male suitor into an ‘erotic trial’ that is impossible to win (Chaucer and Boccaccio 161–3). For the use of ‘choice’ in the heterosexual context of mating, see Parliament 310, 370–1, 388–9, 399, 400, 406, 408, 417. Phillips and Havely review the textual evidence and conclude that the rondel may be of Chaucerian origin but was most likely written separately from the Parliament and not inserted into it until sometime in the midfifteenth century (279). K. Davis remarks that the rondel ‘functions as a hymeneal to the newly betrothed birds,’ although earlier she describes the rondel as a ‘departing song in Nature’s honor’ (‘Alogic’ 161–3). I view the rondel as the latter because the singers are not restricted to the mated birds and, in any event, honouring Nature does not require privileging marriage. Phillips and Havely discuss the attempt in a late-fifteenth-century Scottish manuscript (MS Arch. Selden B.24) to heterosexualize the Parliament by mating the royal tercel to the formel (280). H.M. Leicester proposes that the Parliament creates harmony in the rondel by excluding from vision those things ‘that do not fit the project,’ which is mating, although his reading is in part dependent upon the spurious line 688, which heterosexualizes the singers – and the project (31). David Aers relies on lines 673–92 to argue that the rondel expresses ‘the unabashed release of sexual frustration that has undoubtedly exacerbated social antagonisms and individual aggression’ (14). In a similar vein, John McCall argues that consonance is the final result of the various dissonances of the poem (30).

Au revoir: Queer Poetics and Chaucer’s Englishness 1 Robert Sturges argues that the ‘fragmentary’ Pardoner, obsessed with the physical dismemberment that associates him with Orpheus, emblemizes Chaucer’s own ‘queer’ art, which takes the form of a fragmentary text with

324 Notes to page 308 innumerable variant readings. A queer textuality would honour variants often dismissed, especially those that ‘find further support for the sodomitical’ relationship between the Pardoner and Summoner (141–52). 2 The Pardoner has long been the touchstone for explorations of deviance in Chaucer and, in the last several decades, for dissident readings of Chaucer. For instance, see Burger, ‘Pardoner’; Dinshaw, ‘Touches’ 79–80; Howard, Idea 333–87; Kruger, ‘Pardoner’ 83–5; McAlpine; Sturges. Explorations of deviant eroticism elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales often jump off from the Pardoner (e.g., Cox).

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Index

Absolon, in Miller’s Tale, 52, 63, 94; physical attributes of, 54–5; as queer decoy, 55–8, 313nn4, 5 accessus ad auctorem, 22, 109, 134, 148–9 Achilleid (Statius), 115, 128, 187, 246 Achilles: in Anticlaudianus, 246–7; Dante as, 127–8; sexual transformation of, 128–9, 136–7; Statius on, 115, 128, 131–2 Aeneid (Virgil), 12, 114, 170, 176; geographical focus of, 162; goals of, 161; as model for Chaucer, 157, 159–61, 164; as model for Dante, 122; women in, 160–1 Aers, David, 323n11 Africanus, in Parliament of Fowls, 268, 297–8; continence of, 273–5. See also Scipio agriculture, as hylomorphic metaphor, 20–1 Akbari, Suzanne, 319n5 Alan of Lille, 12, 139, 143; on orthography vs falsigraphy, 208–9; on poetry, 202; on unnatural sex, 205–6; use of metaphor by, 203–5 Albert of Saxony, 124

Albertano of Brescia, 104, 105 Albertus Magnus, 139 Alighieri, Pietro, 148–9 alimentary metaphor, 21, 312n30 Alisoun, in Miller’s Tale, 53, 54–5 Allecto, in Anticlaudianus, 240 Allen, Prudence, 311n18 Allucius, 271–2 analogia, 208 anastrophe, 208 Andreas Capellanus, 43, 289, 295 Anne of Bohemia, 262 Antepurgatory, 115, 123 anti-courtly polemic, 12, 27–8; Catholic Church and, 43–5; Francophobia and homophobia in, 35–8 Anticlaudianus (Alan of Lille), 199, 284; abandonment of Nature in, 256; Achilles in, 246–7; Arithmetic in, 249–50; Grammar in, 242, 249–50; heterosexualized poetics of, 250–2; idealized fertility in, 252–6; liberal arts in, 248–9; narrator of, 251–2; Nature in, 240–2, 248, 288; Nous in, 254; novus homo in, 241, 245, 247–8, 252; Orpheus in, 242–4; Reason in,

352

Index

248–9; sexual orthodoxy of, 244–5; Venus in, 246–7; view on masculine fashion, 241–2, 245; view on sodomy, 239–40, 242, 244, 246; Virgin Mary in, 249–50 anxiety of influence, 22 aporia, 193, 195, 305 Aquinas, Thomas, 20; model of learning of, 83, 84–5, 315n9; on sexuality, 138 Aristotelian prologue, 22, 109 Aristotle, 15–19, 321nn8–10; influence on medieval thinkers, 183, 199; influence of Plato on, 311n18; views on intellection, 111; views on learning, 83–4, 315n8; views on male and female bodies, 311n19; views on procreation, 18, 84; views on spermatogenesis, 16, 110, 311n22 Arithmetic, in Anticlaudianus, 249–50 Armour, Peter, 118, 317n13 Art of Courtly Love, The (Andreas Capellanus), 289, 295 Art of Love (Ovid), 169, 171 Ascoli, Albert, 108, 113 Atalanta, 282 Augustine, 214 Aurora (Peter of Riga), 55 author, etymology of term, 107–9, 113 Averroes, 85 Bacchus, in Parliament of Fowls, 279 Baer, K.E. von, 311–12n25 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12 Baranski, Zygmunt, 107 Barkan, Leonard, 127 Barolini, Teodolinda, 106, 119, 130, 145, 318n17, 318–19n21

Baskins, Cristelle, 272, 322–3n4 Baswell, Christopher, 160, 167, 178, 312–13n1, 319n2 Battersby, Christine, 225 Baugh, A.C., 263 Beatrice, in Divine Comedy, 126, 144, 317n11, 318n17 beauty, description of, 90 bees, as metaphor for literary creation, 21 Bennett, J.A.W., 184, 186, 259, 260–1, 280, 286 Benson, Larry, 262, 315–16n12 Benton, John, 43 Bernard, Saint, in Divine Comedy, 144 Bernardus Silvestris, 233, 254 Bersuire, Pierre, 243 Bertran de Born, 125 Bethurum, Dorothy, 76 birds: as metaphor for knowledge, 81; as metaphor for lechery, 279; as metaphor for love, 80; as metaphor for thought, 152–3 Bisson, Lillian, 121 Black, Jeremy, 6 Black Knight, in Book of the Duchess, 64, 67, 77–8, 82, 93; as poet, 91–2, 93–4; relation with Whyte, 86–9, 91–2 Blanche, duchess, 65, 262 Bloch, Howard, 161 Bloom, Harold, 22 Boas, G., 321n8 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 4–10 passim, 106, 316n4; demande d’amour, treatment of, 289–92; on Divine Comedy, 121, 149–50, 317n11; ‘French’ vs ‘Italian,’ 265; influence on Chaucer, 102, 103, 104, 105, 264–7, 308; lover’s persona of, 165;

Index ‘poetaphysics’ of, 213; putative meeting with Chaucer, 316n2; view of Florence of, 103 Boethius, 211–12 Boffey, Julia, 302 Boitani, Piero, 309n3, 316n1 Bonagiunta da Lucca, in Purgatorio, 115, 129–30, 135; role of, 130–1 Book of the City of Ladies, The (Christine de Pisan), 283 Book of the Duchess, 6, 34, 39–40, 63–4, 200, 314nn1, 2, 314–15n5; abandonment of courtly constraints in, 30; Calin on, 38–9; class issues in, 67–8; dating of, 261; effictio in, 91; escape from feminization in, 40–1; eulogistic strategy of, 66; Francophilia in, 38–9; French influence on, 10, 11; geography of, 306; hunt motif in, 80–3; inner schoolroom of, 87–9; inspiration of, 65; introduction of, 78–9; Kittredge on, 27; knight-centred readings of, 67–8; learning and teaching in, 75–8; literary authority of, 92; love and courtliness in, 77; memory in, 72–3; narrator in, 66, 76–8, 94, 95; queer decoy in, 29, 64, 66, 96; panegyric in, 96–7; Lee Patterson on, 32–4; pedagogical issues in, 68, 82–3; power issues in, 81, 96–7; Ian Robinson on, 29–32; sources of, 76–8, 92 Boswell, John, 48, 118, 202, 307, 318n17 Botterill, Steven, 107 Boyde, Patrick, 133, 318–19n21 Boyle, Anthony, 319n6 Braddy, Haldeen, 265, 322n3 Brewer, Derek, 289

353

Brink, Bernhard ten, 5–6, 9, 261, 263, 309n7 Brown, Emerson, 276–7, 278 Brownlee, Kevin, 95, 238, 322n17 Brumble, David, 225 Burckhardt, Jacob, 5, 309n5 Burger, Glenn, 3, 29, 34, 310n12 Burgwinkle, William, 29, 59, 312–13n1 Burns, Jane, 28 Butterfield, Ardis, 309n3 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 137, 139, 148 Cadden, Joan, 136–7, 217, 318n18 Calin, William, 38–9 Callisto, 282–3 Camille, Michael, 187 Campbell, Thomas, 7 Canterbury Tales, 6, 10, 11, 34; Englishness of, 307–8; importance of, 305; irony in, 106; naturalism in, 199; predecessors of, 258–9, 267, 322n1; queer decoys in, 29; queerness in, 306–7; retraction to, 65. See also names of individual tales carnivalesque, 12 Carruthers, Mary, 71, 72, 81 Castle, Terry, 313n3 catamenia, 17, 311–12n25 Cavalcanti, Guido, 117, 135 Caxton, William, 310n10 Cestaro, Gary, 320n3 Chance, Jane, 175, 319n1, 320n8, 323n5 Chaucer, Geoffrey: as champion of vernacular, 160–1, 165–6, 310n10; chronology of works, 6; contrasted with Dante, 9–10; at court, 32; Englishness of, 8–9, 306, 307; as

354

Index

father-poet, 33, 34, 95; French influence on, 3–5, 10–11, 13, 260, 261, 303, 308, 309n3, 310n11; Germanic influences on, 9; government service of, 101–2; historical attitudes towards, 3–5; influences on, 3; interpretations of, 305; Italian influences on, 6, 7, 9–10, 101, 102, 105, 106, 150, 153–5, 264–7, 309nn2, 3; Italian travels of, 101–2, 316n2; liberation narrative of, 4, 12; possible homosexuality of, 176; tripartite, 4–5; view of God, 311n15; women’s presence in works of, 28 Chaucer criticism: escapism and, 63–4; 15th-century, 309n1; Francophobia in, 7, 8, 9; homophobia in, 5, 7, 34–5 Chaucer Society, 6 Chenu, M.D., 317n7 Chibnall, Marjorie, 35 Chrétien de Troyes, 44 Christine de Pisan, 283 Chute, Marchette, 260 Cicero, 44, 267–9, 270–1, 272, 273, 274 Claudian, 240 Clemen, Wolfgang, 75, 89, 155, 175, 179, 259, 265–7 Clement of Alexandria, 243 Clerk’s Tale, 59 Coghill, Nevill, 313n6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8 Collingwood, R.G., 215, 321nn8, 9 Collins, James, 83 Confessio amantis (Gower), 169 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), 69, 81; as allegory of education, 211–12; message of, 213

‘Contending Lovers, The’ (folk tale), 288–9 Convivio (Dante), 106, 107, 114, 130; as champion of vernacular, 109–12, 135, 316–17n6 Cooper, Helen, 56, 62 Copeland, Rita, 316–17n6 Cornish, Alison, 136, 318n16 Cornog, William, 246 Cottrell, Stella, 7 courtly love: in Book of the Duchess, 66; as class marker, 45–6; as female invention, 42; as feminized masculinity, 28, 40; gender dynamics of, 28–9; Hansen on, 40–1; intellection and, 315n7; polemic against, 27–8, 44–5; primogeniture and, 43; queerness in, 29; ritual nature of, 43; scholastic intellection and, 83–6 courtly poetry: Eleanor of Aquitaine and, 31, 33; as expression of male desire, 31 Crane, Susan, 53 curialitas, 43–5, 51 Curtius, Ernst, 74 Damian, in Merchant’s Tale, 60–3 Daniel, Arnaut, in Purgatorio, 115, 137, 139, 141–2, 318nn17, 20, 318–19n21 Dante Alighieri, 4–10 passim, 13, 158, 179, 316nn3, 4, 317nn9–11, 318–19n21; as champion of vernacular, 108, 110–11, 112–13, 116, 149–50; contrasted with Chaucer, 9–10; critical views on, 105–6; exile of, 309n5; influence on Chaucer, 101, 102, 105, 150, 153–5, 159; queer identity of, 106, 110, 114;

Index queer poetic of, 118–20, 126, 256; self-assessment of, 116–17; selfpresentation of, 114 Dares, 187 David, Alfred, 75 Davis, Kathleen, 280, 319n5, 323n9 De animalibus (Albertus Magnus), 318n18 De architectura (Vitruvius), 168 De mundi universitate (Bernardus Silvestris), 233, 254 De musica (Boethius), 183 De officiis (Cicero), 44 De Robertis, Domenico, 124 De vulgaria eloquentia (Dante), 107, 114, 316–17n6; influences on, 137; poetics in, 112–14 Decameron (Boccaccio), 103, 104, 289, 290–1, 295 Delany, Sheila, 152, 183, 193 demande d’amour, 289–92; as courtly exercise, 289; in Parliament of Fowls, 292–7 Derrida, Jacques, 193 Deschamps, Eustache, 289 Desmond, Marilynn, 157, 175 Dictys, 187 Dido: depiction in House of Fame, 177, 319nn4, 5; presentation of in vernacular vs classical Aeneids, 161–4, 174–5 differance, 193 Dino del Garbo, 135 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 3, 13, 60, 310n13 dit amoreux, 69, 79 Dit de la Fonteinne Amoreuse (Machaut), 78, 82, 94–5 Divine Comedy (Dante), 12, 69, 107; autocitation in, 130; contemporary critical attention to, 148–9; didactic

355

aspect of, 71–2; divulgazion in, 116; geography of, 126–7; memory in, 71–2; power issues in, 107; queer identity in, 114; queer poetic of, 115, 307; pedagogic issues in, 117; transformation of poetics in, 131. See also Inferno; Paradiso; Purgatorio divulgazion, 116 domino theory of the self, 36 Donatus, 208 Donna me prega (Cavalcanti), 135–6 Dover, K.J., 315n6 dream trio, 11; critical tradition regarding, 11–2; didactic function of, 69–70; queer poetics in, 23, 308; sequence of, 72. See also Book of the Duchess; House of Fame ; Parliament of Fowls dream vision, genre of, 69–70 Dronke, Peter, 315n7 Dryden, John, 8, 309n1 DuBois, Page, 311n23 Duby, Georges, 43, 47 dynamis, 17, 19 Ecclesiastical History (Orderic Vitalis), 27, 35 Eclogues (Virgil), 141, 252 Economou, George, 200, 202 education: Aristotelian view of, 84, 315n8; and courtly life, 85–6; in dream poems, 69–71; instructional vs infusional view of, 68–9; medieval views of, 73–6, 83; power relations in, 74–5; refuelling model of, 83 Edwards, Robert, 95, 314–15n5, 323n6 effeminacy, 37, 39, 54–6 effictio, 89, 90–1, 94 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 30, 33

356

Index

epicene: marriage of Nature and Genius in Plaint of Nature, 228–9; nouns, defined by Quintilian, 229 erotic triangle, narrative device of, 51, 52, 63–4, 95, 96 escape narrative, 4, 13, 23, 28, 33, 34, 40, 42, 47, 53–5, 63, 195, 199; Dante’s function in, 101, 102; heterosexuality in, 105; Nature in, 258, 260; origins of, 8 etymology, importance of, 107–9, 113–14 Exhortation to the Greeks (Clement of Alexandria), 243 fabbro, 135, 141, 144, 318–19n21 falsigraphy, 208, 210 Fame, in House of Fame: home of, 189; masculine nature of, 190; opposed to Rumor, 189–90; poetics of, 192; queerness of, 195–6 Farnham, Willard, 288, 289, 295 fashion, attitudes towards, 36–7; of Alan of Lille, 223, 241–2, 245; of Chaucer, 42, 47, 55; of Orderic Vitalis, 44–5, 57, 94 Fasti (Ovid), 275–6, 279, 323n5 father-poet, 15, 19, 20, 21, 23, 33, 92–4, 106, 112, 155; Black Knight as, 96; Dante as, 112, 114, 134, 150 fatherhood, 157, 177 Fein, Susanna, 307 feminization, male, problem of, 40, 41, 47 Ferrante, Joan, 119, 143 Filocolo (Boccaccio), 151, 165, 289, 291 Florence: Chaucer’s travels to, 101; democratic episode of, 103; distinguished from Milan, 103

Fradenburg, Louise, 307 France: attitudes towards English, 310; influence on Chaucer, 3–5, 10–11, 13, 260, 261, 303, 308, 309n3, 310n11 Francesca da Rimini, 118 Francophilia: and Book of the Duchess, 38–9; courtliness and, 39 Francophobia, 3–5, 44; in Chaucer criticism, 7, 8, 9, 11, 153; courtliness and, 39; historical examples of, 35–8 Franke, William, 116 Franklin’s Tale, 290, 291–2, 295 Freccero, John, 130, 132, 133, 134, 142, 144 Friedman, John, 243, 322n17 Froissart, Jean, 32, 76, 79, 95 Fulk le Rechin, 36 Furnivall, Frederick, 5–6, 258, 261, 310n8 Fyler, John, 186, 319n3, 319–20n7 Galen, 311n24, 312n26 Ganim, John, 11–12, 319n5 Ganymede, 127, 173–4; Dante as, 126– 7, 152; Geffrey as, 152, 156, 319n1; as grammarian, 207; in Purgatorio, 319n1; stellification of, 158 Garber, Marjorie, 313n3 Gardner, John, 74 Gaunt, Simon, 49, 63, 66, 162 Gautier de Coincy, 207 Geffrey, in House of Fame, 151; on Aeneid, 172–80; as champion of vernacular, 160–1, 165–6; as Ganymede, 152, 156, 180; journey of, 152, 157–9, 180–1; motive of, 181–2; as queer foil, 175–7, 182; redemption of, 195

Index Gellrich, Jesse, 195 General Prologue, 41; Knight in, 46–7, 58; Pardoner in, 47–8, 51, 52; Squire in, 42, 46–7, 48, 51, 58; Summoner in, 48 Generation of Animals, The (Aristotle), 16–20 passim, 216 Genius, in Plaint of Nature, 208–9; hieratic transformation of, 229–31; marriage with Nature, 225–9, 321n12; orthography and falsigraphy by, 210–11; remasculinization of, 224–5, 232; roles of, 321n7; sexual ambiguity of, 228–9 Genius, in Romance of the Rose, 235–6; as writer, 236–7 Genoa, Chaucer’s travels to, 101 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 19–20, 89, 90, 232, 233, 312n28 Georgics (Virgil), 74, 277 Germany, influences on Chaucer, 9 Ginsberg, Warren, 101, 106 Girard, René, 28 Goethe, J.W. von, 102 Good Parliament of 1376, 322n2 grammar: and disorderly fertility, 206–7; sexual view of, 121, 203 Grammar, in Anticlaudianus, 242, 249–50 Grammar (Priscian), 119 Grand Tour, 101, 102, 151 Great Derivations (Hugutio), 108 Green, Richard Firth, 32 Greene, Thomas, 21 Guillaume de Lorris, 7, 266 Guinizelli, Guido, in Purgatorio, 115, 136, 137–8, 139, 140, 141–2, 318nn17, 20

357

Hahn, Thomas, 33 Halperin, David, 310n12, 312n26 Hansen, Elaine, 27, 40–1, 42, 51, 55, 67, 177, 285, 287, 293–4, 313n5 Harrison, Robert, 108 Harwood, Britton, 274, 280, 287 Havely, Nick, 90, 179, 191, 323nn8, 10 Hawthorne, Susan, 311n17 Hazlitt, William, 7, 8, 316n2 Heinrichs, Katherine, 314n2 hermaphroditism, 136, 214, 217, 318n17; benign view of, 137, 139; distinguished from sodomy, 138–9; in paradisal realm, 146–7; poetics of, 136–42, 196; related to sodomy, 136–7; subversive nature of, 139–40 Heroides (Ovid), 159, 164, 177 Hesiod, 74 heteroglossia, 12 heterosexuality, 105; choice in, 323n7; dialectical relation to homosexuality, 66; hylomorphism and, 298; menace of, 275; metaphors for, 80; union, 28, 29, 48, 62 Hieatt, A. Kent, 313n7 Hieatt, Constance, 313n7 hoax tale: described, 289; examples of, 289–91 Hollander, Robert, 148 Holloway, Julia Bolton, 117 Holsinger, Bruce, 118–20, 127, 129, 144, 147, 307, 318nn17, 20 Homer, 74; in Divine Comedy, 115, 116 homophobia: in Chaucer criticism, 5, 7, 34–5; in Middle Ages, 36, 38, 48–9; in Miller’s Tale, 58; in History (Orderic Vitalis), 94; in Roman d’Eneas, 50–2, 312–13n1 homosexuality, 67; dialectical relation to heterosexuality, 66; Greek

358

Index

tradition of, 315n6; of Ovid, 237; putative origin of, 36, 63; and written language, 127 homosociality, 28, 53, 63, 67, 96, 272; poetry as, 117, 119 Horace, 20, 21; in Divine Comedy, 115 Horowitz, Maryanne, 311–12n25, 312n26 House of Fame, 6, 12, 97, 305; Aeneid in, 159–61, 164–5, 298; authority in, 193–4; conclusion of, 196; Dantean influence on, 106, 153–5, 159; dating of, 261, 262, 263; desert in, 179–80, 319–20n7; eagle in, 152–3, 157–9, 180; failure of romance in, 177–80; Jupiter and Geffrey as queer foils in, 171–7; Kittredge’s view of, 153–5; liberation narrative view of, 153–5, 175, 179, 195; love themes in, 181–2; man of great authority in, 192–4; narrator of, 105; Nature in, 191, 199; 19thcentury critical opinion of, 153; poetics of sound in, 180–5; as predecessor to Canterbury Tales, 258; queer other in, 151; queer poetics in, 185–8, 200; romance Aeneids’ influence on, 166–8; Rumor in, 188–92; scribal commentaries on, 172; vernacular poetics and, 150; Vulcan as queer foil in, 166–71; writers resident in, 187–8 Howard, Donald, 75, 259 Hugutio of Pisa, 108, 109, 110, 317n7 hunting, as metaphor for amorous pursuit, 81 hylomorphism, 13–14, 308; changes in, 18; described, 14–15; in Greek philosophy, 16–19; in medieval

philosophy, 312n27; vernacular as threat to, 107; as view of verbal art, 19–21, 22 Hymen, in Plaint of Nature, 222–3; masculinity of, 223; relation to Nature, 223–4 Iarbas, in Aeneid, 176 Iliad (Homer), 161, 170 imagination, 314–15n5; in faculty psychology, 232–3 In Rufinum (Claudian), 240 inclusa, 278, 280 Inferno (Dante), 281; classroom scene in, 117, 141; poets in, 115–16; queer identity in, 114, 126 Institutes of Oratory (Quintilian), 92, 229 Isabella of Hainault, 251 Italy: Chaucer’s travels in, 101, 102; influence on Chaucer, 6, 7, 9–10, 101, 102, 105, 106, 150, 153–5, 264–7, 309nn2, 3 Jacoff, Rachel, 136, 142 Jaeger, Stephen, 39–40, 43, 44 January, in Merchant’s Tale, 63 ineffectuality of, 60–2, 313–14n8; sexual ambiguity of, 59–60 Jean de Meun, 31, 130, 199 Jeffrey, David, 158 John of Gaunt, 32, 65, 262; in Book of the Duchess, 66; relation to Chaucer, 67 John of Salisbury, 73 Jordan, Mark, 29, 34, 206, 212, 214, 219–20, 230, 231–2, 235, 320n4 Jordan, R.M., 312n28 Jugement dou Roy de Navarre (Machaut), 94

Index Juno, in House of Fame, 173–5 Jupiter, in House of Fame, 168–9; as queer foil, 173–5 Kay, Richard, 121 Kean, P.M., 309n2 Keiser, Elizabeth, 47, 321n14 Kelly, D., 321–2n15 Kendrick, Laura, 188 Kittredge, George, 4, 5, 9–10, 27, 153–5, 156, 192, 264–5, 309–10n6, 310n7, 322n3 Kleinhenz, Christopher, 115 Knapp, Peggy, 307 Knight, in General Prologue, 46–7, 58; as father, 92–3; as poet, 93 Knight, Rhonda, 23 Knight’s Tale, 275; erotic triangle in, 52–3; Juno in, 173; Miller’s Tale as parody of, 56–7; Petrarchan influence on, 104; sexual competition in, 293; Temple of Venus in, 275 Knowlton, Edgar, 320n1 Koch, John, 260–1 Kruger, Steven, 205 Lamentations of Matheolus (Le Fèvre), 281 Landor, Walter Savage, 316n2 Langland, William, 308 Lanval (Marie of France), 51, 313n2 Latini, Brunetto, 317n15; in Inferno, 114–15, 140; influence on Dante, 121–2, 146, 147; as mentor, 117, 120–1, 125; as sodomite, 117–18, 148, 317n13 Lavine, in Eneas, 163–5 Lawlor, John, 76 Lawton, David, 314n9

359

Le Fèvre, Jehan, 281 Legend of Good Women, 32, 33, 40, 65, 194; dating of, 262 Leicester, H.M., 323n11 Leland, John, 310n10 lesbianism: in Parliament of Fowls, 280, 285–7; in physis (Aristotle), 216; in Plaint of Nature, 216–18, 284, 288, 308 Leupin, Alexandre, 202, 204, 320n4, 321n6 Lewis, C.S., 67, 240, 247–8 Liber consolationis et consilii (Albertano of Brescia), 104 liberal arts, in Anticlaudianus, 248–9 Livy, 270, 271, 272–3, 274, 291 Lorimer, James, 3, 9, 13 Lovejoy, A.O., 321n8 love’s heretic (outsider to love), Chaucer’s narrators as, 38, 64, 66, 76–7, 95, 151, 179, 180, 183, 314n9 Lowell, James, 9 Lowes, John, 10–11, 34, 154, 262, 192 Lucan, in Divine Comedy, 115, 116 Lucretius, 20 Lund-Mead, Carolynn, 316n5 Lynch, Kathryn, 69, 212, 218–9, 231, 267, 269–70, 287 Machaut, Guillaume de, 64, 76, 78, 95 Mack, Sara, 186 Macrobius, 267 man of great authority: Chaucer as, 192–3; redundancy of, 192, 193–4 Man of Law’s Tale, 286, 310n13 Manetti, Giannozzo, 316n4 Manly, John, 10, 262 Mann, Jill, 309n3 mansuetudo, 44 Margherita, Gayle, 96

360

Index

Marie of France, 30, 51, 67 Marshall, Linda, 255 Marsyas, 146–7 Martin, Dale, 16 Mass of the Birds (Jean de Conde), 259 Massinissa, 267, 272, 273, 275, 280 Matthew of Vendôme, 219 Mazzeo, Joseph, 14 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 136 McCall, John, 323n12 McGerr, Rosemarie, 280 Meiss, Millard, 145 memory, in medieval poetry, 71–3; and mnemonics, 80–2 men who don’t marry, motif of, 59, 66 Menedon, in Il Filocolo, 290 Menocal, Rosa Maria, 318–19n21 Merchant, Carolyn, 215 Merchant’s Tale : queer decoy in, 52, 58–63 Metalogicon (John of Salisbury), 73 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 78, 127, 160, 242–3, 276, 282, 301, 322n18 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 215 Milan, 103; Chaucer’s travels to, 101, 102 Miller’s Prologue, 56 Miller’s Tale, 27, 63; mockery of heterosexual relations in, 54; queer decoy in, 52–8; sexuality in, 286 Minnis, A.J., 22, 68, 77, 82, 108, 109, 181, 184, 188, 190, 193–4, 285–6, 303, 314n9 Mirour de l’Omme (Gower), 263 Moi, Toril, 46 Morrison, Theodore, 313n7 Morsink, Johannes, 311–12n25 Mozzi, Andrea de’, 118

Muscatine, Charles, 11, 63, 65, 310n11 mystical visions, distinguished from dream poems, 70 Narcissus, myth of, 34 narrator: of Anticlaudianus, 251–2; of Book of the Duchess, 66, 76–8, 94, 95; of Canterbury Tales, normalization of, 103; of House of Fame, 105; of Parliament of Fowls, 260, 297–8, 299–300; of Plaint of Nature, 218–20, 221–2, 229–31, 244 natural poetics: in House of Fame, 183–5, 186, 195, 196, 199; in Plaint of Nature, 202 Nature: artistic representations of, 321n11; contrasted with Reason, 201; as creator, 191; functions of, 199; poetry’s relation to, 213–14; sexual ambiguity of, 216–18, 308 Nature, in Anticlaudianus, 240–2, 248, 288; abandonment of, 256 Nature, in Parliament of Fowls, 199, 256, 294–5, 296; disorderliness of, 293, 299; kiss of, 285–8, 297, 299–300; neutral attitude of, 303 Nature, in Plaint of Nature, 199, 200, 202–4, 214, 221–2, 240, 320n2; apology of, 222–5; facets of, 232; heterosexualization of, 223–4; lesbian nature of, 216–18, 284, 288; marriage with Genius, 225–9, 321n12; and Reason, 287–8 Nature, in Romance of the Rose, 234–5, 256 Neuse, Richard, 106 Nicholas, in Miller’s Tale, 53, 63, 313n5; physical attributes of, 54 Nicolas, Nicholas, 316n2 Nitzsche, Jane, 321n7

Index 361 Nolan, Barbara, 77 Norman Conquest, literary effects of, 7–8 North, Christopher, 153 notatio, 90 Nous, 254 novus homo (perfected man), in Anticlaudianus, 241, 245, 247–8, 252 Nugent, Georgia, 319n4 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 286 Olsson, Kurt, 298–300, 302 Orderic Vitalis, 27, 44–5, 57; life of, 35 ordo naturalis, 166 orientalism, in Roman d’Eneas, 162, 319n5 Orpheus, 127, 322n17, 18, 323–4n1; as pederast and poet, 237–8, 242, 301; as precursor of Christ, 243–4; Virgilian vs Ovidian view of, 186–7 Orpheus, in Anticlaudianus, 242–4 Orpheus, in House of Fame, 186; homosexual inspiration of, 186 Orpheus, in Plaint of Nature, 238–9, 242 Orpheus, in Romance of the Rose, 237; ambiguous attitude towards, 243; as sodomite, 239 orthography, 208, 210 Oruch, Jack, 201, 292–3, 294–5 Oton de Grandson, 314n9 Ovid, 158, 237–8; in Divine Comedy, 115, 116 Ovide moralisé (Ovid), 78, 163, 244 Pacuvius, 209 Panthère d’amours (Nicole de Margival), 319–20n7

Paradiso (Dante), 115; descriptive language in, 143–4; linguistic devices in, 142–3; poet’s purpose in, 144–6; sexual confusion in, 143–4 Paradys d’Amours, Le (Froissart), 76, 79, 94, 95 Pardoner, in General Prologue, 47, 55, 63, 307, 308; feminization of, 48, 57, 323–4n1, 324n2; as foil to Squire, 51 Paris, Gaston, 28 Parliament of Fowls, 11, 196, 306; Africanus in, 268–9, 273–5, 297–8; Bacchus in, 279; catalogue of lovers in, 280–1; compared with Plaint of Nature, 200, 201; ‘The Contending Lovers’ and, 288–9; dating of, 261–7; Dream of Scipio in, 273–5; female sexual autonomy in, 283–5; French influence on, 260, 261, 303; Freudian interpretation of, 269–70; gender issues in, 267–70; genre of, 266; hoax demande d’amour in, 292; homosocial bonding in, 272, 274; influence of Boccaccio on, 264–7; lesbianism in, 280, 285–7; narrator of, 260, 297–8, 299–300; Nature in, 199, 256, 93, 294–5, 296, 299, 303; Nature vs Reason in, 201; Nature’s kiss in, 285–8, 297, 299–300; 19th-century views of, 258–9; as predecessor to Canterbury Tales, 258, 267, 322n1; Priapus in, 275–7, 278–80, 299; sexual competition in, 292–7; Venus’s temple in, 260, 269, 275, 279–81, 299 Pasiphae, in Purgatorio, 137–8 Patch, Howard, 319–20n7

362

Index

Patterson, Lee, 4, 27, 32–4, 41, 55, 162, 309n4 Payne, Robert, 72, 314n3 Pearsall, Derek, 306 pederasty, 85, 121 in Ovid, 238; poetics of, 125, 144 Pequigney, Joseph, 138, 307, 318n17 Peter of Riga, 55 Petrarch, Francesco, 4–10 passim, 21, 22, 316n4; influence on Chaucer, 103; influence on Boccaccio, 149–50; putative meeting with Chaucer, 102, 316n2; relations with women of, 103–4 Philip Augustus, prince, 251 Phillippa, queen, 32 Phillips, Helen, 69, 70, 90, 179, 191, 323nn8, 10 Physics, The (Aristotle), 18, 215–16 physis, 199, 202, 215–16, 220, 225, 228, 248, 250, 253, 288, 321nn8, 10, 15, 322n17 Piers Plowman (Langland), 308 Pittenger, Elizabeth, 208, 209, 210 Plaint of Nature (Alan of Lille), 12, 69, 143, 191, 264, 270, 284, 297, 308; as allegory of education, 212–13; conclusion of, 229–31; contrasted with Parliament of Fowls, 200, 201; as dream vision, 231–2; gender identity in, 220–2; heterosexualization of Nature in, 223–4; lesbian Nature in, 216–8; narrator of, 218–20, 221–2, 229–31, 244, 284, 288; Nature in, 199, 202–4, 214, 221–2, 232, 240, 320n2; Nature’s apology in, 222–5; Orpheus in, 238–9, 242; queer aesthetics in, 211–14; queer poetics in, 218–20; relation of Nature and Genius,

225–9; on sodomy, 202–5, 245–6; Virtues in, 223–4 Plato, 15, 81, 183, 311n16; cosmogenesis of, 15; as predecessor of Aristotle, 311n18 Plotinus, 254 Poetria Nova (Geoffrey of Vinsauf), 19, 90 Pope, Alexander, 8 Potkay, Monica, 320n5 Praz, Mario, 10, 316n2 Preus, Anthony, 17, 311–12n25 Priapea (Virgil), 277–8 Priapus: of Boccaccio, 275–6, 278; of Chaucer, 276–7, 278–9, 299; of Ovid, 275–6, 323n5; of Virgil, 277 Prioress’s Tale: as description of educational methods, 75; and Paradys d’Amours, 76 Priscian, in Inferno, 117, 121 Pugh, Tison, 67, 310n12 pulley–shoe, 36–7 Purgatorio (Dante), 13, 20; hermaphroditic poetics of, 136–42, 196, 318n17; marriage of Aristotelian and Christian views in, 133; missing mother in, 131–6; passage to, 126–7; poet as Achilles in, 127–8; poet as Ganymede in, 126–7; queer poetic in, 115; role of vernacular poet in, 141 queer, use of term, 13, 306, 310n12 queer foil, 28, 29: in Book of the Duchess, 29, 64, 66, 94, 95; in General Prologue, 48, 52; in House of Fame, 166–77; in Merchant’s Tale, 52; in Miller’s Tale, 52–8 queer poetics, 13, 23, 66–7, 86, 96, 97,

Index 115, 126, 199, 216–20, 237–40, 258, 300–3 queer theory, 12, 308; on Dante, 114–15 Quinn, William, 261 Quintilian, 20, 92, 229 Raynaud de Lage, Guy, 224 Reason, in Anticlaudianus, 248–9 Reductorium Morale (Bersuire), 243–4 Reinhold, Meyer, 161 Republic (Cicero), 267–8 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 90 Ricardian poets, 4 Richard II, 262 Robert Curthose, duke, 35 Robinson, F.N., 262, 263 Robinson, Ian, 27, 29–32, 41, 42, 192–3, 260 Rollins, Hyder, 309–10n6 Roman d’Eneas (anon.), 28, 29, 160, 166, 169, 171, 174–5; divergences from Aeneid, 161–4, 174–5, 177–8; homosexual themes in, 49–52, 312–13n1; marriage and family in, 151, 162–3, 164–5 Romance of the Rose (Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun), 31, 69, 80, 169, 171, 191, 266, 284; didactic function of, 71; Genius in, 235–7, 322n16; level of homophobia in, 321n14; memory in, 71–2; Nature in, 234–5, 256; Orpheus in, 237, 239, 243; reference to Plaint of Nature, 233–5; view on sodomy, 236–7 romans antiques, 49 rondel, 323nn9, 11; as queer art, 300–3 Ross, Thomas, 60, 311n21

363

Rowland, Beryl, 309n3 Ruggiers, Paul, 3 Rumor, in House of Fame: abode of, 189; feminine nature of, 190–1; opposed to Fame, 189–90; poetics of, 192; power of, 194; queer poetic of, 195–6 Russell, Stephen, 74 St John, Michael, 322n2 Sappho, 116 Scattergood, V.J., 314n9 Schildgen, Brenda, 143 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 131, 205–6, 318n17 scholastic prologue, 22 Scipio: Ciceronian story of, 267–74 passim. See also Africanus Scipio Major, 267–8, 270–1; continence of, 271–2, 291, 322–3n4; homosocial behaviours of, 272–3 Scott, A.B., 108, 109 Scott, John, 124 Sedgwick, Eve, 28, 52, 63, 272 Sedgwick, Henry, 102, 103 Semiramis: Boccaccio on, 284; Chaucer on, 283–4; Christine de Pisan on, 283; Le Fèvre on, 281 Seneca (the younger), 20; hylomorphic view of, 21, 22 Shannon, Edgar, 156 Shapiro, Marianne, 113 Sheridan, James, 246 Shook, Lawrence, 154–5 Simpson, James, 245, 252, 253 Sinclair, John, 134 Sklute, Larry, 314n4 Smith, J.J., 314n9 Smith, Macklin, 55 sodomy, 321–2n15; attitudes towards, 36–7; and Chaucer’s Pardoner, 48;

364

Index

in Cleanness, 320n5; in De vito sodomitico, 139; in Divine Comedy, 114–15, 117–18, 119, 121–2, 139; in Ecclesiastical History, 35, 57; fear of, 48–9; hermaphroditism and, 136–7; as ideological system, 23; linguistic metaphors of, 204–7, 211; metaphors for, 203–4; in Plaint of Nature, 202–7, 211, 221; poetics of, 147–8, 207–9; in Romance of the Rose, 235, 237; and scholasticism, 121, 203 Somnium Scipionis (Cicero), 269, 273 Songe Saint Valentin, Le (Oton de Grandson), 314n9 Sophonisba, 272–3 Sordello: in Antepurgatory, 115, 123–6; linguistic sin of, 124–5 sound, in House of Fame: generation of, 183–4; and poetry, 184–5 Sowell, Madison, 135, 317–18n15 Spearing, A.C., 69–70, 71, 260, 269 Speght, Thomas, 310n10, 316n2 Speirs, John, 258 Spence, Sarah, 319n4 sperm, theories on the genesis of, 16, 20, 110 Squire, in General Prologue, 46, 48, 51, 58, 63, 86, 92–3; attributes of, 42, 47 Statius, 115, 128, 317n11; in Divine Comedy, 122, 128, 131–4, 140–1, 144; in House of Fame, 187 Stearns, Marshall, 72 stellification, 158 sterility, 313–14n8 Stevenson, Kay, 320n9 Stone, Gregory, 213 Stowe, John, 65

Stratford, John, archbishop, 55 Strohm, Paul, 67 Sturges, Robert, 217, 323–4n1 Suetonius, 137 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 20, 138 Summoner, 55, 323–4n1; in General Prologue, 48, 307 Symposium (Plato), 15 Sypherd, Wilbur, 153, 155 Tambling, Jeremy, 122 Tatlock, John, 4, 153, 262, 263 Taylor, Karla, 134 Teseida (Boccaccio), 93, 264, 265, 266, 279, 284; list of Diana’s followers in, 282; sexual assault in, 275–6; temple of Venus in, 301 Tesoretto, Il (Latini), 118, 317–18n15 Tesoro, Il (Latini), 121, 146, 317–18n15 Thebaid (Statius), 93, 140, 187 Thierry of Chartres, 256 Thompson, N.S., 291 Thynne, William, 315–16n12 Timaeus (Plato), 15, 311n16; cosmogenesis in, 18, 215, 216; hylomorphism in, 16 Travis, Peter, 65 Troilus and Criseyde, 4, 32, 33–4; effictio in, 90–1; feminized masculinity in, 53–4; satirical nature of, 34, 58 tropus, 208 troubadour poetry, 30–1 Trout, John, 242 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 261 Valerius Maximus, 270 Vance, Eugene, 317n14, 320n5 Vasoli, Cesare, 124 Venus: in Anticlaudianus, 246–7; birth

Index

365

of, 168; loves of, 168–71; in Parliament of Fowls, 260, 269, 275, 279–80, 299; in Plaint of Nature, 209, 210–11 Verbum abbreviatum (Albertus Magnus), 318n19 vernacular: in Boccaccio, 102, 149, 151; in Chaucer, 33, 157, 159, 165; in Dante, 12, 103, 106, 107, 110–11, 112, 120, 121, 126, 147, 149, 196, 316–17n6; as mother tongue, 111–12, 114, 135, 136, 150, 152, 196; nobility of, 113, 114; in romance, 151, 165 Virgil, 113, 158; in Divine Comedy, 72, 115–17, 132, 141, 317n10–11; view of education of, 74 Virgin Mary, in Anticlaudianus, 249–50 Vita Nuova (Dante), 108, 130 Vita Caesarum, De (Suetonius), 137 vitium, 205–6, 208 Vulcan, 319n6; as queer foil in House of Fame, 168–71, 174

Warton, Thomas, 316n2 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 225, 226–8, 235, 240, 241, 249, 253 Whig account of literary history, 309n4 White, Hugh, 201, 287–9, 320n2 Whyte, in Book of the Duchess: model for, 65–6; physical description of, 89, 91; as teacher, 69, 86–7 Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 281 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 279, 281, 316n3; influences on, 104–5 Wilks, Michael, 251, 253 William I, 35 William Rufus, 35–6 Williams, Deanne, 314n2 Wilson, John, 153 Wimsatt, James, 70, 314n9 Winkler, John, 321n10 Winny, James, 193, 259 Witt, Charlotte, 16, 311n19

Wallace, David, 103–5, 116, 150, 156–7, 259, 260, 316n3 Wallace, W.A., 14 Waller, Marguerite, 146 Ward, Antonia, 310n8

Zeikowitz, Richard, 53 Ziolkowski, Jan, 203, 207, 208, 228, 321nn12, 13 Zumthor, Paul, 31

Yates, Frances, 71