Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 2503508189, 9782503508184

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CROSSING BOUNDARIE S Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

AR1ZON A STUDIES IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE

General Editors Robert E. Bjork ·Helen Nader

Delno Westt

VOLUM E3

CROSSING BOUNDARIES Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Edited by

Sally McKee

BREPOLS Turnhout, Belgium 1999

©-BREPOLS Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper D/1999/0095/3 ISBN 2-503-50818-9 AU rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Contents Introduction SALLY MCKEE

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Boundaries in Literature Geoffrey of Monmou th's Historia Regum Britanniae: Lessons in Self-Fashioning for the Bastards of Britain LINDA GEORGIA NNA

3

Eve and Her Audience in the Anglo-Norman Adam ROBERT L. A. CLARK

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Seinte Cecile and Cristes owene knyghtes: Violence, Resignation, and Resistance in the Second Nun's Tale JOHN DAMON

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Linguistic Identity in the Middle Ages: The Case of the Spanish Jews ELAINE R. MILLER

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Medieval Documentary Poetics and Langland's Authorial Identity EMIL Y STEINER

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Contents

Religious Rhetoric as Resistance in Early Modern Goodnight Ballads PATRICIA MARBY HARRISON

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Mary Wroth's Willow Poetics: Revising Female Desire in Pamphilia ta Amphilanthus JAM! AKE

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A Bridge "The human face divine": ldentity and the Portrait from Locke to Chaucer ANNABELPATT ERSON

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Boundaries in History Common Language and the Common Good: Aspects of Identity among Byzantine Emigres in Renaissance ltaly JONATHAN HARRIS

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Beata et venerablilis Virgo: Music and Devotion in Renaissance Milan NOLAN GASSER

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Sex, Lies, and Depositions: Pierre de Lancre's Vision of the Witches' Sabbath ELSPETH WHITNEY

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Straungers and Aliaunts: The "Un-English" among the English in Elizabethan England LAURA HUNT YUNGBLUT

263

Notes on Contributors

277

Index

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Introduction SALLY MCKEE

hen the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies invited contributions to its third volume of essays, the theme of which is "Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Persona! and Cultural ldentity ," the expectation was that, in light of current trends of a variety of disciplines, most applicants would respond to the word "identity" as part of the broader conceptual field of "the politics of identity." 1 lt carne as a pleasant surprise to find that the majority of submissions, and subsequently most of those selected, focused instead on the first part of the volume' s theme, "crossing boundaries." That result was as welcome to us as a group of essays on issues of identity would have been, for we were easily won over to this unexpected response by the manner in which the authors enriched the conceptual framework of "boundaries." The concept might have lent itself with little trouble to negative formulations of subject matter, since inherent in the idea of boundaries are division, separation, and potential miscommunication. lnstead, we learn here that they are in fact most interesting when crossed or transgressed, when the emphasis is placed on movement through them, rather than on their mere existence. Focus on the passage through boundaries, conceived in this more positive way, prompts ail scholars to bear in mind that our own areas of speciality, whatever they may be, must always be in flux, or otherwise grow increasingly vulnerable to the dangers of stasis and cliché. The essays presented here testify to the breadth and depth of "boundaries" as a concept. The concept' s origins are located in the work of ethnographers, whose most

W

1

1994).

As one example, see Social Theory and the Politics of Jdentity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford,

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cogent representative is Fredrik Barth. In his seminal work, Ethnie Croups and Boundaries, a collection of articles by Barth and others published in 1967, he shifted the scholarly discussion about ethnicity away from particular attrihutes that define ethnie groups to the boundaries that separate them from another. Boundaries were Jess significant for what they enclosed than for their very nature and purpose. 2 Since then, other scholars have found value in the concept and have applied it in their own disciplines. The disciplines that make most use of the concept of "crossing boundaries" are the youngest, such as feminist and gender studies or, 3 more generally, cultural studies. 4 The concept has also entered the arsenal of longer-established scholarly traditions, like biblical exegesis. 5 The collection of essays that follows represents further elaborations of "crossing boundaries." The centerpiece of the collection, both figuratively and literally, cornes closest to the original intent of the volume' s theme and thus provides a pivot around which the other articles turn. The essay falls appropriately between the first part, whose essays are literary in content and approach, and the second part, whose underlying methodology has more in common with the discipine of history than do the essays of the first part. Annabel Patterson' s reflections on portraits of important intellectuals from the past confronts the question of whether there is a link between portraiture and identity. Stepping through the frames of portrait after portrait, she takes us backwards through time in a discussion of the likenesses of John Locke, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, then of the earlier poets, John Milton and John Donne, before concluding with depictions of the fourteenth century' s Geoffrey Chaucer in illuminated manuscripts. She argues that the adjustments to the persona! attributes in the portraits reflect changing perceptions of the subject and sometimes the subject' s changing

2

Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnie Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, 1969). For an update on this theoretical approach, see Hans Vermeulen and Cora Govers, eds., The Anthropology of Ethnicty: Beyond 'Ethnie Groups and Boundaries' (The Hague, 1994), which opens with a review by Barth (pp. 11-32). 3 For example, see Barbara Caine, E. A. Grosz and Marie de Lepervanche, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges (Sydney, 1988); Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed., City Women, Country Women: Crossing the Boundaries (Melbourne, 1995); Gina Buijs, ed., Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing !dentities (Oxford, 1993). 4 Heinz lckstadt, ed., Crossing Boundaries: lnner- and lntercultural Exchanges in a Multicultural Society (Frankfurt, 1997); Julie Thompson Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities and lnterdisciplinarities (Charlottesville, Va., 1996); Roberta L. Salper, ed., Cultural Studies: Crossing Boundaries (Amsterdam, 1991); John McCarthy, Crossing Boundaries: A Theory and History of Essay Writing -in German, 1680-1815 (Philadelphia, 1989); Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in /talian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities (Kalamazoo, 1991 ). 5 Stanley E. Porter, Paul Joyce, and David E. Orton, eds., Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Jnterpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder (Leiden, 1994).

Introduction

ix

self-perception. This evolution of self-image, according to Patterson, cannot be explained simply by the passage of time and its effects on the physical, outward aspect of a portrait' s subject. The subject' s desire to emphasize different aspects of himself as a result of bis own evolving image of himself also came into play, as she shows with the example of John Locke. Around Patterson's essay are ranged a collection of ten studies ail involving in various ways the notion of "crossing boundaries." Among the first seven, we find treatments of social-climbing arrivistes, a work by a sixteenth-century poetess, an anonymous twelfth-century dramatic office, Chaucer' s story of a martyred saint, ballads recounting the last words of supposedly penitent women and men at the moment of their execution, and the use of uncharacteristic metaphors in Langland. They all have in common the neutral concept of transgression, whether it be from one genre to another or from one analytical perspective to another. In the first essay, Linda Georgianna scrutinizes the significance of bastards in Geoffrey of Monmounth' s History of the Kings of Britain. For that twelfth-century chronicler, bastards epitomize self-made men, according to Georgianna, who brings into focus the sympathetic light in which Geoffrey portrays illegitimate sons, most notably Merlin, in British mythic history. She reminds us that Geoffrey wrote within one hundred years of the successful conquest of England by one of the Middle Age's most famous bastards, William, duke of Normandy. These particular kind of self-made men are at the extreme end of the social spectrum of those who could realistically aspire to attain positions of power in Norman-Plantagenet England. Forced to turn to ambitious supporters outside the circle of the English aristocracy, the English kings created a climate in which a common, hard-working civil servant might scale the social ladder, aristocratie contempt notwithstanding. In other words, aspects of Geoffrey' s History reflect the tension that resulted from advisors of common birth close to the English kings crossing the borders between ignominy and power. Robert Clark sees similar boundaries enclosing gender roles in the Norman Ordo representacionis Ade. The character of Eve, in bis view, embodies evolving ideas about marriage and women's role in it that existed in the twelfth century. Neither entirely misogynist nor friendly to the predicament of women, the poem casts Eve in an uncomfortable position as responsible for the Fall, yet potentially capable of contributing in a positive way to the roles ber husband must play in the world. lt is a retlection of that society' s attempt to establish the proper realms of men and women' s activities and talents. Clark perceives the ambivalence of the anonymous poet as indicative of the confusion inherent in gender roles at that time. John Damon employs another approach to the idea of boundaries in arguing that the traditionally gendered analysis of Chaucer' s Saint Cecilia in The Second Nun 's Tale misses the more germane significance of ber suffering. Rather than seeing Cecilia' s martyrdom as an attribute of her condition as a woman, the author believes that the little-noticed martial imagery in the story points to a different type of transgression of boundaries, one that had more to do with Chaucer' s attitude towards war than with Cecilia's plight as a vulnerable woman. Chaucer relied on certain sources rather than

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others for his presentation of the saint' s story, which Damon see as a reflection of the poet's pacifist inclinations. What boundaries Cecilia transgressed, in Damon's view, had less to do with her gender than it had to do with her religion. Elaine Miller argues that Iberian Jews created an identity for themselves for which there was no parallel in Christian society. Her boundaries, unlike those discussed by the other contributors, are linguistic ones that the Jewish community crossed, in order consciously to define itself against the larger, dominant, and often menacing Christian community. The Jews' sense of themselves as a people different from others was grounded on segregation and limited juridical capacity in Christian society, but the boundaries separating them from the society that encompassed them were reinforced in a positive manner by the development of a linguistic identity. Emily Steiner has found in Langland's Piers Plowman another kind of passage through boundaries. She presents Langland first as a poet who mixes genres. He injects into his poetic rhetoric what Steiner calls "documentary poetics," the use of categories of legal instruments common in the Middle Ages as metaphors in his poems. The crux of her argument, however, lies beyond this initial observation, for the kinds of documents that Langland uses carried with them in that period an association with documents, such as petitions, involved in the abolition of servile status. Although literacy was not by any means wide-spread, ordinary people nevertheless had contact in the course of everyday life with public documents, such as wills and pardons. Langland did not, Steiner argues, resort to documentary poetics because of its incongruity with the literary mode of his poem. Instead, she points out that, unlike people in the Middle Ages, we no longer view the legal document as a literary construction. To Langland, the boundaries between what we perceive as two distinct genres were not where we would expect them to be. Thus, the audience of that time would have recognized the political overtones that have been lost to people in subsequent ages, when the public documents became increasingly relegated to a space outside the boundaries of literary texts. The goodnight ballads that Patricia Marby Harrison studies are deceptive in their transgressions. Songs that ostensibly convey the redemptive speeches of prisoners at the moment of execution, the ballads subtly subverted their own message in their performance and in the object of their appeal for forgiveness. Harrison argues that the ballads expressed popular religious sentiments in such a way that prevented the state from exerting control over them. They were intangibly subversive, and so the composers and the performers may be seen to be flirting with the borders between the licit and the illicit. Jami Ake's analysis of Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus reveals that Wroth crossed a boundary into the realm of desire, a traditionally male domain in literature. In their unrequited desires, her principal female characters represent the virtue of constancy, unlike men who collect for themselves acclaim, by rendering their mourning for lost love into a poetics of desire. Just as the laure! symbolized the public consolation for unfulfilled desire, so the mournful willow tree in Wroth's poetics represents the private fulfillment of female autonomy. Wroth's passage beyond the

Introduction

xi

boundaries usually resistant to female intrusion becomes a poetic act of selftransformation that is no imitation of male desire or rhetoric. The women in this sixteenth-century poetess' s creation are not defeated, as men are, by desire. They become active mistresses of desire through their loyal adherence to its unattainable object. No longer the objects of the male desiring gaze, the female characters of Mary Wroth's poetic transgression assert their own capacity for desire in a way that is particular to their existence as women. In the second part of the collection, the concept of boundaries is brought to bear on the existential plight of Byzantine refugees, Marian devotion in Milanese music, witch hunters' manuals, and finally strangers in Tudor England. In every case, literary texts corne into play, but most of these authors seek to apply the concept of transgression and boundaries to their texts in different way from those of the first part of the volume. Jonathan Harris describes in his essay a palpable movement through the boundaries delineating the West and the East. Refugees to ltaly after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans, most especially the intellectual ones, have traditionally been thought to have relinquished the broader context of their identity as Hellenes and fallen back on more local definitions of themselves in their self-image and self-presentation in ltalian Renaissance societies. Harris argues that the Byzantine intellectuals' crossing from one culture to another did not signal their rejection of the Byzantine Empire, nor their emperor, nor their church, in their hopes of achieving assimilation in their adopted homeland. They were able to maintain in a new environment their hellenic identity founded on cultural and religious differences from the cultures of the Italian peninsula, because they were able to make common cause with their new compatriots against the perceived Ottoman threat. The crossing of the boundaries for these men was complete in a physical sense, without entailing the utter abandonment of the past, as has once been thought. The boundaries between Italian and Flemish musical traditions, in Nol an Gasser' s essay, converged in the fifteenth ccntury, as an expression of devotion to the Virgin Mary in Renaissance Milan. The author painstakingly searches for their convergence in the compilations of motets dedicated to the mother of Jesus, by placing them in the context of Milanese religious traditions, political history, and the duke' s attempts to Jure musicians south of the Alps. Elspeth Whitney introduces the provocative notion of a link between the manuals of magistrates investigating witchcraft in the seventeenth century and shifts in contemporary tastes in pornography. Taking an account of the witches' Sabbath by Pierre de Lancre as her primary focus, Whitney shows how the author extended stereotypes of witches' activities standard for that period to encompass assertive sexual behavior by women that provoked an ambivalent response in de Lancre himself. Satan is no longer the violator of women, on whose bodies he perpetrates acts of unwanted sexual violence. Women now are the active and willing participants in illicit, unbridled, and pleasurable sexual activity, which, Whitney argues, anticipates changes in another genre, pornography. The long-standing tradition of accounts of witches' Sabbaths reaches the frontier of pornographie literature in de Lancre' s voyeuristic account.

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Whitney brings de Lancre's text over the border into the realm of modern notions of sexuality. Laura Hunt Yungblut takes us back to England in the Tudor period to look at the portions of the population who came from other countries in the sixteenth century. A rise in the number of "strangers," as they are called in the contemporary sources, occurred during the first Elizabeth's reign, which provoked a certain level of chauvinism against the newcomers. The Low Countries and France supplied the majority of immigrants and Yungblut shows there to have been patterns in where they decided to settle. The integration of immigrants into Tudor society was not an easy process, as evidenced by the literary texts that Yungblut discusses, in which stereotypes persist over time, despite the country's prolonged exposure to the long-term residence of people of continental provenance. As we saw in Harris' essay, boundaries may be physically crossed, but the social and cultural barriers are often much Jess porous. The creative approaches to their subjects adopted by these authors offer reassurance that in every generation we find new legitimate questions to putto familiar sources, as if over-familiarity repeatedly blurs our sight of them, forcing us to readjust our focus. lt was once enough to differentiate between genres or social phenomena, when we parsed a text or studied an historical trend, in reaction, we thought, to the narratives of past generations of scholars. This relatively recent emphasis on movement and transgression through the areas and genres between which it had once been an accomplishment to differentiate offers us not only the possibility of re-familiarizing ourselves with long-familiar texts, as in the case of The Second Nun 's Tale, but also of learning something new about them. As these essays show, the concept is a very handy tool. Just as Barth directed our focus away from the constituent elements found within boundaries to their placement around a group, in Iike manner these authors make their subjects move through them. The movement we see lies in gallow confessions transforming themselves from songs of repentance into subversive intent, in subjects of portraits choosing to construct different images of themselves over time, and in a woman's attempt to promote the evolution of poetically-asserted female desire. Each author found ber or bis own way of manipulating the passage across boundaries to best advantage. Boundaries have resonance in the late twentieth century, for reasons which a future generation would be best placed to explain. Fundamentally, the concept is a useful device in the bands of creative thinkers, demonstrating that it takes the renewed creativity of each generation to recognize (much Jess understand) creativity in the past.

Boundaries in Literature

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae: Lessons in Self-Fashioning for the Bastards of Britain LINDA GEORGIANNA

F

or a work that announces itself as a genealogy narrative, a form Howard Bloch attributes to "a deep ... mental structure that assumed power to be legitimated through recourse to origins," Geoffrey' s History seems unusually fond of bastards. 1 In a famous scene that marks the turning point of the narrative, British King Vortigern assembles his stonemasons and orders a tower built to protect him from Saxon attack. No matter how hard the builders work to lay a strong foundation, however, the tower keeps sinking. Whatever they build one day, "the earth swallowed it up the next; they had no idea where their work had vanished to." 2 Advised by his

1

Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), p. 82. See also the more recent discussion of Francis lngledew, 'The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae," Speculum 69 (1994), 665-704. Both Bloch and Ingledew draw from the seminal work of Georges Duby, especially "The Structure of Kinship and Nobility: Northern France in the Eleventh and Twelfth Ccenturies," in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 134-48. For a recent critique of Bloch' s treatment of Geoffrey's Historia, see Lesley Johnson, "Etymologies, Genealogies, and Nationalities (Again)," in Concepts of National ldentity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray (Leeds, 1995), pp. 125-36. 2 See Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 1, Bern Burgerbibliothek, MS 568 (Cambridge, Eng.,1984), chap. 106. Ali references are to this edition and will be cited by chapter number. Translations, except where noted by brackets, are taken from

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magicians to seek a fatherless boy whose blood, if rnixed with the mortar, might cernent and fortify the tower's foundations, Vortigern sends out messengers who search fruitlessly until they corne upon two boys fighting and overhear the insult on which, I will argue, much of the narrative turns: "Why do you try to compete with me, fathead?" says the one: "How can we two be equal in skill? I myself [corne from a race of kings] on both sides of my family. As for you, nobody knows who you are, for you never had a father !" 3 In Geoffrey's source, the pseudo-Ne nnius's Historia Brittonum, the charge of illegitimacy against Merlin proves groundless, invented only to expose Vortigern's hidden crime of incest. The chronicler assures us that Merlin is the noble son of a Roman consul. 4 Geoffrey, on the other hand, hammers away at questions regarding Merlin's birth. King Vortigern grills the child's mother, a nun who swears she has never slept with any man, except for the mysterious, sometimes invisible, stranger who would appear at times in her convent room, make love to her, then suddenly vanish. The royal scholars puzzle over her story until one sagely concludes: "In the books [of philosophers] and in many historical narratives 1 have discovered that quite a number of men have been born in this way," citing Apuleius's remarks on the incubus in support of the mother's story. 5 As for Merlin, the fatherless boy quickly masters his accusers with his wit, disclosing the pool under the tower that keeps it from standing firm; and the rest, as Geoffrey says, is history, or rather, prophetic invention designed by a clever bastard who improves his fortunes by shoring up the claims of kingly authority. 6

Lewis Thorpe, trans., Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth, 1966), and are cited by page number, here p. 166. Although Wright in his edition of the Bern manu script uses that manuscript' s spelling of the title, to avoid confusion I have adopted the standard spelling, Historia Regum Britanniae. 3 Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 167. Thorpe's translation is somewhat loose here: "Quid mecum contendis, fatue? Nunquam nobis eadem erit nobilitas. Ego enim ex origine regum editus sum ex utraque parte generationis mee. De te autem nescitur quis sis cum patrem non habeas" (Wright, Historia, chap. 106). 4 For the pseudo-Nennian account, see John Morris, ed. and trans., Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals (London, 1980), pp. 19, 60. As usual, Geoffrey does not indicate his source for the Merlin story. It should be noted, however, that on the few occasions when he does acknowledg e the Historia Brittonum, he, like many contemporaries, attributes it to Gildas, not Nennius. On the Historia Brittonum as a work of historiography, see Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966), pp. 91-120. 5 Wright, Historia, chap. 107; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 168. 6 On Geoffrey's self-reflexive narration in the handling of discovery and exploration scenes such as this one, see Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chape! Hill, 1996), especially pp. 70-71. Lee Patterson refers to this

Geoffrey of Monmouth 's Historia Regum Britanniae

5

Merlin is not the only fatherless boy who makes a name for himself in Geoffrey's narrative. Britain's founder Brutus, though technically legitimate, becomes, like Merlin, another self-originator in Geoffrey's account, which again stresses the irregularities of his birth and familial relations. Aeneas's son Ascanius becomes king on his father's death and in turn has a son, Silvius. Such a genealogy, though without support among classical sources, at least follows the proper form of a lineage narrative. But then "[t]his Silvius was involved in a secret love-affair with a certain niece of Lavinia' s; he married her and made her pregnant." If the order of events points to Brutus's legitimacy-the marriage seems to precede the pregnancy-the phrasing stresses the secrecy, passion, and haste of the affair ("Hic furtiue ueneri indulgens nupsit cuidam nepte Lauinie eamque fecit pregnantem"). 7 Brutus's rather rushed start is further jeopardized by the prophecy, soon fulfilled, that the child Brutus would cause the death of both his parents and wander as an exile before rising to fame. His mother dies in childbirth, and Brutus at fifteen kills his father in a hunting accident. Exiled as a parricide by his angry family ("indignantibus parentibus"), 8 the now-fatherless boy conquers his way through Europe, gathering a Trojan remnant from which he is destined to create, rather than merely carry on, a new "race of kings." 9 To drive home the point, Geoffrey names Brutus's first follower as Assaracus, a half-Trojan, half-Greek warrior accused of being illegitimate, who enlists Brutus's help in securing an inheritance. 10 And as we shall see, selfinvention more than birth determines Brutus's success in the founding of Britain. Arthur may be Geoffrey's greatest bastard; as with Brutus and Merlin, Geoffrey draws attention to issues of timing, accident, and mystery surrounding Arthur' s birth. In a brutal scene, Uther' s uncontrollable passion for Y gerne moves Merlin to devise a

sccnc as an example of Geoffrey's use of "subversive genealogy" (the term is Judith Sklar's), a "myth that rcpresents the outrage of those who know ail the evils of the world and recognize their necessity," or, put another way, "a myth of origins that deconstructs the urigin," revealing "the instability that [Geoffrey] saw as haunting ail mcrely historical origins" (Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature [Madison, 1987], pp. 201-2). Although Patterson's insights on the reception of Virgilian history in the Middle Ages are useful, in my reading, "outrage" and "haunting" hardly describe Geoffrey's cheerful, even triumphant representation of the Troy story. 1 argue below that for Geoffrey such deconstructions provide room and opportunity for social mobility. The Historia Regum Britanniae does not so much subvert as exploit genealogical forms to make room for self-fashioning and fiction itself. 7 Wright, Historia, chap. 6; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 54. Geoffrey' s account of Brutus's genealogy is drawn from the garbled and contlicting accounts that appear in the Historia Brittonum, pp. 19, 60. The particular circumstances of Brutus's conception, between Silvius and Lavinia's niece, seem to be Geoffrey's own invention, especially since they resemble in muted form the more elaborately staged conception of Arthur, for which see below. 8 Wright, Historia, chap. 6; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 55. 9 Wright, Historia, chap. 16; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 65. 111 Wright, Historia, chap. 7; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 56.

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drug to disguise the king as Ygerne's husband, so that Uther can enter the woman's bed undetected. Arthur is conceived that night, we are told, and sometime during the same night (interea or "meanwhile" is as precise as Geoffrey will get), the husband, Gorlois, is accidentally killed by Uther' s forces. When told of the death, Uther "mourned for the death of Gorlois; but he was happy, ail the same, that Ygerne was freed from her marital obligations. He returned to Tintagel Castle, captured it and seized Ygerne at the same time, she being what he really wanted." 11 Arthur' s legitimacy thus rests on the thinnest thread of contingency. 12 A partial explanation for Geoffrey' s preoccupation with the technicalities of legitimacy lies in his choice of patron, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, King Henry I' s most favored bastard son, the first of twcnty-one acknowledged royal bas lards. Raised and educated in the royal court, given enormous influence and wealth by his father, including the only earldom created during Henry's reign, Robert was one of the richest and most powerful men in England. Yet despite his wealth and nearly unlimited access to royal power, Robert's status depended completely on his father's good will; he was wcll aware that although Henry' s eldest acknowledged son, he was blocked as the royal heir by his father's determination to leave the kingdom only to a legitimate heir. Apparently, these were not the old days of Henry's father, William the Conqueror, known both at home and in England as William the Bastard. 13 Yet although the Historia was originally dedicated to the illegitimate Robert of 11

Wright, Historia, chaps. 137-38; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 206-8. Strictly speaking, if we follow Frederick Pollock and Frederick W. Maitland's History of English Law, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1968), 2:396-99, Arthur is technically legitimate according to contemporary English law, which considered a child conceived out of wedlock but born in it to be legitimate. French law differed sharply on this point, however, and subsequent treatments of Arthur's conception and birth make clear that to medieval readers and listeners, Arthur's legitimacy was questionable at best. See Rosemary Morris, The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), pp. 29-32. Questions about Arthur's legitimacy, which Geoffrey's account seems to encourage, continued to haunt Arthurian literature for some time. Regions such as Scotland, chafing under English domination, capitalized on Arthur' s illegitimacy in order to reject his daim to dominion. See Flora Alexander, "Late Medieval Scottish Attitudes to the Figure of King Arthur: A Reassessment, " Anglia 93 (1975), 17-34; and Martin B. Shichtman and Laurie A. Finke. "Profiting from the Past: History as Symbolic Capital in the Historia Regum Britanniae," Arthurian Lite rature 12 (1992), 26-27. 13 See Charlotte Newman, The Anglo-Norman Nobility in the Reign of Henry/: The Second Generation (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 55-57, 197-201. For a biographical sketch of Robert, see Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England (London, 1984), pp. 74-93. On the precariousness of Robert's position, particularly after his father's death, see Robert B. Patterson, "William of Malmesbury's Robert of Gloucester: A Reevaluation of the Historia Novella," American Historical Review 70 (1965), 983-97. 12

Geoffrey of Monmouth 's Historia Regum Britanniae

7

Gloucester, its multiple re-dedications to various nobles, along with its extraordinary reception and rapid dissernination, suggest that in standing up for bastards, Geoffrey addresses a larger issue. 14 By the early twelfth century, genealogy had become a major form of self-legitimation by noble farnilies throughout northem Europe. "Bastards have no lineage," Saint Louis declares, or as Georges Duby puts it in his classic essay on twelfth-century French kinship structures, "To feel noble, and therefore to be noble, a man had first ... to be able to refer to a genealogy." 15 The search for a legitirnizing lineage was not always as naïve as it has been made to seem, especially in postconquest England, where strict rules of succession by primogeniture were slow to develop and where, furthermore, few nobles could trace their line back more than two generations. Geoffrey and some of his contemporaries understood full well that genealogies are made, not discovered. Rather than blindly succumbing to a deep mental structure, Geoffrey presents, even flaunts, genealogy as an invention, constructed and self-consciously maintained, not given, found, or a natural guarantee of anything. Geoffrey writes a myth of origins, but origins for Geoffrey are only the beginning. Familial and political structures, however they originate, run the risk of sinking, like Vortigern's tower, unless they are stabilized, fortified, and made to seem permanent by clever bastards like Merlin and Arthur, by parricides like Brutus, and by nobodies with talent like Geoffrey himself, who shares with his greatest heroes an overriding confidence in the powers of self-invention. By emphasizing questions of legitimacy and the potential for self-fashioning in the stories of his greatest heroes, Geoffrey makes a space for the educated, aspiring new men of twelfth-century England. In addition to producing numerous bastard children, Henry 1 is credited with creating a new class of professional administrators or curiales, the most successful of whom have been dubbed England's "new men." 16 The term is nota self-description, of

14

On the extraordinary success of Geoffrey's project, see Julia C. Crick, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 4, Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng., 1991). 15 The first quotation is cited in Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 74. For Duby, see The Chivalrous Society, p. 147. 16 For a discussion on Henry's acknowledged bastard children, see Given-Wilson and Curteis, Royal Bastards, pp. 60-93. The meaning of the terms "new man" and curialis are the subject of some debate and are used here as broad rather than technical terms. On the new men created and supported by Henry, see R. W. Southem's classic essay, "King Henry I," in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York, 1970), pp. 206-33. Southem's claims, though challenged and somewhat revised by C. Warren Hollister, Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions (London, 1986), especially pp. 97-116, 171-90, 223--46, nevertheless holdup well in the most recent work on Henry' s creation of a class of new men who served and were rewarded as royal administrators. See especially Judith A. Green, The Government of England Under Henry l (Cambridge, Eng., 1986); Newman, The Anglo-Norman Nobility, especially pp. 1-34; and Ralph

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course, but one that originates with their conservative critics, men like Orderic Vitalis, who expresses the bitterness of his noble Norman patrons when he complains that Henry "pulled down many great men from positions of eminence" while he "ennobled others of base stock who had served him well, raised them from the dust ... and heaping ail kinds of favor upon them, stationed them above earls and ... castellans." 17 Orderic describes Henry' s actions in terms of Fortune' s wheel, an image that cornes into prominence at precisely this time of unprecedented social fluidity .18 The charge that Henry raised men "from the dust" is exaggerated, since the evidence shows that the new men rarely if ever came from peasant stock. 19 Yet Henry's genius for, and need for, bureaucracy supported by a finely-tuned patronage system did create a new administrative class of royal servants, often drawn from the lower landholding ranks. Broadly defined as men whose families are untraceable before 11 OO, the new men were in effect nobodies who moved up in the world not in the old-fashioned ways, by inheritance or military service, but through administrative service in Henry' s increasingly complex government, as accountants and assessors, justices, sheriffs, foresters, advisors, even scribes. Like administrators everywhere, as curiales they understood from the inside how power works. Utterly dependent on royal patronage, their loyalty was assured; yet they also kept an eye out for opportunities and took them where they found them. Through royal grants of marriage, wardships, exemptions, fees, purchasing rights, and property exchanges, the shrewd new men built their estates and raised their status bit by bit. Geoffrey de Clinton, one of the most successful of the new men whom Orderic names in his complaint, and whose rise upward took distinctly non-glamorous forms, built two castles both of which, as R. W. Southern notes, "owed their strength to water not earthworks- to subtlety rather than crude force." 20 His name derives from Glympton, a church standing virtually at the gates of Henry's hunting lodge at

V. Turner, Men Raised From the Dust: Administrative Service and Upward Mobility in Angevin England (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 1-19. On the term curiales, see Emma Mason's broad definition in "Magnates, Curiales, and the Wheel of Fortune: 1066-1154," Anglo-Nonnan Studies 2 (1979), 118. Newman, The Anglo-Nonnan Nobility, adopts a similarly broad definition (see especially pp. 18-21 and n. 49), which seems preferable to Hollister's overly restrictive usage in Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions, p. 242. 17 Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1980), 6:16-17. 18 Thus Orderic writes later in his account of Norman ducal history: "Fortune is like a turning wheel; one moment she suddenly lifts a man up, the next she throws him down" (Historia Ecclesiastica, 6:242). See Mason, "Magnates, Curiales, and the Wheel of Fortune," p. 118. 19 For succinct accounts of the new men and their critics, see Ralph V. Turner, "Changing Perceptions of the New Administrative Class in Anglo-Norman and Angevin England: The Curiales and Their Conservative Critics," Journal of British Studies 29 (1990), 93-117; and Green, Government of England, pp. 134-93. 20 Southern, "Henry I," p. 215.

Geoffrey of Monmouth' s Historia Regum Britanniae

9

Woodstock, leading one historian to surrnise that Geoffrey owed his rise less to birth than to the opportunities afforded by his physical proximity to royal power. 21 Not al! curiales fared as well as de Clinton, however shrewd or diligent. What is most "new" about this new class of men is how they rose, not how far. Though by no means al! illegitimate by birth, they were often non-inheriting sons who had in common with bastards the knowledge that lacking a patrimony, they needed a career. Unable to rely on their birth alone for their fortunes, they learned to be useful and thus to make a name for themselves. Many rose through the ranks of the secular clergy, where opportunities for preferment were especially great, particularly for those with an education. 22 A bishopric or an archdeaconry could be a lucrative reward for royal service; episcopal courts rivalled the royal court in splendor and in curial business. One of the most powerful of the new men, Roger of Salisbury, an obscure Norman priest reported to have caught Henry's attention because of the speed with which he could recite the mass, rose with similar speed to become first the king' s chaplain, then chancellor, then Bishop of Salisbury, and finally Henry's chief advisor and finance minister, using his position to raise up along the way other members of his family. 23 An uneducated man himself, Roger had his nephews (or so they were called), Nigel and Alexander, educated in Laon and groomed for royal service. The former became bishop of Ely and the king' s treasurer, while Alexander took a Jess taxing route, first as archdeacon in the lucrative see of Salisbury, then as bishop of Lincoln, where he was known as "Alexander the Magnificent" for the lavishness of bis court. 24 Alexander' s

21

Green, Govemment of England, p. 163. On de Clinton's career, see Green, pp. 239-42 et passim, and Southern, "Henry I," pp. 214-15. 22 On opportunities for preferment through the ranks of the clergy, see M. Brett, The English Church Under Henry l (Oxford, 1975), pp. 104-12; Newman, Ang/o-Norman Nobility, pp. 107-8; and Turner, "Changing Perceptions," pp. 106-7. 23 On Roger of Salisbury' s career, see Green, Government of En gland, pp. 38-50, 163, and especially 273-4; and Edward J. Kealey, Roger of Salisbury: Viceroy of England (Berkeley, 1972). William of Newburgh records the story of how Roger came to Henry's attention in the first book of his Historia Rerum Anglicarum; see William of Newburgh: The History of English Affairs, Book One, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (Warminster, 1988), pp. 56-57. Roger is famous not just for his meteoric ri se to power but also for the suddenness of his fall from grace. William of Malmesbury tells the earliest and most poignant version of Roger' s demi se and death in Historia Novella, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter (London, 1955), pp. 26-39. 24 See Green, Government of England, pp. 263-64, for details of Nigel's career. Henry of Huntington, who dedicated his Historia Anglorum to Alexander, provides a portrait of his patron in bk. 1O. See Henry of Huntington, Historia Ang/orum: His tory of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. liii-lviii, 750-51. See also Brett, The English Church, p. 110; and Hollister, Monarchs, Magnates and Institutions, pp. 156-57. On Alexander as an influential patron of literature who supported up-and-comers like Geoffrey of Monmouth and

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success was more spectacular than typical, but it does demonstrate how far a nobody' s nephew could get with the right grooming and connections. 25 Geoffrey of Monmouth' s admiration for Alexander' s success in particular, as well as his self-describe d connections with other new men, tells us something important about his own aspirations in writing the Historia Regum Britanniae. Just after Merlin bursts on the scene, Geoffrey interrupts his narrative to provide a collection of Merlin' s prophecies, which he daims Alexander commissioned him to record. He also takes this opportunity to offer an elaborate dedicatory epistle to Alexander. 26 While the dedication is explicitly intended to earn Alexander's patronage, it also draws attention more generally to the curial connections of Geoffrey's book, connections that the author advertises in other ways as well. The claim that his Historia originated in an ancient British book given to him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, highlights Geoffrey's close relations with another remarkably successful curialis. Walter, of obscure origins, was appointed archdeacon while very young; during an extraordinary career stretching over the next forty years, he served under three successive bishops of Lincoln, adding along the way various privileges, benefices, and titles, including that of Provost of Saint George's College, and gradually building a sizeable estate of lands in and around Oxford. 27 Whatever the truth concerning the existence of Walter's ancient book, 28 Geoffrey, by touting this connection has, in true curial fashion, hitched his enterprise to a rising star. Readers often assume that Geoffrey's Celtic parentage, whether Welsh or Breton, holds the key to his intentions in composing a history of British kings, this despite the fact that almost nothing is known of Geoffrey's family or upbringing. 29 It is more Iikely, 1 would argue, that class aspirations rather than ethnicity play the determining role in Geoffrey's project. As a non-inheritin g son of obscure parentage, with some learning and much ambition, Geoffrey was well-situated for curial advancement as a secular canon and magister or teacher at Saint George's College in Oxford Castle, the scene of

Henry of Huntingdon, see Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Lite rature, Arts, and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (New York, 1988), pp. 23-24. 25

Later generations apparently noted the family's change in status; either Roger himself, or his son Roger, was dubbed "Roger le Poer" by some later chroniclers. See Kealey, Roger of Salisbury, p. 276, and Green, Government of England, pp. 185, 274. 26 Wright, Historia, chaps. 109-10; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 170-71. 27 See Brett, The English Church, pp. 209-1 O. 28 There has been much speculation on the probable or improbable existence of this source. See Wright's remarks in his introduction to Historia, pp. xvii-xviii. Michael Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1994), pp. 10-13, provides a judicious review of opinions. 29 Little can be reliably said of Geoffrey' s origins, but it is said well by Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 2-3.

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much royal activity in the late 1130's. 30 While there, Geoffrey cultivated close ties with a tight circle of rising curiales, including not only Walter the archdeacon and Walter' s bishop, Alexander of Lincoln, but also Alexander' s successor as hi shop of Lincoln, Robert of Chesney, who similarly began his career as a canon at Saint George's, and to whom Geoffrey dedicated a later work, the Vita Merlini. 31 For his part, Geoffrey makes no secret in his Historia of his own ambitions. His multiple dedications alone, to Robert of Gloucester, King Stephen, and Waleran, Count of Meulan, possibly the three most powerful men in England, suggest a man eagerly pursuing the preferment achieved by his friends in and around Oxford. He not only wanted to make a name for himself, but he seems literally to have done so, witnessing various documents as "Galfridus Arturus," the latter probably nota patronymic, as has sometimes been argued, but more likely a nickname fashioned after the name of his own hero. 32 Geoffrey' s curial ambitions seem to have outstripped his success. Late in life he twice signed himself bishop of Saint Asaph's (Llanelwy) in northeastern Wales, suggesting that he perhaps finally received the long-sought preferment. But he either never lived to occupy, or more likely, never cared to visit, his impoverished frontier church. 33 For the ambitious "Geoffrey Arthur," who had witnessed his friends' steady rise to wealth and power and had openly appealed for patronage to one king, two earls, and two powerful bishops, it was too little too late, no doubt. Yet in the long run, Geoffrey' s name and achievement were to outlast the gains of every other member of his circle. Geoffrey's own ambitions and circumstances, and those of the new administrative class generally, suggest that in promoting as heroes men of questionable origins, the Historia was designed to appeal to a wider and more socially fluid audience than is

30

Admittedly, the most dramatic events, such as the arrest of Roger of Salisbury and Alexander of Lincoln, and Matilda' s use of Oxford Castle as her stronghold during her struggle for the throne, transpired after Geoffrey's Historia was completed. 31 Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 2-4, emphasizes the number of times these men served as co-signatories. On Robert of Chesney and the Vita Merlini, see Basil Clarke, ed. Life of Merlin (Cardiff, 1973), pp. 36-37, 53, 212. 32 For the documents, see H. E. Salter, "Geoffrey of Monmouth and Oxford," English Historical Review 43 (1919), 382-85. On "Arturus" as a nicknamc rather than a patronymic, see Wright, introduction to Historia, p. x. Wright's argument is supported by William of Newburgh's remark that Geoffrey invented his own name after his fictional hero; see Walsh and Kennedy, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, pp. 28-29. Curley's argument (Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 2) that Geoffrey' s use of the name as early as 1129 predates the composition of his Historia presumes more precise information on which to base a terminus post quem than we in fact have. See David N. Dumville, "An Early Text of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and the Circulation of Sorne Latin Histories in Twelfth-Century Normandy," Arthurian Literature 4 (1984), 21 and n. 82. 33 See Wright's introduction to Historia, p. x; and Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 4--5.

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often supposed. lt has often been noted that Geoffrey' s construction of an ancient line of British kings was meant to flatter the Norman nobility, as represented by the king and earls to whom he dedicated his Historia. Less often observed but equally important is that Geoffrey also takes every opportunity to demonstrate that common interests and mutual obligations bind royalty to curiales and new men, among whom he worked and whose social aspirations he shared. 34 Currently, issues of ethnicity dominate the discussion of Geoffrey' s intentions, with opinion divided on whether he writes to promote Norman, Welsh, Breton, or anti-Saxon interests. Yet, though ail of these arguments find some support in the narrative, none does justice to Geoffrey' s ambitious design, nor do narrowly ethnie theories account for the extraordinary reception of the Historia Regum Britanniae, which was by no means restricted to a single ethnie group. 35

34

The question of Geoffrey' s audience, a secular one with some command of Latin, is admittedly a vexed one that awails further study. See Crick, Dissemination and Reception, pp. 10-11. The traditional view that the clergy monopolized Latin literacy has corne under increasing attack, especially by those who study the role of laymen in govemment service able to read at least some Latin. See Henry G. Richardson and George O. Say les, The Governance of Medieval England from the Conques! to Magna Carta (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 269-83; and especially M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993), pp. 224-52. The evidence for non-clerical rcadcrs in the reign of Henry I is admitleùly scanty, but this group grew rapidly as the twelfth century progressed. Clanchy marks 1180-1220 as a "decisive stage" in the history of "pragmatic literacy" (p. 247). This is the same period during which interest in Geoffrey's text was at its height, with fifty-eight manuscripts in circulation by the end of the twelfth century (Crick, Dissemination and Reception, p. 216). 35 Given Geoffrey's fierce anti-Anglo-Sax onism, one would think that at least one ethnie group would find no use for the Historia Re gum Britanniae, yet by the end of the century, Arthur was being hailed by La3amon as "the hope of the English" (see William R. J. Barron and S. C. Wrinberg, LaJamon Brut [New York, 1995], line 14297). For various arguments that Geoffrey writes to champion or denigrate some ethnie group, see the following: John Gillingham, "The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain," Ang/oNorman Studies 13 (1991 ), 99-118, on Geoffrey' s interests in promoting the Welsh; John S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary His tory of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth 's "Historia Rl'gum Britanniae" and lts Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 396-402, 443, on Geoffrey's Breton descent and "racial patriotism" (p. 427); Tatlock and, among others, Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (London, 1983), pp. 38-67, on Geoffrey's Historia as Norman propaganda. Views that Geoffrey composes "a didactic construct" (the phrase is from R. William Leckie, The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century [Toronto, 1981], p. 55), whether, as in Leckie, one that promotes civil harmony during the "anarchy" of Stephen, or, as in Valerie Flint, "The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and Its Purpose, A Suggestion," Speculum 54 ( 1979), 447-68, that he writes to parody and undermine monastic celibate culture, are in my view

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In fact, much evidence suggests that by Geoffrey's time, England was rapidly evolving into a complex, hybridized culture; processes of accommodation, especially intermarriage, worked with remarkable speed to blur ethnie differences between English and Norman peoples, so that, within a century of the Conquest, according to Richard FitzNigel, "the two nations [English and Norman] are so mixed that it can scarcely be decided (1 mean in the case of freemen) who is of English birth and who of Norman." 36 The very fact that we have to guess about Geoffrey's ethnicity, falling back upon such awkward constructions as "normanised Celt" to describe it, suggests that our current fascination with race and nationality might not have been shared by Geoffrey. 37 More importantly, however, arguments that Geoffrey is motivated by his Welsh or Breton descent, or by pro-Norman or anti-Saxon sentiments, presume a society in which national or cultural identity is a fixed and objective category. In fact, however, as Robert Bartlett, among others, reminds us: [N]ationality is not a matter of objective classification at ail. It is a matter of identification, a human judgement doubtless based on many explicit and implicit material and psychological distinctions, but not reducible to any of them .... Identification is [thus] a social process. Self-identification exists in a close relationship with identification by others and identification of others. 38

as overly restrictive as those based on ethnicity. Equally reductive is Christopher N. L. Brooke's argument that Geoffrey "can have intended nothing but mockery and mischief" ("Geoffrey of Monmouth as a Historian," in Church and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. Christopher N. L. Brooke [New York, 1976], p. 82). Brooke, a fine historian, often falls into the trap of aligning seriousness with history and frivolousness with literature. For an astute recent analysis of the truth daims of fictional and historical writing, see Otter, Inventiones, pp. 6-19; see also pp. 69-84 on the role of self-referential metaphors that point to Geoffrey' s self-consciousness as a writer. Otter also refuses to interpret Geoffrey's fiction in terms of "a single institution or faction" (p. 75). The view that cornes closest to mine in stressing issues of class and audience is that of Shichtman and Finke, "Profiting from the Past," pp. 15-21, 28-35. The broadly literary view of Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain, pp. 121-72, remains the fullest and in many ways the most satisfying treatment of the narrative as a whole. 36 See Charles Johnson, ed. and trans., Dialogus de Scaccario: The Course of the Exchequer (Oxford, 1983), pp. 53-54. The literature on patterns of assimilation and accommodation in the early post-conquest period is large and growing, but see, for example, Marjorie Chibnall, AngloNorman England: 1066-1166 (Oxford, 1986); for evidence of widespread intermarriage in particular, see Cecily Clark, "Women's Names in Post-Conquest England: Observations and Speculations," Speculum 53 ( 1978), 223-51. 37 See Wright, who cautiously concludcs a discussion of Geoffrey's ethnicity: "It seems justified to conclude that Geoffrey was a normanised Celt, perhaps of Breton descent, although we cannot be sure of his exact racial extraction" (Historia, p. x). 38 Bartlett's remark occurs in his study of Gerald's ambivalence regarding his own identity

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The social process of cultural identification is especially complex in the multicultural conditions of post-conqu est England. This is not the place to examine the continually shifting identification of "Englishness" in twelfth-century historiography. My argument here is that Geoffrey of Monmouth 's Historia plays a major role in this process by calling attention to both the constructedness or inventedness of cultural identity itself and the opportunities the process provides for self-reinvention. FitzNigel's remark suggests that class or status was replacing ethnicity as a crucial mark of cultural identity in twelfth-century England, a development reflected in and promoted by the Historia Regum Britanniae. Geoffrey indicates his class consciousness as an educated "freeman" when he sneers at what he describes as the misguided attempt of the highly cultivated Romans tu teach British peasants how to conduct themselves in war, saying that to offer wisdom to peasants ("rustici," "vulgus," "plebs") is to throw "pearls before swine" [margaritam inter porcos]. 39 Both his insistence that upward mobility be restricted to his own class of "eruditi" or learned men and his championi ng of the self-made man mark an important shift in post-conquest practices of selfidentification, a shift from ethnicity toward class or status, which Geoffrey construes sometimes as a given or accident of birth, but more often as earned, shaped, and maintained by the arts of self-invention. 40 Whatever his ethnicity, Geoffrey' s ancient "Britons" operate Jess as an ethnie group than as an expanding noble class or "race of kings," as he frequently calls it, which achieves and maintains its status by art rather than by birth. Both Geoffrey and his ancient Britons share an interest in self-fashioning as an art and a necessity, as essential to kings as to upwardly mobile bastards, and the special province of royal advisors and curiales, often nobodies themselves, on whom kings rely to protect and enhance the royal image. Conquest was the key to William ofNormand y's self-transformation from a bastard into a successful duke, and again into an even more powerful king. 41 But in Geoffrey's Historia, written at a time when Jess territory was open to conquest, more curial forms of self-invention often play the major role in the advancement of both kings and curiales. There is, of course, a great deal of conquering in Geoffrey' s narrative, but behind or within every Galfridian conqueror stands a clever, loyal curialis on whom the as either "Welsh" or "of Wales" (Gerald of Wales: 1146-1223 [Oxford, 1982], p. 10). On the constructedness of Norman identity in particular, see R. H. C. Davis, The Normans and Their Myth (London, 1976). 39 Wright, Historia, chap. 91; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 146-47. 40 It should be noted that the shift could also be reversed, as is the case in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries when Englishness cornes to be defined once again in ethnie terms and over against other groups, especially the groups inhabiting the border areas of Scotland, Wales, and lreland. See Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National ldentity, 1290-1340 (Oxford, 1996). 41 On William's rise as Duke of Normandy, see Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power: 840-1066 (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 154-56.

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king relies even more than on his army. In the character of Cadwallo' s counsellor Brian, for instance, Geoffrey pays extravagant tribute to the loyalty and ingenuity of the ideal royal advisor. The rare namc, most scholars agree, recalls one of the most powerful new men in Henry I' s reign, Brian fitz Count, the bastard son of Alan Fergunt, Duke of Brittany, Henry's close ally and once married to bis sister Constance. Brian was sent to Henry's court as a boy to be educated and groomed for service in the king's household and was, over time, richly rewarded for his loyal service, becoming, after Robert of Gloucester, the most powerful of the king' s familiares. During the civil war that followed Henry's death, Brian stood out among bis contemporaries for bis unswerving loyalty to the king's chosen successor, Matilda. 42 Geoffrey' s Brian appears out of nowhere when Cadwallo is considering dividing the kingdom with the Saxon Edwin, here styled as Cadwallo's childhood companion, in a radical departure from Bede. 43 While other counsellors debate the details of the plan, "Cadwallo lay with bis head in the lap of a certain nephew of bis, whom they called Brian." On hearing that an agreement is near that will divide Britain and weaken bis king's power, Brian "bursts out weeping, and the tears which flowed from bis eyes dripped down in such a way that they besprinkled the King's face and beard." Brian's tears rouse the king intime to heed the young man's warning and refuse Edwin the crown, keeping the British king's power intact. 44 Later, Cadwallo lies ill on the island of Guernsey, shipwrecked and sick with longing to return home to Britain but unable to outwit Edwin's defenses. 45 Angry over his lasses, miserable, and near death, Cadwallo is suddenly seized by a yearning to eat game, which the faithful Brian im-

42

On the career of Brian fitz Count, see Newman, Anglo-Norman Nobility, pp. 52, 58-59; and H. W.C. Davis, "Henry of Blois and Brian fitz Count," English Historical Review 24 (1910), 297-303. Gilbert Foliot writes to Brian admiringly of his loyalty to "the good and golden days" of King Henry, "who brought you up from boyhood, educated you, knighted you, enriched you ... ," in short, to the king who made him (Southern, "King Henry I," p. 220). For the role of Brian in Geoffrey' s Historia, see Tatlock, Legendary His tory of Britain, pp. 169-70, 356-57, 389-90; note, however, that Tatlock misidentifies Brian as the son of Robert of Gloucester. 43 Geoffrey's version of the Cadwallo-Edwin relationship represents one of his most audacious rewritings of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (2.20), in which the saintly Edwin is martyred with "ruthless savagery" by "the utterly barbarous" Cadwalla (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, rev. ed., trans. Leo Price-Shirley and Ronald E. Latham [Harmondsworth, 1990], p. 140). 44 Wright, Historia, chap. 191; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 269-70. 45 Not coincidentally, Geoffrey gives the Saxon Edwin his own magician-advisor, the exotic Spaniard Pellitus, whose prophetic knowledge allows the Saxons to predict in advance when and where the British will attempt an invasion. Taking administrative back-biting to extreme lengths, Brian, disguised as a beggar, stabs and kills Pellitus on Cadwallo's behalf. See Wright, Historia, chaps. 193, 196; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 271, 275-76.

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mediately sets out to hunt. After "wandering the whole island without discovering what he was looking for," Brian cleverly hits upon "a new device" (arte nova): "he opened up his own thigh and eut off a slice of the flesh. He made a spit, cooked the meat, and took it to the king, pretending it was venison."46 The stratagem works. The king eats, marvels at such sweet-tasting meat, and quickly recovers to reconquer the island. 47 In these unusually tender scenes, Geoffrey transforms the inventiveness and ultimate selfsacrifice of the curialis into a eucharistie romance of king and loyal servant. Geoffrey' s most famous royal advisor is of course Merlin, and he, more than any figure in Geoffrey' s Historia, embodies the skills and potential of the new curial class. 48 Though initially cast as the sacrificial victim because a bastard, he like Brian lives by his wits, and is saved when he demonstrates to Yortigern's court, and to Geoffrey's audience as well, that the enigma of the sinking tower is best resolved not by the crude magic of blood and sacrifice but by the application of the more sophisticated skills of new men. Questioning the royal magicians, Merlin draws attention to the penetrating power of wit or interpretation when he demands that they investigate "what lies hidden under the foundation ... preventing it from holding firm." When investigation reveals the pool under the tower, Merlin repeats the same probing procedure, demanding to know what lies "beneath the pool." Once the stones beneath the pool are revealed, Merlin again points to a hidden truth when he announces that "within" the two hollow stones lie the two dragons whose actions he will interpret as revealing Britain's future. 49 This repeated emphasis on the skills needed to probe beneath the surface of things serves as a highly appropriate introduction to Merlin's prophecies themselves, which dazzle Vortigern' s court less by their plain truthtelling than by the "equivocal meaning" (ambiguitate) of Merlin's language. 50 Merlin decodes the initial prophecies himself in clear, unambiguous language, both for the benefit of the dull-witted Vortigern, and to cernent the foundations of Geoffrey' s own fiction, as it were, which will presently relate as true history the events Merlin reveals. 51 The later prophecies grow increasingly

46

Wright, Historia, chap. 193; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 271-72. Wright, Historia, chap. 191; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 271-72. Merlin also dabbles in "the new arts" (novis artibus) for his king's benefit when he offers to supply a drug that will disguise Utherpendragon as the husband of Ygeme. See Wright, Historia, chap. 137; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 206-7, and below. 48 The argument that follows builds upon that of Shichtman and Finke, "Profiting from the Past," pp. 28-35. 49 Wright, Historia, chap. 108; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 169. 50 Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 186. "Cum igitur hec et alia prophetasset Merlinus, ambiguitate uerborum suorum astantes in admirationem commouit" (Wright, Historia, chap. 118). 51 The message to Vortigem could hardly be more clear: "Petent Britannicam insulam, inuadent Saxonicam gentem, subiugabunt nefandum populum; sed prius te infra turrim inclusum conburent." [They (i.e., the sons of Constantine) will make for the island of Britain, attack the 47

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opaque and apocalyptic, presenting themselves as puzzles or signs, like the mystery of the sinking tower, that require the services of a skilled interpreter to be solved or read. As noted earlier, Geoffrey interrupts his narrative at the moment Merlin begins to prophesy to introduce himself and rededicate his work to the magnificant Alexander, a discerning and, Geoffrey hopes, generous patron of "subtle wit" (subtilis ingenii). 52 Vortigern's amazement seems directed as much at Geoffrey's skill as a royal historian/advisor as at Merlin's powers: "Vortigern spoke highly of the young man's wit and his oracular pronouncements, for that particular period in history had produced no one who was ready to speak his rnind in this way in front of the king." 53 Merlin's subtlety, like Geoffrey's skill, creates a space within which a talented nobody can build signs of royal authority as well as self-legitimation, signs that, unlike Vortigern's tower, seem guaranteed to last. 54 Merlin's prophetic vision in effect produces Britain's next king, Aurelius, whose kingship is no sooner predicted than it is fulfilled when, the very next day, Aurelius arrives in Britain and quickly burns V ortigern in his tower. After reconquering the island, Aurelius turns his attention to monument-building: "Aurelius collected carpenters and stone-masons together from every region and ordered them to use their skill to contrive some novel building [novam ... structuram] which would stand for ever" to commemorate the British achievement, a building obviously meant to replace Vortigern's unstable tower and "stand for" the new royal regime. But once again the king's men lack the necessary talent to produce a fitting monument: "The whole band racked their brains and then confessed themselves beaten."55 Aurelius, like Vortigern before him, calls upon Merlin's skill or ingenium. 56 Merlin's plan to remove the Giant's Ring of mammoth stones from lreland to Salisbury incidentally requires the conquest of that country, but the war is passed over as insignificant compared to the task of

Saxon people and conquer the race which they detest. The first thing they will do will be to burn you alive, shut up inside your tower ... ; Wright, Historia, chap. 118]. 52 Wright, Historia, chap. 11 O; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 170. The appeal for patronage seems not to have worked to Geoffrey's satisfaction. In his dedicatory preface to the Vita Merlini, pp. 52-53, Geoffrey expresses his hope that Robert of Chesney, Alexander' s successor as Bishop of Lincoln, will be more generous than his (tactfully unnamed) predecessor. 53 Wright, Historia, chap. 118; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 186. 54 On Merlin as a figure for the artist-historian, see Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain, pp. 171-72. Shichtman and Finke argue that Merlin's magic serves as "an instrument of economic protection ... for precapitalist 'inventors'" like Merlin and Geoffrey, who can best demand rewards if they can claim a monopoly on their effective techniques ("Profiting from the Past," p. 32). 55 Wright, Historia, chap. 128; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 195. 56 The word appears eight times in these two sections of the narrative. See Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain, p. 154 and n. 141; and Shichtman and Finke, "Profiting from the Past," p. 33.

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moving the stones. Merlin taunts the young warriors with his superior talents as he did Vortigern's magicians: "'Try your strength, young man,' said he, 'and see whether skill can do more than brute strength, or strength more than skill, when it cornes to dismantling these stones."' Merlin uses his "skill ... in mechanical contrivances" to remove the stones "more easily than you could ever believe," then at Aurelius's command, rebuilds Stonehenge in England as a British royal monument. The king then seizes the opportunity to celebrate this event "in right royal fashion ... bestowing lands on those who had no holdings of their own, thus rewarding them for the efforts they had made to serve him." 57 Both Aurelius and Merlin understand that royal power, however legitimate its origins and even when secured by conquest, must be solidified by the "new arts" of new men, who earn the king' s favor through invention rather than war. Geoffrey protects artful nobodies like Merlin and Brian from the taint of grubbing for royal favor by representing their rewards not in terms of tangible land or wealth, but in idealized terms of the love and favor of the king. In real life, though, the new men of Geoffrey's day, sometimes bitterly accused of self-promotion, hardly meant to remain curiales ail their lives. On the contrary, as Emma Mason has shown, no one could remain indefinitely in the curial class; one either moved up into the baronial class, or else one's name and family sank without a trace. 58 Curial advancement was slow and precarious compared to the more immediate benefits of conquest or inheritance, but the aim nearly always was to join the baronial class above, then kick away the ladder, as it were, eliminating ail traces of the rise. Geoffrey's most ambitious bastard, King Arthur, as well as Arthur' s progenitor, the parricide Brutus, do just that, artfully erasing their own suspect beginnings, and replacing them with structures or symbols made to seem permanent and timeless. Merlin's sudden disappearance following Arthur's conception may seem puzzling, but in many ways Arthur is Merlin's creation, his best piece of work, and his double. As with Merlin, Arthur' s legitimacy is questionable at best; in fact he is doubly fatherless, not only conceived out of wedlock, but in effect nobody's son, since his father was not himself when the child was conceived. On the night in question, Arthur' s father Utherpendragon-the name itself is the product of self-invention, derived from the heraldic banner Uther "ordered ... to be fashioned in gold" after the dragon-shaped star Merlin interprets as favorable sign of Uther' s ascendancy--comes to Y gerne disguised by Merlin's drugs to resemble her husband. 59 Thus, Merlin, ifnot Arthur's father, is at Ieast an indispensable midwife at his conception. 60 In fact, Merlin's engineering of Arthur's birth, more than any incident in the narrative, hints that fictionmaking lies at the very heart of lineage and kingship, a lesson not lost on Arthur

57 58

59 00

Wright, Historia, chaps. 128-30; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 195-98. Mason, "Magnates, Curiales, and the Wheel of Fortune," p. 118. Wright. Historia, chap. 133; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 201. Wright, Historia, chaps. 137-38; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 206-8.

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himself. 61 Conceived in fiction, as it were, Arthur, like both Merlin and Uther, takes early and easily to self-fashioning, winning loyal familiares while still a boy by dispensing gifts so freely that he runs out of land to give, whereupon he devises a scheme: "he made up his mind to harry the Saxons so that with their wealth he might reward [those] ... who served in his household." Tellingly here, the more typical justification for conquest-hered itary right to the land in question-follow s only as an afterthought to the more urgent need for a young king of doubtful origins to shore up his kingship with the visible sign of a large persona! entourage. 62 Unlike Merlin, Arthur becomes a great conqueror, not only driving the Saxons from England, but adding Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland to the British empire before setting out to fulfill his dream of "conquering the whole of Europe," a goal he nearly accomplishes. 63 Yet for ail of the fighting in the Arthurian section of Geoffrey' s Historia, the epitome of Arthur' s career is realized not in battle but in the more cultivated arts that Geoffrey lovingly dwells upon in the famous plenary court scene. For Arthur' s predecessor Aurelius, Merlin' s monument at Stonehenge signified and fortified the power of the royal court; King Arthur, more shrewd, more confident, and more ambitious than Aurelius, transforms the court itself into a monument to his own achievement, creating an institution centered on the aesthetic display of power not in terms of military conquest but of social refinement or facetia: [B]y this time, Britain had reached such a standard of sophistication [dignitatis] that it excelled ail other kingdoms in its general affluence, the richness of its decorations, and the courteous behavior [facecia] of its inhabitants. Every knight in the country who was in any way famed for his bravery wore livery and arms showing his own distinctive colour; and women of fashion [facete] often displayed the same colours. 64 As C. Stephen Jaeger has shown, the Latinfacetia, related to facere, to make or fashion, develops beginning in the late eleventh century as a tenu used "tu express the entire code of refinement and sophistication" associated with courtliness or curialitas, including wit, eloquence, manners and fine dress. 65 And although Arthur's self-fashioned courtiers may seem more ornamental than such practical craftsmen as Merlin and Brian,

61

This idea was brought to my attention by Christine Celio, a student in my undergraduate medieval survey course at the University of California, Irvine, in Spring, 1995. 62 Following his observation that Arthur decided to harry the Saxons to gain lands he could use to reward his loyal servants, Geoffrey adds: "The justness of his cause encouraged him, for he had a claim by rightful inheritance [hereditario iure] to the kingship of the whole island" (Wright, Historia, chap. 143; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 212). 63 Wright, Historia, chap. 154; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 222. 64 Wright, Historia, chap. 157; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 229. 65 See C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Court/y ldeals, 939-1210 (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 161-68.

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even so bath groups contribute to solidifying and signifying royal reputations in curial, not military, ways. The idyllic peace of Caerleon that allows for courtly leisure is secured not by warriors or military fortifications but by the diligence of a group of intellectuals reminiscent of Geoffrey' s own milieu at Oxford' s College of Saint George, here endowed with Merlin' s analytic and prophetic skills: "The city also contained a college of two hundred learned men, who were skilled in astronomy and the other arts, and who watched with great attention the course of the stars and so by their careful computations prophesied for King Arthur. ... " 66 The job of the courtiers in particular is to display and so signify Arthur' s position of strength: Arthur then began to incrcasc his persona! entourage [familiam suam] by inviting very distinguished men from far-distant kingdoms to join it. In this way, he developed such a code of courtliness [facetiam] in his household that he inspired peoples far away to imitate him. The result was that even the man of noblest birth, once he was roused to rivalry, thought nothing at ail of himself unless he wore his arms and dressed in the same way as Arthur's knights.

Widespread imitation of Arthur's arms and dress not only advertises Arthur's power but increases it significantly, since the spectacle of the court itself is said to terrorize wouldbe invaders and preempt attacks: At last, the fame of Arthur's generosity and bravery spread to the very ends of the earth; and the kings of countries far across the sea trembled at the thought that they might be attacked and invaded by him, and so Jose contrai of the lands under their dominion. They were so harassed by these tormenting anxieties that they re-built their towns and the towers in their towns, and then went so far as to construct castles on carefully-chosen sites, so that, if invasion should bring Arthur against them, they might have a refuge in their time of need. 67

Terms of acquisition, whether by conquest or service, suddenly give way in the lavishly-described plenary court scene to terms of consumption or style: the special costumes and ceremonies, heraldic arms, music, courtship, and games, aestheticize the 66

The close connection between Merlin and the clerical intelligentsia is confirmed by the details of reception history. The keenest students of Merlin' s prophecies in the Middle Ages were university men, who by the end of the twelfth century had produced no fewer than five systematic commentaries on the prophecies. See Jan Ziolkowski, "The Nature of Prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth' s Vita Merlini," in Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition, ed. James Kugel (lthaca, 1990), p. 159; and R. W. Southern, "Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing, 3: History as Prophecy," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 22 (1972), 168. 67 Wright, Historia, chap. 154; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 222.

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preceding battle actions; in the courtly games and "imitation battles" (simulacrum prelii), wins and losses are borne "without the slightest trace of ill-feeling." 68 More importantly, the aesthetic display visibly demonstrates the cohesiveness, permanence, and exclusivity of a new class or status group whose creation and signification we are invited to witness and admire.m The grubbing for favor central to actual curial careers is not entirely suppressed in this romance scene. After four days of ceremony, games and feasting, Arthur gets down to business, calling together "ail those who ... had done ... any service" and rewarding each "with a persona) grant of cities, castles, archbishoprics, bishoprics, and other landed possessions." 711 Arthur' s action makes transparent the system of curial preferment that provides entrance to the group. Yet courtly pageantry works as much as patronage to ritualize, signify, and perpetuate Arthur' s power. The shift from conquest to costumes seems overly sudden in Geoffrey's abrupt introduction of the plenary court scene, perhaps signalling his anxiety about the insubstantiality of courtly self-fashioning, and probably more generally of fiction itself Such moments of uncertainty are understandable when we consider that Geoffrey's idealized representation of courtly pursuits is one of the earliest to appear in Europe, predating the earliest French romances by several decades. 71 In any case, in the midst of the courtly festivities, he abruptly cuts the plenary court scene short to announce the arrivai of a messenger who issues the final Roman challenge, which will prove fatal for Arthur and his court, but which the king and his courtiers welcome as rescue from the ease of court lite. "Until now," says the Duke of Cornwall,

68

Wright, Historia, chap. 157; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 230. See the illuminating discussion of the relationship between class and status by Max Weber: "'Property' and ïack of property' are ... the basic categories of ail class situations . . . . ln contrast to the purely economically determined 'class situation' we wish to designate as 'status situation' every typical component of ... life ... that is determined by a specific ... social estimation of honor ... normally expressed by the fact that above ail else a specific style of life can be expected from ail those who wish to belong to the circle .... [S]tratification by status goes hand in hand with a monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities .... Besides the specific status of honor, which always rests upon distance and exclusiveness, we find al! sorts of material monopolies. Such honorific preferences may consist of the privilege of wearing special costumes, of eating special dishes ... of carrying arms ... the right to pursue certain ... artistic practices, e.g. to play certain musical instruments" (Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Talcott Parsons et al. (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 181-91). 711 Wright, Historia, chap. 157; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 230. 71 Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness, pp. 166, 177-78; see also idem, The Envy of Angels: Cathedra! Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe: 950-1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), p. 292, where Jaeger dates the emergence of "what can be called ... courtly society" at "about 1150." 69

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I have been afraid that the life of ease which the Britons have been leading might make cowards of them and soften them up during this long spell of peace .... [W]hen it is obvious that men are no longer using their weapons, but are instead playing at dice [and] buming up their strength with women ... , then without any doubt their bravery, honour, courage and good name all become tainted with cowardice. For the past five years or thereabouts we have thought of nothing but these follies, and we have had no battle experience. It is precisely to free us from this sloth that God has stirred up the resentment of the Romans, so that they may restore our courage to what it used to be in the old days. 72

Four days of courtly celebration suddenly, within a few Iines, become five years of indolence. Ambivalence about courtliness as a worthy pursuit is here expressed in terms of nostalgia for "the old days," driving Arthur and the narrative back to the battlefield in hopes of reinvesting the signs of royalty and national glory with substance. Yet in spite of such moments of uncertainty, the Historia Regum Britanniae remains a remarkably cheerful book, particularly for one dcvoted to the fall of Britain. That is because for Geoffrey of Monmouth and many of his generation, every fall viewed with ambition and imagination is an opportunity for inventive new men to rise. For Geoffrey, if not for his predecessor Virgil, that is the message of the Troy story, a myth of eternal return, history (almost) without tears. 73 Indeed, even as Britain falls, not only is the British remnant promised another chance at greatness, but the Saxons, depicted just a few pages earlier as an "odious race" (nefandus populus), are already busy making a name for themselves as cultivators and rebuilders of the land, 74 while just off stage the Normans, never mentioned but always implied, await their turn to rise. 75 This pattern is already full y formed in the career of Brutus, Britain' s founder, who sets the mold for ail new men. As noted earlier, Brutus like Arthur begins his career with the taint of illegitimacy and violence. Hastening from the disaster of killing his parents, Brutus gains a following of loyal men with the spoils of his European conquests. But as he approaches England, urged on by Diana's Virgilian prophecy -and every imperialist's dream-that Britain lies "empty and ready for your folk," Brutus abruptly sheds his image as a conqueror to make a new start as a cultivated and cultivating monarch: At this time the island of Britain was called Albion. It was uninhabited except for a few giants. It was, however, most attractive, because of the delightful situation of its various

72

Wright, Historia, chap. 159; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 231-32. For a different view of Geoffrey' s reception of Virgil, see Patterson, Negotiating the Past, pp.157-95,201-2. 74 Wright, Historia, chaps. 204-7; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 282-84. 75 On cyclical patterns in Geoffrey' s narrative, see Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain, pp. 144-72. 73

Geoffrey of Monmouth 's Historia Regum Britanniae

23

regions, its forests and the great number of its ri vers, which teemed with fish; and it filled Brutus and his comrades with a great desire to live there. When they had explored the different districts, they drave the giants whom they had discovered into the caves in the mountains. With the approval of their leader they divided the land among themselves. They began to cultivate the fields and to build houses, so that in a short time you would have thought that the land had always been inhabited. Brutus then called the island Britain from his own name and his companions he called Britons. His intention was that his memory should be perpetuated by the derivation of the name. 76

The emphasis in this passage is squarely on the "new arts" of exploration, cultivation, and memorialization, whereas conquest is relegated to the disposai of "a few giants." 77 Brutus, foreshadowing Arthur's talent for courtly spectacle as social signifier, reserves the fiercest of the· giants to perform as royal entertainment: "Brutus ordered that Gogmagog should be kept alivc, for he wanted to see a wrestling match between this giant and Corineus, who enjoyed beyond ail reason matching himself against such monsters."78 Corineus, the ax-wielding, head-butting berserker who accompanies Brutus to England, obliges with a carefully contained display of conquest, leaving Brutus to the more suitably regal business of dividing the land, building cities and monuments, and making laws, fashioning Britain as a memorial to his new royal self and simultaneously erasing any hint of an illegitimate origin, "so that in a short time you would have thought that the land had always been inhabited" by this newly noble race. According to R. W. Southern, developments in English historiography in the century after the Conquest constitute one of England's few significant contributions to the twelfth-century Renaissance. Not surprisingly, Southern does not include Geoffrey' s Historia Regum Britanniae as a part of this achievement, undoubtedly because the productions that he admires and labels "history" are "the products of first-hand research" and disinterested "historical curiosity." 79 Measured against this standard, Geoffrey' s account of British antiquity is at best mere entertainment, in the words of historian C. N. L Brooke, a piece of "mockery and mischief," or at worst, as for Antonia Gransden, a work of "intellectual dishonesty ... masquerading as histor[y] ." 80 Yet the distinction between history and pseudo-history, or literature, on which such judgements are based is a peculiarly modern one, as Nancy Partner has eloquently argued in her

76

Wright, Historia, chap. 21; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 72. See Otter, Inventiones, pp. 71-75. 78 Wright, Historia, chap. 21; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 73. 79 "The Place of England in the Twelfth Century," in Medieval Humanism, pp. 160-62. 811 Brooke, "Geoffrey of Monmouth as Historian," p. 82; and Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, vol. 1, c. 550-c. 1307 (lthaca, 1974), pp. 202-3. 77

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aptly titled study of medieval historiography, Serious Entertainments and elsewhere. 81 Such a distinction is currently under close scrutiny by critical theorists, who in the late twentieth century as in the early twelfth, define history as a branch of rhetoric, and like its close cousin literature, as a "discursive practice or narrative that forms the object of its own interpretation." 82 Geoffrey would not have understood the terms or the urgency of the contemporary debate, but his narrative demonstrates throughout an acute awareness of the power of fiction to shape and even de termine "true" history. At the very least, Geoffrey's history became true retroactively, a spectacular example of what Richard Waswo calls "the history that literature makes." English monarchs over the next four hundred years banked heavily on Geoffrey' s narrative to realize and legitimize their own royal ambitions. To cite a few prominent examples, Henry of Anjou strengthened his hold on the English throne by first arranging the "discovery" of Arthur's (decidedly dead) body, then filling the gap in 1187 by christening his grandson "Arthur"; Edward I liked to call himself "Arthurus redivivus" and drew arguments for English dominion over Scotland largely from Galfridian history; Henry Tudor overthrew Richard III under the banner of Merlin's Red Dragon, was praised in an accession pageant as "Cadwalader blodde lynyally descending," and named his son Arthur for good measure; Henry VIII, in his case against Rome, used precedents drawn from Geoffrey' s Historia to prove that English kings had never submitted to Roman overlordship; and even in the skeptical seventeenth century, long after humanist scholarship had exposed Geoffrey' s Historia as mostly a lie, James VI of Scotland offered a jewel, now on display in the British Museum, to the man who could trace the Scottish king' s genealogy to Brutus and thus smooth the way to his ascendancy as James I of England. 83 Though we might condemn the effects of such royalist propaganda, it would be wrong to accuse these kings of misreading Geoffrey, or of reading him naively. Geoffrey of Monmouth's aim was more ambitious than to perpetrate a hoax on the unwary, peddling lies in the guise of "true history." The kings who profited for 81

See Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977), pp. 183-211; and idem, "The New Comificius: Medieval History and the Artifice of Words," in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo, 1985), pp. 5-60; and especially idem, "Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History," Speculum 61 (1986), 90-117. 82 Richard Waswo, "The History That Literature Makes," New Literary History 19 (1988), here p. 541; see also the seminal work of Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973); and idem, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality ," reprinted in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and the Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 1-25. 83 For these examples and more, see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Sa.xons (Montreal, 1982), pp. 11-27; Richard Waswo, 'The History That Literature Makes," pp. 544-45, and n. 9; and Thomas D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), pp. 7, 14, 34-64, et passim.

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hundreds of years from the "symbolic capital" of Geoffrey' s Historia read him rightly. 84 In his invention of an ancient Britain, so thickly detailed that "you would have thought ... [it] had always been inhabited," Geoffrey places fiction-making at the very heart of kingship and history, suggesting on the one hand that ambitious kings would do well to patronize inventive, clever men, nobodies perhaps but skilled in the art of constructing signs of legitimacy, and on the other hand, that the potential of self-invention, though in his time still dependent on royal favor, need not be limited to a closed caste of nobles. 85 The extraordinary reception of the Historia Regum Britanniae in twelfth-century England suggests that Geoffrey's text both responded to and helped to shape the aspirations of an upwardly mobile class of curiales and new men. In such times of rapid social transformation, and especially in the complex, shifting hybridized culture that we conveniently call "Anglo-Norman," it paid to stand up for bastards.

84

The term is Pierre Bourdieu's; see Shichtman and Finke, "Profiting from the Past," pp.

16-21. 85

Wright, Historia, chap. 21; Thorpe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 72.

Eve and Her Audience in the Angio-No rmanAda m ROBERT L. A. CLARK

Man has said that woman can be defined, delineated, captured-underst ood, explained and diagnosed-to a level of determination never accorded to man himself, who is conceived as a rational animal with free will. Where man's behavior is underdetermined, free to construct its own future along the course of its rational choice, woman' s nature has overdetermined her behavior, the limits of her intellectual endeavors, and the inevitabilities of her emotional journey through life. 1

T

he Ordo representacionis Ade, as it is called in the unique manuscript in which it has survived, is a mid-twelfth-century dramatic office that is the earliest ex tant drama in French and also the most edited and studied of the entire corpus of medieval French drama. 2 Remarkable for its detailed stage directions and the subtlety

1

Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralis m: The ldentity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs 13 (1988), 406. 2 Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 927, groups various texts of a moral, didactic, or religious nature, including a liturgical drama of the Resurrection. Copied in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, probably in the sou th of France, on paper of Hispano-Arabic origin, they are the oldest extant Old French texts on paper. For a detailed description of the manuscript, see Paul Aebischer, Le Mystère d'Adam (Geneva, 1963), pp. 11-18. The end of the play is apparently lacking, but few scholars have accepted Aebischer's contention that performance would have concluded with the reading of the Quinze signes du Jugement, which follows the Adam text in the manuscript.

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of its characterizations, it shows close ties to the liturgy. The drama proper, consisting of 944 Jines, is preceded by the lection of the Adam and Eve story from Genesis and then punctuated by seven choral responsories on the same theme, ail of which are drawn from the Matins office of Septuagesima (ninth Sunday before Easter). The Adam and Eve episode, by far the most developed of the drama, includes the placing of Adam and Eve in "Paradise," the unusual double temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan, and the Expulsion, followed by long laments. After the more briefly treated Cain and Abel episode, the play concludes with the semi-liturgical Procession of Prophets announcing the advent of Christ, itself a dramatic rendering of the Pseudo-Augustinian Sermo contra ludeos, Paganos, et Arianos de Symbolo. ln this essay, 1 propose to explore the representation of Eve in the first part of the drama and, more particularly, the complex process of gendering in the text. 1 will argue that gender issues, particularly within marriage, are very much central to the text but that, in order to understand the poet's approach to these issues and to hear the competing and contradictory discourses about women to which the text gives voice, we must set aside a priori assumptions about its supposedly monolithic clerical ideology. Such an approach, drawing on feminist and post-structuralist theories of the subject as well as on other discursive constructions of women contemporary with the text, will allow us better to understand the complex ways in which it addressed its original audience. The Mystère or Jeu d'Adam, as it is commonly called, is a bilingual text in which the initial lection, choral chants and "ordering" of the service (i.e., the didascalia, or stage directions) are in Latin, while the dramatic dialogue is in Anglo-Norman French. The opening stage directions, which precede the lection from Genesis 1, the first choral responsory, and the opening dialogue, present an overdetermined woman and underdetermined man such as Alcoff has described. Eve and Adam stand before God, called "Figura" in the stage directions, and await his instructions before entering Paradise. In a major reworking of the episodes in Genesis, the Adam poet has conflated the two creation accounts to be found in chapters one and two of Genesis. As in Genesis 1, the earth is entrusted to both man and woman; but from Genesis 2 the poet has taken the account of the secondary creation of woman from Adam' s rib, not represented in the Adam but referred to after the fact. The poet has, however, reshuffled the chronology of Genesis 2, situating the creation of Eve before God' s placing of man in Paradise. In this way, both Adam and Eve hear directly from God ail of the various injunctions they are to observe. This establishes a parity between them that, we shall see, is simultaneously reaffirmed and undermined by what will follow. As Adam and Eve stand before Figura, the drama has not yet begun, but they are already "in character." The stage directions state: "Et stent ambo coram Figura, Adam tamen proprius, vultu composito, Eva vero parum demissiori" [Let them both stand before the Figure of God, Adam somewhat doser, his face quite composed, while Eve's face is a bit downcast]. 3

3

Willem Noomen, ed., Le Jeu d'Adam (Ordo representacionis Ade) (Paris, 1971 ), p. 17. Ail

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29

Thus, from the beginning and before the Fall, even before they enter Paradise, Adam is represented as closer to God, standing before Him in confidence, while Eve is more distant, troubled, her problematic status already clearly marked. As Steven Justice puts it: "Although the temptation is yet to corne, Eve looks already fallen." 4 Eve' s ferninine nature, as Alcoff says, has "overdeterrnined her behavior, the limits of her intellectual endeavors, and the inevitabilities of her emotional journey through life." Eve really does not stand a chance, but, despite this set-up, we shall see that her characterization, as morally problematic as it may be, does not bear the marking of social inferiority with regard to Adam. Figura proceeds to issue his various injunctions to Adam and Eve before they take stewardship over Paradise. As has often been noted, the vocabulary used in this passage represents the relationship between Figura and Adam as a feudal one. 5 Adam must not make war against his lord or else he will Jose his stewardship of Paradise, which his lord has granted him. lt has been argued that Eve also stands to Adam in just such a relationship. Maurice Accarie, for example, states: "Le mariage d'Adam et Eve est un simple contrat, et la hiérarchie entre les époux est à la ressemblance de celle qui les confronte à Dieu. Vassale d'Adam tout en étant son égale dans leur vassalité vis-à-vis du seigneur, Eve lui doit obéissance et loyauté, s'engage à le servir en toute amitié" [The marriage of Adam and Eve is a simple contract, and the hierarchy between the spouses is in the likeness of the one in which they stand before God. Eve, Adam' s vassal while being his equal in their vassality with regard to their lord, owes him obedience and loyalty, and she swears to serve him in ail friendship]. 6 Adam and Eve are indeed equal partners with, however, different roles deterrnined by the culturally constructed differences held to be inherent in their natures. Severa! times, the text uses the words pareil (lines 11, 355) and per (line 313) "equal" or "peer" in referring to their

textual references are to Noomen's edition and are cited parenthetically; translations are my own. 4 Steven Justice, "The Authority of Ritual in the Jeu d'Adam," Speculum 62 (1987), 856. 5 Kenneth Unwin, 'The Mystère d'Adam: Two Problems," Modern Language Review 34 (1939), 71; William Calin, "Cain and Abel in the Mystère d'Adam," Modern Language Review 58 (1963), 174-75; Lynette R. Muir, Liturgy and Drama in the Anglo-Norman Adam, Medium Aevum Monographs, n.s. 3 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 113-14; Karl Odenkirchen, 'The Play as Extended Feudal Metaphor," The Play of Adam (Ordo Representacionis Ade) (Brookline, 1976), pp. 26-33; Wendy Morgan," 'Who Was Then the Gentleman?': Social, Historical, and Linguistic Codes in the Mystère d'Adam," Studies in Philology 79 (1982), 101-21. 6 Maurice Accarie, "La légitimation de la société féodale dans le Jeu d'Adam," in Mélanges de langue et littérature du moyen-âge au XXe siècle offerts à Mademoiselle Jeanne Lods, Collection de !'Ecole Normale de Jeunes Filles 10 (Paris, 1978), 1: 1O. See also Accarie, "Féminisme et antiféminisme dans le Jeu d'Adam," Le Moyen Age 87 (1981), 207-26, in which the author insists on Eve's inferiority as vassus vassorum of Adam.

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relationship. 7 But, in forcing the text into a single feudal model, Accarie and other critics have distorted its teaching about marriage and gender roles, which are among its major concerns. Let us look more closely at how the text presents Eve. The first term that Figura uses to designate Eve is not "wife" but "companion": "Jet' ai duné bon cumpaniun, /Ce est ta femme, Eve a noun" [I have given you a good companion. /This is your wife; her name is Eve; lines 8-9). The social bond between companions-etymolo gically speaking, the bond between people who share bread-is thus inscribed in the text before the marriage bond. The social bond and its obligations are shown to precede and define the marital union, and the poet uses the term companiun, generically masculine but effectively genderless, to rnake this point. Eve thus has a social role to play, one of considerable importance, as it turns out. Adam is to govern her by reason, but she is to give him bon adjutoire "good help" and bon conseil "good counsel." Indeed, God specifically tells her that her salvation depends on it: "Se tu le fais bone adjutoire, / Jo te mettrai od lui en gloire" [If you give him good help, / 1 will place you with him in glory; lines 39-40).x The giving of advice or counsel, good or bad, wanted or unwanted, is a recurrent motif in the text. Indeed, the word conseil is used no fewer than nineteen times if one includes two occurrences of the verb conseillier and two of the Latin consilium. Furthermore, it occurs in speech (or in reference to speech) between ail of the characters, with the exception of the prophets in the closing section of the drama: Eva to Figura. De moi avra bon conseil. (line 46) [From me he will receive good counsel.]

7

In an article that 1 had not read when 1 wrote this essay, Joan Trasker Grimbert points out that the meaning of pareillper seems to tluctuate between "like" and "equal," according to context ("Eve as Adam's Pareil: Equivalence and Subordination in the Jeu d'Adam," in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox [Wood bridge, Eng., 1994], pp. 31-32). She argues that the text is characterized by the "subversive ambiguity of such key words as pareil, conseil, bonté, and don" and that the poet's wordplay, in part a legacy of the Jewish Bible that had been carried over into the Vulgate, "effectively skew[s] what appears at first blush to be a resolutely anti-feminist interpretation" (p. 37). Grimbert is hesitant to allow, however, that the this "skewing" of the texts' s ideological, i.e., clerical, message is intentional on the poet' s part (p. 31 ). White 1 agree with Grimbert's analysis to the degree that the text's message is considerably more subtle than many critics have allowed, 1 attribute its apparent "ambiguity" to the way it purposefully incorporates conflicting discourses about women. 8 Cf. Jean-Charles Payen's commentary on these lines, which, he says, "semble[ nt] signifier que la voie du salut passe d'abord par le respect des valeurs conjugales, dont le premier est l'amour réciproque" ("Idéologie et théâtralité dans !'Ordo representacionis Ade," Etudes Anglaises 25 [ 1972], 22).

Eve and Her Audience in the Anglo-Norman Adam Figura to Adam. Creez conseil: que soi et vers mei leal t (li ne 68) [Heed my advice: may you be loyal to met] Figura to Adam. Por nul conseil ne gerpisez le mien. (line 71) [Do not neglect my counsel on account of any other.] Diabolus to Adam. Je te conseillerai en fei. (line 188) [I will give you advice in good faith.] Adam to Diabolus. Mal conseil dones t (li ne 197) [Y ou give me bad advicet]

didascalia: Tune serpens artificiose compositus ascendit juxta stipitem arboris vetite, cui Eva proprius adhibebit aurem, quasi ipsius ascultans consilium. (after line 292) [Now a skillfully contrived serpent will climb up on the trunk of the forbidden tree, to which Eve will incline her ear, as if listening to its ad vice.] Adam. Jo ai guerpi mun criator Par le conseil de mal uxor. (lines 321-22) [I have abandoned my creator through the advice of an evil wife. Adam. Ele me dona mal conseil! (line 356) [She gave me bad advice!] Adam to Eva. Ore sui perriz par ton conseil. Par ton conseil sui mis a mal. (lines 374-75) [Now 1 am destroyed through your counsel. Through your counsel 1 have been cast into misfortune.] Adam. N'i ad conseil que del morir. (line 386) [There is no other recourse but death.] Eva to Figura. Mal est bailliz qui a lui se conseille! (line 468) [The person who heeds his advice is Iost!] Adam. Creï conseil, chi me fist tost partir. (line 528) [I listened to advice which forced me to Ieave ail too soon.] Adam to Eva. Eve dolente, cum fus a mal delivre Quant creütes si tost conseil de la guivret (lines 539-40) [Wretched Eve, to what wickedness you delivered yourself when you so readily believed the serpent's advice.]

31

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Abel to Chaim. Creez mon conseil! Aloms offrir A Dampnedeu, por lui plaisir. (lines 629-30) [Heed my advice! Let us go make offering to the Lord Godin order to please him.] didascalia: Tune respondebit Chaim, quasi placuerit ei consilium Abel. (after line 638) [Then Cain will answer, as if Abel's advice were agreeable to him.] Chaim to Abel. lcist conseil ne vealt un oef! (line 664) [This advice is not worth an egg!] 9

If 1 have cited almost ail the occurrences of these terms, it is because in reading them,

one realizes that what one has is effectively the Jeu d'Adam in miniature (minus the Procession of Prophets ). Just as much as the choral responsories that set forth the bare bones of the Genesis àccount, they structure the text, albeit more subtly. The giving of counsel is emblematic of the drama' s broader themes of trust and treachery, but it is not too much to claim that it is in itself a major theme of the Jeu d'Adam, played out from Figura's first injunctions through the Temptation and Expulsion to Cain's treacherous killing of his brother. 10 The social bonds in the Jeu d'Adam, as expressed through the crucial fonction of the giving of counsel, are thus not simply a metaphor for the sacred but are primordial and essential, although the meaning of the text and the construction of Eve and the other characters certain] y can not be reduced to a single dynamic. In Eve' s case, of course, the social role of "giver of good counsel" is refigured within the text's construction of the gender binary. Eve will become the mal uxor (line 322), necessarily, since she will be the giver of mal conseil (line 356). But Eve's negative example does not completely destroy the positive valence of this role, specifically as it might be performed by women, for the wife's responsibility of providing good counsel to her husband, so prominent in the Adam, took on considerable importance in this period, as we shall see. 11 Other critics have, of course, addressed the issue of gender in the Anglo-Norman Adam, but the interpretation of gender mies in the text has, more often than not, been

9

In two other uses of conseil not given here (lines 210 and 266), the meaning of the word is closer to "secret." 1 For a discussion of the text's handling of treason in terms of Germanie law, see Emanuel J. Mickel, "Faith, Memory, Treason and Justice in the Ordo Representacionis Ade (Jeu d'Adam)," Romania 112 (1991), 129-54, especially 143-49. 11 Another twelfth-century drama that illustrates the role of wife as good counselor is the Beauvais Danielis Ludus, in which Belshazzar's queen provides him the explanation of the inscription on the wall that his counselors are unable to interpret. 1 would like to thank Caroline Jewers for drawing this to my attention.

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33

more of a stumbling-block than a productive hermeneutic approach. This was certainly so for Erich Auerbach in his famous essay on the Jeu d'Adam in Mimesis, in which he essentializes Eve to an even greater extent than the Adam poet himself, declaring her to be "[ without] moral consciousness," "naive," "impetuous," "half brazen," "very clumsy," and "a weak-though curious and hence sinful--creature." 12 This negative construction of Eve led Auerbach to reject Henri Chamard's reading of the scene in which Adam reproaches Eve for having spoken to the Devil-a reading unanimously adopted by subsequent editors-in favor of Paul Studer' s earlier rendering. 13 In this scene, Adam says angrily to Eve: "Ne creire jale traïtor! /Il est traïtre" [Don't ever believe that traitor! / He's a traitor; lines 280-81]. To which Eve coolly replies: "Bien le sai" [ I know that perfectly well; line 281 b]. Studer' s distribution of the lines in this passage takes this half-line away from Eve because, as Auerbach would have it: "lt is not possible for Eve to say bien le sai, nor for Adam to ask how she knows, nor for Eve to refer to her previous experience." 14 This is extremely odd, because at the very least, Eve could say "bien le sai" and be wrong, which is indeed the case. Nor is it clear why Eve, who has just encountered the Devi!, cannot refer to this experience just as Adam refers to his knowledge of the Devi!, also derived from experience. Auerbach does not offer a detailed argument to support his position, but it is his conception of Eve-as much as the poet' s-that makes him deny to Eve even the possibility of claiming to have knowledge. Auerbach' s reading does, however, have the merit of pinpointing what is at stake in this dangerous game: contrai of knowledge and the power that cornes with it. For it is, of course, a vision of power that the Devi! offers to Eve, the power that cornes from knowledge. About the forbidden fruit, he says: "Il ad en soi grant vertu. / En cestui est grace de vie, /De poëste e de seignorie, / De tut saver, bien e mal" [lt has in it great power. In it is the gift of life, of power and of lordship, of knowing all things, both good and evil; lines 248-51]. To which Eve responds by asking: "Quel savor a?" [What does it taste like? line 252]. In this line are indeed inscribed, as Accarie has remarked, all of the negative traits that the medieval clerical tradition-and Auerbach-assigned to Eve. 15 lt is inevitable that she will succumb to temptation, as

12

Erich Auerbach, "Adam and Eve," in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 143-73, especially pp. 147-49. 13 Paul Studer, ed., Le Mystère d'Adam: An Anglo-Norman Drama of the Twelfth-Century (Manchester, Eng., 1908). In addition to the above-cited editions by Aebischer, Noomen, and Odenkirchen, see Leif Sletsjôe, ed., Le Mystère d'Adam: Edition diplomatique (Paris, 1968); David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston, 1975). 14 Auerbach, "Adam and Eve," p. 148. 15 But see E. Jane Bums's interpretation, in which she argues that, while Eve's "seemingly mindless question" may at first glance seem to enforce the binaries imposed by the dominant (i.e., clerical) ideology, its punning on the etymological link of savorlsaver "boldly conflates the realms of knowledge and pleasure, thereby radically revising the basic structuring mechanism of

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will Adam through ber. There is no redeeming Eve, despite the best efforts of those critics who have sought to rehabilitate her by arguing that she shows a superiority of character, compared to Adam, after the Fall. Thus, Emilie Kostoroski-Kadish has argued that the Adam poet' s representation of Eve is a sympathetic one, "remarkably free from the traditional prejudices." 16 But in insisting that the play shows that "women are individuals in their own right," she overlooks the fact that Eve's troubles begin precisely at the point when she begins to actas an "individual," forgetting the social and moral injunctions of Figura. 17 It is possible, however, to advance a more nuanced reading of Eve' s character that does not seek to idealize her nor reinscribe the misogyny that informs the text' s characterization of her. 18 Furthermore, if we want to understand Eve and the ideological stakes involved in the poet' s construction of her, we cannot accept the text' s essentializing and ahistorical representation of her on its own terms. We must, rather, situate the text' s construction of Eve among other contemporary texts that deal with women. Only then will we be able to see that she is the site not only of the discourse of misogyny but of other ways of speaking about women that were then available. Only by listening to other voices can we hope to hear the other registers of discourse that resonate as overtones above the pi tch of the dominant in the Adam text. The Devi] himself helps orient the reader in this endeavor. lt has long been recognized that the Devi! uses a different linguistic register in the temptation scene with Eve than he used in his failed attempts to tempt Adam. 19 His choice of vocabulary and his abundant use of metaphor, metaphors that are so many lies that seek to pull Eve

the whole of Genesis I" (Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Lite rature [Philadelphia, 1993], pp. 81-82). 16 Emilie Kostoroski-Kadish, '"Feminism' in the Jeu d'Adam," Kentucky Romance Quarterly 22 (1975), 221. 17 Kostoroski-Kadish, "Feminism," p. 221. See also Thérèse Lynn for whom Eve, "Texemplum' du pécheur idéal," accedes to "les dimensions d'une héroïne tragique" ("Pour une réhabilitation d'Eve," French Review 48 [1975], 877). 18 One gets the latter impression from Auerbach's ("Adam and Eve") reading and, to a lesser extent, from Accarie's critique of Kostoroski-Kadish and Lynn when he remarks, for example: "Que cette espérance [dans le rachat par le Christ] soit placée dans la bouche d'Eve n'a rien d'anormal: c'est elle qui a péché; c'est donc elle qui a le plus à attendre de la miséricorde divine" [There is nothing unusual in the fact that this hope (in redemption through Christ) should be placed in Eve's mouth: she is the one who has sinned; it is she, therefore, who has the most to expect from divine mercy; "Féminisme," p. 212]. 19 It has been remarked numerous times that the temptation of Adam by the devil does not figure in the biblical account and, furthermore, that the Old Saxon Genesis B presents a similar double temptation. See Rosemary Woolf, "The Fall of Man in Genesis B and the Mystère d'Adam," in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, 1963), pp. 187-99.

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away from reality and place her on the slippery slope of betrayal, are specifically courtly: "Tu es fieblette e tendre cose, / E es plus fresche que n'est rose./ Tu es plus blanche que cristal,/ Que neif que chiet sor glace enval" [You're a fragile and delicate thing, and fresher than a rose. You're whiter than crystal, than snow falling on ice] (lines 227-30). Figura, on the other hand, lays down the law in verse that often uses parataxis and dispenses with ambiguous, distracting tropes: Tu aime lui, e ele ame tei. (line 13) 20 [Love her, and let her love you.] Il est marid et tu sa mullier. (li ne 34) [He is your husband and you his wife.]

This is not merely a question of characterization. These opposing styles are emblematic of the underlying ideological tension within the text between courtly and clerical value systems concerning the place and role of women in society. As Wendy Morgan has aptly noted, placing courtly language in the Devi!' s mou th is hardly a neutral tactic, ideologically speaking. 21 Anti-courtly rhetoric was one aspect of the ecclesiastical hierarchy' s efforts to exert its control over the institution of marriage, particularly among the nobility, and this campaign was coming to fruition at precisely this time, as Georges Duby has demonstrated in his book on medieval marriage. 22 At mid-century, Peter Lombard was to give the definitive definition of the sacrament of marriage. 23 By this definition, marriage is a double conjunction consisting in the consent of the spouses and, secondarily, the joining of their bodies. The marital bond thus partakes of spiritual love, or charity, and of physical love in conformity to nature. It is clear that the Adam poet, doubtless a cleric himself, writes in full knowledge of the Church's emerging position on the question of marriage. Figura says to Eve: "Adam aime et lui tien cher" [Love Adam and cherish him; line 33]. In other words, she is Lo love him in both ways, according to the law of nature and according to that of charity. Accarie is clearly off the mark, then, when he maintains for reasons already mentioned that the love between Adam and Eve is "vassalic" and has no spiritual value. 24 Furthermore, in her first line following this speech, Eve specifically gives her consent: "Jol frai, sire, a ton plaisir" [I will do so, lord, according to your wishes; line 41]. Despite the fact that their union

211

In this line, the use of chiasmus, a rhetorical scheme with obvious Christian import, serves to figure the clerical blessing of Adam and Eve's union. 21 Morgan, "Codes in the Mystère d'Adam," p. 115. 22 See Georges Duby, Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre: Le mariage dans la France féodale (Paris, 1981 ), especially chap. 10, "Dans la maison royale," pp. 201-21. 23 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), pp. 264-65. 24 Accarie, "Légitimation," p. 1O.

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has not yet been physically consummated , once they give mutual consent, the couple is bound by the sacrament of marriage, as Figura makes clear in the above-cited line: "Il est marid et tu sa mullier." Thus, the opening scene is, as Duby has noted, a marriage ceremony officiated by Figura, or more precisely the ceremony of the desponsatio, the giving of consent. 25 Steven Justice has argued that the expulsion scene of the Adam follows the Lenten penitential ritual of public confession and excommunic ation, once again officiated by Figura, who puts on priestly vestments for the occasion. 26 The Adam poet clearly advances the prerogatives of the Church in the areas of penitence and marriage, with the important difference that it is the teaching on marriage that corresponds to newer ecclesiastical endeavors in the social realm, while the Lenten penitential rite was already archaic at this time and was soon to be completely surpassed by development s in the area of penitence. Therefore, 1 cannot agree with Justice that the text is conservative or, as Accarie would have it, reactionary. 27 ln the new forms of penitence just over the horizon, the Church would seek to accommodat e itself to a rapidly evolving society by addressing the social body through its many estates, estates that were to become increasingly gender-specif ic. But already, in its teaching on marriage, one can see the Church moving in the direction of defining appropriate social roles for certain women, one of which, we have seen, was the role of good counselor ascribed to the wife. In the mid-twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there was intense reflection and contention, both within and without the Church, on the role of women in a rapidly changing society. Many works from the period, including the Jeu d'Adam, testify to this

25

Duby, Le mariage, p. 227. Justice's argument is persuasive but attaches too much importance to the hypothesis that the drama must have been performed at the church's west door, as was the Lenten ritual of public penitence. Noomen has suggested that the drama could well have been performed within the church and that the term ecclesia in the didascalia (after Iines 518, 722, 744, 840), Iike the term sinagoga (after line 882), refers to a playing station (lieu or sedes) and not to the church building itself (Willem Noomen, "Le leu d'Adam: Etude descriptive et analytique," Romania 89 [ 1968], 190-93). Justice' s assertion that the Latin in the text is deployed as an "act of condescension" and a sign of the church' s power to the lay audience seems to spring from a profoundly unsympathetic understanding of the "ritual" of his title ("Authority and Ritual," p. 854). 27 "[The Jeu d'Adam] insists on the old rites, in which a bishop was a bishop and the Jaity said so by submitting to his command in formai Iiturgical submission. lt insists on the old rites as a way of insisting on the old authority ... " (Justice, "Authority and Ritual," p. 864); "L' antiféminisme de la pièce ... apparaît comme une des composantes de cette vision qu'on est bien fondé d'appeler réactionnaire puisqu'elle s'efforce de s'opposer à toutes les innovations d'une époque en pleine effervescence ... " (Accarie, "Féminisme," p. 226). 26

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state of flux and bear the mark of more than one ideological perspective on women. 28 Sharon Farmer has shown that when role models deemed suitable for women were available, the Church was quick to seize upon them and exploit them in ways beneficial to itself but which could also be beneficial to women. 29 Thus Thomas of Chobham, in his Manualfor Confessors (c. 1215), says that in imposing penance on the wife, the confessor' s first and foremost concern should be to instruct her how to move her husband to perform charitable acts because, he says, "no priest is able to soften the heart of a man the way his wife can." 30 Thomas was writing at a date somewhat later than the Adam, around the time of the Fourth Lateran Council ( 1215), among whose canons was the requirement of annual confession for ail Christians of age. But Farmer also cites clerical writings more contemporary with our text, such as those of Orderic Vitalis, that show, as she puts it, that "pious wives could serve as conduits of divine grace in the private sphere." 31 The Adam poet surely intended that the audience of the performance should draw a positive social and moral lesson from the negative exemplum presented for their edification, and the text' s highly didactic treatment of marriage indicates that this audience was almost certainly Jay and aristocratie, though perhaps not exclusively, and that it doubtless included both men and women. 32 Another text which is particularly instructive for our purposes is the fiercely misogynous estates poem by Etienne de Fougères, Le Livre des manières, which dates from the l 170s and may have been written for the court of Henry 11. 33 Like the Jeu d'Adam, the Livre des manières sets forth an anti-courtly, clerical ideology; yet, despite its misugyny and like the Jeu d'Adam, it vigorously promotes the institution of marriage as a counterweight to courtly ideology. And like the Adam poet, Etienne emphasizes the wife's role of good counselor: "Bone fame est molt haute chose:/ de bien feire pas ne repose, / de bien dire partot s' alose, / bien conseilier et bien fere ose" [A good woman is a very worthy thing: / she does not leave off doing good, / she attracts praise for her wise speech,/ she dares to give good counsel and to do good deeds; lines 1133-36]. He further states: "Et si relcison en l'Epistre /que bonne fame est ornement/ a son saignor,

28

Cf. Accarie, "Féminisme," pp. 210-11. Jean-Charles Payen notes: "Le problème de la femme n'est pas Je problème central de la pièce, dont les thèmes majeurs sont évidemment ceux de la faute et de la rédemption. Mais il se pose dès le début, à travers les deux monologues successifs de Figura, qui énoncent la 'loi du mariage' ... " ("Idéologie et théâtralité," p. 22). 29 Sharon Farmer, "Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images ofMedieval Wives," Speculum 61 (1986), 517-43. 3 Farmer, "Persuasive Voices," p. 517. 31 Farmer, "Persuasive Voices," p. 541. 32 Cf. Morgan, "Codes in the Mystère d'Adam," p. 122. 33 Etienne de Fougères, Le Livre des manières, ed. R. Anthony Lodge, Textes Littéraires Français (Geneva, 1979). The author, an associate of Thomas Becket, was Henry' s royal chaplain before being named precentor of the collegiate church of St. Evroul de Mortain in 1166 and, finally, Bishop of Rennes in 1168. He died in 1178.

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et pas ne ment / quant el l'aime et sert bonement / et le conseille veirement" [And we read in the Epistle as well / that a good wife is an ornament to her husband, and does not lie/ when she loves and serves him well and counsels him truly; lines 1160-64]. In the final section of the poem, devoted to women, Etienne, after condemning the licentiousness of the court (cleverly appropriating the topoi of fin' amors), holds up the model of the virtuous wife and husband who can love each other without shame, unlike courtly Iovers who must always hide their love. Etienne's position must not, however, be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of marriage. ln the section of the poem on the burgher estate, where he first addresses women' s social roi es, he assimilates the bourgeoise to a prostitute for the way in which, according to him, she grants her favors to her husband's creditors. Etienne was doubtless more interested in noble women, such as the widowed Countess of Hereford to whom he dedicates his poem, who were in a position to do good works for the Church. Like the Livre des manières, the Anglo-Norman Adam is a text in which one can hear more than one discourse about women, and "Eve" is Jess a character, in the traditional sense of the word, than a site where conflicting ideologies about gender and marriage are played out. As such, "Eve" is rather like the postmodern subject in the writings of such theorists as Paul Smith and Teresa de Lauretis. For Smith, the subject, as opposed to the "individual," is not to be understood as "the source and agent of conscious action or meaning," but rather "is immediately cast into a conflict with forces that dominate it in some way or another-social formations, language, political apparatuses, and so on .... " 34 ln this vicw, much indebted to the work of Louis Althusser, the illusion of the individual as a "whole and coherent persona! organization" gives way to the "conglomeration of positions, subject-positions, provisional and not necessarily indefeasible, into which a person is called momentarily by the discourses and the world that he/she inhabits." 35 In a similar vein, Teresa de Lauretis speaks of the subject' s identity as "multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory ...." 36 Furtherrnore, from a feminist perspective such as de Lauretis's, gender is the pivotai, if not absolutely determining, factor in the construction of female subjects. 37 Such insights invite us to see how "Eve" is interpellated by the tug and pull of conflicting ideologies in ways that are highly gender-specific and also to understand that the medieval subjects who comprised the Jeu d'Adam's audience were doubtless made to feel that same tug and pull. We have no way of knowing, of course, whether those men and women took home 34

Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, 1988), p. xxxiv. Smith, Discerning the Subject, p. xxxv; emphasis in original. 36 Teresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts," Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington, 1986), p. 9. 37 Gender will, of course, always be a factor in the construction of subjects, either male or female, but it is more likely to be a limiting factor, socially speaking, for women than for men. This is, of course, an extremely broad generalization, but it is one that nonetheless holds true for the medieval subjects under discussion here. 35

Eve and Her Audience in the Anglo-Norman Adam

39

the "right" message, but the Church's long struggle to impose new models of marriage and penitence suggests that there was plenty of room for resistance. The drama itself presents us with such rebellious subjects in the persans of Cain and, indeed, his parents. lt be may argued that one has hardly deconstructed either Eve or medieval misogyny by painting out that certain aristocratie women, once securely circumscribed in the non-threatening role of wife or widow faithful to husband and/or Church, were seen to possess the potential of playing important, positive social raies. One could argue that these aristocratie women, like the pious dedicatee of Etienne's text, the Countess of Hereford, appearing as they do in texts produced by the clerical class, are just as much constructs of hegemonic discourse as Eve-indeed, that the historical women themsel ves were limited to a restricted field of action by the dominant ideologies. But by showing that even the construction of the mal uxor Eve participates in several discordant medieval discourses on women-the courtly, the misogynous, the doctrinal discourse on marriage, the discourse on women as good counselors-1 hope to have demonstrated the necessity of problematizing and historicizing such constructs as "medieval misogyny" and "clerical ideology"-if, that is, we wish to achieve a truly historical understanding of medieval women and men. 38

38

1 would Iike to thank Alan E. Knight for his attentive reading of this essay and for his ever helpful comments and suggestions; and Juliann Vitullo, Diane Wolfthal, and Sally McKee of Arizona State University for encouraging this work.

Seinte Cecile and Cristes owene knyghtes: Violence, Resignation, and Resistance in the Second Nun)s Tale JOHNDAMON

T

he Second Nun 's Tale, Chaucer' s version of the life of Saint Cecilia, is one of a number of Chaucer' s Canterbury Tales that present models of virtue. Cri tics have rarely agreed, however, on what specific virtues this steadfast virgin martyr exemplifies. As one of only three tales told by women on the Canterbury pilgrimage, the poem has special appeal for those interested in questions of gender and the role of women in the Middle Ages. Yet it is also a highly pious tale and therefore has often been placed on the margins of current critical discourse, along with the Tale of Melibee and the Parson's Tale, as unfashionably moralistic. Finally, in its focus on a willing martyr who meets death at the hands of a brutal, male power structure, the poem has been grouped with others of Chaucer's works that portray women passively submitting to their own persecution. This uncomfortable combining of divergent threads in Chaucer's work has left the tale understudied and not often read. Not only is the tale hopelessly pious, it resists all attempts at ironie readings, since Chaucer provides no portrait of the Second Nun in the General Prologue and, in the words of Anne Laskaya, "the tale and its purpose are free of the entanglements and pronounced ambiguities that mark so many of the other tales," making it unsuitable for ironie readings. 1 Cri tics of the tale concentrate on discussions of the symbolism of the "corones two" worn by Cecilia and her husband, various types of source study, or

1

Anne Laskaya, Chaucer's Approach to Gender in the "Canterbury Tales," (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), p. 171.

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JOHN DAMON

analyses that contrast the tale in various ways to Chaucer' s other works. 2 Recent ferninist studies, however, have begun to reevaluate this story told by a female speaker and featuring a strong, central, female character. Janemarie Luecke, in her ground-break ing 1982 article, "Three Faces of Cecilia: Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale," speaks of her "more militant students" from the late sixties onward, who either "began to recognize in Cecilia the kindred soul of a dedicated revolutionary" or "identified with the ferninist in Cecilia, the woman who was willing to make any sacrifice to be her own person and do her own thing." 3 We have grown used to hearing the Wife of Bath praised for her independence and resistance to patriarchy (or, conversely, condemned as a gross misogynist stereotype), but Cecilia would at first seem so blandly stereotypical as to be unworthy of attention. She can easily be disrnissed as just another example of Chaucer' s suffering, victirnized female characters, like patient Grisilde, the long-suffering Custance, or the passively-martyred Virginia. She is, after ail, a virgin martyr condemned to death by a powerful male authority figure. Yet studies of Chaucer' s works from a feminist perspective have increasingl y seen the Second Nun's Tale as an important part of his presentation of women. Priscilla 2

For the lily and rose crowns, see Roberta D. Cornelius, "Corones Two," PMLA 42 (1927), 1055-57; Oliver F. Emerson, "Saint Ambrose and Chaucer's Life of St. Cecilia," PMLA 41 (1926), 252-61; John L. Lowes, "The Corones Two of the Second Nun's Tale," PMLA 26 (1911), 315-23; and idem, "A Supplementary Note," PMLA 29 (1914), 129-33; Henry N. MacCrackcn, "A Further Parallel to the 'Corones Two' of the Second Nun 's Tale," Modern Language Notes 27 (1912), 63; Roscoe Parker, "A Note on 'Corones Two,"' Modern Language Notes 41 (1926), 317-18; and J. S. P. Tatlock, "St. Cecilia' s Garlands and Their Roman Origin," PMLA 45 (1930), 169-79. For tales contrasting the Second Nun 's Tale with the offerings of other pilgrims, see C. David Benson, "The Contrasting Religious Tales of the Prioress and Second Nun," in Chaucer' s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chape! Hill, 1986), pp. 131--46; Joseph E. Grennan, "Saint Cecilia's 'Chemical Wedding': The Unity of the Canterbury Tales, Fragment VIII," Journal of English and Germanie Philology 65, no. 3 (1966), 466-81; John C. Hirsh, 'The Politics of Spirituality: The Second Nun and the Manciple," Chaucer Review 12 (1977), 129--46; Robert M. Longsworth, "Privileged Knowledge: St. Cecilia and the Alchemist in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review 27, no. 1 (1992), 87-96; Bruce A. Rosenberg, "The Contrary Tales of the Second Nun and the Canon' s Yeoman," Chaucer Review 2 (1967-68), 278-91. Source studies include Carleton F. Brown, "Chaucer and the Hours of the Blessed Virgin," Modern Language Notes 30 (1915), 231-32; and Ruth Waterhouse, '"A Rose by Any Other Name': Two Versions of the Legend of Saint Cecilia," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 79 ( 1978), 126-36. For Sherry Reames' s contributions to the study of Chaucer' s sources, see n. 12 below. 3 "Three Faces of Cecilia: Chaucer's Second Nun 's Tale," American Benedictine Review 33 ( 1982), 336. For an earlier article that reaches similar conclusions about the Second Nun and Cecilia, but from a very different perspective, see Graham Lundrum, "The Convent Crowd and the Feminist Nun," Tennessee Philological Bulletin 13, no. 1 (1982), 5-12.

Violence, Resignation, and Resistance in the Second Nun's Tale

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Martin calls Cecilia "a militantly active heroine" who "is well able to defend herself, proves almost indestructible, and makes no claim on our pity." 4 Unlike the Prioress, the Second Nun is both anonymous and defined entirely by her role as a female religious. The Second Nun's semi-fictional heroine, on the other hand, defines herself assertively by what she herself wishes: "although she marries, she has a will of her own and her own ideas on the marriage relationship." 5 In contrast to the Clerk's Tale, "[p]atriarchal structures receive no support in the Second Nun 's Tale. The civil authority is corrupt, idolatrous and repressive: disobedience is a Christian virtue." 6 Cecilia represents resistance to unjust authority, and if she is resigned at ail, it is only to the consequences of her acts of rebellion. She knows she will suffer for her resistance to oppression, but that does not deter her. Careful study of Cecilia has shown her to be the most independent and self-actualized female character in the Canterbury Tales. The Old Woman in the Wife of Bath' s Tale may be more powerful, and the Wife of Bath herse If may be more threatening to male sexual dominance, but one cannot imagine Cecilia submitting to a husband who struck her or transforming herself into a beautiful and compliant wife for her rapist-husband, Cecilia is neither resigned to a rote as an abject of male desire nor is she passive in the face of oppression. In a 1974 article, Paul Beichner showed that Chaucer "shifted" the "high point" of the narrative from the "narrated martyrdom" to "the trial scene."7 According to Beichner, Chaucer "intensified the clash between Almachius and Cecilia, creating for each a personality more Chaucerian than traditional; Cecilia had never before been quite so contentious or belligerent, nor had Almachius been so obtuse or stupid." 8 However, to Anne Laskaya, Cecilia' s resignation as a willing martyr overshadows her resistance to authority: "[T]he overt and assertive female resistance to male power praised in the tale becomes problematic when we see that the consequence of laudable resistance is death. As such, the Second Nun 's Tale, like the Man of Law's Tale and the Clerk's Tale, represents the ideal woman as self-sacrificing and long-suffering." 9 Laskaya's reading cannot be disputed, except for one crucial point: Cecilia, as a woman, is not atone in her suffering and self-sacrifice, since she is preceded in death by her husband Valerian, his brother Tiburce, and a number of other male characters. In fact, persecution and death are not gendered events in the Second Nun 's Tale; it is as a Christian and not as a woman that Cecilia suffers. As Martin argues, within the tale' s social framework, Cecilia' s gender is "no disadvantage to

4

Priscilla Martin, Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons (Basingstoke, Eng., 1990),

p. 150. 5

Martin, Chaucer's Women, p. 152. Martin, Chaucer's Women, pp. 153-54. 7 Paul Bcichner, "Confrontation, Contempt of Court and Chaucer's Cecilia," Chaucer Review 8 (1974), 204. 8 Beichner, "Confrontation," p. 204. 9 Laskaya, Chaucer's Approach to Gender, p. 171. 6

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JOHN DAMON

her." 10 Far from being singled out as a woman for abusive treatment, as Grisilde, Custance, and Virginia ail are (not to mention the jilted and lovelorn "saints" of the Legend of Good Women), Cecilia is simply abused, her gender playing little if any role in her trial or her death. The cairn resolve she shows in meeting her fate recalls as much the philosophical detachment achieved by Boethius in facing his own execution as it does the silent suffering of a Virginia or a Grisilde. What Laskaya singles out for criticism is not Chaucer' s vision of ideal womanhood but a philosophical stance held by certain Chaucerian characters, both male and female. ln the developing dialogue concerning Cecilia' s resistance to or inscription in patriarchal and rnisogynist discourses, insufficient attention has been given to the tale's place within the hagiographie tradition. Until recently, scholars assumed that Chaucer was translating directly from some version of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea. For example, Graham Lundrum wrote in 1976, "[W]e are handicapped because we do not know which text of the Golden Legend Chaucer used." 11 Before 1980, however, Sherry Reames had established that Chaucer used Voragine's work only for about one half of his poem, although she believed at that time that he took the remainder from a version of the original late fifth- or early sixth-century Passio S. Caeciliae "best approximated ... by Antonio Bosio' s edition ... , first published in 1600." 12 She believed that Chaucer himself had radically reduced this source in producing the Second Nun's Tale, although even then she held out the possibility that Chaucer was working from some shortened version of the Passio no longer extant. 13 Reames has now identified the specific version of the story of Saint Cecilia that Chaucer translated in the second half of his poem: a liturgical text that she calls "the Franciscan abridgment" of the original Passio. 14 She warns, however, that, rather than reducing Chaucer to the role of mere translator, her research points up the fact that "he would have had to choose" the specific text he translated in preference to "the more commonly available versions of the Cecilia legend." 15 Reames further suggests a new direction study of the Second Nun 's Tale should take as a result of her discovery: "What we must do, th en, is change the terms in which we think about Chaucer's contributions to the tale. Most obviously,

10 11

Martin, Chaucer's Women, p. 153.

Lundrum, "The Convent Crowd," p. 10. Sherry Reames, "A Recent Discovery Conceming the Sources of Chaucer' s Second Nun 's Tale," Modem Philology 87, no. 4 (1990), 337 and n. 2. She is summarizing her own conclusions in "The Sources of Chaucer' s Second Nun' s Tale," Modern Philology 76, no. 2 (1978), 11-35. For another important contribution to the study of the Second Nun's Tale, see Sherry Reames, "The Cecilia Legend as Chaucer Inherited lt and Retold lt: The Disappearance of an Augustinian ldeal," Speculum 55 (1980), 38-57. 13 Reames, "Sources," p. 127. 14 Reames, "Recent Discovery," p. 337. 15 Reames, "Recent Discovery," p. 347. 12

Violence, Resignation, and Resistance in the Second Nun's Tale

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16 we should ask why he chose this particular combination of abridgments to translate." Based on Reames' work, and in response to her suggestion, it is now possible to identify features that could have drawn Chaucer to the tale he told and, more specifically, to the version of that tale he chose to translate. Both the Cecilia legend and Chaucer' s retelling of it stand out markedly from the standard hagiographie tradition of late medieval England, especially in regard to his use of soldier of Christ imagery and martial metaphors in the account of a virgin martyr. There are certain obvious elements that distinguish the story of Saint Cecilia from other hagiographie texts Chaucer could have chosen to translate, as critics Marc 17 Glasser, Priscilla Martin, and Anne Laskaya have previously pointed out. Glasser argues that "[i]t is Cecilia's marriage which distinguishes her legend from those of the other virgin martyrs." 18 Also in contrast to other virgin martyrs, Cecilia is not "explicitly transferred from father to husband" since, as Martin notes, "Cecilia' s father is not mentioned." 19 Glasser also comments that "Chaucer introduces no 'frendes' or author20 itarian figure to force her into marriage," although other Middle English analogues do. Laskaya adds one other important element which can be used to distinguish Saint Cecilia' s story from those of other virgin martyrs: "[H]er destiny is shaped, not by men's attraction to her, but by her own choices-her faith, ber Christian belief. Except for her husband, people in the tale are not attracted to her sexually, even though she is 21 beautiful; they are drawn to her because of her faith, her ideas, her words." This is in marked contrast to the typical vita of a virgin martyr, in which men' s uncontrollable sexual attraction to the virgin leads to her torture and death. These, then, are some of the elements that distinguish the story of Saint Cecilia from other hagiographie texts Chaucer could have chosen to translate: Cecilia's status as married virgin, the lack of parental or other authority pressuring her into marriage, and the absence of lust as a major motivating force for her persecution. Yet ail of these aspects still stress Cecilia' s marriage, despite critical agreement that the marriage is subordinated in Chaucer's version of the tale to Cecilia's confrontation with Almachius. There is, however, one other aspect of the Second Nun 's Tale that distinguishes it both from other similar vitae and from other contemporary versions of Cecilia' s life: Chaucer' s use of martial imagery, including the idea of the soldier of Christ. C. David Benson discusses this image pattern in the tale, and he notes:

16

Reames, "Recent Discovery," p. 348. Marc D. Glasser, "Marriage and the Second Nun's Tale," Tennessee Studies in Literature 23 ( 1978), 1-14. For Laskaya and Martin, see nn. 1 and 4 above. 18 Glasser, "Marriage," p. 3. 19 Martin, Chaucer's Women, p. 152. 20 Glasser, "Marriage," pp. 5 and 13, n. 17. 21 Laskaya, Chaucer's Approach to Gender, p. 169. Laskaya and Martin both actually make their points in contrast to Chaucer's tales told by male pilgrims about virtuous, victimized women, but the aspects they contrast are equally true of the vitae of other virgin martyrs. 17

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Military imagery-e specially the description of the martyrs as "Cristes owene knyghtes" who have won "a greet bataille"-r einforces the paradox that the great power of the Romans is no match for the apparently helpless Christians led by a woman. The more soldiers Almachius sends to destroy the Christians, the more converts are made. 22

Aside from this single comment, tucked away in a footnote, 1 have found no other direct comment on the significance of Chaucer' s use of martial imagery, although Glasser does refer in passing to Cecilia's "relationship of a command er to her troops, urging her Christian soldiers bravely onward." 23 It seems that the image of the soldier of Christ is such a common topos in medieval hagiography that it has taken on a transpare ncy for modern scholars. An image so often repeated tends to blend into its surroundi ng text, eliciting no more than a cursory glance as the reader continues the search for the remarkab le or unusual figure. Y et Chaucer' s use of this motif reverses the late medieval trend toward the substitution of marital for martial imagery in the vernacula r Lives of female saints. In a 1984 dissertation, Diane Lois Mockridg e analyzed nine lives of three women saints (Juliana, Margaret and Catherine) in three languages (Latin, Middle English, and Old French) written between the tenth and twelfth century. 24 This group of female martyrs, commonl y known as the Katherine Group (at least in regard to the Middle English versions of their passiones ), represent an excellent point of contrast to Cecilia' s passio. 25 What Mockridge found was that martial imagery was a major part of the early, Latin vitae of these three saints, but that the same imagery was missing from later, vernacular lives of the same saints, having been replaced by the imagery of the bride of Christ. Mockridg e's conclusions confirm John Bugge's statement in his study of the cuit of virginity in medieval culture that "the notion that the monk was the soldier of Christ receded" from the twelfth century on. 26 The pattern that Mockridg e and Bugge establish has considera ble bearing on the Second Nun's Tale, since Chaucer' s poem contains both marital and martial imagery. Unlike the writers of the late twelfth century Mockridg e analyzes, and contrary to the pattern identified by Bugge, Chaucer em-

22 "The Contrasting Religious Tales of the Prioress and Second Nun," Chaucer's Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chape! Hill, 1986), p. 178, n. 42. 23 Glasser, "Marriage," p. 10. 24 Diane Lois Mockridge, "From Christ's Soldier to His Bride: Changes in the Portrayal of Women Saints in Medieval Hagiography" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1984). 25 For the Middle English "Katherine Group" see S. T. R. O. D'Ardenne, ed., The Katherine Croup, Edited from MS. Bodley 34, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l'Université de Liège, Fascicle 215 (Paris, 1977). 26 John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval ldeal (The Hague, 1975), p. 82.

Violence, Resignation, and Resistance in the Second Nun's Tale

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phasizes Cecilia as soldier of Christ by choosing to translate a version of Cecilia's

passio that featured martial imagery, by retaining the martial imagery in that source, and by reducing or eliminating other material that de-emphasized the soldier of Christ imagery in his exemplars. lt follows that either Chaucer must have resisted the trend Mockridge identifies, or another change reversing this one must have occurred between the late twelfth and the late fourteenth centuries. A preliminary examination of Chaucer's use of martial imagery in the Second Nun 's Tale, the appearance of such images in the sources Chaucer translated, and the emphasis given to similar imagery in other accounts of Saint Cecilia's life roughly contemporaneous with Chaucer's reveals three things. 27 First, the pattern of substitution of marital for martial imagery detailed in Mockridge' s dissertation did continue into the fourteenth century. There are few instances of martial imagery in the lives of women saints roughly contemporaneous with Chaucer's, such as Osbern Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women or the South English Legendary. In the same texts, there are many uses of marital imagery, especially the image of the virgin martyr as bride of Christ. 28

27

For the Latin texts, sec G. H. Gerould, 'The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale," Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, cd. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago, 1941 ), pp. 664-84; Jacobus de Voragine, "Saint Cecilia," The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, 1993), 2:318-23; Hippolyte Delehaye, cd., "Passio Sanctae Caeciliae: Acta et passio beatissime martyris Caeciliae Valeriani et Tiburtii," Étude sur le legendier romain, les saints de novembre et de décembre (Brussels, 1936 ), pp. 194-220. Reames pro vides an edition of the Franciscan abridgment in "Recent Discovery," pp. 356-61. For Middle English texts, see Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, Early English Text Society 206 (London, 1938); Charlotte D'Evelyn and Anna Jean Mill, The South English Legendary, Early English Text Society 235, 236, 244 (London. 1956-59); Carl Horstmann, ed., The Early South-English Legendary, Early English Text Society 87 (London, 1887); Bertha Ellen Lovewell, cd., The Life of St. Ceciliafrom MS. Ashmole 43 and MS. Cotton Tiberius E. VII, Yale Studies in English 3 (Boston, 1898). Lovewell's edition includes the Cecilia legends from the Northern Homily Cycle and the Scottish Legendary. The latter collection is printed in an early edition, which ascribes the legends to John Barbour: W. M. Metcalfe, ed., Legends of the Saints (Scollish): Legends of the Saints in the Scottish Dialect of the Fourteenth Century (1896; repr. New York, 1968). Bokenham' s work is also available in a modern English translation. Sheila Delany, trans., A Legend of Holy Women: Osbern Bokenham, "Legends of Holy Women" (Notre Dame, 1992). There is no easily accessible edition of the Northern Homily Cycle. 28 On bridai imagery in medieval hagiography and the writings of female mystics, in addition to Bugge, Virginitas, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982); idem,"' ... And Woman His Humanity': Female lmagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages," Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Steven Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston,

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Secondly, martial imagery was more prevalent in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vitae of Cecilia than in those of other virgin martyrs, and the image pattern of the bride of Christ was correspondingly Jess prevalent. The few instances of martial imagery associated with virgin martyrs in the relevant hagiographie collections occur in lives of Saint Cecilia. Finally, the specific source Chaucer chose for the second half of his poem, the Franciscan abridgment, presents most strongly the martial imagery of the original Passio, and Chaucer in turn preserved and even enhanced that imagery, in contrast to his contemporaries, who tended to reduce or even eliminate the martial imagery in the Cecilia legend. There may have been other features that drew Chaucer to switch in the middle of his poem from the Legenda aurea to the Franciscan abridgment, as Reames has conclusively shown that he did, but one effect of the switch was to preserve ail examples of martial imagery available in those sources. Chaucer's first departure from the Legenda aurea, his source for the opening sections of the poem, cornes just when the Franciscan abridgment first employs a martial metaphor: "et perfectum in doctrina sua Christo militem." 29 As Reames points out, "In this episode, for the first time in the tale, Chaucer goes considerably beyond the details in the Legenda aurea" in which is omitted "the reference to [Tiburce] as God' s 'knight.' " 30 The martial metaphor is not here applied to Cecilia, but the identification of Tiburce as "Goddes knyght" forms part of an image pattern that eventually presents Cecilia as the leader of an army of Christian soldiers, a highly unusual role for a woman in late medieval hagiography. The martial imagery in the Legenda aurea version of the Cecilia legend is confined to a single phrase, but such imagery plays a much more important role in the Franciscan abridgment and is a major aspect of Chaucer's version of the tale. None of Chaucer' s near-contemporaries included this martial reference in their vernacular versions of Cecilia's passio, yet this single image introduces an important image pattern in Chaucer' s version of the story. In her speech to the martyrs on their way to death, Cecilia articulates the core idea of the willing martyr as soldier of Christ: "Now, Cristes owene knyghtes leeve and deere, Cast aile awey the werkes of derknesse, And armeth yow in armure of brightnesse. "Ye han for sothe ydoon a greet bataille, Youre cours is doon, your feith han ye conserved.

1986); Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, "The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation," Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY, 1986), pp. 29-72; and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984). 29 Quoted in Reames, "Recent Discovery," pp. 339, 359. 30 Reames, "Recent Discovery," p. 338.

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Goth to the corone of !if that may nat faille, The rightful Juge, which that ye han served, Shal yeve it yow, as ye han it deserved." 31 The first three lines of this passage appear in both the Legenda aurea and the Franciscan abridgment, and most of the comparable vernacular versions of the story include these first lines as well. Only in the Franciscan abridgment and its longer source can the entire passage be found. The image as a whole shows Cecilia as a forceful leader who rallies her fellow followers of Christ, the "rightful Juge," in their struggle against the power of the evil judge, Almachius. Although they go off to their deaths, the martyrs surely are not portrayed as victims, suffering with passive resignation, but as spiritual soldiers actively engaged in resistance to oppression. In the Second Nun's Tale, Cecilia's military rhetoric in exhorting steadfast resistance to the threat of violence not only makes her a leader within a metaphoric army of the faithful but also in verts the popular crusading ideal of the soldier of Christ. Between the tenth and twelfth century, during the time that martial imagery was disappearing from vernacular lives of female saints, the trope of the Christian soldier was undergoing a transformation. Major studies by M. L. Del Mastro, Joyce Hill, and John Harris have documented the Latin patristic context and the socially established meaning and implications of martial imagery in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. 32 The use of martial language to describe the spiritual struggle of the saints involved a reversai of the meaning of key terms: the weapons of a soldier of Christ were his words, his armor his faith, his warfare non-violent, spiritual struggle. This image pattern, which originated in the Bible, functioned within a theological and social system that separated sharply the domains of the secular warrior and the "soldier of Christ." 33 A committed Christian was expected to put down his weapons and take up a spiritual struggle against the invisible enemies of sin and temptation, or, in the case of the martyr, against the physical torments of the demon-inspired pagans. The imagery was applied to women as well as men because it involved, not physical opposition, but a courageous and yet non-violent resistance to violence and tyranny. The meaning of the image pattern of the soldier of Christ began to undergo a fundamental change when in 1095-96 Pope Urban II initiated the First Crusade. The pope called on soldiers throughout Christendom to join in a military campaign that

31

Chaucer, The Second Nun 's Tale, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Bensonk, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1987), p. 267. 32 M. L. Del Mastro, "The Military Analogy in Anglo-Latin Saints' Lives" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1973); John Harris, "Soldiers of Christ: Cynewulfian Poetry and the Tradition of Martial Metaphors in Patristic, Anglo-Latin and Old English Writings" (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 1980); Joyce Hill, "The Soldier of Christ in Old English Prose and Poetry ," Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 12 (1981), 57-80. 33 See especially Eph. 6.13-17.

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would make them soldiers of Christ. His actual sermon text is no longer extant, but Jonathan Riley-Smith reconstructs its probable substance: "He authorized the war in his capacity as pope, but it is clear that he also stated that he was acting on Christ' s behalf. He wrote of the crusaders being inspired agents of God who were engaged in God's service out of love for him. He told them that they were followers of Christ and he may well have referred to them as 'knights of Christ.' " 34 In applying the terminology of the Christian soldier to the crusaders, Urban and those who followed him reversed again the meaning of the image pattern. In Hill's words, they now used the terms to "describe behavior diametrically opposed to what, in other contexts, would be suggested by the use of the same words." 35 Like monks, the crusaders were performing obedient service to God, and like martyrs the crusaders willingly faced death, but unlike either monks or martyrs crusaders were actual soldiers carrying physical weapons and fighting earthly wars. In this new context, martial imagery no longer implied a rejection of violence, nor did it point to non-violent resistance. Martyrs had been metaphoric warriors of Christ; crusaders were non-metaphoric, literai knights. If any metaphor remained, it Jay in the idea of comrnitment to Christ. As Christopher Tyerman says, "After 1095, ... Christ of Peace, to the dismay of man y, became a God of W ar, whose Sacrifice required direct, physical, and violent revenge, and whose temporal estate demanded forceful military defense." 36 Today it may be hard to understand what a fundamental change this was. Certainly Christians long before 1095 had accepted the real necessity of defensive wars against pagan invaders (the Vikings for example), but the ideal of martyrdom was reserved for those who rcsisted violence without themselves becuming violent.Now a soldier wearing the cross could achieve martyrdom through death in battle. The rise of the crusading ideal contributed strongly to the disappearance of martial imagery from hagiographie texts. It is easy to overemphasize the significance of Urban' s preaching and the beginning of the crusading movement. They represent the most obvious and visible signs of a process of change that had long been at work in medieval society and the western church. 37 Similarly, the rise of the crusading ideal was not itself solely responsible for the disappearance of martial imagery in the lives of saints and the passions of martyrs. Mockridge, Bugge, Bynum, and others have documented changes in the nature of spirituality that contributed strongly to the shift from martial to marital imagery in hagiography. Yet they have tended to focus on the relationship between the new affective piety of the twelfth century and the ideal of the bride of Christ, giving Jess attention to the more restricted and Jess frequent use of the old image of the soldier of Christ. The emergence of crusaders and members of the military orders as new types of the soldier of Christ coïncides with the disappearance 34

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (New Haven, 1987), p. 8. Hill, "Soldier of Christ," p. 60. 36 Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095-1588 (Chicago, 1988), p. 13. 37 On the process of change that culminated in the crusades, see Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the /dea of Crusade, trans. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, 1977). 35

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of imagery associating virgin martyrs with that martial form of sainthood. The two processes are clearly linked. Martial imagery did not automatically or instantaneously disappear from the vitae of traditional martyrs. Hagiography is a highly conservative and formulaic genre. Over time, however, changes in society' s understanding of what it meant to be a soldier of Christ resulted in the replacement of martial by marital imagery in the lives of virgin martyrs. Since martial imagery increasingly implied the use of violence in a Christian cause, its application to women like Cecilia who resisted oppression non-violently made Jess and Jess sense. A society that rejected female participation in warfare found such imagery incongruous in describing the passive resignation of female victims. One reason that martial imagery persisted in the Cecilia story may have been that it was applied by Cecilia to Valerian and Tiburce, rather than being applied to Cecilia herself directly. Yet Chaucer's use of images of warfare in the Second Nun 's Tale reinforces the active, even aggressive nature of Cecilia's personality. The major motif of busyness, introduced in the Prologue and permeating the Tale, and the forceful courtroom exchange between Cecilia and Almachius intensify the effect of the martial imagery, transforming Cecilia into a kind of female general in a spiritual army of the steadfast faithful. On its own, the evidence of the Second Nun 's Tale would not be sufficient to establish anything about Chaucer's attitudes toward war, but there is a growing body of evidence that Chaucer was deeply concerned about this issue. Richard Kieckhefer identifies questions repeatedly raised about Chaucer' s attitudes toward chivalry: It has been argued that Chaucer and perhaps a few of his English contemporaries were 'voices crying out' for a reinterpretation of chivalric honor: instead of basing it on aggressive prowess, they ... saw it as resting upon patient endurance of suffering. While it is difficult to extricate Chaucer's views from those of his sources and those ascribed to his characters, there are key texts in the Franklin's tale, in the tale of Melibee, and elsewhere suggesting this view. 38

R. J. Yeager has recently doue a comprehensive study of a pacifistic strain in the

writings of Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower, in which he concludes that "Chaucer' s preference for peace seems permanent, if somewhat inchoate; implicitly apparent throughout his work is a uhiquitous skepticism about the daims of chivalry."39 By Chaucer's day, the term "crusade" had corne to be applied even to struggles between rival Christian factions, as Lynn Staley Johnson discusses in a recent study of the

38

Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 73. Robert F. Yeager, "Pax Poetica: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 ( 1987), 121. 39

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radical political stance implicit in Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale. 40 In particular, the military venture known as Dispenser's Crusade was, in Johnson's words, "Not only ... a military failure, but ... a moral failure," and she points out that "Chaucer' s legend of St. Cecilia ... was evidently written during or shortly after that decade of conflict," which included schismatic warfare and the ill-conceived crusade. 41 Scholars have frequently identified the anti-chivalric as one of Chaucer' s primary ironie modes, especially in Sir Thopas, and studies by V. J. Scattergood and Yeager explore the thematic links between the two tales told by the pilgrim Chaucer. 42 Scattergood analyzes ways in which the two tales told by Chaucer the Pilgrim make an attack "against the search for military glory and against war" that "is a generalist one, but ... when he wrote them his memory was coloured by the events of the 1380' s and the possibilities of a Flemish alliance" in the Hundred Years' War: 43 [B]oth staries Chaucer gives himself express substantially the same ideas. Though one is a burlesque romance and the other a moral allegory, and though neither makes prccisc reference to contemporary events, it seems to me that they constitute an argument for a specific point of view on the subject of the military ethos and war, and particularly on the war with France. 44

Yeager also examines the anti-chivalric in Sir Thopas and its relationship to Melibee, saying, "Beyond the fictive world of the pilgrimage Chaucer the Poet knew a great many tales in rhyme and verse; to issue just these two through the mouth of a single pilgrim raises the notion of a subconscious connection on his part, if not a systematic plan." 45 Yeager goes on to point out that their assignment to Chaucer the Pilgrim gives them an added weight: [B ]ecause he carries the poet' s name, speaks in the first person, and apparently follows Chaucer's métier of storyteller, there is necessarily a more intimate relationship between "Geoffrey" and his creator than exists between Chaucer and any of the other Canterbury pilgrims. Not to acknowledge the special relationship of author and namesake character would be psychologically naïve. We do not go too far to build upon it cautiously, then, to suggest that whatever cohesion we find in the Pilgrim

40

Lynn Staley Johnson, "Chaucer' s Tale of the Second Nun and the Strategies of Dissent," Studies in Philology 89, no. 3 (1992), 318-19. 41 Johnson, "Strategies of Dissent," p. 319. 42 V. J. Scattergood, "Chaucer and the French War: Sir Thopas and Melibee," in Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Lite rature Society, ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool, 1981 ), pp. 287-96; Yeager, "Pax Poetica," pp. 114-17. 43 Scattergood, "Chaucer and the French War," p. 295. 44 Scattergood, "Chaucer and the French War," p. 288. 45 Yeager, "Pax Poetica," p. 115.

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Geoffrey's choice of tales must reflect in some measure a similar connection for Chaucer the Poet. Indeed, it may be possible to go further, to argue that the two tales occur sequentially in the "mind" of Geoffrey the Pilgrim only because they relate thematically in the mind of Chaucer the Poet, who, at last, earmarked them both for his fictive "self" to tell. 46 The ideas that link the two works assigned to Chaucer the Pilgrim are anti-chivalry in the bit of doggerel and non-violence in the extended work of prose. Scattergood and Y eager are not al one in identifying a philosophical stance of non-violence underlying the Melibee. As Paul Strohm long ago noted, "Melibee's Prudence challenges the whole idea of the Christian warrior with her claim that the Christian is helpless without the assistance of his God." 47 Strohm demonstrates that Chaucer not only reproduced but augmented the allegorical structuring of his source for the Melibee in order to stress the point "that trust in self-defense is the most dangerous vanity of the Christian on his road to God." 48 Similarities between Cecilia and Prudence go beyond the obvious facts that both are strong-willed women who give advice to men. Both can be viewed as significant role models for women, and both espouse a philosophie stance of nonviolence. Using modern critical theorists, including Carolyn Dinshaw and Helene Cixous, Ce lia Daileader argues for the importance of Prudence as a figure for the defeat of anti-feminist forces and attitudes in the group of pilgrims and in late medieval society, just as feminist studies of Cecilia have begun to identify her as a central female figure within the Canterbury Tales as a whole. 49 William Witherle Lawrence also analyzes ways in which the Tale is connected to current events in Chaucer' s time, especially issues of war and peace. 50 If the ideas in Melibee are serious in nature (rather than being examples of Chaucer' s bad taste in trying to turn a boring piece of prose into some kind of farfetched joke, as some cri tics have argued), then the tale can be linked to The Parson 's Tale and The Retraction as key components in Chaucer's didactic purpose. 51 Paul

46

Yeager, "Pax Poetica," pp. 116-17. Paul Strohm, "The Allegory of the Tale of Melibee," Chaucer Review 2 (1967-68), 35. 48 Strohm, "Allegory," p. 40. 49 See Celia Daileader, "The Thopas-Melibee Sequence and the Defeat of Antifeminism," Chaucer Review 29, no. 1 (1994), 26-39. 50 William Witherle Lawrence, "The Tale of Melibeus," Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), pp. 100-10. 51 Sorne representative arguments for the primarily comic quality of Chaucer' s Melibee include Ruth Waterhouse and Gwen Griffiths, "'Sweete Wordes' of Non-Sense: The Deconstruction of the Moral Melibee," 2 parts, Chaucer Review 23, no. 4 and 24, no. 1 (1989), 338-61 and 53-63 respectively; and Dolores Palomo, "What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Melibee," Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 304-20. Waterhouse and Griffiths use modern theoretical 47

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Ruggiers asserts the Tale' s importance to the overall scheme of The Canterbury Tales by comparing Chaucer' s use of the prose pieces with Dante' s technique in the Divine Comedy: "Chaucer vies with Dante in a certain boldness by making materials generally inimîcal to poetry the large stepping stones across which we walk more confidently into the poem as a whole, or which we may find to be the foundation stones on which the whole poem is built." 52 Links between Chaucer's Melibee, Sir Thopas, and the Second Nun's Tale thus may also include connections to the parson's long prose treatise and Chaucer' s persona! retraction in establishing one serious moral vein within The Canterbury Tales. The anti-chivalric burlesque in Sir Thopas can also be linked to other texts in which Chaucer may be satirizing knighthood, chivalry, and the crusading ideal. The best known argument for Chaucer' s rejection of chivalry and the crusading spirit cornes in a frequently attacked book by Terry Jones. 53 Jones argues that Chaucer was an enemy of chivalry and the chivalric classes. He mentions Melibee in passing, as "more thanjust a pacifist tract-it is also a manual of philosophy for the medieval ruler," but does not discuss the Second Nun's Tale. 54 There is at least one other instance in Chaucer's works of a crusading image laced with irony. In Trailus and Criseyde, Pandarus exhorts Trailus to drown his woes not in a bottle but in battle in words that seem both to call up the crusading ideology and, at the same time, subtly to mock it: "Forthi tak herte, and thynk right as a knyght: Thorugh love is broken al day every lawe. Kith now somwhat thi corage and thi myght;

arguments to "deconstruct" the tale' s seriousness. Palomo' s is a major work in the line of argument that the tale is comic. Palomo is very critical of the tale' s quality and style and asserts that Chaucer could not have intended for it to be taken seriously. A major part of her analysis is an examination of the changes Chaucer made in translating from the French. 52 Paul Ruggiers, "Serious Chaucer: The Tale of Melibeus and the Parson's Tale," Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives, Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner C.S.C., ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (Notre Dame, 1979), p. 93. 53 Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (Baton Rouge, La., 1980). One of the best refutations of Jones is Gardiner Stillwell, "Chaucer's Knight and the Hundred Years' War," Modern Language Notes 59 (1944), 45-47. Stillwell argues against the îdea that Chaucer held Lollard beliefs and for the view that he supported chivalry. Key articles in the debate over Chaucer's possible Lollard beliefs include Roger S. Loomis, "Was Chaucer a Laodicean?" in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown, pp. 29-48 (reprinted in Chaucer Criticism, vol. 1, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Richard Schoeck and Jerome Taylor [Notre Dame, 1960], pp. 291-310); and J. S. P. Tatlock, "Chaucer and Wyclif," Modern Philology 14, no. 5 ( 1916), 257-68. Johnson, "Strategies of Dissent," p. 319, also mentions Wyclif and Lollardy in connection with Chaucer's Cecilia and Dispenser's Crusade. 54 Jones, Chaucer's Knight, p. 146.

Violence, Resignation, and Resistance in the Second Nun's Tale

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Have mercy on thiself for any awe. Lat nat this wrecched wo thyn herte gnawe, But manly sette the world on six and sevene; And if thow deye a martyr, go to hevene! "l wol myself ben with the at this dede, Theigh ich and al my kyn upon a stownde Shulle in a strete as dogges liggen dede, Thorugh-girt with many a wid and blody wownde; ln every cas 1 wol a frend be founde." 55

Despite the popularity of the idea that death in battle represented martyrdom, it did not form part of the most ancient traditions of the Christian faith, and the idea' s juxtaposition to the image of the family that "in a strete as dogges liggen dede, / Thorugh-girt with many a wid and blody wownde" produces a powerful ironie effect. Here again, as elsewhere in the poem, Pandarus gives the young lover advice that Chaucer subtly signais as fundamentally wrong and misguided. In contrast, another of Chaucer's major prose works, the Boece, concerns a philosophical rejection of violence similar to that in the Melibee. Lady Philosophy, like Prudence and Cecilia, is a powerful female figure who confronts the philosophical assumptions of the men with whom she interacts. The Boece is also one of the few works by Chaucer that incorporate repeated martial images closely akin to those in the Second Nun 's Tale. Lady Philosophy counsels Boethius to still the warring impulses in his heart and to arm himself like a soldier against the twin dangers of anger and despair. 56 Yet neither Lady Philosophy in Boece nor Prudence in Melibee advocates a passive resignation in the face of misfortune. Prudence advises an active reconciliation with those who had injured Melibee, and in her closing words Lady Philosophy exhorts Boethius to an active stance in his relationship with the world: "'Gret necessite of prowesse and vertu is encharged and commaunded to yow, yif ye nil nat dissimulen; syn that ye worken and don (that is to seyn, your dedes or your werkes) byforen the eyen of the juge that seeth and demeth aile things.' " 57 Lady Philosophy calls Boethius to active resistance, not to passive resignation. His death at the hands of an unjust authority made him a martyr, if not to the teachings of Christ, at least to the philosophie stance of non-violent resistance to evil. Cecilia thus adds her own powerful, authoritative voice to Melibee' s Dame Prudence and Boece's Lady Philosophy in advocating (for both women and men alike) 55

Chaucer, Trailus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 546. Chaucer, Boece, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 395-469. Martial imagery appears, for example, in book 1, prose 2, lines 8-11; book 1, prose 3, lines 67-81; book 1, meter 4, lines 10-22; and book 1, meter 4, lines 201-9. 57 Chaucer, Boece, p. 469. 56

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non-violent resistance, not passive resignation, to abuses of power. Chaucer chose for the Second Nun 's Tale a female saint associated with the tradition of the soldiers of Christ, and he emphasized and augmented the warlike imagery in his version of the tale. Somewhat paradoxically, the primary result is that Cecilia as she appears in the Second Nun 's Tale becomes a spokeswoman for the ancient Christian philosophy of the power of peace. This philosophie stance is, 1 would argue, the central virtue that Chaucer's Saint Cecilia represents.

Linguistic Identity in the Middle Ages: The Case of the Spanish Jews ELAINE R. MILLER

M

odern-day Judeo-Spanish, the language spoken by Sephardic Jews in Greece, Turkey, Israel, and other countries, is recognized as a linguistically distinct dialect of Spanish. The origins and earliest evidence of Judeo-Spanish, however, are the subject of on-going debate. No definitive response has yet been determined to the question of whether the Jews of Castile already spoke a distinctive variety of Castilian in the fifteenth century, prior to the Expulsion. 1 ln responding to this question, many investigators offer equivocal statements suggesting that the dialect of the Jews was not substantially different from that of the Christians at this time. They recognize the existence of certain distinctive characteristics in the language of the Jews, such as Hebrew syntactic patterns or lexical items like el Dio, "God," yet most researchers do not find enough differences to label the language of the fifteenth-century Castilian Jews as "Judeo-Spanish." Given the difficulties of studying the existence of fifteenth-century Judeo-Spanish based on purely linguistic criteria, 1 propose here that the consideration of the sociocultural importance of the Jews' language offers valuable insights into the relationship

1

José Ramon Magdalena Nom de Déu, "Las otras judeolenguas de Sefarad antes de la expulsion," in Actes del Simposi Internacional sobre Cultura Sefardita, ed. Josep Ribera (Barcelona, 1993), pp. 73-82, is engaged in studying Jcwish texts from regions outside of Caslile in order to determine the existence of other medieval "judeolenguas," such as Judeo-Catalan, JudeoAragonese, Judeo-Navarrese, and Judeo-Galician. 1 will focus on only Judeo-Castilian, although 1 use the better-known term Judeo-Spanish.

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between the Jews and their language(s). This perspective, in effect, focuses on the internai view of the language-how the speakers view their language-as opposed to the external view of outside linguists. After reviewing some of the ambiguities that have arisen in the discussion of the linguistic uniqueness of medieval Jewish language, 1 will show how an exarnination of the Jews' cultural identity in fifteenth-century Castile can lead to the conclusion that their linguistic identity and linguistic usage differed from th ose of the Christi ans of the same era. In order to approach and understand this problem, 1 must first establish some definitions. The key question is whether the language/variety/dialect spoken by the Jews in late medieval Castile differed enough from the dialect spoken by the co-territorial non-Jews to warrant calling it a different dialect. The definition of a "language" versus a "dialect" must remain rather vague and intuitive; the precise boundary between the two has been widely discussed without coming to consensus. Chambers and Trudgill consider dialects to be "subdivisions of a particular language"; the term "refers to varieties which are grammatically (and perhaps lexically) as well as phonologically different from other varieties." 2 Francis's definition is similar; for him, dialects are "varieties of a language used by groups smaller than the total community of speakers of the language." A dialect may differ in "vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, usage, social fonction, artistic and literary expression.'' 3 Petyt concurs, emphasizing that "dialects are the various dif.ferent forms of the same language." 4 The issue of where to draw a distinction between a dialect and a language is complex and in the end, almost unresolvable. Francis explains that in a dialect: [t]he differences may be slight and confined to a few aspects of the language, or so great as to make communication difficult between speakers of different dialects ... Actually there is no positive and clear-cut way to establish criteria by which separate dialects can be distinguished from separate languages. 5 Francis is searching for the boundary between a variety that is a dialect of language A, and a variety that is a separate language B. The language of the medieval Spanish Jews requires approaching the dialect/language debate from a different angle. 1 do not claim, nor do other researchers, that the Jews of Castile spoke a separate language from that of their Christian neighbors. 1 believe, rather, that they spoke a separate dialect of Castilian (or any other variety of Ibero-Romance). The question becomes not, where does a dialect of A become language B, but how much must a variety of A differ from A in order to be considered a dialect of A, rather than simply A itself. This is a

2

J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill, Dialectology (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 3, 5. W. Nelson Francis, Dialectology: An Introduction (London, 1983), p. 1. 4 K. M. Petyt, The Study of Dialect: An Introduction to Dialectology (Boulder, 1980), p. 11;

3

emphasis his. 5 Francis, Dialectology, p. 1.

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distinction that dialectologists generally have not addressed. Francis' s comment that dialectal differences may be either great or small, however, leaves open the possibility of dialects with only a few differences from the "standard" language. If the differences need not be great, the burden of proof of a dialect is reduced. Investigators of JudeoSpanish, like those in other fields, have not defined the requisite level of difference to speak of a dialect rather than the same language. Many of them note differences in the Jews' dialect in Castile, yet do not feel that these differences warrant the dialectal label "Judeo-Spanish." After examining Jewish language use in medieval Iberia, numerous researchers have pointed out distinctive features in their variety of Romance, yet at the same time they profess that the Jews' language was essentially the same as that of the Christians. Révah, for example, is convinced of the similarity of speech across the two religious communities. He writes that "during ail of the Middle Ages the Jews of the Spanish Peninsula spoke very close to the same language as their Christian countrymen from the same places." 6 A similar belief is expressed by Riafio: " ... during ail of the Middle Ages, the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula spoke more or Jess the same language as the Christians who lived in the same cities as them. But it is also known that slight differences must have existed between the speech of the Christians and the speech of the Jews .... " 7 Lleal also views the Jews' Ianguage as much like the Christians; yet with certain notable differences: "I believe that the study of medieval aljamiado texts allows us to state that the Peninsular Jews expelled in 1492 (except in the use of some cultural terms that refer to particular institutions: berurim, taqqanot, sofer . .. ) 8 were not different, Iinguistically, from their Christian contemporaries." 9 These researchers seem to say that the language variety spoken by the Jews was the same as that of the 6

"Durant tout le Moyen Age les Juifs de la Péninsule hispanique ont parlé à peu près la même langue que leurs compatriotes chrétiens originaires des mêmes localités qu'eux" (1. S. Révah, "Hispanisme et judaïsme des langues parlées et écrites par les Sefardim," in Actas del Primer Simposio de Estudios Sefardies, ed. Jacob M. Hassan [Madrid, 1970], p. 238). 7 " ..• [D]urante toda la Edad Media los judfos de la Penfnsula Ibérica hablaron maso menos la misma lengua que sus vecinos cristianos que residfan en las mismas ciudades que ellos. Pero también es sabido que debieron existir ligeras diferencias entre el habla de los cristianos y el habla de los judfos ... " (Ana Riafio, "La lengua sefardf y su evoluci6n," in Actes del Simposi lnternacional, p. 94). 8 An aljamiado text is one written in Spanish (or other Romance language) using Hebrew (or Arabie) characters. The Hebrew terms that Lleal has found in aljamiado documents include herurim (judges or arbitrators), taqqanot (ordinances), and sofer (scribe). 9 "Creo que el estudio de los textos aljamiados medievales nos permite afirmar que los judfos peninsulares expulsados en 1492 (salvo en la utilizaci6n de algunos términos de cultura rcfcridos a instituciones exclusivas: herurim, taqqanot, sofer . .. ) no se diferenciaban, lingüfsticamente, de sus coetaneos cristianos" (Coloma Lleal, "El sefardf y la norma escrita," in Actes del Simposi lnternacional, p. 107).

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Christians-but not quite the same. All of them allude to the difficulty of distinguishing between a distinct dialect of a language, and a variety with "insignificant" differences that should still be considered the "same" language. Penny has echoed the same view, writing that "[e]verything suggests ... that each Jewish community spoke similarly (but perhaps not identically) to Christians living in the same city .... " 10 As part of his evidence, he cites a linguistic study by V arvaro (in . which Varvaro examined thirteenth- and fourteenth-century documents), who, in Penny' s interpretation, "concludes that phonetic, phonological, and grammatical differences between the speech of Jews and Christians were slight or non-existent, and that only at the levels of lexis and phraseology were there certain differences of note." 11 Penny appears to hedge on the issue, allowing two interpretations of the data. What does it mean for the variety to be "similar" but "not identical"? That is, was the Jews' variety "the same" or "different"? In V arvaro' s study, is it more likely that linguistic differences were "slight" or "non-existent"? The difference between the two terms, though semantically small, is the difference between dialects that are distinct and identical varieties. The differences discussed by V arvaro, which Penny almost dismisses, cou Id just as easily be considered evidence for the existence of Judeo-Spanish. While the two documents he studies offer little out of the ordinary in the phonology or morphology, the syntax and style are indeed unusual. V arvaro points out that the "extraordinary density" of certain stylistic elements differs greatly from Christian texts. 12 In addition, any slight differences present in the thirteenth century probably increased by the fifteenth. Furthermore, Varvaro recognizes the greater complexity of Jewish language use, for it is actually composed of "a range of sociolinguistically conditioned registers."13 The Jews could speak in a more or Jess "Jewish" way, depending on the context of the interaction. In "ritual and liturgical situations" the Jew was likely to use a Castilian highly influenced by Hebrew, whereas, "[w]hen the Jew did not wish to be recognized as such, he hid or denied his own cultural identity ... so his Castilian did not differ at ail from that of the Christi ans of the same area and of the same era." 14 Y et surely the Jews also must have interacted in many situations intermediate between the two Varvaro describes--everyday communication with Jews or non-Jews in which

10

Ralph Penny, "Dialect Contact and Social Networks in Judeo-Spanish," Romance Philology 46 (1992), 126. 11 Penny, "Dialect Contact," p. 126. 12 Alberto Vârvaro, "Il giudeo-spagnolo prima dell'espulsione del 1492," Medioevo Romanzo 12 (1987), 168. 13 "[U]na gamma di registri sociolinguisticamente condizionati ... " (Vârvaro, "Giudeospagnolo," p. 170). 14 "Quando un ebreo non voleva essere riconosciuto corne tale, dissimulava o negava la propria identità culturale ... cioè il suo castigliano non si differenziava per nulla da quello dei cristiani della stessa zona e della stessa epoca" (Vârvaro, "Giudeo-spagnolo," p. 168).

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there was no need or desire to hide their cultural identity. In these contexts, the same question of similarity versus difference remains. In these daily communicative situations, the Jew was probably recognizable as a Jew because of the way he spoke. Penny' s interpretation of V arvaro is an oversimplification of this complex issue. DfazMas, Lida, and Spiegel express similar views, noting a number of unique features of the Jews' Spanish, yet asserting that, overall, their language was the same as the Christians'. 15 As these scholars propound the similarity between the speech of the Jews and of the Christians, it appears that each one states that Jewish Castilian is the same as Christian Castilian-except when it is different. They acknowledge a few unique traits, but deny that these prove the existence of Judeo-Spanish as a separate variety of Castilian. They do not, as Wexler puts it, "consider such an incipient state of diglossia as sufficient cause to posit the existence of Judezmo in the period before 1492." 16 Wexler and several others believe that the Jews did indeed speak an early form of Judeo-Spanish in the fifteenth century. Jochnowitz affirms that "an early form of [Judeo-Spanish] was probably spoken in Spain before the expulsion of 1492," 17 and Benardete explains that "[i]n the Peninsula, then, there began with the graduai incorporation of the Jewish aljamas under Castilian control the development of a language among the Jews that differed considerably from that spoken and written by their Christian contemporaries." 18 It often seems that the same linguistic features can support whichever side of the argument a scholar prefers. The observations made by Marcus, 19 for example, have been interpreted in two opposite ways. Wexler considers him one of the scholars who believes that "an analysis of Judezmo and Ladino clearly supports a pre-Expulsion date for both speech forms." 20 Séphiha, on the other hand, writes that Marcus "has definitively shown that no living Judeo-Spanish existed before 1492." 21 Without a doubt, to repeat Harris' s observation, "it is obvious that more study is 15

See Paloma Dfaz-Mas, Los sefardies: Historia, lengua y cultura (Barcelona, 1986), p. 97; Denah Lida, "Ladino Language and Literature," in Jewish Languages: Theme and Variations, ed. Herbert H. Paper (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 79-92; Irving Spiegel, "Old Judaeo-Spanish Evidence of Old Spanish Pronunciation" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1952), p. 7. 16 Paul Wexler, "Ascertaining the Position of Judezmo within lbero-Romance," Vox Romanica 36 (1977), 166. 17 George Jochnowitz, "Judeo-Romance Languages," in Jewish Languages, p. 66. 18 See Meir José Benardete, Hispanie Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews, 2nd ed. (New York, 1982), pp. 58-59. 19 Simon Marcus, "A-t-il existé en Espagne un dialecte judéo-espagnol?" Sefarad 22 (1962), 129-49. 20 Paul Wexler, Three Heirs to a Judeo-Latin Legacy: Judeu-lbero-Romance, Yiddish and Rotwelsch (Wiesbaden, 1988), p. 2. 21 "[A] définitivement montré qu'il n'existait pas de judéo-espagnol vivant avant 1492" (Haim Vidal Séphiha, Le ladino, judéo-espagnol calque [Paris, 1973], p. 47).

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definitely needed in this area ... scholars are still divided on the issue of whether a specific Jewish language did indeed exist in pre-Expulsion times." 22 The difficulties of identifying the unique features of Judeo-Spanish are increased by the time elapsed, which has resulted in the preservation of only a small portion of the written texts of the fifteenth century. In these texts, it is indeed difficult to point to features that are so clearly and vastly different that they prove the Jews spoke their own dialect. Given the small number of documents, it is also difficult to determine whether a given text is representative of an era, genre, or dialect or is largely idiosyncratic. Other factors also complicate the search for Jewish dialectal forms. Writing always represents a more conservative, more standard form of language than speech; as a result, some distinguishing characteristics of Jewish speech were probably never recorded. Furthermore, the Jews, like ail speakers, utilized a variety of styles, and depending on the context, as Varvaro has pointed out, they could use a language variety that included a greater or lesser number of "Jewish" features. This is the well-known phenomenon of speech accommodation. Another factor which must be taken into account is the presence of Hebrew in the Jewish community. Ali educated males (and a few females) were thoroughly familiar with Hebrew, which was used for the study of religious topics. Hebrew was used for prayer and reading Scripture, while Castilian was used for translation of these holy texts. In addition, during the Middle Ages Hebrew was sometimes called upon for use as a Iingua franca, as when communicating with Jews from other countries. The knowledge of Hebrew was widespread enough that the Jews could code-switch and insert Hebrew into Castilian sentences. Researchers disagree about whether such switches constitute characteristics of a distinct dialect, despite the fact that these switches clearly demonstrate unique lexical and syntactic patterns. The limitations on texts and the disagreement as to just what counts as "different" make the task of finding linguistic evidence for a Jewish dialect complex and difficult. The linguistic difficulties of finding unique fcatures that many researchers have encountered can, however, be offset by approaching the issue from the perspective of socio-cultural and linguistic identity. Rather than focusing on specific linguistic features, we can examine the Jews' attitudes towards the languages they used and their own perceptions of how they fit into the surrounding, secular community. In other words, because the relationship between language and culture is bidirectional, with each one affecting the other, by better understanding the Jews' socio-cultural identity, insight will also be gained into their linguistic identity. In Benardete's words, "[w]hat gives cohesion and character to a people is its language. Its language adrnirably reflects, in turn, the dominant traits of the people who use the language." 23 Sociolinguists and ethnologists agree that language is one of the strongest manifestations of cultural and ethnie identity: "[l]anguage is an 22

Tracy K. Harris, Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish (Newark, 1994), pp.

63-64. 23

Benardete, Hispanie Culture, p. 56.

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essential part of culture, and Ianguage differences are often indicators of deep-seated social and cultural phenomena." 24 We may therefore posit that differences in a group' s cultural identity relative to another group's-such as the Castilian Jews relative to the Castilian Christians-may correlate with a different linguistic identity. More specifically, a group's beliefs and attitudes about its language reflect who they are and how they identify as a community. Labov's sociolinguistic studies have demonstrated that "[l]anguage can be a very important factor in group identification, group solidarity and the signalling of difference ...." 25 The combination of small linguistic differences plus differences in group identification is thus sufficient to result in the formation of a separate dialect. The Jews of medieval lberia, who consistently formed a separate community within the larger society, developed their own cultural identity and most likely also developed a linguistic identity which differed from that of the non-Jewish community. Indeed, their linguistic identity and language usage are clearly unique in their use of Hebrew as a liturgical and academic language: no other medieval group used this language. The fact that many educated Jews of this period were bilingual in Hebrew and Romance, and that they assigned each one to specific domains, demonstrates that the roles of languages were different in the Jewish culture than in the Christian culture. The use of several languages was not uncommon among the Jews; rather, it continued a centuries-old tradition of multilingualism. Throughout their history, the Jews have consciously struggled with issues of language choice and linguistic identity. Most often, Jewish language use was a combination ofHebrew, used for ritual and liturgical purposes, and the local vernacular, which the Jews learned thoroughly, and to which they often added specifically Jewish features. Emotionally, Hebrew was as much of a "mother tongue" as the local vernacular, and it played an important part in a child' s early years, since Jewish education traditionally began at home with the father teaching the child some basic prayers and Hebrew words. 26 The importance of Hebrew was expressed by the eleventh-century poet Ibn Gabirol, who explained that he was motivated to write a book on Hebrew grammar, "because Hebrew is, in my opinion, the most valuable of all languages." 27 In the Iberian Peninsula Jewish consciousness about language use is clearly evident beginning in al-Andalus during the tenth to twelfth centuries. The Jewish intellectuals of the Muslim period engaged in vigorous debates as they defended differing visions 24

Francis, Dialectology, p. 8. See Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, rev. ed. (London, 1995), p. 12. 26 Nathan Morris, The Jewish School: An Introduction to the History of Jewish Education (London, 1937), p. 60; Eliezer Ebner, Elementary Education in Ancient Israel during the Tannaitic Period ( I0-220 C.E.) (New York, 1956), p. 75. 27 "AI ser en mi opiniôn el hebreo el mas preciado de los Ienguajes" (Angel Saenz-Badillos and Judit Targarona Borras, Gramaticos hebreos de Al-Andalus, siglos X-XII [Côrdoba, 1988], p. 150). 25

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of a Jewish linguistic identity and argued over the proper use of the holy tongue. The language attitudes revealed during the Muslim era, when the Jews' vernacular was Arabie, provide the foundation for later periods, when many Jews emigrated to Castile and began to speak Castilian. During the Muslim period, the Jews usually spoke Arabie, which they learned quickly under Muslim rule. In al-Andalus, the Muslims used Colloquial Arabie as their vernacular and Classical Arabie as their holy and poetic tongue. They subscribed to the concept of 'arabiyya, which held that Islam and the Arabie language of the Qur' an were the essence of purity and truth, and superior to all other religions and languages. This set of beliefs motivated the Muslims to use Classical Arabie as the language of poetry in order to demonstrate its beauty. The Jews also spoke Colloquial Arabie on a daily basis, yet because of the religious connotations of Classical Arabie, the Jews did not wish to use this language in their own prose and poetry. For prose, they wrote a variety of Arabie known as Middle Arabie. Jewish poetry, until the mid-tenth century, was virtually always of a religious nature and composed in biblical Hebrew. At that time, Hebrew was poorly known and infrequently used outside of strictly religious functions. Jewish leaders and intellectuals in Muslim Spain were discouraged by the Jews' lack of familiarity with Hebrew; they often repeated something first said by a Babylonian leader: "since people stopped using our language it has lost its beauty, and has corne to be held inferior, on account of its limited vocabulary." 28 Ibn Gabirol lamented, "our holy tongue has been destroyed and has almost disappeared." 29 In an effort to renew Hebrew, and cncouraged by the Muslim idea of 'arabiyya, Jewish intellectuals began to utilize Hebrew for more than just religious purposes. They developed its resources so that it could be used more adequately as a poetic and scientific tongue. Through their efforts, the scholars in effect "made Biblical Hebrew the Jewish equivalent of classical Arabie and accorded their language a new status as a cultural monument above and beyond its traditional status as 'the holy tongue.' " 30 The first step in the process of the rebirth of Hebrew is generally attributed to Menahem ben Saruq, who wrote a book, known as the Mahberet, in which he defined biblical Hebrew words that were not well understood. His goal in the book is to "present the Hebrew language clearly, according to the contents of its foundations and the essence of its mots .... " 31 About the same time, poets in al-Andalus implemented a

28

Nehemya Allony, "The Reaction of Moses Ibn Ezra to 'Arabiyya (Arabism)," in Actes du XX!Xe Congrès international des orientalistes: Etudes Hébraiques (Paris, 1975), p. 10. 29

" . . . [H]a sido destruida su lengua santa, y casi ha desaparecido" (Sâenz-Badillos and Targarona Borrâs, Gramdticos, p. 14). 30 See Raymond P. Scheindlin, "Hebrew Poetry in Medieval lberia," in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, ed. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds (New York, 1992), p. 44. 31 "Presentar con claridad la lengua hebrea de acuerdo con el contenido de sus fundamentos

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change so innovative that it has been called "revolutionary" by several modern scholars: 32 poets began to write secular Hebrew poetry modeled after Arabie styles and themes. For centuries, Jews had composed religious poetry in Hebrew; now they also began to use Hebrew in secular poetry. Before long, they applied Arabie poetic techniques to religious poetry as well. During these centuries, Hebrew also came into use in the fields of science and philosophy. Hebrew was revived from an essentially "dead" language, used only for religious purposes, and transformed, by means of the Jews' conscious efforts, into a live, cultivated language, used in all types of writing and even, on occasion, for oral communication. The first man to utilize Arabie poetic techniques in Hebrew poetry was Dunash ben Labrat (915-70), who was educated in Babylon and later moved to C6rdoba. Ben Labrat made many corrections to the definitions in ben Saruq's Mahberet, and in explaining his own definitions, he often called upon examples from Arabie. In the introduction to his book called Te§ubot, "answers" or "criticisms," he addresses himself to ben Saruq and explains that he is writing it "because 1 have seen that your dictionary causes damage and madness in the hearts of ingenuous scholars and in many of those who are considered men of understanding .... " 33 Ben Labrat also drew on Arabie techniques, particularly its meter and rhyme schemes, in his poetic compositions, a practice which evoked a strong negative reaction from other poets, especially from Menahem ben Saruq and his students. They believed that this use of the Hebrew language was inappropriate for the holy tongue. 34 The two schools wrote extensive debates back and forth; the argument centered on whether it was advisable or permissible to use Arabie linguistics to understand the language of the Bible and to provide poetic techniques. The problem in the mind ofMenahem's disciples was the beliefthat no man had the right to impose the techniques of Arabie-a foreign tangue, in important ways-upon the holy language. They wrote, "it is not correct to weigh the Hebrew language on the scale of the Arabie language nor to seulpt Hebrew verse with an Arabie chisel ... because it is the destruction of the language." 35 They wished Hebrew to be

y la esencia de sus rafces ... " (Saenz-Badillos and Targarona Barras, Gramaticos, p. 28). 32

See Israel Levin, "lnterrelaci6n entre la poesfa hebrea y la poesfa arabe en Espafia," in l Congreso lnternacional "Encuentro de las Tres Culturas" (Toledo, 1983), pp. 247-64; Israel Levin and Angel Saenz-Badillos, eds. and trans., Si me olvido de ti, Jerusalen ... Cantos de las sinagogas de al-Andalus (C6rdoba, 1992). 33 "[P]orque he visto que tu diccionario causa mal y disoluci6n en los corazones de los estudiosos ingenuos y en muchos de los que se llaman entendidos ... "(Angel Saenz-Badillos, ed., Tesubot de Dunas ben Labrat [Granada, 1980], pp. 12, 16). 34 Norman Roth, "Jewish Reactions to the 'Arabiyya and the Renaissance of Hebrew in Spain," Journal of Semitic Studies 28 ( 1983), 68. 35 "No es correcto pesar la lengua hebrea en la balanza de la lengua arabe ni esculpir el verso hebreo con cincel arabe .... porque es la destrucci6n de la lengua" (Carlos del Valle Rodrfguez,

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able to stand on its own as a poetic language; they did not want Hebrew to be defined in terms of Arabie. Ben Labrat' s disciples, by contrast, believed that reference to Arabie could enhance their understanding of the holy tongue and the Scriptures. These two groups of scholars were, in sociolinguistic terms, in the process of forging the linguistic identity of their community. They were deciding what relationship the Jewish people of their day should have with Hebrew, the holy tongue, and Arabie, the local vemacular. The fact that they maintained their arguments in Hebrew is evidence, in and of itself, of the new flexibility of the Hebrew language. Through their conscious efforts to renew the Hebrew language, these men wished to show that their language, the Hebrew of the Bible, was as holy and beautiful as the Muslims claimed Arabie to be. And whether ben Saruq or ben Labrat' s disciples won, the debate made clear that these Jews had adopted and adapted the linguistic mode! provided by their neighbors; they had made it their own and distinguished themselves from the Muslims. The actual outcome of the debate was more than the sum of its parts: it was a blending of the two traditions. In Hispano-Jewish poetry, the Hebrew language and biblical allusions combine with Arabie meter and rhyme in a variety of typically Arabie genres, such as panegyrics, eulogies, satires, and poems about wine parties, beautiful women, and boys. As Gerber puts it in her book on the Sephardim, "[t]hese multitalented individuals self-consciously integrated Jewish traditions with Arabie and Islamic culture in order to create something dynarnically new." 36 The linguistic identity of these Jewish intellectuals was different from that of earlier Jewish authorities, because they had a solid understanding of Hebrew and used it for a wide variety of purposes; and it also differed from the Muslims who were their contemporaries, for their linguistic and poetic identity included Hebrew and the Jewish religion alongside Arabie. This same integration of cultural elements endured throughout the Middle Ages. Moving forward to the late twelfth century, we see that the languages of the Jews once again contribute greatly to the Jews' sense of identity and self, in both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. Judah ibn Tibbon, a Granadan Jew who lived in Provence, wrote a testament to his son Samuel, in Hebrew, in which the tensions and interactions between Hebrew and Arabie are clearly visible. Judah entreats Samuel to devote himself to studies of both Arabie and Hebrew; it is difficult to determine which one is more important to him, for each has a critical role. During Samuel's youth, his father writes, "[s]even years and more have passed since thou didst begin to learn Arabie writing but, despite my entreaties, thou hast refused to obey. Yet thou art well aware how our foremost men only attained high

"Origen y esencia de la poesfa hebraico-espafiola en métrica arabe," in I Congreso Internacional "Encuentro de las Tres Culturas," p. 294). 36 See Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York, 1992), p. 44.

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distinction through their proficiency in Arabie writing." 37 The knowledge of Arabicspoken and written, including poetic forms and beautiful calligraphy-was fondamental for the social mobility of the Andalusian Jews; with this Iinguistic skill, they had served in many administrative posts under Muslim leaders and thereby gained wealth and prestige. Assimilation, however, was not the goal of most Jews, and the study of Hebrew normally accompanied the study of Arabie. After reprimanding him for his lack of attention to Arabie, Samuel's father continues, "[n]or hast thou acquired sufficient skill in Hebrew writing, though 1 paid, as thou must remember, thirty golden pieces annually .... " 38 In Hebrew, too, artistic handwriting is valued, and it is another area in which Samuel initially showed little interest. lt appears that Judah is involved in an ongoing attempt to balance the two languages, for he believes both to be important for his son's future. The use of these two languages on a daily basis is shown when Judah advises Samuel to "[t]ake upon thee to write one leaf daily and to meditate for an hour, in the Ben Mishle," a Hebrew work by Samuel ha-Nagid, and also to "[r]ead every week the Pentateuchal section in Arabie. This will improve thine Arabie vocabulary, and will be of advantage in translating, if thou shouldst feel inclined to translate." 39 Hebrew is perhaps slightly more important than Arabie, for, upon willing his son his vast library, the father instructs the son as to the care of the books: "[e]xamine thy Hebrew books at every new moon, the Arabie volumes once in two months, and the bound codices once every quarter." 40 Judah does not make clear whether the differential schedule is related to the relative importance of the languages, the physical fragility of the various books, the content of them, or Samuel's proportionate disinterest in each type of volume. The importance of Arabie calligraphy is mentioned among his last wishes for his son, as he concludes, "[i]f my advice seem good in thine eyes, select from among thy Arabie books one whose script pleases thee. Strive to imitate it." 41 These quotations indicate the importance of language, writing, and study to Judah; devotion to ail of these is one of the most important values he can pass on to his son. Like his religion, his profession, and his family, other topics addressed in the testament, Judah's languages are a part of his identity and are a key element in the way he perceives himself, his son, and his community. The particular contexts and ways in which he uses each one distinguish him and his coreligionists from their Christian and Muslim neighbors. The Jews form a distinct cultural group, and one of the characteristics of their Jewish identity is the unique ways they use language. Language is fondamental not only to self-identity, but also to the way in which a person is perceived by others. Judah is aware of the role of language in an individual' s

37

Israel Abrahams, Hebrew Ethical Wills (Philadelphia, 1926), p. 59. x Abrahams, Wills, p. 59. 39 Abrahams, Wi/ls, pp. 65-66. 40 Abrahams, Wi/ls, pp. 80--81. 41 Abrahams, Wills, p. 84.

3

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reputation, and he warns his son, "[b ]e punctilious in regard to grammatical accuracy, in conjugations and genders, for the constant use of the vernacular sometimes leads to error in this matter. 42 A man's mistakes in writing bring him into disrepute; they are remembered against him all his days." 43 Along the same lines, he advises: "[e]ndeavor to cultivate conciseness and elegance, do not attempt to write verse unless thou canst doit perfectly .... The beauty of a composition depends on the writing, and the beauty of the writing, on pen, paper and ink; and all these excellencies are an index to the au th or' s worth."44 Judah also values the use of each language in its correct, "pure" forrn, for he tells Samuel, "[u]se no rare constructions or foreign idioms or terrns, 45 for though the latter may be justified by analogy, they are none the less unnatural." 46 Judah's concern for hls son's education in Arabie and Hebrew indicates his desire to convey his linguistic values to the younger generation. He wishes his son to grow up with a linguistic identity similar to that of the Jewish leaders, who value both Hebrew, as the means of understanding Judaism and its texts, and Arabie, as a tool for professional advancement in the secular community. In the thirteenth œntury, during the intellectually productive reign of King Alfonso X (1252-84), the linguistic situation of the Castilian Jews became even more complex and regularly involved three languages: Castilian, Arabie, and Hebrew. The Jews of this period (at least the better educated) appear to have moved comfortably among the three languages and cultures and to have felt little tension among them, and in their trilingualism the intellectuals once again differentiated themselves linguistically from the surrounding cultures. At this time, Arabie was probably still the Jews' vernacular, although Castilian was advancing rapidly and already in common use among the Christians. Many Jews used Castilian in shared spaces such as the marketplace and court. Hebrew, as in earlier times, was learned from a young age and studied throughout a boy' s education. Hebrew was still used for scientific writing when directed at an international Jewish audience, but within Spain, the language of astronomy and other sciences was shifting from Arabie and Latin to Spanish. In the royal court, Alfonso X employed Jews to write astronomical treatises in Castilian and to translate texts from Arabie into Castilian. The translators epitomize the dual linguistic and cultural identity of the Jews, for at the same time that they were deeply involved in the king's court and secular science, 42

"Vernacular" here may be taken to mean Arabie; Hebrew would not have been called a vernacular, particularly since the Hebrew term used is derived from the word for "foreign language." 43 Abrahams, Wills, p. 68. 44 Abrahams, Wills, pp. 69-70. 45 Once again, "foreign idioms" most probably refers to Arabie (from which analogies were often drawn in coining new Hebrew expressions), although it could also include borrowings from Romance languages. 46 Abrahams, Wills, p. 69.

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they continued to be dedicated to the Jewish community. Isaac ben Sid, for instance, one of the compilers of the Tablas alfonsies and author of parts of the Libro del saber de astrologia, was also the reader at the Toledo synagogue; evidently, he found no conflict between his two areas of study, religious and secular. Judah ben Moshe haCohen, the other compiler of the Tablas and the king' s physician, also had occasion to utilize several different languages. One of Judah's earliest translations, the Lapidario, contains a prologue that helps clarify his multilingualism. It explains, "and when [the king] had this book in his possession, he caused another Jew, who was his physician, to read it and he was called Yhuda Mosca el Menor and he was learned in the art of astronomy and knew and understood well Arabie and Latin." 47 In all likelihood, Judah used both Arabie and Latin in his medical reading, and of course Arabie and Romance, as well as Hebrew, in his astronomical studies. He used Hebrew for religious purposes and probably for reading some scientific texts as well. In the case of the Alfonsine period, the languages used by the Jews appear to have co-existed in a harmonious way; during this period, their multilingualism was highly valued by both their coreligionists and the Christian authorities. The Jews' use of several languages during the thirteenth century created, once again, a unique identity within the Jewish community, differentiating them from both the Muslim and the Christian communities. The difficulty in defining the linguistic identity of the Jews does not end when they cease to use Arabie in speech and writing. In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, multilingualism was still the norm among Castilian Jews, but they primarily utilized Castilian and Hebrew. One of the most fascinating examples of the interplay between these two languages is a set of legal statutes, known as taqqanot, written in Valladolid in 1432. Traditionally, taqqanot were written in either Arabie or Hebrew, but in this particular case, the statutes are written in a combination of Hebrew and Spanish, both written using Hebrew characters. In addition to the striking language mixing, the fact that the Jewish aljamas were permitted to make their own laws and to rule their own communities is in itself an expression of their unique identity. Medieval legal code acknowledged that the Jews followed a different set of laws from Christian majority and permitted them to do so, provided that they did not scorn Christianity in any way. 48 The differences among the three different religions, or leyes, were widely recognized in medieval lberian society; individuals and groups were readily identified by the ley they followed. Thus the taqqanot define the identity of the Castilian Jews in both their

47

"Et desque este libro touo en su poder fizo Io leer a otro su Judio que era su fisico & dizien le Yhuda mosca el menor que era mucho entendudo en la arte de astronomia & sabie & entendie bien el arauigo & el latin" (Alfonso X el Sabio, Lapidario and Libro de las formas & ymagenes, cd. Roderic C. Diman and Lynn W. Winget [Madison, 1980], p. 3). 48 Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 "De lo:sjudîos" (Berkeley, 1986), p. 29. See also James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community: A Study of His Political and Economie Situation (New York, 1976).

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content-the laws-and their form-the blend of Hebrew and Spanish. The text provides examples of the Jews' use of a non-standard writing style, one which draws upon both their Castilian and Jewish identities. The way in which language is used in the taqqanot indicates that the Jews identified with and drew upon the linguistic resources of two different communities, one Jewish and one secular. Both of these cultures and their languages contributed to the linguistic identity of the Jews. One linguistic feature that strongly linked the Jews to their Jewish heritage is the use of formulaic phrases in Hebrew, the same phrases that appear often in the Talmud and Mishnah. ln the taqqanot, formulaic phrases are used to add a blessing or description to an individual or group. The word qahal, "community ," and its plural qehillot, for example, are always followed by the expression "yismerehu §uro vego'alo," "may its Rock and Redeemer protect it," as in (la) and (lb).49 la. si el qahal, y(iSmerehu) s(uro) v(e-go'alo) (line 152) [if the community, may its Rock and Redeemer protect it] b. segum todos los qehillot, y(ismerem) s(uram) v( e-go 'alam) (line 102) [according to ail the communities, may their Rock and Redeemer protect them]

ln (2), the "rav de la corte," "Rabbi of the Court," is singled out by either the descriptor "may God bless him" or "may his Rock and Redeemer protect him" every time he is mentioned. The king, similarly, receives the descriptor, "may God protect him," as in (3). 2a. fasta qu' el Rav de la corte, y( evarekehu) '( elohim), enbie ... (lines 108-9) [until the Rabbi of the court, may God bless him, may send ... ] b. Io que cl dicho Rav, y(ismerehu) s(uro) v(e-go'alo), enbiare mandar (line 124) [that which the said Rabbi, may his Rock and Redeemer protect him, may command] 3.

porcuanto el dicho sefior Rei, y(iSmerehu) '(elohim) mando por el dicho probilejo (line 388-89) [because the said King, may God protect him, commanded by the said privilege]

Other formulaic phrases also appear, although with much Iower frequency, in reference to other individuals or groups who have a special role in the Jewish community:

49 In the transcriptions, parentheses indicate an

abbreviation that has been expanded, and the italics indicate that which is Hebrew in the original. Line numbers in the examples refer to the edition found in Laura Minervini, Testi giudeospagnoli medievali (Naples, 1992).

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nuestra sefîora la Reina, t( evorak) m(i-nasim) (lines 399, 584, 594, 649) [our Lady the Queen, may she be blessed among women]

b. qadmonim, n(u~iam) '(eden) (lines 205, 778) [ancestors, may the y rest in paradise] c.

Ve-darefo ~(akamim), z(ikronam) l(i-berakah) (lines 218, 220) [and the sages, of blessed memory, commented]

In other ways, too, the writers of the taqqanot use the Hebrew language in order to demonstrate the continuity between the ancient lawmakers and themselves. Their use of Hebrew is not limited to formulaic phrases; they also express important religious and legal concepts in Hebrew, even amidst an otherwise Spanish sentence, as seen in the examples in (5). 5a. que de cual res maior que se matare kaser entre ellos e pora ellos, que paguen de ella de Talmud Torah çinco marabedis e de cada ternera o bezerro que aya en el fasta çien libras ... (lines 53-56) [that for every head of large cattle that shall be slaughtered among them ritually for their own use, a tax of five maravedis for Talmud Torah shall be levied; for every calf and every heifer of one hundred pounds ... ] b. E cual quiere que fiziere huppah que pague be-tok yeme ~uppato diez marabedis, e de berit millah, llegado el nif\o al tienpo se-ya.fo' mi-kelal nefel, que pague de Talmud Torah diez marabedis ... (lines 72-75) [And anyone who has a wedding shall pay, in the days of his betrothal, ten maravedis, and for circumcision, when the child has arrived at the lime when he is considered viable, ten maravedis for Talmud Torah shall be levied ... ] c. e sean mehuyyavim los padres de los fijos que posieren sus fijos con el dicho melmnmed de pagar cada uno al melammed segum su aber (lines 138-39) [and the parents of the sons who place their sons with the said professor, each one shall be obligated to pay the professor according to his means] d. e en los lugares que tobieren y dayyanim el dicho tienpo, sean mukra~im de se allegar diez dias antes que se cunpla el tienpo de su dayyanut, pora seer mevarerim otros dayyanim pora el afio venidero, e dende adelante por esta regla (lines 230--33) [and in the places that havejudges at the said time, they shall be required to gather together ten days before the time of their term expires, in order to elect other judges for the coming year, and henceforth according to this mie)

Despite the frequent use of Hebrew for technical terms such as these, a closer examination of the document proves that the writers were not fully consistent in employing Hebrew for legal and religious terms. Alongside the use of dayyan, "judge," for instance, there is also the Spanish equivalent, "juez." Religious labels do not appear

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only in the Hebrew, as yehudi "Jew" and nokri "Christian," but also in their Spanish versions, "judfo" and "cristiano." Following are examples of these words: 6a. Porende ordenamos que cual quier judio que fuere metaher yeno sel nokri que faga de manera que el ta! vino sea sujebto e obligado a todos los derechos e rentas e premias que el vino que el judio posiere suyo es obligado (lines 547-50) [Moreover we order that any Jew who may be purifying Christian wine should act in such a way that such wine be subject and obligated to ail the rights, fees, and taxes to which the wine that is the Jew' s is subject] b. Porende ordenamos que algun judio o judia no traya a su f:iaver nin a otro judio nin judia ante algun alcalde nin otro juez eclejastico nin seglar ... (lines 393-95) [Therefore we order that no Jew or Jewess shall bring his fellow-man nor any other Jew nor Jewess before any justice or other judge, either ecclesiastic or secular ... ] c. e si algun goy o goyah amcnazaren a algun qahal o yahid por algun yehudi o yehudit, e negare ... (lines 521-23) [and if some non-Jew or -Jewess should threaten some community or individual through a Jew or Jewess, and should deny ... ] d. que se debe vender segum que vale entre los Cristianos, pujando las alcabalas ... (lines 571-72) [that it should be sold according to its value among the Christians, raising the taxes ... ] The fact that these religiously-loaded and thus emotionally-laden terms were interchangeable between the two languages shows how fluently the Jews moved between them. Furthermore, the use of Hebrew was not limited to religious terms, for the taqqanot also include code-switches into Hebrew for common, everyday words. 50 The frequent mixing of the two languages suggests that the Jews identified with both languages and felt themselves to be as much members of the wider secular community as of their own religious community. lt would thus appear that the writers of the taqqanot-and by extension, the community that listened to the oral recitation of these ordinances-were members of two linguistic communities, one Hebrcw and one Castilian. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Jews of fifteenth-century Castile had created a new linguistic identity based on the two cultures around them. They maintained links to their heritage through the Hebrew language and traditional phraseology, but they also remained firmly connected to Castilian by code-switching and including it in their internai legal

50

Elaine Rebecca Miller, "Jewish Multilingualism: The Use of Hebrew, Arabie, and Castilian in Medieval Spain" (Ph.D. diss., University of Califomia, Santa Barbara, 1997), pp. 229-30.

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ordinances. This dual loyalty is the Jews' linguistic identity. As the Jews actively created and maintained their own cultural and linguistic identity, they were simultaneously influenced by external forces that further increased their separation from Christian society and their development of unique cultural and linguistic traits. Royal decrees required the Jews to be separated from the Christians, while their religion also compelled them to live differently from the non-Jews. The combination of these two factors contributed to the formation of distinct Jewish communities in medieval lberia. Legislation was one of the most obvious medieval techniques for separating groups, and while at times it was poorly enforced, at other times it was powerful and effective. Time after time, Spanish monarchs and church councils detennined how the Jews might or might not behave. Legal codes, from the early decrees of Elvira (306 CE) through the increasingly harsh laws of the Inquisition period, made clear that the Jews were to be tolerated in the Christian community, but not welcomed. They were regularly confined to their own neighborhoods; required to wear special garments; prohibited from wearing luxurious fabrics; prohibited from practicing medicine or holding jobs that would give them power over Christians; prohibited from building new synagogues; prohibited from intermarrying, living with non-Jews, or eating or bathing with non-Jews. Although the written laws were not consistently enforced during all periods, by the fifteenth century many of these restrictions were in place, and they clearly marked off the Jews as a separate group, and one to be looked down upon. The laws of 1412 were essentially "regulations designed to make life impossible for Jews who refused to give up their religion." 51 Although these laws were temporarily repealed around 1420 (before being reinstated in 1480 by the Catholic Monarchs ), the threat of further legislation was everpresent. These regulations segregated and marginalized the Jews and surely increased the sense of unity and separateness that was already fostered by their religious identity. Although the Sephardic Jews were generally treated better than those in the rest of Europe, they were, nonetheless, "formally treated as aliens." 52 The Jews' religion was another strong force in their lives and one that created a sense of separation from the non-Jewish community. The Jewish religion dictated virtually every facet of the Jews' lives, including what to eat, what to wear, how to pray,

51

"[D]isposiciones encaminadas a hacer imposible la vida a los judîos que no quisiesen abandonar su religion" (Luis Suarez Femandez, Judfos espaiioles en la Edad media, 2nd ed. [Madrid, 1988], p. 225). 52 Isidore Epstein, Responsa of Rabbi Salomon ben Adreth of Barcelona as a Source of the History of Spain (New York, 1968), p. 5. Epstein uses the term "alien" twice in his brief introduction. He appears to refer to the Jews having a legal status of aliens, or outsiders, as shown, for example, by the requirement that they wear a special badge (as per legislation in Catalonia in 1228 and other decrees). At the same time, the Jews were "protected in Spain." The place of an alien is not always clear: " ... regarded as aliens and treated as such, they were in many respects placed on an equal footing with their Christian neighbors" (p. 1).

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what to study, and how to treat others. As the Jews went about their daily lives, their actions were constantly influenced by their religion and traditions. Their religious rituals and their use of the Hebrew language, of course, further marked them off from others. Thus from an internai perspective the Jews felt themselves to be different, while from an external perspective, non-Jews perceived differences between the Jewish community and their own. At the same time, the Jews' connections with the Christian community are undeniable: they served as physicians, courtiers, translators, and shopkeepers in the Christian community and often had cordial, warm relationships with Christians. The Jews did not simply reject the non-Jewish culture around them; they selectively adapted th ose aspects of the surrounding culture which could serve them and disregarded those which did not appeal to them or which contradicted the dictates of their culture and religion. The Christians, sirnilarly, took advantage of the Jews' talents on an individual level, while rejecting and stigmatizing the Jews at the communal level. ln Max Weinreich's opinion (although he is speaking of the Ashkenazim, the same holds true for the Sephardim), "what the Jews aimed at was not isolation from the Christians but insulation from Christianity." The Jewish reality in any community "is to be sought between the two poles of absolute identity with and absolute remoteness from the coterritorial non-Jewish communities."53 Many lberian Jews, in different time periods, struggled with this need to strike a balance between separation and assimilation. In the case of late medieval lberia, the Jews shared many cultural and linguistic characteristics with non-Jews, but they never lost sight of their uniqueness- nor would the Christians have permitted them to do so. Both by choice and by official decree, thcn, the Jews formed a distinct socio-religious group. Sociolinguistic theory predicts that groups that are separated by religion, culture, legislation, and sirnilar factors will develop their own language variety, due to being insufficiently exposed to the surrounding language norm, or in order to retlect their distinctive reality. 54 The Jews in particular, according to Wexler, "have had a tendency ... to create a unique variant from the adopted coterritorial non-Jewish language." 55 Wexler notes three factors that have been proposed frequently as contributing to the development of Jewish languages. First, the segregation of the Jews causes them to be possibly "unable to acquire the norms of the coterritorial non-Jewish dialects because of limited exposure to non-Jewish society." In the Iberian Peninsula, however, Jews were widely exposed to Christian speech; it would seem, rather, that the Jews chose to 53

Max Weinreich, "The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish," in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (The Hague, 1967), 3:2204. 54 Joshua A. Fishman, "The Sociology of Jewish Languages from a General Socio!inguistic Point of View," in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (Leiden, 1985), p. 12. 55 Paul Wexler, "Jewish Interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework," Language 57 (1981), 99.

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alter the norms of the non-Jews. Second, Judaism results in Jewish speech being more receptive to Hebrew elements and Jess receptive to terms that relate to non-Jewish religion. This tendency is clearly shown in many of the code-switches in the taqqanot. The third factor is the frequent migrations of the Jews, which expose them to a wide variety of dialects and Janguages. 56 According to Blau, these factors came into play in the case of the Jews in Arabic-speaking regions. He asserts that the Middle Arabie of the Jews "bore the imprint of the distinctive history of the Jewish group." 57 These same influences in all Iikelihood affected the Jews' Castilian as well, yet Wexler denies that segregation, migration, and religious separatism were necessarily the causes that "led to the birth of a distinctive Jewish variant." He argues, instead, that "[t]he reasons behind the rise and development of a Jewish language must be sought both in voluntary acts of linguistic creativity on the part of the Jews and in the differential impact of social factors upon the Jewish community." 58 Just such voluntary acts of linguistic definition and the Jews' underlying attitudes towards their Janguages are shown in the early debates on Janguage in al-Andalus and in Judah ibn Tibbon's perspective on Hebrew and Arabie. By the fifteenth century, the Jews' relationship to language was reflected not only in their linguistic identity, but also in the linguistic forms they spoke and wrote, as in the bilingual taqqanot. One researcher has expressed the belief that "dialect speakers do not represent a separate culture as muchas a different subculture, one which, again, overlaps to some extent with that of standard speakers."59 Provided that the notion of "sub"culture does not connote a Jesser variety, the idea of cultural overlap between two groups is a useful portrayal of the case of the Sephardic Jews. Both the cultures and the dialects of the Jews and Christians have much in common, yet they also include differences which are significant to group members and thus serve to create boundaries between the groups. Another revealing mode] for the situation of the Jews is that of the Chicanas in the present-day United States. Pefialosa explains that cultural differences, even between two cultures with many overlapping characteristics, can lead to linguistic difference. " ... [T]he Chicana community is somewhat structurally separate from and in some ways culturally different from the majority community, and this is reflected in the use of language." 60 The medieval Sephardim, likewise, have cultural and structural differences from the Christians that are reflected in language use. Benardete has also mentioned the relevance of overlap to Jewish Janguage and culture, during both the Muslim and Christian periods:

5

Wexler, "Jewish lnterlinguistics," pp. 102-3. See Joshua Blau, "The Status of Arabie as Used by Jews in the Middle Ages," Journal of Jewish Studies 10 ( 1959), 19. 58 Wcxlcr, "Jcwish lntcrlinguistics," p. 103. 59 John Edwards, Language, Society and Jdentity (Oxford, 1985), p. 151. 6 °Fernando Pefialosa, Chicana Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction (Rowley, Mass., 1980), p. 12. fl

57

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... the Jews while living in Arabic-speaking Côrdoba continued with their Hebraic tradition which overlapped or went beyond Arabic-Moorish culture. The Jews of Toledo then had really three sets of language habits for man y decades: Hebraic, Arabie, Castilian. Many motives prompted the Toledan Jews to conserve Arabie. They dropped it in time, but their retaining two sets of language habits in the meanwhile caused their Castilian to suffer changes. 61

Both cultural differences and access to multiple linguistic norms contribute to the development of different dialects. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Jews in Castile lived in Jewish communities and in the Jewish' culture, and one of the characteristics of their culture was a unique linguistic identity. This special identity was based in their multilingualism and the importance of Hebrew in their lives. It follows that this identity would be further, more physically manifested by the development of a distinctive variety of Castilian, although it may be difficult today to pinpoint the specific linguistic forms which are unique. The differentiation of the Jews' language is an entirely natural development arising from their religious and social differences; Wagner explains that these differences "also manifested themselves in their manner of speaking, leaving permanent traces in their language." Wagner would not expect the situation to be otherwise; he writes that "even before their expulsion, the Spanish [the Jews] used in their writings was somewhat different from the Spanish used by the Christians. It could not be any other way." 62 If their writing was "somewhat different," their speech surely demonstrated even greater differences. The Jews' choice of languages, along with their religion and the many governmental restrictions imposed on them, separated them from the Christian community and made them noticeably distinct. The Jews felt these differences and, indeed, fostered them, not wishing to assimilate with their non-Jewish neighbors. Such psychological attitudes are, of course, extremely difficult to find and interpret in five-hundred-year-old written texts, and this is why so many researchers have protested that the Jews' language in medieval Castile was not different from that of the Christians. Yet it seems clear, from the examples discussed above, that the Jews felt themselves to be different from the surrounding community, and one way in which they expressed this uniqueness was through their use of language, or rather, languages. Fishman points out that such psychological considerations are a valid criterion in defining a language. In his view, a Ianguage variety may be considered a Jewish

61

Benardete, Hispanie Culture, p. 59. "fA]l manifestarse también en su modo de hablar, dejase hue!las perennes en su lengua ... ya antes de su expulsiôn el espaftol usado por ellos [los judfos] en sus escritos se diferenciaba algo del espafiol empleado por los cristianos. No podfa ser de otra manera" (Max Leopold Wagner, Caracteres generales deljudeo-es paiiol de Oriente [Madrid, 1930], p. 29). 62

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63 language "because Jews or non-Jews believe [it] to be Jewish." As the Jews adapted the co-territorial languages to their unique cultural, religious, and linguistic setting, it is likely that they used forms that were non-standard in the speech of the monolingual community. While the search for unique linguistic forms will be ongoing and challenging, the existence of such forms follows as a correlate of a unique linguistic identity. Establishing the Jews' distinct linguistic identity thus serves as a common point of departure for researchers on both sides of the debate over the existence of preExpulsion Judeo-Spanish. 64

63

Fishman, "Sociology," p. 5. 1 thank an anonymous reviewer and the editors of this volume for many useful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 64

Medieval Documentary Poetics and Langland's Authorial Identity EMIL Y STEINER

T

he starting point of my approach is an observation that the narrative of the late fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman, unfolds through a series of what 1 shall call "fictive documents." By this phrase, 1 refer to legal instruments that are used to express spiritual or social concepts. Mede' s notorious charter may be the most obvious example, but many other major moments in the poem are organized by documents: Truth' s pardon, Piers' s last will and testament, Patience' s patent, Moses' maundement, and Peace's patent. Oddly enough, aside from Scripture, the only examples of written materials in the poem are documents. This observation, that Piers Plowman resembles a kind of archive of fictive documents, suggests some new ways of asking old questions about the poem and about late medieval English literature generally. What is the fonction and status of writing in Piers Plowman? Or, to put it another way, what authorial identity does Langland construct for himself? And, how might this identity be shaped by the production of various kinds of documents in fourteenth-century England? What 1 am proposing in this paper, then, is an intergeneric concept of authorial identity, by which 1 mean not one constituted at generic boundaries, but rather one produced by cross-genre poaching; medieval poets idealized forms of writing that modern readers usually consider nonliterary. If scholarship has traditionally focused on the influence of classical and continental poetics on medieval English writers, what is posited here is largely insular "documentary poetics" derived from the forms and fonctions of legal documents. I argue in this paper that Langland considered the official, legal document to be an exemplary mode of writing. Not only does Piers Plowman present no other successful model of writing, but it ascribes ideal characteristics to certain kinds of documents and

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expresses divine communication as documentary writing. Many scholars have tried to surmise Langland's education and occupation from his broad knowledge of legal terminology, speculating that he was a legal clerk in Yorkshire or a scrivener in London. Recent research in this area has been especially fruitful; yet Langland's documents tell us less about his career and whereabouts than they do about the ways in which English poets adopted documentary writing as a mode! for authorship. The document became an exemplar for Latin and vernacular writing not only because of its precise legal implications and rhetorical strategies, but because it came to represent an ideal relationship between writing, self, and community. Even more specifically, the document gave medieval authors an authoritative language with which to reconcile a confessional, autobiographical writing with a public voice. In order to demonstrate this thesis, l first examine reflexive passages in the Piers Plowman B-text that discuss the characteristics of ideal writing. I then present evidence for an extensive but little-known tradition of documents in literature, a tradition that made a deep impression on Langland and other fourteenth-centu ry poets. Finally, I will suggest that Langland's documents, by gesturing to this contextual tradition, offer a response (if not a definitive answer) to the poem's queries about writing. The B-text contains two important debates about writing: Will's conversation with Lewte in Pass us XI regarding satire, and Imaginatif' s rebuke of Will in Pass us XII. 1 The latter passage especially has provoked much discussion about Langland's attitude toward poetic making. George Economou, for example, has argued that Will's exchange with Imaginatif reveals Langland's ambivalence toward writing poetry. He concludes that Langland omitted this exchange in the C-text because he had gained more confidence in the value of his poetry. By contrast, James Simpson has interpreted the exchange between Will and Imaginatif as a "radical defense" of poetry as a source of moral authority and as a direct challenge to institutional authority. 2 While these passages should be treated as retlexive moments, I recommend a slightly different approach. Rather than revealing Lan gland' s categorical attitude toward poctry, the se passages formulate the question of what authoritative writing is and how it should fonction. This question is never directly answered by Will, nor explicitly by Langland, but by examples of writing in the poem itself. In Passus XI, Will twice takes on the public voice of the satirist and is twice reprimanded. At the beginning of the Passus, Will angrily denounces the hypocrisy of certain friars who baptize and confess for a fee hut refuse to bury those parishioners who don't contribute to their organization. Will appeals in his cause to Lewte (righteousness or justice), who confirms that the laity have the right to declaim publicly the vices of

1

Citations of the B-text are taken from A. V. C. Schmidt, ed., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text ( 1978; repr. London, 1984). 2

George D. Economou, "Self-Consciousness of Poetic Activity in Dante and Langland," in

Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin (Kalamazoo, 1984), p. 191; James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (New York, 1990), pp. 136-39.

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society: "Thyng that al the world woot, wherefore sholdestow spare / To reden it in retorik to arate deadly synne" (XL! 01-2). But Lewte qualifies this statement, warning that satirists should not be too eager to uncover evil in others, nor should they expose private sins to the public eye: "Ac be neveremoore the firste the defaute to blame: / Though thow se yvil, seye it noght first-be sory it nere amended. /No thyng that is pryve, publice thow it nevere; / Neither for love laude it noght, ne lakke it for envye" (XI.! 03-6). While Lewte appears to authorize moral satire, his qualifications reveal Will's attack to be misguided and uncharitable. Will's exposé of the friars is motivated by a private vendetta rather than a genuine desire to offer spiritual counsel and to amend sinners. Notably, Lewte does not insist that the Jay critic be morally perfect, but he does question Will's ability to report in poetry ("to reden it in retorik") the sins of others withoutjeopardizing his soul through pride and self-interest. Scripture supports Lewte, "he seith sooth," and underlines the need for persona! repentance by citing the parable of the wedding feast in which many are called but few are chosen: God "plukked in Pauci pryveliche and leet the remenaunt go rome." Lewte's qualification and Scripture's parable imply that Will's satire, by subjecting "pryve" sins to public view, may exclude him from the few "pryveliche" chosen for salvation. Scripture's sermon shakes Will out of his smug satirical stance and throws him into a spiritual crisis: "al for tene of hir text trembled myn herte, /And in a weer gan 1 wexe, and with myself to dispute/ Wheither 1 were chose or noght chose" (lines 115-17). This passage accordingly directs Will away from public speaking and toward the reparation of the self. Will briefly regains confidence in his own salvation during Trajan' s optimistic speech, which emphasizes divine mercy and the efficacy of good works. Then, at the end of the Passus, Will is shown a panorama of the natural world and comments with "rude speche" that Reason (representing instinct) directs the behavior of animais but leaves human beings to determine their own foolish actions. Reason chastises Will for presuming to judge what Chaucer' s Miller so memorably described as "Goddes pryvetee." And Reson arated me, and seide, "Ricche thee nevere Why 1 suffre or noght suffre-thiself hast noght to doone. Amende thow it if thow myght, for my tyme is to abide. Suffraunce is a soverayn vertue, and a swift vengeaunce. Who suffreth moore than God?" quod he; "no gome, as l leeve. He myghte amende in a minute wile al that mysstandeth, Ache suffret for som mannes goode, and so is oure bettre." (XI.375-81)

In this passage, Reason sarcastically orders Will to mind his own business and to try to improve ("Amende thow it") on God' s plan if he can. Reason tolerates ("suffre") seeming contradictions in the cosmic plan, just as Christ endured ("suffret") pain on the cross. God could have corne up with another solution ("amende in a minute"), but deemed the Incarnation and Passion to be the best example for humankind. Although

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this passage does not explicitly comment on writing, once again Will has erred by meddling in private affairs at the expense of his salvation. He has sought in his presumption to better God's plan rather than amend his own soul through suffering on the model of Christ. Moreover, Will has twice eschewed responsibility for human error, first, by blaming the fraternal orders for negligence, and second, by blaming the very order of creation. A few lines later, Reason recommends that Will examine himself before he criticizes others: "'Forthi 1 rede,' quod Reson, 'thow rule thi tonge bettre, / Ander thow lakke my !if, loke if thow be to preise'" (lines 385-86). Like Scripture's sermon, Reason' s rebuke throws Will into another moral upheaval, but this time into a more productive state of contrition: "Tho caughte 1 colour anoon and comsed to ben ashamed" (line 403). Both confrontations, at least for the time being, discourage Will from adopting a public voice and encourage him to focus on his own spiritual unworthiness. The relation of writing to the world and to persona! salvation reaches a climax in the Imaginatif episode. Imaginatif introduces himself as the faculty of the soul that allows one to recall the past in order to imagine the future, that is, to transcend time through images. 3 He explains to Will, moreover, that this ability to reconstitute the past and to speculate on the future is bound up in the moral recreation of the self. In recalling past sins and picturing future salvation or damnation, the penitent is moved to reevaluate his life and amend his soul. Imaginatif explains to Will: 1 have folwed thee, in feith, thise fyve and fourty wynter,

And manye tymes have meved thee to mynne on thyn ende, And how fele fernyeres are faren, and so fewe to corne And of thi wilde wantownesse whan thow yong were, To amende it in thi myddel age, lest myght the faille In thyn olde elde, that yvele kan suffre Poverte or penaunce, or preyeres bidde. (XIl.3-9)

Here Imaginatif portrays himself as the personification of moral memory. He presents a slideshow of the soul, serving as the soul' s biographer (or autobiography). He also counsels the soul, thereby resembling Conscience or a more benevolent version of Synderesis, the personification of guilt. Imaginatif speaks of himself as a counselor,

3

Much illuminating scholarship has been devoted to defining Imaginatif as a faculty of the soul. See, for example, H. S. V. Jones, "Imaginatif in Piers Plowman," Journal of English and Germanie Philology 13 (1914), 583-88; A. J. Minnis, "Langland's Ymaginatif and LateMedieval Theories oflmagination," Comparative Criticism 3 (1981), 71-103; Ernst Kaulbach, Imaginative Prophecy in the B-text of Piers Plowman (Cambridge, Eng., 1993). In this paper, 1 restrict my analysis to what Imaginatif says about himself.

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reminding Will of his past errors and reiterating the need for self-improvement through prayers and penance. For example, Imaginatif advises Will not to despise clerical learning that is sanctioned by Christ and helps to save our souls though instruction and example: Forthi I counseille thee for Cristes sake, clergie that thow lovye, For kynde wit is of his kyn and neighe cosynes bothe To Oure Lord, leve me-forthi love hem, 1 rede. For bothe ben as mirours to amenden oure defautes, And Jederes for Jewed men and for lettred bothe. (XII.91-96) According to Imaginatif, Will is better off improving himself, finding arole mode! for good behavior in the example and teachings of the clergy, than interfering in the affairs of the world. Imaginatif suggests, moreover, that Will' s writing exemplifies his hubris, his dcsirc to mirror in his writing the faults of the world, rather than using his moral memory to reflect upon and amend his own sinful life. Quoting Psalm twenty-two, Imaginatif explicitly opposes Will's writing to amending his soul through prayer and suffering: Although thow strike me with thi staf, with stikke or with yerde, It is but murthe as for me to amende my soule. And thow medlest thee with makynges-and myghtest go seye thi Sauter, And bidde for hem the yyveth thee breed; for ther are bokes ynowe To telle men what Dowel is, Dobet and Dobest bothe.... (XIl.14-19) One problem, then, with Will's satire is that it fails to help him to amend his own faults or reflect productively upon his life. A second problem is that it assumes the authoritative voice of clerical writing, but it is neither necessary nor particularly helpful for anyone else. We may conclude that the overarching question that Langland sets up in this section of the poem is how Will' s writing can legitimately serve both society and self. How can poetry be a penitential transcript or mirror of the soul, an autobiographical writing and, at the same time, transcend the self to serve as a legitimate address to the world? Will fumbles for an answer to Imaginatif and cornes up with two contrary excuses for his writing. First, he gives a standard academic apology, excusing writing as a pleasurable respite from other work. Will then changes tactics and protests that writing is a kind of spiritual work authorized by the self: "Ac if ther were any wight that wolde me telle/ What were Dowel and Dobet and Dobest at the laste, / Wolde I nevere do werk, but wende to holi chirche /And there bidde my bedes but whan ich ete of slepe" (XIl.25-28). Sorne cri tics have understandably found Will' s response to Imaginatif to be inadequate and evasive, but for our purposes it introduces a third component to an

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ideal writing. If writing should be optimally an introspective autobiography (on the model, say, of Augustine's Confessions) and at the same time a legitimate public address (like a sermon), it should also be an effective action, a verb (such as do-well), or a performative (like prayer). Will hears two criticisms of his poetry in Imaginatif' s speech: that it Jacks institutional authority, and that it does nothing for his salvation. He defends his writing on the grounds that he has received little guidance from institutional authorities and that his poetry is at least a substitute for action, if not a proper action itself. Thus with Will' s answer, the question of the writing function becomes slightly more complex: what authoritative mode! of writing exists for the poet who wants to address the world and yet attend to his own salvation, to simultaneously write and act? 4 We are nearly in a position to consider why Langland uses the legal document to represent divine writing and how that use might constitute a response to the writing question formulated in Passus XI-XII. Before considering how Langland' s documents might offer a response, however, it is necessary to investigate the larger context of literary documents and documentary practice in which Piers Plowman participates. Beginning in the Jate thirteenth century, English literature was marked by a curious phenomenon, the proliferation of fictive documents and documentary metaphors in homiletic literature, religious allegories, and satire. The most conspicuous of these fictive documents are those purportedly issued by Christ to humankind and grant their readers heaven or pardon a pena et a culpa in exchange for love or penance. These documents of Christ probably originated in sermons and preaching manuals as, for example, the fourteen-line charter of Christ in the popular Latin preaching manual, the Fasciculus Morum (c. 1325), designed originally for a Franciscan audience. In this charter drawn up on the cross, Christ confirms that he has rightfully reclaimed his inheritance from the devil and will possess it eternally with his heirs. 5 Documents sent

4

Elizabeth Kirk similarly observes in Will's argument "such an intimate connection between memory and the creation of texts that to write is both to work and discover." Writing then, concludes Kirk, is a mode "not only of recording but of creating or enacting" ("Langland's Narrative Christology," in Art and Context in Honor of Robert Worth Frank fr., ed. Robert R. Edwards [Rochester, N.Y., 1994], p. 31). 5 Siegfried Wenzel, ed. and trans., The Fasciculus Morum, A Fourteenth-Century Preacher's Handbook (University Park, Pa., 1989), pp. 146-47, lines 84-98. There are several other examples of supernatural documents in the Fasciculus Morum including a story about a wealthy man who donates money to the poor in exchange for for a promissory note. After his death his wife brings the note (cirograph[um} debiti) to the bishop who opens up the grave. The dead man is revealed clutching a most beautiful charter sealed with a golden seal. At first the bishop has trouble extracting the charter from the dead man's grasp, but he prays to God and then easily draws it forth like the sword from the stone. The charter records the rich man's happy fate: "Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego talis pro pecunia quam prodisposicione episcopi Odonis in usus pauperum distribui centuplum ante mortem meam accepi in hoc seculo scilicet in plena remissionc peccatorum mcorum, et sccundum eius promissum vitam eternam in futuro" [Let ail

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by Christ occur in another widely circulated text, Guillaume de Deguileville's pilgrimage trilogy (c. 1330-55), an allegorical narrative, parts of which were adopted into English by Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. The trilogy contains two fictive documents of Christ: a Iast will and testament in the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine in which Christ bequeaths peace to the world, and in the Pèlerinage de l'âme, a charter of pardon for those who repent their sins and live in charity. Notably, these documents are the only instances of divine communication in Deguileville's narrative. The Fasciculus Morum generated a wealth ofEnglish lyrics in the form of charters. In these versified Long and Short Charters (c. 1350-75), extant in over forty manuscripts, Christ reads aloud a charter of heaven inscribed upon his crucified body. The major events of Christ' s life are similarly allegorized as the production of a charter: the Incarnation is the initial assize of heaven, the Crucifixion is the writing of the charter, and the Eucharist is the indentured copy of the charter. The charter itself enfeoffs its readers with heaven in exchange for a "rent" of sincere penance. The charter also recounts in graphie detail the materials of its creation: the parchment is Christ' s skin, the words are his wounds, the sealing wax is the blood dripping from his wounded heart. The completion of the charter is Christ's death: "Consummatum est, this chartre es don." 6 These popular charters reached a diverse readership and were putto uses both meditative and talismanic: they were compiled in devotional collections such as the Vernon manuscript, with theological tracts, and with popular Jay texts such as Mandeville's Travels and the Speculum Christiani. They were also transcribed on the back of official charters, carved onto gravestones and converted into indulgences. 7 Other English charters of Christ possibly related to the Long Charter include the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost (c. 1370) and the "Charter of Heaven," one of the fourteen prose tracts that make up Pore Caitif(c. l380s) and beyond a doubt the most popular and excerpted of the tracts. In short, the fictive document of Christ was a powerful image in Iate medieval English Iiterature and one that appealed to a wide variety of clerical and Jay readers. 8

present and future know that for the money 1 gave to Bishop Odo to be distributed for the use of the poor 1 have received a hundredfold return before my death in this world, namely the full remission of my sins, and in the future, as he had promised, eternal life; Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, pp. 554-55, lines 6-19; his translation]. 6 Christopher Marlowe was certainly familiar with this tradition and uses it to ironie effect in Doctor Faustus, 1.5.73 ff. Examples of the Long and Short Charters have been published in Mary Caroline Spalding, ed., Middle English Charters of Christ (Bryn Mawr, 1904), and the three versions of the Long Charter have been printed as Testamentum Christi in Frederick J. Furnivall and Carl Horstmann, eds., The Minar Poems of the Vernon MS, vol. 2, Earl y English Text Society o.s. 117 (London, 1892-1901). Citations from the Long Charter will be to Furnivall and Horstmann's edition. 7 See Spalding, Middle English Charters, pp. xiii-xxxv. 8 In addition to these fictive documents, late medieval lyrics are replete with references to

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Generally speaking, to portray divine revelation and scripture as a legal document is not entirely surprising considering that it was late medieval England's primary text, possibly the only written text available to ail classes and a cultural staple of English society. The average Christian peering through the rood screens may have glimpsed the massive liturgical books on the altar or spotted the tiny ornate books of hours in the hands of noble ladies or merchants' wives. Yet surely most of English society encountered writing in the form of legal documents: safe-conducts, land grants, testaments and, most of ail, indulgences. Modern readers often assume that legal documents were private texts accessible only to the privileged literate few. Indeed, legal clerks or parish priests may have written and read the text of a charter, but its implementation was nearly always an interactive community affair involving the participation of Jay witnesses. Official documents were perhaps the most familiar texts to th ose with only a pragmatic literacy (those who could recognize standard Latin formulas, knew where to attach their seal, etc.). 9 We may think of Margery Kempe, a self-professed illiterate who left reading and writing to clerics although she herself was an avid listener to sermons and religious treatises. Margery was, however, on more intimate terms with legal documents: she diligently collected letters of safe-conduct from the Bishop of Lincoln and other ecclesiastics to avoid harassment and imprisonment on her English pilgrimage. 10 More importantly for Langland, perhaps, an individual with sufficient literacy to compose a poem most likely would have encountered documents professionally or academically. The expansion of the royal bureaucracy in the mid-fourteenth century meant that the king awarded diplomatie and administrative posts to non-aristocratie literates, some of whom formed the influential "coterie" of court poets. Poets like Chaucer, Usk, Gower, and Hoccleve worked in royal and urban bureaucracies, carried out diplomatie missions, and participated in court proceedings. 11 Many scholars suspect

Christ' s charter. The most well-known reference appears in Chaucer' s adaptation of Deguileville's "ABC hymn to the Virgin." Chaucer writes, "And with his precious blood [Christ] wrot the bille/ Upon the crois as general acquitaunce / To every penitent in fui creaunce" (Larry T. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. [Boston, 1987], p. 638, lines 57-61). Similar references surface in the works of William Herebert, John Mirk, Stephen Hawes and other anonymous lyrics such as the "Disputation Between Mary and the Cross." 9 The classic article on this subject is by M. B. Parkes, "The Literacy of the Laity," in The Medieval World, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London, 1973), pp. 555, 559-60. See also M. T. Clanchy's comments in From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (1979; repr., Oxford, 1993), pp. 46-51, 236; Joyce Coleman further subdivides the various kinds of reading in fourteenth-century England in her very interesting book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, Eng., 1996). w Sanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe (l 940; repr. London, J 967), chaps. 49, 55. 11 Chaucer must have gained significant experience with documents as controller of the wool

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that Langland was part of this London bureaucratie scene as well. 12 Potential poets who did not encounter documents professionally may nevertheless have received some formai training in the composition of legal documents. By the late thirteenth century, the English universities had become recruitment centers for royal and ecclesiastical chanceries. As a result of this new function, and of the increasingly lucrative nature of the legal profession, the universities made the study of official correspondence an integral part of their arts curriculum. Oxford-trained grammar masters wrote handbooks that set forth basic theories of verse and prose composition and offered examples from a variety of literary forms: historical prose, devotional poetry, persona! letters, and official documents. 13 By the late fourteenth century ail grammar schools provided instruction in prose composition, a subject that included the study of mode! letters and documents. 14 Not only, th en, were le gal documents familiar and available texts to all levels of English society, but the nature of the literate professions and higher education effectively conjoined documentary and literary cultures. Despite this familiarity with legal instruments, their proliferation in religious

custom where he processed about one thousand "cockets" (export documents) yearly. He later received permission to farm out these onerous dulies to a deputy, but for five years he executed ail paperwork in his own hand. See Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1992), p. 99; and Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Oison, eds., Chaucer's Life Records (Oxford, 1966), p.158. Usk' s vocation as professional scrivener also required familiarity with "testamentz, chartres, et toutz autres choses touchantz la dite mystier," the knowledge of which is visible in his written "Appeal" and in his Testament of Love. On this point see Paul Strohm, "The Vicissitudes of Usk's Appeal," in Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of FourteenthCentury Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 147-53. Likewise, Gower must have become intimate with documentary culture as a lawyer. Hoccleve, one of the most versatile of late medieval poets, also acquired inestimable experience in the Privy Sea! and at the end of his life compiled a massive French and Latin formulary. 12 On Langland's career and reception see Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work, Langland, Labor and Authorship (Philadelphia, 1997). Lister Matheson has recently offered a compelling dissenting opinion in "William Langland: Social, Political and Geographical Backgrounds" (Paper presented at the 32nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Mich., May, 1997). 13 See, for example, Traugott Law Ier, trans., The Parisiana Poe tria of John of Garland (New Haven, 1973). A student who wished to acquire specialized business training could also pursue a briefer course of study at Oxford under the direction of Thomas Sampson (fi. 1350-80s). Sampson' s knowledge of diplomaties was practical rather than theoretical, as befitting a man who had spent his youth as a clerk rather than as an academic. See examples of Sampson' s documents in Martin Camargo, Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English Artes Dictandi and Their Tradition (Binghamton, 1995), pp. 151, 161-63. 14 Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York, 1968), pp. 119-22.

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literature and as religious symbols may seem counter-intuitive, especially in light of late medieval satire which tends to be vitriolic in regard to lawyers, ecclesiastical officiais, and the documents with which they manifested their power. By the late fourteenth century, the abuse and forgery of documents had clearly become a subject of anxiety, at least for Lollards and reformers. The author of The Book of Vices and Virtues (c. 1375) berates the writers, notaries, and lawyers who "maken fais lettres and fais seales and maketh fais dedes and charteres and many othere falsenesses." 15 John Wycliffe (d. 1384) decries friars who deceive their audience "bi pardons, Iettris of fraternite and priuat preieres for to geten worldely muk more than soule helthe." 16 Numerous diabolical documents also survive from this period, such as Mede's charter or the damning contract in the pre-Faustian tales of Théophile. This reformist and "devil' s record" literature has suggested to some cri tics a deep distrust of the written record and its clerical purveyors. 17 Other critics, assuming that Iiterary representations of documents signify corrupt literate and bureaucratie practices, have concluded that Christ' s charter must be either a critique of these practices or an example of "spiritual paradox" in which temporal evils are transformed in Christ. 18 This well-intentioned sympathy for the disenfranchised illiterate majority has had the effect of simplifying the meanings of a symbol that was fascinatingly multivalent and obscuring the truly radical claims of fictive documents. Despite reformist criticism of legal documents and their abuses, sermon writers and poets viewed the document not only as a symbol of clerical tyranny or bureaucratie corruption, but as a special kind of writing with extra-legal fonctions. More specifically, some writers appropriated documents to depict divine writing, because they perceived legal documents to be performative memory books, spiritual autobiographies that save or damn in confessing the deeds of the author. Official documents were also seen as a way of using an authoritative, public voice to express the confessing subject. These characteristics were derived in part from a peculiar soteriological drama of supernatural documents, and in part from "real" documentary practice and its literary intcrpretations. Let us first consider the soteriological tradition and its relevance to Langland's documents. The gospels abound with references to Christ testifying and granting, but Paul' s letter to the Colossians is perhaps the most intluential source for fictive

15

W. Nelson Francis, ed., The Book of Vices and Virtues (London, 1942), p. 36, lines 8-1 O. F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works ofWyclif(London , 1880), p. 5. 17 See, for example, Michael Camille, 'The Devil's Writing: Diabolic Literacy in Medieval Art," in World Art, Themes of Unity in Diversity, ed. Irving Lavin (University Park, Pa., 1989), p. 355; Clanchy, From Memory ta Written Record, pp. 187-89. 18 Wendy Scase, "Writing and the Plowman: Langland and Literacy," Yearbook of Langland Studies 9 (1995), 121-39; Jill Averil Keen, "Documenting Salvation: Charters and Pardons in 'Thou Wommon Boute Vere,' the Charters of Christ and Piers Plowman" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1995), p. 11; John Wooden, 'The Dialectic of Orality and Literacy in Piers Plowman" (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1996), pp. l 1-12, 46-47. 16

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documents and one that sets up the relationship of confession, performance, and public address. In this passage, Christ is said to have redeemed humanity by erasing the contents of an inimical document (chirograp hum decreti) and nailing it to the cross, thereby defeating the nefarious "powers and principals" in his own person: "delens quod ad versus nos erat chirograph um decreti, quod erat contrarium nobis, et ipsum tulit de media, affigens illud cruci, et expolians principatus et potestates traduxit confidente r palam triumphans illos in semetipso." 19 This passage appears in nearly every medieval discussion of the redemption. Notwithstanding the objections of some theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), medieval exegetes frequently interpreted the chirograph as the diabolical record of original sin, or as the incriminating testimony of one's own conscience, both of which are absolved by Christ's Passion. 20 The Classa Ordinaria, the indispensable biblical study-aid for centuries of scholars, glosses this document as the memory of oursins of which our conscience and the devil accuse us: "Cyrograph um: id est memoriam transgressionis quod erat ex decreto id est ex lege. Conscienti a enim et diabolus ad accusandum erat memor illius transgressi onis." 21 Later medieval exempla literature and allegorical narratives similarly dramatize the de vil' s record as a record of sin, a damning account of the author' s life as revealed by his own guilty conscience, or by an allegorical manifestation of his guilt. Numerous exempla tell the story of a wicked clerk who writes out a deathbed confession that will be used against him in the heavenly court. A heavenly intercessor rescues the clerk by erasing the text of the confession. In a more well-developed version of this tale in the English translation of Deguileville's Pi/grimage of the Soul (c. 1413), the de vil and his gruesome sidekick, the "lothly beste" Synderesis, accuse the pilgrim-nar rator in front of St. Michael's heavenly court with an official transcript of the pilgrim's sins. The pilgrim protests that the devil makes a suspect notary. Synderesis explains that he can only portray the truth about the pilgrim's life: "I am corne ... to accusen the which am nought acustomed to make fables ne to telle lesynges; 1 knowe wel apertly alle thy thoughtes, thy dedes, and thy wordes, from the firste tyme that euere thu haddest discresioun and verre y understondynge. " 22 In literary texts, the record of sin is the site of the sinner' s damnation, but it is often the means of his public penance and the instruction of the community. In the Pi/grimage of the Soul, the public recitation of the pilgrim' s sins in the heavenly court proves the 19

Col. 2.14-15. For a more detailed discussion of Anselm and the question of the devil' s rights, see C. W. Marx, The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, 211

Eng., 1995). 21

Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson, eds., Biblia Latina cum Glossa Ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps ofAdolf Rusch of Strassburg, 148011 (Turnhout, 1992), p. 4. 22

Rosemarie Potz McGerr, ed., The Pi/grimage of the Soul: A Critical Edition of the Middle English Dream Vision (New York, 1990), p. 26, lines 22-28.

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devil's case but also impels the pilgrim to confession and atonement. In Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile, a disgruntled deacon signs in blood a charter with the devil in which he exchanges his soul for worldly goods and honors. Eventually, he repents and implores the Virgin to save his soul. The Virgin restores the diabolical charter and orders Théophile to turn it over to the Bishop who broadcasts its contents to his congregation. The charter, addressed by the de vil, recounts the story of Théophile' s fall. In the fifteenth-century English version, the Story off Theofle, Théophile atones by rehearsing his incriminating charter in front of the whole community: and ail the folk, that herd this tale, ther gretely meruaild, grete and smale; ffor he tald it on swilk manere that ail the folk obout might here, and forto conferm al his saw. the charter to tham gan he schaw .23

In all these texts, the document shows how the private memory of the author' s sins may effect his damnation, but, when recycled for public proclamation and instruction, effects his salvation and the salvation of the whole community. lt was consequently a short step from using the document as a record of private sins to using it as a vehicle of public satire, a record of the conscience of society at large, or of a targeted group, like the friars. For example, a late thirteenth-century de vil' s record in Anglo-Norman, closely resembling Mede' s charter, reports the vices of the rich and powerful in the form of a deed of privileges: "Sachent trestuz ke ove mey sunt / E ces ke a mey a venir sunt, / Ke jeo le Prince de Coveytuz, / De Orgoil e de Envyus, / A riches ay duné e granté ... etc." [Be it known by ail my servants present and future that I, prince of Greed, Pride and Envy, hereby grant and accord to those rich people ... etc.]. 24 In the early fourteenth century, Nicholas Bozon, a friar minor from the north of England, composed in Anglo-Norman a similar letter patent from the emperor Pride. Even more polemical is a Lollard version of the devil' s record, the English Epistola Sathanae ad Clericos (c. 1400). In this document, the devil delivers to "aile the brethern of our ordre" a progress report on the corruption of the friars, and cautions his minions against the "lewid Lollers" who threaten to spread God' s word among the laity .25 If

23

Lines 596-601. Published in Eugen Kolbing, "Die jüngere englische Fassung der Theophilussage," Englische Studien (1876), pp. 53-54. 24 David Jeffrey and Brian J. Levy, eds. and trans., The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology (Toronto, 1990), pp. 137-39, lines 1-14; their translation. This charter was probably written by Archbishop Pecham: see Lucy Toulmin Smith and Paul Meyer, eds., Les Contes Moralisés de Nicole Bozon, Frère Mineur (Paris, 1889), pp. ii-iii. 25 Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, Eng., 1978), pp. 89-93; See also Robert R. Raymo, ed., "A Middle English Version of the 'Epistola Luciferi

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documentary writing could be portrayed as a truthful record of the individual sinner' s conscience, it could also serve as an authoritative satire of society. The fourteenth-century charters of Christ developed from the same soteriological drama and use the document for approximately the same ends as the devil's record. Both the literature of Christ' s charter and of the de vil' s record are concerned with the relation of memory to salvation (or damnation), and both illustrate how a confessional narrative could be transformed into a public and salvific performance. Where the literature of the devil' s record associates memory with damnation, however, Christ' s charter replays the moral autobiography of the redeemer. Consequently, the memory of his life contained in the charter is not a warning or satire, but a universal model of salvation. Christ's charter becomes an exemplary memory-bo ok for all readers and listeners, and it is the process of witnessing Christ' s life and imitating his suffering that enables the audience of the charter to profit from its terms. ln the Long Charter, Christ promises that those who continue to remember those deeds will be granted heaven: "In my Rewme of heuene-blis, / To haue and to holden with-outen mis, / ln a condicion yif thou be kynde /And my loue-dedes haue in Mynde." Likewise, he warns that those who forget will go to hell: "theose that beoth of rent be-hynde, / And theose dedes haue not in mynde, /Sore may thei be a-dred / Whon this cha[r]tre schal be red." 26 In all of the charter of Christ literature, moreover, Christ's charter is imagined to counter and invalidate the devil' s record of sins. In the Fasciculus Morum, Christ' s charter fulfills the lines of Colossians by superseding the record of original sin drawn up between the devil and our first parents: "Et certe, tune dissolvit cyrographu m quod cum diabolo primi parentes pupigerunt ... certe Christus istam servitutem omnino delevit quando in cruce totum corpus suum pro carta nobis reliquit" [And there he certainly destroyed the contract which our first parents made with the devil ... truly Christ cance!ed this servitude totally when he left his whole body for us on the cross as a charter]. 27 ln the Long Charter, Christ uses the charter to bully the devil into drawing up a new contract: "To helle 1 wente, this chartre to schewe /Bi-fore thi fo ... A strayt couenaunt 1-mad ther was / Bi-twene me and Sathanas." 28 Again, in the Pi/grimage of the Soul, only Christ' s charter of pardon, originally drawn up on the cross, can redeem the pilgrim from the devil by pardoning the sins contained in his record. If we turn back to Piers Plowman, we see that this relationship between documents,

ad Cleros,'" in Medieval Lite rature and Civilization, Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway, ed. Derek Pearsall and R. A. Waldron (London, 1969), pp. 233-48. 26 Furnivall and Horstman, Testamentum Christi, pp. 642-56, lines 113-15, 225-28. The "Charter of Heaven" from Pore Caitif relates memory and convenant in a similar way: "There weren vppon the blessid bodi of crist open woundes ... this is the noumbre of lettres with which oure chartre was written, hi which we moun cleyme oure eritage if we liven rigtli & kepe this chartre stidfastly in mynd" (Spalding, Middle English Charters, p. 102). 27 Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, p. 212, lines 263-64, 270-71; his translation. 28 Furnivall and Horstman, Testamentum Christi, pp. 654-55, lines 189-90, 193-94.

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memory, and performance is dramatized in Patience's sermon, a sermon that leaves Hawkyn and Will nearly at the brink of despair. Patience tries to convince Hawkyn the wafer seller that the only way to clean his sin-stained coat is with true repentance and patient poverty. He tries to comfort Hawkyn, however, by reminding him that if the devil continues to overwhelm him with the guilty memory of sins past, Hawkyn may defend himself with a divine "acquitaunce." This document turns out to be the memory of Christ's loving Passion, which acquitted ail sinners from their contract with the devil and which continues to provide a model of behavior for humanity: Ac if the pouke wolde plede herayein, and punyshe us in conscience, We sholde take the acquitaunce as quyk and to the queed shewen it: Pateat &c: Per passionem Domini

And putten of so the pouke, and preven us under borwe. Ac the parchemyn of this patente of poverte be most, And of pure pacience and parfit bileve. Of pompe and of pride the parchemyn decourreth, And principalliche of aile peple, but thei be poore of hert. (XIV .88-94)

This soteriological drama summarized in Patience' s sermon is enacted on a grander scale throughout Piers Plowman and constitutes one of the few governing patterns in the poem. The devil's record in this larger drama is represented by Mede's charter and Christ's charter by Truth's pardon. Both Mede's charter and Truth's pardon fonction as confessional narrative and as public satire; they proclaim the virtues and vices of society and, at the same time, chart the progress of the individual soul from damnation and despair to repentance and salvation. To this purpose, Mede's charter juxtaposes two traditions of the devil's record. It begins in the reformist satirical tradition of Bozon and Pecham, in which the devil's record is used to mirror and correct the sins of a society corrupted by money. Symonye and Cyvylle read aloud ("greden fui heighe") an allegorical charter in which Favel proclaims that he has enfeoffed Mede and Fals with a countryside of vices. Ali of society is implicated by this charter; it is enacted by abusive lords and witnessed by a pardoner, beadle, reeve, and miller. The vices revealed by this charter are not, however, specific to any particular occupation or class, and as the charter progresses, the shift from plural to singular pronouns suggests that it also records the fall of an Everyman who has become enmeshed in sin. The sinner, having fallen into deep despair, fails to amend his soul intime and !oses it to the devil: And thanne wanhope to awakyn hym so with no wil to amende, For hc leveth be lost-this is his last ende. And thei to have and to holde, and hire heires after, A dwellynge with the devel, and dampned be for evere, With aile the appurtinaunces of Purgatorie into the pyne of helle;

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Yeldynge for this thing atone yeres ende Hire soules to Sathan, to suffre with hym peynes, And with hym to wonye with wo while God is in hevene. (11.100-107)

Like Mede's charter, Truth's pardon mirrors the moral condition of society at large, addressing each of the three estates as well as several of the more problematic professions: merchants, lawyers, and beggars. In contrast to Mede's charter, however, Truth's pardon offers an ideal mode! of society and, like Patience's patent or the charters of Christ, it challenges the damning testimony of the de vil' s record by offering a salvific alternative to ail readers and listeners. Each estate and occupation of society may amend itself by performing deeds of penance and charity and consequently may avoid despair and even bypass purgatory. That the pardon serves as a corrective to Mede's charter is demonstrated by its instructions to merchants. Truth sends a special letter stating that they may earn heaven through community service, and he specifically invokes Deguileville's heavenly court when he promises to save them from despair and devils: "And I shal sende yow myselve Seynt Michel myn ange!,/ That no devel shal yow dere ne [in youre deying fere yow], /And witen yow fro wanhope, if ye wol thus werche, / And sende youre soules in saufte to my Seintes in joye" (VII.33-36). Likewise, for the lawyer who does pro bono work, "no devel at his deeth day deren hym a myte / That he ne worth saaf and his soule" (lines 50-51 ). Tru th' s pardon, then, simultaneously offers a blueprint for a better society and a new contract for the salvation of the individual soul. The pardon has, of course, been variously received by both the characters in the poem and its modern readers. Only Piers is convinced of its benefits for the individual soul-he realizes he has been too preoccupied with worldly affairs and must make amends: "'Ne aboute my bel y joye so bisy be na moore; /Of preieres and of penaunce my plough shal ben herafte ... '" (lines 119-20). Will, intent on finding fouit in others, interprets the pardon as a satire on papal pardons. Like the bewildered priest, moreover, modern readers have found Truth's pardon, summed up in two devastating lines from the Athanasian Creed, excessively severe, and hardi y a text worthy of imitation. Understood in its relationship to Mede' s charter, however, and to the larger tradition of fictive documents, Truth' s pardon is exemplary in the sense that it simultaneously addresses the condition of society and effects the salvation of the individual penitent. Later in the poem, Truth's pardon seems more merciful and charitable when, touted by Patience, Moses and Peace, it is reimagined as a document drawn up on the cross and authenticated by Christ' s Passion. These moments will be discussed in greater detail below. I will shift methodological gears here and suggest that if legal documents could serve as confessional writing and as public address in a well-known exegetical tradition, these characteristics were by no means limited to that tradition, nor were they independent of "real" practice. Rather, as I hope to show, Langland's documents were deeply informed by contemporary practice and expectations of documents. In the literature ofboth Christ's charter and the devil's record, the legal document

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serves as a model for self-writing, both in the sense that it is a confessional writing and in the sense that it is the extension of the actor, executed in the blood of the sinner or the blood of Christ' s wounds. For medieval poets, secular as well as religious, legal documents advertised this kind of incarnational authorship because they were perceived to embody the authorial self. In Trailus and Criseide, for example, Troilus can imagine that he is holding Criseide when he rereads her old letters: "The lettres ek that she of olde tyme / Hadde hym ysent, he wolde alloue rede / An hondred sithe atwixen noon and prime, / Refiguring hire shap, hire wommanhede / Withinne his herte, and every word or dede .... " 29 By bearing her letters in hand, Troilus animates her voice and "refigures" her shape. A. C. Spearing has similarly observed that Duke Charles d'Orleans composed his allegorical narrative, Fortune Stabilnes, as a series of verse epistles and le gal documents because, as a prisoner of the English aristocracy, he was eut off from his realm. The duke' s fictive letters and documents substituted for his absent person and authority. 3° For medieval poets, poems were progeny, but letters embodied the self. In several of his poems, Chaucer concludes with an affectionate address to his book as he sends it out to brave the world as, for example, in the famous line at the end of Trailus, "go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye ... and kis the steppes .... " Here Chaucer speaks of his poem as his offspring, not as a double for himself. In contrast, a fifteenth-century poet echoing Chaucer imagines that his letter will impersonate him to his lady: "Go! little bill, and do me recommende / Unto my lady with godely countenaunce ... I will her love and never mo, Go! little bill, and sey her so." 31 The crux of the difference between these two examples is not the word "bok," which in Middle English can refer to any kind of text, but the word "bill" (letter or petition). By choosing the word "bill," the poet evokes a more intimate relationship between author and text, a relationship nearly like that of a saint to his or her relies. Letters and documents were perhaps thought to represent their makers more convincingly than other texts because they were written in the first person singular or plural and seemed to impersonate the voice (and, by extension, the authority and even physical presence) of the author or actor (e.g., "Henry by the grace of God King of England sends greeting to the archbishops, bishops, etc."). This effect is heightened by the transhistorical fiction of most legal documents in which the historical speaker continually exhorts present and future readers by means of the ever-present charter (e.g., "I have given, and conceded, and with this present charter confirmed ..."). Likewise, in the Long Charter, the charter formulas enhance the feeling that Christ is addressing the reader directly from the cross:

29

30

Trailus and Criseide, bk. 5, lines 470-75.

A. C. Spearing, "Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the English Poems of Charles d' Orleans,'' Modern Language Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1992), 91. 31 Reginald T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics (Chicago, 1964), no. 105, p. 201, lines 1-2, 13-14.

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0 [v]os omnes qui transitis per uiam ...

Standeth and hereth this chartre red, Whi I am woundet and al for-bled. Sciant presentes &futuri,

Wite ye that are and schal be-tyde That Jhesu crist with blodi syde ... With my cha[r]tre here present 1 make nou a confirmament: That I haue graunted and giuen .... 32 Notice that the verse from Lamentations (0 vos omnes), traditionally identified with Christ's lament from the cross, is compared to the standard address of a charter (Sciant presentes & futuri) by way of the English translation: both the scriptural and legal quotation suggest that that any reader may receive Christ's revelation as if in the presence of Christ himself. Yet legal documents are even more intimately connected to their makers than letters because they are necessarily autobiographical. Late medieval documents are retroactive and probative-they prove the oral act rather than founding it-and are usually corroborated by witnesses who remember something about the actor or the circumstances in which the document was produced. Thus the continuai memory of the original actors and of the production of the document is crucial to its performativity. Likewise, the charter in the Fasciculus Morum uses conventional formulas to present crucial spiritual information about Christ' s nature and the events of his Passion. "Sciant presentes et futuri ... quod ego Christus, Filius Dei Patris et Marie Virginis, verus Deus et homo ... Scripta, lecta, confirmata, et generi humano tradita feria sexta Parasceves supra montem Calvarie ... anno a creacione mundi 5232" [Let ail present and to corne know ... that 1, Christ, Son of God the Father and of the Virgin Mary, true God and man ... Written, read, confirmed, and given to mankind on Good Friday on Mount Calvary ... in the year 5232 after the Creation of the world]. 33 The document' s exhortative first-person narration and biographical information cause it to resemble an oral confession. The last will and testament is perhaps the most obvious example of a such a documentary confession because it most closely approximates an oral act-the testator dictates the document to a priest at his bedside in the presence of witnesses. Additionally, the testament was designed to address the testator' s spiritual affairs, to dispose properly of body and soul and to make pious donations to the poor and the church. 34 The 1395 will of Lady Alice West states: "In Dei

32

Furnivall and Horstman, Testamentum Christi, pp. 644-45, lines 97-100, 107-9. Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, pp. 146-47, lines 84-86; his translation. 34 E. R. Perrow, "The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 17 (1913), 682-753; M. M. Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England (Toronto, 1963), pp. 258-65; Clive Burgess, '"By Quick and by 33

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nomine, Amen .... I, Alice West, lady of Hynton Marcel, in hool estate of my body, and

in good mynde beynge, make my testament in the maner as hit folweth here after. In the begynnyng, I bequethe my soule to god almyghty and to his moder seynt Marie." 35 These characteristics of the testament are worth mentioning as Piers' s first act of literate piety is drafting his testament. Before he leads the pilgrims to the shrine of Saint Truth, Piers demonstrates perfect devotion by drawing up his own will: Forthi 1 wole er 1 wende to write my biqueste. ln Dei nomine, Amen: 1 make it myselve.

He shal have my soule that best hath deserved it, And defende it fro the fend, for so I believe, Til 1 corne to hise acountes as my crede me telleth, To have a relees, and a remission---0n that rentai 1 Ieve. (VI.85-90)

Piers is often thought of as a rural champion of pious illiteracy, but in fact his literacy, revealed several times in his interaction with legal documents, is the very indication of his spiritual integrity. As Julia Boffey has observed, the testament became a popular form of literary expression in the fourteenth and fifteenth century because it had this sense of moral introspection and confirmation in addition to its strict legal sense of beq ueathal. 36 The formulas of legal documents show why they might be thought of as a kind of self-writing, a textual extension of the author' s life. Yet, despite the particularly confessional nature of certain documents like testaments, Langland and his contemporari es used different legal forms to portray divine writing because they required a more public voice to express the confessing speaker. Anne Middleton has famously written on the idea of public poetry in Ricardian England, a poetry which she describes as a" 'common voice' to serve the 'common good'" and one which was "defined by a constant relation of speaker to audience within an ideally conceived worldly community, a relation which has become the poetic subject."3 7 I would like to add two points to her thesis. First, the desire to adopta public voice in poetry, whether that voice counsels or satirizes, appears in religious literature at least a generation earlier than Langland. Second, Langland and his contemporari es looked to a very specific legal form-the patent-as an institutional code word for a public voice. For the authors of fictive documents and for Langland, the patent particularly

Dead': Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol," The English Historical Review 405 (1987), 837-58. 35 Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Earliest English Wills (London, 1882), p. 4. 3ü Julia Boffey, "Lygate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament," Modern Language Quarter/y 53, no. 2 (1992), 41. 37 Anne Middleton, 'The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II," Speculum (1978), 95.

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advertised itself as a public proclamation or public service message. The term "letters patent" or "open letters" usually referred to an official royal document sealed open for public notice, permanent preservation, or recurrent application. It differed formally from the standard charter in its epistolary style, in its universal address, "Omnibus ad quos presentes littere peruenerint ... salutem" [to ail those to whose attention these present letters shall corne], and in its characteristic execution clause: "in cuius testimonium has litteras nostras fieri fecimus patentes" [in witness thereof we have had these letters made patent]. The validity of this form depended on the integrity of the seal; its distinctive seal, usually the Great Sea!, hung ("pendant") from the bottom of the parchment by a tongue of parchment or by silk ribbons. Letters close, in contrast, were used for ephemeral, private directives such as warrants for the Great Sea!, and consequently were sealed in such a way that the receiver could not read the message without breaking the seal. 38 Significantly, patents were generally used for legislation of persona! interest to the king such as pardons, royal bonds, protections, and proclamations. The patent captured the political and literary imagination of fourteenth-century English writers, partly because of its legal significance, and partly because of its dramatic and compelling format. 39 The most famous royal patent is the Magna Carta, which was periodically proclaimed throughout the realm both in Latin and the vernacular. It was probably an impressive document with its large dangling seals and visible text. Indulgences were also drawn up as patents and were often publicly displayed in the pulpit, on the doors of the church, or even on the graves of dignitaries. 40 Additionally, bccausc the royal patent often dealt with persona! rights and freedoms such as exemplifications (certified copies of original charters), manumissions from servile status, or pardons from crime or debt, it acquired a particularly political valence during the revoit of 1381, the major platform of which was the abolition of unfree status. The townsmen of Somerset, for example, sent the young King Richard a draft of a letter patent of pardon and manumission after the rail y at Smithfield. A few years before the 1381 revoit, tenants of St. Mary Ottery, Devon, organized a strike "un der the pretext of letters patent of exemplification from the Domesday Book," which purportedly freed them from the obligations of bondsmen and gave them direct access to the king's justice. 41 As Steven Justice has pointed out, the vernacular rebel letters of 1381, which

38

See T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of England (Manchester, 1920), 5: 122-26; Hubert Hall, ed., Select Formulas of English Historical Documents (1908-9; repr. New York, 1969), pp. 53-74. 39

For members of the aristocracy, probably the most familiar use of the patent was for letters of retaining. 40 Nicholas Orme, "Indulgences in the Diocese of Exeter 1100-1536," Transactions of the Devonshire Association 120 (1988), 21. 41 See Barbara F. Harvey, "Draft Letters Patent of Manumission and Pardon for the Men of Somerset in 1381," English Historical Review 80 (1965), 89-91; and Rosamund Faith, "The 'Great Rumor' of 1377 and Peasant Ideology," in The English Rising of 1381, ed. R. H. Hilton

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call for the deliverance of the commons from tyranny, also mimic the style of official letters patent. 42 Both vernacular and Latin writers used the word "patent" to signify both a public document available to all readers and Iisteners, and an open, vulnerable body. Christ's patent first appears in the Ancrene Wisse, a handbook for anchoresses written in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. In the seventh book on Love, the speaker compares Christ's love for the human soul to a king's love for an impoverished foreign lady. The king sends messengers (patriarchs and prophets) ahead with letters close of the Old Testament, but his great love for the soul compels him to corne himself with letters patent of the New Testament, written in his own blood: he send his sonden biuren thet weren the patriarches & the prophes of the aide testament with leattres isealet. On ende he corn him seoluen & brohte the godspel as leattres iopenet & wrat with his ahne blod saluz to his leofman. 43 In this passage, the patriarchs and prophets bear temporary letters or letters close to the restricted, private audience of the Old Testament, but Christ demonstrates true charity by bringing humanity the universal and perpetual New Testament as letters patent. 44 By invoking the patent, and particularly its English name, "leattres i-openet," the author of the Ancrene Wisse also stresses the permeability of Christ' s body as well as the public nature of his message. "Open letters" written in Christ's blood is a common image in English mystical writings for describing the spiritual openness of Christ' s wounded body. In the Wohunge of Ure Lauerd (the Wooing of our Lord), another poem from the early thirteenth-century, the speaker implores Christ to show her his bloody heart so that she might read the "love letters" therein: "a swete iesu thu oppnes me thin herte for to

and T. H. Aston (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), pp. 43-73. 42 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 67-68. 43 Geoffrey Shepherd, ed., Ancrene Wisse, Parts Six and Seven (London, 1959), p. 21, Iines 2-6. The French and Latin translations of this passage confirm the meanings of these terms: the French version translates "leattres isealet" as "lettres enseleez closes," the Latin version translates "leattres iopenet" as "litteras patentes." J. A. Herbert, ed., The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle Edited from British Museum MS. Cotton Vitellius F vii, Early English Text Society o.s. 240 (London, 1944), p. 283, Jines 16-24; Charlotte D'Evelyn, ed., The Latin Text of the Ancrene Riwle Editedfrom Merton College MS. 44 and British Museum MS. Cotton Vitellius E vii, Early English Text Society o.s. 216 (London, 1944), p. 152, lines 30-34. 44 This passage is further elucidated by a common practice in late twelfth-century diplomacy in which letters close precede letters patent. At that time, English and French kings negotiated peace treaties, alliances, and marriages by dispatching envoys with oral messages and letters close. The letters close served as safe-conducts for the envoys and testimony to their reliability. The two kings subsequently met at a common frontier and exchanged letters patent in duplicate. Pierre Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatie Practice (London, 1982), 1:46-50, 466-70.

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cnawe witerliche & to reden trewe luue lettres. for ther I mai openlich seo hu muchel thu me luuedes."45 This twofold meaning of "patent" is further dramatized in a fifteenthcentury illustration of the Short Charter. In this graphie illustration, Christ's body is depicted as an unfurled document nailed to the cross like a public proclamation or broadside and sealed with a pendant seal (Christ's bleeding heart). 46 This extravagant patent offers its readers direct access not only to a vernacular charter of heaven, but to Christ's crucified body as well. 47 The authors of fictive documents often exaggerate the formulas of patents to emphasize their public nature. The Fasciculus Morum, for example, expands the patent execution clause to advertise the availability and inclusiveness of Christ' s charter. Thus the execution clause, "in cuius testimonium has litteras nostras fieri fecimus patentes" becomes the more fanciful "in cuius rei testimonium hanc presentem cartam sanguine proprio conscripsi, legi, et per totum mundum publicavi ... Scripta, lecta, confirmata, et generi humano tradita ... publice et aperte, in eternum duratura ... " [In witness thereof I have written this present charter with my own blood, read it and published it through the whole world ... Written, read, confirmed, and given to mankind ... publicly and openly, to last fore ver]. 48 Again, in the English prose version of Deguileville' s Pi/grimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode (c. 1400), Christ sends Charity a testament of peace the terms of which are available to ail pilgrims. The testament includes a patent execution clause in which Christ states, "openliche I haue signed my testament. To aile folk I haue yiven, graunted and confermed pees." 49 Interestingly enough, "openliche" translates the original French word "publiquement." Readers clearly imagined this testament to be sealed letters patent: a late fourteenth-century French illumination of this

45

W. Meredith Thompson, ed. Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, Early English Text Society o.s. 241 (London, 1958), p. 35, lines 546-51; emphasis added. 46 British Library, Additional 37049, fol. 23; the image is reproduced in Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London, 1972), fig. 5. 47 Chaucer uses the double meaning of "patent" in his satire of the pardoner. At the beginning of the pardoner' s prologue the pardoner promises to prove his right to distribute indulgences with a fantastic display of ecclesiastical warrants: "Bulles of popes and cardynales, / Of patriarkes and bishopes 1 shewe." But a few lines earlier he perversely insinuates that his very body is like a forged patent: "First 1 pronounce whennes that I corne, / And thanne my bulles shcwc 1 aile and some. / Oure lige Jordes seel on my patente, / That shewe 1 first my body to warente." By comparing his body with a forged patent the pardoner suggests that, like the fraudulent relies in his "male," his wanton body is on display to the public: he depicts his body as a public letter for private gain. The comparison of his body with a sealed patent also humorously underlines the discrepancy between the pardoner and his letters: the bishop's patent with its characteristic hanging bulls offers an unfortunate contrast with the pardoner's own gelded body. 48 Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, pp. 146-47, lines 92-97; his translation. 49 Avril Henry, ed., The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode (London, 1985), p. 34, lines 1408-9; emphasis added.

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testament depicts an unfurled parchment with two appended seals. 5°Finally, the word "open" is often used in fictive documents to describe the aurai delivery of a document. In the Pilgrimage of the Soul, Mercy presents her patent of pardon in such a way that everyone in the court can see it and hear it: "'and so haue I here of the Lordes graunte a chartre ofpardoun, which I shall rede tofore yow, whereof whoso wole shal haue the copye.' Thanne toke she forth a fair charter enseled with golde and radde it openly, worde by word .... " 51 Where Mede's charter and Truth's pardon appear to corne from an exegetical tradition known to Deguileville and other French writers, the three documents in the last third of Piers Plowman originale in a particularly English political and Iiterary tradition of redeeming patents. As discussed above, Patience invites Hawkyn to make use of Christ' s saving "patente of poverty ."Moses also calls the Ten Commandme nts a patent in Passus XVII and Peace reads aloud Love's patent in Passus XVIII. Arguably, they are ail referring to the same document. It is simultaneously the historical pardon drawn up on the cross that released the patriarchs and prophets from the devil's prison and the memory of Christ' s Passion that continues to protect repentant Christians from their own damning consciences. According to Patience, any Christian may show Christ's patent, authorized by the Passion, to the devil. Moses proudly informs Will that when his patent is properly sealed (by Christ) "Luciferis lordshipe laste shal no lenger" and, like Tru th' s pardon, this "charm" will save man y a soul from the devil: "And whoso wercheth after this writ, I wol undertaken, / Shal nevere devel hym dere, ne deeth in soule greve" (XVII.17-18) . After Christ's battle on the cross, Peace announces to her sisters that she has received the (sealed) patent from Love to the effect that she and her sister Mercy should stand surety for humanity. This patent of Christ is, arguably, the same document as Tru th' s pardon only reinterpreted in its scriptural context and th us redefined as the product of Christ' s merci fui sacrifice. By using the patent to describe Christ's message of redemption rather than more generic "writ," "book," or "Jetter," Langland further connects these three documents semantically as well as legally and thematically. In ail three passages, the word "patent" puns on the availability of Christ' s crucified body and the public nature of his message of salvation. In the first example from Patience's sermon, Patience informs Hawkyn that Christ' s "patente of poverte ... pure pacience and parfit bileve" begins with the line "Pateat &c: Per passionem Domini." While this phrase appears to simulate a patent address, in fact it only approximates the universal notification of a patent. But by punning on the verb "patere," from which "patent" and "pateat" are derived, Langland illustrates how Christ has made his body and the terms of salvation available to ail humankind through his Passion. In Iike manner, Moses' "hard roche" inscribed with the Ten Commandme nts is transformed into an unfurled piece of parchment, its text open to the perusal of any 011

01

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 300, fol. 19a. Pilgrimage of the Soul, p. 49, lines 23-26; emphasis added.

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passerby. Moses ex plains to Will that a knight gave him the Ten Commandme nts on Mount Sinai, but has yet to authenticate it with a seal. Will asks, "Is it asseled?" 1 seide, "May men see thi lettres?" "Nay," he seide, "! seke hym that hath the seel to kepeAnd that is cros and Cristendom, and Crist theron to honge. And whan it is so asseled so, 1 woot wel the sotheThat Luciferis lordshipe Iaste shal no lenger!" "Lat se thi lettres," quod 1, "we myghte the lawe knowe." He plukkede forth a patente, a pece of an hard roche, Whereon was writen two wordes on this wise yglosed: Dilige Deum et proximum tuum-

This was the tixte trewely-1 took fui good yeme. The glose was gloriously writen with a gilt penne: ln hiis duobus mandatis tata lex pendet et prophete. (XVIl.1-16)

Moses' maundement is imagined in this passage as an incomplete document which will be sealed letters patent. Will remarks that Moses "plukkede forth a patente," a document that he can see is expensively produced: "the glose was gloriously writen with a gilt penne." Will, Iike Deguileville' s pilgrim, is permitted and able to read the patent because it has not been sealed letters close-it is a public proclamation . Moses is still looking for the seal, not to close the document from public view but rather to make it effective: "And when it is so asseled so, I woot wel the sothe I That Luciferis lordshipe laste shal no lenger." Will acknowledge s the public nature of the patent as he responds: "'Lat se thi lettres ... we myghte the lawe knowe.'" Further, the seal in question will be the ornate pendant seal of patents, which, as mentioned above, were sealed open for public proclamation or recurrent application. Moses explains that his patent will be validated by Christ's death, and its seal will be Christ's fleshly body hanging from the cross: "'I seke hym that hath the seel to kepe-And that is cros and Cristendom, and Crist theron to honge.' " 52 The idea that the hanging Christ will provide the pendant seal for this patent is reinforced by the biblical verse that forms the gloss: "In hiis duobus mandatis tata !ex pendet et prophete." Finally, Peacc' s patent demonstrates the perpetual relevance and availability of Christ's sacrifice and scripture. Like Mercy and Charity in Deguileville' s trilogy, Peace reads her patent aloud, proclaiming that it will benefit everyone for ail eternity: "Loue, that is my lem man, swiche lettres me sente I That Mercy, my sustur, and I mankynde

52

The "Charter of Heaven" from Pore Caitif explains this idca further, "bi these two lacis hangith the seel of oure chartre ... [these are] christis flessche ... he printe of this seel is the schap of oure lord ihesu crist hanginge for oure synne on the cros" (Spalding, Middle English Charters, p. 102).

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sholde saue / And that God hath forgyven and graunted me, Pees and Mercy / To be mannes meynpernour for everemoore after" (XVIII.181-84). Love's patent also contains evidence from the psalms which proves that the terms of this public document, available to "aile mankynde," are durable and long lasting by virtue of Christ' s sacrifice: "'Loo, here the patente!' quod Pees, 'In pace in idipsum /And that this dede shal duyre, dormiam et requiescam'" (lines 185-86). This later progression of patents closely resembles the passage in the Ancrene Wisse in which the patriarchs precede Christ with the Old Testament in letters close, but Christ cornes himself with the gospels drawn up as a uni versai patent and written in his own blood. By reinterpreting Christ's writing as a patent in the last third of the poem, Langland posits some radical implications both for the reading of Scripture and the writing of vernacular religious poetry. He suggests that writing, scriptural or otherwise, ideally should be an open proclamation or broadside which offers ail readers and listeners direct access to the terms and author of salvation. In sum, Langland and his contemporaries used the legal document to represent divine communication, because the document was imagined to serve two important writerly fonctions: it was an inherently autobiographical writing, the textual extension of the confessing subject, and it was (ideally) a public writing that, like sermons, served the common profit. Because documents are simultaneously memorial and performative, they also transform the process of recording and remembering into a redemptive act. The legal document thus offers a response to Will's conversations with Lewte and Imaginatif in regard to the right fonction of writing. In response to Lewte, some forms of documents, like the patent, benefit ail readers and listeners with their exhortative and universal address. In this way, they provide an instructive alternative to Will's uncharitable satire. In response to Imaginatif, the document confesses the author's life and consequently effects his salvation or damnation. In the case of Christ' s patent in particular, the life and body of the author contained in the document effects the salvation of ail its readers. By suggesting that exemplary writing is documentary, the poem aspires to be a legal document, at once legitimately exposing the moral condition of society and effecting the conversion and salvation of both author and audience. By enrolling supernatural, fictive documents in his poem, Langland suggests that a mode) of writing exists in which a confessional narrative may be reconciled with a public voice, yet he is hardly conclusive about the fonction and status of his own writing. Other writers of his generation and the next, however, held up Piers Plowman as a mode! for their own public writing, for protest and for counsel. By way of conclusion, then, I would like briefly to consider two readers of Piers Plowman, the rebel priest John Ball, and the author of the alliterative poem, Mum and the Sothsegger. Both authors exploit Langland' s documents to serve their own, more overtly political, ends, and both make stronger claims about documentary writing than Piers Plowman can sustain. Yet both John Ball and the Mum-Poet clearly shared the assumptions of the "documentary poetics" at work in Piers Plowman and evident in the contextual tradition sketched out above. In Writing and Rebellion, Steven Justice demonstrates how John Ball, itinerant

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priest and leader in the 1381 rising, appropriated a passage from Piers Plowman for rebel propaganda letters. Borrowing Wit's speech in Passus IX, Ball radically reinterpreted Langland' s vocabulary of labor and of the natural order to support a ruralbased movement for social equality. 53 Justice uses Ball' s transformation of Wit' s speech to compare Langland's and Ball's conception of poetic making. Justice observes that despite ail his emphasis on "do-well," Langland never recommends a plan of social (or redemptive) action, and consequently his poem remains "curiously and insistently literary." In that way, Will's response to Imaginatifreflects the poem's modus operandi; poetry is merely a form of "delay and compensation" until the seeker discovers the true course of action. In contrast, Ball conceives of writing as documentary and institutional. It is the stuff of archives and chanceries and a performative writing that "enacts something, gets something done." As Justice puts it, "Ball's conception of the written word owes more to this bureaucratie culture of instrumental writing than to the culture of theological commentary or the Iiterary form that Langland derived from it." 54 Wh ile 1 agree with Justice that a parallel exists between Will' s response to Imaginatif and the dilatory structure of the poem, 1 believe that his evaluation of Piers Plowman can now be qualified in a few important ways. First, Piers Plowman clearly is not governed by a passive, socially inert concept of writing. The poem explores competing genres and opinions, but is also punctuated with performative documents that enact spiritual legislation and drive the narrative forward. For Will, a writing that is both public and redemptive is impossible to attain, yet this model writing is nevertheless expressed as divine documents; salvation in Piers Plowman is disclosed through various institutional forms of writing. Second, not only did Langland aspire to write in a documentary mode, but both he and Ball were caught up in a larger movement in which the vernacular literary subject increasingly found its public voice in the legal document and in which official discourse was appropriated to serve vernacular concerns. Middleton has rightly observed that "to write a work of literature is at once to use and to deform instrumental discourse, tu open the way of foolish or dangerous understanding of the culture' s almost blunted purposes as the way to their full subjective repossession and communal renewal." 55 Just as Ball turned Wit' s speech into a rebel broadside, so Langland had already borrowed institutional forms to describe an exemplary form of writing. Consequently, Ball' s misreading of Piers Plowman seems Jess radical when we realize that both Ball and Langland were affected by the same cultural trend, one in which vernacular literary production was configured by the reinterpretation of institutional forms. Thus Langland's poem, by enrolling documents within the narrative, explicitly invites a comparison with documentary or performative writing. If the insurgents of 1381 found 53

Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 111. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 117. 55 See Anne Middleton, "The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman," in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), p. 121. 54

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inspiration in Piers Plowman, it was not only because of its malleable language and reformist tone; the poem advertises itself as an open archive or literary cartulary. IfLangland's documents gave the rebels a mode! for public, vernacular writing, the alliterative dream-vision Mum and the Sothsegger (c. 1400) is more directly indebted to Piers Plowman and offers further insight into Langland's documents, their meaning, and reception. 56 The poem is basically an expansion of the Will's debate with Lewte, only this dreamer is more preoccupied with finding a "truth-teller" than in discovering any kind of spiritual truth. He is continually discouraged in his efforts by the omnipresent Mum who extols the political benefits of silence. Ultimately, however, the ùreamer becomes convinced of the good of public satire and invokes the legal document as the justification for and the very structure of his literary enterprise. Two episodes are particularly relevant in this respect. In the first episode, the dreamer receives a divine document that emboldens him to speak his mind and allows him, prophet-Iike, to abdicate responsibility: And boode til a baron, blessid be he euer, (His name is y-nempnyd among the .ix.ordres) Sent a saufconduyt so that 1 wolde Mayn tcync no metiere to mende myself, Ne caicche no colour hit came of my wittes, But [sende fro] a souurayn to shewe it forth after. This boldid me to bisynes to bringe hitto ende Thorough grace of this good lord that gouuerneth al thing. 57 This document recalls Truth's pardon, which enters the Piers Plowman B-text in a similar place and circumstances. Yet, where Truth's pardon reveals the condition of every social class and offers strict terms of salvation, this divine safe-conduct permits the dreamer-poet to appropriate that role for himself-public satire is confidently redefined in this poem as a socially responsible and socially redemptive activity. In the second episode, which occupies the last several hundred lines of the poem, the dreamer finally counsels King Richard by emptying a sack of "bokes vnbredid in balade-wise made" (line l 345), that is, unbound leaves like those used for ballads or

56

For the Mum-poet's debt to and transformations of Piers Plowman, see Alcuin Blamires, "Mum & the Sothsegger and Langlandian ldiom," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 76 (1975), 583--604; Helen Barr, "A Study of Mum and the Sothsegger in Its Political and Literary Contexts" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1989); James Simpson, "The Constraints of Satire in Piers Plowman and Mum and the Sotlzsegger," in Lang/and, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition, Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge, Eng., !990), p. 23. 57 Mabel Day and Robert Steele, eds., Mum and the Sootlzsegger, Early English Text Society o.s. 199 (London, 1946), p. 44, lines 584-91. Al! subsequent citations are to this edition.

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broadsides. The narrator tells us that his bag contains secret poetry ("pryue poyse"), but the poetry in question turns out to be a veritable archive of vices and virtues, allegorical documents that the dreamer publicizes in the name of good counsel. The dozen or so documents in his sack range from an official record of goods bequeathed to the cathedra! church, a "quayer of quitances of quethyn goodes / That bisshoppz han begged to binde al newe" (lines 1348-50), to the more fantastical report of rumors circulating among the common people, "a copie for communes of culmes foure and twenty" (line 1388). These documents resemble Mede's charter in Piers Plowman or the devil's record in the Pi/grimage of the Soul: they confess the sins of their makers and expose th ose sins to public scrutin y. Interestingly enough, among the secular leaflets in the dreamer' s bag is a de vil' s patent, a "raggeman rolle that Ragenelle hymself / Hath made" (line 1565), which proclaims the abuses of maintenance. Thus if Langland portrays the legal document as an exemplary but inimitable form of writing, in these two episodes the Mum-poet characteristically offers a more assertive and secular reading of Langland's documents. Bath episodes demonstrate, however, that the Mum-poet, following Langland, recognized the legal document to be a legitimate form of public writing. Unlike Chaucer or Dante, Langland never invokes classical or continental poets as authorial models, nor does he cite any other text (aside from Scripture) as a mode! for poetry. Rather, as 1 have argued in this paper, Langland gestures to a relatively new exemplar-the document-and to the fonctions and values that fourteenth-century English culture ascribed to that form. It is an exemplar of which he falls short, but to which he nevertheless aspires, and it is a legacy that he bequeathed to succeeding generations. 58

58

This paper is much indebted to the helpful responses of Lee Patterson, Elizabeth Fowler, Traugott Lawler, Matthew Giancarlo and the anonymous reader for ACMRS.

Religious Rhetoric as Resistance in Barly Modern Goodnigh t Ballads PATRICIA MARBY HARRISON

"Of penance I have had enough! Of penitence there has been none!" Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

W

ith these words-"/ lament, I repent, I beleve, I reioyce"-Anne Saunders recites the process of penance and salvation through public confession and repentance and ends on a triumphant note of assurance that her lamentation will be heard by a merciful savior: "/trust in the lord christ, he will here my voyse." That exultant assertion nearly obscures the occasion for her confession, for hers is not the speech of a contrite Puritan churchgoer, but the last words of a woman on a public scaffold just before she is burned at the stake for petty treason. Or so the balladeer would have us believe: Anne Saunders's recitation appears in a popular ballad composed on and for the occasion of her execution. 1 The real Anne Saunders was only one of many who were executed for various crimes against the English crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For victim and audience alike, the climax of the punishment was the final confession delivered just before death. Nearly ail victims confessed their transgressions in terms of sins against God, rather than crimes against others or the state. These confessions held great significance for the early modern populace of England, as they provided titillating

1

"The wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders, which she wrote with her own hand, being prisoner in newgate, Justly condemned to death [0 high and mighty God]," in Old English Ba/lads, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Eng., 1920), pp. 340-48.

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entertainment for the hundreds of spectators who witnessed the executions. Their souvenirs of the happy occasions were "goodnight ballads," which were popular representations or even total inventions of the victims' last words, printed in broadsheets and sold by balladmongers who walked among the crowds, billing their wares as "heed and forbear" warnings for the potentially wayward. The popular appeal of the ballads, however, more likely Jay in their latent duplicity than in any homiletic guidance. For the balladeer and the reader, the ballads suggested the lurid, vicarious thrill of radical disobedience under the thin guise of a morally instructive warning not to follow in the paths of the transgressors. Through their apparent capitulation, the victims seem to reinforce the authority of conventional powers of church and state by their confessions of sins; yet they simultaneously express individual resistance to and defiance of their punishment. That these manifestations of elusive meaning are represented in the popular literature of ballads suggests a crucial discrepancy between new historicist understandings of the control enforced by the state and the actual lessons learned by the early modern public from these spectacles of execution. 1 argue that even as the scaffold represents the site where state and theology are both conflated and conflicted, goodnight ballads articulate a paradoxical moment when the assertion of the state' s authority is spoken through the voice of the transgressor, whose public lament and repentance can actually signify a popular triumph over the punishment of the scaffold.

Popular Religion, Popular Literature, and the New Historicism Inspired by Foucault' s work on state and spectacle in Discipline and Punish, man y new historicist critics have regarded goodnight ballads as emblematic of the state' s use of the spectacle of execution to enforce a dominant ideology and to redefine a set of social values that are perceived as threatened. 2 Within that analytic framework, they have seen the religious confession represented in goodnight ballads as a vehicle for the state' s enforcement of conformity and contrai, suggesting that the coercive interests of both church and state worked in tandem to control their subjects. 3 Thus Stuart A. Kane, 2

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1997). Foucault briefly discusses "the literature of crime" that emerged around the scaffold and alludes to an important distinction between actual executions and their representations (pp. 65-69). Ironically, despite Foucault's mention that such literature was not merely "a concerted program of propaganda and moralization from above" (p. 67), this is precisely how critics have interpreted goodnight ballads. 3 Recent studies of goodnight ballads and execution speeches have included J. A. Sharpe, "'Last Dying Speeches': Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 107 (1985), 144-67; Frances E. Dolan, "Home-rebels and Housetraitors: Murderous Wives in Early Modern England," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 4 (1992), 1-31; and idem, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England,

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who has recently studied goodnight ballads of wives who murdered their husbands, concludes that the circulation of these ballads among the lower classes "very likely had an instrumental or instructional effect, encouraging the lower classes to intemalize these broader cultural anxieties about them, and potentially to reproduce these anxieties in their own daily lives. In this way, the ballads functioned as one element in a consensual self-regulation by the lower classes, men and women alike." 4 Such a Foucauldian view is problematic, however, for two reasons: it reduces religion to a matter of social regulation, and it echoes the perspective of those in control by classifying the ballads as solely "instructional." Kane' s reading of ballad confessions as "rigidly formulaic and highly prescriptive" reflects a long-standing new historicist resistance to considerations of religion as anything other than total capitulation to the sociopolitical order. 5 De bora Kuller Shuger has pointed out that "the almost total neglect" of religion in recent criticism has resulted in the tendency to regard "the sacred as that which is drained, is emptied out" and reduced to "politics in disguise" to explain how the social order functions. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, for example, focuses on some early modem representations of religion that present religion as "a set of beliefs manipulated by the subtlety of priests to help instill obedience and respect for authority ," or as a Machiavellian tool of manipulation for the ruler: "an imposition of socially coercive doctrines by an educated and sophisticated lawgiver on a simple people." 7 Jonathan Dollimore, as another example, seems to regard it as axiomatic that religion was nothing other than a device of the state: "that [religion] has historically served to legitimate systems of power and subjection is indubitable, and what was happening in the Elizabethan period was of the utmost historical importance:

1550-1700 (lthaca, NY, 1994); Stuart A. Kane, "Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity," Criticism 38 (1996), 219-37. For an earlier study of confessions at executions, see Lacey Baldwin Smith, "English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century," Journal of the History of ldeas 15 (1954), 471-98. 4 Kane, "Wives with Knives," p. 232. 5 Kane, "Wives with Knives," p. 226. 0 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits ofThought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 5-6; idem, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity, New Historicism 29 (Berkeley, 1994), p. 3. 7 Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 4 (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 26-27. Greenblatt's unwieldy treatment of religion here seems somewhat surprising in light of his chapters on Tyndale, More, and Wyatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), which contain profound discussions of the religiosity of these figures. See also Greenblatt' s anal ysis of Raleigh' s confession in Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Rotes (New Haven, 1973).

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religion was increasingly being perceived in terms of such legitimation." 8 Dollimore assumes that subversion in literary forms only occurs in forms of "parody, dislocation and structural disjunction" and not in expressions of orthodoxy. 9 Dollimore and others thus necessarily conclude that confessions of guilt and sinfulness that appear "orthodox" carry only religious significance, are devoid of political comment, and evince an acquiescence to the justice of the sentence passed against the felons. 10 Other critics have questioned this Foucauldian view of confessions, pointing to historical evidence that suggests the early modern public was anything but "compliant" and "appreciative" of the control being exercised upon them. 11 In fact, as Thomas Laqueur points out, whatever control that might have been exercised was ignored or undermined by the riotous atmosphcre that prevailed in crowds witnessing executions. 12 Laqueur cites examples of criminals who thumbed their noses at the state and the people and of crowds who mocked the efforts of the state to control their conduct or that of the prison ers. Yet even as effectively as he critiques Foucault' s argument, Laqueur foc uses more on historical incidents, not on literary representations of executions, and only on moments of carnival, not on what 1 would call "moments of orthodoxy," in which those being executed expressed their guilt in conventional confessions. Here is where my argument is situated-first, in considerations of these "moments of orthodoxy" which, 8

Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (New York, 1989), p. 14. Dollimore' s insistence on the inherently oppressive force of religion is unusual in light of the extensive work of British historians-Christ opher Hill, A. L. Morton, and Patrick Collinson, to name just a few-on religion as resistance. 9 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. 25. 10 Two important exceptions to these views are Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood (Chicago, 1992) and Michael C. Schoenfeldt's Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago, 1991 ); both consider the political valences of religious rhetoric. Schoenfeldt' s study of the political uses of religious rhetoric in George Herbert' s poetry focuses on "the implicit critique of mortal political behavior that emphasis upon God's kingship can produce" (p. 14), an argument that supports my reading of how religious rhetoric can undermine rather than support the authorities. 11 See, for example, James Holstun, "Ehud's Dagger: Patronage, Tyrannicide, and Killing No Murder," Cultural Critique 25 (1992), 99-142. Holstun criticizes the tendency in new historicism to ignore "rationally guided oppositional practice" (p. 10 !). 12 Thomas Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868," in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honor of Lawrence Stone, ed., A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), pp. 305-56. The words quoted in the previous sentence are Laqueur's. For a corrective to the view that riots at executions were mere carnivalesque entertainment for the masses, see Peter Linebaugh, 'The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons," in Albion 's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in EighteenthCentury England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (New York, 1975), pp. 65-117.

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in a popular context, resist rather than succumb to state control; and second, in considerations of the popular literature of ballads, a genre which enables such resistance through its performative nature. Thus the circumstances of ballad production, distribution and performance can be seen as the vehicle by which confessions could become seditious rather than submissive.

"Moments of Orthodoxy" as Popular Resistance My first point reflects a continued criticism of the extent to which many new historicists equate church and state, as institutions, with religion, or the outward enactment or expression of a Christian belief system. While a high degree of cooperation and sometimes even collusion between the church and the state certainly existed in the early modern period, there also existed a strong, abiding tradition of resistance to both church and state through religious expression. 13 From the Catholic recusancy of the sixteenth century to the Puri tan resistance of the seventeenth century, religious discourses could and often did escape official church and state control, becoming independent forms of empowerment that stood contrary to these institutions. Thus one cannot acceptas mere capitulation the scaffold speeches of convicted traitors and criminals, who by the very nature of their crimes conflated the religious and the political and whose confessions were thus as politically laden as they were religiously devout. Therefore, if we agree with Kane, who contends that goodnight ballads merely represent "the interiorized voice of State regulation speaking ... through the body of the condemned," 14 we risk underestimating the independent power of religious discourse. Instead, we could consider the ways in which the rhetoric of orthodox confession works in a popular context to undermine the legitimacy of the state. 15

13

See Helgerson's discussion of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which "gives its 'invisible' English church a strongly oppositional identity, an identity founded on suffering and resistance and profoundly antithetical to the hierarchical order of the English state" (Forms of Nationhood, p. 268). See also Donald R. Kelley, "Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Lite rature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1988), pp. 48-76. 14 Kane, "Wives with Knives," p. 220. 15 Peter Lake cautions against making too strong a distinction between the established church and popular religion in "Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England," in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford, 1993), pp. 257-83. See also Lake's discussion of the conventional divide between "the popular" and "the divine" in his essay "Popular Form, Purilan Content? Two Puri tan Appropriations of the Murder Pamphlet from Mid-Seventeenth-Century London," in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), pp. 313-34. Lake's

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What, if anything, did the religious rhetoric of ballads teach the audience? The ballads of scaffold speeches did encourage a pattern of behavior, but not through the principle of deterrence, which is what most critics have assumed to be the governing factor. lnstead, contrary to any Foucauldian view that argues that the subject becomes an object of state control in executions, the religious rhetoric of the ballads rehearses the opposite movement, from object to subject. As Henry Goodcole, the author of a number of early tracts on London crime that were based on his experiences as an ordinary of Newgate Prison, remarked in defense of his lurid accounts of executions, "dying men's wordes are ever remarkable, & their last deeds memorable for succeeding posterities, by them to be instructed, what vertues or vices they followed and imbraced, and by them to learne tu imitate that which was good, and to eschew evill." 16 Goodcole' s remark suggests that far from further scourging them for their wrongdoing, representations of "dying men' s wordes" make them appear exemplary and even almost saintlike. 17 The circulation history of the ballad entitled "The wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders" supports this reading. This ballad, which the subtitle claims was written "with her own hand," reports the last words of a woman who had murdered her husband after he returned home drunk to beat her. The ballad remained in circulation for over a hundred years, according to Hyder E. Rollins, and its popularity was most likely not due to any "heed and forbear" warning but more to its example of a righteous penitent. An anecdote related by Thomas Lodge in 1596 reveals how at least one conscientious woman interpreted the ballad. Lodge describes how the woman had pasted the ballad in her house, saying of her: "Shee will reckon you vp the storie of Mistris SANDERS, and weepe at it, and turne you to the Ballad ouer her chimney, and bid you looke there, there is a goodly sample." 18 Presumably, unless this woman needed a daily reminder not to murder her husband, the "sample" that the ballad of Mistress Saunders provided was an exemplary confession of a mode! penitent whose tale offered instruction to her audience-or possibly an example of an abused wife who finally struck back. Other mode! penitents could become lionized through their representation in ballads merely by the social context. Celebrated as much for their resistance to authority as for their deeds, criminals sometimes achieved the status of folk heroes, and a ballad representing the victim as penitent could recreate him or her as a popular saint. For

evidentiary base is the genre of murder pamphlets, which resemble in content the goodnight baltads discussed here, but nevertheless differ in two important respects: first, murder pamphlets were often identifiably authored, unlike the anonymously written ballads; and second, although arguably written to entertain, murder pamphlets were not written to be performed. My argument stresses both characteristics. 16 Sharpe, "Last Dying Speeches," p. 150. 17 See Lake, "Deeds Against Nature," pp. 260-61, for a brief discussion of Goodcole's pamphlets. 18

Old English Ballads, p. 341.

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example, Captain James Whitney was infamous in the late seventeenth century as a kind of Robin Hood and had a large following even after he was executed for robbery in 1693. "The more penitent he appeared," Rollins asserts, "the more he pleased the crowd" at his execution. The goodnight ballad entitled 'The Penitent Robber" depicts his final confession, representing Whitney as entirely penitent but also referring to the "Thousands corne this day to see" his end, indicating a popularity that suggests fame more than ridicule. 19 Certainly, to judge from "Mistress Saunders" and "Captain Whitney," there was some power in being such an example. J. A. Sharpe cites the story of Elizabeth Caldwell who in 1604 repented long before her execution and thereafter achieved no small amount of fame and prestige. Fashioning herself as an expert on godly living now that she had repented, Caldwell received up to three hundred visitors a day while waiting for her execution, offering advice and passing judgment of her own. A contemporary named Gilbert Dugdale reported that to those "as she thought were viciously given, she gave them good admonitions, wishing that her fall might be an example unto them." 20 Such notoriety and the courage attributed to those brave souls who confessed inevitably led to some amount of titillating pride on the part of the convicted felons, who may have seen these scaffold speeches as their fifteen minutes of fame. As Henry Fielding wryly commented in the mid-eighteenth century, "the day appointed by law for the thief's shame is the day of glory in his own opinion." 21 The process by which scaffold speeches appeared in ballads suggests that such glorification was only intensified through representation. What was not included in the religious rhetoric of represented speeches could be just as important, as confession of one's deeds and self-glorification often could hardly be separated. "Villainy Rewarded; OR, THE PIRATES Last Farewel To the World" purports to be the penitent final confessions of Captain Every's crew who were convicted of piracy in 1696, but the ballad only succeeds in rehearsing and glorifying the pirates' lives of dastardly deeds. 22 The pirates in the ballad do not deny the justice of their conviction-"De ath looks us in the face; / Which is no more than what' s our due,/ since we so wicked were" (lines 4-6)-but neither do they express remorse for what they have done, nor request mercy: "For we on no one mercy took, / nor any did

19

"The Penitent Robber, OR, The Woeful Lamentation OF Capt. James Whitney, On the Moming of his Execution which was on the First of February, 1693," in The Pepys Ballads, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Eng., 1930-31 ), 6:325-28. See also Rollins's remarks on the various ballads representing Whitney, 6:320-21, 325. 20 Sharpe, "Last Dying Speeches," p. 152. 21 Sharpe, "Last Dying Speeches," p. 163. 22 "Villainy Rewarded; OR, THE PIRATES Last Farewcl To the World: Who was Executed at Execution Dock, on Wednesday the 25th of November, 1696. Being of Every's Crew. Together with their free Confession of their most Horrid Crimes," in The Pepys Ballads, 7:239-44. Subsequent line numbers cited parenthetically.

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we spare, / How can we then for mercy look" (lines 45-47). The ballad concludes with a warning to ail other pirates who might follow in their footsteps, a warning that seems to extend an invitation to listeners to take over their wicked ways: From hence we quickly shall be hurl' d to clear the way for you, For certainly if e're you corne to Iustice as we are, Deserved death will be your doom, then Pirates ail take care.

(fines 59-64) In all likelihood the number of potential pirates in the audience was few, leaving the rest of the audience free to marvel at the life of wicked pirates who "e' ery day / liv' d upon others good" (lines 41-42). Seen from this perspective, Anne Saunders' s joyful declaration of certain salvation appears Jess theologically "dubious," as Rollins describes it, than somehow evasive of the very punishment being intlicted upon her. While the state may have manipulated executions and the scaffold confessions to serve as propaganda, and this was certainly evident in the documented instances when those being executed had to recite a scripted confession, the representation of the same events could be used to empower or at least eulogize the victims in their seeming acquiescence to the punishment. Severa! goodnight ballads representing the death of one of the most famous traitors, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, exemplify how representation could draw upon apparent orthodoxy to fashion popular resistance. The actual execution of Essex was legendary as an example of the power of the gallows to extract a final contrite confession from even the most defiant of transgressors. Arrogant and disdainful until just before his death, the Earl of Essex reportedly finally recanted and confessed, not to treason, but to the greater sin he had committed against God, announcing, "I owe God a death." 23 Smith points out that Iike most traitors to the state, Essex expressed his political act of treason against the state in terms of a religious act of heresy, reflecting the intricate relationship between political and religious authority that is typical of early modern discourse: political traitors "appealed to the will of God to justify their actions and claimed that they were preserving their sovereign from the intrigues of evil councillors. In this light treason was no longer treason, but the action of a loyal subject who had the best interests of God and crown at heart." 24 This was Essex' s claim to the end; he remained convinced that his political failure signified God' s disapproval of his ambitions, and he repented of his evident disobedience to God' s will.

23

Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials, as quoted in Smith, "English Treason

Trials," p. 494. 24 Smith, "English Treason Trials," p. 495.

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This devout line of reasoning was sure to win the sympathy of the common people, if not the queen, and the ballads about Essex and his scaffold speech reflect his popularity, replicating the reports of his last words while also showing how religious rhetoric could be constructed so as to challenge implicitly the authority of the state. One particular ballad, "A Lamentable Ditty composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, late Earle of Essex, who was beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ashwenesday in the morning, 1600," provides explicit evidence that the instructive effect of executions on the populace actually might have worked against the state in making a spectacular hero of the victim, who is constructed as a martyr to the state. 25 The circulation history of the ballad supports this hypothesis: it was most likely written soon after the execution but was not published until after Elizabeth' s death, "for obvious reasons," asserts editor William Chappe!!. Certainly, given its thinly veiled criticism and hostility toward the queen and its laudatory treatment of Essex, the ball ad could not have escaped the attention of the censors, despite its seemingly orthodox expressions of guilt and repentance. The author of the ballad begins by claiming that he reports Essex's own words on the scaffold, then depicts Essex admitting his guilt in what appears to be a formulaic confession and repentance: I have a sinner beene, welladay! welladay! Yet never wrong'd my Queene in ail my life: My God I did offend, which grieves me at my end May ail the rest amend, I them forgive. (lines 113-20)

Throughout the ballad, Essex both asks for and grants forgiveness to his enemies, praying "heartily /and with great fervency, / To God that sits on hie, /for to receive him" (lines 133-36) before facing his death bravely and in gentle humility. He does not, however, ask forgiveness of the queen, as the above passage shows, but chooses instead to deny wrongdoing toward the queen by couching his words in confession to God. In 25

In William Chappell, ed., The Roxburghe Ba/lads (1869; repr. New York, 1966), 1:564-70. Subsequent line numbers cited parenthetically. In its praise for Essex, the ballad provides evidence of the popular support that Essex courted and that the queen later conveniently blamed as being the reason for his downfall; the official state pronouncement blamed his popularity for blowing on "the coals of his ambition." For a full discussion of Essex's trial for treason and the events leading up to it, see Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton, 1986), pp. 192-276.

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his study of religious rhetoric, Kenneth Burke points out that this transference can be actually a veiled insult: "praise can serve as a kind of dispraise. For praise of A can imply a refusai to praise B." 26 By asking forgiveness of God and clairning he meant no harm toward the queen-"Yet never wrong' d my Queene in ail my life: /My God 1 did offend ..."-Essex thus does not ask forgiveness of Elizabeth. Moreover, despite his professed hurnility, he actually ends his confession in the more powerful position of granting forgiveness; of his foes, he says graciously, "I them forgive." Forgiveness of enemies implies the magnanirnity of a victor as much as the hurnility of a !oser, and Essex is constructed more as the former in this ballad. 27 The speaker of the ballaù glorifies Essex to such an extent that the religious rhetoric of exchange between Essex and his former enernies becomes charged with political meaning and partially articulated criticisms of the dominant powers. "Sweet England' s pride is gone!" laments the ballad writer, "He did her fame advance /In Ireland, Spaine, and France,/ And now, by dismall chance,/ is from us tane" (lines 1, 5-8). Calling Essex a "vertuous Peere" who "alwayes helpt the poore," the ballad continues, "He nere did deed of ill, / well it is knowne" (lines 18-20). This is a bold claim, considering that Essex was executed for high treason, the greatest crime against the state. The speaker, however, questions the justice of the sentence by avowing, "He was condem' d to die/ for treason certainly- /But God, that sits on high, / knoweth ail things" (lines 45--48). The speaker th us appeals to a higher justice that would recognize Essex' s good deeds at home and abroad as indicative of his true faithfulness to the state, a faithfulness, the ballad's author suggests, that might have superseded duty to the Queen because of an obedience to a higher duty. While this "Lamentable Ditty" never directly refutes the sentence of treason, another ballad, known as "Essex's last Good~night," denies outright the charge that Essex was a traitor: "Count him not like to Campion / (those traiterous men!) or Babington; / Nor like the Earl of Westmerland, / by whom a number were undone ... his quarre! still maintain' d the right." 28 As evidence against the charges of treason, this goodnight ballad recounts his many victories and the honorable deeds he performed abroad in the name of England. However, even as it details Essex's military successes, the goodnight ballad constructs the charges on which Essex was convicted not as a political act of treason but as an act of religious heresy: the last words that the ballad' s Essex utters are his avowal, "When England a Papist counted me,/ the works of Papists 1 [did] defie; / 1 ne're worshipt Saint in Heaven, / nor the Virgin Mary, I!" (lines 89-92). ln other words, while Essex's actions were grounds for charges of the political act of treason,

26

Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston, 1961 ), p. 56. Essex' s grand gesture of forgiveness also casts him in the role of Christ, an implicit analogy that further reflects the ball ad writer' s subtle lionization of Essex and imbricates the political and religious even more deeply. 28 "Essex's Jast Good-night: A Lamentable new Ballad upon the Earle of Essex his Death," in The Roxburghe Ballads, 1:571-74, lines 9-11, 14. Subsequent line numbers cited parenthetically. 27

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the speaker denies the charges, responding as if he had been accused of heresy. Here, therefore, is another instance of the lack of distinction that Elizabethan culture generally made between heresy and treason, a point that Greenblatt argues as well: "No one who actually loved and feared God would allow himself to rebel against an anointed ruler, and atheism [or apostasy], conversely, would lead inevitably to treason."29 Hence, Essex' s representation in "Essex' s last Good-night" argues against the charges of treason by citing evidence of religious devotion. What is remarkable about this tactic is that in its appeal to Essex's devotion as evidence against treason, the connection between treason and heresy actually is manipulated almost to the point of severance, drawing critical attention to the perceived discrepancy between divine and earthly justice. That is, if there is no sign of heresy, and if God's higher truth would recognize Essex's politico-religious faithfulness, the implicit critique is of the earthly ruler, who must be motivated by causes other than justice. lndeed, the speaker of the "Lamentable Ditty" blames "Envy, that foule fi end" as the one who has "brought true vertue's friend / unto his thrall," 30 a personification that finds its embodiment in thequeen, who pardoned many ofEssex's accomplices and followers but did not pardon Essex: Yet her Princely Majesty ... Hath pardon given free to many of them: She hath releas'd them quite, and given them their right! (lines 57-62)

If one reads the exclamation point as indignance, the implication is that "Envy" got the better of the queen's fair judgment. These emotionally charged statements, together with the history of Essex's renowned popularity on which he played for support on his fateful march through London, cast political, if not militaristic, shadows on the religious rhetoric of Essex' s speeches. "A Lamentable Ditty" represents Essex as perpetually vying against the state, appealing to the Pauline Christian value of God's strengths being glorified through human weakness to suggest that he will be the ultimate and saintly victor: "yet shall you strangely see / God strong in me to be, / though 1 am weake" (lines 80--82). Even on the eve of his execution, in the midst of his last confession and final repentance, Essex is still trying to muster support among the guards of the Tower, ostensibly under the guise of requests for prayer: "I pray you, pray for me,/ ... That God may strengthen me ... " (lines 83-85). Essex thus again appeals to popular support, recruiting an army of guards to pray for him: "Then straightway he did call / to the Guard under the wall, / And did

29

10

Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," p. 25. "A Lamentable Ditty," lines 20-24.

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intreat them ail / for him to pray" (lines 85-88). Essex continues to draw upon this rhetoric of penitence in his further statement of self-absolution from the sin of treason: To the State 1 nere ment il! ... Neither wisht the Commons ill in ail my life; But lov'd with ail my heart, and alwayes tooke their part, Whereas there was desart in any place. (lines 121-28, emphasis added)

The last three lin es of Essex' s statement can be read in two ways, depending on how "desart" is defined: the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) records the definition as "abandonment and desertion" in 1603 and as "deserving, worthy of recompense" in 1615. So either Essex supported Parliament, inasmuch as the state deserved the support ("desart"); or he "tooke their part," while acts of mutiny and desertion ("desart") appeared in other physical or attitudinal "places." Thus in representing Essex as loyal to the parliament because he deemed it worthy rather than simply because he owed it obedience, the ball ad version of Essex' s humble confession appears willful and resistant, ominously suggesting a continuing undercurrent of insurrection even through the articulation of a supposedly contrite confession. Overall, the ballad depicts Essex as one who confesses in a manner satisfactory to the state yet whose confession is selfaggrandizing and self-absolving. This move allows the ballad writer to construct Essex as a popular hero, glorified through his bravery and good deeds for England and its people. 31

The Performative Genre of Ballads The ballads on the execution of Essex clearly could have caused trouble with the authorities because of their suggested insubordination. But it was not simply the content but even the very nature of the genre that made the ballads so potentially troublesome. Even though ballads ostensibly provided moral instruction, the circumstances of their circulation meant that they were also occasions of duplicity, celebration, voyeurismlurid entertainment. Written by anyone, read by anyone, heard by almost everyone, goodnight ballads perpetually performed the moment just before execution. Most crucially, goodnight ballads were not word-for-word reiterations of historically recorded

31

In his essay '"God bless thee, little David!': John Felton and His Allies," English Literary His tory 59 ( 1992), 513-52, James Holstun analyzes various representations of Felton' s confession, including several goodnight ballads, which evoke the same strategies of "impenitent penitence" that appear in the Essex ballads (pp. 535-42).

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speeches, but instead were representations that introduced radical ambiguities into an event and how it was interpreted by the early modern popular audiences. Perhaps the most obvious way in which ballads differed from official accounts Jay in the nature of ballads as literature to be purchased and performed, intended to be sung to familiar tunes presumably for the purpose of entertainment as well as instruction. Although the instructional mode seemed to justify the entertainment value for those in authority, there was a sense in which the entertainment prevailed, even in the context of a supposedly moral appeal.3 2 Furthermore, neither the authors nor the readers of the ballads presented a fixed population. While official accounts of the executions almost always were composed by those within the power structure who were controlling the circumstances of the execution, ballads had no fixed or known authorship, an ambiguity that made it difficult to pin responsibility for the ballad on anyone except the balladmonger. 33 Nor had the ballads a fixed readership. Ballads were widely and rapidly distributed, 34 posted in alehouses and public places, 35 ensuring a disparate audience of mixed class and political loyalties; thus there could be no guarantee that they would be "properly" understood as deterrents of bad behavior. 36 As Tessa Watt points out, any moralizing message contained in a ballad would not necessarily reach its intended audience: "The advice was not entirely universal as to social class: as we have seen the reader was expected to be employer rather than labourer and oppressor rather than oppressed. Nevertheless, since some of these ballads survived over a period of a century, the hints about their intended Elizabethan audience may tell us nothing about who they reached as the market broadened." 37 Ballads were available to ail and thus subject to various and shifting interpretations, depending on the position of the audience and the motive for invoking a ballad.

32

Lake, "Deeds against Nature," p. 262. Tessa Watt argues that in general ballads "went into the world authorless . . . . This authorlessness may signify an important change in attitude: the ballad was not an individual creation but a piece of public property, known to an increasingly broad public" (Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640 [Cambridge, Eng., 1991], p. 81). 34 Severa! critics have discussed the circumstances of ballad circulation; see especially Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650, trans. Gayna Walls, European Studics in English Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), pp. 13-27. 35 Watt, Cheap Print, p. 148. In chap. 5, "Stories for Walls," pp. 178-216, Watt discusses the placement of ballads, religious images, and other pictures on the walls of homes and alehouses and argues that their presence as decorations in households helped to form a popular version of Protestantism. 36 Sharon Achinstein examines ballad audiences, perceptions of authorship, and opposition to ballads and ballad-singing by those in power in her essay "Audiences and Authors: Ballads and the Making of English Renaissance Literary Culture," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 ( 1992), 311-26. 37 Watt, Cheap Prin!, p. 104. 33

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Ail of these characteristics suggest a multiplicity, ambiguity, and instability in matters ofreception that make it impossible to claim these goodnight ballads uniformly articulated or reiterated any standards of morality or state ideology. Furthermore, the early modern public has not been remembered as a particularly pious society, as Karen Cunningham points out: "ln spite of official agendas, any attempt to impose reformative or moral thrust on executions seems to have died in the hearts of revelers enjoying their ale in inns and in the Renaissance equivalent of loge seats." 38 This would have been the case even more so for ballads than for coerced confessions at the scaffold. Most confessions at the scaffold followed a fairly generic formula that often was dictated by the state, 39 the historical account thus allowing the state to represent the execution as a self-contained incident that had a didactic thrust. However, in popular literary representations of these events, these same formulas, reiterated through performance and articulation of the 'T' subject position, have an entirely different effect of calling attention to the formulaic nature of a confession and thus emphasizing its artificiality. The shift from history to representation, in other words, is already a shift destabilizing to any sense of a sovereign state. 40 This shift from history to representation has not been much remarked, however. One reason why the new historicism has not produced readings of goodnight ballads as anything other than acquiescence is that little regard has been paid to the performative 'T' of the ballad as it is sung. Read literally, the ballads appear to be perfectly orthodox Protestant articulations of repentance. But the hermeneutic meaning of ballads rested more in the circumstances of ballad performance than in the wrillen words, as Watt reminds us: "we should not look at [a ballad] in isolation, but at how it was 'approp38

Karen Cunningham, "Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death," PMLA 105 (1990), 213. 39 Smith and Cunningham disagree over the origins of the basic script of confessions. Smith ("English Treason Trials," p. 483) sees these generic scripts as arising from a common culture of religion that was uniform and conventional in its expression, a perception of early modern religion, it must be noted, that has been called into question in recent years. Cunningham argues that the Elizabethan authorities allowed little deviation from the accepted form for confession by reminding felons of the topics they needed to cover in their confessions ("Renaissance Execution," p. 211). White both views probably are true to some degree, Cunningham's perspective supports my argument that religious confessions could be in effect ambiguous rather than quietistic: if victims could repeat the state-required confessional form but yet appear triumphant, as 1 argue, the question becomes one of reception rather than submission. 4 Cf. Cunningham, who develops an argument similar to mine: she criticizes the Foucauldian view of state spectacle through her analysis of Marlowe, whom she sees as appropriating the theatricality of these state-sponsored executions to "expose the fraud at the core of public punishments, even as [Marlowe] acknowledges their thematic power" (p. 210). For Cunningham, the very nature of drama itself, as representation, contributes to the undermining effect of portraying executions on stage.

°

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riated.' ... The printed broadside ballad was only the visible tip of an iceberg. Ballads could be chanted out by petty chapmen, performed by travelling players, danced to at bride-ales, harmonized, or shouted as insults. The relationship between the singer and the printed text could take many forms." 41 Criticism of ballads, however, has not retlected much consideration of performative issues. 42 While some critics have regarded the ballads as virtually synonymous with "historical" speeches, other critics have read goodnight ballads as expressive of a "collective disapprobation" of the criminal event, or perhaps indicative of others taking comfort in the idea of "last-minute conversion and salvation for even the lowest dregs of society." 43 Such a view gives precedence to the instructive fonction of ballads. While this perspective certainly appears plausible for ballads that represent executions and scaffold speeches from a third-person perspective, 44 it does not adequately explain the rhetorical effect of confessional goodnight ballads written from a firstperson perspective. What happens as performers reiterate the confessions of goodnight ballads? Watt finds goodnight ballads of criminals so problematic that she does not include them in her study of what she calls "godly ballads" because "the public interest in macabre staries involved aspects of social psychology from which it is difficult to separate the religious element." 45 Watt seems to believe that the appeal of the ballads Jay more in the titillation of someone else's suffering than in the religious nature of the ball ad, but the religious nature of confession seems central, not merely conventional, to these ballads, which celebrate confession and absolution in the first persan. Furthermore, the rhetorical effects of the constantly reiterated confession and appeal for mercy are worth considering: it is as if the promise of absolution is of more interest than the eventual attainment of salvation. In singing the ballad, performers take up the voice of the transgressor and involve themselves once again in the process of confession. Dennis Fos ter' s anal y sis of this process may shed light on how it worked as celebration rather than punishment: "Confession, through the reenactment of sin, sins again, even to the point of drawing the listener into interpretations that inevitably have

41

Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 6, 37. Würzbach's book, The Rise of the English Street Bal/ad, 1550-1650, is a thorough study of ballads through literary criticism, communications, and linguistics, but the analysis of performance is limited to the ballad presenter: "as to the competence and performance on the part of the audience," Würzbach says, "we can only make deductions" (p. 3). 43 Watt, Cheap Print, p. 108. 44 For examples of ballads that appear more socially condemnatory because of their thirdperson perspective, see "A warning for wives" and "The unnaturall Wife," in A Pepysian 42

Gar/and: Black-Letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595-1639, Chieflyfrom the Collection of Samuel Pepys, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Eng., 1922), pp. 299-304 and 283-87 respectively. "The Bloody-minded Husband," pp. 202-5, is written mostly in third person but

contains a goodnight ballad of sorts in the last two stanzas. 45 Watt, Cheap Print, p. 108.

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their own strayings. To become involved with a confession is to experience oneself the alienation motivating the speaker." 46 Because performance of a goodnight ballad does place the reader or singer in the position of the victim, the effect of the ballad' s confession is an identification that undermines the alienation and punishment that the state was trying to achieve: as Cunningham argues, "If the doomed figures ... cause observers to identify with rather than against them, they imply altemate ways of viewing their deaths and destroy the sense of difference needed to justify their torture. Such exhibitions serve their public fonction [for the state] only if the condemned seem to be ... wholly other." 47 Instead, goodnight ballads often celebrated their subjects as "Everymans," evoking sympathy by their appeal to a common problem or weakness. Two corresponding ballads, "The Lamentation of Master Pages wife" and "The Lamentation of George Strangwidge," which rehearse the confessions of two adulterous lovers who conspired to kill Mistress Page's husband, demonstrate how ballads could construct their subjects sympathetically as unfortunate victims of larger social problems.48 Playing upon the popular dislike of marriages arranged solely for parental and financial convenience, both ballads move quickly from their confessions to a critique of this practice. The listener is drawn in to the ballad by an invitation to deliberate over the justice of the event-"You Parents fond, that greedy-minded be,/ And seeke to graft upon a golden tree, / Consider well and rightfull Judges be, / And give your doome twixt Parents' love and me" (lines 57-60)-but the ballad assumes sympathy with the victim. Although both Mistress Page and George confess to their crime, they also manage Lo blame Fortune, "fancie," and especially her parents, who refused to listen to her pleadings: "haplesse I," laments Mistress Page, "whom Parents did force so / To end my dayes in sorrow, shame, and woe!" (lines 67-68), while George directly accuses her father whom he sees as "cause of my committed crime" Cline 5). Mistress Page ends her goodnight with a final appeal to God that is a far cry from a confession of liability:

46

Dennis Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), p. 17. Cunningham, "Renaissance Execution," p. 211. In her study of the representation of madness in early modern ballads, Joy Wiltenburg concludes that the use of the first person in ballads is the vehicle for entertainment: "The first-person voice was not an expression of the mad protagonist's mind, but rather a comic persona: the incongruity of a lunatic's involvement in discourse could be part of the joke" ("Madness and Society in the Street Ballads of Earl y Modern England," Journal of Popular Culture 21, no. 4 [ 1988], 119). 48 "The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth, who being enforced by her Parents to wed him against her will, did most wickedly consent to his murther, for the love of George Strangwidge; for which fact she suffered death at Bar[n]staple in Devonshire. Written with her own hand, a little before her death," in The Roxburghe Ballads, 2: 191-95; "The Lamentation of George Strangwidge, who, for consenting to the death of Master Page of Plimmouth, suffered Death at Bar[n]stable," 2: 196-98. Subsequent li ne numbers cited parenthetically. See also "The Sorrowful Complaint of Mistres Page for causing her husband to be murdered, for the love of George Strangwidge, who were executed together," 2: 199-201. 47

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"give ail Parents wisedome to foresee, /The match is marr'd where minds doe not agree" (lines 95-96). Recitation of these ballads, therefore, would allow the performer to identify sympathetically with either figure and to voice criticism of issues such as marriages arranged for parental gain. The ballads of Mistress Page and George Strangwidge demonstrate how public confession in ballads may be an admission of guilt, but it is also a way to blame others and to daim absolution and escape from sin. Performed confession rehearses the return to a state of spiritual forgiveness and purity. From this perspective, the scaffold speeches in some goodnight ballads appear to employ the same strategies of the dying speeches of martyrs that John R. Knott discusses in his book Discourses of Martyrdom in English Lite rature 1563-1694. Knott' s examination of the rhetoric of representations of martyrs suggests how the religious rhetoric of goodnight ballads could perform a kind of resistance: in representations of trials and examinations, Knott argues, "The victim defeats the intent of the punishment by bearing physical abuse calmly, with a peace of mind shown to contrast with the 'rage' of the persecutor, often by finding means of demonstrating joy in suffering. By remaining unmoved by ·punishment, or even exulting in it, the victim shows the limitations of the power of church or state to control the subversive spirit." 49 Although the criminals represented in goodnight ballads can be regarded only roughly as popular "martyrs," Knott's formulation helps to explain how ballads functioning as entertainment could portray a martyr-like exultation in suffering. "The wofull lamentacon of mrs Anne Saunders," which opens with the triumphant assertion quoted at the beginning of this essay, represents a notable case of such empowerment. Anne Saunders's empowerment paradoxically occurs through the conventional religious rhetoric of submission and the ostensibly moralizing intent of scaffold speeches: the "goodly sample" that the persona of Anne Saunders presents in this ballad absolves her of sin through the conventional rhetoric of a sinner' s repentance; remarkably, however, the ballad also constructs her as a saint in the process, as the murder she committed is progressively forgotten. Saunders begins her lament with the conventional self-abjuration of repentant sinners-"I wayle my wanton lyfe long spent / which had noe better grace" 50-but she wastes no time parceling out fair shares of blame to Anne Drewry, to Roger, to God who made her original sinful nature, and to the devil. Through the process of lamentation, Saunders performs her own absolution. Once she proclaims, "I am Full Redie prest, / my Sines 1 doe Repent," and feels assured that "Christes bloud my bloudy facte hath clensde" (lines 129-30, 135), her eyes are opened to the moral example she has become for "ail honest wyves, / and fynest London dames" (lines 73-74):

49

John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature 1563-1694 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), p. 8. 50 "The wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders" (see above, n. 1), lines 7-8. Subsequent line numbers cited parenthetically.

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And nowe behold and se what for me god hath done, A lost and infected wandring shepe his merry home hath woonne; Whose love so let me fall, ... That he might rayse me vp from death to state of blisse ... To my immortall blisse and joye set fre from synne and blame. (lines 137-46) Thus Saunders sees her punishment, not as an earthly castigation for an act of petty treason in the premeditated murder of her husband, but a "blessing in disguise" from God so that she can claim her reward in heaven: "And yet what shame is this," she questions, "for me, so clad with synne ... the lasting throne to wynne?" (lines 53-56). Having thus in effect asserted her right to the throne, Saunders tractes the profane for the sacred: "And, therfore, nowe farewell, / ail thinges corrupt and vayne, / lt is not longe til heavenly throng / will make me vppe agayne" (lines 57-60). In effect, Saunders dies a martyr in her own eyes, placing herself in the position of spiritual advisor, having denied her own agency in committing the crime and evaded the crime for which she is punished. The ballad makes no mention of her corporeal fate, nor does it record her original crime; performers of this ballad rehearse only the process by which self-condemnation becomes self-commendation.

The Performance of Popular Religion Fredric Jameson' s definition of religion as "the privilegcd mode in which a precapitalist collectivity cornes to consciousness of itself and affirms its unity as a group" may suggest why religious rhetoric in the popular literature of goodnight ballads could wield so much power. 51 Goodnight ballads representing felcns such as the Earl of Essex and Anne Saunders evince a fluid and volatile deployment of religious rhetoric that not only eludes state control, but suggests that such contrai never existed, neither in the practice of enforced confession nor in the representations of those confessions. Therefore if we read religion only as synonymous with the subjection practiced by other controlling forces, as some new historicist critics have tended to do, and do not consider how performance and genre may impact the reception of any message, we may misconstrue the independent power of popular religious discourse and popular representation. Instead we should ask, what is being constructed, rehearsed, performed

51

Frederic Jameson, "Religion and Ideology," in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Essex, 1981 ), p. 318.

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through religious rhetoric in popular literature? Perhaps such literature creates a collective sense of solidarity, as Jameson suggests, that reflects a self-empowerment rather than submission to the state. As popular representations of scaffold confessions, goodnight ballads thus suggest at least one way in which early modern commoners paradoxically resisted the state by collectively confessing, rehearsing, and performing their wrongdoing. 52

52

1 would like to thank Patricia Fumcrton for introducing me to early modern popular literature, James Holstun and Kristcn Poole for their incisive criticisms, and especially Jody Endcrs for her carcful readings and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Mary W roth's Willow Poetics: Revising Female Desire in

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus JAMI AKE

W

hen Lady Mary Wroth composed Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), the first sonnet sequence written in English by a woman, her primary challenge was to construct the persona of a constant female lover using the tools of a decidedly masculine Petrarchan tradition. As many earlier critics have observed, Wroth does much more than merely reiterate the well-rehearsed Petrarchan conventions of the genre' s notable Elizabethan practitioners-a group of courtier poets that included Wroth's father, Robert Sidney, and her more celebrated uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. Many studies ofWroth have focused on illuminating the complexity ofher work in the context of such a prolific literary family and of a fashionable generation of Elizabethan sonneteers. But only recently have critics begun to consider in detail the ways that Wroth's revisions of both Petrarch and his classical sources allow her to adapt Petrarchan poetics to a poetry of female desire. 1

1

For studies of Wroth and the Sidney family, see Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, 1993); Elaine Y. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New Haven, 1987); Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, 1990); and Janet MacArthur, "'A Sydney, though Un-Named': Lady Mary Wroth and Her Poetical Progenitors," English Studies in Canada 15 (1989), 12-20. For sustained discussions of Wroth's classical sources include Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and lts Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, 1995); and Naomi 1. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington, Ky., 1996).

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ln this essay, 1 will argue that in her bid for a sonnet poetics that focuses on female desire, Wroth closely examines Petrarch's carefully chosen Ovidian inheritance in order ta revise the gendered assumptions about artistic process that inform Petrarchan poetics. 2 Explicitly and implicitly calling upon the myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses, she reconfigures the relationship between desire and artistry that had characterized the sonnet tradition since its Italian origins. Wroth focuses her efforts on the sites of metamorphosis where masculine assertion and artistry succeed at the expense of female agency and subjectivity-most notably in the tales of Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus and Echo, and Pygmalion and his statue. In place of Ovidian myths in which female speech is silenced or subsumed into a masculine mode! of creativity and inspiration, she constructs a femalc speaker who is herself a poet and who is able to negotiate the terms of a language never intended to express female desire. Ultimately, her revisionary poetics provides for an escape from the erotic failure and subjective self-enclosure that conclude most contemporary, male-authored sonnet cycles. Unlike Sidney's Astrophil or Shakespeare's sonnet lover, Wroth's Pamphilia emerges from her sequence with resolve and authority, a constant yet prolific subject in contrai of her own desires. I will suggest, too, that in creating a separate and contestatory poetics, Wroth rejects the assumptions behind the Petrarchan laurels and in particular their history of heroically linking male desire with public fame. lnstead, she calls upon the willow tree-a conventional folk emblem of mourning, female suicide, and unrequited love-as an emblematic point of departure for her sequence. The willow, appearing in the first song of Pamphilia ta Amphilanthus, introduccs new assumptions of erotic progress, artistic process, and the relationship between them. In a movement which highlights what Nancy Miller has called the "gendered subjectivity" embodied in writing itself, Wroth' s Pamphilia begins her sequence positioned safely within the culturally acceptable languages of affect, Joss, and "feminine" grief associated in Renaissance culture with the willow and progresses toward self-assertion to become a desiring female subject in the final sonnets. 3 In creating a distinctly feminine "willow

2

See Josephine Roberts's brief discussion of Wroth's revisions of Ovid in her introduction to Wroth's Urania (Binghamton, 1995), p. xxxiii. 3 See Nancy Miller, "Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy Miller (New York, 1986), p. 272. Miller's study considers at length Ovid's account of Arachne's metamorphosis to critique a Western mode! of literary creativity that attends to the myth's seemingly universal admonition against mortal pride but neglects the distinctly gendered incidents that occasioned it. Calling her own critical practice "arachnology," she urges critics to engage in a kind of criticism that would remember Arachne not simply as a spider, but as the creative woman who defiantly depicted in her tapestry the myriad rapes and betrayals of mortal women by gods. Doing so, Miller argues, "may help us to see the ways in which the representation of art in art affects the social construction of artists and their reception in the canons of culture" (p. 287), in Arachne's case, the way that subsequent retellings of her

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poetics," Wroth rewrites the very Ovidian assumptions about desire and poetry which underwrite English Petrarchanism. Petrarch' s sonnet-cycle account in the Canzoniere of his relentless pursuit of Laura, the divine beauty he daims to have first spotted at Avignon in 1327, gave rise to a poetic genre that merged discourses of erotic desire with meditations on contemporary politics, patriotism, and national fame conferred by poetic skill. His playful conflation of his beloved' s name with the poetic laure) (lauro) inspired a laureate tradition of sonnet writing that offered an independent, yet public, identity to the love poet who wittily transforms erotic frustration into poetic valor. Petrarch found the governing trope for his sonnet poetics in the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Apollo's lustful pursuit of the chaste nymph Daphne ends with her transformation into a laure! tree. For Apollo, erotic failure translates (quite Iiterally) into poetic reward as he designates the laure! branches of Daphne' s changed body as the quintessential sign of triumphant masculine performance. For Petrarch, as for Ovid's Apollo, the elusive mistress who is the pretext for the poet' s erotic desire unwittingly cornes under his control as the embodied substance of the poetic text that grants the poet fame. The first song of Pamphilia ta Amphilanthus registers Wroth's debt to the Petrarchan-Ovidian tradition even as it depicts the problems of appropriating metamorphosis to define the terms and consequences of female desire. 4 Pamphilia cornes face to face with a shepherdess, who, Iike Pamphilia herself, laments her abandonment by an inconstant beloved. In a desperate attempt to prove her constancy in love, the forlorn shepherdess transforms herself into a willow tree before Pamphilia' s eyes, performing a suicide reminiscent of Daphne' s tragic metamorphosis into a laure) tree. Unlike Daphne, however, Wroth's shepherdess retains control over her body, artfully enacting a metamorphosis of her own devising. She attempts to assert her daim to perfect constancy by making her body an emblematic text of her fidelity, rendering her interior state transparent and readable on her own terms: My end aprocheth neere Now willow must 1 weare My fortune soe will bee. With branches of this tree I' le dress my ha pies head Which shall my wittnes bee

metamorphosis suppress the significance of her artwork. Wroth' s poetic strategy in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, anticipating Miller' s own feminist poetics, involves just su ch a close examination and reappropriation of the Ovidian myths of representation that Petrarch and his English imitators used to legitimate their own discursive practices. 4 1 refer to this tradition as "Petrarchan-Ovidian" in order to distinguish between Ovid's own poetics and the pieces of the Ovidian tradition selectively imported by Petrarch for his Canzoniere.

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My hopes in love ar dead My clothes irnbroder'd ail Shall bee with Gyrlands round Sorne scatcr'd, others bound Sorne ti'de, sorne like to fall. The barck rny booke shall bee Wher dayly 1 will wright This talc of haples rnee True slave to fortunes spight; The roote shall be rny bed Whcr nightly 1 will lye, Wayling inconstancy Since ail true love is dead. 5

The shepherdess' metamorphosis allows her a kind of agency in death that Daphne never possessed, for although Ovid's nymph prays to the gods to save her from Apollo's lust, she can neither predict nor determine the terms of her rescue. The carefully constructed text of the pastoral poetess, written on the bark that encloses her, tells her "tale of hapless mee," as Daphne cou Id not. Yet in recalling Daphne' s fate, the unnamed shepherdess' attempt at selftransformation raises doubts about her success in enforcing her intended meaning. The risk involved in choosing such an end is its potential to be appropriated for other meanings entirely, to be read in a way that takes advantage of the shepherdess' irrevocable final silence and that rewrites her last attempt at signification. Daphne's metamorphosis provides an inauspicious precedent for Wroth's anonymous shepherdess: once Daphne is silenced, Apollo assumes contrai over her new shape and meaning, even dismembering her limbs to appropriate her body for his poetic pursuits. Daphne's subjectivity and the significance of her metamorphosis are subsumed into a masculine poetics; in fact, as a laure! tree, Daphne quite perversely becomes an emblematic measure of its success. Although Daphne is not actually murdered, she is kidnapped into convention, left to a death-in-life signifying the rewards of male poetic performance. Wroth's shepherdess, by contrast, intends to become a poetic emblem of her own desire, speaking of her willful transformation as an act of resistance against inconstant love. She tries to prevent any future misapprehensions of her motivations by Ieaving behind self-created texts as clues to her correct interpretation after death. She requests that her own poetic lines become her epitaph:

Josephine A. Roberts, ed., The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge, 1983), P7.22-40. Ail subsequent citations of Wroth's poerns, given parenthetically, refer to Roberts's edition and follow her nurnbering.

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And thes lines 1 will leave If some such lover corne Who may them right conseave, And place them on my tombe: She who still constant lov'd Now dead with cruell care Kil'd with unkind dispaire, And change, her end heere prov'd. (P7.41-48)

The shepherdess undoubtedly wields more agency in her metamorphosis than Daphne had retained in hers. Nevertheless, the shepherdess believes that her agency is contingent on a lover' s correct reading of her poetic inscription in relation to her emblematic body. She risks misreading and, even more tragically, invisibility-pos sibilities she herself half-acknowledges in her conditional "if." Even in death, the terms and signs of her constancy must be understood and validated by a sympathetic audience. The suicidai shepherdess is interpreted and her story told, though not by a male lover. Pamphilia' s charitable reading of the shepherdess' "tale of haples mee" incorporates the unmediated voice of the forlorn shepherdess herseJf, investing her with the authority to unfold her own tragedy. Pamphilia's account, Ann Jones suggests, "produces an effect of objectivity that Jegitimates the shepherdess-poet' s complaint." 6 More than this objectivity, however, the combination of the shepherdess' first-person lament and Pamphilia's sympathetic rendering of the shepherdess' metamorphosis as a process both destructive and powerfuJ, signais a nascent, if fragile, female community through which such accounts of female experience and femaJe writings might be passed. Although the willow song is a suicidai lament for the unnamed shepherdess, it aJso offers to Pamphilia the terms for a larger, feminine poetics that finds its power and community in the poetry of mourning and Joss. Much unJike the public triumph and the wide recognition of poetic performance represented by the Petrarchan laurels, however, the shepherdess' willow lament suggests a more private exchange, one fraught with an anxiety of audience as her song remains potentially unheard by a poetic community. In exchanging the laure! for the willow, the first song of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus offers an emblem for reading the sequence as a whole and, with it, a significantJy different set of assumptions for articulating and understanding femaJe desirc. Although its precise literary history is difficult to trace, the willow' s early associations with Joss and ill-fated reJationships well suit it as a trope for a poetics of femaJe desire. First of ail, as Jones reminds us, the willow's relatively humble, pastoral associations were far more appropriate for a female poet than were more conventionally public forms of writing like epic or drama. Early modern pastoral was "a genre that 6

Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington, 1990), p. 142.

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traditionally Iegitimated complaint and satire," even for a woman who dared to write poetry. 7 Moreover, the conventions of pastoral poetry, much unlike those of circulated manuscript verses, were not the exclusive province of aristocratie male poets and audiences. Both the number of published versions of willow sangs, often printed with music for the lute and viol, and wide references to such sangs in pastoral folk tales argue for an even Iarger, unrecorded oral tradition whose conventions were widely known in popular culture. In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century pastoral sangs and poetry, willow garlands frequently adorn the heads of unrequited or abandoned Iovers, the "weeping" appearance of the willow Ieaves reflecting the melancholy of those forsaken. 8 In addition, because the willow tree typically grows along river banks, it also came to symbolize the deaths of young women who had drowned, either accidentally or deliberately. If Petrarch' s laure! celebrates a manu script poetry of publicity, pursuit, and a kind of wit that secures masculine homosocial bonds, the willow encodes an oral poetry of affect, the private grief of women who can voice criticism but who are powerless to pursue their erotic desires and whose only apparent means of self-assertion is, almost paradoxically, suicide. 9 Wroth was undoubtedly familiar with the mournful tradition of the willow song, particularly as it had assumed a place in English popular culture. Such sangs had found their way into published and circulated songbooks and had been heard often on popular and court stages alike. Perhaps one ofWroth's most immediate sources is a willow song found in a Iarger collection of songs entitled The Muses Cardin for Delights, dedicated to her in 1610 by Robert Jones, a prominent Elizabethan and Jacobean songwriter. Jones's willow song follows convention in keeping the speaker male and the beloved female: a forsaken man desires a woman who is herself mourning the Ioss of a beloved. The tone of the song betrays the speaker's increasing scorn and disillusionment as he grows older, as well as his efforts to create a kind of competition for pity between him and his distant, unrelenting beloved: 1 Am so farre from pittying thee, That wear' st a branch of Willow tree, That 1 doe enuie thee and ail, that once was high & got a fall, 0 willow willow willow tree 1 would thou didst belong to mee.

Thy wearing Willow doth imply, That thou art happier Jarre then /,

7

Jones, Currency of Eros, p. 9. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1d, 6d. 9 For a discussion of the kinds of male bonds secured in writing sonnets, see especially Eve Sedgwick' s Between Men: English Lite rature and Male Homosocial Des ire (New York, 1985), pp. 28-48. 8

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For once thou wert where thou wouldst be, Though now thou wear' st the Willow tree, 0 Willow willow sweete willow, Let me once lie vpon her pillow. 10

In a lute song that turns the tropes of mourning into a strangely disdainful seduction attempt, the speaker dismisses the woman's grief only then to blame her for his own Jack of erotic success. If Wroth is responding to the substance of Jones's willow song in the first song of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, she does not simply switch the gender roles of Jones' s speaker and beloved. Rather, she creates in Pamphilia a non-threatening female audience for her mourning shepherdess' grief, thus replacing the competition and misogyny invoked by Jones' s speaker with sympathetic understanding. Although Jones's song offers us evidence of Wroth's familiarity with at least one specific willow song, the willow song's appearances in contemporary drama likely also influenced Wroth' s use of it in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Its appearances in Shakespeare's later plays, known to Wroth, link the willow to an ephemeral, oral tradition of affect to create the discursive site of shared language between women. 11 In Shakespearean tragedy and comedy alike, the willow song-quite contrary to tradition 12 -is always sung by women, and works to call attention to the formation of female bonds in the peripheral spaces of masculine dramatic action, even as it registers the inevitable failure of such bonds, which give way under the generic pressures of the larger narrative. Desdemona's sorrowful willow song near the conclusion of Othello, for example, itself traces an unwritten history of female des pair in love. Desdemona has learned the willow song from her mother's maid Barbary, who "died singing it," 13 and sings it to Emilia in a scene where the two are alone near the end of the play. But rather than discovering their affinity in a song of mourning and abandonment whose lyrics and 10

The Muses Gardinfor Delights, in Lyrics From English Airs 1596-1622, ed. Edward Doughtie (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 12.1-12. 11 See Naomi J. Miller, "Engendering Discourse: Women's Voices in Wroth's Urania and Shakespeare' s Plays," in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville, 1991), pp. 154-72. Although her intent is "to establish not an assertion of influence so much as a scrutiny of difference" (p. 155), Miller offers a number of convincing connections between Wroth's Urania and Shakespeare's plays-details which suggest Wroth's familiarity with Shakespearean drama. 12 Frederick W. Stemfeld has observed of willow songs popular in the period that "with the exception of Shakespeare's song [in Othello] the idol is female" ("Shakespeare's Use of Popular Song," in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented ta Frank Percy Wilson, ed. Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner [Oxford, 1959], pp. 150-66). 13 Ali references to Shakespeare's plays are to the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1974), 4.3.30.

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transmission have already transcended the boundaries of class and race, mistress and maidservant remain emotionally and ideologically distant, Emilia steadfastly pragmatic and Desdemona blindly idealistic in her appraisal of romantic love. It is Desdemona' s blind idealism that finally permits her to claim responsibility for her own murder at Othello' s hands. Briefly reviving after Othello' s violent attack and asked by the frantic Emilia who has murdered her, Desdemona replies, "Nobody; 1 myself. Farewell! I Commend me to my kind lord. O; farewell !" (5.2.124-25). Read in the context of the song, Desdemona's dying words, more than simply reasserting her wifely fidelity to Othello, connect her back to the willow song's female community of disappointed lovers. Her troubling final words echo the willow song's final Iine, a moumful woman's response to a jealous lover who has left her to die: "Let nobody blarne him, his scom I approve" (4.3.52). The song's resonance becomes clearer to Emilia, but only as she dies at her own husband's hand, after choosing to vindicate Desdemona from Iago's accusations of adultery. Like Desdemona, Emilia assumes a place in the willow song's sad lineage and dies singing its refrain to her mistress: "I will play the swan / And die in music. [Sings] Willow, willow, willow" (5.2.247-48). Her song establishes a bond between the women, but one understood only in the act of dying, after both are powerless to alter the tragedy that surrounds and defines them. Although it is nota willow song perse, Gertrude's lyrical account of Ophelia's drowning in Hamlet similarly invokes the willow to offer a language of belated understanding between women that interrupts, but cannot stop, the progress of masculine tragedy. Gertrude's pastoral set piece contrasts sharply with-and momentarily derails -the conspiratorial discussion between Claudius and Laertes as they plot Hamlet' s murder: There is a willow grows askaunt the brook, That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream, Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cull-cold maids do dead men's fingers call them. There on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down her weedy trophies and herself Feil in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, Which time she chaunted snatches of old lauds, As one incapable of her own distress ... (4.7.166-78)

The Queen's language of tlowers recalls Ophelia's literai bestowal of flowers during her pitiful and shocking appearance at court following Polonius' s murder. Although as Elaine Showalter has persuasively argued, it is finally impossible to know Ophelia's

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precise motivations behind her actions or the meaning of her "unshaped" speech, we can read her wanton songs and forthright talk as an attempt at self-definition in a mode outside the parameters of an increasingly irrational masculine semiotics in the play, not the least of which is Hamlet' s own antic behavior. 14 Seeming to follow Ophelia' s example, Gertrude' s aestheticized account of the young woman' s death renders the question of Ophelia's agency and intentions in her drowning as indecipherable as the reasons behind Ophelia's presumed madness and emblematic floral offerings at court. Ophelia's private understanding of events remains largely obscure and Gertrude's account of her death sheds little light on it. Even the grave diggers quibble over whether Ophelia came to the water, or the water to Ophelia (5.1.6-20). ln bold contrast to Gertrude' s previous reluctance to attend the "distract" Ophelia (4.5), the Queen aligns herself with the young woman after her death, both through her pastoral lament and by strewing actual flowers on the drowned woman's grave. But like the dying Emilia's willow tribute to Desdemona, Gertrude's alliance with Ophelia cornes too late to secure a connection powerful enough to stop the momentum of the male-initiated revenge that kills them both. A final Shakespearean example, Viola's willow lament in Twelfth Night, illustrates the potentially erotic quality of the willow tradition as it fonctions in a way that mirrors Wroth's own purposes. In Shakespeare's play, the song begins to disrupt the narrative of male desire and emerges as a counterdiscourse to the Petrarchan rhetoric that characterizes Duke Orsino, the play' s central romantic protagonist. When Orsino' s cliché-ridden rhetoric fails to win the fair Olivia, Viola-disguise d as the Duke's messenger and sent to woo on his behalf-is forced to improvise. Speaking from her own experience rather than reciting frorn the well-worn pages of manuscript Petrarchanism, Viola offers to an eager Olivia an alternative language of seduction, imagined by and for a woman's desire, one that starts with the willow. Asked by Olivia how s/he would woo if given the chance, the disguised Viola replies that she would Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night, Hallow your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out "Olivia!" 0, you should not rest

14

Elaine Showalter, "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), pp. 77-94. ln her examination of the interpretive history of Ophelia, Showalter concludes that none of the commonly used critical approaches offers a satisfactory reading of this elusive character, and she instead surveys the history of the cultural representations of Ophelia.

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Between the elements of air and earth But you should pity me! (1.5.265-76)

Viola finds a language far removed from the Duke' s scripted Petrarchan rhetoric and the courtly conventions it encodes. More transient and thus Jess corruptible than circulated manuscript verses, Viola' s promised "loyal cantons" are wooing words that do not rely at ail upon the objectification of the beloved's body so common to Petrarchan poetry. Her music appeals instead to Olivia' s "soul," an interiority that remains unfragmented in verse. And in contrast to the poets of Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Viola would not reduce her poetry's mistrcss to a text designed to represent, replace, and circulate her. Rather, Olivia would remain whole, identified, and unambiguously the source of the poet' s desire, yet no less a desiring subject in her own right. Viola' s pastoral language, in fact, resonates with Olivia much more than the Duke' s Petrarchan script and moves the "cloistress" ( 1.1.26) to act on behalf of her own desire for Orsino's disguiscd messenger. But although Viola's promised willow sang pro vides a fragile emblem of a female-authored account of female desire, the affective bonds between women cannot hold beyond the play' s conventional nuptial conclusions. Nevertheless, Twelfth Night' s willow song undermines the familiar modes of circulating and transmitting Petrarchan poetry, replacing them (if only temporarily) with an orally communicated, pastoral poetry of female affect that transforms the language of mourning into one of seduction. Wroth takes from the diffuse tradition of the willow song its most enabling features for depicting sympathetic bonds between women and for articulating female desire in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. From its folk origins, she retains its primary occasion as a sang of mourning and forsaken love; but unlike the singers of the older willow songs of English !ore, Wroth' s unnamed pastoral speaker is female rather than male and thus sings of men's inconstancy rather than female disloyalty. Wroth's shepherdess, voicing the traditionally unheard complaint of a female lover, becomes the subject of-and not simply a subject in-her willow song. 15 Moreover, once Pamphilia witnesses the shepherdess' willow lament, she survives to interpret and pass on the song's potentially devastating lessons, quite unlike most of her Shakespearean predecessors. Her encounter with the shepherdess is not simply a lesson in the rhetoric of mourning or in suicidai self-abnegation, but-quite the contrary-a lesson in the powers of poetic signification. Pamphilia, we find, though similarly despondent and certainly affected by the plight of the solitary shepherdess, chooses not to imitate the shepherdess' example of suicide as a response to frustrated desire. But the shepherdess' willow offers Pamphilia what the laure] cannot: a discourse sympathetic to female suffering and eroticism at a remove from the violent Ovidian landscape of Petrarchan desire. In 15

p. 160.

Naomi J. Miller makes the importance of this distinction clear in Changing the Subject,

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Wroth's sequence, Pamphilia, the desiring female subject who has been forcibly transformed by masculine definitions of desire and by the literary tradition that repeatedly tells its story, is instead gradually rendered whole and embodied. If Daphne' s story records her violent transformation from chaste nymph into masculine signifier, Pamphilia' s progress from violated sonnet mistress to constant subject nearly reverses the trajectory of Ovid's myth, beginning from the subjective and linguistic powerlessness that is Daphne' s fate. Pamphilia appears in the first sonnet of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as the tragically literai embodiment of Petrarchan sonnet conceits that depict women: she is powerless, objectified, and dismembered. Assaulted at night and thus at her most vulnerable, she becomes a living emblem of the violence implicit in sonnet lyricism: In sleepe, a Chariot drawne by wing'd desire I sawe: wher sate bright Venus Queene of love, And att her feete her sonne, still adding fire To burning hearts which she did hold above, Butt one hart flaming more then ail the rest The goddess held, and putt itt to my brest, Deare sonne, now shutt, sayd she: thus must wee winn; Hee her obay'd, and martir'd my poore hart, 1, waking hop'd as dreames itt would depart Yett since: 0 mee: a lover I have binn. (Pl.5-14)

Pamphilia's dream vision of her heart pierced by Cupid's arrow places her in a long line of agonized sonnet lovers. In Dante's Vita Nuova, perhaps the closest analogue, the dreaming lover looks on helplessly as his beloved Beatrice is force-fed his burning heart. Nona Feinberg, noting that "shutt" (1.11) can mean "to shut" as well as "to shoot," argues that Wroth's lover maintains more control over her body than Dante's hapless speaker since Pamphilia' s desire is "shutt'' safely inside her. 16 But Pamphilia' s extreme helplessness seems to suggest that her body and its poetic signification are far beyond her control as she languishes under the power of Venus and Cupid. Wroth's introduction of Pamphilia stands almost directly opposed to the characterization of Petrarch' s speaker in the opening sonnet of the Canwniere. Speaking confidently to his readers about to embark upon a reading of his "scattered verses" ( 1.1 ), Petrarch assures his audience that the desperate lover of the body of his sequence is not "the man 1 am today" ( 1.4 ). 17 He has, we find, repented his worldly

16

Nona Feinberg, "Lady Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity," in

Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, p. 185. 17 Francesco Petrarca, The "Canzoniere," or, "Rerum vulgariumfragmenta," trans. Mark

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des ires from his "errant youthful days" ( 1.3) and has instead looked to God for his salvation. The confident self-portrait of Petrarch's lover contrasts sharply with Pamphilia's less-than-heroic entrance as the victimized lover of Wroth's sequence. Pamphilia's initial appearance, in fact, seems to place her squarely in the Petrarchan tradition not as a poetic subject, but as the objectified, dissected woman of the Petrarchan blazon. 18 In the first poem of Wroth' s sequence, Pamphilia' s violated, open body places her among a tradition of sonnet mistresses who are but fragmented projections of the male poet's imagination and the dismembered bodies of the male gaze. As many critics have noted, Wroth's strategy in carving out a discursive space for Pamphilia as a full-fledged subjcct does not rely upon the simple reversai of the gaze. 19 Pamphilia, in fact, never once employs the blazon to exert contrai over her beloved or over her own experience of subjective fragmentation; Amphilanthus is never physically described in the sequence that bears his name. Wroth's exclusion of the male body from her sequence, in some respects, speaks to the kind of authority the blazon topos still communicated in Jacobean poetry, the decorous limits, perhaps, that precluded even the most audacious female poet from dismembering the male body in verse. More than this, however, Wroth's sequence begins to undermine the authority that inheres in the gaze itself and its rote in sustaining male desire. One of the greatest difficulties involved in Pamphilia' s poetic self-definition is the need to escape from a sonnet poetics that links des ire and the dangerously transforming power of the gaze. If masculine poetic self-

Musa (Bloomington, 1996). Ali further citations of Petrarch's poems refer to Musa's translation and are given parenthetically. 18 Nancy J. Vickers connects the blazon topos-the rhetorical dismemberment and display of the female body in verse-with the myth of Actaeon from Ovid's Metamorphoses ("Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical lnquiry 8 [ 1981], 265-79). She argues that the impulse to take apart women's bodies, piece by piece, in a Petrarchan language of compliment enacts a reversai of Actaeon's savage dismemberment by his own hounds, the hunter's punishment for accidentally glimpsing the naked Diana. According to Vickers, the male Petrarchan poet silences the mistress' voice and scatters her dismembered body throughout his sequence as part of a poetic effort to neutralize the powerful effects of female eroticism and to forge his own, integrated identity as lyric poet. The Petrarchan blazon encodes a social reality that situates women as the legitimate, fragmented abjects of the male gaze, a visual relationship mirroring the gendered power relations of Western cultures more generally, where the power of the masculine poetic "!''and that of the male eye are intimately connected. Writing of the pleasure this gendered visual discrepancy affords the masculine viewer, Laura Mulvey argues that "woman ... stands in a patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the si lent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning" ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 [ 1975], 6-18). 19 See, for example, Beilin, Redeeming Eve, pp. 236; Miller, Changing the Subject, p. 40.

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fashioning and subjective integrity in the sonnet tradition are contingent upon the ability to manipulate, contain, and possess the female body in verse, how can female selffashioning be achieved without doing the same to a masculine body? 20 Moreover, how can a female speaker achieve this kind of subjectivity when the only remaining evidence of masculine presence is the beloved's gaze, the very power that has participated in the rhetorical mutilation of female bodies and the silencing of female voices? Although Amphilanthu s never physically appears in the sequence, Pamphilia's persona) and poetic difficulties are compounded by a constant awareness of his eyes; the male gaze, even in its seemingly disembodied state, remains one of the controlling forces behind the sequence, as if it were built into the act of writing poetry itself. Crucial to Pamphilia' s emergence as the subject rather than object of her sonnet sequence, then, is an unfocusing of the Ovidian-Petrarchan gaze that renders the subject of the desiring gaze masculine and its object feminine. Turning her gaze more often inward than outward to meet her beloved' s eyes, Pamphilia initiales in the course of her sequence a kind of persona] metamorphosis contingent on introspection rather than the violence of specularity. Y et even in spite of its menacing tableau of violence and desire, Pamphilia ta Amphilanthu s' s opening sonnet also offers a site of incipient female resistance to the perils of the male gaze and to its conventional ized poetic inscriptions. In addition to introducing a sonnet poetics that essentially reverses the progress of Petrarchan desire, Wroth's poem also engages in an allusive dialogue with the introductory sonnet of her uncle Philip Sidney' s Astrophil and Stella, calling her readers' attention to the differences between their respective treatments of desire. In Sidney' s initial sonnet, for example, Astrophil and his desire are figured as partners in a poetic enterprise to express the lover' s feelings in words so that he might successfully woo his beloved Stella. From the male lover's perspective, love and performance are highly compatible. As Marion Campbell notes, Sidney' s sequence "manipulates a continuous parallel between the act of poetry and the act of making love." 21 And although his rhetorical skills are comically flawed, Astrophil quite straightforwa rdly states his intentions to "show" his love in verse; his confident, rational future tenses throw into high relief Pamphilia's self-pitying, past-tense account of her violation. Far from performing her desire, Pamphilia actively struggles against it; she is performed upon. Astrophil's muse tells him to look in his heart and write; Pamphilia, whose "martir' d" heart is held captive, is allowed no such luxury. Moreovcr, in contrast to the courtly audience whu

°Feinberg asks a similar question in "Invention," pp. 179-90, and especially pp. 176-77. Feinberg argues that Wroth discovers the poetic materials for self-invention by "inscribing Pamphilia as reader and writer of herself" (p. 178) in the Urania and by employing newlyemerging discourses of privacy. 21 "Unending Desire: Sidney's Reinvention of Petrarchan Form in Astrophil and Stella," in 2

Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and in Ours, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (Totawa, N.J., 1984), pp. 84-94.

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overhears As trop hi!' s poetic pronouncements, Pamphilia' s solitary ravishment "in sleepe" goes unwitnessed by anyone but Venus and Cupid. The seemingly benign erotic impetus for sonneteering put forward in Astrophil and Stella disappears in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, where Wroth replaces Astrophil's lighthearted reproach by his muse with Pamphilia' s brutal violation by Venus and Cupid as the scene of poetic initiation. In setting up an implicit comparison between the two sequences, Wroth not only calls attention to the changes in tone and perspective her female speaker brings to her sequence, but also posits a distinct origin of female desire and uniquely dire obstacles to its expression. What is more, in the discursive distance between the Pamphilia who is assaulted by Venus in her dream vision and the waking Pamphilia who speaks and who is able to register the impact of her dream, Wroth begins to Jay the groundwork for the emergence of a fully integrated desiring female subject. 22 Catherine Belsey argues that "to be a subject is to have access to signifying practice, to identify with the 'I' who speaks." 23 Although the present voice of Pamphilia speaks the 'T' of the sonnet subject, Wroth's sonnet lover has only begun to inhabit this position; still the passive victim of sonnet rhetoric, Pamphilia is not yet in control of her own desires, nor can she envision a means of escape from her painful predicament. The difference between the two voices of Pamphilia-one past, one present-is, of course, nowhere as great as the distance between Petrarch' s speaker as lover of Laura and Petrarch' s speaker as saved poet in his first sonnet. For qui te unlike Petrarch, who shows that the lover' s redemption in the Canzaniere's final poems transforms him, Wroth emphasizes from the very first sonnet of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus the sheer arduousness involved in shaping Pamphilia' s final, authoritative voice. Wroth must piece together for Pamphilia the remnants of the sonnet lady fragmented by Petrarchan poetics in order to render her a self-possessed agent by the end of the sequence. In Belsey's words, "to be able to speak is to be able to take part in the contest for meaning which issues in the production of new subjectpositions, new determinations of what it is possible to be." 24 Wroth' s task in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is to create, sonnet by sonnet, the possibility for a subject-position inhabitable by a desiring, yet chaste-and therefore culturally credible and authoritative -female lover. Toward the middle of her sequence, Wroth recalls Ovid's Narcissus and Echo myth, continuing to underscore the dangers of a poetics of desire reliant upon the transformation of its object. In what 1 would argue is a deliberately confusing revision of Ovid's myth, Wroth positions Pamphilia as not quite Narcissus, not quite Echo, in retelling the tale of the fatal Joss of identity that results from self-indulgent desire:

22

Heather Dubrow disagrees. See Echoes of Desire, pp. 138-42, where Dubrow argues that in Pl, "Wroth presents not change but stasis" (p. 139). 23 Catherine Belsey, The Subject ofTragedy: ldentity and Dif.ference in Renaissance Drama (New York, 1985), p. 5. 24 Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, p. 6.

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When hott and thirsty to a well 1 came Trusting by that to quench part of my flame, Butt ther 1 was by love afresh imbrac'd; Drinke 1 could nott, butt in itt 1 did see My self a living glass as well as shee, For love to see him self in truly plac'd. (P53.9-14)

The sonnet's ambiguous final lines make the substance of Pamphilia's vision quite difficult to discern. Pamphilia begins in Narcissus' s place, stopping by a well for a drink ta quench the inner flames of desire. And like Narcissus, she is "by love ... imbrac' d" upon seeing her own reflection in the well. But when Pamphilia, who as a female lover is already an imprecise mirroring of Ovid' s self-regarding male lover, sees her image, she sees it "as well as she," the expected pronoun "he" (for Narcissus) replaced by its feminine counterpart. The gender confusion suggcsts that Pamphilia shares her plight not only with Narcissus, but also with the nymph Echo, Narcissus's female wooer, whose powers to initiate speech were taken from her and whose unrequited love of Narcissus destroyed her body. In Wroth's revision of the Narcissus story, Pamphilia intriguingly assumes characteristics of both Ovidian lovers, though importantly without falling prey to the consuming desire responsible for their respective metamorphoses. Pamphilia departs from the Narcissus of Ovid's myth by recognizing the image in the water and by successfully avoiding its dangers. In Ovid's account, when Narcissus catches sight of himself in the water, he believes his image to be another youth. He misapprehends the beautiful abject of his gaze, conceiving of its splendor in poetic terms typically reserved for emblazoning feminine beauty. Like so many of the desired-and ultimately transformed-women of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the likeness is still, silent, and dismembered for praise: Astraughted like an ymage made of Marble stone to lyes, There gazing on his shadowe still with fixed staring eyes. Stretcht ail along vpon the ground. it doth him good to see His ardent eyes which like two starres full bright and shyning bee. And eke his fingars, fingars such as Bacchus might beseeme, And haire that one might worthely Apollos haire it deeme. His beardlesse chinne and yuorie necke, and eke the perfect grace Of white and red indifferently bepainted in his face. 25

25

W. H. D. Rouse, Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses (London, 1961 ), 3.517-32.

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Enraptured by his own image, Narcissus becomes Jess of a man, losing his substance as he wastes away from longing. In becoming the desired object of his own male gaze, he dies a feminine death, metamorphosed into a flower, a common early modem emblem for untried female sexuality. That Narcissus's own gaze could be responsible for his demise suggests that the power of the gaze transcends the agency of the individual who possesses it, that it is the subject position of gazer rather than the individual gazing that holds the power to transform the always already feminized object of desire. Among its other contemporary lessons, Ovid' s tale of narcissistic love dramatizes the dangers of aspiring toward total erotic and poetic autonomy. Clearly, for Pamphilia to follow Narcissus's example of an excessive and superficial self-regard would mean a kind of subjective and poetic suicide. On the other extreme, however, the tale of Echo illustrates the equally tragic consequences of complete erotic and linguistic self-surrender. A nymph jealously condemned by Juno always to repeat only the last words she hears, Echo relentlessly pursues her beloved but reluctant Narcissus, who, unsurprisingly, is attracted to her voice because it echoes back his own words. For her part, Echo, with the slight linguistic agency left to her, recites Narcissus's words back with a meaning very much her own: By chaunce the stripling be strayde from ail his companie, Sayde: is there any body nie? straight Echo answerde: I. Amazde he castes his eye aside, and looketh round about, And corne (that ail the Forrest roong) aloud he calleth out. And corne (sayth she:) he looketh backe, and seeing no man ollowe Why fliste, he cryeth once againe: and she the same doth hallowe, He still persistes and wondring much what kinde of thing it was From which that answering voyce by turne so duely seemde to passe, Said: let vs ioyne. She (by hir will desirous to haue said, In fayth with none more willingly at any time or stead) Said: let vs ioyne. And standing somewhat in hir owne conceit, Upon these wordes she left the Wood, and forth she yeed eth streit, To coll the louely necke for which she longed had so much, He runnes his way and will not be imbraced of no such. And sayth: 1 first will die ere thou shalt take of me thy pleasure. 26

Narcissus quickly retreats from Echo when he tïnally sees that her voice does not register his desires but her own embodied eroticism. Pining, however, reduces her to a mere voice with no body left to signify her desires. For Wroth and her sonnet lover, Echo's fate stands as an admonitory tale about a desiring woman left only with the ability to imitate masculine discourse. The threat of Echo is the danger that female subjectivity may never be understood when its only means of communication is but a 26

Rou se, Shakespeare 's Ovid, 3.473-87.

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disembodied echo of masculine ideas. JoAnn DellaNeva's observations concerning Petrarch' s own negotiation between the two discursive extremes represented by Narcissus and Echo readily apply to Wroth's own poetic choices as a female poet confronting Ovid' s Petrarchan legacy: The mythical figure of Narcissus is, thus, like the self-assertive poet who is frustrated by the unintelligibility of autonomous language. Both Narcissus and Echo are doomed to frustration because they cannot attain a mutually satisfying love. They are similar to the two poles of literary discourse-the completely autonomous and the wholly imitative-which must be reconciled if the poem is to be both writable and readable. 27

The threat of Narcissus for any sonneteer, John Freccero has argued, is in fact already inherent in the progress of a typical Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Freccero elucidates the elaborate poetic assumptions undergirding Petrarch' s search for a wholly autonomous poetics, explaining that in the Canzoniere, the poet creates a self-enclosed subjective hermeneutic circle and gradually becomes synonymous with his own art-a verbal autonomy "correspond[ing] to the sin of idolatry." 28 Petrarch's laure!, then, "stands for a poetry whose real subject matter is its own act and whose creation is its own author." 29 In creating a figure like Laura who in turn creates the poet' s reputation as poet laureate, Petrarch develops a sign system in the sonnet sequence that closes off ail extraliterary referentiality to the living Laura; like Narcissus' s wooing of his image, his becomes a futile exercise finally ending in complete subjective self-enclosure. Freccero, invoking one of Petrarch's own metaphors from the Canzoniere, observes that Laura' s eyes are "homicidal mirrors in which her narcissistic lover finds spiritual death." 30 This quest for auto-referentiality blurs the distinction between creator (poet) and created text (the poet's "corpus"), subject and object. According to Kathleen Perry, "such poetic subjectivity, in which Petrarch identifies himself with his imagery, his language, his poem, makes distinction between self and other, and therefore any selfknowledge, impossible." 31 Attending to the wrong kind of poetic mirror, then, ends in an annihilating self-absorption.

27

JoAnn DellaNeva, "Poetry, Metamorphosis, and the Laurel: Ovid, Petrarch and Scève," French Forum 7 (1982), 203. Maureen Quilligan advances a similar argument about Wroth's use of the Echo myth in the Urania, claiming that "Echo stages the problem of the Jacobean female author" ("The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth's Urania Poems," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus [Chicago, 1990], p. 312). 28 John Freccero,'The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch' s Poetics," Diacritics 5 ( 1975), p. 37. 29 Freccero, "Fig Tree," p. 34. 3 ° Freccero, "Fig Tree," p. 39. 31 Kathleen Perry, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard (New York, 1990), p 115.

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If Petrarch-in love with a beloved who is but a reflection of his own imagination-is tempted toward the pole of narcissistic idolatry in his sonnet sequence of unfulfilled erotic desire, Wroth negotiates a different route to self-expression. She replaces idolatry with a process of self-fashioning contingent upon a kind of introspection free of superficial, narcissistic vision. Wroth forges a poetic mirror in which a private dialogue of self with self encourages poetic and persona! development rather than self-consumption and debilitating silence, yet one that also avoids the frequent contemporary charges of coy, narcissistic behavior levelled against reluctant or inaccessible sonnet ladies. By replacing Narcissus's mirror with a glass in which her speaker might regard herself "truly," Wroth revises the Ovidian myth into one advocating self-knowledge rather than a closed-off eroticism and a stifled poetic voice. Moreover, Wroth's revision of the Narcissus myth within a larger sequence that--except for its title-refuses to name Amphilanthus, rearranges the logic of desire that structures most male-authored sonnet sequences. The idolatrous Petrarchan poetics informing the sonnets ofWroth's most famous Elizabethan models typically contributes to the notorious difficulty in concluding their sequences. The inevitable failure of the sonnet lover to consummate his relationship with the increasingly distant (or dead) sonnet mistress records the speaker' s sacrifice of erotic fulfillment to the poetic autonomy and fame his love poetry brings. 32 The very act of composing the sequence, Campbell suggests, becomes "a surrogate for the act of loving itself." 33 Sidney' s Astrophil concludes his sonnet cycle disappointed at his failure to woo Stella succcssfully, feebly giving up on his beloved, who remains both his "only joy" and his "only annoy" (108.13, 14). The final sonnet of Samuel Daniel' s De lia similarly ends in despair and poetic impotence; Daniel' s lover is still complaining of his "griefs longlived" (63.12) and daims that "I can say no more, 1fear1 said too much" (63.14). 34 Michael Drayton's ldea, too, concludes with his hapless speaker lamenting both his unending love and his inability to continue his poems: "my heart wanting yet, must break. /My tongue must cease to tell my wrongs, /And make my sighs to get them tongues; / Yet more than this to her belongs" (18.11-14). 35 Likewise, Shakespeare's speaker ends his sequence still his "mistress' thrall" (154.12), frustrated by his inability to alleviate his longing and anger. Whereas Petrarch's diminished lover is made whole again through divine vision, the sonnet lovers of most of Petrarch's Elizabethan imitators remain disheartened and defeated, mere shadows of their former, witty selves.

32

The notable English exception to this is Edmund Spenser's Amoretti where Spenser avoids the self-enclosed circularity of Petrarchan poetics by creating a Protestant poetics that privileges erotic reciprocity in Christian marriage. 33 Campbell, "Unending Desire," p. 86. 34 Arundel! Esdaile, ed., Daniel's "Delia" and Drayton 's "/dea" (London, 1908). Following this final sonnet, Daniel's Delia concludes further with an ode, written in a similarly despondent tone, and a Pastoral that issues a call to love even in spi te of Hon or' s influence. 35 Esdaile, Daniel's "Delia" and Drayton's "/dea."

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The three sonnets that immediately follow the implicit allusion to Narcissus in P53 reveal that Wroth's speaker, like her Elizabethan predecessors, envisions the possibility of simply wasting away from unfulfilled desire. Pamphilia imagines herself reduced to ashes, consumed by the unquenchable flames of her desire: Mine eyes can scarce sustaine the flames my hart Doth trust in them my passions to impart, And languishingly strive to show my love; My breath nott able is to breathe least part Of that increasing fuel! of my smart; Yett love I will till 1 butt ashes prove. (P55.9-14)

In the manuscript copy of the sequence, P55 is followed by Pamphilia's signature, as if the sequence has corne to a close. The cycle continues, however, and raises a new resistance to the self-consuming conclusions of laureate poetics. Just as Wroth's constant speaker has avoided the potential threat of suicide embodied by the shepherdess in the first song, she similarly refuses to conclude her poetry in the masculinist language of erotic failure, as the diminished lover of the Petrarchan tradition. Nor does she choose to follow the example of Petrarch in the Canzaniere and allow Pamphilia a spiritual escape from her desire. Rather, she forges for Pamphilia a poetic conclusion in which erotic and poetic success are wholly redefined. Before Pamphilia can completely escape the circular hermeneutic of the Petrarchan sequence, she must find her way out of the poetic labyrinth that constitutes Wroth' s crown-or corona-of fourteen sonnets about two-thirds of the way through the sequence. Typically, a corona is formed by repeating the last line of each sonnet as the first line of the next poern and by repeating the first line of the corona's initial sonnet as the last line of the final sonnet. Wroth inherited the corona frorn both her uncle Philip Sidney, who used a corona of ten dizains in his Old Arcadia and her father, Robert Sidney, who included a partial corona in his own, unfinished sonnet sequence. As Naomi J. Miller observes, Wroth's introductory image in her crown, the "thread of love" (P77 .14 ), closely refers back to the "saving thread" of her father' s sequence, which for his sonnet lover is a succession of his mistress' faults and is meant to help him escape the foolishness of love. 36 By contrast, Miller suggests, Pamphilia's thread of love is inscribed in the finished form of the crown, and especially in its deliberate repetition of lines, so that "Pamphilia's voice itself becomes her thread of love expressed, revealing her chosen path through the labyrinthine turns of her male

36

See Miller' s extended discussion of the relationship between Wroth' s use of the crown and that of both her father and uncle in Changing the Subject, pp. 42--44, 158.

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beloved' s tluctuating behavior." 37 Yet even more than a labyrinth of male inconstancy, Pamphilia' s elaborate labyrinth is constructed from the myths that tell the staries of heroism that condone, and even celebrate, the harsh suppression of female desire. Even as Wroth's corona looks back to the sequences of her father and uncle, her use of the labyrinth reaches back further to Petrarch and to Ovid. In the Canzoniere, Petrarch figures the difficult progress of his love for Laura as a labyrinth: "ln thirteen twenty-seven, and precisely / at the first hour of the sixth of April / I entered the labyrinth, and I see no way out" (21 1.12-14 ). For Petrarch, the labyrinth is at once temporal, affective, and poetic; each sonnet records his speaker's steps and missteps in desire's maze. But although the labyrinth may be confusing and seemingly inescapable, it is not an entirely unpleasant place for Petrarch's lover; there is unmistakable pleasure in his imprisonment. In the same sonnet where Petrarch introduces the image of the labyrinth, he declares that "Virtue, honor, beauty, gracious bearing, / Sweet words have caught me in her lovely branches /in which my heart is tenderly entangled" (211.9-11 ). His eloquent account of suffering and his place as a laureate poet depend precisely on the severity of his entanglement-in the laure! as well as in the labyrinth-that gives rise to his poetry. In Petrarch's poetic meanderings, we are meant to see his folly in love, particularly when we read his labyrinth against Ovid's representation of Daedalus's labyrinth in the Metamorphoses. 38 Ovid's nearly impenetrable labyrinth confines the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of King Minos's wife Pasiphae and a bull sent in punishment by Poseidon. The hero Thcscus, intcnding to kil! the Minotaur in order to end its periodic demand of young Athenian sacrifices, attempts the maze with the help of Ariadne, who weaves a thread to help him find his way out. After his escape, Theseus seduces and then abandons the devoted Ariadne and returns to a triumphant welcome in Athens, taking sole credit for his success. The threat associated with female desire, then, is heroically repudiated, first by destroying the Minotaur (hated by King Minos because it revealed Pasiphae's adultery) and second, by leaving the once-chaste Ariadne behind on Naxos. Ovid's tale thus becomes, as Nancy K. Miller suggests, "an account which figures a trajectory that takes place essentially between men." 39 By contrast, Petrarch's revision of the labyrinth, rather than celebrating the heroism of an escape from the maze

37

Miller, Changing the Subject, p. 142. Musa notes (Canzoniere, p. 643, n. 14) that in the Renaissance, the labyrinth had symbolic connections to the Underworld and, in the medieval period, also represented a kind of purgatorial testing ground for heroes. Although these meanings undoubtedly also inform Petrarch's allusion to the labyrinth in sonnet 211, embedded allusions to the myth of Pasiphae and the Minotaur in the following sonnet suggest Ovidian resonances as well. 39 Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York, 1988), p. 283. Cf. Sara Mack, Ovid (New Haven, 1988); Mack argues that Ovid is himself critical in his treatment ofTheseus. She observes that Ovid buries the momentum ofTheseus's various pursuits in a series of narrative digressions, and calls Ovid's account of Theseus a "nonstory" (p. 140). 38

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and from its ties to female desire, prolongs the entrapment and revels in the solitary fumbling and contradictory declarations of its errant lover. Petrarch' s fame resides precisely in the difficulty of his lover' s erotic pursuits, whereas Ovid' s Theseus wins accolades for the ease with which he first destroys the monstrous evidence of female Just and avoids its entanglement s himself. Wroth's labyrinth positions Pamphilia squarely within the Petrarchan-O vidian tradition but reconfigures both the meaning of the obstacle that the maze represents for her as well as the significance of her escape. Wroth does not confine Pamphilia to retrace the missteps of any one of the figures of Ovid' s account. Instead, she cunningly endows Pamphilia with attributes belonging to each of them, combining the powers of artistry, heroism, and feminine wit in her sonnet lover. Pamphilia is at once Daedalus, the labyrinth's creator (who, Ovid reveals, also had difficulty finding his way out), Theseus, who destroys the monster at the maze's center, and Ariadne, the chaste woman who provides the thread of escape. The twists and turns of Pamphilia' s labyrinth, however, are constituted by the remnants of its Petrarchan history-its alluring but dangerous definitions of desire as painful, irrational, and fraught with impossible contradiction s. 40 As Pamphilia negotiates the labyrinth, she confronts the sorts of obstacles that alternately delight and agonize Petrarch' s speaker and characterize his sonnets. The poems in the corona, in fact, are among the most thoroughly Petrarchan in Wroth's sequence. For the first time in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Cupid's promises begin to appeal to Pamphilia: "For hapy smarting is itt with smale paine, / Such as although, itt pierce your tender hart/ And burne, yet burning you will love the smart" (PS0.12-14). In the center of the crown we find Pamphilia, in fact, quite uncharacteristically singing Cupid's praises, apparently conquered by eros after valiantly struggling against its dangerous effects in the pre-corona sonnets. Seemingly converted to Cupid's power, Pamphilia espouses a familiar, and decidedly Petrarchan, belief concerning the relationship between her desire and the creation of erotic art. The tale of Ovid' s Pygmalion looms suspiciously in the background: Love will a painter make you, such, as you Shall able bee to drawe your only deere More lively, parfett, lasting, and more true Then rarest woorkman, and to you more neere, Thes be the least, then al! must needs confess Hee that shunns love doth love him self the less. (P83.9-14)

° Cf. Daniel's Delia, sonnet 43, lines 1-2: "Since the first look that led me to this error, / To this thought's-maze ... "(in Esdaile, Daniel's "Delia" and Drayton's "ldea"). 4

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If Pamphilia' s maze is a poetic rendering of the traditional representations of des ire that have entrapped her, its ultimate seduction-and its most monstrous threat-is the promise that a Petrarchan-Ovidian poetics can alleviate her erotic suffering. Figured here as a visual aesthetic, such a poetics entails replacing the beloved with a work of art, one "more neere" to the lover than the actual beloved. Ovid's account of Pygmalion's aversion to ail women and his subsequent creation of a waxen statue which becomes the object of his desire provides yet another cautionary tale for the representation of female subjectivity and desire. Such examples, after ail, are precisely those responsible for the Petrarchan triangle of lover-artwork-beloved, from which the living female beloved is eventually eliminated altogether. 41 That Pamphilia, once outside the maze, never chooses to "paint" her lover in verse suggests the inadequacy of this particular dynamic of desire and creation for her poetic purposes. The kind of art that tempts her here in the heart of the labyrinth, though it may indeed offer her complete interpretive contrai of her beloved, is an inherently selfish mode!, one which too easily returns to the trap of Petrarchan objectification and unfulfilled desire, where the only desirable lovers are those who are copied from life to be transformed into the stuff of fantasy. Pamphilia, who, Theseus-like, defeats the threat of Petrarchan poetic autonomy at the center of the labyrinth, finds her way out only by reiterating its initial question: "In this strange labourinth how shall 1 turne?" But Pamphilia' s escape is hardi y complete, for rather than a confident recontextualization of the li ne that begins the corona, her words remain questioning and unresolved. 42 She has, however, resisted the allure of Petrarchanism's idolatry even as she continues in the difficulties of her desire. The final movement of Wroth's sequence works to privilege a different kind of image--one, quite paradoxically, removed from the power of the gaze. For Pamphilia, the danger inherent in the image of the beloved lies in the consequences of desire inspired by the sight of him: When 1 beeheld the Image of my deere With greedy lookes mine eyes would that way bend, Fear, and desire did inwardly contend; Feare to bee mark'd, desire to drawe still neere,

41

Compare, too, sonnet 13 of Daniel' s Delia, where the lover explicitly conceives of himself as a failed version of Narcissus (in Esdaile, Daniel's "De lia" and Drayton 's "ldea"). 42 On this point, compare Beilin (Redeeming Eve, pp. 232-42), who argues that in the corona Wroth redirects Pamphilia' s love for Amphilanthus toward a love of the divine: "In the 'Crowne,' Pamphilia celebrates love as 'true Vertue' and exhorts her readers to follow a new Cupid-figure who represents divine love" (p. 234). Roberts calls the crown a "failed attempt to idealize passion" (introduction to Poems, p. 46), while Jones observes that by the end of the crown the "knowledge of true love" is still in doubt (Currency of Eros, p. 152).

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And in my soule a speritt wowld apeer, Which boldnes waranted, and did pretend To bee my genius, yett 1 durst nott !end My eyes in trust wher others seemed soe cleere, Theo did 1 search from whence this danger 'rose, If such unworthynes in mee did rest As my sterv'd eyes must nott with sight bee blest; When jealousie her poyson did disclose; Yett in my hart unseene of jealous eye The truer Image shall in triumph lye. (P98)

The turn in the sonnet marks the interiorization of her beloved' s image to a place unobscured by the gendered power relations attendant upon vision. She rebukes the unclear "speritt" that appears within her and prctcnds to be her source of poetic inspiration, refusing to trust her eyes to a false muse who encourages her reliance upon sight. The "truer Image" of the last line, an enhanced verbal mirroring of the "Image" in the first, removes the threat of the ')ealous eye," the appetitive desire of selfconsuming passion. By incorporating the beloved's image within herself, Pamphilia not only hides it from public view, but also protects herself both from inhabiting the potentially dangerous position of gazing subject and from its concomitant power to destroy or to be destroyed by a poetics of vision. With this (paradoxically) non-visual image within her--0ne felt rather than seen-Pamphili a avoids the fate of the Ovidian artist-creator who wittingly or unwittingly transforms the object of desire into symbol, or if unrequited, is himself transformed. The poem points to the existence of the image, but stops short of describing it directly, a move simultaneously referential and nonreferential. She can possess the image but it cannot possess her. Wroth' s last sonnets record Pamphilia' s graduai disaffection with poetry as an adequate means to express desire. She has found the verse of the sonnet tradition, with its inevitable ties to the Petrarchan-Ovidian gaze, a false and insufficient measure of the interior image she harbors. She discovers that it is no longer the beloved but the poetry itself that holds the potential for distraction and violence, and she detects the power fictions possess not simply to relate but also to shape desire: To mee itt seems as ancient fictions make The starrs ail fashions, and ail shapes partake While in my thoughts true forme of love shall live. (PI00.12-14)

As in the first sonnet of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth posits a counter-text against the fictions that attempt to seduce Pamphilia. Here, however, the counter-text takes precedence over the original, as Wroth cunningly creates for Pamphilia an image which

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she refuses to render visible or otherwise emblematic. The "true forme" of love, in direct opposition to pleasures enjoyed with the eyes in earlier sonnets, resides "in [her] thoughts," and thus is a thoroughly interior experience. And unlike the violent scene of martyrdom in the first sonnet, Pamphilia's hidden image deprives her audience of the powerful position of viewing an opened woman. Whereas Pamphilia has been variously laid open to public view in sonnets describing interiorized scenes of torture and recurring internai allegorical battles, Wroth closes Pamphilia' s body from view as she closes the body of her sequence. Her readers' vision-and their own ability to view Pamphilia as object-is finally obscured. Refusing to imitate the elosing sonnets of Petrarch' s Canzuniere by rescuing Pamphilia through the intervention of God's correction, Wroth faces a challenge in concluding her sequence much the same as that faced by Elizabethan male sonneteers. Rather than concluding with the disempowering silence of the Petrarchan wooer whose own text has rendered him powerless, Wroth ends her sequence in a silence that signais her escape from the self-enclosure of Petrarchan poetics. As part of what Jones has called the "expiatory move [that] shapes the sequence," Pamphilia dismisses the genre entirely, having discovered and used its power for her own, self-fashioned authority. 43 She recognizes that the sonnets are merely partial, fragmented textual portraits whose boundaries, as a full-fledged speaking subject, she necessarily exceeds. Pamphilia's last sonnet announces her final refusai to allow her desire to escape her authorial contrai: My muse now hapy, lay thy self to rest, Sleepe in the quiett of a faithfull love, Write you noe more, butt lett thes phant'sies move Sorne other harts, wake nott to new unrest ... Leave the discource of Venus, and her sunn To young beeginers, and theyr brains inspire With storys of great love, and from that fire Gett heat to write the fortunes they have wunn, And thus leave off, what's past showes you can love, Now lett your constancy your honor prove.

(P103.l-4, 9-14)

Pamphilia becomes the voice of experience as she commands her muse to rest, that is, to assume the passive role that Pamphilia herself occupied in the opening sonnet of the sequence. 44 She contrasts the constancy of the "quiett of a faithfull love" to "the

43

Jones, Currency of Eros, p. 152. Here, I disagree with Feinbcrg, who argues that in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, "Wroth' s Musc has been an assumed partncr, not absent, but a tacit collaborator" ("Invention," p. 189). 44

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discource of Venus," which, through its stories, incites the desire to write. Pamphilia' s resolution to stop writing ultimately demonstrates her authority over the linguistic artifacts of desire, her resistance to absorption by desire' s poetic conventions and histories. Hers is far from Sidney' s final couplet in Astrophi! and Stella, where Astrophil, giving up his pursuit of poetry and Stella, concludes with resignation: "That in my woes for thee thou art my joy, /And in my joyes for thee my only annoy" (108.13-14). Sidney's conclusion re-enacts the narcissistic fate of the speaker whose love for the textual version of his beloved has replaced his love of the living woman outside the sequence. Finding a middle path between this kind of self-absorption on one hand and the threat of appropriation by a masculine tradition on the other, Wroth concludes her sequence with Pamphilia' s fulfillment in spi te of Amphilanthus' s absence. Pamphilia experiences neither despair at her beloved's loss, nor consummation. Either conclusion would simply reinscribe the necessity of a masculine presence for the validation of female desire. By dismantling the mode! of Ovidian metamorphosis so crucial to Petrarchan poetry, Wroth endows Pamphilia with erotic control, but without the specter of violence or self-entrapment, forging a poetics that does not rely on the possession of the beloved (either literally or rhetorically) for its success. Perhaps most important, however, is that by the end of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth has removed the power of the metamorphic gaze from the poetry of desire and from Pamphilia's own materials of self-definition. Consequently, the sequence undermines the intimate relationship between sight and eros-and especially that between the male gaze and the violent metamorphosis of women-that structures Petrarchan poetics. The point of a willow poetics, as opposed to laureate Petrarchanism, is that it can be escaped. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus traces the (by no means steady) route from the inevitable mourning and violence of a woman caught in male-authored fictions of desire, to a kind of female desire defined in terms of self-possession. 45

45

1 would like to thank Judith Anderson, Joan Pong Linton, Mario Digangi, Katharine Maus, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this essay. 1 would also Iike to thank the participants in attendance at the ACMRS session on Mary Wroth (February 1997), and especially Naomi Miller, for their lively conversation and helpful suggestions.

A Bridge

"The human face divine": Identity and the Portrait from Locke to Chaucer ANNABEL PATTERSO N

1

f asked where to go for the first modern theory of identity, most p. eople, 1 imagine, would point one in the direction of John Locke, more specifically, to the chapter in Locke' s Essay concerning human understanding entitled "Of Identity and Diversity." Those paired terms might also seem pertinent to the late twentieth century in America and particularly to a profession reeling from the impact of identity politics. But Locke's discussion of identity is surprisingly energizing if we make it look backwards rather than forwards, so that what appears to be a bad case of hysteron proteron, my beginning at the wrong end of the story, is fully intentional. The story 1 want to tell, topsy-turvy, is about the relation between theories of identity in the late medieval and early modern period and images of identity, concretely and yet mysteriously conveyed, in the portrait. One of my aims is to throw into question some recently fashionable ideas about cultural history and periodization and to suggest that Locke is not so clearly the threshold figure between modernity and premodernity, let alone the herald of postmodernity, that bad cultural and intellectual history have led us to believe. Another is to soften the distinction between portraits and self-portraits. The third part of my agenda is ideologically inflected. Because the portrait is the one site where material and immaterial, external and internai conceptions of identity could momentarily fuse, it often contributed to, as well as displaying, acts of self-determination, such as the choice of one' s religion or one' s relationship to the law. In an age of mechanical reproduction and the ubiquitousness of the image, this function has largely disappeared; but in early modern England, and even in the very early modern England we refer to as late medieval, this argumentative role for the portrait was probably deeply exciting.

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John Locke was certainly an example of someone whose identity had been shaped by the religio-political circumstances of his time. Much of the Essay concerning human understandinf? was written in political exile in Holland, to which Locke had fled in 1683 to avoid possible retribution by Charles II for his presence in the circle around the earl of Shaftesbury and others who attempted to exclude the king's Catholic brother from the succession. The Essay, eventually published in England after James II had been banished in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, was the only one of his major works that Locke acknowledged as his own, whereas the Two Treatises on Government, so crucial to the development of liberal political thought in the United States, remained anonymous until just before he died, at which point he willed it to the Bodleian Library. Even the Essay, though ostensibly a contribution to epistemology, contains a not-quite hidden argument for religious toleration, the only possible position, Locke thought, that rational persons cou Id take after seeing the often horrifie consequences of the European Reformation. At the other (wrong) end of my story, the early fifteenth-century portraits of Chaucer, one of which was mediated by the personality of Thomas Hoccleve, were themselves intlected by the proto-Reformation that resulted from the teachings of Wyclif. At ail stages between these two moments men and women would find their identity in question or at stake (sometimes in the literai as well as the metaphorical sense) precisely because religious choice was indeed a choice, no longer settled for them by others or beyond interrogation. In Locke' s Essay the definition of persona! identity proceeds by aggregation. First, Locke declares that the principium individuationis throughout the cosmos is existence itself, a principle shared by ail living creatures, including trees. Beyond that, identity consists in "the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body." Beyond embodiment, however, lies persona! identity, or selfhood, which consists in being "the same thinking thing in different times and places: For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to corne, and would be by distance of time or change of substance no more two persans than a man be two men by wearing other clothes today than he did yesterday, with a long or short sleep between. 1

There is a crucial emphasis here on the small and ordinarily unobtrusive word, "same": the same continued life, the same organized body, the same thinking thing, the same self, the same consciousness. This lexical percussion hammers home the philosopher's belief that what holds us together against the forces of disintegration, foremost among which is time, is a pact between body and mind. For persona! identity there is required

1

John Locke, Essay concerning human understanding ( 1690), ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 2.22.2, 6, 9, 10. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically.

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both material embodiment and cerebral self-consciousness, and the pact between them is proven by the act of writing. Later Locke insists: "Had 1 the same consciousness that I saw the ark and Noah's flood as that 1 saw an overflowing of the Thames last winter, or as that I write now, 1 could no more doubt that 1 that write this now, that saw the Thames overflowed last winter, and that viewed the flood at the general deluge, was the same self" (2.27.16). But thanks to his political experience and religious convictions, the causes both of his political exile and perennial caution, Locke adds yet another and unexpected element to his theory of identity, a juridical aspect. "In this persona! identity ," he asserts, "is founded ail the right and justice of reward and punishment, both here and in the hereafter," the latter being a more reliable discriminator of persona! responsibility: The Apostle tells us, that at the Great Day, when everyone shall receive according to his doings, the secrets of ail hearts shall be laid open. The sentence shall be justified by the consciousness ail persons shall have that they themselves, in what bodies soever they appear, or what substances soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions and deserve that punishment for them. (2.27.26)

lt is particularly worth noticing that Locke's definition excludes: ail of those notions about the past that have been so popular in recent decades-those notions that early modern men and women, and even more certainly medieval men and women, conceived of persona! identity only in relational, social terms. Remember, for instance, Francis Barker's The Tremulous Private Body, which was typical of a certain strain of criticism in the l 980s. According to Barker, the "pre-bourgeois" subject did not experience what we consider subjectivity at al!. His "place and articulation" are defined "not by an interiorized self-recognition ... but by incorporation in the body politic which is the king's body in its social form." Prior to the revolutionary wars of the midseventeenth century, men and women only knew themselves in terms of "patterns of fealty, reciprocity, obligation and command." 2 That is to say, they were only subjects in the sense of being ruled and restricted, not in the possession (or acquisition) of selfconscious self-determination. In hindsight, we can now recognize this doctrine as another version-a post-Foucauldian, post-Althusserian version---0f those condescending statements of the earlier twentieth century about how the Middle Ages gave way to the individualism of the Renaissance. Now the Renaissance itself is consigned to the era before se!f-consciousness; that is to say, Barker is Burckhardt in slower motion, with Samuel Pepys, not Erasmus, marking the arrivai of persons we recognize as ourselves. By substituting for Barker's Pepysian moment the marginally later Lockean moment as my starting point, 1 am not, clearly, arguing for a further postponement of modern subjectivity. On the contrary, Locke's position, rather than marking the transition to a new, modern view of identity, is retroactive, a summary and clarification

2

Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London, 1984), p. 31.

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of centuries of thought about where identity resides. And 1 choose to begin with Locke and move backwards to Chaucer and Hoccleve not only to throw into therapeutic confusion our teleological instincts, but also because for Locke persona] identity was (though he does not mention this in the Essay) deeply imbricated with its material representation: that is to say, the portrait. In the spring of 1688, a few months prior to the Williamite Revolution, when Locke was fifty-six, and still working on the Essay in Rotterdam, he wrote to his friend Edward Clarke requesting him to negotiate for the return of a portrait of Locke that was currently being held in England, he thought just for safe-keeping, by Thomas Stringer. Locke wished to have an engraving of the portrait made for the edition of the Essay that he was already hoping to publish in England. Stringer refused, on the grounds that he was too fond of the portrait because of whom it represented to let it out of his hands, and claiming, in any case, that Locke had given it as a gift to himself and his wife and could not now reclaim it. "It must needs be much to my dissatisfaction," wrote Stringer to Clarke, to parte with that Picture .... because 1 can't see him here for whome 1 have soe harty a friendshipp, 1 do think my selfe not a Iittle prowde that my best Roome is adorned with his Resemblance, ... [and] You know Possession in this case is a good Confirmation of my Title, and unlesse he will give me good security on that poynt, 1 am resolved ... to stand stoutly in defence of it; It is the veneration 1 have for my old friend makes me thus valew his Picture, and untill I am well assured of its Returne to lvychurch, the high sheriffe with the Posse Commitatus shall not be able (under any pretence) to fetch it forth of my bands. Stringer then proceeded to dismiss the talk of engraving as a pretext, on the grounds that Locke's friend David Thomas owned another portrait "that is generally thought better paynted and is of a much ]esse size, and Consequently may be better secured from danger of hurt in Carriage." "Besides," he added, rather presumptuou sly, "such plates are always engraven not from paynt but draughts in black and white, and those draughts may be truer taken from the life, then any Picture, and more Exactly and advantagiously done in holland, (there being better Artists) then in England"; and he concluded by asking Clarke tolet Locke know "that because 1 can't gett the Substance to keepe here, 1 will make as much of his shadow as 1 can .... " 3 The picture in question (fig. 1) was painted by John Greenhill, sometime in the late l 660s, probably soon after Locke, at the age of thirty-five, had joined the household of Antony Ashley Cooper, later Lord Shaftesbury, as persona] physician and secretary. It shows Locke as a handsome, rather sensual, young Restoration person of standing. That 3

Stringer to Edward Clarke, 12 March 1688. The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976), 3:411, no. 1028. Subsequent references to this volume are cited parenthetically by each letter' s number.

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Locke wanted this image of himself to introduce the Essay, published when he was in his later fifties, is telling; but even more revealing is the intensity with which he now engaged in a symbolic as well as practical struggle with Stringer over possession of the portrait. Locke now wrote in person to Stringer, challenging his logic on the issues of ownership ("Sure 1 am you will never perswade any body else, that you think bona fide I gave it you whilst you dare not trust it again in my hands ... ") and resentfully rejecting the suggestion that he should find another original for the engraving: "I hope 1 may be allowd to be of age enough to know, if I would have a print of my self, what kinde will best please me" (no. 1038). Stringer replied at length, with many elaborate and somewhat creepy protestations of his loyalty, but raising the stakes of possession and evaluation alarmingly: " ... tho I have had an Exceeding valew for it, not for the Paynt and intrinsick worth, For that (as the case is) 1 should dispise, but for the sake of the Person it represents, which I can strongly aver, 1 truly loved, yett 1 doe now begin to believe by the Course you are taking that it may be in your power to bring the MAKE BATE to suffer a punishment answereable to the offence" (no. 1045). That is to say, Stringer threatened, perhaps in jest only, to destroy the picture rather than return it, on the grounds that it has caused this quarrel between erstwhile friends, and he has therefore become, mysteriously, a person capable of punishment. At this point Locke completely lost it. De Beer' s magnificent edition of Locke' s Correspondence includes a draft of his reply to Stringer, dripping with sarcasm: "I will write you downe amongst the ancient examples of [friendship]. the Pythias of our age denyd pore Damon his picture to have a draught made of it only because it was his. Had it been another mans tis like free liberall friendly Pythias could have found in his heart to part with it. ... 1 gave it you say you ... you say it and I deny it both very honest fellows the case is thus far equall here lies the oddes 1 sat for it and paid 15 pounds for it methinks therefor till you can shew some better title toit, [it is mine]" (no. 1046). Locke, who paid both in bodily patience, Sitzfleisch, and what he elsewhere calls "dry money" for his portrait, directly charges Stringer with hypocrisy, a charge also cast in pictorialist terms: '"tis not talkeing of themselves that makes mens characters, their actions paint them truer then any pen or pencil can." He then challenges his expertise on portrait technique and finally admits his psychological investment in the issue: "But if an old Batchelor had a minde to appear in a peruke and 20 years yonger in print, by havcing a plate copyed from a picture drawn soe long agon. me thinks an old freind should have found some other way to expresse his complaisance then to have sent him to another picture or his own old countenance neither of which he liked so well ... " (no. 1046). Locke sent a fair copy of this letter to Edward Clarke for further transmission, along with a very long cover letter berating Stringer and justifying himself. He focused particularly on the juridical aspect of this case of magically transferred identity: "Can you hold laughing at the Pithy Expression of MAKEBATE writ in great letters, as if he valued me more then my picture, witness his cariage; Or that if he spoiled the pictur, that would compose the difference. The pore man had ill luck to betray his forwardnesse

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to destroy it: For the wisdom of Salomon could not (you know) think of a surer mark, in the want of other proofs, whereby to judg, which of the two pretenders had no right" (no. 1047). Thus the representation has acquired the full symbolic force of an alter ego, less, however, like the Solomonic infant that so narrowly escaped dissection than a portrait of Dorian Gray in reverse, one which could hold off old age and th ose changes in embodiment that Locke, as a philosopher of identity, should perhaps have been able to contemplate with more dignity. Nevertheless, for all his petulant carryings-on, Locke seems to have lost this battle. The first English edition of the Essay appeared without a portrait; and for the second, in 1694, he provided an engraved version of a drawing of him made by his secretary Sylvester Brounower (fig. 2). lt shows him with the desired Restoration peruke, a sign of social standing, and with a face somewhere between the Greenhill image and that late-fiftyish "old countenance" from which he had tried to escape. There is one other document to which we can turn for Locke' s theory of visual identity. In September 1704, when Locke was seventy-two, he wrote to his friend Anthony Collins about two portraits recently executed by Sir Godfrey Kneller. One was, of course, a portrait of himself; the other was of his closest woman friend, Damaris Cudworth, now Lady Masham, in whose household and whose care Locke would shortly die. What is believed to be the portrait painted for Collins is now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. It closely resembles the more famous Kneller portrait of Locke that is now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. lt is a very different image of Locke from that which in 1694 had introduced the Essay concerning human understanding, yet according to Locke's philosophical theory of identity they must, somehow, be the same person. Kneller painted Locke, presumably at his own request, with his own grey hair and decidedly humbly dressed, his face unsurprisingly worn, but also apparently fi lied with anxiety. 1 have explained elsewhere some of the circumstances that might have weighed on Locke' s mind at this stage, apart from the pressures of simple mortality. 4 This image of Locke was first engraved by George Vertue for the 1714 edition of Locke's works. Vertue placed Locke, still head-and-shoulders, in a formai frame imitative of an oakleaf wreath, and gave him architectural and heraldic foundations, somewhat undoing thereby the ethical and emotional impact of the original (fig. 3). But in the l 760s it was reengraved by I. A. Cipriani, on the instructions of the Whig philanthropist Thomas Hollis, for the frontispiece of a new edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government (fig. 4), the edition that Hollis himself had produced and now proceeded to transmit to the American colonies. There it became extremely influential in the political thought of the American Revolution, especially in the hands of men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As the author of this work, which Locke, as 1 have said, never acknowledged until on his deathbed, he became an ideological icon.

4

See my Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), pp. 232-50.

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Kneller' s image became simpler and, though Jess tragic in expression, in certain formulaic ways more obviously vulnerable. The formai frame is replaced by a wreath open at the bottom; and Locke appears now as a lonely unsupported head (as it were decapitated), with only a small liberty cap between him and the empty space below. We do not know whether Locke hirhself designed (that is to say, arranged with Kneller) the tragic intensity of the late portraits; still Jess whether he imagined their capacity to symbolize his most daring political thought. His letter to Collins concerning the 1704 portrait speaks only of seemingly more mundane concerns, how he wishes his portrait to be framed ("I would have such a handsome frame as such pictures are now put in") and how to ensure that the paired portraits' value survive his own death: "As to my Ladys picture ... get Sir Godfry to write upon it with paint on the back side Lady Masham 1704 and on the backside of mine John Locke 1704. This ... is necessary to be done or else the pictures of private persans are lost in two or three generations and so the picture looses of its value it being not [known] whom it was made to represent." Y et Locke did preface these instructions by alluding to conversations with Collins "upon the principles of knowledg or the foundations of government," a significant pairing of topics. 5 Locke' s concern for the naming of the portraits makes a fine point about how identity, though caught in the image, needs to be recorded in words, names and dates, especially in the case of "private persons." Implicitly, he suggests that his identity should be understood in its intimate relation to Damaris Cudworth Masham's; but explicitly (as revealed earlier in the letter) it is his fame as a philosopher, as the author of the Essay concerning human understanding, and perhaps also of the Two Treatises, that will guarantee the portrait' s cultural importance. 6 For identity-for identification-the mind needs a body, and the body needs accoutrements; the portrait needs a famous name to retain its value, but it also needs a socially respectable frame. Alas, it is only Locke' s picture about which instructions are given for framing in the current fashion; and Damaris Cudworth Masham's portrait can now no longer be traced. Early modern identity, we can therefore suggest, was very much like modern identity; that is, in its mixture of self and social consciousness, of egocentricity and selfironization, of intellectual aspiration, economic constraints, persona! relationships, and public goals. But unlike modern identity, it could not take the portrait, still Jess, of course, the photograph, for granted. Admitting a few earlier exceptions, the English portrait was reinvented from scratch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As we start moving backwards from Locke, portraits become Jess ubiquitous than they were in his culture. Nevertheless, the exhibits that follow raise the same issues as those to which Locke has alerted us: 1) the continuity of the self over time; 2) the relation

5

De Beer, Correspondence, 8:389-90, no. 3624. See De Beer, Correspondence, 8:389: "When one hears you upon the principles of knowledg or the foundations of government. ... " Though attributing these tapies to Collins, Locke makes it clear that these are his tapies of conversation. 6

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between the persona! and the emblematic, what one is as compared to (though of course not as distinct from) what one stands for; and 3) the juridical aspect of identity, or ethical accountability. I also want to suggest that we need to rethink the theoretical distinction between the portrait and the self-portrait. When a man sits patiently for bis portrait at a particular stage of bis life, when he chooses the costume and coiffure (or its absence) that will be attached to bis name thereafter, he is as much engaged in selfportraiture as were, continuously, Rembrandt, or Chardin, or Pablo Picasso. Yet after bis death be may no longer be in control of bis visual identity, which, like any other traces be bas left behind, may be subject to wilful interventions by others, often interventions of an ideological character. Locke's series of self-representations have intcresting earlier precedents, seriatim portraits of other writers and intellectuals who were themselves concerned with the grounds and expression of persona! identity: John Milton, for instance, whom I quoted, without previously acknowledging it, in the first phrase of my title: the "human face divine." That phrase, brilliantly constructed to register the face's poise between material and immaterial, acquires added emotional poignancy when we remember where it appears, in Paradise Lost, 3.44, in Milton's opening lament for his lost eyesight. Portraits of Milton begin when be was a boy of ten; but here I focus only on the "Onslow" portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which shows Milton as a very young man, and on a portrait of him at the age of sixty-two, created first as a drawing (now at Princeton University) by William Faithorne, and later engraved for the 1670 edition of Milton' s History of Britain. What is reproduced here, howcver, is the re-engraving commissioned, again by Thomas Hollis, again for transmission to the North American colonies (fig. 5). In defining the program for Cipriani' s engraving, Hollis related the portrait to a crucial quotation from Paradise Lost: 1 Sing with mortal voice unchang 'd To hoarce or mute though fall'n on evil dayes, On evil da yes though fall' n and evil tongues In darkness and with dangers compast round, And solitude. (7.24-28)

This relation between image and text interrogates what it means to be "unchange d" in principle, though not, inevitably, in appearance. But if one now places this portrait beside Cipriani' s version of the earlier "Onslow" portrait (fig. 6), one can see how Hollis attempted to make continuity of principle exert a magical influence over embodiment. The young man, surrounded by a naturalistic and flourishing laure! wreath, and the old one whose wreath bas been recast in stone, are clearly the same person. Beneath them both floats the tin y liberty cap that appeared in Hollis' s emblematic Locke. Image over word, image and image side by side, assert together that the sixty-two-year-old bard was the same person, not only as the youth in bis early twenties, but also as the middle-aged intellectual revolutionary of the mid-century. There is a special irony involved in this late iconization of Milton. During the civil

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war, Milton had declared himself an iconoclast and in Eikonoklastes had attempted to destroy in words the image of the English king, Charles 1, as expressed in that amazingly successful work of royalist propaganda, Eikon Basilike (fig. 7). Yet after his death Milton himself became, in the hands of others, an icon of American revolutionary principles. There is reason to think that he would have forgiven himself this ethical contradiction. Remembering Locke' s spasm of vanity in his quarre! with Thomas Stringer-the story of identity kidnapped-it is psychologically interesting to note that in 1654, in his Second Defence of the English People, Milton defended himself, in a verbal self-portrait, against the charge that his appearance reflected a monstrous interior. At the heart of this identity crisis Jay Milton' s recent total blindness, a misfortune that his enernies interpreted as punishment on him for his revolutionary spokesmanship. His anonymous polemical opponent had compared him to Homer's blinded Polyphemus, though a miniature version thereof, "for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled, and bloodless form." So, wrote Milton in rebuttal: I certainly never supposed that I should have been obliged to enter into a competition for beauty with the Cyclops .... yet lest ... anyone, from the representations of my enemies, should be led to imagine that 1 have either the head of a dog or the horn of a rhinoceros, I will say something ... My stature certainly is not tall, but it rather approaches the middle than the diminutive. Yet what if it were diminutive when so many men, illustrious both in peace and war, have been the same: ... Nor, though very thin, was I ever deficient in courage or in strength .... At this moment I have the same courage, the same strength, though not the same eyes [as when a young man]; yet so little do they betray any external appearance of injury that they are as unclouded and bright as the eyes of those who most distinctly see. In this instance alone I am a dissembler against my will. My face, which is said to indicate a total privation of blood, is of a complexion entirely opposite to the pale and the cadaverous; so that, though I am more than forty years old, there is scarcely anyone to whom I do not appear ten years younger than 1 am; and the smoothness of my skin is not affected by the wrinkles of age. 7

And ail this, it is wise to remember, from a man who could no longer consult his own face in the mirror. 1 now want to move further back intime, into the late sixteenth century, to consider the series of portraits of himself that John Donne comrnissioned at various stages of his career. The first of these (fig. 8) is believed to derive from a lost miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, the most famous of the Elizabethan rniniaturists. It shows Donne in 1591 at age eighteen (Anno domini 1591 Aetatis suae 18) and very much the smart young man about town. Unfortunately the engraver, William Marshall, tended to butcher the portraits he

7

See John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), pp. 823-24.

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copied, so some creative imagination is required to summon up what the Hilliard original might have looked like. The second, now known as the "Lothian" portrait (fig. 9), dates probably from the late l 590s, when Donne was an Inns of Court man, that is, a hopeful lawyer-politician in training. Another miniature, by Isaac Oliver, dated 1616, is now at Windsor Castle; and Donne was also painted "Quadragenarii Effigies vera," from life at the age of forty; or so his son announced when publishing the portrait as an engraving for the posthumous Letters to Severa! Persans of Honour in 1651 (fig. 10). This portrait was done, then, considerably before he became Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedra) and one of the most famous preachers of his day. Yet the portrait itself now bangs in the Deanery of Saint Paul's, and the engraving assimilates in its legend the image of the still professionally thwarted (or at least undecided) Donne to the ecclesiastical and "Seraphical" one. The last of the series (fig. 11) is a portrait Donne insisted be taken of him in his shroud during his last illness in the early l 630s and thereafter, until his death, placed at the foot of his bed. The portrait itself has not survived, and the figure shows the crudely-engraved version by Martin Droeshout for the 1632 edition of Donne's last sermon, Death's Duel. Clearly, this image is a memento mori, in which individuality has been bumed away in the fires of age and the expectation (like Locke) of a Last Judgement. But if we look closely at the two early portraits, they do not lag far behind in emblematic significance. In the Marshall engraving, which originally appeared as the frontispiece to the second edition of Donne's poetry, the portrait sits on an ideologically controlling set of verses by Isaak Walton, Donne's first biographer, who was determined that everything Donne had done should look respectable to posterity: This was for youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit that Time Most count their golden Age; but t'was not thine. Thine was thy later yeares, so much refind From youths Drosse, Mirth, & Wit; as thy pure mind Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise Of thy Creator, in those last, best Dayes. Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which begins With Love; but endes, with Sighes, & Teares for Sins.

So W alton, who proclaimed the edition of the poems a typographical "emblem" of Donne's conversion from profane to sacred love, has converted also the portrait, transforming it explicitly into an emblem in the formai, peculiarly Renaissance sense of image-plus-verse, image explained and controlled by a moralizing subtext. But look again: over the youth' s head is a Spanish motto: Antes muerto que mudado (Sooner dead than changed). As Helen Gardner pointed out, 8 this was adapted

8

Helen Gardner, ed. John Donne: The Elegies and the Sangs and Sonnets (Oxford, 1965), p. 266; following the lead ofT. E. Terrell, "A Note on John Donne's Early Reading," Modern

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(by a simple change of gender from feminine to masculine) from the first sang in Montemayor's romance, the Diana; and here too Isaak Walton felt the need to intervene, bowdlerizing the message by mistranslation. Referring in his biography to this portrait as expressing Donne's youthful frivolity, Walton noted that his "Motta then was, 'How much shall 1 be chang'd / Before 1 am chang'd.'" For Gardner, who saw no difference in tone between these two early portraits ("The licentious young amorist," she wrote, "and the frustrated lover are the same persan, as the same eyes look out at us from the Marshall engraving and the Lothian portrait,") the motto "Sooner dead than changed" meant only that Donne had taken "as a boast of his constancy" to some young lady or other "the protestation of a fickle mistress" in a fictional romance. 9 For Walton, it meant that Donne had mysteriously prophesied, even in his most irresponsible moments, his later transformation into a pillar of the church. Neither noticed, however, one tiny emblematic element in the original miniature, the cross hanging in Donne's right ear. Gardner only registered it as a fashionable earring. But in 1591, the year after Donne's mother's marriage to a Roman Catholic, a cross in the ear would have been a scandalous statement of doctrinal defiance. While Elizabeth 1 stubbornly retained the use of a sil ver crucifix in her persona! chape!, the symbolic value placed on the cross, as Donne well knew, had been one of the central distinguishing features between the old religion and the Reformed. As the Reformation proceeded in England, not only the worship but the very presence of a cross was regarded as idolatry. To have oneself painted with a cross in one's ear, therefore, especially under the motto "Sooner dead than changed," was for a member of a known Roman Catholic family (the Heywoods) the equivalent of declaring a preference for martyrdom over apostas y. 10 Donne wrote an entire poem, The Cross, expressing this particular form of defiance. 1 quote only the first ten lines of the total sixty-four:

Language Notes 43 (1928), 318. This section of my essay overlaps with the opening of my "Donne in Shadows: Pictures and Poli tics," forthcoming in the John Donne Journal 16 ( 1998). 9 See Gardner, John Donne, p. xxvii. 10 My response to the iconographical detail differs somewhat from that of Dennis Flynn, who did notice its presence and comment on its significance: " ... it is inconceivable that an Elizabethan Protestant would wear such a cross. Of course only a Catholic who fancied himself a swordsman would wear a cross hanging from his ear." The identity that Flynn draws from this portrait, then, is that of the "Spanish and French ligeur captains" for whom "the religious and political differences over which the nation warred ... often seemed secondary to 'honor'" (John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility [Bloomington, Ind., 1995], p. 4). When Donnc's articulate response to the iconoclastie controversy is taken into account, however, the portrait seems less impudent and cavalier than self-dooming. There is no visible swagger; and the tiny little hand undermines the potential threat of the hilt it so unconvincingly ho Ids.

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