Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering 0888448252, 9780888448255

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Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering Edited by JOHN M. HILL, BONNIE WHEELER,

and R.F. YEAGER

Reflecting the strong aesthetic turn in literary studies, these powerful, persuasive essays keep an eye on the seductions of beauty while offering fresh approaches to medieval poetics. Significant new scholarship, they open out to a wide range of medieval poems and poetical features, as well as to the aesthetic preoccupations of nineteenth-century medievalism. The contributors honor Howell Chickering’s multi-faceted work on poetic energy, metrical surprise, and the sonic features of sense by,

collectively, moving insightfully across early medieval fragments, such as “Caedmon’s Hymn” and The Battle ofMaldon, to the art of depicting psychological states in Old English narrative, the sublime aesthetics of terror in Beowulf, and pitch as well as deep and surface proportioning in The Dream of the Rood. For Chaucer’s Age, well-researched contributions assess modes of beauty in Troilus and Criseyde, surprising unity in Chaucer on women and love, the aesthetic

implications of grammatical choices and forms, and the celebration of art in Gower’s French balades. Good fun is had with the artful humor of insatiable wives in the Canterbury Tales, along with the practical and gustatory aesthetic of Lydgate’s culinary poems. The focus on medieval poetry rounds out with thoughtful essays on mystical poetry and prose and on the challenges of translating ambiguity in S7r Gawain and the Green Knight. The gathering closes, however, in

intellectually and artistically striking ways with essays on Coleridge and medievalism, and, finally, the page design, ornamentation and typeface beauties of the Kelmscott Chaucer. Pleasure and delight abound in a most fitting tribute to the broad impact of the career of Howell Chickering, the G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature at Amherst College.

=e

RY DLLEGE

Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering

Reflecting the strong aesthetic turn in literary studies, these powerful, persuasive essays keep an eye on the seductions of beauty while offering fresh approaches to medieval poetics. Significant new scholarship, they open out to a wide range of medieval poems and poetical features, as well as to the aesthetic preoccupations of nineteenth-century medievalism. The contributors honor Howell Chickering’s multi-faceted work on poetic energy, metrical surprise, and the sonic features of sense by, collectively, moving insightfully across early medieval fragments, such as “Caedmon’s Hymn” and The Battle ofMaldon, to the art of depicting psychological states in Old English narrative, the sublime aesthetics ofterror in Beowulf, and pitch as well as deep and surface proportioning in The Dream of the Rood. For Chaucer’s Age, well-researched contributions assess modes of beauty in Troilus and Criseyde,

surprising unity in Chaucer on women and love, the aesthetic implications of grammatical choices and forms, and the celebration of art in Gower’s French balades.

Good fun is had with the artful humor of insatiable wives in the Canterbury Tales, along with the practical and gustatory aesthetic of Lydgate’s culinary poems. The focus on medieval poetry rounds out with thoughtful essays on mystical poetry and prose and on the challenges of translating ambiguity in S7r Gawain and the Green Knight. The gathering closes, however, in intellectually and artistically striking ways with essays on Coleridge and medievalism, and, finally, the page design, ornamentation and typeface beauties of the Kelmscott Chaucer. Pleasure and delight abound in a most fitting tribute to the broad impact of the career of Howell Chickering, the G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature at Amherst College.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/essaysonaestheti0O000unse_h9I7

HOW 4 ik HICKERING

Amherst College > 1965-2013 Photograph courtesy of Sara Jane Mo

SS

PAPERS

IN

MEDIAEVAL

STUDIES

25

Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering Edited by JOHN M. HILL, BONNIE WHEELER, and R.F. YEAGER

PONTIFICAL

INSTITUTE

OF MEDIAEVAL

STUDIES

Acknowledgments We are grateful for the support provided by anonymous donors and by the U.S. Naval Academy.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Essays on aesthetics and medieval literature in honor of Howell Chickering / edited by John M. Hill, Bonnie Wheeler, and R.F. Yeager. (Papers in mediaeval studies ; 25)

Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-88844-825-5 (bound). — ISBN 978-1-77110-358-9 (pdf)

1. English literature — Middle English, 1100-1500 — History and criticism. 2. English literature — Old English, ca. 450-1100 — History and criticism. 3. English poetry — Middle English, 1100-1500 — History and criticism. 4. Literature, Medieval — History and criticism. 5. Poetry, Medieval — History and criticism. 6. Middle Ages in literature. 7. Aesthetics in literature. I. Hill, John M., author, editor of compilation II. Wheeler, Bonnie, 1944-, editor of compilation III. Yeager, Robert F.,, author, editor of compilation IV. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies V. Series: Papers in mediaeval studies ; 25 PR255.E57 2014

820.9’001

© 2014

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 59 Queen’s Park Crescent East Toronto, Ontario, Canada Ms5$ 2C4

www.pims.ca MANUFACTURED

IN CANADA

C2014-901369-8

_C2014-901370-1

Contents

Abbreviations

Vil

Aesthetics and Earlier English Literature: An Introduction to the Gathering FRED C. ROBINSON The Aesthetics of “Cadmon’s Hymn” LESLIE LOCKETT

The Art of the Psychological Narrative in Old English and Old Saxon Verse GEORGE CLARK

Naming the Enemy and Identifying Ourselves: The Warriors of Maldon ARTHUR

35

BAHR_

Fear, Time, and Lack: The Egesa of Beowulf JOHN M. HILL’

Geometrical Proportion and the Music of Voweled Undersong in The Dream of the Rood

67

PEGGY A. KNAPP

Troilus and Criseyde and the Modes of Beauty

78

CAROLYN P. COLLETTE Women in Love: On the Unity of The Legend ofGood Women and Troilus and Criseyde

96

KATHRYN

L. LYNCH

Chaucer’s Insatiable Wives: Women Eating Men and the Romantic Turn

in the Canterbury Tales

vi | Contents JOHN M. FYLER

Doubling and the Thopas-Melibee Link

129

THOMAS J. FARRELL

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire WARREN

142

GINSBERG

Mood, Tense, Pronouns, Questions: Chaucer and the Poetry of Grammar R.FE. YEAGER

Art for Art’s Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades

179

LISA H. COOPER Recipes for the Realm: John Lydgate’s ‘Soteltes’ and The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep

194

ALAN T. GAYLORD Devotional Practice in “Crafted” Mystical Prose and Poetry: A Preliminary Inquiry

216

CLARE R. KINNEY

Trawpe and Tresoun: Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

228

JOHN M. GANIM Cosmopolitanism, Medievalism, and Romanticism: The Case of Coleridge

244

NANCY MASON BRADBURY ‘A Definite Claim to Beauty: The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer

262

Howell Chickering: A Bibliography

291

Contributors

294

Abbreviations

EETS, es or os ELH

JEGP MED

Early English Text Society, extra series or original series

ELH: English Literary History Journal of English and Germanic Philology Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1952-2001).

MLN PMLA

RES SAC

~ MLN: Modern Language Notes PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America The Review ofEnglish Studies Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Aesthetics and Earlier English Literature: An Introduction to the Gathering

In a 1997 Chaucer Review essay, “Stanzaic Closure and Linkage in Sir Gawain and

the Green Knight,” Howell Chickering, G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature at Amherst College, sets out to show how “language rears up in rhyme” in the poem’s bob and wheel structure. He anatomizes how stanza closures act as “grace notes” but equally as “sentence-ends? Not surprisingly for one whose scholarly career has been so often dedicated to editing literary texts (never read Chaucer again until you read his essay “Unpunctuating Chaucer”), he starts with meticulous study of the poem’s grammar and syntax. Chickering argues that the “poetic energy in the typical combination of closure and linkage devices” provides “metrical surprise” as well as “sense and sonic features” His specific subject — sentence segmentation — leads to a parsing of passages that then concludes in a demonstration of how the poet’s closures and linkages ground the poem’s ambiguity. “The poet’s extravagance in rounding off his stanzas is a kind of high aesthetic play, Chickering says, “through which we can recognize his exhilaration at being at the top of his form? Chickering essays usually start as close readings that progress from ‘deeply informed philological word analysis through erudite attention to grammatical and rhetorical variations and build to conclusions about a poem’s meanings in terms of aesthetic play and our reading pleasure. This is the leitmotifof his impressive body of research primarily on Old and Middle English literature. Chickering (universally known

as Chick) has never wavered in his

commitment to textual studies rooted in philology. His publications attest to this commitment. His former student Arthur Bahr notes that Chick’s extensive publications “did not just anticipate the past decade’s turn to ‘new aesthetics’ and ‘new formalism? Rather the persuasiveness of his readings and concerns helped shape the field” Using an appropriately athletic simile, this time applied to his distinguished teaching, another former student says that he “throws himself into his [work] as if itwere a game of squash ... and the class is his arena? Chick’s life

has been spent wrestling with how poems mean ~ and give delight — in their originating contexts and in ours. We compiled this volume in honor of his retirement from Amherst College. Contributors to this volume are former students

2 | Introduction

and professional peers whose work has intersected with Chick’s over long years. Each editor is proud to count him as a longtime friend and professional collaborator. Chick is widely admired for the quality of his wide-ranging publications and teaching, as well as for his deep commitment to lasting friendships with students and colleagues. At the end of his undergraduate years at Dartmouth College in 1959, Chick was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship which he used for liter-

ary study at Clare College, Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1965, and since then — with occasional long research periods in Italy —

he has been an ideal community citizen at Amherst College and in the Five College Consortium. Chick and Amherst are well matched: a teacher and a college notable for excellence and deeply dedicated to all aspects of student growth. Chick conveys to students his passion for the hard work at hand. He expects them to give themselves to their work as he does. Among the thousands of medievalists who often attend the annual Kalamazoo conference, Chick usually arrives with packets of student exams and papers. While others play, he works, enjoying the conversation on paper with the students whose ideas and expressions mean so much to him. Chick spent his professional career teaching at Amherst with great distinction, and during this forty-eight year span, he has been equally active as a poet, translator, editor, literary critic, and collaborator on projects in medieval fields. He has a

great “ear” for poetry and this serves us well in the magisterial book for which he is best known, Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, which provides the Old English text, a translation into modern English verse with a contextualizing introduction, commentary, and glosses. First published by Doubleday Anchor (1977), this widely used Beowulfisa classroom standard now in its third edition. Chick’s longtime co-teacher (and scholarly collaborator on a brilliant article that places Chrétien’s Yvain in contexts of twelfth-century feud resolution), historian Fredric L. Cheyette, remarks that a “stunning indication of Chick’s influence is the number of Amherst undergraduates who have gone on to pursue graduate studies in medieval literature ... given the size of the college (1600 undergraduates),

the small number of medieval courses here, and the profoundly present-minded undergraduate culture, his is a remarkable presence in the field? Both Cheyette and Margaret (Marlou) Switten, Class of 1926 Professor Emerita of French at Mount

Holyoke College, remark on Chick’s formative effect on them as thinkers and teachers. All three of these faculty members were pioneers in the Pioneer Valley Colleges, known more generally as the Five College Consortium: Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Hampshire College, along with the University of Massachusetts, which provides a national model in cross-college collaboration. Switten ruminates on the first class to which Chick invited her to discuss troubadour poetry:

Introduction

|3

I clearly remember the graciousness with which | was received. The most impressive part of that reception was the way Chick handled the class. Often a visiting lecturer is left unaided in front ofa class full of unknown young people whose attention needs to be held and interest stimulated, although one doesn’t always know precisely how to achieve those goals. Pure entertainment is always a possibility, especially with strange music and amusing manuscript images to liven the proceedings. But the more successful talks involve the host professor’s engagement with the class to provide guidance and questions so that students derive the greatest benefit. This was Chick’s way. His ability to engage students, to direct a conversation that included both me and the students, to link what | was presenting to what they already knew, thus making the subject seem intriguing rather than intimidating, these teaching skills that | would come to recognize more and more as time went on, were already, at that first real encounter, very much in evidence, very much appreciated. That collaboration led to several jointly taught NEH-sponsored Institutes and programs for which Chick was the primary grant writer. Marlou ironically notes that: NEH Program Officers assigned to our grant applications did not always appreciate the elegance and appropriateness of his prose on our grant applications, wanting to substitute grantese. Their “emendations” were simply ignored. We hoped that some readers out there would have a better appreciation of the resources of the English language, and apparently they did, since our requests

for funds were granted. Switten also ruminates straightforwardly: \ To be sure, Chick’s courtesy and helpfulness eventually extended well beyond the work on the NEH Institutes. He indeed became my everything editor-inchief. Much of the research I published was immeasurably improved by his keen editorial judgments (as I was often subjected to “Why don’t you say what you mean”?). This would be less remarkable were my specialty Middle or Old English. I have to confess that I never learned these languages; Chick reached out to Old French and Old Occitan, demonstrating anew the ability to con-

nect and the willingness to move into new intellectual territory that marked his approach to interdisciplinary teaching. In Old French or Old Occitan, as in Old and Middle English, he demonstrated keen sensitivity to word meanings and rhythmic subtleties. Although I made such efforts as | could to acquire some knowledge ofEnglish poetry, by and large, it was Chick who moved into

4 | Introduction my territory rather than the contrary, an appreciated gesture of professional friendship.

Switten summarizes above what many have experienced. Chick’s intellectual curiosity pushes him to work diligently in other people’s vineyards, sometimes far beyond the lucky purview of his students and local colleagues. He has been a mentor to many, as his recognition by the Medieval Academy’s international CARA Teaching Award (2011) affirms. He is a teacher’s teacher who has co-taught dozens of courses with colleagues in literature, history, and art history. He was a vital founding Mem-

ber of the Mediaeval Academy of America Committee on Teaching Medieval Studies (TEAMS) for which he edited (with assistance from Tom Seiler) the massive

1988 The Study of Chivalry: Resources and Approaches, which remains useful to both teachers and scholars in the field. He continues as a strong voice of conscience in the academy, especially as a tireless advocate for equal opportunity and equal treatment in higher education. He supports such causes in durable ways and at great expense of time and effort. He is a primary founder (and one ofthe prime fundraisers) of the non-profit Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund whose purpose is to support the research of women

medieval scholars in mid-career, enabling them to break

through the “glass ceiling” they too often face in their professional development. The first of these annual fellowships was awarded in 2011 and its effects reverberate positively in the Academy. Most of all, Chick lives with laughter, acceptance, and hospitality. He lives life like the Florentine ofhis imagination — words, poetry, cucina, music, students, family, friends, and his beloved Sara Jane, all fuse as part ofanencompassing landscape that shapes his life as an opulent aesthetic. It requires but brief acquaintance with Chick Chickering, either through his publications or 77 propria persona, to delight in the extraordinary sweep of his knowledge and interests. Happily, the intent of this volume is to celebrate the fullness of Chickering’s reach. We asked the contributors to this festschrift to consider, in their own ways, aesthetics in relation to medieval literature. A bevy of contributors have responded to his extensive scholarship on Old English as well as Middle English subjects — Chaucer especially, but also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gower, Lydgate; furthermore, several contributors follow his other interests from the Mid-

dle Ages to medievalisms both Romantic and modern. This collection is, then, offered in homage to Howell Chickering — friend, mentor, colleague, extraordinary scholar, great and good man. As is so often the case when replicas are placed beside the real thing, these essays of ours to others’ eyes will naturally fall short of their models. But Chick, we hope, will like them — enough at

least to dispute them here and there, and carry on in kind.

FRED

C.

ROBINSON

The Aesthetics of “Caedmon’s Hymn”

As a modest contribution toward this joint enterprise aimed at celebrating the accomplishments of Howell D. Chickering in his masterly commentary on the aesthetics of Beowulf and of other Old English poems, I should like to offer a few thoughts on the aesthetics of the nine-line text which Bede tells us was composed by Caedmon in a dream. The story is well known. Cedmon was an illiterate neatherd who was always embarrassed when his pastoral friends gathered to drink mead and take turns reciting poetry to the harp that was passed around among them. Cadmon had never learned to compose or recite poetry and so would always slink away when the singing began. One night when he left the social gathering and returned to his quarters and fell asleep, he was visited in a dream by an angelic messenger who commanded him to compose a poem for him. Cedmon protested that he was incapable of producing poetry, but the messenger insisted that he was able to compose and recite poetry and specified that he should sing of the Creation. Immediately Cedmon launched into an expert recital of the nine lines of perfectly composed verse we now call “Cadmon’s Hymn’: Nu we sculan herian metudes myhte,

ond his modgebanc,

wurc wuldorfeder— ece drihten,

— swa he wundra gehwilc,

ord astealde!

He erest gescop

ylda bearnum

heofon to hrofe,

halig scyppend|[;]

[pa] middangeard,

ece drihten [,]

mancynnes weard,

zfter tleo]d[e]

firum on fold{an].

1

heofonrices weard

frea zlmihtig|.]'

Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Cedmon’s Hymn: A Multi-media Study, Edition and Archive (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 212.1 have substituted the modern letter w for O’Donnell’s wynns.

6 | FRED C. ROBINSON [Now we must praise the guardian of Heaven, the

Creator’s power and his plan of mind, the work of the Glory-father — as he fashioned the beginning of each of the wondrous things, the eternal Lord. He first created for the sons of men heaven as a roof,

the holy Creator, then mankind’s guardian, the eternal Prince, the Lord almighty afterward fashioned Middle-earth for men on earth.}

Caedmon remembered the verses he had composed after he awoke, and when the miracle of his learning in a dream to compose expert poetry on Christian themes was reported to Hild, the abbess of the local monastery, she persuaded him to

abandon secular life and become a brother in the monastery, where he spent the rest of his life composing pious poetry on the subjects dictated to him by literate members of the foundation. In the present discussion I should like to review some of the comments which have been made on the aesthetics of Cedmon’s nine lines, commentaries which are accurately representative, I believe, of what modern scholars and critics of Old English literature have had to say about Caedmon’s work. | shall begin with C.L. Wrenn, who devoted an entire British Academy lecture to “The Poetry of Cedmon? the complete corpus of that poetry consisting of “the nine lines of the Hymn?? His lecture seeks to show “how vast is the historical and literary significance of this little poem.”3 His assessment of the poem’s aesthetic quality is as follows: At first the Hymn may seem to have little intrinsic worth as poetry. Yet the more one reads it and allows it to become assimilated in one’s mind, the more one feels it has qualities of balanced and rhythmic grandeur which still have some poetic appeal.4 Czdmon had shown ... what could be done with the best of the traditional art

applied now for the first time to the new truth. ... It is a miraculous revolutionary document which was one of the greatest landmarks in the history of our English poetry.°

2

C.L. Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” Proceedings ofthe British Academy 32 (1946 ),277— 95. Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 281.

Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 286. Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 289. W f Nm Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 292.

The Aesthetics of “Caedmon’s Hymn” | 7

In Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry, Bernard F. Huppé has given extensive attention to the Hymn’s poetic qualities: ... Cedmon’s Hymn must for the believer have seemed as nearly perfect as man’s work may be; either the poem was beautiful to the eyes offaith, or there

was no miracle. It is impossible that God should have inspired what is inferior or merely workmanlike7 Huppeé gives a particularly careful account of the poem’s symmetrical structure:

The Hymn falls naturally into three main divisions.® The first two and one-half lines state the theme of praise: ... There follows a general statement about God’s creation .... Finally comes the paraphrase ofthe first verse of Genesis ... .2 The end of the Hymn returns us to its beginning. There Cedmon rightly sings first of man’s need to praise God, the Creator.'° The final epithet, Frea Almihtig {sic} (Almighty Joy or Almighty Lord), returns us to the thematic statement at the beginning of the poem. For frea means both joy and Lord, as God is both man’s joy and his Lord."' However one might question Huppée’s assessment ofthe meaning offrea “lord” (he

seems to be confusing frea with the etymologically unrelated adjective freo “glad, joyful”), it is clear from his discussion that he sees great order and symmetry in the poem’s disposition of theme and subject matter. John Pope, like Huppé, is especially impressed by the poet’s symmetrical ordering of the elements of his-text and by the satisfying completeness of Cedmon’s composition:

}

The first four lines, celebrating God’s divine powers and the unspecified won-

ders of the Creation, introduce him as the guardian ofthe heavenly kingdom. The next four direct attention to his care for the human race and call him the guardian of mankind. The two sets of four are marked and balanced by the one repeated epithet, ece Dryhten, in lines 4 and 8. The ninth line partly offsets

7

Bernard E Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry (Albany: State University of New York, 1959), Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 103.

8 9

Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry, Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 107. Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry, Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 108.

10

Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry, Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 115.

11

Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry, Wrenn, “The Poetry of Cedmon,” 117.

8 | FRED C. ROBINSON this symmetry, because it is technically a mere variation of the statement in lines 7 and 8 and to this extent differentiates the second part from the first. But the closing epithet, Fréa elmihtig, harks back to the magnificence of God as he is described in the first section. Hence this final line sums up the essential meaning of the entire poem.'” Greenfield and Calder are more tentative as to the symmetrical ordering of the poem, but are just as confident of the poem’s unity and aesthetic power: That Il. 1-4 praise God’s creation of the “ideas” of things in their eternal aspects and II. s—9 the creation of this world for men, and that the epithets heofonrices weard and moncynnes weard are thus appropriately placed in the poem’s structure, seem clear enough. But is the chronological sequence in the second part tripartite — “first, then, afterwards” — to accord with the view of this part as creation of heaven, creation of earth and adornment of earth, or is it bipartite, a simple creation of heaven and then earth (with efter being just a variation of »

me

pa, and no adornment)? ... However we read the Hymn — in its details, its doc-

trine, its subtleness of expression; in its relation to oral Germanic poetry and Christian parallels; in reference to Bede’s statements about its creation and his Latin paraphrase — we can even today feel its affective power."3 However much these commentators may differ from one another in some details, they seem to be in agreement that Cedmon’s Hymn forms an aesthetic whole, a poem with order and symmetry and a satisfying unity of form. For them the text seems to be a complete and pleasurable performance. This strikes me as odd since Bede makes clear that the nine lines that Caedmon composed in his sleep are not a poem but rather are a mere fragment — the aborted beginning of a poem:

Exsurgens autem a somno, cuncta quae dormiens cantauerat memoriter retenuit, et eis mox plura im eundem modum uerba Deo digni carminis adiunxit.

12 13

John C. Pope, ed., Seven Old English Poems (New York: WW. Norton, 1981), 52s Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, ANew Critical History ofOld English Literature (New York and London: New York University Press, 1986), 231.

The Aesthetics of “Caedmon’s Hymn” {When

he awoke, he remembered

|9

all that he had sung while asleep and

soon added more verses in the same

manner, praising God

in fitting

]'4 style. It is presumably this completed “song” (carmen) that Cedmon

recited to Hild and

her doctores, proving that he had not only received in his dream suddenly and miraculously instant mastery of the intricate meter and elevated diction of court poetry, but that he had retained this mastery after awaking and was able to compose more poetry in the same elevated style in his waking state. The longer poem has not come down to us. We have only the truncated prologue ofthe longer work — the nine-line fragment. That scholars and critics would treat this fragment as an aesthetic whole and seek to establish a finished form and unity for it is surprising. When one looks afresh at the nine lines, one is struck by the brevity and abruptness of their content.'5 It seems especially odd that modern scholars should have overlooked the fragmentary nature of the Hymn when we recall that early students of the poem were fully cognizant ofits fragmentary quality. Sharon Turner speaks of“that fragment of the song of the ancient Cedmon”'® and subsequently alludes to it as “the fragment?'7 Conybeare speaks of “the Hymn ... or at least as much of it as the poet composed in his sleep? as “this fragment? “the fragment?'® We can only wonder what the complete poem looked like. Based upon the high quality of the nine lines which we do have (at least in the opinion of most of the commentators cited here), we may be confident that the complete poem would

14

y Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors

15

_MW.Grose and Deirdre McKenna, Old English Literature (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 416-17. and Littlefield, 1973), 59, are perhaps closer to a true assessment of the aesthetics of the poem when they say that “it can be said to contain nothing but a string of words and phrases standing for God.” Asked by the messenger to sing about “the beginning ofcreated things,” Cedmon mentions only the creation of heaven, earth, and human beings. Presumably in the verses he added to the nine lines the next morning, he told in some detail of the seven days ofcreation, the introduction of night and day, the creation ofani-

16

mals, and so on. Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, 3 vols. (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1840), 3: 156.

17 18

Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 157. John Josias Conybeare, I/lustrations ofAnglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. William Daniel Conybeare (London: Harding and Lepard, 1826), 5, 6.

10 | FRED C. ROBINSON have been a performance meriting the praise and wonder ofthe doctores who heard it. But we have not heard it; we have heard only a few opening verses to the poem. It is strange that so many modern scholars should have overlooked this and undertaken to display the aesthetic wholeness of verses that were never intended to be an aesthetic whole.

LESLIE

LOCKETT

The Art of the Psychological Narrative in Old English and Old Saxon Verse

In the Old English poem Judith, as our heroine confronts the horrible task of decapitating Holofernes, she expresses her psychological distress in terms of the increasing temperature within her breast. First she laments, “Pearle ys me nu da / heorte onheted ond hige geomor, / swyde mid sorgum gedrefed” [Now my heart is severely heated and my mind miserable, greatly stirred up with sorrows}. She then cries out to God in prayer: “Gewrec nu, mihtig dryhten, /torhtmod tires brytta > pet me ys pus torne on mode, /hate on hredre minum” [Now, mighty Lord, brilliant-minded dispenser ofglory, avenge that which is so cruel to me in my mind, so hot in my breast ]. God swiftly grants Judith reliefin the form of amore “spacious” mind: “Hi 0a se hehsta dema / edre mid elne onbryrde [ ... } Pa weard hyre rume

on mode, / haligre hyht geniwod” [Then the highest Judge straightway filled her with courage ... Then it became spacious in her mind; hope was renewed in the holy woman].' With this divine aid she is able to slay Holofernes immediately. It may appear that the poet has infelicitously mixed his psychological imagery: Judith suffers from heat in her breast but finds relief in the form of mental spaciousness. Yet both of these conditions play an integral role in Old English narratives of psychological distress; such narratives regularly employ a “hydraulic model” of mental activity, in which the mind behaves like the fluid in a closed container. The mind is localized in or near the heart, and when certain intense mental states heat up the mind, all the contents of the chest cavity start to seethe and boil, increasing the pressure within that container and squeezing the mind. The logic of the hydraulic

1

Judith 86b-88a, 92b-95a, and 97b-98a. Quotations of Old English poetry follow The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-1953), except for quotations of Beowulf, which follow Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, ed. and trans. Howell D. Chickering, Jr, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 2006); and of the Metres ofBoethius, which follow The

Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, with Mark Griffith and Rohini Jaya-tilaka, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Translations of Old English

texts are my own except where I state otherwise.

12 | LESLIE LOCKETT

model, which is corroborated abundantly throughout Old English verse, clarifies the relationship between cardiocentric heat and mental roominess in Judith: God grants the heroine mental spaciousness to relieve the constriction whose ultimate cause is the heat and seething ofdistress in her breast. The driving concern of my previous studies of the hydraulic model of the mind has been the relationship between Old English idioms and Anglo-Saxon beliefs. I have argued that for the Anglo-Saxons, excepting those who occupied the very highest educational strata, the hydraulic model of the mind functioned neither as a purely linguistic decoration nor as a conceptual metaphor, but rather it served to verbalize, accurately and literally, beliefs about the nature and behavior

of the mind that were widely held in Anglo-Saxon England.* This argument rested upon a thorough demonstration that analogues of the Anglo-Saxons’ hydraulic model of the mind occur in remarkably disparate cultures, which left little room to examine the subtle differences that distinguish the Old English hydraulic-model idiom from its nearest linguistic and literary cousins, nor to pay close attention to the aesthetic dimension of the hydraulic-model idiom that pervades Old English verse narratives. The present essay provides the opportunity for me to extend my study of the hydraulic model along both of these paths by comparing Old English [OE] verse narratives of mental events with those of Old Saxon [OS] poetry, which is linguistically and culturally affiliated with OE.> Both OE and OS verse frequently invoke a hydraulic model of the mind, but systematic differences in the way this hydraulic model is deployed support the hypothesis that OE and OS versification practices descended from a common Germanic ancestor, rather than that the OS biblical epics were composed in imitation of OE poems. The OE and OS texts used in this comparison illustrate that the hydraulic model exerted a pervasive and systematic influence over psychological narratives in both languages, thus constituting one of the pillars of early medieval Germanic poetics. Nonetheless, as | address in the closing section, the systematic logic of the hydraulic model is often poorly understood by scholars, with the result that they impose a present-day concept of the mind onto OE and OS psychological narratives and fail to provide readers a clear view of this aesthetically indispensable group of idioms and images.

2

3

Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 110-78. For the sake of amore apt comparison with OS biblical verse, in this paper | will limit my discussion of OE to the corpus of narrative verse; however, the hydraulic model is dynamically operative in other genres, and in both Latin and vernacular: see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies.

The Art of the Psychological Narrative | 13

Contextualization and Comparison: Preliminary Observations Before I proceed with a comparative study that juxtaposes numerous unrelated OE poems with the OS biblical epics, it is worth pausing to consider how compatible the comparative method may be with current conversations about the aesthetics of OE verse. My foregoing reading ofJudith illustrates a principle that implicitly underpins my method ofreading verse psychological narratives: a comprehensive understanding of the prevalent psychological idiom used across the corpora of OE and OS poetry can illuminate a passage in which the psychological imagery does not obviously cohere when it is read in isolation. The soundness of this principle is not to be taken for granted. Howell D. Chickering has sagely argued that critics risk generating an anachronistic and nonsensical interpretation of Judith, or indeed of any OE poem, when their analysis ofits diction relies too heavily on the most idiosyncratic and connotative usages of unrelated texts: “Once a critic goes outside the poem and puts it into context with other materials, interpretive possibilities flower like an exotic jungle .... This is especially true when critics assume the meaning or implication of a word in one text is the same as in another text.”4 Chickering’s caveat appears to conflict sharply with the position taken by Britt Mize in his new monograph on aesthetics and traditionality in OE psychological narrative: While a great many readings of Old English poems comment on the subjective dynamics within them, they tend to presuppose whatever is observed within a single text to be particular to and circumscribed by that text, taking all its meaning from that immediate environment. ... Yet in a heavily marked register, isolationist readings remain in one real sense non-readings. Without attention to the traditionality of representations of subjective experience, interpretation of‘a given text comes unmoored from the dictional and other systems that defined its pragmatic properties for early audiences.5

4

Howell D. Chickering, “Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith? Studies in Philology 106 (2009): 119-36, at 120 and 120 n3; reprinted in On the Aesthetics ofBeowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010),

5

24-42. In the two decades since I first had the good fortune to be an undergraduate in the classroom where Chick modeled sound literary-critical methods such as this, while also teaching us to read, to declaim, and to savor Beowulf and Chaucer, my own analytical habits have turned toward historicist and multi-textual contextualization, admittedly with all of the attendant risks. And so in these pages I proceed with great circumspection, and I hope that my reading proves justifiable in the eyes of the very dear teacher and mentor to whose honor I dedicate this essay, with affection and admiration. Britt Mize, Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 243. 1 am very grateful to Professor Mize for generously allowing me to consult his book in typescript in advance of its publication.

14 | LESLIE LOCKETT The conflict between these two positions is not as stark as it first seems, because

Mize is concerned with patterns of poetic diction that are well represented across the whole corpus of OE verse, whereas Chickering is criticizing the faulty logic that has led scholars to attach a sexual connotation to the rare word wundentlocc “curlyhaired,” which is twice predicated of the heroine in Judith, solely because this word also occurs in the extended sexual double-entendre of the “Onion” riddle of the Exeter Book.® Whether the reader should adopt Chickering’s strategy or Mize’s depends on the nature of the poetic language in question. One might prudently apply the former approach to words and phrases whose poeticism derives from novelty and scarcity, like wundenlocc, and the latter approach to language that participates in a conceptual or imagistic system that demonstrably recurs throughout the poetic corpus. Literary critics have long treated elements of the hydraulic-model idioms of both OE and OS poetry as though they fell into the same category as wundenlocc. Seldom has it been acknowledged that mental heat, mental spaciousness, and the containment of the mind within the chest cavity are all integral parts of a coherent system of images and narrative patterns.” Instead, the juxtaposition of these elements has been perceived as nothing more than the mixing of metaphors, while glossaries and translations have habitually replaced those words that signify the surprising cardiocentrism and corporeality of OE and OS mental events with language that conforms more comfortably to the reader’s expectation that the mind resides in the brain and that the activities of the mind are abstractions, conceptually demarcated from the works of the body. This habit generates practical problems, especially in dictionaries and translations, which | will revisit in the closing section of the essay. Contrary to the tacitly isolationist readings of hydraulic-model narratives that continue to turn up in studies of OE and OS alike, both Britt Mize and Elizabeth Tyler have explored how the characteristic language of psychological narratives forms an essential constituent of the “aesthetics of the familiar” that operates in

6

Chickering, “Poetic Exuberance,” 120 n3.

7

Rare exceptions to this generalization include Soon Ai Low, “The Anglo-Saxon Mind: Metaphor and Common Sense Psychology in Old English Literature” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1998); Britt Mize, “Manipulations of the Mind-as-Container Motif in

Beowulf, Homiletic Fragment II, and Alfred’s Metrical Epilogue to the Pastoral Care? Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008): 25-56; and Mize, “The Representation of the Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry,” Anglo-Saxon England 35 (2006):

57-90.

The Art of the Psychological Narrative | 15 OE verse.* Such language was esteemed by composers and audiences of OE verse precisely because a single word or phrase associated with the domain ofthe mindin-the-heart could tacitly rebroadcast the connotations accumulated through countless earlier collocations with other elements belonging to the same domain. Mize further explains that by continually reporting on the psychological states and events of both protagonists and antagonists, and of humans as well as beasts and even (in riddles) inanimate objects, OE poets cultivated a “poetics of mentality” that effects a multi-perspectival social worldview and does not exclusively privilege the subjectivity of the speaker or the most sympathetic or valiant characters.? In sum, in their respective discussions of the aesthetics of OE verse, Tyler and Mize corroborate the claim that I have previously made from the perspective of one engaged in the history ofideas rather than the history ofaesthetics: namely that the hydraulicmodel idiom does not consist of idiosyncratic poeticisms like wundenlocc; instead, it constitutes a staple of OE poetics and exerts a forceful influence on the sympathies and ethical valuations that OE poems elicit from their audiences.

The Shared Language and Images of OE and OS Psychological Narratives Poets working in OE and OS had recourse to similar terminology when discussing the components of the human being. In OE, the mind was most commonly called

mod, hyge, sefa, or ferhd (or a related compound such as modsefa), while in OS the words md, hug, and sebo (as well as compounds such as mddsebo) were used to sig-

nify the mind.'° OE and OS poems usually maintain a conceptual boundary between the mind and the two entities that departed from the body at death,

8

Elizabeth’M. Tyler, Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), focuses on the traditionality of poetic portrayals

of treasure, one subset of which consists of metaphorical equations of the mind and its contents with treasure: see esp. 52-66, on collocations of hord with words associated with the domain of the mind-in-the-heart, and 101-22, where Tyler discusses the particular depth of meaning and aesthetic pleasure that traditional language brought to OE verse. In Traditional Subjectivities, Mize’s argument is not limited to the hydraulic model or the mind-as-container motif but encompasses all of the OE poetic techniques that continually interject psychological interiority into narratives; he engages directly

with Tyler’s “aesthetics of the familiar” at 31 and 242. 9

10

Mize, Traditional Subyectivities, 16-22 and 251.

Hans Eggers, “Altgermanische Seelenvorstellungen im Lichte des Heliand,” in Der Heliand, ed. Jargen Eichhoff and Irmengard Rauch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 270-304; and Prisca Augustyn, The Semiotics of Fate, Death, and

the Soul in Germanic Culture: The Christianization of Old Saxon (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), esp. 106-45.

16 | LESLIE LOCKETT namely the immortal soul (OE sawol, gast; OS seola, gast) and the ephemeral life force (OE feorh, lif,ealdor; OS ferah, lif,aldar)."" During earthly life, the mind resides in or near the heart (OE heorte, OS herta) or, more generally, in the chest cavity (OE breost, hreder; OS briost). Overall, nearly identical lexical palettes were available to

both OE and OS poets who portrayed these elusive elements of human nature, except that the OS Heliand and Genesis preserve no cognates corresponding to OE ferbd and hreder. The psychological narratives of both OE and OS verse localize all mental activity in the chest cavity. A few examples will suffice to suggest the variability of the diction applied to the mind-in-the-breast in OE verse: “Pa wes modsefa myclum geblissod / haliges on hredre” [Then the mind of the holy man was greatly delighted in his breast]; “pet wes gnornung micel / bam pe on breostum weg byrnende lufan / metodes on mode” [that was a great sadness for him who bore in his breast a burn-

ing love of the Creator in his mind]; “A scyle geong mon wesan geomormod,/ heard heortan gepoht, swylce habban sceal / blipe gebero, eac bon breostceare” [A young man must always be sorrowful in mind, the thought of his heart must be resolute; likewise must he have a cheerful countenance as well as anxiety in his

breast].'* Hundreds of similar passages could be adduced, and the prevalence of cardiocentrism in OE psychological narrative has been well documented already.'3 Cardiocentrism similarly dominates the OS psychological idiom and finds expression in highly varied diction. In the Saxon Genesis, for instance, the narrator says, “Thes uuard Adamas hugi innan breostun / suido an sorogun” [Therefore Adam’s mind in his breast became deeply sorrowful], and Cain laments, “‘sé ik is nu mag drubundian hugi,’ quad he, / ‘beran an minun breostun, thes ik minan

11

The chief OE exceptions are the Metres ofBoethtus and the versification of Psalms 51-150

of the Parts Psalter, representing the “classical tradition” that understood the soul to encompass the mind: see Malcolm R. Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 271-98. The conceptual boundary separating the soul from the mind and from the life force is slightly more porous in the OS poems than in most OE verse, likely due to the influence of biblical azima; see D.H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 284-85; and Beatrice La Farge, “Leben” und “Seele” in den altger12

13

manischen Sprachen (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1991) Andreas 892-893; Death of Edgar 19b-21a; The Wife’s Lament 42-44.

See esp. Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 4-7 and 17-109; and Eric Jager, “Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality?” Speculum 65 (1990):

845-59.

The Art of the Psychological Narrative | 17 bruodar sluog / thuru min handmegin’ (“Thus I now must bear in my breast,” he said, “an agitated heart, because I killed my brother by the strength of my hand”}.'4 The Heliand-narrator says of the Jews who hear Jesus preach, “thes sie ni mahtun an iro breostun farstandan, /undarhuggean an iro herton” [They were unable to comprehend in their breasts, to understand in their hearts]; introducing the evangelists near the opening of the Heliand, he observes, “Habda im uualdand god, / them

helidon an iro hertan hélagna gést / fasto bifolhan endi ferahtan hugi / s6 manag uuislik uuord endi giuuit mikil, / that sea scoldin ahebbean hélagaro stemnun /

godspell that guoda” [In the hearts of those heroes God the Ruler had firmly established the Holy Spirit and a worshipful mind, so many wise words and such a great understanding that they were compelled to raise up that good gospel with their holy voice].'5 When the disciples are recovering from the shock ofwitnessing the Transfiguration, the narrator states, “Thé eft them mannun uuard/ hugi at iro her/ gibade an iro breostun” [The men’s thought came to be at ton endi gihélid mdd, their hearts again, and their mind was healed; there was comfort in their breasts ].'°

Later in the poem, speaking to his followers, Jesus idealizes the godly man who “uuét iuuuaro spello giskéd,/ hugid is than an is herton endi hérid thar mid is 6run to [...]/an is breost hledid that gibod godes,/linod endi léstid” [knows about your good news, contemplates it in his heart and listens to it with his ear ... He receives

the command ofGod into his breast, learns it and executes it}.'7 Certainly in some

cases such cardiocentric imagery is directly inspired by the diction ofthe Vulgate,'®

14

Saxon Genesis (hereafter:'SGen) 84-85a and 58b—60a; see also Heliand (hereafter H/)

688b—690a and 3261b—3262a. All quotations ofOS texts follow Heliand und Genesis, ed. Otto Behaghel, revised by Burkhard Taeger, 9th ed. (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1984). Translations from OS are my own, rendered with the assistance of Edward Henry Sehrt, Vollstandiges Worterbuch zum Heliand und zur altsachsischen Genests, 2nd ed. (Got

tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genesis, A.N. Doane, ed. and comm. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); and Tonya Kim Dewey, trans.,Az Annotated Eng-

lish Translation of the Old Saxon Heliand: A Ninth-Century Biblical Paraphrase in the Germanic Epic Style, with an introduction by Irmengard Rauch (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).

15 16 17 18

H1/2371b-2372a and 20b-25a; see also H/ 2607b-2612, 5389b—5390a, and 5469b-5 470. Hl3159b—3161a; see also 5827b—5828. H12466b-—2470A) “name,” “word,” “worthinesse,” “compaignie,” “merci,” “wille,” “herte,” “face,” “pris,” “love,” and, yes, “grace.”'* The confessor Genius is responsible for the other ten uses, half of which also occur in clearly positive amatory contexts. Chaucer’s use of the uninflected possessive /ady is less consistent, but generally conforms to what we have seen in Gower. Chaucer uses 17 possessive forms oflady: four are periphrastic, including one in Boece, a prose text in which Chaucer always uses the periphrastic form of the words | studied.'3 “Strong” forms occur three mee

wee

me

me

times, and the other ten — 63% of the occurrences in verse — are uninflected.'4 The

semantic context is usually amatory and dominated by the usage in Trorlus, where possessive forms of/ady occur nine times, seven of them “not strong.” But the range of subject matter in Chaucer’s English poetry is wider than Gower’s, and we also see such forms in a religious context — the bit of sailcloth which the Pardoner “seyde was oure lady veyl” (1.695) and in the complex courtly parody of Damyan’s pursuit of May until “fully in his lady grace he stood” (4.2018). Chaucer also uses the “strong” form (as Gower never did) in Troz/us, when the narrator attributes the hero’s good behavior to “loue, his ladies thank to wynne” (3.1777), and in Troilus’

11

Asingle periphrastic form is probably, but not certainly adverbial: “Whan so is that I se and hiere / Or hevy word or hevy chiere / Of my lady, I grucche anon” (1. 1383-85).

12

The cited phrases can be found at 1.1269, 2.527, 3-882, 4.1156, 4.2847, 4.3480, 5.6058, 5-7123, 6.758, 6.837, 6.1368, and 3.1578, respectively.

13

Elliott, citing Mustanoja, notes that “in his prose Chaucer uses the periphrastic construction with of more than ten times as often as the inflected possessive” (Chaucer's English, 45).

14

“And of ladyes love-drury” (7. 895) is probably a plural form, but is counted because the possibility of asingular meaning cannot be eliminated.

148 | THOMASJ.FARRELL Troy “Is of my ladis depe wishful thought that the wind blowing across the plain of sikes soore” (5.675).'5

There is little reason to suspect that the possessive form /ady carries any inherent ironic import. Neither Amans nor Genius is speaking ironically at any of the moments when it occurs, and more importantly, the specific articulation of possessive /ady never carries with it even a whiff of criticism of the speaker for using that construction. Although Chaucer operates in a wider realm, the same is true of him. Given The Merchant’s Tale, given January’s situation, given the heat of his own desires, it is deeply ironic that Damyan should be cast as May’s courtly lover. But those ironies require that we understand the narrative to be casting Damyan in that role, and the phrase “his lady grace” is primarily a strategy for doing so. Similarly, the Pardoner must be understood to invoke “oure lady veyl” without irony; whatever fun or blasphemy he wishes to incite depends on the possibility that the construction stands outside irony. In context, the elegance or intensity invoked by the uninflected possessive form lady may be earned or not, credible or not; like any other element of narrative, it may be ironized. But the initial gesture, the use of the unusual grammatical form, is not inherently ironic.

What does this mean for our understanding ofthe portrait of the Squire? It means, first of all, that unlike the long series of portraits beginning with the Prioress and extending through the Guildsmen and beyond, this one has no interest in exploring the pilgrim’s subjectivity by invoking his own language.'® Until now, the phrase’s prominence has held open the possibility that “his lady grace” cites the Squire’s own words, directly or indirectly. But the linguistic evidence establishes that that phrase belongs, not to the Squire, nor to any version of a characterized Chaucer-pilgrim, but quite specifically to the narrative agent, that is, the omnipresent textual form of subjectivity that exists to carry out an authorial agenda. Our consequent recognition ofthat agent’s role in shaping the otherwise unknown “lady,” her suppositious “grace,” and the Squire’s “hope” to enjoy that favor fur-

15

Elliott suggests that an alternation between inflected and uninflected forms might be used for characterization in The Clerk’s Tale (Chaucer’s English, 44); the slight evidence

16

from Troilus supports that possibility, since Troilus uses only the “strong” form, as quoted: the other eight occurrences (seven uninflected) are narrative discourse. Elliott misses the spelling variant quoted in Troilus 3.1777. I have considered Chaucer’s various techniques for invoking subjectivity in “Hybrid Discourse in the General Prologue Portraits,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30 (2008), 39—

93.

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire | 149 ther reduces the sense that the line has revealed in any profound way the Squire’s subjectivity.'7 But lack of subjectivity is only one of several distinguishing characteristics in the portrait. The narrative agent who so obviously wishes either to praise or blame the Knight, the Summoner, and many others, applies neither of those traditional rhetorical goals to the Squire. Although some readers wish to blame the Squire’s mannerisms, others are more generous. As a result, almost no one thinks that the

Squire is a paragon ofeither virtue or vice, of wisdom or folly. Again, the Doctor of Physic who surpasses all in his discourse on “phisik and ... surgerye” (413), the quintuply “worthy” Wife (460-61), the “worthy vavasour” described in the Franklin (360), the Parson, unsurpassed as a priest (524), and the “verray, parfit gentil knyght” (72) encourage a sense that most pilgrims are viewed (i.e. by “Chaucer-pilgrim”) as epitomes, as extreme examples of their respective estates. But that habit is deeply muted in the case of the Squire. All of these distinctive characteristics are related: the lack of an expressed subjectivity means that we do not know how the Squire understands himselfasSquire, as we do know how the Wife understands herselfas

Wife, the Parson as Parson. And since actualization of the pilgrim’s selfidentifica-

tion usually defines the pilgrim’s worthiness in the portraits, the absence of such selfunderstanding makes paragon status impossible for the Squire. Many critics, seeking to find a standard of measurement, believe that the portrait’s “varied details all relate to the concept of the Squire as lover,” 77 bono or in malo.'* An interest in love is undeniable, but close reading reveals other concerns.

For all its brevity — at 22 lines only five are shorter — the Squire’s portrait develops

17

My interest in authorial language remains indebted to A.C. Spearing, Textual Subyectivity: The Representation of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 1 have previously discussed the Squire’s portrait in “Austen, Joyce, O'Brian, and Chaucer’s Squire: Bakhtin and Medieval Narratology,” Medieval Perspectives 23 (2008 [2011]), 31-42, which this essay supersedes. Although the

18

tenor of that argument is generally consonant with this one, my current research about “his lady grace” now leads me to retract its claim that “the presence ... of some form of the Squire’s subjectivity scarcely seems controversial” (39). Malcolm Andrew, The Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume II, Part One B, The General Prologue: Explanatory Notes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 89, uses the quoted phrase in summarizing the approach of Charles A. Owen, Jr, Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales: The Dialectic of “Ernest” and “Game” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 53-55. On the relevance of the Roman

de la Rose to this approach, see Dean Spruill Fansler, Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914; rept. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965);

Chauncey Wood, “The Significance of Jousting and Dancing as Attributes of Chaucer's Squire,” English Studies 52 (1971), 116-18; Phyllis Hodgson, Chaucer: The General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales (London: Athlone, 1969), 24.

150 | THOMASJ. FARRELL five distinct sections, which alternate in their attention between various aspects of life in the second estate; near the end of each section, a key but ambiguous term reorients the portrait and turns it in a new direction. Aspects of love are central to the longer second and fourth sections, and the key pivotal terms necessarily bring that subject to the threshold of the other sections, but its structural discontinuities and its consequent shifts in emphasis — not a single uniting theme — must direct our efforts to understand this portrait. The esquire originally presented to us as dependent to his father — “With hym ther was his sone, a yong Squier” (79) — is classified only a line later as a “bacheler”

(80): a young member of the feudal class, or a lower order of knight than a banneret (his father’s rank). But this emphasis on the Squire’s place within the feudal hierarchy has already been interrupted by the description of him as “a lovyere” and “lusty” (80). Those invocations of a courtly ethos in turn suggest that the “bacheler”

must now be considered also as an unmarried young man: the theme of love has intruded itself.!9 The constantly shifting emphases of the portrait might remind us of the interlace structure of a French romance, writ very small. Such a structure matters because the narrative agent develops in each section one central idea about the Squire, and those bits of description or narrative effects have defined the major critical responses to and uncertainties about him. For that reason, disagreements about the Squire’s identity have consistently arisen from attention to differing narrative foci, different elements in his discontinuous portrait. The physical description of the “lovyere” lasts about four lines, just long enough to intimate questions about the Squire’s “lokkes crulle as they were leyd in presse” (81). Does he take too much delight in his naturally curly hair? Were the

locks perhaps artificially curled??° No definitive judgment is possible, and the rest of that section of the portrait gives few details upon which to base any judgment before the pivotal invocation ofhis “greet strengthe” (84) shifts our attention to his problematic military career: the Squire’s action “In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Pycardie” (86). Since Tatlock, we have understood that line as a reference to the

1383 “crusade” led by Bishop Despenser, and since Alan Gaylord’s careful articulation of the moral bankruptcy and military ineptitude of that campaign, the tendency has been to see the reference as a damaging one, despite VincentJ.DiMarco’s useful reminder that contemporary condemnation ofthe raid focused solely on its

19 20

Riverside, 802; Andrew, Variorum Edition, 91-92. Compare the comments of Elliot, Chaucer’s English, 312, and Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medteval Estates Satire: The Literature ofSocial Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 118-19.

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire | 151 military failure.*' No one in 1387 could make such an allusion into any kind of strong commendation of the Squire. But the narrative agent seems deeply uninterested in the easy move of using it to condemn, or even indict him. Despenser, whose name would immediately have raised eyebrows, is left unmentioned; the

well-known military failure is invoked only obliquely in the words “chyvachie” and “litel space”;?* even when the reference to the crusade is recognized, we have been

prepared by the estimate of the Squire’s current age as “twenty yeer” (82) to recognize how little responsibility for the campaign a sixteen-year old with no military standing of his own could possibly have had. The suppression of the Squire’s subjectivity further excuses him: the authorial invocation of“his lady grace” occludes his own motives and, not knowing them, we have no basis on which to impugn

them. No reader is likely to be impressed by the Squire’s insouciance as he went off on the Despenser adventure, but the narrative agent works to limit our disapprobation at that level. His behavior was not disgraceful: no more, but no less. Even in

a bad situation, one that gave him little scope to impress, he had “born hym weel” (87). Although Gower (among others) criticized love as a motivation for going to

war, the fact that contrary opinions are also expressed (Gower’s again among them) means that such criticism can hardly be understood as an easily referenced social norm.*3 And the Chaucerian phrasing of “his lady grace” reminds us of another authorial narrative habit: an invariable generosity towards young love in the courtly tradition, even love a good deal more foolish than we can demonstrate the Squire’s to be. In sum, the narrative agent mutes criticism of the Squire precisely where such criticism would have been easiest. He remains unsure what the Squire may have been about on the “Glorious Campaign.” At the mention of“his lady grace,” the central martial section swings decisively back towards a list of the Squire’s amatory activities — singing, playing the flute, jousting, dancing, drawing, and writing poetry. All of these are perfectly usual practices for courtiers, but the list is comically overdetermined: Jill Mann notes that

Amour in Le Roman de la Rose encourages Amant to master one of them.4 Charles

21

John S.P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology ofChaucer’s Works (London: K. Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., 1907; repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 147-48; Alan

Gaylord, “A 85-88: Chaucer’s Squire and the Glorious Campaign,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 45 (1960), 341-61. DiMarco provides the notes to Riverside, 802.

22

Charles

A Owen,Jr,“Development of the Art of Portraiture in Chaucer’s General Pro-

logue? Leeds Studies in English 14 (1983),

116-33, at 120 suggests the backhandedness of

“chyvachie.” 23

On the complexities of this question, see Mann, Estates Satire,

24

Mann, Estates Satire, 120.

116-17.

152 | THOMASJ. FARRELL A. Owen, Jr’s comment on the description of the Squire as “embrouded” (89) — “the embroidery is clothing of course, but character too”*5 — nicely captures how readerly laughter at the Squire’s excesses, hovering between pleasure and criticism, deemphasizes any rush to judgment and keeps a definitive verdict elusive. Typically, final understanding of the Squire has been sought in the portrait’s final section and especially its pivot word, “Curteis” (99). Before addressing that moment, however, | want to theorize how we might respond to the widespread discontinuities and anomalies already evident in the portrait. The better to understand the absence of either praise or blame and the suppression of any interest in the Squire’s expressed subjectivity, | turn to current formulations about performance, and specifically Judith Butler’s definition of performativity as a “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names.”*° Discourse about socially constructed practices is always already around us; through repetition, behavior shaped by and alluding to such discourse (i.e., “citational practice”) reinforces the discourse whose effect is the constructed performativity. Butler’s ongoing concern is the deeply complex performativity of gender, but any social behavior potentially citable and potentially iterable falls within that definition: any socially constructed mode of being entails performative practices, can be performed, is a performativity. Thus by assuming the authority to initiate class discussion, by failing to wear business attire to class, by assigning grades to student work — by performing aspects of my role as professor — I consistently reinforce my students’ inferences about the performativity of “professor.” The Squire is similarly trying to perform a set of identities called “chivalry,” or “courtliness,” or “feudal duty.” But the portrait demonstrates that his performance is bigger, more complex than he understands, and the performativities he pursues are incoherent in relatively obvious ways. From the beginning, the narrative agent applies a bewildering variety oflabels to the Squire’s behavior. He is the “sonne,” the “Squier,” the “lovyere,” the “lusty bacheler”: no other pilgrim is introduced with so many nouns, so many names. The Squire exists in the interstices of that series of social roles, whose expected consilience remains elusive. There are many ways to be courtly, lots of ways to enact feudal, and the discourse most readily available to him for citation, The Romance of the

Rose, proves something less than reliable as a guide: by turns it re-intrudes itself into feudal discourse where it has no place, or fails to deliver its promise of cohesiveness when its courtly guidance peters out after a few lines. Thus, the interlaced

25

Charles A. Owen,Jr,“Morality as a Comic Motif in the Canterbury Tales,” College Eng-

26

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge,

lish 16 (1955), 226-32, at 229.

1993), 2.

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire | 153 structure that records the Squire’s gestures towards identity simultaneously reinforces the verdict that, although intertwined, the various performances of his life

have not cohered. The Squire is citing and iterating several kinds of discourse, which produce various related but unintegrated effects. In such a context, the authorial cast of his “hope to stonden in his lady grace” feels more like a narrative attempt to conjure a “lovyere’s” identity than the exposition of a stable personality trait. The gesture occludes his military identity more successfully than it clarifies his courtly one. Regardless of one’s take on identity theory, the Squire’s subjectivity remains inchoate, because he still lacks the ability to enact a discursively coherent performance; his social practice(s) has/have not yet produced the effects its/their dis-

course(s) name(s) — and that grammatical confusion tallies his difficulty.*7 In this light, the reinscription of the Squire’s relationship to his father in the final pivot word, “curteis,” becomes the narrative agent’s final gesture at a stable identity. Many readers have felt that it succeeds: that “curteis” bridges, connects, integrates the diverse aspects of the Squire’s person that had been alternating, perhaps tottering, between the amatory and the feudal subjects; their conclusions have been (mildly) generous

toward

him.?® For such readers, “curteis” necessarily

becomes a comprehensive term, collecting the sequent adjectives “lowely and servysable” (99) in a form ofcourtesy that encompasses both what might be imagined as the high-heartedness of the second and fourth amatory sections and the discipline of the first and third. But no such reading is inevitable. The weight of the portrait queries the sufficiency of such a brief gesture of resolution, and the strength ofthat single word to support it. We might equally well emphasize the line’s polyvalence, the potential that “curteis ..., lowely and servysable” remains a wholly miscellaneous list, a quick series of snapshots in different poses by this persistently “elusive subject.””9 Our generosity may be premature — or not — because the Squire’s performance remains incomplete, his discourses still disparate, his performativity not fully produced, his identity the one that by definition cannot be evaluated.

27.

Chaucerians have generally invoked identity theory only for the more novelistic characters present in the Ta/es: the Wife, the Pardoner, and the Prioress. See, for instance,

Shayne Aaron Legassie, “Chaucer’s Pardoner and Host — On the Road, in the Alehouse,”

28

SAC 29 (2007), 183-223 and William Orth, “The Problem of Performance in Chaucer’s Prioress Sequence,” Chaucer Review 42 (2007), 196-210. Foran overview, see Andrew, Vartorum Edition, 102; ET. Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An

Anthology forthe Modern Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1975) suggests that the Squire appropriately “disciplines himself in the humility in which the Knight is per29

fect” (1043). Owen, “Development,” 120 uses the quoted phrase. He had been more optimistic in Pilgrimage, 54-55.

154 | THOMASJ. FARRELL Table 1: forms offader, tonge, herte, and lady, sorted by century. a

# Not

#

# Not

Poss.

Possessive

Strong

%

Strong

#

%

#

to 1300 1300-1400 after 1400

1197 10,427 991

190 1935 174

124 363 12

65.3 18.7 69°

28 275 «60

14.7 14.0 34.5

38 1301 102

20.0 67.2 58.6

Totals

12,615

2299

499

2.7)

359

15.6

1441

62.7

Periphrastic

%

Table 2: forms of fader, tonge, herte, and lady, sorted by 1/3 century.

late 12th early 13th mid 13th late 13th early 14th mid 14th

late 14th early rsth mid 15th Totals

# Not

#

# Not

Poss.

Possessive

Strong

%

Strong

=

%

Periphrastic

445 430 239 83 704 1392 8331 394 597

81 54 46 9 110 233 1592 66 108

45 39 33 7 36 47 280 7 5

55.6 G2:

24.7 5.6 8.7 II.1 21.8 8.6 14.3 25.8 39.8

16 12 9 I 50 166 1085 2 60

19.8 222)

17.6 10.6 4.6

20 3 4 I 24 20 227 17 43

12,615

2299

499

27

359

15.6

1441

62.7

# Not Strong

%

# Strong

%

# Periphrastic

39 30 as 26

69.6 88.2 71.4 42.6

8.9 8.8 11.4 32.8

12 I 6 = 15

21.4 2.9 Lan

44

44.4

71e7 77.8 32.7 20.2

#

%

19.6 iboe 45.5 FAD

68.2 63.6 55.6

Table 3: forms offader, sorted by 1/3 century.

# Not

Poss. late 12th early 13th mid 13th late 13th early 14th

165 189 167 119 143

# Possessive 56 34 35 ° 61

5 3 4 20

mid 14th

494

99

37

37-4

late 14th

18

3100

971

158

16.3

152

Byrd

661

159 179

30 33

16.7 0.0

IO 21

33.3 63.6

15 ro

A715

1319

24.3

233

early 15th mid 15th Totals

5 fo) 320

18.2

07-7.

766

%

24.6 68.1 50.0 36.4 58.1

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire | 155 Table 4: forms of herte, sorted by 1/3 century. # Not

Poss. late 12th early 13th mid 13th late 13th early 14th mid 14th late 14th

#

# Not

__Possessive

207 189 20 31 323,

Strong

20 14 I Ui 29

689

114

3440

428

=

%

5 8 ° 7 3 6 68

25.0 57-1 ° 100.0 10.3

#

Strong 15 ° ° ° I

%

Periphrastic

75.0 fo) fe) fe) 3.4

5-3

°

15.9

65

15.2 63.6

early 15th

86

II

I

9.1

7

mid rs5th Totals

224 5209

IO 634

° 98

° Tikes

fe) 88

fe)

fe) 13.9

fe) 6 I ° 25 108

295

% fe) 42.9 100.0 0.0 86.2 94.7 68.9

3

27.3

10 448

100.0 70.7

Table 5: forms of/ady, sorted by 1/3 century. # Not

#

# Not

Poss.

_Possessive

Strong

late 12th early 13th mid 13th late 13th early 14th mid r4th late 14th early 15th mid 15th

52 31 42 36 103 232 1143 116 179 .

5 5 10 2 18 14 155 28 57

Totals

1934

294

5

#

%

Strong

#

%

I I 8 fo) 5 4 54 I 5

20.0 20.0 80.0 0.0 27.8 28.6 34.8 3.6 8.8

° ° ° 1 3 2 fe) 5 17

Oo Oo fo) 50.0 16.7 14.3 6.5 17.9 29.8

79

26.9

38

12.9

Periphrastic

%

4 4 2 I 10 8 91 22 35

80.0 80.0 20.0 50.0 55.6 57-1 58.7 78.6 61.4

177

60.2

YipT Ape

SUOTIDNIISUOD IZAO :9UUTI [[&

Plu

YIET 93e|

UIET Plu

dArssassod "SULIOJ

YT

yet Apes

appr YsI[suq

4ST plu

YICT PIE}

eYD “I

eeee

DNSeIUCHOd

——

50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

0%

late 12th

early 13th

mid 13th

late 13th

early 14th

mid 14th

late 14th

early 15th

mid 15th

Appendix

I counted from most of the texts in the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse that were written within the

1167-1467 timeframe and exist in a version datable within

the time frame studied. In the frequent case of editions that preserved multiple copies of the text, I chose the earliest and (as a secondary criterion) most complete texts as being most likely to preserve consistent usage. Texts were dated by the date of the manuscript as best understood, with the very great assistance of J. Burke Severs and Albert E. Hartung eds., AManual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967—); I also consulted

the “Plan and Bibliography” — both versions — of the Middle English Dictionary. The complete list of texts consulted is presented below, in temporal order. Texts are from the Corpus except where the provenance is noted in curly brackets. When the editions collected in the Corpus edit multiple manuscripts in parallel, | have indicated in brackets the manuscript used. The many forms in which my target words were spelled in Middle English made Boolean searching (supported by the Corpus) impracticable for this project. Searching was done text-by-text, lexical item-by-item, spelling by alternate spelling. Any item unambiguously used in a non-possessive sense, or used in an unambiguously plural possessive sense, was counted as “not possessive.” When the text itself presented a Latin equivalent to the English passage, and the Latin disambiguated the number of the English noun, I used that evidence of number. Each item for which a singular possessive sense was clear or could not be ruled out was identified as “uninflected,” “inflected,” or “periphrastic” in accordance with its form. Adverbial constructions using “of,” including but not limited to those based on the adjective, such as “trewe of herte” were counted as “Not Possessive.” Homonyms — notably the animal “herte” — were not counted except in very rare cases when punning made it necessary to consider both meanings of the passage; however, references to the animal with metaphorical overtones of human emotions were not counted.

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire | 161

The Texts End of the Twelfth Century Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century, ed. R. Morris, EETS 53 (1873). The Ormulum, with the notes and glossary of R.M. White, ed. R. Holt (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1878).

Vices and Virtues: Being a Soul’s Confession of Its Sins, with Reason’s Description ofthe Virtues : A Middle-English Dialogue of about 1200 A.D. Part 1: Text, ed. F. Holthausen, EETS os 89 (1888).

Beginning ofthe Thirteenth Century Layamon: Brut, ed. G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie, 2 vols. EETS os 250, 277 (19631978).[BL MS. Cotton Caligula A.IX] Halt Meidenhad, ed. O. Cockayne; rev. FJ. Furnivall, EETS os 18 (1922).[BM MS. Cotton Titus D 18]

Old English Homilies and Homitletic Treatises (Sawles Warde, and Pe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd: Ureisuns of Ure Louerd and ofUre Lefd1, @c.) of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. R. Morris, EETS os 29, 34 (1867-68).

The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. J W.H. Atkins. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). (Cotton MS.)

Pe Liflade of St. Juliana, ed. O. Cockayne, EETS os 51 (1872). [BM Royal MS. 17 A. xxvii|.

Middle of the Thirteenth Century lacob and losep, ed. A.S. Napier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916).

King Horn, ed.J.Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). Cambridge University Library, MS. Gg. 4. 27. 2. The Early South-English Legendary, ed. C. Horstmann, EETS os 87 (1887).

End of the Thirteenth Century The Harley Lyrics, ed. G.L. Brook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1948);

collated with the MS by F. McSparran. The Lay ofHavelok the Dane, ed. WW. Skeat, EETS es 4 (1868).

162 | THOMASJ. FARRELL Beginning of the Fourteenth Century Herebert, William: The Works ofWilliam Herebert, OFM, ed. S.R. Reimer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987). Mannyng, Robert: Handlyng Synne, ed. FJ. Furnivall (EETS os 119, 123 [1901, 1903]).

Robert of Gloucester: The Metrical Chronicle, ed. W. Aldis Wright, Rolls Series 86 (1887). Rolle, Richard, of Hampole: Works by Rolle, ed. C. Horstmann (London, 1895-96) [The Form of Living (MS. Cambr. Dd V. 64); The Commandment (MS. Cambr. Dd. V. 64); Meditations on the Passion (MS. Cambr. Addit. 3042); The Bee and

the Stork; Desyre and Delit; Gastly Gladnesse; Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (MS. Lincoln Cath. 91); Commentary on the Decalogue (MS. Lincoln Cath. 91)]. William of Shoreham: The Poems of William of Shoreham, ed. M. Konrath, EETS es 86 (1902).

Adam Davy’s 5 dreams about Edward II, ed. FJ. Furnivall, EETS os 69 (1878). Octovian (Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38), ed. from the MS by F.

McSparran.

Middle of the Fourteenth Century

Michel, Dan, of Northgate: Ayenbite ofInwyt, ed. R. Morris; rev. P. Gradon, EETS OS 23 (1965).

Cursor Mundi (The Cursur o the world): ed. R. Morris, EETS os 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101 (1874, 1875, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1892, 1893). [Gottingen MS. ]

Joseph ofArimathie : otherwise called The Romance of the Seint Graal, from the Vernon MS., ed. WW. Skeat, EETS os 44 (1871). Le Morte Arthur, a romance in stanzas of eight lines, ed. |.D. Bruce, EETS es 88

(1903). The Pricke of Conscience, ed. R. Morris (Berlin, for the Philogical Society, 1863). The Romance of Guy of Warwick, ed.J.Zupitza, EETS es 42, 49, 59 (1883, 1887, 1891).[Auchinleck MS. ]

The Romance of Sir Beues ofHamtoun, ed. E. Kolbing, EETS es 46, 48, 65 (1885, 1886, 1894). [version A]

End ofthe Fourteenth Century The Brut, or the Chronicles ofEngland, ed. FW.D. Brie, EETS 131, 136 (1906, 1908). Chaucer, Geoffrey, Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. WW. Skeat (London, for the Chaucer Society, 1872).

“His lady grace” and the Performance of the Squire | 163

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. FN. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. B.A. Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984) Chaucer, Boece, ed. EN. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) {digital text compiled by Thomas J. Farrell.}

Chaucer, House ofFame {from the Online Medieval and Classical Library, http://omacl.org/Houseoffame/} Chaucer, Parliament of Fouls {from the Online Medieval and Classical Library,

http://omacl.org/Parliament/} Chaucer, Legend of Good Women {from the Online Medieval and Classical Library, http://omacl.org/GoodWomen/} Gower, John: Confessto Amantis, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902).

Higden, Ranulf: Polychronicon [in] the English translations ofJohn Trevisa .. .{ME texts only], ed. C. Babington and J.R. Lumby, 9 vols., Rolls Series 41 (1865-6). Lanfranco, of Milan: “Science ofcirurgie,” ed. RV. Fleischhacker, EETS os 102

(1894). Wycliffe, John: Select English Works ofJohn Wyclif. Vol.1 only, ed. T. Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869).

Wycliffe, The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. F.D. Matthew, EETS os 74 (1880).

The Holy Bible ... in the earliest English versions made ... by John Wycliffe and his followers, ed.J.Forshall and F. Madden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850).

[The Second translation | The Story ofEngland by Robert Manning of Brunne, ed. FJ. Furnivall, Rolls Series

87 (London, 1887).

Purity, a Middle English poem, ed. R.J. Menner, Yale Studies in English 61 (1920). The “Gest hystoriale” of the Destruction of Troy, ed. G.A. Panton and D. Donaldson, EETS os 39, 56 (1869, 1874).

Life ofSoul: an edition from MS Laud Misc. 210, ed. P. Schaffner (Ithaca, 1999). Pearl, ed. EV. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, ed. WW. Skeat, EETS os 30 (1867) The Vision of Piers Plowman, B-text, ed. AV.C. Schmidt (London: J.M. Dent, 1978).

Prose life ofAlexander, ed. J.S. Westlake, EETS os 143 (1913 for 1911). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and EV. Gordon; rev. N. Davis

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). The Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. V. Krishna (New York: B. Franklin, 1976).

The Lanterne of Lizt ... from MS. Harl. 232.4, ed. L.M. Swinburn, EETS os 151

(1917).

164 | THOMASJ. FARRELL The Laud Troy Book, ed. J.E. Wulfing, EETS os 121, 122 (1902).

The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS. ... (with a few from the Digby mss. 2 and 86) ..., ed. C. Horstmann (part 1) and FJ. Furnivall (part 2), EETS os 98, 117 (1892,

1901).

The Siege ofJerusalem, ed. E. Kolbing and M. Day, EETS 188 (1932). The Towneley Plays, ed. G. England and A. Pollard, EETS es 71 (1897) The York Plays, ed. R. Beadle (London: E. Arnold, 1982).

Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London: A.D. 1387-1439: with a priest’s of 1454, ed. FJ. Furnivall, EETS os 78 (1882). [wills dated 1387-1395 only]

Beginning of the Fifteenth Century An Apology for Lollard Doctrines, attributed to Wicliffe, ed. J.H. Todd, Camden Society 20 (1842).

Mandeville’s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, from Mandeville’s Travels ... from MS Cotton

Titus C.XVI in the British Museum, EETS os 153, 154 (1919, 1923). Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London: A.D. 1387-1439: with a priest’s of 1454, ed. FJ. Furnivall, EETS os 78 (1882). [wills dated 1402-1433

only] Lydgate, John: Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. E. Sieper, EETS es 84, 89 (1901, 1903). Hoccleve’s works. Part Il: The Regement of Princes, ed. F.J. Furnivall, EETS 72 (1897).

Middle of the Fifteenth Century Fifty Earltest English Wills in the Court ofProbate, London: A.D. 1387-1439: with a priest’s of 1454, ed. FJ. Furnivall, EETS os 78 (1882). [wills dated 1434-1454 only]

Paston family, Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Part | only, ed. N. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

A Common-Place Book ofthe Fifteenth Century ... from the original MS. at Brome Hall, Suffolk [Book of Brome], ed. L. Toulmin Smith (London: Triibner, 1886).

The Book ofMargery Kempe, edited by Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996); text from TEAMS Middle English Text Series,

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/kempifrm.htm et seq.

WARREN

GINSBERG

Mood, Tense, Pronouns, Questions:

Chaucer and the Poetry of Grammar

After Pandarus has finally withdrawn with his candle to the chimney, and “fond his contenaunce, / As for to looke upon an old romance,” Troilus tells Criseyde, “Now be ye kaught, now is ther but we tweyne! / Now yeldeth yow, for other bote is non!” (3.1207-08).' By calling attention to the how, the when, the where, and the

means by which they have found themselves in each other’s arms, Troilus’s three “nows” bring Pandarus (and his proxies, the narrator, and us) back into the bedroom. His almost textbook exposition of the circumstances that have led, at last, to

this moment emphasizes its rhetorical character; by converting a “pas de deux” into a “ménage a trois,” Troilus’s passionate reiteration of the word causes us to realize that for him and for Criseyde, “to love” has become more adverb than verb, less an infinitive than some sort of conjugated conjunction, an instant in time that would cancel all others, which Troilus must repeat to make it real.

Criseyde’s response to Troilus’s declarations is one of the most captivating couplets in Chaucer’s poem: “Ne hadde I er now, my sweete herte deere, /Ben yold, ywis, | were now nought heere!” (3. 1210-11). Far more than Troilus’s, Criseyde’s

“nows” seem to recognize that every present has a past, and that she has directed the course of events. Had she not decided beforehand that she would yield, she tells him, she definitely (“ywis”) would not be there. But even as Criseyde asserts her agency and independence, her grammar

undercuts

her. “Ben yold,” she says;

Criseyde has not yielded; she has “been yielded.” With that awkward passive participle she, like Troilus, conjures up everything Pandarus has done to bring about this tryst; her unwitting acknowledgment of her compromised volition makes us all too aware, in this suddenly unspontaneous moment, of his all too palpable presence. Attending closely to the semantic and syntactic properties of words may seem a modern preoccupation, but Chaucer would have expected his educated readers to notice, adduce, and ponder the implications of Troilus’s ardent “nows” and

1

All citations of Chaucer’s works are from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

166 | WARREN GINSBERG Criseyde’s disconcerting passive. As Peter Travis has shown in his brilliant reading of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” grammar school students learned from their earliest

years how to parse the terms and untangle the sentences they found in Cato’s distichs; they would paraphrase the Aesopian fables they read, write commentaries on them, and construct imitations in a variety of narrative styles.* Under the tutelage of their “grammaticus,” they were taught to analyze individual words, first as categoremata (parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, all came

under scrutiny), then as distinct forms, each with its “own etymological history and philological identity” (61). They would go on to examine phrases and sentences, grapple with Latin prosody and syntax, and eventually graduate to the craft of writing letters. Even from this abbreviated survey of schoolroom activities, one can see that

grammar, in its effort to grasp the thought behind verbal expression, inevitably encroached on the domains of rhetoric, logic, and dialectic. A trained reader,

imbued with an etymological habit of mind, would have taken Troilus’s emphasis on this “now,” and Criseyde’s coupling it to a prior one, as cues to contemplate the persuasive history that led to both. A schoolboy who perhaps had had the importance of syntax caned into him would be inclined to wonder how a subject “I” can “be yielded.” A man far less expert than the Clerk, who “unto logyk hadde longe ygo” (A.286), would feel spurred to unravel the implications of Criseyde’s conditionals, her subjunctives, and to ask whether they make her proposition a hypothetical or an outright assertion. The secretary skilled in dictamen would readily recall the advice Pandarus gives to Troilus about the manner, and to Criseyde about the substance, ofthe letters they wrote to one another. Childhood instruction in the verbal arts created an audience that would especially appreciate the ways in which Chaucer makes grammar perform here. That these readers were men certainly colored the performance and the response one can imagine they had to it. If Chaucer’s literate public recalled their suffering at the hands of hard taskmasters, they may have been inclined to associate their woes with those that Troilus endured. If, looking back, they felt some satisfaction in the learning they had gained, and were disposed, in retrospect, to be grateful to the mistress arts they had mastered, they might have smiled benignly on Criseyde. But such a sympathetic reader, | think, may also have felt, at this moment in the poem, a different kind of pleasure: the gratification of having seen Grammar, always personified as a woman, dominated by an older male. Particularly when Chaucer’s language would transport the lettered back to their classroom, Pandarus, and the

2

Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

Chaucer and the Poetry of Grammar

| 167

bittersweet memories his manhandling of Criseyde might evoke, is the figure they may have regarded with the greatest pleasure. Some months before Troilus and Criseyde’s first night together, we overhear their first “téte-a-téte” conversation. Pandarus, naturally, stage-manages this conversation as well. He has concocted a lawsuit against Criseyde; to plan her defense, he gathers her friends at Deiphobus’ house. Pandarus has Troilus arrive beforehand and pretend he feels ill. Since it would be dangerous to overheat the small chamber where Troilus has retired, Pandarus suggests that he and his niece alone go to solicit his aid. Criseyde worries about the propriety of such a meeting; after Pandarus has argued away her misgivings, Chaucer concludes the second book ofthe Trozlus with a hanging demande d'amour. As our hero waits, rehearsing everything he wants to say to the woman he worships, the narrator asks lovers: But now to yow, ye lovers that ben here,

Was Troilus nought in a cankedort, That lay, and mighte whispringe of hem here, And thoughte, “O lord, right now renneth my sort Fully to dye, or han anoon comfort’; And was the firste tyme he shulde hir preye Of love; O myghty God, what shal he seye? (2. 175 1-57) The third book then begins with a paean in praise oflove; after it, Chaucer returns

to Troilus, who is so abashed when he sees Criseyde enter the room that he forgets the speeches he had memorized. Finally, though, he manages to splutter, in elegant rhyme-royal stanzas, that all his happiness depends on Criseyde allowing him to serve as her humblest, truest knight. Pandarus, poking his niece in the ribs, prompts the response he wants her to give: “What lady could refuse such a request?” At this,

the narrator says:

With that she gan hire eyen on him caste Ful easily and ful debonairly, Avysyng hire, and hied nought to faste With nevere a word, but seyde hym softely, “Myn honour sauf,Iwol wel trewely, And in swich forme as he gan now devyse,

Receyven hym fully to my servyse, Byseechyng hym, for Goddes love, that he Wolde ...

(3. 155-63)

168 | WARREN GINSBERG Criseyde’s words and actions are devastating, not because she paces her answer, as if she were practiced both in knowing how to encourage with speaking looks — the eyes she had diffidently averted while Troilus spoke she now casts on him not simply ina calm and gracious way but “ful easily” and “ful debonairly”—and in knowing how to keep a man on tenterhooks, though whether she delays out of modesty or coquetry or both we are left to decide. Rather, Criseyde’s welcome of Troilus is devastating because she uses the word “he.” The pronoun’s referent is Troilus; he is literally the third person in the room. Criseyde’s “he” startles us into realizing that her acceptance of him as her knight, itself a wonderful mixture of unconditional

surrender (“receyven him fully,” “byseechyng hym”) and deal-breaking stipulation (“Myn honour sauf,”“And in swich forme ..””), is addressed to Pandarus; she speaks to Troilus through Pandarus, nor can she ever speak to Troilus without Pandarus, nor he to her, even when he is not present. When Criseyde completes her thought,

she shifts from “he” to “ye”: “Now beth al hool, no longer ye ne pleyne” (3.168). We so want that “you” to be singular, and that Troilus is the you she means. But it has

been Pandarus who has made the plaints. Her “ye” refers to him as much as it refers to Troilus. And it is plural; it equally refers to both of them together. Students learned the laws that regulate the scope and reference of pronouns, especially when their antecedent is indistinct, both early and late in their careers. Here, however, the antecedent of “he” is clear; it’s the pronoun itself that is wrong.

Criseyde should be using “you” throughout, and Pandarus should not be the “you” she addresses. Because she does neither, grammatical interrogation of her “he” and her “ye” quickly turns into an investigation about ambiguity and the ethics of language. By making Troilus the indirect object of her reply, she makes us aware that the narrator’s question, “what shal he seye,” is rhetorical, or better, meta-rhetorical; it forces us to consider a speaker’s ownership of what he says, the responsibility she bears in saying it, the value we assign intention and consequence in judging the sincerity and truthfulness of any utterance. Not only lovers, then, need to answer the narrator’s question; Pandarus isn’t the

only figure to derive pleasure from putting words in Troilus’s and Criseyde’s mouth. His interference in their affair mirrors the narrator’s; both in turn are surrogates for the author and his readers. Chaucer underscores these elective affinities throughout the Troilus, but nowhere more clearly than when he interrupts the narrative to insert his translation of Petrarch’s sonnet “S’e amor non é.”3 The narrator goes out ofhis way to mark this intrusion by inserting himself into the poem:

3

Fora more detailed reading of Petrarch’s sonnet and Chaucer’s use ofit, see my “Chaucer and Petrarch: S’amor non é and the Canticus Troili” Humanist Studies and the Digital

Age 1 (2010), 121-27.

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And of his song naught only the sentence, As writ myn auctour called Lollius,

But pleinly, save our tonges difference, I dar wel seyn, in al that Troilus

Seyde in his song, loo! every word right thus As I shal seyn; and whoso list it here,

Loo, next this vers he may it fynden here. (1.393-99)

Such a frenzy of metafictional fabrication is hard to ignore; scribes reacted to it by giving the song that follows a title, “Canticus Troili.” Their intervention, of course, repeats the narrator’s, even if the rubric shows they took his title but disregarded everything else he said: had they not, they might have added “edidit Lollius et recognovit Chaucer.” Indeed, the narrator is so determined to cite his source, the fact that he names Lollius, an authority no one has heard of (the best one can say of

him is that he is a mistake), begins to feel like an evasion, a distraction designed to avoid naming the real author of the song. At the same time, as if to anticipate the contradictions that Troilus is about to utter, the narrator embraces both word-forword and sense-for-sense translation, which from Cicero and Horace on were thought to be at odds with one another. His enthusiasm is infectious; we feel his

excitement that Troilus will declare his love for the first time in the very next stanza. Yet with each assurance that we will hear exactly what he said, the narrator makes us sure that the words we are about to read are not Troilus’s. Nor are they Lollius’, nor Petrarch’s. They are his. Even before Pandarus enters the poem, the narrator has identified himself, and through him his author, as the reader’s go-between, the

man who interposes himself between the events of the story and their relation. Behind all of them stands the accusation Francesca lodges against the literature of love, which makes Dante faint: “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse” (Inf. 5. 137), “the book was a pander, and he who wrote it.”4

The narrator’s question about what Troilus can say has an earlier counterpart; it is the question Criseyde asks herself the first time she sees him. Returning from battle on his slightly bleeding charger, in full armor save for his head, Troilus passes by chance beneath her balcony: So lik a man of armes and a knight

He was to seen, fulfilled of heigh prowesse,

4

Allcitations of Dante are from The Divine Comedy ofDante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling and Ronald M. Martinez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

170 | WARREN GINSBERG For bothe he hadde a body and a myght To don that thing, as wel as hardynesse, And ek to seen hym in his gere hym dresse, So fressh, so yong, so weldy semed he,

It was an heven upon hym for to see.

His helm tohewen was in twenty places, That by a tyssew heng his bak byhynde; His sheeld todasshed was with swerdes and maces, In which men myghte many an arwe fynde That thirled hadde horn and nerf and rynde;

And ay the peple cryde, “here cometh oure ioye, And, next his brother, holder up of Troye.” For which he wex a litel reed for shame, When he the peple upon hym herde cryen, That to byholde it was a noble game, How sobrelich he caste down his yen. (2.63 1-48) It takes some time to adjust to the perspective from which Troilus is described, because the narrator presents him both as he is and in terms of the impression he makes. Troilus’s body, might, courage, youth, and prowess, we feel confident, prove that there is no distance between his being a “man of armes and knyght” and his seeming “so lik” one at the beginning of the first stanza | have quoted and a “heuen ... forto see” at the end of it. But a gap opens between this image ofTroilus and the man we see next, his shield hacked and pierced with arrows, his life, it would seem,

like his helmet, hanging by a thread. In what heaven, one has to ask, is so war-torn a figure heavenly? What dreamland do the Trojans inhabit, ifthey are cheered by the bravery of adefender who clearly has been sorely beset? Still, Troilus’s reactions, his modest blush, his lowering his eyes when he hears himself praised, are enchanting. As Criseyde, unseen herself, looks and listens, the crowd’s acclaim and Troilus’s bearing work their magic on her: Criseyda gan al his chere aspien, And leet it so softe in hire synke, That to hire self she seyde, “who yaf me drynke?” (2.649-5 1)

“Who yaf me drynke?” Nothing can better capture the intoxicating rush she feels as she realizes that this is the man who loves her. But Criseyde expresses this exhilara-

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tion as a question, and it, like the narrator’s, has an answer that we would rather not

hear. Troilus’s appearance has undoubtedly staggered her, but the liquor that makes her lightheaded has been supplied by Pandarus. He had just spent the entire morning portraying Troilus as a “verray parfit, noble knyght,” so that when he revealed he loved her, Criseyde would be kindly disposed to him. Would she have been so suddenly giddy, we are forced to wonder, when Troilus rides by, if Pandarus had not previously spoken so glowingly of him? This is the moment Criseyde falls in love, and, like Troilus, she falls in love at first sight. But the man who thrills her is the

Troilus she sees and the Troilus her uncle has represented to her. Both are the “he” Criseyde refers to at the beginning of Book Three. Nor is our vision of the scene less influenced by Pandarus’s mediations than Criseyde’s. The dissonance between his praise of Troilus, which is sincere, and the purpose for which he extolled him, which is tactical, is echoed by the distance we perceive between the people’s praise of Troilus and the little evidence his war gear gives that he will be able to uphold Troy much longer. It is Pandarus’s interference that makes us question why Troilus is described as “so like” the man of arms and knight he obviously is; it is Pandarus’s intrusiveness that causes us to doubt the

metaphor that completes the comparison. Troilus is a heaven to see, ‘provided,’ we feel almost obliged to add, ‘we do not look too hard.’ In the end, Troilus and Criseyde would have us concede that no earthly love is

unmediated — there’s always a third person in the room — and that human motives are never uninflected by self-interest. The woman Chaucer will hold chiefly responsible for this melancholy lesson is Criseyde. Anticipating the first time she sees Troilus, the narrator resorts to metaphor the first time he describes her:

Criseyde was this lady name al right. As to my doom, in al Troies cite Nas non so fair, for passynge every wight So aungelik was hir natif beaute, That lik a thing inmortal semed she,

As doth an hevenyssh perfit creature That down were sent in scornynge of nature. (1.99-105) In his eyes, Criseyde is also a “heven ... forto see”; he appears to have decided he can best evoke her supernal beauty by insuring that each of her attributes makes her less knowable. Instead of reporting what she looked like, or how she was dressed, the narrator describes her effect on him. Against the unassailable fact that the lady’s name was Criseyde (“al right”), he tells us that in his opinion, “as to my doom,” she

was the fairest in Troy. How ever did he come by this view? Obviously he wasn’t in

172 | WARREN GINSBERG Troy some 2000 years before he sat down to write. Yet his words try hard to give the impression that he was; it seems he very much wants us to think his judgment is the result of direct observation rather than an image he’s confected from the books in which she appears. About to launch his story of brokered love, the narrator well might wish to deflect attention from how his reading has brokered his love ofits heroine. But if old texts have served him in the same manner that Pandarus will serve Troilus, how much less will this old poem of his, which we are now reading,

or any other work of fiction that catches up our imagination, pander for us? All at once, a shadow (the shadow of our reading) falls across an adoring portrait of a lady. The Criseyde we see seems to acquire new, disquieting depths as we look, and the pleasure we take in the narrator’s pleasure loses its innocence. So what, then, can we say ofthe grace and comeliness that has enraptured the narrator? Beyond all others, Criseyde’s native beauty is so angelic, he reports, that it made her seem immortal, as does a perfect, heavenly creature that is sent down

“in scorning of nature.” Both the syntactic and the semantic complexities of this ostensibly conventional simile would drive a grammarian to distraction. No one in Troy was as fair as Criseyde; her beauty surpassed everyone else’s. This much is clear, but by repeating the claim, the narrator has virtually guaranteed that his audience will think of the woman over whom the war is being fought. Even before she or Helen appears, Criseyde out-Helens her; the narrator first raises and then doubles the doubtfulness of his assertion by making it twice. In any event, for a medieval audience, any comparison with Helen, even an implicit one, is an inauspicious way

to introduce a woman in a Troy story. The narrator’s adulation of Criseyde, however, goes further; her “natif beaute,” he says, was angelic. The conceit was

a commonplace, but here the adjective “natif”

confounds logic; the physical features that nature gave her made Criseyde seem immortal, that is, preternatural. This paradox begets another when the narrator completes his thought: by seeming immortal, Criseyde shares the immutable perfection of creatures made by God to endure forever in heaven. When, however, they are sent down (to do God’s bidding, we suppose, or for rebelling against it), they

move against their own nature and they put nature’s changeable creatures, who are born and die, to scorn. Both implications inhere in the phrase “in scorning of nature.” In either case, the same natural endowments that elevate Criseyde to the heavenly consistory operate contrary to or outside nature on earth. By the end ofthe stanza, Criseyde seems superlative not by comparison but because the attributes that make her so alluring are selfcancelling; unlike immortal things, her nature seems open to the greatest possible change. And change is exactly what Criseyde does: as the narrator sadly reports at the start of the poem, she forsakes Troilus before, all too fallen, all too human, she dies.

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In many respects, had Criseyde been born in Chaucer’s England, she might

have been the Prioress. Her portrait in “The General Prologue” of the Canterbury Tales is a remarkable example of rhetorical effictio: no instructor ofthis or the other trivial arts, however, ever taught their pupils better than Chaucer does here how to read details that speak loudest because they have not been said: Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,

That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy; Hire gretteste ooth was but by Seinte Loy; And she was cleped madame Eglentyne. Ful weel; she soong the service dyvyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely; And Frennsh she spak ful faire and fetisly ... At mete wel ytaught was she with alle; She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle ... Hir over-lippe wyped she so clene That in hir coppe ther was no ferthyng sene Of grece, whan she dronken hadde hir draughte ... (A.1 17-28) The details seem almost haphazardly assembled, as if Chaucer tacked whatever feature or gesture has just caught his eye onto the trait or peculiarity he had noticed a second before. Here we learn first that the Prioress smiles simply and modestly; next that her greatest oath was “by St. Loy”; then that her name was Eglentyne. We hear as well that she sings the divine service with the nasal intonation that was fashionable in Chaucer’s day, and that she speaks French very elegantly, even if with an English accent. Finally, we see that she has exquisite table manners — she let no morsel drop from her lips, which she takes care to wipe clean before she drinks. In rapid succession, we see the Prioress smiling, swearing, singing, speaking, eating. The focal point of all these actions is her mouth. Chaucer has in fact so consistently directed attention to Madame Eglentyne’s lips, we might think she were a romance heroine; we are taken by surprise when we realize we have not heard a word about the one thing that we’d expect to see coming from them — prayer. Silence has never been more eloquent; out of it, we begin to form a gram-

mar of the Prioress, in which effusion communicates want, a sense that some-

thing’s missing. There are, of course, many more things to say about the Prioress, indeed about

all the passages I have discussed. I would like to conclude, however, by gathering together the modes of reading I have been exploring to examine the Canterbury pilgrim who would have been most familiar with grammar, rhetoric, and logic. In

174 | WARREN GINSBERG “The General Prologue,” the first thing we learn about the Clerk is that he is at Oxford and that he has specialized in logic: A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also,

That unto logyk hadde longe ygo. As leene was his hors as is a rake, And he nas nat right fat, I undertake, But looked holwe, and therto sobrely. (A.28 5-89)

The rush of details and rapid shifts of perspective certainly have their rhyme, but if a reason lies behind their arrangement, it is not immediately apparent. One sees how deep study would have caused the Clerk to grow thin; he has, one imagines,

become so absorbed in mastering the abstract principles of inference and deduction that physical necessities, like eating, no longer command his attention. The Clerk, then, is a man who has subordinated the needs of the body to the passions of the

mind; why, though, does the narrator’s attention suddenly swerve to his rake-thin horse, as if it was meant to mediate between them? Perhaps Chaucer is playing against the Platonic notion that the soul in the grip of an emotion ts like a rider borne by a reinless horse — in this instance the idea would reinforce the feeling that the Clerk pursues his mental lucubrations with the same fervor that other people pursue their physical cravings. But Chaucer actually:conveys this point less by allusion than by what we might call associative grammar. The Clerk “unto logyk hadde longe ygo.” The past participle “ygo,” “gone,” is a word of movement; the Clerk’s horse is also a vehicle of locomotion. A horse, however, brings you from one place to another. The Clerk’s going into logic, which has made him as exiguous as the mount he rides, implies a different, non-spatial motion — as he moves ever more deeply into logic, his learning removes

him from the world. But the term that

depicts the effects of the Clerk’s retreat from mundane preoccupations is “holwe”; he “looked holwe, and therto soberly.” In Middle English, “holwe” carried the same sense of emptiness, of something no longer or not yet there, that “hollow” has in Modern English. The connotations of the word are unsettling; they might lead a reader to worry that the “going” which results from the Clerk’s immersion in his studies will only take him so far. His mind grows more acute, his body becomes skeletal; meanwhile his horse plods its way to Canterbury. Perhaps its bony frame is meant to remind its rider, who was at Oxford to enter orders, that however sober his devotion to Aristotle has made him appear, plumbing the depths oflogic should not be an end in itself. The emaciation of spiritual fasting is a hollowness more meet for a churchman-in-training to attain.

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I hesitate to burden the Clerk’s poor horse with more weight than it can bear, but his nag is crucial because, as a means oftransit, it is connected to the man it carries, who is in transition himself. The Clerk, Chaucer goes on to tell us, is too

unworldly to accept appointment as a bureaucrat in the chancellery at Westminster; at the same time, he has not left university to take up a benefice:

Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy; For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice, Ne was so worldly for to have office. (A.290-92) Chaucer’s irony is wicked: had the Clerk become a priest, the implication runs, his cloak wouldn’t be worn because he would have used the income ofhis benefice to buy a “courtepy” that suits the dignity of his office. The Clerk’s scholastic penury may not rise to the level of the spiritual poverty, but it certainly locates him closer to that ideal than the churchmen Chaucer indirectly invokes here. If the Clerk’s indigence situates him between the Parson and the Friar, whose double-worsted, ambergris-cuffed semicope was hardly “thredbare, as is a povre scoler’s” (A.260-62), his studiousness differentiates him other Oxford clerks, whose

pursuits are more sensual:

For hym was levere have at his beddes heed Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,

Of aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie. (A.293-96)

The Clerk would rather have Aristotle’s books at his bedside than rich robes; these rejected robes not only tie the couplet to the “courtepy” of the previous lines, they bring to mind Jankyn, the Oxford clerk who we can imagine married the Wife at least in part for the “fine ground” of the ten pounds of coverchiefs she would wear to church on Sundays. The Clerk also has little interest in fiddles or psalteries; is there a reader of the Canterbury Tales who does not think ofthe “gay sautrie” that other Oxford clerk Nicholas strums in his bedchamber? But the number of works the Clerk would rather have shows he still covets in a material way,

even if the knowledge he prizes in those twenty volumes is not a quantifiable thing. Once again we see a Clerk who remains in the physical world and is moving beyond it. It is fitting, then, that Aristotle’s philosophy turns tangible in the next lines by becoming alchemical. A common pun in Chaucer’s time dubbed men like the

176 | WARREN GINSBERG Canon and his Yeoman “philosophers”; instead of changing lead into gold, the Clerk transforms money into knowledge: But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre; But al that he myghte of his freendes hente, On bookes and on lernynge he it spente, And bisily gan for the soules preye Of hem that yaf hym wherwith to scoleye. (A.297-302)

Once again, the Clerk’s economics hover between material exchange and redemptive ideal. He repays the friends who give him money by praying for their souls. Alms, though, are the currency of charity, which is ecumenical. It would be wrong to fault the Clerk for praying for those who enable him to continue his studies. Nevertheless, he seems to limit his thankfulness to them, especially if we compare his intercessions to the Parson’s, a “clerk” who was “ful looth ... to cursen for his tithes” (A.486). The Clerk, no doubt, is a worthy man, who would gladly learn and

gladly teach, but the logic that links him to his mount and organizes the rest of his portrait prompts us to wonder whether Oxford will be his final stop or a way station to a better calling. When Harry Bailly calls on the Clerk to tell his tale, he informs the pilgrims that he learned his story from Fraunceys Petrak, the poet laureate of Italy. Petrarch had been so taken by Boccaccio’s account in the Decameron of the cruel trials that the marquis Walter devised to test the constancy of his patient wife Griselda, he decided to translate it into Latin. Petrarch wrote a prologue as well, in which he

traced the course of the Po from a small stream rising at Mount Viso in the Apennines to the great river that flows through many northern Italian cities before it empties into the Adriatic Sea. The Clerk reproduces this preface word for word, but adds, when he is done, that to his mind it is extraneous: “And trewely, as to my

juggement,/ Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent, /Save that he wole conveyen his mateere” (E.53—55). By repeating Petrarch’s preamble even though he thinks it is

supererogatory, the Clerk virtually splits himselfin two: he assumes the role of the deferential translator-copyist who will mirror in English the words he says he committed to memory at Padua, and he is also the assertive translator-editor, ready not only to interpret but to trim the text. This double posture as humble scribe and bold commentator, which forecasts the Clerk’s identification with both Walter and Griselda in the tale, effectively translates Petrarch’s geography into ethopoesis; the Clerk’s impulse to affirm his independence from authority and submit himself

Chaucer and the Poetry of Grammar | 177 ungrudgingly to it becomes the principle that regulates his character. The odd coupling of these attitudes changes the terms but replicates the pattern ofhis portrait in “The General Prologue”; once again the Clerk shuttles between two connected but competing sensibilities. When he finishes his tale, the Clerk dutifully repeats Petrarch’s interpretation ofit: the forbearance Griselda showed by never complaining to her husband is a model of the constancy with which we should bear the trials God allows life to bring us. But the Clerk then appends an “Envoy,” in which he turns Petrarch’s lesson on its head. In six rollicking stanzas, about which Chick Chickering has written so insightfully, he now holds up Griselda as a counterexample to the Wife of Bath.’ In place of an allegory of faith, he presents Griselda as ironic vindication of the way Alice and archwives like her have actually behaved in their marriages: they should continue to browbeat their husbands, he suggests, as constantly as Griselda submitted to hers. At the end ofhis performance, the Clerk again straddles the practical and the metaphysical, displaying the same reserve and selfassurance that he displayed at the beginning of it. In hindsight, however, we also see that the “Envoy’s” unexpected levity, so closely following Petrarch’s earnest moral, makes the Clerk’s initial verdict about the impertinence of the landscape more and more pertinent. By acknowledging that he would cut the passage, the Clerk, we only now realize, has associated himself, wittingly or not, with the Wife of Bath; she too is an editor, as she proved to her Oxford clerk when she tore three leaves from his book of wicked wives. Unlike her,

however, the Clerk retains Petrarch’s prologue; he shows Alice that, like Griselda,

he can subordinate personal feelings to higher authority. This retrospective identification of the Clerk with two women, one the symbol of patience, the other an

embodiment of a man’s idea of feminine irrepressibility, is disconcerting. The Clerk seems at once a Chichevache, the cow that was rake-thin because its fodder was supposed to be patient wives, and its opposite. More disconcerting still, the contradictory pairing of forbearance and competitiveness in him provides the Clerk a motive that explains how the prologue he would cancel is connected to the “Envoy” he adds. The Clerk sings his song not simply to fire satiric squibs at the Wife; his sourly good-natured rhyme and vitriol fills the virtual space the Clerk cleared by admitting he’d delete the preface. In the end, under the guise of editorial meekness, the

5

Howell Chickering,“Form and Interpretation in the ‘Envoy’ to the ‘Clerk’s Tale?” Chaucer Review 29 (1995), 352-72.

178 | WARREN GINSBERG Clerk triumphantly restores at least one of the pages Alice had ripped from Jankyn’s misogynist anthology. With reticent insolence and assertive modesty, the Clerk proves he is the sophist that Harry Bailley, the pilgrims’ Host, suspects he might be. Great writers mine every resource of language to delight the mind, please the ear, have us feel the pulse oflife. In Chaucer, even grammar is poetic; in his hands, the parts of speech dance. His nouns and pronouns send us back to school, once again to learn that worlds can hide in words, if only we pay attention.

R.F.

YEAGER

Art for Art’s Sake: Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades

In so many ways, it is unfortunate that John Gower, sometime around 1390-92,

elected French rather than English in which to compose his Cinkante Balades (henceforth CB). Assuredly, at the time he seems to have had excellent reasons. Not

least among them, very likely, was a powerful wish to engage a bevy ofthe noblest French chevalier-poets in a mildly competitive back-and-forth, even as (and perhaps in emulation of) his friend and soon-to-be patron Henry Bolingbroke jousted in Normandy, at St. Inglevert, with some of the same. Indeed, if the generally accepted theory is true, that the Cinkante Balades was written with Henry specifically in mind (and certainly the two opening poems dedicating the sequence to Henry in London, British Library MS Additional 59495, the only copy extant of the Cinkante Balades, tend to support such a view), it was this sequence that accounted

for the gift by Henry to Gower of the silver “SSS” collar Gower’s effigy wears on his tomb.' But if those were Gower’s reasons, what he gained in his lifetime he jettisoned in posterity. Had Gower written his Cimkante Balades in English, his reputation would be’ far the better, and the history of English letters would have been written differently. This is because, very simply, the Cinkante Balades amounts to very fine art — and solely art. The sequence thus stands out uniquely from the rest of Gower’s works. Nothing else we know of his, not even his other balade assemblage (for

it is a misnomer to term these eighteen poems a sequence), the so-called Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, with its articulated moral message, is as free of

the didactic and/or the socio-political and as fully given over to the making of poetry gua poetry as is the Cinkante Balades. Nor is any work of Gower’s as finely crafted, top to bottom, save perhaps the stand-alone poem “To King Henry IV: In Praise of Peace? his only known work in Middle English other the Confesszo

1

See my discussion, “John Gower’s Audience: The Ballades,” Chaucer Review 40 (2005), 81-105.

180 | R.F. YEAGER

Amantis.2 Nevertheless, despite its iambic pentameter lines and rime riche stanza, from a purely aesthetic standpoint “In Praise of Peace” falls several cuts below the Cinkante Balades. Too often in it Gower subordinates beauty to utility, apparently satisfied that his poem be a vehicle to deliver substantive advice clearly to the newly powerful usurper. Yet it goes without saying that the unfamiliarity of most moderns — even scholto Gower’s work — with the artistry of the Cinkante Balades devolves from close ars this decision to write them in French. That readers centuries in the future weren’t Gower’s primary audience for these poems is of course hardly news. Asking after that readership, however, seems a fruitful beginning-point to a thoughtful consideration of his aesthetic choices in the sequence. By the 1390’s fewer and fewer English readers had fluent French, a deterioration Chaucer certainly recognized, and

Gower must have noticed as well.3 One likely measure of Gower’s awareness,

indeed, is implicit in his poetic decisions just noted, to compose balades in French for Henry, young earl of Derby, and a decade later “In Praise of Peace” in English for that same Henry, now head of state. Setting pen to parchment to write the Cinkante Balades in French was, then, scarcely done without aesthetic purpose of an altogether strategic kind, from its title forwards. In and around 1390, courtly attention on both sides of the Channel was riveted onto the Livre de Cent Ballades, an adventure in the poetic literary begun in the late 1380's by Jean de Saint-Pierre, seneschal d’Eu, and subsequently attracting contributions from thirteen of France’s highest born.‘ As its title indicates, the Livre de Cent Ballades was a collection of a hundred balades by different hands. These included Philippe d’Artois, count of Eu; the younger Boucicaut; Regnaut de Trie, later Admiral of France; Jean de Chambrillac, seneschal of Périgord; and the dukes both of Orléans and Berry. Eventually there was an addendum by other eminent French “responders.” Gower took the name and doubtless his inspiration for his Cinkante Balades from the Livre. So, as well, did Christine de Pizan, who produced a collection, Cent Ballades, in or slightly before 1401. Christine’s election of this form and this title for what seems to have been her first poetic work is especially illustrative of how influential was the Livre de Cent Ballades on the momentary Zeit-

2

But see also David Carlson’s Introduction to John Gower, Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Anglie (1381) and Cronica tripertita (1400), ed. David R. Carlson, with a verse

3 4

translation by A.G. Rigg (Toronto and Oxford: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2011), 14, who argues for the Cronica tripertita as “the most involved prosody with which Gower ever worked, in any of his languages.” Compare, for example, Chaucer’s reference in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales to the Prioress’ French of “Stratford atte Bowe.” See the edition of Gaston Raynaud, Les Cents Ballades, poéme du XIVe siecle (Paris: FirminDidot, 1905).

Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 181 geist. Newly widowed and impoverished, she desperately needed an income and turned to poetry to support herself and her son. With the stakes so high, that she would wager on a Cent Ballades of her own as offering the best odds to gain essential patronage indicates the modish power and draw the Livre de Cent Ballades possessed for a decade. To conclude then that Gower’s title, and his Cinkante Balades as a whole, intentionally invited comparison with the Livre de Cent Ballades in 1392 shouldn’t seem

far-fetched. Chiefly important, however, are the implications of this statement, insofar as it reflects, and reflects upon, Gower’s aesthetic choices. At the most basic, that Gower’s “target,” if you will, was a French balade sequence, and his audience, which

included especially the future Henry IV, consisted of fluent French speakers, some of whom, like Henry himself, could call the poets ofthe Livre de Cent Ballades at least acquaintances, if not in several cases relations and actual friends, plausibly explains why Gower elected to write in French rather than English as his linguistic medium. To challenge (for that, in a way, is what Gower must have had in mind) the “flower of France” to a poetic “duel” using English as his medium would have been another kind of choice, one perhaps Chaucer would have made conceivably by no means lesser, but necessarily quite different, if not even a bit easier. To choose to write in French, however, was audacious. To write balades exclusively, when other strophic

forms not present in the Livre de Cent Balades were available to him, was more audacious still. It set Gower’s entire sequence up for immediate comparison and judg-

ment, balade by balade, image by image, rhyme by rhyme, on wholly aesthetic grounds. Imagining him unresponsive to these issues as he wrote, or that a pressure especially to polish his art to a high burnish did not direct his stylus while composing the Cinkante Balades would be a mistake, | think, ofatowering order. Next, consider the artfully plotted narrative that establishes the fifty-one Cinkante Balades as a true poetic sequence. Telling a story using lyric forms wasn’t original to Gower; Petrarch had done it earlier in the Rzme,and Machaut as well in

the Voir dit. Yet that Gower broke new ground in creating a mini-drama as a means of conjoining his balades is easily overlooked, albeit impressive when placed in context. Before Gower no Englishman had attempted anything like it, in any language. Another two hundred years would pass before Phillip Sidney did so next, in Astvophel and Stella. Nor did Gower simply borrow dramatic structure from the Livre de Cent Balades. It has a narrative framework also, but a relatively loose one, of two

parts. In the first fifty poems a young knight and an old engage in a dialogue-cumallegorical debate, about battle and how to love properly; and then, when a woman,

5

That Sidney was inspired by the Italian Petrarch rather than by his countryman Gower is both ironic and sadly characteristic.

182 | R.F. YEAGER

“La Guignarde” (“she who desires”), confounds the young knight by maintaining that falsity in love is more fun than loyalty, the old knight asks for others’ opinions. Their advice, as they give it, comprises the second fifty balades. Gower’s narrative, however, is more ambitious, and closest in plan to Machaut’s

Voir dit (ca. 1360-65), a poem influential on the Confessto Amantis as well.® Like the Voir dit, the Cinkante Balades takes the form of intercalated verse epistles between a

lady and one or — more plausibly — two wooers.” Most of the balades emanate from the first male correspondent; the second appears just twice. As in the Voir dit (and in Christine de Pizan’s Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame), the lady also has her say. In balades XLI-XLIV, initially she excoriates, then dismisses her long-suffering lover

who in balade XL has accused her of disloyalty, and turns toward a second (or — less likely — reaccepts the first) whose accomplishments she lauds. The male “speaker” of XLV greets her warmly, and in XLVI she joyfully welcomes him as her ideal love, feelings that he pledges to return in XLVII, while reflecting nevertheless on the mixed gift of pain and pleasure that love entails. Alternatively, it is the single male correspondent who restates his loyalty, his perspective broadened by experience. Whether she has one lover or two, Gower’s lady lives a complicated life. So does the primary male correspondent — and, thanks to Gower’s artful insertion of detail, we know much more about what life involves for him. Gower’s success in developing character through the steady accrual of mundane detail is high, and remarkable as a contribution to the artistry of the sequence. Always trying to see his beloved, he is sometimes successful, but more often he is kept distant: To abstain from your presence a long time — It is painful to me, in case it must needs be done; And on the other hand, should I want to come, To do so without your counsel would be impossible: Command me what I ought to do, Because you have lordship over me.® 6

For the influences of Machaut on Gower, see especially Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

7

Holly Barbaccia has argued strongly for a single lover: see “The Woman’s Response in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades? in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton, with John Hines and R.F. Yeager (Woodbridge: Boydell

8

“De vo presence a long temps abstenir / Grief m’est, en cas q’a force ensi feroie; / Et dautrepart, si jeo voldrai venire,/ Sanz vostre esgard ceo faire ne porroie: /Commandetz moi ceo qe jeo faire en doie, /Car vous avetz de moi la seignorie ...” CB XXV.17-24. Text and translation of the Cinkante Balades are from John Gower: The French Balades, ed. and trans. R.F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011).

& Brewer, 2010), 230-38.

Aesthetic Decistons in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 183 Sometimes he must travel, on what business we are not told, but we see clearly that

the journeying is physical, as well as metaphoric: From my two eyes until I may see you,

A thousand times a day my heart sends itself In my stead to travel the straight path To visit both you and your country; For a just cause and by necessity, That is without pretense honest and reasonable, I have removed myself for a time from you, lady.?

Evidently he and his lady share a circle that too often spreads rumors, and he must feign aloofness to throw them off: My lady, if itmight please you, I would visit you more often;

But the false jangle and the too-false conspiracy Of slanderers have disturbed my way, And above all else I wish for your honor: Therefore, my lady, as for my part, In place of myself 1send my heart to you ....'° A good deal of this has obvious roots in the Roman de la Rose (along with an occasional refugee, e.g., the Maylandscape, garden and Rose in CB XXXVI, Danger, in CB XXIII) but before dismissing Gower’s lover as a “mere” literary convention, it 1s worth observing that he has close kin in the Vorr dit, the Rume and the Vita Nuova — artistically speaking, not a bad crowd. Beyond the broadly obvious, that he too receives scant recompense for loyalty, Gower’s unnamed lover shares with them an introspection made credible by the frankness ofhis thoughts, and the quality ofhis comparative language:

9

10

“De mes deux oels aincois ge jeo vous voie,/ Millfoiz le jour mon coer y est tramis/ En lieu de moi d’aler la droite voie/ Pour visiter et vous et vo paiis ... ? CB [X.9-12; “Par droite cause et par necessité,/ Q’est sanz feintise honeste et reasonable,/ M’ai par un temps de vous, dame, elsongé ... ?CB XXIX.1-3. “Ma dame,si ceo fuist a vo plesir,/ Au plus sovent jeo vous visiteroie;/ Mais le fals jangle et le tresfals conspire/ De mesdisantz m’ont destorbé la voie,/ Et vostre honour sur toute riens voldroie:/ Par quoi, ma dame, en droit de ma partie/ En lieu de moi mon coer a vous envoie ...” CB XXV.1-7.

184 | R.F. YEAGER Like one who dreams and is in uncertainty — First it seems to him that he goes all about And acts and speaks — thus when I am alone, Talking to myself, 1 form many a question, I dispute, and then respond, with my reason;

I do not know if I am fay or a human creature: Such is my contemplation of love; May God grant that I pray not in vain!"! Moreover, Gower has learned Machaut’s trick, and Petrarch’s, conceivably first-hand,

of sketching in chronology to bolster verisimilitude. The affair(s) described in the Cinkante Balades occupy two years or perhaps a bit less of the principals’ lives. Thus, for example, it is March in balade XIII, May in XV, winter and Christmas in XXXII]

and XXxXIII, St. Valentine’s Day in XXXIV and XXXV, May again in XXXVI and XXXVII.

Such references, obviously, crosshatch the quotidian details offered in individual poems, and serve both to parse them as “authentic,” and to anchor them memorably. Lest we forget, however, it is of details like these that all fiction writers craft character — and that it is character, far more often than plot, on which our judgment of their art ultimately hinges. Yet it is easy to overlook how artfully Gower, ever the economical minimalist, has teased out his characters in the Cinkante

Balades using just a few details, selectively chosen. We perceive them — the lady, the first lover, and (if at all, but barely) the second — “che perla in bianca fronte,” as

Dante has it of Piccarda in Paradiso 3.14, “like a pearl on a white brow” - slightly, but enough. The lover, for all his metaphoric capability and selfexamination, cannot present a view of his lady that escapes the generic — a detail Gower seems likely to have contrived for pointed effect. Not only does the lover’s myopia to the woman beyond the cliché explain her unwillingness to take him seriously, but it also establishes a subtle critique of the amorous male gaze. That the latter is intentional is suggested by how, in contrast, the lady comes through in her own voice, freshly articulate and vibrantly intelligent, once she takes up the pen herself. Indeed, her control over the linguistic image is as powerful as the lover's, and like his derives its power from observation, ¢.g., “The lips of the mouth that lies in such a way,/ The deceiver

11

“Com cil qui songe et est en nouncertein,/ Ainz semble a lui qu’il vait tout environ/ Et fait et dit, ensiquant sui soulein,/ A moi parlant jeo fais maint question,/ Despute et puis responde a ma resoun,/ Ne sai si jeo sui faie ou chose humein:/ Tiel est d’amour ma contemplacion;/ Dieus doignt ge jeo ne prie pas en vein!” CB XXIV.17-24.

Aesthetic Decistons tn John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 185 well knows to move them sweetly”'? But she, unlike him, exhibits a range of comparisons that testifies not only to her immersion in the canon of literary amour, but also to an earthy cognizance ofwhich he is incapable: More treacherous than Jason to Medea, Or than Hercules was to Deianira,

More than Aeneas, who left Dido, More than Theseus, who made love to Ariadne,

Or Demophon, when he forgot Phillis — So I find him, alas, whom I was wont to love:

Thus henceforth for my part I shall sing, It is my grief, that once was my joy. Never did Hector, whom Penthesilea loved, In such haste arm himselfat Troy, As you fully naked have lain down in bed — You take every lover, whoever might come It matters not at all, so long as it might be a woman;

Thus you are more common than the highway. Alas, that Fortune has deceived me,

It is my grief, that once was my joy.'3 Nor should we forget — since Gower himself did not — how ambiguity szmpliciter enhances character, by attracting and holding our attention to what we glimpse, and would know better. For this reason, for the art of it, ] think, the num-

ber of the lady’s paramours is kept a mystery. On its solution depends the power of the sequence entire — and to seek it means to ask dark questions. Was he — her first,

perhaps her only, lover — really “comun plus ge la halte voie” (“common as the highway”) as she asserts in XLIII.14? Or she a Helen to his trusting Menelaus, as he

12

“Les lievres de la bouche q’ensi ment / Cil tricheour tant beal les sciet movoir ...” CB XLI.17-19.

“Plus ticherous ge Jason a Medée,/A Deianire ou q’Ercules estoit,/ Plus q’Eneas, q’avoit Dido lessée,/ Plus qe Thesetis, q’Ariagne amoit,/ Ou Demophon, quant Phillis oubloit/ Je trieus, helas, q’amer jadis soloie:/ Don’t chanterai desore en mon endroit, C’est ma dolour, ge fuist aingois ma joie./ Unques Ector, q’ama Pantasilée,/ En tiele haste a Troie ne s’armoit,/ Qe tu tout nud n’es deinz le lit couché,/ Amis as toutes, quelge venire doit,/ Ne poet chaloir, mais q’une femne y soit;/ Si es comun plus ge halte voie./ Helas, ge la fortune me decoit,/ C’est ma dolour, ge fuist aingois ma joie.” CB XLIII.1-16.

186 | R.E. YEAGER claims in XL.5—6? In the end, the difficulty we have in being sure about the characters’ loyalty one to another must reflect their moral fibre, and so determine how we feel about him, and her — or them — when she either allows the cast-off to return,

or finds true love at last in a new relationship with — surely we hope! — that “d’aigle, qui surmonte/ Toute autre oisel pour voler au dessure” (“the eagle who surmounts/ All other birds for flying up above? XLVI.1-2) whom she would then so fully deserve. What is not a mystery, | am sure by now, is that I favor the “second eagle” solution. I do so in large part because my reading of Gower has darkened over the years; either that or — take your pick — I have become more appreciative of the abyss he sees so often and so clearly, whether in affairs of government or of the single human heart. But that road leads astray from the aesthetics of the Cinkante Balades, which is my subject; and in any case, I can, I think, justify my position on the lady’s two lovers somewhat, by looking more closely at balade XLVI, in which the lady promises herself to the lover — whichever — she designates as “the eagle.” More importantly, balade XLVI offers a superb example of Gower’s poetic artistry at its best. And let us be clear from the outset that she does, in fact, promise herself with-

out reservation. Gower was never the prude modern critics have made him out to be. Nor is his lady here. Physically as well as emotionally she admits her openness to him, acknowledging as she does so her keen awareness of the line she has crossed. Here is the first stanza: —

In resemblance to the eagle, who surmounts All other birds for flying up above, Very sweet friend, your love so greatly mounts Above all lovers, for which I assure you Of true love, saving always the measure

Of my honor, which I shall protect: If |dare not speak, I shall think unceasingly.'4

Thoughtfully considered bit-by-bit, Gower’s artfulness here is remarkable. In a single stanza, the lady’s character is set, her unique voice confirmed. She’s unexpectedly direct, even bold, in the frank granting to her “eagle” her love. True, she pointedly reserves “the measure/ Of my honor, which I shall protect,” with its obvious

14

“En resemblance d’aigle, qui surmonte/ Toute autre oisel pour voler au dessure,/ Tresdouls amis, vostre amour tant amonte/ Sur toutz amantz, par quoi jeo vous assure/ De bien amer, sauf toutdis la mesure/ De on honour, le quell jeo guarderai:/ Si parler nose, ades jeo penserai.” CB XLVI.1-7.

Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 187 warning that her “honor” won’t be traduced. But “honor” in this context is an interesting word: it can mean “chastity” but also “reputation;” and a “measure” ofit can suggest something less than the whole. It is the refrain, “If 1dare not speak, I shall think unceasingly,” that seems to cast shadow on her apparently conventional — and virtuous — assertion. About what is she thinking “unceasingly” that she “dare not speak”? Is there more to the commitment she has just “spoken,” or another sense implicit there, to be divined?

The second stanza suggests as much. Throughout the land the story flies, and tells How prowess is altogether your concern, And when | am able to hear so noble a tale About your valor, I put all my effort , Within my power, that I might obtain your honor: But because of the people I take very great care; If |dare not speak, I shall think unceasingly.'5

Although I have chosen to translate “cure” in line four in the most neutral fashion, as “care,” the lady’s word — Gower’s word, let us not forget — has common synonyms in “concern,” and “worry.” Hence lines one through five could be parsed “Everyone says everywhere that your ‘prowess’ (or alternatively ‘exploits’) are all you think about, and whenever I hear about your ‘valor’ I cast my worry aside to do whatever I can to obtain your ‘honor’ (that word again!) Polysemy of this order is characteristic of Gower’s style, and indicative of the level of his expectation for his readers’ verbal acuity. In the following line the lady acknowledges limits: “I take very great care” or “I watch out? but solely (?) “because of the people? whose negative gossip would, we assume, damage her “honor” which here can only mean “reputa-

tion.” A flirtatious reading is difficult to avoid; “ifitwere up to me alone,” Gower seems to have the lady imply, “I’d chase you openly.” The refrain “If Idare not speak, I shall think unceasingly” punctuates the duality nicely. As does the exquisitely drawn vignette in the third stanza, of ladies safely out of earshot of their men, comparing notes:

15

“Par les paiis la fame vole et conte/ Coment prouesce est toute en vostre cure,/ Et quant jeo puiss oir si noble conte/ De vo valour, jeo met toute ma cure,/ A mon poair don’t vostre honour procure:/ Mais pour les gentz tresbien m’aviserai;/ Si parler n’ose, ades jeo penserai.” CB XLVI.8-14.

188 | R.F. YEAGER Between us ladies, when we take reckoning of

Your noble bearing and your fierce stature, Then from that I become a little red with shame, But I transform it then by jesting, So that no one is able to recognize the pretence: By such color with joy I frighten myself; If Idare not speak, I shall think unceasingly.'¢ This stanza is very rich indeed. It’s difficult to say which shows superior artistry: the finely executed miniature of the lady hearing her “gossips” gush over her secret lover, and concocting a joke to hide her blush of ownership (one can imagine the Limbourgs doing this in azure and gold in a book of hours, in a stone chamber

with a gothic window and a green vineyard without); or the deepening of the lady’s self-revelation Gower effects here. The line “By such color with joy I frighten myself” betrays both a fictional character acutely self-aware, and a poet perceptive in an arrestingly modern way about the inherent contradictories of human desire. By manifesting the psychological via the physical — the blush, the frisson of fear — Gower lays bare, delicately, but in a stroke, what it is that the lady “dare not speak” yet thinks about “unceasingly.” The concluding envoy of four lines thus arrives in a charged context that makes their ambiguity at once impossible to ignore, and simple to resolve.

To you, who with honor have such adventure, That your valor surpasses all others at the trial, Right it is that love renders your just claim; If |dare not speak, I shall think unceasingly.'7 This is poetry for grown-ups. By now Gower has established his lady’s selfperception sufficient to show her capable of double-entendre, and provided a snapshot of herself alive in her world, replete with gossiping “friends,” clear enough to indicate to readers why she would need to resort to it. When she addresses her lover as one whose “valor surpasses all others at the trial” (“vos valours toutz passont a l’essai”)

16

17

“Entre nous dames, quant mettons a la compte/ Vo noble port et vo fiere estature,/ Lors en deviens un poi rugge pour honte,/ Mais jeo le torne ensi par envoisure,/ Q’aparcevoir null poet la coverture:/ Par tiel colour en joie jeo m’esmai;/ Si parler n’ose, ades jeo penserai.” CB XLVI.15—21. “A vous, q’avetz d’onour celle aventure,/ Qe vos valours toutz passont a l’essai,/ Droitz est q’amour vous rende sa droiture:/ Si parler n’ose, ades jeo penserai.” CB XLVI.22-25.

Aesthetic Dectstons in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 189 or when she urges him “for love” to “render [his] just claim” (“q’amour vous rende sa droiture”), do we need to note more about what “trial” or “render” might mean

in these closing lines — or ought we remark only that, surely, she says these things hopefully? Indeed, should we need further evidence of the lady’s scarcely veiled invitation, consider again her opening stanza, in her untranslated French voice:

En resemblance d’aigle, qui surmonte Toute autre oisel pour voler au dessure, Tresdouls amis, vostre amour tant amonte Sur toutz amantz, par quoi jeo vous assure

De bien amer, sauf toutdis la mesure

De on honour, le quell jeo guarderai: Si parler n’ose, ades jeo penserai. Looking backwards, from the context of her envoy, that she has been thinking “unceasingly” of sexual satisfaction is plain, not only in her choice of rhymes (“surmonte/ amonte”), but also, if read more slowly, in the carefully assembled sentence

“.. vostre amour tant amonte/ Sur toutz amantz, par quoi jeo vous assure/ De bien amer, sauf toutdis la mesure/ De on honour” which can be parsed “Your large love

mounts on top ofall your lovers — for that, | promise I’ll love you in return, so long as we protect my reputation.” This is very subtle work, requiring poetic control and significant psychological acumen to bring off. Gower’s light touch here is all the more remarkable because the voice is the Iady’s. The sexually naive poet, the monochrome moralist with a too-heavy hand — the Gower of reputation — could only botch it. Yet the voice here is wisely well imagined, the writing economical, and the lady’s character subtly but precisely delivered. Perhaps, for a true aesthetic sensibility, a single poem of this order might be sufficient to establish its author as a kindred spirit. Delicacy of any order being a quality seldom credited to Gower by many readers, however, it is worth confirming the point with another example. CB XXXII is built around an image common to much amorous poetry ofthe period: This new year, Janus, who has a double face

Sees the winter pass and the spring coming: If thus a comparison I make to myself. My eyes look contrarily to his. I see the winter coming, cold and hurtful, And the spring going, and know of no return;

190 | R.F. YEAGER Because love pierces me and saves me not at all. The bright spring, which the sun embraces, Becomes dark to me, since earlier

The winter took away from me all the grace of love: Thus through grief Iam dull and downcast,

I know no sport, in consequence, nor singing: Instead I am roofed over beneath the sad cloud;

Because love pierces me and saves me not at all.

Your beauty grows, for never does it fade; Thus, my lady, for you it is appropriate That your goodness displays itself everywhere: But I, because I am entirely your servant, Am unable to behold any semblance of grace;

It is a hard and difficult service,

Because love pierces me and saves me not at all.'® The balade’s first and second lines present the predictable treatment ofJanus, a god looking away from winter toward the coming spring.'? Gower’s reversal of the gaze ofJanus in the first stanza transforms the anticipated trope to something arresting. Emanating from within the fiction in the lover’s voice, it thickens our knowledge of him by another layer, revealing, as it does, how thoroughly his passion acts to filter his perception. His is the narcissistic myopia of unfulfilled desire. For him, all the world around should remain as dark, cold, and frozen in time as are

his thoughts, lacking his lady. Again, as with his depiction of the lady in balade XLVI, Gower’s psychological insight is dead-on. As is his dramatic sense, crafting the

18

“Cest aun novell Januse, q’ad double face,/ L’yvern passer et l’estée voit venant:/ Comparison de moi si j’ensi face,/ Contraire a luy mes oils sont regardant,Je voi ’ivern venire froid et nuisant,/ Et l’estée vait, ne sai sa revenue; Q’amour me poignt et point ne

me salue./ La cliere Estée, qui le solail embrace,/ Devient obscure a moi, siq’au devant/ L’yvern me tolt d’amour toute la grace:/ Dont par dolour jeo sui mat et pesant,/ Ne sai jeuer, ne sai chanter par tant,/ Ainz sui covert dessoubtz la triste Nue;/ Q’amour me poignt et point ne me salue./ Vo bealté croist, q’a null temps se desface; Pourceo, ma dame, a vous est accordant//Qe vo bounté se monstre en toute place:/ Mais jeo, pour ge sui tout vo servant,/ Ne puis veoirde grace ascun semlant,/ C’est une dure et forte

retenue;/ Q’amour me poignt et point ne me salue.” 19

Compare for example Chaucer’s use of it in the “Franklin’s Tale,” Canterbury Tales, Franl1252-55.

Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 191 narrative of the sequence: the lover’s fixation, linked imagistically to, and arising altogether naturally out of, the season reaffirms the fictive history of the romance even as it works to sustain the lover’s emotional credibility. Both are key factors in holding essential reader empathy for him in his plight. Identifying himself with winter also permits the lover in the second stanza to cast his lady as the spring, with — again — psychologically astute complexity as a result. “Dull and downcast” (“mat et pesant”) in his grief (I. 11), “roofed over beneath a sad cloud” (“covert dessoubtz la triste Nue,” 1.13), such as winter brings,

he is denied access to the “bright spring” (“La cliere Estée,” 1.8) which the sun — not he! — “embraces” (“embrace? 1.8). The choice of verb — “embrace” — operates

polyvalently, just as does the lady’s language in balade XLVI, examined above. Here the lover’s word selection betrays the desire and the fear that underlie, and undercut, his stated preference for winter. It’s achingly clear how much he’d rather be

the sun that brightens spring; how (un)true, then (except psychologically), his petulant wish for “winter to come, cold and hurtful,/ And the spring to go, and know

no return” (“livern venir froid et nuisant,/ Et l’estée vait, ne sai sa revenue” II.5-6).

Gower’s aesthetic intelligence operates as well at a macro level as at a micro one. Within balade XXXII, stanza two is itself thus cast to suggest the poem’s central image, a Janus head, looking backwards through its continuation of the lover’s

selfrepresentation as winter begun in stanza one, and forward toward stanza three, devoted to praising the lady’s beauty, which has, in the developing context, important resonances ofspring. That she is like the vernal season as it spreads beauty and love across the landscape, inexorably outstripping winter’s dark isolation year after year, makes sense of the first line of stanza three: “Your beauty grows, for never does it fade” (“Vo bealté croist, q’a null temps se desface,” |.15). Initially a paradox — how can beauty oft be effaced by time? — the line can be read as a compliment to a beloved’s inner qualities that become more attractive as they mature. The conceit is

acommonplace of the Petrarchan tradition.*° Here, however, Gower works within

in the diurnal context of the seasons he has established: as the spring, the lady’s

beauty renews itself eternally, beyond the limitations of linear time. Significantly too, her progressive unfolding as the seasons turn ahead contrasts sharply with the lover’s puerile wish to freeze the world, and time, in the winter of his misery. Reference to the head ofJanus provides a likely explanation for what seems another macro effect, as well. CB XXXII is the only balade of the fifty-four in the sequence lacking an envoy. After thirty-one balades of three stanzas plus an envoy, to come suddenly upon a poem ofjust three stanzas is arresting. Gower’s purpose would seem to be to reinforce structurally the central metaphor of the poem. The

20

See Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.

192 | R.F. YEAGER medial relation of the second stanza to the first and third is Janus-like, as noted

above. Were an envoy present to distract from the back-and-forwards play, this effect might be lost. The play is thus carried not in its images alone, but is built into its structure as well. An effect subtle enough to be often missed, it nevertheless advances the meaning of the poem, and typifies Gower’s aesthetic sensibility and his control over his medium.*' Nor is this aesthetic sensibility limited to larger gestures. CB XXXII also offers good examples of Gower’s concern at a more micro level, for poetical “mechanics.” In both French and in English, Gower

shows himself a master of the highly

respected rime riche, that is, rhymes constructed of orthographically identical words with different meanings in different contexts.”* The first three lines of CB XXXII, stanza one, are illustrative:

Cest aun novell Janus, q’ad double face,

L’yvern passer et l’estée voit venant: Comparison de moi si j’ensi face, Contraire a luy mes oills sont regardant ... “Face” in line one is Janus’ twinned visage; in line three, however, “face” is a late

Anglo-Norman first-person present subjunctive form of“faire” (MnF “fasse”), with the added twist not only of the rime riche, but also playfully resonant of the action, i.e., the lover comparing his own face with Janus’s.?3 Subsequently, in line fifteen, at the beginning of the third stanza, Gower builds upon this rime riche to achieve an additional effect. In “Vo bealté croist, q’a null temps se desface,” where “desface” is a compound verb (“efface”), the lady’s permanently beautiful visage is held in contrast, via the echo of rime riche, with the two faces of Janus, and also with the lover’s own.

21

There may be, as well, some intended playfulness in the placement of this poem, i.e.,

22

views. See further Masayoshi It6, “Gower’s Use of Rime Riche in Confessio Amantis,” in his

“XXXII” has three stanzas but two directions, two characters, two seasons, two world-

John Gower, the Medieval Poet (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1976), 232-49; and a related

23

study by Masahiko Kanno, “An Aspect of Gower as an Innovator of Words,” in his Studtes in John Gower, with Special Reference to His Words (Tokyo: Eihésha, 2007), 111-22. Cf. Muzrour de ’!Omme, lines 1778; 11,473; 12,678; 13,190 for other examples of Gower’s use of “face” in this way, as a verb. For additional instances, see A Concordance to the

French Poetry and Prose ofJohn Gower, ed. R.F. Yeager, Mark West, and Robin L. Hinson (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997).

Aesthetic Decisions in John Gower’s Cinkante Balades | 193 These few examples, cursorily selective by necessity, may nevertheless suffice to suggest the high degree of care Gower paid to his aesthetic decisions great and small in the Cinkante Balades. There is a very good book to be written about these poems, and about the artfulness of the Traitié balades also. Gower was a poet of many Capacities, as his friend Chaucer clearly recognized, and I hope even in this short space to have justified somewhat my original claim that, had Gower written the Cinkante Balades in English, the English canon, and Gower’s place in it, would

be quite different. Attention is due to the poet in John Gower, and to his work (especially the too-often neglected shorter poems), in all three of his languages, even as we continue to probe his selfpresentation in his longer and more familiar Vox Clamantis, Confessio Amantis, and Mirour de !Omme as the political philosopher, the social reformer, the critic of church corruption.

The foremost hope of these pages, however, is that they may serve as a small, first installment on a debt ofinspiration about things poetical and aesthetic owed to Chick Chickering. His insistence on “getting it right” has turned our every encounter into an intellectual journey. His impatience to break new ground makes, perhaps, a closer look at some little-known poems of John Gower an appropriate, albeit inadequate, homage. But most importantly, his determination, in print and in conversation, that poetry should be looked at hard, carefully and long before calling it truly read, that words matter, in themselves and in their ordering, has over

many years shaped how medieval writers of English, Italian, and French verse can be understood and — more importantly, perhaps — valued, in their own times, and

for all.

eS Aw ri

COO

PEK

Recipes for the Realm: John Lydgate’s ‘Soteltes’ and The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep

On 6 November 1429, the eight-year-old Henry VI was crowned King of England ~ and of France, despite (or rather, because of) the fact that the Dauphin of France had been crowned King Charles VII of his native land earlier that year.' The coronation banquet held to celebrate the occasion was a lavish affair, as we know from

the semi-versified record of the event created by John Lydgate, monk and Lancastrian poet-propagandist.? This curious work describes a sumptuous menu of three

I learned from Chick Chickering that medieval literature and good food go together, and it is with fond memories ofhis seminars that I proffer this exploration of that same topic. 1

On the dual monarchy (established in 1420 by the Treaty of Troyes), see JW. McKenna, “Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422-1432,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), 145-62; Ralph Alan

Griffiths, “Propaganda and the Dual Monarchy,” in his The Reign ofKing Henry VI, 2nd ed. (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 217-28; both cited in the best study of

the “Soteltes” to date, Robert Epstein’s “Eating Their Words: Food and Text in the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI,” Journal ofMedieval and Early Modern Studies 36 (2006), 355—

377, at 372 n12.On another manuscript (New York, Pierpont Morgan Buhler MS 17) that reveals a late medieval reader’s interest in Lydgate’s poetry and Henry VI’s ascension on the one hand and recipes on the other see Paul Acker, “Texts from the Margin: Lydgate, Recipes, and Glosses in Buhler MS 17,” The Chaucer Review 37 (2002), 59-85.

2

“Soteltes at the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI,” in John Lydgate, Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), 81-82, referred to throughout as the “Soteltes.” All references are by line number

to this edition or else to the particular course between the verses. The poem was previously edited in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II: Secular Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS os 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 623-24. As Sponsler notes, while the coronation took place in 1429, MacCracken dated the “Soteltes” to 1432

on the basis of three other poems Lydgate also wrote for the coronation (Sponsler, Mummings, 133). There are fourteen surviving exemplars in manuscript as well as an altered version in Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle of 1516 and 1542 (STC [A Short Title Catalogue of

Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475— 1640. First compiled by AW. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave. 2nd. ed. rev. and enl. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson, and Katherine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Soci-

ety,1976-91)] 10659 and 10662). See Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005), 1929 (henceforth NIMEV).

Rectpes for the Realm | 195 courses, each including such marvelous items as, for example, a “Custade Rooial

[pastry] with a leparde ofgolde sittyng theryn” ofthe first course.3 The courses are separated from each other by verses that describe and comment upon the “sotelte” that ends each part of the meal and from which comes the poem’s modern title. Sotelte is a somewhat unstable term in medieval cookery, but generally, as in this banquet’s case, it refers to a semi- or wholly-edible diorama, often ofatopical and/or allegorical bent, that could be constructed out of sugar, pastry, and even meat.4 In 1429, the soteltes for Henry VI depicted the boy king accompanied by Saints Edward and Louis, by his father Henry V and the Holy Roman Emperor, and finally by the Madonna and Child with Saints George and Denis. Some seven years after the banquet of 1429 — that is, around 1436 — Lydgate wrote a much longer poem known as The Debate ofthe Horse, Goose, and Sheep. This work is a verbal contest between the three animals of its title over their value to humankind; it takes place over the course of seventy-seven rhyme royal stanzas, not including an authorial envoy offifteen eight-line stanzas.’ Where the “Soteltes” is an example of what is often called an “occasional” poem ~ that is, verse designed for and recording a specific moment in human affairs — the Debate is far less tied to a particular event, despite its references to the Hundred Years War and to the

siege of Calais in 1436 (lines 409-24).° Indeed, its popularity well beyond the time of its writing is evidenced by its survival in five printed editions, two produced by

3

Forarecipe for “Crustade Ryal” involving bone marrow, eggs, almonds, sugar, and spices in pastry see Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, ed. Thomas Austin, EETS os 91 (Lon-

4

Onsoteltes and their increasing elaboration, see Terence Scully, The Art ofCookery in the

don: Oxford University Press, 1888), 55; cited by Epstein, “Eating Their Words,” 373 n20. Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), 105-110, and Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast

and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 228-35; Henisch makes brief mention of Henry VI’s coronation banquet at 233. See also PW. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1993), 142-43. On the related genre of the extremets — either edible or animate — across the Channel in the fifteenth century, see L.B. Ross, “Beyond Eating:

Political and Personal Significance of the entremets at the Banquets of the Burgundian Court,” in At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures ofFood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Timothy J.Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo (Turnhout, Belgium: Bre5

pols, 2007), 145-66. Minor Poems ofJohn Lydgate, Part I, 539-66. All references are by line number to this edi-

tion; I have silently put in lower case the first letter of lines as needed. In addition to the printings, the poem survives in twelve manuscripts, one of which was copied from Caxton’s first edition (on which see n7, below); on that copy see Curt F. Buhler, “Lydgate’s Horse, Sheep and Goose and Huntington MS. HM 144,” Modern Language Notes 55 (1940), 563-69. For the complete list of exemplars, see NIMEV 658.

6

See Jeremy Withers, “The Ecology of Late Medieval Warfare in Lydgate’s Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep? Interdisciplinary Studtes in Literature and Environment (2011), 1—

19, at 11-12. 1 am grateful to Karl Steel for pointing me to this essay.

196 | LISA H. COOPER William Caxton (in 1476-77, as one of England’s first printed works) and three by

Caxton’s successor Wynkyn de Worde.” To summarize this second and also relatively little-known poem: the narrator, wishing to illustrate the ancient custom of dispute settlement, describes a wall-painting ofjust such a settlement that he saw “Nat yoor a-gon” (16), in which a horse, sheep, and goose take turns to present arguments for their respective superiority before the two judges, an eagle and a lion (though in fact a ram speaks for the sheep, who is too timid to argue on its own behalf). In the narrator’s reimagining of the event the image depicts, the three beasts invoke everything from the Bible and Christian allegory to the actual use to which their dung is put in order to prove their points, but ultimately none is proclaimed the winner. Instead, the judges declare that the animals should “for-sake”

comparison (516) and instead “vse her yiftes & her prerogatives / to that eende which that thei wer made” (507-8), and that they should perform “her office as natur hath hem wrouht” (511). This pronouncement is followed by an extended

envoy, in which the narrator explains what he calls the “inward meenyng” (564) of the fable: namely, that “Natur hir giftis doth dyversly devide” (648) and that therefore no member of the commonalty should “despise” — the last word ofeach ofthe envoy’s stanzas — any other, for all are “necessary” (644). These two works, despite their differing genres and different lengths, are linked by what I will here call a “rhetoric of recipe.” By this phrase | mean a number of things. First, | mean that while neither poem is formally a recipe in the sense that the term is used by linguists to denote a text-type (a group of texts defined as such by their shared formal characteristics), both the “Soteltes” and the Debate are nevertheless /zke recipes in that their intended function is not simply didactic but also productive. That is, like more standard recipes (directions about what to do to and with a series of ingredients), these two poems not only instruct their readers about something, but also teach them how that something #5, can be (or, in the case of the

“Soteltes,” was) made. This is an effect of which Ruth Carroll also takes note when she observes that while “the function of a recipe ... is to give instructions on how

7

Caxton’s editions are STC [2nd. ed.] 17018 and 17019, but 17019 was printed first (dif-

ferences between the two are negligible, limited to typography and spelling); see David Scott-Macnab, “Caxton’s Printings of The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose: Some Observations Regarding Textual Relationships,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 13 (2004), 1-13. Complete copies are to be found at the Pierpont Morgan Library (17019, the first edition) and the Cambridge University Library (17018, the second edi-

tion). It is worth noting that the copy of the first edition (17019) provided in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, from a copy also at Cambridge University, is not complete. De Worde’s editions are STC [znd. ed.] 17020 (c. 1495), 17021 (c. 1499), and 17022 (1500).

Rectpes for the Realm | 197 to prepare something,” an important sub-category of recipes are those that instruct

the reader on how to make “a new entity.”8 In the case of both of Lydgate’s poems ~as my brief summaries above have already suggested — the “new entity” that has been or can be made from them is both literal (a meal in the “Soteltes,” a plethora

of items and foods in the Debate) and figurative (a sanctioned reign, a functioning commonwealth). Both poems represent actual artifacts made, or make-able, for consumption, but they also figure a much more abstract political and social ideology that is likewise meant to be consumed. I will return to this last point below, but first, to elaborate further on what |

mean by the “rhetoric of recipe,” let me note that productive writing like that found in a recipe involves an investment as much in process as in product on the part of both writer and reader — an investment, in other words, in the way a series ofactions leads to the “new entity” noted by Carroll, and, vice versa, in the way that a fabricated entity, whether pudding or poem, is not an artifact ex mzhilo but rather the result of a series of chronologically ordered acts.? Therefore, and as | have also argued elsewhere, recipes (and texts that make use of them, like the “Soteltes” and the Debate)

have a curiously flexible temporality: they record both what has been successfully done (or made) before and what can therefore be done (or made) again if so

8

Ruth Carroll, “Middle English Recipes: Vernacularisation of aText-Type,” in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, ed. Irma Taavitsainen and Paivi Pahta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174-91, at 187. On text-types and the formal (linguistic, semantic, etc.) qualities of recipes both medieval and modern see also

Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen et al., “Approaching Instructional Writing in English,” in [mstruc-

tional Writing in English: Studies in Honor ofRisto Hiltunen, ed. Matti Peikola et al. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009), 1-11; and Manfred Gorlach, “Text Types and Language History: The Cookery Recipe,” in History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, ed. Matti Rissanen et al. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 736-61. On medieval recipes more specifically, see Ruth Carroll, “The

Middle English Recipe as a TextType,” Newphilologische Mittetlungen 100 (1999), 27-42; and Irma Taavitsainen, “Middle English Recipes: Genre Characteristics, Text Type Features and Underlying Traditions of Writing” Journal ofHistorical Pragmatics 2 (2001), 85— 113. For a comparison of the different structures of medieval and modern recipes see Teresa Sanchez Roura, “The Medieval English Culinary Recipe Today,” in The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age 8: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Rosalynn Voaden et al. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 307-16. On the

“four registers” of any modern recipe (ingredients, tools, directions, and description of results), see Luce Giard, “The Rules of The Art,” Chapter 13 of Michel de Certeau, Luce

Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking, rev. ed. Luce Giard, trans. TimothyJ.Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 215-22, at 215.

g

On the temporal structure of medieval recipes see Carroll, “Middle English Recipes,” 182, and “Middle English Recipe as a Text-Type,” 35.

198 | LISA H. COOPER desired.'° As texts that are at least in part about things, objects that once had or can have actual existence in the world, Lydgate’s menu-poem and his debate-poem gesture backwards and forwards in time. As Jack Goody might say, they are both prescriptive and commemorative, both recipe and receipt, even as they also function as literary artifacts in the present during which we read them."' For the particular poems with which I am concerned, this temporal slipperiness is connected to their emphasis not just upon preservation of various kinds, but also upon reanimation or even — especially given the animal bodies that are at the center of both poems — revivification. Indeed, Terrence Scully remarks upon medieval food culture’s “reanimational

or restorative

cuisine,”

whose

“aim

was

to make

[animals]

look

uncooked”— or, in other words, to give the impression of having undone, erased, the

elaborate process that resulted in the consumable wonder upon the table. I will take up these ideas of reanimation and erasure further below.'* The rhetoric of recipe also involves an investment in the display and the use of both language and things, or — it might be better to say — language for the sake of things. The writer of a recipe displays in words the process to which his or her text refers (though in medieval recipes, that process is often delineated somewhat obliquely), while the reader who follows those words does so in order to create (or

at least imagine creating) a new thing that will itself be displayed and then consumed in turn.'3 What this means, |think, is that medieval recipes and menus might help us to explore the line between presentation (of an object) and representation (in language), as well as that between making (in the sense of producing) and making up (in the sense of fictionalizing) — or, to put it another way, and borrowing here

10

Lisa H. Cooper, “The Poetics ofPracticality,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 491-505, at 504. On several reasons for a medieval reader

to believe in the efficacy of any given recipe, such as its basis in humoral theory, see Jerry Stannard, “Rezepliteratur as Fachliteratur? in Studies on Medieval “Fachliteratur,” Scripta 6,

ed. William Eamon (Brussels: Omirel, UFSAL, 1982), 59-73, at 68-69.

11

See Jack Goody, “The Recipe,” in his The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 129-45, esp. 135-37. As Goody notes, the terms recipe

and receipt are etymologically related and appear with the meaning ofplan, on the one hand, and bill of sale, on the other, at virtually the same time (in the 1390s) (137); see MED, sw. receit(e, def. 1 and 4, and Carroll, “Middle English Recipes,” 190. On the fluc-

tuating tense of conduct literature more generally see Stephanie Trigg, “Learning to Live,” in Middle English, 459-75, at 462.

12 13

Scully, The Art of Cookery, 106. Carroll, “Middle English Recipe as a TextType,” notes the prevalence of the formula “and serve it forth” in medieval recipes, a phrase that emphasizes the initial display of the food (33).

Recipes for the Realm

| 199

from Christopher Cannon’s provocative discussion of the topic, between immaterial form and material formation.'4 This is something that the Greek term poests, our poetics, also implies, and it is also something of which today’s chefs and novelists are very aware, as the cultural critic Adam Gopnik observes: “Even cookbooks are finally more book than they are cook, and, more and more, we know it: for every novel that contains a recipe, there is now a recipe book meant to be read as a

novel.”!5 My intent in introducing this idea of the “rhetoric of recipe” as a phenomenon at once both formal and thematic is, first, to suggest that it may be one way of coming to grips with the fact that in late medieval England we find recipes both medicinal and culinary that sound like poems, many poems that are also recipes or contain them, and also a variety of poems that appropriate recipes to their own ends, of which one famous example is Chaucer’s “pyke walwed in galauntyne” in his balade To Rosemounde.'® Second, and far more broadly, it is also to suggest that we need to keep finding ways to address the intersection ofthe practical and the poetic in medieval textual culture, a phenomenon with which students ofthe literary Middle Ages are really only just starting to come to terms. It is a truism that all medieval literature was meant to be or could at least be disguised as “didactic” — a loose term often made to encompass, as it is in the introduction to a fairly recent volume of

essays on the topic, any premodern work that “was created, transmitted, or received as a text designed to teach, instruct, advise, edify, inculcate morals, or modify and regulate behavior”'7 (and this, despite the fact that, as Jan Ziolkowski observes, the

14

Christopher Cannon, “Form,” in Middle English, 177-90, esp. 177, 182, and 184. Goody

notes the connection of the formula and “formalisation in a more general sense” in “Following a Formula,” Domestication of the Savage Mind, 112-28, at 125. On the larger textual field in which recipes and recipe-like discourse are found see Carroll, “Middle English Recipes,” 188, and Taavitsainen, “Middle English Recipes,” 87 and 91-98.

15

Adam Gopnik, “Cooked Books: Real Food from Fictional Recipes,” The New Yorker

16

(April 9, 2007), 80-85, at 85. The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), 649, line 17. Christopher Cannon notes that Chaucer’s poem is in fact the earli-

est evidence we have for pike in this kind of recipe (Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2008], 2-3). Alfred Hiatt opens his discussion ofthe collision of genres in Middle English texts with Chaucer’s image (“Genre Without System,” in Middle English, 277-94, at 277-78).

17

Juanita Feros Ruys, “Introduction: Approaches to Didactic Literature - Meaning, Intent, Audience, Social Effect,” in What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods, ed. Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008), 1-38,at 5.

200

| LISA H. COOPER

adjective didacticus is not a term the Middle Ages used itself; it does not Fexisticm Medieval Latin”).'® But we have nevertheless for the most part largely continued to privilege those instructional texts that measure up to our own aesthetic preferences and fit into our own generic categories, either because they are what we think of as beautifully written or because they have, at the very least, some semblance of a plot (sermon literature, exempla collections, and behavioral manuals are all good exam-

ples). Ido not think I overstate the case to say that despite our increasing attention to the conditions of reading and writing in manuscript culture — conditions, particularly the practice of compilation, that tend not to distinguish the literary from the non-literary as neatly as we might sometimes still wish'? — in our scholarship and especially in our teaching we nevertheless continue to privilege some of the tallest trees (Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl-Poet) at the expense of the forest, that vast

body of material that sits somewhere in between the plainly poetic and the insistently instructional, and of which the poems under investigation here are a part. We continue to give rather short shrift to the many texts whose “literariness” falls below the high standard we continue to set for medieval writing, the texts that survive in numerous and as-yet-not-fully-documented compilations, the texts that late medieval readers seemed actually eager to be reading, if numbers of surviving manuscripts are any evidence.*° To explore two of John Lydgate’s minor poems — the category into which they were placed by the editor of the most recent (1934) edition

18

Jan Ziolkowski, “From Didactic Poetry to Bestselling Textbooks in the Long Twelfth Century,” in Calliope’s Classroom: Studies in Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Annette Harder et al. (Paris: Peeters, 2007), 221-43, at 223. According to the

19

OED, sw. didactic (adj. and n.), the word comes into English around the middle of the seventeenth century. For an eloquent overview of this shift in scholarly attention and its relationship to medieval textual praxis, seeSeth Lerer, “Medieval Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA

20

118 (2003), 1251-67, esp. 1251-55.

See, for example, the corpus of relatively unexplored material in George R. Keiser’s Works ofSctence and Information, AManual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung, vol. 10 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences,

1998). D. Vance Smith has argued for the necessity oflooking a little closer at the “unexceptional poetry that bubbles below the surface of the Middle English canon, which is still centered on Chaucer and Langland” in his “Medieval Forma: The Logic of the Work,” in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 66-79, at 78. | should add that I do not at all mean to

suggest that medievalists have been unengaged with the question of what constitutes the literary both in the Middle Ages and in our own time; for a recent series of explorations into that very topic see the essays collected in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medteval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013).

Recipes for the Realm | 201 that contains them both ~ is admittedly still not to come all that close to bridging the gap I am pointing to in our scholarly purview. After all, while Lydgate’s rehabilitation as a poet worthy of extended consideration has only lately begun in earnest, he was an auctor of considerable stature in his own time and beyond, and his poems, however “minor,” come freighted with the aura of his own self-created laureate status.*! Nevertheless, it is my hope that my reading will provide one possible model for traveling outside and across the lines of our own still somewhat entrenched aesthetic sensibilities and critical priorities.

In the only extended study to date of Lydgate’s banquet record-cum-poem, Robert ' Epstein remarks that both the “Soteltes” and the event it records have “some feeling to [them] ofa political mass.” As he further observes, the work’s readers, like the dinner’s original participants, are asked by it to ingest quite literally young Henry VI’s right “by discent and by title of right / justly to reigne in England and in Fraunce” (23-24).?* Epstein’s astute analysis of the “Soteltes” as political allegory needs no reduplication; | wish instead to turn to what we can observe about the

piece’s literariness, or, at the very least, the verbal texture of its least literary-seeming parts. Before I do, however, it seems worth noting that in the mid-1950s, when

Rossell Hope Robbins printed the “Soteltes” in his anthology of late medieval secular lyrics, he included only the soteltes proper (that is, the descriptions of the dioramas and the verses that accompany them) and zof the rest of the feast’s tripartite menu.?3 In other'words, Robbins’ edition of the poem omits thefood entirely. While this decision might have been made largely out ofadesire to save space (the whole record of the banquet, both courses and verses, having been printed several times elsewhere), the omission nevertheless represents a kind of a priort decision about what menus — and the recipes that helped produce them —~ are, or, perhaps more accurately, what they are not: they are not poetry, and so do not deserve editorial ministration or literary analysis. Tellingly, in the sense that it reminds us that Robbins’ and possibly our own continuing prejudices in this regard were not neces-

21

See RobertJ.Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. Chap. 2, “John Lydgate: The Invention of the English Laureate,” 49-87.

22

Epstein, “Eating Their Words,” 363 and 368.

23

“Sotelties for the Coronation Banquet, A.D. 1432,” in Secular Lyrics ofthe XIVth and XVth Centuries, 2nd ed., ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), no. 105

(pp. 98-99).

202 | LISA H. COOPER sarily shared by premodern readers and writers, at least four of the fourteen extant manuscripts of the “Soteltes” lay out the verses in paragraphs rather than on separate lines, thus leveling to some extent the distinction that Robbins’ edition implicitly draws between prose menu and verse poem.*4 Robbins’ editorial practice represents a reading against which, as I have already suggested, I would like to push back. Following Cannon’s observation that Middle English writing “has long required comprehensive formal analysis — but to precisely the extent that it has not seemed to allow it,””5 I suggest instead that attention to

the formal properties of the menu portions of the “Soteltes” reveals that they do constitute a kind of poetry or, if you prefer, proto-poetry or — especially in this case, where they accompany actual verse — para-poetry. Here it is worth reprinting all three courses and their corresponding soteltes in full (inverting Robbins’ edition, | omit the verses), with ztalics indicating items discussed in the analysis that follows:2°

This was the first cours at his coronacion, that is to say, first, furmentze |frumenty], with venyson. Viande Royal [jellied dish} plantid with losenges of golde. Borehedes in castelles of earmed [pastry castles} with golde. Beef. Moton. Signet. Capon stued Heron. Grete pike. A redde lech [sliced bread/pudding/jelly] wath lions corven thereyn of white. Custade Rootal with a leparde ofgolde sittyng theryn. Fritour like a sonne with a flour de lice therynne. A sotelté, Seint Edward and Seint Lowes armed in cote armours bryngyng yn bitwene hem the Kyng in his cote armour with this scripture suyng: [the first verse follows]

24

They are London, British Library MS Egerton 1995 (fols. 176v—177v), ofthe late fifteenth century; London, British Library MS Cotton Nero C.ix (fols. 173r-173v) and London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xvi (fols. 91r-92Vv), of the fifteenth/sixteenth cen-

turies; and Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 863, of the seventeenth century. It is worth noting that Egerton 1995 goes to greater lengths than the others to highlight the poetry: individual verses are clearly separated by virgulae suspensivae and every line of each stanza is underlined in red. Of course, late medieval readers were accustomed to encountering verse laid out in horizontal format; what makes the situation of the “Soteltes” unusual is the juxtaposition of such “prosified” poetry with another type of text, the menu, which as the surviving manuscripts reveal could be laid out in either paragraph or list form. As I note below, however, most scribes chose the paragraph, meaning that at least upon first encounter there is less ofanimmediately apparent distinction between menu and poem than otherwise. On the horizontal layout of verse, common through the fifteenth century, see M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 98-99. 25

26

Cannon, “Form,” 184.

Ihave both borrowed from but also expanded, changed, and in some cases omitted the

glosses on the menu provided in Sponsler’s edition.

Recipes for the Realm | 203 Here foloweth the second course: that is to wite: Viande blank, barrid ofgolde. Gely partid writen and notid Te Deum Laudamus. Pigge endored {glazed with egg yolk/saffron]. Crane. Bitore. Conyes. Chikyns endored. Partrich. Pecok enhakyll. Greate breame. Leches white with an antelop of redde corven theryn, a crowne about his neck with a cheyne ofgolde. Flampayne (pork pie} poudred with lepardis and floure de lices of golde. Fritour, a lepardis hedde with ii ostrich fethers. A sotelté, th’emperour and the kyng that ded is, armed, and here mantelles of the garters; and the kyng that nowe is, knelyng bifore hem with this reasoun: [the second verse follows]

The thrid course sueth; that is to say: Blaunde Surrey [dish of chopped eels or fish] poudrid with quatrefoilis gilt. Venyson rostid. Egrettes. Curlewe. Cokkes. Plover. Quailis. Snytes. Grete birdes. Larkes. Carpe. Crabbe. Lech of three colours. A colde bakemete like a shelde quarterly redde and white, set with losenges and gilt, and floures of borage [an herb]. Fritour crispes. A sotelté of

Our Lady sittyng and hir Childe in hir lappe, and she holdyng in hir hand a crowne and Seint George knelyng on that 00 side and Seint Denyse on that other side, presentyng the Kyng, knelyng, to Our Lady, with this reason folowyng: [the third and last verse follows |

Speaking from the culinary side of things, the first course follows the structure of other equally elaborate menus that have survived from the period, beginning with the perennial favorite of frumenty — a kind of wheat porridge — served with meat (usually venison, as in this case), then including the boar’s head that was usually also

part ofthe first course, and carrying on through the fritters, generally made of fried dough (though this feast’s first course apparently contained one large fritter in the shape of a sun, and the second course another in the shape of a leopard’s head).

The menu as a whole also follows the general rule for the content as well as the form ofaristocratic feasts, which Bridget Henisch calls the principle of“lavish abundance ... with as many different dishes following each other to the table” as possible in a “profusion” within which “each [dish is] regarded as an isolated, self&con-

tained unit.”?7 In the majority of the surviving manuscripts, however, the courses of this banquet are presented not in a vertical list, as in most modern menus, but rather in horizontal blocks of text with the dishes (usually, though not always) separated from one another by a punctus or virgula rather than appearing on separate lines. The visual effect of this arrangement is, pace Henisch, a blurring of the self

27.

Henisch, Fast and Feast, 145 and 146; see also Trigg, “Learning to Live,” 465.

204 | LISA H. COOPER containment of each item within a thicket of words, producing what can at first look like textual as well as alimentary chaos.?® Upon closer examination, however,

we can see that all three courses possess a verbal as well as culinary rhythm, one characterized principally by alliteration. In the first course, for example, “venyson” is followed by “viande,” “borehedes” by “beef”; in the second course, “pecok” fol-

lows “partrich,”“fritour” follows “flampayne”; and in the third course we see curlew and cocks, carp and crab — all as pleasing to enunciate and even to run the eye over as, presumably, to eat.?? There is also some interesting variation of detail which, while it corresponds to the dishes actually served, also heightens the cumulative effect of the verbal description, as for example in the first course when the blunt listing of “Beef. Moton. Signet” becomes “Capon stued” and then suddenly explodes into the three highly elaborate, and here verbally elaborated, dishes of sliced pudding (the “lech” with carved lions), the custard royale embellished with a leopard,

and that sun-shaped fritter @ /a “flour de lice.” On the one hand, it could well be argued that the formal properties | am pointing to here are nothing more than an accident of language and the order of service (and I should emphasize that I in no way mean to imply that the record of the banquet’s dishes represents any kind of authorial activity or intention, even if I do imagine that a poet as inclined to prolixity as Lydgate might have taken pleasure in the sheer number and variety of the words for all the food — that is, if he even happened to see the menu).3° On the other hand, the.ongoing return to form in cur-

28

I have examined nine ofthe surviving fourteen manuscripts in person, one in microfilm, and another in a printed edition; of those eleven, only three present the courses in vertical, menu-like lists: London, Guildhall MS 3313 (fols. 129v-130v), New York, Morgan MS M.775 (fols. 15r and 24r), and London, British Library MS Lansdowne 285 (fols. 6v—

7r). In Robert Fabyan’s early sixteenth-century Chronicle, the courses are presented in lists as well; see STC (2nd. ed.) 10659, Sig. Bb.i verso—Bb.ii verso (fols. clxxxvili verso—cIxxxix recto) and STC (2nd. ed.) 10662, 378-79.

29

30

Luce Giard remarks that “in every language, culinary recipes make up a kind of minimalist text, through their internal economy, their conciseness, and their minor degree of equivocation,” just as “the everyday work in kitchens remains a way of unifying matter and memory, life and tenderness, the present moment and the abolished past, invention and necessity, imagination and tradition” (“The Rules of The Art,” 216 and 222). Gordon Kipling suggests that the lines describing the poem’s soteltes are “devices” — texts providing direction to an artisan or, in this case, literary maker — that would have been presented to Lydgate in advance in order for him to craft the accompanying verses in time for the feast; as he notes, there is no way of knowing if the monk in fact attended the coronation banquet. See Gordon Kipling, “Lydgate: The Poet as Deviser,” in Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor ofH.A. Kelly,ed. Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 73-101, at 83-84.

Recipes for the Realm | 205 rent premodern as well as later literary studies and that some have called the “New Formalism” would ask us to look again. After all, as D. Vance Smith reminds us, “form in medieval texts is neither merely aesthetic nor aesthetically disinterested; it is always tuned to purpose” And as he also notes, “medieval readers and writers read for form in complex ways” that seemingly simplistic works have obscured from our view.>! Smith is thinking here about a poem far more evocative than Lydgate’s banquet poem, for his remarks are attached to a consideration of the haunting memento mort verses beginning “Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh.”3? But even with this caveat in mind, looking at Lydgate’s preserved menu we can still see how at least one of the dishes, the “Gely partid writen and noted Te Deum Laudamus” of the second course, acknowledges, and in turn forces us to acknowledge, the writ-

ten or, better, scripted quality of the meal; as Epstein drily notes, “there is [not only] food in the text ... there is text in the food.”33 Moreover, a “Boar’s Head Carol” of the late fifteenth century suggests that I am not the first person to see poetic possibility in a menu like Lydgate’s, for the carol — one of anumber ofsimilar works that have survived — actually turns such a menu into a song:

31

Smith, “Medieval Forma? 71 and 78. See also Cannon, “Form,” esp. 184-87. On New Formalism see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007), 558—

69. On the question of form in late medieval English poetics see Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), and Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: Uni-

32

versity of Chicago Press, 2013). The Middle English Poem, Erthe upon Erthe, Printed from Twenty-Four Manuscripts, ed. Hilda R. Murray, EETS os 141 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tribner and Co., 1911), quoted in full in Smith, “Medieval Forma? 74. It is worth noting, however, that London, British Library MS Egerton 1995, which contains the “Soteltes” (fols. 176v—177v), also contains

a version of the “Erthe” poem (fols. 5 51r—55v), one that is intriguingly — given my subject matter here — immediately followed by the same terms for venery and carving (fols. 55v—58r and 63r—64y) that I will discuss at this essay’s end. Lydgate’s Debate concludes with a related if rather more typical memento mori as part of its warning to princes not to despise their subjects, since of royalty and commons alike it is true that “of erthe we cam, to erthe we shal a-geyn” (637).

33

Epstein, “Eating Their Words,” 361; by “text,” Epstein is referring both to the writing on the jelly in the second course and to the other “heraldic emblems and patterns,” such as the leopard, lion, and fleur-de-lis that appear in the dishes (361); he also notes that the

inscribed jelly is the place where the banquet’s “discursive nature” is most fully on display (363). Cannon remarks on “the surprisingly literary form that medieval cookery sometimes took,” commenting further that “the sofe/te is an instance in which medieval cookery borrows from the literary or visual arts” (Middle English Literature, 4).On such heraldic food as typical of aristocratic banquets see Henisch, Fast and Feast, 229.

206 | LISA H. COOPER Then commys in be secund kowrs witt mykyll pryid: be crannis & pe heyrrons, pe bytteris by ber syde, be pertrychys & pe plowers, be wodcokis & pe snyt, Witt hay! Gud bred, alle, & wyin, dare I well say, be boris hede witt musterd armyd soo gay. furmante to potdtage [s/c], witt wennissun fyn,

& pe hombuls [zanards] of pe dow [doe], & all bat euer commis in.>4 We can in turn compare the alimentary triumphalism of the “Boar’s Head Carol” to that of the early Middle English goliardic poem “The Land of Cokagne,” which

imagines an abbey made entirely out of food: Al of pasteiis bep be walles, Of fleis, of fisse, and rich met,

Pe likfullist bat man mai et. Fluren cakes beb pe schingles alle Of cherch, cloister, boure, and halle.

Pe pinnes beh fat podinges — Rich met to princez and kinges.35

34

NIMEV 3314 (for other versions, see 3312, 3313, and 3315); here from “A Boar’s Head Carol, II,” in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, no. 56, 49-50, at lines 13-16 and 21-24. Of this song, the editor Rossell Hope Robbins notes that the last full stanzas “are merely versified quatrains of the dishes at a medieval banquet” (243). While

Robbins is dismissive, the poetic possibilities of just this sort of menu were explored in Walter de Bibbesworth’s Le ¢tretiz, a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman vocabulary (glossed in Middle English) whose last section describes in rhymed couplets an aristocratic feast including the boar, venison with furmenty, cranes, peacocks, and swans (Walter de Bibbesworth, Le tretiz, ed. William Rothwell (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1990], 28-29, lines 1105~35); that the rhymes clearly had a mnemonic function does

3)

not erase their verbal play. On this part ofLe tretiz see Constance B. Hieatt, “Ore pur parler del array de une graunt mangerye’: The Culture of the ‘Newe Get,’ Circa 1285,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts 700-1600: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honor of E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 219-33. “The Land of Cokagne,” in Early Middle English Verse and Prose, 2nd rev. ed., ed. J.AW. Bennett and GY. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 136-44, lines 54-60.

Recipes for the Realm | 207 An important difference between the two poems, however, is that while according to the “The Land of Cokagne” there are no animals in its fantasy land (“Hors no capil [gelding], kowe no ox,/ Per nis schepe no swine no gote” [32~33]), the table of the “Boar’s Head Carol” is chock-full of animals. And of course so is the table of Lydgate’s “Soteltes,” whose menu, to quote Epstein once more, “evokes not just a

cornucopia but an ark.”3® In this regard we might look again at the “pecok enhakyll” of the second course of Henry VI’s banquet, a peacock whose meat has been cooked and then replaced inside the bird’s carcass, feathers and all. The dish is a perfect example ofthat “reanimational or restorative cuisine” singled out by Terence Scully, quoted above; as he notes, displays of cooked animals inside their skins and in life-like poses were staple features of the richest medieval feasts.37 In Lydgate’s “Soteltes,” food like the stuffed peacock, the pigs and chickens gilded with egg yolk,3* and of course the carved antelopes and pastry leopards and lions serve as a kind of fiction for the table, a fiction that is reanimated and restored — along with the political fiction it supports — by the text that records the event.3? Preservation, always a major concern in medieval cooking, is extended by the banquet’s soteltes into a concern with the preservation of past history and the projection (here, a literal solidification) of future hopes. Nowhere is this more clearly the case in Lydgate’s poem than at the end ofthe second course, where we see both “the kyng that ded is” (Henry V) and “the kyng that nowe is” (Henry VI) together in edible animation.

This ideal of triumphant preservation — of the dead as well as of the living — allows us now to turn to The Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep. For there we see

36

Epstein, “Eating Their Words,” 360.

37.

Scully, The Art ofCookery, 106; see also Henisch, Fast and Feast, 131; and Hammond, Food

and Feast, 137-38. The sociologist Richard Sennett, exploring a number of modern remakings of a 19th-century recipe for stuffed chicken in a chapter on what he calls “expressive instructions,” remarks on the way a series of metaphors for “boning, cooking, and stuffing create together a new metaphor ofreincarnation” (The Craftsman [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 192).

38

Onthe predilection for coloring food yellow — whose connection to gold and the nobility it implied made it a perennial favorite — see C. Anne Wilson, “Ritual, Form, and Colour in the Mediaeval Food Tradition,” in “The Appetite and the Eye”: Visual Aspects of Food and Its Presentation within Their Historical Context, ed.C. Anne Wilson (Edinburgh:

39

Epstein argues that the prose presentation of the food serves precisely this purpose: “the

Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 5-27, at 17-21.

reader encounters, like the attendees to the banquet, the verse and the food together, and must assimilate both. The text in a sense recreates the occasion. ... [T]he entire text

comes to replicate the conditions of the original public performance” (“Eating Their Words,” 368).

208 | LISA H. COOPER

a similar impulse in the words ofthe still-living goose of that poem, who remarks scathingly to the horse (who has justified his worth in predominantly martial, theological, and mercantile terms [36—-159])4° that while the “fowle careyn” of an equine carcass is good for nothing but “infectyng” the air, a “newe slayn” goose is a “morsel agreable,” especially when it is “sewid [served] vp atte kyngis table”4

—and then not simply “in disshis of gold,” but rather “swymmyng on lyve in watris cristallyn” (204-9).4* The crystal waters here are probably to be created from the ubiquitous gelatin — like the “gely” of the second course in the “Soteltes” — that was not only made from meat or fish but was also used to display such foods inside it. Such gelatin in fact served as a preservative for stewed meat, apparently one reason it was used so often,43 though in the goose’s case it is apparently to be used to represent the water on top of which its body will be posed. The goose’s celebration of its future as edible trompe loerl is, we should note, quite distinct from the “The Swan Lament”

in the Carmina Burana

(c. 1230), who

declares, as it is being roasted, “Mallem in aquis vivere, /nudo semper sub aere,/ quam in hoc mergi pipere” [I would rather live upon the water, /ever beneath open air,/than be doused in this pepper]#4 — though it is also true that before it celebrates its end on the table, the Debate’s goose proclaims itself superior to the horse because of the way it is able “Tabide in thre [places], lond, watir, & ayer,”

and to “bathe in rivers, swymme in many a pond” while still alive (165, 167), thus

40

For an analysis that focuses on the poem’s constant references to war and attention to the three animals’ military value, see Withers, “Ecology.” Walter classic study John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. (London: Methuen, 1961), connects the Debate to Lydgate’s “peace-loving” his approval of “enlightened commercial policy” (232).

41

See MED, sw. seuen (v.[3]). Hammond notes that “sewe” can also be a “sauce poured over a dish, or one in which it was served” (Food and Feast, 136); see MED, s.v. seu (n.[1]),

42

its extended FE. Schirmer’s Ann E. Keep politics and

b. A similar argument about his superiority based on taste (which is “reolente and swete aboue all othir”) is made by the pheasant (against the peacock, who argues for the beauty of his feathers) in the early fourteenth-century Latin prose Dialogus creaturarum moralizatus, which was printed in English translation in the early sixteenth century; see Dialogo Ixii in The Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed, ed. Gregory Kratzmann and Elizabeth Gee (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), 152.

43

Scully, The Art of Cookery, 56.

44

Carmina Burana 1: Text 2: Die liebeslieder, ed. Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann

(Hei-

delberg: Carl Winter, 1941), no. 130 (p.215); Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150, trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), Appendix 27 (pp. 297-98), lines 19-21.

Recipes for the Realm | 209 manifesting perhaps some degree of (unacknowledged) nostalgia for the same life mourned by the Carmina Burana’s swan.45 Just as the goose of the Debate for the most part gleefully provides an implicit recipe for itself—roast me, put me back in my feathers, serve me with good wine so too is the sheep (in words spoken for her by the ram) verbally dissected into a triumphant catalogue of abbreviated culinary and medicinal recipes, an extended reflection upon the value of the animal’s muscle, bone, sinew, and wool that is

worth quoting in full: [The Sheep’s] fleessh is natural restauracioun,

As summe men seyn aftir gret siknesse: Rostid or sodyn, holsom is motoun, Wellid with growel [grue/], phisiciens expresse, Ful nutritiff aftir a gret accesse. The Sheep al-so concludyng douteless Of his [szc] nature louyth rest & pees.

Of the Sheep is cast a-way no thyng: His horn for nokkis {bow-tzps], to haftis goth the bon; To the lond gret profite doth his tirdelyng [dung]; His talwe eke seruyth for plaistres mo than on; For harp strynges his roppis [sezews] serue echon;

Of his hed boiled holl with wolle & all, Ther comyth a gelle, an oynement ful roiall!

For ache of bonys & also for brosour It remedieth & dooth men ese ful blyve; Causith men starkid bonys to recur; Dede synnewis restorith a-geyn to live. Blak sheepis wolle with fresh oile ofolive —

45

On the way these lines briefly depart from the poem’s focus on the animals’ use-value see Withers, “Ecology,” 7-8. Wendy A. Matlock also remarks upon the “unsettling” nature of the goose’s celebratory tone when speaking of its end on the table and the animal suffering to which its words point; see her “Talking Animals, Debating Beasts,” in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Carolynn Van Dyke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 217-31, at 226. For another poem in which a hunted animal laments its fated end

upon the human table, see “The Hunted Hare,” in Secular Lyrics ofthe XIVth and XVth Centuries, no. 119 (pp. 107-110) at line 75, and the discussion by David Scott-Macnab,

“The Animals of the Hunt and the Limits of Chaucer’s Sympathies,” Studies in the Age ofChaucer 3.4 (2012), 331-37, at 335-36.

210 | LISA H. COOPER Thes men of arymys with charmys previd good, — Ata streiht neede thei can weel staunche blood.

(370-92) Here Lydgate’s poem ~ already an intersection of bestiary, Aesopic fable, and scholarly or parliamentary debate** — also comes to resemble another genre, that of the animal last will, of which two notable Latin examples survive, the late antique Testamentum porcelli [Testament of the piglet] and the later medieval Testamentum asint

[Testament of the ass].47 In both of these, the animals about to die dictate how their body parts are to be distributed. A signal difference between these earlier works and Lydgate’s poem (in addition to that of language) is that in the Debate not only are the goose and sheep nowhere near death, and celebratory rather than mournful, but they also provide far more detail about the material ways in which their bodies are to be used after the fact. In this way, Lydgate’s poem presages by almost a hundred years the sixteenth-century Testament of the Buck. In this work, printed by William Copland in c. 1560 (one of the two surviving manuscripts has been dated to c. 1525-50), a deer

vanquished in the hunt relates to the hunter how his parts are to be distributed and by what person or other animal they are, for the most part, to be eaten.4* While the

46

On the fluidity of Middle English literature in this regard see Hiatt, “Genre Without System,” especially his comment that “mixing genres ... may turn out to be the fundamental trait of Middle English literature” (291). Taavitsainen, “Middle English Recipes,” makes a similar point from a linguistic perspective when she notes that for early scientific writing (including medical recipes), textual transmission, or “text tradition,” may be “a better way of contextualizing than genre” (90).

47

Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, 38-40, 124, and Appendix 29-30 for translations.

48

wyl bucke his Testament, STC {2nd. ed.] 15118.5; for a later printed edition see The Liter-

ature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Illustrated by Reprints of Very Rare Tracts, ed. James Orchard [J.O.] Halliwell (London, privately printed, 1851), 51-65. On the several textual contexts ofthis work see Edward Wilson, “The Testament of the Buck and the Sociology ofthe Text,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 45.178 (1994), 157—

84. Bruce W. Holsinger notes the way the buck focuses on the pleasure his body parts will bring to their recipients (Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer |Stanford University Press, 2001 |, 345-46). On the double custom ofthe break-

ing of the deer and the curée, or rewarding of the hounds — one of the most important rituals of the medieval hunt — to which the Testament also alludes (lines 17-18, 34, and

42, but also in a sense the poem in its entirety) see John Cummins, The Art ofMedieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988; repr. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2003), 41-45; William Perry Marvin, English Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 118-29 and 13-41; and Richard Thomas, “Chasing the Ideal? Ritualism, Pragmatism and the Later Medieval

Hunt in England,” in Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies: Animals as Material Culture in

the Middle Ages, ed. Aleksander Pluskowsi (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007), 125-48.

Recipes for the Realm | 211 Latin animal testaments are intentionally comic, socially satiric, and sexually allusive,

the Debate, though it certainly functions in part as a social satire on the rivalries that disrupt the harmony of the realm, is like the Testament really quite serious about the material value of animal bodies. As Thomas L. Reed,Jr,puts it, “considering the wealth of detail filling the [Debate], the goose turds and the mutton broth, the animals are

surely not meant to be assigned figural identities that ignore their literal integrity.”49 What Reed further calls “the persistence of the literal in the face of higher levels of significance” in this poem is especially evident in the verses that attend to the wide variety of ways in which literal (rather than figurative) animal bodies can be used to restore the actual bodies of human beings. Such uses were no joke in the period of the poem’s circulation, and the references to healing practices in the Debate connect the animals’ words to the category of medical as well as culinary recipe, often found together in manuscript compilations and at times indistinguishable from one another.°° In the passage quoted above, for example, we see how the sheep’s body produces not only the “natural restauracion” (370) of mutton but also plasters and salves; several lines earlier,

we have already been told that sheepskin is used to make clothing and gloves that “dryve awey the cold” and “good parchemyn / To write on bookes in quaiers many fold” (366-67). Even earlier, the goose explains that his excrement, unlike horse dung, can help heal burns, assuaging — as he puts it — “the peyn that perceth to the roote” (201), an echo of the second line of the General Prologue by which | imagine Chaucer would have been quite amused.5! Questions about the relationship of form and content in Middle English literature take on something of a new edge in recipes like those gestured to, if not entirely spelled out, in both the Debate and the “Soteltes.” For such recipes, while they have a verbal content of their own, also provide instructions for making new things — things with which human beings can protect, replenish, and fill their own

49

Thomas L. Reed, Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics ofIrresolution (Colum-

bia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 372 (for the fuller, astute discussion ofthe poem, see 364-75). For a reading of the poem primarily as political allegory see David Lampe, “Lydgate’s Laughter: ‘Horse, Goose, and Sheep’ as Social Satire,” Annuale Medraevale 15 (1974), 150-58.

50

For the argument that medical and culinary recipes form a single text-type see Gorlach, “Text-Types,” 747; Carroll, “Middle English Recipe as a Text-Type,” goes beyond this to argue that other kinds of recipes — agricultural, artistic — are part of the same category

51

Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1970), 52 and

(38).

200, notes that the goose also echoes the words of the sparrow-hawk in Chaucer's Parliament ofFowls (“Lo, here a parfit resoun of agoos!” [568]) when he exclaims “Her is a gentil reson of an Hors!” (477). The echo is also noted by Matlock, “Talking Animals,” 218.

212 | LISA H. COOPER bodily forms (to put it another way, content as well as content themselves), at least

until the moment when, as the Debate’s moralizing envoy scathingly remarks, the human “careyn” is “stuffid” with nothing but “fowle ordur” (616). As Dorothy Yamamoto notes, the animals of the Debate do not simply explain and provide instructions for their use but rather “offer up their bodies as examples of total assimilability” of the animal to the human.5? Another way to put this would be to say that if as textual forms the “Soteltes” and the Debate blur the line between the genres of recipe and poetry, so too do their dramatis personae — the possibly edible saints and kings of the banquet poem, the animals of the Debate — also tread the fluid, and

fraught, boundary between the (generally) consumed animal and the (generally) consuming human person. But nowhere is the Debate’s treading and finally crossing of generic boundaries more in evidence than in William Caxton’s 1476-77 printings of the poem. The two editions printed in those years (which vary only minimally from one another) perform a reading of Lydgate’s work that engages with both its form and its content at once, a reading that reveals how Caxton apparently understood the ways in which the Debate (like the “Soteltes,” which he did not print) has the capacity to serve as both allegory and menu, a lesson in social idealization and in culinary practicality

52.

Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human,.in Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25; Yamamoto here points to an analogous description of the sheep’s utility in John Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things, which observes that a year-old lamb “beb in vse ofthe flees and in vse of be fleissh nedeful to mankynde” (Ox the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum: A Critical Text, ed. M.C. Seymour et al., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1975-1988], 2:1116). On the material and symbolic uses of animals in the period, in

addition to Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies, see the essays collected in A Cultural History ofAnimals in the Medieval Age, ed. Brigitte Reslm, Vol. 2 of A Cultural History of Antmals, gen. ed. Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl (New York: Berg, 2007); Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994); Jeffrey Jerome

Cohen, “Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages,” in Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 39-62; Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011); and Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Mann notes that the way animals speak in works like the Debate (which she mentions only in passing) is a kind of “ventrilo-

quism” centered on human concerns, not “a serious attempt to penetrate other modes of being” (165); however, Withers, “Ecology,” takes issue with this view of the Debate, arguing that Lydgate “at times resists ... his culture’s widespread estimation of animals according to purely anthropocentric values” (2) and in fact at points implies “that horses, geese, and sheep would be better off having never known humans” (14). Matlock, “Talk-

ing Animals,” 220, makes a similar point.

Recipes for the Realm

| 213

alike. After the “Explicit” of Lydgate’s poem (fol. 13v), Caxton appended two more items. The first is the moralizing conduct poem beginning “Hit is ful hard to knowe ony estate,” to which have been added two more stanzas (“The world so wide the air so remevable” and “The more I go the farther | am behind?” [itself the first stanza

of Lydgate’s poem “Tyed with a Lyne”]), often found in combination (fols. 14r— 15r).53 The second (fols. 15v—17r) actually consists offive different items that come

from a set of late medieval practical texts on hunting and related topics that are found scattered in twenty-one manuscripts and four early printings (one of which is Caxton’s), and that are referred to collectively by their most recent editor as the “J.B. Treatise.”54 The first of these items, a two-column vocabulary of 106 primarily collective nouns for groupings of animals and people, moves from a “Herde of dere,” and another of “swannys,” to a “Bevye of quayles,” a “Gagyll of ghees,” and a “Hoost of men” (15v). (Hints that the list is meant to entertain as well as instruct

can be seen in the entries “a Gagyll of women” [15v] and “Superfluyte of nonnes” [16r] as well as in the placement ofa “Scole of scolers” between “Scole of fysshe” and “Cluster of grapes” [16r]). Just as the Debate’s envoy turns its animals’ conversation into an allegory for the affairs of men, so too does this list turn from animal groupings to terms for the speech and actions of persons — from the “Trouthe of barons,” “Boste of souldyours,” “Threte of cortyars,” and “Laufters of hostelers” to

the “Glosying of taverners” (16r), “Lyeng of pardoners,” and last but not least, the “Hastynes of cooks” (16v). This semi-serious vocabulary, with its possible allusions in its cast of characters to the Canterbury Tales, is followed by eight terms for animals and men at rest (such as “an Herte is herbored,” and “a Squyer is logged” [171r]), three for the different demeanors ofhart, buck, and roe deer (171r), and nine-

teen carving terms familiar from other late medieval courtesy manuals like John Russell’s Boke efNurture (c. 1460),°> terms that represent animals not in their living,

53

NIMEV 1629, 3504, and 3436. The contents are described by Scott-Macnab, “Caxton’s Printings,” 4-5. My citations here are from the second edition, STC [2nd.ed.] 17018 (see nz, above). As mentioned in n32 above, this material also appears in one of the manu-

scripts that contains the “Soteltes”: London, British Library MS Egerton 1995, fols. 5 5v— 58r and 631-6 4v.

54

Fora complete edition see David Scott-Macnab,A Sporting Lexicon of the Fifteenth Century: The ‘J.B. Treatise’ (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2003). Another printing of the items included specifically by Caxton is G. Legman,

“Words of Multitude and Assembly: The First Printed List,” American Notes and Queries 55

5 (1946), 179-82. John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, in Early English Meals and Manners, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, N. Trubner and Co., 1868), 1-123, esp. 21-32 on Carv-

ing; see also the Boke of Kervynge, a prose adaptation of Russell’s text printed in 1508 (STC [2nd. ed.] 3289), also in Early English Meals and Manners, 149-74, esp. 161-63.

214 | LISA H. COOPER but rather in their dead and kitchen- or even table-ready states: “a Dere broken,” “a Swan lyfte,” “a Heron dismembrid,” “a Crane displayd,” “a Pigge heded & syded”

[x74].5°

What Caxton’s editorial choices here imply is that the two longer lists from

the J.B. Treatise — first, the collective association of animals and human beings, and second, the actions by which animal bodies are turned into objects for human con-

sumption — can serve as equally fitting addenda to the Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep. The presence of the two vocabularies suggests that readers interested in the poem in the last quarter of the fifteenth century might have understood at least one and very possibly both of these sets of instructions as a fitting epilogue to the animal debate that precedes them.‘7 This kind of suggestive textual juxtaposition, which asks readers to cross the gap between entertainment and instruction, con-

tinued into the mid-sixteenth century, when the printer William Copland provided readers of his edition of the Testament of the Buck, mentioned above, with an appended series of recipes, eleven pages in all, for the parts of abuck and doe — an editorial move that fashions the reader-as-potential-cook into the last inheritor of the testating animal’s remains.5® Almost a century before Copland, however, we find Caxton printing one more item from the /.B. Treatise at the very end of the vocabulary he appended to the Debate. It is a description of how a deer attempts to escape its hunters by way ofwater:

A herte yf he be chasid he will desire to haue a riuer Assone as he taketh the Riuer he suleth [soz/s, i.e. enters the water)

yf he take ouer the ryuer he crossith Yf he retorne he recrosseth And yf he take with the streme he fleteth [swzms|

Yf he take agayn the streme he beteth or els breketh [swims upstream] Yf he take the londe he fleeth. (18r)

56

On the literary if not outright fictional quality of such instruction see my “Poetics of Practicality,” 502-504, and Trigg, “Learning to Live,” 467-68.

57

Scott-Macnab, “Caxton’s Printings,” suggests both that the “terminology related to animals ... forms a natural link with Lydgate’s animal fable” and that the popularity of the J.B. Treatise material was behind Caxton’s decision to add these texts (6). 58 My argument about Caxton’s edition is in concert with Wilson’s regarding The Testament ofthe Buck, particularly his point — encountered only after I had formulated my own — that “the association oftexts within the one volume [testament and recipes] ... constitutes a “reading” of the poem” (“The Testament of the Buck,” 173)

Recipes for the Realm | 215 This final vocabulary lesson is surely intended to be no more than that; from it, one can learn (as I have) the specialized terms suleth, beteth, and its synonym, breketh.5? But in its frantic striving to escape the destiny of its carved compatriots on the previous page, the deer of this final passage seems to me also to look back at the longer poem to which it is appended. For if we can read this practical text for its potential poetry — for its image of the breathless, desperate, and ultimately triumphant deer (who, we note, escapes to freedom, however temporarily, in the last line)®° — so too can we read the Debate (and, as I have also suggested, the “Soteltes”)

as a text that “crossith” over any number of boundaries: recipe and allegory, animal and human, word and thing, life and death. And as | have been arguing throughout this essay, to perform that kind of reading (albeit, one hopes, without the perils attendant on the deer) is to start to learn how to cross and re-cross the discipli-

nary divide that too frequently separates the poetic from the practical in our current critical practice.

59

On the specialized terms here, especially “breketh,” see Scott-Macnab, “Caxton’s Printings,” 9-10. It could perhaps be argued that this verbal codification, which in effect describes what Susan Crane observes is actually the “unpredictability” of “the practical effort to kill a wild animal” is yet another part of the hunting ritual, and, more specifically, part ofits “informed mastery ofthe natural world” [emphasis Crane’s]; see her “Ritual Aspects of the Hunt 4 Force? in Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser (Notre

60

To find either desperation or triumph into these lines, as I do, is probably to project an emotional quality into the text that it lacks on its surface. But see Scott-Macnab’s observation, also noted above (n45), that some Middle English poetry does imagine the hunt

Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 63-84, at 68 and 76.

from the perspective ofthe frightened animal (“The Animals of the Hunt,” 335-36).

ALAN

T. GAYLORD

Devotional Practice in “Crafted” Mystical Prose and Poetry: A Preliminary Inqutry Towards a Theory of Devotional Reading This essay is an inquiry into what happens when a text for devotion is “translated” into “literature.” | argue that such a translation is a complex ofsentence and solaas; that is, setting aside as much as is possible the modern theoretical categories of “literature,” I concentrate on the synchronic element(s) of craft. You can build a priedieu, or “kneeler,” out of rough lumber, with simple joints, and no paint, padding,

or ornament; or you can make it with great care and diligence, with carefully shaped wood and pleasing lines and curves, and with unostentatious but sturdy padding — Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, made an elaborate Victorian prie-dieu of carved-oak, in the “Gothic” style, “enriched with painting and gilding.”' Craft, even excessive craft, makes the difference. But what is the aim ofsuch craft, what makes

it beautiful or ugly, effective or irrelevant? What makes it a good translation, or a bad? Within such a huge subject and with such a broad definition, I here focus on Julian of Norwich (prose) and Middle-English Pear/ (poetry), with the help of two methodological protocols, asking: (1) what is the linguistic register, and what are the salient formal features, of the examined work? — in prose: rhetorical constructions

and images; in poetry: prosody and images — and (2) translated away from its crafted features, what is the devotional practice driving each work, and with its marks of craft added, what has it been translated into? What are the implications for the contemplative, the devotional, reader? I do speak of the reader, not the hearer — textuality not aurality — and this for a particular reason. I argue that the poetics of each work calls upon craft to place the devotional practice within the embrace of beauty, so that its formal beauty serves

1

Illustration and quotation from Frederick Litchfield, I//ustrated History ofFurniture, From the Earliest to the Present Time from 1893 (Boston: Estes & Laurent, 1893). Source files:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12254; Wikimedia Page: —http://commons.wiki media.org/wiki/File:Prie-dieu_in_Carved_Oak, Designed_by_Mr._ Pugin.jpg

Devotional Practice in Mystical Prose and Poetry | 217

as

at Sao

vy

“Prie-Dieu, In Carved Oak, enriched with Painting and

Gilding. Designed by Mr. Pugin, and manufactured by Mr. Crace, London,” from Frederick Litchfield, [//ustrated History ofFurniture, 7th ed. (London, 1922), p. 375-

as a propaedeutic, leading the private reader to perceive with greater depth, sensitivity, and delight devotional meanings. So it will not be enough to discover such beauty as a kind of spiritual salsa spread over the spiritual meats; no, the beauty becomes part of, organic with, the emerging meaning. I suggest that the discipline of /ectio spiritualis provides a metaphorical illustration of the kind of contemplative reading required for crafted works of devotion —one that becomes, to adapt Milton, “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” But there

218 | ALAN T. GAYLORD will also begin to emerge some further development and definitions that reach beyond the usual borders of the non-literary, non-aesthetic /ectiones. And those would result from the application of prosodic criticism ... even for prose!

Reading as Recital In the later Middle Ages, in England, texts began to be produced that anticipated a kind of private reading in which the imagination of a single reader contemplated an aural composite of sound — the spokenness of the text. The textures of sound were an integral part of the work’s rhetoric. Not necessarily performative, in terms of a listening audience, the internalized text as imagined became what I have called an

individual “recital,” a recital for one. Behind this contemplative practice was halfa century (or more) of the discipline of textual contemplation, now re-imagined and beginning to flower into secular prose and poetry. The closet or the study took the place of the salon. In Victorian England, as the Arts and Crafts Movement was taking on form and energy, William Morris was lecturing on its principles, its future, and its aesthetic; one of his most quoted dicta can serve us here: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”* The “house” I will

examine will be the cell of the Anchorite and the closet of the mystic, and the issue to pursue will be the question of beauty in the contemplation of the devotional text.

One text will be from the Pearl Poet, hyperbolically a work of crafted literature; the other will be from an author, both a speaker and a writer, a devout woman from Norwich: Julian, who writes in prose, exquisitely crafted prose. In the one, the craft of beauty is so prominent as to endanger its usefulness; in the other, its usefulness is so unpretentious and humbly direct as to obscure its remarkable and beautiful craft. But when the beauty of each is fully discovered, it should be clear that that both are extraordinary examples of devotional craft. Middle-English Pearl does not look at first blush very much like Julian’s Short or Long text of her Showings, but what these have in common deserves close attention, beginning with a theory of reading based on what we have been learning about private and public reading in the late fourteenth century. These two works are crafted for readers who will treat texts like this in a variant of /ectio divina, as an exercise of meditation combining both aesthetics and divinity.

2

William Morris, “The Beauty ofLife” (1880) in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878-1881 (London, Ellis & White, 1882), 108.

Devotional Practice in Mystical Prose and Poetry | 219 In brief, the idea of such a project is as follows: the overall aim is to read with flexible pace and an imaginative ear; that is, the reading begins with a written text

and imagines how it would sound. This would be voicing the text, though not necessarily assuming a person who is speaking; rather, orality and vocality blend in a translation ofwritten signs into an imagination ofaspeaking, which is to say an utterance that rides on a breath, rises. and falls with syntactic intonation, and shapes the

sounds and stresses ofarticulation to turn literature into an aural/oral recital.3 This project of private reading in the largest sense is not just about devotional literature, but when the focus is on literature by and for mystics, for contempla-

tives, and for devout men and women, certain other features ofprivate reading take on special character. It is clear from the literature itself that many, if not most, of

those in this audience had heard the literature read out loud to them, but in the latter part of the fourteenth century it is also clear that as literacy spread and the pool of talented writers expanded, there was a new emphasis upon a private reader with a text in his or her lap or on a reading stand, a reader who could read and re-read, who could go back to a puzzling passage and compare it with other related places in the text. It would more and more be a meditative reader who knew other texts, who had access to libraries oftexts, or friends or colleagues who had other texts, and

who had a growing sense, from a devotional point of view, of what fine writing could be. In other words, the devotional text could be all the more usefu/ for being

beautiful. But in speaking ofan early practice, we will not easily find definitions of what that beauty comprised, no abstractions or general discussions. And yet the private reading for devotional meditation comes out of a rich tradition of“affective spirituality,” in which a particular eloquence is drawn upon that has the texture of a speaking voice, and a rhetoric that is low-key but intensely earnest. It would be absurd not to attribute to its craftsmanship or sincere artifice. The beauty lies in the sincerity, a voice that speaks without artifice - meaning without decezt, and yet

also in a language of great artifice - meaning crafted. We might call it homely eloquence.

3

This paragraph summarizes what I have come to call “Prosodic criticism? For further discussion see my “Reading Chaucer: What’s Allowed in ‘Aloud?’ Chaucer Yearbook: A Journal ofLate Medieval Studies,

(1992), 87-109; “Chaucerian Sentences: Revisiting a “Cru-

cial Passage from the Num’s Priest’s Tale? in ‘Seyd in forme and reverence’: Essays on Chaucer and Chaucerians in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr., ed. T.L. Burton and John F. Plummer (Adelaide, Australia & Provo, Utah: The Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), 161-80; and “Some

Prosodic Observations on the Peculiar Metric ofPearl? in Approaches to the Metres ofAlliterative Verse, ed. Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 2009), 187-218.

220 | ALAN T. GAYLORD

The Theory of Fictional Orality “Fictive orality” is what I prefer to call “a literary construction of orality.” If we consider the continuum stretching from strict orality (no reading or writing) to complete literacy (all writing, all private reading) as a metaphoric wall stretching around our commonwealth of texts, |have chosen a particular position to defend at one bar-

bican clearly described by D.H. Green in a 1990 essay entitled, “Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies? He writes (and this is an essay everyone interested in these issues might want to begin with), “..we may agree that a medieval author can fictionalize his audience and his living contact with them without this necessarily meaning that he is reciting his work to them as listeners ... °4 Now for Green this is just one point, one position, among many, for his central interest is in the late-medieval transitional forms oforality and literacy, and his fullscale working out of these forms within the literature of Old High German is his magisterial volume, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800-1300 (1994). Up to his stopping date, there are few instances he will point to of individual, private reading of secular literature (as opposed to religious study and meditation, /ectio divina, of which of course there were many monastic examples). But I am concentrating on two literary texts from the late-fourteenth century in England, at least 75 years after Green’s survey, and arguing a wellknown issue in German studies, concerning fingrerte mundlichkeit, which is to say, fictive orality.’ We will be dealing, then, with a literary construction of orality as discovered in a narrative and a narrative meditation that are constructed as cunningly as Pugin’s absurd prie dieu, but with greater earnestness and intellectual force: claritas — radiant with beauty. I have limited my scope in this preliminary investigation to the way each work opens, displays its language, and begins to make its connection to the reader and his or her meditations. It is perhaps easiest to introduce the topics of craftsmanship and beauty with Middle English Pearl and its poetry, so I will begin with that.

Pearl and Its Poetry From its very opening stanza, Pearl’s craft can be seen and heard, for its elaborate rhyme scheme and its alliterative ornamentation speak from the page, and its con-

4

D.H.Green, “Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies? Speculum

5

65 (1990), 267-80, at 278. See Stephan Kohl, “Fingierte Mindlichkeit: Erzahler in mittelenglischer Literatur? in

Mundlichkeit und Schrifilichkeit im englischen Mittelalter, ed. Willi Erzgraber and Sabine Volk-Birke (Tubingen: Narr, 1988), 133-46.

:

Devotional Practice in Mystical Prose and Poetry | 221 sequent register of discourse includes ear-pleasing structures of assonance and consonance. Furthermore, the metaphor of fine jewelry is prominent, beginning with line 2:

Perle plesaunte to prynces paye To clanly clos in golde so clere, Oute oforyent, I hardyly saye, » Ne proued I neuer her precios pere So rounde so reken in uche araye So smal so smothe her sydes were Where so ever I jugged gemmes gaye I sette hyr sengeley in syngl[e]re Allas I leste hyr in on erbere Thurgh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot I dewyne fordolked of luf daungere Of that pryvy perle wythouten spot® [Pearl, pleasing at a prince’s pleasure To purely [be] closed in gold so shining: From [the] Orient, Isurely say

Found I never her precious peer. So round, so fine in every aspect, So slender, so smooth her sides were.

Wheresoever I judged gems gay I set her alone in singularity. Alas, I lost her in a garden.

Through grass to [the] ground it from me ran.

I dwindle away, wounded by frustrated longing For that special pearl without spot.|” (1-12) This is a pearl, first ofall, fit to be set into a brooch or other ornament, enclosed

in goldsmith’s work. The language ofthis rich beginning glitters with bright details and intimations of spiritual meanings. The ear will be pleased by the special work

6

All quotations are from my own edition and translation of Pear! in progress, based on the original manuscript and comparisons with the facsimile and with EV. Gordon’s edi-

7

Translations of Pearl are my own - intended as a literal gloss, not a “poetic” approxima-

tion of the poem first published in 1953. tion.

'

|

222 | ALAN T. GAYLORD the alliteration does — not as the metric of the poem, but as a prosodic current of great and sinuous power, foregrounding words or phrases, and giving ideas an acoustic singularity. There is no question but that Beauty is central, the theme of themes; its presence offers a network of allusions and religious symbols, and a structure that radiates through the architecture of the verse, itself beautiful as the scholastics would have it, in its harmonies and resonant numbers.

In his garden of restless mourning, the poet now falls into an anguished sleep: “I slode upon a slepyng slaghte / On that prec[iJos perle wythouten spot”(59-60). And so the account ofhis vision begins: “fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space / My body on balke ther bod in sweven / My goste is gon in godes grace” (61-63). Beauty here is a compelling current ofdesire, and the poet-dreamer is drawn on by the great yearning, great longing, that is erotic in origin. But he will gain a vision, at last, of fulfilled desiring, which his medieval readers would call not eros or cupid-

itas but caritas, the apocalypse of agape. A Vision of Fulfilled Desiring

The Poet-Dreamer comes to his senses in a paradise garden, and the eidetic force of the narrative makes it clear that all about him is beautiful beyond the limits of normal language. The poem becomes a fantasy of expressive sound and wonder: Dubbed wern alle tho downes sydesd With crystal klyffes so cler of kynde Holtewodes bryght aboute hem bydes Of bolles as blwe as ble of ynde As bornyst sylver the lef on slydes That thike con trylle on uch a tynde When glem ofglodes agayns hem glydes Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle thay schynde The gravayl that on grounde con grynde Wern precious perles of oryente The sunnebemes bot blo and blynde In respecte of that adubbement [Arrayed were all the downs’ sides

With crystal cliffs so clear in nature.

Woods bright about them stand With tree trunks as blue as blue ofIndia. Like burnished silver the leaves slide together,

Devotional Practice in Mystical Prose and Poetry | 223 That thick (do) quiver on every branch.

When gleam from open skies against them falls, With shimmering bright full keenly they shone. The gravel that on ground did grind Were precious pearls from the Orient: The sunbeams [were] but dark and dim

With respect to that adornment. | (73-84) This is more than ordinary adornment, for “addubement” comprehends a scene of splendors whose provider could only be God the Creator; and what is adorned is not clothing, furniture, or jewelry, but a visionary landscape with acres

of pearls underfoot, and trees with leaves quivering like burnished silver. The rhyme scheme is difficult to maintain, but the poet has handled it by virtue of his creation of a discursive register that is neither in high style, nor in the common vernacular. Word order and word-meanings are frequently strained in the service of rhyme. This particular passage, within the poem’s exordium, is filled with treats in the articulation and sounding of phrases like “Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle thay schynde”; but the copious alliteration is part of a larger intellectual scheme, which is the evocation of a visionary radiance. There are at least nine words

in this stanza that describe effects of light. And Advancing towards the light is the aim ofthe contemplation that is being encouraged by such craftsmanship. A few stanzas later the Dreamer will meet the Pearl Maiden who is at once intimidatingly beautiful and yet somehow familiar. When they greet each other, the main argument of the poem will begin. The poet adds an element to his emotions of wonder: it is his growing sense of recognition — “I knew hyr wel I hade sen hyr ere/ .../ On lenghe I loked to hyr there / The lenger I knew hyr more and more” (164, 167-8). This will keep strong the theme of longing, which accompanies every step the Dreamer takes from here

on. He will be speaking to the infant he lost, here re-envisioned in her glory as a lovely young maiden. He knows her with his spirit, and because recognizing her is intrinsic to his vision. And yet, for all his longing, she is untouchable.

I think some hypotheses can be formed treating the beginning of Pearl as propaedeutic. As a fictional vision its rules for reading will not be made explicit or abstracted; they are implicit in the way the poem proceeds and the way it touches the reader. It suggests, but doesn’t require, that the reader be private; the implicit reason is that the text must be deeply and sensuously experienced, even as the mind deals with its structures, the order ofits narration, and the implications ofits words and its impulses, both musical and intonational. It offers challenges and pleasures

224 | ALAN T. GAYLORD to the imagination, and sooner or later (generally sooner, | think) makes thinking and pondering lead to meditation. There is an itinerary here following the prosodic stimuli of the poetry. The destination will be pleasure mixed with pain (the Dreamer does not heed the advice and warnings of the Maiden and tries to cross over to her and break into Paradise), yet at the end he is at peace with himself and his maker. He may not be merry in the common sense, but there is some kind of

joy for the private reader as she or he puts down the text, a joy that reads and weeps, and smiles at last with consolation. For that reader, those readers, such new works

of devotion will be profoundly useful and brilliantly beautiful. In their extraordinary edition of The Writings ofJulian ofNorwich, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins offer an appreciation ofJulian’s style that helps make transition from the glittering poetry of the Pearl Poet to the prosaic riches ofJulian: “More like modern lyric poetry than prose, Julian’s writing still feels the tug of the oral ...?8 Broadly said, there is a creative poesis in this prose, and in calling it lyric, the description assumes intensity, economy, and clarity of what is said and how it is said. And also, hugely important for analysis here is the reference to “the oral,” leading us to a voice within a tradition of strong voices. Let us begin, and listen with meditative ears: Ande when I was thrittye wintere alde and a halfe, God sente me a bodely syekenes in the whilke I laye thre dayes and thre nightes, and on the ferthe night I toke alle my rightinges of haly kyrke, and wened nought tille have liffede tille daye. And after this | langourede furthe two dayes and two nightes, and on the thirde night I wenede ofte times to hafe passede, and so wened thaye that were aboute me ....1 thought thus: “Goode lorde, maye my leyvinge be no langere to thy worshippe?” And I was answerde in my resone and be the felinges of my paines that I shulde die, and I asented fully with alle the wille of mye herte to be atte Godes wille. (65)

As we hearken to her voice, we will be able to follow every clearly placed word, if not understand every deeply probing idea. Two interwoven processes of understanding are set into motion: the first is the narration of how this devout woman experienced and then contemplated her visions, the sixteen separate “Showings” that presented themselves to her inner sight; the second is the work of following,

8

The Writings ofJulian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 24-25. All quotations from Julian are from this text.

Devotional Practice in Mystical Prose and Poetry | 225 interpreting, and absorbing what this humble and extraordinary mystic lays out for our brains and hearts to peruse. To use one of her favorite words, the whole recital is “hamely,” or “homely.” The term is part of her lively grasp ofthe vernacular, and begins with a relationship — an intimacy that is comfortable, unpretentious, and affectionate. It describes at once her awareness of her “evenecristene,” her readers and fellow Christians (mostly women, it would seem).

The craft of this paragraph is to be found in its careful construction. It is “crafty” in its complete absence of posturing, its avoidance ofany touch of bathos in recounting intimate details so directly, and in her masque of simplicity. Julian stands in for all readers, especially gracious to others like her Persona; but all her friends and colleagues would already know, or learn soon, that she was a probing and complex theologian. And her style mirrors her mind, and supports her diegesis. The narration in this opening paragraph is sinuous, grammatically complex and yet simple in its attitude, proceeding with deliberate pace to describe her sickness, her responses, and her conflicting desires. It is an argument in the technical

sense, with a kind of syntactical plot, and it is launched to carry us effortlessly to the simple facts of a critical illness and then, in paragraphs that follow, to questions that reach out towards Heaven and Hell. After this my sight begane to faile, and it was alle darke aboute me in the chamber, and as if it had ben night, save in the image of the crosse, wherin helde a

comon light, and I wiste not how. All that was beseid the crosse was oglye and ferful to me,as if it had ben mekille occupied with fiendes. (133) Her devotion concentrates obediently on the proffered crucifix. The argument,

not yet fully disclosed, is about to emerge onto stranger and more brilliant shores. It is a liminal moment, and as she passes, her sight shrinks to a narrow apprehension ofthe crucifix as the rest of her world goes dark and murky. It is a place of danger. The whole paragraph is about intense looking, unenlightened and expectant. The final sentence beautifully situates the dread-word, “huglye”— the shape, rhythm, and sound of it are further instances of this crafted speech. Her first Vision now manifests itself as Julian gazes intently at the crucifix held before her. The Christ-head begins to stream with blood: this is the first Showing, and also the sign that one ofJulian’s desires — to feel keenly the pains of Christ in his passion — has been granted. She does not detail the fleshly agonies of these pains, for she now sees with her inner sight and her spiritual understanding. She advances into the heart of her narrative in the form of questions, doubts, and anxieties about the meaning for her and her evenecristene of such pains.

226 | ALAN T. GAYLORD For those who think a mystic is a person who lives in raptures without a smile or laugh, Julian may offer a surprise as in the following: And sodaynlye, me behaldande in the same crosse, he chanchede into

blisfulle chere. The chaunginge of his chere changed mine, and I was alle gladde and mery as it was possiblle. Than brought oure lorde merelye to my mind: “Whate es any pointe ofthy paine or ofthy grefe?” And I was fulle merye. (87) The pacing and the artful placement of “blisse” and the iteration of “merye” are well crafted. There is great and joyful subtlety here. The moment is a touch of, a glimpse of, Heaven and makes one “merry” — one of the richest words in medieval English culture. “Than brought oure lorde merelye to my mind,” must be said, surely, with a smile, as the next sentence must be imagined as a celestial grin, fol-

lowed with the quiet glee in that perfect rounding off: “And I was fulle merye.” Potent and fully charged, the simple sentence is like the hazelnut, holding eternity in a tiny but portentous moment. Having said this, Julian moves on to the next declaration of what Jesus told her:

He answerde be this worde and saide: “Sirine is behovelye.” In this worde “sinne,” our lorde brought to my minde generallye alle that is nought goode: the shamefulle dispite and the utter noghtinge that he bare for us in this life and in his dyinge, and alle the paines and passions of alle his creatures, gastelye and bodelye. For we ere alle in party noghted, and we shulde be noghted, folowande oure maister Jhesu, to we be fulle purged ... . And the behaldinge of this, with alle the paines that ever ware or ever shalle be, alle this was shewed me in a toch and redely passed overe into comforth. ... And this paine, it is sumthinge, as to my sight, for a time. For it purges us and makes us to knawe oureselfe and aske mercy. For the passion of oure lorde is comforth to us againes alle this, and so is his blissed wille. And for the tender love that our goode lorde hath to alle that shalle be safe, he comfortes redely and swetlye be his wordes, and says: “Botte alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wele...” (91, 93)

This manner ofending, or of summary conclusion, is not the final end ofA Vision, which has twelve more sections to go. But it fully illustrates a powerful feature of Julian’s style, as repetition and syntax expand into fullness. The sentences ride on a longer breath, and the effect is of strong but gentle ocean-breakers rolling into

Devotional Practice in Mystical Prose and Poetry | 227 shore. She is far from finished with the theme and its expression, “Botte alle shalle

be wele,” but her craft enables her to take this collocation and pack it with import. The language, shall we say, is a supercharged vernacular, the koine of adevout and intellectual mystic — every word a blessing for her evenecristene, and every sentence a mystery, and every movement of that mouth bringing that mystery into meaning.

CLARE

R.

KINNEY

Trawpe and Tresoun: Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

It seems particularly appropriate that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight starts out with an exfoliating narrative of translatio imperit, given that the poem itself has provoked a remarkable number of translations (or would-be colonizations). Some nineteen English verse translations have been published since 1900; the millennium has ushered in new versions by W.S. Merwin (2002), Bernard O'Donoghue (2006),

and Simon Armitage (2007).' Whether translators try to domesticate the poem (O’Donoghue writes that he has aimed to produce “plain style modern verse”), or whether they seek to carry over into modern English something ofits rich strangeness, they mainly succeed in impelling someone else to take up the challenge anew.* My goal here is to ponder just what it might be about the aesthetic of Szr Gawain — both its thematics and its poetics — that at once provokes and resists re-speaking. It is my contention that the difficulties of contemporary translation speak suggestively to the poem’s own interest in the difficulties of translation; my discussion of some of the most recent redactions of the work will therefore begin by addressing a translation quandary within the poem itself. When Sir Gawain finally arrives at the Green Chapel, he finds that his journey’s end is marked by a “bal3 ber3? a swollen mound:

1

The tally of nineteen excludes a good number of prose translations or translations of the poem into other languages. For a list of translations published up to 1993, see Malcolm Andrew, The Gawain-Poet: An Annotated Bibliography 1839-1977 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979), 21-31, and Robert J. Blanch, The Gawain Poems: A Ref-

erence Guide 1978-1993 (Albany, NY: Whitston Publishing Co, 2000), 42~50. For the most recent translations, see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, trans. W.S. Merwin (New York: Knopf, 2002); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans.

Bernard O’Donoghue (London: Penguin, 2006); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, trans. Simon Armitage (New York and London: WW. Norton, 2007).

2

Subsequent citations from these translations are indicated parenthetically. O'Donoghue, “Introduction,” xxii.

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 229 And al watz hol3 inwith, nobot an olde caue,

Or a creuisse ofan olde cragge, he coube hit no3t deme with spelle.3

Gawain has presumably been expecting a man-made edifice; he gets something that is nothing but an old cave or a crevasse in an old crag. What interests me here is the way the poet describes the knight’s response: “he could not determine (or judge or say) it with speech/words.” The bob’s isolation ofthe phrase “with spelle” emphasizes Gawain’s failure of language — but he is only confounded for a moment: ‘We! Lorde,’ quop be gentyle kny3t, ‘Wheber pis be be grene chapelle? Here my3t aboute mydny3t Pe dele his matynnes telle! (2185-88)

Having designated it a place where the devil may do worship, he expands on this in the next stanza: the place is an ugly oratory (2190), a fit place for the man clad in green to carry out his devilish devotions (2191-92), a chapel of mischance (2195), the most cursed kirk he ever entered (2196). Faced with an inscrutable object, he

translates it into a more familiar evil, generating various substantives (oratory, chapel, kirk) designating recognizable edifices as he imagines (with a little bit of comic melodrama, as A.C. Spearing has noted) a Chapel Perilous inhabited by the devil.4 The chapel is not, of course, contained by Gawain’s rendering; with exquisite irony, it gradually metamorphoses into a place hospitable to more orthodox acts of devotion where the, knight, confronted by his own human failings, performs his mea culpa and confesses his “‘cowarddyse and couetyse” (2374) to his mysterious opponent. Although informed that he has endured a kind of purgation beneath the edge of the Green Knight’s ax, and is now “‘polysed of bat ply3t’” (2390-94), Gawain nevertheless amplifies his own penance: he will hereafter wear the green girdle as “‘syngne of my surfet’” (2433). (That this “retranslation” of the chapel is by no 399

3999

means the final word of the matter is made clear, to be sure, in the many pages of

3

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed.].R.R. Tolkien and EV. Gordon, 2nd ed. rev. Norman

4

indicated parenthetically. A.C. Spearing, The Gawain Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), lines 2170; 2182-84. Subsequent citations are

Press, 1970), 187.

230 | CLARE R. KINNEY subsequent scholarly debate about the ambiguous status of the Green Knight as father confessor, the reliability of the knight’s assessment of his own failings, and

the fungible significance of the green girdle itself.)5 Attempting to make sense of the incongruous Green Chapel, Gawain has been faced with a problem of naming, and the difficulties of interpretive naming are cen-

tral to the poem. The attempt to confront, define or articulate the marvelous and wonderful is an integral concern of romance. In the Arthurian canon, a successful

quest is marked by the domestication of the inexplicable: ifajourney is provoked by a strange and provoking event, the return to Camelot involves the relating ofa story that explains or contains it, or the dispatching there of defeated enemies to testify to a quester’s triumph over mystery. At one extreme, the translation of wonder into common language turns into spiritual allegoresis (as in the Quest del Saint Graal); in other romances — the more compelling to my thinking — there can never be a complete translation, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its opponent

who disappears at the last “Whiderwarde-so-euer he wolde” (2478), represents an especially striking instance of this phenomenon. Fredric Jameson has argued that one of the defining markers of medieval romance is a moment of resolution when a threatening Other (an anonymous and belligerent Black Knight, for example), finally names himself, and in so doing becomes part of the same social reality as the quester (becomes un-Othered, in effect). We have such a moment in Sir Gawain,

but consider what happens when Gawain, says to the Green Knight “‘How norne 3e yowre ry3t nome, and benne no more?” (2443). The simple declaration “‘Bertilak de Hautdesert I hate in pis londe’” (2445) is in fact followed by a lot “more”: it slides into a syntactically convoluted passage of 22 lines in which Bertilak elides his own naming with the naming of Morgan le Fay as the ancient lady in his castle, as the instigator of the adventure, as the person who transformed him into the Green Knight and as Gawain’s aunt (2446-64), without ever clearly pinning down

his precise relationship to the enchantress, or why he has taken it upon himselfto complicate, in the personal testing of Gawain, Morgan’s meaner ambition to terrify Guinevere. The Green Knight becomes the knowable and lordly Bertilak, but Bertilak serves a mistress who deals in strange lore, and that alien enchantress is also Gawain’s blood relative (to kidnap Freudian terminology, she represents that notion

5

See, for example, J.A. Burrow,AReading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966); Spearing, Gawain Poet, 178-80, 219-236; W.R.J. Barron, Trawthe and Treason: the Sin ofSir Gawain Reconsidered (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1980), 113-14; R.A. Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight (Gainesville: University of Florida Presses, 1984), 66-76. 6

Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” NLH 7 (1975), 135-163, at 161.

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 231 of the unheimlich that offers terrors far too close to home).7 Gawain’s adversary remains, in John Plummer’s words, a “lexical knot.”® In the world ofthis poem, the

naming of something simply provokes in the reader a retreating bottom line of enquiry and suggests an expanding chain of signification. (One might think, for example, of the series of epithets the green girdle acquires as it moves about the physical and moral landscape of the poem: a “juel” for Gawain’s perilous venture [1855],a “falssyng” [2378], a “pure token / Of pe chaunce of be grene chapel” [239899], a “syngne of [Gawain’s] surfet” [2433], a “token of untrawpe” [2509], and a tes-

tament to the “be renoun of be Rounde Table” {25 19].) If the poem itselfso strikingly thematizes the impossibility of finding words for its wonders — or the tendency ofits most resonant persons and objects to engender competing translations — then what chance has the belated reader to fix its meaning? The denizens of Camelot are initially struck dumb by the vision of the Green Knight — “vch mon had meruayle quat hit mene my3t” (233). Our twentieth- and twenty-first century translators respond to the marvels of the poem that contains the Green Knight more loquaciously, seeking to unlock the work’s “lel letteres” (35) and, just as Gawain took up the putative “game” (283; 365) of the Green Knight’s challenge, attempting to reinscribe the mystery man within their own game, their own devices. Considering the difficulties they encounter, one might ponder the narrator’s warning that, as a year passes, “Pe forme to be fynisment foldez ful selden” (499). The end never quite matches what was there first — or per-

haps never quite unfolds what was originally written. This is the vexed condition ofall translations, to be sure, but the poem does present particular and often noted local challenges.?' Itscomplex lexicon (much more challenging than Chaucer’s) moves sinuously between French/Latinate and Germanic diction and, haunted by ghost-words fram a much older tradition, hovers even within its own historical moment on the threshold of the familiar/alien divide. Its difficult prosody offers a unique combination of alliterative meter with the rhymed “bob and wheel,” its tonal register is distinctly slippery, and its sophisticated narrative releases informa-

7

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. & trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 219-52.

8

John Plummer, “Signifying the Self: Language and Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch,

Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1991), 195209, at 198.

9

On the stylistics of Sir Gawain, see Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); on poetic diction in alliterative poetry, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: D.S.

Brewer, 1977), 69-92.

232 | CLARE R. KINNEY tion in a particularly controlled, spatially self-conscious and often syntactically irreproducible manner in the course of any given stanza. The poem’s complex aesthetic makes all the more urgent the first big decision any translator must make — the choice famously unfolded in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 lecture to the Berlin

Academy of Sciences — between “foreignizing” and “domesticating” the target text.!° Does one try to convey to the reader the linguistic idiosyncrasies, the knottiness, the stylistic otherness of the original, and move the reader towards it (respect, to reinvoke Sir Gawain’s own terms, the wonder of the “vncoube tale” [93]), at the

risk of ending up in some linguistic no man’s land and playing false to one’s own language? Or does one move the text at issue toward the reader, trying to offer a version that is entirely idiomatic within the parameters of one’s own tongue — bringing the tamed marvel/enemy/wonder/questing beast back to Camelot — at the risk of enacting another kind of betrayal?'' There is no simple answer to the dilemma, but when faced with a historically distant work of astonishing formal

complexity that deploys, in part, a vocabulary that is not only regionally specific but also “alliterative poetry specific? — a work that is in effect already written in another tongue — either choice is consequential. “Traduttore, traditore”: the Italian proverb equates translation with treachery. Interestingly enough, Ser Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a collision ofthe two.

SIPEN pe sege and pe assaut watz sesed at Troye, Pe bor3 brittened and brent to bronde3 and askez, Pe tulk pat pe trammes of tresoun ber wro3t Watz tried for his tricherie, pe trewest on erthe: Hit watz Ennias pe athel, and his highe kynde, Pat siben depreced prouinces, and patrounes bicome Welne3e of al pe wele in pe west iles. (1-7) Aeneas translates Troy westwards, but how do we translate Aeneas? Is he also the “tulk” who wrought treason (the fellow-conspirator of Antenor in some traditions); does the translatio imperit whose telos is Camelot (and, by extension, the romance

10

Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translation,” trans. Susan

Bernofsky, The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Rout11

ledge, 2004), 43-63, at 49. See also Venuti’s commentary on Schleiermacher’s remarks, 19. Fora provocative meditation on translation as betrayal, see Antoine Berman, “Transla-

tion and the Trials of the Foreign,” trans. Lawrence Venuti, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 276-89.

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 233

we are reading) derive from his act of treachery?'* Or do we betray the heroic Aeneas and his “highe kynde” if we do not decide that Antenor is the unnamed “tulk” in line 3? What do we do with the tulk with no name? The poem hints even at the outset that the same man can be a warrior of high renown and a traitor; this, of course, is something that its hero, berating himself for being “fawty and falce” despite his own loathing of“trecherye and vntrawpe,” will discover (2382-83). And indeed translations have trouble being true to the “trawpe” that Gawain has prided himself upon — the “seker trawpe” he pledges to the Green Knight when he takes ups his ax (403) and the “trawpe” that his host in the northern castle merrily solicits in the Exchange of Winnings bargain: “Swete, swap we so, sware with trawpe” (1108). There is simply no one word in modern English that can name the same

range of connotations (truth, pledged word, fidelity, personal integrity) that the original term embraces and | have encountered only one modern translation that repeats a faintly equivalent term at these two especially loaded narrative junctures.'3

So if it is difficult to get at the truth of Gawain, what of the Green Knight? Turning to his most recent appearances in the translations of Merwin, O’Donoghue, and Armitage,'4 one might first consider his eruption into the original text:

Per hales in at pe halle dor an aghlich mayster, On pe most on be molde on mesure hyghe;

Fro be swyre to be swange so sware and so pik, And his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete, Half etayn in erde | hope pat he were, Bot mon most I algate mynn hym to bene,

And bat be myriest in his muckel pat my3t ride;

For of bak and of brest al were his bodi sturne, Both his wombe and his wast were worthily smale, And alle his fetures folzande, in forme pat he hade, ful clene; For wonder of his hwe men hade,

Set in his semblaunt sene;

12

See also Tolkien and Gordon’s extensive note on this crux, 70.

13.

The translation in question is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. and ed. William Vantuono (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

14

[am here following in the footsteps of Miriam Youngerman Miller’s brief but incisive

discussion of translations oflines 134-37 by Marie Borroff, Brian Stone, James L. Rosen-

berg, and Burton Raffel; see Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Miriam Youngerman Miller and Jane Chance (New York: Modern Language Associa-

tion, 1986), 8-11.

234 | CLARE R. KINNEY He ferde as freke were fade,

And oueral enker-grene. (136-50)

The description unbalances the reader from the start; the newcomer is “aghlich,” fearsome, but is also located (if perhaps a little archly) within familiar human hierarchies: he is a “mayster,” someone who commands, not a churl. What follows sug-

gests a flickering point of view, first attached to the narrator, later to the people of Arthur’s court, in which the Green Knight veers back and forth between monster and human being. Tolkien and Gordon’s editorial punctuation (there is none, to be sure, in the manuscript) offers no period until the end of the wheel; we must keep all the details of the Knight in our minds at once, there’s no compartmentalization. The stranger is one of the hugest beings on earth, half-giant (the qualification seems important), in the narrator’s opinion, but at any rate one of the largest of men, and

the finest for his size who might sit a horse (the courtly “myriest” abrades interestingly against the guttural dialect word “muckel” here). Although his torso is dauntingly big, his waist and belly are slender and he is well proportioned He is both handsomely put together and unnaturally large, and only at the very end of the stanza, in the last rhyme word of the bob, is his mysterious color climactically and teasingly disclosed. Helping to delay that revelation is the interjected mystery of “He ferde as freke were fade”— the final word, whose meaning is not entirely clear, has been conjectured to mean “bold” (or possibly “hostile”) by modern editors. Here is W.S. Merwin’s version of these lines: ... in at the hall door comes a frightening figure, He must have been taller than anyone in the world: From the neck to the waist so huge and thick, And his loins and limbs so long and massive, That I would say he was halfa giant on earth. At least I am sure he was the biggest of men. Yet he sat with a matchless grace in the saddle. His back and his chest and whole body were frightening And both his belt and belly were trim and small And all of his features were in proportion to the rest of him. But more than anything His color amazed them: A bold knight riding,

The whole of him bright green (136-50)

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 235

Merwin’s strategy is one of domestication: he writes ofhis project that he “did not want ... to cramp and twist the lines” in trying to reproduce a “verse form in what has become, in six hundred years, another language.”'5 His long lines tend to have

four stressed syllables, but although he offers a certain amount ofalliterative density (as in lines 139 and 143-44 above), there is no sustained attempt to recreate an

alliterative meter and he prefers to offer no more than two alliterating syllables per line. (The choice to reproduce the Gawain-poet’s alliteration in modern English always brings with it the risk of bending the original content to fit a different lexicon; despite his more modest use of the device, Merwin gives evidence of this in

the metonymical “belt” — rather than waist — alliterating with “belly” in line 144.) The translator’s general priority is clean narrative thrust; his diction is not particularly ornate. His pointing is heavier than in the scholarly editions; his description breaks down into a larger number ofdiscrete units (the oddly isolated line 142 is of particular note) and he does not reproduce very exactly the qualifying markers of the original lexicon: the “al” (although) of line 143 seems to have been misread as “all” and attached to the knight’s back and chest, generating Merwin’s own expansive reference to the whole body. His decompression of the poetic density of the original has its drawbacks (its intermittently pedestrian effect is perhaps underlined by the rendition of “hales,” with its suggestion of violent movement, as the quieter “comes” in line 136). “And all of his features were in proportion / to the rest of him” is baggy, and moves the bob line perilously close to bathos. (It also bears witness to this translator’s willingness to expand the poem’s single-stressed bobs; the five syllables, two of them stressed, that we find here, do not convey the feeling ofa pivotal pause that the Gawain-poet himself produces.) The incantatory quality of the wheel disappears; Merwin here, as throughout his translation, offers only the

faintest ghosts of rhyme (anything/riding), although he does keep “green” in its terminal and climactic position in the stanza. Bernard O’Donoghue is more polemical than Merwin in explaining his goals as a translator: in his opinion, one cannot preserve the Gawain poet's alliterative prosody without “sacrificing any claim to idiomatic naturalness” (an assertion which of course begs the question of whether the poem was written in a “natural” idiom to begin with).'® The poem may be highly ornate (and, for that matter, its chief characters highly ornamented in garb and accoutrements), but O’Donoghue is having none of it. His own “plain style modern verse” aims only to preserve the pattern of stresses (which he likens to sprung rhythm) of the original; indeed, O’Donoghue is so uncomfortable with alliteration that he avoids it even when a

15 16

Merwin, “Introduction,” xx. O’Donoghue, “Introduction,” xxii.

236 | CLARE R. KINNEY direct translation would be quite idiomatic: for example, “ner slayn wyth pe slete” (729) becomes “Nearly killed by the sleet.” His allegiance to “plain style” also extends to un-rhyming the bob and wheel of each stanza. He believes that the five lines’ visible typographical difference from the rest of the stanza suffices to mark a shift in style, which means that in this respect he is tacitly translating the poem into a “text to be read” rather than a “text to be heard.”!7 Here is the Green Knight's first entry in the O’Donoghue version: a monstrous apparition strode in the door, one of the tallest creatures in the whole of the earth. So square and powerful from neck to waist, his thighs and his forearms so muscly and long,

you'd think that he was some kind of half-giant. But I think what he was was the hugest of men,

the most pleased with his size of anyone living. For, though his back and his chest were incredibly big, his stomach and waist were fashionably trim, and all his features in proportion, given his size, exactly right. They were shocked by his colour though, Apparent at first glance; what was most uncanny was he was green from head to toe.

I am struck by the fact that O’Donoghue’s “natural” and idiomatic and modernized Green Knight is in fact an exaggerated and/or adulterated version of the original alien with a strong whiff of Hollywood about him. A fearsome master has become a “monstrous apparition” (who rather mysteriously strides in to the hall, even though we will learn he is on horseback;'* his grim or daunting torso is now “incredibly big.” and his waist “fashionably trim.” O’ Donoghue’s expansion of“be most” in line 137 to “the tallest creature” suggests to a modern reader something akin to Frankenstein’s monster; at the same time, his foregrounding of the more limited modern sense of “merry” in rendering “myriest in his muckel” as “most pleased with his size” confers upon the invader a crass and overgrown self-satisfaction. (One

17. 18

O’Donoghue, “Introduction,” xxiv. That information, implicit in the original text and soon made explicit by the detailed description ofthe Green Knight's horse, has been erased by the free translation of “myriest in his muckel bat my3t ride.”

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 237 might note that he moves “myriest in his muckel pat my3t ride” in the very opposite direction from Merwin’s equally free rephrasing, “sat with matchless grace in the saddle.”) The knights and ladies of Camelot are shocked rather than wondering and the inchoately threatening nature of the visitor’s behavior (“He ferde as freke were fade”) has been replaced by a supplementary reference to the uncanny phenomenon ofhis pigment. Lest we should miss the point, and as if tocompensate for the removal of the word from its former climactic position in the wheel, Donoghue italicizes “green.” His “plain modern idiom” hammers things home to the last with the awkward, thrice-repeated “was” ofthe last two lines of the wheel (reprising an equally awkward repetition at line 141); the original text elides the verb to rather subtler effect. The Green Knight’s color no longer creeps up on us and O’Donoghue’s overemphasis evokes, rather unfortunately, something of the textual marker “Zap” or “Wham” in the graphic frame of acomic book. Simon Armitage’s introduction to his own translation suggests at first glance a good deal of common ground with both Merwin and O’Donoghue: he wishes to “blow a little warm breath” across a “layer of frosting” — that is, the frozen, historically distant language that blurs the vivid diction and narrative of the medieval text.'? He is, nonetheless, committed to rendering the elaborate form of the original in all its stylistic otherness: he preserves the alliterative meter (although with rather more variations than the poem itself) and the rhymed bob and wheel:

a fearful form appeared, framed in the door: a mountain of aman, immeasurably high, a hulk of ahuman from head to hips, so long and thick in his loins and his limbs I should genuinely judge him to be a half giant, or a most massive man, the mightiest of mortals. But handsome, too, like any horseman worth his horse,

for despite the bulk and brawn of his body his stomach and waist were slender and sleek. In fact in all features he was finely formed it see Amazement seized their minds,

no soul had ever seen a knight of such a kind — entirely emerald green.

19

Armitage, introduction, 11.

238 | CLARE R. KINNEY

The demands of Armitage’s own alliteration produce some shifts in meaning, most notably in the framing ofthe fearful form in the doorway, his “mountain of aman,”

the additional hyperbole of “immeasurably,” the intrusive “genuinely,” the “horseman worth his horse” and the rather pompous abstraction of “Amazement seized their minds.” Like both ofthe other translators, he offers a more staccato phrasing,

dividing the stanza into multiple sentences and therefore offering a less sinuous and free-floating appraisal of the intruder. He preserves the rhyme of the bob and wheel by way ofa hint of doubt in the qualifier “it seemed” and “He ferde as freke were fade” disappears into the more generalized wonder at “a knight of such a kind.” Nevertheless, this stanza’s rendition suggests a more faithful representation of the density of the original text’s diction, the phonetic and semantic departure from everyday speech that insists upon the otherness of the utterance but also conveys a heightened and richly textured sense of wonder. Indeed at other points of the translation Armitage pushes such exuberant density considerably beyond the original: a canopy “enbrawded and beten wyth pe best gemmes / Pat my3t be preued of prys wyth penyes to bye,/ in daye” (78-79) is, in his account, “studded with stones and stunning gems./ Pearls beyond pocket. Pearls beyond purchase / or price.” The glancing colloquialism of “stunning gems” (reprised when we find that Gawain, contemplating the northern castle, “had not seen a more stunning structure” [793], and also when, relieved of his armor, he dons “a stunning gown” [864])

is carried much further in other portions of the translation. If Armitage eschews the simplified poetic deployed by Merwin and O’Donoghue, he nevertheless offers his own version of domesticating the alien text when he introduces very current idioms that can slide into startlingly “low” diction. He seems to be influenced here by the jarring gear-changes into the “chummily colloquial” whose problematic effect on Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf has been so acutely explored by Howell Chickering.*° The Green Knight’s insulting description of the Round Table knights as “berdlez childer” becomes “Bum-fluffed bairns” (280); when we are warned “Bot pa3 pe ende be heuy haf3e no wonder” (496), Armitage vulgarly tells us “Don’t be so shocked should the plot turn pear-shaped,” only to return to a much more elevated tone in his elegant rendition of the subsequent description of the passing of the seasons (500-531). When Gawain confides to his host his fears about reaching

the Green Chapel by New Year’s Day, “laughing out loud, the lord said ‘Relax!’” (1068). The ladies in the northern castle are “the cute one and the crone” (1317); the

cute one “giggled girlishly as she teased good Gawain” (1212); her green girdle is

20

Howell Chickering, “Beowulf and ‘Heaneywulf,” The Kenyon Review n.s. 24.1 (2002), 160-78,at 168.

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 239

“Just the job” (1856) to save Gawain from death. In the original, Gawain’s guide warns of the “borelych burne” at the Green Chapel; Armitage has the guide describe a “hulking superhuman.” Armitage’s Green Knight warns Gawain at their rendezvous, “You’ll cop for what’s coming to you” (2218) and he later declares, after

Gawain flinches from the ax, “Never have I know such a namby-pamby knight” (2273). (Gawain’s diction suffers a similarly disconcerting shift: after his adversary

turns the second stroke into a feint, he shouts “Get hacking, then, head-banger” [2300]). Such choices are particularly odd given that one of the things the Yorkshire poet Armitage particularly values in the poem is that he detects “echoes of [my] own speech in the original” and notes that some of its dialect words still survive in the speech of older northerners on both sides of the Pennines.*! He will occasionally deploy a somewhat “northern” lexicon; he freely translates, for example “ny3e innoghe of be norbe, pe naked to tene” as “the nithering north needled man’s very nature” (2002). But the colloquialisms I have previously listed do not

speak to Armitage’s Yorkshire background; they would, however, sound perfectly at home in British tabloid journalese or in the Estuary English ofthe British television program The Office. I have gestured towards some paradoxes here. The poet-translator who is boldest in attempting to render the “other language” of the text also lapses into the rather cheap and prosaic local effects of contemporary colloquialism: even as he moves his readers towards the historically distant and linguistically foreign text, he still offers them the easy amusement of arch anachronism. O’Donoghue, on the other hand, the translator who is wedded to transparent modern English verse, actually offers his own version of hyperbole, of “poetic” over-emphasis. It appears that in battling Ser Gawain, you can end up swerving from your own quest. Merwin, for example, writes, of wishing to keep “the movement of the lines, their pitch and momentum.”?? In many portions of his translation he indeed succeeds in doing this, but at other times he is betrayed by his relatively loose treatment of the bob and wheel. One might argue that the “pitch and momentum” ofSir Gawain and the Green Knight actually derives from the fact that the poem regularly slows down in a highly controlled manner. The bob insists upon a pause; the wheel comments or dilates or recapitulates. Through the sonic work of rhyme, it very briefly contains narrative energy before the next stanza pushes onward, as if newly invigorated. When, for example, Bertilak’s lady starts to turn the tables on Gawain in the mat-

ter of gift giving, we read:

21

Armitage, introduction, 11.

22

Merwin, introduction, xx.

240 | CLARE R. KINNEY ‘Nay, hende of hy3e honours,’ Quob pat lufsum vnder lyne, ‘Paz I hade no3t of yourez, 3et schulde 3e haue of myne.’ (1813-16)

The last two lines snappily flip the reader from “yours” to “mine,” from the soliciting to the offering of a gift, and we’re ready, in the next stanza, to move to a whole new level of temptation. Merwin offers: “No, most honored knight,”

Said she of the fair body,

“Though I have nothing from you yet, “You should have something from me.”

Even leaving aside the distracting awkwardness of “she of the fair body” (the quasikenning “lufsum vnder lyne” has no modern equivalent, although O’Donoghue’s “fairest lady” seems a more reasonable substitution), Merwin’s deployment ofonly an awkward hint of rhyme (knight/yet, body/from me) lacks punch. Lines 1815-16, in which Merwin abandons the positioning of yours/mine as terminal words and offers the less succinct disyllables of “nothing” and “something” as the only remnant of the original’s compressed combination of rhyme and reversal, are wordily prosaic (the otiose “yet” is particularly unfortunate), as if, once again, the writer’s fear of “cramping and twisting” his matter has produced a kind ofdilatory overcompensation. Translators engage in a perpetual dynamic of substitution, questing to find equivalents in their own tongue for foreign words, phrases, idioms, but also setting

the terms of the exchange. They decide what aspects of the original they will seek to reproduce as precisely as possible (not necessarily or only at the level ofthe individual word; perhaps this may involve more inchoate matters of tone or mood). They also make decisions about what need not be carried over, what is not, in their opinion, a crucially defining characteristic of their source text. For some translators certain qualities of the original may even be perceived as an obstacle to the text’s survival as a readable artifact (as when O’Donoghue implies that imitating the rhyme pattern of the poet’s bobs and wheels will interfere with the pleasure and understanding of a reader attuned to “modern plain style”). Different translators strike different bargains with their source texts and, by extension, with their readers — or perhaps they negotiate a series of bargains in which certain contracts are more important to honor than others. And the deals they consider themselves to

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 241 have brokered may actually change in the very process of translation: “Pe forme to be fynisment foldez ful selden.” I have already proposed that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight thematizes the whole business oftranslation, and one might extend this argument to these matters of contractual exchange: after all, both a contract to exchange mortal blows and a

bargain to exchange more quotidian winnings animate the romance plot. Gawain subordinates one ofhis contracts to the other, implicitly deciding that his pledged word to return all his trophies to his host is less important than surviving, as well as simply keeping, his appointment at the Green Chapel. But the climactic encounter with the Green Knight suggests that all bargains and, in particular, all instances ofoffering one’s “trawpe” are to be taken equally seriously. It is Gawain’s performance in the ostensibly less momentous games at the northern castle that determines what will happen to him when his mysterious opponent lifts that great ax and eventually obliges him to confront his own fragile humanity. He is forced to admit that the fearful “coveting” of his own life has led him to break faith with his host in accepting and treacherously withholding a talisman of deceptive significance.*3 Bearing all this in mind, it is interesting to look at what happens within the economy of exchange created by various translators at the very moment in which the secondary contract, the one which Gawain will ultimately break, is proposed in the poem. Having laid out the conditions of exchange, the host ofthe northern castle says to Gawain: “Swete, swap we so, sware with trawbe” (1108). The line offers

particular difficulties. We start with one of those substantive adjectives that will need to be expanded in modern usage: in the retrograde 21st century, where men are much more chary of using anything that sounds like an endearment to one another, it becomes a word with no current equivalent. We have the wonderful and

irreproducible resonance of “swap,” which derives from ME swappen, “to strike,” and therefore hints in advance at the ax blows that will line up so tidily with Gawain’s swaps — or with his failures to swap. We have a translator’s “false friend” in the imperative “sware,” which in fact means “answer,” not “swear” (which would be “swere”). And we have that terribly important word “trawpe,” whose exfoliating

moral resonance has no real equivalent in modern English, but which Gawain has crucially invoked in confirming his contract with the Green Knight (403), and which has also been attached to the pentangle that Solomon constructed “in bytoknyng oftrawpe” (626). That Gawain is asked to answer “with trawpe” hints at

23

He has also, in doing so, shifted his faith away from the Virgin Mary, his official patroness.

242 | CLARE R. KINNEY a kind of continuing responsibility: the very terms of the deal emphasize he must keep on “answering” faithfully to the terms of the bargain, just as he will eventually answer to the Green Knight. It is very much to my purpose that the line is not only teasingly difficult for a modern translator but also astonishingly relevant to the project of translation. “Sweet translator, let’s go about the business of swapping, of exchanging, of substitution; answer/respond in your own work to your source poem with integrity, with truth, with fidelity. Keep your promises to it.” The Green Knight/Bertilak might be thought of as issuing a wider challenge from within the romance. So how do our translators fare in response? To offer a small basis for comparison, I list here not only the most recent renditions of the line but also those of three medievalists who published translations of the poem in the previous century: J.R.R-Tolkien, Marie Borroff, and William Vantuono:*4 Merwin: Agree to that good sir, and let us swear to it

O’Donoghue: Dear friend let us swear to make such a swap

Armitage: Young sir, let’s swap, and strike a bond Tolkien: Shall we swap thus, sweet man — come say what you think! —

Borroff: Swear now, sweet friend, to swap as I say Vantuono: Thus shall we swap, sweet knight, having sworn with honor Only the older scholars make Gawain a “sweet friend” or “sweet man,” no doubt because they are more attuned to the lexicon of medieval romance and are less interested in domesticating its values. (And only Borroff manages a regular aa|ax alliteration on the original “sw.”) Merwin banishes the swap and expands “sware” into both agreement and swearing; only Tolkien avoids completely the deceptive “swear,” although his expansive “come say what you think!” invites an opinion rather than an answer. (I'd argue that “swear” is vestigially present in

24

The additional editions are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, trans. Marie Borroff (New York: WW. Norton, 1967); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, trans. J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); and Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. and ed. William Vantuono.

Translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 243

Armitage’s “strike a bond”~ as is also, perhaps serendipitously, the alternative meaning of swap.) Most significantly, only one of the six, Vantuono, attempts to offer a clear cognate for “with trawpe.” He, however, blurs the fact that the phrase is directed at Gawain and attaches it to the “we” of the first part of the line: the loss of the specific imperative attenuates, just a little, the echo of Gawain’s earlier pledge to the Green Knight (which Vantuono translates with the same phrase). His “with honor” certainly conveys some of the resonance ofthe original, although it tends to shift the concept into the chivalric register and plays down its more universal moral resonance. *5 Vantuono, at any rate, is alone here in considering that, in translating a poem so interested in the proper naming of things, he needs to find some kind of exchange value for Gawain’s invoked “trawbe.” In the other versions it is quite literally lost in translation ... or rather, perhaps, withheld, like the girdle that is never given over to Gawain’s host. I myself would suggest that if one finds oneself unable to offer a substitute for “trawpe? one risks entering, just a little, into Gawain’s own condition. He finds, to his cost, that there is indeed no substitute for “trawpe” — but he also finds (or at least is offered the opportunity to recognize) that to falter, as the Green Knight declares, just “a lyttel” in “lewté” (2366) is an inevitable consequence of human fallibility. And if translators end up committing their own petty treasons against “lel letteres,” they are, after all, only human.

25

Expanding the informal survey further, one finds other renditions that occupy a kind of middle ground in finding an equivalent for “with trawpe.” Brian Stone has “Sweet sir, truly swear to such a bartering”; Keith Harrison, “There my fine fellow, swear on it truly.” But in these translations “trawpe” is attenuated when it turns from substantive to adverb; it slides from being an invocation of amoral condition appertaining to the whole knight to a qualifier of a particular action at a particular moment. (The fact that the swearing truly is very specifically attached to “a bartering” or to an “it” whose antecedent in context is “bargain,” and is not left as a resonantly flee-floating imperative in the second half line, additionally diminishes its effect.) See Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Brian

Stone, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Keith Harrison (London: The Folio Society, 1983).

JOHN M. GANIM

Cosmopolitanism, Medievalism, and Romanticism:

The Case of Coleridge

Coleridge’s interest in Kant’s social and political ideas is well documented." He popularized Kant’s philosophical and political ideas, fusing them into his own unique program. His fascination with the apparently “purposeless” beauty of medieval poetry is also well known. This essay will argue for a connection between these apparently unconnected areas of Romantic aesthetics and ethics. These connections reveal a complicated trajectory in Coleridge’s use of the medieval past. In his early poems, the medieval is figured as an uncanny disruption of the everyday, both troubling and enabling the responsibilities of individuals to each other. In his later, political writings, the Middle Ages represented a recoverable ideal of hierar-

chical responsibility, an ethical idea which normalizes rather than disrupts human relations. In these later writings, social and psychic traumas are rather associated with the French revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism, which is to say with modernity itself. To comprehend how and why Coleridge’s domestication of the Middle Ages follows such a difficult and tortuous path, and why that matters, requires us to begin in the twentieth century. At the end of his widely known Mimeszs: The Representation ofReality in Western Literature, the twentieth-century critic Erich Auerbach turns, somewhat unexpectedly for the decades during which he wrote the book, to the work of Virginia Woolf.* In the 1940s and 1950s, it was other modernists, such as Joyce, who claimed

the attention of most criticism. Auerbach, however, shared the commitment to realism held by other European critics, such as Georg Lukacs, though without the ideological underpinnings of Lukacs’ Marxism. Woolf's style, especially in To the Lighthouse, argues Auerbach, offers a view of the phenomenal world which is universally intelligible. In contrast to the hermetic fragmentation ofJoyce and the experiments

1

René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793-1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), 65-135.

2

Erich Auerbach, Mimests: The Representation ofReality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 525-57.

Cosmopolitanism, Medievalism, and Romanticism

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of high modernism, Woolf employs psychological subjectivity to allow life itself to be expressed without the imposition ofa preordained order. The result is a “more real reality.” The key to Woolfs contribution is that she does not make one subjective consciousness the chief content of her novel, but the “multiplicity of persons suggests that we are here after all confronted with an endeavor to investigate an objective reality” (535). The passage he analyzes, in which Woolf character Mrs Ramsey measures and sews a brown stocking, is framed, he says by two experiences oftime, one following the musings of Mrs Ramsey, the other following an observer who meditates on her beauty, but releasing, in so doing, “the depths of time.” “The stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection,” Auerbach writes, “which are not tied to the present of the framing occurrences which release them” (541). Woolf builds this on a narra-

tion lacking great “changes, exterior turning points, let alone catastrophes” (546). Auerbach’s extraordinary conclusion about his analysis of Woolf's stylistic achievement is worth quoting in full: And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than

the wealth of reality and depth oflife in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice. To be sure, what happens in that moment ~ be it outer Or inner processes — concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things

which men in general have in common. It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life.

The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied and simple the people are who appear as subjects of such random moments, the more effectively must what they have in common shine forth. In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent — below the surface conflicts — the differences between men’s way of life and forms of thought have lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become increasingly mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. (552-53)

Up to this point in his study, Auerbach had been concerned with certain constellations ofstyle in European literature, but now he seems to open his claims to the

entire world. Auerbach’s conclusion, with its prediction ofthe increasing unity and the possibility of a“common life of mankind on earth” (552) is virtually a political manifesto, expressed at a level of generalization that is dizzying after the minute and painstaking linguistic analyses that make up much of his book. If earlier readers of Mimesis read the book as an example of aestheticism and formalism, his

246 | JOHN M. GANIM admirers today are more likely to celebrate him as a champion of humanism and cosmopolitanism. Most prominent among these admirers was the late Edward Said. Auerbach’s status as a German Jewish exile first in wartime Turkey and then in the United States, motivated Said to claim Auerbach as an exemplar ofa certain kind of cosmopolitan humanist.3 For Said, Auerbach offered to cultural study what Auerbach himself claimed for Virginia Woolf. For readers not aware of Said’s identification with Auerbach from early in his own career, it may seem surprising that a committed political intellectual with well-known strongly defined views should so strongly embrace Mimesis’ postwar idealism, almost utopian and unworldly in its hopes. From another point of view, however, such as his investment in music as a universal language, Said’s late musings on the potential for cosmopolitan understanding is understandable and consistent. Indeed, one can read much of Said’s writings, including Orientalism, as a call for an account of the varieties of experience in their richness and complexity, but unified by a fundamental human situa-

tion.4 Said shared with Auerbach a hope that aesthetic experience was an avenue to a cosmopolitan transnational humanism. Since the end of the Cold War, one of the most persistent arguments involving human rights, international relations and the ethical responsibility of states and citizens has been between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Both grow out of the heritage of enlightenment and Romantic thought, as the eighteenth century reconceived what it meant to be a citizen of the world, with responsibilities to those beyond our own national or regional borders. The concept of citizenship unmoored from local allegiance is first articulated by Diogenes and the Stoics, as Martha Nussbaum famously phrased the issues: Asked where he came from, the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes replied, “I am a citizen of the world.” He meant by this, it appears, that he refused to be defined by his local origins and local group memberships, so central to the selfimage of a conventional Greek male; he insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns... The Stoics who followed his lead developed his image ofthe kosmopolités (world citizen) more

fully, arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities — the local

3 4

Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 85-114. Edward W. Said, Orrentalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

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community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun” (Nussbaum 29).5

In the writings that followed on Nussbaum’s original formulation, she sought to locate an ethics for our own time in the work of Kant, especially his 1795 Perpetual

Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.° The relation between aesthetics and this new ethical awareness is a complicated one. The humanities in recent decades have attempted to rethink the aesthetic in response to an increasing pressure from the claims of instrumentalism by offering a different avenue to relevance and ethical awareness.’ It is not an easy task. Wilde’s manifesto for the independence ofthe aesthetic, “all art is quite useless,” has haunted the value of beauty time and again, even if, as in Wilde, there was a tran-

formational quality to art that ends up questioning the everyday. The title of arecent book, Romanticism After Auschwitz, has spectacularly phrased the issue.* How can we claim, George Steiner once argued, for any humanizing influence of culture after the holocaust, alluding to the famous image ofits perpetrators supposedly absorbed in the poetry of Rilke?? As it turns out, certain strains in Romanticism have addressed the issue ofits conflicted ethics from the outset, as articulated in the title of another book, Lawrence Lockridge’s The Ethics ofRomanticism.'° In this essay, in

homage to Howell Chickering’s own work, | want to point to how the Middle Ages and its celebration by the Romantics were imbued with such concerns. | wish, that is, to trace the entanglement of ethics and aesthetics in Romantic medievalism,

especially the vexed question of Cosmopolitan values. Such questions were fraught with contradictions from their earliest formulations in Romanticism, not least of all because they were associated with Herder’s

5

Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

6

Martha C. Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism, Journal ofPolitical Philosophy 5

7

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton and Jeffrey Rhyne

8

Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). See also Pieter Vermeulen, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism After the Holocaust (London; New

(March 1997), I-25.

(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

9

10

York: Continuum International Pub. Group, 2010). George Steiner, Language and Silence; Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 15. Laurence S. Lockridge, The Ethics ofRomanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

248 | JOHN M. GANIM celebration of German identity, seconded by Goethe and tumbling through the terrible burden ofthe twentieth century. In English literature, however, an intelligible common poetic emerges in relative innocence, embodied, of course, in

Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordworth opens the “Preface” with a famously direct statement of form and content, proclaiming his use of “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” (138).'' Where Auerbach would praise Virginia Woolf choice of middle-class existence as a basis for literary treatment, Wordsworth tells us that “Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended” (144). The rural and rustic, in Wordsworth’s reinvention of

pastoral, make a claim to a zero degree universal experience. The remainder of the “Preface” turns away from this global agenda and asserts its Englishness, now lashing out at “sickly and stupid German Tragedies” and now defending poetry “when the style is manly” (150). Despite his well-known discomfort with the poems he solicits from Coleridge, he insists that “the poems of my Friend would in a great measure have the same tendency as my own, and that, though there would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely coincide” (140). Wordsworth’s conditional phrasing of Coleridge’s contribution reflects his own unease with Coleridge’s contributions. Some of Coleridge’s poems seem to have little to do with Wordsworth’s agenda in the “Preface,” which did not appear in the collection’s first edition. It might be that in asking for consistency in the Lyrical Ballads we are ignoring how the poems, and the poets, reflect differing aesthetic commitments. “The Foster-Mother,”“The Dungeon,” as well as the “Ancient Mariner,” are often overwrought and even sensational in their language and form, experimenting with dramatic and narrative devices rather than exploring the possibilities of a minimalist poetic diction. “Foster-Mother” and “Ancient Mariner” gesture towards adventure stories and Gothic fictions, at once popular and cultic, but a bit too close to those German

tragedies for comfort. At the same time,

Coleridge’s contributions, especially “Foster-Mother” and “Dungeon,” are poems of

11

William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)

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social protest and outcry, raising issues only implicit in most of Wordsworth’s contributions. Wordsworth ends the “Preface” with a call for a revolution in taste, but Coleridge is protesting against the social order. Rather than a synthesis, the Lyrical Ballads reveals a tension between Romantic poetics and politics. Wordsworth, who later in life would translate selections of Chaucer into modern English, embraced

the universalism rather than the exoticism of medieval poetry, as he put it in one of the notes to the Preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical

Ballads: “\t is worth while here to observe that the affecting parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure and [sic] universall intelligible even to this day” (144). As Coleridge and Wordsworth drifted apart, Wordsworth would contrast “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge’s contribution to the volume, with this principle of intelligibility. “The old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers,” he wrote to Joseph Cottle as early as 1799.'* Many years later, Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14) as if in defense would articulate one of the most famous concepts in literary criticism. He and Wordsworth had agreed that “my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”'3 For our purposes, we should note that he is employing the word “Romantic” in ways that resemble our own modern categorization conflated with an eighteenthcentury association of the Romantic with the premodern, especially the medieval, and the exotic and the otherworldly. In such a formulation, if poetic truth in

Wordsworth is constituted by a verbal allegiance to the mundane, allowing it to speak through him and his interiorization of its meanings, Coleridge accesses the past and its cultural memory, which haunts the present and requires an alteration in consciousness at the outset, rather than, as in Wordsworth, at the end of the

process of writing and reading.'4

12

Wordsworth to Cottle, 24 June 1799, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester Shaver, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 1:264.

13.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, chap. 14, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-2001 ), 7:6.

14

On the hermeneutic processes implicit in the Rime, see Leslie Brisman, “Coleridge and the Supernatural? Studies in Romanticism 21 (1982), 123-59. Whether the poem’s stated

moral conclusion is consistent with the experience of the poem has been questioned in, for instance, Frances Ferguson, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner? Georgia Review 31 (1977), 617- 35, and Tim Fulford, “Poetry ofIsola-

tion: The Ancient Mariner? Coleridge’s Figurative Languages (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 62-73.

250 | JOHN M. GANIM

In fact, in the conversation poems and elsewhere, Coleridge does achieve a poetry imitating everyday speech at times, at least everyday speech by Coleridge. Coleridge remained skeptical whether children or rustics really did have an access to a truth lost to the rest of us and his later criticism at least described poetry as a constructed object rather than a natural outpouring, even though his own best works exhibited excess just as did Wordsworth’s, though in a different way. Wordsworth, deeply influenced by eighteenth-century theories of sense perception most fully developed in Hume, sought to render individual experience universal. Coleridge, more indebted to German idealism and historicism, was acutely aware

of difference, and in his poetry, difference and otherness are dramatized and foregrounded. While one result is a sensationalism resembling the Gothic fictions he loved, another result is a reading experience that encourages us to understand otherness and difference. Such difference could also be historical and geographic, resulting in an occasional orientalism and a frequent medievalism. Paradoxically, it was Coleridge who was familiar with Kant’s work and would

employ Kant’s ideas later in his career. Coleridge’s use of Kant, particularly in his theological and political writings, dates from after 1815 or so. Nevertheless, Kant’s two most accessible tracts, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784) and Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) are early enough to

have influenced the early Coleridge and infused the sensibility of the Lyrical Ballads. It is also Coleridge who is most explicit about his ‘political affiliations during the radical youth of both poets. In the poems leading up to and including Lyrical Ballads, however, it is Wordsworth, despite what Keats would term the egotistical sub-

lime, who communicates a sense of personal witness in his poetry. Wordsworth had agonized about the developments in the French Revolution, perhaps intensified by his sense of personal responsibility towards Annette Vallon. As with many British intellectuals, the publication of Godwin’s An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice encouraged a non-revolutionary sense of progress that accommodated divided sympathies between revolutionary France and its enemy England.'’ Wordsworth absorbed Godwin’s emphasis on individualism and human dignity, while modifying his radical rationalism. While the narrator or observer of Wordsworth’s poems may not be able to do much, he sympathizes with the plight ofevery day suffering:

"Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest ofcreated things Of forms created the most vile and brute,

15

William Godwin,An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London: Print. for G.G,J. and J. Robinson, 1793)

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The dullest or more noxious, should exist

Divorced from good ~a spirit and a pulse of good A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably linked. (73~79)'°

For Wordsworth, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” brings out the best in people, who are made aware oftheir common humanity as he goes about his begging. Ofcourse, in rejecting economic and social theory, Wordsworth can only make his point by focusing on figures in a landscape. The daily rounds ofthe beggar constitute a cir culation of emotional and spiritual currency, but it is a currency validated in individual actions separated from cause and effect. Significantly, not only is the speaker in Wordsworth often alone and isolated, so are the characters he meets. In “The Thorn,” the narrator is haunted by the repeated refrain of Martha Ray, “Oh, misery, oh misery / Oh woe is me! Oh misery,” redeemed from pathos by the

disclosure than she had possibly murdered her baby, and also by the narrator’s attempts to come to terms with the tale. In “Simon Lee,” the old huntsman is over-

whelmed with gratitude for the simple assistance offered by the narrator in removing a tree root. Like some of the other lyrical ballads, it verges on bathos and awk-

ward comedy, but makes its point, again, through the meditation of the poet or narrator, encouraged by a repetition and refrain emphasizing the simplicity rather than the complexity oflife. Where Coleridge is more familiar with the politics and philosophy of cosmopolitanism, his supernatural and gothic poetry, however popular in terms oflate-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century taste, results in a poetic language that is frequently esoteric, private, and hermetic. Wordsworth would eventually critique Coleridge’s poems, but on aesthetic rather than political or philosophical grounds. However more elaborate Coleridge’s intellectual systems, Wordsworth’s aesthetic wielded a formidable political content, what Hazlitt would later call the “leveling muse.”'7 Coleridge’s poems from the 1790s are explicit about their politics, but are not as radical in their proposed solutions.'* Coleridge’s earlier political poems cele-

16

Line numbers are to William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800,

ed. James Butler and Karen Green, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

17

The Spirit of the Age in William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 11 ed. PP. Howe after the edition of A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London; Toronto: J.M.

18

See the observations about Coleridge’s youthful radicalism in Michael Lowry and

Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1930-34). Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter, Post-

Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001),

117-26.

252 | JOHN M. GANIM brate events such as the French Revolution, but then shift from attention on them

to another place, sometimes, but not always, England itself. Interestingly, this shift in place seems typical of his political poetry, as if starting anew rather than following through were the point. As he writes of the Pantisocracy colony: Whilst patriot souls their country’s fate lament; Whilst mad with rage demoniac, foul intent,

Embattled legions Despots vainly send To arrest the immortal mind’s expanding ray Of everlasting Truth; — I other climes

Where dawns, with hope serene, a brighter day Than e’er saw Albion in her happiest times, With mental eye exulting now explore, And soon with kindred minds shall haste to enjoy (Free from the ills which here our peace destroy) Content and Bliss on Transatlantic shore.'?

Even in his still radical period, lecturing to raise funds for the Pantisocracy project, Coleridge regarded the local and the universal as linked. In contrast to Godwin’s

sweeping dismissal of irrational attachments to family and traditional association, Coleridge advocated Christian charity, “that expands like the circles of aLake — the Love of our Friends, parents and neighbours lead us to love ofour Country to the

love of all Mankind” [Lects 1795, 163 ].7° Poems from the late 1790s can sound like Wordsworth and rewrite Southey, such as “The Outcast,”

Pale Roamer through the night! thou poor Forlorn! Remorse that man on his death-bed possess, Who in the credulous hour of tenderness Betrayed, then cast thee forth to Want and Scorn!?!

19

20

21

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Prospect of Establishing a Pantisocracy in America? The Complete Poetical Works ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p.69, Il. 4-14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture 3?Lectures 1795 On Politics and Religion, vol. 1 of The

Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 163. Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, p.71, \l.1—4.

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Here, in “The Outcast,” the object of sympathy is someone excluded from normal society, and the concluding lines, a pattern to be repeated in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” is a surprisingly conventional prayer.

May He shed healing on the sore disgrace, He, the great Comforter that rules above!?? In nearly all these poems, the solution to social distress is a form of Christian char-

ity, as it is in “Pity” where mercy towards a homeless old man is compared to the actions of“the Galilean mild / Who met the Lazars turn’d from rich men’s doors / And call’d them Friends, and heal’d their noisome sores!”23 “The Fall of Robe-

spierre,” Coleridge’s play, contains refrains that express a politics of the local and the communal:

Tell me, on what holy ground May Domestic Peace be found? Halcyon daughter of the skies, Far on fearful wings she flies, From the pomp of Sceptered State, From the Rebel’s noisy hate. In a cottag’d vale She dwells,

Listening to the Sabbath bells! *4

One ofColeridge’s most polemical poems, “On the Present State of Society” (1796) was published in his Collected Works as “Religious Musings.” It combines both reactionary and,apocalyptic “Enthusiasm,” presenting a dialectic sense of history, in which both good and bad derive from the idea of property. Only a thoroughgoing grounding of society in Christian teachings can ameliorate its many conflicting forces. Here we find Coleridge’s political theory as it develops in later decades already outlined. The French Revolution is presented as one of the signs of the Apocalypse. If Coleridge’s poems about the present sometimes end on a note of Christian charity, his medieval-tinged poetry ends on more compromised notes. The poems by Coleridge that invoke medieval themes or forms are marked by a disruption of the everyday by figures that seem to appear as if from some forgotten past. While

22

Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, p.71, ll. 13-14.

23

Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, p. 93, \l. 12-14.

24

Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, p.71-2, ll. 1-8.

254 | JOHN M. GANIM such disruptions tend to be typical of the Gothic conventions upon which Coleridge drew, Coleridge’s use of them raises pressing questions about responsibilities to one’s neighbors and to others. The “long grey beard and glittering eye” of the Ancient Mariner marks him as ofa different generation, but also of a differ-

ent time and place. He is marked, that is, by an essential foreignness. As a sailor, he is part of the community ofthe sea, but he also has no place to call home. This rootlessness and mobility is amplified, not necessarily created, by his crime. An earlier generation of critics read him as an archetype related to the Wandering Jew. The normal life of the Wedding Guest and his fellows, celebrating a ritual of continuity, harmony and fulfillment, is rendered alien, at least to the Wedding Guest, by the

Mariner’s strangeness. As if mesmerized, the Wedding Guest’s role is to witness and to listen to the repetition of the Mariner’s experience. As even Coleridge seems to have understood, the attempt to normalize the Mariner’s fate by the traditional religious imagery of the last scenes of the tale are in conflict with his unfathomable alienation. By violating the natural order of things in shooting the albatross, the Mariner is punished by becoming himself forever unnatural. The Wedding Guest’s reward for his witness is an exhaustion, a melancholy, and a secret sharing of that alienation. The promise of moving forward in time symbolized by a wedding is cancelled by the nightmare of moving back in time, into narrative repetition and into temporal and historical regression. In Christabel, Christabel’s act of charity towards Geraldine results in an uncanniness, what Freud called das Unheimliche,

transforming the welcoming warmth of the castle of Christabel and her father, Sir Leoline. Here, too, time is inverted, in the sense that Geraldine turns out to be the

daughter of a friend that Christabel’s father has wronged, and the sexual undercurrent of Christabel and Geraldine’s night together undoes Christabel’s innocence and optimism. In these poems, as in others by Coleridge, simple human gestures of sociability and community result in frightening and dispiriting consequences. The end of enchantment by figures such as the Mariner and Geraldine is disenchantment, melancholy, and disillusion. Interestingly, the medieval forms where such effects are also found are the Grail romances, which were, after all, originally designed to disenchant romance itself by advocating an ascetic alternative to the pleasures oferotic narrative. In La Mort le Rot Artu, for example, Lancelot’s belated attempt to lead a chaste life after Galahad and the Grail have been welcomed into heaven is a moody rejection of the conflicted values by which Lancelot had earlier lived. This half-hearted but thoroughly penitential renunciation is picked up by Malory in the last book of Le Morte D’Arthur. When Coleridge turns to the Middle Ages again (excluding the medievalism and orientalism of “Kubla Khan”), it signifies very different values indeed. His first

description is of a conventional sort of eighteenth-century ethnographic history

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drawn from the Bible. Coleridge’s wide-ranging observations on medieval culture derive from the conventional assumption that the sons of Noah populated the parts of the world after the flood, and established different races and nations. Medieval culture, according to Coleridge, is by-and-large the product of the Northern peoples, the “Goths.” At the same time, this anthropological view of history accords a certain coherence to each of the major periods and cultures, a relativism inflected by the emerging German historicism that Coleridge helped popularize. In classical architecture, one feels one’s humanity and takes pride in it, suggests Coleridge, but “On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is ‘that | am nothing ” (71).25 While the sense of the infinite in the Gothic cathedral is one of the stereotypes ofcriticism from the eighteenth century to the present, what is striking here is the personal version ofthe sublime that Coleridge describes, resulting in the dissolution of the self. As with many of his concerns, Coleridge’s idea of and response to the Middle Ages changes throughout his life, and in later years these ideas and responses are involved with his conception of the State. Early on, however, the medieval was for him both a hermetic and a universal culture, simultaneously accessible as the more vigorous and unencumbered childhood of our civilization (a notion borrowed from Herder),

and a special place to be accessed by the sensitive and sympathetic imagination, akin to a mystical experience.*® It is significant that Coleridge’s fullest exegesis of what we now call Romanticism, promulgated in this lecture from 1818, should begin with the discussion of the Gothic and the medieval. In this lecture, the medieval mind is bifurcated into a systematizing mode and “the other part of the Gothic mind,” an “inward” turn. Coleridge here is characteristically multiplying descriptors of various sorts, but what he seems to mean is that the medieval outlook leans towards the systemization of scholasticism on the one hand and contemplative withdrawal associated with monasticism on the other, but it is not easy to tell since he brings in other dichotomies when this one does not work, as in

the case of Chaucer.

25 26

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, collected and edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols. (London: W. Pickering, 1836-39), 1:71. Foran account of how Coleridge, and the other Romantic poets, employ the traditions of medieval, especially Troubador poetics, see Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medtevalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), especially 28-48. Fay calls on Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay to locate the implicitly homosocial themes and anxiety about feminization in Coleridge and others.

256 | JOHN M. GANIM Coleridge’s Chaucer belongs to a somewhat different heritage, not only Gothic,

since we have a “chain with two rings or staples : — at the southern end there is the Roman, or Latin ; at the northern end the Keltic, Teutonic, or Gothic ; and the links beginning with the southern end, are the Romance, including the Provengal, the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, with their different dialects, then the Norman-

French, and lastly with a specifically but in a different interior nature of

the English” (81).27 Chaucer is part of amedieval world-system, literary result: “As in Shakspeare, his characters represent classes, manner; Shakspeare’s characters are the representatives of the humanity, in which some element has become so predominant

as to destroy the health of the mind; whereas Chaucer’s are rather representatives

of classes of manners. He is therefore more led to individualize in a mere personal sense” (88—9).2® Chaucer is presented here as a poet of manners, while Shakespeare

is a precursor of Romanticism, creating character after character who resemble Coleridge himself. Coleridge’s complicated relation to the Middle Ages is paralleled in his equally complicated relation to Kantian cosmopolitanism. In an essay in The Friend, he celebrates “Cosmopolitanism, at once the Nursling and the Nurse of patriotic affections! This, and this alone, is genuine philanthropy, which like the Olive Tree, sacred to concord and to wisdom, fattens not exhausts the soil, from which it sprang, and in which it remains rooted, it is rooted in the soil of the nation: nourished and nourishing the national soil.”*? Esther Wohlgemut, in her study of Romantic Cosmopolitanism, cites Coleridge as paradigmatic of her argument that Romantic cosmopolitanism was not the polar opposite of nationalism, which is how some influential twentieth-century cosmopolitanisms locate themselves (as in Nussbaum).3° Rather, cosmopolitanism and nationalism were part of an “ecosystem,” rather resembling the attempt to define a “rooted cosmopolitanism” in the early twentyfirst century. Coleridge was of course at this point attempting to distance himself from his own radical past, without necessarily betraying the ideals that first motivated that radicalism. As Wohlgemut explains, cosmopolitanism in the 1790s had

27 28 29

Coleridge, The Literary Remains, 81. Coleridge, The Literary Remains, 88-89 . S.I. Coleridge and Esq, The Friend: A Series of Essays, in Three Volumes, to Aid in the Formation of Fixed Principles in Politics, Morals, and Religion, with Literary Amusements Interspersed (London: R. Fenner, 1818), 190.

30

Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also Peter Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (Waterloo, Ont., Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007) and the essays in Colin Jager, “Secularism, Cosmopolitanism and Romanticism) Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd .edu/praxis/secularism/, August 2008.

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become identified with the expansionist goals of the French Revolution, a threat somehow different than the unity preached by the British Empire which opposed it. Kant’s ideas, proposes Wohlgemut, offered Coleridge a way of negotiating his early revolutionary fervor with the pessimism engendered by the Napoleonic wars. To do so Coleridge had to accept the nation state as a starting point, as Kant argued in his Idea foraUniversal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose of 1784. The internal perfection ofasociety is inseparable, in Kant’s view, from an ethical and legal relation to other societies: “the problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved.” Even Kant’s Perpetual Peace envisions something like a United Nations rather than a world government. In Enlightenment thought, the Middle Ages not only represented superstition and the suppression ofrational thought. The dissolution of the Roman Empire, with its trade routes and international passage, was replaced by a feudal economy that discouraged the mobility and cultural connections arising from commerce. As Margaret Jacobs noted, the first stirrings of cosmopolitanism in the early modern period could be found in artisans, urban tradespeople, and professionals, who established contacts and associations with members of their professions and guilds in other nations.3' These early cosmopolitans negotiated differences in language and custom and often identified with their international counterparts as much as with fellow citizens at home, who might not be sensitive to their interests.

Eighteenth-century thought, especially the associationism that developed into utilitarianism, assumed that knowledges and institutions, like sense experiences, were developed serially. Sentiments and values that surrounded institutions in the past were assumed to be superannuated. Coleridge called on German idealism, and especially Kant,to combat such presentism. The Middle Ages, and the great epochs of the past, were uniquely understandable on their own terms, and the values they pass on remain valid in their recombinations with newer forms: Happy moment was it for England when her Chaucer, who has rightly been called the morning-star of her literature, appeared above the horizon; when her Wicliffe, like the sun, shot orient beams through the night of Romish superstition! Yet may the darkness and the desolating hurricane which immediately followed in the wars of York and Lancaster, be deemed in their turn a blessing, with which the land has been visited. May I return to the thought of progress, of accumulation, of increasing light, or of any other image by which

31

Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

258 | JOHN M. GANIM it may please us to represent the improvement of the species? The hundred years that followed the usurpation of Henry IV, were a hurling back of the mind of the country, a dilapidation, an extinction, yet institutions, laws, customs, and habits, were then broken down, which would not have been so read-

ily, nor perhaps so thoroughly destroyed by the gradual influence of increasing knowledge; and under the oppression of which, if they had continued to exist, the virtue and intellectual prowess of the succeeding century could not have appeared at all, much less could they have displayed themselves with that eager haste, and with those beneficent triumphs, which will to the end of time be looked back upon with admiration and gratitude.3* When Coleridge, in his later conservative and nationalist period, turned to the Mid-

dle Ages it was to set out the terms for his defense of the delegation of church and state as a defining idea of modern Britain. In On the Constitution ofChurch and State (1830), he turns time and again to medieval ecclesiastical institutions and their rela-

tion to civil government as the core of an idea that inhabited the present in a newfound unity.33 As studies such as Smith’s Gothic Bequest and Chandler’s Dream of Order demonstrate, even if Coleridge were not a medieval revivalist, his argument that both the national church and the nation itself had their origins in medieval culture influenced the critical nostalgia of medievalism in the nineteenth century.34 Conservative political theory and ecclesiastical history both were inspired by Coleridge to imagine, as did Walter Scott, the virtues of patriarchy and hierarchy. Why the Middle Ages were a problem for Coleridge’s early political radicalism and that it complicated his cosmopolitan idealism is evident in his later arguments against Roman Catholic emancipation.35 As Alice Chandler pointed out, while Coleridge’s medievalism might seem muted compared to some of his contemporaries, he did extol the local allegiance of lord to vassal or peasant as a source of rootedness and community, and it was community (argues Chandler) that was at

32 33

Coleridge, The Friend, 262. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series (London: Routledge and 2001:), vol 10.

34

K. Paul; [Princeton]:

Princeton

University

Press, 1969-

See Alice Chandler, A Dream ofOrder: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English

Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) and R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 35

Press, 1987). See Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and Nattonal Identity, 1778-1829 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

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the heart of conservative medievalism.3¢ For Coleridge, then, the nation was experienced at the local level, and he could even argue, as he did in his response to Kant,

that patriotism and cosmopolitanism were not mutually exclusive, but were in fact deeply intertwined. As many studies ofIrish eighteenth-century history have noted, the Catholic Church was identified, and identified itself, with the Middle Ages,

while Protestantism defined itself with nationalism and modernity, requiring suppression as an ongoing process. Catholicism was international and mobile. Beneath this apparent divide between modernity and the premodern were in fact more comThe history of Christianity in Britain was the site of contestation, plicated patterns.

especially concerning the claims that the early English Church had an institutional legacy separate from Rome. This was a debate going back to the seventeenth century and earlier, and Coleridge depended on it to argue for a unique dialectic of church and nation. For the nineteenth century, hoped Coleridge, the National Church (which was almost a medieval estate in the abstract unifying the clerisy of all denominations in one mission) would inherit the social role of the medieval

state, caring for its parishioners in a way that a lost feudal aristocracy could do no longer.37 The medieval now emerges as an ethical amelioration ofthe present, but it could only do so, paradoxically, if it combated difference and was purified. A case could be made that Coleridge was most medieval in his later view of the State. His critique of modern politics, conservative and liberal alike, was that it ignored the ideal of government, which he found in the traditional arrangements of medieval feudalism. These arrangements are familiar to us through the image of the body politic, in which the various estates of society reinforce each other through an accord ofconcern and correction. Coleridge’s political ideas were also historical, so that while he may not agree with Rousseau, he did understand that the Social Contract was an,extension ofthis accord. But in the modern world, the abstractions

and forces of economy and polity leave no room for the human amelioration and altruism that the older medieval model provided. A new idea of social responsibility was necessary, one he called the National Church. While it might at times coincide with the Church of England, what Coleridge pointed to was something we might recognize later as the improvement mentality of American Progressivism, supported by an elite composed of enlightened but practical social leaders, including clerics, but also teachers, lawyers, physicians and so forth. The noblesse oblige

identified with the land-owing aristocracy of the Middle Ages was no longer found

36 37

Chandler, ADream of Order, 91-98. See David P. Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).

260 | JOHN M. GANIM in the reactive and self-serving landed gentry of his own time. We might consider Coleridge’s proposed policies more communitarian than cosmopolitan. Indeed, eighteenth-century political thinkers often pointed to one of their own nations or cities or societies as a cosmopolitan ideal, and then judged other societies by the degree to which they achieved that ideal, a way of thinking that still underlies our own Enlightenment-based policies. Such a cosmopolitanism, as has been pointed out by critics of contemporary cosmopolitanism, has a difficult time with difference, unless that difference is nothing more than a translation ofits own categories and values. Yet Coleridge insisted that his outlook was cosmopolitan in the classical Kantian sense, precisely because he also inherited the notion of historical dif-

ference from Herder and the German Romantic philosophers, in which each age, and hence, presumably, each society, developed forms and notions appropriate to its own culture and development. Coleridge’s earliest comments on cultural breadth indicated a sympathy towards an internationalist cosmopolitanism, but always inflected by a stress on local allegiances also. By the nineteenth century, his ideas have more or less been inverted, privileging local and national identity as a precursor to cosmopolitan ideals, which now become at best a distant third goal and at worst an impediment to political coherence and cultural achievement. Ancient Greece provides him with his cautionary tale: While they were intense patriots, they were the benefactors of all mankind, legislators for the very nation that afterwards subdued and enslaved them. When, therefore, they became pure cosmopolites, and no partial affections interrupted their philanthropy, and when they yet retained all their country, their language, and their arts, what noble works, what mighty discoveries may we not expect from them? ... Alas! no Sophocles appeared, no Phidias was born; individual genius fled with national independence...38

As with his notion of the National Church, representing in some sense an idea of the common good, Coleridge channels Kant’s philosophy of the state in a direction that leaves behind the internationalist and cosmopolitan signposts of Kant’s other political concerns. It is in submission to the idea of a nation and its symbols that the subject finds his identity, not necessarily or primarily in understanding or communicating with the other beyond (or within) one’s borders. If Coleridge bor-

38

Coleridge, The Friend, 180.

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rows from the feudal Middle Ages to preach the virtues of the National Church, he borrows from the symbols of absolutism to articulate his conception of the identity of the individual in absolute subjection. The so-called “Romantic” Coleridge, then, with his briefto call upon the power of medieval poetry, presents a complicated set of contradictions. The immediate access the Middle Ages had to the imagination, according to Romantic and German idealist enthusiasts, and the accessibility and naturalness of its verse forms, accord with the open and common aesthetic propounded by the opening pages of the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” The imagery of folklore and popular tale that underlies even the most elite productions of medieval romance establishes a claim to a certain universality, at least within a pan-European tradition. Even as Coleridge moves towards a more conservative political and religious position, he never entirely gives up his youthful ideals of justice and humanity. The gentile noblesse oblige supposedly typical of its social bonds, to be celebrated in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, assume a common love between the people and their leaders. Coleridge borrowed Kant’s proto-Romantic ideas, but over time minimized Kant’s Enlightenment universalism. Indeed, there were other strains in Romanticism’s view of the Middle Ages that gravitated against a cosmopolitan outlook. One was the association between the Middle Ages and the origins of acertain mystical sense of nationhood, famously propounded in Herder’s, and later in Goethe’s, writings. Related to this incipient nationalism was a concomitant conception of race, which would, in the nineteenth century develop into a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, of dominance and submission. Coleridge’s medievalism holds an unstable place in his political and aesthetic system, often complicating the principles he explicitly espoused.

NANCY

MASON

BRADBURY

‘A Definite Claim to Beauty’: The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer

In The Future of Aesthetics, Francis Sparshott suggests that the mode of inquiry named in his title has survived the powerful critique lodged against it in recent decades because certain “perplexities” have nevertheless persisted: “the power of beauty, and the place of something like beauty among values; the function of the artistic activities of adornment, fiction, and play in the life of the mind; the logic whereby criticism gets from description to evaluation and back’! After a period in which aesthetics and history have been polarized as critical categories, and the former often deprecated in the name of the latter, historically informed thinking about the nature of beauty now seems not only to have persisted, but to offer enticing possibilities. To its contributors, the editors of this volume posed a question both aesthetic and historical: “What constitutes ‘beauty’ in medieval English poetry?” | attempt an historically contextualized answer by taking a fresh look at the ‘beauties’ in Chaucer’s poetry that William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones placed in the foreground of their 1896 landmark collaboration, The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, or the Kelmscott Chaucer.* Limiting my discussion to the Canterbury Tales and avoiding stereotypes about “a weakling aesthete? “girlish dreams? and “Victorian inhibitions; | ask what we can learn about the aesthetics of Chaucer’s poetry from a late

1

Francis Sparshott, The Future ofAesthetics, The 1996 Ryle Lectures (University of Toronto

2

Press, 1998), 83. Ed. ES. Ellis (London: Kelmscott Press, 1896). | have consulted the two copies of the

3

Kelmscott Chaucer in the collection of Smith College’s Mortimer Rare Book Room. I thank Martin Antonetti, its director, for permission to photograph the Chaucer and my colleague Cornelia Pearsall for shared knowledge of the Victorian period. The first two epithets were applied to Burne-Jones and his paintings by a critic in 1933 and are quoted by John Christian,“ACritical Somersault? in Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, ed. Stephen Wildman and John Christian (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 2; the artist is said to suffer from the third by Edward

Hodnett in Image and Text: Studies in the Illustrations of English Literature (London: Scolar Press, 1982), 216.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer | 263 nineteenth-century book expressly designed to be beautiful. In doing so, | salute the wide interests and critical acumen of this volume’s honoree, an influential former

teacher and valued local colleague. ‘Beauty’ was unquestionably what these two zealous book artists pursued. “I began printing books? Morris wrote ofhis Kelmscott Press, “with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters?4 For Morris, an ideally beautiful illustrated volume of Chaucer’s works required of its creators not just a thorough knowledge of book arts, but also a deep and sensitive familiarity with the works themselves. He believed that in the centuries since its invention, printing had sunk to deplorable levels, and he sought to rediscover and implement the “structural” or “architectural” principles that lay behind the finest medieval manuscripts and early printed books. His lectures on the book arts in the 1890s stress that above all else, the decorative elements of abook and its “story” must be inseparably a part of one another; beautiful books must be “thoroughly expressive of the story they tell?”5 The connection among elements must be “essential and artistic”; “This is the only possible way in which you can get beautiful books?”® Asked by an interviewer in 1895 what guides him in designing and ornamenting pages, Morris responded, “the subject, of course”; “The books that I would like to print are the books I love to read

and keep.” Thus the resultant book, in its late nineteenth-century materiality and cultural specificity, should not just be beautiful, but should reveal ‘beauties’ in Chaucer’s works from a vantage point different from that of our current critical preconceptions. In keeping with their beliefs about the ideally beautiful book, the ambitious volume Morris and Burne-Jones began planning in the early 1890s was the cul-

mination of over forty years of shared interest in Chaucer’s poetry as well as in medieval manuscripts and early printed books. Their long friendship, “one of the defining features of both their lives?® also culminated with the Kelmscott

4

“A Note by William Morris On His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press” in The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book By William Morris, ed. William S. Peter-

son (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 74-8, at 75.

5

“On the Artistic Qualities of the Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg in the Fifteenth Century? in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 45-58, at 56. “The Woodcuts of Gothic Books? in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 25—44, at 40. From an 1895 interview with William Morris reprinted in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 106-117, at I10, 112.

8

Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 9.

264 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY

Chaucer; Morris outlived its publication by less than four months. In her memoir of her husband’s life, Georgiana Burne-Jones records that from the time the two young men arrived at Oxford as students in 1853, Morris began the life-long custom of reading aloud to Burne-Jones. Converted to a passionate interest in the Middle Ages by their reading of John Ruskin’s essay, “The Nature of Gothic” — “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century; according to Morris 9 — their shared reading matter quickly turned to medieval literature. In the evenings in their rooms in the then-tumbledown and now long-vanished “Old Buildings” at Exeter College, “the friends read Chaucer, and in the daytime they went often to look at the painted books in the Bodleian”!° Although both had produced other Chaucer-inspired works of art over the years, they were nearly sixty when their joint project definitively united their love of Chaucer’s poetry to their passion for fine craftsmanship. They quickly undertook a collaborative rereading of the poet’s works; according to Georgiana Burne-Jones, it was “infinitely funny” when Morris, himself a poet who claimed Chaucer as his Master, “occasionally professed to be taken prosaic and not to understand what the poet meant.”'' Shortly before Morris’s death and two years before his own, BurneJones said of the finished Chaucer,“When Morris and | were little chaps at Oxford, if such a book had come out then we should have just gone off our heads, but we

have made at the end of our days the very thing we would have made then if we could?'* Their success in producing a book with “a definite claim to beauty” was quickly confirmed. Upon its release in June of 1896, the Chaucer was widely described as “the most beautiful book ever printed? and it remains “universally recognized as one of the greatest books to emerge from the private press movement?'3 Among the very first to be captivated was W.B. Yeats, who started inquiring about obtaining a copy in 1893, three years before publication, and who joined the chorus of praise when it appeared, “To me it is the most beautiful ofall printed

9 10

From Morris’s preface to the Kelmscott Press reprinting in 1892 of this chapter from John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, i. Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials ofEdward Burne-Jones (1904; 2 vols. in one, New York: Macmillan, 1906), 1:104.

11

G.Burne-Jones, Memorials, 2:217; for Morris’s tributes to Chaucer as “model” and “Master,’ see J.W. Mackail, The Life ofWilliam Morns, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1901), 1:197—200.

12

G. Burne-Jones, Memortals, 2:278.

13,

Wildman and Christian, “Catalogue? in Artist-Dreamer, 310,272.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer | 265 books?'4 We might not have expected one ofthe great poets of the twentieth century to set his heart on a “Victorian” book, but Sparshott offers a useful reminder of what it is that allows aesthetic judgments to transcend even radical shifts in taste such as the modernist reaction against Victorian art: We should never forget what everyone knows: that in any taxing and intricate complex of skills there are likely to be a few who find the activity more congenial, master the techniques sooner, grasp the principles more firmly, work harder and more innovatively and with more confidence and self-criticism, than anyone else; and their supremacy is not disputed even by those who find the practice itself artificial, and even arbitrary.'5 He could easily be describing the extraordinarily meticulous craftsmanship that went into the Chaucer. When his newly designed type arrived, Morris immediately ordered the letterg recut (“it seemed to me too black”); Burne-Jones regularly instructed the engraver to make changes as minute as removing an individual line or two from the shading in the engravings made from his pencil drawings by a complex process that involved retracing, photographic transfer onto woodblocks, and hand cutting.'® 16 Even an unsympathetic critic such as Hugh Kenner acknowledges the book’s extraordinary craftsmanship while faulting its folio-sized bulk and Gothic-based typeface. For Kenner, Morris’s books are “beautifully, ornately unreadable” and the Chaucer a “masterpiece of typographic futility”'!7The expression of

14

See The Collected Letters ofW.B. Yeats, ed. John Kelly, Volume 1: 1865-1895 (Oxford, 1986),

348. In 1905, Yeats’s friends sprung for a copy as a fortieth birthday gift; one of the givers, Lady Gregoty, testified that,“Ihave never known W.B. Yeats wish for anything so cov-

etously as for that book” Letter from Lady Gregory (Augusta Persse), 29 January 1905; See Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. Viola Meynell (London: Cape, 1940), 268, 269.

15

Sparshott, Aesthetics, 65.

16

See Paul Needham, “Catalogue” in William Morris and the Art of the Book, ed. Paul Needham et al. (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford University Press, 1976), 2147, catalogue no. 97A, plate cix, for a reproduction of a proof on which Burne-Jones requests a dozen corrections, many of them in the shading; for Morris’s attention to the letter g, see Mackail, Life ofWilliam Morris, 2:254.For details of the many other craftsmen

involved in the book’s production, see William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 17.

1991), 228-57. “The Most Beautiful Book? ELH 48.3 (Autumn 1981), 594-605, at 595. It is worth not-

ing that Yeats intended to read the Chaucer; he wrote to the Press’s secretary, “It is especially valuable to me just now, for I am to start reading Chaucer right through? Letter to Sydney Cockerell, July 6, 1905, ed. Meynell.

266 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY his criticism, however, bears out Sparshott’s point: Kenner finds a very large and highly decorated nineteenth-century book in an unfamiliar type face “artificial” and “arbitrary” to the point of futility, but nevertheless acknowledges its beauty and distinct superiority to others of its kind. Even as viewed in the austere light of modernism, the Kelmscott Chaucer is beautiful, but what access, if any, to medieval sensibilities is offered by this book, so

quintessentially Victorian at a casual glance? What can it tell us about ‘beauty’ in medieval poetry? As William S. Peterson aptly observes, in the later nineteenth century, “the term medieval was thrown about with wonderful abandon”!® But unlike

those Victorian artists and printers caught up in a superficial and scantily-informed “ye olde” nostalgia,'? Morris and Burne-Jones added to their deep familiarity with Chaucer’s poetry a knowledge of medieval manuscripts and printed books that was material and bodily, not just theoretical, a craft-based knowledge that shaped their

own book. Paul Needham writes that as a book collector, Morris’s “taste was formed not from scholarship, his own or others} but from decades ofdesigning, often in a medieval idiom, in a wide variety of media?*° Morris referred to the medieval craftsman’s skills as “a habit of the hand”?! and he set out to train his own able hands

accordingly. Among those medieval craftsmen whose work Morris most admired was a printer from Ulm, Johann Zainer, who produced in 1473 an edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Latin prose De claris multeribus (On Famous Women). Morris described the copy of this “Ulm Boccaccio” in his personal collection as “a very old friend of mine, and perhaps the first book that gave me a clear insight into the essential qualities of the mediaeval design of that period”? Its opening page (Figure 1) gives an idea ofthe late medieval foundations upon which Morris’s architecture of the book was raised. Various influences inspired the striking borders Morris designed for his books (see Figures 2, 3, 4),”3 but Zainer’s Boccaccio illustrates the translation of the

direct freehand drawing of medieval manuscript borders to the woodcut ornamentation of the early printed page. Of its decorative program, Morris wrote: “The great initial S I claim to be one ofthe very best printers’ ornaments ever made, one

that would not disgrace a thirteenth-century manuscript? According to Morris,

18 19

Peterson, “Introduction by the Editor? Ideal Book, xiii. For the effects of the Gothic revival on mid- and late nineteenth century printing, see

20 21 22 23

Paul Needham, “William Morris: Book Collector? in Art of the Book, 35. “Woodcut Books? in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 50. “Woodcut Books? in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 52. For other influences on Morris’s borders, see Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 138-42.

Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 22-37.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer

| 267

/ riarum vallein qua ad labore ceteri mor: tales nafarfipduaa elt: nec eodem maleo aut incude etia Fabre Feta) fen eiulans na: [cendi crimen deflens : autinualida ceterop ricu vente

invitam/guinimo (qd nemini vn gm alter contigiffe

auditum eft) cum tam ex limo terre rey omniam Faber Optimus: Adam mann copegiffer gprial- ex agro cui is

NN Y

poftea Damalcenus inditum nomen eft in orto delici:

arum tranftalifet: eum in foporem foluiffet placitum/. artificto fibi em cognicorex Sozmienns fate edugit ean

SS

dem fur comporem/s maturam viro, loci amenitate, « arg Factozis lerabunda intutru/in mortalem: & rerum prase bominamy ate vigilantis tam virifociam : & ab eode

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y lapfura/ea quia inter peipuas dotes fuas mulicres nu iS m erat/6z plurimum ef ea gloziec moztalium in dilcrero

(Aindiciojiam confecute fent/non fuperflne incer clarita

tes earum itangm Fulgo: pcipuus c& appohta elt) & in ec infuper tam ture feque ntibus agponenda veniet, originis qm incolatus padih ciuis Fcéaicz amica [plen

Figure 1. Woodcut initial ornamenting the first page of De claris mulieribus, Giovanni Boccaccio, printed by Johann Zainer, Ulm, 1473. PML 194. Reproduced by permission of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

268 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY

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for ther as wont to walken was an elf, Ther walketh now the lymytour bymself,

In undermeles and in morwenynges, 4 Hnd seyth bis matyns and his hooly thynat Hs he gooth in bis tymytacioun, Wommen may go saufly up and doun; In every bussh, or under every tree, Ther is noon oother incubus but he, And he ne woldoon hem but dishonour

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That on a day cam ridynge froryy?

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Of whiche mayde, anon, mauagree hit he

Daunced ful ofte in manye a grene mede; This was the olde opinion, as Lrede,

By verray force be rafte bire maydenbed: for which oppressioun was swich clamour

Lapeke of manye bundred yeres ago;

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De saugh a mayde watkynge bym biforn,

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Figure 2. Opening of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Kelmscott Chaucer, p. {112}. Reproduced by permission of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer | 269

\We MS Pe

Figure 3. Dorigen contemplates the rocks, Franklin’s Tale, Kelmscott Chaucer, p. [161]. Reproduced

by permission of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, MA. \

Zainer “in especial shone in the production of borders”; those that extend from the initial S help to make up “the most elaborate and beautiful piece ofits kind??4 Its curving, natural lines counterbalance the straight lines oftext, just as they did in illuminated manuscripts and as they do in the Chaucer and other Kelmscott books. Zainer’s halFborder also illustrates the vital link Morris saw between the decoration ofabook and its “storytelling” function: the initial S forms the body ofthe serpent that tempts Eve with an apple, and its tail twines off into tendrils that encircle representations of the seven deadly sins.*5 The terms of Morris’s admiration reveal the

24

“Woodcut Books” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 52, 46-48.

25

The antifeminism of this opening for a book on “famous women” is faithful to Boccaccio’s “storytelling?” which begins with Eve.

270

| NANCY

MASON

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Thow blamest Crist, and scist ful bitterly, He mysdeparteth richesse temporal; Thy neighebore thou wytest synfully, Hnd seist thou hast to lite, and be hath at. Parfay, scistow, somtyme he rekene shal, Whan that bis tayl apal brennen in the gleede, for be noght helpeth necdfulle in bir neede.

RHerkne what is the sentence of the wise: Bet is to dyen than have indigence: Thyselve neighcbor wol thee despise;

If thou be povre, farwel thy reverence! Yet of the wise man take this sentence: Alle the dayes of povre men been wikke:

Be war therfore, er thou come to that prikke! Lf thou be povre, thy brother hateth thee,

Mnd alle thy freendes fleen from thee, atlas!

UY HARM! CONDICION Of POVERTE! ya

Af ith thurst, with coold, with bunger so con-

iq p foundid! To asken help thee shameth in thyn herte; Lf thou noon aske, so Soore artow ywoundid, That verray nede unwrappeth al thy wounde bid!

YY Maugree thyn beed, thou most for indigence Or stele, or begge, or borwe thy des

O riche marchaunts, fulof wele been yee, O noble,o prudent folk, as in this cas!

Youre bagges been nat filld with ambes as, But with sys cynk, that renneth for youre chaunce;

At Christemasse myri¢e may ye daunce! Yeseken fond and see for yowre wynnynges; Ha wise folk ye knowen al thestaat Of reqnes; ye been fadres of tidynges

Figure 4. Custance in her boat, Man of Law’s Tale, Kelmscott Chaucer, p- [43]. Reproduced

by permission of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

The Canterbury Tales im the Kelmscott Chaucer | 271 craft-based, “habit of the hand” element of his aesthetic judgments: in Zainer’s

books, “the composition is good everywhere ... the lines rich, which shows ofcourse that the cutting is good? According to Morris, the cutting of the image into the

wood blocks “made all the difference in the world?*® To say that it involved long and serious study of medieval objects and craftsmanship is not to deny that the medievalism of Morris and Burne-Jones also reveals elements of nostalgia and escapism. Georgiana Burne-Jones noted her husband’s lifelong passion for illuminated manuscripts and recalled his saying late in life that if he wanted a change “more in tune with [his] heart’s desire than any other; he

would “go to the British Museum and send for a book that took a lifetime to make, and then forget the world and live in that book for days?7 The collaborators’ medievalism was, however, not nearly so impractical as their infamous early mis-

takes might suggest. Their role in the disastrous murals for the Oxford Union begun in 1857 is well known, its Arthurian scenes painted amid windows on damp, improperly prepared brick. Another medievalizing folly dates from the same period: Morris got his head stuck in the highly authentic helmet ofa suit of armor he had ordered from a local blacksmith as a model from which to draw.?* But by the time Morris took up typography in the late 1880s, these youthful fiascos were far in the past, and he set out with knowledge and purpose to design a Gothicinspired typeface accessible to readers accustomed to Roman type. The Roman type ofhis day he found too thin and pallid to stand beside the strong lines of the woodcut ornaments he admired in books like the Ulm Boccaccio, and in particular he objected to the “sweltering hideousness” of the Bodoni type popular at the time, which he regarded as unpleasantly prone to dazzle the eye of the reader with optical illusions caused by its “preposterous” alternation between thick and thin lines.*? The result was his Great Primer sized Troy type (18-point), a Gothic-based type face named after its use in the Kelmscott Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1892) and judged “a splendid artistic achievement in its own right” by the Press’s modern historian.3° Morris then designed its Pica (12-point) counterpart, the Chaucer, the

smaller size necessitated by the double columns of the planned edition ofthe poet’s works. An entertaining demonstration of the extent to which the Kelmscott Chaucer was produced from real knowledge of methods and materials, rather than from

26 27. 28

“Woodcut Books” in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, §2, 43. G. Burne-Jones, Memorials, 2:279. Mackail, Life, 1:117-26, the story of the armor at 121.

29 “The Ideal Book” (1893), in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 69. 30 ~=Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 94.

272 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY romantic medievalizing fancy, was the search for the paper. Morris wrote in 1896 that he took as his model “a Bolognese paper of about 147373! and, among other equally precise specifications, he held that each finished sheet must be “lifted slowly and carefully by hand, sheet after sheet, by a skilled and unhustled workman, employing a mould in which the wires have not been woven with ... monotonous regularity”3? Morris must have come to realize that more than one fine fifteenthcentury Italian paper could meet his stringent requirements: as a model of the desired qualities, he apparently gave his chosen papermaker, a Kentish craftsman named Joseph Batchelor, a copy of the Summa of Alexander of Hales printed in Venice in 1475.33 One’s heart goes out to Batchelor, who reports that he has man-

aged to produce a handmade paper that is “quite useable and is Antique, but is not so like the Venetian you left me with as I wish?34 Morris was pleased nevertheless and designed its watermark, a perch holding a leafy sprig in its mouth, which appears in the surviving paper copies of the Chaucer, a lasting memorial to Batchelor’s trials. Against its luxuriously textured white linen paper, the brilliant black of the book’s ink still almost glitters. In his definitive history of the Kelmscott Press, Peterson judges that the result of Morris’s exacting specifications and Batchelor’s craftsmanship was “not a ‘quaint; pseudo-antique sham but a serious recreation of the finest papers that had ever been used in books?”35 The Kelmscott Chaucer is beautiful, then, and the aesthetics of its handcrafted

production reveal more familiarity with medieval book arts than is always acknowledged, but is it Chaucer? Certainly Morris used the best text available, the work of

Walter W. Skeat; the “battered copy” of Skeat’s edition from which most of the type was set is now at Yale.3° Morris went to considerable pains to persuade Oxford University Press to grant permission to reprint Skeat’s newly completed text; were he not seriously concerned about textual integrity, he could have set it from a more easily accessible source, such as Caxton or the “good seventeenth-century edition” in his own library.37 Nevertheless, aside from a substantial and sympathetic article by

31

“Note by William Morris,’ in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 75.

32

H. Halliday Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, Master-Craftsman (London:

33

Macmillan, 192.4), 61. Acopy of the Summa (Venice, 1475) from Morris’s book collection bears a note from

Sydney Cockerell, Secretary ofthe Press, indicating that it was the book that Morris took 34 35 36 37.

to Batchelor. See Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 342 147. Needham, “Catalogue? no. 77, in Art of the Book, 127. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 98. Needham, “Catalogue? no. 92, in Art of the Book, 134. Morris mentions his possession of this Chaucer edition in an 1891 interview in the Pall

Mall Gazette, reprinted in Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 94. For his struggles with Oxford University Press, see Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 236-39.

The Canterbury Tales im the Kelmscott Chaucer | 273 Velma Richmond about the representation of the poet-figure in the Chaucer and balanced assessments from two historians of the book,3* the few who address the fidelity of the Kelmscott Chaucer's decorative program to Chaucer’s poetry have tended toward the negative, especially in regard to the Canterbury Tales: “the work falls short of Morris’s own ideal” in that he “fails to match form with content”; “the monolithic choice of chivalric subjects for the illustrations” tends to “nullify the rich, lively diversity of The Canterbury Tales?39 or, in an extreme view to which few would subscribe, as a result of his “Victorian inhibitions” and “romantic idealism”

Burne-Jones “ruined” the Chaucer by his overly selective program of illustration.4° By his own account, far from disregarding Chaucer’s imaginative vision, BurneJones made every effort to look through the medieval poet’s eyes: “in this book Iam putting myself wholly aside, & trying to see things as he saw them — not once have I invaded his kingdom with one hostile thought4' Nevertheless, the decorative program of the Kelmscott Chaucer can seem to offer a Canterbury Tales almost unrecognizable in current Chaucer criticism. Most notable is its complete effacement of the narrative frame so central to modern readings of the work, a crucial source of its irony and polysemy. A polar opposite to the Ellesmere Manuscript, which illustrates the pilgrims but not their tales, the Kelmscott Chaucer illustrates the narrated fictions but not their tellers: no pilgrimage, no story-telling contest.4* This Canterbury Tales, one is quickly reminded, was created without the influence of those early layers of Chaucer criticism that have shaped all later readings so profoundly, whether the more recent critic accepts or reacts against them. No suggestion of Kittredge’s roadside drama here (no Canterbury pilgrims to interact), and no Don-

38

Velma Bourgeois Richmond, “Edward Burne-Jones’s Chaucer Portraits in the Kelmscott Chaucer? Chaucer Review 40 (2005), 1-38; Duncan Robinson, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Kelmscott Chaucer (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1982); Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 228-57.

39

Diana C. Archibald, “Beauty, Unity, and the Ideal: Wholeness and Heterogeneity in the

40

Hodnett, Image and Text, 216, 218. Despite his overall disapproval, however, Hodnett’s readings of the depiction of Dorigen nearly engulfed by the sea and the encounter between the knight and the fairy lady in the Wife’s Tale are consistent with my own

41

Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 250, citing a letter to Helen Mary Gaskell (22 July 1894), British

42

For acompact account of trends in Chaucer illustrations in the intervening centuries,

Kelmscott Chaucer? Studies in Medtevalism 7 (1995), 169-80, at 169, 178.

(208-9). Library Additional MS 54217, fo. 251. see Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 232-35; for more detailed accounts, see the essays in Chaucer

Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of the Canterbury Tales in Pictures, ed. William K. Finley and Joseph Rosenblum

Library, 2003).

(New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British

274 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY

aldsonian “Chaucer the Pilgrim? that amiable but shallow persona so distinct from the poet-author.43 In current Chaucer criticism, both of these formulations have given way to subtler discriminations about narration, voice, and performed identity,

but the dynamic relation between fictional frame and narrated fictions has remained a consistently important source of the work’s appeal. The Kelmscott Chaucer thus creates an alterity of its own: not the “surprising otherness” modern readers experience in medieval texts,44 but the alterity of a Victorian Canterbury Tales in which the multiple ironies produced by the tale-teller pairings are not a significant aspect of its beauty or value. The effacement of the framing narrative cannot be attributed to Burne-Jones’s illustrations alone: Morris’s page design often favors the tales over the prologues and other links in which the pilgrim storytellers reveal themselves and interact with one another. Even so long and important a prologue as the Wife of Bath’s begins halfway down the second column of a page otherwise occupied by the ending of The Pardoner’s Tale (KC 104).45 The Wife’s Prologue does not register at all in the “shoulder-notes” or marginal annotations that, for aesthetic reasons, Morris used in place of running titles in his books;4° in the Chaucer they are printed in red ink. “The Pardoner’s Tale” (KC 104) is the shoulder-note for the page on which the Wife’s Prologue begins; its subsequent pages are labeled, “The Tale of the Wife of Bath” (my emphasis). Figure 2, by contrast, demonstrates the prominent treatment given

to the tale proper: it begins on a new page with a large outer border, a title in large type, an engraving framed by an inner border, and a very large decorated initial word. The Kelmscott Chaucer’s typographical emphasis on tales over links contrasts tellingly with the Reverside Chaucer (1987),47 where the titles of prologues, tales, and links are treated alike, printed in type of the same size and decorated with the same horizontal line and printer’s ornament. Longer prologues such as those of the Wife and Pardoner register in the running titles. The table of contents in the Riverside edition acknowledges the links (i.e.“The Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, Tale,

and Epilogue”); except for the [General ]Prologue, the Kelmscott Chaucer lists only

43 44

45 46

47

George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage? Modern Philology 9 (191112), 435-67; E. Talbot Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim? PMLA 69 (1954), 928-36. Hans Robert Jauss, “The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature” New Literary History 10 (1979), 181-229. Page numbers in parenthetical citations are to the Kelmscott Chaucer, abbreviated as KC. On Morris’s use of shoulder-notes, see Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 128.

The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Except where noted, all citations from the Canterbury Tales are by fragment and line number from this edition.

The Canterbury Tales i the Kelmscott Chaucer | 275 tales. These choices reflect the anticipated importance of the pilgrimage frame to each book’s readers. Their book shows clearly that the storytelling figure who mattered to Morris and Burne-Jones was Chaucer — not the pilgrim narrator he created for the Canterbury Tales, but the cherished medieval poet whose image appears in the Chaucer thirty-one times.4* In effect, Burne-Jones’s illustrations of the Canterbury Tales subsume all the pilgrim tellers, including the first-person narrator, back into the penholding author who created them. The Kelmscott Chaucer's famous opening spread reveals a rapt and handsome figure standing at a symbolic well ofcreativity.49 His placement above the iconic first sentence of the General Prologue with pen and small book in hand implies that he is writing it. As many have noted, this slender love poet (to judge by his placement in an enclosed springtime garden with birds) is a far cry from the portly, white-haired figure depicted by the Hoccleve portrait, the equally substantial horseback figure in the Ellesmere miniature, and the wellrounded “popet in an arm t’enbrace” described by Harry Bailey (7.700-01). BurneJones’s poet-figure reappears on the last page of the Ja/es, again in a garden, this time with a large volume under his arm, over the words, “Here taketh the makere

of this book his leve” (KC 222). A sundial indicates the passing of time, the poet looks older, and in place of the well, he faces a female figure identified as “Poesis?

In a striking example of Morris’s principle that “the unit ofa book is not one page, but a pair of pages;5° the facing page illustrates Chaucer’s early poem, “An ABC? with the poet, now in his bedroom-study, kneeling to an alternate female source of

inspiration, a vision of the Virgin Mary. For the Kelmscott Chaucer, a single poet is ‘storyteller’ enough, and the multiplicity that interested Burne-Jones was not multiple narrators, but multiple symbolic representations of poetic inspiration: the well, Lady Poesis, the Virgin. Burne-Jones’s twenty-eight illustrations for the Canterbury Tales are indeed very selectively bestowed: in addition to the two images of the poet at beginning and end, the Knight’s, Clerk’s, and Franklin’s Tales each receive six illustrations; the

Wife’s Tale three, those of the Prioress and Squire two each, and one for the Man of

48

Richmond, “Chaucer Portraits? analyzes these depictions; her count of 31 author images

49

appears on p. 5. In addition to his famous description of Chaucer as “the well of English undefiled?

Edmund Spenser wrote that in the poet’s “gentle spright /The pure well head of Poesie did dwell” Mutabilitie Cantos, Faerie Queene, Book VII, canto 7, stanza 9. Both expres-

sions were much paraphrased by later writers. See Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical 50

Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1978), 1: 114-16. “Note by William Morris? in The Ideal Book, ed. Peterson, 78.

276 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY Law’s Tale. By the standards of current critical priorities, special interest in these particular tales is not surprising, but among the seventeen tales not illustrated, lack of attention to the Miller’s, Pardoner’s, and Nun’s Priest’s Tales is utterly unexpected.

The last of these in particular is frequently singled out as a key to Chaucer’s poetic; it recently gave rise to a book-length study, Peter Travis’s Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.5' Assessment of Burne-Jones’s pictorial choices usually focuses on his omission of the fabliaux and of comic tales in general, but also without illustration are the serious tales told by the Monk, Physician, Pardoner, Second

Nun, and Parson, as well as the tale of Me/ibee. Thus seriousness alone was not a

decisive criterion for illustration, nor was Christian piety an obstacle, since among Burne-Jones’s first and last projects over a long career were his multiple depictions ofthe miracle in the Prioress’s Tale that appear on a wardrobe, a much-revised painting, and two designs for engravings in the Chaucer (KC 58, 60). It is safe to say that it was for aesthetic reasons that Burne-Jones chose the twenty-eight images from the Canterbury Tales and the facing illustration to “An ABC? But what aesthetic reasons? The choice not to illustrate the fabliaux is highly significant from the point of view of modern Chaucer criticism. Burne-Jones obviously gravitated toward tales most characterized by those poetic styles that Charles Muscatine described in the mid-twentieth century as idealistic, conventional, formal, deliberate, allegorical, and courtly, and he slighted tales in Chaucer’s realistic vein, those that feature language Muscatine characterized as rapid, turbulent, familiar, domestic, and colloquial.5* The brilliant collision of these boldly contrastive discourses has been regarded by virtually all critics since Muscatine as fundamental to the art of the Canterbury Tales; in the words ofJohn Ganim, “this sense of ‘mixture’ of styles is arguably one of the

constants of the best Chaucer criticism of our time?’53 Its defining example is the contrast between the Knight’s philosophical romance and the Miller’s earthy fabliau, a juxtaposition to which the Kelmscott Chaucer calls little attention. It offers a very richly decorated Knight’s Tale, with six illustrations and an opening “Whilom” that is a work of art in itself, followed by an unillustrated Miller’s Tale given only a large title, large outer border, and decorated initial letter (not word,

though it begins with a corresponding “Whilom”), the same treatment that marks the beginnings of other unillustrated tales except the Cook’s and Sir Thopas, both

51

Peter Travis, Disseminal

Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priests’s Tale (Notre Dame, IN: Uni-

versity of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

52

Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California

53

Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 20.

Press, 1957).

The Canterbury Tales 77 the Kelmscott Chaucer

| 277

of which are further snubbed by beginning on pages that lack even a border. Because this choice not to illustrate the contrastive world of The Miller’s Tale impinges so significantly on the reading of the Canterbury Tales implicit in the decorative program ofthe Chaucer, it is worth looking at what can be known of the reasons behind it. “No picture to Miller / no picture to Reeve / no picture to Cook’s Tale? BurneJones noted in one ofhis sketchbooks,54 nor did he illustrate the Shipman’s or Mer-

chant’s Tales. In a letter to Algernon Charles Swinburne, he wrote that

Mr. Morris has been urgent with me that I should by no means exclude these stories from our scheme of adornment ~ especially he had hopes of my treatment of the Miller’s Tale, but he ever had more robust and daring parts than | could assume, and | trust it has been performed that the volume could be placed in the hands ofa new born babe without additional harm to its already sinful soul.55 The deficiency in “robust and daring parts” relative to Morris that Burne-Jones lays claim to here has created the false impression that the bawdy humor of Chaucer’s fabliaux “proved too strong for the delicate feelings ofthe artist? as Duncan Robinson puts it.5° In remarks addressed to the sexually aberrant Swinburne, however, the professed standard of suitability to a new born babe can only be ironic; Fiona MacCarthy’s richly documented 2011 biography of Burne-Jones offers evidence that he and Swinburne regularly exchanged salacious materials that Burne-Jones carefully destroyed.57 Burne-Jones’s protestation about his inferior parts relative to Morris also draws upon a long-established jest and a fundamental aspect ofhis self fashioning quite apart from any “Victorian inhibitions.” Tall and thin, Burne-Jones suffered from chronic poor health from an early age, while Morris was a virtual tornado of energy until his very last years, a force of nature with wild hair the young

54

Robinson, Kelmscott Chaucer, 24; the sketchbook is housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum,

Cambridge. 55

As cited in Burne-Jones Talking: His conversations 1895-98 preserved by his studio assistant

56

Thomas Rooke, ed. Mary Lago (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), 45; the letter belongs to the Brotherton Library, Leeds (Robinson, Kelmscott Chaucer, 112 n11). Robinson, Kelmscott Chaucer, 24.

57

Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 195-96.

58

Hodnett, Image and Text, 216.

278 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY

Burne-Jones described as “unnaturally and unnecessarily curly?5? Friends recalled Morris in constant and purposeful motion, characteristically “bustling up the path ... with a bottle of wine under each arm with which to drink the health of the Kelmscott Press”6° For decades, Burne-Jones drew comic visual and verbal portraits juxtaposing himself, an elongated, languid figure, to Morris, a round and curly

dervish.*! Burne-Jones’s “conviction of his own lack of substance? as Caroline Arscott describes it,°? extended even to the page design of the Chaucer. Of pages such as the one reproduced here as Figure 2, where his picture is surrounded by Morris’s bold typographical designs, Burne-Jones wrote: “I love to be snugly cased in the borders & buttressed up by the vast initials — & once or twice when I have no big letter under me, |feel tottery & weak?®3 Figure 6 reproduces one of those precarious pages on which no large, Morris-designed initial “buttressed” Burne-Jones’s wood engraving. By this point in their work on the Chaucer, it was increasingly clear that Morris was dying, and Burne-Jones’s customary insistence on his collaborator’s superior vigor had very likely taken on a new impetus: wishful thinking. Thus while it says a great deal about Burne-Jones’s sense of humor, his friendship with Morris, and the self-image he cultivated, his letter to Swinburne does little, I think, to explain why he chose not to illustrate The Miller’s Tale.

Another piece of evidence regarding Burne-Jones’s refusal is a remembered conversation between the artist and his studio assistant, Thomas Rooke, one that can also be mistaken for prudishness if its humor is missed, which is easy enough to do when it is quoted without its opening rejoinder. When Rooke expressed his relief _ that Burne-Jones had “quite ignored the base stories in Chaucer” (emphasis in original), the artist reportedly replied, “Chiefly done for your sake, Little Rooke. I’d like to pretend Chaucer didn’t do them. Besides, pictures to them would have spoiled

the book. You don’t want funny pictures either. Pictures are too good to be funny. Literature’s good enough for that?”°4 The facetious suggestion that he refrained

59

G. Burne-Jones, Memorials, 1.165.

60

Robinson, Kelmscott Chaucer, 18.

61

These lively sketches are widely reproduced; see for example MacCarthy, Last PreRaphaelite, 180, 181, 256, 387, 425,466. Bonnie Wheeler discusses two versions of adraw-

ing in which the two collaborators receive Chaucer’s blessing, “Leaning on Chaucer? in

62

63 64

The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector, ed. Takami Matsuda et. al. (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 1-6. Arscott, Interlacings, 15-17, quotation at 16.

From a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 8 December 1894, quoted by Needham, “Catalogue? no. 98, in Art of the Book, 138-9. Burne-Jones Talking, ed. Lago, 68-69.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer

| 279

from illustrating the fabliaux “chiefly” to spare the sensibilities of his studio assistant warns against taking this reported conversation too seriously as an explanation of Burne-Jones’s artistic choices. Another conversation with Rooke, not to my knowledge cited in discussions of the Kelmscott Chaucer, reveals that, to his lasting credit, Burne-Jones had no patience with the Reverend Skeat’s suggestion that the fabliaux and other lapses into “coarseness” in the Tales resulted from the loss ofthe restraining influence of Chaucer’s wife after her death in 1387.°5 Burne-Jones complained to Rooke that Skeat “says in his notes that no doubt if Chaucer’s wife had been alive the Canterbury Tales would never have been given out,...he isa He can’t get Mrs. Chaucer out of his mind?®? Although we need to fill in for our-

selves the blank left by the censorship either of Rooke or of Georgiana BurneJones,°7 the artist’s response to Skeat’s dubious ideas about lack of wifely restraint and resultant “coarseness” in the Canterbury Tales does not sound like the reaction of aman who would seriously like to pretend that Chaucer did not write his bawdy tales. Hardly a prude in his private life, Burne-Jones as presented in Penelope Fitzgerald’s fine biography was a complex figure who described himselfas frightened by lust,°® but apparently not so frightened as to refrain from extramarital relationships, most disastrously with his tempestuous artist’s model, Mary Zambaco, a married woman who exposed their affair by trying to drown herselfin the canal in front of Robert Browning’s London house. Dante Gabriel Rossetti described Burne-Jones’s involvement in an appalling public scene: “bobbies collaring Ned who was rolling with her on the stones to prevent it, and God knows what else?”® In his art Burne-

Jones was a frank lover of the human body, one of many artists who challenged the ‘decency’ standards to which the most conservative Victorian institutions clung as the century drew toward a close. In the Chaucer, he rarely missed an opportunity to represent nudes when sanctioned by the text or the prospect is left open. His one recorded expression of defiance toward Chaucer’s text involved introducing a nude

65 66

Walter W. Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1894-97, 1:lii1. Burne-Jones Talking, ed. Lago, 44-45.

67

Rooke’s studio notes survive only as transcribed by Georgiana Burne-Jones; see BurneJones Talking, ed. Lago, 1x-x.

68

Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones (1975; rev. ed., Gloucestershire: Sutton Pub-

lishing, 1997), 248.

69

MacCarthy, Last Pre-Raphaelite, 211, citing a letter to Ford Madox Brown, 23 January 1869.

280 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY his drawings for Chaucer’s Romaunt includes this note to self: “Venus. figure: one of (make her naked never mind Chaucer)?7° Earlier in his career Burne-Jones had refused a request that for purposes of public exhibition he add a drapery in removable chalk to conceal the frontal nudity of the male figure in his Ovidian-Chaucerian painting, Phyllis and Demophoon (1870). His Phyllis bore the “striking profile” of Mary Zambaco, and, forced to alter the head for the 1882 version of the work in order to avoid further scandal, he fulmi-

nated against the “Puritanism” in which he considered England to be “soaked?7" It must have been on the basis of a very partial knowledge that the sculptor Gustav Vigeland opined in 1901,“You won't find a single picture of Burne-Jones that could not be displayed at Sunday School??? It would have been an advanced Sunday School that hung Phyllis and Demophoon, or, to take another example, The Depths of the Sea (1886), in which a mermaid draws the body of adrowned man down to the

seabed in a seductive embrace, only her bent elbow concealing his genitalia, and her enigmatic smile, if read as provocative, conferring a suggestion of necrophilia. Burne-Jones’s more transgressive paintings would seem to rule out the prospect that he lacked the “daring” to draw a scene from a fabliau. Although ironically expressed, Penelope Fitzgerald’s interpretation of Burne-

Jones’s refusal is much more persuasive: “Morris wanted illustrations of the Miller’s Tale, while Burne-Jones was lost, once again, in the magic rose-garden.”73 The artist found no beauty, no inspiration in those tales in which Chaucer’s “realistic style” predominates. He had no inclination to draw scenes from tales set in his own familiar haunts — Oxford, Cambridge, London — even as envisioned via Chaucer’s four-

teenth-century imagination. Art historians describe the “antinaturalistic approach” of Burne-Jones’s late work, deeply engrossed in myth, symbolism, and allegory: “his holidays at Rottingdean [near Brighton], far from resulting in any marked response to the coastal landscape, produced a number of paintings and drawings that featured mermaids and undersea life?74 By his own account, Burne-Jones was unsuited to work such as realistic portraiture; he considered “direct transcript from nature”

70

Robinson, Kelmscott Chaucer, 25, from papers held by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

71

Fitzgerald, Burne-Jones, 128, 127.

72

Quoted in Andrew Wilton, “Symbolism in Britain? in The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910, ed. Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone

73

(London: Tate Gallery, 1997), 11-34, at 32, cited by Richmond, “Chaucer Portraits? 10. Fitzgerald, Burne-Jones, 247.

74

Wildman and Christian, “Catalogue; in Artist-Dreamer, 314, citing The Depths of the Sea.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer | 281 antithetical to his art.7> Evoking longstanding jokes about his shrinking qualities relative to Morris’s forcefulness may have been a simpler way to evade his collaborator’s urging for illustrations of the fabliaux than attempting to justify his refusal on deeply held artistic grounds. The continuity between Burne-Jones’s Chaucer illustrations and his development as a painter is no surprise: a career-long disciple of Ruskinian medievalism, he did not subscribe to a hierarchical distinction between fine and decorative arts that would make illustrating the Chaucer a lesser activity than painting. In the Middle Ages, according to the Ruskinian view, all arts were ‘decorative? Burne-Jones’s

designs were rarely medium-specific, and in addition to books, they appeared on glass, textiles, furniture, pianos, mosaics, jewelry, and costumes and scenery for a

stage play.7° Drawing from Chaucer engaged him deeply as an artist: despite moments of anxiety, he described the work as “the greatest of delights to me” and

himself as “beginning to feel in the mood to do nothing else all my days?77 The sheer number of images he designed for the Chaucer suggests the depth of his engagement: according to his studio notes, Burne-Jones envisioned about fortyeight designs with an upper limit of sixty; a later note says “72 in all and he won’t have more?’7® Morris was alarmed by the delays, the rising costs, and the book’s growing size, creeping up toward the six hundred pages that he had allotted for a one-volume edition.’? The finished book contains eighty-seven wood engravings designed by Burne-Jones. As we have seen, the illustrations for the Canterbury Tales are drawn chiefly from romances, but the beauties of Chaucer’s work for Burne-Jones ranged well beyond a“monolithic choice of chivalric subjects?*° Not one of the twenty-nine images allotted to the Tales and its facing page, “An ABC? depicts battle or tournament, despite the presence of six illustrations from The Knight’s Tale. The clearest allusions to knightly combat are a bellicose statue of Mars (KC 24) and a poignant depiction of the dead Arcite (KC 30). Six engravings depict infants and children (KC 58, 60, 132,

134, 139, 223). A selfreferential interest in art reflects Chaucer’s own interest in

75

77.

Wildman and Christian, “Catalogue? in Artist-Dreamer, 313-314; G. Burne-Jones, Memorials, 2.261-63. Alan Crawford,“Burne-Jones as a Decorative Artist? in Artist-Dreamer, ed. Wildman and Christian, 5-23. MacCarthy, Last Pre-Raphaelite, 433, from a letter to Helen Mary Gaskell, November

78

1894. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 244-47, quotation at 247.

76

79

Robinson, Kelmscott Chaucer, 33-36;

80

Archibald, “Beauty, Unity; 178.

Needham, “Catalogue? no. 94, in Art of the Book, 136.

282 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY books and artworks: seven scenes depict books and three of these include authentic medieval reading implements; five illustrations depict sculptures.®' Featured in fif-

teen of twenty-nine illustrations, aspects of the supernatural had “a definite claim to beauty”: these scenes include two images of Venus (as statues in the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, KC 22, 167); one each of Diana and Mars from The Knight’s Tale (23, 24); three of the Virgin (twice in the Prioress’s Tale, first as a statue and then performing her miracle, and a third time in a vision in “An ABC” 58, 60, 223); three

images of the loathly lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, including “before and after” images of her transformation, here into a nude Botticellian Venus (112, 114,

115); one

each of the magic horse and the lovelorn talking falcon from The Squire’s Tale (153, 156); two further scenes from The Franklin’s Tale that involve the clerk-magician, including his magical illusion of Aurelius dancing with Dorigen (165, 170); and the

allegorical figure of Lady Poesis at the end of the Tales (222). If we look at what Burne-Jones actually drew, rather than which tales he illustrated, we see in the Chaucer a preoccupation with the same expressive techniques art historians identify in his other late work: vision, allegory, myth, symbol. “BurneJones came to use mythological subjects ... to explore psychological and sexual tension, an anxiety-laden state of mind, the secret recesses of the soul”; “Increasingly he

sought to forge a new pictorial language in accordance with an inner vision, to cut loose from the trammels of representation in a way that hovers on the brink of modernism?®? As much as it may hover on the brink of modernism, his search for new pictorial ways to express inner states also led him deeply into the poetry of Chaucer, a poetry that stimulated his “inner vision” and offered alternative ways to think about representation. An irresistible source of beauty in Chaucer’s poetry, I suggest, and part of the reason for Burne-Jones’s unflagging desire to draw images from it, was the poet’s experimentation with new means of representing his characters’ subjectivity, so relevant to the artist’s own late work.*} Both poet and painter sought techniques for externalizing inner states, still a challenge for a fourteenth-century writer and always a challenge for a visual artist. What we would call Burne-Jones’s romanticism — for example, his use of scenery to express human emotion — turns out to make him a

81

For books, see KC 1, 9, 58, 165, 170, 222, 223; for sculptures, 22, 23, 24, 58, 167. Joanna

Banham and Jennifer Harris comment on Burne-Jones’s “accurate depiction of library paraphernalia” in William Morris and the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 205; see the roll stand and attached weight (KC 223).

82.

Wildman and Christian, “Catalogue? in Artist-Dreamer, 199, 313.

83

A study of Chaucerian terson, Chaucer and the is primarily interested Burne-Jones in that of

subjectivity that helped to shape subsequent inquiry is Lee PatSubject of History (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Patterson in the subjectivity of the pilgrim tellers in the Canterbury Tales, characters within the tales.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer | 283 perceptive and intriguing illustrator of Chaucer’s explorations ofsubjectivity. The first of his three illustrations of The Wife of Bath’s Tale (Figure 2) shows an armed knight on horseback with suffering in his face accosted by a ragged but stern and powerful woman, her finger raised in warning: “Sire knyght, heer forth ne lith no wey” (3.1001). Ways or paths, literal and metaphorical, are key images in the Canterbury Tales, and indeed the knight in Burne-Jones’s illustration rides, not on an open path or road, but in a semicircle around the beaten shore ofa dark body of water. Surrounding the figures from one side ofthe frame to the other is one of the impenetrable forests that in Burne-Jones’s art indicates anxiety and mental confusion, and, in this case, the threat of the knight’s death as well: a skeletal dead tree

rises ominously above the others. The scene is in some ways as much Keats as Chaucer: a lone knight is held in painful rapture by a woman with supernatural powers; the sedge appears to have withered from the lake and the birds so common elsewhere in the volume are absent. But this figure is a beldame, not a belle dame, and what she tells the knight is not deceptive but true: he has chosen the wrong path and thus arrived in the impenetrable thicket of his own mental state; without a change, “heer forth ne lith no wey? Burne-Jones’s visual exploration ofsubjectivity in the Canterbury Tales is also revealed in the image of Dorigen looking out to sea that begins The Franklin’s Tale (Figure 3). She contemplates “the grisly rokkes blake” (5.859) that externalize her fears for her absent new husband who must return to her by ship. That the naturally present rocks have become exaggerated, distorted projections of Dorigen’s fear is quietly confirmed by the tale’s narrator when Arveragus returns without mention of his survival of perilous navigational hazards: in three words he simply “Is comen hoom” (5.1089). Rather thana naturalistic image of a woman looking out to sea from the Brittany coast, Burne-Jones offers a view into Dorigen’s “derke fantasye” (5.844). She would “sitte adoun upon the grene,/ And pitously into the see biholde” (5.862-63), crying out against “Eterne God” in the manner

of the prisoner in

Boethius’s Consolation ofPhilosophy, usually an indication of misguidedness or futility in Chaucer. Burne-Jones’s illustration renders the “grene”on which Dorigen sits as a near-island in a surging sea that laps around it; a real sea would flood it with the next of the billowing waves forming in the background. The Franklin’s narrating voice, however, places Dorigen safely “upon the bank an heigh” (5.849) near her house, where she walks with friends, watches the ships, and looks “dounward fro the brynke” toward the rocks (5.858). The unrealistically vulnerable position given to

her by Burne-Jones is projected from the character’s own subjectivity.*4

84

Hodnett observes that the precarious position “seeks to make the emotional significance ofthe scene palpable? Image and Text, 208.

284 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY Burne-Jones also depicts the rocks themselves as projections from Dorigen’s “derke fantasye? They are not naturalistic cliffs and boulders, but huge post-andlintel constructions of her imagination; a mermaid inhabits a submerged version of this ominous marine architecture in The Depths of the Sea (1886), and indeed Dorigen considers that these rocks deserve to be “sonken into helle” (5.892). Fantastic rock formations with enormous piled stones are features of the Brittany coast,

but the looming and vertiginous Stonehenge-like structures perceived by Dorigen represent the deliberate “werk unresonable” of a Creator whose rocks “semen rather a foul confusion / Of werk than any fair creacion” (5.872, 869-70). Burne-Jones’s

illustration preserves the tale’s subtlety of tone: it is not without sympathy for a lone woman in a threatening landscape, but its exaggerations reveal that the threat is largely a peril of her own making, and they hint that the ultimate outcome will be comic rather than tragic. From the same tale, a similarly wry illustration (KC 167) expands a tiny potential allegory in the text that might otherwise go unnoticed. Aurelius thanks “lady myn Venus” that the rocks have disappeared (5.1304— 5) and goes to the temple “Where as he knew he sholde his lady see” (5.1307) in

order to confront Dorigen with the news of his fulfillment of his task. In BurneJones’s illustration, Aurelius stands in the center between a nude statue ofhis “lady”

Venus and the living presence of his “lady” Dorigen, each with the same stylized profile, long hair over one shoulder, and bent left arm facing the viewer. Like Palamon before him (1.1102-11, 1155-57), Aurelius has difficulty distinguishing living woman from personified love. To Morris’s growing consternation, Burne-Jones reworked a number of his designs for the Chaucer, and in these revisions one sees deliberate movement toward

external expression of a figure’s inner state. For The Man of Law’s Tale, his evocative final design for a solitary and wind-tossed Custance contemplating the sea from her boat (Figure 4) began as a depiction ofa sleeping woman shrouded in white draperies in a coffin-like vessel, tossed by surging waves (Figure 5).85 The unconscious female figure in the rejected drawing is poignant, but rather than capturing Chaucer’s enduring figure of female constancy, it calls to mind an expiring Lady of Shalott whose vessel has overshot Camelot and floated out to sea.8¢ In contrast, the

revised image of Chaucer’s heroine standing to gaze at her surroundings transforms the dark sky, circling birds, and turbulent, unrelieved expanse of waves around

85

The drawing, now in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, is reproduced in Needham, “Cata-

86

One of Burne-Jones’s earliest literary illustration projects was Tennyson’s famous poem;

logue? no. 95D, Art of the Book, plate civ.

see G. Burne-Jones, Memorials, 1:99.

The Canterbury Tales in the Kelmscott Chaucer | 285

Figure 5. Preliminary drawing by Edward Burne-Jones, “Custance Cast Forth on the Sea (The Tale of the Manne of Lawe)” 1975.50:4. Reproduced by permission of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. ‘

‘ Custance’s boat into a powerful visual expression of her anxiety and loneliness, revealed in the tale by her recurrent thoughts of drowning and death (2.455, 467, 516-18).

An equally revealing reconceived image, one of the six designs for The Clerk’s Tale, shows Griselda setting out for her father’s poor cottage when cast out of Walter’s household (Figure 6). The rejected design (Figure 7)87 shows the same barefoot

female figure in the foreground and Walter’s forbidding, dark castle in the background, but its middle ground is occupied by a small wood with the twisted and broken off trees that Burne-Jones used to express a figure’s suffering and confusion,

87

Now in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, the drawing is reproduced in Needham, “Catalogue? no. 95G, in Art of the Book, plate cvi.

286 | NANCY MASON BRADBURY

(

Howell Chickering: A Bibliography

Amherst College, 1965-2013; G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature, 1997-2013

Books Editor, Jomnt Curriculum Planning Book of the 1981 NEH Summer Institute on the Teaching of Medieval Civilization. Pp. 430. Amherst, MA: Five Colleges, Inc., 1981.

Editor, 1983 NEH Institute Resource Book for the Teaching of Medieval Civilization. Pp. 284. Amherst, MA: Five Colleges, Inc., 1984.

Editor (with Thomas H. Seiler), The Study ofChivalry: Resources and Approaches. Pp.700. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988. Editor (with Margaret Switten), The Medieval Lyric: a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mount Holyoke College. South Hadley, MA: The Medieval Lyric, Box 1974, Mount Holyoke College, 1988-89. 4 vols. with 6 tape cas-

settes. Editor (with Margaret Switten), Jean Renart’s “Romance of the Rose or of Guillaume de Dole”: a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mount Holyoke College. Video cassette with accompanying text, translation, and critical commentaries. South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College, 1993.

Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition. Old English text, with translation into modern English verse, Introduction, Commentary, and Glosses to Select Passages. Doubleday

Anchor, 1977. Pp. 416. Reprinted with select additional bibliography, 1982, 1985,

1989, 1990. Third edition, with new Afterword and updated Bibliography, 2006.

Co-editor, with Ann Astell and Dorsey Armstrong, of Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler, Kalamazoo MI, Medieval Institute Publications, 2013.

Co-editor, with Robert F. Yeager and Allen J. Frantzen, of Teaching “Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century. MRTS, Arizona State University Press, 2014.

292 | Howell Chickering:A Bibliography Articles “Foweles in pe frith: A Religious Art-Song,” Philological Quarterly 50 (1971): 115-20. “The Literary Magic of Wid Feerstice? Viator 2 (1971): 83-104.

“Some Contexts for Bede’s Death-Song? PMLA 91 (1976): 91-100. “Medieval Studies: Interdisciplinary Approach Gains Adherents,” Humanities Report 4.3 (March, 1982): 12-16. Reprinted in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 9.2 (Fall, 1982): 3-6, 8.

“Teaching Beowulf as Poetry,” in Jess B. Bessinger and Robert F. Yeager, eds., Approaches to Teaching “Beowulf” (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1984): 40-44.

“Unpunctuating Chaucer,” The Chaucer Review 25.2 (1990): 96-109.

“Lyric Time in Beowulf, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91.4 (October, 1992):

489-509. “Hearing Ariel’s Songs,” The Journal ofMedieval and Renatssance Studtes 24:1 (1994): 131— 72. Reprinted in Shakespeare and the Arts, ed.Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 65-106. Vol. I of the series Shake-

speare: The Critical Complex, ed. Orgel and Keilen. “Comic Meter and Rhyme in the Miller’s Tale? Chaucer Yearbook 2 (1995): 17-47.

Reprinted in Essays on the Art ofChaucer’s Verse, ed. Alan T. Gaylord (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 379-402.

“Form and Interpretation in the Envoy to the Clerk’s Tale? The Chaucer Review 29.4

(1995): 352-72. “Stanzaic Closure and Linkage in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? The Chaucer Review 32.1 (1997): I-31.

“Chaucer by Heart,” in Under Criticism: Essays for William H. Pritchard,ed. David Sofield and Herbert F. Tucker (Athens: OH: Ohio University Press, 1998), 91-108.

“The Poetry of Suffering in Book V of Troilus? The Chaucer Review 34.3 (2000): 243-68. “Beowulf and ‘Heaneywulf,” The Kenyon Review 24.1 (Winter 2002): 160-78.

“From “Lo! to ‘So’: Modern Poetic Paraphrases of Beowulf? 5-19, and “Ironic Tones of > Voice in the General Prologue? 21-37, in Supplement to “Yazyk i rechevaya deyatel’nost™ (“Language and Language Behavior”), vol. 4 (2003 for 2001), ed. Nicolay Yakovlev [The Linguistic Society of St. Petersburg, Lecture Series, gen. ed. Yuri Kleiner].

“Creative Reading: A First-Semester FirstYear Course,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 4.2. (2004): 263-87. “A Light Touch” [review—article of W. S. Merwin’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight], The Kenyon Review 26.3 (Summer, 2004): 167-78.

Howell Chickering: A Bibliography | 293 “Rhetorical St¢mulus in the Middle English Prick of Conscience? in Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor ofJeremy duQuesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie A. Hayes-Healy, 2 vols. (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 1: 191-230.

“Love, Anger and Peace: Social Practice and Poetic Play in the Ending of Yain” (with Fredric L. Cheyette), Speculum 80.1 (2005): 75-117.

“And I seyde his opinion was good’: How Irony Works in the Monk’s Portrait,” in “Seyd in forme and reverence”: Essays on Chaucer and Chaucerians in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr., eds. T.L. Burton and John F. Plummer (Adelaide and Provo: The Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), 3-18.

“Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith? Studies in Philology 106.3 (Summer 2009), 119-36. Reprinted in On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill (University of Toronto Press, 2010), 24-42.

“Chaucer’s Riding Rhyme,” in Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan T: Gaylord, ed. Susan Yager and Elise Morse-Gagné (The Chaucer Studio, 2013), 49-63.

“Beowulf Translations,” in Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Howell Chickering, Allen Frantzen, Robert F. Yeager, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Stud-

ies (Arizona State University Press, 2014). “Teaching the Prosody of the Canterbury Tales Couplets,” in Approaches to Teaching the Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. Frank Grady and Peter W. Travis (New York: MLA, 2014).

Other Publications Several poems and some forty book reviews.

Work in Progress “Beowulf 3074-75: Philological Ambiguity and Editorial Interpretation” in a forthcom-

ing Festschrift for J.R. Hall. “Infans, Mater, and the “Greyn”: The Materiality of Song in The Prioress’s Tale” in a forth-

coming Festschrift for Carolyn P. Collette. “Werre: The Structure of Medieval Feud in the Melibee” (monograph-length article). Chaucer and the Sound of Poetry (short book with accompanying audio files).

Contributors

ARTHUR BAHR is currently Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (2013), uses both formalist and historicist interpretive modes to read

manuscripts and texts of Chaucer and Gower, as well as the Auchinleck and Andrew Horn manuscripts. With Alexandra Gillespie, he has co-edited a special volume of The Chaucer Review on the intersection of codicology, aesthetics, and concepts of literariness. His current book-project is on the poems of Cotton Nero A.x.

NANCY MASON BRADBURY is Professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her projects in recent years include an article on the Latin Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf in Speculum; a special issue of Chaucer Review on “Time, Measure, Value} co-edited with Carolyn P. Collette; a dual-language edition (Latin and Middle

English) of The Dialogue ofSolomon and Marcolf, co-edited with Scott Bradbury; and an essay, “The Victorian Afterlife of The Thornton Romances,” in a forthcoming collection, Medieval Romance and Material Culture. With Cornelia Pearsall, she teaches a course in Victorian Medievalism.

GEORGE CLARK holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. He taught at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), the University of Texas (Austin), and at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) where he is professor emeritus. In addition to many essays, Clark has published a book on Beowu/f and translations of Icelandic sagas and tales for the Complete Sagas ofIcelanders and Forty-Nine Tales. His article “A Voyage round Egill Skallagrimsson” awaits publication and another on the dating of Beowulf will appear in 2015. Clark’s book “Maldon and the Viking Tide” remains in progress.

CAROLYN P. COLLETTE Is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Kings’

Manor, University of York. Her recent publications include The Later Middle Ages: A Sourcebook, co-edited with Harold Garrett-Goodyear (2010), and “Waging Spiritual War:

Philippe de Méziéres, The Order of the Passion and the Power of Performance? in War

Contributors | 295 and Peace:

Critical Issues in European Societies and Literature 800-1800 (201 1), 379-94.

Her most recent book (2014) is Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, York Medieval Press, an imprint of Boydell and Brewer.

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LISA H. COOPER is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (2011) and the co-editor (with Andrea Denny-Brown) of Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (2008) and of The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Mate-

rial Culture (2014). Her new project is on the intersection ofthe practical and the poetic in later medieval England.

THOMAS J. FARRELL is Professor of English at Stetson University. He is the editor of Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (1995)and co-editor of the Clerk’s Tale chapter in Sources and

Analogues of the Canterbury Tales (2 vols., 2002-2005). His essays have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, ELH, the Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology, and other journals and collections. JOHN M. FYLER is Professor of English at Tufts University, and also teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English. He is the author of Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (2007) and Chaucer and Ovid (1979), and he edited the House of

Fame for the Riverside Chaucer. JOHN M. GANIM is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (1983), Chaucerian Theatricality (1990) and Medievalism and Orientalism (2005). He has recently co-edited a col-

lection of essays with Shayne Aaron Legassie on Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages (2013). He has served as President of the New Chaucer Society (2006-2008) and has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2001). ALAN T. GAYLORD works as an Independent Scholar in fields of medieval literature, Chaucer, and medievalism; after 40 years as professor at Dartmouth College he is now

Winkley Professor of English, emeritus; and enjoys research appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. He has retired to Medford Leas in New Jersey. His current projects include a monograph on the medievalism of William Morris (“A Cultural History of the Morris Chair”); and a book of essays on “Prosodic Criticism” with the Chaucer Studio.

WARREN GINSBERG is Philip H. Knight Professor of Humanities at the University of Oregon. His books include Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (2002); Dante’s Aesthetics of Being

(1999); The Cast of Character: The Representation of Personality in Ancient and Medteval

296 | Contributors Literature (1983); he is also editor of Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Middle English Texts Series (1992). He is currently finishing a book titled The

Dancer and the Dance: Tellers, Tales, and Translation in the Canterbury Tales. JOHN M. HILL from the Department of English Language and Literature at the U.S. Naval Academy, has taught at the University of Washington, Smith College, The Catholic Uni-

versity and Baruch College, CUNY. He has garnered short and year-long grants from the Danforth Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the course of teaching mainly undergraduates, he has published Chaucerian Belief (1991), The Cultural World in Beowulf (1995), The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic (2000), and The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf (2008). He has edited or co-edited

four volumes: Reconstructive

Polyphony: Studies in the Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages, with Deborah SinnreichLevi (2000), On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and other Old English Poems (2010) and special issues of The Heroic Age (an on-line journal) as well as Philological Quarterly, the lat-

ter two on anthropological approaches to Old English poetry. More than two dozen of his essays on various Old and Middle English topics appear as chapters in books or as essays in periodicals. CLARE R. KINNEY is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot (1992) and edited

Mary Wroth (2009) in the series Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 15 50-

1700, published by Ashgate. Her published articles include work on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, medieval and early modern romance, the Sidney circle (including Mary Wroth and Mary Sidney Herbert), Spenser and Shakespeare.

PEGGY A. KNAPP is a Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. She founded and edited the annual book series Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts and is author of The Style ofJohn Wyclif’s English Sermons (1977), Chaucer and the Social Contest (1990), Time-Bound Words (2000), and most recently Chaucerian Aesthetics (2008).

Her articles on medieval, renaissance, and contemporary matters have appeared in, for example, Specu/um, PMLA, ELH, Philological Quarterly, Journal ofMedieval and Early Modern Studies, Criticism, and Chaucer Review.

LESLIE LOCKETT is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where she teaches Old English, Medieval Latin, and manuscript studies. Her first book, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions, was awarded the 201 3 Sir Israel Gol-

lancz Prize from the British Academy. Her current projects include a new edition and study of the Old English Soliloquies and a history of medieval Latin retrograde verse, a playful type of poetry that remains metrically and syntactically viable when it is read backwards.

Contributors

| 297

KATHRYN L. LYNCH is the Bates/Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College, where she

is also the Dean of Faculty Affairs. She is the author of The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (1988) and of Chaucer’s Philosophical Vistons (2000). She is also the editor of Chaucer’s Cultural Geography (2002) and ofthe Norton Critical Edition of Chaucer’s Dream Visions and Other Poems (2007). Her essays on Chaucer, Shakespeare, cultural exchange, and dreams in medieval and renaissance literature have been

published in numerous journals including The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, JEGP, Speculum, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

FRED C. ROBINSON ts the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor Emeritus of English and a librarian of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University where he taught English philology and medieval literature since 1972. He is the author of, among other books and essays, The Editing of Old English (1977).

BONNIE WHEELER, Director of the Medieval Studies Program and Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, has edited, co-edited, and co-written thirteen

books, most recently The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of their Collected Correspondence and Related Writings (2009). She still serves on the Executive Board of

TEAMS, the Committee on Teaching the Middle Ages, which she founded. Founding editor of Arthuriana, she is also editor of peer-reviewed book series for Palgrave Macmillan including The New Middle Ages and Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. At present Wheeler is finishing a book on the “work” of medieval humiliation. R.F. YEAGER is Proféssor of English and Foreign Languages and chair of the department at the University of West Florida. He is President of the International John Gower Society, editor of JGN: The John Gower Newsletter, and has published widely on medieval English and European literatures. His special interests are Old English literature and language, the French of England, and the poetry of Chaucer and Gower. He has written and edited more than seventeen books and collections of essays, including John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (1990), A Concordance to the French Poetry and Prose ofJohn Gower (1997), and Who Murdered Chaucer?A Medieval Mystery (2003), with

Terry Jones, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor. He has edited and translated John Gower: The Minor Latin Works (2005) as well as a companion volume, John Gower: The French Balades (2011); also, with Brian W. Gastle, he has co-edited Approaches to

Teaching John Gower’s Poetry (2011) for the Modern Language Association.

Hoping for a small gust of wind at the Piazza del Campo in Siena,

Editors Bob Yeager, John Hill, and Bonnie Wheeler gather happily after they hatched the plan for this collection. An unsuspecting Chick in background. Photograph courtesy Sara Jane Moss

JOHN M. HILL teaches Anglo-Saxon literature

and fourteenth-century English poetry at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the author of Chaucerian Beltef (1991), The Cultural World in Beowulf (1995), The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic (2000), and The

Narrative Pulse ofBeowulf (2008). He has also edited Reconstructive Polyphony: Studies in the Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages, with Deborah Sinnreich-Levi (2000), On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and other Old English Poems (2010), and special

issues of The Heroic Age and Philological Quarterly.

BONNIE WHEELER is Director of the Medieval Studies Program and Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. She has edited, co-edited, and co-written thirteen books,

most recently The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of their Collected Correspondence and Related Writings (2009). She serves on the Executive Board of TEAMS, the Committee on

Teaching the Middle Ages, which she founded.

She is also founding editor of Arthuriana, and editor of peer-reviewed book series for Palgrave Macmillan including The New Middle Ages and — Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. R.F. YEAGER is Professor of English and Foreign Languages at the University of West Florida. He is editor of JGN: The John Gower Newsletter, and has

published widely on medieval English and European literatures. He has edited and translated John Gower: The Minor Latin Works (2005)

and a companion volume, John Gower: The French Balades (2011); with Brian W. Gastle, he has

co-edited Approaches to Teaching John Gower’s Poetry (2011).

COVER A poet, possibly Geoffrey Chaucer himself, declaims from a wooden pulpit in the frontispiece to Cambridge, Corpus Christi Library MS 6r, fol. 1v, a luxury edition of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, c. 1415-25. Courtesy of The Master of Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; reproduced by permission.

“

I have never met Howell Chickering, but I remember teaching myself Old English decades ago with the help of his dual-language edition of Beowulf. A much admired teacher and colleague, he has had a wide-reaching impact, and well deserves this Festschrift of essays in his honour. The contributors include an impressive range of scholars working in the field. Many of the essays in this volume focus on the aesthetic qualities of specific works of vernacular English poetry and prose. Some, like Chickering’s own papers, start with philological questions, others-circle around questions of form, and a handful of very successful essays tackle nineteenth- and twentiethcentury medievalism. The volume deserves a warm welcome, and should interest not only

students of Old and Middle English but also those keen to probe the limits of the ‘new formalism’ and to test the reach of aesthetic categories in the analysis of the literature of the middle ages. WILLIAM

ROBINS

University of Toronto

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