God's Patients : Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws [1 ed.] 9780268104474, 9780268104450

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God’s Patients

God’s Patients Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws

john bugbee

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bugbee, John, 1970– author. Title: God’s patients : Chaucer, agency, and the nature of laws / John Bugbee. Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018052876 (print) | LCCN 2018052958 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104474 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104481 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104450 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 026810445X (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Chaucer, Geoffrey, –1400—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR1924 (ebook) | LCC PR1924 .B777 2018 (print) | DDC 821/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052876

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parentibus meis sine quibus non

The destine, ministre general, That executeth in the world over al The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn, So strong it is that, though the world had sworn The contrarie of a thing by ye or nay, Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yere. —Knight’s Tale, 1663–69

The world can only be “consistent” without God. —Thomas Merton, “To Each His Darkness”

C o n t e n t s

Preface: A Foretaste of Two Philosophical Themes ix Acknowledgments

xix

List of Abbreviations xxi

Introduction: Passion as Theme and Method

1

PA RT 1 Act io n and Pas s i on

chapter one

Concerned with Constancy: The Clerk’s and Man of Law’s Tales chapter two

Hermeneutical Interlude: Chaucer, Gadamer, Boethius

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41

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Contents

chapter three

Bernard and Chaucer on Action and Passion 127 appendix to chapter three

Bernard, C. W. Bynum, and the Deep Roots of Paradox 148 chapter four

Holy Anomaly: The Second Nun’s Tale and Active Sanctity 151

PA RT 2 Wi ll an d L aw

chapter five

Law Gone Wrong: The Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales 213 chapter six

Bernard, Chaucer, and Life with the Law 248 chapter seven

Conclusion: The Union of the Themes and Its Implications 291

Notes

317

Bibliography 435 Index

463

P r e f a c e

A Foretaste of Two Philosophical Themes

part 1 A c t i o n a n d Pa s s i o n In 1958, dissatisfied with the cursory treatment his masterpiece Mimesis gave to the “poorest of the [literary] periods,” the early Middle Ages, Erich Auerbach published a kind of fragmentary supplement to the studies in the earlier book.1 It involved him in telling once again the story of sermo humilis, a peculiar merger of the most sublime subject-matters with the humblest forms of speech, which developed in Western literature, according to Auerbach, under the influence of the Christian Gospels. In the course of the retelling he found it useful to insert a ten-page excursus on a related historical phenomenon he calls “gloria passionis”—the paradoxical concept, deeply rooted in Christianity but largely foreign to the Greco-Roman component of Europe’s cultural origins, that suffering might somehow be celebrated, might even be a moment of great triumph. The word suffering here has the double meaning that is now familiar in English only from obsolete turns of phrase like “suffer the children,” but that stands out clearly in the Latin passio: to suffer can be to undergo pain, but also to undergo anything at all—to permit or allow an ix

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action to happen, or merely to be on the receiving end of it. The idea of glorying in suffering, on Auerbach’s account, was just as much a surprise under this wider meaning as under the narrow one: if it was odd to celebrate the experience of pain and defeat, it was also, and perhaps more fundamentally, odd to celebrate the experience of being-acted-on, of undergoing action, in a culture whose common sense generally suggested that it was better to do than to be done unto. That common sense has a long history. One critic of modern times suggests that it makes its literary debut in the eighth book of the Odyssey, where Odysseus entreats the poet Demodocus to follow his lay of the actions and sufferings of the Achaeans under the walls of Troy with an account of the successful end of the affair; the reason for the entreaty, according to Georgia Ronan Crampton, is that Odysseus is the hero of the latter story, and is indulging his “human preference for being an agent rather than a patient.”2 Another modern voice tells us that the same prejudice haunts theory at the other end of Western literature’s twenty-seven-hundred-year span: one of Jill Mann’s major works aims to correct the trouble that she says feminist literary critics, in particular, have had in reading Chaucer, because they too simply assume that action and passion are clearly divided and that action is always the desirable one of the pair.3 Auerbach’s short excursus gives samples of the opposition to this common sense from across the history of Christian theological writing, and also samples of some secular poets apparently influenced by that opposition. Arriving in the high Middle Ages, he illustrates by recourse to a suitably paradoxical (and appealingly gnomic) quotation from one of the twelfth century’s best-known religious writers, Bernard of Clairvaux, who asserts in a sermon “On the Passion of the Lord” that Jesus “both had in life a passive action, and underwent in death an active passion, while he worked salvation in the midst of the earth.”4 The last clause is, like so much in Bernard, a close paraphrase of scripture (Psalm 73 [74]:12), perhaps intended to suggest that both Christ’s three-year active ministry and his three-day passion and death—both in “the middle of the earth,” in very different senses—contributed to “working our salvation.” But it is the provocative assertion that Christ’s actions were somehow passive and his Passion somehow active that interests Auerbach. It suggests not only that it is possible and sometimes even needful to seek

Preface xi

out passivity, but also that the relations between passivity and activity can become surprisingly tangled, so tangled that we may not be able to classify a particular human being’s connection to a particular event as belonging unambiguously to either category. Bernard’s own interest in the question was by no means fleeting, as anyone who reads the remainder of the sermon will see. Practically all of its concluding quarter is arranged as a series of active-and-passive parallels: Father Adam left behind him two things, labor and sorrow—labor in action, sorrow in passion. Christ takes these two things into his hands—or rather hands himself over into their hands. He makes it possible to follow him through his fortitude (i.e., action) and through his similitude (to us, namely his susceptibility to suffering). We must direct our actions to justice and order our passions for the sake of justice. And so on. The two sentences that immediately follow Auerbach’s lapidary find contain a particularly concrete development of the active-passive theme: For which reason I will be mindful, as long as I exist, of those labors which [Christ] bore in preaching, those exhaustions in running to and fro, those temptations in fasting, those sleepless nights in praying, those tears in suffering with others. I will also call to mind his pains, clamorous revilings, spittings, cuffings, derisive gestures, upbraidings, nails, and things similar to these, which passed through him and came to pass against him in great abundance. (SBO 5:64)5 There is a division here that a quick reading might overlook but that is hard to miss in the context of the sermon: the first sentence deals primarily with what Christ did, the second with what was done to him. There is also a second subtlety: no sooner does Bernard create this division with his syntax than he muddies it with his choice of words. Christ “bore” his own labors—with a Latin word (pertulit) we could just as well translate “suffered.” His tears, listed among the actions, occur on the occasion of compatiendum—suffering-with. As for the passing-throughand-against-him of his sufferings, this attempts to render an unusual and difficult phrase centered on the word transire, a creature of very many meanings. It is suggestive for Bernard’s use of it that it can also take the essentially passive meaning “to be transformed,” and that Bernard in fact

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uses it that way a few sentences later. The final clause could therefore mean that Christ’s tribulations, spittings, upbraidings and the rest “were quite abundantly transformed” through and around him—giving his Passion a quite immediate active sense.6 It is a pity that Auerbach does not quote those two sentences: if he had, some stray late-medievalist reading the essay might have noticed that they had previously been borrowed by another attentive reader interested in human agency. Here is the Parson’s Tale: As seith Seint Bernard, “Whil that I lyve I shal have remembrance of the travailles that oure Lord Crist suffred in prechyng: / his werynesse in travaillyng, his temptaciouns whan he fasted, his longe wakynges whan he preyde, his teeres whan that he weep for pitee of good peple, / the wo and the shame and the filthe that men seyden to him, of the foule spittyng that men spitte in his face, of the bufettes that men yaven him, of the foule mowes, and of the repreves that men to hym seyden, / of the nayles with whiche he was nayled to the croys, and of al the remenant of his passioun that he suffred for my synnes, and no thyng for his gilt.” (256–59) The quotation is not a casual aside. It appears near the beginning of the “tale,” when Chaucer has just introduced the fifth of six reasons that “oghte moeve a man to contricioun,” the state that a large part of the Parson’s Tale aims to produce. The structure of six reasons for contrition, like most of the beginning of the tale, appears to be translated somewhat loosely from a widely distributed thirteenth-century penitential manual, variously called Summa de poenitentia or Summa casuum poenitentiae, by the Dominican Raymund of Pennaforte. This fifth reason, however— “remembrance of the passioun that oure Lord Jhesu Crist suffred for oure synnes” (255)—does not come from Pennaforte, and it is the only one of the six wholly lacking there.7 It is a substantial insertion, occupying twenty-eight of the tale’s long “lines,” and the quotation from Bernard (also lacking in Pennaforte) serves as a kind of centerpiece: it comes immediately at the start of the insertion, and later lines (269–73) appear to return to items from Bernard’s lists to add details and implications. We cannot, of course, be sure that Chaucer was not working from some yet-undiscovered missing link, perhaps a French translation of

Preface

xiii

Pennaforte, that already made the insertion. But—to quote the editors of the Riverside Chaucer (956B)—“it is equally possible to think that Chaucer himself made a purposeful compilation and translation from divers sources.” The possibility alone is enough to justify our attention. If the insertion is Chaucer’s own, it means that, working for once in a patently theological vein, he saw fit to add the suffering of God to a list of the most important things for ordinary people to meditate upon. And it demonstrates his above-mentioned interest in the way strict separations between action and passion often collapse, because it also means that he chose to lead off his consideration of God’s suffering with a quotation falling just one sentence away from, and continuing the thought of, the most concentrated statement one could find of a certain divine scrambling of the categories of action and passion.8

part 2 Wi l l a n d L aw “Biheste is dette,” reads a well-known line from the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, offering to listeners real and fictional a fruitful way to think about promises: they are debts held by the person to whom the promise is made. The surrounding lines extend the idea a bit with a number of redescriptions of the pilgrims’ promise to tell stories: it is a forward or agreement (34, 40); it is now the devoir of each pilgrim (38); and it is the lawe that each pilgrim gives to all the others, which the giver also should fulfill (43–44). All these things, these expectations facing Chaucer’s pilgrims, are debts. Contractual obligation, however, is not the only familiar phenomenon that Chaucer’s contemporaries would have heard described in the language of “dette.” The religious tradition they knew best used the word in its most famous prayer to draw attention to a different kind of binding and loosing. “Dismiss for us our debts just as we too have dismissed [debts] for our debtors,” reads Matthew’s version of the Pater noster, and the verses that follow the prayer make clear what kind of debt is primarily intended: “For if you dismiss for people their sins,” says Jesus, “your heavenly father will dismiss for you your offenses; but if you do not dismiss [them] for people, neither will your father dismiss your

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sins.” For a very long time, it seems, one of the traditions that shaped Europe has suggested that there is something about the result of sin that is like the result of a contract—some sort of implied “ought” in the world that waits, burdensome, until it is satisfied or dismissed.9 And there is yet a third fundamental realm where Western culture applies the notion of debt metaphorically—indeed dead-metaphorically, so that even those who use the relevant words generally overlook what they once meant. In the study of formal logic there appear lawes of another sort: conditional statements that tell what consequence attends on a set of circumstances. “If A, then B” is a form of thought of extremely wide application: it is, for instance, the form most usually imagined for the laws of nature sought by the high-modern natural sciences. Grammarians and logicians have a specialized vocabulary for the parts of the conditional: A, the antecedent or protasis, implies B, the consequent or apodosis. The etymologies contain the information we want. A protasis is, literally, a prearrangement, sharing a root with syntax and taxonomy; in practice it was once the offer made in a contract: “I will serve you for seven years,” say. The apodosis is, just as literally, a givingaway or giving back: “You will give me your daughter in marriage.” Our very language suggests that every conditional statement is a kind of contract, described originally in the concrete vocabulary of exchange, and therefore having something in common with bihest, with forward, with (human) law, and apparently with sin. These forms have enough in common, in fact, to make it useful to group them under a single general concept of law—placing the word in italics, when necessary, to distinguish the general concept from the particular examples of it (the positive law of the courts, the physical law of the scientists, the “natural law” of moral theology) that bear the same name. The idea of considering all these logical and metaphysical structures under the same general category will show itself fruitful below, especially in part 2, but it does not originate with me. It can be found in numerous parts of the literary and philosophical landscape: for example, in an essay on law by Owen Barfield, who informs the reader that “the nature of law, as law, is the same, whether it be moral, or logical, or municipal.”10 For a medieval instance, we have this voucher from Thomist commentator Cornelius Ernst: “‘Law’ for St. Thomas bears a wider range of senses than we ordinarily allow it; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that

Preface xv

we do not try to unify the different senses of the word as St. Thomas did, but are content to let it have its discriminated senses in contexts felt to be simply diverse.”11 But probably the most thorough attempt to think about law-in-general, and certainly the attempt that most deeply underlies this book, appears in the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw the kind of regularity here called law (which he most often called simply “thirdness,” sometimes “representation”) as an enduring feature of reality, one of three fundamental categories into which both thought and nature are divided.12 What could such abstract maneuvering possibly have to do with us—that is, with a pending investigation into the categories of action and passion (and their muddying) in a medieval poet? It is one of the tasks of the book to demonstrate, across the length of its whole argument, that the answer is “nearly everything.” The connection starts with a simple question about law. Most, if not all, sorts of law—physical, moral, juridical—are things with which a human will can come into very intimate contact. How does that contact proceed? What is, and what should be, the relationship between a human will and a law that claims to bind it? This is merely a slightly more abstract form of a question whose concrete varieties will be abundantly familiar to readers of medieval literature: How should human wills react to oaths? To contracts? To the edicts of political authorities? The Franklin’s and the Physician’s tales entirely revolve around such questions, and so many more of Chaucer’s poems involve them as a major component (the Wife of Bath’s, Friar’s, Summoner’s, Shipman’s, and Pardoner’s tales at the very least) as to suggest a poet no less interested in these questions than in questions about action and passion. If we extend the list a bit and notice that the Clerk’s and Knight’s tales too are deeply concerned with the fulfillment or nonfulfillment of promises, we may begin to suspect that the two groups of questions are connected. This should be no surprise, as both themes concern the confrontation between a human will and some more or less external reality: one asks how my will should interact with a law, while the other, the question of passion and action, usually concerns how my will should interact with the will of another. As the two questions develop, each in its own part of the book, they will show increasing similarity and increasing interrelatedness, and it will become

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more and more plausible that a given thinker’s answer to one question will also indicate his or her answer to the other. By the concluding chapter, it will be possible to add to that inductive evidence some deductive reasons that make the correlation appear not fortuitous, but necessary—thus suggesting that the two questions are, at some deep level, one. Why such an abstract preamble to a book on Chaucer? Because the book’s wager is that close attention to the two sets of questions just described will change how we think—not only about the particular poems considered below, nor even only about Chaucer’s corpus as a whole, but about nearly all the best-known literature of the high and late Middle Ages. That is partly because the questions are so pervasive, but also because the standard answers given to them have changed drastically in the centuries since Chaucer, so drastically that the responses that leap out, over and over, from both the poetic and theological writings of the earlier age strike many modern hearers as simple nonsense, if indeed they are able to register that anything is being said at all. But the wide agreement that this book tries to document among the responses of the earlier age suggests that to many, and probably most, Europeans of the time they were not nonsense, but common sense. Quite probably they were, like the very different common sense of our age, accepted so automatically that a person holding them would frequently be unaware of what he or she held. Such fundamental beliefs are, however, far from ineffective: and one effect of our own has often been to render incomprehensible, repulsive, or simply boring the writings that another age found full of life and insight. For such reasons it might not be too much to expect that a careful encounter with these two themes could change not only how we think about medieval literature but to some extent also simply how we think. Such a thing may happen when we discover in ourselves a set of beliefs that we had not previously known were there—when an encounter with a clashing set forces us to see our own for the first time. The resulting meltdown in worldview may lead the contents of our beliefs to change; but even if it does not, it may force us to acknowledge our beliefs’ rival siblings, to recognize that ours constitute one of a range of possible responses to a question rather than simply showing forth the way things are. And even that limited change may have lasting effects on thought and action.

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xvii

A thoroughgoing change in basic concepts will be more likely after a thorough engagement with the foreign world that serves as midwife; thus most of this book’s chapters are immersive studies of Chaucer’s poems and of the theological ideas most likely to have influenced him. The work is introduced, however, by a deeper look at the first of the two philosophical themes, accompanied by an initial pass at the largely forgotten set of ideas that underlies the once-standard answers to both.

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

A book that devotes more than half its length to something called “cooperative agency” would be making a strange start if it omitted mention of cooperators. That is all the more true where, as here, the book casts itself as making available knowledge that was once so commonly held as to be difficult or impossible to credit to a particular author; the writer of such a book has had as good a chance as anyone to appreciate how much he owes to those who have gone before. Many of their names he may not even know—and so much the better, if other circumstances are right, for the claim to be putting on offer material that for a long time was disseminated by the medium of a “tradition.” The book does, of course, also owe its existence to a smaller number of authors whose names I do know, and a still smaller number whose writings have shaped not only the book but its author. But all those names will be easy enough to find in the notes, epigraphs, and bibliography that follow. There are also thanks to be given to institutions whose support (and patience) allowed the book to deepen its roots and grow to its present state. At various widely separated stages, the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund, the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge, Wolfson College in the same university, and the Department of English at the University of Virginia all extended aid that made the work vastly xix

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Acknowledgments

more pleasant, and the result better, than it would have been otherwise. Thanks of a different kind to the publishing house of Rowman and Littlefield, which has kindly extended permission for the reuse, in chapter 5, of material from my article “Solving Dorigen’s Trilemma: Oath and Law in the Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales,” Medievalia et Humanistica 36 (2010): 49–76. Bob Banning and Alfred DeStefano did yeomen’s work on the index, copyediting, and other Last Things. A more personal debt of gratitude extends to all the friends, colleagues, students, and mentors with whom I have discussed these ideas in person, who have suggested sources or sent me their own writings on related topics, and who have in many cases also given the great gift that every academic author hopes to receive: a careful reading. As the project has been years in the making, there is no doubt that any list I can produce will accidentally omit some of these donors; apologies all round for any such lapses. But thanks be given (in no order but the effectively random one of the alphabet) to David Aers, Jason Aleksander, DeVan Ard, Silvianne Aspray, Larry Bouchard, Daniel DeHaan, Georgianna Donavin, Robin Field, Elizabeth Fowler, Richard Firth Green, Evan King, Tom Luongo, Ryan McDermott, John Milbank, Heather Morton, Barbara Newman, Jim Nohrnberg, Peter Ochs, Sherry Reames, Elizabeth Robertson, Mark Ryan, A. C. Spearing, Zach Stone, and Robert Wilken. Many of those named may, of course, find themselves disagreeing with some of the results that follow: special thanks in those cases for the commitment to collegiality that allows the discussion to proceed with a minimum of rancor. Finally, and perhaps most deeply of all, thanks to the pair on the receiving end of the book’s dedication, a declaration true in more ways than they are likely to have noticed.

A b b r e v i a t i o n s

CP

Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers

DCD

Augustine, De civitate Dei [The City of God]

DDD

Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Deo [On Loving God]

DGLA

Bernard of Clairvaux, De gratia et libero arbitrio [On Grace and Free Choice]

DPD

Bernard of Clairvaux, De praecepto et dispensatione [On Precept and Dispensation]

EETS

Early English Text Society

HMIV

Bernard of Clairvaux, De passione domini [On the Passion of the Lord (sermon for the fourth day of Holy Week)]

PG

Patrologia Graeca. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–86.

PL

Patrologia Latina. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844–64. xxi

xxii

Abbreviations

RR

Guillaume de Lorris / Jean de Meun, Roman de la rose [Romance of the Rose]

SABM

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in assumptione beatae Mariae [Sermons for the Assumption of Blessed Mary]

SBO

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi opera

SDE

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in dedicatione ecclesiae [Sermons for the Dedication of a Church]

SDOA

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in dominica infra octavam assumptionis [Sermon for Sunday in the Octave of Assumption]

SNBM

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in nativitate beatae Mariae (“De aquaeductu”) [Sermon for the Nativity of Blessed Mary (“On the Aqueduct”)]

ST

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae

Introduction Passion as Theme and Method

Passivity has a bad name. First of all in the usual sense of the phrase: people speak badly of it. To any reader who doubts the fact, the author would like to recommend the following exercise. Find an audience well acquainted with an admired literary character whose persona includes a sizable dose of receptivity, a capacity for listening, a willingness to change his or her actions and habits in response to facts or motives that come in from the world outside. Deliver to said audience some form of academic presentation that describes the beloved character as “passive.” Record the results for posterity. Writing this book has involved many iterations of the experiment in a variety of settings, with an impressive degree of consistency among the results. One version happened, for example, at a presentation about Chaucer to the English faculty of an elite liberal arts college, from among whom a voice rose in perhaps the most insistent protest the project has generated: “You cannot,” said the voice, “possibly mean to call Custance [the protagonist of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale] passive. Look at how strong she is, all that she accomplishes. This is not a 1

2

God’s Patients

passive person; you need another word.” In vain did I appeal to various kinds of evidence that the power at work in Custance came to her from without, and in vain point out that the phrase repeated so often as to become almost a tagline for the poem—ay welcom be thy sonde—directly invites divine providence to take control of the situation in whatever way it chooses. On another occasion, a quite different audience— undergraduates studying Chaucer at a small Catholic college—raised what was probably the second-most-insistent protest the project has generated: they objected to the application of the same accursed word to the Virgin Mary. In vain did I point out that the tradition has nearly unanimously spoken of her receptivity, that she is everywhere associated with the virtue of humility, and that her most famous and essential utterance, her acceptance of the angelic proposal that she should become Jesus’ mother (Luke 1:38), is delivered in the passive voice—in the translation Chaucer would have known, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, “May it be done to me according to your word.” Neither protestor was proposing an account that conflicted with mine of what happened to, around, and by the action of the person under discussion. The disagreements were not, in other words, fundamentally about those two persons. They were fundamentally about the word passive. To my mind this is because passivity has a bad name in a second sense also: it is a name that has “gone bad,” that no longer does the work it once did. In modern speech the word points not to its etymological meaning but to something else: to a stance toward the world that is diffident, washed-out, vapid, languid, effete, uncaring, apathetic (!), ineffective, and so on; the stance of one who is a victim, and perhaps, still worse, a victim somewhat responsible for his or her own victimization. It is not particularly difficult to see why partisans of a fictional (or real) character do not want to see the word applied—and, understandably, want it still less if the character is a woman. The explicit association of women with passivity and men with activity in European thought reaches back at least to the time of Aristotle, and it would be optimistic to suppose that it is no longer with us. And, of course, it is often only a small step to a further association of those two dyads with the even more fundamental one of “bad” and “good.” But the virtually automatic reaction against passivity has some regrettable results in the linguistic, and I think also in the epistemo-

Introduction 3

logical, sphere: for the category of passivity does have some legitimate work to do, and it need not be negative work. At least that is part of the claim that this book will make, over and over, across almost its entire length. Obviously passive, in its most etymologically grounded acceptation, means simply “being on the receiving end of an action,” and there is no clear and forcing reason why that reception should imply inferiority to the “agent” on the other end: what if the verb in question is to praise? In practice, however, ordinary language has carried the word into the character-defaming regions just mentioned. And while it is generally more interesting to argue about things than about their names, in this case there is reason to pause over a word, to regret the difficulty our languages have in hearing passive as a morally neutral descriptor.1 Its acquisition of a negative valence has, I suspect, not happened at random; there is a pattern to it that can be understood. The feature of the word’s current meaning that makes it so unpalatable seems to be a certain implication of universality. That is, to note a person’s passivity is ordinarily to be heard to say (whether one meant to say it or not) that that unfortunate character is always and only passive. It is as if the language, or its users, have difficulty imagining a passivity that is temporary or nuanced. But of course both things are possible. Temporary is easier to see: one can clearly be on the receiving end of action at one moment and dishing it out the next, so that the word passive can describe a single event rather than a character trait. How passivity can be nuanced is more complicated and more interesting; and it is the subject of at least half of this book. The essential idea to consider is that it may be possible not merely to be passive and then active in succession, but also to be passive and active simultaneously, even with respect to the same action. The claim may well seem nonsensical, or at least paradoxical. It will be enough at this point if the reader is willing merely to take it as a claim, or hypothesis, to be considered further. This book is meant to develop the hypothesis, in at least three ways. First, by expounding what it could possibly mean—especially by considering its appearance in two writers who have (I will argue) subscribed to particular forms of it: Geoffrey Chaucer and Bernard of Clairvaux. The book is, second, an exercise in working out the consequences of the hypothesis —what might follow if it is true, what, in particular, would change in our interpretation of

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Chaucer’s poems?—so that, in the hypothetico-deductive fashion characteristic of the modern natural sciences, plausible and fruitful consequences will strengthen our tendency to believe in the hypothesis that gave rise to them. A last and least mode of consideration—least prevalent, that is, in the book as a whole, but most important to spend a few moments with here—will involve some antecedent, as opposed to consequent, reasons to accept the hypothesis. These are not strong enough to force its acceptance; to say that would be to say that we could logically deduce the existence of a mixed active-and-passive state. But they may fall short of deduction and still, with luck, be strong enough to encourage the reader to have a go at the rest of the book. What are these antecedent reasons? One set is an appeal to common human experience. Regardless of the paradoxical sound of the hypothesis when stated outright, I would wager that most readers can on reflection identify some moments in their own past that at least roughly fit what it describes. One such case in my own mind is that of a friend who, after a long spell as a monolingual English speaker, suddenly immersed himself full-time in a world that ran on a different language (Czech, as it happens; he had gone to live in Br’no). When I saw him for the first time four or five months after arrival, he commented that the best thing about learning the language had been those mysterious moments, often late at night (and possibly facilitated by inculturation into the local fondness for fermented barley and hops), when a complicated Czech sentence would come out of his mouth all in a rush, prompting in him most immediately a reaction not of pride but of shock: in his words, “Whoa, where did that come from?” Learning to play a musical instrument, or for that matter to ice-skate or ski, can offer similar moments. It seems to me difficult to describe the lead character in such moments as not being active: some insightful Czech sentence (or graceful glissando or impressively upright and stable passage from top to bottom of a slope) really did issue forth from his person. But at the same time the “agent” in such settings has a strong sense that it is in some sense not “him” or “her” that is acting; she has spoken idioms she did not know she knew, used muscles she did not know she could control; and to that degree at least she is passive before the unfolding event, receiving the sentence or the A-major run just as much as the other listeners are. And therefore it seems at least provisionally useful to describe the person as being simultaneously active and passive.

Introduction 5

The instances of mixed passion-and-action central to this book appear in other contexts (and other centuries) and will be analyzed in quite a bit more detail; the question of their similarity to the instances just described is open for debate. But these more familiar instances may serve as at least a first approximation to what the paradox could mean; and they also offer some sense of cases in which to be “passive” is not to be afflicted with lassitude and weakness, but quite the reverse.2

Theological Proem: The Contemplative Ideal This is a book about a lost ideal. It is about a group of people who believed not only that a simultaneously passive-and-active state is possible but that it is necessary. Not always in the sense of logical or factual necessity, of being unavoidable—although arguments for that claim will appear also, especially in the last two chapters. Even more clearly, though, the group held a passive-and-active state to be what we might call morally necessary: required, that is, if a human is to be (and do) the best she or he possibly can. So far from finding the passive-and-active state an inferior one or a compromise tainted by its passive elements, they understood it as the pinnacle of human existence. The main title of this book indicates the kind of passivity that they had primarily in mind: passivity, or receptivity, before a divine will. Thus the philosophical question of action and passion appeared for them as the more particular, and more theological, question of the relations between an active human will and a divine will that was understood as issuing from beyond the human self, even if discovered within it; and thus the possibility of combining action with passion in the aforesaid “ideal” meant acting with an agency or a power that was simultaneously one’s own and also, somehow, God’s. Part 1 of this book is an attempt to encounter that ideal in situ. First of all in Chaucer’s poems: especially in the Man of Law’s Tale, which seems to me a powerful embodiment of the ideal; in the Clerk’s, where the treatment of human and divine agency at first looks similar but emerges, on closer reading, as sharply opposed; and in the Second Nun’s, where the ideal is conspicuous by what is, given the hagiographical context, its nearly inexplicable absence. Situated among those efforts, also in part 1, are detailed expositions of the same ideal of conduct as it appears in theo-

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God’s Patients

logical ideas with which Chaucer certainly had contact, ideas here drawn primarily though not exclusively from the writing of Bernard of Clairvaux. The second part of the book then takes up what is, on the face of it, a second question, connected to a different dyad: the question of the relationship between a human will and any law (in the broad sense described in the preface) that lays claim to govern it. Here too the investigation turns up a possibility that is surprising or impossible at first look but that, it will emerge, was once asserted as an ideal of human conduct; and once again it is a kind of coincidentia oppositorum, the possibility of a law that acts rather like a will, and of a will that loves, and in some way becomes one with, a law. Here the main tales considered, the Franklin’s and Physician’s, put the ideal on display almost entirely by negation, showing wills in fierce competition with (and misunderstanding of) the relevant laws; but they do so, chapter 5 will argue, in ways that prod the reader into thinking about the better relationships with law that should have been. The following chapter goes on to propose that better relationships should involve not only the ability to break bad laws (as Chaucer’s characters fail to do) but the ability to affirm, love, and ultimately merge with good ones —again drawing on theological writers to show that such an ideal was concretely recommended in the “real world” and is not just a figment of a fevered reader’s brain. Once again Bernard of Clairvaux serves, for reasons considered later in this chapter, as the leading source. That brief sketch has not yet explained why it is possible to speak of one ideal rather than two. The most adequate explanation I can offer does not appear here, but arises across the course of the seven chapters that follow—where it becomes steadily more clear that the two themes are linked by bonds difficult to dissolve, so that the answers a given author formulates for one set of questions will virtually dictate his or her responses to the other set, and so that what first appears as two separate ideals increasingly seems a unified stance. Because that stance is best understood by beginning with the two ostensibly separate questions — and because those questions are best encountered as they are concretely embodied in medieval literature and theology—the chapters to follow are written in a bottom-up style, plunging into the poetry in one chapter and the theology in the next, and usually advancing general claims only

Introduction 7

as they emerge from those close readings. Thus it is entirely possible to begin reading where the author began writing, with chapter 1; and readers eager to get their hands into the literary and theological soil that makes up the bulk of the book are heartily encouraged to do just that, saving the rest of this introduction for later. Its chief remaining task is to offer a sort of warrant for the book’s overarching method: for the usefulness and validity of having a look at the Canterbury Tales through the lenses of these two philosophical themes, and alongside these medieval theological writers. For some readers it will be enough to think of the method as hypothetico-deductive, of its warrant as a simple matter of consequent justification: accept provisionally the possibility that using these lenses and reading these fellow travelers will be a fruitful thing to do, and dive in; the ensuing journey should, I hope, both repay and justify the initial trust. But readers who would like a longer look under the hood, with more advance explanation, can find it by reading on here, where three sections of explicit methodological reflection (and one taking note of related studies) will follow a slightly more expansive attempt to introduce the contemplative ideal and its “lostness.” What more, then, can we know about this lost ideal—this notion (to approach via the action-and-passion question) of a human action so closely attuned to a divine will that it can equally well be described as divine action? First of all, we can know that the ideal comes in many varieties. In a relatively weak instance, for example, the human agent might receive from supernatural forces only the idea of the act to be performed; in a stronger case, the background conditions or the personal power necessary to carry it through; and in a still stronger case, the ability even to will to perform the act. The cases that will be most enlightening here—because furthest from the “common sense” of our culture—are those in which the receptivity is not like that of a quarterback who is handed the football that empowers him to complete a pass; nor even quite that of a teacher who can transmit some piece of understanding or way of life to her students only because she has previously been shaped in the same way. It is, instead, a belief that a transcendent God, transcendence notwithstanding, can somehow be present and active “in” me in real time, “doing” my deeds in such a way that I could not possibly do them without that presence—but also in such a way that they remain “my” acts as well as God’s.3

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God’s Patients

It has a hundred names —even counting only the ones given it in Christianity, for obvious reasons the tradition to be considered most in a book on medieval Europe. (There will be, however, occasion for brief nods to similar ideas in Judaism, Hinduism, and classical Taoism; they can certainly be found in Islam as well.) It is called “mysticism.” It is called “acting in the Spirit.” It seems to be closely tied to what the Eastern Christian churches (along with some in the Latin West) call “divinization” or “deification” or “theosis.” From an abstract point of view outside these traditions, it might sound oddly akin to what is called “possession”—except that it comes with the claim, better evaluated after the following chapters’ detailed presentation, that it does not involve the suppression or destruction of the human agent, but her or his elevation to the most fully active state possible. In this book also a variety of names will appear as we meet with the ideal from different angles. Some are borrowed from traditional sources: cooperari and cooperatio are favorites among Latin theologians, rendered here by talk of “divine-human cooperation”; recent theology sometimes uses “double agency” for the same idea. The Latin writers were in turn translating the συνεργειν (synergein) of the Greek New Testament, the root of our word “synergy.” A few times I have borrowed the metaphor of marriage, used in the Pauline corpus and by several Hebrew prophets, especially Hosea, to describe a divine-human relationship. I also call the active-andpassive state a “contemplative ideal,” because in Christian tradition the state of prayer called contemplation, involving some sort of human participation in the life of God, is frequently described as just such a combination of passion and action.4 A few names have been invented for this study, or rather have emerged from it, most notably “conjoint action,” as a general term for action in which two agents work in some sense as one. It would be wise to begin from the assumption that none of these labels is adequate to its intended “object,” and that short attempts at description like the ones a few paragraphs above also fall short. In fact, just about all the numerous descriptions with which one might experiment seem in danger of misleading in one way or another—not entirely surprisingly, given the nature of the object being hunted. This difficulty does not mean, however, that it is impossible to say anything useful about the ideal, nor that the writers who hold to it have no way of dis-

Introduction 9

tinguishing what they find to be good and bad, accurate and inaccurate, representations of it. In other words, the apparent impossibility of producing a definition to an arbitrary degree of clarity and determinateness does not imply that “anything goes.” This book, accordingly, aims for a via media. There are certainly many places where it brings to light (usually from within one of Chaucer’s created worlds) a way of action that does not match the ideal, thus demonstrating that the ideal is precise enough to have boundaries. On the other hand, in recognition of the occasional usefulness of imprecision, I have allowed myself more flexibility with terms than would be helpful in, say, a book of formal logic, or even in a full-length history of mysticism.5 Thus for the ideal itself, at least in first approximation. But I have also called it a lost ideal. The cooperative or contemplative ideal under discussion seems to have been, during a long period in the history of “the West,” an intellectual commonplace so widely accepted that many writers simply assumed it rather than arguing for it; but that period has not persisted into the present. Confronted by such an apparently stark reversal, one can hardly help wanting to know more about what, precisely, the loss of the ideal consists in, and if possible about what caused it. These questions, especially the latter, involve stepping from the relatively stable ground of literary and doctrinal study to the somewhat more dangerous terrain of intellectual history. And clearly they are questions large enough to require a book-length study themselves. Nonetheless, because this book opens onto, and is to some extent inspired by, the question of what has changed and why, there should be space for at least a few gestures toward answers —some here, and a few more in the book’s closing pages. The most basic suggestion as to what has changed begins from the observation, made several times in what follows, that the intended object or audience of the cooperative ideal was frequently everyone— or at least everyone who has entered on the “way” called Christianity. The notion that it is somehow possible to join one’s will to a divine will was not, for example, consistently reserved to Christ alone; nor, as far as one can judge from the writings used as evidence here, to an elite corps of saints or spiritual adepts; nor even to monks, nuns, and other explicitly professed religious. It was often discussed in terms suggesting that the writer thinks of it as the requisite way to “salvation,” if not

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salvation’s very definition. Thus the notion at one time appeared, or at least hovered in the background, wherever there was thinking about the relationship between creator and creation, or about the final goal of human life, or about the nature of human action at its best—which is to say that, at least in medieval Europe, it appeared almost everywhere. There seem to be two reasons that this is no longer so clearly the case. The first is the extremely obvious one that European culture is no longer predominantly Christian—at least in the simple sense that it is no longer true, as it was in the high and late Middle Ages, that the majority of the population, including a majority of those whom a cursory glance would identify as political and economic elites, profess the religion. A portion of the change has gone in the direction of other “world religions,” most of which have some sympathy with something like this cooperative ideal; but much more of it has gone in the direction of a worldview that sees very little of the real in God-talk, and therefore finds talk of “salvation” or a “creator,” let alone talk of divinehuman cooperation, at best metaphorical and at worst meaningless or even pernicious. More interesting, though much harder to handle competently in a short space, is another reason for the ideal’s loss, one that has happened within the Christian tradition itself. Here it is not so much a matter of the ideal’s total disappearance as of its sequestration. In our time “mysticism,” if we may thus label a concern with the possibility of union with God, is often thought of, even among practitioners of traditional religions, as a specialized area of interest, the territory of those few people possessed of a special call to it. But this is a more or less recent development; indeed even the isolation of that meaning of the word is a relatively recent development, one which by and large had not yet taken place in the centuries this book will study. In those centuries the word mystical—that is, Latin mysticus and its vernacular equivalents —did exist, but still referred primarily, as it had for ancient Christians, to a way of reading texts, namely by seeking one of the “spiritual senses” rather than remaining only with the literal.6 The absence (or in any event the scarcity) of the modern meaning does not, of course, indicate that the ideas of divine-human union and cooperation were themselves absent; below we will see many premodern examples, some medieval, some as old as the New Testament, some still older. The case was more

Introduction 11

likely quite the reverse: that sense of the word was not much needed, not because its object was nowhere, but because it was almost everywhere. Where there is little notion of some other branch of Christianity that is not (what we would call) “mystical,” there is little need for a special word or concept for the branch that is. Thus the invention of something called “mysticism” as a mysterious, potentially dangerous, and largely optional subphenomenon reserved for an elite seems — again with the caveat that much historical work would be necessary for confirmation—to be roughly coterminous with a loss of power and general currency on the part of “mystical” ideas. This withdrawal, moreover, appears to be more or less contemporary with the transition between the periods we call “medieval” and “modern”: to give it a good wide margin, let us say that before 1250 the ideal of divine-human cooperation is still in full flower, and before 1400 it is still the frequent victor among a few competitors; while after, say, 1600 it seems to be losing ground rapidly, having to fight for a hearing outside protected religious contexts.7 At any rate, whatever the source and the details of the ideal’s loss, the fact is that a way of thinking once pervasive and familiar has ceased to be so. It is a fact of great immediate relevance for the understanding of medieval literature, and of Chaucer in particular. The reason, of course, is first of all that Chaucer’s works are shaped at a deep level by the presence of the ideal—or so it will be a major task of this book to demonstrate, by an argument that stretches across nearly its whole length. But equally important is a look at what has happened on the other side of the change: for the mere fact of being “modern” means that modern critics by and large have not been shaped by ideas of divine-human cooperation. A challenging clash of presuppositions follows, and the result has often been the production of wildly disparate ideas about Chaucer’s characters, because a reader who has no notion of the possibility of an action that is simultaneously human and divine (or who has encountered the possibility but rejected it) will, on reading of an action intended to be just that, tend to classify it as one or the other. By the end of chapter 1 some real-world cases will have begun to appear: critics who treat the combined action-and-passion of Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale, for instance, as a matter either of her own uncomplicated activity (and so speak of her “self-reliance”) or

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of pure passivity in the face of others’ agency (and so speak of her “masochism”). Faced by such a deep and seemingly intractable interpretive divide, a reader of the poems may reasonably ask how to fix it—a demand that opens very quickly onto the theoretical question of how best to read texts written under a set of presuppositions different from one’s own. An introduction is not the place to attempt to answer such a fundamental question; it is best put aside until a “hermeneutical interlude” (ch. 2) can turn to it in earnest, using the chapter’s worth of concrete readings that precedes as grist for the mill of secondary reflection. Here, however, it is at least possible to answer the more limited question of what the broad shape of the inquiry will be. If our goal is greater understanding of a text with unfamiliar presuppositions, what sort of things should we look at? A reasonable first step would seem to be learning quite a lot about the “foreign” presuppositions themselves, and about how they differ from the reader’s own. The interlacing of literary and theological study in what follows essentially represents a twofold approach to that learning, an approach that divides the book’s chapters rather neatly in half. The first, the fifth, and half of the fourth chapter are organized primarily around close readings of Chaucer’s poetry, often alongside close attention to his literary sources. Since the entire inquiry follows the two philosophical themes, action-and-passion and will-and-law, as its guiding threads, these literary sections also make philosophical and theological inferences, and they draw at times on primary sources from those two fields; but their main matter is Chaucer. Each such unit is then followed by another that reverses the priorities: the third, sixth, and second half of the fourth chapter all look primarily at medieval theological and philosophical sources, putting on display the parallels between what appears explicitly in that material and what has just been found present in more subterranean fashion in Chaucer’s poems. And just as the more literary chapters turn to philosophical and theological texts, so do the theological chapters frequently refer back to Chaucer’s poems to confirm or deepen the understanding of what was discovered there; the experience of reading is meant to be one of seamless flow rather than of arbitrary alternation. Where in particular, though, should one turn in order to learn about the theological and philosophical presuppositions most likely to

Introduction 13

have shaped Chaucer’s thought? On many matters the span of possible opinion in the late fourteenth century—and for that matter throughout the Middle Ages —was wide, and any selection risks the charge of arbitrariness: even the presence of an idea in such weighty authorities as Augustine, Boethius, or Aquinas by no means ensures that a freethinking poet of many centuries later would agree.8 The safest and most illuminating strategy for this project has seemed to be a search for something approaching theological commonplaces of the day—ways of thought that appear to have been so pervasively present that any theologically literate layman would have found them almost impossible to avoid. I have tried to track down such commonplaces in two ways. One approach, less apparent than the other on the surface of the final product, has been a reliance on standard works of intellectual history. On the question of action and passion, for reasons laid out below, this has primarily meant historians of monastic theology like Bernard McGinn and Jean Leclercq. On will and law, I have looked to a different set of historians concerned with issues touching divine will, voluntarism, and (though the term must be handled carefully) nominalism: William Courtenay, Heiko Oberman, Francis Oakley, Berndt Hamm, and Eugenio Randi are among the leading figures there.9 The second and more evident approach has been to expound commonplaces of the Christian intellectual tradition directly from one or another of its best-known participants, cross-checking from time to time with other influential figures, and with secondary writings, to be sure that the ideas turned up in this way are in fact common property. And though the book draws in passing on a good number of such figures, I have chosen to rely on one more than all the rest combined— one high-medieval figure who is especially well placed to serve as something like the anthropologist’s “informant” who discloses information about his “culture” or tradition of thought. His fitness for the job is clear not just from the directness and power with which he approaches the book’s two major themes but from the authority, wide circulation, and longevity of his writings: he seems to have been read, in whole and partwise, much more widely than later figures like Thomas Bradwardine and Robert Holcot, and even more than the thinkers like Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham who come immediately to modern minds when medieval theology is mentioned. This is Bernard of Clairvaux; and though his role as a witness to major currents

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of Christian tradition does not begin in earnest until chapter 3, it is a role central to the book. Hence it will be worth spending a few moments here to discover why he is so well suited for it.

Method, Part 1: Why Bernard? Having died in 1153, he seems on the face of it a strange choice. If we are seeking information about the theology of the late fourteenth century, should we not choose writers closer at hand? Bradwardine or Holcot, for example; not only did these men live closer to our target era by nearly two centuries: they were also English; they were certainly important in their time, even if studied today only by historians of theology; and at least by late in his life Chaucer had some awareness of the work of each.10 They also wrote at length on the two themes central to this book. Nonetheless, on most issues Bernard is a better choice as a representative of the theology most likely to have shaped Chaucer’s thinking at a deep level. This is true for at least two reasons. First of all, there is the question of Bernard’s influence on the theology, and indeed the broader religious consciousness, of the late fourteenth century. He has a unique place in the culture of the high and late Middle Ages, and today’s scholars seem agreed that the practical effect of his writings there is difficult to overestimate. One need only open at random a modern biography or introduction to be regaled with statements of his impact. Bernard McGinn writes in what will doubtless remain for decades the standard history of Europe’s Christian mysticism that “No mystic of the whole Middle Ages was more read and more often cited than the abbot of Clairvaux.”11 Jean Leclercq leans on material evidence: “More than 1,500 manuscripts of Bernard’s works have survived . . . and nearly half of these date from his own time. This high figure seems to constitute a unique case in literary history.”12 Others take a summary approach: “By the end of the twelfth century, then, Bernard had become part of the climate. . . . By the time [the early-thirteenthcentury Ancrene Wisse, which names Bernard and shows his influence] was written, the abbot of Clairvaux was indeed wellknown [sic] and loved, both by people who had Latin and those who did not, he was part of the spiritual landscape.”13 The influence was not only wide, but deeply

Introduction 15

felt: several medieval writers explicitly placed Bernard’s works on a par with those of Origen and Gregory the Great; John of Salisbury, Leclercq relates later in the book just mentioned, “said that the Holy Spirit had spoken through the mouth of Bernard.”14 Excerpts from his writings were widely used in anonymous theological Summae of the thirteenth century, and presumably in more general-purpose florilegia as well; as the preface has already mentioned, there was at least one widely distributed collection made up exclusively of quotations from him (the Flores Bernardi, on which see also Leclercq, Bernard, 102–3). Some of his writings sufficiently impressed Peter Lombard (whom Bernard met and passed on, with his recommendation, to the abbey at St. Victor) to find a place in the latter’s Sentences, which was destined to become the fundamental textbook for university theology for nearly four hundred years.15 This book, of course, has a special interest in the relationship between this massive influence and a particular English poet. Chaucer does quote from Bernard and refer to him with some frequency, which might lead one to believe the question rather unnecessary, substantial direct influence incontestable.16 It is not, alas, so simple, since the prevalence of florilegia and of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts shaped by Bernard’s writing makes it difficult to tell when Chaucer was quoting directly and when from an intermediate source—and thus also difficult to tell how much of the material surrounding any given quotation Chaucer actually knew. For this reason, even though direct influence is certainly possible, this book’s reliance on Bernard as its chief theological informant requires a bit more discussion. What, then, about indirect influence? It does not take much work to verify its likelihood—indeed to verify that the absence of Bernard’s indirect influence on a theologically engaged fourteenth-century English poet would be exceedingly unlikely. The reference above to Ancrene Wisse is one voucher for Bernard’s influence near that time and place; and while I know of no thorough study of Bernard’s influence in late-medieval England, such evidence as is readily available suggests that his thinking formed part of a widely diffused and deeply absorbed background for thought. “[In England] he is everywhere and nowhere,” Holdsworth’s above-quoted article observes; “that is to say that his spirituality evidently affected a wide circle . . . but that he is not so often directly quoted, or referred to.”17 This quiet but extensive satura-

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tion of English religious culture suggests that Bernard’s two centuries’ distance from the Ricardian poets can serve as an advantage rather than a handicap for the present book’s work: his ideas are a strong candidate for what Renaissance critic Hans Reichert calls “osmotic mediation,” and they are only the more so because the time lag between his century and Chaucer’s allows for the ideas’ thorough assimilation into a widely available religious background where a poet might find them.18 If Chaucer had lived only a few years after Bernard’s death (or, of course, if Bernard’s impact had been less) we would have to be much more nervous about whether the relevant ideas could have been transmitted by indirect means. Beyond the likelihood that the contents of Bernard’s texts will have worked their way, whether directly or indirectly, to within Chaucer’s intellectual reach, there is also a somewhat different kind of reason for turning to them here, the second promised reason for the choice. The ideas in Bernard’s works, though sometimes unfamiliar to modern readers, are very often ideas once in general circulation rather than innovations. Consider for example the remark of the modern commentator who writes of Bernard’s series of sermons “In Praise of the Virgin Mother” that they “are hopelessly unoriginal, at least as regards content. . . . You will be hard pressed to discover a single new idea, a single new interpretation of a biblical text. . . . Nothing can be found which cannot be traced to an earlier source—and inevitably a source of unimpeachable orthodoxy.”19 This is, of course, a dubious accolade by modern standards, and of dubious value in attracting readers —unless, as is the case here, the readers happen to be seeking information precisely about the main currents of the “unimpeachable orthodoxy” of medieval Christianity. Bernard himself, moreover, would probably have welcomed the remark as an indicator of success, since he does not appear to have thought of himself as innovating, or of innovation as a goal. I have indicated in footnotes many places where a point arising in his writings could have been demonstrated out of any number of Western Christian texts. In fact the solitary point taken from Bernard thus far makes an excellent example: at least part of the idea noted in the preface about Christ’s “active passion” and “passive action” appears not only in Bernard but also four hundred years earlier in the influential De orthodoxa fide of John of Damascus; which in turn has it from the fourth-

Introduction 17

century church father John Chrysostom; whose phrasing suggests that the idea did not originate with him either.20 Such immersion in tradition, far from being a drawback, is exactly what one wants of an “informant”: he gives information about a culture as readily as about his individual mind. Thus the second reason for preferring Bernard to Holcot or Bradwardine: even where his own direct or indirect influence on Chaucer cannot be proven, Bernard is an excellent witness, or informant, about a broad tradition of theological common property that is still more likely to have had such influence.21 To use a different metaphor, there are cases in which we cannot know whether Bernard is the intellectual “father” (direct progenitor) of some of the thinking of a later writer; and in which we cannot even know whether he is an intellectual great-grandfather (that is, an ancestor in a straightforward line of transmission, even with several other transmitters between, as in indirect, including “osmotic,” influence); but in which there is good reason to suspect that he may be an intellectual “cousin”—to suspect, in other words, that his thinking and that of the later writer have a common ancestor generations back. If we then discover, as in the chapters to follow we will, that particular aspects of the later writer’s work do in fact echo central themes of Bernard’s writing, the antecedent probability of some kind of connection is reinforced. It would be too much to claim that direct (or even indirect) influence has been proven; but it would also be unnecessary. The status of trusty informant, strengthened by actual resemblances in the writings at issue, is itself enough to suggest that immersion in Bernard’s thinking on a given topic can teach us something about what his latter-day cousin had in mind. Some of the characteristics that make Bernard’s writings apt to the role of informant are shared with many other monastic writings —with, in fact, the tradition of medieval “monastic theology” generally.22 The usefulness of that tradition to latter-day humanists seeking to understand what was most widely available in medieval religious thought is difficult to overestimate. Such humanists still frequently turn to the other broad stream of medieval theology, the scholastic one, and more often than not to Thomas Aquinas in particular. But that is only sometimes a helpful turn. Neither Thomas’s undeniable powers as a philosopher and theologian, nor the latterly wide appreciation and availability

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of his writings, would make much immediate sense of an impulse to look primarily to him for help in understanding the writing of, for example, Chaucer—who never names or quotes him, and who lived in a time when Bernard was undoubtedly more widely read, at least outside the universities.23 Texts written by and for monks, in comparison with scholastic writings, had to be accessible to a somewhat less specialized audience. Thus, for example, though Bernard and his fellow monastic authors demonstrably knew the basics of Aristotelian logic, they generally show little sign of the technically virtuosic interest in the subject that some of the scholastics take. What they offer instead, however, should be of great interest to modern scholars. First, there is a strong sense in monastic theology of the passing along of a continuous tradition of thought that reaches back to the Greek-writing church fathers and, beyond them, to the Greek and Hebrew scriptures: see for example Jean Leclercq’s report of a remark by Artur Michael Landgraf, possibly the twentieth century’s preeminent historian of scholasticism, to the effect that monastic theology is “the traditional theology from which early scholasticism broke away.”24 Second, the monastics offer, by comparison with scholasticism, a more readily apparent concentration on the inescapable “pastoral” questions of Christian existence: theological fundamentals like the meaning of the Trinity, the incarnation, and the sacraments are present, to be sure, but are usually accompanied by—and tied to—practical questions about how to live daily life, how to get along with fellow monastics, how to follow a monastic rule, how one might be drawn in prayer and action into the life of God. All these things contribute to making monastic theology an invaluable resource. Its relative accessibility means that most of the contemporary population likely had more exposure to it, whether directly or through its influence on preaching, than to scholastic materials; and it also lowers a bit the overhead required of a modern scholar in search of understanding. Its commitment to tradition means that it deliberately makes available what had already been said, often by large numbers of earlier voices —a thought that should, if applied cautiously, increase our sense of its value as a witness. And its practical and pastoral orientation again increases the chances that wide swaths of the population of medieval Europe would have an interest in it: relatively few people were technically minded

Introduction 19

logicians, but relatively many had an interest in learning about salvation, and about God, and about how to live in the light of that learning. None of these observations discredits scholastic theology, either in itself or as a resource for the understanding of medieval religion; despite the “break” just mentioned, Leclercq, after quoting Landgraf, quickly adds that monastic theological method, though “distinguished from the scholastic method . . . is not essentially different,” and that in fact the distinctions between the two largely arise from two different modes of life, and “lie less in the doctrinal than in the psychological domain.”25 Still, the distinctions are large enough to suggest that today’s scholars should attend to both streams, and should perhaps also wonder why the monastic one has been used little in recent decades.26 One last feature of monastic theology makes it, and Bernard’s writings in particular, especially valuable for the project at hand: it, and he, turn out to be vitally concerned with both of the main themes under discussion. The habitual orientation of monastic writing toward things practical and pastoral includes interest, as already noted, in “how to be drawn in prayer and action into the life of God”: but that is precisely the question of divine-human cooperation. Bernard’s medieval reputation as a contemplative par excellence, a man of almost proverbial insight, makes his own writings on that question, on display in chapter 3, especially relevant.27 Likewise the question of how to relate to a law, as we will see especially in chapter 6, is illuminated to surprising depths by Bernard’s extensive and rich reflections on what it means to live by a monastic rule. There it will also become apparent that many of the texts first examined for help with the theme of action and passion have just as much to say about will and law—a confluence that can serve as the first of many vouchers for the underlying unity of the two themes.

Method, Part 2: A Clarifying Skeptical Assault It may aid the work at hand to define the approach a bit more firmly before diving in. I have attempted to do this by imagining a skeptical question that might arise from combining a generally accurate notion about Chaucer with a misapprehension of the book’s method. Chaucer is widely, and justly, thought of as the most elusive of storytellers, at

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least when it comes to disclosing what he actually thinks about the ethical and philosophical questions that his stories raise: hence the seeming interminability of debates over whether the Prioress’s Tale points to a strain of anti-Semitism or what the Wife of Bath indicates about her creator’s attitudes toward women. For this reason daring to propose that Chaucer’s work favors any particular position or belief— as this book does in the case of the “contemplative ideal” it describes — is a fearful enterprise. Having already seen the collapse of too many attempts to nail down exactly what Chaucer thought, readers are right to be wary. Would it not be wiser to avoid the attempt and content ourselves with observing the undeniable: that Chaucer raises deep questions and then routinely, and probably purposefully, throws out crumbs to partisans of all sides? The answer is that this book’s aim is not quite to get a fix on what Chaucer consciously thought. Instead the attempt is to do something that sounds more ambitious but that turns out, I believe, to be easier: to acquire some idea of the deeper forces, the habits or tendencies of mind, that shaped his conscious thought. We cannot know for sure what would ensue if we could travel to London in 1386, stop Daun Geoffrey on the street, and ask him for his thoughts on human agency. Perhaps he would have a ready answer, rooted in his reading of one of Bernard’s sermons, or rooted in the words of a traveling preacher who had himself encountered Bernard or another authority from the tradition: “Why, yes, quite a question, because we tend to think action and passion are immiscible opposites, when in reality the highest forms of action turn out to involve making a kind of passive space for divine action.” On the other hand perhaps he would have nothing of the kind to say, would not even understand what we meant by asking, would turn out never to have thought about the question in those abstract terms. But—or so I claim—it would not much matter. This book argues for the presence of a set of preferences below the surface of Chaucer’s writings, preferences that are much more stable, across a number of different works, than are the multifarious thoughts that are spelled out in words; it is even possible that these preferences are as stable as they are precisely because Chaucer did not give them much deliberate thought. They are, to borrow a happy distinction from the philosopher who has inspired much of my approach, not the ideas that Chaucer declares, but those he betrays.28 Because it is after these deeper patterns, the work to

Introduction 21

follow largely passes over many parts of Chaucer’s work, beloved of past inquirers, where philosophy lies near the surface—for example, the House of Fame, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, certain sections of the Knight’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde.29 Instead it wagers that we will often more successfully discover what Chaucer thinks about philosophical questions by reading passages where he seems to be talking about something else. We will still attend, to be sure, to the explicit “content” of what is said, but will attend just as much to patterns in the grammar with which it is said and in the large-scale structures of “plot” and character. This attempt to discover patterns that emerge from reading across the works is, in a sense, an attempt to mirror Chaucer’s own methods — or at least to mirror what some critics of recent decades have believed his methods to be. He does not seem interested in forcing moral or philosophical doctrine into his stories in a top-down way; instead he seems genuinely beguiled by the chance to explore the possibilities of each new genre, and each new story, he comes to. He is the poet of “God’s plenty,” in John Dryden’s three-hundred-year-old assessment, happy to sink deeply into the particulars of each situation he describes.30 And yet—so this book argues —patterns emerge; a formal structure in the plot of the Clerk’s Tale may remind us strongly of a formal structure in the grammar of the Man of Law’s; and even if, as is likely, Chaucer did not create many such resonances deliberately, it does not follow that the resonances are merely artifacts of a critic’s arbitrary eye. The two similar structures have, after all, come from the mind of the same creator, and may well tell us something useful about that mind, particularly if what they “say” is repeated, again and again, in discoveries made across poems of all different types. Likewise the critical method of this book attempts a middle course. It aims to avoid imposing preconceived philosophical notions onto the literature: that is one reason that its first chapter plunges deeply into the poems rather than the theology, with only this introduction’s sketch to alert readers to the philosophical questions at hand. But it aims also to avoid denying the possibility of patterns, and to stay alert for them, to maintain the kind of openness that gives them space to disclose themselves. In that sense receptivity is the book’s method as well as its first theme. The need to keep an eye out for such patterns has sparked a further feature of the book’s method: it has dictated careful attention to the changes Chaucer made in transforming other authors’ stories into his

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own. If there really are influential “forms of thought” underlying Chaucer’s conscious mind and helping to shape its products, their effects should be especially perceptible where a clear original is available for comparison. Thus nearly all my readings make reference to Chaucer’s literary sources, with the most extensive comparisons coming where he followed them most closely, as in the Clerk’s, Second Nun’s, and Physician’s tales. Many of the alterations thus brought to light were doubtless intentional. Others no doubt were not. It seems to me that the latter, at least when they fall into recognizable patterns, are to the critic no less valuable than the former. What is unintentional need not be the result of chance alone; it can, and if it is accompanied by many similar examples likely does, indicate a habit of thought, a stable preference. In chapter 4 it will be useful to introduce the term authorial as a category for alterations that appear to result from something in the author’s mind—irrespective of whether that something be conscious intention or a shaping force of some other kind. The general category will allow a helpful bracketing of the question of Chaucer’s conscious intent, freeing the book to ruminate on all the changes that appear to be “authorial,” and then to see what can be learned by reconsidering the tales in that abstracted, but not artificial, light.

Method, Part 3: What Role for the Narrators? There is another methodological challenge to be settled here—here rather than elsewhere, because it affects the project in a fundamental way without growing from any one of the particular investigations that follow. It is a simple question, and so well known that veterans of Chaucer criticism may find it no longer of much interest. And yet it is a question that does not cease to recur in discussions of the Canterbury Tales, especially discussions willing to risk hypotheses about what (or at least “how”) Chaucer himself thought. The question is: What about the narrators? The Canterbury-pilgrimage frame at least apparently introduces another layer of complexity between the words of each individual poem and the author’s own thinking; it opens the possibility of reading the tales as written en masque, from the point of view of the pilgrimnarrator ostensibly telling the tale. This sort of reading, of course, is not

Introduction 23

equally convincing in all tales. It is perhaps most so for those short ones (for example the Reeve’s, Friar’s, and Summoner’s) in which a prologue shows us an incensed narrator preparing to let loose with an attack on the profession of a fellow-pilgrim who has just insulted him; in such cases it is easy to believe that Chaucer has kept the fictional teller continuously in mind. In other cases, like the Knight’s, Second Nun’s, and Man of Law’s tales, there is little evidence in the story itself of a detailed connection with the particular person who is supposed to be speaking—or little, at any rate, to convince the serious skeptic, who might sourly observe that if some new manuscript revelation completely scrambled our current assignment of tales to tellers, it would be only a matter of months before critics produced internal evidence purporting to prove the aptitude of each new pairing. The skeptic’s case is strengthened considerably by evidence suggesting that some tales, including the Knight’s and at least half of the Second Nun’s, were written as independent poems long before Chaucer contemplated a linked set of tales, and only lightly revised; and by Chaucer’s apparent changes of heart as to which teller should get which tale (touching, for example, the Wife of Bath’s and Shipman’s tales).31 Thus, to assume that each tale is crafted throughout from the point of view of a fictional teller would be to proceed on ground just as treacherous as that walked by the naïve critic who takes every opinion expressed by a narrative voice to be Chaucer’s own.32 Despite these reasons for caution, some readers will find my lack of attention to the putative narrator of each tale a glaring omission in a project that concerns itself with human relationships on which the narrators might be expected to hold a stereotyped opinion. Does not an Oxford Clerk, for example, likely have a particular “take” on the relations of men and women that will skew his retelling of Petrarch’s story of Griselda? “Clerkes,” after all, “preise wommen but a lite,” as the Clerk’s Tale itself tells us (line 935), in a nod to the antifeminist clerical works with which the fifth husband of Alys of Bath whiled away his spare hours. Can we possibly reopen the question of Griselda’s moral status (as ch. 1 attempts to do) and speculate about whether her extreme submission is being seriously recommended or subtly derided, without also reckoning with the fictional teller’s presumed or explicit opinions on how marriage ought to work?

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In brief, I think we can—despite the appeal of seeking in the teller’s personality a kind of external key to the tale proper. I believe this not on a priori grounds, but because of the particulars of how tales and tellers interact in Chaucer’s collection. A brief look at the Clerk’s Tale—one of the stories in which the narrator is most present, both in periodic interjections and in an odd extended epilogue that offers several kinds of commentary about the tale just told—will go a long way toward showing what I mean. The reader who pages through Chaucer’s tale of Griselda and culls out all the narrative interjections in the hope of discovering a stable personality for the teller will find himself, at best, with a debate on his hands; at worst, hopelessly confused. On many questions that one could raise, including those most central to the investigations here, the evidence for the narrator’s opinions is decidedly ambiguous. This book will, for example, be interested in whether Chaucer means us to understand Griselda as having a normal interiority that she must painfully master to comply with Walter’s abusive demands, or whether we should instead understand her as some kind of purely “patient creature,” an epitome of passivity with no need to master a will she does not have. And chapter 1 will find the narrative voice helpfully intruding into the tale to register explicit opinions —on both sides. Abandoning, then, the narrative interjections, we might next turn to what we can learn about Chaucer’s clerk from outside the tale proper, and there we find even less help. The portraits in the General Prologue and Clerk’s Prologue do have a certain consistency, both suggesting a quiet, studious man serious about his philosophy and engaged in little else; trustworthy, perhaps, as a guide on the road to wisdom, if a little too eager to impart it in stylized and slightly impenetrable phrases. Fine: but all this tells us nothing of the central questions we will want answered about the tale. Perhaps, then, if we want to know how the tale evaluates Griselda we should rely on some knowledge of the attitudes of Oxford clerks in general towards women? We could not be blamed, perhaps, for expecting a proverbial distance or even hostility—except that this very clerk at times contradicts that expectation before our eyes: even his already-noted observation that clerks do not praise (or prize) women highly comes in a concessive clause whose corresponding sentence is in fact an expression of the highest praise (lines 932–38).

Introduction 25

Moreover, other clerks in the Tales, like the Miller’s Nicholas and the Reeve’s two swains, appear to harbor attitudes toward women that are, if not precisely respectful, also rather out of line with what we might expect from reading clerkly bastions of antifeminism like Jerome or Walter Map.33 As a group, Chaucer’s clerks do not cleave closely enough to any stereotype to provide a basis for confident assertions about the teller of the Clerk’s Tale. Finally, we come to the tale’s ending, thinking that here, surely, Chaucer makes his tale-telling character show his cards, revealing what we are to understand that he, the character, thinks about the events just described, so that we will be able to calibrate our attempt to understand Chaucer’s own attitudes by taking into account the distortions this teller introduces. But here too there are complications. The first substantial piece of what the “Clerk himself ” says is, as he also tells us himself, a long direct quotation from Petrarch (“herkneth what this auctour seith,” 1141). In fact nearly every line of the three stanzas that follow is closely translated from an epilogue written, in what seems to be Petrarch’s own voice, to Boccaccio at the conclusion of his Latin translation of the Decameron’s Griselda tale.34 The content of the three stanzas makes the situation still more complex. The first thing the auctor Petrarch says is that this story is most definitely not to be taken as an exemplum that women should follow (1142– 44). That news, if we accept it at face value, diminishes still further any remaining hope of clarifying what the Clerk thinks of Griselda by considering what he, or clerks in general, are supposed to think of women in general: she is not a figure for Everywoman. He goes on to tell us (1149–52) that she is not exactly a figure for Everysoul either. Griselda’s submission to Walter does not stand in a relation of strict analogy, at least according to this explanatory passage, with our individual submissions to God, but in an a fortiori relationship: if a (with probable implied “mere”) woman could accomplish such great feats of patience with respect to a “mortal man” (and an abusive sadist at that), surely we can all do better in the trials overseen by God. After these three stanzas things get even worse. To this point the “Clerk” has appeared to advance Petrarch’s ideas with approval, but now he supplements them with an original: the comment that women these days will not put up with so much as did the storied Griselda. Read by

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itself, this stanza (1163–69) is a lament for the recent decline in feminine character, and thus seemingly contradicts the immediately preceding impression that the “Clerk” endorses Petrarch’s ban on understanding Griselda as a role model for his contemporary women; now, it seems, we must mourn their failure to live up to her standard. Then the next stanza takes yet a third (or is it fourth?) turn, one completely out of character with everything the freestanding portraits of the Clerk have suggested: this quiet, studious man suddenly makes like his rowdier confrere Nicolas, trickster-hero of the Miller’s Tale, and urges his hearers to “stynte of ernestful matere” while he, “with lusty herte fressh and grene,” sings “a song to glade yow” (1170 –76). The song that follows, largely addressed to wives, offers still another reaction to the tale, urging them to take Griselda as a negative exemplum lest, on account of their excessive patience, they be eaten by a cow; and it is full of suggestions worthy of Alison of Bath, to whom it is more or less dedicated (1170), about how a wife might craftily dominate her husband by any means necessary. Is this the same Clerk who periodically interrupts his own tale to remind us that wives should will nothing but what their husbands will? Perhaps not: early scribes titled the song “Lenvoy de Chaucer,” and it is indeed written with the virtuosity of some of Chaucer’s independent short poems —thirty-six lines ending on only three rhymes, with no repeated rhyme words. But the rhyme royal stanza immediately preceding the song seems to place it unambiguously in the Clerk’s mouth.35 One could, no doubt, construct some account of the Clerk’s character that would fit with all this disparate, even schizophrenic, evidence. One might say, for example, that the Clerk has been all along only playing at being a serious student of philosophy; that he holds the illusion together through the end of the material he takes from Petrarch; and that the wildness of what follows shows us his conclusion that in the present no-longer-golden age, the wisest course is to let one’s own true nature (in sympathy with the true nature of latter-day wives and husbands) break through all that effort of control. But then there is the trouble of explaining why Chaucer, who so frequently seasons his portraits with small hints about the hidden moral decay of his characters, has given us no indication in either the General or the Clerk’s Prologue, nor anything consistent in the tale’s own narrative interjections, to suggest a complex character with an inner self corresponding to what pours out after the Petrarchan passage. Moreover, one who tried

Introduction 27

to salvage consistency in some such way would then logically have to work back through all the narrative interjections, and hypothesized narrative skewings, of the tale proper to explain how our readings should change. To my knowledge, and understandably, no one has undertaken that formidable task. It seems wiser to settle for the moment on the alternative position—uncomfortable or wonderful, depending on one’s frame of mind—that the end of the tale simply makes no sense; or at least not that kind of sense. It can, of course, quite deliberately make no sense. It holds up well, this chaos, as one of the “cracks in the frame of illusion” that Alfred David finds all over Chaucer’s work.36 The narrating voice introduces the chaos with an innocent-looking line—“O word, lordynges, herkneth er I go” (1163)—and proceeds to “go” not in orderly fashion, after the saying is done, but by more or less scattering to the winds, in the very saying itself, whatever coherence Chaucer has maintained for his Clerk-mask. But as we have seen, it is doubtful that the mask had much coherence even earlier in the tale. In the end, we will have to say that anyone interested in taking the Clerk as a consistently developed character whose desires and habits have affected the tale in predictable ways will have a lot of explaining to do, and his hypothesis will likely remain open to critical attack for the foreseeable future. A fortiori for the other tales central to my argument, the Knight’s, Franklin’s, Physician’s, Man of Law’s, and Second Nun’s: each of these provides its readers even less clear and consistent data about its narrator than does the Clerk’s Tale, and consequently there is very little chance for agreement about each teller’s personality or its influence on the tale. Thus, in the present attempt to connect the themes of agency and law in Chaucer with their religious background, it has seemed wisest to bracket the question of the narrators entirely, relying instead on indicators internal to the tales themselves to make what inferences are possible about the relationship between Chaucer’s own mind and the characters and events it has brought to birth.

A Few Prior Investigators Readers familiar with the last few decades’ worth of writing about medieval literature will by now have had a few other books come to

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mind: this is not the first one to concern itself with questions of passion and action or of will and law (though it is, as far as I know, the first to connect those two themes). Its discussions with most of these fellow inquirers require little introduction here, but there are a few studies linked so closely or in so many ways to this one that some brief acknowledgment may be useful. On the second of the book’s underlying themes, that of will and law, it is quite a short list: other than the works on late-medieval “nominalism” mentioned above, which ultimately go after quarry different from mine, it comprises perhaps three books. On the literary side are Richard Firth Green’s Crisis of Truth and Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer, both of which consider at length the questions about oaths and vows that are so prevalent in medieval literature and that constitute a special case of what I mean by law in the broad sense. On the philosophical side there is the work of Giorgio Agamben, which comes closest to this project’s concerns in The Highest Poverty, a book that appeared after the first version of this one was completed. Each of these three comes in for remark at the appropriate place (in chs. 5 and 6), but they do not require a general treatment here. On the theme of passion and action the number of contemporary inquirers has been much greater. First among them is a book already mentioned in the preface, Jill Mann’s Feminizing Chaucer, which has helped form my own thoughts on the subject of human agency, though it has often done so in the role of respected sparring partner. It, along with some independent comments by the same author on the relationship of religious belief to the interpretation of medieval texts, comes in for more sustained attention here (attention stretching from the second half of chapter 1 through the “Hermeneutical Interlude” and sporadically beyond) than any other secondary work. Another book on the topic that the reader will find named at a few key points is Mark Miller’s Philosophical Chaucer, which roots its thinking in psychoanalysis and in the ethics of Immanuel Kant and some of his heirs. It is a book from which I have learned much, again often despite, or through, disagreement. Among other things, I have found myself at odds with it on the extent to which Kant’s ethical ideas match those of authors Chaucer knew, particularly Boethius; on how successfully Kant’s transcendental method unearths universal truths about the structure of human action; and even on questions concerning what Kant, and Boethius, actually

Introduction 29

say. Nonetheless a long series of wrestling matches with the book in the ten years since its publication has brought to light much about my own thinking on human agency, and has even called some of that thinking into existence—a debt I am glad to acknowledge. Two other works on the passion-and-action theme deserve a special mention because, though their explicit appearances in these pages are sparse, they were very helpful to the early stages of this project and are generally underappreciated: Georgia Ronan Crampton’s The Condition of Creatures, a study of passion and action in Chaucer and Spenser that reminds its readers, among other things, of how pervasive the topos of “agere et pati” has been in Western literature; and Tamiko Chino’s unpublished dissertation “Ladies in Waiting,” which combines a survey of ancient and New Testament discussions of patience with readings of three literary treatments of the Griselda legend. Finally, there is a relatively recent work, one that had not yet appeared when the first full draft of this one was finished, that investigates a strikingly similar question in a different set of texts. This is David Aers’s Salvation and Sin, which undertakes for Piers Plowman, with Augustine as chief theological informant, something very like what part 1 of this book attempts for the Canterbury Tales with Bernard’s help. Even some of the labels for the books’ respective discoveries are similar: the theological commonplace that I have called “conjoint” or “cooperative” action, for example, Aers refers to as “double agency.” These likenesses strike me as strongly supporting both projects: in particular, if there remained any doubt that the ideas about agency here drawn from Bernard are not just peculiar to him (or to Cistercians or monastics) but are common property of mainstream medieval Christianity, the evidence in Aers’s book should dispel it. I have even taken the liberty of borrowing quotations in one or two places where Salvation and Sin has led me to a passage in Augustine that reinforces a point made here from Bernard. Moreover, Aers’s extended demonstration that these ideas pervade Piers Plowman helps support what I have said about the forms of mediation by which the same material might have reached Chaucer. The structures that we both describe seem quite simply to have been everywhere in high- and late-medieval Europe, easily available to, and perhaps even unavoidable for, poets as well as those writing formal theological treatises. That fact in turn supports two secondary goals of this project: to argue that continued study

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of cooperative agency (and, I believe, of the particular notion of law that accompanies it) will cast new light on much medieval literature, not just Chaucer’s and not just Langland’s; and to argue that such continued study will also cast new light on the transition between the Middle Ages and modernity, since the set of concepts being studied was so common to the first epoch and seems largely, though not entirely, foreign to the second. The bulk of this book, like the bulk of Aers’s, immerses itself deeply in the texts it studies; for that reason there will be little direct interaction between the two once the detailed argument gets going. But the leading questions and aims of the two books are similar enough to make comparison fruitful in an introduction where overview is the aim. I would like to highlight two clear differences of approach between the books and then register two demurrals from large-scale moves made in Aers’s. The first of the differences is that Aers conceives his book as fighting against a relatively established critical opinion about Langland’s theology: many have claimed that Langland swings toward “nominalism,” with an accompanying theory of salvation that is “Pelagian,” and Aers is concerned to demonstrate that Langland’s theology matches neither label, but is instead firmly planted in what Aers calls the “Augustinian” mainstream.37 The present book has been freed of the need to fight any parallel battle by the convenient circumstance that among Chaucer scholars there is no such general agreement to correct: estimates of his theology have ranged from the strongly “nominalist” to the strongly “realist” to the equally strongly “opportunist”—that is, to the idea that he has no consistent theology to be discovered, but merely an assortment of free-floating ideas brought in ad libitum to fit the circumstance of each particular poem.38 The second difference in approach concerns what each book hopes to achieve and where each begins. Salvation and Sin, focusing as it does for its entire length on the questions about agency that occupy only one part of this book, also attempts something more ambitious than I do here: a thorough run, for its own sake, at the theological climate of the fourteenth century as it bears on these questions. Thus that book begins with three chapters of purely theological work, expounding not only Augustine but also Aquinas, Holcot, Bradwardine, and Ockham, before starting to read Langland in earnest. Here it has seemed wise to follow the opposite route, begin-

Introduction 31

ning with literature rather than theology, in the hope of showing that theological questions, and thus a need for recourse to theological “informants,” grow naturally out of close attention to Chaucer’s poems. Among other reasons for that strategy is the simple fact that it may be necessary to convince some readers that a theological and philosophical approach to Chaucer is appropriate at all—a conclusion that needs little belaboring in Langland’s case. My two demurrals are on points that appear relatively minor but are potentially weighty in implication. The first is a mere quarrel over a name. The group of ideas concerned with divine-human cooperation that Aers and I both find to be at the center of the Christianity of the Middle Ages —as opposed to alternative ideas that focus on the role of either the divine or the human agent, particularly in matters of soteriology, to the diminishment or exclusion of the other partner—Aers calls, as already mentioned, “Augustinian Christianity.” This is not an empty change of label, but carries an argument within it. Aers is deliberately (and, I think, rightly) opposing a common rough categorization that divides theories of salvation into two camps: one camp for “Pelagians” and “semi-Pelagians,” who allow human will to play some part; another camp for “Augustinians” who ascribe everything to God’s grace alone. That nomenclature, whatever its usefulness in keeping various soteriologies apart in one’s mind, has the disadvantage of being grossly untrue to what Augustine actually wrote. Particularly in his latest works on the subject, he was concerned to demonstrate not only the vital roles of both human and divine willing but also the ways in which the two do not compete, but mutually reinforce each other—ways in which, in a word, they cooperate.39 Thus Aers means to reclaim the word Augustinian for a more accurate use, designating not one extreme in a struggle between human will and divine grace but a different position altogether, a position according to which either extreme, just by virtue of believing that those two forces are in a struggle, has already missed the most essential point. (In his historical survey, the pointmissing positions come with names attached: Holcot and Ockham on the too-much-human-will side, Bradwardine on the grace-alone side.) Aers’s move has a laudable goal. It is unquestionable that the use of Augustinian to mean “discounting the human will” deserves to be scrapped—as does the inevitable and equally mistaken corollary ac-

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cording to which any account that gives any role at all to human will earns the label “Pelagian” or at least “semi-Pelagian.” And yet I do not think it wise to use Augustinian the way Aers does either, especially in the phrase “Augustinian Christianity.” Any ordinary listener, after all, will expect the term to mean “deriving from or inspired by Augustine.” But clearly there are whole subdomains of Christian theology— in particular, much of the Greek-speaking tradition, back to its earliest roots —that do have what Aers would like to call an Augustinian position on divine-human cooperation (indeed Greek theology as a class has held on to the possibility of cooperation more consistently than has the Latin West) but do not derive it from Augustine. In fact the same is true, to a less extreme degree, of Bernard’s own writing: this book should demonstrate beyond doubt how deeply it dwells in a “cooperative” notion of the relation between God and world; but, as widely read Latin religious writers go, Bernard is one of the less obviously “Augustinian” in the literal sense of intellectual descent. Indeed it is likely that the clarity and centrality of the cooperative ideal in his understanding of Christian life derives at least in large part from the strong influence, through the monastic tradition, of Greek theology and of scripture— which is to say, of ideas that did not reach him primarily through Augustine.40 The reason for quibbling about a label is not merely to plead for equal time for Greek theology. It is also that the quibble, if accepted, will strengthen a more fundamental point that this book (in common, I take it, with Salvation and Sin) wishes to make: namely, that the “cooperative ideal” or “double agency” was virtually everywhere in the Christian tradition, and in the broader culture it shaped, at least for the roughly thousand-year span we call the Middle Ages. Pointing out its presence in influential works of Augustine is a good start toward demonstrating its pervasiveness, but recognizing that the idea was not created by or confined to theology that is literally “Augustinian,” but pervades other major streams of theology as well—not surprisingly, as the idea also pervades both the Greek and Hebrew scriptures —surely makes the case still stronger. The second demurral pertains to a matter of substance rather than a name. Salvation and Sin frequently looks to the Christology and ecclesiology of the thinkers under study for an indication of how their engagement with the central issue of agency will go. Those two topics

Introduction 33

function as a kind of marker or advance predictor: thinkers who have robust notions of the community of the church, and who think about salvation and grace in ways closely connected with their thought about Christ, tend, in the sample Aers investigates, also to have robust notions of double agency. For example, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas give rich and full treatments of Christ and the church, and a strongly cooperative account of the relation between creator and creature; whereas Aers argues convincingly that Ockham and Bradwardine, who do not speak much of Christ or the church when discussing agency, also do not generally envision human and divine action as fully cooperative. But it would be an error, I think, to conclude that the only way to write or think adequately about divine-human cooperation is by constant explicit reference to Christ and the church. Again my chief exhibit is Bernard himself, who lays out a thorough, extremely influential, and I believe fully “cooperative” treatment of human action in an abstract philosophical work that says comparatively little about either: his early doctrinal treatise On Grace and Free Choice, taken up in detail in chapter 3. Bernard, of course, thinks and writes about Christ at length in many other places (the preface already gives one short sample), and chapter 3 will consider in passing some of his thoughts on the church. Thus Aers might respond that a view of his writings as a whole shows a difference in the two “markers” from, say, Bradwardine, whose most famous (and immensely long) work De causa Dei says little about Christ, church, or Trinity even in the places where one might most expect it.41 Still—and without losing appreciation for Aers’s emphasis, shared with his colleagues Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, on the detailed constituting narratives of particular communities —it is worth recording that one of this tradition’s more traditional thinkers manages to lay out his ideas about agency in a rather abstract style. To overlook that fact, or to think that Aers’s two markers must dominate any Christiantradition treatment of agency that hopes for success, seems to me to risk making particularism itself into too universal a requirement.

Synopsis and Goals A quick summary of what is to follow may help the reader who has specific goals in mind. For purposes of clarity I will mention here primarily

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the self-contained import of each chapter, rather than describing its involvement with the large-scale arguments of the book as a whole. But still I hope the reader will bear in mind that the book is intended not as a collection of essays but as a single continuous argument that brings to light, in a slow and cumulative fashion, the one-time ubiquity of the “lost ideal” introduced above—first as it bears on questions of action and passion, then on those of will and law, in each case moving from a literary exposition to a theological one. As already advertised, it is the first four chapters that concern themselves primarily with the action-and-passion theme, chapters 5 and 6 with wills and laws, though there are crossovers, some explicit and some subterranean, in both sections. Chapter 1 considers primarily the Clerk’s and Man of Law’s tales, focusing in each case on the female protagonist and her ways of acting and suffering; occasional direct juxtapositions aim to show that the two women, felt by many critics as unpleasantly similar, are far better understood as a study in contrasting (even diametrically opposed) acceptations of the virtue of patience. The effort to establish firmly my reading of the Clerk’s Tale has called for some detailed source-study, involving close comparisons to the poem’s five potential direct ancestors; this chapter’s first “division” is therefore long, and readers not previously devoted to Griselda and her interpretation may wish to make their first approach to those sections with a nimble eye. Chapter 2 is a “hermeneutical interlude” that steps back to reflect on the work of interpretation that the first chapter has begun, drawing on the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer for vocabulary and a set of classifications of types of reading; those tools allow me to suggest that some contemporary critics, in their laudable attempts to produce what Gadamer calls “dialogic” readings, are missing the goal in consistent ways, and then to provide theoretical underpinning for the kind of corrective work this book attempts en route to the same goal. The Interlude also contains the book’s most sustained look at the Knight’s Tale, in response to the claims of previous inquirers (Mann and to a lesser extent Miller) who have found there the Canterbury Tales’ most profound thoughts on human agency. Chapter 3 returns to the book’s first-order topics with a philosophical reflection on action, passion, and patience, drawing on a detailed

Introduction 35

consideration of Bernard of Clairvaux, who provides an understanding of agency and cooperation quite congruent to the one the first chapter found in the Man of Law’s Tale. Toward the chapter’s end it becomes clear how learning more about philosophical presuppositions close to Chaucer’s reflects back on the literature, making us read and evaluate several tales (the Knight’s here comes in for further comment) in quite new ways. Chapter 4 provides an extended final example of the literary consequences of studying medieval agency, reading the Second Nun’s Tale and several of its sources and analogues in the light of the “cooperative ideal.” The exercise thoroughly deranges the most common views of the meaning of the tale and its prologue, raising the question, for example, of whether the story should count as a saint’s life at all—and in the process further developing our understanding of the ideal uncovered in chapters 1 and 3. For its turn to the will-and-law theme, the fifth chapter takes up a new pair of tales, the Franklin’s and Physician’s. It focuses on the validity of oaths and other kinds of law there, and particularly on ironic differences between the reader’s and the characters’ abilities to see the laws’ origins and limitations. That approach allows us to understand the two tales as closely parallel, delivering very similar moral messages by remarkably congruent structural means. Chapter 6 turns back to medieval theology, again primarily in the works of Bernard, for further illumination of the will-and-law theme; it finds in his treatise On Precept and Dispensation a rich, hopeful, and frankly surprising notion of rule following that closely matches the suggestions the previous chapter found informing Chaucer’s poetry. As in the case of action and passion, the apparently commonplace medieval conception turns out to be foreign to much modern thought; here as there, attending to an unfamiliar set of presuppositions likely to approximate Chaucer’s casts considerable light back onto some opaque areas of his work. Chapter 6 also begins to indicate explicitly the close connections between the book’s two philosophical themes. Chapter 7, the conclusion, falls into two parts. First comes a synoptic glance at the results that approaching Chaucer via these two themes has produced, in order to develop further the idea of a single religious ideal at play behind both; this is the book’s most sustained consideration

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of their unity and of the ideal itself. The second part begins with one last return to the hermeneutical question of how today’s critics do and should approach religious themes in Chaucer. Thought on that subject quickly raises the more fundamental question (to which only the beginning of an answer is given) of what changed, between Chaucer’s age and ours, to render so many once-common theological assumptions about agency and law so unfamiliar now. As for the book’s goals in brief outline: the most pervasive of them is simply a better understanding of Chaucer—an attempt to produce readings that are more fruitful and, one hopes (deferring for the moment the definition of a difficult term), more true than those currently available. But because the book makes the attempt by trying to show how deeply the poems have been shaped by a religious and ethical ideal, a number of other results follow which may have implications for future scholarship, and these count as goals in their own right. The first of them is an understanding of the presence and the nature of the “ideal” itself. It is hoped that readers will see what it is, will see how widespread it once was and how greatly it differs from our own time’s most familiar ideas about agency and law, and will at least be open to pondering its validity—that is, whether it may not undergird a stance toward the world at least as consistent and as productive of truth, goodness, and beauty as the different stances more prevalent in our time. Second, acquaintance with the ideal may give modern readers a new way of thinking about the division between the “Middle Ages” and “modernity.” The findings of this book suggest the hypothesis of a thoroughgoing change across, say, the long interval between 1400 and 1600 CE, so that one can pick up a piece of European literature from before that time and be relatively confident that its presuppositions about agency and law will match the “medieval” ones examined here, whereas random selection from after that time will light on many authors in whom those presuppositions have been replaced, few in whom they have been retained. If that hypothesis is borne out in further study, it will look increasingly as though attention to the eclipse of the once-commonplace “mystical” solutions to this book’s two questions can teach us new things about the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity—if, indeed, the eclipse and the transition are not two names for the same event.

Introduction 37

A third supplemental goal falls in the more restricted realm of literary criticism. If this book is even remotely right about Chaucer, it will also, by implication, have much to say about the poetry of William Langland, of Dante Alighieri, of the Gawain poet, and of many another high-to-late-medieval author. The pervasiveness of the ethico-religious ideal it traces should mean that few writers who stray into the territories of agency and law (as nearly all do) will be unaffected; in the case of the three just named, the involvement with those themes seems especially deep, the evidence of its shaping by premodern ways of thought especially strong. As for how to harvest the fruit of thought about these writers in the light of this ideal, I hope this book’s interpretive methodology, as laid out in the “Hermeneutical Interlude”—in particular, its understanding of what it means to pursue an open dialogue between the presuppositions of reader and text—will prove helpful. Fourth and last comes a still more modest goal: the recommendation of monastic theology in general, and Bernard’s writings in particular, as outstanding resources for the approach to this half-foreign culture that is nonetheless an influential ancestor of our own. Those writings (perhaps like Chaucer’s own) are not only excellent avenues, for all the reasons noted above, to the sufficiently difficult pursuit of learning about the Middle Ages; they are also unusually effective, for reasons that I hope will become clear in the chapters to follow, in allowing the Middle Ages to teach us something about ourselves.

P A R T

1

Action and Passion Here we meet the most challenging problem in speculative theology, the problem of the relations between the Uncreated Freedom and the freedom of created beings. —Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, 17

c h a p t e r

o n e

Concerned with Constancy The Clerk’s and Man of Law’s Tales

Division 1: Griselda, or How Not to Suffer

To renounce one’s autonomy to the point of abandoning all spontaneous and independent reflection, intellection, volition, even feeling, is sometimes presented as an ascetic ideal. But this is an impossibility, and even the idea that such a thing is desirable can do irreparable harm. —Thomas Merton1 This in truth is the law of constancy, that we neither persist in evils, nor are we unsteady in goods. For there is a constancy also in evils, but one that is not a virtue. —Moralium dogma philosophorum2 It is not real patience to allow yourself to become a slave when you could be free. —Bernard of Clairvaux3

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For such a quiet, unassuming person, Griselda starts a lot of fights. The heroine of the Clerk’s Tale has been the focus of disputed questions ever since Chaucer set her story in rhyme royal—and, indeed, even before.4 Critical opinion seems fairly settled on the idea that Walter is a cruelly manipulative figure, not to be admired; but what are we to make of Griselda? Is she, as the tale’s narrative voice at least occasionally tells us, a flour of wyfly pacience (line 919)? Does the tale hold her before us as an ideal to be imitated—even if only, as its conclusion assures us, for her constance in adversity, and not as an ideal of humylitee aimed at wyves (1143– 46)? Many understand the Clerk’s to be this kind of morally exemplary tale, whether or not they agree with the teaching it allegedly imparts.5 Others, of course, have seen here a tale concerned first with religious allegory and only secondarily with moral teaching: the relations between Walter and Griselda are supposed to teach us something about the relations between God and humankind, or Christ, or perhaps the Virgin Mary.6 This approach imparts some relief from the uncomfortable possibility that the tale recommends Griselda’s extreme pliability to actual humans in everyday situations —but on the other hand it also risks making the tale harder to swallow rather than easier, by suggesting that it is not just a crazed nobleman but God himself who wants such reactions from his “subjects.” More recent critical trends, inspired in some cases by a reaction against the strongly allegorical readings of “patristic criticism,” have turned again to viewing the Clerk’s Tale as a realistic story about human interactions. The resulting readings are often still ethical, but in another way.7 Attempts to understand the tale continue to the present moment, with any major medievalists’ conference likely to feature one or several presentations on it from rising lights and established stars alike. Many of these efforts still wrestle directly or indirectly with the question of the tale’s genre as a key to interpretation—is it an allegory? An exemplum? A realistic drama of domestic life? The trouble with beginning from questions of that sort is that each one too easily implies the existence of exactly two answers, a yes or a no, commitment to either of which will sharply limit what can subsequently be seen in the tale. If we think the tale is purely a religious allegory, we will try to believe with G. L. Kittredge that the gritty details of Walter’s cruelty have “no status in this particular court”—but we will then wonder why Chaucer has dwelt on those details at such length.8 If

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we opt, on the other hand, for an insistent realism, we will find ourselves trying to ignore strong evidence that Chaucer had something more than a purely realistic tale in mind. Thus I propose a different path across this contested field, beginning with a return to the most basic of questions: What are we to make of Griselda? What, particularly, of her most outstanding attribute, whether it is labeled “constancy” or “patience”? That approach helpfully staves off the descent into perhaps larger, but for our purposes less immediately useful, questions such as whether the tale “is” an allegory or not, thus allowing a more open-eyed (and eye-opening) way into the tale. The alternative path, alas, will come at some cost. First of all, the basic question with which it begins will quickly find its way back into complexity. But this second complexity will be beneficial, as it will generate a question about Griselda that can be answered (as so many other questions cannot) in a convincing, even demonstrative way. The question is roughly this: Does Chaucer intend that we understand his character as what she frequently says she is —a kind of moral automaton, whose will is merely a mechanical extension of Walter’s —or rather as a more or less normal flesh-and-blood woman who struggles to be what she says she is? In the course of unearthing a variety of ways in which the tale opens possibilities for criticism of Griselda, the next two sections will see our basic question (“What are we to make of Griselda?”) transform into this more complex one.9 The complex question is indeed answerable, but only, it will emerge, by extensive recourse to source study. The Clerk’s Tale as we have it offers, on the question of Griselda’s “automaticity” as on so many others, evidence supporting both sides. But comparing the tale to its sources will reveal which pieces of evidence are Chaucer’s innovations and which are inheritances from Griselda’s previous incarnations —often inheritances that Chaucer has weakened even as he passes them along. Adding this second dimension, or “filter,” to the evidence will show a consistent pattern in Chaucer’s use of the older material, which in turn gives a relatively stable sense of what he had in mind— whether his conscious mind or his unconscious. Proceeding this way has required a great attention to detail: there are eleven key passages in Chaucer to be considered, eight apparently on one side of the question and three on the other, and each of them has had to be compared with all five of Chaucer’s potential sources. I attempt in what follows to lay

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out the case compactly, but nonetheless the mere presentation of the evidence occupies two further sections, after which two more (“The Evidence in Review” and “Chaucer, Petrarch, the Vertical and the Horizontal”) bring the accumulated knowledge back around to bear on the complex question of Griselda-as-automaton. Finally, a seventh section provides a first look at evidence from outside Griselda’s stories, drawing on theological remarks about patience, constancy, and Stoicism current in the fourteenth century to show that a desire to distinguish between true and false patience, life-giving virtues and debilitating near misses, was no invention of Chaucer’s. It is the first deployment of a strategy that will be repeated many times in the course of this book, as with the attention to Boethius near the end of chapter 2 and the detailed looks at Bernard of Clairvaux that fill most of chapters 3 and 6: the discovery of something very like Chaucer’s concerns in theological writers both validates the literary readings that have preceded and at some points extends them, casting further light back onto the stories and characters with which the search for understanding began. The Griselda who emerges from these labors is, I think, of a new kind. Though it will become clear that Chaucer adds to his sources invitations to think of her allegorically, she is certainly not merely, nor even primarily, an allegorical figure. But neither is she merely a struggling woman caught in a realistic domestic tragedy; and least of all is she a positive moral exemplum. In fact Chaucer’s impact on the story is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction: the balance of the work he has done shapes Griselda into a negative exemplum, a picture of what must be avoided rather than imitated. She is, moreover, an answer to a question asked by Petrarch—an answer so emphatic that it registers more as a howl of protest than a simple word. And perhaps most significant of all, we will learn along the way that Chaucer’s howl is no rarity, but almost a commonplace in the writing of his time.

Some Initial Scruples Concerning Infanticide A likely short description of Griselda’s story runs something like this: a woman’s astounding capacity for the endurance of suffering triumphs over tribulations imposed by her cruel husband. But at least in Chaucer’s version, we can find abundant, if scattered, evidence that a more

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complicated description is necessary. For one thing, the reader may leave the tale a bit unnerved by the sheer extent of its protagonist’s ability to remain silent. As one critic observes, it is difficult to uphold as a “paragon of virtue” a woman whose devotion allows her to watch without complaint as her husband’s agent carts off their children, as she thinks, to be murdered.10 Could there be something a bit wrong here? If we begin by assuming that the tale is first and foremost an allegory—or, for that matter, that it is a more or less ordinary moral exemplum—we will think not: believing that the tale aims to describe God’s relations with humanity or to teach constancy, we will likely find such feats to be merely hyperbolic ways of driving the point home. We may also try to further dissolve the discomfort occasioned by Griselda’s failure to protest by judicious application of the solvent of cultural difference, imagining that medieval readers would not have felt a modern degree of outrage over such a laissez-faire attitude toward the death of one’s offspring. It is especially tempting to believe in such medieval insouciance where there is a suggestion of a divine demand for the deaths in question, as there will be for allegorizing readings that take Walter as a figure for God. But much concrete evidence about medieval audiences points in the opposite direction. For example, the tale contains relevant echoes, as one recent critic points out, of the medieval mystery plays: Walter’s faked abductions, Pamela Allen Brown suggests, would have instantly brought to many minds the spectacle of Herod’s soldiers carrying off the Holy Innocents to be murdered. That scene was often portrayed in high drama, with the infants’ mothers refusing to hand over the children, sometimes proposing to fight off fully armed soldiers with kitchen implements, and frequently giving their lives in the attempt to save their offspring—against which background Griselda’s failure to raise even her voice in protest looks less and less morally appealing.11 Nor does a comparison with contemporary descriptions of the lives of saintly women lead to any normalizing of Griselda’s complaisance: while the hagiography of the time does suggest that the late Middle Ages found a certain lack of enthusiasm about children acceptable in holy women, nothing appears there that approaches Griselda’s quiet acceptance of her children’s deaths.12 Another version of the attempt to quiet our discomfort by recourse to cultural difference might propose to excuse Griselda’s behavior not by her (arguable) status as a quasi-saint, but simply by her gender. Perhaps,

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the argument would run, a late-medieval audience would have expected women to be complaisant to such a degree that Griselda’s silence would not irritate; would it not have understood women to be physiologically, emotionally, and perhaps somehow even ontologically, “passive” with respect to their male counterparts, and therefore have expected them to receive with little resistance almost everything their male counterparts sent their way?13 But here too it would be wrong to reach such a conclusion too quickly. Petrarch famously tells, in one of his letters to Boccaccio about the story, of reading his version to a Veronese friend who protested that Griselda’s behavior was simply unbelievable.14 Recent scholarship has discovered another member of the story’s fourteenthcentury audience who went so far as to provide for Griselda, in the margin of a manuscript of Boccaccio’s version, the reaction that many a reader six or seven centuries in the future might also have liked to see: told at the end of the story that her trials were all a hoax, the marginal Griselda replies, “Go piss on your hand, Walter! Who’ll give me back twelve years? The gallows?”15 Thus it seems that at least some medieval readers, like many modern ones, experienced the story as raising the question it never makes explicit: why on earth does Griselda put up with it? Once those attempts to contextualize the story have proved inadequate to account for Griselda’s troubling submissiveness, a reasonable next recourse is to have another look at Chaucer’s text. And when we do we may well feel our unease growing stronger rather than tapering off. Again, what are we to make of Griselda? If we are open to considering the status of her character as a whole, we will find quite a number of places where the tale itself encourages critical skepticism, subtly but insistently suggesting protest against her silence. On the occasion of the removal of her first child, for example, the poem comments: I trowe that to a norice in this cas It had been hard this reuthe for to se; Wel myghte a mooder thanne han cryd “allas!” (561–63) This sounds like a straightforward expression of sympathy for Griselda—until one reflects that the mother in this case did not cry allas, nor make any other sound, when Walter’s ugly “sergeant” an-

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nounced that he would take her daughter off to die. And even before this, the sergeant himself has had a few words for Griselda which it is hard not to hear ironically, once we have entertained the possibility that the tale contains quiet criticism of her extremely passive patience: Ye been so wys that ful wel knowe ye That lordes heestes mowe nat been yfeyned; They mowe wel been biwailled or compleyned, But men moote nede unto hire lust obeye, And so wol I; there is namoore to seye. (526 –32) This least sympathetic of characters has what might in other circumstances be an admirable, or at least admissible, outlook on the powers that be: one can certainly complain against them, but in the end one must obey. But his words serve as a biting sort of foil for Griselda, who obeys without even complaining.16 The force of the foil increases when one discovers that both these encouragements toward complaint are Chaucer’s insertions into the story—making these the first among many cases where comparison with the sources is vital. In Petrarch’s version, Walter’s retainer arrives with a similar-sounding philosophical speech: “You know, most wise lady, what it is to be under lords; nor is the hard necessity of obeying unknown to a lady gifted with such intelligence, however inexperienced.”17 But the suggestion that the orders of the powerful may at least “been biwailled or compleyned” in the course of the aforesaid obedience—and that complaint is an ordinary human reaction that one might expect alike from nurses, mothers, and henchmen of dubious character—is entirely Chaucer’s. As a result Petrarch’s version much more easily comes across as a bona fide appeal to a praiseworthy philosophical (and stereotypically “Stoic”) equanimity successfully achieved by his Griselda. The scene in Chaucer, newly adorned with these two reminders of Griselda’s failure to complain, is somewhat harder to pass off as a philosophy lesson. These are not the only signs that Chaucer’s audience is allowed, even encouraged, to be skeptical of Griselda’s acquiescence in infanticide. The villainous Walter himself eventually begins to wonder

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whether there is something wrong with her silence. Hearing of her stolidity at the abduction of her second child, he seems to be as much shocked as impressed: he “wondred . . . upon hir pacience,” and he thinks to himself that he could almost believe that her equanimity grew from crueel corage, from malice, or from subtiltee—did he not already know that she loved her children parfitly (687– 93). In this passage as in the earlier ones, Chaucer has inherited the basic shape of the story from his sources but intensified the possibility of disaffection with it. In Petrarch, Walter is here said to be almost capable of thinking that his wife’s “oak-like strength proceeded from a certain wildness [or bestiality] of animus”—not exactly high praise for a recently ascended aristocrat, but far from the series of unambiguously condemnatory attributes that Chaucer substitutes.18 Some of those adjectives, it is true, come from the intermediate French versions. For example, the Livre Griseldis strengthens Walter’s would-be condemnations, translating Petrarch’s feritate bluntly as “cruelty” and noting that Walter could almost have considered his wife a suspette et mauvaise femme. But it is Chaucer alone who raises the possibility of subtiltee. The word is easily overlooked but striking when attended to, as it makes explicit a question that implicitly underlies much of the Clerk’s Tale. Is it possible that Griselda is, as it were, faking her equanimity, gritting her teeth and exerting all her willpower in order to preserve an outward illusion of calm while actually suffering terribly within? This will be, as already noted, the central question of the investigation here, and we will eventually find ample grounds for a positive answer. For the moment Chaucer has merely let drop a single word of suggestion. But it is enough, combined with his other intimations of criticism, to suggest that there is something troubling about Griselda; and that the troubles modern readers have with her are not artifacts of our own reading, but are well-grounded in features of the poem itself—at least some of which features are, like this one, Chaucer’s innovations.

A Closer Look at the Marriage Before we take up the question of Griselda’s possible subtiltee in earnest, it will be worth taking note of one more way in which the tale opens

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the door to understated criticism of its protagonist. It is a possibility sufficiently disturbing that one hesitates to bring it up, for fear of being accused of blaming the victim, or at least of suggesting that Chaucer has done so. Nonetheless the tale itself offers solid support to the idea by a wide spectrum of means, ranging all the way from some of Chaucer’s most subtle alterations of his predecessors to a blunt couplet that brings attention to the trouble in about a dozen words. The suggestion itself is easy to see. Though Walter is the tale’s most obvious villain, is there any sense in which his despicable behavior—or at least its continuation at length—is facilitated by the way in which his wife reacts? The most concentrated of the tale’s hints in that direction arrives at the beginning of Griselda’s second trial, when her two-year-old son has just been weaned. In Petrarch’s version, the audience is prepared for the horror that is to come with a few brief words: he writes that the child’s “father, having reverted to his wonted inquisitiveness” (p. 121, lines 239– 40), approaches Griselda to announce the child’s imminent removal. Chaucer retains the warning, but adds two thoughts of his own. First comes a one-line editorial disparagement of Walter’s behavior: “O nedelees was she tempted in assay!” (line 621). But the second innovation is a kind of rueful shrug in couplet form: “But wedded men ne knowe no mesure, / Whan that they fynde a pacient creature” (622–23). One might easily pass over that second insertion as vaguely extending the complaint that immediately precedes it; or as merely a kind of engaging filler; or even as a sly double entendre, since the Latin patientia was a well-established term for the passive role in sexual intercourse.19 But it does seem that to the extent that those two lines register discontent, the discontent is not directed exclusively at Walter: line 623 suggests that his measureless temptations are given occasion, perhaps even brought on, by his wife’s “patience.” It is, to be sure, not immediately clear from the couplet itself whether Chaucer wants it to be taken in that way, or even whether he wants that interpretation included among a range of other possibilities. But there are more subtle indications elsewhere in the tale that he is ready to lay some of the blame for Griselda’s sufferings at her own doorstep—or at very least that he invites his reader to consider that possibility. The clearest of these comes when Walter and Griselda exchange their wedding oaths. It is just a few minutes after they have met that

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Walter proposes to Griselda some rather extraordinary ground-rules for marital bliss: Be ye redy with good herte To al my lust, and that I frely may, As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte, And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? And eek whan I sey “ye,” ne sey nat “nay,” Neither by word ne frownyng contenance? Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance. (351–57) And Griselda’s reply is a hyperbolic match: As ye wol youreself, right so wol I. And heere I swere that nevere willyngly, In werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye, For to be deed, though me were looth to deye. (361–64) The general terms of the agreement are clear: Griselda must take whatever Walter sends her way, without complaint, without, we might say, even looking at him funny. And whatever is here a load-bearing word, indicating a certain kind of infinity in Griselda’s oath. She is not promising merely a particular action or set of actions. The promise includes a variable: I will do—whatever you want me to do. I will even will— whatever you will. After such a beginning, we should not be too surprised that deep trouble ensues when it turns out that Griselda’s new husband is a man inclined toward testing at any price—in one critic’s word, an “epistemophiliac”—a man who is concerned above all to get to the bottom of her will.20 Worse, his testing seems to be of a kind that can only detect negative results: as long as she complies with her own promises, he has not yet been guaranteed the truth and feels he must go on testing. Her perfect compliance gives no way out of the cycle of tests and more tests; her “perfect” (from this point of view) masochism matches, perhaps even encourages, his almost limitless sadism. In this sense having found a “perfect creature” really does con-

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tribute to Walter’s lack of measure. No wonder a destructive spiral ensues. Granted that the results are awful, though, how are we to decide the apportionment of cause or blame? There is no question that Walter’s obsessive testing is a major source of the evils in the tale; but to the attentive reader there is also a second suggestion here in plain sight that some of Griselda’s trouble emerges from her side of the contract, in fact from the way she makes the contract. Though the demand placed on her is extreme, Griselda responds by swearing, without further prompting from Walter, still more than was demanded. He asks “only” that she refrain from complaint (that ye ne grucche it), either in word or contenance. She responds with an oath that she will not disobey in werk ne thoght. The addition of that last word shifts the sphere of discussion from exterior actions to internal mental states; as far as it is governable by her will, Griselda says, she will not only refrain from showing any discontent with Walter; she will not even think bad thoughts about him. It is a remarkable way to begin a marriage. And while other versions of the tale start with similarly extreme promises, they have the full extent of the extremism proposed by Walter rather than appended by an all-too-willing bride. Petrarch’s Griselda, for example, ends by affirming roughly the same thing as Chaucer’s: she says (in my painfully but perhaps usefully literal translation), “Knowingly I—let alone will never do, but even will never think—what is against your animus; nor will you do anything, even if you should condemn me to death, that I will bear as a grievance.”21 But in Petrarch’s version, unlike Chaucer’s, the desire for thought-control has already been stated by Walter, who has just inquired whether Griselda is “prepared, with a willing animus, that in all things having to do with you I will be pleased in this way: that in nothing will you ever dissent from my will [voluntate]; and [that] whatever I should wish to do with you should be permitted to me, without any resistance of face or word, with you willing it from your animus.”22 The demand to control both inner and outer is set out twice, both times with the word animus, which can easily refer to the faculty responsible for the thinking that Griselda’s response agrees to control. But Chaucer reduces Walter’s first demand on her mental processes to a passing introductory “with good herte” (line 351), which, while interior, is less

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likely to be thought of as the source of Griselda’s thoght (363); and he omits the second one altogether. As a result the oath’s wild promise to manage internal as well as external acts is now laid solely to Griselda’s account.23 Chaucer has altered the initial oath-exchange in two simpler ways as well. One is by the mere fact of having oaths involved: in all five potential sources Walter and Griselda simply make promises, whereas Chaucer has put into both mouths the word swere, with all its connotations of seriousness and danger. The other is that Chaucer makes it clear that, in addition to asking her father, Walter asks Griselda herself for consent to the marriage. (In Petrarch and two of the three French sources he certainly does not; I believe the Livre Griseldis also intends that he does not, though its text is ambiguous.24) As with the new imbalance between proposal and response, Chaucer here gives Griselda a greater role in shaping her own dismal situation than her literary ancestors had had—and the situation itself has become somewhat more dramatic. The result is a character to whom we are ready to credit more of what follows, or on whom we are more ready to blame it, should it turn out badly. Combined with the numerous hints gone before that Chaucer’s Griselda, despite the tale’s surface-level exaltation of her, does not always act as a truly virtuous human should, this increase in her responsibility relative to Walter’s allows plenty of space for a thoroughly negative assessment of her character—for a conclusion that the habits of action that first read as patience or constancy are in fact vicious near misses, outstanding examples of a potentially great good that has been corrupted into an actually great evil.25 To clinch the case we need only turn back to the question of Griselda’s possible fakery or subtiltee— which we can do most handily simply by considering how she describes her own situation.

Is Griselda Walter’s Mechanical Bride? The wedding oaths have already given us a look at how those descriptions will run: she will claim to have turned over to Walter both her thoght (363) and her will (361), suggesting that she has somehow bound her mental faculties by a ligature of such machinelike reliability that

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they will simply duplicate Walter’s own. If that self-assessment is correct, it is no wonder that Griselda gains the victory in the couple’s diseased psychological contest. To pass each test, she must acquiesce without showing any pain; but that task will be easy to one who feels no pain; and if she has in fact evacuated her own intellect and will and replaced them with Walter’s, is it not almost a logical corollary that— as she indeed claims several times —she will feel no pain at his cruelties? If her desires are only his, how can she object?26 Griselda is, moreover, remarkably consistent about the assertion of linked wills, repeating something like it at least four more times, once for each of her four trials (roughly lines 509–11, 645–67, 858 –61, and 967–73). It strikes near the core of the story, at least in Chaucer’s version, whose motive engine is Walter’s desire to know Griselda’s wille (see n. 20): Is she really “his,” without remainder, without independence, all the way down? It is a question of skepticism, a desire to know whether a largely hidden reality matches what the more easily observable signs would suggest—in this case, whether Griselda’s “inside” matches her “outside,” or only seems to do so because of som subtiltee.27 Readers who want to know what to make of Griselda thus find themselves uncomfortably rubbing elbows with Walter, as we too, in a way, want to get to the bottom of her will, even if with an arguably gentler aim. We will need to know what is there because if her inner life is as she says, we will have to revise the ordinary understanding of her, perhaps even to the point of undoing her familiar epithet. For how patient is “patient Griselda” if she does not inwardly suffer, but has somehow passed to a state of accepting her husband’s offerings with real, not merely apparent, equanimity?28 This is how the simple question of how Chaucer wishes us to understand Griselda changes to a more complex and specific inquiry: Is Griselda the automaton she says she is, or is she a suffering woman who largely stifles her ordinary reactions to suffering by an extraordinary effort at self-control? As hinted already, the reader who approaches the Clerk’s Tale on its own will find that question nearly impossible to answer from the text, because—as with many other questions about this poem—he or she will find ample evidence on both sides. Weighing in on the side of will replacement, besides the five assertions of preternaturally thorough fealty listed in the previous paragraph, are occa-

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sional narratorial interjections that seem motivated by the same worry about a potential inner-outer mismatch that troubles Walter. “She was ay oon in herte and in visage,” the poem lets us know just after the second trial (line 711), in the course of reporting Walter’s careful investigation of just that question. Indeed, the poem continues, as time went on, The moore trewe, if that it were possible, She was to hym in love, and more penyble. For which it semed thus: that of hem two Ther nas but o wyl. (713–16) And a third similar observation comes a few stanzas later, where Walter is the one “to whom that she was yeven herte and al” (758)—possibly a throwaway line, but possibly a reassurance that her attachment is not just a matter of externals. Combining these with Griselda’s five declarations gives us a set of eight loci in support of the notion that Griselda has become Walter’s automaton, possessed by his will rather than possessed of her own. On the other side of the question is, first of all, the fact that the poem cannot resist qualifying with wiggle words some of its strongest statements of Griselda’s “automaticity.” To say, at line 715, that it seemed that the couple shared a single will is to tell us what we already knew; the real question is whether the inward reality, the will, matches the seeming. Similarly, after Walter announces the imminent abduction of Griselda’s daughter, “as it semed, she was nat agreved” (500; as with all citations of medieval texts, the emphasis has been added). Perhaps such caution in the poem’s own voice should engender similar caution among its readers: Why should we assume that these signs of equanimity are to be trusted? And while qualifying Griselda’s subjection to Walter’s will in this way perhaps counts only as negative evidence, the poem also offers positive evidence that her will has not been fully obliterated: a few memorable occasions on which her composure cracks, suggesting not the serene recipient of a successful will-transplant but a woman undergoing excruciating pains that finally force their way through a massive bulwark of self-control into her observable exterior.

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The first and most irruptive of these comes during the third trial, as Griselda responds to the news that Walter has effected a divorce and is sending her back to her village.29 In the middle of reminding Walter that she does not have much of a dowry to take, as he has just directed, with her when she departs, and after more than five stanzas of apparently unwounded gratitude, Griselda suddenly bursts out with this: “O goode God! How gentil and how kynde Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage The day that maked was oure mariage! “But sooth is seyd—algate I fynde it trewe, For in effect it preeved is on me— Love is noght oold as whan that it is newe.” (852–57) Similarly suggestive of a momentary lapse in an otherwise steely selfcontrol are Griselda’s two fainting spells when Walter reveals the happy (?) news that the events of the past twelve years have all been rigged as a test; the suggestion is particularly strong in view of the riveting detail that in the second swoon the unconscious mother clasps her restored children to herself with such a grip that bystanders can loose them only “with greet sleighte and greet difficultee” (1102). And a less dramatic “crack” occurs between the two, when Griselda warns Walter that he should not “prikke” his aristocratic second bride with “no tormentynge . . . as ye han doon mo” (1038). That remark, for all its phrasing as helpful advice to a sadist, nonetheless suggests a woman quite conscious of having been grievously mistreated. Thus the witness of the tale taken alone is ambiguous; and if we merely count numbers, the idea of Griselda as a genuine automaton will win, with eight passages in its favor and only three opposing. Viewed against the background of earlier versions of the story, however, the same data suddenly look entirely different. The three cracks in Griselda’s appearance of untroubled acquiescence give a good initial sense of the results. The passage beginning “O goode God!” (to take them in the same order again) is entirely Chaucer’s, part of a twelve-line insertion, one of the longest in the tale.30 The double swoon is also Chaucer’s,

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constituting most of what seems to be his longest insertion (twentyeight lines).31 As for the third “crack,” Griselda’s remark about her previous treatment, this does occur in the sources, but there she is more circumspect, avoiding any such strong word as the Clerk’s Tale’s “torment.” In Chaucer’s two main sources, Petrarch and Le Livre Griseldis, she merely warns Walter not to “drive [or trouble, or set in motion] this [wife] with the spurs with which you drove [troubled, set in motion] the other.” While this is not exactly an enthusiastic review of one’s husband’s comportment, it is still possible to hear it as a wifely automaton’s genuine concern for Walter’s well-being, newly endangered by his mistaken belief that any woman would accept his treatment in the way she has done. Still more tellingly, in both sources Griselda demurely masks any direct reference to herself, substituting “the other” for the expected first-person pronoun: far be it from her to say directly that she is the one Walter has driven or troubled. Chaucer’s retelling angles for maximum bluntness on both counts: be sure, says his Griselda, that you don’t spur her with the tortures you used on me!32 Thus the poem’s main indications of friction, pain, and internal struggle on Griselda’s part, although they are few, have all been either invented or greatly strengthened by Chaucer.33 When we look, by contrast, to the other side of the scales —the eight passages suggesting a mechanically perfect bondage of Griselda’s will—we discover that their extraction is very different: no fewer than six of the eight descend from Petrarch in some form. Moreover the two exceptions, when examined closely, do little to disprove the rule. The first of them is the poem’s antiskeptical assurance that Griselda’s interior matches her exterior, that she is “ay oon in herte and in visage.” If the statement merited full credence, it would indeed seem to force readers to admit a Griselda who is entirely Walter’s unquestioning servant, in the depths of her thought as much as in her bodily actions. In context, though, the statement is very much up for question. The context is Walter’s close observation of his wife; Petrarch’s original reports that “with his eyes fixed on his wife, [Walter] was diligently observing whether any change of her toward him happened; and he could not discover any, all the way down, except that she was becoming more faithful to him and more humbly devoted as days went on.” The line in question is an isolated addition in a stanza otherwise quite faithful to Petrarch’s text:34

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He waiteth if by word or contenance That she to hym was changed of corage; But nevere koude he fynde variance. She was ay oon in herte and in visage; And ay the forther that she was in age, The moore trewe, if that it were possible, She was to hym in love, and moore penyble. (708 –14) In that setting the line in question can easily be understood as a kind of free indirect discourse, relating what Walter perceives (or rather fails to perceive) rather than what an independent authority vouches for. That impression will gain strength not many stanzas later when events demonstrate that the very next thing the poem goes on to say—that Griselda is becoming more and more trewe (loyal) and penyble (devoted, but also able to endure pain) as she ages —is merely an appearance, not a reality. It is, after all, only in the third trial, after twelve years of apparently penyble endurance have gone by, that Griselda first shows the slightest hint of protest, namely the expostulation beginning “O goode God!” already quoted. The second ostensibly pro-automaton passage original with Chaucer is one of Griselda’s own declarations of fealty, falling during the third trial: But certes, lord, for noon adversitee, To dyen in the cas, it shal nat bee That evere in word or werk I shal repente That I yow yaf myn herte in hool entente. (858 –61) Once again, however, the context vitiates the weight this appears to give to the notion that Griselda’s interior (herte) is Walter’s as thoroughly as her exterior. The passage follows immediately on the six afflicted lines beginning “O goode God!” and ending “Love is noght oold as whan that it is newe” (852–57); thus it makes up a part of a single long addition whose primary import is strident protest at obvious wrong. Against that background what Griselda says here takes on a different meaning, concessive rather than affirmative: despite the fact that you

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have changed from an apparently gracious nobleman into a sadistic monster, I will not repent my (past) decision to link my inner self entirely to yours. (The introductory But thus seems to mean “nonetheless” or “in spite of everything.”) There is also a further qualification: the remarkable fact that what Griselda promises here is, after all, merely external. She mentions her herte only with respect to the past; what she claims to control for the future is merely word and werk—presumably meaning that she will not speak or show any resentment to Walter, even if her thoughts toward him are occasionally less than harmonious. Since the whole passage is Chaucer’s insertion, the promise does give Griselda, just as the wedding oaths do, more responsibility for strong claims against the future than she had in the sources. But it stops short of implying the persistent state of an automaton; to do that Griselda would have to say something about her future internal being.35 What we have instead suggests a woman trying to control, even to convince, herself, reminding herself of her resolve to maintain into the indefinite future an exterior that matches the internal commitment she here claims to have made. Given what precedes the passage, she is perhaps even reining herself in a bit, reacting to the fact that her natural human feelings have just now, for the first time ever, slipped out. But if she had really received a kind of will transplant, if she were really Walter’s automaton penitus (all the way down), surely there would be no such slippage, no further need to remind herself to keep up appearances? Thus the two prima facie pro-automaton passages that Chaucer invents turn out to have little if any weight as evidence. The fact that he inherits the other six from his sources (all ultimately from Petrarch) would already be enough to suggest his very limited investment in the idea of a mechanical link between the couple’s wills. But in fact there is much more to discover than this, for Chaucer has changed every one of these others in revealing ways. At the first of them, the wedding oaths themselves, we have already had a close look; but the remaining five bear further investigation. In order to group his changes according to their effects, I will take them out of the order of the tale, considering them instead in this sequence: lines 654 –58 (from the second trial), 972–73 (fourth), 505–11 (first), 715–21 (between second and third), and 752–58 (third).

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The Aetiology of an Automaton Consider first the fealty statement from the second trial. Understanding it requires us to remember the odd fact—odd in the sense that Chaucer’s poem is otherwise not much interested in concrete description of the trappings of power—that Griselda changes her clothes an awful lot. Four times, to be exact, the narration pauses to remark her sartorial mutations, not counting other reflections and discussions of the theme.36 The passage in question is among the secondary reflections; Griselda produces it in the course of explaining for Walter’s benefit the subjection that will allow her to surrender her second child: “For as I lefte at hoom al my clothyng, Whan I first cam to yow, right so,” quod she, “Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee, And took youre clothynge; wherfore I yow preye, Dooth your plesaunce; I wol youre lust obeye.” (654 –58) The assertion on its own—I have sloughed off my own will and freedom—is startling enough. But source study tells us something more: in Petrarch’s version the association between clothing and will had been still more ferociously exact, the implications still more surprising, than they are in the Clerk’s Tale. “For in the very act of entering your household,” his Griselda tells Walter, “it was with my movements of will and my affects just as with my [ragged] clothes: I took off mine and put on yours. Therefore whatever you will concerning any matter whatever, I also will.”37 The passage is absolutely explicit on a topic about which Chaucer’s no longer gives more than the scantiest of hints: Petrarch’s Griselda has not only left behind her own “movements of will and affects”; she has “put on” Walter’s as a substitute. Which is to say that Petrarch’s Griselda says she has done exactly what we are investigating: she has not merely bowed to Walter’s will, choosing to surrender an unmarried person’s sense of self-determination; she has undergone something much more like a transplant operation.38 That difference between the two accounts is borne out by their different conclusions. Where Chaucer’s Griselda says merely, “Do as you like and I

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will obey” (658), in Petrarch it is less a matter of obedience than of a state where there is no longer any need to obey, because there is no option to do otherwise: “Whatever you will . . . I also [eo ipso!] will.” In a very small space, then, Chaucer has dropped two strong assertions of a mechanical linkage of wills. Thus the statement of fealty that remains, which read in isolation will seem to suggest a poet interested in producing a mechanical Griselda, more plausibly counts, when read against its source, as evidence in the opposite direction; that is the direction in which Chaucer has so strongly pushed the passage. Extending our consideration of this example to the lines just before and after this segment will add a useful nuance. What immediately follows is in Petrarch a statement of devotion that is even more clearly beyond the bounds of ordinary nature: “If I knew in advance your future will,” Griselda tells Walter, “I would begin both to will and to desire whatever it was even before you willed [it]” (lines 252–54). Chaucer softens the passage into a much more down-to-earth claim: And certes, if I hadde prescience Youre wyl to knowe, er ye youre lust me tolde, I wolde it doon withouten negligence. (659–61)39 Still clearer is the alteration in the passage preceding the reference to clothing, which in the Clerk’s Tale comes across as merely another of Griselda’s many loyal promises: “ ‘I have,’ quod she, ‘seyd thus, and evere shal: / I wol no thyng, ne nyl no thyng, certayn, / But as yow list’ ” (645– 47). In Petrarch her declaration is slightly but vitally different: “ ‘I have said,’ she said, ‘and repeat: I can will or nill nothing except that which you will or nill.’ ”40 Chaucer’s version harbors an ambiguity about just the question under investigation, one that would easily go unnoticed were it not for comparison with Petrarch: “I wol no thyng” could be either a simple statement of fact about something over which Griselda no longer has control—this is just how my will functions, being somehow so tightly linked to yours as no longer to be self-determining—or a performative declaration in which a Griselda still in control of her will announces a choice or promise to will only what Walter does. In context, particularly given her declaration (“evere shal”) that she will keep

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repeating this utterance into the indefinite future, the latter meaning is perhaps more likely. But Petrarch’s “I can will nothing” unambiguously meant the former, and thus Chaucer’s softening of it (even if only into ambiguity) pushes Griselda toward being less an automaton, more a struggler, than she was in the source—the fourth such push we have been able to remark in approximately twenty lines. This last alteration of Chaucer’s also has a second kind of effect, one tied up with its aforementioned reference to the indefinite future. Only in Chaucer is the future mentioned at all: Griselda’s assertion about the future and the past (“I have seyd thus and evere shal”) replaces what in Petrarch and all three French sources referred only to past and present (“I have said and repeat”). One might write off the change as an artifact of prosodic necessity, as shal is an easy rhyme; but parallel shifts happen often enough to make one suspect that there is more to them. Another example, in fact, was described in the last paragraph but one, where we saw Chaucer transforming an assertion of present will-replacement (Petrarch’s “whatever you will . . . I also will”) into a necessarily future promise of obedience (“I wol youre lust obeye”). So it is also with the changes already remarked to the couple’s initial wedding oaths: Chaucer shifts the responsibility for a claim about Griselda’s future internal state (“nevere willyngly, / In werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye”) largely onto Griselda’s shoulders. And in the third trial Chaucer inserts into the midst of three or four stanzas of very close translation of a speech by Petrarch’s Griselda a single new couplet that has a similar effect: “And evere shal, whil that my lyf may dure, / Aboven every wordly creature” (825–26). In the sources Griselda is making a statement about her own past and present humility, but Chaucer here extends it to cover the future as well, using the same two words, evere shal, that were used 180 lines earlier to do the same job. All this evidence has emerged from considering only the first of the five passages supporting Griselda’s “automaticity” that it is this section’s task to consider. The remainder, happily, can be dealt with considerably more quickly. When we turn to the second instance the temporal pattern just described continues: once again Griselda is given a newly strengthened assertion about the future. The context is the cruel fourth trial, in which Walter recalls the previously dismissed Griselda from the hovel to which she has returned so that she can serve, dressed in her

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pauper’s rags, as the majordomo in charge of arrangements for his wedding to his second, younger, wife. The line in question is in Petrarch a more or less passing reference to the future: the ever subservient Griselda says that she will never tire or grow slower in doing what pleases Walter “while any remnants of this spirit remain” (351). Chaucer deepens the remark, transforming it from a promise about external actions to a two-line guarantee of Griselda’s future inward state: “Ne shal the goost withinne myn herte stente / To love yow best with al my trewe entente” (972–73). It is a peculiar move, in that Chaucer’s Griselda here—as in several of the previous paragraph’s changes —makes about the future just the sort of hyperbolic claim that we have several times seen Chaucer remove from the story when made about the present. Peculiar as it is, though, such changes happen so frequently and so forcefully (at this point, and at all the loci that the preceding paragraph describes, all three potential French sources remain close to Petrarch, so that Chaucer has moved against all four authorities in making the temporal shift) that it would be difficult to attribute them to coincidence. Why Chaucer might have wanted to create a Griselda so eager to make promises about the future will be easier to guess after this section’s work is done—in part because we will learn from the remaining three ostensibly pro-automaton passages that he was equally interested in making momentous changes in her relationship to the past. In particular, while Petrarch’s story repeatedly emphasizes Griselda’s own leading role in having become the stalwart, constant promise-keeper she is, Chaucer’s translation of those passages nearly always removes the ascription of credit to Griselda. Our third passage, consisting of the first trial’s fealty statement, is typical. Griselda tells Walter: Ther may no thyng, God so my soule save, Liken to yow that may displese me; Ne I desire no thyng for to have, Ne drede for to leese, save oonly yee. This wyl is in myn herte, and ay shal be; No lengthe of tyme or deeth may this deface, Ne chaunge my corage to another place. (505–11)

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The parallel in Petrarch begins similarly but diverges in the middle. His Griselda declares: “Nothing can please you that [will] displease me. There is nothing whatsoever that I desire to have or fear to lose, except you; I myself have fastened this in the center of my heart, whence it is never to be torn out by lapse of time or by death. All things may happen sooner than this animus be changed.”41 The older poet’s Griselda here emphatically gives her past self credit for her present strength, laying special emphasis on her own role by using a pronoun where none is required. Given the emphatic reflexive ipsa, in fact, her declaration might plausibly be rendered as speaking still more strongly, to wit: “I myself, and none other” have arranged myself as I am.42 By contrast Chaucer’s Griselda, though she speaks of herself in the present as having an equally strong will, becomes suddenly vague on the question of how she got that way: “This wyl is in myn herte.” The question of who put it there—the question of Griselda’s past agency—has been removed from the limelight. A parallel case—the fourth of this section’s five passages —arrives in the narratorial interlude between the second and third trials that describes Walter’s incredulous redoubling of efforts to detect some flaw in his wife’s apparent inner strength. This is the context for Chaucer’s striking observation (following Petrarch’s) that it “semed . . . that of hem two / ther nas but o wyl” (715–16). But in the lines that follow, the two authors propose quite different aetiologies for this strange seeming. Petrarch tells us that “of the two there seemed not to be but one animus, [and that one] not common to both but merely of the husband alone; for the wife had affirmed [herself], as has been said, to will nothing [and] to nill nothing on her own.”43 Chaucer again diverges near the midpoint: It semed thus, that of hem two Ther nas but o wyl; for as Walter leste, The same lust was hire plesance also. And, God be thanked, al fil for the beste. She shewed wel, for no worldly unreste A wyf, as of hirself, nothing ne sholde Wille in effect, but as hir housbonde wolde. (715–21)

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Gone is any reference to a Griselda who had affirmed (or Petrarch’s firmaverat can mean, still more bluntly, “had decided”) that the two wills should be one. To the contrary, what in Petrarch she arranged for herself Chaucer has converted into an abstract sententious aphorism, a mere “should be,” in the narratorial voice; and that shift of mood invites an ironic interpretation, for maxims are much more likely to be doubted than bald indicative statements, particularly when they are in the mouth of an uncertain narrative voice, particularly when it is a voice created by Chaucer. The stanza as a whole is consequently rather puzzling: one cannot say for certain whether to attribute the antifeminist sentiment of its close to Chaucer himself, to a fictionalized “Clerk” who apparently reverses his ideas on the subject at the tale’s end, to a bout of sarcasm like the one that gives us the Man of Law’s Tale’s “Housbondes been alle goode, and han ben yoore” (line 272), or to none of these. What one can be certain about, however, is that Chaucer chose not to attribute this valorization of the subjection of wifely wills to Griselda—whereas Petrarch attributes it precisely and only there. Whatever else Chaucer’s Griselda is, she is not, or not simply, what Petrarch’s seems to be: the proud victor in a successful (and an unambiguously finished) campaign to replace her own will with that of another.44 The fifth of Chaucer’s inherited ostensibly pro-automaton passages is marked by a similar change. It arrives just five stanzas later, when the third trial is getting under way, but before Walter has paid his customary visit to Griselda to announce it. Thus in this trial alone, we see her reaction to having independently gotten wind of what is to follow; and as already noted, this trial is also unique in being accompanied by the suggestion that its contents (namely divorce from Walter) may make her unhappy. Here is Petrarch: “When [this] rumor had come to Griselda’s attention, she was sad, as I suppose—but she, as one who had [once] decided about the fates of herself and of the things [or people] that were hers, stood constant and unshaken, waiting to see what he to whom she had subjected herself and all things of hers would decree about her.”45 Chaucer changes the situation, twice, in a way by now predictable: But whan thise tydinges came to Griseldis, I deeme that hire herte was ful wo. But she, ylike sad for everemo,

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Disposed was, this humble creature, The adversitee of Fortune al t’endure, Abidynge ever his lust and his plesance, To whom that she was yeven herte and al. (752–58) Once more the record of Griselda’s past active force (active both concretely and grammatically) is bent toward neutral-or-passive descriptions of present status: “She had once decided about herself ” becomes “She was disposed,” and the one “to whom she had subjected herself ” becomes the one “to whom she was given.” And once more the change is Chaucer’s: while the three French translations alter other details (and while Le Livre Griseldis omits the first phrase entirely), they all agree with Petrarch in explicitly naming Griselda as having, in the pluperfect tense, been the agent responsible for whatever disposing or giving, deciding or subjecting, has happened.46

The Evidence in Review: Griselda Past, Present, and Future That is the last of the five Petrarchan inheritances that we had to consider—and thus also completes the longer scan of eight passages from the Clerk’s Tale that seemed to support an automatic or mechanical Griselda, a bride whose will has been entirely replaced by her husband’s. Clearly most of that support derives from Petrarch rather than being original with Chaucer; and we have seen several passages in which Chaucer has diminished the force of the support he inherited. Beyond that general evidence for a push away from a mechanical Griselda, though, we have discovered something else: that the evidence about the kind of agency Chaucer’s Griselda exerts, which can feel like a directionless jumble if regarded all together, falls into strong patterns when sorted according to whether it speaks of Griselda in the present, Griselda in the past, and Griselda in the future. It is with respect to the “present Griselda” that the evidence indicates most clearly Chaucer’s tendency to make his character into an ordinary woman rather than an automaton. Petrarch’s Griselda repeatedly

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states that her will simply is identical to Walter’s, with no mention of present-tense choice in getting it there; such statements have largely if not completely disappeared from Chaucer’s version. And of course there are passages in Chaucer, most obviously the three cracks-in-composure, that make it clear that Griselda has a will, thoughts, and feelings of her own that must be forcibly controlled if they are to match Walter’s; and essentially all of those passages are Chaucer’s. Thus source study all but reverses what modern readers are likely to make of Chaucer’s Griselda: against the background of its predecessors, the Clerk’s Tale’s lingering hints of a “mechanical bride” turn out to be just that, lingering hints, mere traces left over from a character who was once much more an automaton than she is now. As regards the past, as we have just seen, Chaucer has elided nearly all the wild claims about a particular moment of will replacement that Petrarch’s story, followed almost uniformly by its French translators, had to offer. If Petrarch told the story that way because he had the Stoics’ instantaneous conversion to wisdom in mind, Chaucer must have wanted his character making no such shift. At any rate, whether deliberate thoughts about Stoicism are involved or not, Chaucer has hunted down the idea of a past conversion with such thoroughness as to remove not only its most blatant statements (notably the putting-on of Walter’s will with his clothing) but numerous subtler references.47 Here too he has moved Griselda toward being a more ordinary character, one whose will is still with her, still requiring force and struggle, not one who had, in Petrarch’s words, “once [and for all!] decided” about her fate. In her relationship to the future, though, Chaucer’s Griselda does show herself as otherwise than ordinary. Or more precisely in what she says about the future: every one of the references to her future state noted in the previous pages issues from her mouth, not from narrative sections of the poem. And what they say is truly remarkable, as remarkable as what Petrarch’s tale (but no longer Chaucer’s) says about the present and the past Griselda. In fact what she says about the future to a great extent is what Petrarch’s tale says about her present and past, as we have more than once seen the Clerk’s Tale extending or transmuting Petrarch’s strong, sometimes incredible statements about the present total subjection of Griselda’s will into Griselda’s equally strong promises about her future inner state. This is a fruitful way to understand even the alter-

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ation of the wedding oaths themselves, by which, as we saw, Chaucer’s Griselda is given much more responsibility than in any of the sources. That change, which at first appears puzzling against the background of so many others that deprive Chaucer’s Griselda of the more-than-human forcefulness of Petrarch’s, falls into line when one reflects that oaths govern the future, not the present or past; and about the future Chaucer’s Griselda’s claims to power are consistently outlandish. Later developments maintain the pattern, in that Chaucer creates for Griselda a new (and generally an extravagant) promise against the future at some point in every trial but the first, where he inherited one from Petrarch. This division of “tenses” suggests an answer to our original question: What are we to make of Griselda? Here is a character who continually promises for the future what she continually fails to achieve in the present—continually, and at times spectacularly, as on the three occasions on which her ordinary but stifled inner feelings force their way through the veneer of placidity. Moreover, the attempt to be what she promises to be, namely a mere extension of Walter’s will, is exactly what renders her a silent bystander to what she thinks is murder; and we have seen the narrative add numerous subtle invitations to question the rectitude of that silence. Surely this is not a character we are meant to admire? Surely, if we are to think in terms of exemplarity, Griselda’s is negative, intended to show us what not to imitate? In fact her story, in Chaucer’s hands, has become a kind of lesson in the perils of imitation; for what is at the root of Griselda’s troubles, in his version of the story, is itself imitation of a certain kind. She makes promises about the future. She can never fulfill them—she will never become the automaton she dreams of being—but she continuously (and destructively) exerts nearly superhuman effort in the attempt. She is, in other words, an excellent portrait of someone trying to imitate an impossible ideal, and failing. To put the matter glibly, we might say that Chaucer’s Griselda is a portrait of someone who takes Petrarch’s Griselda as an exemplum, and makes the mistake of trying to imitate what she sees there.48 That is not to say that the fault is Petrarch’s. He himself indicates that his character is not meant for imitation, closing his version of the story with an epilogue very much in the do-not-try-this-at-home line: he says that he has retold the story “not so much for this reason, that I might stir up the married women of our time to imitating the patience

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of this wife, which to me seems hardly imitable, as that I might stir up the readers to imitating at least the constancy of the woman, so that they might dare to perform for our God that which she performed for her husband” (396 – 99).49 Here warning labels come so thick and fast, in fact, that it is difficult to tell which are crucial and which incidental: the tale is not meant to instruct wives but “readers,” and it is not meant to indicate how to behave toward husbands but toward God, and, perhaps, “constancy” rather than “patience” is the virtue on display for imitation. Moreover, even had he not provided warnings, Petrarch could fairly have expected sensitive readers to know that an exemplum is not necessarily offered as a model to be imitated in every respect—a rule of interpretation in whose absence such texts as Jesus’ exhortation to become like children (Matthew 18:3), or still more his apparent commendation of the behavior of a dishonest steward (Luke 16:1– 8), would wreak ethical havoc on their readers. Chaucer’s Griselda, however, has apparently missed that memo. As a result the relationship between his character and Petrarch’s seems to be something like the relationship between a posited ideal or thought-experiment and its reductio ad absurdum. Petrarch’s story, with its clear statements of a single choice in the past that fixed Griselda’s will for all time and its removal of every trace of suffering from Boccaccio’s tale, does have very much the flavor of an experiment: as if Petrarch had pondered long the Stoic ideal he found in Seneca, in Cicero, and in his own massive De remediis utriusque fortunae, and asked himself—well, how about it? How would it look if such a person were actually roaming the streets?50 And the Clerk’s Tale, with its picture of ordinary suffering breaking through the cracks in a nearly superhuman but still insufficient attempt to suppress it, has the flavor of an exasperated reply: it would look absolutely horrible. The lesson of Chaucer’s negative exemplum seems to be that the moral ideal Petrarch’s tale puts forward is well described by the first of this chapter’s epigraphs: it is impossible to achieve and disastrous to attempt.

Chaucer, Petrarch, the Vertical and the Horizontal To assert that Chaucer found Petrarch’s thought experiment horrifying is of course already to say that it engaged him—pace the occasional criti-

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cal claim that Chaucer’s primary interest was in moving the story altogether away from the philosophical questions that occupied Petrarch and making it again what it was in Boccaccio, a gritty, concrete story mostly concerned with this-worldly relations between husband and wife. That claim tends to be allied with the even more frequent assertion that Chaucer has deliberately increased the pathos in Griselda’s story, and both generally issue in prescriptions for attending to what we might call “horizontal” rather than “vertical” elements when interpreting the tale.51 But the evidence does not consistently cooperate with either claim. Though Chaucer does add details and some passages that come across as “pathetic,” he also lets go without comment, or even sharply downplays, several opportunities that should have been entirely irresistible to a poet bent on tugging his readers’ heartstrings. One of the most striking of these is the potentially soul-crushing moment at which the recently pauperized ex-marchioness goes to welcome her ex-husband’s arriving bride, whom the audience knows to be also her daughter. Chaucer gives the scene only two lines (1013–14) and simply omits the agonizingly ironic greeting that Griselda speaks in every one of the Clerk’s Tale’s five ancestors: she says, “Welcome, my lady”—in Petrarch’s Latin, Bene venerit, domina mea—while standing in the territory of which Walter once made her the domina (see line 308 in Petrarch), and of which everyone should have expected her to be domina until death. In the Clerk’s Tale no speech is reported, and the stanza closes not with dramatic confrontation but with a newly invented suggestion that the whole matter has not been dramatic at all: “And after that [Griselda] dooth forth hire bisynesse.” Ho-hum, back to work! As for Walter, Chaucer’s handling of him moves even more consistently in the same de-patheticizing direction. His demeanor at the height of the third trial, the moment of his granting Griselda a “shift” to walk home in, provides a helpful sample of the trend. In Petrarch’s version Walter is in the throes of an internal struggle as dramatic as any that afflicts Chaucer’s Griselda, so overcome by the attempt to choke back his emotions that he can scarcely speak: “Tears were overflowing in the man so that he could no more be contained, and so he, averting his face, forced out—hardly—in trembling words, ‘You may have for yourself a single shift,’ and thus departed weeping.”52 All three French sources handle the scene the same way, closing with the marquis’s exit

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from the room gushing tears. Chaucer reduces all this to a comparatively bland pair of lines noting that Walter spoke “unnethes” and then “wente his wey, for routhe and for pitee” (892– 93). So much for any notion that an increase in pathos across the board was a primary goal. And so much, for that matter, for any notion that Chaucer’s story always eschews “verticality” and pursues “horizontality” for its own sake: Walter at least is easier to “allegorize” in Chaucer’s telling than in his predecessors. Just by virtue of having less mercy, fewer internal conflicts of his own, and in general a more one-dimensional personality than they, he is more susceptible to being understood as a personification of cruel Fortune, or perhaps of an inscrutable God who stands behind it. This is not to say that we must read Chaucer’s Walter allegorically; certainly not that we must read him exclusively allegorically. Chaucer may very well have had other reasons for “flattening” Walter’s character.53 But it does seem unlikely that Chaucer took as a major goal the removal of “vertical” meanings from the tale. If he did, he botched the job badly. There is also a still simpler kind of evidence that a desire to bring Petrarchan allegory back down to Boccaccian earth was not the main mover of Chaucer’s translation. If it had been, would he have larded the Clerk’s Tale with a vast profusion of religious hints and references, virtually none of which appear in any source? It is not just a matter of the well-known mention of the oxes stalle beside which Walter first speaks to the kneeling Griselda (291)—though that reference, or rather set of references (since Chaucer inserts it three times), would by itself suffice to suggest that the poet wants his audience thinking of religious resonances and not only of this-worldly marital and political relations.54 There is also much more, as for example the conversion of Petrarch’s allusion to the book of Job (Griselda’s parting declaration “nuda de domo patris egressa, nuda ibidem revertar” closely parallels the Vulgate for Job 1:21) into at least two, possibly three references. And then Chaucer has simply piled his story with passing adversions to God at every available moment—an incredible move, given the relative absence in Petrarch and the total absence in Boccaccio of such references, if his goal had been to dissuade readers from religious interpretations.55 Finally, even the most evident feature of the poem’s form suggests a vertical orientation: a glance down the list of other places where

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Chaucer uses the rhyme royal stanza—among the Canterbury Tales, only the Man of Law’s, Second Nun’s, and Prioress’s; and then Anelida and Arcite, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Complaint of Mars—shows that at least among the long poems the form is entirely reserved for matters of religious or philosophical weight. All this evidence of vertical interest, when brought together with the undeniable fact that the Clerk’s Tale’s main character is simultaneously more “real” or “ordinary” than Petrarch’s, her reactions (no matter how much she attempts to stifle them) closer to those expected of a normal human, suggests something interesting about Chaucer’s intentions. He cannot be pursuing “realism” simply out of a preference for the concrete world over the arid territory of philosophical speculation, a preference for the horizontal over the vertical. He seems, instead, to pursue the horizontal in the service of the vertical—engaging in realism not in order to replace the story’s philosophical interest, but to make it richer, more practically useful, more “real.”56 On this understanding, Chaucer is fully aware that Petrarch’s story lays before its reader a certain kind of ethical ideal. He has no intention of looking away, of pretending that the story is not about an ideal; nor of rewriting his own version to be about something else. His poem engages the same topic, but instead of a positive commendation or a dispassionate experiment it is a scathing attack. The means of attack—the reasons urged against the ideal— consist in a series of observations about the likely effects of the ideal on a real human being, a human being who is not a hypothetical thoughtexperiment but who acts and reacts as human beings generally do. In the end these observations are simple enough; they can be reduced to two. First, Chaucer’s tale suggests that, try as they might, human beings can never entirely do away with the joy-and-burden of their independent willing, feeling, and thinking. Second—lest we think that the notion of doing so remains an attractive limit-concept, good to strive for despite the impossibility of achievement—the Clerk’s Tale makes the opposite abundantly clear. The attempt, as mentioned already, is not only futile, but destructive. Or put another way, Chaucer’s handling of Griselda suggests that the trouble is not that she fails to live up to the ideal she inherits from Petrarch’s character; the trouble is that the ideal itself is pernicious. And it is the very effort to demonstrate that fact that has inspired the tale’s realistic touches —not because the philosophical

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questions it inherits from Petrarch are uninteresting, but because they become all the more interesting as the human life in which they are instantiated becomes more real.

Griselda’s Patientia Asinaria Given the high repute that patience, constancy, fortitude, and related virtues enjoyed in the Middle Ages, as witnessed by the wide dissemination of compendia of ancient ethics like the Moralium dogma philosophorum and by these virtues’ ubiquitous presence in Christian treatises on moral life, one might expect that rejecting the ideal Petrarch explores would set Chaucer at odds with nearly all the thought of his age. In fact he was, to the contrary, in very good company. The virtue of patience in particular was indeed discussed widely and at length, but also with considerable nuance, including a very real awareness of the possible ways in which it could go wrong. There is a heavily documented introductory study of the question that is still required reading for anyone interested in medieval understandings of patience, even though it is now forty years old.57 Here it will be useful to rely not directly on that piece, but on a closer look at one of the sources it invokes several times: the De virtutibus et vitiis of the thirteenth-century bishop of Paris William of Auvergne. This work, part of William’s massive seven-or-more-part summa begun in the 1220s, appears to have been extremely influential: it may have been used as a university textbook, and in any case is extant in roughly forty manuscripts from England and all across Western Europe, some copied as late as the end of the fifteenth century. Such popularity, of course, by no means demonstrates that an English poet who lived around the midpoint of the treatise’s 250-year spell of popularity actually read it. He may have; or he may have found citations from it in moral collections of various kinds; but, as argued in the introduction above, the texts whose direct influence on an author can be documented in detail are not the only ones able to illuminate the author’s work. Others, if chosen wisely, can serve perfectly well as cultural “informants.” William’s text is well placed for that role, providing a sample of the kinds of thought about patience and related virtues that enjoyed wide audiences in latemedieval Europe.58

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The sample contains material quite striking to anyone who has read the Clerk’s Tale in a way approximating that given above. William’s chapter begins with brief comparisons between patience and the allied virtues of fortitude, humility, and meekness; but before two pages have gone by it turns to the possibility of false patience. “After these things,” William writes, “. . . you should know that insensibility is occasionally called patience—insensibility, of which Aristotle says that certain people are insensible, like workers of the land; and that patience does not seem a virtue, nor worthy of the name of patience according to the testimony of Aristotle which we have taken as true; for one who suffers insensibly suffers no pain or injuring.”59 Here is a strong scent of Griselda’s themes, but also a reversal. Whereas Chaucer’s Griselda strives to appear “insensible,” apparently taking a capacity for undergoing hardships without feeling anything to be a moral ideal, William declares such a capacity to be no virtue at all, but something harmful. Real patience, it seems, must involve suffering, and not only in the now-archaic sense of undergoing the action of other agents; patience means experiencing dolor or laesio, actual pain or actual injuring, and putting up with it. But insensibility is only the first of four kinds of false patience. The next two are less clearly applicable to Chaucer’s Griselda, but with the fourth we arrive at one that fits her apparent goal in life still more exactly than does the first: [There is] a fourth patience, which we have been accustomed to call “asinary” or “asinine,” and it is the accustomed patience of certain people, about which we once mocked Aristotle; for certain people, used to whips as donkeys are, do not fear whips, nor do they [the whips] injure them, nor do they bear them virtuously, but merely as being passible; and for this reason they do not act virtuously, but they merely undergo, as a donkey does. For to undergo truly patiently and virtuously is either to act, or to resist passivities, which is, again, to act; for to carry a burden is not merely to undergo the weight and the physical inconvenience of the burden, but also to act and to conquer [them].60 Again a kind of insensibility is at issue, only now William specifies that it is an insensibility acquired by habit. But to make that specification is

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to indict Chaucer’s Griselda even more clearly, because that is precisely her intended way into the state: it is not inborn, nor preternaturally infused in an instant as appears to happen with Petrarch’s Griselda. Chaucer’s portrait of her before marriage makes her look anything but insensible, and moreover her combination of claims and promises of insensibility with a few moments of pain strikingly expressed bespeaks a person struggling by main force to achieve a state, not a person already “arrived” there. The surprise, here again, is that the status that Griselda seeks, and that the Clerk’s Tale itself has often been (mis)read as promoting, is rejected as a terrible and pitiable error here on the second page of one of the period’s best-known treatments of patience. William’s somewhat obscure reference to his previous mocking of Aristotle is likely meant to reinforce the point. Though I have not found the passage he means, it is presumably an attack on the central role of habit-formation in the Aristotelian notion of virtue: taken to an extreme, that approach to ethics could indeed convince someone that the goal of moral life is to practice putting up with adversities until they are so familiar that they no longer feel adverse.61 Nor is this tendency to weigh good and bad varieties of patience, or at least better and worse varieties, unique to William. A similar effort, down to the image of the donkey, appears in the compendium of remedies for vices known as “Postquam,” a text with which Chaucer had considerable acquaintance, as it is a major source for the Parson’s Tale.62 In fact such weighings, not only of patience but also of closely related virtues like constancy and obedience, turn out to be a quite standard move, frequent in both medieval and patristic theology. Not surprisingly they often arise in discussions of Stoicism. One influential example falls in the fourteenth book of the City of God, where Augustine takes up at length the Stoic ideal of απαθεια (apatheia), a state of wisdom that puts its possessor beyond the reach of what much ancient philosophy called the four “passions”: fear, desire, gladness, and sadness. The story is complicated, because the Stoics, as is well known, almost universally allowed that the “wise one” or “sage” would still experience something replacing and in some ways resembling these passions: where the unwise person’s mind was troubled by fear, desire, and gladness, the sage feels —or perhaps it is nearer their intent to say exerts—the so-called ευπαθειαι (eupatheiai), “good passions,” of caution,

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will, and joy. (Sadness or grief, according to most Stoic teachers, disappears completely in the sage, leaving no substitute.) Augustine is aware of the subtlety of the Stoic position, but nonetheless rejects it, for two familiar-sounding reasons: it is impossible to achieve and destructive to attempt. For him even the basic four passions, the ones that are often not in accord with the mind but trouble it as though from outside, will necessarily persist all through “this life,” and those who imagine themselves to have gotten beyond these disturbances are not only deceived, but dangerously so. At the chapter’s end he puts it both forcefully and, for readers of Griselda’s stories, suggestively: “If some have deeply loved in their own selves, with a vanity all the more enormous in proportion to its rarity, the fact that they are roused or stirred up by absolutely nothing, bent off course or attracted by no state of mind, they rather lose all humanness than attain true tranquility. For it is not the case that because something is inflexible [durum], it is therefore upright, nor that because it is insensitive [stupidum] it is therefore sound and rational.”63 Though the discussion is not explicitly about the virtue of patientia, the same rejection of insensibility we saw in William drives Augustine’s conclusion also. Clearly he has little admiration for constancy for constancy’s sake, for the pure stick-to-itiveness that makes such a strong ingredient in the characters of both Walter and Griselda (and that Petrarch several times describes with forms of the word durus). Nor is that judgment peculiar to Augustine: similar distinctions, often describing duritia as a false shadow of true patience, appear in many of the most widely read classical, patristic, and medieval authorities.64 It is worth dwelling for a moment, as Augustine does, on the question of Stoicism, particularly as similar debates between Christians and Stoics have come up again and again over the past two millennia, and have tended to play themselves out each time in recognizable ways.65 Where the Stoics strive for apatheia, Christians —even once they have admitted that that Stoic ideal does not mean the sort of total numbness that would be obviously destructive, but merely the removal of such passions as are irrational and disturbing, retaining the eupatheiai in their place—almost always complain, as Augustine does, that such “extirpation” is impossible in this life.66 Not that they generally held the absence of irrational and disturbing passions to be evil in principle; to the contrary, according to Augustine, the state in which they are absent is

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“clearly good and in the highest degree to be wished.” But it is also “not of this life,” and the person who makes the mistake of trying to bring it about in this life will end by creating something far worse than a few disturbing passions. Moreover, says Augustine, even if attaining apatheia in this life were possible, the one who managed it would in fact lose an important aid to the moral life: in the citizens of God’s city, passions like fear and sorrow function to spur the ones who undergo them toward the ultimate goal of a life (the next life) in full union with God. Other Christian writers, in substantial agreement with Augustine’s practical conclusion, speak at times of the need to struggle with the passions, and at times of an imperative to “spiritualize” or “ennoble” them, but only very rarely of the possibility of moving beyond them altogether.67 Thus the rival systems offer a pair of ideals at once very like and very unlike. Both divide the world into two groups of people: the Stoics speak of the foolish and the wise, Augustine of the human city and the city of God. But what it means to enter the desired group is quite different in the two cases. For the Stoics, broadly speaking, it means to arrive at a state of “autarchy,” self-sufficiency, in which one’s internal state is entirely governed by one’s own will; the only passions that remain (or at least that penetrate deeply into the self) are those in accord with reason. It is a state that calls to mind the condition of Petrarch’s Griselda, which is also the condition that Chaucer’s Griselda struggles and promises to achieve. For Augustine, by contrast, reaching the best state possible in this life means something very different. It is perhaps something like what recent theology calls a “fundamental option”: a life-guiding change, yes, but one operative at a deep level; a change across which affects and passions persist—though their meaning is altered by the living of a “right life” which somehow renders them “right” as well.68 But all the while, at less deep levels of the self, there is still plenty of turbulence to go around—still plenty of passions beyond one’s control, still, alas, a good bit of sinning, and still, in a crucial difference from the Stoics, the need for constant struggle, inward as well as outward. Once again William of Auvergne states the common Christian position with a succinctness worth quoting. So far from having arrived at a tranquil state of life, he says, the person imbued with the true virtue of patience is continually at war on two fronts. In the voice of personified Patience, William writes:

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My champions conquer not only enemies through me, but also their very selves: as is read in Proverbs 16, “A patient person is better than a strong man, and the one who rules his own animus than the conqueror of cities.” “To rule one’s own animus” is that which we understand by “to conquer their very selves.” My divided champions fight so much, both against themselves and against enemies — just as in the same place the expositor says —that in the other case [i.e., that of the conqueror of cities] he undertakes combat entire, whereas in this case [i.e., that of the ruler of his own animus] he undertakes combat divided. For they suffer a strange and remarkable rebellion in their very selves, which they most honorably vanquish also by my power.69 Thus the one who is truly, virtuously patient is not the person who, when oppressed by some temporal power, feels no anger; it is the person who does feel that expected internal reaction but masters it. Once again an understanding of true patience widely available in Chaucer’s time is almost the opposite of what his Griselda, with her frequent (albeit unsuccessful) promises to feel and desire nothing but what her oppressor feels and desires, takes as her ideal. Before passing on we should remark one extraordinary last sentence of William’s, quoted above but with an impact very likely passed over, as it is difficult to capture in English. What, once more, is real patience? His definition is brief: “To undergo truly patiently and virtuously is either to act, or to resist passivities, which is, again, to act.” The verb to undergo is of course pati, to be on the receiving end of action; and to receive action in a truly patient way is . . . to act. It is not a bad effort at a Zen koan: to be passive, says William, is to be active. At least when one is passive rightly; one could perhaps try to be purely passive, merely a receiver of action, but success would make one asinine, not patient.70 Here, instead, being patient means restraining, but also retaining, one’s internal passiones, so that one is being active and passive in the same moment. Thus William ends —in a kind of move we will see over and over in any number of thinkers, Chaucer not least among them—by elevating for imitation not a state that seems “pure” but one that seems paradoxical. It is not unhesitant action proceeding outward from an unimpeded will: though that possibility comes in for consider-

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ation later in this book, it is nowhere in William’s mind as he considers the meaning of patience. It is also not pure passivity, for all the reasons just stated. It is something that is somehow both action and passion, an active reception of what life sends —a passio activa, perhaps, though with a different meaning from the one Bernard of Clairvaux gives to Christ’s active Passion.71 It is not much like what we see in Chaucer’s Griselda—little like the silent sufferer she generally is, and less like the unfeeling automaton she claims, and strives, to be. One more blow, then, to any notion that Chaucer put her forward as an exemplary character. If such a notion wishes to base itself on a sense that her kind of purely passive subservience is simply “the way things were” in the late Middle Ages, it stumbles on what is by now overwhelming testimony that things were not universally “that way,” that there were abundant invitations to think critically about the virtue of patience and to condemn its destructive simulacra. (Chaucer’s “Envoy” at the tale’s end is such an invitation, though one so uproarious that it is difficult to know whether to take it at all seriously. Nonetheless, an advantage of the reading of the tale advanced here is that it unites the moral import of the story itself with that of the Envoy, at least to the extent that both disparage Griselda and the ideal of subservience to which she declares her devotion.) Nor can Griselda’s exemplarity be salvaged by taking up the suggestion Petrarch makes, and Chaucer preserves, at the end of the story, that behavior like hers would be fine if it were only directed toward God rather than toward a deranged marquis. It is true that such an approach would jibe with the fact, heavily emphasized in Hanna’s “Commonplaces” article, that patience was often judged good or bad according to whether one endured suffering for a good end (as a martyr or confessor does) or a bad one (as does the thief who endures hours concealed in damp and cramp in order to rob a house). But while that is the main criterion in some works, including Augustine’s influential De patientia, Hanna has probably overgeneralized its centrality; one of the limitations of his article is that it speaks of the possibility of false patience almost entirely in terms of suffering for a bad end, whereas it is quite clear that some authors had in mind other ways to go astray. William of Auvergne’s relatively lengthy consideration of false patience, for example, has very little to do with the goal for which one suffers, and very much more to do with the form of the suffering—with its insensibility and its lack of internal struggle.

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The reader aware of that particular kind of falsity will not easily be convinced that Griselda’s patience would be any less asinine if offered to God than it is when given to Walter: the many places where Chaucer’s tale suggests subtle objections to Griselda’s patience, often while associating it with the falsity-via-insensibility that William warns against, give ample reason for thinking that the basic complaint here is indeed about form rather than goal. And thus when Chaucer invites the reader to play with the notion of Walter as a figure for God (nn. 53–55 and associated text), the result is not a redemption of Griselda’s kind of patience, but almost the opposite—a kind of inoculation against any future redemption by that route. That is, by the time the Petrarchan safety valve arrives — Chaucer’s epilogue’s assertion that the story does not teach wives to follow Griselda’s humylitee, but teaches all to be constant in adversitee and to receyve in gree what God sends (1143–51)—it is too late: the reader may well think, “But I have already seen what awful results such constancy has, even when it is offered to a figure whom I have already been experimentally interchanging with God in my mind.” There is something wrong with Griselda’s behavior as such. The reader has been shown a negative exemplum, a concrete lesson in how not to suffer, regardless of what one suffers for. That the lesson is a deliberate one becomes more plausible the more one discovers how many different forms of patience were imaginable by medieval writers —as is already clear in the case of William of Auvergne, and as will become even clearer with respect to Chaucer himself after a look at another tale.

D i v i s i o n Tw o : Custance, or Drift as Mastery Fallen man in whom life and death are fighting for mastery is no longer fully master of himself: he has no power left except to cry out for help in the void. Help, it is true, comes as an unaccountable answer to his cry, though never in the form that he expects. Can this be called “mastery”? . . . Man’s real power lies hidden in the agony which makes him cry out to God: and there he is at the same time helpless and omnipotent. —Thomas Merton 72

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I cannot deny . . . that the position I have been developing . . . may eem to entail more active stances than that captured by the phrase “mere endurance.” . . . For one thing, I would never qualify endurance by “mere.” . . . Indeed, Christian endurance may take quite aggressive stances (monasticism being one example) toward the world. — Stanley Hauerwas73

We will take as the primary connection between the two tales the question of the human will—a question whose centrality to the Clerk’s Tale by this time needs no argument. It will perhaps not be surprising to hear that the question is equally central to the Man of Law’s Tale, a story so often thought of, at least in the criticism of the last century or so, alongside Griselda’s. It must be admitted, however, that the treatment of the protagonist’s will in the two stories is different enough to give us pause. The fact appears even in the vocabulary of the tales, as a quick look at a concordance can verify. The word purpos, along with variant forms, appears ten times in the Clerk’s Tale—out of merely forty-eight appearances in the Tales as a whole, thus far out of proportion to the tale’s length. Also extremely frequent, though not quite so disproportionately, is the word entente with its forms: 13 of 115 appearances are in the Clerk’s Tale. The statistics correspond with the reality explored above: the story revolves entirely around the mutually reinforcing relations of two extremely strong, not to say fixated, wills. As for the tale’s attitude toward all this “intention,” a simple scan through the list of instances shows how often the meaning of entente and purpos matches what comes across in Chaucer’s memorable translation, halfway through Griselda’s trials, of what a note above has mentioned as Petrarch’s “bad constancy” passage: Ther been folk of swich condicion That whan they have a certein purpos take, They kan nat stynte of hire entencion, But, right as they were bounden to that stake, They wol nat of that firste purpos slake. (701– 05) Purpos, put simply, is in most of Griselda’s story—as arguably also in most of Chaucer’s other uses of the word—a negative, a problem

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to be solved, usually because it denotes an overzealous enthusiasm to be loosed. Things are different in the Man of Law’s Tale, not because the words purpos and entente suddenly earn Chaucer’s endorsement, but because they largely vanish. Purpos appears exactly once, at line 170, where it has nothing to do with any character’s will; it refers to the poem’s purpose or main point, to which the narrative is returning after an interruption. With entente the situation looks more balanced, as the word appears eight times; but one of them (line 942) has a similar place-holding function, and five refer to the intentions of relatively minor characters. Only twice is the protagonist Custance said to have an entente, and neither instance refers to the kind of attachment to goals that we find in Walter and Griselda. One of them is a passing matter of the “hooly entente” with which Custance crosses herself as she re-embarks from Northumberland (867); and the other is a rule-proving exception, because an intention to accept someone else’s intention: Custance “taketh in good entente / The wyl of Crist” (824 –25). Statistics on word frequency alone are surely inadequate foundations for an argument, but perhaps they can serve as a useful heuristic, suggesting hypotheses for which more weighty evidence is then supplied. It seems to me that this difference between the two tales’ vocabularies is neither illusion nor coincidence, but a sign of a fundamental difference between their main characters. We have seen how strongly Griselda exerts her will in a not-quite-successful attempt to import the will of another as a replacement. Custance too might be accused of turning over her will to another, but her situation differs from Griselda’s in at least two ways. First of all, she is blessed with an object of desire of a more unpredictable kind. True, we repeatedly see her accepting the wyl or sonde of Christ or God; but the content of those “sendings” differs wildly from episode to episode, in stark contrast to the maniacal focus with which Walter’s will clings to the testing of his wife. Second, attending as we did in the previous section not only to the goal but also to the form of human willing, we can observe that Custance goes about following her desire in a way wholly different from Griselda’s. She utters no startling oath that hands over her will at the beginning of the process, makes no claim to simply replacing—certainly not in

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Griselda’s machinelike style—her own will with God’s. In fact she utters no explicit oath at all, a circumstance that fits nicely with Chaucer’s silence about her purpos or entente. To modern readers such relative purposelessness might well suggest, and has in fact suggested, that Custance will turn out to be the worst kind of doormat, a “martyr” in the pejorative sense of late-twentiethcentury pop psychology: here, the latter-day reader might think, is a woman afflicted with a drive to self-annihilation every bit as insufferable as the one that troubles Griselda.74 But I would like to argue the opposite: that as against the self-annihilatory content of Griselda’s “purposes,” the absence on Custance’s part of any clear dedication to a statable goal represents an advantage, an opening of the door to more varied types of action, rather than a loss. Support for that suggestion is not hard to find in the tale, since, whether we like this result or not, Custance’s kind of passivity produces a strangely efficacious character, one who travels the world and changes lives in fundamental ways everywhere she goes. Indeed the more closely we inspect her kind of patience, the more different we will find it from Griselda’s —so that in the end it will not be too much to claim that while each woman represents a way of responding to counsels of patience that Chaucer could have found widely broadcast in his religious tradition, it is only Custance, to put it very simply, who gets it right. And the comparisons will show Griselda’s way-of-being even more clearly than before as the dark shadow of a virtue, a destructive near miss. Among the ways in which the two women differ most fundamentally is by a sense in the Man of Law’s Tale—due in part to the lack of oaths —that Custance’s acts of surrender to God’s will are independent of each other, so that she must face anew the agony of submitting herself each time the opportunity arises. This is true even though some of Custance’s most explicit and passionate references to the question could be taken as promises, very much in the style of Griselda, that her submission will last indefinitely: But natheless she taketh in good entente The wyl of Crist, and knelynge on the stronde, She seyde, “Lord, ay welcome be thy sonde!” (824 –26)

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This is, of course, the moment when Custance accepts a sentence of exile, or rather presumptive death by exposure, which she believes her husband Alla has inexplicably handed down. It is just one of many instances, as the acceptance of Cristes (and others’) sondes makes a virtual refrain in the poem: with the same word Custance’s recently converted husband Alla accepts the false report that his newborn son is a monster (760); with it Custance thankfully acquiesces in the odd circumstance of washing up on the Northumberland shore after years adrift (523); and a similar acceptance (though without the word sonde) marks the tale almost from its origin: “Allas, unto the Barbre nacioun / I moste anoon, syn that it is youre wille,” Custance tells her father as the story gets under way (281– 82). But on closer inspection there are two reasons why this refrain of the poem has nothing like the implications of Griselda’s oaths. First of all their content is not the same. A declaration that external events, even when unpleasant or brutal, will always be “welcome” need not quite imply assertions of Griselda’s kind that one has made one’s own, without remainder, the will behind the events, or that one would have chosen them in advance for oneself if possible. It might mean, for example, merely that one will turn toward the events with a mind habituated to expecting against expectation that some hidden good can emerge from them. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, it is not clear that Custance’s refrain must be read as promising anything at all. “Ay welcome be thy sonde”: it is true that the subjunctive could conceivably indicate performative speech, in the manner of a monarch’s declaration “let this day be held sacred.” But it also functions plausibly as a prayer. Lord, says Custance, may what you send be welcome to me; and since I am well aware that I cannot simply will myself to have that reaction to what you send, I must ask that you assist me in having it. Contrast Griselda’s flat declaration that Walter’s will “ay shal be” in her heart (line 509) and her other unhesitant assertions of control over her own future thoughts, catalogued at length in the first part of this chapter: the two women assume very different pictures of the human psyche. Custance’s refrain implies that each act of surrender is limited and will require renewal, whereas Griselda claims for her oaths and promises the status of overarching rules settling all future cases at a stroke. The difference fits quite well the standard distinction already noted between

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Christian and Stoic moral teaching, whereby Christians condemned the Stoics’ (putative) quest for extirpation of the irrational passions as impossible and destructive. Once again Griselda looks something like the Christian Middle Ages’ notion of a Stoic sage, or at least of one with pretensions to being a Stoic sage, claiming to have reached a state where no further struggle is necessary. By contrast Custance, with her anguished response to her sufferings and with her perpetual prayer for help in governing her own internal state, looks very much like an attempt to present a picture of the proper Christian, as opposed to Stoic, response to the world’s vagaries.75 A hint of yet another difference between the two women’s varieties of patience appears elsewhere in the few lines we have already heard from Custance. It is the first (in the poem) among the passages quoted: her acquiescence to her arranged marriage, beginning with the illuminating single word allas. Five letters, but they are enough to make explicit the vast difference between this world and Griselda’s: in this world, when suffering happens, the sufferer complains. It is nothing like Griselda’s world, in which the ideal victim feels no pain and the real victim imitates that “perfection” by trying her best to stifle the anguished response that onlookers expect. Allas, recall, is precisely the word that Chaucer says the nurse of a murdered child might well let fly, but that Griselda herself is too tightly controlled to utter.76 Custance’s frequent and appropriate lamenting is, in fact, another reason for the impression that she must undergo some process of mental submission all over again with each new affliction: just as Griselda’s claim to have no volitional life of her own implies a claim that she does not suffer from Walter’s trials (see “Is Griselda Walter’s Mechanical Bride?,” above), so Custance’s unapologetic bewailing of her own suffering indicates a will alive and well and therefore persistently challenged by each new demand for submission—despite the “welcome” she hopes, or asks, to extend for “ay.” There is no doubt that the moral questions the two tales ask are strikingly similar. There is even a point at which the narrative voice of the Man of Law’s Tale echoes the fatalistic philosophy of Walter’s ugly henchman. In the very next stanza after that notable allas, we hear, amid comparisons with human cataclysms of the past, of the great lament over Custance’s imminent departure for Syria. Neither at the fall

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of Troy nor of Thebes nor at Hannibal’s defeats of Rome, it seems, was there such “wepyng for pitee”; but nonetheless “forth she moot, wher-so she wepe or synge” (292, 294). Here as in Griselda’s chamber, it seems, “men moote need unto [Lordes] lust obeye,” irrespective of whether one chooses to protest in the process. But in the end this similarity at the periphery only sets off more clearly the profound difference between the central characters: while Griselda remains dry-eyed despite strong suggestions that tears would be appropriate, Custance does in fact wepe freely, and not only here but all through the tale. We hear, for example, her fearful prayer to the holy cross at the outset of her first rudderless voyage (451–62) and her fearful prayer to Mary at the outset of the second (841–54); on both occasions her voice is pitous. On the second her complaint picks out a human target: her child’s harde fader, Alla, whom she believes to desire their son’s death. But her reaction to apparent filicide could not be more different from Griselda’s: shortly before embarking, Custance goes so far as to call her husband “routheless” (862). When they are eventually reunited in Rome, complaint continues: Custance reacts with “sobbyng and . . . bitter peyne” and requires much convincing before she can even speak with Alla, so well does she remember his unkyndenesse (1065, 1057). How different this all is from Griselda’s reactions to her own apparently abusive husband scarcely needs pointing out; but it may just be worth remarking how much more ordinary, expected, and human are Custance’s reactions than those of (even Chaucer’s relatively humanized) Griselda. At least in this respect, to read Custance as an impossibly otherworldly heroine and Griselda as a comparatively ordinary and “realistic” character is to get the situation almost exactly backwards.77 There are still other significant differences between the women. So far from joining Griselda in the pursuit of nonentity, and despite her early fatalist assertion that “wommen are born to thraldom and penance” (286), Custance is capable on occasion of taking an extremely active role in her destiny. The apostate theef who attempts to rape her while her boat stops in an undisclosed location between Northumberland and Rome would be the best available witness of her occasional strength of will, had the result not rendered him permanently incommunicado. It is a remarkable scene and much discussed; one discussant has aptly invoked it to point out that “Constance’s ‘silent endurance’ does not

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imply limpness or inertia” or masochism: “When attacked on board ship by a would-be rapist, she resists so vigorously that she throws him overboard . . . the only instance, this, in Chaucer, of a woman fending off rape by her own physical efforts.” Rather a remarkable entry on the résumé of a woman sometimes supposed to be pathologically passive.78 However, while the protest against the perception of “limpness” is right on the mark, the circumstances leading to the drowning of the thief are in one important way more complicated than this critic suggests. Here is the passage: But shortly, from the castel, on a nyght, The lordes styward—God yeve hym meschance!— A theef, that hadde reneyed oure creance, Cam into ship allone, and seyde he sholde Hir lemman be, wher-so she wolde or nolde. Wo was this wrecched womman tho bigon; Hir child cride, and she cride pitously. But blisful Marie heelp hire right anon; For with hir struglyng wel and mightily The theef fil over bord al sodeynly, And in the see he dreynte for vengeance; And thus hath Crist unwemmed kept Custance. (913–24) Though Custance puts up a laudable resistance that should indeed clear her of any suspicion of masochism or excessive passivity, still it must be remarked that she does not “throw the thief overboard”; nor can we fairly say that she has prevailed “by her own physical efforts.” Chaucer has studiously confined Custance and her efforts to oblique cases, reserving the nominative for Mary, who helped her; Christ, who kept her unstained; and the thief himself, who fell (not “was thrown”) from the ship. Custance’s efforts may have made the drowning of her assailant possible, but they did so not directly but only by opening the door to supernatural aid; the result is closer to a miracle on Custance’s behalf—though one in which she plays a central role—than to an example of strong independent action.79

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If this peculiar displacement of human agent from grammatical subject were an isolated case, we might believe it merely an accident of composition that tells us little about the poet’s mind. But it is not so. Again and again throughout the poem, Chaucer puts supernatural forces in the grammatical driver’s seat, consigning the humans to the status of conduits, or sometimes that of mere bystanders. When Custance sails off for Syria and the murderous trap laid by the wikked Sowdanesse, the poem dilates upon the occasion’s unfavorable astrology and concludes “that crueel Mars hath slayn this mariage” (301). Perhaps, but a court of law would more likely blame the Sowdanesse.80 The conversion of Hermengyld happens under the influence of the saintly and mysterious Custance, but she doesn’t get top billing: “Jhesu hath converted thurgh his grace / Dame Hermengyld, constablesse of that place” (538 –39). When a local knight gone bad burns with unchaste love for Custance, the blame is laid at another door: “Sathan, that evere us waiteth to begile,” resentful of Custance’s perfection, has lit the knight’s fire. Most spectacularly, a thickly encrusted passive-voice construction ascribes the conversion of Custance’s husband to a thoroughly ambiguous agency: And for this miracle, in conclusioun, And by Custances mediacioun, The kyng—and many another in that place— Converted was, thanked be Cristes grace! (683– 86) The reader in search of the agent may choose among three candidates. It seems an odd grammatical tic; but there is strong evidence, even beyond its ubiquity in the tale, that it is deliberate. Turning back to the attempted-rape scene for a bit of source study uncovers something surprising: in Chaucer’s primary source, Nicholas Trevet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle, “Constance” is even more active than in the Man of Law’s Tale, sneaking up behind the aggressor (to whose desires she has promised acquiescence as soon as their boat is out of sight of land) and knocking him overboard. But we should not therefore conclude that Chaucer has after all set out to create the most passive Custance possible, because he seems to have had a second source in John Gower’s

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Confessio amantis, which offers a version of the rapist episode in which Constance’s active role is smaller, and that of Providence larger, than in Chaucer’s version.81 In Gower she does nothing more than to tell the would-be rapist to go “loke out ate porte” to make sure there will be no witnesses to their union, and then to pray—whereupon “Sodeinliche he was out throwe / And dreynt” (1120 –22). Here no physical struggle at all is required. If Chaucer had that model in front of him, the aim of his retelling was clearly not simply to create a tale of passive human pawns well played by Providence; if it had been he could have merely followed Gower. Instead he has carefully threaded his way between Trevet’s version and Gower’s, creating a Custance who is neither a simply active heroine nor a saint of purely passive reliance on miraculous intervention, but one who acts as a kind of “channel” for powers that are beyond her. He has also shaped her husband in a similar way: the moment of passivity just remarked in King Alla’s conversion is Chaucer’s invention, as both his main sources describe the event in sentences whose subject is Alla himself. And we have already seen that similar relations hold for a number of the tale’s “wicked” characters (the Sowdanesse, the unchaste knight). Human agents who channel supernatural powers are everywhere the norm.82 Such “channeling” is at the heart of the difference between this tale and the Clerk’s. The Man of Law’s Tale is equally a poem about human wills and their interactions; but if the focus in the Clerk’s Tale is on one human will’s attempt at total subjection to something stronger, here the emphasis is on human wills not subjected to but, in a very literal etymological sense of the word, co-operating with, their superiors. The pattern, which for now I will call “conjoint action,” is fairly constant across the examples already noted: a man or woman exerts effort toward a goal; the goal is achieved, but not by the human effort; rather, the effort provides a foundation or an opening for supernatural action—it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the attainment of the goal. Such thinking is not at all foreign to the theology of the late Middle Ages, which included, to take one concept that recalls Custance’s kind of agency, a widely used category of “sine qua non causality”—the “causality” worked by an event which does not have the capacity to produce a desired effect itself, but whose contribution is nonetheless required for the effect to happen. Thus the sine qua non cause falls, as Custance’s

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contributions do, between two extremes, that of the pure and independent agent able to act without any help and that of the entirely powerless beneficiary of a supernatural agent.83 More important than the particular example of sine qua non causality is the recognition that the broader category of divine-human cooperation was quite accessible even to those who did not occupy their time with detailed Scholastic classifications of types of action. Indeed, the historian Heiko Oberman labels divine-human cooperation a “general medieval notion,” one so prevalent that the main questions under discussion did not concern whether but how such cooperation took place; and the label comes in the course of his treatment of the different types of cooperation proposed by two English theologians of whom Chaucer was aware, Robert Holcot and Thomas Bradwardine.84 As for the idea itself, it appears frequently in a source as canonical as Augustine; here, for example, is an instance that, with due adjustment for the agent’s gender, fits the drowning of Custance’s assailant well: “When the Lord has begun to possess us, certainly the adversary who had been ours becomes His own, and is conquered by us, but not by our strength: ‘because not in his manhood is a man capable.’ ”85 Such “cooperative” thinking, as the next few chapters will increasingly demonstrate, pervades medieval religious thought but is overlooked with remarkable regularity in modern criticism—a strange omission that will be taken up, and related to wider patterns of overlooking, in the “Hermeneutical Interlude” that follows this chapter. For now we can conclude with the relatively simple task of noting one further implication of divinehuman cooperation for the relationship between the Man of Law’s Tale and the Clerk’s. The opposition between the tales, it turns out, extends to their rhetoric, even their syntax: Chaucer has marked the Clerk’s Tale with a grammatical tic of its own, similar in frequency to, but appropriately different in meaning from, the one just observed in the Man of Law’s. Where the actions of Custance and her cohorts often appear obliquely or in passive voice, Griselda’s actions are often manifested “negatively”: surprisingly often, the tale proceeds by telling what she does not do. This phenomenon, like the other, seems to be Chaucer’s addition to his source. One critic observes that Griselda “does not have the moral vehemence of Petrarch’s Griselda” because “her words tend to be char-

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acterized by negatives.”86 He supports the claim with three lines from the period just after Griselda’s return to her father’s house: Ne shewed she that hire was doon offence; Ne of hire heighe estaat no remembraunce Ne hadde she, as by hire contenance. (922–24) Any number of other passages could have illustrated the point just as well; in one place Griselda expresses her fidelity to Walter with six negatives in two lines, surely some kind of record.87 Here as in Custance’s tale, the grammatical tic fits well with more general movements in the action and tone. Griselda attempts, and almost successfully, to show nothing but total submission to Walter’s will: it is fitting that many of her acts are narrated in such a way as to make no direct reference to her positive agency. Custance’s world, on the other hand, is one of oblique action, dependent action, action that is subordinated to the larger doings of supernatural agents —but action that is, in its cooperation with those forces, nonetheless real, registering on the positive side of the balance-sheet of possible agencies. The grammatical idiosyncrasy of each tale, then, corroborates the peculiar properties of its lead character’s agency, thus strengthening the feeling that the two tales present very different types of suffering and patience. Griselda comes close to being a nonperson, a sphere of pure passivity; Custance comes close to being a “steered” person or a channel for divine power.

The Two Patients Compared The more closely one inspects the two tales, the harder it becomes to believe that that difference between their protagonists is normatively neutral. Chaucer appears to admire, or at least to invite his audience to admire, one sort of patience and not the other. That impression is based in part on a simple argument from absence: running down the list of all the subtleties that have suggested Chaucer’s ironic undermining of Griselda, we quickly find that not one of them applies to Custance.

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There are, for example, no subtle hints, parallel to the remark about Walter’s discovery of a pacient creature, of her accidental complicity in her own suffering. The human agents responsible for Custance’s travails, like her two mothers-in-law and the unchaste knight, are moved to action not by a Griselda-like patience but by other attributes (Custance’s beauty, her foreignness, her Christianity) for which the narrative is not likely to be censuring her; and as for the divine agent, Providence itself, there is little possibility of blaming Custance for triggering its ire, if only because its inner workings are in this poem so veiled as to remove the possibility of giving any such triggering even the sort of barely rational logic that Walter’s testing enjoys. Likewise there is in the Man of Law’s Tale none of the awestruck marveling at the protagonist’s steadfast silence that prompts the reader (not to mention the torturer) to wonder whether Griselda’s stony exterior conceals interior tumult: Custance’s kind of steadfastness is not silent, and her tumult is quite manifest, with no apparent intent to conceal.88 Beyond these absences, there is also positive evidence for the difference between the women: Chaucer’s changes to his sources, which tell such a complex and, I think, in the end damning tale about his reaction to Petrarch’s thought experiment, point in the Man of Law’s Tale in altogether different directions. For one thing, he has clearly (not tenuously, as with the Clerk’s Tale) increased the pathos of Custance’s story. But the more telling difference between one set of changes and the other involves not the protagonist’s sufferings but her actions. As we have seen, Chaucer makes Griselda’s agency, in the tenses in which the narration of actual accomplishments would be possible (that is, the past and present), much more ordinary, more accessible to everyday experience, than it was in his sources; he preserves and strengthens the extraordinariness of Petrarch’s Griselda only with respect to what she promises to become in the future. By contrast, he makes Custance’s agency extraordinary in the present—not by granting it the elision or suppression of agency that Griselda promises and strives for, but by showing its successful cooperation with supernatural agencies, thus firmly connecting her with what some in the period considered a high, perhaps the highest, moral ideal.89 Before passing on, it is worth remarking one last difference between the tales of Griselda and Custance—again a difference that lurks in the

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large-scale structures of their respective poems, or more precisely in the readers’ responses to those structures. If the Clerk’s Tale, as I have argued, both puts on display and criticizes as mistaken a particular kind of patience, it must be admitted that the criticism is somewhat hidden. At first glance, as the first division of this chapter noted and as centuries of responses bear witness, the audience may well see only the display, and think that the tale offers a positive exemplum of the patient life. No doubt some audience members will manage to feel grateful admiration, while others (both medieval and modern, as recent findings reveal) will be disgusted not only with Walter’s cruel excesses but with Griselda’s willing acceptance as well. But readers of both groups will agree, at least on first reading, about the content and the intent of the tale; they will think that Chaucer generally favors the kind of patience on display, and thus they will imagine that their respective reactions for and against it are also reactions for and against Chaucer. It is against the opposition of that more obvious reading that I have argued that the authorial intent is quite different, that Chaucer in fact finds this pseudoexemplum as repulsive as many of his readers do. In the Man of Law’s Tale, by contrast, the comparative simplicity of moral evaluation makes the close reader’s experience very different: while a deep understanding of Custance’s kind of agency requires detailed attention and knowledge of backgrounds, doing that work will not reverse, but will strengthen, the casual reader’s impression that Chaucer finds here something to admire. Critics who find Custance repulsive to their sensibilities will not soon find in the tale a second level of meaning that shows her up as pathological; they will simply have to say that the tale quite patently valorizes behavior that they dislike. That difference between the tales has a very practical effect. The existence of two possible readings of the Clerk’s Tale, one latent and one patent, itself grants a special kind of force to the latent one. This is so because of the way that the two readings, arranged as they are, naturally strike the reader: the more obvious one will in general come to mind first and the hidden one second. Since in this case the two readings directly oppose each other, it is almost impossible not to hear the more difficult of them, if it be once granted credence, as a better reading whose ironic light exposes the naïveté of the first and replaces it. The arrangement might be called a sop to the vanity of the clever inter-

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preter, who can congratulate himself on finding a submerged meaning by careful attention to the tale, and who is not likely to return to a simpler first reading where the two are difficult to maintain together. Thus the idea of a subtle polemic on Chaucer’s part against Griselda’s brand of patience, once entertained, tends to grow in strength.90 We turn now to broader contexts, first to a chapter’s consideration of modern attempts to understand these religious tales, then to a chapter’s look at medieval religious ideas that appear to match the thinking we have already descried beneath the tales. Both are areas worth the attention of any modern person attempting to read medieval texts — and in the end both will reinforce this chapter’s sense of Chaucer’s thoughts about how not to suffer.

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Hermeneutical Interlude Chaucer, Gadamer, Boethius

If I begin by looking at anything from the viewpoint of the “Not-I,” then I do not really see it, since it is “not I” that sees it. If I begin from where I am and see it as I see it, then it may also become possible for me to see it as another sees it. —Thomas Merton / Zhuangzi1

The consideration of Custance in chapter 1 not only highlighted the Man of Law’s Tale’s preference for oblique grammatical constructions; it also raised the suspicion that the preference is not accidental but is closely connected to the structure of human action assumed, or at least explored, in that poem. In particular the grammar parallels the many situations I labeled “conjoint action,” in which some supernatural power, rather than the obvious human agent, is the primary force behind events. The investigation also turned up a few cases in which modern readers have overlooked both species of obliquity or “conjointness,” the grammatical and the ethical. This interlude steps back a level, making

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that fact about modern reading its explicit subject matter—an exercise worth pursuing because the fact is not an isolated one, but part of a larger pattern. The move to the meta-theme of interpretation and its rules requires its own concrete evidence to keep it grounded, and therefore requires engagement with sample interpreters. Though this section will cast brief glances at other contemporary critics, including Elizabeth Robertson and L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, its lengthiest engagement by far is with Jill Mann, for two reasons. First of all, her most relevant work, Feminizing Chaucer, combines sensitive literary insight (I find it still the strongest full-length study of the agency of Chaucer’s characters) with some clear examples of the kind of “overlooking” just described. Secondly, Mann has in other places made available some explicit methodological reflections of her own, so that both the hermeneutic principles she admires and their apparent results are ready to hand. Thus her work is well placed to serve as an illustrative example of what seem to me similar approaches taken—almost always less explicitly and sometimes less successfully—by many another modern reader. It will appear and reappear throughout this chapter, leading the argument on to discoveries that advance the book’s more general goals and prepare the way for the following chapter. Many of the discoveries concern interpretive method, but toward chapter’s end they will deal increasingly with more concrete matter: first, philosophical theology, where we will get some samples of the way questions about agency tend to arrive tangled up with questions about God; and second, Chaucer’s poetry, when the chapter examines some troubles with Mann’s claim that the Knight’s Tale puts forward, in Theseus, the highest exemplar for action in the Canterbury Tales. We begin, however, with Mann’s book itself. It has been the subject of some controversy: so many critics2 accused its first edition3 of insufficient adherence to feminist ideals and of overly strong sympathies with the medieval Christianity of its subjects that Mann feels it necessary to repeat, in the preface to the second edition, a disclaimer from elsewhere that her “own position is that of an unequivocal atheist” (xvii). But she freely admits the presence of the temptation to which her critics think she succumbs: the “elsewhere” in question is the 1995 lecture “Chaucer and Atheism,” in which she confesses to occasionally

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“frighten[ing] [her]self . . . with the power of [her] Christian apologetics” (14). The admission comes in the course of pointed observations about the treatment of religion by literary medievalists: we, she says (including herself in the group), tend to be guilty in religious matters of a historicism that we have passed beyond in questions of gender, race, and politics. By “historicism” she means the attempt to get temporarily inside the minds of medieval poets and audiences, to understand the poems as contemporaries would have, and in the process to bracket or leave behind the skeptical or incredulous questions that naturally occur to thinkers in our six-hundred-year-distant situation. This is how we still usually treat medieval religion, Mann argues, either because that kind of historical explanation is useful for pedagogical purposes or because “we imagine that the only other alternative is unbridled subjectivism—the subjection of the literary text to the free play of the reader’s personal beliefs, prejudices, and accidents of personal history, without adaptation or compromise” (“Chaucer and Atheism,” 8). Ultimately, however, the historicist task is impossible, essentially because all the notions and practices according to which we might interpret anything are inescapably tangled up with our own situation: “It is only from the standpoint of the modern that we can define what ‘the medieval’ is; it is from the perspective of twentieth-century expectations that we shall insist on the need to understand medieval literary topoi, or particular cultural formations or social attitudes” (7). Accordingly Mann proposes a third way, a kind of reading that encourages us to preserve, even in the act of reading, the particularities of our own situation. The difficulty is that doing so will, on the face of it, leave unresolved the clash in background assumptions that exists between me and, say, a fourteenth-century hearer of Chaucer: how can I claim to “understand” a text produced by and for, and relying in part on the belief system of, a long-vanished society, if I do not try to hold my own beliefs in temporary suspension? As the immediate case in point, we might ask how an atheist would “understand” a fourteenth-century text that not so much argues for as assumes providential oversight of the world. In order to bridge such gaps, Mann (following Mikhail Bakhtin as read by Tzvetan Todorov) proposes that we think of the relation between reader and text as one of dialogue. The reader should come to the text with her concrete historical situation, and indeed her concrete personal situation, intact;

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the questions she poses should be ones in which she has a genuine interest. For its part, the text retains its particularities, which shape and limit the interpretive possibilities so that the interpreter is not free to launch into totally unbounded play. Here it will be helpful to introduce another theorist with remarkably similar notions about interpretation. The desire to move beyond historicist reading into a “dialogic” style characterizes not only Bakhtinvia-Todorov, but also the expansively laid out hermeneutical scheme in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. The length at which Gadamer considers questions, though it notoriously makes his writings slow to work through, will be of much use in this case, in that it has allowed him to offer a detailed typology of the different kinds of orientation a reader might have toward a text. That means that besides giving an account of the “dialogic” stance that readers should seek, Gadamer also discusses several lesser alternatives —“Enlightenment,” “Romantic,” and “historicist” reading are the handiest labels —and the sometimes intricate relationships among those four possibilities. A summary treatment of the whole typology can provide a kind of road map on the way to dialogic reading, describing for the would-be dialogist not only the destination but various possible wrong turns along the way. We will see that it is not uncommon for writers who sincerely desire to arrive at dialogic reading to stop, on occasion, at one of the other major positions, usually without being aware that they have done so; having a clearer picture of the entire landscape should help readers know when they are thus stopping short, by allowing them to recognize their surroundings more readily.

Dialogue’s Alternatives, or Gadamer’s Typology Weighs In For current purposes the logical place to begin is with Gadamer’s account of historicist reading, which is itself historical. He traces historicism’s ancestry to the Romantic movement, whose interpretive impulses might be characterized as broadly in line with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s understanding, circa the second decade of the nineteenth century, of a still older maxim: to interpret a text is “to understand a writer better than he understood himself.”4 Like Mann’s two guides, Gadamer believes that this idea of reading demands to be overcome, and for similar rea-

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sons. The difficulty is not so much the temporary adoption of foreign worldviews as the attempt to suspend or “extinguish” one’s own: even the most successful works of history in the Romantic vein, Gadamer notes, immediately telegraph their authorship to the careful reader, thus demonstrating the author’s failure to remove his own perspectives. Moreover, even if such extinguishing were possible it would leave behind a subject wholly unable to make aesthetic judgments or to decide what parts of the vast amounts of information we call “history” are actually of interest — and such a subject would be useless as an interpreter. Gadamer argues that these latter decisions involve responses of the whole person to an artistic object or an array of information, responses that are made before any explicit rational or aesthetic judgment happens. These responses depend on various sorts of prejudices — presumably both those peculiar to our historical and personal situations and those common to large groups of humans. To extinguish such prejudices would therefore extinguish the possibility of interpretation.5 The fundamental stances that Mann and Gadamer take toward historicist (and in Gadamer’s case toward “Romantic”) reading, then, are extremely similar. But each then adds a concern of his or her own. Mann’s reasons for wanting to overcome historicist reading have a great deal to do with its likely effects. She worries that historicists will tend to imagine that all writers of a given period have the same intellectual background and habits of thought, thus “merging” Dante and Chaucer, for example, “into the grey sameness of ‘medieval Christianity’ ” (“Chaucer and Atheism,” 17); and she notes the possibility of a certain “sleight-of-hand quality” according to which a critic might easily find the “historical” Middle Ages holding the views he wishes it to hold, usually views suspiciously consonant with his own (6). Gadamer’s additional worry, by contrast, is more abstract and simpler, but also arguably more difficult to repair. The problem arises, according to him, even before we consider the possible effects of an attempt at historicist interpretation. The problem is that the historicist notion of interpretation, besides being impossible to achieve, is an inadequate and misleading account of what it means to understand something. While understanding, for Gadamer, must indeed include the interpreter’s best attempt to inhabit the mental world of the author being read, the effort must on no account end there. He sums up the situation this way:

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If we fail to transpose ourselves into the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks, we will misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us. To that extent this seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement: we must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. We may wonder, however, whether this phrase is adequate to describe the understanding that is required of us. The same is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him—i.e. to discover where he is coming from and his horizon. This is not a true conversation— that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject—because the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person. Examples are oral examinations and certain kinds of conversation between doctor and patient. Historical consciousness is clearly doing something similar when it transposes itself into the situation of the past and thereby claims to have attained the right historical horizon. (Truth and Method, 303, emphasis added) Historicism (like its ancestor, Romantic hermeneutics) falls short of the goal: there is much more to the act of understanding than merely an attempt to adopt temporarily an unfamiliar worldview, to practice seeing the world through someone else’s eyes as an exercise in broadening or well-roundedness. There should also be real dialogue; and dialogue, at least on Gadamer’s account, must be about something. Thus for the problems with historicism. The solutions these two writers propose to its troubles are, as already hinted, also similar, though there are telling differences in emphasis. Part of Gadamer’s solution begins to appear in the passage just quoted. His way of overcoming historicism by no means jettisons the investigation of historical backgrounds, but on the contrary requires it: we must always continue “transposing ourselves into the historical horizon,” doing our best to see the world as the authors of our texts did. But, Gadamer adds, we should know that our best will always be our best, and will thus never escape our own native interests and presuppositions; the full meaning of “transposing ourselves,” he writes, is that “into this other situation we must bring, precisely, ourselves” (305). Such a prescription should strike a chord with anyone sympathetic to Mann’s conclusion that the way a modern atheist

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should read Chaucer is “ ‘As an atheist’— an atheist in dialogue with a Christian text” (“Chaucer and Atheism,” 15). The ideas underlying these prescriptions of Gadamer’s are similar to the basic ideas Mann admires in Bakhtin and Todorov. Like Bakhtin, Gadamer seeks a kind of interpretation in which the “prejudices” of both the interpreter and the text are allowed to persist long enough to enter into a dialogue: his notion of interpretation as a “fusion of horizons” asks interpreters to admit the two sets of prejudices to a common realm of debate where they can get at one another, rather than being kept in separate (but transferable) modules labeled “fourteenth-century Christian orthodoxy” or “twentieth-century atheism.” More precisely, interpreters should recognize that all prejudices have really always resided in a single, though continually changing, horizon, that of human history; that worldviews separated by hundreds of years have already affected and grown into one another; and that the historicist notion of separate horizons is merely a useful approximation, a necessary phase in our thought (Truth and Method, 302 –7). The single human horizon moves and reforms itself in part by means of our encounter with our own past, in the course of which encounter “all our prejudices” are tested (306). Thus — and for present purposes most importantly — in the kind of reading Gadamer hopes to see, both the author’s prejudices and the reader’s are called into question, precisely by being taken seriously enough to be worth questioning, precisely by being allowed to persist past the initial stages of their encounter.6 Much of the time Mann’s lecture urges its readers toward approaches quite in line with this Gadamerian program: not only are Bakhtin’s dialogical ideas similar, but Hans Robert Jauss’s agreement with Rudolf Bultmann that the reader must, in a phrase that Mann quotes with approval, “put his understanding in jeopardy, or, stated differently, ‘allow the self to be crossexamined by the text while examining it’ ” is even more strikingly so (“Chaucer and Atheism,” 9).7 But the emphasis is different, so different that at some moments Mann’s proposals might tempt a modern reader into giving short shrift to the very historical knowledge that could most usefully “crossexamine” him or her. For example, she briefly takes up, in order to reject, the proposal that the solution to the troubles she sees with historicism might be “not to abandon historicism but on the contrary to have more of it” (7). That solution

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will fail, she says, for reasons already noted, chiefly that historicism is impossible, and will not become less so for the benefit of the one who redoubles his efforts to achieve it. The answer is sensible if received thoughtfully, by one who holds firmly in mind what is here meant by historicism—the eradication of one’s own particularities in order to adopt, even temporarily, someone else’s. But an incautious reader might be tempted to forget the expansion and think the word simply means “learning as best we can about the differences in presuppositions that separate us from medieval writers.” And to reject that (as we have already heard Gadamer emphasize) would not be sensible at all. The danger of misunderstanding becomes more acute — indeed becomes a near certainty — when Mann casts the hermeneutical discussion in terms of a struggle between historicism and “presentism,” and “insist[s] on the necessity” of the latter (14). This terminology does not serve the debate well, it seems to me. The trouble with historicism, as just discussed, is not that it allows a voice to the presuppositions of historical figures, but that it imagines that it is both possible and good to shut out all other voices; and a proposal to repair that mistake with something called “presentism” sounds very much like a proposal to fall off the other side of the horse. It suggests a counsel to now instead give sole attention to our own presuppositions, shutting out all other voices, including the “historical” ones, the worldviews of the authors we are trying to interpret. In fact Mann knows better, as already noted; she clearly states her intention to allow medieval presuppositions to be heard; her “presentism” is meant to allow dialogue. But in that case it is not at all symmetrical with the term historicism as she uses it. In point of fact the difference that Mann wants the two terms to indicate is not really the difference between the presuppositions of two favored epochs, the epoch of the writer and that of the reader. It is instead something more interesting, more important, and logically prior: it is a difference between two notions of the rules governing the clash of presuppositions. Should there be a “winner” at all—one set of prejudices that is affirmed to the exclusion of the other—or should the two sets of presuppositions be brought into explicit dialogue? It is a vitally important question, and its possible answers deserve more precise labels. Using the pair of terms historicism and presentism, moreover, does not merely risk confusing two important but abstract questions; it also

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has more practical, and deleterious, side-effects. To propose to overcome historicism by opposing to it a symmetrical-sounding presentism is to suggest that the “space” of viable kinds of reading is dominated by just two possibilities.8 And dyads have their risks. In this case the risk is fairly concrete: the person who has, for the most part, only a single pair of concepts with which to imagine some problem that faces him will tend to believe that, once he has discovered option A to be unsatisfactory, his work is done: there is nothing for it but to go with option B. (The enemy of my enemy is perforce my friend.) If in fact, as is very often the case, there are still choices to be made after option A is ruled out, our dyadic thinker is in great danger: not knowing that a further choice is necessary, he is likely to go astray, to fall into the less good of his (let us say) two remaining options without even perceiving that he is doing so, because his conceptual structure has not allowed him to imagine that there are still two options remaining. A more complex division of the “space” of possible stances could help to stave off such troubles. In this case, of course, one is ready to hand in Gadamer’s own account of the forms that interpretation in the modern West has actually taken, which is at its core a tripartite scheme. Before the self-conscious pursuit of “dialogue” and the “fusion of horizons” that Gadamer advocates, and before the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historicism that it is intended to overcome, the European Enlightenment, Truth and Method tells us, had its own form of reading. This “Enlightenment hermeneutics”— itself constructed as a replacement for older traditioncentered methods of reading the Bible—was above all characterized by a “prejudice against prejudice,” an idea that the interpreter’s task was to leave both his own and his author’s distorting presuppositions completely out of the picture, attempting a view of the world affected by no worldview at all, and thus certified as (to use a term anachronistically) “objective” knowledge. It was against this objectivizing form of reading that Schleiermacher and his contemporaries proposed their different way of handling difference. Where Enlightenment reading had claimed the ability to accede to the standpoint of truth, after which there would be no further need to adjust one’s own ways of seeing in deference to the opinions of more darkling epochs of the past, the Romantics proposed that those older presuppositions had independent value. That notion paved the way for the historicist attempt to devise a method by which

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those presuppositions could be temporarily recovered in order that better understanding could occur. It has then fallen to our current age, on Gadamer’s account, to recognize that the temporary adoption of a foreign worldview is perhaps necessary but certainly insufficient for interpretation, and to press on toward a dialogue of presuppositions. Unquestionably such a brief outline leaves out a great deal of complexity in the actual history of interpretation over the past quarter millennium. Moreover, the epigraph to this chapter, an attack on historicist reading that claims roots reaching back to China in the third century BCE, suggests that the issues in Gadamer’s outline are not unique to the periods, or the continent, from which he takes most of his labels. But both those facts make Gadamer’s conceptual scheme more helpful rather than less: his multistage account (Enlightenment reading, Romantic reading, historicist reading, dialogic reading) provides a set of “ideal types” useful for classifying reading styles in general, and in particular for pointing out stages on the way toward dialogue. One way to begin seeing the usefulness of the multistage division is by considering relationships among the stages. For example, what Gadamer calls Enlightened and historicist hermeneutics are in one sense close relatives, as both see the difference in presuppositions between reader and text as a problem to be overcome—whereas the dialogic prescriptions, Gadamer’s and Mann’s alike, take that difference as “good,” something potentially productive, and not, or at least not speedily, to be removed.9 But the four modes of reading can also be grouped another way, according to which the Romantic and historicist modes function as a kind of interlude that allows the hermeneutics of the Enlightenment to pass out from itself and then return as something partly similar to but also importantly different from what it was before. In particular, both Enlightenment hermeneutics and Gadamer’s dialogic prescription give a good deal of weight to the prejudices, the real interests, of the reader. The difference, according to Gadamer, is that the Enlightenment was not aware it was doing so; it thought of itself as free from prejudice, whereas the “dialogic” reader will assert that there is no such freedom, and that the Enlightenment only deceived itself into thinking it had attained such a thing by tacitly projecting its own quite particular situation and interests onto the universe at large, so that they seemed universal (or “natural” or “objective”) rather than particular. Gadamer’s

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dialogic reader, by contrast, should recognize his interests and prejudices as just that, but should bring them along anyway. The passage through Romanticism and historicism, with their constant attempt to suspend (rather than to claim universality for) the reader’s own prejudices — along with the eventual discovery of the impossibility of the task—has somehow prepared the way for this return-with-difference. Viewing the tetrad of reading types in that way reveals that the kind of reading Mann and Gadamer both want is in some important features not so different from another possibility that should seem distinctly less desirable. Disturbed by the risk of historicism in matters of religion, Mann hopes for a kind of reading that does justice to the reader’s real position and interests; and while Enlightenment reading had many flaws, it certainly fulfilled that particular requirement. In other words, Gadamer’s account reminds us, as promised, that there are several possibilities besides historicism, not just one: anyone seeking to escape the comfortable historicist home where Mann sees current criticism, at least in religious matters, stagnating will have to take care to avoid the “bad alternative” of Enlightenment reading. Its temptations are all the greater precisely because it is not wholly repulsive, but has some desirable features — a seductive near miss lying dangerously hard by the dialogic way being sought.

Enlightenment Reading and Religious Subjects: Concrete Examples Mann’s readings seem to me to occasionally fall into this very trap — perhaps in part for want of the warning that Gadamer’s or another multipart account of the possibilities could provide.10 Her desire to approach Chaucer with her atheism intact, allowing both Chaucer’s assumptions (insofar as they can be determined) and her own to come into question, is a laudable goal. But in practice—as becomes clear from a few of the readings on display in Feminizing Chaucer, as opposed to the kinds of reading Mann calls for in “Chaucer and Atheism”—something else sometimes happens. Dialogue slips over into Enlightenment, and the preservation of readerly atheism sometimes comes at the cost of failing to provide adequate space for the likely assumptions of the author: instead of entering into dialogue with “medieval” presuppositions, the “modern” ones simply replace them, governing the event of inter-

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pretation without resistance and escaping the fruitful cross-examination they should have suffered. The difficulty is not merely theoretical, but leads Mann to produce readings that, in a number of places, would almost certainly have been deeply dissatisfying or simply incomprehensible to Chaucer and his early audiences — thus excluding some of the presumptive dialogue-partners from the negotiating table. The different approach this book pursues is in part an attempt to restore to them their seats. The overlooking (by many critics, not Mann alone) of the peculiar “conjoint action” that chapter 1 notes in the Man of Law’s Tale can serve as a first example of such distortion. Its relevance to religious questions is clear: those conjoined in action, at least in this tale, are always a “natural” character and a supernatural one. A reader working under the hypothesis of atheism combined with an Enlightenment mode of reading will very naturally tend to overlook this conjoint action, because he or she will discount the reality of one of the conjoined agents. For a case painted in bold colors, recall John Yunck’s immediate transformation, so apparently quick as to suggest that it was automatic rather than the result of deliberation, of “the stars and the devil” (both conjoint actors in the tale) into “heredity and human evil” (a sort of reduction to what the former two agents might mean in a “disenchanted” modern world). This is Enlightenment hermeneutics in capsule form; and, though the case is more complex, it is reasonable to suspect that Mann’s too-complete assignment of agency to Custance in her deliverance from the would-be rapist, thus eliding the “heelp” of “blisful Marie” and of Christ (lines 920, 924, also discussed in the previous chapter), grows from a similar impulse.11 Custance’s multiple rudderless voyages provide another case in point. Chaucer’s audience is meant to marvel at the improbability of her survival, and the narrative does not avoid the question but elevates it, in a passage Mann reproduces at length, to the status of central mystery: Now sith she was nat at the feeste yslawe, Who kepte hire fro the drenchyng in the see? Who kepte Jonas in the fisshews mawe Til he was spouted up at Nynyvee? (484 – 87; quoted with seventeen more lines at Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 110)

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Mann makes several insightful remarks about the passage, which connects to much of what she wants to say about the intertwining of activity and passivity in Chaucer’s characters. The “mysterious force that preserves Constance from death,” as she points out, is “released as a result of [her] surrender,” that is, as a result of her willingness to be passive when it is good to do so. Mann notes, moreover, that this surrender itself is not so much a matter of weakness as of strength, the strength “we feel in Constance’s unshaken dignity, in her equally calm acceptance of disaster and good fortune, in her unconscious influence on those around her” (Feminizing Chaucer, 110). With the important reservation that Custance’s readiness to lament her fate means that her reactions to good and evil fortune, even if one might argue that they are “equally calm,” are certainly not identical—that it is Griselda, not Custance, who aspires to such extremes of equanimity — these observations are right on target. But the metaphysical explanation that Mann goes on to provide for these empirical data is far less convincing. “The twice-repeated motif of the rudderless boat is at the heart of this tale,” she writes, “because it expresses the courage needed to hazard the self to the flux of events, bereft of all supports to selfhood save selfhood alone” (ibid.). Here we are suddenly afield from anything the tale itself expresses; if Chaucer is thinking in terms of “selfhood” at all, it is not a selfhood that supports itself. The very passage under consideration is a thirty-five-line hymn asking the question, “Who has supported this self so that she survived this ordeal?”—and answering it: the same agent who supported Daniel, Jonah, and Maria of Egypt. The critical slip is a useful one, as it draws our attention to a paradox that Christian thought on divine-human cooperation has not hesitated to affirm. Dependence on God, in that tradition, can look very much like independence, precisely because the God on whom one depends is conceived of as “existing” in an entirely different way from everything else. As a result the dependence tends toward invisibility: it is true, in a sense, to say that Custance does not depend on anything, since that on which she depends — perhaps uniquely, among possible referents of human words — can in no way be called a thing. “It” or “He” (to use other, equally inadequate words) “is” on another plane altogether.12 And yet it is not very accurate, or very illuminating, to call Custance independent, and certainly not to say that she depends on her own

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self. At least, that is, on the usual modern understanding of what a self consists in: it is true that the paradox can be stated in another way that might allow such talk, though with altered meaning. If divine-human cooperation is to be taken seriously—and the next chapter will begin to pile up the evidence for just how central the idea was in medieval Christianity—then the person who enters into it acts with a causality that is at once her own and God’s. A student and descendant of the tradition, Jacques Maritain, once made a useful short gesture toward such a state: The saint denudes himself of his dominion over his own self in order to give it to God; and that is possible since God is more ourselves than we are ourselves; to lose our soul for Him is thus not to lose it but to find it. It is with the liberty of God Himself that the man of perfect soul is free. He is independent of every external constraint because he is dependent only on the Divine causality which is in no sense stranger to him. He is self-sufficing because he has lost his own self and lives only by the life of the Divine Savior who lives in him. (Freedom, 22) To my mind it would be hard to find a better description of the kind of agency Custance wields; and its last two sentences amply show how easily this self-with-other agency, this dependence on another who is not entirely other, can be confused with self-reliance. But to describe it that way remains a confusion — not to mention a description with which Chaucer, and his first audiences, and (if available) the “saint” in question herself, would surely have found it impossible to agree.13 To insist on such a description without remainder is once again to practice Enlightenment hermeneutics, to cut down the odd-looking paradox of the text to a chastened form that fits comfortably within what the reader’s preexisting beliefs were already able to admit. It therefore ensures that the reader’s beliefs will not be seriously challenged — which means, in the end, that both parties lose: Chaucer by not having the fullness of what he wrote given real consideration, and the reader by lack of access to a large part of what Chaucer has to offer. Such a reading is a perfectly fine station on the way toward dialogue, but it is not yet dialogue itself—and thus, at least on Gadamer’s account, not yet real understanding. Nearby passages in Mann show a similar temptation toward transmuting what Chaucer’s texts say into analogous but different statements

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that might puzzle their author. For example, she writes on the next page that, “Like the ‘why’ of suffering,” the “why” of salvation is answered only by multiplied images of itself. It is a tautology that constitutes a frank acknowledgement that to answer either question by saying “it is God’s will” is to reformulate the enigma without solving it. But if the questions multiply enigma, they turn it into a source of strength; the confidence that sustains their rhetoric lifts and carries the reader forward on its billowing waves as Constance is lifted and carried on the sea. The reader is summoned to surrender to the tale, to be carried by it rather than to resist it with sceptical interrogation, and to feel this surrender not as cowardly inertia but as the absorption into the movement of a greater power. Constance’s surrender to God is reenacted as literary experience in our own surrender to Chaucer. The surrender is not, however, rewarded by easy reassurance. (Feminizing Chaucer, 111) As with the observations already considered, there is much here with which to agree and disagree. The sense that surrender can involve being brought into line with “the movement of a greater power,” and can be the opposite of cowardice, again shows perceptive appreciation of the “cooperative” elements in Chaucer’s portrait of Custance. On the other hand the discussion of the “why of salvation” seems wide of the mark. The text’s explicit and insistent question, for one thing, is not “why” but “by whom” (lines 485, 486, 491, 500, et al.). More serious is the fact that the question is not really answered only by “multiplied images of itself ”— that is, by other questions, even questions that (as Mann writes on the same page) “are coming back to us as answers.” The long tide of interrogatives does not begin to answer itself, as Mann suggests, simply by a sort of perseverance, by the mere fact of continuing to be there. Rather, the initial and genuine question “who saved Custance?” is indeed answered by other questions, but questions that have a special capacity to serve as answers because their answers have been previously agreed upon. There is an external referent: the answer is “the God of Israel,” and that is a character about whom a Christian at least thinks he knows something; this God is one way and not another. To that extent

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the situation in the tale parallels that of the questions that answer questions in YHWH’s speech near the end of the book of Job. “Where were you when I placed the foundations of the earth?” (38:4). “Can you pull out Leviathan with a hook?” (40:20).14 The questions are rhetorical in a strict sense: their answers are already known, and they are “asked” only to remind the person asked of the answer. By exactly the same mechanism the questions in the Man of Law’s Tale convey real information, and to suggest that something about the situation is tautological is suspect at best — unless one has decided in advance that this God is really just a product of human imagination, in which case the charge of tautology is much more plausible.15 These readings, like Mann’s others discussed above, are too selfaware to be branded as “Enlightenment” interpretations in the fullest sense. Nonetheless there is little evidence here of the questioning of modern presuppositions that Gadamerian dialogue demands. Nor, for that matter, are the medieval presuppositions really questioned. Instead there is merely an acknowledgment of two quite separate possibilities, followed by the choice of one over the other. The result is oddly reminiscent of the separation of worldviews familiar from historicist hermeneutics, with the difference that the task is no longer conceived as a temporary adoption of the foreign set of presuppositions, but instead as a mere acknowledgment of its existence. This is tolerance, surely; it is a step forward from an attempt to dismiss or otherwise deny the existence of difference; but it is not dialogue.

The Wrong Exit from Historicism The problem of slipping toward Enlightenment reading understandably most affects those most aware of the pull of historicism and most eager to avoid it. Another notable example appears, it seems to me, in some of the psychoanalytic readings of L. O. Aranye Fradenburg.16 Consider for example her suggestion of parallels among psychoanalysis, Judaism, and Christianity as ways of thought (her word is “therapies”) that can illuminate medieval texts. Her grounds for the analogy are that all three impose on the individual human subject an imperative to “sacrifice.” To an extent this is certainly true. It would be difficult to hear some of the

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directives of Jesus without agreeing that some form of sacrifice (renunciation may be a less troubled term) stands at the gateway of Christianity: he speaks of giving up “home or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for the sake of my name” (Matthew 19:29); of taking up a cross in order to follow him (Mark 8:34); of “hating” one’s family, and even one’s own soul or life [anima], in order to be his disciple (Luke 14:26). It is nonetheless a fair question, and a necessary one, exactly what kind of renunciation is meant here and how it relates to the kind that psychoanalysis demands. There are sure to be both similarities and differences, so that the live questions concern where exactly these fall, and which of them are most important, and who gets to decide. In Gadamer’s terms we might say that the field for dialogue must shift from general claims of similarity down into particular details: and much of the action in pursuing dialogue will happen where disagreements arise, where two systems that speak of renunciation nonetheless issue directives with different practical implications. The clash of presuppositions, the readiness to allow one’s own presuppositions to change, and the stance of attempting to discover what is true about a common subject matter will all be just as necessary in this dialogue about details as they are in more general questions.17 To bypass such details and simply assert a similarity between a structure of presuppositions that the reader is taken to inhabit or understand (psychoanalysis) and a comparatively “foreign” structure that manifestly informs the text being read (premodern Judaism or Christianity) is a risky move: what it risks is yet another form of Enlightenment hermeneutics, another way in which the reader’s presuppositions may dominate or replace those involved in the creation of the text. This variant is a subtle one, in that a hand extended apparently in friendship turns out, intentionally or not, to be a covert bid for the upper hand. “You see, we are alike after all, despite what they say about our incompatible presuppositions!” But the subject whose text is being read must beware: the likeness may have been generated by a willingness to look past differences that should not, from her or his point of view, be looked past. In that case the handshake may ultimately drag the subject being read out of her own presuppositions and into a false similarity with the reader. Fradenburg’s most compact and programmatic statement of the linkage based on sacrifice furnishes a good example of this process, I

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think, in its reading of the twenty-second psalm, from which the article takes its name: “Be Not Far from Me.” One sentence of the psalm—“But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts” (verse 9) — is taken as making God out to be responsible for creating a devastating lack at the core of the human person that only God can then heal (“for there is none to help,” verse 11; cited in Fradenburg, 42). And there are indeed elements in Judeo-Christian religion that speak strongly of the human need and capacity for God. This verse, however, does not appear to be one of these elements, at least in its original context, where its emphasis falls, quite to the contrary, on God’s care for the speaker since before he was conscious. Fradenburg has quoted from the King James Bible, a choice reasonable enough in an essay directed to medievalists, since it stays close to the “tu es qui extraxisti me de ventre” of the Vulgate—which is to say, of Jerome’s Gallic Psalter or “Psalmi iuxta Septuaginta.” But it is notable that in Jerome’s later revision of the Psalter “iuxta Hebraicum” it is entirely impossible to understand the passage as presenting a kind of trauma associated with birth: there it reads, “But you have been my champion [propugnator] from the womb, my assurance [fiducia] from my mother’s breasts.” More recent translations do not go quite so far, but they do suggest a focus on care rather than loss — as does, for that matter, the King James Version, with its “you made me hope.” (The JTS Tanakh gives “You drew me from the womb, made me secure on my mother’s breast”; the NRSV offers “Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.”) It may seem petty to quibble over a single citation, and in fact the article’s later references to Augustine and the apostle Paul more successfully allow space for dialogue with their texts’ original meanings. But its reading of the psalm sounds a useful cautionary note about the ease with which an apparent similarity between worldviews can mask a projection of one set of beliefs — in this case psychoanalytic ones about the omnipresence and centrality of birth trauma—onto another. Such shifts may happen even when the reader does not intend them, but believes himself to have found a preexisting likeness rather than to have concocted one. Enlightenment reading, it seems, is not so easy to avoid.18 Avoiding it remains, nonetheless, a laudable goal. Nor need we, in despair of ceasing in any other way to impose our worldviews on “foreign” texts, resort to a historicist attempt to suspend our own identities

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and interests altogether. It is possible to keep trying for dialogue instead. Doing so will require considerable attention to the likely presuppositions of our authors, using every resource—certainly including both historical backgrounds and the knowledge of their particular lives and works — in our desire to encounter them. All this is what the studies in this book try to do; that is in part why they move back and forth between Chaucer’s poems and theological writings that resonate with them. But we can undergo that immersion in medievalia while still remaining who we are; we can turn to medieval materials, as both Gadamer and Mann prescribe, precisely because it is in our interest to do so— whether for the joy of it or because we believe that doing so may teach us something. In the latter case, of course, we must be open to being taught; and that suggests in turn that we must be open, even if only very slightly, to the possibility of revising our own underlying beliefs. If instead we approach our texts in absolute certainty that at the end of the dialogue some cherished belief — whether it be Christian, Marxist, psychoanalytic, or what have you — will remain unchanged, all we will really establish for certain is that only a constricted dialogue can occur. But which beliefs must be haled before the internal court? In principle, surely, the interpreter should be ready to have any belief examined and possibly changed. In practice, I suspect that we are capable of consciously examining them—or even of being aware of them—only a few at a time, as our “interests” and assorted life-situations bring them to the forefront of our consciousness. The present book, for example, is an attempt to chase down certain beliefs about agency and law. Jill Mann has made a similar attempt on the side of agency, motivated by a fairly concrete modern interest: she estimates (correctly, I think) that our readiest-to-hand modern bias takes, in far too unreflective a manner, activity and passivity as simply opposed, and the former as good and the latter as bad. And she believes that encountering a medieval poet’s very different beliefs on the subject will do us good, perhaps leading us to shift our beliefs a bit. In short, the encounter should teach us something. Thus far I could not agree more. Then, however, a complication arises. It turns out that beliefs do not always remain well behaved and separate, but often tangle themselves up with one another in unexpected ways, so that the presuppositions one has readied oneself to examine are not the only ones that end

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up in the dock. The beliefs about agency that we can most readily retrieve from the Middle Ages are excellent examples of such tangling; and what they tangle with, worse luck, is God. That is, every coherent medieval account of human agency I know of depends in some way on an account of how to think about God’s agency. Thus it will be very hard to claim that we are entering into a dialogic relationship with a medieval text about matters of agency — allowing ourselves to learn and change — if we are not also prepared for dialogue about matters theological. Or, putting it the other way around, if in questions about God we slide into Enlightenment reading rather than dialogue, there is every reason to expect that our relation to the text will fall short of dialogue in questions about agency also. Full understanding of the latter requires understanding of the former; and full understanding, in the dialogic sense developed here, means making one’s own psyche available for change. The fullest demonstration of the link between agency and divinity will emerge from the next chapter’s immersion in some writings of Bernard of Clairvaux that were widely read in Chaucer’s time, if not so well known today. Here, though, it will be useful get a first look at the connection by considering the less extensive, but enormously influential, ideas on the same subjects in a more familiar work, namely Boethius’s On the Consolation of Philosophy.

Unavoidable Entanglement: Boethius on Providence and Human Agency One way into the ancient text is by considering some nuances of Chaucer’s own treatment of human suffering—nuances that we have already seen remarked in Mann, whose readings of Custance’s story are very attentive to its Boethian resonances. One moment of such attention appears at the end of the last long passage quoted, where Mann notes that the Man of Law’s Tale’s reminders of providence, despite the “surrender” they invite, do not lead to “easy reassurance.” Indeed it is not a story from which we bear away a sense that everything will come out all right — at least not under any usual understanding of “all right.” Mann appropriately goes on to notice the far-from-fairy-tale ending that concludes the poem (see esp. lines 1132– 45, 1158). We need not pause

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for the details, but the import is clear: painful things continue to happen to Custance all through her life, and Chaucer takes corresponding pains to make us think that this is the ordinary course of things, even for such a saintly woman. If the ethics of “surrender” that the Man of Law’s Tale suggests offers any worldly consolation at all, it is not the consolation of escape from sorrow. Nor — and this is the important point for current purposes —is it the consolation that would be afforded by a full explanation of each sorrow as it comes; the echoing rhetorical questions might remind the medieval listener of a need to place trust in God, but the warrant they offer for such trust says nothing about the reasons for any particular event Custance, or her audience, might encounter. As already noted, though, Mann joins these disconsoling observations to more hopeful thoughts about a mysterious strength at work in the tale’s protagonist, in and through her acts of surrender; and it is this combination that brings her reading into parallel with the teaching of the De consolatione on human suffering.19 The treatment there, primarily in book 4, relates to both Mann’s “why of suffering” and her “why of salvation”: Lady Philosophy asks rhetorically (in Chaucer’s translation), “What unrest may ben a worse confusioun than that gode men han somtyme adversite and somtyme prosperite, and schrewes also han now thingis that they desiren and now thinges that thei haten?”20 There follows a litany of answers to the question — something like nineteen of them, in fact, some rather inventive, like the suggestion that God grants some wicked people riches because the hardships of poverty would make them still more wicked (298 – 304). There are two arguments each proposing why good folk might receive good fortune or schrewes might suffer adversity; the harder cases, bad things happening to good people and good things to bad, earn six and five explanations, respectively. And the monologue (IV.pr6.178 –343) begins with three or four more general arguments calculated to soften our natural protest against the whole situation: possibly we cannot really tell who is good and who is a schrewe; even at our best we cannot see inmost hearts; some of what we perceive as suffering may be the bitterness of good medicine. If we ask what effect this part of Lady Philosophy’s teaching is likely to have on her pupils, the answer also accords well with the picture of the world painted in the Man of Law’s Tale. The Lady’s arguments are intended to suggest that assorted injustices will, in the light of the final

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trajectory of events, ultimately turn out to be no such thing, as “divyne purveaunce” is well in control of the situation as a whole. But each argument is only a hypothetical accounting: she never suggests that there is a way to tell, in any given case, which of the nineteen possibilities is at play, or whether some twentieth might be. Therefore a particular suffering person will never really have an “explanation” of his suffering, never know what exactly providence is doing; he can only remember Lady Philosophy’s helpful demonstration that potential explanations exist, and the rest must be an act of trust that this particular suffering is covered by one of them. Near the end of the monologue, Philosophy speaks explicitly about the meagerness of the human understanding of God’s workings: “It nis nat leveful to man,” she says, “to comprehenden by wit, ne unfolden by word, alle the subtil ordenaunces and disposiciounis of the devyne entente” (353–56). Those words too find an echo in the Man of Law’s Tale: Crist, which that is to every harm triacle, By certeine meenes ofte, as knowen clerkis, Dooth thyng for certein ende that ful derk is To mannes wit, that for oure ignorance Ne konne noght knowe his prudent purveiance. (479– 83) The passage imposes Boethian limits on the comfort offered by the idea of providence. It is “no easy reassurance,” as Mann says; easy reassurance would be a completely rational theodicy whose rationality guaranteed its effectiveness. On any occasion of suffering one could trot it out and receive a forceful argument, grounded in accepted truths, that this suffering is for the best. Not so with this Boethian (and Custancian) comfort: its arguments in general lead only to the conclusion that, despite appearances to the contrary, it is rational to believe that a divine hand is at work in, with, or despite the suffering.21 Because of the un-easy nature of the argument, an act of trust is required if the comfort is to do the comforted any good. As a result, a person following the course of treatment offered in the Consolatio to this point might come away with a moral in three parts: accept what comes; be a virtuous person (since, as Lady Philosophy will tell her pupil at IV.pr7.65–72, all fortune is good fortune to

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the virtuous); and believe (though you cannot quite demonstrate) that what-comes is overseen and controlled, even if not directly willed, by providence. Custance’s character is practically defined by her adhesion to all three directives. The first, in the form of Custance’s “ay welcome be thy sonde,” was noted several times in chapter 1; the second is a virtual axiom of the tale; and for the third, Custance kindly provides a clear demonstration as she readies herself for her second episode of drift: He that me kepte fro the false blame While I was on the lond amonges yow, He kan me kepe from harm and eek fro shame In salte see, althogh I se noght how. (827–30)22 On the proper human response to Fortune’s vagaries, then, Lady Philosophy teaches; Chaucer’s Custance listens and passes on the teaching; Mann’s reading of the tale agrees with both. What could be amiss? It seems to me that while Mann’s interpretation of the ethical teaching implied in the tale is right on target, her treatment elsewhere of the theological questions with which that teaching intertwines involves some distortion of Boethius. Speaking in her preface about Chaucer’s “attempt . . . to deconstruct the idea of power,” she writes that his “Boethian insistence on the determining role of chance limits human agency to the contingent, and leaves divine agency merely a matter of trust — a trust that can only be understood in terms of the human manifestations of love and faith” (xvii, emphasis original). There is one central difficulty here, but it is best understood by attention to two key phrases. First, Mann speaks of the “determining role of chance” for Boethius, surely thinking of the second book’s famous portrait of Fortune with her wheel. But the Consolation is arranged as a progressive education by the end of which the student recognizes Fortune as at most a vicegerent, and perhaps merely an illusion, behind which stands divine providence. The text is explicit about that conclusion: “No thing nis leveful to folye in the reaume of the devyne purveaunce,” Lady Philosophy avers (IV.pr6.348 – 51), and the Latin Chaucer has translated with folye is temeritas, which can mean thoughtlessness or rashness, but also simply chance. Thus rightly understood—that is, from the point of

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view of the end rather than the beginning of the course of education Boethius makes Lady Philosophy provide — chance has no determining role in the cosmos, or at least no independent determining role. And the fourteenth century was well aware of the fact: it is not Boethius, but the pagans (and only the less enlightened among them), to whom Chaucer’s near-contemporaries typically ascribed a belief in real chance, or “Fortune,” as a fundamental force in the cosmos.23 In Boethius, by contrast, the most that could be said is that chance appears to have a determining role to those who have not yet begun to know what stands behind it. This may be another momentary slip, as Mann certainly is aware of the interest that both Chaucer and Boethius have in escaping the domination of chance. She observes, for example, that “For Chaucer, this Boethian freedom from the bondage of Fortune was the highest ideal of Christian philosophy, and it is a sign of the importance he gives to women that it is not in a man, but in two women — Constance and Griselda — that he embodies this ideal” (Feminizing Chaucer, 107– 8). But even this recognition of an “ideal” is accompanied by a curious elision of God from the scene: curious because it is, after all, divine providence that replaces Fortune as governor of the world in the course of education given to the Boethian student. A relationship with providence is what the former bondsman or bondswoman of Fortune is freed into, and it is hard to see how one can preserve the “freeing” without preserving the destination that gives it its meaning (or at least providing some alternative destination). The elision of God, it seems to me, is likely also what makes possible Mann’s assimilation into a single philosophical ideal of Custance and Griselda, whose very different relationships to the events that happen to them (thus to “Fortune” or to providence) in fact render them, as the preceding chapter has tried to demonstrate, polar opposites in the matter of action and passion. That is, while each is indeed “freed from Fortune” to the extent that each maintains some kind of coherent personality through an awful series of external challenges, Griselda’s aim and promise is to annihilate her agency in deference to Walter’s, whereas Custance somehow preserves an agency that cooperates, even in her “weakest” moments, with that of her supernatural supporters. But it is not surprising that a reader who disallows the reality of supernatural elements, however sympathetic and creative her attempt to understand Custance in a purely this-worldly

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way, might overlook her cooperative agency; it is hard to imagine cooperation where there is nothing to cooperate with. And with the paradoxical possibility of cooperation gone, the fundamental difference between Custance’s agency and Griselda’s becomes hard to perceive: one kind of submission suddenly looks very much like the other.24 Here, then, is a first example of the deep connection between questions about God and questions about human agency: an answer given to a God-question has limited in advance the answers available to an agency-question. The lesson for the moment — to be attempted more thoroughly, supported by a richer theory of human agency, in the next chapter—is that even for the best-trained and most sensitive of readers it will be all but impossible to come into real dialogue with alien presuppositions about agency unless one also opens oneself to real dialogue about theology. Once again the hindrance to dialogue is the impulse to allow the reader’s preexisting assumptions too much influence. Mann’s readings rejoice, we might say, in half of what Boethius teaches, the half that fits comfortably with the presuppositions she brings to the table. From the standpoint of modern atheism, something that looks like a call to human liberation is easy to accept; the notion that the only true liberation consists in an understanding of and relation to divine providence is understandably rather more of a challenge. But any dialogue that means to understand the full depth of what Chaucer and Boethius have to say requires a serious engagement with both. Similar difficulties arise when we turn to a second key phrase in Mann’s above-cited description of Chaucer’s Boethianism, namely the claim that both authors relegate divine action to being “merely a matter of trust.” It is, as already noted, quite correct to remark the un-ease of Boethian theodicy, its refusal to make light of suffering or to advance a specific explanation for any specific evil, and to remark the need for trust that follows on those refusals. The importance of trust is so great, however, that the word merely is rather out of place. It suggests that the trust and its results have been more or less shunted off into the realm of ineffectiveness, as though the student of Boethius is meant to end by saying, “I have learned that I should intellectually affirm that divine agency is in charge of everything. But since that affirmation is merely a matter of trust—since I cannot really get the intellectual goods I would like to have, for example a clear and incontestable perception of how

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God is working in any given situation—I will generally leave the whole idea of providence to the side as a vaguely comforting notion for difficult times. When it comes to practical matters like making real plans and executing them, I will of course confine myself to reliance on what can really be known, immediately perceptible things —‘human manifestations of love and faith,’ in Mann’s words.” Once again the idea expresses something true to Boethius, our ignorance in divine matters; but once again it tells only half the story. The missing half is the centrality of trust and its effects — a centrality that becomes more apparent when we substitute for trust the alternative label that Mann accurately invokes: it is also called faith. It is an indispensable idea in the religious tradition that shaped Boethius’s thinking: in the canonical Gospels, for example, faith (or trust) is the virtue most often recommended to followers of Jesus, far more often than love.25 Thus trust can hardly have for Boethius the role that Mann’s description implies, that of a substitute, a second best, a rueful accommodation to a regrettable limit. Rather it is a goal enthusiastically sought—so enthusiastically, in fact, that Boethius offers the entire De consolatione as a course of instruction calculated to produce it. And, most crucially, trust does not imply practical ineffectiveness but quite the reverse: as the New Testament’s references to it make clear, it is meant to shape the intention, the meaning, and even the concrete content of a person’s actions at every step. Nor do the texts stop with trust’s effects on the trusting person; they also routinely make this trust out to be a powerful motor of developments in the external cosmos. The Gospels frequently suggest, for example, that Jesus’ healings depend not only on his own power but also on the faith of the person to be healed; and he himself is made to speak of the efficacy of faith, or trust, in stunning terms: “If you had faith like a grain of mustard you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and transplanted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”26 To dismiss what has been described in that way with the word merely is only possible if one knows for certain that the description is false: which is to say, if one is approaching the whole matter with the presuppositions of a modern atheist so firmly fixed in mind as to rule out entirely the quite different implications of the different presuppositions Boethius would have held. That is not to say that no value can come from such a reading; but it does show that on some central topics Mann

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approaches Boethius, as she has occasionally approached Chaucer, in an Enlightenment rather than a dialogic mode.27

Fighting Chance: Theseus’s Alternative to Pure Action The point of dwelling on Mann’s not-quite-dialogic handling of Boethian thoughts about God has not been a purely theoretical one; rather, that approach — with the sometimes similarly undialogic treatment of human agency that results —has concrete consequences for the reading of Chaucer’s poems. A central point of Mann’s book is the undesirability, and indeed impossibility, of what we might call “pure action,” of an agency that has no time for other people’s plans, for interruption, for the vagaries of Fortune. Hence her above-quoted remark about Chaucer’s “deconstruction” of “the idea of power, or at least [of ] ideas of simple ‘possession’ of it” (Feminizing Chaucer, xvii). Thus far it is not difficult to agree — thus far, and also with the notion that Chaucer likely found in Boethius (though I would say also in his religious tradition more generally) a blueprint for his deconstruction project. But, as with the question of liberation from Fortune, agreement becomes more difficult when we turn to the question of where Chaucer expects us to go next — in this case, of what he offers to replace a too simple, too one-sided, too stereotypically “masculine” notion of action. Mann is, as usual, helpfully explicit: she picks out the Knight’s Tale’s Theseus as the highest ethical exemplar in the Canterbury collection (ibid., 133 – 34). Her reasons for the selection are clear as well: Theseus is, par excellence, a masculine hero who allows himself to be interrupted. The entire tale can take place only because of his willingness to stop a triumphal procession to attend to the plea of a group of women; and the story unfolds as a long series of interruptions in his plans, most of which have their effect only because of his willingness to jettison his past intentions and construct a new set. Chaucer, as Mann notes, often describes this relatively passive element of Theseus’s makeup, this readiness to be pointed in new directions, as pitee, and associates it not only with nobility (“pitee renneth soone in gentil herte,” line 1761) but with femininity (in Theseus’s closing appeal to Emilye’s “wommanly pitee,” line 3083; but also in the many places where women provoke or per-

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suade him to have pitee himself). These two connections already begin the “deconstruction” of Chaucer’s readers’ habitual assumptions, if they have arrived expecting high rank to sort primarily with masculinity and “pure action,” or even if they (more simply and more fundamentally) have thought of “pure action” as a good to be sought. The most powerful human figure in the first Canterbury Tale, at any rate, operates with a more complex kind of moral ideal. But while Theseus does seem an attractive, and deliberate, portrait of active capability cut through by a “readiness to receive” (ibid., 138); and while Mann is surely right to argue, against critics who believe that Chaucer prescribes passivity as an ideal for women in particular, that this “readiness” is a kind of passivity commended to men and women alike; still it does not follow that Chaucer intends Theseus’s particular kind of non-pure action as the greatest height to which human agency can ascend. His willingness to be interrupted and the resulting alternation between active and passive states are indeed a considerable improvement over what one would expect from a “pure” agent entirely devoid of pitee, but there are other aspects of Theseus’s approach that give the onlooker real reason for concern. Consider, for example, the famous 103-line speech with which he tries to draw the Knight’s Tale’s events to a fitting conclusion. Mann comments that the oration “does not try to deny change by imposing order on it; on the contrary, recognition of change is the premise on which the speech is based. . . . That a man should die is not strange; what is strange is that we are always so surprised when a man dies. Theseus’s pity and his patience embody a deep acknowledgement of the ‘successions’ of mutable things, and a willingness to move with them that is not shared by the static rigour of ‘ire’ and ‘tirannye.’ ” These comments are insightful and apt — apt, at least, to most of what Theseus says. His speech begins from a Boethian theme (and Western philosophical commonplace) about the immutability of the First Mover and his, or its, ordering of lesser, mutable things so that they enduren by successiouns, presumably as a sort of best-we-can-do substitute for being eternal. It then passes on through a list of eternal-looking things (oak tree, stone, river, great city) that closer inspection reveals as susceptible to decline and death; it arrives at a meditation on the inevitability of human demise; it deduces therefrom that a young and

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honorable death should be an occasion for joy rather than grief; and finally it sums up delicately, as if forced there: “What may I conclude of this longe serye / But after wo I rede us to be merye / And thanken Juppiter of al his grace?” (3067– 69). All falls in good accord with Mann’s comment: there is no wishful denial of change here, no inappropriate or unrealistic ordering, just a counsel to accept what cannot be changed and to make the best of it. But the speech does not end there. In spite of having begun his first summative “moral” with a phrase (“What may I conclude . . . / But”) suggesting that no other conclusion is possible, Theseus immediately presses on to a second, more practical counsel, namely that Palamoun and Emelye should marry: And er that we departen from this place I rede that we make of sorwes two O parfit joye, lastynge everemo. (3070 –72) Here the philosopher-prince takes a decided turn for the princely — almost as if, like the Pardoner whose exposition of his trade’s dirty secrets leads by reflex to a doomed attempt to con the crowd before whom he has just unveiled, he is unable to stop himself. “Lastynge everemo”? Theseus has just spent eighty lines demonstrating that nothing, short of “Juppiter” or the “Firste Moevere” himself, lasts “everemo.” To append this practical conclusion to that speech is a non sequitur on the order of Chauntecleer’s translation of mulier est hominis confusio as “Womman is mannes joye and al his blis” (Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 3166): it offers its hearers precisely the opposite of what logic demands. If we take this section of the speech into view — and we can scarcely avoid doing so, as it is the practical conclusion to which everything else builds up, and which goes on to shape the end of the story— Theseus does indeed “deny change”; or more precisely, he simply forgets it. Given the fact that, as Mann also notices, the two-thousand-odd previous lines of the tale add up to a single hyperextended lesson in the constant failure of human plans and the consequent need to be ready at any moment to pick up pieces and start over, it becomes extremely difficult not to hear this concluding promise of an eternally happy marriage

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as anything other than Chaucer’s ironic comment on Theseus’s own not-quite-sufficiently-thorough assimilation of the message. As Mann recognizes, “The ‘happy ending’ of the Knight’s Tale is no more final than the ‘happy ending’ with which it began; as this story stops, another will start” (Feminizing Chaucer, 140). But Theseus speaks, in his final twenty-six lines, as though things were otherwise, expressing a sudden but unambiguous intention toward permanence that dangles in unsupported mockery of its utterer, decisively undercut by the fact that the poem’s audience already knows better. The fairy-tale-like concluding lines of the poem itself, which inform us that Palamoun and Emelye “endeth” in such bliss, wealth, health, tender love, and gentle service that nary a word of jealousy or anger ever passed between them (3101–7), cry out, in context, to be taken in exactly the same way. No “end-ing” of that kind is remotely possible, and anyone who has read the preceding two thousand lines — let alone gone on to read the Man of Law’s and Clerk’s tales, with their concluding recitations of the real ending, in death, of every major character—must know it. It seems, then, that the combination of passivity and activity on display in Theseus, however preferable to a stereotypically masculine aspiration to a pure agency that excludes passivities altogether, falls rather far short of what is imaginable. To the very last, it seems, he thinks that this next plan will be the one that works; he has not gotten the message that all plans and all actions will always be shot through with passivity. Or if he has gotten the message intellectually, as the first eighty lines of his speech suggest, still he has not let it suffuse his person to the point where it would affect his practical conclusions as much as his speculative ones, derailing his impulse to start over, each time, as if he were a “pure agent” coming afresh to a new situation. If he did thus deeply internalize the notion that some form of passivity will intrude each time, that his decrees simply will fail to dictate the shape of reality, we might expect him eventually to begin putting forward a type of agency that is not quite so certain of its destination. We might see him planning his action in a way that takes more account of external forces, perhaps even looking to those forces for guidance or collaboration as he helps work out what will be: cooperating, in short. But in fact he has only enough wisdom to know how to start over after each disaster comes, or at most to state in advance (as lines 2994 – 3040 do) that there will be some

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disaster, thus leaving space for a future bout of necessary passivity that will punctuate his activity. The quality of his action is in the end perhaps not so thoroughly “feminized” as it seems: he is left with an eternal alternation between, rather than any deeper combination of, action and passion. He will go on forever fighting chance, or providence, or whatever it is that interrupts his plans. We may wonder why Chaucer has given such limitations to an otherwise remarkably admirable character. The strongest answer I know of is one that A. J. Minnis made available, in a more general context, roughly thirty-five years ago: Theseus’s limitations are those that an informed fourteenth-century writer might reasonably expect a stereotypical wise pagan to have.28 In particular, the kind of cooperative agency we have seen in Custance but missed in Theseus requires at minimum some sense that the world can be cooperated with — that the forces directing it are not entirely blind, but may at times take account of human striving and adjust for it, or may even at times give the struggling human a hint as to which direction she or he should go. Custance, in brief, believes in providence and in prayer; and there is good reason to think that many in the fourteenth century would expect a philosophical pagan to believe in neither. The most striking primary evidence of that expectation comes from the list of propositions condemned in 1270 and 1277 by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris; as they were largely inspired by the rapid adoption of Aristotelian philosophy (especially as interpreted by Averroës) in the thirteenth-century University of Paris, they give some sense of how thinkers of the period understood the differences between philosophical “paganism” and themselves. One of the condemned propositions (#12 from 1270) asserts that “human acts are not ruled by the providence of God,” and another states without further explanation that “one should not pray” (orandum non est, #180 from 1277). A number of other propositions might serve to suggest at least one reason why some of the thinkers being confronted might believe that one should not pray, namely that one would be wasting one’s breath: one of these states that “God cannot move anything irregularly, that is, in a different way than he [actually] does move it” (1277, #50), another that “the First Cause does not have knowledge of future contingents” (1277, #42), and yet another, still more simply, that “God does not know singulars” (1270, #10).29 All in all the picture that emerges is that of a cosmos governed by laws rather than by will — a cosmos in which it may be possible to

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speak of God, but in which it is hard to tell the difference between “God” and what we would today call the laws of nature. Such a world might well invite, from one of its more virtuous citizens, the kind of behavior we see in Theseus: it would be clear to such a one that the world harbors external forces capable of interrupting his plans, but it might not appear that there was anything to be done about it beyond picking up the pieces after each interruption, or at most beyond knowing in advance that there will be some pieces to be picked up. If this sketch does describe something like what Chaucer had in mind for Theseus’s “religion,” it makes a great deal of sense that Mann has singled him out as the highest of the Tales’ ethical exemplars. After all, the ideas that we have seen her deriving from Boethius, with approval and on the supposition that Chaucer drew the same ideas from that source, fit rather well with this picture of pagan philosophy: they suggest that chance (or Fortune) is effective in the world and providence is not. But we have also seen that these ideas do not match what Boethius himself intended to teach; instead, insofar as they appear in the Consolation, their role is that of intermediate positions entertained for a time but ultimately rejected. Minnis argues persuasively that Chaucer deliberately used Boethius in just this way in constructing the figure of Troilus, putting in the Trojan’s mouth strong statements from the Consolation about fate and necessity while leaving out the context that would have shown that Boethius himself did not believe them.30 Mann’s comments about chance and providence seem to me to proceed from a similar mechanism applied to another part of Boethius’s argument — a part wherein Lady Philosophy offers her pupil, in good faith, the wisdom that the world is not entirely deterministic, but has not yet moved on to the further observation that its indeterminism is guided by something other than chance. If we seek out Boethius’s own conclusions instead, a cascade of useful results follows. One of these is the question of the pathway to the promised independence from chance or Fortune: as already noted, it is less a matter of withstanding Fortune by force of will (even if that may sometimes be necessary) than of the discovery that Fortune is at most a subservient force, and perhaps a mere illusion, between the observed world and a real, if hidden, providence. The recognition of that pathway in turn establishes beyond a doubt that Boethius’s conclusions do not match Theseus’s kind of agency nearly so well as they match that

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which swirls around Custance—a type of agency in which trust is an effective factor, raw chance plays either a limited role or none, and providence is not a vaguely comforting speculation but something with which one enters into a relationship, however dark. And that alignment between Boethius and the Man of Law’s Tale suggests, finally, that if we are to allow ourselves to compare one protagonist to another and rank them in order of moral attainment, Custance will make a better candidate for greatest exemplar than Theseus.31 The whole question of the evaluation of these two characters should count as a second instance of the inseparable entanglement of questions about agency with those about theology. To begin from theological notions like those Mann proposes —making providence ineffective or illusory, ceding a leading role to chance — is ipso facto to reject Custance’s kind of agency, ruling it out of court as simply impossible; and it is also, contrariwise, to make a favorable assessment of Theseus’s kind very likely, almost without regard to the particular content of his actions. And that is a great pity, because the loss involved in overlooking Boethius’s real ideas about agency (or in failing to grant them adequate space) goes far beyond the damage done to the interpretation of a few of Chaucer’s poems. It is precisely in these bypassed ideas, whether drawn from Boethius himself or from the similar premises of the Man of Law’s Tale, that there is to be found a third option, different both from the stereotypically “masculine” fantasy of pure, uninterrupted agency and from the active-passive alternation that Theseus substitutes. And that third option, it seems to me, contains most of what Chaucer has to teach the modern world about human action. Our world, after all, is already rather familiar with the concept of the purely active superman; and the figure of the self-controlled Stoic, heroically (perhaps tragically) braced against the shocks of fortune, is no stranger in our time either. But this third option we find hard to understand, as the lingering impasses over the interpretation of Custance make clear: when one critic can declare her so strong as to be self-supporting amidst her calamities while another finds her repulsively “masochistic,” it is a fair bet that neither has entirely captured the presuppositions that underlie her character. To become better acquainted with those presuppositions is a noble task, but not a small one. Attempting it will require another chapter and another theological informant.

c h a p t e r

t h r e e

Bernard and Chaucer on Action and Passion

Amongst the great figures of the Middle Ages, there are few whose study is more effective than that of Saint Bernard for the purpose of dissipating certain prejudices dear to the modern mind. —René Guenon1 active and passive in a single mystery, a single sudden flash of identity, the heart-breaking manual acts of the Pope. — Charles Williams 2

It is high time to introduce Bernard of Clairvaux, who will provide us with a medieval theory of action that both fits very well with what we have already observed in Chaucer’s poems and deepens our understanding of them. Thus the core of this chapter is devoted to key passages from Bernard on agency, with a few pages near the end reserved for the most evident parallels with Chaucer and, finally, a brief second look at the Clerk’s and Man of Law’s tales in the new light thus acquired. The 127

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reasons for this approach have for the most part appeared in the interlude just completed and in the introduction, but it may help to begin by recalling three salient factors. First, the questions about action and passion raised in chapter 1, though there extracted directly from Chaucer’s tales, are unavoidably philosophical — and also theological, since they necessarily get tangled up with questions about God. That fact strongly suggests the fruitfulness of bringing to bear tools and texts drawn from those two ways of knowing. Second, the interlude suggests the danger of failing to investigate, and give sufficient weight to, the likely background assumptions of the author under study; the reader who does that is very likely to impose his own assumptions about philosophy or theology, whether or not he recognizes that he is doing so, and therefore to miss much of what Chaucer might otherwise communicate. Third, for reasons laid out in the introduction, Bernard makes an ideal partner for Chaucer in this effort; he is both an excellent informant on the theological assumptions that Chaucer would have been most likely to encounter and a thinker deeply interested in questions of action and passion for their own sake. His contributions will prove so useful that it would be foolish to ignore them. There remains, of course, the question of which of Bernard’s writings to pursue, and there are many to choose from. He is best known for, and was also perhaps most influential by, the wide dissemination of his published sermons; of these, the set of eighty-six long ones on the Song of Songs (or rather on its first chapter or so) achieved the greatest historical following, not only by being duplicated themselves but by spawning a stream of commentaries, summaries, imitations, and continuations.3 However, Bernard also left several other sets of sermons, including a still longer cycle for the liturgical feasts of the year; hundreds of personal letters; and a small number of short more or less doctrinal treatises, many written to answer a specific need but nonetheless following a relatively systematic and argumentative style. While I will draw at times on the sermons, the treatises will be my primary source, for several reasons. First of all, they provide a convenient way into Bernard’s thought for the new arrival, particularly the new arrival who hopes to study this or that particular topic: such a reader benefits from the treatises’ logical arrangement, relatively tight focus, and sustained attention to individual issues. That is to say that the treatises are the place where

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this unscholastic doctor comes closest to a scholastic mode, with all the advantages and disadvantages appertaining thereto. Secondly, there is something to be said for the argument that the treatises simply must be read first. Bernard McGinn, for example, in recommending the one called On Grace and Free Choice (“the most profound and influential of the Abbot of Clairvaux’s dogmatic works”), opines that the “mystical theory” expressed in the sermons on the Song “cannot be understood apart from its dogmatic base.”4 The third reason is somewhat ad hoc: it has simply turned out to be the case that the questions with which we need to approach Bernard — here those involving action and passion, and in chapter 6 those involving will and law—are admirably addressed in the doctrinal treatises, particularly On Grace and Free Choice, On Loving God, and On Precept and Dispensation.

Bernard on Divine-Human Cooperation The chief act of the will is not effort but consent. —Thomas Keating O. C. S. O. 5

The relevance of these writings for our themes is not far to seek. On the second page of that “most profound and influential” treatise of Bernard’s, we find a declaration that the most important of works — human salvation—comes about only in cooperative wise: Therefore, that [i.e., salvation] which is given only by God and only to free choice cannot exist without the consent of the one receiving any more than without the grace of the one giving. And thus free choice is said to work together with grace-working-salvation when it consents —that is, when it is saved. For to consent is to be saved. (DGLA 1.2, SBO 3:166 –67)6 Bernard describes God’s grace as gratia operans salutem; for the action of the human faculty of choice he uses the cognate cooperari. It is difficult to translate both phrases in a way that retains the force of the original: the most natural choices in English are “grace working salvation” and “cooperate,” but they mask the alignment of the two verbs. The impor-

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tant point is that cooperari, especially in near juxtaposition with a form of operari, calls its etymology to mind much more strongly than does the English cooperate. Bernard, and the other Latin theologians who write on the matter, are not expressing a vaguely comforting sense that in the trials of life God “cooperates” with us — that is, plays along with our wishes and is generally supportive rather than obstructionist. They are saying something much more concrete: that we can speak in some rather specific ways of joint actions, co-operations, carried out by a human will and God’s will working in tandem. To find out what those rather specific ways are, we must take a bit of a tour through Bernard’s works, gathering information in experimental fashion about the kind of cooperation he has in mind. We can start near the end of this same treatise, whose thirteenth chapter provides an important discussion on the status of merit in salvation. For immediate purposes we need only attend to some clarifying sentences that come after the most fundamental doctrinal work is done: With those who consent with the will to the good which they accomplish by work, God entirely shares the work that he develops through them. Wherefore Paul, when he had told the many good things that God had done through him, said, “Not, however, I, but the grace of God with me.” He could have said “through me,” but because that was less, he preferred to say “with me”— presuming himself to be not merely one who assists the work through what he does, but even in a certain way a partner, through his consent, of the Worker. (DGLA 13.44, SBO 3:197– 98)7 As in the previous quotation, we see the central importance of consent of the will as a way of sharing in works that are fundamentally of divine origin: in fact both the first and last sentences here suggest that the consent accompanying a human action is as important as its content. It is also noteworthy that while a person may accomplish a work that has good in it, it is said to be God who really “develop[s] the work through” him or her; and thus, since “the work” (which seems to mean the credit or merit for the work) would not of itself fall to the human worker, God must also share out the work or credit in a kind of second gift. And yet Bernard apparently believes that God does so with perfect reliability,

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since he structures his sentence around a confident universal statement: God shares with those who consent. The same reliability, we imagine, is at the root of the confidence with which Paul describes himself as not just a servant who contributes a particular effect, but a “partner” or associate. All this agrees quite well in a general way with the idea of action we divined in Custance: she too continually consents to a God who always holds the initiative; she too is shaped by a relationship to the Worker rather than by dedication to any particular work (as her openness to ever-new “works” bears witness); she too must trust a gift for whose reliability she has no objective, or we might say mechanical, proof. Some of these points become still clearer in a nearby passage where Bernard again attempts to describe God’s work with the creature towards salvation: [God] uses angels and people of good will as his fellow-soldiers and coadjutors, whom he will most amply reward when the victory has been accomplished. And indeed for that reason Paul audaciously proclaims of himself and those like him: “We are God’s coadjutors.” And thus God generously assigns merits to a person wherever he has condescendingly arranged something good to be done through and with her. Hence we trust confidently that we are God’s coadjutors, the Holy Spirit’s co-workers, deservers of the Kingdom, because by consent we join ourselves without fail to the divine will. (DGLA 13.45, SBO 3:198)8 Here perhaps even more clearly, not only the merit but the original good work itself is God’s doing, generously ascribed to us whenever God decides to get us involved; after which the merit for the work is reliably added on, assuming the person has consented to the work and thus become a co-worker rather than an uncooperative instrument.9 What else can we know about this cooperation? Bernard tells us more in an appendix to another of his best-known treatises, On Loving God. Here as before we see that God’s action precedes the human response; but in these passages the action on both sides, interestingly for our investigations in later chapters, is spoken of in terms of law. There is one supreme law, Bernard writes:

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Love is, therefore, a law, and the law of the Lord, which in a certain way embraces and brings together the Trinity in unity in a bond of peace. Still, let no one suppose that I here take love as a quality or a kind of accident (otherwise I would say that there was something in God that is not God, and may that be far from me) but the divine substance—which is certainly neither new nor unusual, since John says “God is love.” Therefore love is rightly said to be both God and the gift of God. . . . This is the eternal law, the creator and governor of the universe, since all things were created through it in weight, and measure, and number. And nothing is left without law, since the Law of All itself also is not without law — not, granted, [a law] other than itself — by which it rules even itself, even if it did not create itself. (DDD 12.35, SBO 3:149–50)10 .

He goes on to say that no one can escape the governance of this divine law of caritas (love). Those who attempt to do so, either by virtue of not having risen from fearing to loving God (“slaves”) or by virtue of loving God’s gifts more than God himself (“mercenaries”), have, I say, not the Lord’s but their own law, [which is] nonetheless subject to that [law] which is the Lord’s. And indeed each [i.e., the slave and the mercenary] has been able to make for himself his own law; nevertheless they have not been able to remove it from the immutable order of the eternal law. Moreover I should say that each has made his own law for himself when he has preferred his own will to the common and eternal law, thus perversely willing to imitate his Creator — so that just as he is both a law to himself and makes his own rules, in the same way this person would govern himself and would make his own will a law for himself. (DDD 13.36, SBO 3:150)11 “His own will” here is voluntas propria, a frequent phrase in Bernard for the stubborn self-will that opposes either God’s will or the common will or (as here) the common law. It could be translated “proper will.” Made into a self-administered law, it turns out to be, or at least to be associated with, an unendurable burden, one that would without God’s help soon drag us down to hell. Bernard concludes:

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This, in fact, has been the property of the eternal and just law of God, that whoever willed against being ruled gently would be ruled painfully by himself, and whoever willingly threw off the gentle yoke and light burden of love would unwillingly sustain the unbearable burden of his own will. . . . Lord my God, “why do you not take away my sin, and why do you not bear off my iniquity?” so that, with the heavy load of my own will thrown off, I might recover my breath under the light burden of love, and then no longer be coerced by a slave’s fear nor seduced by a mercenary’s cupidity, but be steered by your Spirit, the spirit of truth, by which your children are steered. (DDD 13.36, SBO 3:150 –51)12 It is worth pausing over the verb that describes the relation between the “Spirit” and God’s “children.” “Steer” is a slightly unusual translation for agere, but it best approximates what I take Bernard to mean. “Drive” sounds too much like what a cowboy does to cattle, and what demons, but one hopes not the Spirit, might attempt with humans. “Guide” and even “lead,” on the other hand, might suggest too little involvement, as if it were a matter of advice offered from a distance that the human might coolly choose to take or leave. Part of what makes the question of what words to use for divine-human cooperation difficult is the fact that the truest account of it would presumably try to escape the spectrum of more and less involvement altogether: cooperation, for Bernard, implies a transformation of the self that could only take place in conjunction with the Spirit, and in some sense is a transformation into the Spirit, but without the loss of (transformed) human identity. It is an event, as we will see by chapter’s end, whose results are impossible to separate and ascribe to different authors. To try to model it by assigning percentages of credit to the two poles, divine and human, as they were before transformation would be to miss all this, and therefore to miss the main point.13 For current purposes, however, the most essential thing to observe is merely that in Bernard’s world, much as in Custance’s, there are no purely free agents and no such thing as absolute autonomy. One must choose to serve one power, one law, or another, and the one who attempts to serve only his own will comes no closer to escaping God’s law than does the one who consents wholeheartedly; he merely serves it in

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painful suffering rather than under the “light yoke” that it might have been. The one who would do well, on the other hand — here as in the Man of Law’s Tale — does not so much invent as consent. And we are asked to believe one thing more: that this consent does not, as one might fear, lead to a lockstep or preprogrammed existence devoid of surprise and creativity; that instead it leads, by paths that will very likely remain obscure, to spontaneity, lightness of heart, perhaps even something justly called joy.14

Givenness: Bernard’s Twofold Given that I see your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established—what is a human being that you are mindful of her, or the son of a human, seeing that you visit him? You have diminished him [to a point] little less than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor and stationed him above the works of your hands. —Psalm 8:4 –715

The ultimate task of this chapter, on finishing its exploration of divinehuman cooperation, will be to examine how the latter illuminates what we have already seen in Chaucer’s stories, especially the Man of Law’s Tale. Before arriving there, though, I would like to highlight one pervasive aspect of Bernard’s teaching. It is what I call, for want of a better term, the Bernardian Twofold — a formal pattern closely related to the idea of gift that has already been mentioned several times. From Bernard’s above-quoted warnings against the presumption of “ruling oneself ” or “making one’s own will a law,” one might be tempted to conclude that he denies to humans any faculty of self-legislation, or at least implies that it is a faculty that should never be used. There, indeed, it does sound as if “making for oneself one’s own law” is merely an evil and futile attempt to escape from the one law that pervades all of creation. But in other passages, Bernard is clearer about the extent to which human self-legislation remains and is good. In On Grace and Free Choice, for example, he observes that “the Creator distinguished the rational creature in a particular way . . . with this prerogative of divine dignity, that in the manner that he [the Creator] was self-legislating and that

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it was a matter of his own will, not of necessity, that he was good, in the same way the creature too would exist as also, in a certain way, selflegislating—in this limited extent, that not without his own will would he either do evil and be justly condemned or remain good and be deservedly saved” (DGLA 11.36, SBO 3:191).16 Our actions in accordance with or against the divine law are themselves a form of self-legislation: we are to that extent sui juris, “of our own law.” But that is a fairly limited extent. It means that we do not become good or evil without the participation of our wills; but it does not follow that our wills alone could suffice to make us either good or evil. Only God, in Bernard’s understanding, has (he would rather say “is”) such a powerful will. To imagine humans as wholly autonomous is from this perspective an attempt to arrogate to humanity what is God’s proper way of being: to approach something in which we are offered participation as a gift by attempting to seize not just the participation but the full reality and make it “our own,” no longer as a gift, but without qualification. We might say — acknowledging that we do not completely know what either term means — that this would be an attempt to take grace and turn it into nature. That temptation is a frequent theme in Bernard. The first few pages of On Loving God are a kind of meditation on it, where the gift in question is the core of the human self. The proper excellence and true dignity of that self, according to Bernard — that which distinguishes us from other animals, for example—is the liberum arbitrium (DDD 2.2; cf. DGLA 1.2). But the liberum arbitrium is a gift, and one must receive it correctly. Bernard says, for example, that self-knowledge is truly knowledge only if by it “the human recognizes that this same dignity [i.e., the faculty of free choice] is in himself but nevertheless not from himself.”17 Neither half of that recognition can be dispensed with, he continues a few sentences later, for to have what you do not know you have — what glory does that have? Further, to know what you have, but not to know that you do not have it from yourself—that has glory, but not with God. To the one having glory in his own mind is said by the Apostle: “What do you have that you have not received? If, however, you received it, why do you glory as if you had not received?” He does not say simply

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“Why do you glory?” but adds “as if you had not received” in order to call blameworthy, not the one who glories in the things he has, but the one who glories as if in things he had not received. . . . Therefore it is necessary that you know two things: both what you are, and that you are not [what you are] from yourself—lest you either, as it were, fail to glory at all, or glory emptily. (DDD 2.3 – 4, SBO 3:121–22)18 One begins to see the meaning in the label “twofold”: Bernard counsels a double affirmation, the two halves of which pull in almost opposite directions. Affirm that you are something glorious, in part because, uniquely among material creatures, you have a faculty of giving yourself law; but affirm that you have all this only by gift. A strong condemnation of alternative relations to God’s gifts shortly follows: “It is pride, and a very great crime, to use things given as if they were innate, and in favors received to usurp [also] the glory of the favor” (2.4, SBO 3:123).19 And yet this misappropriation of gifts is a crime we almost cannot avoid: “Truly it is difficult—nay rather impossible—for anyone (that is, by his own powers of free choice) to turn the things once accepted from God completely around to the will of God, and not rather to twist them back to his own will and retain them for himself as if they were his own” (2.6, SBO 3:124).20 One of the most extended treatments of the idea appears in a series of six sermons Bernard wrote for the celebration of the dedication of a church. The first of these begins with the startling announcement that the feast does not properly celebrate the church building at all, but the monks who have gathered for the celebration. “Perhaps you are amazed and embarrassed,” Bernard writes, “that feasts are celebrated for you” (Sermones in dedicatione ecclesiae 1.1, SBO 5:370). He explains that the church building is holy only because it is sanctified by the bodies of the monks, which are in turn sanctified by their souls, which are sanctified by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Astounding power and goodness, then, have been vested in these ordinary monks. But the word is appropriate—the power and goodness are indeed vested: that is, they are given to the monks from elsewhere. That double affirmation recurs frequently in the sermons, perhaps most forcefully in the fifth, titled “On the Twofold Consideration of Oneself.” It advises in part:

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Read, O human, in your heart, read inside yourself the testimony of truth about yourself: certainly by this common light you will judge yourself unworthy. Read in God’s heart the testament affirmed in the Mediator’s blood, and you will discover to what a great extent you possess in hope something other than what you are seen to have in fact. “What is a human,” it says, “that you make him great?” He is great, certainly — but in God, since he was made great by God. Or how would he not be great in the eyes of the One whose great care is for him? “His own care is for us,” says the apostle Peter. And the prophet says: “I, moreover, am a beggar and a poor man; the Lord is solicitous for me.” (SDE 5.5, SBO 5:391)21 A few moments later Bernard claims further scriptural support for his resolutely twofold picture of the human moral status: “ ‘Who can be saved?’ say the disciples to the Savior. He says: ‘With humans this is impossible, but not with God.’ This is our whole assurance, this is our sole consolation, this is the whole reason for our hope.”22 And near the end of the sermon comes a striking restatement of the whole theme. “Lingering now for a little while in the higher vantage point,” Bernard writes, meaning the “vantage” of what we have in hope rather than in fact, “let us look for the Home of God, let us look for the Temple, let us look for the City, let us look even for the Bride. And I have not forgotten [what I said earlier], but with fear and reverence I say: we are [these things]. We, I say, are [these things], but in God’s heart; we are all these, but by his deigning, not by our dignity” (SDE 5.8, SBO 5:394).23 Here and throughout Bernard’s writings, the givenness of our selves is understood to persist, to be a feature of our selves that is present as long as the selves are. But as Bernard’s givenness has two sides, there are two threats to it, two ways in which it — or at least our memory of it — can be lost. We could forget that our existence as rational semi-self-legislating creatures and the intended dwelling place of God is ours by a generous gift—thus thinking such a high kind of existence unreal, the gift not really (or ineffectively) given. To think in this way would be, in Bernard’s terms from On Loving God, to forget what we are, to fail to glory at all, and would correspond roughly with the sin of despair. Alternately we might forget that our existence as partial self-legislators and God’s intended dwelling is ours by a generous gift— thus thinking of that kind of exis-

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tence as “natural,” just the way things are, requiring no reference to a giver in order to think of it correctly and respond to it well. This is Bernard’s “usurpation of the glory of the favor,” treating “things given as if they were innate,” forgetting that we are not “from ourselves” and thus “glorying emptily”—the correlate of the sin of presumption or of pride. To live in the light of persistent givenness would be to walk a vanishing borderline between these two errors, ourselves acting, yes, but with an action that somehow manages not to forget the Giver of our capacity to act, an action that resists the universal tendency toward taking gifts for granted and instead maintains an awareness of its own dependence.24 Bernard recognizes the difficulty of the feat: as we have already seen, he says that the effort will almost inevitably fail, and in fact will inevitably fail unless it is underwritten by yet another kind of gift. And yet we are called to this near-impossibility, this life on a knife’s edge, as in the end the only sane, healthy, fruitful mode of human existence.25 This is a good place to issue the next of what will be a series of reminders that some particular idea under consideration — in this case, “persistent givenness”—is not peculiar to Bernard’s thought, but a kind of commonplace of earlier Christian tradition.26 The thought persists into the modern era as well: in Works of Love Søren Kierkegaard offers counsel that parallels, in the realm of ethics, Bernard’s paradoxical injunction about knowing what one is: he writes that two things are necessary for salvation — one’s utmost striving and the knowledge that one’s utmost striving is utterly insufficient. And extensive play with the paradoxes of givenness has not been lacking in recent years.27 Here as elsewhere, what we find in Bernard is worth attending not just because it is in Bernard, but because its presence there is a fair indication of its presence many other places also. One place similar thinking appears —whether by direct influence or not is not our immediate question — is in Chaucer. We noted in chapter 1 a striking difference between the heroines Griselda and Custance. While each finds herself in a situation reminiscent of Job’s, beset on all sides and never knowing which of her possessions might next be peeled away, their reactions are not the same. Custance, for her part, does not take it upon herself to further the peeling. Griselda does so: it is possible to understand her strengthening of her vows in competition with Walter as something like the self-protective behavior of an employee sensing

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the imminent arrival of a pink slip: you can’t fire me, I quit! Her hurry to get rid of everything she possesses — even, impossibly, to get rid of her own will, by replacing it with someone else’s — roughly parallels Bernard’s first way of getting it wrong: by not knowing properly what one is, and thus “fail[ing] to glory at all.” Custance’s way of being is at once less driven by the need for mastery and, from another point of view, less hungry for passivity. Her relation to material and immaterial particularities is a quieter one: she exists among them, works with them, and is ready to drop them at a moment’s notice. Ready to drop them—but that is an entirely different attitude from being bent on doing so. Her attitude toward the world, in fact, is just what Bernard’s “twofold” seems to dictate. The few things she might call her own — her husband, her child, her friends, her status as an emperor’s daughter, even her passions —are, like so many things for Bernard’s wayfaring soul, gifts; she takes them for what they are, neither clinging to them desperately (as if they were hers by right or nature) nor exerting her will toward doing away with them (as if they were not truly hers at all). Thus the facts of the Man of Law’s Tale suggest not just religious seriousness, but a particular kind of religiosity, underlying the tale. They imply for Custance a God who asks that we hold everything we have, and everything we are, lightly, ready to be handed over at need — but without striving eagerly for the handing over. This twofold attitude fits well not only with themes made explicit in Bernard, but with themes broadly available in Christian tradition. Jesus himself, in the Gethsemane narrative of the Synoptic Gospels, is not eager to be martyred; he prays to be spared. He is merely ready, ending the prayer with a phrase not too far distant from ay welcome be thy sonde: “Let not my will but yours be done.”28 He also enjoins a similar attitude on his disciples in the parallel scene from John’s Gospel: they should not rush to abandon “the world”; they are in fact deliberately sent into the world; but they should be “in but not of ” the world (17:11–18). And similar sentiments appear at greater length in a letter written by an early disciple: “This remains: let those who have wives be as if not having them; and those who weep be as if not weeping; and those who rejoice, as if not rejoicing; and those who buy, as if not possessing; and those who use this world as if they did not use it; for the figure of this world passes away” (1 Corinthians 7:29–31).29

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An Alternative to Alternation Patience, moreover, has a perfect work: that is, it perfectly makes workers. —James 1:4 with gloss 30 If the formal task of philosophy is taken to be the suspension of dichotomy, Reason may try to solve it by nullifying one of the opposites and exalting the other into something infinite. This is what happened in Fichte’s system. —G. W. F. Hegel 31 Whenever I come across a dilemma, I look out for the fallacy. — Charles Peirce 32

At last we are ready to attempt a fuller answer to the question posed at the end of the “Hermeneutical Interlude”: what is available — in Chaucer, in Boethius, in the real world—as another, and perhaps even a “better,” way of combining action and passion than the mere alternation we see in Theseus? By now it will surprise no one to learn that I believe that Custance’s way of being, described in chapter 1 as “conjoint action,” is the concrete example that gives that answer most convincingly. But here as elsewhere the literary insight will gain strength from attention to a theological context. Let us return to Bernard’s fifth sermon for the dedication of a church, here immediately after his quotation, which ends one of the long passages above, of the psalmist’s “I am a beggar and poor: the Lord is solicitous for me”: There is surely between the two reflections an ingenious connection by which, as if in one and the same moment descending and ascending, he sees both himself, poor and beggarly, and God solicitous for him. To ascend and descend simultaneously is angelic —“You will see angels ascending and descending on the son of man,” [Scripture] says — for there is not any such alternation [viz., as humans find necessary] in their ascending and descending. Simultaneously they are both sent into ministry for the sake of those who receive

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the inheritance of salvation, and stand before the face of Majesty, as God mercifully provides, in order that both the consolation should be ours and no tribulation should be theirs. . . . Angelic ascent and descent indeed lack alternation; for us, however, it is necessary to be turned now this way, now that way, because it is neither permitted to stand too long above nor beneficial to tarry too long below. (SDE 5.5–6, SBO 5:391– 92)33 Humans, in the normal course of things, alternate—as any reader of the Knight’s Tale, with its constant ups and downs, knows. (The notion is still built deeply into our stock of clichés, in that we speak of the vicissitudes of human existence; vicissitudo, alternation, is Bernard’s very word here.) Angels, by contrast, have it all at once. But inasmuch as Bernard says that the psalmist manages to borrow their perspective for a few moments, we have here not only an assertion that humans are ordinarily barred from the angels’ more steady (though to us more paradoxical) mode of being, but also a hint that we may sometimes aspire to it. Since the alternation here is between heaven and earth rather than action and passion, one might object that its connection to Thesean alternation is no more than a marginally relevant formal similarity. But Bernard often applies one and the same form to many different kinds of “matter,” and there are other passages where he connects this form, the idea of the simultaneous experience of two things apparently opposed, explicitly to questions of agency. One of these we have already seen: it is the passage from a Holy Week sermon considered in the preface, quoted by Erich Auerbach in the course of his own exposition of medieval muddyings of the categories of action and passion—and very nearly quoted by Chaucer himself, who instead translates the sentence immediately after it into the Parson’s Tale. There Bernard is quite clear about the non-alternation in the agency of at least one human being, Christ, who possessed a “passive action” during his years of ministry and an “active passion” in the events leading to his death. Now that the relevance of such thoughts to Chaucer’s poems is becoming clearer, it is worth returning to an earlier part of the same sermon for a clarification of what “active passion” might mean. Bernard says that Christ, alone among humans, not only chose the moment of his own death but somehow actively died: “Because he willed it, he was sacrificed. Not merely ‘he

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willed it and he was sacrificed,’ but because he willed it. Indisputably he alone had power to lay down his soul; no one took it away from him. . . . ‘And, with his head inclined, made obedient to the point of death, he handed over his spirit.’ Who goes to sleep that easily when he wishes? Indeed, it is a great weakness to die; but clearly to die this way is immeasurable strength” (HMIV §4, SBO 5:59; emphasis added).34 Bernard goes on to contrast this death with that of a human suicide: even the suicide, he says, does not really “lay down his soul”; instead he only “pushes on and violently severs” it. (We might extrapolate to a higher, and grimmer, level of precision: the suicide cannot actively die, but can only take actions that he expects to lead to his death. It is possible to attempt suicide and fail.) Christ, Bernard suggests, did not merely allow, or even take, actions expected to kill him; he actively died. There was something unique and paradoxical about this man’s death. We can also find in Bernard yet a third treatment, a still more detailed one, of the coming-together of action and passion — in a combination of a kind that will more likely be classed as actio passiva than as passio activa. It falls in a place where there can be no question that the combination applies not just to Christ but to all humans: an analysis of human action that appears near the end of the treatise On Grace and Free Choice with whose beginning our consideration of Bernard began. The passage we want appears after a good deal of the work is done. Bernard has, for example, already drawn loosely on two passages from Paul (Philippians 2:13; 2 Corinthians 3:5) in order to subdivide “everything that can be good” in a human action into three successive stages: the conception, the willing, and the accomplishing of a deed (14.46). He has told us that our chief human role, and the only possibility of our gaining merit, is confined to the middle of the three, because the thought is given to us by God, and whether the deed is finally accomplished or not is largely beyond our control. God, Bernard says, “works these three things in us,” but differently: “He does the first without us, the second with us, the third through us” (14.46). Thereafter he considers the middle of the three, willing or intention, as the point where human-divine cooperation resides. It is the precise characterization of that cooperation that is most instructive. Grace precedes our efforts by “sowing the thought” in our mind, but it does so only in order to cooperate with us in the later stages:

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Thus [God’s grace] works with free choice in this way, that it precedes it merely in the first [stage, namely thought], but accompanies it in the others, thus preceding in order that they might afterward work together. Thus what was begun by grace alone is accomplished equally by both, so that they operate through their individual effects in a mixed way, not individually, and simultaneously, not by turns. It is not that partly grace [works] and partly free choice, but they individually carry the whole thing through by an undivided work: indeed, free choice does the whole thing, and grace does the whole thing, but as the whole thing is done in the former, so the whole thing is done from the latter. (DGLA 14.47, SBO 3:199–200)35 The co-operation effected between free choice and grace is from the human point of view a kind of superposition of action and passion; the human will must — at least until this superposition is complete — be thought of as passive before the will and grace of God, but active in responding. And the two co-operate so closely that one can scarcely say what each contributes to the operation. Each does the whole work, but only with the other’s presence, and the difference between their operations is one of mode (expressed here by their subjection to two different prepositions, in and ex) rather than of content. This is a close parallel in theology to the life situation Chaucer has sketched in Custance’s tale. The two appearances taken together — the poet’s concrete instance and the theologian’s general description — provide a compelling alternative to Theseus’s alternation. This state of “cooperation” is hard to come by, to be sure: Bernard sometimes observes that it is only available in this life in fleeting foretastes, and (since the passive component depends on divine action) then only by gift. Nonetheless it is the height to which humans, for authors in his tradition, are called. Formally it is quite different from alternation; what the human does and what divine grace does work at the same instant, are even the same cooperative “action,” so that in such moments each human has something of the passive action that Bernard ascribes to Christ, and perhaps suffers something of his active passion too. To ask exactly what kind of unification takes place between God and the human agent at such moments is to ask a vexed question. Bernard does clearly think that there is at the very least a growing like-

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ness to God on the part of the human: some kind of “conformation” of the human will to God takes place, and it is that process that allows Bernard to speak (though elsewhere, and rarely) of “deification.” But we need not try to settle every detail of what he means by these various terms.36 It will be enough if we merely take careful note of what he does express clearly: the idea that some human actions are inseparable from divine ones, and are thus adequately described only if labeled both human and divine. Such a belief lies close to the root of the latemedieval presuppositions that I detect in Chaucer’s poems — a way of thought whose distance from the common sense of today makes it easy for modern readers to miss much of what the poems have to say. And since such missing (the previous chapter offers several examples) seems regularly to derive from an overconfidence in modern presuppositions, it seems wise to bring those presuppositions into dialogue with the very different starting point represented by Bernard, noting the differences as we go. Particularly important is the fact that Bernard is not concerned merely with the relatively obvious passivities involved in his first and third stages — the preconditions and aftermath of a movement of the will. One must surely point these out as well, above all to dissuade anyone interested in promulgating (or acting on) a theory of “pure action”; and I take it that necessary passivities of this kind are what Jill Mann has in mind when she speaks, as discussed in the previous chapter, of Chaucer’s tendency to “deconstruct” simplistic notions about the possession of power. But Bernard’s analysis —here rooted firmly in that crucial verse of Paul’s, Philippians 2:13— goes one very large step further, claiming that the bare activity of liberum arbitrium, of assent to or dissent from a proposed action, even when we attempt to think of it with all the obvious externalities stripped away, still has something “passive” about it: it must, at least when human action is at its best, simultaneously receive something in order to act. As Paul’s sentence, nodded to by Bernard at the head of his discussion, has it, “It is God who works in you both the willing and the accomplishing according to good will.”37 It is a claim about a paradoxical entanglement. While the divine here acts with (and indeed almost instead of) a human (who has “only” to assent), the divine also simultaneously elevates the human —“marries” the human, one might rather say, inviting him or her into a shared agency

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and even a shared being—so that the resulting action, worked by the divine in such a fundamental sense, can nonetheless still justly be called a human action.38 If these ideas passed along through Bernard have any traction for the reading of Chaucer — and still more if we are willing to entertain the possibility that they also describe something real about human action — then we will want to adjust our categories. The ideas of pure action and pure passion with which we frequently think, or with which we think we think—encouraged no doubt by the two grammatical voices of our language, and by philosophical traditions that have too readily taken Aristotle’s ten categories, with their apparently firm separation of the two called “action” and “passion,” as indicating the necessary shape of reality—may need to yield ground to some newcomers. It is hard to say what the new categories would be; hence, presumably, the great challenge remarked by Jacques Maritain’s epigraph to this half of the book. But this chapter, and I think the Man of Law’s Tale, are attempts to encounter the new categories experimentally. Custance in particular seems a picture of a state of guidance without domination, discipleship without colonization of the will. Instead of exerting pure action — but also instead of merely being on the receiving end of such a thing — she approaches the world in a way that simultaneously affirms the reality of suffering, and of hope, and of her own continually renewed God-given strength; and her experience of God seems to match what some modern theologians have called “noncontrastive” transcendence—an otherness that completes and strengthens her, an otherness in whose presence she is most truly herself.39 It is clearly enough a paradoxical notion, at least if our categories and our common sense remain fixed in unsympathetic positions, insisting on the reality of pure action and pure passion. But the question should be not merely whether a notion strikes us as paradoxical, but whether that reaction must be taken to mean that the notion must be cast out as fantasy or nonsense. May it not sometimes be our categories that should be cast out instead? In the present case, it seems to me, the paradox deserves at least a hearing — both on its own terms, as a claim about reality, and a fortiori in the context of trying to understand the writings of a six-hundred-year-old Christian poet, whose presuppositions seem likely to match this paradox rather better than they match what has since become our common sense.40

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I leave the reader with just a few final comments on our characters in context. In weighing the validity of Custance’s paradoxical stance, we ought to consider what the other options are—and thus far it looks very much as if the only options besides paradox are horror and endless repetition. What does Griselda do? Faced by the dilemma of passion and action, she tries to escape the dualism by seizing one pole — that of absolute passivity — to the exclusion of the other. It is not an affirmation of an enduring relationship between two wills such as we find in Bernard and in Custance, but rather an attempt to collapse the difference between the two wills; it is, if you like, a mysticism of annihilation.41 But however we label Griselda’s striving, she finds that the paradox is not so easily avoided; her absolute passivity approaches success only by virtue of simultaneously approaching an absolute activity, a fantastic exertion of self-overcoming that attempts to plant Walter’s will in a cavity where hers once grew, an exertion whose strain we see in the clenched fingers of her second swoon. One pole, seized by itself, quickly turns into its opposite, and into horror: and whether we call the result purely passive or purely active, Griselda is bounden to that stake as much as the Clerk’s Tale suggests Walter is (704). That way out of the dilemma offers little hope of success.42 So much for the attempt to choose one pole of the dilemma to the other’s exclusion. What of endless alternation? Here, of course, we have Theseus, the consummate planner, whose only reaction to each successive collapse is to plan again, and whose vicissitude between action and passion shows no sign of being less than interminable. His kind of agency may well be spot-on for a fourteenth-century conception of an ancient pagan, taken to have little or no understanding of the capacity of providence for working with particulars. As the end of the previous chapter suggests, if the clashing waves of Fortune are not understood as overeseen by the unsearchable but loving designs of a trustworthy God, then firm readjustment to necessitee, and a resolute beginning-again from the shambles, are probably the best we can do. Thus a reader operating under a ban on the affirmation of particular providence—or a ban on its prerequisite, belief in the reality of God — might very justly judge Theseus’s kind of agency the best that Chaucer can imagine. But, also as in the previous chapter, the ban blocks more than intended: the close dependence of medieval thought about human agency (as represented

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here by Bernard) on medieval thought about God means that ruling the latter out of court also makes some varieties of the former impossible. And some of what is lost may be valuable, even superior to some of what remains. If on the other hand the ban on medieval thought about God can be relaxed, Theseus will find his perpetual alternation surpassed (certainly from Bernard’s point of view and, one suspects, also from Chaucer’s) by the agency of Custance, whose actions are always already cut through with, even nondistinct from, the “passivity” that is God’s will acting in her. As regards action and passion she is in the place of Bernard’s angels — and of his picture of Christ — and of every human who rightly responds to grace: standing at both poles at once, “active and passive in a single mystery,” as this chapter’s epigraph has it. Perhaps this is the sense in which this most harried of saints is Constant after all.43

A p p e n d i x t o C h a p t e r Th r e e B e r n a r d , C . W. B y n u m , a n d t h e D e e p R o o t s o f Pa r a d o x The third chapter of C. W. Bynum’s Metamorphosis and Identity considers at length Bernard’s handling of paradoxes —not in particular the “paradox of givenness” explored above, but paradoxes in general. Among other useful observations, Bynum notes how often Bernard sketches a surprising or paradoxical dyad but then fails to resolve it into some third position that either mediates between or subsumes the first two. Her reflections, however, seem to me wide of the mark in two important ways. First, they omit the fact that in many cases, Bernard does not merely juxtapose two seemingly opposed phenomena, but offers some account of an internal relation that explains their connection, pulling them together, as it were, in spite of the apparent contradiction. In many of the cases considered above, for example, the concept of givenness itself connects the two poles of a dyad: we are something glorious and something lowly; but we are both for the same reason — glorious because God has deigned to make us so, and lowly in that we are entirely dependent on a glory that is given us by a giver not subject to our control. Therefore our lowliness and grandeur grow up together, and the more we acknowledge one, if we do it with understanding, the more the other increases; it may even be only our mistaken point of view that makes them seem opposites. Such coinherence — which Bernard puts perhaps most clearly on display in a sermon on Mary, for which see chapter 4, note 86—casts serious doubt on Bynum’s general conclusion that in Bernard’s dyads

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“nothing really holds the [resulting] entity together except the assertion of unity” (162). The second demurral is that I think Bynum overestimates Bernard’s peculiarity in this matter. The perception that his tendency to let paradoxes persist rather than resolving them is unusual naturally leads her to search for more or less local explanations, such as that Bernard feared the “real change” that would be involved in finding resolutions (e.g., 131– 44, 162), or that the twelfth-century intellectual milieu as a whole did so. But in fact structures like Bernard’s dyads are relatively common in a long line of previous theological writings: while it must be conceded that one can also find Christian thinkers (Aquinas comes to mind) whose habits of thought seem to tend more toward smooth resolutions guided by widely applicable principles, still Bernard’s tendency to rest in paradox has many precedents, so many that, rather than seeking a smallscale and psychological explanation, one might more simply observe that Bernard is here as elsewhere passing along the witness of generations of Christian writers before him. In particular, christological writings dating back to the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon very likely prepared the ground for Bernard’s comfort with persistent hybrids, in that their detailed accounts of the two natures of Christ made belief in an unresolved paradox obligatory: Christ is said to be “in two natures” inseparably but also inconfuse or sine confusione (Greek ασυγχυτως, asyngchytos) ˜ —, that is, without “mingling” or resolving into some third nature. (The Chalcedonian decree is available in Denzinger, Enchiridion, 108, and in translation in Denzinger, Sources, 61, and Hardy, Christology, 373.) A forceful and influential statement of the idea as it was passed along after Chalcedon appears in John Damascene’s eighth-century On the Orthodox Faith, one of the most important conduits by which Greeklanguage theology reached the Latin West. John writes at chapter 47: “We . . . neither name Christ [to be] of one composite nature, nor another thing [arising] from differing things [ex aliis aliud], in the way that a human is from a soul and a body, or as a body is from four elements; but [we say Christ to be] the same things [arising] out of differing things [ex aliis eadem]. For we confess the same one both to be and to be said to be, from Godhood and from humanity too, complete God and complete man — both from two natures and in two natures.”44 In other words, di-

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vinity and humanity, coming together in Christ, do not yield some third kind of thing with a new name (ex aliis aliud, another from others), but a person who somehow remains entirely each kind of thing, a paradoxical both-and (ex aliis eadem). Further examples and ethical implications of this complex teaching from other writers in the tradition appear in the last endnote to chapter 4. Bynum’s chapter does discuss (158 – 62) the relevance of christological paradox to Bernard’s spirituality, but her treatment suggests at most a subsidiary causality, or rather that the causality is reversed: that Bernard understands Christ as he does because of his more general tendency to avoid resolutions, rather than the other way around. The question of which way the causality flows is an important one, it seems to me, for those who wish to interpret the products of medieval culture. If Bynum is correct, we will tend simply to write off most of Bernard’s paradoxes as artifacts of his, or his century’s, particular turn of mind, and thus will hesitate to accord much significance to the appearance of similar ideas in a poet (or a painter, or a theologian) of a nearby age; and we will not feel any special contradiction between the fear of change we think we have perceived in Bernard and any sympathies for change that we detect in the poets. If, however, Bernard thinks as he does because of the way the weight of Christian tradition has shaped his thought, it will mean quite a bit more if we find a Chaucer (or a Dante, or a William Langland) thinking in similar paradoxes. And because we will suspect that their paradoxical thinking is closely linked to his, we may hesitate to categorize him as one who fears change—given that the ideas issuing from paradoxical habits of thought in these later cases at times seem quite eager for it. (See also ch. 3, n. 40.)

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Holy Anomaly The Second Nun’s Tale and Active Sanctity

Division 1: Cecilia (and Custance) Cecilia is another matter. So much so, in fact, that a first glance leads one to wonder whether the lead character of the Second Nun’s Tale is not Chaucer’s deliberate protest against the religious and ethical ideal explored in the last few chapters: the ideal of “conjoint action” or “double agency,” widely available in medieval Christian religious writers, that I have argued forms the foundation for the Man of Law’s Tale and informs, if for the most part negatively, the Clerk’s and Knight’s. Whether one’s spontaneous reaction to Cecilia is attraction or repulsion, it is likely to have a different tone from one’s reaction to either Griselda or Custance. Here for the first time is a character in control of her own story, and “in control” in a simple, direct way unthinkable in the cases of those other saintly or quasi-saintly women; indeed, as we

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shall see, “in control” to an extent scarcely possible in any other hagiography of the day. True, the story begins with conflict between Cecilia’s prayer that God “kepe hir maydenhede” and the apparently inescapable fact that she “sholde unto a man / Ywedded be” (126 – 28), and her desires appear to lose the first round of that conflict, in that the wedding proceeds. True, Chaucer tells us that at the wedding she wears a hair shirt beneath her golden robes, and comments that “in hir corage” she was “ful devout and humble” (131). But those are about the last signs of humility, or of passivity, of receiving action, to issue from the saint. The moment they have gone by, Cecilia is unmistakably in charge, successfully dodging her husband Valerian’s rather understandable advances and instead shipping him off to see the Pope-in-hiding, whom he easily finds in exactly the place and manner she specifies. Once Pope Urban has baptized him, also according to Cecilia’s directions, the returned husband gains eyes to see his wife’s protecting angel, just as she promised—leaving readers with the impression that even angelic manifestations are subject to her control. Further exhortations convert her brother-in-law Tiburce (285 – 301); strengthen Tiburce and Valerian as they go to their martyrs’ deaths (381– 90); and bring to the faith many servants of the hostile prefect Almachius, in the very act of trying to force Cecilia to renounce Christianity (410 – 20). Even her own persecution and death seem subject to her planning: the face-to-face confrontation she finally has with Almachius shows us little of the patient sufferer, still less the helpless victim. She is every inch the agile and almost belligerent opponent, arguing with and even mocking the man who has pointed out his power to kill her until, enraged, he does his best to oblige her apparent desire for martyrdom.1 There has been no lack of critical notice of Cecilia’s capacity for taking charge—of what in the context of this study we might provisionally call her purely active soul. Janemarie Luecke, for example, observes three ways in which Chaucer’s saint is saintly — by her vowed virginity, her martyrdom, and her “lastynge bisynesse” (line 95)—and asserts that the last one far outweighs the other two.2 Lynn Staley extends a similar view of Cecilia’s personality into a broad historical claim about Chaucer’s intentions.3 And Sherry Reames’s series of enlightening articles on the tale has several times called attention to Cecilia’s remarkable degree of activity and control.4

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The extent of that activity and control is all the more striking against the background of the complicated give-and-take of action and reception, human will and divine initiative, that the reader takes away from the Man of Law’s Tale. Try to imagine one of Custance’s characteristic phrases —“althogh I se noght how”— on Cecilia’s lips: the experiment fails. She is so confident of herself that, so far from failing to see how even God could pull her from her plight, she not only sees the way clearly but makes clear that it is her way. Her martyrdom is the most obvious example of this: her survival for three days after a ghastly wound, at first sight quite parallel to the miraculous survival of the litel clergeon of the Prioress’s Tale, reveals itself, when questions about agency are brought to bear, to be an entirely different kind of event. The clergeon is preserved through no particular action of his own; Mary comes and saves him in the “prevenient” way in which she is wont to act in Marian-miracle stories.5 In Cecilia’s case there is no mention of Mary, nor any other intermediary, but only a direct relationship between saint and the “king of heaven” (542) — who, moreover, remains entirely offstage and rarely mentioned. Indeed, hevene king appears to have hit upon this particular miracle only at Cecilia’s suggestion: she has asked him “To han respit thre dayes and namo” (543) in order to give her time to pass her latest crop of converts along to Pope Urban’s care and to dedicate her house as a church. Good idea, Cecilia, hevene king seems to have said: it falls out just as she has asked, giving her the unusual distinction, quite foreign to the little clergeon, of choosing the precise moment of her death from a mortal wound administered three days earlier. And Cecilia passes to the beyond after a life lived, uniquely among Chaucer’s characters, in apparently total command of both eros and thanatos. Such a stark contradiction with the kind of agency Chaucer seems to display, and to admire, elsewhere could be a problem for this book’s thesis. To this point it has seemed plausible to posit a consistent ideal of human action somewhere in the background of each tale investigated: a “cooperative” notion according to which the ideal human action is not merely human but simultaneously divine at well. We have learned further that this cooperation between human and divine implies an element of passivity in the human agent, because he or she is unable to perform many works without this kind of aid and because the “aid” seems — certainly in the case of Custance, the prime positive

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example — to require receptivity, openness, perhaps even suffering; certainly a willingness to “cooperate” toward ends and by means that he or she may not be able to perceive. None of that applies to this saint who is constantly pursuing her own entente, who never appears in a stance of receptivity, waiting for someone else’s action; as we have just seen, even in the rare instances when God is mentioned as having an active role in events, the role may well turn out to be that of fulfilling Cecilia’s plans. And she is very much a planner, as much a planner as Theseus is; indeed the chief difference between them appears to be that her plans have a way of succeeding. One could thus easily come away from her story, as one could not from the Man of Law’s or Knight’s Tale, thinking that its author means to encourage the making of plans without reference to prayer or prior divine counsel, and expects it to succeed. This apparent independence, the degree to which Cecilia’s confidence is self-confidence, is for readers coming from the Man of Law’s Tale the most jarring aspect of her story. Though Chaucer tells us twice near the tale’s beginning (124 –26, 138 – 40) of Cecilia’s frequent prayer, we actually see her engaged in that activity exactly once. The prayer lasts two lines, fifteen words, and is quite clear about what it wants of God: “My soule and eek my body gye / Unwemmed” (136 –37). There is nothing here of the Boethian prayer that reposes trust in a providence whose workings are permanently beyond human understanding, and little anywhere in the story to parallel the Man of Law’s Tale’s explicit depiction of dependence on powers that come to a human agent from without. If Cecilia’s strength comes to her in any similar way, Chaucer is quiet about it.6 Yet she is praised. That is, the tale rather clearly presents her as its “heroine”; there is no trace I can detect in the tale itself of the otherwise pervasive Chaucerian irony that might transform the poem’s apparent admiration for this kind of agency into a condemnation (as the Clerk’s Tale transforms Petrarch’s apparent praise of Griselda’s selfabnegation).7 For the standing hypothesis that Chaucer’s thought about agency proceeds in concert with the cooperative ideals so readily available in Bernard, Augustine, and all through the Christian tradition, this is a problem, or at least an anomaly, an oddity that demands attention. What sort of sense can it make to have two such vastly different ethical ideals promoted by the same author? What does Cecilia mean, in

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particular, for Chaucer’s relationship to the one ideal that to this point has looked as if it governed his thinking? The degree to which the question is troubling can be estimated by the number of hypotheses advanced over the last century or so to answer it. They have come in many different forms. Some of these would proceed by dissolving the problem, for example by claiming that one who studies closely enough will discover Cecilia’s way of being holy to be, despite appearances, ultimately not different from Custance’s.8 This is a thought-provoking suggestion, but viewing the question through the lens of questions about agency, as attempted in this chapter, seems to me to make assent impossible (and the chapter’s last few pages will return to the matter in order to reconcentrate the evidence for that impossibility). Another way around the question would be to acknowledge Cecilia’s uniqueness but to argue that anomalies do not require special attention where — as in the fictional creations of the poet of “God’s plenty”— there is no reason to expect uniformity. But such a reaction would not do justice to the depth of the contradiction between Cecilia’s kind of agency and Custance’s.9 Other reactions to the basic question of Cecilia’s anomalous agency have attributed it to chance, which is to say, to causes that in no way aimed to produce a fiercely, independently active leading character: perhaps her oddness is an epiphenomenon of the genre of the poem, for example, or of the particular sources Chaucer used, or of his (most unusual) way of combining those sources. Still others have gone to an opposite extreme, proposing that Chaucer deliberately created a character with such a fierce and independent kind of agency on account of a particular occasion for which the poem was written. Somewhere in between would be an assertion that Chaucer arranged Cecilia’s type of agency deliberately, but that we do not necessarily know why; or, still more cautiously, that Cecilia’s peculiarities may or may not be deliberate but are at least “authorial”— that is, they result (just as previous chapters suggest that Custance’s equally remarkable kind of agency results) from some habitual way of thought that shaped Chaucer’s product, whether or not he was aware of it. The argument here will come to rest, as regards Cecilia’s agency per se, on something like this last outcome. But the process of investigation will lead into unexpected regions — the complicated structure of the

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tale’s prologue—where it will be possible to get hold of a firmer conclusion: one that revitalizes a century-old idea about the strange chronology of Chaucer’s writing to suggest that the thoughts about agency in the prologue, at least, look intensely deliberate, and look as though they provide the tale’s missing dose of irony in the bargain. The evidence turned up along the way will also indicate much about what the figure of the Virgin Mary might mean in the prologue (and elsewhere in Chaucer, and in much other literature of the period); and, most importantly for this book, it will leave us with the fullest and clearest exposition yet of the pervasive but paradoxical “cooperative ideal” already hunted across three chapters. The path toward those results begins in simple enough fashion: by investigating four possible explanations, drawn from the list just given, for Cecilia’s oddity. The method will be, as it was in chapter 1, that of extended comparison with Chaucer’s sources — an effort by which this chapter also hopes to answer a call for source study issued over twentyfive years ago, when the second of the Second Nun’s Tale’s two most important sources (discussed below) was first identified.10

Explanation 1: The Hagiographical Imperative, or, Weren’t Fourteenth-Century Saints Just “Like That”? Perhaps the most obvious candidate for an explanation of Cecilia’s anomalous agency is the fact that she is, unlike Griselda and Custance, a “real saint.” Chaucer is here writing an instance of the well-established genre of the saint’s life, the only more or less straightforward instance he left us, and so naturally will conform to that genre’s norms; might it not be that those norms simply dictated that many saints should become supersaints, people strong beyond ordinary humanity who accomplish great things for the sake of the church? One might reasonably conjecture that hagiography would impart just such a skew to its characters, especially when the hagiography was intended for use in liturgy or by churchmen — the case with both of Chaucer’s major sources (on which more below). But a close examination, undertaken with questions about the nature of agency in mind, shows this conjecture to fall far short of explaining what we see in the Second Nun’s Tale.

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There are two ways in which the examination might be conducted: by recourse to the large and rapidly growing literature on medieval hagiography, and by plunging into the primary sources themselves, comparing Chaucer’s tale to more or less contemporary saints’ lives written independently of his influence. Neither approach yields convincing evidence that the fiercely independent agency of Chaucer’s Cecilia is primarily a result of hagiographical convention; in fact each approach suggests the opposite conclusion. Even (to take the second approach first) if we restrict ourselves to looking closely at other versions of Cecilia’s story extant in Chaucer’s time, we do not typically find a saint exerting the “pure,” that is the self-grounded, agency of the Second Nun’s Tale’s heroine. In the account of her life that appears in some manuscripts of the South English Legendary, for example, Cecilia’s verbal battle with Almachius (here called merely “the Iustise”) is present in the full splendor of its naked insults; but so is this explanation for the fact that Valerian and Tiburce get called before the magistrate before Cecilia does: Cecilie, for she wyfman was, at hom she most a-byde; Ak these bretheren, that men were, a-boute wenten wyde, And whane me martyreden cristenemen, thider he wolden gon & stele to whan he myghtte best, & burien hem a-non. (lines 132–35)11 It is difficult to imagine any such suggestion, any notion of taking second place to her kinsmen in any serious activity, or for that matter any similarly blunt statement of limitations suffered because of gender, being made of Chaucer’s Cecilia. And there are more such surprises in store. The angel whose reported presence keeps Valerian celibate on his wedding night is in Chaucer a supernatural lover, if a chaste one (“I have an aungel which that loveth me, / That with greet love, wher so I wake or sleepe, / Is redy ay my body for to kepe,” 152 – 54). But in the Legendary, the relationship is also, and in fact more strongly, characterized as one of senior guardian to immature ward: “Suete lemman,” Cecilia tells Valerian, “in warde icham I-do: / An aungel of heuene is my wardeyn, & my lemman ther-to” (19– 20). The passive voice hits especially hard. Cecilia, to whom in Chaucer’s account virtually nothing happens without her say-so, is “done into ward,” placed in this relation-

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ship, and phrases her description as if the placing were against, or at least independent of, her will. Nor is it quite in keeping with the dominant characteristics of Chaucer’s Cecilia that the Legendary’s version remarks, twice in its first ten lines, its heroine’s unusual silences: “Stilleliche she hire let baptize” (line 3), a fact Chaucer does not mention; and when she hears “menstrales song” at her wedding, “This mayde stilliche song of god & of his moder marye” (9–10), which is implied but not said, let alone emphasized, in the Second Nun’s Tale (135). A look at the version of Cecilia’s life in the collection of saints’ lives sometimes called the North English Legendary gives similar results.12 Within the first fourteen lines of the tale proper we hear that “Of pape Urban [Cecilia] was baptist,” an un-Chaucerian reminder that the saint depended on other humans for at least some of her Christianness, and then—twice—that she was “milde of mode,” which Chaucer’s creation, to put it mildly, is not. The context for the second of these two remarks makes a particularly sharp contrast with Chaucer’s character: With hir frendes scho was ful dere And with al other folk in-fere, Bycaus scho was both fayre and gude And untill all folk milde of mode. (19–22) If such a passage had to be applied to one of Chaucer’s characters, it would surely be not Cecilia — whose interactions with fellow humans seem limited to exhorting them toward conversion or martyrdom, to trading insults, and to issuing commands — but Griselda. But the assertion of mildness fits rather well in the northern Legendary’s version of the story, in which, for example, the verbal battle with Almachius is entirely gone: Cecilia’s death sentence comes about because the prefect is angry about his lost opportunity to seize her lately martyred husband’s wealth, which she has craftily donated to the poor at the first sign of Almachius’s desire to claim it. Nor were such relatively milder tellings of Cecilia’s life unusual; Reames remarks her surprise on finding that a “large proportion” of manuscript versions omit the trial scene entirely.13 To be clear, there is no evidence that I know of that Chaucer saw the two versions of Cecilia’s life just cited.14 Thus there is no argument

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here that he deliberately avoided their particular suggestions of passivity and quietude, which do not appear in the sources we know him to have used. The point is simply that whatever prompted him to create a version of Cecilia entirely lacking in passivity and quietude, an agent of pure action, it does not seem from this evidence to have been the ordinary conventions of hagiography: examples of ordinary hagiography that are not of that sort are too easy to find. Nor does the secondary literature on saints’ lives lend much in the way of normalcy to Chaucer’s egregiously independent saint. The study that makes the strongest bid to do so is Karen Winstead’s Virgin Martyrs, a book helpful both in its focus on the subset of saints’ lives most obviously relevant to the Second Nun’s Tale and in its suggested division of high- and late-medieval hagiography into three eras (1100 – 1250, 1250 –1400, and 1400 –1450) featuring distinct characteristics and aims.15 And in fact Winstead’s thesis about the middle period is precisely that it tended toward the invincible supersaint, leaving behind the evident vulnerability and relative hominess that the first period preserved from its late-antique sources, and instead creating aggressive characters whose power it was possible to celebrate, but imitation of whom was difficult to imagine. Chaucer’s story then appears (82– 83) as merely one of the most extreme examples of the type, paired in that role with the only other saint’s life from the period known to have been written by a layman: a life of Saint Christine by one William of Paris (65). Winstead’s division of the periods, however, arises in response to a particular set of questions: she is especially interested in power relations between the genders and between the politically strong and weak. Approaching the evidence instead with questions about agency as such, about how it is held and where it comes from, about whether it is ever cooperative or always merely fought over, gives rise to a very different grouping, one that preserves subtle but extremely important differences among stories and confirms the shocking uniqueness of Chaucer’s. We will be able to see its uniqueness most clearly by spending a few paragraphs with the story Winstead makes out to be most like it.16 For Winstead, William’s life of Christine is “an even more dramatic story of feminine mastery” than the Second Nun’s Tale, but essentially both are “the same kind of conflict-oriented virgin martyr legends,”

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marked by “themes of discord and rebellion,” that others (including, according to Winstead, the authors collected in the two English Legendaries) had been writing “for over a century.” (83, 85). And indeed William’s Christine is, by some measures, a match for the aggressively active Cecilia. She has verbal battles, not with a Roman prefect but with her pagan father, whom she early calls a “fole” (line 114) and later a “devele” and “Of Satane fende” (222, 224). She withstands an increasingly fearsome — one might be tempted to say an increasingly hyperbolic — set of tortures at the hands of four assailants, of whom her father (who merely has her flesh flayed from her bones) is only the first; and she passes through them all, just as Chaucer’s saint will, without feeling the expected pain (see, e.g., lines 159, 246, 318, 374). She also takes strong action, at one point destroying her father’s collection of idols by tossing them from the window of the tower where she is imprisoned (129– 44) — having first thoughtfully relieved them of their gold and silver plating in order to donate the proceeds to charity (136). And near the end of the tale, in an exhibition of power that arguably goes beyond anything ascribed to Cecilia, she resurrects one of her own torturers, who had just been killed when his collection of trained serpents, conjured to bite Christine to death, turned and “slow hyme thate the charme begane” instead (429–38). And yet she is not Cecilia: clearly not, self-evidently not, for anyone approaching her story with questions about divine-human cooperation, conjoint action and “pure” action, in mind. Early in the poem William offers to explain how this young woman came to follow the God of Christianity despite her pagan surroundings: this came about because The holy goste in Cristyne is, And he hath tawghte hire to forsake Hir fals goddes ilkone, ywisse, That are but stonys & stokkes blake: And fulle purpose now wille she take To drede no dede, but thinke of blysse. Thus gode cane of vncrystyne make Right holy martirs to be his. (49–56)

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She depends immediately on God for her new way of life, in a way never suggested of Chaucer’s Cecilia.17 The implication that (in line with both the Bernardian Twofold of ch. 3 and the main streams of Christian orthodoxy) the good one does is all ultimately credited back to God is reinforced in the next stanza’s reference to Christine’s grace (57), a word not very much present in the Second Nun’s Tale. (It appears four times there; at lines 237, 254, and 399 it refers strictly to grace received by Tiburce and Valerian, while the fourth instance, at line 325, refers to humankind in general and seems largely a pleonastic rhyme word.) Cecilia, in particular, is never said to receive, ask for, or have any need of grace — which is more than a little peculiar for a Christian saint, even one inhabiting fourteenth-century hagiography. But the idea of grace and various parallel assertions of dependence recur all throughout William’s story. Christine is Jesus’ “child” (100) because “he alone me made & boughte” (104); Christine also looks forward to being Christ’s “seruaunte” (191); pitched into the sea with a stone around her neck, she is rescued by angels and baptized on the spot by Christ himself (262–66); and explicit references to “grace” and to Christine’s thankfulness for receiving it appear on nearly every page (e.g., lines 210, 292, 319, 373, 450 –54).18 One of Christine’s onstage prayers is especially telling by comparison to the Second Nun’s Tale: from the midst of one of the surprisingly painless tortures, she cries out, “I thank yt The, heuyne kynge, / That Thou has ordeynde thus for me” (321– 22). The content of her thanks demonstrates that while the two women look similar from what we might call an external perspective — both, by supernatural assistance, survive gruesome tortures unscathed — their internal relationships to God are diametrically opposed. One story concerns a faithful follower for whom God ordains what will happen, and whose role is to assent to divine power working around and through her. The other is about an apparently in-dependent agent who, as far as one can tell from any evidence in the text, makes her own decisions about what will happen and at most runs them by God for ratification; she is hardly a follower at all. The difference is especially stark in the light of lessons learned in earlier chapters. For Christine, as in Bernard’s account of human action, grace precedes free choice in order to perform alone the first stage of an action, the suggestion of the deed to be done; whereas Cecilia’s free choice

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seems to be in control through all three stages, from suggestion through successful execution. Or in Chaucer’s terms, Christine’s agency, despite her occasionally aggressive actions and words, looks in its constant dependence on divine initiative very much like Custance’s; Cecilia’s agency, as the next section of this chapter will demonstrate in more detail, does not.19 The question is not (at least for the moment) whether one mode of being in the world is superior to the other, but only how different they are. And if the question of divine-human cooperation is as fundamental to Chaucer’s thinking as it appears, the answer is that they are about as different as it is possible to be.20 Thus the attempt to explain Cecilia’s kind of agency as merely a natural result of the hagiographical trends of the day ends in collapse. Those trends may have produced supersaints in some senses, characters accomplishing superhuman feats via supernatural powers; but the feats were generally referred back to the powers, and the powers clearly painted as having come to the saints by gift, and the saints’ dependence on God made explicit at every turn. All this means that, viewed with the questions about the nature and evident source of their agency in mind, those other saints of the late fourteenth century had remarkably little in common with Chaucer’s Cecilia.

Explanation 2: Chaucer’s Two Sources and Their Fateful Splice If conventions of the genre of hagiography do not account for the peculiarities of Chaucer’s character, what about the particular instances of hagiography he happened to use? The answer is more complicated than that to the previous hypothesis. The sources, along with the unusual way in which Chaucer used them, have certainly helped shape the Cecilia Chaucer’s readers know; but his tale also alters those sources at several points to intensify, to an extreme degree, some of the tendencies generated by the sources. The next two sections take a look at each phenomenon in turn, and each requires some close work with the source texts. We are fortunate, and relatively recently so, to know quite a lot about Chaucer’s two major sources for the tale and his uncharacteristic way of employing them. Both are accounts of Cecilia’s life descended from a long sixth-century Passio sanctae Ceciliae, which Chaucer likely

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did not know directly.21 The identity of one of the descendants has long been clear: it is the account of Saint Cecilia’s life near the end of the immensely popular Legenda sanctorum, or Golden Legend, of the latethirteenth-century Dominican bishop Jacobus de Voraigne. With few exceptions, Chaucer follows Jacobus from the tale’s beginning at line 120 to about line 348, just before the baptism of Tiburce.22 What happens after this point, though, was through most of the last century contested and unclear. The story remains close in outline to Jacobus’s, but no longer translates it; relative to the Legend, it summarizes some events, inserts others, and comes close to word-for-word translation only in some lines of dialogue. Much ingenious speculation about the existence and likely characteristics of a second source came to a fairly decisive end in 1990 when Sherry Reames published what she calls the “Roman curia / Franciscan abridgement” of Cecilia’s life, a reading for the office of Matins on the feast of Saint Cecilia, ultimately also derived from the sixth-century Passio but different from Jacobus’s version in many particulars.23 A look at the tale alongside this source makes clear that Chaucer’s poem switches almost without a seam from close translation of Jacobus, ending at line 347, to close translation of the “Franciscan abridgement,” beginning at line 349. It then cleaves tightly to this liturgical version of the story through its end, with just a few possible insertions from Jacobus.24 This is what is so atypical about Chaucer’s procedure here. Relative to, say, his use of the major sources of the Knight’s, the Man of Law’s, and even the Clerk’s Tale, what he tells us in the tale’s prologue seems largely true: Foryeve me that I do no diligence This ilke storie subtilly to endite, For bothe have I the wordes and sentence Of hym that at the seintes reverence The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende. (78 – 83) Chaucer has not, in other words, rung changes on his sources to anything like his usual extent. He has instead spliced two versions of the same story together in an unusually stark way, and the result, even if he had made no further changes whatsoever, would have shaped Cecilia into a remarkable character, more aggressive, independent, and isolated

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than her namesake in either source.25 For the most part this is because Chaucer’s peculiar splice has undone a certain amount of balancing found in each source; it manages to include most of the features of each that push Cecilia toward pure and self-grounded agency, and to exclude the passages that would have softened that portrait. A few examples will be enough to make the process clear. When the recently converted Valerian is offered a boon by Cecilia’s attendant angel and asks for the conversion of his brother, Chaucer is working from the Golden Legend: “I ask,” says Jacobus’s Valerianus, “ . . . that with me he too recognize the truth” (line 65), and Chaucer’s echoes: “I pray yow that my brother may han grace / To knowe the trouthe, as I do in this place” (237– 38). The Valerianus of the Franciscan-Roman version, by contrast, is much more specific about his own plans for the future. His prayer is “that he [God, or Christ] might deign to set free like me my brother Tyburtius, and that he make us both perfect in the confession of his name” (lines 88 – 89).26 Given the later course of the story, “being made perfect in confession” surely implies the church’s technical sense of the word confessor— one who affirms belief in the face of persecution or injury. This Valerianus is allowed to follow in his wife’s footsteps; the occasional hints that she has set out deliberately to be a martyr are here matched by his own heroic (if from one point of view also self-destructive) plans. But Chaucer’s Valerian, following Jacobus’s, evinces no such entente. What happens immediately thereafter reinforces the effect. The angel grants the boon, whereupon, in Chaucer’s version, the brother in question suddenly wanders into the room, somewhat confused by the mysterious scent of lilies and roses (and, one imagines, equally confused about how he got there); there follow three stanzas of explanation from his two Christian relations before he makes his own sympathetic proclamation (lines 288 – 89) and receives from Cecilia the kiss of an intimate friend or kinswoman (cognata, in both sources; Chaucer uses allye). In the account of the situation she simultaneously gives, she is, characteristically, the central figure and the source of the agency: “This day I take thee for myn allye,” Seyde this blisful faire mayde deere, And after that she seyde as ye may heere:

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“Lo, right so as the love of Crist,” quod she, “Made me thy brotheres wyf, right in that wise Anon for myn allye heer take I thee, Syn that thou wolt thyne ydoles despise.” (292– 98) Here again the Franciscan-Roman version tells the same basic story, but with different embellishments that drastically change how we see the characters. Tyburtius does not instantly appear, but arrives “while they were feasting and speaking about holy knowledge,” perhaps a good while later. He is still surprised by the odors, but in this version he seems to enter the place confidently: “And he entered as if to [the home of ] a kinswoman; he kissed the head of Saint Cecilia.”27 In contradistinction to Chaucer’s character, this Tyburtius is already acting like an ally, or kinsman, or intimate of Cecilia’s, and he kisses her to show it; this is a man with agency of his own from the beginning, agency that works together with Cecilia’s toward their common goal. Chaucer’s version, deliberately or not, robs “Tiburce” of any such forcefulness. Thus the mere fact that Chaucer follows the Legenda aurea for the first half of the story weakens Valerian and Tyburtius. What we cannot see from reading the tale as we have it is what would have followed had Chaucer stayed with Jacobus the whole way through: a long and feisty verbal battle (lines 124 –59 in Jacobus) between Almachius and the two brothers on the occasion of their summons before his court, matching and preparing the way for Cecilia’s trial scene. In Jacobus’s original, this verbal combat markedly strengthens the previously weak-looking brothers, making them appear more like proper saints with their own forceful agency and less like mere puppets or passive foils for Cecilia. Valerianus in particular challenges the prefect almost as boldly (and almost as suicidally) as Cecilia later will, with words like these: “You are little men, not princes, born in your time, who will die faster and render account to God more than all [others].”28 But the Franciscan-Roman version omits the brothers’ dialogue with Almachius entirely, and therefore so does Chaucer, who switches from Jacobus to the Franciscan version about twelve lines before the dialogue begins and thus offers only the latter text’s brief and invective-free account of the brothers’ appearance before the judge (lines 360 –66).

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If we take the Franciscan-Roman version of the story as our base text rather than the Legenda, the result is much the same. Its second half, which Chaucer used, makes Cecilia far stronger, far more independent, far more the focus of the story, than the corresponding part of Jacobus would have: its omission of the brothers’ trial is enough to ensure that. But the full text of the Franciscan-Roman version balances that ending with a beginning that ascribes to Cecilia sociality, dependence, even weakness. Consider the tale’s third stanza, where Cecilia prays the single prayer mentioned above. Chaucer’s two-line rendition, as expected, almost literally translates Jacobus, where Cecilia sings “in her heart to God alone, saying ‘Lord, make my heart and my soul unstained, lest I be confounded’” (21–22).29 But the liturgical Cecilia sings a slightly different tune. She has the exact same direct-discourse line of prayer, but one sentence later, something more appears: “She was urging the angels with prayers, accosting the apostles with tears, and intensely praying the entire holy cohort serving Christ, that by their prayers they would help her to entrust her chastity to the Lord.”30 Against the background of the nearly complete absence, in the Second Nun’s Tale, of anything in the role of mediator between Cecilia and “heaven’s king,” the line is a shock. This Cecilia not only needs supernatural help from fellow creatures, she asks for it at dramatic length. And, most astonishingly to readers of Chaucer’s tale, she asks for it in tears. One last result of Chaucer’s splicing of his sources, more subtle than the foregoing, affects not the personalities of the tale’s leading characters directly, but the tone of the prevailing religiosity within which their actions take place. It is remarkable (though it has gone generally unremarked) that what is happening when Chaucer cuts Jacobus off to turn to his second source is a long passage in which Cecilia instructs Tiburce in basic Christian doctrine — and that Chaucer’s axe falls precisely when she starts speaking about Christ’s Passion. The five lines on the subject that survive in Chaucer (343 – 47) translate less than onefifth of the teaching on the Passion that concludes her sermon in Jacobus (lines 112 –13; the passage goes on through line 118). Chaucer then jumps past the end of the sermon, resuming his poem with the Franciscan version’s account of Tiburce’s baptism — thus cutting from a teaching session that he has otherwise entirely preserved the vast majority of attention to the suffering of Christ. In the context of a tale fiercely

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intent, as will become still more apparent in the next section, on downplaying its heroine’s own passivity and need for aid, this move may well be deliberate; at very least it fits perfectly with the other effects of the splice. It is not necessary to multiply instances indefinitely; anyone who closely reads the two sources alongside the Second Nun’s Tale will find more. The practical conclusion is twofold. First, Chaucer’s sources have indeed strongly influenced his Cecilia: thus it is possible to agree to a point with past critical observations that some of her supernatural forcefulness is merely inherited from the way she was previously presented, especially in the Legenda aurea.31 Second, however, neither source taken by itself features a heroine who is so one-sidedly active, or independent, or alone in her domination of the story; the way in which Chaucer combines them has moved her much further in those directions. Thus Chaucer’s sources and his way of handling them do furnish a partial explanation for the peculiarities of his Cecilia. The story does not end there, however.

Explanation 3: Authorial Action There are also a number of places where Chaucer altered his source-ofthe-moment in ways that speak to questions of action and passion — places, in other words, where Cecilia’s mode of agency is due not only to the sources and the splice but also to a more targeted kind of authorial intervention. I have found seven such passages. Six of them push in a single direction, toward a Cecilia whose agency is even more independent, whose passivity is even more thoroughly elided, and whose person is even more isolated from any peer, than would have been the case if the sources and the splice alone were responsible; the seventh is ambiguous. The list as a whole represents an attempted answer, at least as regards questions of agency, to a call Reames issued in the paper that published the Franciscan-Roman “life”: that in the light of our greatly improved knowledge of Chaucer’s sources, “we should take a fresh look at the changes and additions that Chaucer himself seems to have introduced,” since “even small innovations . . . can play an important role in establishing the tone of Chaucer’s narrative and defining its particular

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emphases.”32 Most of the seven innovations concerning agency, as we shall see, are indeed small but important; one or two are not even small. The first example comes in the course of a brief report of Cecilia’s habit of prayer immediately following the single prayer we see her make: “And for his love that dyde upon a tree / Every seconde and thridde day she faste, / Ay biddynge in hire orisons ful faste” (138 – 40). These three lines, as far as they go, follow the Golden Legend as closely as ever. But they also omit the end of its sentence: the line reads, “And praying with two- and three-day fasts she would entrust what she feared to the Lord.”33 Jacobus’s Cecilia was not merely praying, she was praying about things that she feared; Chaucer’s Cecilia has been relieved of her fears, and not by God, but by Chaucer.34 Such a small change could easily be accidental, a chance result of the general derangement of meanings that attends the translation of poetry, especially when it is translated into a strict rhyme-scheme and meter. But combine it with five or six other changes that inflect the meaning in the same direction, and with the absence of any changes clearly moving the opposite way, and one begins to suspect that something other than chance is at work. The next alteration increases Cecilia’s activity just as the previous one decreased her passivity: it has to do with the conversion of Tiburce. We have already seen that Chaucer’s way of splicing his sources means that he uses Jacobus’s version of this event, which makes Cecilia very much a solo agent, leading a docile Valerian and an initially befuddled Tiburce to their martyrdoms. But there is more here than just the effects of the splice: Chaucer’s translation tweaks the grammar to deprive Tiburce even of the small bit of agency that the Golden Legend left him. There, after Cecilia secures from Tiburce a confession of the falsehood of his idols, she declares his entrance into the fold in these words: “Today I declare you to be my kinsman. For as the love of God made your brother a spouse to me, so the contempt of idols will make you a kinsman to me.”35 This throws a different light on the passage already examined from Chaucer, where the clauses line up quite differently: “This day I take thee for myn allye,” [says Cecilia] . . . “Lo, right so as the love of Crist,” quod she, “Made me thy brothers wyf, right in that wise

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Anon for my allye heer take I thee, Syn that thou wolt thyn ydoles despise.” (292, 295– 98) In Jacobus, to be sure, it is Cecilia who declares or proclaims the new kinship, and depending on whether one understands the word fateor as performative or merely as the declaration of a fact already true, her words may already arrogate to herself some of the agency involved. But her next sentence unambiguously makes Tiburce’s contemptus ydolorum the subject of the action, thus preserving some considerable amount of agency for the contemptor. Chaucer’s Cecilia, instead of this, repeats the same claim twice: Cecilia is the subject of both sentences, the ambiguous fateor is resolved into the unambiguously performative I take, and the contemptus ydolorum is relegated to an adverbial clause merely providing Cecilia with a warrant for a choice that is purely hers. The contrast between this commandeering of the grammatical subject and the frequently oblique grammatical position that the Man of Law’s Tale gives to its leading lady (see ch. 1, division 2) could not be clearer.36 Three quite small alterations near the end of the tale push Cecilia’s character further in these same directions. Sherry Reames has highlighted one of them, which falls in Chaucer’s description of Cecilia’s reaction to her scalding bath: he tells us not only, as the FranciscanRoman version has it, that Cecilia “as if in a cold place, remained firm, with health so undiminished that no part of her body released even signs of sweat,” but also that she “feelede no wo” (line 521).37 The change may have been suggested by Jacobus, who says explicitly that she did not feel even the least bit of sweat.38 The difference is small but falls closely in line with those already noted: while the Franciscan Cecilia “stood firm” (perstitit, a good verb for Cecilia, with its undertone of heroic dedication to purpose) in what one would expect to be a horrifically painful situation, the Dominican Legend relieves any uncertainty as to the nature of her impassivity, making it completely clear that the saint does not feel the pain in the first place. (The distinction is, of course, precisely the one so central to the reading of the Clerk’s Tale in chapter 1: Is Griselda, as she seems to be in Petrarch’s telling, an automaton who feels no pain, or merely a woman of extraordinary self-control attempting to act as an automaton would? The evidence presented there suggests the

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latter conclusion; here we see that Chaucer has made his Cecilia, with very little ambiguity, into a case of the former.) Given the close match between this shift and Chaucer’s many other moves to purge from Cecilia’s character nearly every trace of passion or passivity, it is reasonable to begin suspecting that all the moves may be deliberate, or at least “authorial,” rather than accidental.39 A second change near the tale’s end is even smaller; it comes in the second-to-last stanza, the one instance in which Cecilia speaks directly to Pope Urban, apparently more or less summoning him to her deathbed in order to arrange a suitable disposition of her possessions and followers. Notwithstanding the power relations implied by such a summons, in both the Latin sources Cecilia refers to the pope with tue beatitudini, “your Blessedness”; in Chaucer alone the honorific has disappeared.40 Also small, but potentially explosive, is a third nearby change; it appears in the tale’s last line and, so far as I have seen, has eluded notice in the critical literature. The Franciscan-Roman abridgment, after briefly describing the consecration of the saint’s house into a church, ends with a connection to the fourteenth century, a reminder that the listener could in principle experience the lasting result of these events himself: in the one-time home, but present-day church, of St. Cecilia, still standing in Trastevere, “the gifts of the Lord overflow to the memory of saint Cecilia down to the present day.”41 Chaucer, however, ends with a different sort of relation among Cecilia, the Lord, and the ordinary listener: the church is the place “In which, unto this day, in noble wyse, / Men doon to Crist and to his seint servyse” (552 – 53). As with the prayer-in-tears that begins the tale, so with the memorial that ends it: Cecilia, once imaginable as merely an outstanding believer among believers who suffers pain, asks for help, and benefits from the Lord’s blessings like everyone else, is in Chaucer’s telling so outstanding that the difference is one of kind rather than degree. She appears to receive “service” from other believers in just the way Christ does —or at any rate that would be a reasonable inference from her promotion, with nary a cautionary qualifier in sight, into grammatical parallel with him. This, like many another unassuming quirk of the tale, is extraordinary. Ending the relation of a saint’s life with the institution of her cultus may be standard practice, but ending with a hint of her apotheosis is not.42 Before examining one more change with a similar result—a change more extensive than any of the foregoing, and as unremarked as the

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last—we should pause to consider the single change that could be taken to move the tale in a contrary direction. Also falling at the tale’s end, it is a knotty issue connected with the consecration of Cecilia’s home: who exactly does the work? Chaucer’s sources differ. In the Franciscan abridgment, Cecilia says that she asked God for three days of supernaturally extended life so that she might consecrate her house (consecrarem, line 209); but Jacobus’s Cecilia makes it crystal-clear that she has asked for the delay of her death so that Urban might do the job (consecrares, line 226). Manuscript evidence strongly suggests that consecrarem is the older reading: it is present vastly more often in manuscripts of the sixthcentury Passio from which both sources descend.43 The alternate reading that appears in Jacobus and a number of other high-to-late-medieval versions no doubt indicates ecclesiastical worry about competition for sacramental power — not a groundless worry, from the point of view of anyone devoted to establishing or maintaining the hierarchy’s power, given John Wyclif ’s invocation of the older version in support of sacramental decentralization (see n. 3).44 Chaucer’s translation, not unlike his reworking of the attempted rape in the Man of Law’s Tale, splits the difference between two sources. His Cecilia tells Urban that she has asked for the delay in her death in order “To recommend to yow, er that I go, / Thise soules, lo, and that I myghte do werche / Heere of myn hous perpetuelly a cherche” (544 – 46). That I might have my house made into a church: Chaucer’s Cecilia is able to “have” the pope do something, and is thus in charge to a greater extent than in Jacobus, but still the poem avoids the Franciscan version’s suggestion that she could perform the actual consecration. That Chaucer could easily have stayed with the Franciscan text, his source for nearly every other line in the tale’s second half, we can see by merely dropping from line 545 the word do—after which the line would still be in meter, with the presently silent e of myghte taking up the slack, and the sense would keep perfect accord with the Franciscan source-ofthe-moment.45 The question is what the change means. Against the background of the Franciscan consecrarem, it looks at first glance as though, uniquely among the changes considered here, it points us in the direction of a humbler, more cooperative, more dependent, less powerful Cecilia. Things are not quite so clear, however, first because the moments at which Chaucer appears to interpolate readings from the Legenda aurea

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into the normally Franciscan second half of the tale suggest that he probably had access to the whole of Jacobus’s version — in which case his splitting of the difference is likely deliberate, and his intention at this moment likely something other than the reproduction of Jacobus’s inoffensive line. (Had he wished to follow Jacobus completely, “And that ye myghte werche” would have answered well.) But there is also a more complex reason to discount the first impression this change makes. It is not only the subject of the verb consecrare that differs from source to source: the description of what exactly is to be done to the house does also. In the telling of the Dominican’s Legenda, Cecilia simply asks the pope to consecrate hanc domum meam in ecclesiam, whereas the Franciscan Cecilia proposes to consecrate hanc domum meam in eternum ecclesie nomini. What exactly does this longer phrase mean? It could be the same as consecrare in ecclesiam: something like “consecrate my house to [that is, so that it enjoys] the name of ‘church.’ ” But nomen is also a standard word for a legal title to something; if we are willing to understand the word consecrare as a bit less sacramental than it is in Jacobus, as meaning merely something like “dedicate,” then all Cecilia is claiming is the power to dedicate her house to the church, that is, to donate it to the control of the abstract institution. In that case Chaucer’s version, which clearly concerns the creation of a church where there was not one before, arguably claims more for Cecilia, not less, than does the Franciscan version. The ambiguity is not easy to resolve.46 The last change in our list of seven falls relatively early in the tale, in a text frequently commented on but without much remark of its import for the concerns of this book. The passage in question is from the Legenda aurea and to some extent interrupts the narration there: it falls just after Jacobus’s puzzled Tyburcius has walked into the room where Cecilia and Valerian were celebrating, noticed the apparently sourceless sweet odors, and heard from Valerian about the newlyweds’ unseen floral crowns. What follows is drawn from the Ambrosian-rite preface of the Mass for Cecilia’s feast day. Jacobus perhaps intends it as a kind of authoritative voucher for the reality of the miracle: “Saint Cecilia became so filled with the heavenly gift that she received the palm of martyrdom: she disdained the world itself along with the bedchamber. The witness is the confession called forth from her spouse Valerian and from Tyburcius,

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whom, Lord, you crowned with scent-bearing flowers by an angelic hand” (85– 88).47 Chaucer translates: The palm of martirdom for to receyve, Seinte Cecilie, fulfild of Goddes yifte, The world and eek hire chambre gan she weyve; Witnesse Tyburces and Valerians shrifte, To which God of his bountee wolde shifte Corones two of floures wel smellynge, And made his angel hem the corones brynge. (274 – 80) At first glance, this seems to be typically close, uninflected, and indeed nearly invisible translation, down to the scent of the flowers and the eek that marks the syntactical asymmetry between the direct object mundum and the prepositional phrase cum talamis. But a second look reveals much more. Both authors tell us that Cecilia received the palm of martyrdom, but how? What caused the reception? Jacobus is clear: it is a direct effect, delivered in a result clause with ut, of someone else’s action on her. (Someone) so filled her with a heavenly gift that she received the palm—after which the third element in the syntax, her actual dismissal of the joys of world and bedchamber, follows as a side comment, merely a fuller description of what the palm of martyrdom meant for her.48 In Chaucer’s version the relationships among the three elements — gift, palm, and refusal of joys — have been entirely redone. The receiving of the palm is no longer a result, but a purpose: Cecilia does what she does for to receive it. (This is where the poem comes closest to baldly confirming the impression that assorted hints and Cecilia’s feisty dialogue with Almachius would give most readers anyway: that we are to understand her as desiring martyrdom, striving for it. The fact that Chaucer says so more or less flat out, while his sources and analogues do not, fits all the other evidence here that he is pushing her toward a state of “pure agency” and pure control.) Secondly, the refusal of world and chamber, previously a syntactic afterthought, is now the main action of the sentence, the thing around which all else revolves: it is what Chaucer’s Cecilia, now as always the chief “doer” in the situation, does in order to achieve her purpose. And thirdly, the divine action that was in Jacobus’s

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version the main event now itself becomes an afterthought, or more exactly is removed from being an action at all. In Jacobus, Cecilia “repleta est dono celesti”; the Latin construction is passive perfect, stressing not her state but her reception of the action.49 But Chaucer shifts it to a status descriptor, even deleting the auxiliary verb so that “fulfild of Goddes yifte” is nothing but a passing comment on the kind of woman she is. Gone altogether, as far as the grammar is concerned, is Jacobus’s clear statement that a heavenly gift has caused her to do the remarkable things she does. Chaucer has, essentially, made his heroine upstage God. Or, in the more precise terms of this study, Chaucer has here excised an absolutely clear statement of “conjoint action” from his source. The result is a Cecilia who is what critics have sometimes erroneously read Custance to be: a person whose agency rises entirely from within herself. Chaucer’s seven changes taken together paint a consistent picture. They have decreased the passivity of Cecilia’s character (the first and third changes considered) and her humility (the fourth). They have increased the quantity of her agency, the number of acts for which she is responsible (the second and seventh changes). They have also altered the quality of her agency, in that significant acts formerly performed together with other agents, whether human or otherworldly — acts done by “conjoint” or cooperative action, in other words — have been redescribed as entirely to her credit (again the seventh and perhaps the second). They have elevated Cecilia’s ontological status (the fifth and perhaps the sixth change); in the case of the fifth change, it has risen to the point of utter inimitability. And the sole change that shows any hint of weakening Cecilia’s agency, the sixth, turns out to be so thoroughly ambiguous as to be just as likely intended as another strengthening.50 It is important to be clear about the implications of all these Chaucerian metamorphoses. Taken as a group, they strongly suggest that the peculiarities of his Cecilia are not merely—I would say not even primarily — by-products of the peculiarities of his sources or of his way of combining them. Though there is a kind of “supersanctity” in the Legenda aurea, what Chaucer gives us goes far beyond it. As was also true in the comparison to the broader hagiographical tradition (in “Explanation 1”), it is not merely a question of the type or amount of power that a saint wields — a question on which Chaucer’s Cecilia is not so very far out of line with Jacobus’s and with much hagiography of the time. It is

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also a question of where the power comes from, and on that question Chaucer’s saint seems to be simply sui generis. Neither his sources, nor his way of using them, nor the general hagiographical conventions of the time give any warrant (nor, as far as I have found, any precedent) for depicting a saint as so absolutely independent — not only of peers and pope and church, but of God.

Explanation 4: The Occasional Piece Such a sharp contrast with the available parallels makes it difficult or impossible to ascribe the anomalous agency of Chaucer’s Cecilia to the workings of chance; it results at least in part, to recall one of the terms in which the question was introduced, from something “authorial.” That observation, however, leaves open the question of whether the authorial effect was deliberate or not; Chaucer’s changes are so subtle that they could have been made unintentionally, by a mind whose habit of thought at the time (for whatever reason) simply inclined toward handling agency that way. This question is difficult to answer definitively, and in the end a definitive resolution may not be needed. Still it will be well to register in passing, as a fourth and last kind of “explanation” for Cecilia’s oddity, two existing proposals that would answer positively the question of deliberateness. Each suggests that the Second Nun’s Tale was created for a particular purpose; and in each case the purpose is of a kind that might well have inspired in Chaucer’s mind a conscious desire for a supremely active Cecilia. The first suggestion was aired fifty years ago by Mary Giffin: Chaucer may have written the piece in connection with the appointment of the Englishman Adam Easton as the cardinal attached to the church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere, an event that happened sometime between 1381 and 1384.51 That, of course, would not immediately explain the peculiarities of Cecilia’s character (nor was doing so a major part of Giffin’s aim). But starting from the endpoints of evident effect and hypothesized cause one could easily enough propose a sort of just-so story to connect them. Perhaps, for example, it seemed desirable to create such a juggernaut of a saint when the poem’s primary intended audience was the recently ascended Easton, who had a few years previously

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presented the pope with a treatise called Defensorium ecclesiastice potestatis, and who might be pleased with the picture of his new seat’s namesake as an invincible champion of the church. The difficulty with such hypothesized stories —beyond the fact that most of them are, failing the discovery of new historical data, awfully hard to “test”—is that many of them will be difficult to line up with one or another of the complicated twists of the tale. For example, Easton’s Defensorium included an attack on John Wyclif; if Chaucer had aimed to please the writer of such an attack, would he have ended his story by inserting, apparently solely on his own initiative, the favorable reference of line 539 to a woman’s preaching? A possible variant of Giffin’s approach would combine her idea about the poem’s occasion with the prosodic observation, which she does not make, that the two halves of the tale seem to have been written at two distant times.52 Perhaps Chaucer wrote the first half of the story, based on Jacobus, on the occasion of Easton’s installation, and then the other half considerably later—either because he never finished the original effort or because he destroyed the second half of the original effort and replaced it with what we have now. That would remove the trouble with the hint of Lollard sympathies near the poem’s end. It might, however, also lead us to expect a general shift in its second half away from the impulse to portray Cecilia as purely active and immensely powerful, and thus far I have not detected such a move. More recently, Judith Weise has offered a grimmer possible occasion for the piece.53 Chaucer wrote it, Weise suggests, as a kind of penitential exercise dedicated to the feminine half of the human race, and particularly to Cecilia Chaumpaigne, the woman who in the year 1380 signed a quitclaim releasing Chaucer from any prosecution connected with an allegation of raptus. Weise’s hypothesis is roughly that raptus did in this case mean what modern law would call rape; that various large loans, sales, and debt collections associated with Chaucer within a year or two of the quitclaim suggest that he paid Cecilia a large sum by way of outof-court settlement; and that the Lyf of St. Cecile was originally a freestanding work of penance or apology, serving in the real world something like the function suggested for the Legend of Good Women by its prologue.54 This proposal has the advantage of including a more obvious rationale than does Giffin’s for Cecilia’s peculiar character: the story of a hyperpowerful woman immune to all passivity could be meant for a kind

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of literary counterweight to the criminal appropriation of power involved in rape (or, less criminally, in seduction). But the other difficulty with Giffin’s hypothesis still obtains here: it is simply very hard to know what to make of the proposal, how to test it further, without the discovery of new historical evidence. That difficulty will be unavoidable for any attempt at a historical explanation of the oddity of Chaucer’s creation. But the uncertain conclusions of historical approaches need not spell the end of the attempt to understand Chaucer’s tale and the intentions behind it, because there are also other ways to seek understanding. Here we will press on with further attention to the primary text, now by taking an extended look at some remarkable territory that most students of the Second Nun materials have not considered in depth: the Prologue.

Some Peculiarities of the Prologue The complexity of the Second Nun’s Prologue is immediately apparent to anyone who looks at a modern edition, or for that matter at some of the most important manuscripts: both the Hengwrt and Ellesmere, for example, indicate with marginal titles the prologue’s division into three parts. First come four stanzas suggesting a moral lesson against ydelnesse and in favor of its remedy bisynesse; then part 2 comprises eight stanzas of invocacio, of which the first seven are a proper prayer to Mary, more or less in the role of Muse, petitioning her help in writing the life to follow, and the eighth asks readers for a merciful reading; third and last come five stanzas of moral etymologizing of Cecilia’s name. (For convenience I will occasionally adopt a convention used in Weise’s “Tell-Tale Lexicon” article and refer to the three parts of the prologue as P1, P2, and P3.) The third part, though possibly the most foreign to modern aesthetic sensibilities, is at least quite clear as to its origin: it comes directly from Jacobus’s own introduction to the story. Chaucer’s exercise in close translation actually begins here (line 85) rather than with the tale itself at line 120, and old editions sometimes treated line 85 as the beginning of the tale.55 The presence of part 1 is also usually taken to require no special explanation, as prologues against idleness are relatively commonplace in the period.56

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But even these two parts, for all their straightforward and workmanlike appearance, are worth further attention. In view of the reading of Cecilia’s character just advanced, the introductory encomium to bisynesse takes on new meaning. Certainly some of what we find in it seems, as past commentators have remarked, extremely conventional: for example, the claim that the main reason for writing the entire tale has been to avoid, certainly for the author and perhaps also for the reader, idleness, which leads to sin (22–25). But the extraordinarily close fit between the writer’s attempt to rouse himself to action and the tale that follows, whose protagonist is more or less a personification of bisynesse, is not at all common. Chaucer, it seems, has not only written a tale about a purely active character, untroubled by passivities or by participation in more complex kinds of agency; he has also hinted at his own entente to do so from the very first stanza. No less — if more subtly — does the prologue’s third part line up with the tale’s obsessive promotion of action. The best way to see this is by another look at Chaucer’s source, which associates Cecilia with what Chaucer calls bisynesse (Latin operacio) at least twice in quick succession. It happens in the third and longest of the five etymologies offered: the name Cecilia, Jacobus proposes, may be considered a compound of a celo and Lia—“Leah from the heavens,” more or less (Legenda aurea, line 2). Leah, of course, is the figure from the book of Genesis, the sister of Rachel with whom Jacob is first “rewarded” after working seven years in the hope of taking her sister as a bride (Genesis 29:16 –30). In medieval writers she is a standard symbol for the active life, as Rachel is for the contemplative, and so Jacobus explains his etymology’s use of Lia by a plausible connection to Cecilia’s busy-ness — her assiduam operacionem, “incessant working” (line 6). He then goes on to explain a celo, and things get a bit more complicated: “Cecilia was . . . [a] heaven through her constant contemplation. . . . Or she is called heaven because, as Isidore says, the philosophers had said heaven to be rapidly whirling, round, and burning. In the same way she is rapidly whirling through her diligent working, round through her perseverance, burning though her fiery love.”57 The borrowing from Isidore, it seems, serves Jacobus in part to ensure that the link between Cecilia and heaven holds not only if one takes heaven in a spiritual sense, meaning something like nearness to God, but

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also if it refers merely to the physical skies. Some of what he brings forth on the physical side is unsurprising: heaven is volubilis, “spinning” or “whirling,” and so is Cecilia in her anxious or diligent or attentive working, solicitam operacionem— all of which fits quite well the character Chaucer’s readers know. But Jacobus’s other, earlier explanation for celum points in the opposite direction: Cecilia is associated with heaven because of her constant contemplation, jugem contemplacionem. To ears attuned to the standard typology, this is a shock: suddenly Cecilia is not only a figure, via Leah, for the active life, but for the contemplative as well. The combination of the two in one person may not be impossible, but it is certainly worthy of remark — the more so if one thinks of the two states in terms of action and passion respectively.58 Given the amount of energy medieval theology expended in debating the relative value of the “active life” and the “contemplative life,” this dual characterization cannot be accidental. Particularly coming from a Dominican, whose order often sought to promote a “mixed life” focused on a practice of contemplata tradere, or the handing on to others of the fruits of contemplation—a life, therefore, both contemplative and active—it is high praise.59 In that context it is remarkable what Chaucer makes of his source. Jacobus’s explanation for Cecilia’s link to the physical heavens he passes along relatively unscathed (lines 113–18). But his handling of her connection to the “heaven” where one nears God demands attention: Or elles Cecile, as I writen fynde, Is joyned, by a manere conjoynynge Of “hevene” and “Lia”; and heere, in figurynge, The “hevene” is set for thoght of hoolynesse, And “Lia” for hire lastynge bisynesse. (94 – 98) Chaucer weakens Jacobus’s deliberate juxtaposition of action and passion in two ways, effectively to the point of deletion. First, he strikes the intensifying adjective jugem, so that while the bisynesse is lastynge, the contemplacio is no longer said to be constant. More importantly, the telltale word contemplacio, with all its deep resonances in medieval Christianity, itself disappears, replaced by the much broader idea of “thoght.”

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Passivity has been purged: thoght of hoolynesse can connote assertive planning for one’s own holy entente, the sort of thing appropriate to one who sets out on an aggressive quest for the “palm of martyrdom,” at least as easily as it can suggest any connection to the passive receptivity involved in contemplation. It did not suit Chaucer, it seems, to suggest that Cecilia has in her elements of Rachel as well as Leah. One more time an apparently laissez-faire translation actually exercises the author’s authority, bending the sources to give us a saint still more purely active, with still less of the humble but efficacious receptivity extolled in Custance, than they deliver on their own.60

The Peculiarities of the Second Part Thus the first and third parts of the prologue, with their extolling of bisynesse and their muting or elision of suggestions of passivity, are very much in line with the tale itself. But when we turn to the second part—the most mysterious of the three, thus far least well understood by critics — things are different.61 Those eight stanzas harbor two remarkable oddities that set them off against their context. Both have to do with the speaker’s (or perhaps writer’s, given the “I write” at line 78) petitions to Mary for help in lines 65 (“for to werken yif me wit and space”) and 77 (“Now help, for to my werk I wol me dresse”). First of all, the mere possibility of asking for help with the task is extremely peculiar, given that the first part of the prologue presents the job as already complete (“I have heer doon my feithful bisynesse,” line 24). The prologue’s stance has shifted without warning from that of a dedicatory letter presenting a fait accompli to that of real-time preparation for work. And even without that temporal oddity, any serious request for help would be a noteworthy gesture in the current context. The fact that the protagonist of the tale that follows shows little or no need for help cannot be ignored, given the numerous places where Chaucer has excised his sources’ (and fails to duplicate his analogues’) suggestions of such need. Nor do the other two parts of the Prologue, in making their sundry didactic assertions about bisynesse, give any hint that the teller of a tale needs special assistance when getting down to it. Thus the request here in the middle part is entirely isolated.

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The second peculiarity of P2, which involves the particular kind of help requested, is still more striking. So long as it actually addresses Mary — which is to say, during the seven of its eight stanzas that make up the Invocacio proper — P2 does not ask for anything so mundane as the practical success of the work to follow. The eighth stanza does so: its request is merely for a good reception, and therefore for a kind of help that would come about without the involvement of the writer and after he has finished his work. But it is different in many ways from the preceding stanzas: it addresses the audience, not Mary, and it takes no notice of the “ultimate concerns” of salvation and damnation that loom so large in the actual Invocacio ad Mariam. The help the invocation seeks is of a very different kind: not that the poem, once finished, be well received; nor even, as the student of “condign” and “congruent” merit might expect, that God, or Christ, or Mary will accept the work as good enough despite its limitations; but instead that the writer’s own powers be made adequate to the task: “So for to werken yif me wit” (65). It is, in other words, a prayer that some supernatural force will change the worker rather than changing the work to be done or the environment that will receive it. It is, or is very nearly, a prayer for conjoint action. This is peculiar. There is nothing strange about a poet’s beginning a work with an invocation that asks for help; nothing, even, strange about asking for a help that will make itself known to the poet from the inside out, asking a muse for strength rather than for a diminution of the task: Chaucer himself does just that at the start of each of the first four books of Troilus and Criseyde. But there the muses, and the requests, are clearly chosen to fit the action that follows, whereas here the request is a terrible match for the prologue’s other two parts and for the tale they jointly introduce. Comparison with the Prioress’s Prologue is instructive: there Chaucer draws on the same passage from Dante used here (Paradiso 33, discussed below) and connects it just as strongly to a protestation of the speaker’s weakness, to fear of the task at hand, and to a need for help from Mary. But all these things fit the atmosphere of the following tale quite well, since its lead character is himself extremely weak and in desperate need of help that will in fact come from Mary. Here, by contrast, the fearless lead character often gives the sense of needing help not even from God, let alone from Mary, who neither appears nor is mentioned anywhere in the story. Though there are certainly places in Chaucer

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where introductions relate only obliquely to what follows (the Man of Law’s Tale being the most obvious case), I can think of none whose prelude so flatly contradicts its tale as do these seven stanzas.

Division 2: Mary (and Cecilia) It is by remaining open to an infinite number of unexpected possibilities which transcend his own imagination and capacity to plan that man really fulfills his own need for freedom. —Thomas Merton62

The Meaning of Mary The mismatch becomes still clearer when we turn to the seven stanzas’ addressee. The invocation to Mary begins with a reminder of one of its sources: “Thow that flour of virgines art alle, / Of whom that Bernard list so wel to write” (29– 30). Following the stanza in which that reference appears, the poet delivers a twenty-one-line exercise in translation, reproducing with considerable faithfulness the majority of a long prayer to the Blessed Virgin in Dante’s Paradiso. It is not a casual effort: Chaucer’s three seven-line rhyme royal stanzas, for example, neatly preserve, while inverting into a native meter and rhyme scheme, the seven terzine of his source. Nor is the source passage itself an incidental one. It is very nearly the culmination of the entire Commedia, the opening of its hundredth and last canto, in which Dante’s final escort approaches Mary on his behalf—first in the general terms of praise that Chaucer’s stanzas reproduce, and later with a specific request, asking that Dante be granted, despite the inconvenience of being still alive, a vision of God. And with the attempt to describe that extraordinary vision the poem concludes. As immediately germane to the concerns of this book as the prayer’s content is the identity of its speaker, Bernard of Clairvaux. His importance here may not be immediately obvious, but given Chaucer’s penchant elsewhere for invoking muses who match the happenings that follow, this invocation makes it important to discover what he thinks

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about when he thinks about Mary; and we are invited several times over to pursue the question by looking to Bernard. He was, first of all, widely viewed in the Middle Ages as a passionate devotee of Mary and a leading expositor of Marian doctrine; that alone would render his work useful in this context.63 But then Chaucer has, as it were, named him twice, once explicitly (line 30) and once by drawing so closely on the most famous prayer Dante puts in his mouth. And there is yet a fourth reason to turn to Bernard for illumination with this passage in particular: the plausible claim advanced by Erich Auerbach (“Dante’s Prayer,” 23) that Chaucer’s source in Dante for the Invocacio ad Mariam, while not lifted from any one passage of Bernard’s, faithfully reproduces the tone and content of his Marian writings.64 If that is so, attention to those writings should clarify both the Dantean passage they helped inspire and, by extension, Chaucer’s thoughtful reuse of Dante’s lines. What, then, does Mary mean — both in Chaucer’s prologue and in the wider tradition of Marian devotion that it cannot help but bring to mind, for which Bernard’s writings can serve as a helpful representative? What sorts of associations would she most reliably conjure for Chaucer’s expected audience? The topic is, of course, vast. Even within Bernard’s writings the number of sources to choose from is dauntingly large, as his collection of surviving sermons for the liturgical year includes many for feasts connected to Mary: the Annunciation, the nativity of Christ, Mary’s purification, the finding of Jesus in the temple, Mary’s nativity, the Assumption, and more. We will draw from several of these, but it will be well to begin elsewhere, with a glance at Bernard’s most famous continuous consideration of the Blessed Mother: a series of four “Sermons in Praise of the Virgin Mother,” written not for any particular occasion but as an expression of the author’s own devotion. These meditations, centered on the Annunciation, confront the reader with a variety of ideas about Mary, but probably the strongest — first introduced four pages into the 54-page work, immediately upon the introduction of Mary herself—is that of her humility. Bernard wastes no time in declaring the centrality of this virtue to Mary’s life and to Christian life generally. In particular, doubtless because his first audience would consist largely of vowed celibates, he makes a series of juxtapositions between Mary’s humility and her virginity: “Virginity is a laudable virtue, but humility is more necessary. The former is counseled, the

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latter commanded. . . . You can be saved without virginity; without humility you cannot. I say that the humility that deplores the loss of virginity is able to please; without humility, on the other hand, I dare to say that not even the virginity of Mary would have been pleasing” (Sermones in laudibus virginis matris 1.5, SBO 4:17–18). Bernard then goes still further: quoting a line from Isaiah—“On whom will my spirit rest, if not on the humble and peaceful person?”— he reasons that the Holy Spirit’s “resting” with Mary is necessary to her conception. Therefore, he concludes, the Incarnation depended in some way on Mary’s humility: “It is clear that in order that she would conceive of the Holy Spirit (just as she herself declares), ‘God had regard for the humility of his handmaid’ more than the virginity” (SBO 4.18).65 The immediate connection between Mary and humility is not just a peculiarity of this particular set of homilies, nor just a peculiarity of Bernard. It appears, among other places, four lines into Chaucer’s translation of Dante, where Mary is “humble, and heigh over every creature” (Second Nun’s Prologue, line 39). Auerbach’s article on Dante is particularly good in connecting this idea with its sources: he notes that “according to tradition, the Virgin is humble, for she immediately submits to God’s will (Luke 1:38)” (“Dante’s Prayer,” 23), and he provides one of the way stations in the handing down of that tradition, a liturgical sequence by Notker Balbulus that mentions Mary’s entrusting to humankind an exemplum matris virtutum. Auerbach explains that this “mother of the virtues is humilitas. . . . Mary’s humility is an important motif in her [traditional] eulogy [of which the article provides many samples] . . . , based, in the tradition, on Luke 1:38ff.; it is opposed to Eve’s superbia” (13).66 With that most central (and rather un-Cecilian) fact about Mary established, we are ready to launch out onto the choppier waters of Bernard’s seasonal sermons. Two limiting organizational choices have helped manage the flood. First, I have confined the investigation to three days on which Bernard’s sermons connect Mary closely to questions of activity and passivity: the feast of her nativity, the Assumption, and the Sunday following Assumption.67 Second, because the immediate goal of considering Mary is an understanding of the Second Nun materials as a whole and particularly of the agency of their protagonist, I have arranged the investigation of Mary according to four major categories

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suggested by this chapter’s earlier investigation of Cecilia. To what degree, and in what way, is Mary generally thought of as “active”? More specifically, to what degree is she the kind of solo agent that Chaucer has made his Cecilia to be? On the other hand, what sorts of “passivity” does Mary typically display in the tradition? And, most tellingly with respect both to the unprecedented independence of Cecilia’s agency and to this book’s larger themes, what sorts of “conjointness” appear in her agency? Considering these four questions will provide an excellent look at the extent to which Cecilia’s kind of agency matches, or fails to match, the kind frequently ascribed to Mary. In the process we will learn more about each side: about the agency that Bernard and his tradition typically celebrate and about the kind on display in the Second Nun’s Tale.

Four Questions about Mary Certainly Mary is active. Raising the question among readers of medieval literature will probably first bring to their minds the explosion of Marian-miracle stories all over Europe in the high and late Middle Ages. There Mary is almost nothing but active, intervening frequently in human lives, delivering from demons, delivering from personal sins, above all delivering from the law-guided consequences that one has every reason to expect—and often providing aid, as both Dante and his English poetic debtor notice, even before the supplicant can supplicate (Second Nun’s Prologue, 54 –56).68 All this, however, belongs to a welldefined genre of literature, one that a poet must actively decide to work within, and it is not where Chaucer is working in the Second Nun materials. Here the genre itself (saint’s life rather than Marian miracle), the explicit reference to Bernard’s Marian writings, and the borrowing from Dante (whose treatment of Mary’s agency strikingly combines activity and passivity, as at Purgatorio 10.34 – 45) all suggest that Chaucer’s point of reference is an older and more theologically nuanced tradition, one in which Mary’s agency is much more complex and cooperative.69 As a sample of this other kind of Marian action, consider Bernard’s reading, in his sermon for the Sunday following Assumption, of the episode from the Gospel of Luke called the Visitation. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, has gone to see her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with

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John the Baptist, and the Gospel narrates their conversation on Mary’s arrival. Bernard starts by noting Elizabeth’s three expressions of wonder and praise: “For what reason does this happen to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43); “When your word of greeting took shape in my ears, the infant in my womb exulted in joy” (1:44); and “Blessed are you who believed that the things said to you by the Lord will be brought to completion” (1:45). The immediate reaction the gospel writer gives to Mary is the canticle Magnificat. Here is how Bernard describes that response: [Elizabeth’s three sentences] are indeed great commendations; but more than this, [Mary’s] devout humility did not suffer [itself ] to retain anything for itself; it rather imparted all things to him whose favors were being praised in itself. You [Elizabeth], it says, magnify the mother of the Lord; but my soul magnifies the Lord. You say that your son [ John in utero] has exulted [or “leapt”] in joy at my voice; but my spirit has exulted in God my salvation; and he [ John] also, like the bridegroom’s friend, rejoices with joy at the voice of the bridegroom. You say that she who has believed is blessed; but the cause of the tendency to believe and of the blessedness is the regard given by heavenly compassion, so that all generations should call me blessed rather because of this: that God has had regard for a humble and insignificant handmaid. (Sermo in dominica infra octavam assumptionis §12, SBO 5:272)70 Mary does not exactly decline the praise, but she passes it on to a further goal, reminding Elizabeth and us that ultimately praise is due not to her deeds, not to her status, not even to her faith (which itself would already be a quasi-passive thing, a willingness to trust in God’s promises); praise is fundamentally due to the divine “regard” or attention that has accomplished all of the above. It is a close echo of Bernard’s counsel about human action generally, that we should act with a will that comes, as it were, from elsewhere, and without “usurping” the glory that comes from the action. Bernard is quick to admit, as we saw in that more general treatment (in De diligendo deo, discussed in ch. 3), that such a waiving of glory or merit is — despite its necessity for good action — just about impossible for human agents. But Mary, in Bernard’s account, is precisely

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the one who does achieve the near-impossible, expressing in this longest of her scriptural utterances simultaneously the greatness with which she has been favored and the derivation of that greatness from a source beyond her. This dual expression is, of course, precisely what chapter 3 called Bernard’s twofold, a coincidence of greatness and gift. It is also presumably why the verses quoted there from early in the eighth psalm have so often been associated with Mary: “Given that I see your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established—what is a human being that you are mindful of her, or the son of a human, seeing that you visit him? . . . You have crowned him with glory and honor.” The passage suggests a world in which divine and human power are not in competition, but mutually reinforce each other: to acknowledge a human’s glory and power, simultaneously recalling that they are gifts of God, does not lead to any disparagement of divine glory and power, but to a greater recognition of it.71 Thus the quality of Mary’s activity does not match Cecilia’s very well: the Second Nun’s Tale makes no suggestion that Cecilia has even attempted Mary’s impossible task, let alone achieved it. While the poem does not make her out to be self-aggrandizing, there is also no place in which she defers credit for her action back to a divine source; in fact some of Chaucer’s adjustments, as to the Ambrosian Preface, move in the opposite direction, downplaying God’s role at the expense of Cecilia’s. What of the second question, concerning Cecilia’s status as solo, as the only really notable character in the tale? It is, perhaps surprisingly, just as bad a match for Mary. Granted, if there is a merely human person to whom medieval Christianity could accord a sort of right to be set apart, it would be Mary; by the high Middle Ages, even those who disliked the idea of her immaculate conception were still happy to speak of the special prerogatives granted to her and to no other creature, and reference to her as queen over all creation — a thought reinforced by the frequent association of her with the “woman clothed with the sun” in the Revelation to John (12:1– 17) — had become common. And yet in the theological tradition she is frequently held up as a model for accessible imitation in a way that Chaucer’s Cecilia, so superhumanly distant from even her nearest followers, is not. Bernard’s just-quoted sermon furnishes a good example. Taking note of a biblical description (Acts 1:13–14) of a group of male

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and female followers gathering after Jesus’ ascension, Bernard remarks a logical expectation: “If perhaps Mary was present, she who is above all, as much by the prerogative of her Son as by the privilege of her holiness, would surely be named first.” But the text surprises: she is present, and she is not named first but almost last: the passage lists Peter and John, then James and Andrew, then seven other male disciples, and finally concludes “with women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers.” For Bernard this is a consequence of Mary’s mansuetudo and modestia, for she “with inexpressible mildness, abased herself below widows and penitents, below the one from whom seven demons had been cast out. I beseech you, children: imitate this virtue, if you love Mary; if you struggle to please her, imitate her modesty. For nothing is so worthy of a human, nothing is so appropriate to a Christian, and most of all nothing to this extent befits a monk” (SDOA §11, SBO 5:271).72 The claim that Mary “abased herself ” presumably derives from the traditional idea that the writer of Luke-Acts knew her personally and wrote in consultation with her — which would suggest that she appears near the end of his list by her own choice. The point for current purposes is that this nearly miraculous feat, a display of great humility from the one who should by rights find it most difficult to be humble, is held up for general emulation. Mary’s excellence, in other words, is not meant to create a barrier but to function as an invitation to join her. The contrast with Chaucer’s Cecilia could not be greater. She is not imitable even within the world of her tale, and indeed she becomes Chaucer’s Cecilia in large part by having her imitability removed: recall that one of the most distinctive features of his version is the nearly unique fact that his Tiburce and Valerian do not become what Cecilia is, with radiant confidence, verbal battles, and converts of their own (n. 31). And having seen those two saints barred from propinquity to their mentor, how should we others imagine coming near her?73 As for our third question about Mary, the antideponent verb of the vitally important phrase remarked twice above by Auerbach (Luke 1:38, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum) should mean it will be no surprise to find a strong element of appropriate passivity, of letting-God-act, in what theologians have to say about its utterer. One of Bernard’s expressions of this receptivity clashes particularly memorably with Chaucer’s portrait of Cecilia. In the middle of the sermon “On the Aqueduct,” he uses the

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angel Gabriel’s declaration that Mary has “found grace with God” (Luke 1:30) to meditate on the role of grace in her person more generally, and in ours: “You have found,” the angel says, “grace with God.” . . . This one [Mary] will always find grace, and grace is the only thing we need. . . . Certainly grace is the only thing by which we are saved. Why do we desire other things, brothers? Let us seek grace, and let us seek it through Mary; because what she seeks, she finds, and she cannot disappoint. . . . Let others seek merit; let us burn with zeal to find grace. What then? Is it not of grace that we are here? Assuredly it is of the Lord’s mercy that we have not been destroyed. Who are we? We are perjurers, we are murderers, we are adulterers, we are robbers [or “rapists”: raptores], we are in sum the filth of this world. Consult your consciences, brothers, and see that where sin abounded, grace also superabounds. Mary does not rely upon merit, but seeks grace. (Sermo in nativitate mariae §§7– 8, SBO 5:279– 80)74 Just as Mary holds the cosmos’s best claim to be set above all others, but waives it, so here she who, of all creatures, could possibly rely on her own merit does not do so, but asks for grace. She asks, in other words, to receive what she needs as a gift, as something not under her own control. And we others are told to do likewise. “Let others seek merit”; Mary and we who imitate her will rely on gift instead. And what of Cecilia? Hear again the opening lines of her prologue’s invocation to Mary: And thow that flour of virgines art alle, Of whom that Bernard list so wel to write, To thee at my bigynnyng first I calle; Thou confort of us wrecches, do me endite Thy maydens deeth, that wan thurgh hire merite The eterneel lyf and of the feend victorie. (29–34) With the exception of one and a half lines (26 – 27) in the prologue’s first part, line 33 is the very first thing we hear about Cecilia in the en-

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tire piece. And what we hear — astonishingly welded into a single line with a description of Cecilia as Mary’s mayden, just three lines after Chaucer calls Bernard to mind—is that she has done just the thing that Bernard says not even Mary has tried: she has won victory through her merit. It is such a bold and atypical statement, in the context of the debates about merit that have occupied Christianity for at least the last sixteen hundred years, that one is surprised to find little if any critical comment on it.75 Not that it is impossible for Christian writers to speak of the reality and efficacy of merit, Mary’s or others’; indeed Bernard himself does so, devoting the entire thirteenth chapter of the treatise On Grace and Free Choice to the idea. But the most important point in his discussion comes early: “The merits of salvation are not to be sought from the free choice, because only mercy saves.” Or as the subtitle of the following section more directly puts it, “God has divided his gifts into merits and rewards.” We do gain merit, in other words, but, according to an increasingly familiar kind of paradox, the merits are no less gifts of God than are the rewards they “earn.”76 By giving us one side of the paradox without its counterweight, the reality of merit without its “gifty” status, Chaucer may not quite have violated any explicit requirement of the theological tradition he simultaneously invokes. But he has come close to doing so, and in the process he has, in yet another significant place (line 33 is one of the few lines in the entire Second-Nun corpus without a known source), pushed his central character toward an extreme of independent action on some spectrum of agency and receptivity. The fact that he does so in the act of invoking not only Mary but Bernard’s Mary—precisely the one least likely to be praised for winning things thurgh hire unqualified merite—makes Cecilia’s extremism all the more evident. It is as if Mary, on hearing Elizabeth’s acclamations, had not referred the praise back to God in the verses of the Magnificat, as Bernard understands her to do, but had simply looked her cousin in the eye and said: Yes, that’s right. Besides the passivity implied in having one’s merits turn out to be gifts, Bernard also speaks to Mary’s passivity in a second way, one underwritten by a long liturgical tradition. The occasion is the feast of the Assumption, for which in Bernard’s time a frequent Gospel reading seems to have been one that does not speak of the mother of Jesus at all, but of another Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. The text is Luke 10:38 – 42, the story of Jesus’ visit to the two sisters, during which

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Martha “was bustling around with continual work” (satagebat circa frequens ministerium) and Mary, “sitting at the Lord’s feet, was listening to his words”— an arrangement that provoked complaint by her sister, a statement by Jesus that Mary had “selected the best part,” and, by Bernard’s time, many centuries of figural interpretation according to which Martha represents the active life and Mary the contemplative. Since contemplation is always or nearly always figured as having a strong passive element, the passage also invites reflection on action and passion in the relationship to God, and Bernard does not miss the chance. He begins with a small detail that he takes as puzzling: the story begins by declaring that Martha “received Jesus into her home,” whereas, given that this passage is offered us for reflection on a Marian feast, we might expect that the receiver should be her sister Mary, the namesake of the one who received Jesus into her womb. Bernard derives a lesson from the puzzlement: “Let no one be disturbed,” he writes, “because the woman receiving the Lord is not called Mary, but Martha, when in this Mary [i.e., the mother of Jesus] are found, united and at their height, both the negotium of Martha and the non otiosum otium of Mary.”77 Why not use the names of Martha and Mary almost interchangeably, in other words, since the Mary with whom we are really concerned includes aspects of both? As for what those aspects are, the translations deserve care. Martha’s negotium can be rendered “busyness”; it is an attribute she shares with Cecilia, and Bernard’s statement that the Blessed Virgin joins them in it indicates as clearly as anything could that busyness itself is not a problem. The problem is the absence in Cecilia of any trace of busyness’s counterweight, the forte of Martha’s sister, the hard-totranslate non otiosum otium: the leisure that is not worthless, the inactivity that is not idle. Paradoxes like this three-word riddle, which combines in itself elements of passivity and activity, are a frequent way of describing the ostensibly paradoxical state of contemplation, then as now. Bernard’s combination of it with Martha’s unmixed negotium in the character of the Blessed Virgin suggests once more that, despite logical temptations to think otherwise, activity and passivity need not mutually exclude one another — at least not as they were conceived in certain ethical ideals of the high Middle Ages. All which is to say that the Blessed Virgin is thought of as acting with double agency or “conjoint action”— which observation brings us to our fourth question about her. The attribution of a combination of

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active and passive traits to Mary is, like so much else, by no means unique to Bernard; in fact it is all but obligatory in theological writing about Mary through the Middle Ages.78 Such combinations survive in the assertion of Dante’s prayer, noted above where Mary’s humility is considered, that she is both umile ed alta—in Chaucer’s translation, both humble and heigh. The poets’ presentation, however, loses one important nuance of the theological writers’ treatments. There we find that humility and greatness are not merely two apparently contradictory traits held together in the same admirable personality; rather, they have an internal relationship: Mary (or anyone else) is “high” because she is humble. Bernard occasionally refers this idea to an authoritative source in the words of Christ: noting the humility required for someone who has just been told she will give birth to “the Son of the Most High” to set out immediately to spend three months helping a pregnant cousin, Bernard remarks, “Indeed if everyone who humbles himself will be exalted, what will be more sublime than this humility?”79 The line he is quoting is spoken by Jesus three times in the synoptic Gospels, which reproduce it in a way unusually close to verbatim: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”80 All three instances make it entirely clear that the directive toward humility, and to humility that leads to exaltation, applies to everyone, not just a few unusually holy people; and thus Mary, once again, serves Bernard as the great exemplar for a form of action and a way of being that all should imitate. A second appearance in Bernard of the causal link between humility and greatness clarifies the point with great beauty and nuance. In the sermon already twice quoted for the Sunday following the Assumption, Bernard attends to Mary under the species of the “woman clothed with the sun” from the book of Revelation; noting the twelve stars with which that woman is crowned, Bernard interprets them as three sets of four “prerogatives of grace.” The first eight concern the angelic visitation, the conception of Christ, virginal motherhood, painless childbirth, and other achievements relatively inaccessible to most mortals. But the last quartet are “prerogatives of the heart,” things that other believers might at least try to imitate — and, remarkably enough, Bernard says that it is these four that “shine with a certain special brightness” among the twelve. Two of the four are particularly of interest here:

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Mary’s devotio humilitatis and magnanimitas credulitatis, loaded terms if ever such there were.81 The notion of magnanimity in particular has had a long and fascinating history in the Christian tradition, too long and fascinating to be pursued adequately here. But in brief, this habit of mind that, in Aquinas’s definition, “makes” or “deems itself worthy of the greatest things” caused considerable nervousness in some adherents of the religion of the crucified God—some of whom (Augustine among them) held that humility was a peculiarly Christian virtue, absent from pagan ethics. The inverse proposition, that magnanimity is a peculiarly pagan virtue and should be absent from Christian ethics, has also had strong voices to commend it.82 These two “prerogatives,” magnanimity and humility, could easily be taken as incompatible, even antagonistic — for how can a person at once pursue humility, with its etymological connection to soil and its association with meekness and weakness, and strive for greatness? But in Bernard’s constellation these two stars do not eclipse, but strengthen, each other; and not merely by the arbitrary declaration of an external will, but for concrete reasons he is able to explain. The passage immediately follows one already considered, the reading of the Magnificat as deflecting Elizabeth’s praise of Mary back to God. With characteristic paradox, Bernard observes that Elizabeth, after all, is also not wrong: “Shall we suppose,” he asks, “Saint Elizabeth to have erred in that which she certainly spoke by the Spirit? Let it be far from us! She for whom God had regard is clearly blessed [as Mary says], and blessed is she who believed [as Elizabeth says].”83 The grammar, not for the first time, suggests something about the agency: in Elizabeth’s account of the situation, the reason for Mary’s blessedness comes in a relative clause of which Mary is the subject (quae credidit); in Mary’s own account, the cause-of-blessedness clause has Mary receiving the action (quam respexit Deus). Bernard continues, in a mouthful of a sentence: For here the great fruit of the divine regard shows itself, since indeed, in the secret chamber of [Mary’s] virginal heart, by the subtle and inexpressible know-how of the supervening Spirit, so much magnanimity approached so much humility that . . . these two stars . . . became brighter from their mutual regard — because, as it were, neither did so much humility diminish the magnanimity, nor

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so much magnanimity diminish the humility, but while she was so humble in her own estimate, she was nonetheless also magnanimous in her belief in the promise; so that she who reckoned herself to be nothing other than an insignificant handmaid by no means doubted herself to have been chosen to this incomprehensible mystery, to this astounding interchange, to this inscrutable sacrament; and she believed that [she] would soon be the true bearer of God and man. (SDOA §13, SBO 5:272–73)84 The paradoxical relationship — not just juxtaposition, but mutual reinforcement — of two forces within the soul, one of which (magnanimity) sounds active (in its concern with doing great things) and one of which (humility) sounds passive, should by now feel almost familiar. Dare we say that they work together, they cooperate? Bernard’s immediately following passage uses the very word, while also making clear once again that what we see in Mary is not merely for her, but is meant for everyone to imitate: The prerogative of divine grace performs this in the hearts of the chosen, that neither should humility make them pusillanimous, nor should magnanimity make them arrogant; rather [the two virtues] should cooperate with each other, so that not only does no haughtiness sneak in from the magnanimity, but humility is advanced to the greatest degree from the fact that [the chosen] are found that much more reverent [i.e., they are humbled by the greatness of what their magnanimity makes them imagine], and not ungrateful to the granter of gifts —and conversely no pusillanimity will stealthily enter from the opportunity given by humility, but by however much less each one is accustomed to presume on his own [resources] in small things, by that much more should he trust in divine power also in every large thing. (SDOA §13, SBO 5:273)85 The two virtues not only cooperate; they also (perhaps as is necessary for true cooperation, since an increasing unification of opera might imply an increasing unification of operatores) are changed. Magnanimity, active virtue though it seems to be, turns out to have its passive element, perhaps to be just as passive as humility — since, after all, Mary’s

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magnanimity consists in believing that great things will be done in and through her, and believing it entirely because God has said so. And Mary’s humility, passive though it seems to be, turns out to be just as active as her magnanimity, since it consists in being willing to accept the incredible magnitude of the great things — things that a selfgrounded “magnanimity” could never have imagined — that will be done in and through her. In the end it is not too much to say that humility and magnanimity, in Bernard’s treatment, not only reinforce each other but are virtually identical. Mary’s magnanimity, as also the magnanimity to which Bernard says we are called in imitation of her, just is the acceptance of an apparently impossible promise —“althogh I se not how,” a Middle English rendition might say. It requires a soul large enough to believe that what will happen within her is something far beyond her.86 The score, at the end of our list of questions, is zero to four: Cecilia does not match Mary in a single category. She does not act as Mary does, referring credit back to the source of her power. She is solo, inimitable, where Mary is a model for all believers, and where the Marian spirituality Chaucer invokes counsels against singleness in general. As for passivity, the theological tradition everywhere shows Mary relying on God for help, expressing receptivity to God’s plan, whereas Cecilia never shows the least need for guidance. And as for “cooperative” or “conjoint” action, the tradition ascribes to Mary’s way of being a simultaneous activity and passivity, action and contemplation, while virtually all mention of such paradoxes — attributed to Cecilia quite explicitly several times in Chaucer’s sources — has been deleted from the Second Nun’s Tale. With this kind of record, how Cecilia qualifies as Mary’s mayden (line 33) is quite a mystery: viewed through the lens of questions about agency, the two women have nearly nothing in common. One last piece of evidence in the case will strengthen the sense of mismatch: the little-remarked matter of what Chaucer removes from Dante’s twenty-one-line prayer to Mary. Several short clauses have gone missing from the translation, but there is only one glaringly large omission, constituting by far Chaucer’s most obvious modification of his source. He leaves out one entire tercet, the fifth of the seven that begin the last canto of the Paradiso, which reads as follows: “Lady, you are so great and of such worth that anyone who wants grace and does not have

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recourse to you wants his desire to fly without wings” (lines 13 –15).87 The question of what the omission means, of course, must be preceded by the potentially deflating question of whether it means anything at all: it is fair to wonder to what extent it indicates some thought about the subject matter on Chaucer’s part, and to what degree it was instead driven by prosodic necessity, or even by chance. In this case, however, there is external evidence that the three lines in question struck Chaucer in some important way, and were not dropped purely by accident. The missing tercet reappears, alone, in the third book of Troilus and Criseyde, repurposed as part of an invocation not to Mary but to Cupid or Eros: “Benigne Love, thow holy bond of thynges, / Whoso wol grace and list the nought honouren, / Lo, his desir wol fle withouten wynges” (lines 1261–63).88 The meaning of the omission (and of its reuse) must be somewhat speculative, but speculation need not be groundless. The tercet gives us a very strong Mary, the strongest anywhere in Dante’s prayer. More precisely, it gives us a necessary Mary, one without recourse to whom human salvation is entirely impossible. To many modern ears the idea will sound like a Christian heresy, like “Mariolatry,” the worship of Mary as a kind of goddess, perhaps even one competing with the Trinity, bestowing grace on her devotees of her own accord rather than acting (to borrow Bernard’s image) as an aqueduct for gifts from elsewhere. But to many Christians of medieval Europe (as to some branches of the religion today) the idea of a kind of necessity to Mary’s involvement in salvation was welcome: indeed Bernard’s sermon “On the Aqueduct” is one of the authoritative places that explore the idea. God, Bernard writes, “willed that we should have all through Mary” (totum nos habere voluit per Mariam).89 However, one frequently finds the idea accompanied by a reminder that the grace Mary brings is not her own, but originates elsewhere; Bernard’s six-word phrase does that work by including the detail that someone else has chosen (voluit) to make Mary the conduit of grace that she is. Later, at the sermon’s end, Bernard reminds his hearers still more strongly of the origin of the grace Mary brings, by stating explicitly that God could have delivered the gift by some completely different channel.90 But while Dante’s “umile ed alta” might be taken as a hint of a similar qualification—certainly he is elsewhere very careful to show that creatures are dependent or “double” agents — in this particular tercet, taken in isolation, there is no such nuance.

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And Chaucer drops it. It is not to his purpose, apparently, to promote such a “high” view of Mary here.91 The fact that he reuses the dangerous lines in a prayer to Eros, near the high point of a poem whose lead character pays a crushing price for the service he renders to that deity, may serve to strengthen the point. Chaucer perhaps felt that Dante’s words suggest an excessively “strong” devotion — here meaning a devotion that imagines an excessively strong object of worship over against an excessively weak worshiper. Perhaps it is here as it seems to be with the kind of devotion that Griselda shows Walter (ch. 1, division 1, final section): the form of the devotion is somehow wrong in itself, regardless of who is on its receiving end. In any case, the theological tradition Chaucer invokes by naming Bernard proposes a quite different kind of devotion to Mary, and his Invocacio follows closely in that other line, jettisoning a significant piece of its immediate source to do so. Taken by itself, that is a remarkable fact. As noted above (“The Peculiarities of the Second Part”), it is odd enough to begin a story of ultra-independent sanctity with a prologue that asks for help and invokes Mary. But even once we accept that Chaucer (for whatever reason) decided to proceed in this way, we might still expect him to present the strongest and most self-sufficient picture of Mary he can imagine: something, perhaps, like what appears in some of the Marian-miracle stories, and something quite different from the nuanced picture of Mary’s cooperation and dependence found in Bernard and allied writers. Instead Chaucer has gone out of his way to remove the only moment in his source that even feints toward such a picture. It is still another indication that in writing this passage, uniquely among the Second Nun materials but typically for much of the rest of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer felt the attraction of “conjoint agency” with its paradoxical combination of action and passion, magnanimity and humility. Which is to say that he found himself driven, whether consciously or not, toward emphasizing a glaring mismatch between the story he wrote and the muse he invokes at its beginning.

What Does the Evidence Mean? What do we make of the mismatch? Why is it there? This puzzlement echoes the one with which the chapter began; the difference is that the

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explicandum is now a mismatch internal to the Second Nun materials, that between Mary and Cecilia, rather than that between Cecilia and Custance. Before answering it, we have one last clue to consider. Slightly more than a century ago, Carleton Brown proposed another kind of mismatch between this middle part of the Second Nun’s Prologue and its surroundings, a chronological one: he suggested that the seven stanzas to Mary were Chaucer’s much later interpolation into a finished poem. Chaucerians will know that the hypothesis has not fared well in the critical melee.92 Brown essentially offered two arguments. The first is that the flow of the writing would improve in two ways if the seven stanzas were not there. The references to “the seinte” (unnamed here) and “hire legende” in lines 82– 83 suggest, says Brown, that readers should have her name and identity in mind, but she has not been mentioned since line 35, nor named since line 28; if lines 29–77 disappear, though, the gap since the last naming would be six lines rather than fifty-five. Deleting the stanzas would also remove the odd delay following line 77, which at present concludes a long and passionate prayer for rescue from the imminent danger of damnation with the promise, “Now . . . to my werk I wol me dresse”—and then immediately turns not to the werk at all but to a thumping anticlimax, in the form of a stanzalong petition for a merciful reading from the audience, which would follow much more logically after the writer’s description (in a quieter and less spirit-wracked tone, one might add) of his feithful attempt to make a translacioun (24 –25). Brown’s second argument consists of a more direct attempt to date the Invocacio and the tale separately. He sees the Second Nun’s Tale as inferior to most of Chaucer’s writings, and takes the inferiority as strong evidence that it is an early work. For two reasons, he says, the stanzas to Mary must be later: their borrowing from Dante puts them after Chaucer’s first known Italian voyage (1373 –74), and their poetic sophistication — particularly their success in weaving together material from a wide variety of sources — indicates the authorship of a poet in full command of his powers. Brown himself acknowledges that neither of his two main arguments is strong enough to be forcing; but the counterarguments that followed are not especially convincing either,93 and new evidence has accumulated over the years. One small piece appears in the pages above: it is the peculiar double shift in stance that separates the Invocacio from

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the rest of the prologue — the different kind of help it hopes for, and especially its sudden assumption that the composition of the tale lies ahead rather than in the past. Those changes considerably strengthen Brown’s first argument, in that they give renewed reason to think that the prologue with seven stanzas removed would be a more coherent unit than the version we have now. Further strengthening of the same argument comes from an influential work whose estimate of the poetic quality of the Invocacio, oddly enough, is the opposite of Brown’s. While Brown takes its poetic superiority as evidence that it was composed separately from its neighboring sections, Robert Burlin — while making no mention of Brown’s then six-decades-old article — declares the prayer to Mary “diffuse, eclectic, and unfocused upon what is to follow,” and further maligns its peculiar placement between the other two sections of the prologue as “unshapely and undramatic.”94 Burlin, focused here on the Prioress’s Tale rather than the Second Nun’s, goes on to attribute these woes to Chaucer’s poetic immaturity at the writing of the Second Nun materials, which he supposed a single unit and a very early one. But had he had Brown’s hypothesis in mind, he could with at least equal reason have considered another explanation: the faults he lists all comport rather well with the suggestion that the prayer was forced in late to a preexisting structure. There have also been at least two critical interventions of the last few decades aligning nicely with Brown’s second argument, the purely chronological one. One is Sherry Reames’s series of suggestions that the prosody of the tale itself markedly improves as one moves across the splice point of its two sources, and that it is therefore very likely that Chaucer wrote the two parts at widely separated times (see n. 52). If those two parts — T1 and T2, in Weise’s abbreviated terminology — were written a decade apart or more, it suddenly becomes much easier to believe that the Invocacio was not written with its neighbors. The etymologies of P3 were almost certainly written with the tale’s first half, and the prooemion on ydlenesse (P1) may well have been also; what is to prevent our thinking that the oddly matched stanzas that separate them were composed with the tale’s second part, or even later? Adding some force to the thought is a second approach, Weise’s own, via linguistics rather than prosody: it is an attempt to date the five distinct parts of the Second-Nun corpus by measuring the percentage of

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Romance-derived words in each, on the theory that in general Chaucer used more and more Romance vocabulary as time went on. The approach is controversial and relatively complicated,95 and adequate consideration even of the method, let alone the bold hypotheses Weise builds on the numbers that it produces, would require a longish article. But at least one aspect of her numerical conclusions is immediately relevant to Brown’s suggestion about an interpolated Invocacio. With five pieces of writing to compare, there are ten possible comparisons to be made: 1–2, 1–3, 1– 4, 1–5, 2–3, and so on. When Weise runs the numbers in various ways, she finds two of the ten comparisons consistently showing a more statistically significant difference in Romance-language content than the other eight.96 One is the comparison between the two parts of the tale proper, a result that accords perfectly with Reames’s prosodic judgment that they were written at different times. The other is the comparison between P2 (seven-eighths of which are the invocation to Mary) and the first part of the tale. Even if we retain a healthy skepticism about the weight of such statistical results as direct evidence for date of composition, the comparison is worth noting: something about Chaucer’s compositional practice in the invocation looks to have been different from the practice that governed his writing of the longer, and likely earlier, of the two halves of the tale. And that fact fits well with the evidence developed across the length of this chapter that some of the deep contents of these two pieces, namely their attitudes toward questions of agency, differ fundamentally as well. It is probably clear by now where the argument is tending. In the light of these new forms of support, and in the absence of telling counterarguments, Brown’s suggestion about later interpolation deserves a second look. And the look should be accompanied by the argument of the bulk of this chapter that there are theological mismatches between Mary and Cecilia, and between Cecilia and much of the rest of Chaucer’s thought about agency. If all mention of Mary, along with the plea for assistance via “conjoint action” that accompanies the mention, is a latecomer to the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale, the fact would serve pretty well as a partial answer to the question about why Cecilia and Mary don’t match: they betray different authorial habits of thought about agency because they are creations of, as it were, different minds. The Chaucer who affixed Dante’s invocation to the beginning of Ce-

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cilia’s tale was a different Chaucer from the one who wrote the first half of the poem and, in doing so, set the basic direction of Cecilia’s character. Or so it is reasonable to think, if a decade or more had passed between the two events. That second author may well have looked back at the work of the first and found himself less than pleased with what he saw.97 That possibility raises a question carefully deferred to this point: Was Chaucer aware of the clash between the invocation and the tale? (Or, for that matter, of the clash between the tale and the thinking about human agency that seems to underlie other tales?) Most bluntly, is the dubious choice of Mary as Muse for this story, along with the surprising appeal for a grace that strengthens the writer so that he may write a tale from which nearly all instances of such strengthening grace have been expunged, deliberate? Is there, after all, irony of the most withering kind in Chaucer’s final offering of the Second-Nun materials — but irony that has been exported to the prologue, where it has escaped the notice of most students of the tale, simply because they found more than enough to occupy them in the tale itself? I would like to think so. Complex though it is, it seems to me the most plausible hypothesis available to explain the surprising set of data that this chapter has brought to light. And Chaucer’s practice elsewhere—the use of irony so universally that the discovery of a nonironic tale is a surprising event, itself becoming an explicandum that has probably already contributed to bold hypotheses like that of early composition by a poet not yet in possession of his later faculties —also speaks in its favor. Why not believe that Chaucer, having written relatively early (for whatever reason) the life of a supersaint who Does Not Suffer, returned to the scene late in his career, perhaps with much of the Canterbury project behind him, having benefited from all that it and the rest of his life had taught about irony and about agency — returned to the scene, picked up the manuscript, and felt his stomach turn at his own creation? Why not believe that this poet in particular, so ready to put forward a rich pageant of points of view under the broad Canterbury umbrella, kept the story essentially as it was, but added something new: a relatively small insertion, forty-nine lines, but forty-nine lines that proceed from a worldview fundamentally at odds with the one the rest of the tale implies? Why not, particularly since the Clerk’s Tale already in-

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dicates Chaucer’s willingness, when confronted with a story for which his distaste is evident, to pass the story along anyway, but with warning signs, disclaimers, and protests woven subtly but liberally all through it? The argument must certainly stop short of claiming to be proof. But, besides fitting the data, the hypothesis makes for an excellent story.98 Moreover, considered among the various conclusions one might draw, it is relatively cautious. Most notably it does not presume to say why Chaucer changed his mind, or had his mind changed. We have seen a few proposed answers to that question already: Giffin and Weise, for example, offer historical accounts that would account for the character of Cecilia (see “Explanation 4” earlier in this chapter). One could also proceed by offering instead to “explain” the other side of the mismatch, the Marian writing: perhaps early in his career Chaucer shaped Cecilia’s character as he did because his mental habits concerning agency really were somewhat stereotyped and cartoonish, but something happened as he matured to make them more complex—an encounter with particular religious writings, perhaps, or just the gradual awareness of approaching death?99 But in itself the hypothesis of a Chaucer critical of his earlier writing is not so bold as either of those ideas; it merely requires us to believe that he was aware of the contradiction between the ethical ideals that his tale and its prologue imply, and that he wrote at least the latter work with some conscious awareness that the ideals were there. And if he did not? Then we have not lost much except a good story. It will merely mean that a sharp reversal in Chaucer’s mind-set took place without his noticing—which might well make us more interested in the reversal rather than less, on the principle of attending to the beliefs an author betrays rather than those he declares. In any case the substance of this chapter’s findings will remain. It will still be the case that there is a colossal gap between the ideas of agency implied by the tale and by the Invocacio ad Mariam; the idea (or the ideal) in the Invocacio will still have shown itself as roughly identical to the one previous chapters found elsewhere in Chaucer; and we will still have learned valuable and new things about the ideal from this Marian presentation of it. Along with the rejuvenation of the idea of a late date for the Invocacio, these are the most incontestable results of this chapter. Each of the three casts light not only on Chaucer’s work but also on the broader cooperative ideal that helped shape it. And each of them deserves brief comment in closing.

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Th r e e C o n c l u s i o n s The Anomalies and Their Implications The first result is the simple fact of the anomaly itself — the degree to which Cecilia’s mode of action “stands out.” Its dual contrast inspires the two-part division of this chapter: it is marked both against the kind of action put forward as admirable elsewhere in Chaucer (most explicitly in the person of Custance) and against the kind of agency that Bernard, along with Dante and the long tradition that informs both of them, attributes to Mary. The bulk of the argument in favor of that dual difference fills the pages that have already gone by. However, I would like to round out the discussion by responding to a recent and forceful argument to the contrary, in part because doing so will help clarify further the ideal that underlies both Chaucer’s Custance and the figure of Mary as we have met her here. The contrary argument is very direct: “Although Chaucer’s outspoken St. Cecilia looks very different from the figure of the suffering Virgin Mary in the Man of Law’s Tale,” Sherry Reames writes, “Chaucer is not endorsing two radically different definitions of sanctity” (“Mary, Sanctity,” 95).100 The contention relies on two concrete similarities between the women. The first is that while both Mary and Cecilia (and I would like to add Custance) are married, and therefore officially classified by most of the thought of the time as under someone else’s authority, “saints without much institutional power” (ibid.), it is nonetheless true that each wields great power in other ways. Reames credits this reversal to Chaucer’s constant return to “the New Testament paradox in which apparent lowliness is turned into spiritual influence and the power to fulfill God’s purposes” (95– 96). That such a paradox exists is true and relevant, but from the point of view of this chapter also incomplete — partly because the Second Nun’s Tale is remarkably lacking in declarations that the purposes Cecilia fulfills are in fact God’s, and decisively because in any case any similarity between the results the two women achieve is far outweighed by a difference in the kinds of “apparent lowliness” that get them there. Custance’s lowliness, it is fair to say, is not merely apparent but real; her status as emperor’s daughter does her no good during the majority of her tale, when it is forgotten or concealed or in fact leads to disempowerment (her arranged marriage to the

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Sultan); and she really is a shipwreck, an accused prisoner, and a nearvictim of rape. So also Mary, who speaks directly of her lowliness (humilitatem, Luke 1:48) and has generally been understood by the tradition as in worldly terms poor and powerless: though the incarnation is a “work” of extraordinary power, it is clear at every point that the initiative is God’s, not hers. She is an exalted collaborator, but exalted is a past participle. With Chaucer’s Cecilia quite the reverse is true; her “apparent lowliness” is only apparent, is in fact unreal. She is in charge of the events around her from first to last, planning her purposes and wielding far more power than anyone else in her story. Even in the case of events that would ordinarily emphasize her subjection to someone else — her marriage to a Roman noble, her need of a priest to baptize converts and a bishop to consecrate her house, her death after (though not exactly from) the attack of a Roman executioner — the expected narrative circuit from disempowerment back to empowerment has shrunk to an invisible point: Cecilia is free from passivity not only at the end of each episode but before it ever begins, allowing (what looks like) passivity only on her own actively chosen terms. This is to say that, somewhat like Theseus but more successfully, she absorbs passivity into the service of activity rather than allowing the two to marry as equals and influence each other. Thus Reames’s New Testament paradox probably needs redescribing: it is the women who are really, not apparently, lowly who find themselves filled with new power, in part because the lowliness allows the power the room it needs, or (in a metaphor closer to Bernard’s) receives it and cooperates with it. We do not see this happen in the Second Nun’s Tale. The power Cecilia wields seems to have been hers all along. The second similarity to Mary that Reames asserts is that both women are “great prophets against the arrogance of power” (95). In Mary’s case, the reference is particularly to the Magnificat, which speaks of God’s humbling the proud and rich and raising up the lowly and poor (“deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles,” Luke 1:52). But again the differences speak more loudly than the similarity. Mary does not speak these lines against (nor even to) any powerful person. Neither here nor more generally can Reames’s epithet for Cecilia, “outspoken,” apply to her; in fact one of Bernard’s Marian sermons makes much of the

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fact that Mary is said to speak exactly four times in all of the gospels (SDOA §10). And of course the import of the Magnificat is precisely a celebration of the gift given by God, on God’s own initiative, to an otherwise lowly and powerless woman. Her hymn thus is built around, and intended to reemphasize, a very concrete instance of a humilis whom God exaltavit, whereas the potentes whom the same verse declares that God deposuit remain abstract. In Cecilia’s encounter with Almachius the situation is reversed: there is a clear picture of a powerful and proud man who will, it is presumed, be brought low; but any attempt to find here a matching picture of a humble person who has been exalted requires considerable imagination on the reader’s part. Where, in the portrait Chaucer has given us, did she look humble to start with?101 In the end I find it possible to agree with the letter of Reames’s observation (“Chaucer is not endorsing two radically different definitions of sanctity”), but only because of the word endorsing; I think there is no doubt that Chaucer has presented two radically different versions of sanctity. One of them he, supported by the theological insights into action and passion that somehow found their way into his thought, emphatically endorses, positively in the Man of Law’s Tale and negatively, by showing the horrors of one of its contraries, in the Clerk’s. The other— the picture of a saint who is “outspoken” without also showing any trace of the humility, the receptivity, the need, the listening, that accompanies action in Custance’s case (and, unfortunately, almost replaces action in Griselda’s) — I think we can now fairly suppose that Chaucer does not endorse. At least this is true of the Chaucer who wrote the Invocacio ad Mariam, affixing it to a tale where it does not belong, repeatedly highlighting the very style of conjoint agency that he has so many times gone out of his way to elide from Cecilia’s story: it is hard to see how that author could recommend Cecilia as an example for imitation.

The Universality of the Ideal The second conclusion is a neat coming-together of Cecilia’s two “mismatches.” If she fails to match Custance, and Mary fails to match her, it is because Mary and Custance match each other exceedingly well. And that is because one is a very frequent exemplar for medieval Christian

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reflection on “conjoint action,” and the other is, or so previous chapters argue, a creation of that tradition. The presence of such creations should be no surprise, because the ideal of divine-human cooperation that the tradition proposes is meant to apply to a wide range of created agents; ideally, to all. It has long been clear that the ideal applies to Christ as well as Mary: Bernard’s comments on Christ’s “passive action” and “active Passion,” discussed in the preface and in chapter 3, leave no doubt of that. Its transference or applicability to all creatures is clear in Bernard’s presentation of the stages of human action (ch. 3, final section), but is also discoverable nearly everywhere in a long tradition. Here is a helpfully direct example from a modern writer: “Saint Paul magnificently casts light upon abasement in his hymn found in his letter to the Philippians with its double movement of descent and elevation: He [Christ] was humbled and that is why he was exalted. . . . [This] is a question of the paschal journey to which, in imitation of Jesus, every Christian is invited.”102 André Louf draws a conclusion we have seen before: the causal relationship, or indeed the near identity, between humility and exaltation. His main source, of course, is the same triply repeated Gospel passage (named explicitly in the ellipsis; cf. n. 80) that Bernard invoked 850 years earlier; and he draws as well on Philippians 2:1–16, the vastly influential description of Christ’s own paradoxical superposition of action and passivity that also appears here in chapters 3 and 7. Putting those two sources in parallel drives home the point with which the quotation ends: the ethical ideal that Jesus did in fact exhibit is also the one to which all followers are called.

On the Form of the Ideal The third discovery is somewhat more abstract, though we have already seen many concrete forms of it. One way in is via a felicitous remark of Janemarie Luecke, who notes that her more feminist students in the 1970s appreciated Cecilia’s ability “to be her own person and do her own thing.”103 The reaction is understandable, and to a point I find it possible to agree, despite the generally unsympathetic assessment of Chaucer’s Cecilia that appears here. As remarked already, bisynesse itself is not her problem; her problem is its lack of balance with anything else. Or to bor-

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row Luecke’s phrasing, the problem is that Cecilia’s “own thing” is the only thing we see her doing. Mary, by contrast, wins theological praise by her ability to do someone else’s thing — and to do it, still more remarkably, in a way that does not involve the self-effacement of a Griselda, but involves instead the magnanimous acceptance of both the great achievement and the humility that come with the gift. Such paradoxically “passive action,” common to Mary and Custance but not to Chaucer’s Cecilia, is so frequent an occurrence in the Christian tradition (and so relevant to the remainder of this book) that it is worth noting its abstract form — which seems to be, roughly, “A and not-A,” a flagrant violation of the law of noncontradiction. Be humble and be magnanimous. Be active and be contemplative. Be active and be passive! The game, of course, is that a command to hold together two apparently contradictory assertions implies a command to find a way to understand, or at least to live, them as not contradictory: to allow one’s mental categories and life to be rearranged so that what appeared impossible, but was nonetheless commanded, becomes possible. That is what the category of “conjoint action” or “double agency” seeks to do, by groping toward a way of acting that is simultaneously receptive, simultaneously a letting-happen of someone else’s will. In the meantime, until thought and life resolve into some yet-unimagined pattern, the contradictory command is painful, but also at least potentially fruitful.104 The observation of the Christian tradition’s love for abstractly contradictory forms is not new. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is the ordinary form of “orthodox” doctrine, whereas “heresy” generally consists in the dropping of one half of a paradox in order to affirm the other without cognitive discomfort. Here is a passage from Blaise Pascal, in the outline form so frequent in his writings: — There is then a great number of truths, both in faith and morals, which seem antagonistic, and yet harmonize in admirable order. — The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some one of these truths; and the source of all the cavils brought against us by heretics, is their ignorance of some one of these truths. —And it usually happens that, being unable to perceive the relation of two opposing truths, and believing that the admission of the one in-

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volves the exclusion of the other, they adhere to the one and renounce the other. . . . + The error they all fall into, is the more dangerous, from each pursuing one truth: their fault is not in embracing falsehood, but in not adopting the countervailing truth.105

The easy way out that Pascal calls “pursuing one truth” is exactly what has formed Cecilia’s character: passivity is gone, activity reigns uncomplicated. And it also describes well the trouble modern critics have had with the whole matter of agency in medieval texts, in particular with Cecilia, Custance, Griselda: believing that admission of passivity entails the exclusion of activity, they have felt compelled to choose between.106 If their belief is true, one can understand the impulse to favor the purely active Cecilia over the masochistic Griselda, given the very real oppression of women by men in so many times and places. But if the choice is not necessary, then the whole question appears in an entirely different light, and so does every character involved with it. It is then also not necessary to respond to oppression merely by seizing power. Indeed it then seems far less possible to seize power in the absolute way Cecilia’s story imagines; such an absolute grasp on power does not exist, any more than does the absolute self-annihilation imagined in the Clerk’s Tale.107 It is only possible, if this reorganization of categories is correct, to seek the paradoxically combined power and powerlessness, action and passion, that the religious tradition in question ascribes to its founder. It counsels all humans to imitate Christ’s kind of agency; according to the tradition, Mary is a successful imitator; Chaucer has created another in Custance. And the other two characters under discussion? There are complexities (more in Griselda’s case than Cecilia’s), but on the whole they line up as rather neatly opposed—one pathologically passive, the other, if another paradox can be pardoned, pathologically active. One is tempted to think of them as vicious extremes against whom Custance plays the virtuous Aristotelian mean, and one would not be far wrong. But it would be still better to avoid thinking of the three as arranged on a spectrum at all: that image suggests that the mean will be a figure of mere moderation or (less charitably) insipidity, a Custance who acts but is careful not to be too active, and who is willing to suffer but not too

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much. Far better, for reasons just stated by Pascal and made concrete in Bernard’s discussion of Mary, to see Custance as not somewhat but entirely, vibrantly active—but somehow being all the while receptive; and entirely subject to God’s will — which ends by being somehow not distinct from her own. And better to think of this ideal, once it can be glimpsed and then, it is hoped, sought in life, as a primary unity from which the two merely one-sided figures of Griselda and Cecilia represent defections.108 In other words the ideal in question, like the more familiar Christian truth-claims that Pascal has in mind, is very much a matter of both-and. What it offers is not so much a “middle way” as an entirely new way of thinking that strives to learn how both sides of an apparent contradiction can be simultaneously affirmed.109 A willingness to live with paradox will prove necessary also in the second part of this book — though there the contradictions will appear on the ostensibly objective terrain of law rather than in the ostensibly subjective realm of human agency. Links between the two sets of paradoxes, and a sense that somehow they are really the same paradox, will grow steadily across the chapters involved. But the path begins, as it did for part 1, in the relatively concrete world of Chaucer’s stories and characters — in this case, with the quasi-tragic love triangle of Dorigen, Arveragus, and Aurelius.

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Will and Law From the source of all contingency that he was in the Middle Ages, God became [by the time of Gottfried Leibniz] the guarantee of the absolute rationality of the world. —Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 152 And take this for a general reule, that every conseil that is affermed so strongly that it may nat be chaunged for no condicioun that may bityde, I seye that thilke conseil is wikked. —Tale of Melibee, 1231

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Law Gone Wrong The Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales

Introduction: The Franklin’s Tale’s Oaths and Their Reception Does the very idea of a vow imply the foreclosure of vital future possibilities, the selection of some provisional certitude that seems ultimate at the moment for the final and definitive truth? Does the vow, instead of surrendering our liberty to the unpredictable liberty of God, on the contrary seek to bind God’s hands and confine him to the plans we have determined for our own lives—or, worse still, to the myopic plans that others, who are not guaranteed to be either prophetic or wise, may impose in his name?

—Thomas Merton1

Recall hapless Dorigen’s reaction when young squier Aurelius, the would-be suitor whom she has long ago dismissed with a playful, if illconsidered, oath and then apparently forgotten, reappears, after an interval of two years, to report that the impossible condition of the oath

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has been fulfilled and to request that she make good on the bargain. Dorigen is astoned (line 1339). She has not one word to say to Aurelius in response to his 28-line monologue; instead she limps home to begin a monologue of her own, this one a 102-line litany of chaste maidens and wives, many of whom chose death rather than submission to various sexual violations and dishonors. At the end of the litany the tale gives us to know that Dorigen has gone on in this vein for “a day or tweye,” and, in case we have somehow missed what is at stake, adds that she was “purposynge evere that she wolde deye” (1457–58). The oddest thing about the situation is the stark limitation of choices in Dorigen’s mind. She sees her lot as defined by a forced option between two awful alternatives: hating the thought of fulfilling Aurelius’s adulterous wishes, she inclines (or at least thinks she does) toward what seems to her the only other possibility, the desperate solution chosen by many of her exempla. But the tale’s reader rather easily imagines that there are more than two avenues open; indeed, we are likely to be shocked that suicide is held up as an option at all, let alone as one of the only two options. An obvious third way seems never to cross Dorigen’s mind: why not simply refuse Aurelius’s “suit”? That is, when he appears to try to collect “payment,” why not point out that the oath was made in jest and tell him to go jump in the Channel? One reply, of course, would be that Chaucer does not write that story because it is not the story he is writing: he is following, here as in the Clerk’s Tale, a source or sources whose main outlines he means to preserve, and in both tales that approach robs critical questions about why he did not change this or that detail of much of their force.2 But in the case of Dorigen’s oath such a reply would be too simple. Closer comparison to Chaucer’s literary sources reveals idiosyncrasies in the Franklin’s Tale that bring the question of the proper understanding of oaths to the foreground and encourage readers to ask exactly the kind of question just mentioned. Thus the whole matter of oaths, far from being merely a bit of backstage machinery, appears to be a central part of what Chaucer wants his audience to consider. And something very similar is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Franklin’s Tale’s probable neighbor, the Physician’s story of Apius, Virginius, and Virginia; viewing it with parallel concerns in mind, and by a method similarly attentive to its sources, will reveal that the occasionally remarked parallels between the tales are much more extensive, and

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more important to the interpretation of each, than is generally thought. Many of the peculiarities of swearing in the Franklin’s Tale are already well known. For example, when modern readers find themselves skeptical about the seriousness and validity of Dorigen’s “rash oath” to Aurelius, they are not alone: the high and late Middle Ages had their own requirements for valid swearing, and this particular oath stands in fairly clear violation of all three of the best known of them. First of all, oaths that would bind the swearer to do evil (including violating previously existing promises, like the ones that wed Dorigen to Arveragus at the beginning of the tale) were held to have no binding force. Secondly, as the feend in the Friar’s Tale so memorably teaches his pupil, swearing an oath is not just a matter of pronouncing words, but must be accompanied by a real intention. Third, oaths sworn without due deliberation were also held to be invalid. These three conditions, respectively called justice (justitia), truth (veritas), and judgment (judicium), make up a canonical list for many medieval commentators. They derive from theologians’ and jurists’ application of Jeremiah 4:2—where the Israelites are encouraged to swear “in veritate, et in judicio, et in justitia”—to latterday legal and theological questions about swearing, and so have the weight of scripture behind them. Chaucer, for his part, is well aware of this verse and its traditional use; when his Pardoner launches into a sermon on swearing “as olde bookes trete,” it is the first locus directly quoted: “Of sweryng seith the hooly Jeremye, / ‘Thou shalt swere sooth thyn othes, and nat lye, / And swere in doom and eek in rightwisnesse’ ” (lines 630, 635–37).3 That Dorigen’s oath to Aurelius fails in the realms of justitia and judicium is rather obvious, and its lack of veritas is convincingly argued by several critics’ observations about the particular content of the requirement Dorigen sets, the protasis of her conditional. Clearly, as she herself tells us later (1342 – 45), she meant the removal of the rocks from Britain’s coast to be an impossible condition, and therefore her “oath” to Aurelius really declares only her intention to remain firm as those rocks in her devotion to Arveragus; she has essentially told Aurelius, if we update the idiom a bit, that she will sleep with him when hell freezes over. And Chaucer goes his most direct source one better in this regard by making Dorigen’s condition not only express impossibility (which is already present in Il Filocolo in the unnamed lady’s demand for a blooming garden in January), but a specific impossibility whose con-

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tent reinforces a second time her devotion to Arveragus: her most obvious reason for thanking anyone who could remove the rocks would be the removal of a threat to her husband’s life.4 Some of these objections to Dorigen’s oath, particularly its shortage of justitia and judicium, are also objections to Dorigen’s behavior. Those that are take their places in what is by now a venerable tradition of revisionist evaluations of the Franklin’s Tale’s protagonists — revisionist, that is, by comparison with George Kittredge’s enthusiastic endorsement of Dorigen and Arveragus as the noblest couple in the Tales, the representatives of a happy solution to a debate about marriage that had been under way through most of the preceding stories.5 Indeed, much of the critical literature on the Franklin’s Tale over the last hundred years consists of argument between admirers and detractors of Dorigen and Arveragus. Admirers like Kittredge tend to invoke their wedding promises and the lengthy excursus that follows, noting especially the intention of equality (or, given Arveragus’s retention of “the name of soveraynetee” at line 751, near-equality) — which, given the lessons of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, might indeed be taken to indicate that this couple will lead marriage-minded folk down the right path.6 Though this pro-and-con debate is not the center of the argument here, it will be useful to look briefly at a few more of the detractors’ counterarguments before proceeding. Against the knightly Arveragus, they have lodged the suspicion that Chaucer may intend his two-year glory-hunting trip, which begins only a year after the wedding (lines 807–13), to register as selfish rather than as knightly. They have asked, more bitingly, how wise (787) and freendly (1467) is this knight who, in the course of the allegedly generous decision to share his wife’s body with an amorous squire, threatens to kill her if she tells anyone, or even if she looks sad about it (1481– 86). They have wondered to what extent Arveragus can be said to keep his initial oath to renounce maistrye and “folwe hir wyl in al” (749), given that at the crucial moment he unhesitatingly assumes the right to override Dorigen’s own inclination toward responding to her dilemma violently, and that in doing so he meets no challenge from her.7 Against Dorigen the skeptics register a troubling tendency towards histrionics: as the tale itself somewhat sardonically puts it, for Arveragus’s absence “wepeth she and siketh, / As doon thise noble wyves whan

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hem liketh” (817–18). Her flair for melodrama extends to a point that was for Christian morality, at least, quite forbidden, namely to a willingness to swear by God in matters both serious and trivial: during her dramatic encounter with Aurelius in the garden she takes God’s name to witness three times in the course of eighteen lines.8 The first of these interjections (984) reaffirms her devotion to Arveragus, which might be taken as a sufficiently important and righteous cause to justify such an oath, but the second follows hard thereupon and jarringly combines all the seriousness of religion with complete frivolity: “But after that in pleye thus seyde she: / ‘Aurelie,’ quod she, ‘by heighe God above . . .’ ” (988 – 89). She goes on to make, under the seal of that invocation, the ill-considered and (she thinks) impossible-to-fulfill oath which, could it be fulfilled, would commit her to becoming an adulteress. The third specimen, at line 1000, affirms that no other condition will deliver to Aurelius what he wants — an affirmation surely back on the side of the angels, relatively speaking, but again probably unworthy of guaranteeing by the highest oath a person can make. By way of comparison, the wedding promises she exchanges with Arveragus are naked of any explicit appeal to the divine.9 Finally, and most famously, Dorigen’s two long compleynts—the one against the rocks that threaten her husband’s life (865 – 93) and the already-noted litany that follows Aurelius’s attempt to collect payment — put her histrionic strain on display in the most blatant of ways. The suspicion that Chaucer is poking a certain amount of fun at both recitals arises not just from their unwieldy length, but also from the material effect of the second one: not, despite what Dorigen says, a steeling of the tragically noble heart to suicide, but a postponement of the deed until the absent husband can return and resolve things another way.10 Here as with the tales considered in earlier chapters, comparison with Chaucer’s sources casts strong new light on the story’s meaning. In this case the results of the comparison can be presented quite succinctly, and they transform evidence that otherwise looks merely suggestive, rendering it all but decisive. Of the six reasons just recounted for possible disapproval of the Franklin’s Tale’s leading couple, five are Chaucer’s inventions. Neither of Boccaccio’s versions of the story features an absent husband or one whose concern for honor leads him to threaten his wife, nor do any of Dorigen’s predecessors swoon and sigh, bewail

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their lots so lengthily, or swear so blasphemously. And the exception— the fact that the husband in each of Boccaccio’s tales does decide for the couple how they will respond to the oath once the impossible condition is magically fulfilled — may only prove the rule. Chaucer has cast the husband’s taking charge in a new light by framing the story with what is present in no known analogue: a lengthy treatment of the couple’s wedding oaths, whose remarkable even-weightedness Chaucer sets up as if it were to be the story’s major theme. Thus the husband’s decisiveness and control, in the sources almost a matter of course and no object for discussion, becomes in the Franklin’s Tale a sign of contradiction, a strong sixth reason to doubt any simple idealization of the protagonists. If Chaucer is not quite deciding the case in advance against his leading couple, he is certainly giving would-be prosecutors much to work with. The investigation that follows of this chapter’s proper matter, the tale’s treatment of oaths, will both strengthen and be strengthened by that more general readerly suspicion of Dorigen and Arveragus.

Episode 1: The Wedding Oaths, Swearing, and Law No one, if he professes with caution, promises that he will henceforth transgress in nothing, that is, that he will no longer sin. —Bernard of Clairvaux11

The trouble begins earlier than is usually recognized, in the midst of those very wedding promises that the protagonists’ supporters often take as their finest moment.12 The ambiguity of the key term pacience in that discussion is a useful clue to the problem. Here are the lines leading up to its first appearance: For o thyng, sires, saufly dar I seye, That freendes everych oother moot obeye, If they wol longe holden compaignye. Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye. Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love anon Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon! Love is a thyng as any spirit free.

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Womman, of kynde, desiren libertee, And nat to been constreyned as a thral; And so doon men, if I sooth seyen shal. Looke who that is moost pacient in love, He is at his avantage al above. (761–72) So far this does not seem particularly complicated: a person who is pacient must be one who refuses to grab for mastery, but shares power. It is not the most common modern meaning of the word (it is closer to the etymological associations with passion, in the sense of receiving action, and with passive), but it seems to have been in frequent use in the fourteenth century.13 It fits perfectly with the standard understanding of this long passage on the promises: the poem is, it seems, commending the equality of status they wisely enjoin on Dorigen and Arveragus. Something changes, however, in the lines that follow: Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn, For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn, Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne. For every word men may nat chide or pleyne. Lerneth to suffre, or elles, so moot I goon, Ye shul it lerne, wher so ye wol or noon; For in this world, certein, ther no wight is That he ne dooth or seith somtyme amys. Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun, Wyn, wo, or chaungynge of complexioun Causeth ful ofte to doon amys or speken. On every wrong a man may nat be wreken. (773– 84) The pacience commended here shades over into something closer to our modern meaning: forbearance, as against wrongdoers or annoyances. It is the virtue that allows one to get past injuries done to oneself without insisting on being wreken, on taking revenge. It certainly need not be opposed to the idea of sharing power, but the two are separable: it is possible to conceive of a vindictive egalitarian or an indulgent monarch.

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The shift is notable because of the way the second meaning is applied: the poem recommends pacience, in lines 779– 84, as a response to the inconstancy of human life. Given that we are always internally or externally tripped up in our best efforts — given that no one escapes doing amys—therefore the need of this forbearance. The image (a somewhat optimistic one) is of regularity and interruption: goodness of will, of intention, and even of action, comes across as a general rule unfortunately punctuated by irregularities of circumstance that “cause” one to go astray. It is a type of image that recurs often in the Franklin’s and Physician’s tales; so often, indeed, that it will be helpful to reserve a word to refer to it. As noted in the preface and introduction, I will call any regularity or rule — any formal pattern that claims to guide, or appears in, the behavior of material realities — a law, using italics when necessary to distinguish that general concept from the more usual (and narrower) meanings of the word. Thus the laws enforced by the courts make up a particular subclass of law; the measurable physical regularities that we now call “laws of nature” constitute another; an intention to do good in all circumstances would be a law (though one that would demand a good deal of interpretation); conditional resolutions, too, like Dorigen’s promise to “love” Aurelius, are laws. Obviously classification with such a broad category will mask a great many particular differences, but abstractions, as well as particularizations, have their uses; I ask the reader to play along for the moment to see what sort of fruit this one can bear.14 In the meanwhile there is more to learn about pacience in Chaucer’s passage. He opposes it, for example, not just to taking revenge but to rigour (775). What sort of rigor opposes moral forbearance? Must it not be some kind of moral rigor — that is, some expectation that humans will behave perfectly, without the amoral or immoral blips that succeeding lines detail? The reigning image is again one of a law, a regularity, that we might (in some moral fantasy) wish would be perfectly fulfilled, but that in fact never is. It follows that the patience counseled is just the opposite: a rejection of that way of understanding law in favor of a more nuanced, and less perfectionistic, set of expectations. From a “patient” point of view, then, the moral fantasy of a strict and absolute fulfillment of law, however desirable it might first sound, is a dangerous one, and maintaining it is not only fallacious but actively harmful.15

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In the tale that follows, a tale largely about oaths — the making of oaths, the keeping of oaths, the interpretation of oaths, the releasing of oaths —it is hard not to apply these initial reflections on law in general to oaths in particular. “On every wrong a man may not be wreken” (784) doubtless applies to all the general wrongs that one person might do to another; but surely here it applies especially to wrongs against oaths. And similarly with the remark that “for every word men may not chide or pleyne”: readers coming fresh from the Wife of Bath’s Prologue will think of the barbed words she exchanges with her first three husbands, and hear here an old counselor’s advice about letting a few such darts go by unanswered in order to maintain a happy marriage. But in the context of a story about oaths, is not this line also a counsel against the legal literalism that would bind a swearer to every jot and tittle, “every word” of a previous promise? Third, and most especially, the warning that everyone “seith somtyme amys” means more here than it would elsewhere. Dorigen “says amiss” in a garden one day, in a very particular way that does not involve a barbed tongue but an incautious one. Given that context, the advice implied in line 780 perhaps has less to do with forbearance of wrongs in general than with a forgiving understanding of what an oath is and how to handle it: one cannot hold the swearer bound to every word that crosses her or his lips. The painful irony, of course, is that in this tale the most effective binder of the most errant oath will be not the lusty squire who receives it, but Dorigen herself, with the full support of her husband — just the people, in other words, whom one would expect to be least interested in understanding and enforcing the oath as an inescapable and machinelike law. In the end, Aurelius’s plea for “payment” (1311– 38) will be almost superfluous; Dorigen not only offers no resistance to his shifty arguments, but does not even go to verify for herself that the rokkes are indeed aweye (whereas her ancestors in both Boccaccio’s versions do make the parallel investigation). Very little persuasion is necessary to compel a person who understands oaths the way Dorigen does. We have, it will be noted, heard this song before. It is sung by the Clerk’s Tale, whose lead character begins by swearing a wedding oath stronger than the one her husband has proposed, implies by several later promises a faultless control over her own psyche, and spends nearly the whole tale in an unsuccessful quest to fulfill various laws with perfect

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rigor. Indeed the contrast between the Clerk’s and the Man of Law’s tales, described near the end of chapter 1 in terms of the lead characters’ different mixtures of passivity and activity, could as easily be described in terms of their different relationships to law: rigorous and mechanical fulfillment on Griselda’s side, something far more supple on Custance’s.16 Dorigen’s strongest exhibition of moral rigorism comes in the compleynt near the tale’s end, but important foretastes appear here before the story has properly begun. Consider a few more lines that reflect further on the wedding promises: After the tyme moste be temperaunce To every wight that kan on governaunce. And therfore hath this wise, worthy knyght, To lyve in ese, suffrance hire bihight, And she to him ful wisly gan to swere That nevere sholde ther be defaute in here. (785– 90) First of all, this recommendation of temperaunce, like the earlier passages, can be interpreted in two ways: as a general plea for the forbearance necessary in all human relationships; but also more particularly, as a plea for a moderate, sensible, context-observant understanding of the oaths and other laws that make up the mechanism of our governaunce. Such laws must be understood, and sometimes meliorated, with attention to context (after the tyme). Interpreters who subscribe to this sort of prudential thinking will be able to take some oaths quite seriously while discounting others — surely including those made off the cuff, in violation of an earlier and more serious promise, by persons who think the fulfillment of their conditions is impossible. Thus this counsel is no less critical than the preceding ones of the protagonists whose tale it introduces, whose interpretation of at least one sort of oath is drastically short on temperaunce. Then, immediately after that last reminder that lapsus linguae is the order of the day and that therefore patience and temperance are indispensable, the poem delivers the explicit consequence for the story of all its moral advice to date: Arveragus’s almost complete renunciation of

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maistrye earns him the appellations wise and worthy; and Dorigen, for her part, “ful wisly” swears “that nevere sholde ther be defaute in here.” What? Given the understanding uncovered so far, this line should arrive with a considerable jolt. Something is seriously askew when, at the end of thirty strong lines on the inevitability of human failure, the poet can return to his first activity of praising our heroine—for swearing “ful wisly” that she will never default from the relevant law. There are, of course, two live senses of the word “wisly” in the fourteenth century, but each of them rather thoroughly fails to describe the situation at hand. The word’s primary meaning is “certainly, with certainty”: and that is exactly what the preceding thirty lines have told us is out of human reach, at least when the question is one of flawless adherence to a rule. Alternately — especially given the “wise, worthy knyght” two lines earlier and the praise of the marriage vows as “an humble, wys accord” two lines later—it is easy to hear in line 789 praise for Dorigen’s swearing as done “quite wisely”; but given the moral lessons just delivered, we cannot take that assessment seriously either. This second-order oath of Dorigen’s, in fact, dramatically violates the apparent counsel of Bernard of Clairvaux in this section’s epigraph: it promises never to break a preceding promise. How wise, or certain, could it be? Thus we have, in precisely the passage often read as a high encomium on the leading couple’s wedding promises, a gentle but insistent attack on their understanding of swearing itself and perhaps even of law in general. If it is at first hard to perceive, that may be credited to the subtlety with which Chaucer mounts the attack, allowing us to subscribe, at least until the contradiction of those closing lines, to the mind-set of his protagonists. We can get a clearer idea of that mind-set and its discontents by leaping now to the other end of the tale, where oaths held with rigour are having their inevitable effect.

Episode 2: Escape from Freedom: Dorigen’s Compleynt The long episode in which Dorigen compares her sad fate to that of nearly two dozen exempla has often been pilloried as doing little for the tale beyond straining the audience’s own patience.17 Under the reading developing here, however, it does have a substantial contribution to

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make: the particulars of Dorigen’s above-mentioned inability to see the full slate of options available to her can teach the reader quite a lot about how Chaucer wants his protagonists, together with their view of law, to be received. One convenient way to gain access to that teaching is by briefly considering a thoughtful response to the tale in recent criticism. In the course of his extensive study of a large body of late-medieval literature that organizes itself around oaths and swearing, Richard Firth Green writes as follows: “If we are in any doubt as to whether the private law of trouthe or the public law of ecclesiastical marriage is the more potent shaping force behind the plot of ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’ we might ask ourselves which course of action is represented as the more painful for Dorigen and her husband — keeping her oath to Aurelius or breaking it.”18 He means, of course, that breaking the oath is represented as more painful, even though the alternative is adultery; and therefore that we should conclude that “public law,” which would have allowed the invalid rash oath to be broken but would not have condoned the proposed adultery, is subordinate to the “private law of trouthe” in this tale. The argument is forceful if we think of Dorigen as caught in a tragic dilemma between keeping and breaking the oath: in that case it will be hard to deny that the tale selects the former option, then apparently approves the choice by Aurelius’s unexpected forgiveness of the illicit “debt” once the debtors show themselves ready to pay. The trouble, however, is that in her compleynt Dorigen is not deciding between keeping her oath and breaking it. She is deciding between keeping her oath and killing herself. “Dorigen and her husband,” on the whole, never have (or never take) the chance to deliberate about which of Green’s two options is more painful. They come closest after Arveragus’s return, since he does seem to imagine that keeping and breaking the oath are the two possibilities before them (lines 1474 –78); and perhaps if we suppose that he commandeers their collective process of thought as successfully as he takes charge of the practicalities of their action, we could concede that for a brief moment “they” do face the dilemma Green describes. But at least while she is on her own — and therefore through most of this section of the poem — Dorigen sees things quite differently.19 The complaint’s opening lines lay out her understanding:

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“Allas,” quod she, “on thee, Fortune, I pleyne, That unwar wrapped hast me in thy cheyne, Fro which t’escape woot I no socour, Save oonly deeth or elles dishonour; Oon of thise two bihoveth me to chese.” (1355–59) Ambiguity is possible in the word dishonour: Dorigen might intend either the dishonour of fulfilling her rash oath by committing adultery with Aurelius or that of breaking it. But whatever uncertainty persists at this point will not survive the remainder of the complaint, which returns over and over again (at lines 1363 – 66, 1395 – 98, 1405 – 8, and 1420 – 23, among others) to the horror of choosing between an illicit sexual liaison and death — whereas the notion of simply refusing Aurelius’s claim scarcely or never crosses Dorigen’s mind. Her flippant oath, this most unreal and impotent of all laws, she thinks of as an absolutely stable and unquestionable feature of the universe; better, even, to say that it shapes the space within which she thinks rather than appearing as an object of thought inhabiting that space. She does not seem to see it at all.20 Further evidence for this blindness of Dorigen’s comes from the glaring incongruity between her actual situation and the exempla with which she fills most of her complaint. The problem is not only with the rapid-fire cases near the end of the list, whose inadequacy to the moment has often been remarked, but also with the lengthier ones like the stories of Lucretia and the daughters of Phildon. The majority of these stories have to do with suicide as a reaction to threatened or actual rape, not adultery.21 Dorigen is in like straits only to an observer who believes that she has only two options, that suicide before the fact is her only escape from an otherwise forced sexual liaison. She is, unfortunately, one such observer, apparently understanding herself to be powerless in the face of a law that should have no force whatever. To an audience already on the alert against overly rigorous responses to law, her placing herself in such company is faintly ridiculous: the reader might justly react by asking one more time why she does not simply refuse, an option that she has but that many of the women on her list did not. Thus here a second time Dorigen’s compleynt demonstrates the extremity and character of

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her rigorism: both her explicit comparison of herself to rape victims and her tacit blindness to the possibility of refusal indicate that she experiences her oath as “just the way things are,” as a kind of mechanical force, akin to a gust of wind or a shove, acting on her, to all practical purposes, physically. Which is to say, not acting as what it is, a force that comes to bear only through her intellect and will, that therefore leaves her a choice about whether to comply. She is thus oddly like Griselda, claiming (and with no greater accuracy) to have bound her will to the direction of something external, though here the external thing is a law rather than another person’s will. It is remarkable how often in these tales of strong-willed characters the primary use made of the will is to refuse freedom — to escape from it into some form of less-than-obligatory slavery. It seems to me that much of the Franklin’s Tale invites the reader to notice how unnecessary Dorigen’s loss of freedom is. But even if we were to grant for the moment, against that “coaching” by the tale, that she really is threatened with a sort of rape by duress, a dilemma between yielding to Aurelius and killing herself, there is another way in which her freedom goes astray: even between the two dismal options that she has allowed herself, Dorigen makes, at least according to a text well known and authoritative in Chaucer’s time, the wrong choice. The book is Augustine’s City of God, which, while seemingly renowned throughout most of the Middle Ages, was enjoying an especially vigorous renaissance of interest in the fourteenth century—a renaissance that emphasized, among other things, the desirability of reading the book entire. Though it is by no means certain whether Chaucer followed that counsel, there are reasons to think it likely that he was familiar with at least the section most immediately relevant to Dorigen’s situation. Interest in the City of God, for one thing, flourished above all in the “humanist” circles that attracted his sustained attention: Petrarch was a great champion of the book, and Nicholas Trevet, author of the main source for the Man of Law’s Tale, wrote the first of the extensive commentaries on it.22 Chaucer himself, moreover, makes a direct reference to the treatise, and at a point that indicates, if the reference is legitimate, that he drew on the City of God in order to think about the very concerns that trouble Dorigen: it comes at the beginning of Chaucer’s retelling, in the Legend of Good Women, of the story of Lucretia, who of course responded to

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rape by suicide and whose story is the fifth of the exempla Dorigen adduces as evidence that she should do likewise.23 Augustine’s discussion of Lucretia, suicide, and rape would be hard to miss, in any case, even if one had only a passing knowledge of the City of God: it comes in the center (chs. 16 – 28) of the first of the treatise’s twenty-two “books” and makes up over a third of that book’s length. And his judgment on the central question at issue would be all but impossible to forget, as anyone who has read the long discussion can attest. Again and again, over the course of thirteen chapters, he raises the matter of whether suicide might be a permissible response to rape, whether actual or threatened; and again and again he answers with a clear and resounding “no.” On Augustine’s view suicide is entirely off limits, barring the possibility, difficult and dangerous to discern and in any event irrelevant to Dorigen’s story, of a direct command from God. No one should look at Lucretia’s case and conclude otherwise; the Christian women violated during the sack of Rome who did not respond with suicide (for it is their plight that gets Augustine’s discussion started) have chosen a better path. Even without a resolution to the debate over whether Chaucer knew this text directly, there is good reason to keep it in mind while reading Dorigen’s compleynt. For one thing, other medieval authorities, notwithstanding their capacity for disagreement with Augustine on various other questions, very largely followed him on this one.24 Moreover, as just hinted, Augustine’s discussion is directed to women in situations very much like Dorigen’s — or at least like the one that Dorigen imagines for herself: that of looking back on a long line of previous victims (and women in danger of becoming victims) who have committed suicide and gained posthumous praise for doing so. The relationship between Augustine’s text and Chaucer’s seems, in fact, almost too close for coincidence; and in fact it likely is, as the chances are good that both were created, at least in part, in response to the same text. About the Franklin’s Tale’s debt to Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, there is, of course, no doubt; and it is probable that Augustine’s discussion was written with the same exemplum-heavy antifeminist treatise in mind, but with a far less ambiguous intention to criticize it. He had gone after Jerome’s text once before, when his dismay over some of its sentiments about women and marriage prompted him to write, roughly ten years before the City of

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God, a short tract “On the Conjugal Good.”25 Some of the remarks about suicide in the later work also sound as if they may have been arranged against Adversus Jovinianum, and if so the attack extends not only to Jerome’s conclusion but to his method: speaking to the related question of those tempted to kill themselves to avoid capture by enemies, Augustine specifies that case studies from the past are of little use in determining the morality of such a move, because “we are not now asking whether it has been done, but whether it should have been done. Naturally sound reason is to be preferred even to exempla.” That is apparently still more true when, as in Adversus Jovinianum (and therefore also in Dorigen’s complaint), the exempla are pagan ones: Augustine concludes by remarking that “whatever exempla the peoples who do not know God adduce against [this argument], it is clear that [suicide] is not permitted to the worshipers of the one true God.”26 Any medieval reader of the Franklin’s Tale who encountered Augustine’s text, then, would find not only Dorigen’s decision but her entire approach to moral reasoning condemned by one of the foremost authorities of the age, who in the process also explicitly considers and lengthily rejects one of the very precedents she has used to plead her case. A conflict of that sort should surely raise doubts about how Dorigen was received in Chaucer’s time, or how she was meant to be received.27 Dorigen’s meditations come to an end, in any event, with the sudden homecoming of the “worthy knight” Arveragus (1460). But his return does not change the moral landscape as drastically as a reader might first think. True, there is suddenly no more talk of suicide. True, his forceful edicts about the need to keep trouthe (1474, 1476 –79) are clearly deployed against the possibility of simply refusing the oath, thus indicating beyond a doubt that that possibility has at least occurred to him. And yet it would be wrong to say that Arveragus’s arrival begins a second struggle with a new set of options, that of keeping the oath and that of simply breaking it. The speed, force, and frequency with which he delivers his “decision” all speak of something other than struggle. While Arveragus does at least imagine the possibility of refusing the oath, he deliberates over it scarcely more than did his wife: his reaction looks less like the making of a choice than like the passing along of the immediate consequence of a wholly unquestioned code of ethics according to which an oath, once sworn, trumps all challengers.

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The question is why. One answer is R. F. Green’s: Arveragus’s response is automatic because this is a tale, one among many such, in which a private chivalrous culture of oath-keeping is posited as supreme. But the presence within the tale itself of so many grounds for suspicion of Dorigen and Arveragus in general, and of their thinking about Dorigen’s oath in particular, suggests a different answer: that the supremacy of oath-keeping is indeed “posited,” but only by the story’s protagonists, whose fanatical dedication to keeping every oath at any cost — whose rigorism, in other words — Chaucer is interested in questioning. It would be one thing if he had left us a pair of protagonists who confront a foolish and destructive oath and decide, after deliberation and with some expression of regret about the harm that will result, to keep it; it would then be easy to agree with Green’s idea that the Franklin’s Tale elevates oath-keeping to the greatest good, so that the harm done by it seems less than the evil of oath-breaking. But in the tale as we have it— where there is no deliberation, little regret, and almost no decision, even on the part of Arveragus and surely on that of Dorigen—it is difficult to believe that Chaucer means to elevate the principle behind all this insanity, this machinelike substitute for thought that blinds the protagonists to some options and leads them to choose poorly among those that remain, at all. It is rather more plausible that he means not to elevate, but to satirize; that he holds, in fact, that one of the most important things to know about oaths and other laws is the one thing Dorigen and Arveragus apparently fail to know — that there are times when at least some of them should be broken. We have by now seen several kinds of evidence that support such an ironic reading of the Franklin’s Tale: well-established arguments skeptical of the protagonists’ general status as moral paragons; the presence of a nuanced polemic against rigour in the opening passages; the simple strange fact of Dorigen’s inability to imagine, and Arveragus’s unreadiness to take seriously, anything but a rigorist interpretation of the shakiest and most destructive of oaths; and the direct contradiction of Dorigen’s conclusion and way of reasoning by one of the era’s most authoritative texts. For one final piece of evidence, we must move outside the tale altogether, in order to consider its several points of resonance with its probable neighbor. These will suggest that the Physician’s Tale of Apius and Virginia, despite its polar opposition in genre and mood, is

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very much concerned with offering a more concentrated dose of the same medicine that the Franklin’s Tale has just administered.28

Episode 3: The Physician’s Tale and the Franklin’s It takes the Physician’s Tale just about two hundred lines to reach the point of despair that the Franklin’s arrives at in roughly three times as much space. But it is, at least when seen through a certain abstracting filter, the same point. Critics have long since observed that each tale arrives near its end at an impasse involving a legitimate relationship between a man and a woman, and a second man’s bid to interrupt the relationship in order to have his way with the woman.29 There are, obviously, great differences in the details. The stable relationship varies from husband-wife to father-daughter. The amount and kind of power wielded by the interloper differs: Aurelius appears to hold over Dorigen only the power of words and thoughts, whereas the Roman judge Apius presumably could deploy a certain amount of material force to achieve his ends. And the way the two stories finish is drastically different, featuring stark horror in one case but a fantastic series of quitclaims, gratuitously released debts, in the other. Those differences are real, but there are also more and deeper connections between the tales than usually recognized; the device of classifying diverse kinds of law together can bring them to light. First of all, in each tale the interloper advances his illegitimate suit in approximately the same way. Apius has no real claim to Virginia, merely a will to “possess” her; but he invents a story which, if true, would enlist the legitimate support of the law to put her under his guardianship. Aurelius, in suggesting (1331– 32) that he is advancing his illegitimate “suit” out of concern for Dorigen’s honor rather than for any self-interested motive, does something not very different: while the law to which he appeals is only a dismissive word spoken in jest, not a complex system of statutes as in Apius’s case, nonetheless each man means to use his respective law in exactly the same way, as a stable regularity that governs wills and simply must (or so some think) be obeyed. Each tries, essentially, to hide his naked will behind a screen of law, aiming to substitute the latter for his will in a way oddly reminiscent of Dorigen’s and Griselda’s attempts to

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refuse freedom. The difference, of course, is that the two men pursue only the appearance of having their hands tied, not the reality—rather as Walter does in pretending that he is “constrained” into his various cruelties by his people (Clerk’s Tale, 800; cf. 479– 90, 624 – 41). In all these cases the motive is obvious: if the external force each man invokes can be blamed for the evil to follow, no one need observe that the real impetus is coming from a single person exerting his will to get what he wants.30 A second overlooked parallel between the two tales is even more to our purpose. Virginius, the father of the Physician’s Tale’s hapless heroine, suffers from an oddly familiar sort of blindness: he fails to understand his situation well enough to perceive the possibility of resisting the unjust law that afflicts him. Like Dorigen, he seems scarcely able to see out of a moral universe entirely shaped by that law. The result is distressingly similar: like Dorigen, he thinks himself trapped in a strict dilemma between death and sexual shame. And even the situation of the audience is similar to that in the Franklin’s Tale, for Chaucer has again larded the story with subtle indications that make the overlooked third option, a simple refusal of the bogus law, painfully obvious to the attentive. The quickest way to see those indications is by comparison with the story’s primary source in Jean de Meun’s part of the Romance of the Rose.31 Chaucer’s most spectacular innovation concerns the manner of Virginia’s death. In Jean de Meun’s poem, the execution takes place suddenly, immediately after the judge’s sentence, when seizure of Virginia is imminent: Juija par hastive sentence Appius que, senz atendance, Fust la pucele au serf rendue. . . . Virginius, Qui bien veit que vers Appius Ne peut pas sa fille defendre, Ainz li couvient par force rendre E son cors livrer a hontage, Si change honte pour domage Par merveilleus apensement, Si Titus Livius ne ment;

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Car il, par amour, senz haïne, A sa bele fille Virgine Tantost a la teste copee E puis au juige presentee, Devant touz, en plein consistoire. (RR, lines 5621–23, 5627–39) [Appius judged with hasty sentence that the girl should be rendered to the servant without delay. . . . Virginius, who saw well that he could not defend his daughter against Appius, but would have to give her up by force and deliver her body to shame, therefore exchanged shame for injury by an astonishing calculation, if Livy does not lie; for he, for love, without hate, at once cut off the head from his beautiful daughter Virginia and then presented it to the judge, in front of everyone, in open court.]32 Virginius’s violence is the last-ditch effort of a man desperate to save his daughter from a fate that strikes him as still worse. The poem’s remark that he beheads his daughter “for love, without hate,” suggests that the spectacle is one of pure tragedy, commended to our attention for its shocking display, and more likely to arouse a kind of awed (cf. merveilleus) horror at the whole occurrence than a moral condemnation of the actor.33 Chaucer stays with de Meun in many particulars. Apius still renders his judgment “hastily” so as to keep Virginius from speaking in his own defense (191– 98; RR, 5617– 20). And some of the narration that follows is translated closely from de Meun: his declaration that Virginius “li [Virginia] couvient par force rendre / E son cors livrer a hontage,” for example, appears as “Moste by force his deere doghter yiven / Unto the juge, in lecherie to lyven” (205 – 6; RR, 5630 – 31). But there are differences as well. In Chaucer’s telling, Virginia is not present in court when Apius pronounces his verdict; and the moment it is handed down Chaucer suddenly takes the story in a different direction altogether. Instead of making a wondrous decision to exchange shame for the swift stroke of a sword, Chaucer’s Virginius reacts in almost leisurely fashion: “He gooth hym hoom, and sette him in his halle, / And leet anon his

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deere doghter call” (207– 8). It is, of course, Virginia’s absence from the courtroom that allows this more deliberative approach; likely Chaucer has kept her away for just that reason. Virginius, alas, does not profit from the opportunity. That is, his conversation with his daughter betrays no hint of wavering. While we are told that he feels pitee (211), the information comes with a grim disclaimer: “Al wolde he from his purpos nat convert” (212). Indeed the emphasis on the fixity of Virginius’s purpos is rather reminiscent of Walter’s mind-set in the Clerk’s Tale; and here as there the immovable object is also described with the word wyl (250).34 It is, moreover, named yet a third way within the same forty-line interval, by Virginius himself, who at line 244 calls his daughter’s imminent execution “my sentence”—thus taking responsibility for the deed with a word that suggests careful deliberation. As for his daughter’s opinions on the matter at hand, Virginius shows no inclination to ask; when she begs for mercy, his reply is as firmly negative as may be: “No, certes, deere doghter myn” (235 – 36). And though she requests “a litel space” in which to “compleyne” her death, the tale does not tell us that it was granted. He gives her time enough to fall down in a faint, then to get up again, by which point (and without any further mention of mourning or compleynt) she is ready to assent to Virginius’s choice of dommage over honte: “Yif me my deeth, er that I have a shame” (249). He obliges immediately, marking with a sword stroke the end of a forty-eight-line invention on Chaucer’s part—after which the tale returns for a while to extremely close translation of Jean de Meun. These changes invite, or rather compel, the audience to begin questioning. A parent who kills his daughter in hot blood to save her from an immediate threat is one thing; a parent who walks home to discuss with the daughter the (terribly piteous!) fact that he intends to behead her is quite another. If nothing else, we will begin to wonder: given the time he had for deliberation, could not Virginius have thought of a better way out of the situation? Why is there, as he tells Virginia, no “grace” or “remedye”? What about the traditional expedients of raising a loyal army to fight off the wicked judge; or calling him to a duel; or fleeing into Egypt? As with the Franklin’s Tale, one is tempted to reply that such things are not considered here because Chaucer is following an existing story from which he does not wish to depart. But here as there, his alter-

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ations to the story have strained the logic of the original. It made some kind of horrible sense when Jean de Meun’s Virginius slaughtered his daughter; it makes much less sense when Chaucer’s character follows suit. We hearers are invited to note the lack of sense and to begin asking these story-bending questions.35 The result is something like what chapter 1 notes of the Clerk’s Tale: Chaucer turns an unlovely story on its head, using small changes to make the original so much more unpleasant, the characters so much less appealing, that the one once available for some kind of admiration (there Petrarch’s Griselda; here, though with a more qualified kind of admiration that includes a strong dose of pity, Jean de Meun’s Virginius) can no longer fill that role. And the similarity of the Franklin’s to the Physician’s Tale is even closer, since in both cases the central problem is a faulty law, and in both cases the audience finds itself coached toward an indignant questioning not so much of the law itself (since its injustice, in each tale, is clear for all to see) as of the characters’ failure to question it. In each case, the protagonists wring their hearts over a tragic choice between death and shame while the audience looks on wondering why the fools do not simply break, ignore, the worthless law without which they face no such choice.36 This understanding of Chaucer’s most dramatic changes to the story also makes sense of a host of smaller ones. The tale’s denouement has changed slightly, for example. When Apius, enraged at the sight of Virginia’s head and thus the defeat of his foul desires, orders Virginius seized and killed, Jean de Meun tells us the sequel in a quick couplet: “Mais ne l’ocist ne ne pendi, / Car li peuples le defendi” [But he (Appius) neither killed him nor did he (Virginius) hang, for the people defended him] (5643– 44). In Chaucer’s version we get a bit more detail: And whan the juge it saugh, as seith the storie, He bad to take hym and anhange hym faste; But right anon a thousand peple in thraste, To save the knyght, for routhe and for pitee, For knowen was the false iniquitee. The peple anon had suspect in this thyng, By manere of the cherles chalangyng, That it was by the assent of Apius; They wisten wel that he was lecherus. (258 –66)

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Chaucer’s Apius, it seems, has been an unpopular judge all along. And this is not the only way in which Chaucer weakens Apius’s position and strengthens Virginius’s. He invents very little characterization for the “knight”— about four lines, compared to the sixty or so given to his daughter — but one of the four tells us that Virginius is “strong of freendes” (4). In fact, the family is so “strong of freendes” (again at 135) that Apius knows that he cannot take the daughter “by no force” (133); and no meede will work either, in part because of Virginia’s great personal goodness. By contrast, when Jean de Meun likewise mentions (RR, 5596 – 99) Appius’s inablity to bend Virginia to his will, her immunity seems purely from the latter cause; there is no mention of the family’s strong connections. Still more striking is Chaucer’s omission of a couple of lines already quoted from the courtroom scene, telling us that Virginius “bien veit que vers Appius / Ne peut pas sa fille defendre” (5628 – 29): apparently the suggestion of Virginius’s relative impotence did not suit Chaucer’s purposes. Thus by the tale’s end, with just a few small changes out of the main spotlight, Chaucer has managed virtually to reverse the power relations between his male leads. The pressure on the audience to ask why Virginius does not resist Apius’s edict grows accordingly. A few more lines from the trial provide the strongest evidence for this view. Jean de Meun tells us that immediately before Appius’s judgment, Virginius “touz estait prez de respondre / Pour ses aversaires confondre” [was entirely ready to respond in order to confound his adversaries] (5619– 20). Chaucer adds something: the judge’s hasty interruption comes just before Virginius his tale tolde, And wolde have preeved it as sholde a knyght, And eek by witnessyng of many a wight, That al was fals that seyde his adversarie. (192– 95) Given that line 194 tells us of Virginius’s readiness to call on witnesses, line 193 surely means (as the Riverside Chaucer also suggests) that he is ready to “respond” not just with words but with sword — to do combat, in fine romance style, in defense of the truth of what he says. Once again Chaucer strengthens the character; one gets the impression that

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Virginius, if he had wished, could have made short work of his accuser (the “cherl” Claudius) and perhaps of the unpopular and relatively weak judge Apius too. If a throng of angry commoners can later “thrust in” (260) and physically prevent Apius’s commands, could not this wellconnected and apparently combat-ready “knight” have done as much? The parallel with, and intensification of, the leading couple’s misjudgment at the end of the Franklin’s Tale is striking. Virginius has as much material power as Chaucer can give him, and every opportunity to buck the judge’s order; but the instant the edict is spoken any hint of resistance crumbles, for our noble knight seems to have no inkling of the possibilities open to him. He is trapped, just as Dorigen and Arveragus are trapped, by the mistaken notion that this idea, this invented thing, shapes the world in a way that cannot be questioned or altered, but can only be followed in machinelike fashion.37 Such an understanding also helps explain one final oddity of the Physician’s Tale, namely its appeal to Jephtha, a figure from the book of Judges similarly faced with the prospect of killing his daughter: the one of whom Virginia pleads with her father that he at least “yaf his doghter grace / For to compleyne, er he hir slow, allas!” (240 – 41). The allusion has little direct effect on the tale’s action, staying Virginius’s hand only long enough for a couple of swoons, but it is sure to be a purposeful insertion: it does not appear in any other known version of the story, yet Chaucer gives it five piteous lines at the tale’s tensest moment. Moreover, it is a sudden and solitary mention of the Hebrew scriptures in a tale otherwise entirely “pagan” in setting. The critics have, accordingly, sprung into action to explain what it is doing there.38 Jephtha is, of course, one of the twelve “judges” of Israel who give the book in which he appears its name. Despite the label (which holds in the Vulgate’s Liber Judicum as well) their function is in general military and executive rather than judicial. Our concern is with what is perhaps the central incident in the chapter-and-a-half that Jephtha’s life receives. Preparing for battle with the Ammonites, Jephtha “swore a vow to the Lord, saying, if you give over the children of Ammon into my hands, whosoever shall first come out of the doors of my house and shall run to me as I return with peace from the children of Ammon, him I will offer as a burnt offering to the Lord” (Judges 11:30 – 31).39 After a successful battle Jephtha returns home to a joyous reception from his only

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child, a daughter, who comes dancing out of the gates to meet him. Seeing her and remembering his vow, Jephtha “tore his garments and said, ‘Woe, my daughter, you have deceived me, and you yourself have been deceived, for I opened my mouth to the Lord and I will not be able to do something else.’ To whom she responded, ‘My father, if you opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me whatsoever you promised, since supremacy and victory over your enemies have been granted to you’ ” (11:35–36).40 She goes on to make the request that Virginia mentions, asking for two months to “bewail [her] virginity” with her companions. He grants it, and at the end of that period she returns and “he did to her as he had vowed” (11:39). Other than what we may infer from the characters’ own words, there is no reflection in the text for or against the morality of Jephtha’s promise or its fulfillment; the story simply concludes by noting the institution of a custom of “lament[ing] the daughter of Jephte” among Israelite women (11:40). It is a powerful, and prima facie a horrifying, story, much discussed in the exegetical traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. It would be no surprise if it took powerful hold of Chaucer’s mind as well. And indeed, there is some reason to think that he had the story in mind not only in writing the climax of the Physician’s Tale but all through the poem: that hypothesis would explain some otherwise puzzling innovations in his version of events. Virginius’s calling his daughter the “endere of my lyf ” and “my laste wo” (218, 221), for example, surely comes across as in itself catastrophically unfair—but it follows a certain kind of logic if it is inspired by Jephtha’s equally unfair complaint that his daughter has “deceived” (or perhaps better “beguiled”) him. And there may be even be a Vulgate-inspired moment quite far from these lines, when at the tale’s beginning Chaucer introduces the information, absent from Jean de Meun, that Virginia is an only child. Even his way of phrasing the fact sounds rather like the book of Judges: “No children hadde he mo in al his lyf,” writes Chaucer (line 6); “Non enim habebat alios liberos” is the Vulgate’s line (Judges 11:34).41 There is little doubt that for modern readers the effect of the allusion to Jephtha is a heightening of the horror felt at the Roman events on stage. If the Physician’s Tale serves as a reductio ad absurdum of the end of the Franklin’s Tale, so the reference to Jephtha’s vow is a further reductio of the Physician’s: it is as if Chaucer, in the hope of getting

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through to some rather deaf listeners, resorts to more and more extreme versions of a basic point. Have you not seen that the ostensibly tragic dilemma in the Franklin’s Tale would not exist if it were not for the main characters’ diseased commitment to legal rigorism? Very well, here is the Physician’s Tale, in which the enforcing bit of law is not only legally void but also entirely evil, created by a character for whom it is a challenge to discover the least scrap of sympathy. Do you not see that in this tale too the enforcing law would have no power but for the mistaken reaction of the protagonists? Very well, at the high point of the story I introduce reference to a biblical figure whose similar inability to conceive of disobedience to a man-made law— his own ill-conceived vow — yields the ghastliest of results. Of course, these connections will only serve as a disparagement (or a reductio) of Virginius’s actions if we believe that a fourteenth-century audience would have reacted to Jephtha’s story with something like the horror and condemnation that modern readers are likely to feel. But there is good evidence that this is the case, at least among one influential segment of the population. Christian theologians throughout the Middle Ages used Jephtha as an exemplum when they considered questions about vows; their conclusion nearly always agreed with that attributed by Thomas Aquinas to Jerome: “In vowing he was foolish, because he had no discernment, and in repaying he was wicked.” The vow would fail, in most medieval eyes, to meet at least one, and likely two, of the three criteria noted near the beginning of this chapter. Most obviously, it is ill considered in a way that surely would count as a lack of judicium: it is a “rash oath” in the folklorist’s most proper sense, containing a variable in its apodosis (“whoever shall first come out I will offer”) and thus committing the swearer to do something not yet fully specified. Some such complaint is likely what Aquinas means by noting that a lack of “discernment” (discretio) makes the vow foolish: either that it was made without careful thought in general, or more specifically that it fails to discriminate (discernere, the root of discretio) between one possible exiter-of-the-doors and another.42 Jephtha’s story excited comment so frequently, and the comments appear at first to have such daunting degrees of complexity, that it is worth devoting a few paragraphs to a closer look at his story itself, at the reasons most usually brought forward in condemnation of its protago-

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nist, and at some apparent exceptions to that result. First of all, it would have been easy for medieval readers to conclude that Jephtha’s vow was deficient not only in judicium but in justitia as well. Arguing the reasons sometimes involved exegetes in an ambiguity present just under the story’s surface: it is difficult to determine whether readers should believe that Jephtha meant to sacrifice an animal, as would be expected in a typical folkloric rash-oath story, or whether the intent is rather that he had human sacrifice in mind as at least a possibility all along, and is dismayed only because he did not expect that his daughter would be the victim. The second possibility, discomfiting as it is, gains support from the Vulgate’s use of masculine relative pronouns, which ordinarily refer to men and to humans of unspecified gender but not to animals, for Jephtha’s prospective victim.43 Any openness to the possibility of human sacrifice would likely have disqualified the vow from participation in justitia, as medieval authorities were well unified in the conviction that the God of Israel had declared the practice outside the bounds of righteousness.44 Even without that possibility, though — and thus regardless of how or whether the ambiguity of Jephtha’s intentions was resolved— it seems that many medieval readers would have judged the vow unjust, as they would have known the observation by the Jewish historian Josephus, widely broadcast to the Latin Middle Ages by its inclusion in Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, that the vow risks the possibility that the first thing out the door to greet Jephtha might be an animal unlawful to sacrifice, like a dog. These complaints would, of course, render the vow not only foolish in most high-medieval eyes but void, as void as Dorigen’s flippant “oath” to Aurelius. Hence the judgment that Jephtha went wrong a second time—was impius, in Aquinas’s and Comestor’s word—in fulfilling his vow. That judgment appears not only in Aquinas and many other Latin commentators but even more firmly in such vernacular contexts as Dante’s Paradiso (5.64 – 68) and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (2845– 902), both of which join Thomas in saying explicitly that Jephtha should have recognized the evil he was about to do and broken (or “changed”) his vow. Chaucer’s own likely assent to the same verdict is suggested by a line given to Dame Prudence in the Melibee: “Moreover, I seye that though ye han sworn and bihight to perfourne youre emprise, and natheless ye weyve to perfourne thilke same emprise by juste cause,

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man sholde nat seyn therefore that ye were a liere ne forsworn” (1065). The desire to avoid murdering one’s own daughter would surely strike this speaker as juste cause— surely in the case of Jephtha, and perhaps also, it is fair to think, in the Roman case narrated by the Physician’s Tale. What of the exceptions to the rule that medieval commentators condemned Jephtha? Gower’s treatment in the Confessio amantis, for example (4.1505– 95), speaks neither for nor against Jephtha’s behavior, as far as I can see (and pace Brown, “What Is Chaucer Doing,” 139, which groups it with vernacular condemners Dante and Mannyng). Presumably he maintains neutrality because he does not offer the story as teaching anything about vows or judicium, but as warning virgins against delaying marriage: the vow and the killing merely serve as examples of the kind of unexpected thing that can prevent marriage later for one who spurns it now. Anyone who spends sufficient time with medieval readings of Jephtha’s story will find many such complexities, so that any attempt to summarize across the period requires caution. Still, all my encounters with primary sources have tended to confirm the conclusions drawn by the modern observers referenced in this chapter (notably Hoffman, Brown, Crafton, and Thompson) that while many medieval exegetes sidestepped the problem of Jephtha’s behavior by treating it as an allegory for Christ’s, or everyman’s, sacrifice of his own flesh, or for Christ’s offering-up the church to his Father — nonetheless when they considered the story purely on the literal level, they were all but uniform in their condemnation of both the vow and its fulfillment.45 The fact that such a consensus developed despite several authoritative vouchers in Jephtha’s favor—most notably the statement just before his vow that “the spirit of the Lord came [or was sent] upon him” (Judges 11:29), the fact that he does after all win the battle for which the vow seeks help, and the appearance of his name in a list of heroes of faith at Hebrews 11:32—suggests something about the strength of the revulsion medieval readers felt for the story. For the medieval audience by and large, then, the parallel Chaucer’s allusion creates between Virginius and Jephtha seems to reflect as badly on Virginius as it does for modern eavesdroppers. A final, and somewhat subtler, note is that the parallel appears to reflect rather badly on Virginia as well. Her reaction to her plight is surprising: after a brief querying of the situation she cedes responsibility to her father’s sentence as completely as her father has done to Apius’s, encouraging her father, just

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as Jephtha’s daughter does, to carry through with what he has proposed. She even adds a mild hortatory “oath” of her own: “Dooth with youre child youre wyl, a Goddes name!” (250). The effect of the oath on a hearer familiar with the most common medieval interpretations of Judges 11 is likely to be the reverse of what Virginia intends: instead of placing a good sentiment under a holy seal, it affirms that the speaker is no less woefully estranged from right judgment and sanity (or justitia and judicium) than her father is. She is, after all, calling on God in order to stir her father to a deed whose prototype virtually all God’s most authoritative spokespeople have condemned. The line calls to mind Dorigen’s equally sudden and equally misguided invocation of God when swearing her non-oath to Aurelius; but now—very much in keeping with the one tale’s translation of the other’s elements into more extreme and violent forms — there is no room for the suggestion that the words are spoken “in pleye,” since what is proposed is an immediate action, rather than an (impossible) conditional agreement. Also, of course, the deed itself is still worse than the one that Dorigen’s oath playfully entertains.46 Thus the tale’s portrait of Virginia appears to be, at least at this moment, less unambiguously laudatory than a first reading suggests. Knowledge of medieval receptions of the Jephtha story, moreover, raises the doubts about her in a second way: just as medieval exegetes stressed Jephtha’s own foolishness and impiety, so they sometimes wrote of his daughter — with emphasis on her months of wandering the mountains bewailing her virginity—as a “type” for all foolish virgins.47 Even granting that we cannot be sure that Chaucer had such reactions in mind when writing his poem, still they are worth registering as part of a background of unfavorable interpretation needful to recognize if we are to make accurate guesses about how Chaucer meant his reference to Jephtha’s daughter to strike his listeners’ ears. In the end, it seems, the effect of the reference on a fourteenth-century audience is likely to have been similar to its effect today: a strong repulsion that further undermines the already shaky edifice of the readers’ admiration for the protagonists.

Reprise: Law and Oath in Chaucer How, then, are we to relate to laws? For the complications of the context seem to demand that very general question. Past treatments of oaths in

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Chaucer have sometimes concerned themselves instead with the more specific question of (to put it simply) whether he was for them or against them: the results have been sufficiently intransigent in their mutual contradiction to suggest that we need a different approach.48 Briefly, then, let us return for a still more abstract look at the logic of the Franklin’s Tale, proceeding on the hypothesis that Chaucer is neither for nor against oaths (and other laws) in general, but that he may have some recoverable views on how humans should interact with these inescapable features of their moral landscape. The law to which Dorigen feels bound as the end of her tale nears is a very prototype of the species, stated as a condition and its consequence, an A implying a B: Looke what day that endelong Britayne Ye remoeve alle the rokkes, stoon by stoon, That they ne lette ship ne boot to goon— Thanne wol I love you best of any man. (Franklin’s Tale, 992– 95) The three options Dorigen faces on being told that the impossible protasis has been fulfilled can be expressed in logical terms. She could fulfill the conditional by answering the true protasis A with a true apodosis B — in other words, by committing adultery with Aurelius: a horrible thought to her, but at least she would have done what she takes to be her duty by the law.49 She could refuse to fulfill the conditional, which would retroactively falsify her pledge, such as it was, to Aurelius, since it would mean that A had failed to imply B. And finally, there is the radical solution that her compleynt favors: she could escape the whole problem by removing herself from the field of play, thus making fulfillment impossible. But how “radical” is this last option really? One can see why it would be thought so, an attempt to root out the entire problem by a drastic move that would perhaps never have occurred to the dandyish Aurelius. But from a certain abstract point of view, the move is not particularly bold. To make fulfillment of the law impossible in this way is more akin to finding a grisly loophole than to breaking the law itself; the rash oath would, in a very real sense, remain intact. That is, what

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Dorigen proposes to do is to demonstrate a hidden proviso of her “contract”: really, as all parties would have to agree, the arrangement is not merely “if you remove the rocks I will sleep with you,” but “if you remove the rocks and I am still alive I will sleep with you.” One could discover any number of such unspoken conditions, most of which would be difficult to deny but so obvious as not to require articulation: if the world has not ended in the meantime, if a magician has not turned you into a tree, and so on. The idea of such hidden provisos is quite at home in some medieval understandings of vows and oaths. Aquinas’s treatment in the Summa, for example, is rife with cases of what he calls a conditio implicita, as when he writes that “the vows of those who are in another’s power have an implicit condition, namely ‘if they are not revoked by a superior.’ ” His point is often precisely that if a person fails to make good on the vow when such an implicit condition is not met, the vow itself has not been broken.50 Dorigen, unfortunately, proposes to take one of these overlooked conditionals and falsify it; but such a maneuver would leave the oath itself, as a conditional statement about reality, true and unopposed. The protasis, now revealed to be a compound proposition involving both the removal of some rocks and Dorigen’s continued presence above ground, would be false, and therefore nothing would follow from it. She would not have broken her oath but merely circumvented the consequences it threatens. The fact that Dorigen understands suicide as a way to avoid the “loss of her name” (line 1360) suggests that she sees things in much the same way: suicide is a way of escaping an oath’s consequences without contravening the oath itself.51 From this logical point of view, Dorigen’s three options line up in a new way. No longer is suicide the outlier of the three, a violent and, depending on one’s moral evaluation, either heroic or criminal destruction of an intractable dilemma between the other two choices. Instead we see two options (adultery and suicide) that maintain intact, in their respectively horrifying ways, the awful oath, and only one (simple refusal) that breaks it. This way of seeing makes it clearer than ever that Dorigen leans, during her compleynt, toward the worst possible choice. It is not merely the worst because suicide would be wrong in itself, or because of its condemnation by recognized moral authorities, or because the motivating oath is clearly invalid. Even on the rather dehumanized view of

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abstract logic, Dorigen’s choice does not meet the main problem: if what we fundamentally have here is a bad law, and the law needs to be opposed, the only way to do so is by simple refusal. Suicide is just another way of giving in. The final benefit of this abstract approach to the tale’s end is that it uncovers yet another parallel with the Physician’s Tale, which matches its probable neighbor in this matter as exactly as in others. If Dorigen must choose among adultery, (apparent) perjury, and suicide, the paths open to Virginius line up the same way: sexual enslavement of his daughter, the contravention of a judge’s edict, and murder. Since Virginius is as blind as Dorigen to the real opposition that the middle option represents, the audience alone perceives that the remaining two possibilities —in each tale, a choice between shame and deeth—actually fall on the same side of a more important decision that seems somehow to have been taken, and irrevocably, long before the characters ever became aware that there is a choice to be made. That unexamined (indeed unperceived) decision is a determination to abide by law at any cost.52 What does all this tell us about the general question of how human wills do, and should, relate to laws? Most of this chapter, it must be admitted, has instead provided answers to the negative question of how they should not relate.53 What these two tales oppose is moral rigorism: the notion, badly mistaken from the point of view laid out here, that a law should govern a human will in an unforgivingly automatic way—in something like the mechanical way in which a hammer blow acts on a nail, or in which, across the centuries following Chaucer’s death, “physical laws” were increasingly taken to govern the material world. What they enjoin, at least by implication, is the reverse: the idea that we can and should look at a law, see it, think deliberately about it, and choose whether to give it our support or not. If it is a bad law, our course seems relatively clear: it can be broken — perhaps, if it is bad enough, should be broken. And breaking it, mounting real opposition to it, should involve something more than the sort of end run around undesirable consequences represented by Dorigen’s plan to falsify a hidden proviso (or by the logically parallel maneuver that Virginius unfortunately, unlike Dorigen, carries out). It should involve not only the avoidance of bad consequences but opposition to the phenomenon of consequence itself, to the link between protasis and apodosis that is the essence of a law.

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That is, it should involve some intervention to ensure that A is not necessarily followed by B, that there is at least a possibility that A (the entire protasis, with all known implicit conditions intact) will be true and yet B will not. And often the most direct way to ensure that possibility will be by ensuring its actuality: that is, by simply refusing to perform B despite a fulfillment of A. But given the hypothesis that guides this “reprise”— namely that Chaucer neither found all oaths (or laws) good nor found all of them bad, but was interested in how human wills should relate to them — we must also ask: what about good laws? What do Dorigen’s story and Virginius’s tell us about how to relate to them? The short answer is that what they tell us is not enough. Even if they suggest the same general teachings that they provided with respect to bad laws —do not act mechanically, do not focus primarily on consequences, but interact with the law as a whole, with its tendency to follow A with B — the instruction will likely feel rather incomplete, as though it has not adequately told those instructed what to do. The reason for that sense is that there is an apparent asymmetry between the desire to oppose, and the desire to support or affirm, a law. As just observed, for a person newly freed from the illusion that a bad law requires machinelike subservience, what to do next is fairly clear: mount a real opposition by finding some way to interrupt the previously unquestionable flow of consequence, arranging things so that the expected B does not follow upon every provided A. But if I am similarly freed from unthinking adherence to a law that I, after stepping back and considering the question for the first time, discover that I do wish to affirm, what am I to do? Presumably I am to work to see that each instance of A is answered by the prescribed B. Which is to say that I am to do exactly what I was doing before, when I was following the same law in an unthinking and mechanical way. An observer looking on from a distance, or hearing a report of my actions that includes no reliable estimate of my internal state — an observer in Walter’s situation with respect to Griselda — would have no way of telling that anything had changed. That result is rather disappointing to anyone who believes in the reality of laws and of human interactions with them. We have a sense that there is a real difference here, that mechanical adherence because one cannot imagine the possibility of an alternative is quite different from a

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thoughtful dedication of oneself to a law. In that case it should be possible to give some account of the difference, to say what it means to affirm, to will, perhaps even to love a law itself, rather than merely enacting its consequences. After all, one case of A-followed-by-B does not make a law—nor, if a law is to be anything other than a convenient name for a set of instances, do two cases, or seven, or seventy times seven. It is like the difficulty with trying to prove a general principle by counting up instances: though we tend to accept a single counterexample as disproving the generality, no accretion of individual positive cases will ever constitute proof.54 It turns out, happily, that there are other ways to speak about affirming a law than by counting instances of its fulfillment — ways that were very much available during Chaucer’s life. For the third time in this book the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer an accessible and, in the fourteenth century, widely read account of what is needed, this time in the form of a nuanced and often surprising account of law that arises from the question of how a vowed monastic should relate to the Rule of St. Benedict: it is very much an essay in the question of what it means to love a law. It is a strongly antirigorist statement, and thus it fulfills and illuminates what the literary readings of this chapter have proposed as the moral import of the Franklin’s and Physician’s tales, just as Bernard’s discussion of cooperative agency (ch. 3) reinforced what surrounding chapters found underlying the Man of Law’s and, negatively, the Clerk’s and Second Nun’s tales. But in this case the thought Bernard supplies also extends what has been discovered in Chaucer in several ways — at least two more, beyond the simple one of covering good laws as well as bad. First, it suggests that the apparent asymmetry noted in the preceding paragraph is just that, apparent: for Bernard, even in the question of opposition to a law, a single instance is not enough to ensure that the law itself has been really engaged (which is to say, really opposed). If he is correct, then what the Franklin’s and Physician’s tales have taught us about opposing a law—that it requires a real case of A-but-not-B, rather than an escape through a loophole that shows A not fully fulfilled — is merely a necessary, not yet a sufficient condition; some further, more mysterious factor is also required for the opposition to be complete.55 And the second conclusion is at least equally weighty: if Bernard is correct, our notions about what generality means — which is to say, about

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what a law is and how a law relates to the cases it governs — need revising, because as they stand they do expect an asymmetry between the effects of positive and negative instances, illustrations and counterexamples. But that is to get far ahead of matters best left to a new chapter.

c h a p t e r

s i x

Bernard, Chaucer, and Life with the Law The important thing is for monks to love the Rule, not as a document printed on paper but as a life that should take possession of their inmost hearts. —Thomas Merton1 A person cannot achieve justice if he only wants justice. He can only be truly just from a position that lies above justice. —Romano Guardini 2 This is the first and perhaps the greatest lesson of Cîteaux. The ideal of Christian perfection is not legalistic, but personal. It is not the perfect adaptation of the individual to a system, however wisely conceived. It is the complete submission of self to the Spirit, Who bloweth where He listeth. —Louis Bouyer 3

Given the readings of the previous chapter, it does not look as if Chaucer has any wish to be antinomian — to do away with laws. If, for example, the Franklin’s Tale indeed invites its audience in a dozen ways

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to stinging criticism of its protagonists and a firm rejection of their foolish legal rigorism, the invitation supposes a healthy amount of respect for their original wedding promises. Without such respect, there would be little reason to object to Arveragus’s wife-sharing decision, or for that matter to the rash (non)oath that laid the groundwork for it. In fact there would be little reason to object to anything at all, and little reason to read the story: if all oaths, as species of laws, are unreal, or nonbinding, or mere conveniences to be dissolved at the will of their makers, a poet would be hard-pressed to draw any drama out of a tale about a conflict of oaths. And the story as Chaucer himself encountered it manifestly revolves around such conflicts: each of Boccaccio’s tellings, unlike Chaucer’s own, presents not only the wedding promises but also the wife’s promise to the would-be adulterer as at least potentially weighty and binding. Whatever Chaucer means his poem to say about oaths, then, it can hardly be that they should never be given any weight: if he believed that, he would surely have turned over the leaf and chosen, from Boccaccio, another tale, as this one would have held little interest for him. A little reflection will turn up a goodly list of other stories from Chaucer—certainly, for example, the Knight’s, Friar’s, and Wife of Bath’s tales and the whole of Troilus and Criseyde— that would fall into vapid meaninglessness without the presupposition that at least some promises had better be fulfilled. At the same time the readings in the previous chapter suggest even more clearly Chaucer’s lack of sympathy for the view that all promises (or other laws) should be fulfilled all the time; that view, if those readings are correct, is the main target of the satire he produces in transforming Boccaccio’s and Jean de Meun’s characters into the Dorigen, Arveragus, Virginia, and Virginius his readers know. The chapter reveals, then, that Chaucer’s position avoids two extremes, a conclusion not terribly surprising, since both thoroughgoing antinomianism and absolute rigor tend to be difficult to maintain. But its last section also goes a step further, passing beyond demonstrations of what Chaucer’s stance toward law is not, to at least begin the more positive task of reconstructing what his stance is. This chapter continues that work, first of all by demonstrating that, here as with the question of divine-human cooperation taken up in part 1 of this book, the position that has turned up from a largely “internal,” literary, examination of Chaucer’s text also has an

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“external” pedigree. Questions about the nature of law, and particularly about how a person should follow or fulfill laws, no doubt arise at many points across a civilization’s history; but there seems to have been a particularly large amount of attention to such questions beginning in the so-called renaissance of the twelfth century, with its general concern for legal reform and for the standardization of what had previously been disparate. Something very reminiscent of Chaucer’s apparent stance toward laws appears prominently in the debates; and, just as in part 1, learning about it can cast new light both on the stance and on the particular poems that put it on display. In a work of this scope, of course, with only a chapter to spend on the question, there can be no thought of doing justice to a historical treatment of how human relations to law were imagined during the two or three centuries preceding Chaucer’s life. But that does not mean that the question must be abandoned. Instead of comprehensiveness, the chapter can attempt what its earlier counterpart (ch. 3) attempted for the book’s other main theme: a relatively thorough look at a representative informant, “representative” not only in the sense that he lived in the desired epoch and wrote influentially on the required themes but also in the sense that his modus operandi makes him a good point of access (or “witness,” or “informant”) for ways of thinking shared by a large body of other influential writers. Here as in the earlier chapter, Bernard of Clairvaux will serve admirably in that role—not least because, as we will discover, Bernard’s view of law is also of a nuanced kind, judicious but not rigorist, rule-affirming but not “deterministic” or “necessitarian.”4 It is prima facie a good fit, in other words, for what the previous chapter discovered in Chaucer’s poems. As we learn more, the resonance between the two will become still stronger; and Bernard’s writings will also carry us one step further in the investigation of wills and laws, to a question that the Franklin’s and Physician’s tales, with their spotlighting of laws respectively bogus and evil, could not easily raise: what does it look like to be in relationship with a good law? How shall we act toward laws that we wish to affirm rather than to overthrow? There is an obvious source in Bernard’s writings for questions about law—a work so focused on those questions, in fact, that it will be helpful to spend a substantial section of this chapter coming to terms with its main argument. This is the treatise On Precept and Dispensation (De prae-

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cepto et dispensatione), which was, or purports to have been, originally a long letter written to answer questions from two Benedictine monks about how the ancient Rule of St. Benedict should be followed in the monasteries of the twelfth century. Lest a work clarifying a monastic rule sound like a fairly dusty corner of the otherwise heavily trafficked library of Bernard’s writings, it should be borne in mind that the Rule itself was by no means an obscure text in the high and late Middle Ages. Bernard’s treatise was frequently copied along with the Rule as a commentary, so it would have been widely known in monastic circles — to literate Benedictines of some periods, perhaps nearly as widely known as the Rule itself.5 Some measure of its popularity may be taken merely by counting manuscripts from the first few generations after its writing: there are fifty-seven of them, a number that ties the treatise, among Bernard’s writings, with two others more frequently read today, On Grace and Free Choice and the Apology to William on Cîteaux and Cluny, and ranks those three tied contestants just slightly behind On Loving God (sixty manuscripts) and The Steps of Humility and Pride (sixty-nine). For England in particular the evidence is less reliable, since the dissolution of the monasteries has left us with many fewer manuscripts to draw on; but the numbers that we do have suggest that the treatise was just as widely transmitted there, if not more so.6 As for its staying power, that can be gathered from the existence of an English translation made nearly four centuries after the original; or from the appreciation with which, roughly two and a half centuries after Bernard’s death, Jean Gerson singled the treatise out as fundamental to some of his own work; or from even a partial roll call of the other figures on whom its direct influence is easy to demonstrate: Peter the Venerable of Cluny, the Cistercians Aelred of Rievaulx and Baldwin of Ford, Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and, in the sixteenth century, the Spanish saint John of God.7 The ideas discoverable in the treatise, moreover, demonstrably enjoyed a still wider circulation than the treatise itself. This is a result of the phenomenon already discussed in the introduction and in chapter 3: in this work as elsewhere, Bernard draws from and passes along a larger body of common teachings, so that his writings serve as a good witness to ideas so widely dispersed that many high- and late-medieval Europeans would have found it difficult not to encounter them, whether or not the direct ancestry of any particular encounter included Bernard. In

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the case of Precept and Dispensation it is more important than ever to weigh carefully the likelihood of this kind of dissemination of ideas, as one might fairly doubt whether Bernard’s thoughts about the interpretation of monastic rules apply at all to the situation of a poet retelling a romance (the Franklin’s Tale) and a bit of ancient history (the Physician’s), each of which revolves around what seems at first glance quite a different sort of law. Likewise, the impressive list of successors influenced by the treatise includes a suspiciously high concentration of monastics and people writing about monasticism: as Aquinas’s primary use of Precept and Dispensation occurs in a consideration of the status of religious vows (ST II-II.186), Gerson is the only indisputable exception. Though the book clearly had wide influence in monastic circles, then, one might wonder to what extent it provides a window on thinking taking place elsewhere. Fortunately the verification of a relationship to other writers of many states of life, monastic, clerical and lay, is not only more urgent for Precept and Dispensation than for Bernard’s other works: it is also easier to perform. The verification comes about most effectively by reference to a second work about laws, one that recent scholarship has established as the most important direct source for Bernard’s treatise: the Prologue of Ivo of Chartres. This name of this late-eleventh-century canonist is not one that frequently comes to the attention of modern readers, to be sure, but in Bernard’s time things were otherwise. Ivo’s work in general, and the Prologue in particular, were of great influence, and clearly shaped the thinking of numbers of contemporaries who do frequently attract modern gazes: the work’s presence is easily detectable not only in Precept and Dispensation but also in Gratian’s Decretals, Peter Abelard’s Sic et non, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard, to name just the recipients currently best known. This is not the place for a thorough introduction to Ivo’s work or its influence, tasks that have been performed well elsewhere.8 But understanding Bernard’s treatise and its usefulness as an “informant” will be easier if we first note something about the function of Ivo’s. Among the other works of this bishop of Chartres are two major collections of “canons,” short excerpts from a wide range of earlier writers; like the three great collectors mentioned in the previous paragraph, Ivo felt the drive to juxtapose disparate inheritances so that they could

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be thought about together and perhaps reconciled — a drive that has been called characteristic of the age.9 The Prologue seems to be intended, and was certainly used, as a preface to one of these two collections of Ivo’s (called the Decretum and the Panormia), though it is difficult to tell which one, as there are manuscripts that pair it with each. In any event the work partakes enthusiastically of the spirit of collectionfor-reconciliation: an alternate title for it is De consonantia canonum (On the consonance of the canons), and from its first page it begins providing rules meant to help readers solve apparent contradictions among the various inherited dicta. These lessons in legal interpretation—some furnished with extensive descriptions of similar moves made by popes and bishops of the past — make up the bulk of the Prologue, and it is in the course of giving those lessons that Ivo lays down principles that Bernard later borrowed for his treatise on interpreting the Benedictine Rule. The important thing to notice for immediate purposes is that these two authors are interpreting rather different sorts of thing. The Rule of St. Benedict is not a collection of canons, and its interpretation might reasonably be thought to require an entirely different approach. The fact that it does not — which is to say, that Bernard happily extracts many of Ivo’s principles and applies them to his own ostensibly quite different material — should suggest that in fact, and against expectation, he thought of the two tasks as close kindred. The suggestion is borne out, moreover, by independent evidence. First there is Bernard’s generalizing tone in Precept and Dispensation, which makes the work’s claims feel widely applicable, not merely focused on the particular questions asked by his two interlocutors; at times they do not even feel focused solely on the Rule of St. Benedict.10 Second, Bernard a few times explicitly states that one or another of his conclusions applies across what I am calling different instances of law, namely the Rule of St. Benedict, “divine law” (including the direct commands given by God to persons in the Hebrew Bible), and the injunctions of the New Testament.11 Finally, a reading of Ivo’s treatise will find the same sort of applicability-across-analogouscases claimed there, but extended to realms beyond the churchly. Very near the end of the Prologue, for example, Ivo concludes the laying-out of one of his principles with the observation that “this [principle] must be observed not only in ecclesiastical rules, but even in the laws themselves.”12 He means by this last phrase the civil and forensic laws that the

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Middle Ages adopted from ancient Rome: there immediately follows a lengthy quotation from the Institutes of Justinian demonstrating that he, too, subscribed to the principle in question, and it is not the first time the Prologue goes to that source for support.13 The meaning of all this generality for current purposes is twofold. First of all it provides yet another set of witnesses in favor of the notion argued in the preface and in chapter 5 that, at least when attending to the Middle Ages, it is not only permissible but at times almost necessary to think in terms of “law in general,” rather than insisting on always treating church law, monastic rule, civil law, and (perhaps) even those regularities of the cosmos that we now call “laws” of physics, separately. But second, and much more immediately, it should quell many reservations about using Bernard’s work as a sort of spyglass providing access to some of the thoughts about law widely available in his time and succeeding centuries. It is true that his immediate occasion was the interpretation of Benedict’s rule; but we see him thinking of the “divine law” available in scripture in many of the same ways; and it seems that he also found those same principles of interpretation equally valid for the law of the church and that of the civil courts, inasmuch as he took many of his ideas from a source that draws explicitly on both. When one also considers that the source in question was independently a great influence on the development of late-medieval thinking about law— and one then goes on to observe (as will be done once or twice below) that the source in turn drew many of its ideas from further sources of great antiquity and influence, not only Justinian but also papal decrees from the fifth and ninth century and the letters of Paul—it becomes clear that there were in circulation in medieval Europe hosts of what, extending the kinship metaphor of this book’s introduction, we might call first, second, and third “cousins” to Bernard’s treatise. Nor are connections through Ivo the only source of such intellectual kinship; some of the ideas to be discussed at most length below, and most relevant to the understanding of Chaucer’s poems, do not seem to find an echo in Ivo but do appear centrally in Franciscan writers after Bernard — a circumstance that will be taken up in due course (n. 50). The general point, in any case, should be clear: a great many of the ideas we find in Precept and Dispensation would not have been hard to encounter for anyone in the late Middle Ages who was thinking about laws, and many such encounterers would

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likely have felt as comfortable applying them to law-in-general as Bernard himself seems to have been.

The Contents of On Precept and Dispensation It is quite true that the whole idea of humility needs to be rethought in terms that will make it real to modern people. It is true that obedience must be rediscovered, not as submission to legalistic authority but as openness to the hidden will of God.

—Thomas Merton14 What is on view when one looks through the spyglass? The work’s title, first of all, already says something about its relevance to the questions raised by Chaucer’s tales. The precepts it has in mind are outright commands or injunctions rather than (as is more common with the modern English word) wise maxims: in the first instance Bernard means the injunctions of the Benedictine Rule, though they are approached, as just discussed, with principles that are applicable more widely. Thus in the terms of this study his title announces that the treatise will have to do with a kind of law. The meaning of dispensatio, for its part, was changing during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the older understanding, nearly any occasion on which an authoritative lawgiver did something to a law — removed it, changed it, or even put it in force in the first place — would count as a “dispensation,” etymologically a “weighingout” of the law to its subjects. But in Ivo’s and Bernard’s time the word was shifting toward the more limited set of actions that its English cognate primarily designates today: events in which someone in authority “dispenses with,” waives, a rule ordinarily in force. One can find the word used both ways in Ivo and Bernard, but the context almost always clearly indicates which is meant; Bernard’s title, as the treatise itself will later demonstrate, primarily intends the latter meaning, the allowing of exceptions to a rule. The treatise, then, could as well be called “On Law and the Making of Exceptions”— just the matters that so trouble Dorigen, Virginius, Arveragus, and Virginia.15 There are parts of the treatise that this quartet might have benefited from reading. The essential question troubling the two monks to whom

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Bernard responds is very much about the proper degree of rigor in their relationship with law. Most concretely they want to know whether everything written in the Rule that they have sworn to live by should be considered a serious and binding command, a “precept”— in Bernard’s paraphrase of their question, “whether . . . all the points [the Rule] contains are precepts and consequently destructive for him who transgresses them, or merely counsels or warnings” (De praecepto et dispensatione 1.1, SBO 3:254).16 The question is not an academic one: if everything enjoined by the Benedictine Rule is a precept, it would appear, given the near-impossibility of fulfilling all its injunctions flawlessly across the course of one’s life, that to swear the vows of monastic profession is tantamount to consigning oneself to eternal damnation. The Rule, after all, lays down requirements about a great number of relatively minor matters (regulations concerning food, for example, and the keeping of silence) that are morally indifferent for anyone who has not sworn a vow about them, but that are suddenly invested with the weight of perjury before God for anyone who has. To profess the Rule thus multiplies one’s chances to be damned: who but a fool, the monks wonder, would make such a vow? And in fact, as Bernard’s interlocutors also noted, the case is still worse, because monks are not bound merely to the demands explicitly laid out in the Rule; they also undertake obedience to an abbot. The Rule itself explicitly requires that obedience, for example by declaring that “obedience without delay” is a necessary part of a monk’s humility — after which it raises the stakes by specifying that “without delay” means that a superior’s command should be obeyed “as soon as if it had been commanded divinely” (Rule 5.1, 5.4).17 Such a focus on obedience means that monastic profession involves an open-ended vow, one of those dangerous promises that, like those made by Griselda and Jephtha, includes a variable. Bernard’s interlocutors were well aware of the dangers, and seem to have spent much space on the question, expressing concern about whether anyone could live up to the (in Bernard’s paraphrase) “so many and so tiny things which are ordered in every direction even by negligent superiors” (DPD 10.24). Surrounded by that multitude of commands artificially invested with divine force, they wonder whether any “sin could now be either venial or light to a monk, for whose every action the grave offense of disobedience lies in

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wait” (ibid.).18 One can hear, and perhaps sympathize with, the frustration behind one of the final questions that Bernard reports having received: Is this what monasticism is supposed to be—monasticism, that “way of coming to God that is all the surer for being more arduous, all the more secure for being more constraining?” (DPD 13.31).19 It seems, to the contrary, as if monastic profession signs one up for the worst of both worlds — a lifestyle that is difficult and a chance at salvation that has become smaller, not greater, as a result. The interlocutors are seeking a way out, and it is clear that they proposed one to Bernard: they suggested that, despite the Rule’s remarks about obedience without delay, human mandates (like those of one’s abbot, and like many of those in the Rule itself) should not be weighed as heavily as “divine commands” like those found in scripture. Eternal salvation, it seems to them, can only be guarded by understanding monastic profession in such a way — if we discount, that is, the possibility of guarding it by refraining from becoming a monk at all. Given the treatise’s avoidance of historical details, it is difficult to be certain about the concrete situation that sparked the monks’ inquiries. The inference of a well-informed twentieth-century reader, however, is plausible: that the monks were unhappy, whether justly or otherwise, with particular commands or interpretations of the Rule handed down by their abbot and were seeking some way out from the burden of his authority.20 In any case the response to their basic proposal occupies the bulk of the treatise. The proposal itself Bernard rejects, declaring that human commands must be treated as having the weight of divine ones. But then he offers three other ways out from the damning path of logic the monks have proposed. In order to understand what Bernard can tell us about the available options for interpreting law in his time, we will need to examine these three “ways of escape” in sequence. I have allowed myself, by way of laying them out in a relatively compact and sequential fashion, to jump from place to place in the treatise, a necessity imposed by the fact that the organization of the original, especially in the case of the third “way,” is far from compact or sequential. Presumably because of its epistolary origins, it rather circles repeatedly around the basic point, requiring considerable concentration from the reader who hopes to evaluate it according to the rules of logical argument.21

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The first of Bernard’s escape routes involves the practice of “dispensation” named in his title — but for all that it is dispatched relatively quickly, occupying roughly the first ten of the treatise’s sixty-one sections. There Bernard considers conditions under which a monastic superior or “prelate” can issue dispensations freeing a monk from certain provisions of the Rule. For present purposes there are just a few essential points. The first is that Bernard has figures of authority in mind; it is not just anyone “to whom dispensation is entrusted,” he writes, but only “those who can say with the Apostle: ‘Thus let a person esteem us to be ministers of Christ and dispensors of the mysteries of God’ ” (1.3).22 A monk could not, for example, decide to issue a dispensation for his brother monk, nor for himself (though, as we will shortly see, there are extreme cases in which something not too far distant from the latter is possible). Second, it is very important to Bernard to assert, by way of counterbalancing that first point, that dispensations are not made merely by the will of the authority figure in question. Such decisions are indeed subject to the discretio of an abbot, but that does not place the abbot above the Rule (to which, after all, the abbot “himself once voluntarily submitted himself by profession”). Instead, dispensations are to be made only when some “necessity” is imposed by a higher law — namely love, caritas, which Bernard, echoing an idea from On Loving God taken up in chapter 3, here calls Dei regula, “God’s rule.” The role of the abbot is simply that of prudent judge who must decide when caritas necessitates a dispensation and when it does not. Bernard claims to find support for this complex three-part regulative structure (abbot, monastic rule, and charity) in the Benedictine Rule itself: “It is for that reason,” he writes, “that in those things that are left to the abbot to dispense, the same legislator [Benedict], being cautious, never, as I recall, uses the word will, but uses either consideration, or disposition, or providence, or at least decision or something of that sort, beyond a doubt wishing that the provident and faithful dispensor follow the judgment of reason when he might perhaps dispense, not the pleasure of his own will” (4.9).23 Thus Bernard—following closely Ivo’s Prologue, which similarly calls for dispensations to be made according to reason, following necessities imposed by the criterion of charity — allows exceptions to happen, but does so without simply subjecting laws to human wills. 24 A third and final point to register about Bernard’s treatment of dispensations is that they cannot be applied equally to all the provisions of

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the Rule. Here too he is following Ivo, who divides precepts into the “movable” and the “immovable” (Prologue 9–11, with many sections of examples following). Bernard changes the terms a bit, using three categories rather than two: he classifies the “necessity” that attaches to any given command as either “stable,” “inviolable,” or “immutable” (DPD 2.4 –3.8). The last category applies to “natural goods,” things established so firmly “by a divine and natural ratio” that not even God can change them. Bernard’s examples are the “spiritual instruction” of the Sermon on the Mount and “whatever about love, humility, mildness, and other virtues is passed down in the New or the Old Testament to be observed spiritually.”25 His middle category covers commandments given by God and immune to any possible dispensation by humans, but potentially susceptible to dispensation by God himself: the Decalogue’s prohibitions of killing, adultery, and theft are listed. (It is presumably because God’s suspension of God’s own commands does not count as “violation,” as change imposed from without, that this sort of necessity, while not “immutable,” is labeled “inviolable”; it cannot be changed by humans, because that would be violent.) As for “stable necessity,” the least weighty kind, it applies to commandments that are not, as it were, good naturally or good in themselves, but that are “advantageous for the gaining or protection of charity”— salient examples being much of the Benedictine Rule itself, along with the rules of other orders, “authentic ecclesiastical canons,” and “other ecclesiastical provisions made by worthy authority.” As long as these continue to serve charity, they are “immovably fixed, and cannot be changed at all, not even by the superiors themselves, without offense”; hence the term stable. But “if perhaps they should at some time be seen to be contrary to charity . . . is it not clear that it is most just that the things that were invented for the sake of charity are, also for the sake of charity, either omitted, or interrupted, or perhaps more suitably changed into something else, when it is seen to be advantageous?”26 (Here too Bernard is following Ivo, so closely that his citations of authorities — Popes Gelasius I and Leo the Great — on the proper handling of this kind of precept are taken from him nearly word for word.)27 That entire discussion, however, only covers the first of the three “solutions” Bernard offers to his two inquirers; and though it was likely an important set of ideas for monastic superiors to hear, it may have done little to ease the two monks’ concerns about authority. They, after

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all, were worried especially about the “so many and so tiny things” that their superiors might impose on them, things not explicitly required in the Rule. The judgment that superiors could waive some provisions of the Rule when reason judged that charity was thus better served would only help where the superior himself could be relied on to act with discretion, reason, and charity. What if a superior should instead command a monk, under obedience, to do something positively destructive? The second of Bernard’s ways out, a qualification to the above-mentioned equal weighting of divine and human mandates, applies here. Commands passed on by humans are indeed to be followed as reverently as those of God, he writes, “at least where the person does not command anything contrary to God. If [the latter] happens, I counsel that one should without doubt proceed on the judgment of Peter, that ‘it is necessary to obey God more than humans’ ” (9.19).28 The exposition that follows is complicated and draws on several more scriptural passages, but the point is clear. Monastic obedience, according to Bernard, does not imply a mindless following of orders. Things contrary to God, or (as must therefore follow) things contrary to charity, or (as a later passage puts it) things that are “repugnant to justice” are permanently out of bounds.29 Such a dictum, among other things, imposes a limit to the open-endedness of the monastic promise to obey, saving it from being entirely a “rash vow” in the style of Griselda.30 And it represents a second safety valve that might help monks nervous about promising obedience to human authority. Like the previous such “valve,” this one delivers its assistance without departing from a law-governed cosmos or sidling into the realm of the antinomian: here as there, the safety mechanism can only be triggered when to do otherwise would violate a higher law, the “divine rule” of charity by which God lives. Bernard’s interlocutors, however, might still feel their worries unassuaged. To provide relief in that minority of cases that would give a prelate grounds for dispensing some requirement, and likewise in the very rare cases in which a command’s contradiction of charity is sufficiently clear that a monk might justly take it upon himself to refuse, leaves most of life still bound by the Rule and by prelates’ orders. Thus the basic problem remains: given the practical impossibility of constantly fulfilling every one of those many and tiny mandates, and given that monks must (it seems) vow to do so, it would still appear that mo-

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nastic profession is an express lane to damnation via the exit marked “perjury.” Bernard’s response, his third proposed solution to the monks’ concerns, makes up the core of Precept and Dispensation. It also appears to contain more of his own made-to-order judgment than do the first two solutions: here, in any case, he rarely follows Ivo’s Prologue, which has little to say on the relevant questions. His starting point is a distinction that he will maintain with near-perfect consistency across the treatise: any breach of obedience, he writes, will be called disobedience, and sin, “and either transgression or prevarication” (6.12). The word praevaricatio Bernard reserves for very serious offenses (the sort of thing, it seems, that could potentially result in damnation), whereas transgressio covers any “going-beyond” or breaking of a commandment (and thus, when as here the two are set in direct contrast, it can mean specifically a lighter infraction that does not qualify as a prevarication).31 How to distinguish between them? The passage continues: “But it matters, of course, for what cause, with what affect, with what intention, with whom giving the precept, and against what precept this evil is committed.”32 Here are five criteria; but in practice making the distinction will be less complex than that list suggests. The treatise actually says very little, for one thing, about the different sorts of causes (item #1) by which a misdeed may be done; what it does say (e.g., in §13) can easily be assimilated under the heading of intention (#3). The same is true of its remarks on the affect of the perpetrator (#2), which (aside from a brief example, also in §13) the treatise discusses only with respect to the possibility of contempt for the law, a problem it likewise ties closely to the question of intention, as related below. Thus the first two criteria effectively drop off the list. The fourth item, the question of whose precept the infraction violates, is already familiar, as it is central to the solution Bernard’s correspondents have proposed to their own problem. If we can distinguish one command from another based on whether it is issued by a human or directly by God, they suggest, and take the human ones somewhat less seriously, perhaps at least some monks will manage to fulfill the divine ones and so attain salvation. But, despite a moment early on (7.13; and cf. 7.15) when it briefly appears as though Bernard will agree, his consistent (and in fact insistent) response in the rest of the treatise is forceful

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denial. So long as the human commandments in question are issued by duly constituted authorities and say nothing “contrary to God,” he writes, either kind of command is to be “followed with equal care, deferred to with equal reverence” (9.19).33 That judgment reappears so many times throughout what I am calling the core of Precept and Dispensation (roughly 7.13 –13.34) that its establishment could fairly be called the main point of the treatise. It should be noted in passing that Bernard does acknowledge some distinctions between human and divine commandments: we have already seen, for example, that the practice of dispensation proper can dissolve only the “stable necessity” of the former, not the “inviolable” or “immutable” necessity of the latter. Moreover, the early passage just mentioned remarks that one fears “more grave offense” against lawgivers for whom one experiences more respect or awe. One might well wonder, then, how Bernard goes on to affirm with such emphasis, and so repeatedly, that “as much obedience is owed to humans as to God.”34 The solution seems to be that, notwithstanding the admission that differences in the authority of the lawgiver do result in real differences among mandates, and thus that there are real differences between human commandments and divine ones, Bernard enjoins those subject to mandates to treat the two types identically in practice — elevating, as it were, the treatment given to human commands so that it matches that more spontaneously offered to divine ones.35 For current purposes this refusal to allow the monks to solve their problem by taking human commandments less seriously means that we need not concern ourselves much with the fourth criterion on Bernard’s list. Whatever decides the all-important difference between “prevarication” and mere “transgression,” the divinity-or-humanity of the giver of the broken precept is not it. That leaves only two items from the original list to help make the distinction. Bernard is clear that the fifth entry, the content of the broken precept, does make a difference in the seriousness of the offense: some commandments are by their nature weightier than others. He says, for example (here developing another distinction in Ivo), that the seriousness of a rule depends in part on whether the deed under discussion is, on the one hand, “naturally” good or bad, or on the other hand is morally indifferent in itself — the former type, it seems, usually

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possessed of “inviolable necessity,” the latter merely of “stable.” Monastic commandments to keep silence and avoid laughter, for example, are light ones, as there is nothing intrinsically good, in a way independent of circumstances, about those practices; if it were not for the commandments, neither laughter nor speech would be sinful (8.17). By contrast, the ban on killing is much more serious, as there is something quasi-permanently, perhaps intrinsically, evil about the practice it forbids: thus this command ranks among those “whose observation can never be unjust or evil, whose transgression can never be good or licit, at least as far as human dispensation is concerned” (7.16). And within this latter, more serious category there are still further distinctions: Bernard compares theft and miserliness (7.14), fornication and gluttony (11.25), in each pair declaring that the first is more abhorrent to God than the second, and violations accordingly more serious. He later (12.29) points out explicitly that even the most direct divine commands vary in weight, since Jesus refers at various times to “the first and greatest commandment” and “one of these least commandments of mine,” and at one point — for so Bernard reads an evocative passage in the Gospel of Matthew — ranks three commandments in order of increasing weight, assigning increasingly severe penalties to their transgression. “Everyone who is angry at his brother,” says Jesus, “will be liable to judgment; whoever, again, says ‘racha’ to his brother will be liable to the Council; whoever, again, says ‘you fool’ will be liable to the Gehenna of fire” (Matthew 5:22, discussed at DPD 11.25).36 Bernard’s commentary on this passage is noteworthy in two ways. Most immediately it furnishes him with authoritative evidence that even divine commands can be “light,” their transgression less serious than a crimen or grave offense: with an eye on the first of the sins in Jesus’ list, he asks rhetorically, “How . . . do we define that to be a grave offense which, with Truth as judge, makes [a person] bound only to judgment?” (11.25). Nonetheless, he continues, to sin in this way is to break a divine command; and from this it follows that the monks need not fear that treating human commands as if divine will put them in constant grave danger, for even transgressions of actual divine commands are not always so serious. “Look: one light or venial sin for the monk has been discovered,” as Bernard puts it, recalling his correspondents’ fear that no sin could be venial after monastic profession, “and it makes him a trans-

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gressor not of a human, but of a divine mandate” (11.26).37 After this hopeful counsel, however, the situation becomes more complicated. Bernard adds a few more examples of venial transgressions against divine commands and then remarks that “[things of this sort] are indeed sins, and God prohibits every sin; and nonetheless they are counted venial, not grave, except when by contempt they are turned into use and habit, and for that not the kind of sin, but the intention of the sinner, is weighed” (11.26).38 Suddenly a new factor has entered the equation: intention, the third item on Bernard’s initial list of criteria for classifying sins, and the only one not yet discussed. The immediate impact of its appearance is disheartening: if intention is awry in such a way as to include a habituating contempt for the rule being broken, the sins of whose “lightness” we have just gratefully heard become serious again. Later in the treatise Bernard confirms that even breaking the lightest of human commandments can in this way become a grave offense: “If, when an elder commands that I be silent, a word slips out from me, perhaps through forgetfulness, I make myself guilty of disobedience, but venially. If out of contempt, knowing and deliberating, by my own will I break forth in words and break the law of silence, I make myself a prevaricator, and in a grave way [criminaliter]; and if I persevere impenitently until death, I have even sinned damnably” (12.30).39 The news, however, is not all bad. Just as the transgression of a minor precept in a contemptuous spirit can be grave, so also the breaking of even the most serious laws in the absence of such a spirit avoids grave offense: Finally, attend to what the grave offense of disobedience beyond all doubt consists in, from the book of Samuel: “It is like the sin of soothsaying,” he says, “to oppose, and like the heinous act of idolatry to will not to obey.” He does not say “not to obey,” but “to will not to obey,” so that not the simple transgression itself of an order, but the proud contention of the will, may be reckoned the heinous act of idolatry; for “to will not to obey” and “not to obey” are not the same thing. In fact the latter is sometimes from error, and also sometimes from weakness; but the former is either from hateful obstinacy or from arrogance that cannot be borne. . . . Therefore the [mere]

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omission of any kind of mandate does not make disobedience grave, but [only] opposing, but [only] willing not to obey. (11.26; emphasis added)40 Intention, it turns out, is not merely a major factor in deciding the difference between sin and grave offense, transgression and prevarication: it is the dominant factor. While differences in the weight of the broken rule can make a sin more serious or less, they are mere inflections to the fundamental determination, which depends only on whether the disobedience is, on the one hand, accidental (from error or weakness), or on the other deliberately willed or from a habitual pride. Bernard goes on to reinforce the claim by speaking of the “first and greatest prevarication” committed by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden: what made that sin so awful was not the deed itself but the obstinacy that accompanied it, as shown in the “rebellion of defense that followed,” that is, in the couple’s various attempts to blame others rather than repent (11.27). Had it not been for that refusal to repent, Bernard says, “even that ancient prevarication, so notorious and so harmful, would have, as is thought, easily obtained indulgence” (11.28).41 There is here the usual disavowal of any interest in putting forward an idiosyncratic idea: “as is thought” (or “believed”: Latin creditur) flags the judgment as the common property of many. Not only is intention the major factor in discriminating among sins, Bernard suggests, but fellow followers of the Christian tradition already know this to be true.42 The point of this discovery for the larger question about degrees of transgression is, of course, that it leaves Bernard’s interlocutors (along with everyone else) much more in control of their fate than they had feared. One may easily slip into disobedience and sin, as Bernard acknowledges, but crimen is another matter: it does not “sneak up furtively on the unknowing [monk], or befall the unlucky [monk] by accident.”43 To arrive at crimen one must instead “rebel,” one must act deliberately and with contempt. And the news then becomes still better, because, as the discussion of the “first prevarication” foreshadows, there is one more way to escape “grave offense,” despite the weaknesses of human nature: there is repentance after the fact. In the particular context of Bernard’s immediate concern, there are provisions built into the Benedictine Rule, penances or “remedies” as Bernard calls them, that stipulate how a

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breach of obedience may be mended and the transgressor kept from wandering too far: That profession of ours includes both [precepts and remedies], so that everyone who has professed, when perhaps he should fall short in any of the regular mandates, if he should have recourse to the equally regular remedy, even if he is convicted as a transgressor of the mandate, he is nonetheless not convicted as a prevaricator of the pact. And thus I would consider to have broken the vow, violated what was proposed, prevaricated the pact, only the one who has contemned both the precept and the remedy. . . . For truly the one who does not shun the instruction of the censure that is from the Rule does not go beyond the Rule’s limits, even if he often falls short. (13.33)44 The remedies thus indicate one more way in which to break a rule is not necessarily to break the Rule. Breaking the Rule, performing a serious praevaricatio, is in a funny way a complicated affair, requiring, among other things, considerable constancy across time. It is not merely a matter of an infraction at a single point. The requirement of deliberate intention suggests that the root of the problem must exist for an interval before it manifests itself in the broken rule; and this last observation, that “remedies” for rule-breakers are available after the fact, means that to set oneself decisively outside the bounds of the Rule requires persistence into the future too. Therefore, while the two monks’ initial observation about the practical impossibility of flawlessly fulfilling so many tiny injunctions is correct, the implications they draw from that impossibility are not. Let Bernard sum up the matter: I grant, certainly, that it is impossible for anyone among mortals not sometimes to fall short of obedience in the precepts, at least venially; but there is not therefore any cause for complaint about impossibility, since, also according to the Rule, one can emend even that which should happen to be committed criminally. Therefore what you say, that everything ordered by superiors can be observed in its entirety by no one, is true: but disobedience is a light fault, and an easy cure for it is found in the Rule, at least if the transgression is

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without contempt. If, however, you contend that also contempt itself sometimes cannot be absent, that is certainly false; nevertheless, the Rule’s carefulness does not leave that sort of disobedience without a cure either. And although it requires stronger medicine for curing, it nonetheless is free of the disease of prevarication, except when the strong medicine itself is contemned. (13.33)45 The two monks’ attempt to create a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument about monastic life fails, in other words. And Bernard, not content with showing that the argument fails, also goes to considerable length to demonstrate where its flaw lies — a demonstration worth attention here, as it is rich in implications for Chaucer’s stories. The monks, following the structure of a reductio or modus tollens argument, have begun with an initial set of beliefs about monasticism and deduced an unacceptable conclusion, namely that all or nearly all monks are headed for hell. Since that cannot be right, they reason, one of the suppositions that have led to it must be wrong: most likely (as we have already seen) the supposition that human commandments are to be treated with the same respect due to divine ones, or possibly (as suggested more rarely, e.g., in 12.30) the supposition that it is profitable to become a monk in the first place. Bernard’s response is tailored to counter that sort of argument. He acknowledges that, given the initial assumptions, the unacceptable conclusion would follow; but he “blames” that result on a different assumption, one unnoticed by the monks themselves. The trouble is not, according to him, the attempt to ascribe divine authority to merely human rules: given the vouchers for that principle from Jesus and St. Benedict (n. 35), he reasons, we had better keep it intact. Rather, the trouble is a misunderstanding about what following a rule actually means. The monks’ hidden supposition is that it means proceeding so that one’s observable behavior tracks the rule in the relentless way that the conclusions of a deductive syllogism track its major premise — or, to use an anachronistic but precise analogy, the way observed motions in the natural science of the high-modern period (latterly called “classical” or “Newtonian” physics) are held to track the laws that hold sway there. In both those cases the fulfillment of a rule, the following of the law, means that in every “case” governed by a general “rule,” without exception, a predictable “result” follows. All humans are

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mortal (the rule); Socrates is a human (the case); therefore Socrates is mortal (the result). If rule following in general proceeds on those lines, then so also with monastic mandates. The Rule enjoins silence after Compline; it is currently after Compline; therefore, and with unquestionable, inescapable regularity, I will now be silent. If I am not, according to this interpretation, the Rule has been definitively broken — just as, if Socrates is immortal, the statement “all humans are mortal” must be counted as definitively false.46 Bernard is explicit both in ascribing these beliefs to the monks and in repudiating them himself. This can be seen from his description of how each party thinks about “perfection.” The monks apparently took the word to describe just such an ideal of exceptionless fulfillment: Bernard quotes them (10.24) as asking whether “anyone [is] found thus perfect that not at least some very small thing is occasionally snatched away” of the many and tiny commandments they face.47 The question implies both that being “perfect” is a matter of verifying adherence in each one of a set of instances and that the monks suspect that it cannot be done. On the latter point Bernard agrees, answering their rhetorical question negatively: no one is “thus perfect.” Indeed Bernard is, if anything, more adamant than the monks themselves about the impossibility of this kind of perfection, assigning an unflattering label even to those who so much as imagine that this is what perfection means. “You believe, then,” he writes, “. . . that the mandates of God can hardly be observed in their entirety, [and] those of an abbot cannot be, whereas Truth himself witnesses that ‘not even one iota is to be passed over’ ”— with the unfortunate result that we are all at serious risk of being damned. “He who thinks in this way,” Bernard continues, “seems to me . . . not yet to have ‘tasted how gentle the Lord is’; seems still to groan under the ‘yoke of the law’; seems not yet to catch his breath under grace; seems not at all to have experienced the ‘gentle yoke’ of Christ; and therefore most certainly seems still to be ‘weak on account of the flesh,’ because the Spirit does not ‘help his weakness’ ” (13.31).48 The one who believes that what is required of us is this sort of case-bycase perfection, fulfillment in every instance, is one who lives sub iugo legis— under the law’s yoke. Bernard makes no bones about wanting to understand law in a different way: the focus should be on attitude and intention more strongly than on case-by-case monitoring; and due attention should be given to processes, like the “remedies” of the Benedic-

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tine Rule, by which a person can demonstrate after an infraction that his intention and attitude are nonetheless still in line with the relevant law (or have at least returned there). The view is, one might say, holistic rather than pointillist, top-down rather than bottom-up — and such a view necessarily rejects what the monks have called “perfection.” That is not to say, however, that Bernard thinks perfection a useless category; he has his own account of it, according to which it too is a matter of intention or attitude. The idea is laid out early in the treatise, and its first appearance takes the form of a paradox. Bernard writes that “perfect obedience does not know law. It is not shut up within bounds, nor is it content with the narrow straits of the profession. With a more bountiful will it rushes into the broadness of love, and, being willing toward everything that is enjoined, it stretches out, not thinking about measure, by the force of a generous and eager soul, into infinite freedom” (6.12).49 The first phrase is a riff on a familiar Latin proverb, “Necessity knows no law,” which Bernard has mentioned a few sentences previously; and his version of it, in context, has a potentially troubling sense. Obedience “does not know law,” for him, not because one perfected in obedience has been freed of the law’s restrictions, but because the perfect one is so spontaneously eager to do what the law enjoins that he no longer experiences its injunctions as restrictive. (Bernard had previously been sketching the limits of a monk’s obedience and acknowledging that no one should be required to exceed the boundaries of the particular monastic rule he has professed; by saying that perfect obedience does not think about “measure,” then, he means that once endowed with perfect obedience, a monk will no longer check whether the orders he is given fall within the monastic “job description” he has agreed to—even though from a strictly contractual point of view he is entitled to do so.) It is easy to catch here an unpleasant whiff of Griselda’s more extreme utterances, such as her remark that she would gladly do Walter’s will, could she but discover it, even before he willed it. The passage, however, must be kept in balance with the rest of what Bernard says about obedience: given declarations already noted from elsewhere in Precept and Dispensation, the eagerness to obey that he enjoins upon the perfected monk cannot extend to commands that are contrary to God or to charity or to justice. Moreover, his letter to the monk Adam (n. 30) speaks of the necessity of preserving a monk’s

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“freedom” so that he can refuse if such a misbegotten order comes his way (§12, SBO 7:40, and Letters, p. 33; cf. the epigraph to ch. 1 from Bernard). Having in these ways somewhat mitigated the dangers of a Griselda-like absolute subjection to a human will, Bernard is willing to trust the monastic rules to produce good and not evil. What he has particularly in mind, in this passage, is presumably the goal of monastic life known as conversio morum: the alterations of one’s mores, moral habits, so that they come more and more into conformity with a monastic rule. As the process of habit-change progresses, a vowed religious presumably finds it easier to stay in line with the rule’s injunctions than it was at first; and such changes might well converge on Bernard’s “perfect obedience,” a state in which one’s attitude toward the injunctions is one “ready in love” rather than “bound by necessity” (6.12). In any case the key point is the contrast between Bernard’s view of perfection and the monks’— a contrast that reinforces the gap between their ideas of what it means to follow a rule at all. One option is determinism, case counting, judgment from the bottom up; the other asks how the subject relates to the law as a whole, over time — so that following a law becomes something more akin to living with another person in marriage than to answering questions on a multiple-choice exam. One should not, however, infer that life with the law under Bernard’s sense of perfection is easy: conversio morum is a goal that must be returned to time and time again, with many frustrating lapses along the way. Indeed one of Bernard’s few explicit references to the idea in this treatise (16.47) punningly refers not only to conversio but to conversatio, the latter a word that derives from the frequentative of the former; the desired change in one’s habits only comes about in the course of a repetitive circling back that must at times seem endless. But that cyclical path is surely itself one of the reasons why adherence to a rule is best considered, as one of this chapter’s epigraphs has it, not a matter of simple subjection to abstract norms, but a “life” lived out by a human will. And that life is, it seems, the concrete working-out of an intention, an attitude toward the governing rule, that one can reasonably attempt to keep stable even while periodically failing to “live according to the rule” in individual cases.50 Having all this behind us —Bernard’s argument, stated in many different ways over the course of his treatise, that rule-following is a matter

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of one’s relationship to the rule as a whole rather than of fulfillment in individual cases — allows us to recall with new understanding a short sentence used as an epigraph in chapter 5, whose fully concrete sense will only now be apparent. Bernard’s interlocutors complained at one stage that if human commands are given divine weight, “no lesser caution is necessary” in handling the human commands than in handling divine ones, and that the constant need for that high degree of caution imposes an unbearable burden on weak flesh that was already struggling to fulfill the relatively few commandments of divine origin (13.31). Against that background, when Bernard responds that “no one, if he professes with caution, promises that he will henceforth transgress in nothing, that is, that he will no longer sin” (13.32), he has something quite specific in mind. Caution is good, he is telling his interlocutors, but caution will also be redefined just as perfection has been. True caution is not what the monks have imagined, a matter of clenching one’s teeth and going about on tiptoe in order to avoid breaking any of those many tiny commandments. It is in some ways quite the opposite: it is a matter of knowing, from the moment one professes the rule forward, that one is not promising never to break those commandments — and consequently knowing that one need not go about on tiptoe.

Precept and Dispensation: Conclusions and Initial Application Were it proved that the ratio of frequency of all events to such of them as were due to natural causation was 1:1, that would be no argument whatever against the existence of miracles. — Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 2:369 (from J. M. Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, “Universal”)

If we take a broader look back over Bernard’s treatise, and in particular over all three of the ways of escape he offers from his interlocutors’ damning logic, what do we see? Certainly, first of all, that his approach to law, like the one inferred from Chaucer’s poems, is neither antinomian nor rigorist: this writer for whom God himself can be described as a law (ch. 3) is not interested in the abolition of all law, but neither is

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this pastorally minded abbot interested in interpreting law in a way that will crush all hope of life with a monastic rule. But more than this: Bernard’s position is not merely a tertium quid, a neither-nor whose most salient attribute is its avoidance of two undesirable options. Rather than merely avoiding them, it combines, in a way that might at first seem impossible, their desirable opposites. In one direction the mutual support of the opposites is easy to see: Bernard’s rejection of rigorism, so far from implying antinomianism, is precisely what makes possible his enthusiasm for law, because it allows a belief in the goodness and validity of individual laws — a belief that would be impossible if they were understood to demand exceptionless conformity. The converse, the way in which Bernard’s rejection of antinomianism, instead of tempting him toward rigor, supports his antirigorism, is more complex but also more striking. Bernard shies away from affirming that any particular set of concrete injunctions, be it even the Decalogue itself, is valid without exception. Still less does he issue a blanket affirmation of all laws. Instead he affirms that laws exist in a hierarchy, each having its own “necessity” that allows it to overturn some lesser laws, and in turn to be suspended or overturned by higher laws when conditions are right. And the entire structure depends on the one law, caritas, that outranks, undergirds, and guides the application of, all the rest. To see laws as arranged in such a way means that in the very act of affirming laws-in-general, Bernard necessarily affirms that any particular law one names can be broken. A particular law can escape that frangibility only if it is somehow necessarily identified with divine charity itself; so that any particular law that is held to be infrangible, if it is not in reality identical with charity, has become something like an idol, that is, a finite part of creation mistakenly treated as divine.51 The general pattern here is of a kind we have seen before. Confronted with the possibilities of human action and human passivity, Bernard speaks of (and Chaucer’s Custance, I have suggested, embodies) a passive action and an active passivity—and discovers that the two extremes with which the question started are untenable, even illusory. Confronted with the dangers of pride and pusillanimity, Bernard finds in the person of Mary a magnanimous humility, a humility that opens the door to things otherwise unthinkable—and again the erstwhile “poles,” magnanimity without humility and humility without magnanimity, turn

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out to be inferior to the paradoxical combination. We have even seen (near the end of ch. 4) a claim that the Christian tradition in general has regularly depended on paradoxes of this kind. No wonder, then, that when Bernard turns his attention to law, something like the same paradoxical shape emerges. Its emergence offers us exactly what the end of chapter 5 promised: a different notion of what law is, a different idea of generality, from those that hold sway in the realm of the deductive syllogism, or of high-modern physics. Laws under Bernard’s gaze are regularities-that-admit-exceptions: but to his way of thinking, the exceptions do not make them any less real as laws. In fact it may be that they are the only real laws; while what we moderns might previously have thought of as laws, the exceptionless syllogistic variety, turn out to be mere fantasies, or at best rough approximations of reality. Turning back to Chaucer’s poems with these ideas about law in mind is an exercise that offers immediate, indeed almost obvious, results. If Precept and Dispensation proposes three ways of escape from the burden of a crushingly mechanistic, case-by-case understanding of law, the first two clearly suggest some hope for Dorigen and Virginius. Both “ways”—that is, both the practice of authoritative dispensation of laws and the determination that a law in conflict with divine law should not be obeyed — suggest a cosmos in which individual laws are fungible rather than eternally fixed. In the case of dispensation, the expectation is clearly about a law that is, to put it bluntly, “good,” or as Bernard might have said, “expedient”: a law that in ordinary circumstances helps people who follow it achieve their ends. If such a law can be waived when in some particular case it is no longer performing its ordinary role, but is working against charity instead — then, a fortiori, the laws that bind (or appear to bind) Dorigen to sleep with Aurelius, or Virginius to give up Virginia to a lecherous judge, should be dispensed, as they are not even good or expedient to begin with, but dictate evil outcomes that transgress other, better laws already in place. In point of fact either of Bernard’s first two “ways of escape” might fairly come into play here: a trustworthy “dispensor,” if there were one, would doubtless do away with such destructive laws; but as there is no one to play that role, Dorigen herself, and likewise Virginius himself, should surely assume the responsibility of the kind of appropriate infraction that Bernard authorizes for a monk commanded to do something unjust or uncharitable.

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The point here is not so much to imagine grafting Bernard’s detailed jurisprudential arguments onto Chaucer’s fictional worlds; though doing so might make an interesting exercise, it is not entirely clear what it would prove. The point, at least with these first two ways of escape, is merely to document the general sympathy between the apparent ethical stance of the poems and the explicit one of Bernard’s treatise. The latter dwells in a world in which laws can be suspended or changed — only under certain circumstances, to be sure, and only in accord with some higher law, but nonetheless the practice is real and perhaps not rare. The Franklin’s and Physician’s tales only “work,” their story lines only hang together, because none of their respective protagonists lives in that sort of world; rather, they all live in a world in which a law, once established, is a permanent and unquestionable thing. Thus anyone who subscribes to something like Bernard’s picture of the proper human relationship to laws would ask Dorigen and Virginius to behave quite otherwise than they do, and by doing so to undo the central knots of their stories. The previous chapter contended, drawing primarily on evidence internal to the poems, that Chaucer himself all but begs his readers to consider those alternate behaviors that his protagonists fail to see — that he himself, in effect, shows how and why they “should” behave differently. The evidence of Bernard’s first two “ways of escape” indicates that such a reaction is no idiosyncrasy or innovation on Chaucer’s part, but rather that it matches the way many people of his and preceding centuries — including many deeply enmeshed in the Christian intellectual tradition—would have reacted. What, then, about Bernard’s third “way of escape,” the vital teaching that adherence to a law is not primarily a matter of counting up instances, and that the law itself is something richer and deeper than any set of concrete cases? At least on the level of form, there is a noticeable similarity between the situation of some of Chaucer’s lead characters and that of Bernard’s monks. Dorigen and Virginius feel themselves confronted with a choice between the strict fulfillment of a law and escaping its consequences through a loophole, without realizing that both options fall on the same side of a more fundamental division between maintaining the law intact and breaking it. The monks worry over the apparent chasm between casewise perfect fulfillment (presumably followed by salvation as its reward) and occasional transgression

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(apparently issuing in damnation), without understanding that both scenarios — one of which they know to be impossible in practice — likewise fall on the same side of a previous assumption that law as such implies rigor, implies that the linkage between protasis and apodosis always remains intact. These formally parallel failures of understanding manifest themselves in different ways. Dorigen and Virginius are blind to the options that openness to the possibility of lawbreaking would have suggested, and thus choose their courses of action badly; the monks are blind to the “gentleness” of the law that governs them, and thus become desperate to find other ways out from its (illusory) demand for an impossible kind of perfection. But the parallels are close enough to make Bernard’s expressive terminology useful in thinking about Chaucer’s tales. Dorigen with her inability to see outside the bounds of a transparently void oath, Virginius with his even more complete blindness to the possibility of trespassing an even more obviously unjust stricture: would it not be fair to say that these are people living out their lives, working out their moral inferences, entirely sub lege? Indeed in Dorigen’s case there are still clearer reasons to use the phrase: even before she swears the rash oath, she has made a promise — the last of her wedding promises —that is virtually the definition of life sub lege. “That nevere sholde ther be defaute in here” (788): is this not precisely what Bernard and the monks agree is impossible, and precisely what Bernard attempts to point out as absent from a “cautious” oath? Is it not a striving for the wrong kind of perfection, an “incautious” kind of swearing that can only lead to the wrong kind of caution later, the same scrupulous paranoia about instances that the monks feel as their damned lot? There remains, to be sure, the one obvious difference between Bernard’s monks and Chaucer’s characters, namely that the latter have the task of fighting against evil laws, the former that of doing their best to conform to laws that are basically good. But the difference merely indicates that, as promised, Precept and Dispensation advances reflection on will and law to a point that these two tales cannot fully reach. The remaining task of this chapter will be a fuller illumination of that further point—that high-medieval understanding of what it means to live with a (good) law — by drawing on different, but also familiar, texts. There are a few enlightening passages on the topic near the end of Bernard’s treatise On Grace and Free Choice; but there is also much to be

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gained from brief last looks at some of the Canterbury tales considered in previous chapters.

How Not to Kill Constance: Regularity, Murder, and Deferral There is an oddity about the Man of Law’s Tale as yet unremarked. It is a violent story, with most of the violence directed toward the heroine, who undergoes in her thousand lines something on the order of four attempted murders, one attempted rape, and the successful rubbing-out of scores of her associates. But the peculiar thing about all the mayhem— other than the fact that so much of it remains merely “attempted”—is a certain indirection that characterizes it. In most of the cases, the malefactor has an excellent chance to end Custance’s life by means simple and direct, but passes it up in favor of something more baroque. In Syria, where Custance’s entire wedding party has just been put to the sword by her wicked mother-in-law-to-have-been, the only survivor is Custance herself, who, for reasons at the time unexplained, is favored with what one might expect to be a slower death by exposure—being set adrift on the Mediterranean in a rudderless boat. Some time after her miraculous preservation from that ordeal the pattern repeats itself even more emphatically, when a dastardly knight whose amorous advances Custance has spurned creeps under dark of night into the castle where she lives — and murders someone else, Hermengyld, the constable’s wife. He clearly could have worked his evil on Custance, but also prefers an indirect approach, merely laying the bloody knife he has just used on her friend beside her on the assumption that she will be blamed and executed for the crime. Custance’s third major antagonist takes two shots at her target. She is Custance’s second mother-in-law, Donegild, who is deeply unamused that her son Alla has taken “so strange a creature” (line 700) as a wife. Her solution, too, is to attempt to kill Custance—which she does by another very indirect method: like the knight, she frames her intended victim for a false crime, in this case by intercepting an innocuous letter from the constable to Custance’s absent husband, Donegild’s own son, and substituting one that describes Custance’s newborn as a “feendly creature” and Custance herself as an “elf ” whose presence no one can abide (750 –56). Like the knight before her, Donegild hopes that an Au-

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thority will believe evil of Custance and respond as it “naturally” should: that is, by killing or otherwise harming her, thus getting the job done without risk to the perpetrator. Alas, however, her plan is interrupted by a surprising reaction on her son’s part. On receipt of the letter, Alla swallows his woe and writes a brief reply based on a refrain he seems to have picked up from his wife: “Welcome the sonde of Crist for everemoore!” (760). Instructions follow to keep the child and his mother unharmed, in spite of their alleged wickedness, until Alla returns to Northumberland; thus Donegild’s attempt to accomplish her evil intention by intervening upstream in a causal flow that should lead to Custance’s death is foiled when one part of the machine turns out to function with a lessthan-mechanical regularity. In this case, however, the machinating one is not so easily foiled: on the thwarting of her attempt to intervene far upstream from the goal, she merely tries again, this time further downstream. Since false accusation did not convince Authority to issue a death-warrant for Custance, Donegild instead falsifies an edict directly, in the form of another substituted letter (lines 792 – 802). And the means of punishment enjoined in this second false letter is again one that is not immediate, but relies on a natural and predictable unfolding of events likely to lead to Custance’s death: once more (864 –75) the hapless woman hits the open sea in her rudderless boat.52 What are we to make of all this indirection? Why does it feature so strongly in Custance’s tale? It is possible to propose quick answers of a kind that would intimate that the question has not been terribly interesting: if any of these episodes proved fatal, the story would end prematurely; as it stands they are a kind of motor for the plot, as the indirectness of the dangers draws the anxious reader in and, more importantly, leaves space for the miraculous rescues that are integral to the tale’s message. In one case, that of the jilted knight, the plotter also is given an explicit reason for preferring a frame job to mere murder: he wants “to maken hire on shameful deeth to deye” (592). And, of course, the four murder attempts closely follow, at least as far as the basic structure of the action is concerned, those in Chaucer’s major literary source or sources, Nicholas Trevet and John Gower. All true enough, but it is also possible to answer the question in a more fruitful way. All the infernal machinations that threaten Custance’s continued membership in the Church Militant are, from the point of view of this study, laws: they are features of the cosmos expressible in hypothetical

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propositions, and the villains expect them to roll forward with an awful regularity. If you set a young woman adrift in the Mediterranean, she will die. If a “strange” resident alien is found with a bloody knife immediately after the violent demise of a neighbor, the local constabulary will administer punishment. If a king receives word that his recently acquired (and still “strange”) wife is in fact a malevolent faerie who gives birth to monsters, he will administer punishment. And so on. Chaucer can be expected to have an interest in these situations where action is partly or wholly structured by interaction with laws because, as I have argued from the Franklin’s and Physician’s tales, questions about law-ingeneral have considerable force in his mind. The structure of deferral that appears so frequently in the Man of Law’s Tale brings to center stage both the power of the laws for whose effects the machinating characters wait and that power’s all-important limitations and failures. There is also a second reason why Chaucer would be interested in action structured around the predictable behavior of laws: if he subscribes to anything like Bernard’s theory of agency, he is not likely to believe that there is any other kind. Bernard makes this clear as part of his division of the human act into idea, will, and accomplishment, discussed in chapter 3. Of the three parts, “neither the first, since in it we do nothing, nor the last, which likewise for the most part either useless fear or damnable faking wrests away, but only the middle is reckoned to us as merit” (DGLA 14.46, SBO 3:199).53 This is because only in the middle stage does “free choice” play a relatively starring role. It is vastly less responsible for the outcome of the willing, that is, the accomplishment of the goal; while that cannot happen “without us” (14.46), while it “has to be done with regard to us or even in us” (14.49), it is nonetheless a matter of God’s working “through us” (14.46); it is not something done “by us” (14.49).54 Bernard’s wayfaring soul awaits salvation (or indeed the success of any other act, as his text slides between discussing salvation in particular and action in general) in the same way that Donegild awaits Custance’s demise: all either can do is put forward the action that should lead to the desired result, and then wait. For either party, every act is a kind of surrender.55 In Custance’s story, then, Chaucer is interested in the fact that human action must be undertaken in accord with laws. But the serial failures of assorted villainous plots show that he is also interested in

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something else: when something goes wrong, what is it? What interrupts laws, or, in Bernard’s language, “wrests away” the intended goal of human action? When we begin asking these questions, we are suddenly back in well-explored regions. It is true that Custance’s antagonists await from various laws “responses” that are not under their direct control, whereas Dorigen, Virginius, and (to some extent) Bernard’s two monks are plagued by laws demanding from them “responses” that are under theirs. Nonetheless, carrying on with the device of thinking of laws abstractly makes it clear that at root all parties named are concerned with a familiar set of questions: How regular are these laws? How dependable or forceful is the consequence with which they make B follow A? Are they perfectly rigorous, or do they admit of cases in which (in the Knight’s Tale’s words) “somtyme it shal fallen on a day / That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yeer” (1668 – 69)? The desires of the villains, of course, are also the opposite of those harbored by Dorigen, Virginius, and the monks, with the former group hoping that their wicked laws will show perfect regularity while the latter group — or, in the cases of Chaucer’s characters, those listeners to their stories who can see a wider spate of possibilities than they can—hope for exceptions, for relief from the law. But the underlying questions are the same. It is notable where, and on whose side, the exceptions appear. Four times Custance is saved. Three times the rescue is frankly miraculous — twice on the open sea, when there is no explanation given for her survival of months and years of exposure other than that the agent who causes it has been known to pull off similar miracles before (484 – 504; cf. 871–74), and once by the supernatural smiting of her knightly antagonist at a key moment (669–72). One time, however, there is nothing involved that we would normally label a miracle, only that extraordinary act of mercy on her husband’s part. Here it is in full: Welcome the sonde of Crist for everemoore To me that am now lerned in his loore! Lord, welcome be thy lust and thy plesaunce; My lust I putte al in thyn ordinaunce. Kepeth this child, al be it foul or feir, And eek my wyf, unto myn hoom-comynge. (760 –65)

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It is a very simple action. Indeed some observers might categorize it as no action at all, but as a failure to act. But it blasts down the threatening scheme of the moment every bit as effectively as do the three cases of direct divine intervention. Surely it is no accident that, in this tale of laws and wills, action and passion, one of the escapes from one of the most threatening laws comes about by an act of quiet consent to (what Alla takes as) God’s will. We saw in chapter 1 that Custance’s miracles do not come about through her own power, and that Chaucer’s grammar explicitly, if subtly, emphasizes the fact; instead she is merely cooperative, and Christ, or Mary, or God works the miracle through her willingness. Here Chaucer shows us the same sort of action at work in her husband, whose greatest achievement in the story is this act of acquiescence, a gracious accomplishment that provides an unexpected opening in the chain of causality that Donegild hoped would catch Custance. His behavior strongly recalls Bernard’s intentionally paradoxical précis as he begins to draw the treatise On Grace and Free Choice to a close: “Are we to say,” he asks rhetorically, “that the entire function and sole merit of free choice is that it consents?” He answers himself without delay: “Precisely” (14.46, SBO 3:199).56 By now we should hear Alla’s consent as something more interesting than a purely passive offering-up of his will to the control of an easyto-characterize external force. He seems to have discovered something like the active passion that Bernard attributes to Christ in a Holy Week sermon: this most forceful action of his is an opening of himself to what he believes God wants, and that mixture of action and passion has more active effect than any attempt at “pure” action ever could.57 But the episode has as much to say about will and law as it does about passion and action. Like Dorigen and Virginius, Alla is in the situation of being responsible for the fulfillment of a law rather than the villains’ situation of waiting for the law to be fulfilled: he has the power to choose whether B (“the king orders his wife put to death”) will in fact follow A (“the king hears that his wife is a malevolent otherworldly creature”). Unlike his fellow characters, but very much like a prelate instructed by Bernard’s treatise, he chooses to interrupt that ordinarily valid consequence — not arbitrarily, but under the guidance of a higher law, one close to or identical with God himself. “My lust I putte al in thyn ordinaunce” is remarkably reminiscent of Bernard’s dictum that

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dispensations are not made by a prelate’s will, but must “follow the judgment of reason” and be accompanied by a reason, a ratio necessitatis demonstrating that the change is in accord with the higher law of charity (DPD 4.9). Thus for Alla’s way of thinking about law. And it is also consonant with his wife’s way, although we more often see her on the receiving end of a law’s effects than in the position of choosing whether to fulfill a law herself. The couple has in common an acknowledgment of the validity of interruptions, as Custance’s welcoming of what Christ sends requires her — also like a judicious prelate — to be open to putting aside a previous set of expectations when a new direction of more pressing necessity appears. Against that agreement, however, rises up in the tale an entirely different way of thinking about law, the way of Custance’s antagonists, who, despite the exceptions that keep popping up to thwart them, appear to make their plans in the expectation that the regularities involved will roll forward with exceptionless, inexorable dependability. They are rather reminiscent of the Knight’s Tale’s Theseus, whose plans, if made with better intentions, suffer from the same naïve confidence in their own success —and ultimately suffer similar defeats at the hands of chance (or of Providence, or of Chaucer). Moreover, if we again adjust for the difference between a person awaiting the fulfillment of a law and one from whom the law expects its fulfillment, it is a stance very like Dorigen’s and Virginius’s inability to conceive that a law might be left unfulfilled — and also very like the similar inability that plagues Bernard’s interlocutors in Precept and Dispensation. Custance’s antagonists too are operating sub lege, presuming a finite law to be infinitely trustworthy — with the difference that, instead of feeling crushed by that necessitarian rigor as Dorigen, and Virginius, and Bernard’s interlocutors do, they intend to use it to crush someone else. Their understanding of law has allowed law to become a murder weapon. It is fair to say—reaching back for a second thought inspired by Precept and Dispensation— that in making the same mistake that Bernard’s monks make, treating finite and contingent regularities as if they were entirely inescapable — Custance’s antagonists also fall into something akin to the sin of idolatry. Recall the circumstances of Bernard’s explicit reference to that sin: it comes in the passage he quotes from the book of Samuel, telling of the evils of willed disobedience. It is “like the grave

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offense of idolatry to will not to obey,” and like soothsaying to oppose an order. At first these similitudes may seem to be merely florid ways of saying that willed disobedience is very, very bad. But on second look the badness has a more particular content: idolatry and soothsaying have something in common. They both approach what in principle cannot be controlled (the divine, the future) and claim to render it docile, predictable, subject to control. In the same way a deliberate refusal of obedience is a bid to seize control by putting oneself outside the influence of the law. And now it emerges that rigorism has an oddly similar impulse at its root: as the one who refuses obedience imagines that he will be free of law and thus able to act as he pleases, the rigorist expects that his knowledge of, or adherence to, the law will grant him a perfectly predictive knowledge of how the world unfolds. Both antinomianism and rigorism, it seems, can be chalked up to an understandable but unfulfillable desire for control. Against both these attempts at mastery, the attitude of Custance and Alla stands out in high relief. If “welcome be the sonde of Crist” is their guiding principle, it is not one that lends itself to rigorist interpretations. How to be rigorist under a law that gives one nothing definite to be rigorist about? The counsel is rather toward continual listening, continual openness, continual readiness to accept what comes —with an acceptance, presumably, that could at different times involve deliberate action in accord with Cristes sonde, or the willingness to have one’s deliberate actions interrupted, or the willingness to avoid altogether what ordinarily counts as action.58 The pair, in any case, show little inclination toward control, but much toward cooperation: they show themselves ready, again and again, to change their expectations, and they declare (or at least declare their hope) that they are ruled by this “welcoming,” this least regular of regularities. If we take their tale as a whole to be about the conflict between their way of understanding law and their adversaries’ way, a familiar kind of structure comes into view: two degenerate extremes, here rigorism and the refusal of all law, are shown to be impossible by the arrival of a third position that combines their opposites in a felicitous way. And as we have also seen before, the extremes can quickly turn into each other, as when the sub lege stance of Bernard’s monks suggests to them a wholesale rejection of monastic commitment. Custance’s and Alla’s dependence on a “higher law” that guides all the rest, by contrast, allows them to affirm laws without losing a certain

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ethical suppleness. We now turn, as promised, to one final source’s attempt to understand what life with such a “good law” might mean.

The Bonfire of the Categories The source is one by now familiar, namely Bernard’s treatise On Grace and Free Choice. The passage begins by citing the opening of the book of Hebrews, which refers to Christ as the “figure and splendor of the Father’s substance.” Bernard takes the phrase to suggest that Christ is a form or pattern according to which humanity was made and then, in the redemption, remade. But the application of a new form to that which it forms is the application of something general and regular to something otherwise lacking in regularity; thus it is, in the broad sense used here, the application of a law. Bernard follows with a few dense but rewarding sentences describing how this divine form behaves in the world: The form itself came, to whom the [human] free choice was to be conformed, because in order that it should receive [its] original form, it was necessary that it be reformed out of that from which it had also been formed. The form, moreover, is Wisdom; [and] conformation [is] that the image [of God, namely the free choice] should do in the body what the form does in the world. Namely, “It reaches strongly from end to end and arranges all things gently.” It reaches from end to end, that is, from the highest heaven to the lower parts of the earth, from the greatest angel to the tiniest worm. It reaches strongly, moreover, not indeed by inconstantly running here and there, nor by spreading from place to place, nor by a dutiful guiding merely of the creature subject to it, but by a certain strength that is substantial and present everywhere, by which, in any case, it moves, orders, guides all things together in a supremely powerful way. And it is not forced to do all these things by any necessity of its own, nor does it really labor in them under any difficulty, but arranges all things gently by a placid will. (DGLA 10.33, SBO 3:189)59 There are many things worthy of note here, and not all of them are clear. Perhaps the place to begin is with the surprising point that by the end of the passage, Bernard is speaking of will rather than of anything

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that sounds like law. This is not likely a mistake; nor, I think, does it indicate that it was inappropriate to look to this passage for information about law in the first place. Instead the passage shows us a kind of action that combines some characteristics we ordinarily associate with laws and some we normally connect with wills. As just noted, Christ’s action is like the action of what we would call a “law of nature” in that such action is everywhere at once, rather than “run[ning] here and there” or “spread[ing] from place to place” as wills normally have to do if they wish to have effects in more than one location. Likewise, this phase of Christ’s interaction with the world seems to involve no effort: Wisdom, or Christ, does not “labor” in these works “under any difficulty.” Its (or his) actions are also in that way like the laws of nature, at least as they have usually been understood in the modern West: not as working toward a goal against resistance, but as simply the way things are.60 On the other hand, this divine action is also “not forced to do all these things by any necessity of its own”— nor, a fortiori, by anyone else’s necessity. In other words, its action is free and undetermined: something that appears, in our usual categorization of reality, very much on the side of wills rather than laws. How shall we describe this action that is simultaneously without a will’s effort and without a law’s necessary determination? Bernard gives it a label we have seen before: it acts suaviter, “sweetly” or “gently”—just the word that describes divine things in Precept and Dispensation, where Bernard follows scripture to say that God himself is suavis (Psalm 33:9, Vulgata iuxta Septuaginta) and that the yoke of following Christ is also suave (Matthew 11:30). The word has approximately the same associations there as here: just as the “gentleness” of the divine Form here opposes a necessitarian view of divine action, so in the later treatise knowledge of God’s gentleness would have allowed the monks to drop their mistaken habit of interpreting laws as mechanical, exceptionless, rigorist. The appearance, in similar vocabulary, of the same opposition between two understandings of law — one life-giving and one destructive, one holistic and one case-by-case — in two works written roughly sixteen years apart gives some hint of how deeply the contrast lodged in Bernard’s thinking.61 At any rate, one important component of “gentleness” in this earlier treatise is a certain scrambling of the categories of will and law— a scrambling that becomes still more pronounced if we consider one further question, what we might call the question of the reliability of ac-

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tion. Notwithstanding our inability to predict the particular paths divine action will take, it is fair to say that for Bernard God’s action is reliably good; this must be among the firmest statements in his universe. But this absolute reliability conflicts with a common understanding of freedom. If God’s actions are will-like to the extent of being “free” or undetermined, as has just been affirmed, how can we know in advance that they will always be good? Bernard considers the problem a bit later in the same chapter of Grace and Free Choice and offers to solve it by refining the meaning of a central concept. Whatever else free means, rightly understood it cannot mean that the free will is in a state of continual equipoise between good and evil. If it did mean that, Bernard writes, “neither God, nor the holy angels (since they are so good that they cannot also be evil) nor, in the same way, the prevaricator-angels (since they are so evil that they do not have the power to be good) could be said to be of free choice; and we too would lose it after the resurrection, when we will be inseparably added, some to the good, others to the evil” (DGLA 10.35, SBO 3:190).62 But in fact, he concludes, “Neither God nor the devil lacks free choice.” This last category shift breaks the strict equivalences between freedom and unpredictability, necessity and predictability, that “common sense” might be tempted to assume; it may well strike us as strange and even confusing, but Bernard means it seriously. Freedom, for him, need not imply even a hint—indeed, it need not imply even the possibility— of unpredictability on the large scale. He does not attempt much explanation of this ancient Christian paradox, which instead stands as an enigmatic summons to further thought for anyone who equates freedom with unpredictability or arbitrary whim.63 And immediately thereafter the paradox becomes still more challenging, as Bernard goes out of his way to assert that free wills, once perfected, are more reliable than necessitarian laws. Expanding on the idea that God and the devil have retained free choice, he writes that “not feeble necessity makes it that [God] cannot be evil, but a constant will in good, and a willing constancy; and it is not the violating oppression of another that makes for the fact that [the devil] cannot catch his breath afresh in the good, but his own will obstinate in evil, and a willing obstinacy” (ibid.).64 There is a difficult-to-translate play on words here that is both central to Bernard’s point and eye opening for this book’s basic project. What has arranged things so that God cannot be evil? Nothing so weak

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as “feeble necessity,” infirma necessitas—a phrase that would have been a startling oxymoron a few pages ago. Now, though, it should appear quite in line with Bernard’s teaching, so much so that we no longer need consider it an oxymoron; he is entirely serious about it. But to understand precisely what he means requires considering two possible senses of the adjective, both of which Bernard seems to intend. First of all, infirma means “feeble” or “sickly.” In that case necessity, very much contrary to the usual biases of modern thought, is the weak force in the universe. The stronger force is will: a “strong will” (firma . . . voluntas), and no mere law, is what is behind God’s incapacity to do evil. But the second meaning of firma and infirma reveals an intention still closer to the heart of this book’s reflections. Firmitas can also mean “reliability, steadfastness, constancy,” and I have chosen this translation above: God works with a constant will and a willing constancy. It is in the antonym infirma that the implications of this second meaning are most striking and most strange: the thing that Bernard tells us is not responsible for God’s reliability —infirma necessitas— is not just feeble but “fickle” or “undependable” or “inconstant” necessity. Who would think to describe necessitas this way? But infirmus, like suavis, is a word we have seen before: Bernard uses it in Precept and Dispensation to describe the person who knows nothing of Christ’s gentleness, “because the Spirit does not help his infirmitatem,” his weakness or inconstancy (13.31). Again the later treatise describes a fundamental opposition with the same vocabulary used in Grace and Free Choice: infirmitas is associated with necessitarian rigor, the province of those who live sub lege; strength and constancy associate instead with the supple flexibility of the “gentle.” And in a world in which rulefollowing, rule-breaking, and “perfection” are understood in the nonnecessitarian way that Precept and Dispensation proposes, these surprising associations make a good deal of sense. In such a world the will (despite all the present failings of human wills, to which Bernard was no stranger) is the important and lasting reality, and “necessity,” the force that attempts to hold together those case-by-case determinisms that we mistakenly imagine to be the dominant, or the only, kind of law, is at best a contingent arrangement, valid only during a possibly long but ultimately transitory moment. Such observations fall right into line with the different success rates of the rigoristic and the “gentle” approaches

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to law in Chaucer’s poems — and not just in the Man of Law’s Tale: think of one of the major differences between Custance and her fellow suffering heroine Griselda, who makes an astonishing wedding promise, strengthens it at every opportunity, and apparently means to take it as the fixed norm for the rest of her life. She strives to be a creature of necessity, bound to adopt at each point exactly what Walter wants; and once we have absorbed Bernard’s reevaluation of will and law, it should not surprise us that the striving is not wholly successful—that she “fails” or “cracks” a few times, in Chaucer’s telling, as any human would—and that to the degree that it is successful, its results are horrifying. Or think of the Knight’s Tale, where Theseus’s incessant planning similarly relies on the regular behavior of laws that turn out not to behave as expected. These thoughts may suggest an answer to the rhetorical question above: who would think to describe necessitas as inconstant? Theseus might, could he only wake up and see what his tale’s readers see about the endlessly iterated failure of his expectations. And Custance’s antagonists likewise. Griselda, Dorigen, and Virginius might also, if they could awaken to the awful consequences of their (often similarly failed) determinations to act with necessitarian rigor. Even St. Cecilia — the one apparent counterexample among Chaucer’s characters, in that she manages to make plans successfully, to rely on predictable behaviors that do deliver the expected goods — comes in for a subtle undermining at the last, at least if the understanding of her prologue in chapter 4 will bear weight. One begins to get the sense that in Chaucer’s writings, any attempt to cleave to a fixed law as an unshakable guide to action is destined for a bad end, rather as Dame Prudence’s epigraph to this section of the book suggests. Given the profusion of examples, it even seems reasonable to propose that what the allegorical Dame voices is not simply one of a legion of ideas that passed through the poet’s fertile mind, but expresses a deep habit of thought, likely one inherited (as the substantial accord with Bernard suggests) from a long and widely accepted tradition. Strong laws, then, are “gentle” laws, in Chaucer no less than in Bernard, and both writers seem to suggest that any successful approach to living with them will have to be gentle as well. One more idea about what such gentleness might mean can be gleaned from a last pass at Custance’s version of it. Her lodestar, the unruly rule she follows, contains

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what is in this connection a suggestive word: “ay welcome be thy sonde.” The word implies reception, to be sure, but it also allows space for some sort of reaction on her side: it is an unhospitable host who fails to respond to the particular condition of the guest she welcomes. It is a very different picture of the world from that implied by Griselda’s attempt simply to copy, on every occasion, Walter’s will with her own — an attempt that leaves no field for choice, surprise, or unpredictability arising from Griselda herself. Once Walter’s will is known, her will — or rather her will as it would be were such case-by-case perfection humanly possible — is known also. Not so with Custance, who merely promises (or asks) to receive what God sends: how she responds will not be externally dictated. More strange, however, and more remarkable, is the fact that it does not appear to be internally dictated either. That is, one gets the sense that Custance herself may not know her own response until it arrives, that it grows within her, “through her” and “not without her” as Bernard might say, but that it is no more purely of her making (“from her” or “by her”) than it is purely of someone else’s. Such a picture of action provides a strong link between Custance and her frequent patron, the mother of Jesus, who also receives from God something that grows within her, not completely under her control, but also not without her consent. Thus the conception and birth of Jesus can be taken as a paradigm for the supremely powerful kind of “active passion” that also appears in Custance. The element of passivity in each case is no weakness, but is instead the very thing that opens its bearer to a new power that comes from outside it but wells up within it. Such a possibility operates, it seems, at all levels of human life, up and down various scales of sublimity and ordinariness: from the surprising overboarding of Custance’s assailant thief, to the language learner’s grateful wonder at a sentence that falls from his own lips as if from elsewhere, to Mary’s passive-and-active fiat (“let it be done”), around which, according to Christian acceptation, the moral history of the world turns. Unpredictable and uncontrolled as such a relationship to the law is, it is not therefore any less an admirable state proposed for imitation. Quite the contrary: on Bernard’s view only such an openness appropriately responds to the gift of a law, and especially to the gift that the Law who is God wishes to make of God’s self.65 Such openness, “welcom-

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ing,” and growth-within may be the closest we have come to answering the previous chapter’s closing question: How are we to relate to a (good) law? Certainly nothing of this dynamic of law-and-response, of actionwith-passion, is well described or adequately imagined by the category of “necessity” or of deterministic law. Custance is more a creature of will than of that kind of law — though her will appears to be closing in on the kind of lawlike regularity, regularity grounded in choice, that Bernard attributes to the divine will. That closing-in, with its further breakdown of the boundary between “will” and “law,” is remarkably close to a last passage from Bernard, his attempt at an explicit picture of a human will coming into increasing conformity with the divine will. The passage follows the long quotation above, which already mentions that in “conformation”— that is, growth in human sanctity as the human will becomes conformed to Christ—God’s image within us does “in the body what the Form [Christ] does in the world.” Shortly afterwards the idea is taken up more fully: Therefore, let free choice undertake to be in charge of its body in just the way that wisdom is in charge of the world: it too should extend strongly from end to end, governing so powerfully the individual senses and limbs that it does not allow sin to reign in its mortal body, nor gives its members as weapons of iniquity, but delivers them over to be servants to righteousness. In this way the human being will no longer be a servant of sin, since he or she will no longer sin. . . . Let him or her take care, however, to do these things no less gently than strongly; that is, not out of dejection or out of necessity, which is the beginning but not the fullness of wisdom; but rather with a ready and glad will, which makes the sacrifice be accepted, since “God loves a cheerful giver.” And thus in all things he or she will imitate wisdom, in that he or she will both strongly resist vices and be gently at rest in conscience. (DGLA 10.34, SBO 3:189– 90)66 God’s paradoxical action, God’s scrambling of common categories, in some measure takes hold in the human will as it becomes conformed to Christ. The results are no less surprising in the human case than in the divine: as Christ rules the world all at once and without effort, so here

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the human will fights powerfully against vice while remaining at rest. But the most remarkable piece of this passage is the instruction on the quality that this self-governance should have. It should be done strongly but also “gently” (suaviter); and not, at all events, “out of necessity.” No surprise, by now, in the opposition of those two categories: also within the human self, what is needed is not the weak (though strong-looking) force of necessity, but the strong (though weak-looking) force of a “gentle,” an open, a ready-for-surprises, a passive-and-active will. To think otherwise is the “beginning but not the fullness of wisdom.” We can only conclude that those of Chaucer’s characters who attempt to govern their wills by one or another kind of “necessity”— let us call them Dorigen, Arveragus, Virginius, Griselda, Theseus — are still not far from that beginning.67

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Conclusion The Union of the Themes and Its Implications

Section 1: The Convergence of the Themes

The basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. —Thomas Merton1

What would it mean to be further down the road to wisdom? The previous chapter concluded with a glance at how some Chaucerian characters fall short of a particular religious ideal — an ideal which, I have argued, Chaucer shares with Bernard of Clairvaux and other widely influential representatives of the Christian tradition. It also provided, while pursuing its question about life with a law, some positive information about what the ideal involves. This sequel continues that positive note by asking what it would look like for a character (or a person) to have progressed further toward this religious ideal. In other

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words, what is there left to discover about the ideal that this book has chased across Bernard’s and Chaucer’s texts? What more can it teach us about Chaucer, or about late-medieval culture more generally? We have come at the ideal from two directions: as an answer to questions about agency and as a separate answer to questions about what I have called law. But it has begun to become clear that the two sets of questions and replies are not as separate as they first appear — indeed that it would be difficult to take a position on one of the questions without committing to a matching answer to the other. In the Clerk’s Tale, for example, the lens of agency first suggested how troubled, and in the end how chimerical and misguided, Griselda’s “patience” is; but it also led to thoughts about her relationship to law, via her attempts (described in detail in ch. 1, and returned to briefly in chs. 3, 5, and 6) to make her oaths to Walter into an exceptionless, quasi-mechanical, choice-obviating guide to life. In the Man of Law’s Tale there emerged a similarly close relationship between agency and law: Custance, who first hove into view as a heroine of the passive-and-active ideal, also has an entirely different relationship to oaths, promises, and laws from Griselda’s — seemingly a better one. On the one hand she is not such a devotee of rigorous law as is the oath-strengthening Griselda; to the contrary, much of her story consists of a series of miraculous (thus in a sense “unlawful”) escapes from various “mechanical” or “necessitarian” attempts to do her in. On the other hand, Chaucer has also not made her a pure antinomian any more than he has made her a purely selfsufficient agent; she has a lodestar, a kind of law or principle. The fact that it saves her from death rather than binding her to the destructive cyclical behavior of Griselda (and Walter, and Theseus) seems to have something to do with the kind of star it is. As chapter 1 observes, “ay welcome be thy sonde” may be as much petition as promise; and as chapter 6 adds, in either case it leaves space for responses that are unpredictable and that grow from an agency that must be recognized as Custance’s, notwithstanding that it can also be recognized as God’s. Thus the maxim does not lead her into the attempts at self-erasure that Griselda performs. It seems that favorable versions of agency and law (“favorable” from a point of view that resonates with the contemplative elements of Christianity to which Bernard bears witness) work together as strongly in Custance’s case as unfavorable ones do in Griselda’s.

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Why is this so? Can we find a general explanation for the strong link between the two themes? In the first half of this chapter I would like to propose three such connections. The first is general and almost obvious; the other two are more hidden and more bound to the details of the stories, and the theology, under consideration. It should be possible to learn more about both the theology and the stories by brief expositions of all three. The first begins from the observation of two possible ways of seeing “the world”: is the world as a whole governed by something like a personal will, or by something like a law? It is a question that might easily produce protests about the need for dozens of philosophical nuances.2 But I wonder whether it cannot also generate some useful, if provisional, information about these two prospective answers. The choice is, after all, just a somewhat simplified version of the choice Boethius considers in the Consolation, especially in books 4 and 5, where Philosophy tries to show her pupil that the cosmos is not governed by something impersonal called “chance,” but something else, something that feels a bit less lawlike and more will-like, called “providence.” Bracketing various details and protests, then, it does appear flatly possible to think about the cosmos, or for that matter about an individual situation, as governed by something like a will or as governed by something like a law. If one thinks in the former way, one will be in the world of chapters 1, 3, and 4, fretting about agency and passivity, about how human wills interact with the Will in Charge, about whether the human wills and the divine one can sometimes achieve unity. In a lawdominated world or situation one will be in chapters 5 and 6, wondering how wills (particularly one’s own) get along with laws. But there is a general structure, a set of questions, that is common to both modes of understanding. Perhaps the most fundamental question is, What is the relationship between the will-I-call-my-own and “X”? Is the relationship one of competition, where each party stakes out territory for itself? Is it a relationship of domination, where one party must learn to be completely subsumed in the other? Or is something cooperative, perhaps some sort of marriage, available? Marriage is, of course, what I have been saying Custance achieves, and also what the absent character, the character in the Physician’s or Franklin’s Tale who would relate to the laws there in a saner way than

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the actual characters do, would achieve. (It is, in other words, what the audience is invited to achieve there, insofar as Chaucer deliberately invites his hearers to notice how far wrong the protagonists of those tales go.) There are reasons to expect that someone who seeks “marriage” in one realm, that of agency or that of law, will also seek it in the other, and in fact that the two seekings are not very different; and likewise that a person who seeks something else in one realm will be equally far from marriage in the other. Call to mind again Griselda’s effort to make herself passive to the point of self-annihilation. She makes the attempt by way of a set of laws, namely the wedding promises she swears to Walter and then repeatedly strengthens: and, as should be no surprise given the softening of boundaries observed in the previous chapter between the categories of will and law, it is almost a matter of indifference whether one describes her goal as passivity before Walter’s will or before those laws that she takes as guides. Nor does her attempt look so very different, viewed with these questions in mind, from the passivity of Dorigen or Virginius in face of their respective besetting laws. One might say that their devotion to a rigorist or sub lege way of interpreting laws makes them passive and that Griselda’s devotion to passivity makes her a rigorist. The two choices are fundamentally the same: each involves an attempt to refuse freedom, to convert one’s own faculty of acting into a mechanical device that will not henceforth require decision or volition. All that amounts to the first of the promised explanations for the links between the themes. The second, while more complex, begins with a return to the simple question of this chapter’s beginning: Who is the missing character in the Franklin’s or Physician’s Tale, the one who gets laws right? What are his or her characteristics? Chaucer, as just mentioned, invites the audience to play the role, at least to the extent that we are asked to notice the trouble in the existing characters’ reactions and to dream of alternatives. One way to do so would be by taking up a suggestion made in chapter 5, and considering a bit of advice the Franklin’s Tale offers —“for every word men may not chide or pleyne” (line 776) — in its application to laws rather than to words in general. The phrase implies, as that chapter argues, a stance toward laws contrary to Dorigen’s rigorist one; it advises not the jettisoning of all laws but the understanding of laws as something other than self-sufficient machines dictating an unquestionable shape to the future universe. Our “missing

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character” will thus need to surrender his or her expectations of collecting exact payment on whatever the laws promise, on the literal or metaphorical “credit” they appear to guarantee; sometimes, at least according to the view of law that has emerged here, such payment is not forthcoming, and to insist that it simply must be is to place oneself on the wrong side of metaphysics. There are, as it happens, a few characters in the Franklin’s Tale who manage such a surrender of expectations, at least to a degree: the three men who, near the end of the tale, enact the debt releases considered in the concluding question d’amour. They seem to be, at this point in the narrative, finally getting onto the right track. Their doing so is all the more remarkable when one remembers that each of them has previously shown some commitment to a rigorist way of understanding laws: Arveragus in his lack of interest in the possibility of breaking Dorigen’s rash oath, Aurelius in his presentation of it to Dorigen (lines 1319–32) as an immutable juggernaut, and even the illusionist in his hard-line bargaining over his fee. Against that background their sudden generosity is mystifying, even (in A. C. Spearing’s word) miraculous. Given the association that emerged in the previous chapter between influential elements of Christian theology and a nonrigorist reception of law, their change of heart also lends strength to Spearing’s idea that the world of the Franklin’s Tale changes, across the course of the poem, from a pagan to a Christian one (see ch. 5, n. 8). It is worth dwelling a bit more on the ubiquity and the breadth of meaning that this notion of surrendering debts takes on in Christianity. It is present, for example, to borrow briefly from a contemporary of Chaucer’s, beneath the Latin phrase that serves as a kind of refrain through long stretches of Piers Plowman: “redde quod debes”—“repay what you owe.” Its presence there is suggestive for our concerns here, particularly if the line is meant not merely as a generalized plea for social justice but also as a reminder of the gospel parable from which it derives. This is Matthew’s story (ch. 18) of an unforgiving servant whose master releases him from a huge debt until he finds that the servant has imprisoned a peer for failing to repay a vastly smaller sum. To anyone who has that story in mind, Langland’s refrain cannot be taken without irony. The phrase, after all, appears only once, at its utterer’s most unappealing moment: “Now the lord of that servant, feeling compassion, dismissed

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him and dismissed his [immense] debt for him. But that servant, having gone out, came upon one of his fellow-servants who owed him one hundred denarii, and holding on, was strangling him, saying, ‘Redde quod debes!’ ”3 Perhaps, then, Langland would have us respond to the line in the way the parable suggests: if we want full repayment — if we want rigour and “perfection” and to receive everything that (we think) is coming to us — we should certainly start by paying back everything that we ourselves owe. But if we owe even our existence to a gratuitous act of love, and if we recognize our existence and everything we have as examples of the “persistent givenness” described in chapter 3, then making restitution is absolutely out of reach for us: like the unforgiving servant, we are in debt for “ten thousand talents” (verse 24). In which case we had better give up the demand to be paid back in full ourselves. We had better get used to practicing forgiveness rather than rigour as regards what is owed us. In its original context, the gospel passage explicitly refers to other kinds of “debt” than the material. Jesus tells the story in answer to Peter’s question: “Lord, how many times shall my brother sin against me and I dismiss [it] for him? Up to seven times?” The Vulgate uses the same crucial word dimittere—which can mean dismiss, discharge, forgive, send away — in three places, once for Peter’s question and then twice within the answering parable, leaving no doubt that the latter means (at least in part) sin when it speaks of debt. Nor will that metaphor have come as any surprise in a Judaic context that had, as noted in the preface, already for centuries used debt as a way of thinking about sin. And as also noted there, Jesus elsewhere reinforces the equivalence, for adherents to the new movement that will become Christianity, by teaching his followers to pray: “Dismiss for us our sins, since we ourselves also dismiss [the debt] for each who owes us.”4 It is also possible, however, to add a further step, generalizing still further, and radicalizing still further, the debts that one speaks of dismissing. One can imagine a state in which a person has given up every demand for what he thinks he has coming—indeed, any demand, or expectation, on “the world” at large. And this is the second way in which law and agency come resoundingly together, because anyone who follows to its conclusion such a notion of law and our relationship to it, anyone who fully subscribes to a nonrigorist reception of oaths, laws,

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and debts, if these are understood with maximum breadth, will find herself obligated to cast aside all attachment to the future and — drift. Somewhat as Custance has done. The idea is not foreign to Christian theological writing, particularly when it is attentive to the monastic or contemplative style of theology Bernard represents. Here is Simone Weil, commenting on the line just quoted from the Lord’s Prayer: At the moment of speaking these words, one must already have forgiven all debts. This means not only reparations for offenses which we think ourselves to have undergone. It is also recognition of the good which we think ourselves to have done, and in a perfectly general fashion everything that we expect from beings and things, everything that we believe is our due, of which the absence would give us the feeling of having been frustrated. These are all the rights that we believe the past gives us over the future. . . . Our debtors are all beings, all things, the entire universe. We believe ourselves to hold claims against all things. In each claim . . . it is always a matter of an imaginary claim that the past holds over the future. That is what must be given up. To have forgiven our debtors is to have given up, en bloc, the entire past. To accept that the future is still virgin and untouched, bound rigorously to the past by bonds that we do not know, but entirely free of the bonds that our imagination thinks to impose on it. To accept the possibility that anything at all may happen, and in particular that anything at all may happen to us.5 These words could have been written for Custance, with her extreme openness to an uncontrolled future — an openness that, without rendering her entirely passive or will-less, means that she is ready to leave behind anything at all, including what onlookers would ordinarily incline to call her “self.” The rest of Weil’s meditation has something to say on that subject also: The principal claim that we believe ourselves to hold against the universe is the continuation of our personality. This claim implies all the others. . . . The forgiving of debts is the giving up of one’s own personality. It is to give up everything that I call “me.” With-

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out a single exception. To know that there is in that which I call “me” nothing, not a single psychological element, that exterior circumstances cannot make disappear. To accept that. To be happy that it should be so.6 Read with precision, I think, this counsel gives no sanction to a peasant girl’s attempt, on being raised to the status of marchioness, to strip herself of her own will or to convert it into a mechanical appendage of her husband’s. But it does support the emperor’s daughter who, reduced to owning little but a broken-down boat she cannot control, kneels on the beach to pray for her own continual openness. And it fits beautifully with a puzzling element of her tale, the bare fact of which is present in Chaucer’s version and his sources alike: her refusal, on arrival in Northumberland and again on her boat’s interception in the Mediterranean by a Roman senator, to reveal her identity. “She seyde she was so mazed in the see / That she forgat hir mynde” (526 – 27). Custance’s mynde is less likely the broad set of mental faculties named by the modern cognate than her memory, her command of the past — which latter semantic range accounts for ten or eleven of the fifteen columns the Middle English Dictionary gives the word. This she has, for the moment, left behind, giving it up, as Weil’s account suggests one would, in the course of her abandonment to the open ocean of God’s will.7 The general point, in any case, is that the same religious ideal that prescribes approaching laws with forgiveness rather than rigour also—at least if forgiveness is taken with the strong generality Weil gives it — prescribes a degree of detachment from future and past that may almost dictate Custance’s quasi-paradoxical action-with-passion, her action that is so thoroughly receptive. The person immersed from moment to moment in the present, after all (and chapter 1 already suggested that Custance is just that, that her acts of will must be undertaken afresh each time), is not one who will formulate massive plans of her own, ignoring externalities; every move she makes is being shaped by forces external to herself, and she is aware of it. Thus a second strong link between this book’s two major themes: the one who accepts laws as admitting exceptions, at least if the belief deeply shapes her or his mind and action, will necessarily be led toward a supple, harmonizing, marriageminded stance when exerting agency.

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It is worth remembering that both ideas — or both presentations of the single underlying idea — can at times be difficult even to desire for oneself, let alone to achieve. Even once it has become clear that Custance’s story is no recommendation of masochism or excessive passivity, it remains a recommendation of face-to-face encounter with potentially painful facts about human existence with its inescapable (as opposed to its unnecessarily self-inflicted) passivities and with the dissolution, soon or late, of what we tend to understand as the human self.8 These facts are what allow the religious ideal under investigation to claim universal relevance, and not just relevance to those who think of themselves as religious; the ideal is a response to inescapable realities like death, loss, and the preceding chapter’s observation that every human act involves a kind of surrender to forces on which it must partly depend. These realities need not lead the person who perceives them to histrionic fatalism or despair. Bernard’s (and the wider tradition’s) demonstration of them aims to be merely a sober assessment of the only kind of existence, and of action, available to us. But it is a sobering assessment to those of us who have not yet come to a life in line with this teaching, to those still tempted to believe that humans can act in a fashion entirely autonomous or (in Bernard’s language) “from ourselves”; those, that is, who take the gifts of God and “twist them back to [their] own will . . . as if they were [their] own.” Which is to say, also with Bernard, that it is a sobering assessment for almost all of us, almost all the time.9 The fact that this religious ideal can take on a forbidding aspect, especially to the beginner, is not out of line with the tradition that generated it. “Unless a seed of grain dies, falling on the earth,” says Jesus, “it remains merely itself; if it dies, however, it bears much fruit.”10 There too there is a message about necessary passivity, even necessary death; but it is clear that there is something that the necessities are necessary for, namely a new kind of life that can appear when the old is given up. Thus the sobering picture of human life comes with the claim that it will turn out to be, once accepted, a totally new and newly joyous way of being in the world. As with Bernard’s account of human salvation, acceptance— consent—is the tiny but entirely indispensable key. It makes the difference, as both Bernard and Simone Weil tell their listeners, between the two options open to a human: fulfilling God’s will-or-law joyfully and voluntarily or fulfilling it painfully and involuntarily.11 Nor is it only

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pre- and postmodern contemplatives who have noticed the forced option. Chaucer rhymes it into one of the most memorable couplets of the Franklin’s Tale: “Lerneth to suffre, or elles, so moot I goon, / Ye shul it lerne, wher so ye wol or noon.” The saying (lines 777–78) may be something of a commonplace — it appears also at line 661 of the Parson’s Tale, and its Latin form disce pati is a widely quoted motto — but that need not have prevented Chaucer from being quite serious about it, nor need it prevent the phrase from having echoes in his own work even beyond the ones he deliberately planned. In fact we have seen the consequences of the maxim played out all across his poems. There are characters who do not learn to suffer, who try to be too purely active, either in mastering the world around them (Theseus) or in “mastering” themselves into a state of pure passivity (Griselda). They are doomed to a bad end—or rather to no end at all. The inescapable passivities of life eventually break through their attempts at mastery, leaving Theseus in his endless cycle of planning, failure, and starting again, and leaving Griselda in the swoon that overtakes her when her children are restored and we finally see, in the death grip she fastens on them, some hint of what her apparent equanimity has actually cost. What does “learning to suffer” look like? Lernen in Middle English can have the force it has in modern German, where the situation described is often more external, and more subject to voluntary control, than is the mostly psychological growth covered by the modern English word. “Heute Nacht muss ich Mathematik lernen,” says the German student, by which he means that he must sit in front of a math book, flip the pages, do the exercises, and so on: his Anglophone counterpart would say “I have to study math” instead.12 This overtone makes “lerneth to suffre” into a one-line motto for the religious ideal we are seeking: it means “study allowing” or even “practice undergoing”; devote yourself actively to being passive, to receiving. As for what the ideal might look like in practice, one can find a suggestion in the twentiethcentury Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, here finally liberated from the status of donor of epigraphs and brought into the main text. Gesturing toward a “state of insight” that contemplatives hope to attain, he writes that it “implies an openness, an ‘emptiness,’ a ‘poverty’ similar to those described in such detail not only by the Rhenish mystics, by St. John of the Cross, by the early Franciscans, but also by the Sufis, the

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early Taoist masters and Zen Buddhists. [This state] implies the void, poverty and nonaction which leave one entirely docile to the ‘Spirit’ and, hence, a potential instrument for unusual creativity.”13 The description, no less than Weil’s reflections, brings to mind Custance’s way of being as I have tried to let it be seen. It means willing passivity, but without the gap between action and passion that drives the endless cycle of Theseus’s life. And there are hints in Bernard and elsewhere that this is, difficult though it may be to describe and to attain, a way of being that is eventually available to all of us; it is even the only sensible response to the “inescapable reality” with which we began, the fact of having all our actions mixed up with passion. “This is no strange supernatural state,” writes Merton elsewhere of the difficult condition of accepting gifts from beyond one’s own power of demanding, but “simply the ordinary way of human existence.”14 We have been glimpsing a single religious ideal from a number of angles — via some theologically informed reflections on Chaucer’s stories, some recollections of Bernard’s ideas on the subject, and now from some comparatively recent comments by Merton and Weil. The immediate goal is still to understand how that single religious ideal offers answers to the book’s guiding questions about agency and law in a way that shows those two themes to be at root really one. A third and final explanation for their unity can begin from a second, deeper look at Weil’s reading of the Lord’s Prayer as demanding a radical renunciation of all expectations. The first look left an important question unanswered: How, practically, might one go about fulfilling the demand? The answer is not obvious. At first glance we seem to be faced by a straightforward ethical injunction —“Act well, but do not expect repayment!”— a challenge to be answered by simply shutting off one’s expectations by a heroic effort of will. But things are not so simple. Here is more of what Weil has to say about “the rights that we believe the past gives us over the future”: [One such right is] the right to a compensation for each effort, whatever may have been the nature of the effort: work, suffering or desire. Every time that an effort goes out from us and that the equivalent of that effort does not come back to us in the form of a visible fruit, we have a feeling of disequilibrium, of void, that

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makes us believe that we have been robbed. The effort of undergoing an offense makes us expect the punishment or the apologies of the offender, the effort of doing something good makes us expect recognition from the one thus obliged; but these are merely special cases of a universal law of our souls. Every time that something goes out from us we absolutely have a need that at least the equivalent should return into us, and because we have the need for that we believe that we have the right to it.15 In other words, the expectation of repayment is not a sign of a moral weakness that should be fixed by an exertion of the will. It is much more like a simple law of nature. If Weil is right, there is something pitiably paradoxical in an attempt to exert one’s will to fix the problem: exertions of the will are the problem. Further exertions aimed at removing the unavoidable consequence of exertion are no more likely to succeed than is Griselda’s heroic striving to annihilate her own agency.16 How, then, are we to achieve the goal, the stance toward law that refuses expectations, if we are debarred from exerting will to get there? At least one way out of the puzzle is already suggested in the passage just quoted. Weil is speaking of action, but is there only one kind? “Every time”— she writes twice — an effort “goes out from us,” the undesirable consequences follow: there is an expectation, a debt, an imagined line of credit held against the future. True, she will go on to say that this imagination is delusional: repayment, at least in forms we understand, will often fail to appear; but the point is that expectation nonetheless will be there, dependable and unshakable as gravity, every time an effort goes out from us. The logical sequel will surprise no one who has read the previous chapters of this book: in order to act without expectation, we must act with an action that does not go out “from us.” We must act instead with an action that comes from somewhere else. The possibility of such an action runs all through the examples here considered, from Custance— who continually acts with a force not her own, as even Chaucer’s grammar repeatedly shows — down to Thomas Merton, whose epigraph at the head of this chapter states the claim of the religious ideal we have been pursuing in almost the briefest form possible.17 And the possibility of such an action is at the core of this book, which is intended to show

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that we can only adequately understand Chaucer’s stories (and much Christian theology) if we are ready to entertain it. Most immediately the possibility has just provided one more link between the two major themes we have been following: we have learned that according to at least one modern view of the question, it is only the agent whose agency comes from beyond her who will be free to relate to law-and-order in the forgiving way indicated. There is, for the followers of this religious tradition, one human par excellence who has learned to suffer in both these ways, the way involving agency-from-elsewhere and the way involving debt-forgiveness: Christ. Weil, once again, has stated the claim usefully, and in a way just as attuned as Merton’s to the parallel presence of similar ideas in other religious traditions: In acts of obedience to God, one is passive; whatever may be the pains that accompany them, whatever may be the apparent deployment of activity, it does not produce in the soul anything analogous to muscular action; there is merely waiting, attention, silence, immobility through the suffering and the joy. The crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience. This species of passive activity, the highest of all, is described perfectly in the Bhagavad-Gita and in Lao-Tse. There too there is a supernatural unity of contraries.18 Moreover, she sees, in introducing these observations, an explicit connection between agency and law. “The efforts of will,” she writes, “have no place except for the accomplishment of strict obligations. Where there is no strict obligation, it is necessary to follow— either natural inclination or vocation (which is to say, the commandment of God).”19 Things line up here just as with the first link between the themes at this chapter’s beginning: “strict obligation” (one hears an echo of Bernard’s necessitas, the hobgoblin of those toiling sub lege) calls forth what Weil is calling “will,” a word that for her designates agency that proceeds from the self alone. Conversely, in the absence of such “obligation” or “necessity” one works in spheres —that of natural inclination or that of divine command—where the laws are like those the previous chapter describes: nonrigorist, nonnecessitarian, “gentle,” and consequently strong enough

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to accomplish “thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne” (Franklin’s Tale, 775). These spheres allow for cooperation among agents, for activepassive combinations, for willing (to use a word that Weil in this context avoids) with a will that is not simply one’s own.20 Since this sort of nuanced ethics, based on a hope for divine union, is not always as audible in Christian discourse as it might be, one might be tempted to think it merely the province of a specialized group of contemplatives with radical lifestyles. In fact, though, it is not only monks and ascetics who have perceived such thinking as central to the religion, but also some who have held positions less likely to be classified as out of the main stream. Here is one example: In St. John’s Gospel Christ says of himself: “The Son can do nothing of his own accord” (5:19 and 30). This seems to rob the Son of all power; he has nothing of his own; precisely because he is the Son he can only operate by virtue of him to whom he owes his whole existence. What first becomes evident is that the concept “Son” is a concept of relation. . . . On the face of it, a contradiction arises when the same Christ says of himself in St. John: “I and the Father are one” (10:30). But anyone who looks more closely will see at once that in reality the two statements are complementary. In that Jesus is called “Son” and is thereby made “relative” to the Father, and in that Christology is ratified as a statement of relation, the automatic result is the total reference of Christ back to the Father. Precisely because he does not stand in himself, he stands in him, constantly one with him.21 The former pope goes on to say, much as Weil has just said, that this apparently paradoxical mode of being, this surprising identity between self-surrender and divinisation, is not merely Christ’s mode of being but is what all Christians, in some measure, hope for. The task, he then continues, in words reminiscent of Bernard’s remarks (chapter 3) about the difficulty of receiving gifts as gifts, is all but impossible. But Christ succeeds: The Son as Son, and insofar as he is Son, does not proceed in any way from himself and so is completely one with the Father; since

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he is nothing beside him, claims no special position of his own, confronts the Father with nothing belonging only to him, makes no reservations for what is specifically his own, therefore he is completely equal to the Father. The logic is compelling: if there is nothing in which he is just he, no kind of fenced-off private ground, then he coincides with the Father, is “one” with him. It is precisely this totality of interplay that the word “Son” is expressing. . . . When it thus becomes clear that the being of Jesus as Christ is a completely open being, a being “from” and “toward,” which nowhere clings to itself and nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the same time that this being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure relation, pure unity. . . . To [the evangelist] John, being a Christian means being like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not standing on one’s own and in oneself, but living completely open in the “from” and “toward.”22 Christ’s accomplishment, according to that last sentence, shows the way or opens the door toward success in the all-but-impossible task of openness, of life lived from the will of another. Ratzinger’s presentation of the idea, moreover, demonstrates its deep roots in the Christian tradition, not only in John’s Gospel but in the earliest Christian texts, the letters of Paul: when he later returns to the same paradoxical truth (at 220 –21: “He who does not cling to himself but is pure relatedness coincides in this with the absolute and thus becomes lord”), he begins from the hymn on Christ’s self-emptying in the second chapter of the letter to the Philippians, a text generally dated to the 50s CE. It seems that Custance’s attempt to live in complete openness to the divine will stirs up resonances in a very long wire. One particular place it resonates, of course, is now long familiar, and is (as I hope to have established) of great value for the understanding of Chaucer: it resonates in Bernard’s writings. Let us bring back one more time the Holy Week sermon with which this book opened, in which Bernard asserts that Christ “had in life a passive action and underwent in death an active passion.” Chapter 3 looked briefly into the sermon to learn better what Bernard means by “active passion”: that Christ’s suffering and death paradoxically involve active choice, and not just as one would normally decide on a course of action, make an initial

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move, and then wait for other parties to fulfill their ends of the bargain. That would still be alternation of the Thesean kind, an approximation with which most of us must currently get by, but which this tradition suggests that we are also called to pass beyond. Here, Bernard says, there is something active even about the moment of death itself: Christ, in opposition to the normal way of victims, is not “being killed,” but doing actively that which is ordinarily most passive, namely dying. I hope the latter-day reflections from Weil, Merton, and Ratzinger, initially dug up as aids in understanding the connections between agency and law, have also helped clarify the other half of Bernard’s paradoxical phrase, namely “passive action.” It turns out to be a familiar concept, one that appeared in Bernard’s three-part analysis of human action (chs. 3 and 6); in many of the events in which Custance serves as something like a conduit for supernatural powers (ch. 1); and in Romano Guardini’s description of how Jesus went about following the Father’s will (ch. 6, n. 65). It is the kind of action-from-elsewhere, action rooted in passion, openness to “a will other than one’s own,” that leads Jesus to the cross and makes possible the passive-active merger that is for the Christian at once the worst and best moment in the world’s history. And despite the danger of blasphemy, this paradoxical moment is in some sense the model for what all our action should eventually be. Christ, according to this tradition, is the one who has learned to suffer. The rest of us are still learning; and Chaucer has left us, in Custance, a thoughtful and subtle portrait of an advanced student.

Section 2: Reading Chaucer Religiously It has been a quarter century since the appearance of a slim volume called Chaucer’s Religious Tales, originally the proceedings of a conference that set itself to redress what seemed an unfortunate neglect.23 The tales selected as “religious” vary a bit from critic to critic, but coeditor David Benson proposes a canonical short list in his introduction. It happens to include exactly those stories Chaucer wrote in rhyme royal: the Clerk’s Tale, Man of Law’s Tale, Second Nun’s Tale, and Prioress’s Tale. Several of the book’s essays include disclaimers to the effect that it was difficult to settle on a list, because, in Benson’s words, “depending on

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one’s definition, virtually all of [the Canterbury Tales] could be so labeled” (p. 1); nonetheless, there was agreement that these four poems — all of them consistently among the most dismaying of the Tales for modern audiences — have in common something setting them apart from the rest. I hope that the studies presented here give reason to think again about that classification. I do not mean to deny the usefulness or truth of remarking a certain difference in Benson’s four, but I hope to have shown that when viewed through the lens of two abstract but vital questions, several less obviously religious tales prove to contain many of the same fundamental stances, perhaps even the same “teachings,” as they do. The way the tales line up under this new lens is in fact rather striking. The Clerk’s Tale and the Man of Law’s, on my reading, ultimately agree about passion and action, but their presentation of the ideas is nearly opposite: Griselda shows us the maddening effects of one approach to human action, Custance the ultimately life-giving (though by no means ease-inducing) results of another. The presentation of Custance’s deeply religious ideal of action is then strengthened, not by another tale on a Christian theme — and in fact Chaucer’s tale of St. Cecilia, as chapter 4 attempts to demonstrate, is the place in the Canterbury collection where Custance’s ethics comes closest to being directly contradicted — but by two ostensibly much more “secular” stories, the Franklin’s Tale and the Physician’s. These are not without their overtly religious elements, to be sure, but for the most part those elements are not so obviously central to what most readers will take from the tales: one could strike Dorigen’s argument with “Eterne God” over the “grisly feendly rokkes blake,” for example, and the larger structure of her story would remain intact. But when one approaches these two tales with a mind shaped by the question of will and law, they show themselves as not only deeply linked with each other but deeply connected to the question of action and passion investigated in part 1. And I hope that by now both those questions, at least as the authors on display here understood them, have proven themselves to be inescapably “religious,” in that both the elaboration of what they mean and the solutions proposed for them are closely tied to questions about God and God’s relation to humanity. Thus the tales that harbor them, regardless of overt subject matter, seem to me as religious as the most explicitly Christian ones.

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The question of which of the tales qualify as religious, then, is complicated for deep as well as for more evident reasons. But that is not my only motive for mentioning the collection Chaucer’s Religious Tales. It also happens that one of the included essays touched off a minor controversy connected to another theme of this book — namely, the question of how today’s literary critics have approached, and should approach, religious questions in Chaucer. This is Linda Georgianna’s piece “The Protestant Chaucer,” most of which is a helpful survey of attitudes, from the sixteenth century on, toward Chaucer’s real or imagined religion. Georgianna tells the story of the sixteenth-century “martyrologist” John Foxe, whose “massive revisionary history” of English Protestantism includes a clearly anti-Papist Chaucer, the author of such “virulently antifraternal” works as the prose Jack Upland and the Plowman’s Tale, both long since shown to be spurious (Georgianna, 56 –57). Her thesis is that more contemporary critics have still not escaped some of Foxe’s proclivities: not the tendency to fits of passion in religious matters, to be sure, but the inclination to ascribe to Chaucer (what she takes to be) fundamentally Protestant attitudes toward religion. In particular, Georgianna says, such attitudes appear when eminent critics like Thomas Lounsbury and E. Talbot Donaldson opine that Chaucer cannot really have taken the most overtly religious tales seriously or meant them in his own voice. We can see from elsewhere, they imply (and sometimes state outright), that his own attitude towards religion must have been one of an enlightened skeptic, far advanced over the simple piety, even credulity, of the mass religion of his time. Some even suggest that flatly religious pieces like the Retraction, along with some of the more morbidly or bloodily pious religious tales, were written under direct pressure from various monastic or ecclesial authorities. Georgianna goes on to argue that some of the twentieth century’s most enthusiastically Protestant critics make essentially the same assumptions in this matter as do critics of an apparently anti-religious stripe.24 She intersperses throughout the essay a few suggestions as to why she thinks all might be heading down the wrong road together: the essential idea is that the apparently “non-intellectual, affective piety” (64) of the most obviously religious tales might not, after all, have been so foreign to Chaucer, since, she says, the “ ‘natural’ rationalism or skepticism” (66) these critics attribute to him is a hallmark of Protestantism but not necessarily of late-medieval Catholicism, which Georgianna characterizes as generally fideistic.

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That way of understanding the divisions of Western Christianity is much too simple, as David Aers complained in a response years later.25 And the immediate use to which Georgianna puts her observations conflicts strikingly with the readings in this book: her final paragraphs argue that the language of the Clerk’s Tale (“the extravagant language of adoration and prayer”) indicates that Chaucer’s “highest religious values” were marked by “the immoderate, willed assent of unquestioning love” (68), whereas I have found that the “unquestioning” and otherwise absolutist elements of Griselda’s character are precisely what Chaucer exposes as vicious and destructive. Even so, I think there is good reason to attend to Georgianna’s approach. While it is not true that Catholicism and Protestantism equate in any simple way with fideism and rationalism, it is not unreasonable to look to differences among forms of Christianity as one source for various misapprehensions about Chaucer’s religion among modern critics. In other words: fideism is not the answer, but might there be something about Chaucer’s medieval Catholicism (something largely lost or at least submerged in the last six hundred years) that makes interpretation difficult? I believe, of course, that the answer is yes, and that we have seen most of the needed evidence already. It remains only to add a few bits of genealogical work to sketch at least a suggestion that the hypotheses thus far drawn from literature and theology are also supported by history. We are admirably placed to consider the question, because the major architects of the Reformation themselves engaged frequently, deeply, and even lovingly with the writer who has been our main informant on late-medieval religion. “It is common knowledge,” writes Bernard McGinn, “that among medieval authors Bernard stood second to none in the admiration of the Reformers.” In particular, “after St. Augustine, Bernard was Luther’s most admired theologian: ‘I regard him as the most pious of all monks,’ said Luther, ‘ . . . He is the only one worthy . . . of being studied diligently.’ . . . ‘[He] was a man so lofty in spirit that I almost venture to set him above all other celebrated teachers both ancient and modern.’ ”26 There were, however, some points on which the Reformers disagreed with Bernard, and the disagreement stands out all the more against the background of high esteem: doctrinal differences that can overcome admiration of that order are not trivial ones. What were the particular matters on which Luther felt he could not agree with his

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twelfth-century teacher? McGinn gives us a succinct quotation that mentions just two: “Bernard was,” Luther says, “superior to all the Doctors in the Church when he preached, but he became quite a different man in his disputations, for then he attributed too much to law and to free will.”27 It is not news that disputes with predecessors over those two matters, law and human action — also the two organizing themes of this book—had a place near the heart of the Reformation. In general Luther wanted to distance himself from the idea (the medieval commonplace, as we have heard from Heiko Oberman) of divine-human cooperation, especially “in the work of man’s recreation,” just where we saw it most plainly laid out in Bernard.28 Bernard “attributed too much to free will”: in other words, there should be no human action mixed in with the necessary passivity before the divine will, no elevation of liberum arbitrium to the status of God’s “coadjutor”; Luther wants salvation to be considered, to the degree possible, God’s work alone. From Bernard’s own point of view this surely would have counted as falling off to one side of the difficult-to-maintain paradoxical middle, what chapter 3 called the “twofold” of “persistent givenness”: Luther’s stance, with its denial of cooperative agency, would seem a clear instance of not knowing what you have or what you are — not believing, in other words, that God would bestow on a creature the scandalous levels of freedom and responsibility that Bernard claims God has in fact bestowed.29 Again, Bernard “attributed too much to law.” Luther is no antinomian, but neither does he have any patience for the understanding of law present in Bernard’s monastic theology, wherein a law can gradually draw a human will toward a perfect conformity with itself, thus contributing positively to human sanctification. Still less could Luther have tolerated the notion that God himself lives by, and indeed is, a kind of law. And of the paradoxical reassurances that accompany these threatening ideas in Bernard — the assurance that the perfect conformity to which the law draws a person is liberating rather than oppressive, and that the “law of love” that is God scrambles our categories, so that our attempts to think of it must acknowledge that this most perfect kind of law looks in many ways more like a “will” or “person”— Luther would perhaps have made no sense at all.30 Nor will, one imagines, the greater number of modern readers, at least on first approach. The common sense of modernity very much

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seems to have followed the Reformers in their rejection of both the possibility of conjoint or cooperative agency and of the possibility of a law that is nonrigorist, a law to which one relates as a whole rather than by attention only to the individual events it tries to govern. It seems likely that, just as those twin once-familiar answers to questions about agency and law have shown themselves on close examination to be almost inseparable aspects of a single religious ideal, so the corresponding pair of rejections by the Reformers is rooted in a single rejection of that ideal. Or perhaps merely of some one key ingredient within it: for example, a hostility to the mere form of what I have occasionally called “superposition” or “both-and” thinking might neatly account for both rejections. The thinker whose basic instinct leans toward analysis, toward understanding by breaking things into component parts supposed primary, and away from the notion of primordial or indissoluble unions, might well not want to think of human salvation as an action ordinarily performed by two agents in an inseparable way. Such a person would also likely imagine laws as relating to the world in only a single way, namely as either successfully governing or failing to govern a set of individual cases. Anyone who starts by understanding law in that way will surely agree with Luther’s assertion that humans find the moral law impossible to fulfill—just as the “sub lege” monks to whom Bernard wrote Precept and Dispensation did. And anyone who understands law in that way will also quite naturally reject, with Luther and Calvin, the notion that law could have much to do with the inner life of God. That God must be greater than that sort of law all parties are agreed; the question that discriminates among thinkers is whether there is any other sort. If the root of the Reformers’ rejections of the medieval ideal is linked to a preference for analysis, a privileging of the small, discrete, and uncomplicated, an inclination not to believe that larger structures and top-down causalities have any reality that cannot be reduced to the small and the bottom-up — these are all preferences reasonably connected with the increasing prevalence of “nominalist” thinking in the late Middle Ages and early modernity.31 But whatever the cause, the immediately pressing point is that many of the influential philosophical writers of what we now see as “high modernity,” from at least the early seventeenth century through most of the nineteenth, thought more or less as the Reformers did on the two themes pursued here. It is worth observing, if only to emphasize the depth of the early-modern revolution,

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that such thinking permeated not only philosophical writing but what we now call the natural sciences — not surprisingly, given that the two were hardly separated when the revolution was in progress. Medieval thinking about physical objects and their interactions, of course, largely relied on Aristotle, whose notions of “final cause” and “formal cause” described the behavior of things in ways that we today might try to characterize as following a “gentle” or nonrigorist sort of law. If we say, for example, that there is something called the “form” of a Jack Russell terrier, which constitutes both the formal and final cause toward which a developing specimen grows, we have described a rule that is “gentle” in something akin to Bernard’s sense (chapter 6): it allows prediction of the result of a process without taking much interest in the detailed course of events that leads there. By contrast, the laws sought among the scientific “revolutionaries,” from Descartes to Robert Boyle to Newton and beyond, were not gentle ones: they were held to dictate behavior at every moment, without exception, in accord with what seems to be a rather brute-force kind of efficient causation. Such a quick sketch of a major movement in the history of European thought is necessarily oversimplified; but perhaps it is close enough to the truth that the timing of the movement can, in the context of this book, raise an eyebrow. If, as the whole course of this book has argued, a “contemplative ideal” prevalent in the Middle Ages implied a belief in divine-human cooperation and a “gentle” or nonrigorist concept of law-in-general, a broad question of Geistesgeschichte arises —one so broad that it would require another book to treat it adequately, but one nonetheless worth airing here, if only as a hypothesis for further thought. Is it possible that the slipping-away of the contemplative ideal at the end of the Middle Ages (or more precisely its loss of widespread recognition, its confinement to relatively small numbers of highly trained religious thinkers and to pursuers of an activity newly called “mysticism”) underwrote, or at least went hand-in-hand with, an increased tendency in European culture at large to think of laws as absolutely rigorous? And that that tendency, in turn, at least partly funded the determinist understanding of law central to the first several centuries of “modern science,” and only slowly being dismantled in our time?32 In any case — to descend again from such riskily speculative heights —to the extent that the dominant thinking of “high modernity” accorded with the leading Reformers in their rejection of Bernard’s un-

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derstandings (and thus of the prevailing high-medieval understanding) of cooperative agency and of law, Georgianna’s above-mentioned article has some purchase. While her idea that Chaucer has been imagined by modern critics in a “Protestant” way is surely too simple as regards the question of fideism and rationalism, it may apply fruitfully to questions of cooperation and law: perhaps modern critics have been missing something because they have read back onto the poet, not a Protestant-inspired rationalism untrue to a medieval Catholic fideism, but a Protestant-compatible resistance to the notion of divine-human cooperation untrue to that notion’s common medieval reception as a moral ideal. Protestant-compatible, indeed, rather than Protestant-inspired; it is not clear whether this is a case of direct influence or whether, like Bernard for high-medieval Christian theology, Luther and Calvin and the whole Protestant ethos are more safely considered witnesses to a still broader movement of thought that should be reckoned the real worker of the influence. And at least for our purposes it may not much matter.33 The more important need is to recognize the depth at which a rejection of the “contemplative” or “collaborative” ideal underlies the common sense of our culture—and in particular, for the more circumscribed purposes of most of this book, to recognize the depth at which it underlies our readings of medieval literature. As the “Hermeneutical Interlude” attempts to demonstrate, the assumption of the unreality of “cooperation” shapes the thinking of even the best philosophical readers of Chaucer in our day to such a degree that at times, like Dorigen and Virginius, they cannot even see that it is an assumption, let alone imagine an alternative.34 My argument has been that Chaucer shows us an alternative, precisely because adherence to the “medieval” positions (both cooperative action and a complex or “gentle” relation between will and law) underlies some of his best tales. He shows us an alternative, that is, if we will let him—and perhaps some of the more explicitly theological coinhabitants of his age — speak on such matters. If we do not, as the “Hermeneutical Interlude” warns, we will have a hard time hearing much else of what he has to say. All that, of course, deals with what we might call “historical” reasons for trying to understand the theology of action and passion, will and law, as presented in Bernard or any other helpful informant. But if historical reasons are all we have, we are acting less like historians than

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like historicists, engaging in a reading in that troubled style. To move onward to “dialogic” readings we will have to have other sorts of reasons also. In particular, faced with the choice between two understandings of the relation between passion and action, we may eventually — even though chastened by the bristling of a thousand hermeneutical cautions — want to begin asking whether one is more correct; or at least we may want to ask whether one is more useful to us now. It will be no secret, after the work of eight chapters, that I think “cooperative agency” often fits that bill—but that it somehow became inaccessible to much of high-modern European culture, and remains relatively inaccessible now, so that an intentional effort of retrieval is appropriate.35 And I hope that by now that thought is not an unjustified prejudice, but can count as a hypothesis that has gained considerable strength from the plausibility and fruitfulness of the thoughts it has inspired — which is a roundabout way of saying that the cooperative ideal has some claim to being true. I would like to close by observing some ways in which such a position may be useful as well, by noting a few positive consequences of being able to think in terms of “conjoint action” and other apparently paradoxical combinations. These consequences, I think, appear in many areas of life, some noted in the first pages of the introduction; but there are in particular at least two activities quite close to home for this project and its readers that can be understood much more adequately if our picture of the world does allow for unanalyzable combinations of action and passion than if it does not. The first of them is writing a certain kind of narrative poetry: the kind, in fact, that Chaucer wrote. As also remarked in the introduction (“Method, Part 2”), Chaucer often seems to have written in an exploratory mood, taking on new plots and new genres as they came to him, perhaps often unsure, and perhaps even to an extent unconcerned, about where they would lead. His writing does not seem to have been carried out in the manner of the “purely active hero” discussed and discarded in the “Hermeneutical Interlude”; he was perhaps not setting out, in most of his poems, to demonstrate some idea already held in his conscious mind. I would like to imagine that he was also not working wholly by Thesean alternation; though we have the prologue to The Legend of Good Women to show us that he wrote drafts and revised like other poets, it is

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hard to imagine his active phases being quite so unironically active, and their intermittent downfalls being so complete, as those of his noble Athenian character. I prefer the idea of a Chaucer who acted as a kind of experimentalist in the realm of human stories, whose characteristic “ordering” of his material was as little ordering as possible, but who imitated, as Anne Middleton has observed, “the detached and painstaking historian, scrupulously letting time take its natural course and allowing implications to fall where they may.”36 And yet out of such detachment — such Gelassenheit, to borrow an appropriate term that Martin Heidegger once borrowed from Meister Eckhart—identifiable meanings emerge, just as meaning, coherence, and strong practical effects proceed from (or perhaps “find an opening created by”) Custance’s similarly inquisitive and unpredetermined stance toward the world. This essay in interpreting Chaucer has attempted to follow, in some small way, a method that duplicates Chaucer’s own. (Thus, for example, its author knew nothing, on setting out years ago, about the role Bernard of Clairvaux would play in the final product, and next to nothing about Bernard himself.) The guiding hope is that such subtle shadowing in the method of relative intentionlessness has allowed the appearance of meanings that also closely shadow Chaucer’s. Gelassenheit seems a reasonable way to proceed, because the reading of poetry no less than the writing requires some kind of superposition of action and passion. E. Talbot Donaldson describes it this way: “Reading a poem intelligently is, I believe, one of the hardest things on earth to do. . . . In order to read it well one has to put oneself in the impossible position of having all one’s wits and faculties about one, ready to spring into activity at the first summons; yet, like hunting dogs, they must not spring before they are summoned; and only those that are summoned must spring; and the summons must come from the poem.” A difficult matter indeed, like the contemplative states that it will surely call to certain minds. From poetry as from contemplation, one must plan on respites: “To maintain oneself in this state of relaxed tension,” continues Donaldson, “is frightfully fatiguing, and any serious reader will, I am sure, want to rest a great deal.” One wonders whether fatiguing is precisely the word for what is meant to be a kind of effortless action, but the fact of ordinary mortals’ limited endurance in such states is uncontroversial. Fortunately, Dr. Donaldson is ready with an extensive regimen of

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rest cures: “Such activities as source study, investigation of historical context, philology, editing, and patristic exegesis are salubrious vacations from the awful business of facing a poem directly.”37 But we are not to remain in such sanatoria indefinitely. “The activities I have mentioned,” Donaldson concludes, “ . . . are as necessary and as honourable as literary criticism. . . . But these activities are not the same as literary criticism, and none of them should be permitted to replace an interpretation of the poem arising from the poem.” If they do, we will have lost the possibility of interpretation: we will have become in our reading too purely active, leaving insufficient space for the text to speak. We will have become, in Gadamer’s word, Enlightenment readers. Though Donaldson does not use the term, that is his diagnosis of the chief problem with the “patristic criticism” this essay of his attacks. Ironically it is also the chief problem the present book has found in more recent readers whose prejudices run in a quite different direction—and also one of the chief troubles it has itself struggled hard, as we all must, to avoid. May only the summoned dogs have sprung.38

N o t e s

Preface 1. Auerbach, Literatursprache, translated as Literary Language. 2. Crampton, Condition of Creatures, 1. 3. Mann, Feminizing Chaucer; the preface to the 2002 edition provides a helpful introduction to the author’s engagement on these matters with feminist criticism, both before and after the publication of the 1991 original. 4. The sermon is intended for Wednesday of Holy Week, its fourth day, and thus is often labeled HMIV. The translation is mine; Auerbach quotes the Latin (from §11 of the sermon) at Literatursprache, 58–59n9. The original reads: “Et in vita passivam habuit actionem, et in morte passionem activam sustinuit, dum salutem operaretur in medio terrae.” I cite Bernard’s Latin from the standard Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. Leclercq et al., here at 5:64; the title is abbreviated to SBO hereafter. 5. “Proinde memor ero, quamdiu fuero, laborum illorum quos pertulit in praedicando, fatigationem in discurrendo, tentationum in ieiunando, vigiliarum in orando, lacrimarum in compatiendo. Recordabor etiam dolorum eius, conviciorum, sputorum, colaphorum, subsannationum, exprobrationum, clavorum horumque similium, quae per eum et super eum abundantius transierunt.”

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6. A more profound sense of “active passion,” which is also a sense more closely involved with the muddying of action and passion that I find in several high- and late-medieval authors, will appear when ch. 3 returns briefly to this passage. An attempt to describe “passive action” follows in the same place (and is completed by a second attempt in ch. 7, §1). 7. The Parson’s Tale combines Pennaforte’s first and second reasons into one, perhaps in order to make room for the insertion of this newcomer. The only other similarly “structural” change (as opposed to insertions that preserve the structure) is the addition of a new half-reason to Pennaforte’s fifth, which is Chaucer’s fourth. A detailed comparison is available in Petersen, Sources, 10–14. There have been suggestions, notably in Kellogg, “St. Augustine,” that Chaucer did not, or did not always, work as exclusively from Pennaforte as Petersen believed. The correspondences across this particular stretch of nearly 160 lines, however, are too striking to be accidental or a matter of distant influence; Chaucer must have had in front of him either Pennaforte or some closely related text, and no other candidate has been found. Here and throughout the book, unless noted otherwise, I quote from the Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition. 8. It must be admitted that Chaucer’s source for Bernard’s comment could be a florilegium or another penitential manual, in which case (if the extract was a very small one) he could have missed the line about Christ’s passiva actio and activa passio entirely. And in fact his translation taken by itself does not make it clear that he has picked up on Bernard’s subtle distinction between Christ’s actions and sufferings. But as with the other caveat mentioned in the main text, it is quite reasonable to entertain the reverse hypothesis: namely that Chaucer did see a considerable amount of Bernard’s sermon, and was attracted to it at least in part by its neat juxtapositions (and perhaps by its occasional deliberate superimpositions) of the categories of action and passion. Such material evidence as I have seen is inconclusive as to which hypothesis is true. The Flores Bernardi, for example, a compilation of excerpts largely due to the thirteenth-century Cistercian Guillaume de Tournai, does in fact include these two sentences stripped of their context (bk. 5, ch. 42). On the other hand, they are presented as part of a continuous stream of text “On the Remembrance of the Lord’s Passion,” and Chaucer does not appear to have used anything else from the stream. Moreover, the florilegium’s version of these two sentences differs at one point from the version that circulated as part of the intact sermon—the florilegium changes the first item that the speaker will remember from laborum illorum, “these labors,” to laborum et dolorum, “labors and sorrows”—and Chaucer’s quotation appears to follow the intact sermon. That fact by no means proves that he knew the entire piece, but it does make it unlikely that he worked from this particular florilegium. (Though I have not consulted manuscripts, it appears that both texts were quite stable:

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the modern critical edition of Bernard’s works records no variants in the sermon at this point, and the 1576 Opera omnia is identical as well; whereas every early printing of the Flores I have seen, including that appended to the 1576 Opera, contains the noted variant.) 9. In fact the connection of sin with debt reaches back well before the time of Christ: for its strong presence in pre-Christian Judaism, see Arndt µ (debt), sense 2 and Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. οφειλημα [opheile ma] (sin); and s.v. οφειλω [opheilo ]µ (to owe), sense 2.b. (to commit a sin); and the references following each. Here as with all biblical citations I have translated very literally from the Vulgate (in Biblia sacra, ed. Weber); the Latin of Matthew 6:12, 14–15, with punctuation added, reads: “dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimisimus debitoribus nostris. . . . si enim dimiseritis hominibus peccata eorum, dimittet et vobis Pater vester caelestis delicta vestra; si autem non dimiseritis hominibus, nec Pater vester dimittet peccata vestra.” The version of the same teaching in the Gospel of Luke builds the equivalence of the two concepts even more closely into the prayer itself: “dimitte nobis peccata nostra, siquidem et ipsi dimittimus omni debenti nobis” (11:4; emphasis added). 10. Barfield, “Poetic Diction,” 127. 11. Ernst, introduction to vol. 30 of Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, xxiii. 12. See for example Peirce, Collected Papers 1:141–80. I have considered using other terms than law as a standard label for these regularities, including rule, order, and regularity itself. All have advantages and disadvantages. The chief drawbacks of the word law are that it might at times tempt readers to think that the positive law of the courts is primarily meant, and that when Peirce himself occasionally distinguishes between law and “ordering” or “legislation,” he means by the former term something closer to positive law than to general regularity. Nonetheless I have stayed with law through most of the text in part because Bernard of Clairvaux, an indispensable resource for what follows, often uses lex in a way that seems similarly general, and because explicit reference to Peirce will be relatively infrequent. But it may be useful to try substituting rule or regularity for law if confusion arises.

Introduction 1. The difficulty is not an artifact of modern English or otherwise recent, but was already apparent in the ancient world: besides the predilection among Homer’s characters, as noted in the preface, for acting rather than undergoing action, cf. the observation that the Greek πασχειν (paschein), “to undergo, to experience,” in principle applicable to “everything that befalls a per-

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son, whether good or ill,” had, well before the Common Era, “developed in such a way that [it] came to be used less and less frequently in a good sense, and never without some clear indication . . . that the good sense is meant” (Arndt and Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. πασχω [pascho ]µ , 633B). 2. In fact modern English already hints at this possibility by the strange development according to which a passive person is limp and ineffective but a passionate one is full of fire—and, more oddly still, an apathetic one is limp and ineffective again, because he or she suffers (!) from a deficiency in passion. These latter three italicized descendants from common ancient roots (cf. Latin pati, Greek πασχειν or παθειν [pathein], “to suffer, to undergo”) have of course acquired their meanings by way of an implied psychology according to which emotions “come upon” a core self or will that suffers them more or less patiently, but is largely not responsible for generating them. And while some particular variants of that picture—namely Roman Stoicism, or at least a stereotyped version of it—tried to be consistent in placing all value in the will and thus downplaying the passions, the common sense of our everyday speech seems to have retained the psychology but reversed the valuation: who today would see passionlessness as a desirable state? The resulting rather hybridized view of the human self, if there is any truth to it at all, suggests another way in which a kind of passivity can align with heightened, rather than depressed, activity: the passions, even if understood as coming from outside a person’s deepest “essence” or “core,” nonetheless can be useful, perhaps sometimes even necessary, in giving rise to activity. (“Reason the card, but Passion is the gale,” in Alexander Pope’s formulation: see Essay on Man 2.108.) 3. According to some accounts of the ideal, it is precisely the radical transcendence of the God whom (at least) Judaism and Christianity and Islam gesture toward—a God who is not one being among others in the manner of the Greek “pagan” pantheon, but who is the reason for the being of everything else—that makes possible the radical divine immanence involved in this “cooperative mysticism.” A god who is in some way on my plane of existence is a god I may bump into, struggle against, even serve, but not “become one with”; the God who is wholly other, about whom even the predicate is must mean something different from what it means for every other subject, is a God with whom my being need not compete, a God who can work in my actions, and in whose actions I can work. A delightfully accessible, but profound, introduction to this central feature of Christian theology (largely accomplished by meditating on its opposite) is Merton, “Promethean Theology,” in New Man, 15–34. Another brief treatment appears in Barron, Priority, 217–29 (a section called “Aquinas’s God”). Barron seems to be drawing on the more general and foundational, but still accessible, exposition of the same idea in Sokolowski, God; readers who can make the time are earnestly entreated to a marination in the first fifty pages of that book as a mind-expanding and almost necessary pro-

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legomenon to any further discussion of Christianity. Other works offering useful treatments of this peculiar transcendence-that-allows-immanence are Burrell, Faith and Freedom and Knowing the Unknowable (both in conversation with Jewish and Muslim parallels); Przywara, “Gott in uns” (a dense but rewarding historical treatment); Tanner, God and Creation; Coakley, Powers and Submissions (especially the first few chapters); McCabe, God Still Matters; Grant, Confessions (for parallels between Christian and Indian philosophy), and Moevs, Metaphysics (ch. 1, in preparation for the discovery of similar ideas to Dante—though with the caveat that Moevs’s interpretations at some points seem to me closer to neo-Platonism than to mainstream Christianity). Finally, Etienne Gilson’s discussion of the “metaphysics of Exodus” (Spirit, chs. 3–4) attempts to lay out a similar Judeo-Christian notion of God’s relation to the world by explicit contrast with the ideas on the subject found in pre-Christian Greek culture; the argument is contested but very much worth reading. 4. For contemporary examples, see Bloom, Courage, 43, which notes that the interior silence required for contemplation “cannot be defined as either activity or passivity” but is a “serene watchfulness”; or Merton, New Seeds, 86, which compares the often regrettable passivity of a mind in front of a television set with the “supremely active passivity” of contemplation. 5. One example of such relative freedom has already gone by: the vague association of deification with divine-human cooperation may have struck students of mysticism as criminally imprecise, since, understood strictly, one term speaks only of a work that God and a human perform together, the other of some closer degree of union. Many have found it possible to believe in one and not the other: for Martin Luther, some notion of deification was very real, but talk of cooperation was, to say the least, highly suspect; for twentiethcentury Calvinist theologian Karl Barth, something like the reverse was true. Nonetheless there are also reasons for connecting the two, grounded both in abstract logic (since there is reason to hypothesize that a perfect unity of works might require a union between the workers) and in concrete tradition (since even a relatively cautious author like Bernard of Clairvaux can say that his generally mild-sounding faculty-based notion of union in will, work, and love is at its highest stage “deifying”). For the reader who wants more detail on this particular point, McGinn, “Unio Mystica,” is an excellent place to start. For brief notice of Barth and Luther, see Gavrilyuk, “Retrieval,” 647–48, 652–53; for the absence of deification talk in Aquinas and Peter Lombard, see Louth, “Place of Theosis,” n. 6. For Bernard on deification, see On Loving God 10.28. 6. Bouyer, “Mysticism,” gives a more precise account of the peregrinations of the word (and concept) in early Christianity. The word did begin to be used relatively early for other sorts of “hiddenness” beyond the hidden meanings of Scripture, first for liturgical practices that revealed something about God (nearly always connected with Christ) and finally for the possibility of an

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experiential approach to God. That last meaning is especially associated with the fifth-to-sixth-century Greek writer Pseudo-Dionysius, whose tract “Mystical Theology” was widely known to the late Middle Ages in Latin translations by John Scotus Eriugena and Robert Grosseteste (and was later Englished by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, which it helped inspire). But Bouyer specifies that even with Dionysius the idea of the “mystical” remained closely bound to its earlier roots in exegesis and in liturgy. 7. The dwindling of the ideal’s power has not been complete or permanent: one does not have to look far to find talk of cooperative agency and even divinization in Christian theology today, and many of the relevant theologians are interested in restoring the hope for divine union to a position at the center of the religion. Moreover there seems to have been no age from which these ideas entirely disappeared. Nonetheless contemporary efforts in favor of divine-human cooperation do have the flavor of retrievals, and they have perhaps not yet diffused very far into the main streams of Christian belief, let alone the culture at large. That is, the picture of God and world described by the works in n. 3 still has to be announced; it is not what most observers of the religion—probably including many of those who practice it—first assume that it teaches. That this sophisticated and paradoxical “cooperative” theology was more generally accessible, more part of the background of thought, in the Middle Ages than in the centuries that followed is of course a historical claim in its own right, requiring some form of support. The present book will at very least demonstrate that such ideas were front and center in the writings of a man often said to be the most influential figure in the Europe of his day; it will show that the same ideas appear in a host of other writers in the Christian tradition, earlier and later; and it will lay out strong evidence that the ideas also shaped, at a deep level, the thinking of a wildly influential vernacular poet of the late Middle Ages. By contrast, among the intelligentsia of high modernity it is relatively common to find celebrated writers (René Descartes comes to mind) who profess Christianity, apparently without dissimulation, but whose writings show little sign of a cooperative picture of the relations between God and world. It is not difficult to find others remarking that various kinds of “mysticism” were more prevalent in Western Christianity (though often without deployment of that word, as remarked above) until the last centuries of the Middle Ages: brief observations on the fading of thought about “divinization,” for example, appear in Louth, “Place of Theosis,” 33. 8. This is, of course, the kind of complaint that sometimes plagued the school of “patristic criticism” associated with D. W. Robertson and Bernard Huppé; skeptics found that they engaged in “eisegesis,” or “reading into” literary texts a foreordained theological conclusion, often one taken from Augustine. For a canonical critique, see Donaldson, “Patristic Criticism”; see also

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recent reassessments in Justice, “Who Stole Robertson?,” and Gaylord, “Reflections.” My own feeling is that expressed in Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, 231: it is “time to get beyond those old battle-lines.” And not only because of weariness with battle but also because inquiry is better served that way: overenthusiasms of the past are not best remedied by overreactions in the present, the past danger of “reading in” selected theological opinions not best avoided by ignoring the role of theology in medieval poetry altogether. One thoughtful approach to reading literature against such intellectual “backgrounds” without slipping into eisegesis was proposed some time ago by A. J. Minnis (Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 9), who borrowed terms from manuscript study to suggest that we admit as influences on a particular author only those ideas that seem to have had the necessary “dissemination” and “provenance” to have reached him or her. These requirements are meant to be fairly restrictive—and so they are, as it is at least possible that ideas could travel in ways more various than actual texts can. Nonetheless it seems to me that the ideas about agency and law set out in this book (in most detail in chs. 3 and 6) will pass even these narrow gates. 9. The term must be handled, that is, in awareness of the lessons of the last few decades’ attempts to connect late-medieval literature with an alleged school of “nominalist” thinking: these efforts have met with mixed success, in part because at least some of them suffered from inaccurate understandings of the intellectual history of the period. There has been a great deal of useful corrective work in this area since the 1960s. William Courtenay in particular has taught us that there was no self-identified “school” of nominalist thought before 1400; that the influence of William of Ockham in fourteenth-century England was vastly smaller than once believed; that the distinction of God’s “absolute” from God’s “ordained” power, sometimes identified as one of the chief “nominalist questions,” was in fact the common property of nearly all theologians of the high and late Middle Ages; and that many previous modern students of the distinction have misunderstood it rather badly, taking potentia dei absoluta as a separate kind of power by which God might do surprising and law-breaking things, whereas medieval theologians until a very late date generally took it as merely a distinct human way of thinking about divine power, a thought experiment demonstrating that things could have been otherwise than they are. These debates have had consequences for our understanding of the literature: see, for example, the exchange between Robert Stepsis and David Steinmetz mentioned in ch. 1. Despite the false starts, Courtenay himself has opined (“Dialectic,” an excellent place to start for anyone coming to those questions afresh) that further (duly chastened) work on connections between nominalist thinking and the literature of the period should still be able to bear much fruit. However, the present book does not attempt any direct contribution to that work, in part because its interest in law mostly concerns

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the relationship between a law and a human will attempting to follow it, whereas the modern debates over nominalism have generally paid more attention to the relationship between laws and the wills that establish or oversee or enforce them—the wills of kings rather than commoners. While the direction taken in part 2 of this book might lead to new light on “nominalist questions” at the most abstract level, that of the relationship between general terms and particular instances, explicit reference to the question will be infrequent. (Introductions to the debates about nominalism and literature are available in Utz, Literary Nominalism, and Keiper, Bode, and Utz, Nominalism; for Courtenay’s corrections, see especially Schools and Scholars and Capacity and Volition.) 10. The chief evidence for this is, of course, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, where the narrating voice makes brief reference to Bradwardine during a fauxpensive digression on free will and divine foreknowledge (lines 3234–51) that interrupts the story about chickens; the leading female chicken has by this point already offered her mate lengthy counsel lifted from the consideration of dreams in Holcot’s commentary on the Book of Wisdom (2922–3156). As is often true, it is not easy to tell how deeply Chaucer involved himself with these sources beyond the boundaries of his very particular borrowings. Probably most laypeople would have been more likely to have encountered some of Holcot’s commentary, which was widely dispersed in late-medieval England, than of Bradwardine’s long technical treatise. 11. McGinn, Growth (vol. 2 of the four-volume Presence of God), 223. 12. Leclercq, Bernard, 96. 13. Holdsworth, “Reception,” 176. 14. Leclercq, Bernard, 99. 15. Leclercq, Bernard, 102. For more on the interaction with the Master of the Sentences, see Rosemann, Peter Lombard, 34–37. For a good brief sketch of the ways the Lombard’s text was actually used in the universities (which will slightly dampen one’s estimate of the numbers who might have encountered Bernard’s ideas by this route), see Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 11–13, 16–19. 16. For what it is worth, Chaucer’s established corpus names Bernard ten times. He thus ties with Gregory the Great on that very rough scale; there are eleven references to Jerome, and Boethius, discounting references to the character of that name in the Boece, receives eight. Augustine seems to be the only theological or philosophical thinker named significantly more often (twenty-three times). In each case except that of Boethius a large majority of the references fall in the Parson’s Tale. (Data from Oizumi’s Concordance.) 17. Holdsworth, “Reception,” 174. 18. The notion of osmotic mediation is not particularly radical; it begins from the relatively unproblematic assertion that “an author need not have read a particular book in order for it to influence his imagination” (Reichert, Fortuna, 11, my trans.).

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19. Waddell, introduction to Magnificat, xvi. 20. “In no way will someone commit a fault,” Chrysostom writes, “calling [Christ’s] passion too an act.” The remark comes from a sermon on the Acts of the Apostles (PG 60:18) but is here translated from a medieval Latin rendition of the De fide orthodoxa of John of Damascus (by Burgundio of Pisa; cap. 59, p. 237, in Buytaert, ed.). 21. The subhead of a section of Waddell’s just-quoted introduction— “Bernard as a Witness to Tradition”—vouches for such a use. Many wellacquainted readers have made similar observations; see for example Gilson, Mystical Theology, 32: “[Bernard] often gloried in having advanced next to nothing in the way of doctrine that had not been taught before, nor was this a mere show of mock modesty . . . but the sincere expression of his habitual attitude . . . for so, he was convinced, it had to be.” (See also Barré, “Docteur Mariale,” 107, which includes direct references to some other “sincere expressions” of this stance of Bernard’s.) Gilson’s surrounding paragraph argues that this lack of “originality” indicates no lack of brilliance and in no way diminishes the returns available to modern readers. It does seem plausible that attention to such a traditionally grounded thinker may frequently be more fruitful and challenging than attention to the innovators whom modern thought tends to favor; after all, the ideas of some of the innovators—William of Ockham comes to mind—grew into the dominant “common sense” of modernity, and thus will seem oddly familiar to latter-day readers. It is also, of course, no small advantage that Bernard writes beautifully and packages traditional teachings in ways that modern readers can still find engaging. 22. For the term, a sustained argument for the reality of the category it names, and an exposition of the category’s contents, see Leclercq, Love of Learning. 23. Against the temptation to rely too heavily on Aquinas, it is also worth remembering that even on the scholastic side his status as undisputed prince of thinkers is a relatively recent acquisition: in the fourteenth century and well beyond, John Duns Scotus was often thought of as the more important of the two (see Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 280). I have from time to time drawn on Aquinas in what follows, but have generally done so for illustration or extension of points previously worked out from other sources or on their own merits. 24. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 228n2, quoting a private letter from Landgraf; my trans. from the German. Leclercq himself elsewhere observes that “more and more it [monastic theology] appears to be a prolongation of patristic theology” (191). One of the welcome revelations of Leclercq’s book is the extent to which medieval Latin monastics continued to receive and pass along in their “tradition” ideas directly traceable to the speculative thinkers and exegetes of ancient Greek-speaking Christianity—Origen, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom—whom the language barrier had removed from im-

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mediate accessibility in medieval Europe (Leclercq, Love of Learning, e.g., 90, 106). On the other hand the idea of traditionalism needs to be handled with some care. For one thing, the scholastics in general surely thought of themselves as immersed in tradition also, and were willing to appeal to Augustine, Boethius, John Damascene, and the rest—as well as to scripture—as authorities, though many of them might be more eager than the monastics to interpret those authorities in directions that minimized conflict with Aristotelian ideas. Secondly, monastic “traditionalism” did not necessarily imply a conservative resistance to change; it could sometimes mean allowing an old idea to develop in radically unexpected ways. Cf. the remark of a modern Carmelite that, while both theologian and contemplative “serve the same cause . . . the theologian’s reasoning excels in organizing already established points of doctrine while the contemplative’s love, possessing greater penetration, makes him a bold, avant-garde scout. . . . We owe to contemplatives the explication of most dogmas” (Eugene of the Infant Jesus, cited in Leclercq, Love of Learning, 215–16). 25. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 217. 26. Besides the hypotheses already mentioned—a habitual preference for what was in its own time clearly innovative, and a habit of seeking information first from the readily available and topically arranged writings of Aquinas—there may be a third reason for neglect, among literary scholars, of Bernard’s writings in particular: a kind of backlash against the idea of a uniform and widely influential code of “courtly love” in medieval literature. Some proponents of the idea in the early-to-middle twentieth century suggested that Bernard’s allegedly “affective” theology helped inspire the code, on the idea of an analogy between an ennobling love for God and an ennobling love for a woman who had been elevated to almost supernatural status. The proposal did not in the long term succeed, for several reasons: Bernard’s theology is far more than merely affective; the relationship of its affective elements with medieval literature proved debatable (Gilson, Mystical Theology, makes a long attack on the connection); and the very idea of a uniform code of courtly love fell into general disfavor. It may be that literary critics of the last sixty or seventy years have, since the deflation of that proposal, felt any contact with Bernard to be tainted and suspect; if so, it is a most unfortunate case of losing baby with bathwater. 27. The most enduring testimony to Bernard’s contemplative reputation is no doubt Dante’s choice of him as the final escort for his wayfaring avatar in the last cantos of the Commedia; but Chaucer seems to have felt similarly certain that he would be immediately recognized as among the most insightful of seers: see the passing remark “Bernard the monk ne saugh nat all, pardee!” (Legend of Good Women, prologue, 16). It is likely, though not quite incontestable, that the reference is to Bernard of Clairvaux: see Tatlock, “Chaucer’s

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Bernard,” and Hamilton, “Bernard the Monk.” (Several sources suggest that this saying of Chaucer’s is a late-medieval proverb, but if so the point about Bernard’s reputation becomes all the stronger, his insight then literally, rather than “almost,” proverbial; see Whiting, Proverbs, B255, p. 39, and Smith, “Limited Vision.”) 28. Charles Peirce; see Pragmatism, lectures 1–3. 29. Among the inquiries I have in mind are Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” and Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions, along with the efforts already mentioned to read late-medieval literature in parallel with “nominalist” thinking. 30. See especially Anne Middleton’s assessment of Chaucer’s methods in “Physician’s Tale.” 31. For scans of the relevant secondary literature on Chaucer’s apparent reassignment of these two, see the Riverside Chaucer, 872B, 910B. 32. This cautious approach to the connections between tales and their tellers has weighty opponents, some as thoroughly canonized as John Dryden, who in 1700 congratulated Chaucer on the degree to which “the matter and manner of [the pilgrims’] tales, and of their telling, are . . . suited to their different educations, humours, and calling.” The quotation appears in Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, 102, which discusses it in the course of a systematic attack on the common presumption that readers can often find in Chaucer’s tales in particular, and works of medieval literature more generally, an implied fictional narrator. 33. Both, of course, are prominently featured in the antifeminist book fought over by Alys and Jankyn in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The originals are conveniently available with translation in Hanna and Lawler, Jankyn’s Book. 34. Available in the newer Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale, 1:128– 29, as well as in the older Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. Bryan and Dempster. 35. There has been no lack of critical controversy over the question of whether it dwells there comfortably. See, for an introduction, the comments to lines 1170–76 in the editions of the complete Tales by Robinson, Baugh, and Skeat. 36. See the essay by that name in David, Strumpet Muse. It should be said that ch. 1 of the present book will, despite the cautions registered here, try in a small way to make sense of all this, by proposing a reading of the Clerk’s Tale that gives it a “moral” matching that of the Envoy. That proposal was not generated by a deliberate effort to find a consistent reading, but was an unexpected by-product of a reading that had quite other aims—a fact which might help a bit with its credibility, at least if one believes that the author has managed to avoid hunting for consistency without knowing it.

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37. The meaning of Augustinian is very much in debate, as will be clear from the following paragraphs. For its part nominalism, as many readers will already know, does not here refer primarily to what the word originally meant, namely an assertion that universal logical terms do not denote anything “real” (that is, independent of the human mind) but are mere names (nomina); instead it points to a range of theological ideas sometimes associated with that answer, including a heavily voluntarist rather than intellectualist way of speaking about God and a soteriology that at least sometimes registers as “Pelagian” or “semi-Pelagian.” Portals of entry to the complicated question of the existence and role of such thinking in the late Middle Ages are pointed out in n. 9; see also ch. 5, n. 54, and the text to ch. 7, n. 31. 38. Myles, Chaucerian Realism, is a book-length argument for what its title indicates. For works associating Chaucer with nominalist theology, see the investigations mentioned in n. 9. 39. I am thinking especially of Augustine’s treatise Grace and Free Choice (De gratia et libero arbitrio, written ca. 426 CE), a text to be mentioned again in later chapters, and one written explicitly against those who see human will and divine grace as two forces in competition (see especially ch. 3, n. 7; ch. 4, n. 76; and the opening section of Augustine, Grace). The matter is complex, because some of Augustine’s earlier and more strictly anti-Pelagian writings gave some readers the impression that he himself thought of will and grace in that way, thus prompting the need for this correction. A useful first look at this background to the treatise appears in Teske, general introduction to Answer, 12–13. Also worth consulting is the exhaustive general account of the complexities of the word Augustinianism from an intellectual historian’s point of view in Saak, Creating Augustine, 2–21. 40. None of which is to say that Bernard deliberately opposes Augustine, nor even that he fails to admire, learn from, and quote him. He merely does so less than many of his contemporaries, as a quick glance through some of the writings of his friend and biographer William of Saint-Thierry will verify. Gilson offers a helpful and nuanced treatment of Bernard’s relative independence from Augustine, reading in part: “Many articulations of his thought are Augustinian, but one may say that his doctrine is not the same in fibre as that of Augustine” (Mystical Theology, 220n24). He hypothesizes that the independence stems from Bernard’s early immersion in the Rule of St. Benedict, which “expressly referred Bernard towards the First Epistle of St. John, towards [John] Cassian and towards Gregory the Great,” after which he had less need of Augustine than other thinkers without a similar formation. He then goes on, however, to describe some areas in which Augustine’s influence on Bernard is most clear. 41. Aers, Salvation and Sin, 63, 69.

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one.

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Concerned with Constancy: The Clerk’s and Man of Law’s Tales

1. Merton, “Identity Crisis,” in Contemplation in a World of Action, 69–70. 2. My translation from the Latin of this immensely influential and widely translated twelfth-century work, a sort of digest of the moral teaching of Cicero, Seneca, and other ancients, often (but uncertainly) attributed to William of Conches. For the text, see Holmberg, ed., Das Moralium, at 39; for its influence, Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 148. The Latin reads: “Hec quidem est lex constancie ut nec in malis persistamus, nec in bonis simus vagi. Est enim in malis constancia, sed que virtus non est.” 3. Bernard, De consideratione 1.3.4 (SBO 3:397–98). The Latin reads: “Non bona patientia, cum possis esse liber, servum te permittero fieri.” 4. The Clerk’s Tale is blessed with one of the better-understood sets of sources in the Canterbury group, in large part because of the impressive work of J. Burke Severs (Literary Relationships). The tale itself reports its source as Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis, his retelling in Latin of the very last of the one hundred stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron, though Chaucer clearly also worked, and in fact translated more lines directly, from an anonymous French translation of Petrarch known as Le Livre Griseldis. Both Petrarch and the Livre appear with translation in Correale, Sources and Analogues, vol. 1. Chaucer appears also to have drawn, though in such relatively tiny proportion as to suggest that he may have done so only by memory, from another French translation of Petrarch, that included with the late-fourteenth-century “household book” Le Ménagier de Paris (ed. Brereton and Ferrier, or trans. Greco and Rose)—itself a very close descendant or paraphrase of a translation made by Philippe de Mézières and included in his Livre de la vertu du sacrament de mariage. (See nn. 32 and 39 for the particulars of Chaucer’s use of these two texts, which contain just a few parallels with the Clerk’s Tale that cannot be accounted for by another source; for a thorough consideration, see Severs, Literary Relationships, 135–76.) Finally, recent critical opinion increasingly argues that Chaucer had some direct acquaintance with the Decameron, though again likely without a copy at hand to work from; on this see Cooper, “Frame,” esp. 8–9; Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, 166n17; and on the Clerk’s Tale in particular, Finlayson, “Petrarch,” with responses in Farrell, “Source.” The claims to follow about Chaucer’s alterations to his sources have been checked against all five of these earlier versions of the story, though for each claim I spell out the comparison only to the sources most immediately relevant. 5. See especially Morse, “Exemplary Griselda,” on which more at n. 25. 6. One of the earliest efforts in this line is Sledd, “Monsters and the Critics”; see also Stepsis, “Potentia Absoluta,” and its vigorous rebuttal in

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Steinmetz, “Nominalism.” Further notice of critical argument for and against allegorical readings appears in Morse, “Exemplary Griselda,” 51n2, and recently in Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures, 51n5. 7. For example, Carruthers’s “Lady” takes the story as teaching something about the nature of gentilesse rather than of pacience. The real moral of Chaucer’s tale, on this view, is most explicitly stated in Boccaccio’s rendition: “Even in poor cottages there rain down divine spirits from heaven, even as in princely palaces there be those who were worthier to tend swine than to have lordship over men” (Decameron 2:791). 8. Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion,” 436–37. 9. By automaton and automatic I mean, of course, to indicate the story’s suggestions that Griselda is something like a machine, with no will of her own, moved only by her interior duplication of Walter’s will. It is paradoxical that these words primarily take that meaning, given their etymology: if they were true to their roots they would mean, quite literally, “having a mind of its own.” But from their earliest known use they have referred less frequently to things that actually do have minds of their own than to things that appear so—things moved by some hidden mechanism so as to appear to move independently. See the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “automaton.” 10. Bestul, “True and False.” He notes particularly the contrast between the reactions of Walter’s subjects, who at times condemn the rumored infanticide, and Griselda’s placid acquiescence; if they can find reasons for complaint, surely she has still better ones. In general, though, modern criticism has not much favored the possibility that the tale is intentionally critical of Griselda’s reactions. One recent (though brief) exception is Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures, 58–59; another is the intricate last chapter of Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, which argues for a paradoxical superposition of criticism and admiration. (More on Miller’s reading appears at nn. 48 and 70.) Other suggestions include Roney, “Chaucer Subjectivizes,” 287, and Aers, Faith, Ethics, 29–33, though the latter suspends final judgment about whether Chaucer has created Griselda’s weaknesses deliberately. Finally, see the sustained argument for Chaucer’s (or rather the Clerk’s) disapproval of Griselda in Reiman, “Real Clerk’s Tale,” an article that I encountered only in the final stages of revision of this chapter. Several of its conclusions are close to mine, though in general they are reached by quite different paths. 11. Brown, Better a Shrew, 190. The audiences she imagines are early modern ones, some of whom could only have encountered the mystery cycles, suppressed in the sixteenth century, by reputation. Her arguments that Griselda’s story would nonetheless call the plays to those minds (for example, because both Walter’s apparent and Herod’s actual infanticide are motivated by an insecure despot’s attempt to maintain power) should hold a fortiori for Chaucer’s own audience.

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12. Useful examples appear in Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, which examines the lives of several woman saints of the time, most thoroughly Dorothy of Montau, who did in fact survive eight of her nine children, and who is never said to have shown much sorrow at their passing. However, Kieckhefer warns that the records also do not say that Dorothy did not grieve for her children—which means the situation is quite otherwise than with Chaucer’s “record” of Griselda. Moreover, Dorothy’s children seem to have died naturally; even if she did not grieve, there would still be considerable distance between her (inferred) equanimous acceptance of their deaths and Griselda’s acquiescence, arguably even cooperation, in what she thinks is her children’s murder. 13. Helpful selections from the relevant literature, beginning with Aristotle and the physiology of Galen and progressing through the late Middle Ages, appear in Blamires, Woman Defamed. 14. For an account of the reaction of the Veronese and also of a Paduan friend (both possibly invented by Petrarch), including some relevant quotations from Petrarch’s letter, see Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, 138–39; Carruthers, “Lady,” also begins with notice of these reactions. The entire letter (17.4; 17.3 contains the tale itself) is conveniently translated in Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, 2:669–71. 15. The irritated reader is Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli, copyist and glossator of the “Mannelli codex” of the Decameron; see Clarke, “Reading/ Writing Griselda,” 183–85, 200 (I am grateful to Richard Firth Green for the reference). Of course, the very last sentence of Boccaccio’s tale itself already contains a strong hint that Griselda might have done well to be more rebellious: “[Walter] would not perchance have been ill requited, had she happened upon one who, when he turned her out of doors in her shift, had let someone else jumble her furbelows to such purpose that a fine gown had come of it” (trans. Payne, rev. by Singleton, 791). It is also noteworthy that early-modern retellings of the tale protested in great numbers against Griselda’s submissiveness, sometimes by outright ridicule and sometimes by pairing her as “sheep” with a more successful “shrew” character; see again Brown, Better a Shrew, 179–83, 192–93, 198–204. 16. There is a also nice double entendre in the ugly sergeant’s proverblike lines: perhaps ordinary lordes heestes may not be yfeyned (evaded), but these particular heestes have already been yfeyned (faked) by the lord himself. 17. Line and page numbers for Petrarch’s Latin and for the anonymous French Livre Griseldis will refer to Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale; this passage is pp. 121–23, lines 214–16. In general I offer my own English translations and provide the original texts in the notes. Here Petrarch’s Latin reads: “Scis, sapientissima, quid est esse sub dominis, neque tali ingenio predite quamvis inexperte dura parendi necessitas est ignota.”

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18. Note here a hint that Petrarch himself already plays with the possibility of criticizing rather than lionizing Griselda, since “oaken strength” is not unambiguously positive in a culture that knew well Aesop’s fable of the oak that breaks in the wind while the pliant reed survives unharmed (it appears, for example, in William of Auvergne’s widely read Summa de vitiis et de virtutibus, discussed later in this chapter); and since feritas, beastlike wildness, is likely even more negative in Petrarch’s mouth than it seems to us—student that he was of ancient codes of civility aimed at distancing humans from a subjection to passions that would make human behavior animal-like. (Not much later he will describe the “hardness” with which Walter is thought to have murdered his children as effera et inhumana, “beastlike and inhuman.”) For other possible instances of criticism in Petrarch, see n. 10 (since Petrarch handles the subject of discussion there, Walter’s subjects’ reactions, in terms nearly identical to Chaucer’s) and n. 50. It is also noteworthy that Petrarch’s original of Chaucer’s “this [situation] would be hard even to a nurse” appears to say “this [Griselda’s display of indifference] would have been hard even in a nurse,” though there is some ambiguity in the meaning of durus, hard (p. 121, line 219). But here, as with nearly all cases of possible Petrarchan criticism, Chaucer takes a hint so ephemeral as to border on vanishing and develops it into a more central, if still subtly stated, element of the tale. For William, see On Morals, 173–74. Petrarch’s original reads, “suspiciari posset hoc femineum robur quadam ab [animi] feritate procedere” (p. 123, lines 269–70); here and throughout I have refused to translate the word animus, as it has so many possible equivalents—mind, spirit, heart, will, intention, emotional state—that insisting on a consistent translation would mangle many meanings, while picking a new one for each occurrence would mask connections among events. 19. It appears, for example, in Seneca; see Adams, Sexual Vocabulary, 189–90. 20. Cf. lines 452, 620, 735, 786, and 1078 for various remarks of Walter’s intentions. The middle three of these five merely describe him as a tempter, but the first and last give opinions on why he tempts Griselda: “hir sadnesse for to knowe,” says the narrative voice (452); to know her “purpos . . . and al [her] wille,” says Walter (1078). For Walter’s “epistemophilia,” see Cramer, “Lordship, Bondage.” 21. The Latin: “[Nil] ego umquam sciens, ne dum faciam, sed [eciam] cogitabo, quod contra animum tuum sit; nec tu aliquid facies, et si me mori iusseris, quod moleste feram” (p. 117, lines 159–61; emphasis added for clarity). 22. Petrarch’s Latin: “an volenti animo parata sis ut de omnibus tecum michi conveniat, ita ut in nulla unquam re a mea voluntate dissencias et, quicquid tecum agere voluero, sine ulla frontis aut verbi repugnancia te ex animo volente michi liceat” (lines 154–57).

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23. The three French versions follow Petrarch in clearly crediting the demand for inward control to Walter. Philippe de Mézières and the Ménagier end his speech with the question whether Griselda will avoid contradicting him “in deed, in word, in sign, or in thought.” In the Livre Griseldis, Walter’s series of questions begins with an inquiry as to whether Griselda will be ready de bon cuer, doubtless the source of Chaucer’s “good herte.” But he immediately adds an inquiry about her plain vouloir, then repeats that claim on her will twice more in the space of three lines and finishes with a still more extraordinary demand for control of her feelings: et te plaise quanqu’il me plaira, “and that whatever will please me [will] please you.” These four demands for control of the inward person are entirely absent from Chaucer’s translation. Previous notice that Griselda’s reply exceeds Walter’s demand appears in Roney, “Chaucer Subjectivizes,” 287, and in Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 224, though neither of these notes that the imbalance is Chaucer’s invention—a fact particularly relevant if one is about the difficult business of ferreting out the poet’s intentions or habits of thought. 24. Boccaccio is the only source in which Walter clearly asks Griselda whether she will marry him. Petrarch, Philippe de Mézières, and the Ménagier merely have him ask whether she will consent to his extraordinary demands if (or perhaps it is more accurate to say “when”) the marriage should go through. The Livre has him begin his questions by asking “se tu es preste et le veulx, et que tout me loise,” which Severs, for example (Literary Relationships, 240), takes as a query about the desirability of marriage (“whether you are ready and wish it [marriage], and [also wish] that everything be permitted to me”). But the crucial pronoun le can—and it seems to me more likely does—refer forward to Walter’s own demands rather than to marriage generally (“whether you are ready and wish the following, both that everything should be permitted to me . . .”). Chaucer’s own offering at this point—“Wol ye assente, or elles yow avyse?” (350)—is itself less clear a petition for Griselda’s approval than one could wish; but he has unambiguously included the petition a few stanzas earlier, where Walter tells Janicula that he would like to speak to Griselda “For I wol axe if it hire wille be / To be my wyf and reule hire after me” (326–27). At the corresponding point in Petrarch and the three French sources, Walter merely says that he wishes to ask her “certain questions” or “a thing” or “about certain things,” phrases that in those contexts seem to refer only to the extraordinary questions that we actually see him put to her. (I owe to Finlayson, “Petrarch,” 267–68, my attention to the importance of Griselda’s consent, though the critical comments there seem to me to misread both Petrarch and the details of Severs’s argument.) 25. The strongest sustained argument for the Clerk’s Tale as an exemplum whose protagonist displays real virtue is doubtless Morse, “Exemplary Griselda.” But while that article impressively canvasses the sources of, and de-

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bates over, Petrarch’s tale and other pre-Chaucerian versions of the story, it then gives roughly a page to the Clerk’s Tale itself—mentioning none of the evidence presented here of subtle undermining of the heroine—and concludes that Chaucer’s “text and its fourteenth-century contexts . . . suggest that he accepts Griselda without qualification” (84). As a result, while the article’s case for authorial approval or “acceptance” is extremely strong for some of the intermediate versions of the tale (and relatively plausible for Petrarch), its inference from those “contexts” to Chaucer’s “text” is much too rapid, overlooking the possibility that Chaucer has sharply changed the tale’s meaning by manipulating the details of his ostensibly innocent retelling. 26. Claims of painlessness or of pleasure in whatever Walter wills appear at lines 505–6, 647, 832, and 967. The list is nearly identical, not surprisingly, to the list in the next paragraph of Griselda’s assertions that her will is bound to Walter’s. But in neither case need we assume without further investigation that Chaucer means his listeners to take her claims as entirely true. 27. Past considerations of inner-and-outer in the tale include Carruthers, “Lady” (though with perhaps too optimistic an assessment of Griselda’s inward virtue) and Bestul, “True and False”; see also Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 225, and the references in Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures, 49n1. 28. Thoughts of the Stoic ideal of απαθεια (apatheia) are entirely appropriate here, though they must be advanced with some caution, as there are differences as well as similarities between Griselda and the expected fourteenthcentury stereotype of a Stoic sage: most obviously that the sage strives to be governed by his or her own disciplined reason and will, not to adopt another’s. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Petrarch’s version of the tale was directly inspired by his wrestling with an ideal of conduct he found in Stoics (Seneca) and part-Stoic syncretists (Cicero), and that Chaucer will have been alert to the wrestling match. On this more below (nn. 38, 65, 66), as also on the crucial differences between the fundamental ethical ideals of Christianity and those of Stoicism as it was understood in the late Middle Ages. For a very brief but helpful introduction to Stoic and non-Stoic elements of Petrarch’s moral philosophy, see Mann, “Petrarch’s Role,” 11–14, 24. 29. It is worth noticing that this third trial is the only one that prompts even the slightest suggestion of protest from Griselda, and also that its content is precisely what she has long since announced (lines 507–11) to be her only fear in life: the loss of Walter. There is a strong case to be made that the third trial is the hardest of them and the climax of the story—which might lead to ways of interpretation interestingly different from the common (and prima facie quite reasonable) assumption that the trials are arranged in order of increasing difficulty. 30. There are only a few other insertions of similar length; in general they similarly develop some scene already present in the originals. Thus Chau-

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cer’s tale, read line-for-line against Petrarch, proves itself an exercise in extremely close translation as regards major actions and events (though not as regards their evaluation, as we shall see). Such striking fidelity to the “plot” of the sources, incidentally, to my mind renders doubtful an important part of David Aers’s otherwise illuminating reading of the poem, namely its claims about Chaucer’s tendency to “produce absences” of things whose presence the reader might expect—as, why does Griselda never consult a priest or other confessor about her marital woes? Why is there no recourse to the Christian sacraments in a tale whose characters mention the crucifixion and bless each other with its sign (e.g., lines 556–58)? But if the tale is read in the context of what Chaucer seems to have understood himself to be doing—providing an English rendering that eschews major innovations but rearranges the characters’ moral impact by small changes in what they do and say—the idea that the reader should expect such things is dubious. Why should we not, for instance, just as well wonder why Griselda does not use her formidable diplomatic skills (430–41) to raise an army from a rival duchy and arrange her own abduction? The answer is that this is simply not how the story goes, and the undeniable fact that Chaucer has multiplied the religious references he found in his sources need not mean that he wants the reader to ask why Griselda herself does not more often act in an explicitly “religious” way. There are other possible motives for the insertions: a different set is discussed later in this chapter, under the subhead “Chaucer, Petrarch, the Vertical and the Horizontal.” See Aers, Faith, Ethics, 25–39, esp. 29–36; for previous observation of how closely Chaucer adheres to his sources’ “sequence of events,” see Severs, Literary Relationships, 227–28, and Salter, Chaucer, 37. 31. It seems to be a further development of elements in Philippe de Mézières and the Ménagier, which both mention a single swoon and a death grip on the children—though they have Griselda perform the latter after awakening from the former. The Livre Griseldis has a swoon but no grip. Petrarch has neither element, though he uses several phrases that could suggest, or be misread to suggest, a fainting spell: leto stupore (line 378), de sompno turbido (379), suorum pignorum in amplexus ruit (386). Given these phrases, the Clerk’s Tale’s multiplication of the swoon could be an instance of the interesting phenomenon Severs calls “double translation,” in which Chaucer renders, one after the other, both Petrarch’s and the Livre’s accounts of a single episode (Literary Relationships, 225–27). In any case, it is extremely rare for Chaucer to follow Philippe and the Ménagier rather than the Livre Griseldis; by Severs’s count (174–75), excluding small verbal parallels, he does so at most five times, and of the five this instance is the one most difficult to dismiss as accident or coincidence. Thus Chaucer’s inclusion of Griselda’s death grip represents a breach of his usual procedure—a breach that ignores the “unrealistically joyful” Petrarch and the middle-of-the-road Livre in favor of a source

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otherwise rarely used where the reunion is “disturbingly painful.” The move further again supports the notion that Chaucer wanted a Griselda whose apparent tranquility masks extreme inward struggle. (The quoted descriptions of Petrarch’s and Philippe’s texts are from Goodwin, “Griselda Story,” 135.) 32. The phrase quoted from Petrarch reads: “ne hanc illis aculeis agites quibus alteram agitasti” (lines 371–72); the Livre’s quite direct translation reads: “que tu ne la poingez des aguillons que tu as pointe l’autre” (lines 391– 92). The other two French sources, Philippe and the Ménagier, perhaps pave the way for Chaucer’s bluntness, using the unambiguously negative molester for Petrarch’s agitare. But they still fall short of the strength of Chaucer’s tormentynges; Philippe has aguillons there, literally “spurs,” while the Ménagier refers to Walter’s estranges admonestemens, strange “urgings” or “promptings” or “exhortations.” Both preserve Petrarch’s “the other” for Griselda’s main reference to herself, and while Philippe does allow Griselda a personal pronoun at the end (she conjectures that the new wife could not suffer as much “as I suffered”), it is doubtful whether Chaucer’s “as ye han doon mo” descends from that source, both because the two pronouns fall in different places in Griselda’s utterance and because the evidence that Chaucer knew Philippe’s work directly, as opposed to through the Ménagier, is tenuous. (It relies mostly on a small number of verbal parallels, since all of the more substantive innovations that derive from a French source other than Le Livre Griseldis are either found in both Philippe and Le Ménagier or in Le Ménagier alone; see Severs, Literary Relationships, 174–76. Note in this connection that Goodwin, “Griselda Story,” 134, is incorrect to state that the Clerk’s Tale’s final reminder of Petrarch at line 1147 is only present, among the French versions, in Philippe; in fact the Ménagier has it also. It seems possible that Chaucer saw, or had heard, only the latter version, though perhaps from a manuscript closer to Philippe’s text than those we have today.) 33. This fact is relevant to David Wallace’s extensive political reading of the tale (Polity, ch. 10), which several times asserts that Griselda shows no signs of interior dissent whatever, and that this perfect self-subjection threatens despotic rule by depriving it of tyranny’s most common self-justification, the need to control unruly subjects (see, e.g., 288). It is a fascinating idea, but seems to me to founder, at least as regards the Clerk’s Tale, on the presence of clear signs of interior struggle inserted by Chaucer alone. 34. Petrarch’s Latin (p. 123, lines 274–76) reads: “Defixis ergo in uxorem oculis, an ulla eius mutacio erga se fieret contemplabatur assidue, nec [ullam] penitus invenire poterat, nisi quod fidelior illi indies atque obseqencior fiebat.” The French versions do not alter Petrarch, as far as I can see, in any way significant for my reading here. It is possible, incidentally, that Chaucer intends line 711 to translate Petrarch’s penitus, which I have rendered “all the way down”; in that case this instance of apparent automaticity, in addition to having its force reduced to almost nil by the considerations in the main text

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above, must be counted with the six that are patently inherited from Petrarch, for a final tally of seven and one. 35. Griselda does make statements about her future internal state at other places in the poem: for example, at the wedding oaths, as we have seen, and at several points noted in the next section (“The Aetiology of an Automaton”). Evaluating those promises is a task for the section following that one. The point here is merely that this particular assertion about the future (unlike some of the others) clearly involves no claim to automaton-status, as it only concerns externals. 36. The four direct accounts of the changes of clothes fall at lines 372– 78, 894–96, 913–17, and 1114–20; for other references to the changes, besides the one examined in the main text above, see, e.g., 1055, and, most obviously, 867–91. For earlier comment on Griselda’s changes of clothing, see, for example, Dinshaw, “Griselda Translated”; Wallace, “Array”; Hansen, “Abrahamic Test”; Denny-Brown, “Povre Griselda”; and Utley, “Five Genres,” esp. 207n31. Most of these focus on seeking latent meaning in Chaucer’s use of the motif, whereas here I pursue only the likely meaning of his removal of the association that Petrarch explicitly gives it. 37. The Latin reads: “In ipso enim tue domus introitu ut pannos sic et voluntates affectusque meos exui, tuos indui: quacumque ergo de re quicquid tu vis, ego etiam volo” (p. 121, lines 250–51). Voluntates might easily be translated “wishes” or “desires,” but that would mask its close connection to the faculty of will. Domus works as “household” better than as “house” since, as Pertrarch’s Griselda will remark during the third trial (line 316), the reclothing took place at Janicula’s threshold, not Walter’s. Affectus is difficult, as, especially in medieval Latin, it can not only indicate the etymologically predictable meaning (“passion, emotion, mood, state of mind”) but can shade over, perhaps via “desire, inclination,” to “intention” or even, finally, “volition”—so that its range reaches from the passive to the undeniably active. The same seems to be true of its medieval French cognates, a fact relevant to the next note. I suspect that Petrarch does not intend the word to mean “volition,” however; else voluntates affectusque would be redundant. 38. Thus I cannot agree with Carolyn Dinshaw’s assertion (“Griselda Translated,” 145) that Griselda’s “allegorical reading” of the meaning of her reclothing is “more specific” in the Clerk’s Tale than in any of its sources; in fact the opposite seems to be true. Philippe de Mézières and the Ménagier reproduce Petrarch’s full claim, including the statement that not only Griselda’s will but her “affects” have been replaced by Walter’s (possibly a specimen of the agere et pati topos, if the etymological, passive, meaning of the word is intended). The Livre Griseldis drops the reference to Griselda’s affects, but as regards her will it follows Petrarch exactly: its Griselda tells Walter, “When I entered—there is nothing more true—over the sill of your house, I took off my clothes and also my acts of will [voulentez] and put on yours. Therefore what-

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ever you will, however it should be, I will” (p. 155, lines 234–37). Thus it is only Chaucer who removes the explicit assertion that the reclothing was accompanied by the arrival of a machinelike ligature by which Griselda’s will automatically reproduces Walter’s. It is again worth pondering to what degree Petrarch, in adding such an extraordinary claim to Boccaccio’s story, had Stoic philosophy in mind, and in particular the teaching widely found there that people can undergo an “instant conversion” to wisdom or sagehood, and that in some sense one’s reason (λογος) can effect this change by “a single massive act of will.” (Thus Colish, Stoic Tradition, vol. 1, respectively 44, 43. The possibility is complicated, however, by other Stoic assertions that one can work one’s way toward wisdom and that when the final change comes the newly minted sage is usually unaware of her status for some time: see Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 90–93; Brouwer, Stoic Sage, 79–89; and Zeller, Philosophie 3.1:262–63.) 39. Petrarch’s Latin reads: “Nempe que si future tue voluntatis essem prescia, ante etiam quicquid id esset et velle et cupere inciperem, quam tu velles.” The Livre Griseldis again follows closely (lines 237–38: “If I could know your will before you yourself [did], I would will it and do it before you yourself”). Here it is possible that Chaucer’s alteration was inspired by the Ménagier, which removes the promise or boast that Griselda would will before Walter if she could: “If it were possible that I would be informed of your thoughts and wishes before you said them, whatever they were, I would accomplish them to the extent of my ability” (p. 212, lines 473–74). But even if Chaucer is imitating rather than inventing, he so rarely chooses the Ménagier over Petrarch and the Livre (see n. 31) that it is fair to conjecture that such choices are with cause; thus they too can contribute to the ferreting-out of authorial intentions or patterns of thought, even if their evidence weighs less heavily than that of changes entirely original. 40. Lines 247–48: “Et dixi, ait, et repeto: nichil possum seu velle seu nolle nisi quod tu.” The English word nill (Chaucer’s nyl) is a now-obsolete equivalent for nolle: either can mean not only “to fail to will” but also, as presumably here, “to will against.” Once again the Livre is virtually identical to Petrarch, whereas the Ménagier (and Philippe) are close to Chaucer’s alteration: both give roughly “I neither will nor nill anything outside of what I know to please you.” 41. Emphasis added. Petrarch’s Latin reads: “Nil placere enim tibi potest quod michi displiceat. Nichil penitus vel habere cupio vel amittere metuo, nisi te; hoc ipsa in medio cordis affixi, nunquam inde vel lapsu temporis vel morte vellendum. Omnia prius fieri possunt quam hic animus mutari” (p. 119, lines 205–8). 42. The standard Latin grammar responsible for this translation of ipse (Gildersleeve and Lodge, Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, #311.I) also offers “I

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alone” and “I . . . of my own accord”; the point of each rendition is that the pronoun “separates a subject or an object from all others.” Even if the force of ipse in Petrarch’s Latin has faded somewhat from these classical heights, still his choice of a pronoun that separates and emphasizes is noteworthy—and all the more so given its removal in Chaucer’s translation, which bolts to an opposite extreme, not only deemphasizing the unique responsibility of the subject in question but relieving her of all responsibility whatever. Yet again the change is uniquely Chaucer’s: all three French sources follow Petrarch in having Griselda explicitly claim credit for her current state. 43. Emphasis added, in this quotation and the next, to highlight the salient difference between the two. The Latin reads: “ut duorum non nisi unus animus videretur, [isque] non communis amborum sed viri dumtaxat unius, uxor enim per se nichil velle, ut dictum est, nichil nolle firmaverat” (p. 123, lines 274–79). 44. Critics have occasionally observed that Chaucer omits Petrarch’s explicit statement that the shared will is Walter’s. If they are right, the change is yet another blow on Chaucer’s part against a merely mechanical linkage of wills, but I find it more likely that Chaucer intends the line-and-a-half following his “o wyl” to translate the remark. As for the question of how things have become as they are, the Livre Griseldis has had no influence on Chaucer’s transformations, as it drops the entire sentence concerning the couple’s single animus, thus entering no vote. Philippe and the Ménagier follow Petrarch in ascribing the credit to Griselda’s willing. They do, however, dissolve Petrarch’s strong affirmation of Griselda’s past-tense act of decision into nothing more than an observation that the story has affirmed the same: perhaps uncomfortable with seeing such strong activity issue (even in the past) from Griselda, they state that the couple’s shared “heart and will was principally that of the husband, for that wife, as was said above, did not will from herself or for herself any preference of her own, but gave everything back to the will of her lord.” But even in these less-used sources, Griselda retains a role in bringing about the willing-in-concert-with-Walter; it is only Chaucer who reacts to Petrarch’s assertion about Griselda’s past agency by eliding that agency altogether. 45. “Que fama cum ad Griseldis noticiam pervenisset tristis ut puto sed ut que [semel] de se suisque de sortibus statuisset inconcussa constitit expectans quid de se ille dicerneret cui se et sua cuncta subiecerat” (p. 123, lines 289–291, with the disambiguating punctuation of Sources and Analogues removed). The idea that anything planned by Walter could sadden Griselda is so uncharacteristic of Petrarch’s generally pro-automaton stance, and so apparently contradictory with the immediately following assertion that she was inconcussa, “unshaken,” that one is tempted to look for an explanation. One emerges if we push the source study back another layer: Petrarch’s ut puto is an insertion into Boccaccio’s story, where the parallel passage simply states as a

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fact that Griselda “sorrowed sorely in herself” on hearing the rumor. Thus ut puto was likely intended as a marker of lack of certainty rather than of confident “putation”: “I suppose she was sad,” it seems to mean, “because, after all, any normal woman would be in such circumstances, even though her behavior, which is all I am going to pass along as fact, provides no evidence of sadness.” Perhaps in order to reproduce this reluctance to state Griselda’s sadness as fact, Philippe de Mézières and Le Ménagier convert the entire sentence into a conditional, roughly “and if she was reasonably troubled in her heart, no one should marvel at that”; while the Livre Griseldis simply drops the entire phrase, sadness and all. Considerations of space preclude a thorough comparison between Petrarch and Boccaccio here, but the exercise would show this insertion to be in line with a general pattern. In the Decameron there is no doubt about whether Griselda really feels pain and no question of her being an automaton or a successful attainer of apatheia; the story repeatedly states her internal suffering flat out, sometimes in quite lurid imagery; and as far as I have been able to determine, Petrarch’s version systematically removes every one of Boccaccio’s statements of internal pain, with the exception of one or two that he instead vitiates with wiggle words like puto. The result for the Clerk’s Tale is that Chaucer’s nearly verbatim transcription of the line—“I deeme that hire herte was ful wo”—nonetheless appears to mean virtually the opposite of what it meant in Petrarch: the three new cracks in Griselda’s composure give independent evidence for internal sorrow, allowing the earlier poet’s doubtful “deeming” to be taken at face value in the later. 46. The published English translation of the Ménagier translates the second phrase with a status descriptor (“he to whom she was in submission,” 85), but the original has the pluperfect of an active reflexive verb, just as in Petrarch (“cellui ouquel elle s’estoit toute soubmise,” lines 562–63). It may be that the être auxiliary suggested to Chaucer a status description rather than an action, just as it may have done for the modern translator. But even if so, he has chosen to resolve whatever ambiguity the French verb has in the direction of the far less obvious reading, and has simultaneously chosen to follow the Ménagier (or Philippe’s text, which is similar) over his two more usual sources, both of which have unambiguously active verbs. All this suggests a motivation stronger than mere chance. 47. Griselda’s already-mentioned remark “that I yow yaf myn herte” (861, discussed near the end of the second-to-last section above) could credibly be advanced as an exception. But the force of the exception is not great, for two reasons: two, that is, if we pass over the obvious reason that it is an exception, heavily counterbalanced by the many other cases where Chaucer has removed reference to an establishing act of will in Griselda’s past (if I am not mistaken, he has removed every such moment from Petrarch’s story). One other reason is that it is not entirely clear whether the giving of the

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herte described there is meant to be a moment of “conversion” of Griselda’s mind and will to a fixed dependence on Walter’s: it could be, but it is also a phrase that could describe the entry into a less remarkable sort of union, a more ordinary act of falling in love. Secondly, it is Griselda who reports the giving of herte, and we have seen that Chaucer elsewhere makes her an uncertain witness of her own internal states, as when she tells Walter, “Ther may no thyng . . . / Liken to yow that may displese me” (505–6) but subsequently cracks under the strain of pretending that it is so. 48. These results of source study also provide reason for doubt about the otherwise forceful reading of the Clerk’s Tale in the last chapter of Miller’s Philosophical Chaucer. If Chaucer’s intent were, as Miller suggests, for Griselda “to embody the perfection of patient fortitude” (232), which must then necessarily hover paradoxically between suffering (because her patience will not be real patience if it does not involve pain) and not suffering (because, on Miller’s view, her patience, insofar as it is perfect, should move her to a place of perfect equanimity)—if that were Chaucer’s intent, one could understand his abolition of the present-tense mechanical ligature of her will with Walter’s, since that “automaticness,” left intact, would make real suffering implausible. One could even understand his removal of the claims about Griselda’s past responsibility, as that change similarly moves her away from being so perfectly in control that she might be thought not to be truly suffering at all. But it is difficult to understand, on this interpretation, why Chaucer would simultaneously make Griselda claim for the future things that she has not achieved in present or past. That third type of change strongly suggests that the aim of the Clerk’s Tale is not to show us the paradoxical realities that would attend a successful attainment of the virtue of patience, but rather to show us a misguided effort leading to a colossal failure. 49. Petrarch’s Latin reads: “Hanc historiam stilo nunc alio retexere visum fuit, non tam ideo, ut matronas nostri temporis ad imitandam huius uxoris pacienciam, qui michi vix imitabilis [or mutabilis, or inimitabilis, or mirabilis, or immutabilis] videtur, quam ut legentes ad imitandam saltem femine contanciam excitarem, ut quod hec viro suo presitit, hoc prestare deo nostro audeant.” Understandings of this sentence, which arrives with a sudden spike in the frequency of variants in the manuscripts, are roughly as numerous as the understanders. My own suspicion is that of the various factors, Petrarch means to emphasize most the difference between God and husband, the point being that the moral teaching of the tale is aimed at one’s relationship to God, not one’s relationship to other humans; though see Middleton, “Literary Contexts,” 128–30, for the noteworthy observation that Petrarch likely intends “readers” (legentes) to mean those who can read his Latin, and therefore to exclude rather than include the “married women” who would read Boccaccio’s tale. As for the difference between patientia and constantia, at least one able

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reader (Donaldson, in his notes to Chaucer’s Poetry, 917–20) takes it as the key to understanding both Chaucer’s version and Petrarch’s, asserting that if we assess Griselda in terms of the latter virtue—a higher one, he claims, and unlike patience not susceptible to decay into a destructive version of itself— we will understand her greatness and escape many of the story’s troubles. But the claim seems untenable, first because patience (a virtue generally promoted by Christian, but not pagan, moralists) could easily be taken as the higher of the two, as Petrarch’s “at least” (saltem) already seems to imply; and second because medieval moralists were no strangers to the possibility of constancegone-wrong (on which see n. 64). 50. As already noted, there are reasons to think that Petrarch’s experiment really is an experiment—that it is open to the possibility of negative results—in that it seems to include moments (though not nearly so many as the Clerk’s Tale) that subtly suggest criticism of its “idealized” protagonist. To the instances suggested in n. 18 should be added Griselda’s strong concern about the burial of her children’s corpses—a concern present once in Boccaccio, but multiplied by Petrarch to be present at the removal of each child (and referred to yet a third time by Chaucer: see lines 569–72, 680–83, and 1094–96). Whatever the complexities of medieval attitudes toward this much-discussed question (on which see Lavezzo, “Everyday Death,” 272–75), Petrarch’s own stance seems relatively clear, thanks to his inclusion of “Dying in Fear of Being Cast Away Unburied” as the very last of the 132 misfortunes that make up the second half of De remediis. There Reason argues against Fear that lack of burial is of no concern whatever, drawing in the process on such authorities as Cicero, Lucan, Virgil, Seneca, and the first book of Augustine’s City of God. For the same author to emphasize Griselda’s fretting over just that point suggests something other than unqualified approbation. For the 132nd misfortune, see Petrarch’s Remedies, 3:334–38 (text) and 4:520–32 (sources); for the vast influence of De remediis, in the two centuries following his death probably Petrarch’s most influential work, see Mann, “Petrarch’s Role,” 7. 51. A strictly “horizontal” interpretation of the tale can be found in Carruthers, “Lady,” and compare R. F. Green’s recent claim that Griselda’s story stubbornly remains “about a struggle between competing views of marriage (the patriarchal and the cooperative),” notwithstanding the allegorizing efforts of Petrarch and most of his successors to make it about something else (“Griselda in Siena,” 33). For the notion of increased pathos in the Clerk’s tale, see, e.g., Severs, Literary Relationships, 234, and Salter, Chaucer, 41–42, 50–58. For proponents of the “vertical” dimension, see the references in n. 6 to Morse and Hume, who survey the debate over the tale’s allegorical content. Many entrants into the vertical-versus-horizontal discussion seem to me too dependent on an exclusionary logic according to which a demonstration that Chaucer is interested in the gritty human details of the couple’s interaction

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also suffices, without further argument, to prove that he is not interested in offering the same story as a forum for thought about the relations between a human will and Fortune or Providence. There is no obvious reason why he could not have both in mind. 52. “Habundabant viro lacrime, ut contineri amplius non posset. Itaque faciem avertens, Et camisiam tibi unicam habeto, verbis trementibus vix expressit, et sic abiit illacrimans” (p. 125, lines 325–27). 53. For example, another possible goal—which is in any case undeniably a result, intentional or not—is that the flattening simply makes Walter vastly less likable, more merely brutal, than he is in any of the sources. And as Donaldson long since observed, that change tends to reflect badly on Griselda in turn, since “it is not human to go on loving a monster”—an observation that very nicely fits this chapter’s evidence that the Clerk’s Tale is intensely critical of Griselda, though Donaldson takes it in another direction (notes to Chaucer’s Poetry, 918). Elizabeth Salter offers yet a third explanation: Chaucer makes Walter’s character more cruel and unfeeling in order to make Griselda appear, not less appealing, but more grievously abused, more pathetic (Chaucer, 55–59). That possibility, however, requires belief in Salter’s larger thesis that the Clerk’s Tale is wracked by unreconciled rival impulses, one toward realism and one toward religious fable; otherwise it would be hard to account for the numerous places where the poem passes up opportunities for pathos and cruelty. 54. An ox’s stall, of course, is the traditional site of the Virgin Birth, from an intertwining of Luke 2:7 with Isaiah 1:3; lest we miss the point, Chaucer prepares the central reference eighty-odd lines earlier with the remark that “hye God somtyme senden kan / His grace into a litel oxes stalle” (206–7), then invokes it a third time at line 398. All three insertions are original to Chaucer; in every source the couple speaks for the first time at Janicula’s threshold, with no mention of a stall nearby. 55. The Clerk’s Tale’s references to Job appear at lines 871–72, translating Petrarch’s sole allusion; at 932–38, which name Job explicitly, as the received text of Petrarch’s tale never does; and likely at 902–3, where Janicula curses his own birth (cf. Job 3:1–19). Severs believes that the middle of the three, which extols women’s humility and capacity to be “true” above that of any man, was inspired by a different naming of Job at this point in a version of Petrarch’s text; but as that variant has been discovered only in a single one of the scores of extant manuscripts, and as the manuscript in question was written after Chaucer’s death and belonged to a “family” of versions different from the family apparently known to Chaucer, the evidence is not overwhelming (see Severs, “Job Passage,” and also Literary Relationships, 115). In any case, a list of new religious references in the tale would have also to include, at minimum, lines 455, 491, 505, 555–60, 611, 616, 718, 852, 1062, 1064, 1088,

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1096, and the second half of line 1153. Not a single one of these occurs in any of Chaucer’s five potential sources. 56. A point made also in Salter, Chaucer, 40. 57. Hanna, “Commonplaces.” Also useful, especially for monastic treatments, is Casey, “Virtue of Patience.” There is, moreover, a wealth of useful information on the notion of patience in Chaucerian criticism in Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, ch. 6. The conclusions presented there, however, seem to me to move too rapidly from the small set of vice-virtue manuals Blamires takes as his main guide on ethical questions to a generalization called “patience as understood in the Middle Ages” (159)—thus undervaluing the impact of some other influential writers, like those discussed in this section, who disagreed fundamentally with some of those sources. At several points the resulting picture of medieval opinions seems to owe too much to unqualified Stoicism. 58. Information about the number and dissemination of manuscripts of William of Auvergne comes from Roland Teske’s introduction to his translation of On Morals, the part of De virtutibus et vitiis that includes the chapter on patience (see p. xii). The summa to which both belong is called Magisterium doctrinale et sapientale, a title that indicates an intention to merge teaching handed down in Christian tradition with the newly rediscovered wisdom of classical philosophy; William is usually said to be the first Christian theologian to attempt a serious engagement with the long-lost parts of Aristotle and with Avicenna. Some sense of his work’s correspondence with thoughts in wide late-medieval circulation can be divined from a reading of Hanna’s “Commonplaces” article alongside the first few pages of William on patience, as those pages repeatedly lay out (at least six times, by my count) ideas that Hanna declares typical of the time. 59. Citations from William are my translations from the 1963 reprint of the 1674 Opera omnia, here at 1:249A, col. A. I have consulted Teske’s translations in On Morals in making my own. “Suffers” here renders pati, more obviously connected in the Latin to patience and to passivity, the reception of action, than in English. The emphasis in all quotations from William is of course mine; in this case it attempts to capture the force of the often dismissive demonstrative ista. William’s Latin reads: “Post haec autem scire debes, quod patientia interdum dicitur insensibilitas, de qua dicit Aristoteles, quod quidam sunt insensibilies, ut ruricolae, & non videtur ista patientia virtus, neque nomine patientiae digna juxta testimonium Aristotelis quod posuimus; nihil enim doloris, vel laesionis patitur, qui insensibiliter patitur.” 60. Here I have found it helpful to render pati by “undergo” rather than “suffer.” The Latin is from 1:249B, col. A: “Quarta patientia, quam vocare consuevimus asinariam, sive asininam, & ista est consuetudinaria quorundam patientia, de qua aliquando irrisimus Aristotelem; quidam enim flagellis as-

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sueti ut asini, flagella nec timent, nec eis laeduntur, nec virtuose illa sustinent, sed passabiliter tantum, & ideo non virtuose agunt, sed solummodo patiuntur, sicut asinus; pati enim vere patienter, & virtuose, vel agere est, ver resistere passionibus, quod iterum agere est; portare enim onus non solum pati est gravitatem, & gravamen oneris, sed etiam agere, ac vincere.” 61. “On finit par s’habituer à tout,” as Camus’s Stranger would have it. Present-day promoters of “virtue ethics” will certainly object, probably correctly, that such a result could only follow from a misreading of Aristotle or of the high-medieval writer who most famously borrowed from his system of ethics in this regard, Thomas Aquinas. Still, it is notable that William’s protest, or at least caution, about habit-based ethics is abroad at the same time as Thomas’s work—and that its author was reputed as the first great Christian Aristotelian of the high Middle Ages, and for a long interval may well have been read more widely outside the universities than Thomas was. The dangers of habituation also appear, in a powerfully thought-provoking way, in the first few chapters of the De consideratione of Bernard of Clairvaux—a treatise not much used in this book, despite subsequent chapters’ extensive drawing on its author. 62. A third such discriminating treatment appears in another source for substantial sections of the Parson’s Tale, the extremely popular Summa virtutum of William Peraldus. It should be noted that these (and other) writers weighed varieties of patience, and applied labels to them, in ways more various than Hanna’s article might lead a reader to think: in “Postquam,” for example, donkey-patience is not sinful or even unequivocally a “false” variety; it is merely less good than other kinds of patience, being distinguished from them primarily by being unchosen rather than deliberately undertaken for a good end or out of a desire to imitate Christ. Nonetheless the discussions in all these widely circulated texts agree in suggesting that the intellectual currents of the time were quite eager to distinguish among different kinds of patience, with results that often look very bad for Griselda’s kind. For “Postquam,” see Wenzel, Summa virtutum, here at 206–7; for a good brief account of the role of the treatise, and that of Peraldus’s Summa, in the Parson’s Tale, see the Riverside Chaucer, 956. 63. De civitate dei 14.9; the Latin reads: “Et si nonnulli tanto immaniore, quanto rariore vanitate hoc in se ipsis adamaverint, ut nullo prorsus erigantur et excitentur, nullo flectantur atque inclinentur affectu; humanitatem totam potius amittunt, quam veram assequantur tranquillitatem. Non enim quia durum aliquid, ideo rectum; aut quia stupidum est, ideo sanum.” 64. The condemnation of duritia in particular is worth noting for any reader of either Chaucer or Petrarch. For further sources, besides Hanna’s article, see the long list of examples in Straw, Gregory the Great, 237n8, which notes that the patience-duritia distinction is “something of a commonplace.”

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Attempts to distinguish simply between true and false patience are also not difficult to find: besides William of Auvergne, see this chapter’s epigraph from Bernard of Clairvaux. Medieval thinkers also distinguished the virtue of constancy into true and false, or good and bad, varieties: this chapter’s epigraph from the Moralium dogma philosophorum is one influential example, and Chaucer himself seems to be another (in his treatment of Walter, and in further cases of “bad constancy” treated under the heading of adherence to law in ch. 5). Petrarch also seems to make the distinction, disparaging Walter at least once in language suggestive of constancy-gone-wrong: after the second trial, he writes that “these tests of good-will and conjugal faith might have been enough for the most inflexible spouse, but there are those who, when they have once begun, do not desist, but rather ‘lean in’ and stick to what has been proposed” (lines 272–74; cf. Clerk’s Tale, 698–705). The last phrase, incumbant hereantque proposito, calls to mind the definition of constancy in the Moralium (p. 30): “Constancy is a stability of animus that is firm and perseveres in what has been proposed [in proposito perseverans].” Blamires points out that Seneca’s De ira, in a passage Chaucer borrowed (perhaps indirectly) for the Summoner’s Tale, mentions something like bad constancy, or rather something better called rigor that can be mistaken for constancy (Chaucer, Ethics, 157). 65. The literature on Stoicism is of course vast, and the topic worthy of more study still. Works that have helped with this chapter (by dint of focusing on Stoic ethics, rather than logic or physics), besides those cited below, include Colish, Stoic Tradition, especially 1:7–50 and 2:44–46, 54–79, 214–38; Brouwer, Stoic Sage; and Rist, Stoic Philosophy, especially ch. 5. For the particular question of apatheia and its reception in Christianity, the encyclopedia entries by Forschner and P. de Labriolle are good starting points. 66. The attempt to get a fix on the meaning of apatheia also runs into yet a further complication. It is not merely that Stoics allow wise minds to continue to contain eupatheiai: it is also true, according to an earlier consideration in De civitate dei (9.4), that they often will allow the existence in the wise even of disruptive passions like fear and desire—as long as the sage does not “consent” to them or allow them to take full possession of the mind. The result, Augustine suggests in that place, is that Stoic doctrine is in effect (though not in appearance) almost identical with Platonist and Peripatetic reflections on the matter, both of which assert that the wise are affected by passions, but then react by mastering them rather than by being mastered. To the extent that this is true, Stoicism’s teaching in this area is less at odds with the usual Christian approach than Augustine’s later treatment of the relationship in book 14 suggests. Nonetheless Christian writers before and after Augustine very frequently treat the relationship in the latter, more adversarial way described in the main text here. The confusion may largely stem from real differ-

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ences among the Stoics themselves, on which see Colish, Stoic Tradition, 1:42–50. For a wide sample of early Christian reactions, see Stelzenberger, Beziehung, ch. 7, along with the examples of primary sources given in Hanna, “Commonplaces,” 77n36 (Peter Damian and, again, William Peraldus); arguments that Christians frequently misrepresent Stoic teaching in this area appear in Becker, New Stoicism, 128, and Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 42. Finally, a suggestive distinction between Stoic and Stoic in this regard appears in Simone Weil, who blames the Romans for spoiling a subtle Greek school of thinking that was once a “twin conception to Christianity” by “substitut[ing] in place of love an insensibility based on pride”—though in fact the dividing line may not fall quite where she suggests, as at least some Roman Stoics are careful to deny insensibility among the wise. For Weil, see Need for Roots, 290, and cf. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 95–96; for Roman affirmations that the sage still undergoes feelings of various sorts, see Seneca’s ninth letter to Lucilius, esp. §3 (Letters, 40), as well as his Consolation to Marcia 7.1, Consolation to Polybius 17.2 and 18.5, On Providence 2.2, and On the Constancy of the Wise 10.4. (Recent translations of all four treatises appear in Seneca, Hardship.) 67. See, e.g., Stelzenberger, Beziehung, 266. One might almost say that Chaucer’s Griselda is in tune with some of these Christian writers, as we do see her struggle against her ordinary passions; the trouble is that she appears to do so with the mistaken aim of removing them altogether. For Augustine, the roadblock to apatheia has much to do with sin; he thinks apatheia can be attained by a human who is beyond all sin, but that no one is sinless in this life. That is another reason why attempting to reach the state now is not only futile but destructive: the person who does so, on Augustine’s view, necessarily “considers himself to live without sin,” a bit of wishful thinking that, so far from making the wish come true, will “bring it about . . . that he does not accept forgiveness.” (For these quotations, and the brief phrases from Augustine in the main text, see De civitate dei 14.9; translations mine.) 68. See the second sentence of De civitate dei 14.9: “The citizens of the holy city of God, in the pilgrimage of this life, living according to God, fear and desire, sorrow and rejoice, and because their love is right, they make all these affections right.” Or, a few pages in: “The right life makes all these affects right, the perverse [life makes them] perverse.” “Right” renders rectus in each case. For the notion of “fundamental option,” whose name is recent but whose roots date to scripture and to Aquinas, McDonagh’s brief encyclopedia article is a good starting place. 69. William of Auvergne, Opera omnia 1:249C, col. A: “Propugnatores mei non solum hostes vincunt per me, sed etiam se ipsos: sicut legitur Proverbior. 16, Melior est patiens viro forti, & qui dominatur animo suo expugnatore

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urbium. Dominari animo suo hoc est, quod intellegimus vincere seipsos. Propugnatores mei dimidii tantum pugnant, & contra se, & contra hostes sicut ibidem dicit expositor, quia ibi totus impugnat, hic vero dimidius; patiuntur enim mirandam rebellionem in semetipsis, quam & virtute mea nobilissime triumphant.” 70. This fact underlies the problem, already mentioned in passing above, that Mark Miller calls “one of the most basic dramatic difficulties” of the Clerk’s Tale: if Griselda succeeds in attaining perfect patience, she will paradoxically cease to be patient at all, because perfect compliance would surely have to mean that she is experiencing no internal resistance or suffering (Philosophical Chaucer, 232). But rather than disclosing this problem as an inescapable “antinomy” at the root of all human love, as Miller thinks, Chaucer seems to me to dissolve the problem by distinguishing between one kind of patience and another, showing emphatically that the kind of “perfection” that leads to the antinomy (that is, perfect erasure of one’s own will) is not perfection at all, but a mistake, a destructive simulacrum of real patience. The fact that we find similar distinctions between true and false patience in William, and indeed in so many well-known medieval moralists as to render the distinctions commonplace, to my mind makes this understanding of the tale difficult to resist. 71. For Bernard, see the passage at n. 4 of the preface, taken up in more detail near the end of ch. 3; see also preface, n. 6. 72. “The War within Us” #4, in New Man, 12. 73. Hauerwas, “Endurance,” 208. 74. Some influential readings have made that understanding of Custance quite explicit: see, above all, Delany, “Womanliness,” which argues that “for most readers Constance is among the least attractive of Chaucer’s women, sharing with patient Griselda . . . the repulsive masochistic qualities of extreme humility and silent endurance” (36). 75. For a passing statement of the Christian side of this disagreement, see Augustine’s Gift of Perseverance 9.19–20—itself quoting Ambrose’s Flight from the World as declaring flatly that “our hearts and our thoughts are not in our power.” Custance’s entire tale seems to be governed by an awareness of the impossibility of complete control of the mind; see in particular its concluding thoughts on the inevitable interruption of delit by various passions and sins (lines 1135–38). References to detailed treatments of the standard medieval account of the relations between Christianity and Stoicism appear in nn. 65 and 66. Incidentally, the difference between Griselda’s attempts at once-andfor-all declaration and Custance’s understanding of the need for repeated (and nonidentical) acts of allegiance in shifting circumstances is surely one reason that Custance gives the impression of being “anarchic” or “outside of law” (thus Robertson, “‘Elvyssh’ Power,” 161), whereas Griselda’s patience seems “shorn of its quality of movement” and “frozen” (Mann, Feminizing Chaucer,

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117). Here, however, we will uncover the availability of a medieval concept of law complex and flexible enough to include Custance’s decidedly unpredictable action; see esp. ch. 6. 76. Clerk’s Tale, line 563. Hence Delany’s characterization of Custance’s mode of life as a “silent endurance” shared with Griselda (see n. 74) misses the mark. On the contrary, silence turns out to be an important point of distinction between the two women, one of many reasons for reading them as a study in contrasts rather than as close kin. 77. Yet it is not an uncommon reversal, in part because of a tendency to read the Clerk’s Tale as bent above all on a “realistic” de-allegorizing of Petrarch’s original. Delany’s assessment of the two characters risks the same inversion in declaring that moderns dislike the Man of Law’s Tale in part because, “unlike Chaucer’s other female characters, Constance achieves no multidimensional ‘reality’” (“Womanliness,” 36). 78. The quotation is from Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 107, and is directed against Delany’s charge of masochism. The “undisclosed location” of the attack is, in Chaucer’s most obvious source, the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Nicholas Trevet, explicitly said to be Spain, and the apostate theef a convert to Islam. For Trevet, see vol. 2 of the newer Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale. 79. Robertson (“‘Elvyssh’ Power,” 159–63) has noted the peculiarity of Custance’s agency in this passage. She concludes, though, that Chaucer has deliberately given his character an “obscure agency” about which there is not much more to be said than that it is obscure or “ineffable”—and thus ultimately associated, via a notion of otherness or difference seemingly derived from Jacques Derrida’s use of Emmanuel Levinas, with God, and in particular with a nonhierarchical, noninstitutional kind of religion. This seems to me a roundabout route to an appropriate goal: while Custance’s mysterious kind of agency does derive from Judeo-Christian ideas, it is possible to find a much more direct connection, one routed not through our own philosophical contemporaries but through theological notions Chaucer is very likely to have encountered. Moreover, making the link that way (the task of ch. 3) will show that there is actually quite a lot that can be fruitfully said about Custance’s kind of agency, including some specific ways in which her agency contradicts the most usual modern assumptions on the subject. The rerouted link will also tend to challenge any suggestion that Custance’s kind of religion must necessarily be at odds with an institutionally established Christianity, since many of the theological thinkers who offer pictures of human agency resembling Custance’s have been highly regarded by, and in some cases highly placed in, the “visible church.” 80. This is not to say that Chaucer and his contemporaries could not have believed in the reality of astrological causation: it seems that for the most part they did. But they also believed (in a distinction pursued in helpful detail

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in Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity) our knowledge of the links between astrological and terrestrial events to be so imprecise as to render understanding possible only in general and on large scales. One might therefore believe it to be clear that a planetary conjunction had caused the start of a war, for example, but probably not the demise of a marriage. The Man of Law’s Tale itself, of course, tells us much the same thing: “The deeth of every man” is written in the stars, “but mennes wittes ben so dulle / That no wight kan wel rede it atte fulle” (196, 202–3). 81. It is not absolutely certain that the similarities between the two pieces are a result of Chaucer’s imitation of Gower rather than the other way around, but it is a critical consensus of long standing; Margaret Schlauch’s piece on the tale in the older Sources and Analogues (ed. Bryan and Dempster) begins with a short summary of the arguments. The idea that Chaucer deliberately rendered Custance more passive in order to make room for divine Providence as the tale’s real protagonist was proposed over fifty years ago in Yunck, “Religious Elements,” a piece that still repays reading, though my conclusions here are quite different. My source for Gower’s “Tale of Constance” is the newer Sources and Analogues, 2:330–50; the tale itself occupies lines 587– 98 of the second book of the Confessio amantis. 82. It is significant that Yunck, in arguing for Chaucer’s replacement of Custance by Providence in the role of protagonist, does not mention that the same kind of “channeling” takes place with the evil characters too. The closest his article comes to acknowledging this other side of the coin is in observing that the antagonists in the tale “are the stars and the devil.” But the phrase is then in effect retracted by a piece of interpretation to which the “Hermeneutical Interlude” below will return: the next sentence glosses the stars and the devil as “human heredity . . . and the malice of human evil” (259). This leaves some things unexplained and others asymmetrical: if Chaucer meant to portray merely human evil, why did he go to the trouble of describing supernatural agents behind the malefactors in so many cases? And why should we interpret the “good” supernatural agents as the real protagonists of the story, while implicitly denying that those on the evil side are real at all? Similarly Elizabeth Robertson’s treatment, while correctly noting Custance’s peculiar kind of agency and taking it as an integral part of her “elvyssh power,” does not remark that nearly everyone else in the tale acts with a very similarly peculiar kind of agency. Though Custance is clearly the central figure, the way her agency works seems as much a feature of the universe the tale creates as of her in particular. 83. Sine qua non causality seems, however, most often to have been invoked in attempts to explain the power of the sacraments, rather than in more abstract considerations of the interplay of human agency with divine action; more direct theological treatments of the latter question, and thus more direct

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parallels to the Man of Law’s Tale, must wait for ch. 3. The question of sine qua non causality is also complicated by the fact that different thinkers (and sometimes, as with Aquinas, the same thinker in different works) understood quite different things by the term. Historical treatments appear in Courtenay, “Covenant” and “Leaden Coin.” Aers, Salvation and Sin, also treats the question, rightly remarking (192n62) that Courtenay would probably draw some different conclusions if returning to those articles today. 84. Oberman, Forerunners, 134. 85. The inner quotation comes from the Septuagint version of 1 Samuel 2:9, a verse that Augustine appears to take as a compact expression of the idea of divine-human cooperation. Much of his surrounding chapter (De civitate dei 17.4) is a long exposition of the song of Hanna in 1 Samuel 2, much of it devoted to showing that all human accomplishments are dependent on divine gift, are, one might say, in fact divine accomplishments. How important that insight is to Augustine we can gather from his beginning his exegesis with the assertion that Hanna is the mouthpiece for “the Christian religion itself, the city of God itself . . . [and] finally the grace of God itself.” The sentence quoted reads in Latin: “Cum enim Dominus possidere nos coeperit, profecto adversarius qui noster fuerat ipsius fit, et vincitur a nobis; sed non viribus nostris: quia non in virtute potens est vir.” Virtus of course can mean “virtue” or “strength” rather than “manhood,” but in context Augustine is clearly taking the note of excellent man-ness as central—in order to express its limits. (For a feast of further examples of Augustine’s use of the “language of cooperation,” see the first chapter of Aers, Salvation and Sin, e.g., 17. Aers finds that both Holcot and Bradwardine ultimately fail to reproduce Augustine’s successfully cooperative account, very roughly by granting too much power, respectively, to the human and to the divine side; for more on Augustine’s own view, see the remarks on Salvation and Sin in my introduction. For another brief and forceful statement of the principle of cooperation in a widely influential work, see Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 5.9, p. 132.) 86. Kirkpatrick, “Griselda Story,” 243. 87. Lines 971–73: “Ne nevere, for no wele ne no wo, / Ne shal the goost withinne myn herte stente / To love yow best.” A. C. Spearing remarks this particular accretion of negatives in the second edition of Criticism, 96, but takes it primarily as a sign of the strain Griselda is under rather than of her tendency toward nonexistence. It is worth noting that a pattern of describing actions by negation, while original with Chaucer in the transmission of Griselda’s story, appears to be relatively common in medieval theologians’ discussions of patience: cf. Hanna, “Commonplaces,” 72, on Gregory the Great. 88. This fact suggests that it may be Custance rather than Griselda who makes the better parallel for Job, even though Chaucer does not insert into her tale any explicit references to say so. Much of the central part of Job’s story,

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after all, revolves around his insistence on his right to complain against God about his unearned sufferings—as against the advice of the “comforters” who often suggest that he should remain silent. 89. Ch. 3 explores in depth this ideal, worlds apart from the one that animates Petrarch’s (and attracts Chaucer’s) Griselda, then reconsiders Custance in the fuller light gained there. That Chaucer has increased the pathos of Custance’s tale is a common observation; a canonical instance is Weissman, “Gothic Pathos,” which tells its reader that “most analysts agree . . . in finding that [Chaucer] has heightened the rhetoric and intensified the pathos of the heroine, both so noticeably that the alterations invite critical evaluation of some kind” (133). An outstanding example happens at Custance’s reunion with Alla in Rome: I remarked above the lengthy sobbing and emotional resistance that attend the occasion, but not the difference from Chaucer’s sources, in which Alla simply seizes his wife and kisses her—after which “Was nevere wiht that sih ne wiste / A man that more joie made” (Gower, Confessio amantis, 1442–43; Trevet’s account is similarly positive). Weissman’s own evaluation is that Chaucer increases Custance’s pathos only by way of irony, of mocking a late-medieval cultural trend toward a sort of hand-wringingly pathetic Christianity; I suspect, to the contrary, that her vocal complaints— balanced as they are with the impressive levels of agency considered above— are Chaucer’s effort to confront the problem of evil, and the question of how we should suffer, as seriously as possible. Custance’s willingness to accept sondes and her ability to act strongly in her own interests gain didactic value from the evidence that she is also suffering deeply; if her reactions suggested that she did not feel much pain, a reader might well react as Satan does to Job’s first few trials: Of course she can put up with that. Skin for skin! 90. See Mann’s Feminizing Chaucer, xvii–xviii, for some related thoughts about the relevance for a given interpretation of the fact that it comes as a surprise—though she argues for the lasting superposition of the two rather than the replacement of one by the other. But while superposition is a useful way to think about some interpretive impasses, such as the putatively yes-or-no question of whether the Clerk’s Tale’s Walter “is” a figure for God, it does seem that some other “second readings” devour their parents rather than peacefully coexisting with them.

two.

Hermeneutical Interlude: Chaucer, Gadamer, Boethius

1. Merton, Way, 42—what Merton calls a “reading” (rather than a translation) of a text from the Taoist teacher Zhuangzi, or Chuang Tzu. Cf. the translations of Zhuangzi by Legge (Merton’s source, at p. 182) and Watson (p. 10).

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2. For example, Crane, Gender and Romance; Laskaya, Approach to Gender. Both sets of accusations are considered in the preface to the 2002 edition of Mann’s book. 3. Simply titled Geoffrey Chaucer; the second edition, Feminizing Chaucer, is not changed in its essence but contains a new preface, a concluding excursus, and a few other extensions. 4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 192; see 192–97 for a discussion of the shifting meaning of this maxim; and cf. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, 112. Schleiermacher’s own source is likely the remark by Immanuel Kant that “it is not at all unusual to find that we understand [an author] even better than he understood himself” (Critique of Pure Reason, A314/B370). In what follows I often stress the similarities between Romantic hermeneutics proper and its descendant, historicism; the two are, however, distinguished in Gadamer, largely according to whether the adoption of foreign presuppositions is meant to be permanent or temporary. 5. The parallel with Chaucer’s portrait of Griselda is striking, as her attempt at suspending her own will in favor of someone else’s fails in just the same way as does the historicist critic’s attempt to suspend his or her worldview in favor of someone else’s. In each case the operation is impossible to achieve and destructive to attempt. Gadamer’s two arguments for impossibility are laid out clearly in “Universality,” p. 6 and pp. 8–9, respectively. The selfcontradiction of the historicist impulse also nicely parallels the suggestion in Miller’s Philosophical Chaucer that human agency is “constitutively masochistic” (e.g., 139) in that it feels compelled to create a truer version of itself but does so by destroying the very conditions—biases, quirks of personality, and even, Miller argues, necessary features of human perception—that give it an identity at all. As with the paradox of Griselda’s patience noted in ch. 1, however, Miller thinks the urge toward the razing of one’s own identity an inescapable “antinomy” rather than (as it is for Gadamer) a circumventable problem rooted in a historically located and ultimately inadequate approach to which there are alternatives. 6. The demand that the reader’s prejudices be held open for testing is quite a demand, implying as it does that no one can be a fully adequate reader of, for example, Chaucer and Langland who does not admit at least the possibility of being convinced by their presuppositions, who does not feel his own conflicting ones flicker anxiously from time to time, and perhaps even change permanently, in the process of reading. The reader who finds the demand too extreme, however, might try the same shoe on various other feet. For example, if we should encounter a Christian reading Sartre under the protective aegis of a prior agreement with herself, a private oath that she would return to all her preexisting beliefs at the end of the reading no matter what might happen in between, we might justly expect that the “understanding” thus produced,

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though it might contain some valuable insights, would fall short at a certain point, that it would lack a certain richness, precisely by virtue of refusing “dialogue” at the deepest level, of failing to take its interlocutor quite seriously enough. The only way such a reader could be certain of emerging unaltered, we might object, would be by keeping very tight control of her thoughts at every step along the way, thus potentially refusing to hear some of what the text has to say. 7. The outer quotation is from Jauss, Question and Answer, 65; Jauss in turn is quoting Bultmann, “Das Problem.” 8. As in the preceding paragraph, Mann herself knows better: she has mentioned at least one other possible interpretive stance, as the next endnote but one will also acknowledge. My concern here, though, is with the suggestive power her two terms may have for others who are paying less close attention—or for any of us, including Mann, in unguarded moments (some examples of which appear below). 9. The “problem” that the Enlightenment and historicist approaches seek to evade is, on this understanding, the mere presence of a competing worldview, essentially because it suggests that the worldview of the reader may have to be adjusted. Their strategies of evasion differ: for the Enlightened reader, it is more or less a matter of dismissal, and for the historicist, a matter of a kind of tolerance that is equally effective in protecting the tolerator from change (see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 303). 10. In fairness, Mann’s reference to the danger lest we allow interpretation to be dominated by the “free play of the reader’s personal beliefs” shows that she is aware of the existence, and danger, of something related to Enlightenment reading. Without a doubt she, like most thoughtful modern readers, also knows of the different but kindred possibility of Enlightenment reading proper: the imposition on a text, not of “personal” beliefs held arbitrarily or as a result of chance, but of beliefs that one holds in common with practically all one’s contemporaries (and that are for that reason all the harder to identify as beliefs rather than as how-the-world-permanently-is)—the idols of the tribe, to borrow Francis Bacon’s distinction, rather than those of the cave. My point is that the lack of a clear name and a concept for this attractive false path makes it much easier to forget that it is there, and therefore makes it easier, even for those aware of the danger, to begin wandering down it when the attention slips. 11. I say Mann’s case is “more complex” because these two slips are not precisely of the same kind. The apparent unconsciousness of Yunck’s passage from medieval terms to modern ones does suggest Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment, in that Yunck may not have made the question explicit to himself, and so may not have thought of himself as applying any system of beliefs; the same cannot be said of Mann, who is quite deliberate about her intention to bring Chaucer’s texts usably into the ken of atheist readers.

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12. See the introduction, n. 3, for a selection of presentations of this indispensable idea. 13. Against any temptation to suppose that the medieval notion of dependence-on-God-alone was in some sense “really” an inchoate groping toward what we now understand as “independence” or “self-reliance”—and that therefore a resuscitated Chaucer might very well come around to agreeing with these latter ideals after all—it should be pointed out that the Middle Ages were quite capable of imagining the possibility of self-reliance: ch. 4 puts on display a lengthy portrait of that state in Chaucer’s own works. If the reading there has any cogency, Chaucer was quite able to distinguish between independence and God-dependence, and presumably many of his contemporaries could also; they would not readily agree that the latter can be harmlessly redescribed as the former. 14. Translations and numeration from the Vulgate; in some modern translations the second question is part of Job 41:1, in others of 40:25. For the source of biblical citations throughout this book, see the preface, n. 9. 15. It is not precisely clear where Mann sees tautology here. If she means the term to apply to the statement “Custance was saved because God willed it,” she may mean to assert that a religion subscribing to divine omnipotence must regard “X is God’s will” as precisely equivalent to “X happens,” in which case saying that God willed Custance’s survival would add nothing to the already reported fact that Custance survived. If so, however, she is mistaken: in fact there has been much space in the Christian tradition for affirmation that things that are not God’s will do happen. For one influentially placed example, see Peter Lombard’s Sentences, I.d46.3.11 (trans. Silano, 1:250). The theodicy of Boethius discussed below, with its emphasis on God’s power to transform real evils into real goods (rather than on “explaining away” evil by declaring that it itself is God’s will), might qualify as another. 16. It may be surprising to find the qualifier Enlightenment attached to Fradenburg’s work, given her debts to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva who usually register as decidedly post-Enlightenment. But the surprise is merely an artifact of my borrowing of Gadamer’s label as an ideal type for a practice of interpretation—the privileging of some of the reader’s presuppositions to the extent that they obliterate the writer’s—that can, as already noted, turn up in any age. 17. As a first approximation to this dialogue-in-the-details on the particular question of renunciation, I would suggest four questions that might help reveal what affinities any given notion of sacrifice shares and does not share with other notions. First, a command to sacrifice can be of two kinds: it can demand the active destruction of a thing (or habit of personality), or it can demand only that the thing be retained without attachment, that the possessing subject be ready to drop it immediately when an occasion that requires

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this should arise. (The descriptions in Fradenburg’s article of the sacrifice of “proscribed pleasures” [52] and the sacrifice of “the subject’s history” [50] suggest to me that she is thinking largely of the former variety, with respect both to psychoanalysis and to the religions; but much evidence in this book will indicate that the religions at least have often had space for the latter type. One example has already gone by, in that just such a difference appears to divide Custance’s relationship to her cosmos—decidedly of the “latter type”—from Griselda’s. See further ch. 3, n. 29, and the section that precedes it; the notion of the “mixed life” in ch. 4, n. 78; the closing section of ch. 6; and the first section of ch. 7.) Second, there is the complex question of what the devotee is to expect once the sacrifice is done—what goods are on offer (cf. Mark 10:30) in exchange for the ones to be given up? Or, in the more radical case of renunciation of the self or parts of it, what ideas are offered about what the sacrificing subject will become once what she currently is has been left behind? Third, is the renunciation represented as a renunciation of real goods—and therefore as a frankly and persistently painful and difficult undertaking—or is there a claim that the objects of sacrifice, once seen correctly, will register instead as merely obstacles or distractions on the path to a greater good? And finally, who exactly will perform the renunciation? This even more clearly than the first is a question that divides Griselda’s kind of sacrifice from Custance’s, in that one woman claims complete control over her psyche and her ability to jettison parts of it at need, while the other appears to assert that it is only through outside aid that she can make a sacrifice at all: “Ay welcome be thy sonde!” Here again a first glance suggests that the notion of sacrifice that Fradenburg’s article attributes to both psychoanalysis and the religions has more in common with Griselda’s way of being than with Custance’s. That impression could change with adequate dialogue; but these questions at least map out some of the terrain on which dialogue must happen. (For a helpful introduction to religious stances on some of these matters, see Lebreton, “Doctrine du renoncement.”) 18. Mark Miller’s readings in Philosophical Chaucer seem to me sometimes to go off course in the same way, conflating medieval Christian positions (notably those of Boethius) with modern ones (Kantian ethics as read through Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel) that look similar in some ways but that reveal themselves to closer inspection as separated by subtle matters that make all the difference in the world. For its part Elizabeth Robertson’s article on Custance, cited with appreciation in ch. 1, seems to me also to partake of broadly “Enlightenment” methods—though methods formally closer to Mann’s than to Fradenburg’s—in that it appeals to postmodern categories (otherness, abjection, the deep semiosis of the psyche) that at times replace, rather than entering into dialogue with, categories more nearly native to the objects of study. For example, Robertson’s discussion of Custance’s Christian-

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ity and her God in terms of “difference” and “otherness” (“Elvysshe Power,” e.g., 167, 168, 173), while it can raise useful questions, also risks occluding for modern readers the once-widely-available idea of a co-operating God who is both “other” and, in the words quoted above from Maritain, “in no sense [a] stranger.” 19. While Chaucer’s indebtedness to Boethius needs no belaboring, it is certainly important not to overestimate the debt by assuming that he agreed unproblematically with every idea in the De consolatione; he no doubt received much of what is there on an experimental and exploratory basis, as he did with so many other ideas. Nonetheless the treatise can be a helpful companion for many of his poems, especially those, like the Clerk’s and Man of Law’s tales, that speak of human suffering and its relation to providence. 20. Bk. 4, Prosa 6, 178–83. Line numbers for Boethius throughout this interlude refer to the Boece as printed in the Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition. This passage is one of at least three that sound similar to Alla’s messenger’s anguished question: “How may it be / That thou wolt suffren innocentz to spille / And wikked folk regne in prosperitee?” (Man of Law’s Tale, lines 813–16). 21. The “in general” marks the fact that there seems to be some variety across the text in exactly how closely Lady Philosophy says providence controls human affairs, with some individual passages appearing to suggest a stronger kind of consolation than that just described. For the vexed question of how to interpret such variations in the treatise, a good starting point is Marenbon, Pagans, 46–52. 22. It is worth noting that the structure of Custance’s trust here is very much the same as the structure of the trust that the narrative voice’s rhetorical questions, discussed a few pages above, enjoin on the listener: each is based on knowledge of a previous event in which God acted to save the protagonist. 23. See for example Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 44, for Thomas Bradwardine’s (simplifying but perhaps not unusual) account of pagan belief in Fortune as absolute chance and its subsequent refutation by Boethius and other Christians—as well as by Aristotle and the Stoics. 24. To understand freedom as primarily a negative concept (freedom from external constraint, requiring no positive account of what one is freed for or into) is, at least on some thoughtful contemporary discussions of the matter, to understand it in a peculiarly modern way—though a way currently so dominant in the West that many find it difficult to believe that there are alternatives. (For a good brief account of this line of thought, see Kasper, Christian Understanding; Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, is a more demanding, but extremely eye-opening, look at the subject.) The negative concept fits most easily with a cosmology from which God has disappeared, whereas a vision of the world that includes some notion of God will more likely also in-

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clude a metaphysically “positive” account of freedom, of which the cooperative agency visible in Custance is an example. See also ch. 3, n. 14. 25. As Boethius was an accomplished reader and translator of Greek, it is appropriate here to refer to the New Testament in that language. Πιστις (pistis), the word usually translated by faith, would in fact often be more clearly rendered by trust. It need not mean, and often simply cannot mean, the kind of intellectual assent to a factual proposition that modern minds often understand by faith; frequently it seems to mean instead an open-ended attitude of entrusting one’s self to another person. The same is true of the verb usually translated to believe (πιστευειν [pisteuein]). Thus it would be well to pause at each reference to faith or believing in the New Testament, and in quite a lot of later Christian literature, to consider whether this particular instance might have more to do with trust than with propositional assent. (Any solid Greek dictionary will verify these meanings, but one can find a particularly clear instance of them at John 2:23–24, where πιστευειν is the main verb in each verse. The usual Latin translations for πιστις and πιστευειν, namely fides and credere, also preserve the possibility of meaning “trust,” which seems to be the older meaning in both languages.) 26. “Si haberetis fidem sicut granum sinapis diceretis huic arbori moro eradicare et transplantare in mare et oboediret vobis” (Luke 17:6). Cf. Matthew 17:20 and 21:21 and Mark 11:23. 27. Recognition of the first of the kinds of effectiveness just listed for faith or trust, its power to change the trusting person, does not require commitment to a “religion,” as traditionally understood. A thoughtful look at human psychology is enough, as is evident from William James’s misleadingly titled essay “The Will to Believe” (which he later remarked should have been called “The Right to Believe”). As for the presuppositions native to the De consolatione in particular, it is true that some readers have taken Boethius as writing there in a way relatively independent of Christian tradition, a suggestion which would greatly reduce the need to attend to the category of faith or trust when reading it. The suggestion strikes me as unconvincing, however: see for example the useful recent résumé in Marenbon, Pagans, 42–53, of evidence that Boethius takes his Christianity just as seriously here as in his explicitly theological writings. 28. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, esp. chs. 2 and 4. 29. It is, unsurprisingly, possible to find some complications in the way the fourteenth century viewed pagan philosophy; for example the Secreta Secretorum, which was thought in the Middle Ages to be a genuine work of Aristotle, includes in its account of astrology the declaration that it is possible to pray to the “heghe destynour,” who will sometimes avert evils predicted by readings of the stars. (See Steele, Three Prose Versions, 65, and cf. 21, 196; see further the discussion of pagan fatalism in Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan

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Antiquity, e.g., at 40–47 and 179n58.) As regards the condemned propositions themselves, moreover, it is not entirely clear that Stephen Tempier, or the many who were later influenced by his lists, would have thought of the twohundred-thirty-odd specimens as representing a unified system of thought; there has been much modern scholarship devoted to discovering who exactly was targeted by which proposition, and to my knowledge no one in the Middle Ages or now has imagined that any one person held them all. Nonetheless large numbers of them do tend consistently in the direction described in the main text above. The scope of the condemnations’ effects has been much debated, but all are agreed that it was sizable: they continued to circulate in the fourteenth century as part of still larger collections of condemned propositions, and many bachelors of theology were required to swear to avoid what was listed there. For an excellent brief introduction to the issues, including a survey of recent scholarship, see Marenbon, Pagans, 149–55; Thijssen, “Condemnation,” is still more brief but contains useful information not in Marenbon. For plausible connections to various points in Chaucer, see Minnis, 42, 70, 95. A critical text of the propositions condemned in 1277 is Piché, La condamnation; Hissette, Enqête, gives a proposition-by-proposition commentary on the same list of 219 items, following a renumbering by topic that first appeared in Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant (second part, pp. 175–91). The Chartularium, ed. Denifle et al., contains both the 1277 propositions (vol. 1, pp. 543–58) and the much shorter list from 1270 (thirteen propositions, 1.486–87). 30. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 94–102. 31. It is instructive to notice here how Mark Miller’s reading of the Knight’s Tale relates to Mann’s. He too finds there the most sophisticated ethical thinking in the Canterbury collection, asserting that it contains “a theory of autonomy that is about as good as [Chaucer] thought it was possible to produce” (Philosophical Chaucer, 101; cf. 84). But Miller (unlike Mann, but like my readings here) finds that even that “theory” is ultimately dissatisfying, and thus for him the fact that it represents the best available ideas about human agency only tells us that every theory of agency ultimately fails. They do so, according to Miller, because of antinomies at the heart of what it means to be a human agent, antinomies discoverable by reading Kant (chiefly through Bernard Williams) and Boethius, and whose consequences show themselves in the Canterbury Tales. But his book does not take up the Man of Law’s Tale, and the kind of human agency on display there is quite different from that in the Knight’s. One wonders whether a consideration of Custance might have indicated that, as n. 5 above also suggests, the apparent antinomies are not inescapable, but can dissolve with a change in a thinker’s presuppositions— perhaps the very kind of change that a “dialogic” encounter with Custance’s tale could bring about.

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Bernard and Chaucer on Action and Passion

1. Guenon, “Saint Bernard,” 247. 2. Williams, “The Vision of the Empire,” part e, from Taliessin through Logres, in Charles Williams, 27. 3. For the sermons’ influence, see Leclercq, Bernard, 99, and Holdsworth, “Reception,” 175. 4. Introduction to Bernard, Grace and Free Choice, 3. 5. Keating, Open Mind, 71. 6. “Free choice” is liberum arbitrium; the phrase is sometimes translated “free will,” but I have followed most of Bernard’s translators in choosing “choice.” As in previous chapters, translations are my own, and they privilege accuracy over ease of English style; in most cases I provide the Latin in endnotes. Volume and page numbers refer to the standard collection Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. Leclercq et al., and are also preserved with the reprinted Latin in Winkler, ed., Sämtliche Werke. The translations in Winkler and in the still-in-progress Sources chrétiennes series of Bernard’s works (which also reproduces the Latin text of SBO) have been among those helpful in making my own. The Latin for this passage reads: “Quod ergo a solo Deo et soli datur libero arbitrio, tam absque consensu esse non potest accipientis quam absque gratia dantis. Et ita gratiae operanti salutem cooperari dicitur liberum arbitrium, dum consentit, hoc est dum salvatur. Consentire enim salvari est.” 7. The italics in the last sentence attempt to capture the fact that Bernard’s contrast is between a focus on the work done (as “grace working through me” would imply) and a daring assertion of relationship with a transcendent Worker. The former might suggest that humans are mere instruments valued only by what God can do through them, but the latter focus emphatically excludes that possibility. It is important, however, that its elevation of the “human element” is not at the expense of respect for God, but that instead it presents God, still holding the initiative, as the chief effector of both the work and the elevation. Augustine draws on the very same Pauline passage (1 Corinthians 15:10) to make a similarly emphatic, if marginally less celebratory, statement of the necessary role of human free choice in cooperation with grace: see his treatise Grace and Free Choice, already mentioned in the introduction, here at §5.12 (in Answer to the Pelagians, IV, 79). That treatise also provides an excellent catalogue, aimed against those “who defend the grace of God [in such a way] that they deny the free choice of human beings or who think that free choice is denied when grace is defended” (§1.1, p. 71), of the large number of Pauline texts that (at least on Augustine’s reading) imply that salvation, notwithstanding its ultimate dependence on divine initiative, also depends proximately on human choice. Thus Augustine effectively argues that some version of the “medieval commonplace” about divine-human coopera-

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tion, introduced near the end of ch. 1, in fact extends back at least as far as the beginnings of Christianity. Bernard’s Latin reads: “Qui enim bono, quod opere complent, voluntate consentiunt, opus omnino quod per eos Deus explicat, ipsis communicat. Unde Paulus, cum bona plurima, quae Deus per ipsum fecerat, enarrasset: ‘Non autem ego,’ ait, ‘sed gratia Dei mecum.’ Potuit dicere ‘per me,’ sed quia minus erat, maluit dicere ‘mecum,’ praesumens se non solum operis esse ministrum per effectum, sed et operantis quoddammodo socium per consensum.” 8. The Latin: “Utitur angelis et hominibus bonae voluntatis, tamquam commilitonibus et coadiutoribus suis, quos, peracta victoria, amplissime munerabit. Denique et Paulus de se suique similibus audaciter pronuntiat: ‘Coadiutores enim Dei sumus.’ Ibi itaque Deus homini merita benigne constituit, ubi per ipsum, et cum ipso, boni quippiam operari dignanter instituit. Hinc coadiutores Dei, cooperatores Spiritus Sancti, promeritores regni nos esse praesumimus, quod per consensum utique voluntarium divinae voluntati coniungimur.” Interestingly, Paul (here at 1 Corinthians 3:9) does not proclaim quite what Bernard says he does, at least not according to the usual witnesses to the high-medieval Bible. For Paul’s συνεργοι [synergoi] the Vulgate gives not coadjutores but simply adjutores, assistants; the Sources chrétiennes edition of Bernard’s treatise (in “L’Amour de Dieu”; “La grâce et le libre arbitre,” ed. Callerot et al., 344–45) relates that Jerome (who is not the source of the New Testament letters in the Vulgate; see Kelly, Jerome, 88–89) elsewhere gives cooperatores, and Ambrose cooperarii. The editors speculate that Bernard has intentionally invented a new word because he found adjutores to give too small a role to human agency, cooperatores too great. The former claim fits the context well, especially given Bernard’s comments about Paul in the previous quotation, but the latter appears to conflict with Bernard’s declaration in the same passage that we are cooperatores of the Holy Spirit. I have followed the French editors in using an uncommon cognate rather than choosing among words of more established meaning; this forces the reader to derive the meaning primarily from context, which is what the translator would be doing in any case. 9. These themes are, again, far from unique to Bernard, but widely found at the origins of Christianity, in Paul’s writings and elsewhere in the New Testament. For lists of some key loci see Rahner, “Some Implications,” 320–22. 10. Note that “creator and governor” are feminine in Latin (creatrix et gubernatrix), in order to agree with lex. Bernard is quite serious, it seems, about the equation of God with a law. The inner quotation is from 1 John 4:8. The Latin reads: “Lex est ergo, et lex Domini, caritas, quae Trinitatem in unitate quodammodo cohibet et colligat in vinculo pacis. Nemo tamen me aestimet caritatem hic accipere qualitatem vel aliquod accidens—alioquin in Deo

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dicerem, quod absit, esse aliquid quod Deus non est—sed substantiam illam divinam, quod utique nec novum, nec insolitum est, dicente Ioanne: ‘Deus caritas est.’ Dicitur ergo recte caritas, et Deus, et Dei donum. . . . Haec est lex aeterna, creatrix et gubernatrix universitatis. Siquidem in pondere, et mensura, et numero per eam facta sunt universa, et nihil sine lege relinquitur, cum ipsa quoque lex omnium sine lege non sit, non tamen alia quam seipsa, qua et seipsam, etsi non creavit, regit tamen.” 11. “Makes his own rules” translates the standard phrase “sui juris,” which dates at least to Cicero and could be more simply rendered “independent” or “one’s own master”; in this context, however, the specifically legal timbre of God’s self-mastery seems worth retaining. The Latin: “Habent, inquam, legem non Domini, sed suam, illi tamen, quae Domini est, subiectam. Et quidem suam sibi quisque legem facere potuerunt; non tamen eam incommutabili aeternae legis ordini subducere potuerunt. Tunc autem dixerim quemque sibi fecisse suam legem, quando communi et aeternae legi propriam praetulit voluntatem, perverse utique volens suum imitari Creatorem, ut sicut ipse sibi lex suique iuris est, ita is quoque seipsum regeret, et legem sibi suam faceret voluntatem.” 12. Two more appearances of voluntas propria here. The direct inner quotation is from Job 7:21; Bernard also draws here on Romans 8:14 (“quicumque enim Spiritu Dei aguntur hii filii sunt Dei”). The Latin reads: “Hoc quippe ad aeternam iustamque Dei legem pertinuit, ut qui noluit suaviter regi, poenaliter a seipso regeretur, quique sponte iugum suave et onus leve caritatis abiecit, propriae voluntatis onus importabile sustineret invitus. . . . Domine Deus meus, ‘cur non tollis peccatum meum, et quare non aufers iniquitatem meam,’ ut, abiecta gravi sarcina propriae voluntatis, sub levi onere caritatis respirem, nec iam servili timore coercear, nec mercenaria cupiditate illiciar, sed agar Spiritu tuo, spiritu libertatis, quo aguntur filii tui.” 13. The difficulty of finding an adequate one-word expression for human relations with the guiding Spirit dates far back in Christian tradition, as is clear from the Vulgate’s translation of two of the clearest New Testament passages on the idea, namely Galatians 5:18 and Romans 8:14; both use the Greek αγω [ago ],˜ but for the former the Vulgate gives ducere, and for the latter, Bernard’s direct source here, agere. Presumably because of the same difficulty, Aquinas, on quoting the passage from Romans, feels compelled to qualify the word: “Nonetheless it must be considered that the children of God are not driven/guided/steered [aguntur] like slaves, but like free people. . . . The Holy Spirit inclines us toward doing in such a way that he makes us do voluntarily” (emphasis added; my trans. from Summa Contra Gentiles 4.22, 4:164 in Wörner). The surrounding paragraphs are a provocative meditation from the scholastic side on the paradox of an action that is at once our own free act and also “driven” or “guided” or “steered”—a helpful supplement to the monastic

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meditations that follow here, and a voucher for the agreement on these matters across different parts of the Christian tradition. 14. The surprising claim that consent to divine law (or will) leads to freedom is naturally tied up with Bernard’s understanding of what that law is; fuller detail will have to wait for ch. 6, but for now it is worth observing that the idea recurs throughout Bernard’s writings (e.g., On Precept and Dispensation, §23). For the ubiquity of similar notions across the Christian tradition, see Kasper, Christian Understanding, and Burrell, Faith and Freedom. The contrast with a stereotypically modern account of freedom, wherein the greatest good is an escape from all external influence to a state of pure selfdetermination, is on the face of it quite stark, though a thorough study of the deeper representatives of each side (taking as an example of the modern side Immanuel Kant’s ethics, say, rather than knee-jerk libertarianism) might find hidden possibilities for dialogue. Cf. ch. 2, n. 24. 15. From the Vulgate iuxta Septuagint; the “Vulgate iuxta Hebraicum” says that the human’s place will be “little less than a god” or “than God.” In both versions “visit” can also mean “punish” or simply “see” (presumably in the sense “take note of”). The Latin here translated reads: “quoniam videbo caelos tuos: opera digitorum tuorum lunam et stellas quae tu fundasti quid est homo quod memor es eius aut filius hominis quoniam visitas eum minuisti eum paulo minus ab angelis gloria et honore coronasti eum et constituisti eum super opera manuum tuarum.” 16. “Self-legislating” here is another translation of “sui juris,” on which see the note to the middle of the three passages above from On Loving God. The Latin: “Hac sane dignitatis divinae, ut dictum est, praerogativa rationalem singulariter creaturam Conditor insignivit, quod quemadmodum ipse sui iuris erat suaeque ipsius voluntatis non necessitatis erat quod bonus erat, ita et illa quoque sui quodammodo iuris in hac parte existeret, quatenus nonnisi sua voluntate, aut mala fieret et iuste damnaretur, aut bona maneret et merito salvetur.” 17. DDD 2.2, SBO 3:121: “Dico . . . scientiam vero, qua eamdem in se dignitatem agnoscat, non a se tamen.” 18. The verb glorior is often translated “boast” rather than “glory,” but the latter preserves the associations with the noun “glory” also in play here. To “glory emptily” (inaniter) is doubtless in Bernard’s mind to engage in vainglory, vana gloria, which is under discussion in the ellipsis. The inner quotation is from 1 Corinthians 4:7, with a nod to Romans 4:2 just preceding. The Latin reads: “Habere enim quod habere te nescias, quam gloriam habet? Porro nosse quod habeas, sed quia a te non habeas ignorare, habet gloriam, sed non apud Deum. Apud se autem glorianti dicitur ab Apostolo: ‘Quid habes, quod non accepisti? Si autem accepisti, quid gloriamus, quasi non acceperis?’ Non ait simpliciter: ‘Quid gloriaris,’ sed addidit: ‘Quasi non accperis,’ ut asserat re-

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prehensibilem, non qui in habitis, sed qui tamquam in non acceptitis gloriatur. . . . Utrum ergo scias necesse est, et quid sis, et quod a teipso non sis, ne aut omnino videlicet non glorieris, aut inaniter glorieris.” 19. Latin: “Est quippe superbia et delictum maximum uti datis tamquam innatis, et in acceptis beneficiis gloriam usurpare benefici.” 20. Other important instances of this “givenness” and the implied twofold response (joy and the recognition of receipt) appear in Bernard’s On Loving God 10.29 (with respect to the givenness of the highest degree of love of God, the degree connected to human deification) and On the Steps of Humility and Pride 8.22 (with respect to the apostle Paul’s rapture to “the third heaven”). The Latin of the quoted passage reads: “Verum id difficile, immo impossibile est, suis scilicet quempiam liberive arbitrii viribus semel accepta a Deo, ad Dei ex toto convertere voluntatem, et non magis ad propriam retorquere, eaque sibi tamquam propria retinere.” 21. The recent translations of these sermons in Bernard, Sermons for the Autumn Season, 178–212, improve on those in Bernard, Sermons for the Seasons, 2:385–453. The internal quotations are from, respectively, Job 7:17 (cf. also this section’s epigraph from Psalm 8), 1 Peter 5:7, and Psalm 39:18. The Latin title of the fifth sermon is De gemina consideratione sui, and the passage quoted reads: “Lege, homo, in corde tuo, lege intra teipsum de teipso testimonium veritatis: etiam hac communi luce iudicabis indignum. Lege in corde Dei testamentum quod firmatum est in sanguine Mediatoris, et invenies quam longe aliud spe possidere, quam re tenere videris. ‘Quid est,’ inquit, ‘homo, quia magnificas eum?’ Magnus utique, sed in illo; siquidem magnificatus est ab illo. Aut quomodo non magnus apud illum, cui tam magna est cura de eo? ‘Ipsi enim cura est de nobis,’ ait Apostolus Petrus. Et Propheta: ‘Ego autem,’ ait, ‘mendicus sum et pauper; Dominus sollicitus est mei.’” 22. SDE 5.6, SBO 5:393. Here Bernard quotes Mark 10:27 (cf. Matthew 19:26; Luke 18:27). His Latin: “‘Quis poterit salvus esse?’ dicunt Discipuli Salvatori. Et ille: ‘Apud homines hoc impossibile est, sed non apud Deum.’ Haec tota fiducia nostra, haec unica consolatio nostra, haec tota ratio spei nostrae.” 23. Temple, city, and bride are of course metaphors of long standing for the church; the first two are most rooted in the book of Revelation, the third in the nuptial symbolism of the Letter to the Ephesians and in several texts in the Hebrew Scriptures (most obviously the Song of Songs, but also prophetic writings, especially Hosea). Latin: “Iam in illa superiori specula vel paululum immorantes, quaeramus domum Dei, quaeramus templum, quaeramus civitatem, quaeramus et sponsam. Neque etiam oblitus sum, sed cum metu et reverentia dico: Nos sumus. Nos, inquam, sumus, sed in corde Dei; nos sumus, sed ipsius dignatione, non dignitate nostra.” 24. It is remarkable to what extent certain expressions of ordinary language capture (or perhaps fall victim to) the paradox that Bernard is working

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with. Consider the phrase “taken for granted,” which applies precisely to an object or situation that is being treated as if had not been “granted” at all, but as if it were present, as it were, naturally. Similarly, “given,” used as a substantive, means something unquestionable for purposes of a current discussion— whereas the word itself would seem to imply that someone has had to “give” it, and therefore could have chosen not to. Thus each gestures toward both sides of the paradox of givenness. 25. Readers struck by the centrality to human life of this particular paradox may wish to examine the reflections on Bernard’s paradoxical dualities more generally in Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, ch. 3, and the brief response to those reflections in the appendix to this chapter. 26. To the related comments in n. 7 on the relationship between God and humankind in Augustine’s De gratia et libero arbitrio should be added the citations to Augustine and others in ch. 4, n. 76. There is also a sermon less certainly attributed to Augustine in which the author expresses the same idea in just the way Bernard does, in speaking of a new church building as a metaphor for the “temple” constituted by each believer and by the community of believers: “We have merited to be made the temple of God,” writes the author, “by no preceding merits, but by God’s grace.” Here there is less explicit celebration of what we have become than in Bernard, but the same two poles can be detected: we are something wonderful, but only by having been given to be so. (The sermon is Class III, “De sanctis,” #229, collected in PL 39:2166, where an editor’s note observes that it appears in the Roman Breviary and is attributed there to Augustine, but that others doubt or deny the attribution. The connection is also noted in Bernard, Sermons for the Seasons, 2:391n, where the sermon is given its alternative classification, “De tempore,” #252.) 27. I am thinking first of all of the thoughts on givenness in Marion, God without Being—which attempts, among other things, to resurrect the defunct word caduke (French caduc) by way of attempting to describe the mode of existence according to which creatures are both real and nonetheless dependent on a greater, divine, reality even for their being itself. The analysis is developed further in the same author’s Being Given; see also Milbank, “Gift,” for engagement on the topic with Marion, Jacques Derrida, and earlier phenomenology. 28. So Luke 22:42 (Vulgate: “non mea voluntas sed tua fiat”); similarly Mark 14:35–36 and Matthew 28:39, 42, 44. All three sources report both sides of the prayer: a passionate petition to avoid the Passion coupled with acceptance of God’s will. 29. These ideas about the human relation to givenness resonate strongly with the notion of “use” that Giorgio Agamben finds to have developed in the late Middle Ages, especially among Franciscans; cf. ch. 6, n. 50. Such ideas

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are also among the reasons for the previous chapter’s hesitations over L. O. Aranye Fradenburg’s way of handling Christian (and Judaic) imperatives toward sacrifice. One often finds an impulse toward something like Custance’s neutral readiness-to-renounce rather than toward active sacrifice—when, indeed, the two religions do not exert their influence (as in innumerable readings of the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis 22, and as in the life’s work of René Girard) to lead their adherents altogether away from an inclination toward sacrifice that turns out to derive from other religions or societies. It is true that injunctions toward a more active peeling off of possessions and attributes also appear: see for example the informal remark by a modern monk that the Benedictine life “does not require all the fierce strippings of a John of the Cross”—thus suggesting that, while the writer himself is not drawn that way, there is a valid place for a more proactive asceticism (Merton, Survival, 76). For that matter, the Last Supper narrative of John’s Gospel presents Jesus as praying that his Father might “make him resplendent” (Latin clarificare, 17:1), a request that suggests eagerness for his death and resurrection. Still, the pervasive presence, documented across this book, of receptivity of Custance’s and Bernard’s type, receptivity with a diminished drive toward positive “stripping,” at very least flags with the need for further dialogue any claim that would make such a drive essential to Christianity: there would need to be more qualification of what is being stripped, by whom, under what circumstances, and so on. The Vulgate for this passage from Paul reads: “Reliquum est ut qui habent uxores tamquam non habentes sint, et qui flent tamquam non flentes, et qui gaudent tamquam non gaudentes, et qui emunt tamquam non possidentes, et qui utuntur hoc mundo tamquam non utantur; praeterit enim figura huius mundi.” 30. Vulgate: “Patientia autem opus perfectum habet.” (Some versions, like the 1983 Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft printing, read “habeat,” so that the phrase is “let patience have a perfect work”—closer to the sense of modern translations from the Greek. But the facsimile of the 1480–81 Strasbourg Biblia latina clearly reads “habet.”) A marginal gloss in the Glossa Ordinaria to the word opus begins: “id est perfecte operantes facit.” 31. “On the Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingean Systems of Philosophy,” quoted in Solomon, In the Spirit, 107. 32. Letter to John Dewey, ca. 1905; in Peirce, Collected Papers 8:244. 33. The idea of angels as simultaneously attentive to God and solicitous to humans is another old one in Christian tradition, dating at least to the fifthcentury writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (Divine Names 4.8). The inner quotation here is from John 1:51. The passage from Bernard reads: “Plane artificiosa connexio utriusque considerationis, qua velut uno momento descendens pariter et ascendens, et se pauperem et mendicum, et Deum pro se sollicitum vidit. Angelicum istud est, ascendere et descendere simul. ‘Videbitis,’ ait, ‘angelos as-

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cendentes et descendentes super filium hominis.’ Neque enim talis aliqua vicissitudo in eorum ascensionibus et descensionibus est. Simul et mittuntur in ministerium propter eos qui hereditatem capiunt salutis, et assistunt vultui maiestatis, Deo misericorditer providente, ut et nobis sit consolatio, et eis tribulation nulla. . . . Angelicus quidem ascensus et descensus caret vicissitudine; nos autem modo hac, modo illac versari necesse est, quod nec supra diutius stare liceat, nec expediat infra longius demorari.” The ellipsis marks the omission of a full page of text in which Bernard considers related paradoxes of descent-with-simultaneous-stasis, including the descent of the New Jerusalem in John’s Apocalypse and God’s own descent from heaven, as figured in Christ’s bending to write with his finger on the ground (John 8:6). 34. Besides John 10:18 (“No one takes [my life] from me, but I put it down on my own; I have the power of putting it down and the power of taking it up again”), Bernard may be thinking of the opinion of some theologians that Christ’s body shared a property sometimes ascribed to Adam’s prelapsarian one, that of needing food only to “supply a lack,” but not as a condition of survival (cf. Boethius, “Contra Eutychen,” bk. 8). Presumably a kind of life that does not depend on external conditions like food would be hard to extinguish by external means—in which case Christ’s death could not be passive, but only active as described here. Also noteworthy is that the inner quotation inserts between two fragments of John 19:30 an excerpt (“made obedient to the point of death”) from another passage extremely significant for our themes: the hymn on Christ in Philippians 2, a chapter that has been central to the Christian contemplative tradition’s meditations on action and passion. It reappears in the next paragraph and then again in chs. 4 and 7. Bernard’s Latin: “Quia enim voluit, oblatus est. Non modo voluit et oblatus est, sed quia voluit. Solus nimirum potestatem habuit ponendi animam suam: nemo eam abstulit ab eo. . . . Et, inclinato capite, factus obediens usque ad mortem, tradidit spiritum. Quis tam facile, quando vult, dormit? Magna quidem infirmitas mori; sed plane sic mori, virtus immensa.” 35. Latin: “Sic autem ista cum libero arbitrio operatur, ut tantum in primo illud praeveniat, in ceteris comitetur, ad hoc utique praeveniens, ut iam sibi deinceps cooperentur. Ita tamen quod a sola gratia coeptum est, pariter ab utroque perficitur, ut mixtim, non singillatim, simul, non vicissim, per singulos profectus operentur. Non partim gratia, partim liberum arbitrium, sed totum singula opere individuo peragunt: totum quidem hoc, et totum illa, sed ut totum in illo, sic totum ex illa.” 36. More discussion of the process of conformation appears, with further supportive texts from Bernard, near the end of ch. 6. The word verb deificare appears at De diligendo deo 28; for the caveat about the fleetingness of such experiences in this life, see §§28–29 and 39. A future likeness to God (without further explicit attempt to say what the idea means) is promised to believers at

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1 John 3:2. As mentioned in this book’s introduction, McGinn, “Unio Mystica,” is a good point of entry for anyone who wishes to begin sorting out what deification, conformation, and unification mean in Bernard and other authors. 37. The Vulgate’s Latin: “Deum enim est qui operatur in vobis et velle et perficere pro bona voluntate.” It is notably ambiguous whether the pro bona voluntate that ends the verse refers to God’s will and modifies operatur (i.e., “God works in you both the willing and the accomplishing, doing both according to God’s good will”) or to the human subject’s will, modifying perficere (i.e., “God works in you both the willing and the subsequent accomplishingin-accord-with-the-good-will-that-you-have-just-received”). It is possible to find authoritative readers taking it each way. One could also read the passage in a third manner, namely by asserting that it is not necessary to choose whose will is meant, since the “working of one’s will” by God described by the beginning of the sentence suggests that the will that then “accomplishes” is in some sense already both human and divine. 38. The implications of this additional step are quite simply worldchanging—at least in the sense that the step seems to require, either before or after it is taken, a reconstruction of the mental world of the stepper. As a small token of the sort of change implied, the reader might consider how anyone who accepts Bernard’s idea must respond to the extended argument about human agency laid out in the first four chapters of Mark Miller’s Philosophical Chaucer. In compressed form the response would seem to be that Bernard— and his source Paul, and many other Christian thinkers between and since— would agree with Miller that neither “normative naturalism” (the ethic of following one’s spontaneous passions that Miller associates with the Miller’s Tale’s Alisoun and the Knight’s Tale’s Emelye) nor a “formalist” ethic (the roughly Stoic counsel, which Miller associates with Theseus, that ethics involves choosing to curb some passions and giving rein to others) is in itself finally adequate as an account of human agency. (The latter ethic, it seems to me, is very like Bernard’s analysis with the “further step,” the crucial cooperation at the middle stage, removed.) But while Miller goes on to conclude that no other theory of agency can be any more adequate to the facts of human existence than is Theseus’s failed formalism, Bernard represents a third option: an account of willing that restores something akin to “normative naturalism” at the very heart of the formalist structure, by introducing cooperation into the faculty of “free choice” itself. The resulting picture of action retains the formalist’s emphasis on choice while also responding to the naturalist’s longing for the relative ease of a kind of action that somehow remains “mine” while originating “outside” me. In modern terms it might qualify as a recapitulation of the aesthetic sphere within the religious (Kierkegaard) or as a kind of second naïveté (Ricoeur). 39. For a formal exposition of “noncontrastive transcendence,” see Tanner, God and Creation, esp. ch. 2; for less analytic treatments of similar ideas,

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see the remaining works listed in this book’s introduction, n. 3, particularly those by Coakley, Burrell, Grant, and Merton. 40. The possibility of jettisoning or changing our categories in response to a paradox is, it seems to me, one very likely reason why Bernard and other Christian writers are fond of presenting paradoxes without resolving them. It is not merely (as remarked in the appendix to this chapter, in response to C. W. Bynum) that their fondness is underwritten by a long tradition, stretching back at least to the Council of Chalcedon, of challenges to standard Greek logic and ontology. Proposing a paradox can also be an effective pedagogical move, precisely because a paradox engenders a salubrious and long-lasting sense that something is wrong, and moreover (if the paradox appears in a context sufficiently fundamental and general) that the wrongness will not be removed by some clever solution affecting only the subject matter under consideration, but requires that our categories and methods of thought themselves be open to change. And change in the basic rules of thought is change of a kind whose outcome, almost by definition, our current thinking is unable to predict. Thus the presentation of an unresolved paradox, far from implying the conservatism Bynum fears, can be an invitation to a thoroughgoing revolution in thought. 41. Relevant here is the frequent observation by historians of Christianity that Bernard’s mysticism is largely one of transformation rather than annihilation, and that some later mystics influenced by Bernard (particularly Meister Eckhart, and more cautiously his disciples Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso) are much readier to speak of total loss of the human will as a laudable goal—though here as everywhere it requires careful study to find out the precise differences. For an excellent exposition of Bernard’s transformationism as against the mysticism of annihilation, see Gilson, Mystical Theology, 112–18, and esp. 119–33. For a more general approach, distinguishing the unitas spiritus that Bernard and others describe from a (primarily later) focus on unitas indistinctionis, see again McGinn, “Unio Mystica,” and McGinn, Growth, 213–17. Talk of religious annihilation invariably brings Marguerite Porète’s Mirror of Simple Souls to mind, and indeed others have suggested a parallel between Griselda and Porète’s brand of mysticism (e.g., Watson, “Yf Wommen,” 2– 3)—though the reading presented in ch. 1 suggests that for all her apparent longing to dissolve into Walter’s will, Chaucer’s Griselda is too much an ordinary, or a real, human to succeed. (A helpful overview of Marguerite’s text appears in McGinn, Flowering, 244–65.) 42. As further evidence for how quickly pure passivity has been transformed into pure activity, recall that Chaucer’s treatment makes Griselda speak as though she had complete control over her future emotional states. Any such psychology is contradicted not only by Custance’s “ay welcome be thy sonde” and her protestations under duress but also by the three-part analysis of human action in the last long quotation from Bernard above—an

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analysis in which little more than the middle third is subject to human control, and even then only in cooperation with decidedly uncontrolled forces. The attempt to exit a dialectical situation by seizing to one pole, and the trouble that often ensues, seem to constitute a widespread formal pattern. See the epigraph from Hegel that begins this section, and also the frequent appearance of such patterns in the writings of Gregory the Great, which seem to have saturated the later Middle Ages as thoroughly as did Bernard’s. Cf. for example Straw, Gregory the Great, 241: “Here again Gregory depicts a pattern of polarity in which the members of an opposing pair of qualities or states take on one another’s characteristics. Prosperity is good in moderation . . . but [it] turns to adversity when the discipline of the soul relaxes, and excessive humors soften the flesh and push the soul to pride.” 43. Echoes of these ideas are not difficult to find in modern thought. First, the association of ancient paganism with a certain endless circularity has persisted into modern times, as for example in Kierkegaard’s use of categories like “recollection’s love” and “identical repetition” to describe pagan religion: for him these are inferior stages, beautiful but not yet developed into the nonidentical repetition (a capacity for growth, surprise, and uniqueness, though not without pattern and rule) available to philosophy that has matured under the Christian dispensation. Second, at the conclusion of a hermeneutical journey that began with Gadamer, it is worth pointing out that the desire for a union between passion and action also appears in the context of the theory of interpretation. The theory put forward by an incisive challenger and furtherer of Gadamer’s work—Paul Ricoeur—turns on a distinction between what he calls understanding (the ordinary process of approaching a text, involving flashes of insight tempered by sober testing of one’s insights against reality) and what he calls explanation (which is the resort to more “external” and “methodical” approaches that become necessary when the process of understanding breaks down). Given the surprising, unpredictable, and generally from-elsewhere nature of much of what falls under “understanding,” it is possible to see its relationship with “explanation” as yet another dialectic between passion and action. Most striking, then, is Ricoeur’s finding that when interpretation is at its best, the two poles are not alternating states; instead they are simultaneous, mutually dependent, and in fact fused together into a single inseparable movement much like that encompassing Custance’s (and Bernard’s) passive-and-active agency. See Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, esp. ch. 4. 44. My translation from the most influential medieval Latin version, that of Burgundio (ed. Buytaert, 174). The Latin reads: “Nos . . . neque unius compositae naturae Christum nominamus neque ex aliis aliud, quemadmodum ex anima et corpore hominem, vel ut ex quatuor elementis corpus, sed ex aliis eadem. Nam ex deitate quidem et humanitate Deum perfectum et hominem perfectum eundem esse et dici, et ex duabus et in duabus naturis confitemur.”

Notes to Pages 152–154

four.

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Holy Anomaly: The Second Nun’s Tale and Active Sanctity

1. There are clear echoes of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion at the end of the poem, but these, too, frequently manage to emphasize Cecilia’s power and activity. The most obvious parallel is a threatening question (468– 72) whose essential part runs: “Han noght oure myghty princes to me yiven, / Ye, both power and auctoritee / To maken folk to dyen or to lyven?”—doubtless descended from Pilate’s question to Jesus: “Do you not know that I have power to crucify you and I have power to release you?” (John 19:10, my trans. from Vulgate). But Pilate has asked the question in response to Jesus’ exasperating silence; Almachius is provoked because Cecilia, as he puts it, speaks so proudly (473). In particular she has just called him a liar (465) and a raving maniac (466). 2. Luecke, “Three Faces.” 3. Staley’s claim (“Postures of Sanctity,” esp. 209–13) is that Cecilia’s rebellion against oppressive Roman authority is a stand-in for the struggles of the ecclesiastical rebels of the fourteenth century against an oppressive church. There is substance to the suggestion, as John Wyclif sometimes likened his own struggles to those of the early church’s martyrs, naming Cecilia in particular on at least one occasion. However, Staley’s feeling about the strength of the association, the confidence with which we can assume Chaucer to have intended his audience to think about Lollards when reading about Cecilia, seems to me overstated, particularly given that some of her sources (notably Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 89–92) argue that the fear of oppression and censorship likely to produce such disguising maneuvers in a reform-minded poet came to a head in the decades after Chaucer’s death, and were relatively mild when he was writing. Remark of a particular use of Cecilia’s story by Wyclif appears in Reames, “Recent Discovery,” 344n21. See also the magisterial treatment of ecclesiastical repression and late-medieval writing in Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, which discusses Staley’s approach to the Second Nun’s Tale at 312–13. 4. See, for example, Reames, “Recent Discovery” (348) and “Cecilia Legend.” 5. More on prevenience and the miracle stories appears below in the context of a comparison between the prologues to the Second Nun’s and Prioress’s tales (n. 68 and associated text). 6. Paull, “Influence,” remarks the frequent occurrence of prayer scenes in much hagiography, usually as a saint “prepares for what seems an inevitable death” (191). It is remarkable that such scenes, while multiply repeated in the Man of Law’s Tale, are almost entirely absent from the Second Nun’s. 7. Other observers by and large agree on this point. V. A. Kolve remarks that the tale is “untroubled by irony” (Telling Images, 221), while Reames comments that “if the tale was meant to be read ironically . . . it is odd

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that Chaucer has used none of his customary methods to put us on guard” (“Cecilia Legend,” 54–55). 8. A recent version of the suggestion appears in Reames, “Mary, Sanctity,” 95–96. A broader claim that Cecilia, Custance, and several other characters in the Tales share identical kinds of agency is offered in Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents. 9. The explorations to follow should make that depth clearer: for now perhaps it will be enough to suggest that it is not merely a matter of lauding two different kinds of human being, as if a modern author should write commendatory biographies of, say, Jean Vanier and Albert Einstein. Rather, this chapter hopes to show that the contradiction is so deep that admiration of Custance’s way of acting simply requires a rejection of Cecilia’s way, at least if the previous chapters’ understanding of the former is correct. It does not seem possible for one person honestly to celebrate both at the same time. 10. The “call” appears on p. 348 of Reames, “Recent Discovery,” an article discussed in some detail later in this chapter (under “Explanation 3”). 11. Quotations from the Legendary come from Horstmann, SouthEnglish Legendary. The pronoun “he” in lines 134 and 135 is modern English “they.” Horstmann’s editions preserve the letters thorn and yogh; here and in other quotations in this chapter I have silently converted them (in the latter case, variously to gh, sh, z, and ampersand). 12. The collection is preserved in MS Harley 4196; the text is available in Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden, 159–64. 13. Reames, “Recent Discovery,” 348 and n. 32. Those omitting the trial include the York Breviary, most extant copies of the Sarum Breviary, and the Dominican lectionary. 14. Furrow, “Man of Law,” 234n8, offers reasons to think that Chaucer almost certainly encountered the South English Legendary in some form, but even if the certainty were absolute the extreme variation among manuscripts (and the sheer number of stories in some of them) would render his knowledge of any particular section dubious. 15. Besides Winstead, I have benefited from consulting Heffernan, Sacred Biography; Paull, “Influence,” with useful demurrals in Spearing, “Narrative Voice”; and Braswell, “Art of Hagiography.” An impressively thorough treatment of the period’s hagiographical trends is Vauchez, Sainteté en occident. Reading other “literary” examples of the genre is, of course, also eye opening; besides those already cited in this section, the life of St. Cecilia in Osborn Bokenham’s Legendys, 203–25, amply repays study, although its fifteenth-century date means that it cannot serve as a source of information about hagiographical conventions Chaucer inherited. Nonetheless it frequently furnishes useful comparisons to what Chaucer chose to emphasize or remove, and what follows will call upon it several times in that role.

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16. William’s life of Christine is available in Horstmann, Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, 183–90; this William is not be confused with the thirteenth-century bishop studied in ch. 1 (William of Auvergne, also sometimes called William of Paris). My argument is indebted to Winstead’s book for the selection of this “life” for comparison to the Second Nun’s Tale, even though this book draws nearly opposite conclusions. 17. The idea that even the beginning of the Christian life, i.e., the faith involved in conversion and voluntary baptism, must be given by God has at times been in the foreground of debates about the relation between divine and human agency, or grace and free choice. See, for example, Augustine’s late anti-Pelagian writing The Predestination of the Saints, §§2.3 and 3.7, which asserts the idea strongly against a suggestion—made by the inquirers who prompted the treatise, but also in line with what Augustine himself thought earlier in his life—that we might consider this initial faith the sole responsibility of the individual Christian, to whom the rest of the Christian life is then given as a kind of reward. I do not mean to claim that Chaucer or William of Paris had the notion of “divine initiative” uppermost in their thought when they wrote stories that are (respectively) silent and emphatic about it. Nonetheless it is remarkable that on this question the two poets line up precisely as they do on all the other matters noted in these paragraphs: William’s tale (and most other fourteenth-century hagiography with it, “supersaintly” or not) lands squarely in line with what one expects of “orthodox” medieval Christianity, and Chaucer’s, with its portrait of a saint under her own command, does not. Such consistency seems likely to owe a great debt to the authors’ habits of thought, even if they did not plan each manifestation of their respective stances consciously. 18. With respect to Christ’s “buying” of Christine in particular, it is striking, and underremarked, that reference to Christ’s suffering and death is almost entirely lacking in the Second Nun’s Tale. The only mention of it is the one, drastically abridged from Chaucer’s source, at lines 343–47 (on which see the next-to-last paragraph of “Explanation 2”). By way of comparison, Bokenham’s story of Cecilia preserves the older sources’ discussion of the Passion in a full twenty-four lines (7851–74). 19. It might be more precise to say that the agency of William’s Christine, so far from being anything like Cecilia’s apparently self-grounded agency, occasionally reminds the reader not of Custance but of Chaucer’s selfabnegating Griselda, as in the expression of gratitude under torture just quoted: Custance, surely, would have wailed against the pain. But whichever of Chaucer’s characters Christine most reminds one of, the question about the source of her agency should make her great distance from Cecilia clear. In the last quotation, Horstmann’s manuscript gives thankyt as one word, but he suggests dividing it in a note.

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20. A detailed treatment is unnecessary, but it is worth noting that the disagreement between Winstead’s and my assessments of the relationship between the Second Nun’s Tale and William’s life of Christine repeats itself when the comparison is made to other versions of Cecilia’s life instead. Winstead groups Chaucer’s poem also with the stories of Cecilia found in the Legenda aurea and the two English Legendaries, writing that “nothing about [the Second Nun’s Tale’s] message is new,” since all four versions equally present the saint as an “indefatigable soldier of Christ . . . in command of every situation and always in action” (83). But confronting the texts with questions about divine-human cooperation, as we have already seen, highlights differences: Chaucer makes Cecilia’s command and action grow from an entirely different source than the other stories do, and moreover her command is consistently present, in the Second Nun’s Tale, to a degree unmatched in the other versions. The need to maintain these four stories’ similarity, on the other hand, seems to lead Winstead into some readings that feel rather against the grain. For example, after noting that the North English collection deletes Cecilia’s sharp-tongued battle with Almachius and replaces it with her (presumably exemplary) giving away of her inheritance, Winstead concludes not that the change softens Cecilia, but that it makes her all the more “subversive,” since it groups her with a number of women saints of the period who refuse to be “merely the passive victims of greedy men” (80–81; cf. 90). And the South English Legendary’s observation that Cecilia must stay at home while her male converts go out to do the heavy lifting is not taken as a significant qualification of her character; instead it merely “makes her subsequent metamorphosis in court all the more astonishing” (99n72). The more subtle reminders of vulnerability and passivity that appear in the Legendaries but not in Chaucer—their observations of Cecilia’s silences, her baptism, her being “done into ward,” and her “mildness”—do not appear in the discussion. 21. Probably the most accessible edition of the sixth-century work is that appearing in various recent reprints of a 1910 re-edition of what is presumably the earliest printing, in Bonino Mombrizio’s 1477 Sanctuarium, 1:332–41; selections from this version appear in the older Sources and Analogues (ed. Bryan and Dempster; pp. 677–84). A different twentieth-century edition appears in Delehaye, Étude, 194–220. Yet a third edition, from 1600, is reprinted in Laderchi, ed., S[anctae] Cæciliæ; the title of its rare original printing (ed. Antonio Bosio) suggests, significantly, that the original Passio was concerned with several saintly characters, not just one: Historia passionis b[eatae] Caeciliae virginis, Valeriani, Tiburtii, et Maximi martyrum: Necnon Vrbani, et Lucii pontificum . . . 22. A valuable introduction to Jacobus’s magnum opus, considering both its status as one of the most copied books of the Middle Ages and the fundamental ways in which it is a poor representative of typical hagiography (or

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at least of the attributes for which hagiography is typically valued), is Reames, Legenda Aurea. 23. For a short sample of the previous speculations, see the Riverside Chaucer, 942b; but a random walk through articles about the Second Nun’s Tale written before 1990 will turn up many more. The article in which Reames unveiled the second source (complete with a transcription of the closest known manuscript version, though she argues that the version Chaucer worked from was slightly different) is “Recent Discovery.” Further information is available in Reames’s article on the tale in the newer Sources and Analogues, ed. Correale, 1:491–528. 24. Reames notes four possible reversions to Jacobus in the second half of the tale in her Sources and Analogues piece, 494n13, and one more in “Recent Discovery,” 346; few of them are so clear as to be indisputable, and most seem of minor import, though one of the five will come in for discussion below (n. 38). 25. The possibility should be at least briefly entertained that it was not Chaucer who performed the splice, but that the Second Nun’s Tale is instead a close translation of some manuscript that already stitched the two together at the midpoint—perhaps even a manuscript of the Golden Legend itself. But Reames argues “with some confidence that this possibility is remote” (Sources and Analogues, 495), for two reasons. First, thorough studies of all known manuscripts of the Legend have turned up surprisingly little variation in the content, particularly in Cecilia’s life. Second, the evidence that Chaucer wrote the two halves of the tale at two different times (on which more at n. 52 and the associated text) makes it much more likely that he was also working from two sources: it would be a remarkable coincidence if he happened to pause for a decade, presumably without knowing it, exactly on the seam of a prespliced source. See also Reames, “Recent Discovery,” 347n30 and associated text. 26. The Latin of the two requests reads as follows: “Peto . . . ut et ipse mecum veritatem agnoscat” (Legenda aurea); “ . . . ut fratrem meum Tyburtium sicud me liberare dignetur, et faciat nos ambos in sui nominis confessione perfectos” (Franciscan-Roman version). All quotations from these two sources come from Reames’s 2002 Sources and Analogues piece. In general I have quoted the Latin (with Reames’s line numbers) and provided my own translation; the only exceptions are those cases in which the result was so close to the translation Reames gives that it seemed better to quote hers. 27. “Et ingressus quasi ad cognatam suam, osculatus est capud sancte Cecilie” (lines 96–97). 28. “Homunciones estis, non principes, tempore vestro nati, cicius morituri et Deo racionem plus omnibus reddituri” (lines 146–47). 29. “Fiat, domine, cor meum et corpus meum immaculatum, ut non confundar” (lines 21–22). Chaucer’s version, already quoted in part above, is

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Notes to Pages 166–168

“O Lord, my soule and eek my body gye / Unwemmed, lest that I confounded be” (136–37). 30. “Invitabat angelos precibus, lacrimis interpellabat apostolos, et sancta agmina omnia Christo famulantia exorabat, ut suis eam deprecationibus adjuvarent suam Domino pudicitiam commendantem” (lines 12–15). 31. See above all Reames, “Cecilia Legend,” the core of which consists of a long series of differences between Chaucer’s version (usually grouped with Jacobus’s) and other versions in wide circulation. The immediate consequence that Reames most frequently observes is the weakening of Valerian and Tiburce, who “in the Second Nun’s Tale, and there alone, . . . do not grow into heroic Christian leaders in their own right” (53). Though Reames’s later discovery of the Franciscan-Roman source forced her to recant some of the article’s larger inferences, it still repays reading—in part, for our purposes here, by supporting the point made under “Explanation 1,” namely that the fierce and unimitated agency wielded by Chaucer’s Cecilia is typical neither of the saint’s life genre nor of the Cecilia tradition in particular. Ultimately what follows here will argue, against Reames, that Chaucer’s Cecilia also differs from Jacobus’s (as she more evidently differs from the saints of more typical and traditional hagiography, like those considered under “Explanation 1”) by kind rather than merely by degree—an observation made possible by the asking of questions about the nature of agency in each story. 32. Reames, “Recent Discovery,” 348. 33. “Et biduanis ac triduanis jejuniis orans commendabat Domino quod timebat” (lines 22–23). As many critics have remarked, Chaucer also changes Jacobus’s “biduana ac triduana jejunia” from fasts lasting two and three days to fasts spaced at two- and three-day intervals; this is likely a simple error in translation. At any rate it does not much affect Cecilia’s character, unless Chaucer means that Cecilia fasted every other and every third day simultaneously, i.e., that she ate normally only one day out of six—which would be consistent with other changes in the direction of a Cecilia outside the ordinary bonds of the human. 34. The fears’ disappearance is noted in Staley’s chapter in Powers of the Holy, where it contributes to a demonstration of Cecilia’s generally active and aggressive character. The oddity of Chaucer’s omission is highlighted, here as in many other places, by the fact that Bokenham’s fifteenth-century version retains what Chaucer cuts: his version gives “She fastyd & preyd in humbyl degre, / To god commendyng that she dede drede” (7480–81). If Eileen Jankowski is correct in arguing that Bokenham used the Second Nun’s Tale as a source alongside the Legenda aurea and the sixth-century Passio, he has not merely retained but restored, casting an even more forceful vote against Chaucer’s fearless Cecilia. (See Jankowski, “Reception”; the article concludes with a list of eighteen places in which Bokenham’s translation is so close to Chaucer’s as to suggest direct influence.)

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35. “Hodie te fateor meum esse cognatum. Sicut enim amor Dei fratrem tuum mihi conjugem fecit, ita te mihi cognatum contemptus faciet ydolorum” (lines 91–93). 36. Robertson, “Apprehending,” points out the Second Nun’s Tale’s repeated focus on human choice and suggests that it presents the choices in a relatively bare way, requiring a character to choose by force of will alone rather than in a way guided by rationality. But it seems to me that many such moments are inspired not by a preference for voluntarism over intellectualism, but by the tendency being traced out here toward an active, independent, and isolated main character. In the present instance, for example, what is omitted from Chaucer’s source is not a suggestion of a lengthy process of thought leading up to the choice, but merely a suggestion that some of the relevant willpower had its origin in a will other than Cecilia’s. 37. The Franciscan-Roman source has “quasi in loco frigido sic illibata perstitit sanitate, ita ut nulla pars membrorum eius saltem sudoris signa laxasset” (lines 195–97). 38. Jacobus gives “quasi in loco frigido mansit, nec modicum saltem sudoris persensit” (lines 217–18; emphasis added). The Franciscan-Roman version is very much closer to the sixth-century Passio here, which fact supports the thought (see n. 31) that Jacobus already initiates a movement toward a purely active and literally “impassible” supersaint. But Chaucer’s version, as I hope is becoming clear, goes far beyond even Jacobus. Reames’s remark of this change comes in a list of apparent borrowings from Jacobus in the second, ordinarily Franciscan-sourced, half of the tale (Sources and Analogues, 494n13); she does not comment on the meaning of the change. 39. Another remark of this particular change comes in Kolve, Telling Images, which suggests for it a more specific meaning. Asserting that “all versions [of Cecilia’s story] known to [him] imply the symbolic identity of lechery with heat and fire” (213), Kolve concludes that Chaucer’s “subtle change” merely emphasizes “the contrast between heat and cold already present in his sources.” The result is that “at its deepest level, the scene concerns neither torture—though that is what Cecilia’s enemies intend—nor purification and testing—though that has been suggested by some critics” (214); instead, “St. Cecilia in a bath ‘al coold’ represents a condition beyond the reach of carnal heat or physical fire” (216). The reading building here, however, suggests that Chaucer likely had in mind—or had his mind shaped by—a more general thought: Cecilia’s immunity to passion as such, that is, to passivity of every sort, including the literal suffering that fire should ordinarily cause. “Carnal heat” would then be just one example of the passions that do not affect her, not a particularly privileged meaning of a symbolic fire. 40. See the Franciscan abridgment, lines 207–8, and Jacobus, line 225. 41. In Latin, “beneficia domini exuberant ad memoriam sancte Cecilie usque in hodernium diem” (lines 213–14). In medieval Latin beneficium

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can refer specifically to sacraments and other liturgical acts; here the word probably means that the Mass and perhaps the Divine Office take place in the church. 42. It is true that saints’ lives across the fourteenth century partook more and more of what Vauchez calls a “divinisation of the saints,” with its “apogee” in the early 1400s (see Sainteté en occident, 613, or Sainthood, 525). But even if Chaucer’s implied elevation of Cecilia takes some of its loft from a general movement of the time, he has still come down on the side of participating in the movement; he could easily have done otherwise, merely by giving a relatively straight translation of his source. I say the change is “potentially explosive,” of course, because the degree and kind of veneration due the saints, latterly one of the rousing issues of the Reformation, was already contested territory in Chaucer’s time, an issue of great concern for at least some Lollard groups. It is suggestive that when Wyclif invokes Cecilia’s story in print (see n. 3), he refers to her as beata Cecilia; he may well be deliberately avoiding the sancta that comes naturally to Catholic tongues in order to eschew any hint of a higher kind of being to whom something like worship is due. 43. Here, then, by contrast with n. 38, Jacobus weakens his saint— perhaps because he takes both his weakening her here vis-à-vis the pope, and his strengthening her above vis-à-vis the usual relations between human flesh and scalding water, as helpful in inculcating the kind of attitude toward religion he finds desirable. Details on manuscript counts and on what sorts of manuscripts have which word appear in Reames, “Recent Discovery,” 343–44, esp. nn. 19–22. It is remarkable that though fifty-seven of the sixty-five manuscripts of the Passio that Reames was able to check have consecrarem, the 1600 and 1910 editions (Bosio and Mombrizio) both give, as Jacobus does, consecrares. 44. Thus Lollard concerns appear several times over near the end of the tale. Sorting out Chaucer’s intentions with respect to Lollardy, however, would seem to require a lengthy study (if it could be done at all) and thus must be left beyond this book’s scope. For an example of the tangle involved, consider that while the choices Chaucer makes in translation, treated in the following paragraph, might look calculated to avoid an accusation of Lollard sympathies, and the closing near-apotheosis of the saint is even more clearly out of line with the movement, Chaucer’s use of the blunt word preche to describe a female saint’s deathbed activity (line 539) is on the face of it a daring statement in the Lollards’ favor. It is also one of the few choices in the tale apparently unique to Chaucer: both his Franciscan-Roman source and the sixth-century Passio grant Cecilia the ability to “teach thoroughly” (perdocere) and to “strengthen [her listeners] in the Lord’s faith” (in fide dominica confortare), but neither uses any word usually translated as “preach”; and cautious Jacobus drops the passage

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corresponding to lines 538–39 altogether. Bokenham’s later version retains Cecilia’s teaching (line 8240) but not her preaching. 45. The emendation is so minimal that it is tempting to consider whether Chaucer might actually have written myghte werche, then suffered the do as an interpolation by a scribe interested in preserving the poem from the risk of scandal. But manuscript support for that thought is not strong: according to Manly and Rickert’s Text of the Canterbury Tales, of eighty-one Chaucer manuscripts that contain the end of the Second Nun’s Tale, sixty-eight (including the Hengwrt and Ellesmere) have the “do”; eight have another short word instead (most often to); only five omit the word entirely. 46. That is, further evidence can be found on each side. The fact that even the Franciscan version in the end has Urban do the job (“Domum autem eius in eternum nomini sancte ecclesie consecravit,” line 212) suggests that we are discussing quasi-sacramental consecration. If it were merely a matter of transferring the title of a house, why make a fuss over the pope’s or bishop’s formal involvement, and above all why would Cecilia’s own previous declaration of the deed not have sufficed? Such an understanding would essentially make the transfer happen twice. Weighing in on the other side is the suggestive fact that when the Franciscan version’s Urban performs the deed, the new word sancte appears: whatever he did to her house, he did it to the name of holy church. This change does make it somewhat more plausible that the compiler means the holy church, the institution of sancta ecclesia, rather than a holy church, a particular building. Reames’s translation opts for the nonsacramental view (“so that I might . . . dedicate this house of mine in perpetuity to the ownership of the church,” says Cecilia); I do not find either option entirely satisfying. It could be that the writer of the Franciscan version was himself confused, or deliberately obfuscatory, perhaps by way of heading off possible consequences of coming down on one side or the other. 47. The Latin: “Sancta Cecilia sic celesti est dono repleta ut martirii palmam assumeret. Ipsum mundum est cum [t]alamis execrata. Testis est Valeriani conjugis et Tyburcii provocata confessio, quos, Domine, angelica manu oderiferis floribus coronasti” (lines 84–87). A version of the Ambrosian preface quite close to this text appears in Henshaw, “Preface.” 48. It is not certain, but Chaucer’s eek may do more than just transparently mark the asymmetry between world and chamber. In Jacobus the focus is clearly on the greater achievement that is martyrdom: along with the bedchamber (of the two, the easier to give up), Cecilia execrates ipsum mundum, even the world itself. In Chaucer’s rendition, by contrast, Cecilia’s doing without “the world and eek hire chambre” could be understood to reverse that ranking, declaring that this amazing saint not only gave up her life but also, mirabile dictu, remained a virgin. Such a reading would be easy to dismiss as merely an accident of translation, a side effect of the needs of the iambic mo-

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ment, were it not that the relative valuation saints’ lives typically gave to virginity and martyrdom had shifted, over the centuries between Ambrose and Chaucer, in just that way (see Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 252–55—a section titled “Virginity over Martyrdom”). Jacobus’s text, for its part, would reasonably be immune to the same cultural shift because it preserves verbatim the relevant phrase from the Ambrosian preface. 49. This is why my translation of Jacobus resorts to “became filled”; “was filled” in English is liable to be taken as a description of status. The ambiguity does not exist in Latin (at least in strict Latin) because the auxiliary verb for its passive perfect is present, not past; if Jacobus had intended a status description in past tense, he would have had to write erat repleta or fuit repleta. Repleta est could function as a status-descriptor in the present (“is full”), but not, as far as I can tell, in the past, and all the nearby narration is unambiguously pasttense. 50. Once again Bokenham’s later version can serve as a benchmark for comparison; here the results are quite remarkable in the aggregate. If we compare the twelve inflections to the tale remarked in the last two sections (the seven changes against the source-of-the-moment under “Explanation 3” along with the five sample effects of the source splice under “Explanation 2”) with Bokenham’s treatment of the same passages, we will find that in ten of the twelve cases he has followed the sense of Jacobus and earlier sources rather than Chaucer, or has otherwise worked toward a more human, imitable Cecilia. The only instances of which this is not true are Chaucer’s alteration of the Ambrosian Preface (on which Bokenham casts no vote, because he omits the passage altogether) and the remark that Cecilia in her bath felt no woe (which Bokenham includes—but he would, because he uses Jacobus as a source throughout the story). He is also happy to ascribe to Cecilia’s action some of the “conjointness” lacking in Chaucer’s account, as when she refers to her last group of converts as “Thys pepyl, wych by goddys grace I wunnen haue” (8251–52). All of this is especially remarkable if Bokenham knew the Second Nun’s Tale and thus deliberately went against its decisions in these places; but even if he did not, the consistency with which he sides with earlier sources indicates again how unusual Chaucer’s choices are. 51. See Giffin, “Hire Hous.” She suggests for the poem a very specific purpose embroiled in high-level politics of the day: King Richard II was in 1383 trying to get Pope Urban VI to repair the damage done by an “unwise provision” (apparently the appointment of an unpopular abbot) that had caused “riot and bloodshed” at the monastery of Bury St. Edmonds (ibid., 34). Part of Richard’s strategy, after several direct appeals to the pope had failed, was a “royal progress” largely choreographed by John of Gaunt; the itinerary included a stop at the Priory of Norwich Cathedral, where Adam Easton had lived and been educated as a child. Shortly after the progress, Easton inter-

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vened in the case as mediator between king and pope, after which “a settlement was reached in favor of England” within a few months (35). Perhaps, Giffin suggests, John of Gaunt prevailed upon Chaucer to produce a Lyf of Saint Cecilia for the king to present to his hosts at Norwich, with a copy sent off to the place’s intellectual heir in Rome, “as part of a plan to obtain Norwich aid for a sister house in trouble” (35). 52. Reames has argued this in several essays: see for example “Cecilia Legend,” 49n27; “Recent Discovery,” 347–48; and especially her piece in the newer Sources and Analogues, 496. The idea is discussed further near the end of this chapter. 53. Weise, “Tell-Tale Lexicon.” The hypothesis she offers draws heavily on earlier writings about Chaucer and Cecilia Chaumpaigne, including Cannon, “Raptus”; Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 136–51; and Plucknett, “Chaucer’s Escapade,” itself a response to Watts, “Strange Case.” Also useful is Saunders, “Medieval Law,” which expresses, against Pearsall, caution about our ability to know what raptus meant in this case (45). 54. And in fact that prologue mentions the “lyf . . . of Seynt Cecile” itself as having, if not a penitential function, at least the role of evidence in favor of Chaucer’s acceptability to the accusing god Cupid. In the G version its role in his “defense” before Cupid may be precisely that it features a strong and admirable female lead: part of the god’s explicit accusation (G 267–312) has been that Chaucer has little good to say about that half of the human species, and the “lyf” is grouped with two other works (Boece and “Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne”), one of which is, and one of which presumably was, dominated by an impressive woman. In the F version, where Cupid does not directly accuse Chaucer of maligning women, the connection to gender is harder to see. 55. F. J. Furnivall’s six-manuscript edition reproduces indications found in four of the six that prologue changes to tale at line 120, but also adds the subhead “THE TALE” in brackets before line 85 of each. See Chaucer, SixText Print, 530–31. 56. See Brown, “Prologue,” along with the additions and disputes in Tupper, “Bed’s Head.” Both are considered further below. 57. “Fuit etiam [Cecilia] . . . celum per jugem contemplacionem, Lia per assiduam operacionem. Vel dicitur celum quia, sicut dicit Ysidorus, celum philosophi volubile, rotundum, et ardens esse dixerunt. Sic ipsa volubilis per operacionem solicitam, rotunda per perseverenciam, ardens per caritatem succensam” (lines 5–9). 58. As one should, since centuries of attempts to describe the contemplative state have often spoken of it as involving passivity. The more nuanced treatments often suggest that contemplation is a state simultaneously passive and active, combining the two inseparably so as to change the meaning of

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those categories, very much in the way Bernard describes the cooperation of human and divine wills in the “work” of “assent” or salvation. (See the introduction, n. 4, for some twentieth-century descriptions of contemplation in this way.) 59. Sample claims for the superiority of this mixed life to either the life of pure contemplation (which takes second place) or the life of outward action appear in the Summa theologiae of Jacobus’s confrere and contemporary Thomas Aquinas, II-II.188.6.corpus and III.40.1.ad 2. 60. It would be well to note here two challenges to that claim. One in Mary Giffin’s belief that Chaucer’s treatment at lines 97–98 contains adequate representation of the active and contemplative lives (“Hire Hous,” 44); but she does not make comparisons to his sources and sequelae and so does not notice the degree to which he has suppressed the contemplative part. The other is the fact that Chaucer preserves Jacobus’s juxtaposition of Cecilia’s operacio with her perseverancia, telling us that she was “Ful swift and bisy evere in good werkynge, / And round and hool in good perseverynge” (116–17). The latter term, at least in Latin, has strong resonances with passivity and patience, as when the Vulgate uses persevero to translate the Greek υπομονεω (hypomoneo )µ , the verb whose noun form (υπομονη [hypomone ]µ ) is one of the New Testament’s two words for patience (see Matthew 10:22). But whether those associations persisted into Chaucer’s thinking about the word’s Middle English cognate is uncertain, and even if they did, his weakening of the clearer reference to passivity described in the main text above still yields a final product whose attention to Cecilia’s passivity is less than was that of the source. In the case of that “clearer reference,” incidentally, Bokenham stays much closer to the source (Jacobus), once again making Chaucer’s changes an isolated phenomenon: he retains the unequivocal word that Chaucer drops (“Eek she was heuenly by contemplacyoun,” line 7400), and then, in a reprise not present in Jacobus, draws explicitly the implication of a “mixed” life: “Now, blyssyd Cecyle, syth ye . . . / . . . wyth actyf lif / Endewyd wer wyth contemplatyf . . . ” (lines 7432, 7435–36). 61. The middle section of the prologue, with its invocation to Mary, is “mysterious” in that its origin is not so easy to explain as is that of the other two parts. This claim may be surprising, because Tupper’s widely cited article argued just over a century ago that there is very little remarkable about it, indeed that “such a prelude to a Miracle of the virgin or to a life of a saint is a literary convention even more common than the ‘Idleness’ prologue” (“Bed’s Head,” 10). But of the six examples that he then ticks off in support, not a single one involves an invocation to Mary as a prelude to a saint’s life. Two of them concern Christ and make no mention whatsoever of Mary. Of the remaining four, those by John Capgrave and Alexander Barclay were written after Chaucer’s death and under his influence; and in any case Capgrave’s

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prayer is to Christ, merely mentioning Mary and asking neither one for help, while Barclay’s passage is not a prelude at all, but the conclusion of a sixhundred-page satire. The remaining two belong to the genre of Marian miracles, which differ widely enough from saints’ lives that to lump the two kinds of writing together and suppose an element from an example of one inspired a similar element in an example of the other is a dubious move at best. In any case only one of them actually invokes—calls on—Mary or requests help. That one, a thirteenth-century account of the finding of the “psalter of our Lady,” may conceivably have influenced Chaucer, or be related to a tradition that did: a phrase from its invocation (“Ich nou bidde thi grace, / And thereto lif and space,” lines 16–17) is reminiscent of Chaucer’s line 65 (“So for to werken yif me wit and space”). But even if there is a real relationship between that single source and that single line, it would require much better evidence to conclude, as Tupper does, that Chaucer’s fifty-six-line Invocacio is largely an exercise in following convention. For the thirteenth-century poem, see Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden, 220. 62. “Significance,” 353. 63. The accuracy of this medieval image is a different question, and a tricky one. Many in the last half-century have pointed out Mary’s relatively small place in Bernard’s oeuvre (according to one statistically minded commentator, she occupies about 3.5 percent of it), and noted further that his Marian writings, like his writings in general, make no goal of theological originality. Nonetheless the mind of the age had no doubts about his association with the Virgin Mother, who appears in approximately one-third of all known medieval images of the saint, prompting a student of iconography to remark that “by the end of the Middle Ages Bernard had become so closely associated with Mary that portraying him in her company had come to seem the surest means of identifying him” (France, Medieval Images, 269). The connection, moreover, had begun already in Bernard’s lifetime and attained great strength within a few decades of his death (276–77); its endurance across subsequent centuries was in part due to Dante (France, Medieval Images, ch. 9, passim; and see Dante’s description of Bernard at Paradiso 32.107–8 as one who, in Singleton’s translation, “drew beauty from Mary, / As the morning star from the sun”). All of this should encourage our turn to Bernard at this juncture: if we need to know what a medieval poet and his audience would have made of an invocation to Mary, attending to the saint whom they would have imagined as the greatest of “Marian doctors” is a reasonable way to go. For further pursuit of the accuracy of their imagination, a good starting point, balanced and with useful references, is the introduction to Bernard, À la louange, 25–29. 64. Auerbach states that this passage from the last canto of the Commedia “preserves the true spirit of Saint Bernard.” In itself the assertion is a bit nebulous, but the article that backs it up—a long exposition of nu-

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merous regularly appearing tropes of praise, many passed from hand to hand for nearly a millennium, many surfacing in both Dante and Bernard—is anything but. 65. Bernard’s quotation from Isaiah 66:2 follows an “old Latin” version rather than the Vulgate. The line Mary speaks is from the Magnificat, at Luke 1:48. Bernard’s Latin reads: “Laudabilis virtus virginitas, sed magis humilitas necessaria. Illa consulitur, ista praecipitur. . . . Potes denique sine virginiate salvari; sine humilitate non potes. Potest, inquam, placere humilitas, quae virginitatem deplorat amissam; sine humilitate autem, audeo dicere, nec virginitas Mariae placuisset. ‘Super quem,’ inquit, ‘requiescet spiritus meus, nisi super humilem et quietum?’ . . . Patet itaque, quia ut de Spiritu Sancto conciperet, sicut ipsa perhibet, ‘respexit Deus humilitatem ancillae suae’ potius quae virginitatem.” 66. Auerbach, “Dante’s Prayer,” 13. Dante’s original says that Mary is “umile ed alta più che creatura” (Paradiso 33.2). Probably her traditional association with humility does not need belaboring. But if it does, one good labor would be to remember that the verse from Luke that Auerbach names twice— surely the Scriptures’ most famous single line about Mary, her response to the Annunciation with “behold the Lord’s handmaid; let it be done to me according to your word”—is one that thousands of people, lay and religious, would have been reciting three times a day by Chaucer’s time, as it is the antiphon that precedes the second Ave Maria in the Angelus. Lex orandi, lex credendi: the association between Mary and humble receptivity—which is to say, in the terms of this study, passivity, emphasized by the passive-voice fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum—could not have found a more deeply rooted reinforcement than that. 67. For the Assumption itself Bernard left six sermons; they appear, with the single sermons for the Sunday following Assumption and for Mary’s nativity, in vol. 5 of Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. Leclercq and Rochais. The nativity sermon, titled “On the Aqueduct,” seems to have been especially well known and representative of the tradition of Marian writing (thus Pierre-Yves Emery, in Bernard, Sermons pour l’année, 699). All quotations below are my translations, though sometimes made in consultation with Emery’s French. I have also consulted what was for nearly a century the only recent published English translation of these sermons, in St. Bernard’s Sermons for the Seasons—a rendition useful for quick reading, but frequently inexact about details—and the very recent Englishings in Sermons for the Autumn Season, trans. Edmonds and Scott. 68. This “prevenience” of Mary’s—which Chaucer borrows from Dante and preserves in the lines just referenced (“often tyme of thy benygnytee / Ful frely, er that men thyn help biseche, / Thou goost biforn and art hir lyves leche”)—is especially out of place here, prefixed to a tale in which, so far from

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being prevenient, Mary does not act at all; as noted above, Chaucer’s use of the same idea (and the same borrowed prayer) in the Prioress’s Prologue, lines 477–80, fits the Marian miracle story that follows much better. The idea’s fit in its original context is strong too, since Dante’s Mary is, in addition to being supremely humble, the explicit initiator of the chain of graced agents who come rescue the wandering poet before he has any idea he needs rescuing. 69. For rather scathing notice of the spirituality behind the “Marian miracles,” see Patterson, “Living Witnesses”—though, in its focus on the miracle stories, the article occasionally risks giving its readers the inaccurate impression that all medieval expressions of “Mary’s cult” were of their seemingly unelevated and superstitious kind (see, e.g., 517–18). Patterson gives excellent references to large collections of the miracle stories; there is also a useful selection from the English subset in Boyd, Middle English Miracles. 70. The italicized phrases are Bernard’s direct quotations from the beginning of the Magnificat, Luke 1:46–48. “Impart” is a slightly odd word, but so is Bernard’s infudit (the text in Patrologia Latina has refudit, an easier reading). “Regard” is an attempt to capture respicere and respectus, which combine the idea of gazing-on with another idea more important here: that of taking notice, paying attention, thus having “respect.” Bernard’s Latin for Elizabeth’s three exclamations matches the Vulgate almost exactly: “Unde hoc mihi, ut veniat Mater Domini mei ad me? . . . Ut facta est vox salutationis tuae in auribus meis, exsultavit in gaudio infans in utero meo. . . . Beata . . . quae credidisti [Vulgate credidit], quoniam perficientur in te quae dicta sunt tibi a Domino.” The following expository passage reads: “Magna quidem praeconia: sed et devota humilitas nihil sibi passa retinere, in eum magis universa infudit, cujus in se beneficia laudabantur. Tu, inquit, magnificas matrem Domini: sed magnificat anima mea Dominum. In voce mea filium perhibes exsultasse in gaudio: sed exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo; et ipse quoque tanquam amicus sponsi, gaudio gaudet ad vocem sponsi. Beatam esse dicis quae credidisset; sed credulitatis et beatitudinis causa respectus est supernae pietatis, ut ex hoc magis beatam me dicant omnes generationes, quia ancillam humilem et exiguam respexit Deus.” 71. For the association of Mary with Psalm 8, see Broughton, “Prioress’s,” 585–86, which notes that Chaucer’s use of the psalm’s opening phrases in the Prioress’s Prologue was likely partly inspired by its presence in several medieval liturgical forms dedicated to Mary, including the “commemorative Office of the Virgin” and the “Little Office of the Virgin.” 72. “The one from whom seven demons had been cast out” is of course Mary of Magdala; Bernard is confident that she would have been among the unnamed women. The Latin here translated from the Vulgate is “cum mulieribus et Maria matre Iesu et fratribus eius.” Bernard’s opening remark reads: “Si forte Maria affuit, nominetur prima, quae supra omnes est, tam Filii praeroga-

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tiva quam privilegio sanctitatis.” And the longer passage: “quae et infra viduas et paenitentes, infra eam de qua eiecta fuerant septem daemonia, ineffabili sese mansuetudine inclinabat. Obsecro vos, filioli, aemulamini hanc virtutem, si Mariam diligitis; si contenditis ei placere, aemulamini modestiam eius. Nihil enim tam idoneum homini, nihil tam congruum Christiano, maximeque monachum nihil adeo decet.” 73. Kolve says much the same with respect to her sexual purity in particular: “She enacts the counsel to perfection with such chastity of will that ordinary human life seems untouched by her example” (Telling Images, 215). It is worth noting that while encouragement of imitation is the most frequent way in which Bernard’s Marian writings show their opposition to lone stars like Cecilia, they occasionally make the point more directly. Near the end of the sermon for Mary’s nativity (“On the Aqueduct”), Bernard considers a verse from the Song of Songs: “dilectus meus mihi et ego illi qui pascitur inter lilia,” “My beloved is mine and I his, who grazes among the lilies” (2:16). Noting the concluding plural, he comments that Christ (the Beloved in this reading) does not graze where only one lily grows. Rather, in a memorable line, amat semper media Jesus—“Jesus always loves middles,” i.e., loves to be in the midst of things, as when he promises that if two or three gather in his name he is there in medio eorum (Bernard, §17, quoting Matthew 18:2), and as befits his role as “mediator of God and humans.” Bernard even writes that this Mediator “is not pleased with aloneness” (nec in singularitate complacet sibi) and “disapproves of separated by-ways and places of repose” (diverticula . . . et reclinatoria reprobat)—unexpected observations, perhaps, from a monk writing for monks, even cenobitic ones. The same preference for avoiding isolation fits Mary’s nature as a second mediator who passes grace and thanksgiving between God and man; hence the titular metaphor of the aqueduct. She is not a solo act. 74. The word translated by the assertion that Mary does not “rely upon” merit is praetendere, which of itself could indicate a still stronger claim—that Mary does not “pretend to” merit in the sense of not asserting that she has any, perhaps because she indeed does not. But given that Bernard elsewhere refers frequently to Mary’s merit (e.g., “excellentissimum . . . nostrae Virginis meritum,” SDOA §8), he likely intends here only the milder etymological sense of the word: she refuses to “lay out” her merit (even though she could do so) as evidence for the court in which she is metaphorically judged. The Latin of the long passage reads: “‘Invenisti,’ ait angelus, ‘gratiam apud Deum.’ . . . Semper haec inveniet gratiam, et sola est gratia qua egemus. . . . Nimirum sola est gratia, qua salvamur. Quid nos alia concupiscimus, fratres? Quaeramus gratiam, et per Mariam quaeramus; quia quod quaerit, invenit, et frustrari non potest. . . . Quaerant alii meritum, nos invenire gratiam studeamus. Quid enim? Non gratiae est quod hic sumus? Profecto misericordiae Domini est, quod non sumus consumpti nos. Qui nos? Nos periuri, nos homicidae, nos adulteri, nos rap-

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tores, purgamenta utique mundi huius. Consulite conscientias vestras, fratres, et videte, quia ubi abundavit delictum, superabundat et gratia. Maria non praetendit meritum, sed gratiam quaerit.” 75. Discussions about human merit (whether it exists, whether it is effective for salvation, how much if any of it can be attributed to free choice as opposed to grace) are amply familiar from the debates of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but were present from early Christianity: the term meritum came in for heavy attention at least as far back as Tertullian and was subsequently a vital part of the Pelagian controversy preserved in Augustine’s late writings. By the late Middle Ages there had been a rich ramification of the concept, which included the distinction between “condign” and “congruent” merit often invoked (among other places) in considering the question of whether “facientibus quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam”—whether God avoids denying grace to those who do what they can. For understanding those debates as they existed in the late Middle Ages, works of Courtenay, Oakley, and Hamm listed in the bibliography offer passage into the state of the art. 76. This is an approach to merit familiar long before and long after Bernard, reaching back to, among other places, Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, which in turn rely heavily on Paul’s letters. One of Augustine’s most direct statements of it comes in an influential letter to a priest (and future pope) named Sixtus: “Even eternal life itself,” he writes, “ . . . is given-inrecompense to preceding merits; nevertheless, because the same merits to which it is given-in-recompense were not obtained by our sufficiency but were created in us by grace, it too is called grace, [because] it is given gratuitously— and not because it is not given to merits, but because even the very merits to which it is given have been given.” For a later literary example that upholds both sides of the paradox, consider Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St. Werburge of Chester, an early-sixteenth-century poem deeply indebted to Chaucer. It declares near its beginning that merit will be rewarded after death (lines 69–70), and near its end that such merit is available to the one who attends “redy day and nyght” upon Christ (line 2004). But soon after the latter declaration the poet takes pains to deflect the credit for any goodness in his own book back to God, concluding with the more general moral that “For euery good dede done in any cost / It cometh allonly of the holy gost” (2032–33). Augustine’s text is in Epistle 194, §5.19, here translated from PL 33:880–81, with consultation of Roland Teske’s English of the complete letter in Augustine, Letters 156–210. Other highly germane loci in Augustine include On Grace and Free Choice 6.15 (in Pelagians IV, 81; it declares that God, in crowning human accomplishment, crowns God’s own gifts) and the somewhat more ambiguous Sermon 170, §10.10 (PL 38:932). 77. Sermo in assumptione beatae Mariae 2.9, SBO 5:237. The Latin reads: “Neminem ergo moveat, quod suscipiens mulier Dominum, non Maria, sed

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Martha vocatur, quando in hac una et summa Maria et Marthae negotium, et Mariae non otiosum otium invenitur.” “Una et summa” could also refer to the Virgin Mary (“this one and highest Mary”) rather than to the negotium and the otium; the point that she combines those two things would stand. 78. For instances beyond Bernard, a useful source is Pelikan, Mary, especially its sixth chapter, “The Handmaid of the Lord and Woman of Valor,” where the examples build up to this summary statement: “As the dual title of this chapter suggests, [Mary] was throughout the centuries the Handmaid of the Lord and the Woman of Valor, and neither of these without the other” (85). “Woman of Valor” translates mulier fortis from Proverbs 31:10, a muchquoted verse originally lamenting the scarcity of such women, but often applied to Mary; “Handmaid of the Lord,” of course, is Mary’s humble selfdescription from that most famous of verses quoted several times already, Luke 1:38. For another important angle on conjoint action from within Bernard’s corpus, see the sermon that immediately follows the one just discussed (Sermons for the Assumption 3.4, SBO 5:240–1): it suggests that the best life may be neither the life of action nor the life of contemplation per se, but the life that offers itself as equally willing to do either, according to God’s disposal—a “mixed life” of a different kind from the Dominican version mentioned earlier in this chapter. Bernard goes on to say that any perfected soul will have all at once Martha’s busy serving (administrationem), Mary’s contemplation, and Lazarus’s penitence. 79. Sermo in nativitate beatae Mariae (“De aquaeductu”), §9, SBO 5:281; the Latin reads: “Etenim si omnis qui se humiliat exaltabitur, quid hac humilitate sublimius?” This could be understood to ask not what will be but what is more sublime (that is, more exalted) than Mary’s humility—which would shift the relationship between humility and exaltation away from causality and toward identity, as the next two paragraphs also suggest. 80. “Omnis qui se exaltat humiliabitur et qui se humiliat exaltabitur” (Luke 14:11; identically Luke 18:14; cf. Matthew 23:12). The idea pervades Christian thinking about agency even before the Gospels, as in the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, discussed under my second conclusion (“The Universality of the Ideal”) below. It is also present in Judaism long before Christ: see for example Proverbs 29:23, in the Vulgate roughly “Humility follows the proud person, and glory will lift up the humble in spirit” (superbum sequitur humilitas et humilem spiritu suscipiet gloria). 81. All quotations to this point in the paragraph are from SDOA §7, SBO 5:267. Later in the sermon Bernard substitutes “humilitas cordis” for “devotio humilitatis” and “magnanimitas fidei” for “magnanimitas credulitatis,” without intending any change in meaning that I can detect (§10, SBO 5:269). 82. An introductory sketch of the whole question appears in Louf, Way of Humility, 5–9. The quoted definition of magnanimity (“maximis dignificat

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seipsum”) appears in ST II-II.129.3.1, which takes it from Aristotle with minor alterations. Aquinas also offers another, more etymological definition: magnanimity means a certain stretching-forth of the mind toward great things, “quamdam extensionem animi ad magna” (II-II.129.1.corpus). For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics 4.3 (e.g., trans. Rowe, 148). 83. SDOA §13, SBO 5:272: “Numquid putamus . . . Elisabeth sanctam in eo, quod per Spiritum utique loquebatur, errasse? Absit. Beata plane quam respexit Deus, et beata quae credidit.” 84. Here I have had to alter the punctuation given in SBO in order to create a complete sentence. That text reads: “Hic enim magnus divinae respectionis exstitit fructus. Ineffabili siquidem artificio Spiritus supervenientis tantae humilitati magnanimitas tanta in secretario virginei cordis accessit, ut . . . hae . . . fiant stellae ex respectu mutuo clariores, quod videlicet nec humilitas tanta minuit magnanimitatem, nec magnanimitas tanta humilitatem; sed cum in sua aestimatione tam humilis esset, nihilominus et in promissionis credulitate magnanimis, ut quae nihil aliud quam exiguam sese reputabat ancillam, ad incomprehensibile hoc mysterium, ad admirabile commercium, ad inscrutabile sacramentum nullatenus se dubitaret electam, et veram Dei et hominis genitricem crederet mox futuram.” 85. Bernard’s Latin could also mean that humility is advanced to the greatest degree by magnanimity, with the result that the chosen are found “that much more reverent”; the overall impact does not change much. The passage reads: “Agit hoc nimirum in cordibus electorum gratiae praerogativa divinae, ut eos nec humilitas pusillanimes faciat, nec magnanimitas arrogantes; magis autem cooperentur sibi, ut non solum nulla ex magnanimitate subintret elatio, sed hinc maxime provehatur humilitas: ut inveniantur eo amplius timorati et largitori munerum non ingrati, ac vicissim ex occasione humilitatis pusillanimitas nulla subrepat, sed quo minus de sua quisque in minimis praesumere consuevit, eo amplius etiam in magnis quibusque de divina virtute confidat.” 86. This is the strong statement advertised in the appendix to ch. 3 of a seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of active and passive that reveals itself, on close inspection, as not held together (pace C. W. Bynum’s comments noted there) merely by the arbitrary will of the observer, but as growing from a deep internal connection between the things juxtaposed. 87. My translation; the Italian reads: “Donna, se’ tanto grande e tanto vali, / che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre, / sua disïanza vuol volar sanz’ ali.” Chaucer (whose translation follows in the main text) takes disïanza as the subject of vuol as well as of volar, as do many, but not all, modern translations of Dante. 88. The other bits from Dante’s prayer entirely omitted from Chaucer’s translation are lines 3, 9, and 21 of Paradiso 33. Particularly the first (which calls Mary “the fixed goal of an eternal plan,” termine fisso d’etterno consiglio) and the last (which says that in her is found not only the “goodnesse” that

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Chaucer reproduces at line 51, but quantunque in creatura é de bontate, whatever good there is in creatures) extol Mary in the highest degree. As Chaucer did not reuse them elsewhere in the intriguing way he used the missing tercet, it is harder to speculate about whether these omissions were content driven or not; if they were, their absence appears to support the hypothesis about Chaucer’s motives given in the following paragraphs. 89. SNBM §7, SBO 5:279. In context, the “all” first means “all of what is most worth having, namely the grace of salvation”; Bernard has just been discussing God’s choice to “bestow the entire price” of redemption upon Mary, meaning that Jesus is entrusted to her and comes to humankind only through her. But this is not taken as a limitation of Mary’s role, but rather as implying that all hope, all grace, all salvation, comes to us only through Mary (“si quid spei in nobis est, si quid gratiae, si quid salutis, ab ea noverimus redundare”; §6, SBO 5:278–79). 90. “Neque enim impotens erat Deus et sine hoc aquaeductu infundere gratiam, prout vellet; sed tibi vehiculum voluit providere”—“Neither was God incapable of pouring in grace even without this aqueduct, if God had wished; but God wished to provide this conveyance to you” (SNBM §18, SBO 5:288). Thus one might say that the necessity of Mary’s involvement is “conditional necessity,” contingent on God’s willing it to be so, rather than absolute. 91. Thus I cannot agree with Luecke’s contention that “in [the Invocacio] the Second Nun . . . raises Mary to the equivalence of a goddess” (“Three Faces,” 346): if by “goddess” one means a supernaturally powerful and self-sufficient entity, the evidence just presented suggests that Chaucer has done everything he could to avoid the possibility of such an interpretation. One might with more justice say that he has raised Cecilia to the likeness of a goddess, complete with the suggestion in that surprising concluding line (531) of worship due to her. 92. Brown, “Prologue.” Some estimate of the long-term critical reaction can be had from a look at Frederick Robinson’s second edition of the Works, which comments that Brown “has inconclusively argued” for the idea (755b), or at the current edition of the Riverside Chaucer, which omits all mention of it. Robinson does not explain his judgment of inconclusiveness, but it likely relies on the attack in Tupper’s already-mentioned “Bed’s Head.” Brown’s work relies in turn on an earlier suggestion by Walter Skeat (Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 403) that the three stanzas from Dante (but not the rest of the Invocacio) had been added later. The critical community has, it should be said, accepted as a lasting contribution Brown’s uncovering in the same article of the sources for many of Chaucer’s borrowings in the Invocacio from sources other than Dante. 93. In particular, Tupper, “Bed’s Head,” argues against the theory of later interpolation by trying to dispel the notion that the seven stanzas are particu-

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larly sophisticated. But as already observed (n. 61), the article’s argument against the novelty of Chaucer’s accomplishment is shaky, and as far as I can see, Tupper does not attempt a more general argument against the quality of his accomplishment at all. For its part the hypothesis of an early date for the tale—or rather for its first half, given the likelihood of a gap between the two halves—still enjoys wide, if not universal, support. 94. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 278n11. 95. Weise is aware that her work will attract both descriptions. The article (“Tell-Tale Lexicon”) gives a good account of some likely objections, many of them already present in reactions to its ancestor, Mersand’s Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary. For example, there are several known late works that have quite low Romance-vocabulary ratings, including the Miller’s, Reeve’s, and Wife of Bath’s tales; Weise suggests that in each case Chaucer had a particular motive for keeping things Anglo-Saxon (a desire to set a tone that was, respectively, churlish, Northern, or “olde”). 96. Weise offers for each of the five pieces of writing not only a mean Romance-vocabulary rating (the average of the percentages of Romance words she found in each of the six-line blocks into which she divides each piece) but four “confidence intervals” around the mean, at 60, 70, 80, and 90 percent. These intervals tell us something about how stable the mean is: the 70% confidence interval, for example, gives upper and lower bounds for the interval into which the mean would fall 70% of the time if one repeated the averaging many times, scrambling the tale’s lines each time into different randomly arranged six-line blocks. The reason for this somewhat artificial procedure seems to be that short pieces of writing will have very large confidence intervals (suggesting that the “actual mean” might be far from the mean Weise happens to have measured) and long pieces smaller ones. This provides a rough way of adjusting for the real-world fact that if we have only a twenty-line sample of an author’s writing, we will not be very confident that the next twenty lines we discover, even if written at the very same time, will have similar properties; a mere statistical fluke might well throw them off. If, however, our first sample is a thousand lines, we will be much more prone to expect that the next thousand will have many properties in common with it, at least in the absence of any particular reason for difference. (My remark above that the T1T2 and P2-T1 comparisons show the most significant difference is an attempt to translate the fact that in all four sets of confidence intervals, these are the two comparisons whose intervals overlap the least. At the 80% level and below neither comparison shows any overlap at all.) A less nuanced, but still generally accurate, impression can be gleaned simply from the striking differences merely in the “raw” list of mean percentages of Romance words: the lowest scorer is the first half of the tale at 7.5%; next is the etymological introduction that precedes it, at 11.2%; the second half of the tale scores 11.4%; the

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prelude on ydelnesse ranks 14.4%; and the highest scorer of the lot is the Invocacio, at 14.9%. Of course, if increasing Romance vocabulary reliably indicates a later date, these rankings suggest that the idleness prelude (that is, P1) may be late also—a suggestion whose force diminishes, but does not entirely disappear, under the more complex analysis involving confidence intervals. Even were a late date for P1 more firmly established, however, it would not much trouble the interpretations of this chapter, which primarily concern the relationship between P2 and the tale proper. 97. There is, of course, a further complication: given that it is relatively clear that T1 and T2 were written years apart, does the new information turned up here imply that the first seven stanzas of P2 were added at yet a third period, or could the addition have been made when T2 was written? As far as I can tell, the evidence is currently not sufficient for an answer. One might reflect that the celebrated “slip” in which the speaker-or-writer of the Invocacio refers to himself as “unworthy sone of Eve” (62) suggests a date before the whole group of materials was incorporated into the Canterbury collection and associated with the a nun—and therefore conclude that composition together with T2 is more likely than after it. But the date of incorporation is uncertain, and if it happens to have been quite late, the “slip” ceases to have any bearing on the relative dating of P2 and T2. One can also imagine scenarios that would explain either conclusion: that Chaucer would return to a completed poem and add a prologue that pushes in a different direction is quite plausible, but it is also thinkable that he would return to a half-finished poem, finish it in a way largely consistent with the direction in which it was already moving, and confine his expressions of distaste for those directions to a prologue that he also wrote at the same time. 98. The observation sounds merely flip, but there is a serious intention behind it. Given the extreme breadth of the set of imaginable hypotheses, one that makes a good story is likely to be valuable for several reasons. First of all it will be memorable; second, it will involve a coherent and relatively simple account of something that happened in history (the change of Chaucer’s mind in a particular direction), and so lend itself to comparison with other data and other thoughts that may appear later. When one is considering hypotheses about the internal state of a medieval poet, the usual criteria for deciding which hypotheses to entertain seriously—like ease of falsification or some sense of antecedent probability—may be quickly exhausted, new data for falsification being scarce and notions of what is probable being highly contested; and in that situation it is reasonable to turn to other, ordinarily secondary, criteria like these. (Here I follow and adapt suggestions on the choice of hypotheses from Peirce’s thought-provoking “Logic of History,” in Collected Papers 7:162–255, esp. 224–32.) 99. The most thoroughgoing attempt I have seen in this direction is Gillmeister, Chaucer’s Conversion, which argues for what its title indicates, late

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in the poet’s life, and ties it to a detailed reading of the short poem “Truth,” among other works. As with the other historical hypotheses, evaluation is difficult, but the proposal does raise interesting questions: for example, if the ideal of “conjoint action” was a relatively late acquisition among Chaucer’s mental habits, where might he have found it—Bernard? Augustine? Bradwardine? Boethius? Preached sermons? The question is difficult rather because possible sources are too numerous than because they are too few. Likely the more stubborn trouble with this line of thought will be the difficulty of believing that Chaucer’s ideas about agency were as simple and stereotyped as the character of Cecilia would suggest, even early in his authorship—given, for example, the relative sophistication of his experiments with the topic in the Knight’s Tale, which most critics believe to have been substantially complete at a similarly early period. (See the remarks on the dating of the two poems in the Riverside Chaucer, 826, 924.) 100. The assertion that Cecilia fits, despite appearances to the contrary, with Chaucer’s other female agents is not unique: see n. 8 for a book-length effort to argue that she and Custance (along with several other Chaucerian characters) pursue identical ideals. Assertions of a more by-the-way kind that Cecilia and Mary exercise similar kinds of agency are also frequent, but many of them seem to function by attributing to Mary, without further justification, the traits that Cecilia obviously has. Into this category fall Luecke’s assertion that Mary “is urgently busy about the work of God, just as was Cecilia” (whereas urgency would seem difficult to attribute to the pictures of Mary’s work available in the tradition) and Russell Peck’s remark of Mary’s “ability to fulfill her ‘entente’ in human and divine terms” (whereas theological treatments invariably stress that the entente she fulfills is not in its origin hers, but God’s). For Luecke, see “Three Faces,” 347; for Peck, “‘Entente’ and Translation,” 22. Peck’s further strategy (26n6) of attributing to both Mary and Cecilia the various subvirtues of fortitude is closer to the mark but falls into a trouble we have seen elsewhere, not least in Chaucer’s Cecilia herself: it accords perfectly with one half of Mary’s paradoxical union of attributes while neglecting the other. 101. There is reasonable evidence that Chaucer and his first audience would have perceived these differences. That is, while there is indeed precedent in the theological tradition for speaking of Mary as a prophetess, the word tends to be used in ways that distance her from Cecilia rather than uniting the two. Ancient and medieval writers who speak of Mary as a prophet (including Origen, Irenaeus, and Rupert of Deutz) refer to the Magnificat’s putative prediction of the future, partly in that it speaks words that the whole church will later be able to speak; to Mary’s metaphorical “speaking” of the most proper Word of God, i.e., Christ; and to what Bernard calls her magnanimitas fidei, her openness to believing the Lord’s promises and doing what they imply, understood as a trait characteristic of prophets. While this last point especially con-

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nects Mary as we have seen her here with one concept of prophecy, it is a concept—the prophet as “conjoint agent”—that in no way fits Cecilia. To Mary’s “prophecy” in the sense today’s scholarship (including Reames’s remark above) understands as most proper, roughly “the speaking of human-language words that are also God’s, particularly on behalf of the downtrodden and against oppressors,” I have not seen reference in the tradition. My information on the kinds of prophecy attributed to Mary derives from the forthcoming second volume of Reynolds, Gateway to Heaven. 102. Louf, Way of Humility, 10–11; emphasis added. 103. Luecke, “Three Faces,” 336. 104. Cf. the remarks ch. 3, n. 40, on the mind-altering power of paradox. As for concrete instances of the general form, at least five have appeared in this chapter. There has been reference to the need, when trumpeting merit, for a counterweighing reminder that merit itself is a gift; to the combination in Mary of negotium and non otiosum otium; to Mary’s blessedness as rooted both in her belief and in God’s regard; to the combination (and indeed identification) of her interest in great things with her humility; and to Christ’s lowliness and power. 105. Pascal, “Thoughts on the Pope and the Church,” 376, 378; see similar ideas at Pensées, #449 (556), p. 167 in the Krailsheimer translation. In the ellipsis Pascal provides examples, beginning with a central truth-claim of Christianity: Christ is God; Christ is a human. It seems to make very little sense to say both about the same person, and there have been many movements that have avoided doing so: Arianism drops the first, while docetism of various kinds (though Pascal does not mention it) effectively drops the second. For a recent look at the pervasiveness of such forms in Christian thinking, see Sweat, Theological Role of Paradox, which provides an introductory discussion (ch. 1, pp. 13–27) and references (4nn5, 8; 13n1; 17nn24, 26; and 18n30) to authors who have taken up the question in Christianity more generally; for paradox in medieval literature and culture generally, see the brief notice with references in Newman, Medieval Crossover, 4–6. 106. The Christian tradition has had to confront precisely this problem many times. Perhaps the most canonical statement of the confrontation in Latin Christianity is Augustine’s Grace and Free Choice, which is an excellent antidote to the persistent temptation to join battle under the banner of one or another of the two “sides” named in its title. Instead, Augustine proposes to investigate how these two necessary forces work together, a task made possible by his initial dismissal of the mistaken assumption that one must choose between them. See details in ch. 3, n. 7. 107. These observations, of course, recall Jill Mann’s central point in Feminizing Chaucer: while feminist readers (and, I would add, almost all other readers also) have usually worked under the unspoken assumption that being

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active is good or desirable and being passive is bad or undesirable, Chaucer’s stories show us that those equations are untenable, and in fact that the terms in which they are stated, if taken as uncomplicated (“pure” activity and passivity), have no real referent. The effort of the first part of this book has been to show that Chaucer very likely acquired that nuanced way of thinking as part of his formation by the mainstream Christian thought of his time, which not only anticipates the critique of pure agency that Mann finds in Chaucer but goes a step further by offering a positive alternative, the ethical ideal of “conjoint action” or “double agency” to which all are called. 108. There is a suggestive parallel here with a form that some canny observers of the tradition have identified as characteristic of the main stream of Western thought up through the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but as largely abandoned thereafter. Here is Charles Peirce: “Get rid, thoughtful Reader, of the Ockhamistic prejudice . . . that in thought, in being, and in development the indefinite is due to a degeneration from a primary state of perfect definiteness. The truth is rather on the side of the scholastic realists that the unsettled is the primal state, and that definiteness and determinateness, the two poles of settledness, are, in the large, approximations, developmentally, epistemologically, and metaphysically” (Collected Papers, 6:348). 109. The most obviously relevant example among standard Christian truth-claims is the doctrine of the incarnation—itself expressed at least since the council of Chalcedon, as mentioned in the previous chapter, in the form of a paradoxical both-and. It is easy to miss the full implications of what by Chaucer’s time had long been standard christological teachings. For example, one result of the affirmation that Christ is “in two natures” that undergo no “confusion” is precisely a resistance against resolving the paradox of the person who is “fully God and fully human.” To affirm instead that Christ’s two natures merge together into some new nature—a possibility considered and rejected by Aquinas, for example, at ST III.2.1—would be to say that Christ was a new kind of being. But it is vitally important for the tradition to say that Christ is not a kind of being at all. To be a kind of being is to have a nature that, at least in principle, some other being might share. But Christ does not have such a nature. Instead—in a way that for the Greek philosophical background against which the theological declarations were written must have come across as a logic-bending, category-snapping challenge to rethink one’s way of thinking— Christ has two. There are depths to be pursued here; readers who want more might best begin with the forthright and intriguing discussion in the De orthodoxa fide of John of Damascus, one of Aquinas’s sources and a widely influential authority already cited in the appendix to ch. 3. They will also do well to consult Boethius, “Contra Eutychen,” book 6. There is a modern treatment of the notion of Christ as “true God and true man” and its implications—with some

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attention to the difference between this apparently contradictory double affirmation and the Hellenistic idea of a “divine man,” a hybrid entity halfway between humanity and divinity—in Ratzinger, Introduction, esp. part 2.I.C ; see also Daley, God Visible, 208–09, 211. The difference was explicitly remarked from relatively early in the tradition, for which see, e.g., the seventh-century declaration of Maximus the Confessor that Christ “has a double energy [or ‘working’]. . . . Christ is not some intermediate being” (from Ambiguum 5, translated in Louth, Maximus, 177, and itself expounding an early-sixthcentury text of Pseudo-Dionysius). The difference is especially noteworthy here because “resolutions” of the sort that C. W. Bynum finds lacking in Bernard’s paradoxes—the discovery of a middle way between two extremes, or of a third thing that subsumes or sublates two opposites, as a half-active, halfpassive character would do—seem to be the formal analogy of the “divine man” notion rather than of Chalcedonian Christianity. Here again it looks as though the tendency to deal in unresolved paradox is not a peculiarity of Bernard’s cast of mind, nor of his epoch, but a feature of his religious tradition from a time near its beginning.

five.

Law Gone Wrong: The Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales

1. Merton, “Ecumenism and Renewal,” in Contemplation in a World of Action, 186. 2. One can, of course, still ask the broader question of why Chaucer chose to proceed by such close adherence to the “plot” as a whole in writing a given tale; but it is harder to be confident that the answer to that broad question involves a particular intended effect—the expression of a moral or philosophical opinion, say—rather than a prior decision, innocent of any such intentions, about the kind of game he was going to play. In the case of the Franklin’s Tale, Chaucer’s adherence to his sources is not nearly so close as it is for the Clerk’s, but he does maintain most of their sequences of events. His most obvious source is Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo, but the story also appears in the Decameron, and critics have increasingly argued that Chaucer knew both; both are available, with a summary of the recent arguments, in Edwards, “Franklin’s Tale,” in the newer Sources and Analogues. 3. Jesus’ teaching against swearing in Matthew 5:33–37 (which appears to ban swearing altogether, and thus sorts ill with the instructions in Jeremiah) appears earlier in the sermon but gets only an indirect reference. Two strong studies of the validity of Dorigen’s oath appear in Gaylord, “Promises” (to which this chapter is much indebted; its third part, pp. 350–57, builds an overwhelming case for the invalidity of the oath) and Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Franklin.” A brisk review of further secondary sources, with em-

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phasis on the likelihood of a verdict of invalidity, appears in Roney, “Chaucer Subjectivizes,” 280–82; a thorough account of the requirements of different types of medieval courts for verifying oaths and contracts can be found in Green, Crisis of Truth, especially in ch. 8, “Rash Promises.” For an example of a theological exploration of swearing that begins from Jeremiah, see Aquinas, ST II-II.89.3. Finally, two minor matters of semantics deserve a nod. First, I will attempt to follow the traditional usage according to which a vow (votum) is a promise made to a god and an oath (sacramentum) a promise made to someone else but calling a god to witness; for promises that involve gods (or the Judaeo-Christian God) in neither capacity I will generally avoid using those words except where one of the authors under discussion has done so. Second, it should be noted that particularly in studies of folklore the phrase “rash oath” often means something quite specific, namely an oath (vow, promise) that does not completely specify what it agrees to, but contains a variable. Thus Griselda’s wedding oaths would count, as would the promise of the Wife of Bath’s rapist-knight to do whatever the mysterious hag demands of him, but Dorigen’s promise to Aurelius technically should not: all relevant parties are quite clear about what it promises, and the confusion concerns not that apodosis but the protasis, the conditions required to spark a repayment. Nonetheless I occasionally use the term to differentiate Dorigen’s oath to Aurelius from her wedding promises: the former is at least “rash” in the ordinary sense of lacking prior deliberation. 4. Wurtele (“Chaucer’s Franklin,” 367) is among those pointing out this Chaucerian innovation. That Dorigen means her condition to be impossible to meet was observed as long ago as 1907 (in Hinckley, Notes, 239) and is stressed in Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” 41b, and in Gaylord, “Promises,” 347. 5. Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion”; there is a good synopsis of twentieth-century reactions in the note to Fragment III in the Riverside Chaucer, 863B–864A. 6. The degree to which the path of (near-)equality was familiar, as an ideal or a reality, in Chaucer’s time and place is a vast question that cannot be pursued in any depth here. Against any temptation to answer it too quickly, however, with unexamined certainty that the social structures of the Middle Ages were overwhelmingly more oppressive to women than those of our own day, it is worth considering the cautionary findings of some recent research: see especially Schnell, “Discourse,” and Kooper, “Loving,” for injunctions toward marital (near-)equality in some medieval preaching. 7. Wurtele notes both Arveragus’s failure to share maistrye (“Chaucer’s Franklin,” 370) and his far-too-rarely-remarked death threat (368); see also Gaylord, “Promises,” 343–44. Hamel, “Franklin’s Tale,” 326, observes that Arveragus’s early departure for Britain appears to value honour over “marital

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happiness.” Diamond, “Chaucer’s Women,” 80–81, argues that while Arveragus’s absence is typical “knightly” behavior, the tale’s teller glosses over what in many other romances becomes an “essential conflict between the roles of lover and knight” and thus inadvertently provides readers with grounds for disapproval of Arveragus. 8. For the Christian tradition of a ban on swearing, especially on using God’s name for the purpose, see again the Pardoner’s sermon, lines 633–47; as noted above, it begins with a reference to Jesus’ prohibition of swearing at Matthew 5:33–37. It is of course a fair question, in the oddly hybrid paganand-Christian world of the Franklin’s Tale, to what extent we should expect Dorigen to swear, or more generally act, according to Christian morality. Relevant approaches range from Sledd’s belief that the tale’s leading characters are Christian, to Hume’s assertion (“Pagan Setting”) that they are pagan, to Spearing’s suggestion that the entire universe portrayed here transforms, over the course of the story, from a pagan to a Christian one, with a critical moment falling at lines 1245–55 (see his introduction to the Franklin’s Tale, and also “Classical Antiquity,” 65–66). My observations do not depend on the resolution of the question; I mean only to point out that Chaucer could expect his audience to notice and disapprove of the fact that Dorigen does not abide by the well-known Christian cautions against, and strictures on, swearing. 9. For Dorigen’s histrionics more generally, see Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, 160–61 and 166–68, and the references there. Gaylord, “Promises,” remarks the excessive swearing of both lead characters (334, 338), though without noting the sharp contrast with the description of Dorigen’s speech as pleye. 10. For the length and suspicious counterproductivity of the second compleynt, see Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” 36b, 41b, 43b. Many other articles have probed the construction of the compleynt, and many of them find there reasons for suspicion of Dorigen’s character; for references, see the Riverside Chaucer, 900A (note to lines 1355–1456), and Edwards’s Sources and Analogues piece, esp. 216nn19, 20. 11. From On Precept and Dispensation, §32, a treatise on the meaning and proper handling of monastic vows, to be considered in some detail in ch. 6. The Latin reads: “Verumtamen nemo, si caute profitetur, pollicetur se ultra in nullo transegressurum, hoc est iam non peccaturum” (SBO 3:276). 12. The locus classicus for the supporters’ view is again Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion.” See the Riverside Chaucer, 897A (note to lines 792– 98), for a helpful list of more recent supporters and detractors of the wedding oaths in particular. 13. The Middle English Dictionary (ed. Kurath and Kuhn) gives this meaning of pacience as 2.b. (“sufferance, leave, permission”), while the most common modern meaning is 2.a. (“forbearance, moderation; self-restraint, calmness, equanimity”).

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14. The request for “playing along” is not made lightly; it is based in the accounts of interpretation found in the two modern theorists whose thought has most shaped this book, namely Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Peirce. Each teaches that “projections” or “hypotheses” like this one are an integral part of all acts of knowing; they must, of course, then be followed by a process of testing and likely revision like the one to follow here. Peirce in particular also advises of the need to weigh before the testing what sort of antecedent probability one’s hypotheses have; but this maneuver of introducing a very broad category of law scores high, in part because, as remarked already in the preface, the category is not an ad hoc invention, but has proven itself useful elsewhere. 15. See Mann, Feminizing, 88–90, for a related understanding of patience, though I want to stress more strongly than Mann does the opposition of patience to rigour and the resulting implication that the pacience in question has something very deliberate to do with law. For strong evidence of the high- and late-medieval currency of such antirigorist stances, see the consideration of relevant writings of Bernard of Clairvaux in ch. 6. See also Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, 157, which points out condemnations of rigor in Seneca’s De ira and in Robert Holcot’s commentary on the book of Wisdom— the former a text of which Chaucer has some knowledge, as he borrows from it (though perhaps indirectly) in the Summoner’s Tale, and the latter one that he may well have known at first hand, given especially his use of it in the Nun’s Priest’s. 16. Blamires (Chaucer, Ethics, 156) points out that the English word rigour occurs in Chaucer only in the Franklin’s Tale and appears to originate, for the language as a whole, there; the more usual word in Middle English would be reddour. One wonders whether the innovation might not have been sparked by Chaucer’s attention to ancient moral texts like Seneca’s that spoke of rigor—generally in order to condemn it. 17. Audience members who find their patience stretched have good reason for it: Saint Jerome, author of the antifeminist tract Adversus Jovinianum from which all the exempla in Dorigen’s complaint derive, already apologizes for going on at such length and with such multiplication of cases, remarking that he knows he has “included far more in this catalogue of women than the conventions of examples allow” (Hanna and Lawler, Jankyn’s Book, 1:175). It would have been hard for Chaucer to miss the apology, and it is thus all the more likely that the tedium of Dorigen’s presentation is deliberate. (Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” is among those remarking the tedium.) 18. Green, Crisis of Truth, 332. 19. One could object that her understanding is not really so different from her husband’s, in that suicide is merely a more dramatic way (than simple refusal) of breaking the promise to Aurelius, so that the essential choice re-

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mains one between keeping and breaking. But this chapter’s last section argues on logical grounds that these two ways of avoiding fulfillment should be thought of as distinct, in fact so distinct that only one of them can really be considered to break the promise. 20. Some critics have argued that Dorigen does consider the full slate of three options (one such is Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” 37b–38a). And it is true that she has heard from Aurelius mention of the possibility of breaking the oath, e.g., at lines 1320, 1331, 1335. But her mind does not seem to store the idea: her long monologue contains only two dim hints of the possibility, of which one is ambiguous. After the opening statement just quoted, Dorigen continues, “But natheless, yet have I levere to lese / My lif than of my body to have a shame, / Or knowe myselven fals, or lese my name” (1360–62). Sledd takes the last line to refer to simple refusal of the oath, after which Dorigen, ill advised as she seems to be on the standard canons governing the validity of oaths, might well think that she had been “false”; and she might reasonably fear that when others learned of that “falseness” she would “lose her name.” However, she uses the same phrase about fifty lines later to describe not the breaking of an oath but another instance of sexual dishonor: Lucretia killed herself because “hire thoughte it was a shame / To lyven whan she hadde lost hir name” (1407–8; though cf. Lucretia’s story in the Legend of Good Women, 1810–11). Moreover, Dorigen would be just as “false” in keeping her rash oath as in breaking it—indeed more so, because she would be violating her prior, and much more valid, wedding promise to Arveragus. Thus line 1362 may well not add anything beyond the mental and social consequences of the shame of body already mentioned in 1361; that is, the three phrases introduced by “than” may merely list three aspects of what it would mean to keep the rash vow. The second possible reference to a simple refusal comes in lines 1424–25: “I wol be trewe unto Arveragus,” Dorigen declares, “Or rather sleen myself in som manere.” The “or rather” suggests that these are two different possibilities, and thus that in line 1424 it has briefly occurred to Dorigen that she might remain trewe in some way other than by killing herself. But even if so, this is one passing line out of a hundred, and the possibility it names (if it does) is immediately replaced by the one Dorigen thinks she would “rather” pursue. It remains true that the choice overwhelmingly occupying her mind is that between suicide and adultery. 21. Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” has noted the mismatch. On the other hand the inappropriateness of the shorter exempla, remarked in print as long ago as 1937 (Dempster, “Chaucer at Work”), has perhaps been exaggerated. Take Bilyea, for example (line 1455): though her most memorable attribute is her forbearance to complain of her husband’s awful breath, Chaucer’s source Jerome also calls her “a woman so chaste that she was held up as an example” even in the allegedly pure world of preimperial Rome. Her story, like

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many of Dorigen’s closing exempla, concerns a woman’s lifelong faithfulness to a single man. See Hanna and Lawler, Jankyn’s Book, 1:172. 22. See Kent, “Reinventing Augustine’s Ethics,” 242–44; the piece includes a helpful discussion of the new way in which the book was used in the fourteenth century. 23. Most critics of the past century or so have believed that Chaucer did not in fact read Augustine’s work, but learned of its contents from some intermediate source, largely because his reference to Augustine’s “compassioun” for Lucretia has struck them as a reaction that no one who had actually read the text could have. Strong evidence to the contrary is available, however, both in the form of a plausible explanation of Chaucer’s remark and in that of peculiarities elsewhere in the “Legende of Lucrece” that point toward knowledge of Augustine’s original text. I lay out the evidence in a paper called “Chaucer’s Lucretia and What Augustine Really Said about Rape: Two Reconsiderations,” currently under review for publication. 24. No authoritative writer in the Latin tradition seems to have considered the question of suicide at comparable length for another three-quarters of a millennium—which fact could be either a cause or an effect of the intellectual dominance of Augustine’s treatment. See Murray, Suicide, 2:101–2. 25. For the conflict between the two church fathers, see P. G. Walsh’s introduction in Augustine, De bono coniugali, and Kelly, Jerome, 263–72. That Augustine’s treatment of Lucretia in the City of God may be meant to respond to Jerome’s has been suggested by Hanna and Lawler, Jankyn’s Book, 242. 26. De civitate dei 1.22. It should be said that some aspects of Augustine’s text also suggest that he may not have had Jerome’s in mind here, or not solely: notably he goes on, after the lines quoted, to observe that “they” (who hold suicide to be an option in some extreme cases) often cannot find many examples on their side other than Lucretia and Cato—whereas Jerome’s book has no shortage of examples and, being concerned only with the nobility of ancient women, does not mention Cato. Augustine could, of course, have been thinking at some level both of Jerome and of “pagan” opponents who would have invoked Cato eagerly. In any case his condemnation of proceeding by cases seems likely have had the same impact on any medieval readers of Jerome (and Chaucer) who knew it, whether or not the impact was intentional. I translate Augustine from Dombart and Kalb, eds.; the Latin reads: “Non modo quaerimus utrum sit factum, sed utrum fuerit faciendum. Sana quippe ratio etiam exemplis anteponenda est . . . quaelibet exempla opponant gentes, quae ignorant Deum, manifestum est hoc non licere colentibus unum verum Deum.” 27. The conflict also raises the question of how a medieval audience might have adjudicated a disagreement between two such weighty authorities.

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After all, as the late Middle Ages went on, Augustine seems increasingly to have yielded territory to Jerome, at least outside strictly academic contexts, in discussions about the position of greatest ancient theological authority (Hamm, “Hieronymus-Begeisterung,” 128–39); and there were some texts circulating from the early fourteenth century that depicted Jerome as the superior intellect whose soul, just after the saint’s death, visited the relatively ignorant Augustine to instruct him on points of doctrine (Rice, Saint Jerome, 51–55). As for Adversus Jovinianum in particular, parts of the treatise were widely known and influential in the period, having been reproduced in works of Abelard and John of Salisbury (Blamires, Woman Defamed, 64), and it was also quoted as an authority by such writers as Aquinas, William Peraldus, and Peter Lombard. Still, the large majority of these latter references involve questions of sexual morality (especially the superiority of virginity to the married state)—matters which are at the center of Jerome’s treatise, and on most of which Augustine and the general run of subsequent Christian writers were in agreement. It is doubtful whether the work would have been thought of as carrying equal weight on an entirely different question, the morality of suicide, on which it appeared to oppose not only the vehement teaching of Augustine but a very broad consensus that had formed in his wake (n. 24). It is also not immediately clear what the counsel of Adversus Jovinianum to Dorigen would actually be, nor what a member of Chaucer’s medieval audience would have understood it to be: the point of Jerome’s list of pagan exempla seems to be a general elevation of celibacy over marriage, and it need not follow that he believed that Christians living, as he would have seen it, under an entirely different dispensation should defend their chastity by the drastic means of some of his ancient case studies. A second case of a medieval authority in apparent dispute with Augustine’s position on suicide also turns out to be of dubious impact: this is a parenthetical remark in the Decretum Gratiani that it is not permitted for one under persecution to perish by his or her own hand “except when chastity is endangered” (absque eo ubi castitas periclitatur; pt. 2 c. 23 q. 5 ch. 11, PL 187:1221; noted in Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 253). But the entire “canon,” including the parenthetical remark, is a direct quotation from Jerome’s commentary on Jonah (at 1:12; ed. Duval, p. 210), which makes it less than clear how much weight Gratian wished to accord the exception: he does not delete it, but unless I am mistaken he also does not include any such exception when considering rape and suicide more directly (as opposed to killing in general, the topic here) elsewhere in the Decretum. At least one subsequent church council included hanging oneself and killing oneself with a sword as offenses for which a person should be denied burial, with no mention of any exceptions for circumstances (the 1284 council at Nîmes, for which see Mansi, Collectio 24:546B; this corrects the information in Stengel, Suicide, 70, relied on by Donaldson, Rapes, 30).

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28. “Probable neighbor” is said advisedly: we do not know for certain Chaucer’s intention for the relative position of the Franklin’s and Physician’s tales, or even whether he ever reached a definitive intention. However, most current theories follow Fragment V immediately with Fragment VI, thus preserving the connection between the two tales. One approach to the question is laid out well in Robert Pratt’s 1951 argument (“Order”) that there is no clear thematic link between them, nor any other strong positive reason for putting them together, but that Fragment VI should be placed after Fragment V because putting it anywhere else would interrupt some established connection. (Some later critics, however, do find deliberate thematic links: see for example Brown, “What Is Chaucer Doing,” 140–43; Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter”; Beidler, “Pairing”; and Crafton, “Physician’s Tale.”) A more positive reason for thinking of the two tales together is inconclusive in itself, but perhaps merits mention in company with others: the stories of Lucretia and that of Virginia were themselves closely linked in much medieval culture. The similarities between Livy’s versions of the two tales, to begin with, are such that at least one commentator suggests that much of the core of Virginia’s story is based on Lucretia’s (Ogilvie, Commentary, 477–78, as also noted in Donaldson, Rapes, 7n16). The two then appear back-to-back as exempla of chastity in Valerius Maximus, and therefore in Simon de Hesdin’s fourteenth-century “translation” thereof, which also includes much of Livy’s vastly longer versions of the stories—with the result that Simon’s version passes along most of Livy’s accounts of the two women in close juxtaposition, whereas in Livy himself they are separated by the distance of two “books.” Virginia’s tale follows immediately on Lucretia’s in Gower’s Confessio amantis (7.4753–5706) as well. Even with respect to Chaucer’s versions it has been suggested that the Physician’s Tale would fit better into the (likely contemporaneous) Legend of Good Women than into the Canterbury Tales, and it has been proposed that it may have first been written to accompany the Legend of Lucrece (see Chaucer, ed. Robinson, Works, 727). To be sure, the explicit mention of Lucretia is a passing moment in the Franklin’s Tale; but given how much more weight Chaucer places on Dorigen’s death-or-shame dilemma than do his sources, it is not unreasonable to think of the tale as deeply marked by Lucretia’s story; and such a marking would immediately link it with the Physician’s Tale. The arguments that follow here, in any case, are meant to lend weight to, without presupposing, the notion of a thematic connection between the two poems. 29. For example, Beidler, “Pairing,” 276; Faulkner, introduction to Twentieth-Century Interpretations, 5–6. 30. One could object that the two laws differ in a more fundamental way, as Aurelius’s has a conditional structure, while Apius’s is simply an outright order. But there are many precedents, some of them weighty with tradition, for understanding both types of law under a single category: not least the

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“covenants” made by YHWH in the Pentateuch, of which some (Genesis 15) are promises outright without any conditions while others (Deuteronomy 29– 30) impose a conditional or “if-then” structure on the world. Peirce (Reasoning, lecture 2) also groups the two types, by making the surprising claim that unconditional or categorical statements are a special case of hypothetical ones. Cf. also Green, Crisis of Truth, 305, for his discussion of “rash bargains” (like Dorigen’s) vis-à-vis rash promises proper, which are unconditional. 31. There may be other sources. The earliest known version of the story is in the third book of Livy’s History (Ab urbe condita), but it appears also (besides the Romance) in five fourteenth-century versions other than Chaucer’s: Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus; Gower’s Confessio amantis; Pierre Bersuire’s French translation, and an anonymous Italian translation, of Livy; and Simon de Hesdin’s French of Valerius Maximus (with Livy). Chaucer clearly worked primarily from Jean de Meun; though there have been arguments that he knew some of the other versions, the evidence is not extremely strong for Livy, and even slighter for the five more nearly contemporary versions. See discussion in Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” 21–22; the Riverside Chaucer, 901–2; and Shannon, “Physician’s Tale,” in the older Sources and Analogues, with rebuttal and further references in Bleeth, “Physician’s Tale,” in the newer (2:536). Bleeth’s article is also my source for the texts of Livy and Jean de Meun. 32. As elsewhere, my translations aim to be as literal as possible. I have benefited from several published translations, including Bleeth’s, in making them. 33. This sort of reaction may be familiar from a modern parallel, namely Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved; its protagonist Sethe, who has escaped slavery by fleeing north with her children, when on the point of recapture cuts the throat of her infant daughter so that the child will not have to return to a slave’s life. One might debate how strongly to condemn the infanticide, but at least for some readers the first reaction the story provokes is horror at the situation that leads to the characters’ actions rather than a moral judgment about the actions themselves. Likewise in de Meun’s version of this story—but not, for reasons to follow, in Chaucer’s. 34. The associations explored in ch. 1 of Walter’s and Griselda’s mindset with Stoicism, or at least with the negative stereotype thereof propounded by some unimpressed medieval Christians, have also been extended to Virginius: see the remark that in Chaucer’s version he “seems almost a parody of the stoical Roman hero” (Brown, “What Is Chaucer Doing,” 139). 35. With respect to the effect of Virginia’s absence and her father’s consequent leisure to contemplate his action, it is interesting to compare Charnes, “‘Werk Unresonable,’” 301, and Rosenberg, “Bari Widow,” 351, on Chaucer’s parallel gift of time to the characters in the Franklin’s Tale. Charnes, however, finds that the delay there “gives rise to . . . the expectation that [violence] will

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occur,” whereas I am arguing that in the Physician’s Tale it gives the audience reason to consider that it should not have—a suggestion made earlier in Brown, “What Is Chaucer Doing,” 138. 36. Among critics suggesting that the protagonists have other options, Farber, “Creation of Consent,” makes the strongest statement I have seen: “The choice Virginius presents to his daughter is blatantly false” (158–59). This thoughtful article, which makes more than I do here of the difference between Virginius’s thought processes and those of his daughter, also helpfully emphasizes the father’s “asshen” face (209) and transpierced heart (211)— thus making clear that whatever we may think about Virginius and his deliberations, they are not prosecuted with the pure and dispassionate calculation of a machine. To my mind, however, that fact only increases the censure we are likely to feel for his faulty thinking: granted that he is not indifferent to his daughter’s fate, but genuinely feels himself to be facing the worst horror he can imagine, and even so cannot bring to mind the other courses of action that Chaucer’s changes to the story have pushed into the reader’s sphere of attention, something is seriously askew. 37. Brown, “What Is Chaucer Doing,” 133, 135, notes the implications of Virginius’s strong popular support in Chaucer, as does, in passing, Barney, “Evaluation,” 85. These Chaucerian innovations, for what it is worth, appear even more drastic if the basis for comparison is Livy’s version of the story. There “Verginius” at the climactic scene is still weaker than in Jean de Meun: he is unarmed, and must seize a butcher’s knife to do his desperate deed, whereas Appius has provided himself with, besides the “lictor” attached to his office, a group of armed men who quickly cow Verginius’s friends by explicit threat of violence. In Livy as in Jean de Meun, it is abundantly clear that the protagonists really do face a tragic choice between two abhorrent options. 38. Among the results is the proposal that the reference actually requires no explanation, being just one of many late-medieval examples of an untroubled jumbling of pagan and Christian sources (Pratt, “Chaucer and Les Cronicles”)—but the length and climactic position of the allusion to Jephtha, along with other factors to be noted shortly, make a stronger explanation desirable. Another candidate arises from the useful scan of the history of Christian exegesis of Jephtha’s story in Thompson, Reading, which notes that Jephtha’s daughter “figures as an exemplar in many patristic and medieval treatises that commend virginity and the consecrated life” (236n4). She is appropriate to Chaucer’s Virginia at least that far, but what follows in the main text here will suggest that Chaucer had in mind a more precise parallel between the stories. It should be noted that the tale’s “paganness” applies to its overt setting only, not to its sources, many of which have long since been located in Christian writers. (See the extensive list in Bleeth, “Physician’s Tale,” esp. 537–39.)

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39. The Vulgate (with my punctuation added for clarity) reads: “Votum vovit Domino, dicens, si tradideris filios Ammon in manus meas, quicumque primus fuerit egressus de foribus domus meae mihique occurrerit revertenti cum pace a filiis Ammon, eum holocaustum offeram Domino.” 40. “[Qua visa,] scidit vestamenta sua et ait, heu, filia mi, decepisti me et ipsa decepta es; aperui enim os meum ad Dominum et aliud facere non potero. Cui illa respondit, pater mi, si aperuisti os tuum ad Dominum, fac mihi quodcumque pollicitus es, concessa tibi ultione atque victoria de hostibus tuis.” 41. I am indebted to Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” 24, for the importance of line 6. In Livy, Virginia is said to be her father’s only daughter (3.45; in Bleeth, “Physician’s Tale,” 342–43), and that fact has sometimes been taken as evidence that Chaucer drew on Livy directly as well as on Jean de Meun. But Chaucer’s statement is much closer to that in the book of Judges: in Livy the news, besides not excluding the possibility that Virginia has brothers, is reported in two words (unica filia) that seem in no way related to Chaucer’s phrasing, and by a character, and in a part of the story, that both Chaucer and Jean de Meun omit entirely. 42. Thomas’s comment appears in a discussion of swearing at Summa theologica II-II.88.2ad2: “In vovendo fuit stultus, quia discretionem non habuit, et in reddendo impius.” The actual source seems to be not Jerome but a pithy condemnation in Peter Comestor’s influential Historia scholastica: “Fuit ergo in vovendo stultus, et in solvendo impius” (PL 198:1824). The Comestor is in turn reasoning from unfavorable remarks of Josephus, discussed shortly in the main text. In adding the explanatory phrase about discretio, Thomas is not being idiosyncratic; it was a much-discussed term, associated with accurate perception and the ability to make fine distinctions, and was often held the prime requisite for a good judge (as in the definition of iudicare in Pierre Bersuire’s Repertorium morale, helpfully excerpted in Allen and Moritz, Distinction, 158–59). Thus the failure of the “judge” Jephtha to show discretio is particularly dismaying. Allen and Moritz suggest (161) that Chaucer’s invocation of the story may be meant to draw attention to judge Apius’s own lack of discretio, not to mention Virginius’s similar lack. 43. The case is, to be sure, complicated by several other factors. In the Hebrew, it seems, the pronouns are ambiguous and thus more in line with what is expected of a rash-oath story; thus the Anchor Bible (which also provides a helpful discussion of the pronouns in its commentary; see Boling, trans., ad loc.) translates: “Anything coming out of the doors of my house to meet me . . . I will offer it up.” A lengthy treatment of the story in Augustine’s Questions on the Heptateuch also asserts that Jephtha intended a human sacrifice, and follows with the especially dismaying suggestion that he may have had a specific human in mind, namely his wife (7.49.6; ed. Zycha, pp. 498– 500, or see the French translation by Péronne et al., “Fin des Questions sur

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l’heptateuque,” 91). The idea was known to the later Middle Ages (e.g., to Hugh of St. Cher, for whom see Allen and Moritz, Distinction, 174n49), but it does not seem to have been widely influential. Finally, it is worth observing that Latin commentators may have sometimes reported the story in such a way as to restore the ambiguity about the victim: thus the Patrologia Latina has Rabanus Maurus assert that Jephtha swore to sacrifice quidquid, “whatever,” first ran out to him (108:1177). On the other hand it is questionable whether all such restorations actually occur in their putative sources; Augustine’s contemporary bishop Quodvultdeus is also reproduced in PL 51:789 (grouped with Prosper of Aquitaine) as using quidquid, while a later critical edition gives quicquid, “whoever,” with no variants (Quodvultdeus, Opera Quodvultdeo, ed. Braun, 106). 44. See Rabanus Maurus’s commentary on Judges, §2.15 (PL 108:1177– 90), for forceful and apposite arguments to this point—apposite because they begin from the Jephtha story. He also takes up, as such discussions must, the story of Genesis 22 in which God commands the (near-) sacrifice of Isaac; he answers the apparent conflict both by reference to Abraham’s receipt of a direct command from God (whereas Jephtha, as far as one can tell from the text, is merely following a general rule in favor of honoring one’s vows) and by arguing, as many other commentators do also, that the Genesis 22 story itself speaks against human sacrifice by interrupting the planned killing and substituting a ram (col. 1080). 45. The few positive or neutral treatments of the literal sense of the text I have encountered either appear in deployments of the story for a highly specific and unusual purpose (as in Gower, and as in Rabanus Maurus’s “Book on the Oblation of Children,” PL 107:425–27); or were simply without much direct influence in Latin Christianity (like Origen’s Commentary on the Gospel of John, 6.36, where the assessment is somewhere between neutral and positive, ultimately accepting the course of events while explicitly protesting against something that makes God look so cruel: see Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 10, ed. Menzies, 377–78); or are contradicted by the same author in other works (like Rabanus on oblation again, since his above-mentioned Judges commentary takes a more usual line, and like Augustine’s cautious treatment in the City of God). Augustine’s was, as far as I have discovered, the most influential noncondemnatory treatment of the literal sense: he suggests, in the same discussion of suicide and sexual dishonor in which Lucretia appears, that Jephtha may have acted as he did by reason of a special divine command (City of God 1.21)—though he does not there decide the question, but merely says that it “is justly asked.” Six years later he seems to have decided the issue negatively, for his treatment in the Heptateuch commentary mentioned in n. 43 flatly asserts that Jephtha was given no such injunction (7.49.4–5). But the City of God was (and is) read much more widely than the later work, and its

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suggestion had some impact (noted by Thompson, Reading, 38): it is likely at the root of, among other sequelae, Peter Comestor’s remark that “some, in excusing [Jephtha], say that he did this by the familiar counsel of the Holy Spirit” (Historia scholastica, Judges, 12, PL 198:1284). No one, however, seems to have moved beyond Augustine’s cautious suggestion to assert definitively that Jephtha did hear a divine command, and the mere possibility of secret orders from above does not appear to have generated much resistance against the largely unified tide of disapproval. 46. Some have proposed to give positive evidence that the tale, or Chaucer, intends Virginia’s request for death to be taken with straightforward moral approbation, with virgin-martyr stories advanced as a likely precedent; see Tupper, “Bed’s Head,” 7, and Robinson’s note to the Physician’s Tale, lines 41ff. (Chaucer, Works, 727). But the most concrete such suggestion that I have seen—Tupper’s idea that Virginia’s death scene calls to mind a passage on St. Pelagia in Ambrose’s De virginibus, 3.7.33—seems to me far-fetched, the connections it proposes between the two texts quite dubious. 47. See Crafton, “Physician’s Tale,” 10–11, which gives examples of that reaction in sermons and vice-virtue handbooks. 48. Among works arguing that Chaucer generally speaks against oaths, I am thinking first of Strohm, Social Chaucer—though the portrait there is nuanced, suggesting a middle-class poet nostalgic for a golden age when the human world could proceed by reliance on oaths and vows, but extremely skeptical about the usefulness of such things in the ungolden fourteenth century. On the opposite extreme is, for example, White, “Chaucer or the Critics,” which suggests a poet enthusiastically in favor of nearly every oath or vow he meets. Green, Crisis of Truth, does not go nearly that far, but it does push its readers back (relative to Strohm’s position) toward believing that Chaucer can, in his apparent praise of oath-making, sometimes be taken at his word. 49. We would do well to remember that, as many critics have observed, the protasis A really is not fulfilled, in that the rocks’ disappearance was not accomplished by Aurelius except indirectly, was nowise accomplished stoon by stoon, and in any event seems to be illusory rather than real. (See, e.g., Gaylord, “Promises,” 348–49. The last point is yet one more Chaucerian innovation that weighs in on the side of a Dorigen who is under no obligation whatever: in Boccaccio’s two tales, though the suitor similarly uses magic to fulfill the heroine’s impossible condition, what results seems to be a real January garden, with edible fruits and pickable flowers.) The logical analysis that follows is nonetheless fruitful, since the central characters in the tale apparently do not notice that A is not really A. 50. ST II-II.88–89. The quoted passage, from 88.9.ad 2, reads: “[Dicendum quod] vota eorum qui sunt in potestate aliorum habent conditionem implicitam, scilicet si non revocentur a superiori.”

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51. I say an oath because, as n. 20 suggests, the “loss of name” may refer to a contemplated infraction of her wedding oaths rather than of her oath to Aurelius. But the point about the logical status of Dorigen’s three options holds whether she has in mind the former or the latter or both. 52. The fact that the two tales share a false dilemma between shame and death has been previously remarked by several articles, notably Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” and Crafton, “Physician’s Tale,” though they draw rather different conclusions. 53. It may be useful to pause and notice how widely the readings here differ from the thoughtful reactions to the Clerk’s and Franklin’s tales in the conclusion to John Burrow’s Reading of Sir Gawain. There the idea is that both Chaucer’s poems and those of the Pearl poet fall under the general type of stories of testing—a genre that also includes, among many celebrated examples, the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. For Burrow, each tale subjects its hero to a conflict between a greater virtue, which will eventually win out, and a lesser one; and if the great late-medieval poets deliberately weaken the claims of the greater virtue (trouthe, in all the cases considered here)—by making Gawain’s oath merely part of a Christmas entertainment, or by making Dorigen’s happen in pleye—that merely increases our wonder at the strength of the hero or heroine who holds fast to the better choice even in its reduced circumstances. But the present chapter aims to show that Chaucer piles on such an overwhelming number of weakening factors—the discourse against rigour at the tale’s beginning; the blasphemous swearing of the oath; its clear violation of canonical requirements for validity; the fact that its protasis is not really fulfilled; the fact that Dorigen never checks to see whether it is fulfilled; her reliance on a tedious recitation of cases, including some dubious ones condemned by acknowledged authorities, at the point of decision; the poem’s close structural parallels with the Physician’s Tale, where the error of excessive troth-keeping is easier to see; the latter’s invocation of the Jephtha story, the era’s standard exemplum for demonstrating that troth-breaking is sometimes the right moral choice; and perhaps even the opinions of Dame Prudence in the Tale of Melibee that likewise disparage a policy of rigorist adherence to oaths—that Burrow’s reading cannot credibly apply to the Franklin’s Tale. Ch. 1 could be taken as making a parallel case for the Clerk’s. 54. Students of the medieval “problem of universals” will have noted the quiet arrival of a position on that question in the discussion above. That is, not everyone will agree that a law really is something more than a convenient shorthand for the collection of cases that it governs: to say so is to take a “realist” rather than a “nominalist” position about laws. And (if a broad-brushed statement may be forgiven) the dominant directions in Western thought across what we might call “high modernity,” certainly from the seventeenth

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through the early nineteenth centuries—and with only a few exceptions during the two hundred years that have followed—have favored nominalism to such a degree as to render a thoroughly realist position almost unthinkable for most people. That at least is the assessment of Charles Peirce, who put the retrieval of a realist position, accomplished with much help from premodern thinkers and from John Duns Scotus in particular, at the center of his philosophy; on Peirce’s account, contrary to the assumptions of his age, realism is not only indicated as the superior position by logical and metaphysical considerations but illustrated by facts that the empirical sciences can observe. The claim is worth attending to: if he is correct, readers of our time, when we look back at texts from the fourteenth century, are looking out of and across a nominalist watershed to a time when realism was at very least an equally available option, and was in most circles probably the dominant option. In that case it may be appropriate to borrow, here and there, bits of realism like the above lending of credence to the notion that a law can possess some reality that is not reducible to the list of cases it governs. Readers who feel suspicious of such a borrowing are entreated to allow it (since there is no space in a book like this one to argue for ontological realism) as a hypothesis for exploration, one whose provisional adoption, like the cold water of the Sowdanesse’s baptism, “shal nat greve us but a lite.” Perhaps the fruit that such borrowings bear will give skeptics reason to begin to take greater interest in realism; at very least the exercise may begin to open us to ways of thinking that we might otherwise have overlooked, and that are on the average more likely sympathetic with what was available in late-fourteenth-century England than our native assumptions are. For the persistence of realism as a live option across the fourteenth century and beyond, Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, is useful in documenting the slowness with which Ockham’s philosophy, a primary source of nominalist thinking, took root. For Peirce on nominalism and modernity, see Collected Papers 1:5–27, or, for the stout of heart, his early Scotistic review of a contemporary book on George Berkeley (CP 8:7–38). Peirce’s realist ideas about law in particular are relevant to anyone who finds the engagement with law in the present book worthwhile; an excellent starting place is Pragmatism, ed. Turrisi, 189–95 (also available somewhat less completely as CP 5:93–107). Since Peirce takes the notion of “continuity” as the most fundamental way of getting at the generality (or “thirdness” or “representation”) that is of the essence of laws, further pursuit might involve a reading of the selections on continuity at CP 6:164–84 and 6:185–213 (the latter restored to its original context in Reasoning, ed. Ketner, 247–68), as well as a canvassing of the Collected Papers’ many index entries on “law,” privileging later writings over earlier. The distinction in this “Reprise” between the consequences of a law and the phenomenon of consequence itself has a parallel in Peirce’s remarks on the class

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of signs he calls “arguments”; for some challenging originals, see CP 1:462–67 (early in his authorship) and 4:572 (late). 55. One approach to the “mysterious factor”—sympathetic in some points though not identical to the one here—is the book-length engagement with the question of intention in Myles, Chaucerian Realism. It should be noted, however, that Myles deliberately uses the term realism to cover a much broader range of meanings than the one it has in the question of universals.

s i x . Bernard, Chaucer, and Life with the Law 1. Merton, Rule of St. Benedict, 6. 2. Guardini, Der Herr, 92, my trans. 3. Bouyer, Cistercian Heritage, 199–200. 4. For previous comment touching on Bernard’s nuanced relationship to rules, see for example Auberger, L’Unanimité, 297–98, though that account seems to me at some risk of suggesting too rigorist a picture of the background Cistercian thought against which Bernard stands out. Giorgio Agamben briefly treats Bernard’s stance in the course of a more general argument (Highest Poverty, 54–56, discussed later in this chapter). The introduction to Le précepte et la dispense, ed. Callerot et al., also discusses the relevant issues. 5. The use of the treatise as a commentary on the Rule has been widely remarked; see, for example, Leclercq, introduction to On Precept and Dispensation, 98n68, and the further references there. Nearly all commentators have accepted the claim that Precept and Dispensation began as a letter as historically true; see, however, Winkler, “Einleitung,” 328–29, for the observation that Bernard’s omission from the text of the concrete details that one might expect in a letter, if it does not mark the occasion for the piece as fictional, at least suggests that he intended it to have more universal applicability than a letter ordinarily would. 6. A survey of the roughly two dozen multitreatise manuscripts of Bernard that survive from twelfth- and thirteenth-century England shows Precept and Dispensation appearing more often than any other treatise but one, the Apology, which outranks it by only a single instance; and in this set of texts Precept appears twice as often as either On Loving God or Grace and Free Choice (Holdsworth, “Reception,” 170–71). The comparisons made here, however, only include Bernard’s dogmatic treatises; not surprisingly, his set of sermons on the Song of Songs far outranks any of them, with 111 European manuscripts from the early period, as do some short letters that appear in up to 148. (See Bertrand and Lobrichon, “Introduction,” 27–28, which is also the source for the figures in the main text.)

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7. For more on the circulation of Precept and Dispensation, see Leclercq, Bernard, 103; Callerot et al., introduction to Le précepte et la dispense, 30–31 (one source for the reference to Gerson); and the account of the fifty-seven early manuscripts in Leclercq’s introduction to the treatise in Sancti Bernardi opera, 3:244. The English rendition is incorporated into Richard Whytford (or Whitford), The Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection, a work structured around the three monastic ideals of obedience, poverty and chastity; Whytford includes the whole of Bernard’s work at the end of the section on obedience. For the roll call, see Leclercq, “L’obéissance,” 299–300; Winkler, “Einleitung,” 341; and Callerot et al., 31. 8. See Callerot et al., introduction to Le précepte et la dispense, 31–43, for a brief but effective introduction to the Prologue and its influence, including on the three authors just named; pages 40–47 lay out a convincing case for Bernard’s direct and extensive use of the treatise. There is also useful information in the Prologue’s two modern editions, by Werkmeister and Brasington; in Sprandel’s monograph Ivo von Chartres; in Munier, “Yves de Chartres”; and in J. de Ghellinck, Mouvement, e.g., 445–59, 488–89. Werkmeister’s introduction to the Prologue (23, 41–42) notes that the work’s influence on Gratian may have been only through another influential work, the Book of Mercy and Justice of Alger of Liège, even though another work of Ivo’s (one of the two collections of canons mentioned later in this paragraph in the main text) was clearly a direct and important source for the Decretals. 9. See, e.g., Haskins, Renaissance, ch. 7; similarly Callerot et al., introduction to Le précepte et la dispense, 32–33; and with more detail, a scope that encompasses what we would now consider several different fields, and an ambition to trace the drive for conciliation of the disparate back to the Carolingian period, J. de Ghellinck, Mouvement, 60–65. Finally, Werkmeister’s introduction to the Prologue makes brief but thoughtful connections to the practical desire to avoid schism (42–44). 10. See Winkler’s idea about the treatise’s universal applicability in n. 5. Winkler goes on, drawing only on Bernard’s own tone and not on any connections with Ivo, to observe that Bernard “certainly wants to raise his statements above the questions of everyday life to the higher plane of general validity” (“Einleitung,” 328, my trans.), and closes his comments by declaring that in Precept and Dispensation Bernard has created not merely a work about monasticism but “beginnings for a general account of the grounding of norms” (341). This feature of the treatise seems to me quite in line with much of Bernard’s writing, which often shows a certain facility with generality, a love of finding the same shape present in different material contexts. 11. For example, at DPD 12.29; see also the discussion of dispensation that reaches from DPD 2.4 to 3.8. While such moments stop short of demonstrating that the work has the very general, even speculative, scope that Win-

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kler claims for it, they at least give the idea some concrete support, as they show Bernard applying the same general principles in what might seem to us very different circumstances. 12. Ivo of Chartres, Prologue, §51; ed. Werkmeister, 126. 13. Ivo’s Latin (with the letters u and v differentiated) reads: “Nec tantum hoc in ecclesiasticis observandum est regulis, sed etiam in ipsis legibus.” The principle in question concerns limits on the validity of “dispensations” made for special cases, on which more follows in the main text. In line with this sense of general applicability, one commentator remarks that the Prologue “proposes a general theory of law and dispensation” (Munier, “Yves de Chartres,” 1555), though the further source he mentions (J. de Ghellinck, Mouvement) does not say anything as bold, at least in the place indicated (488–89). 14. Merton, “Renewal and Discipline,” in Contemplation in a World of Action, 113. 15. For more on the meanings of dispensatio, see Callerot et al., introduction to Le précepte et la dispense, 36–39, 45, 60; and Leclercq, “L’obéissance,” 299 (translated as Leclercq, introduction to On Precept and Dispensation, 94–96). One important aspect of the word’s history is that the Vulgate uses dispensator to translate the Greek οικονομος (oikonomos), “steward” or “house manager,” as it appears in Luke 12:42 and 1 Corinthians 4:1–2; those instances fit primarily with the older and more general meaning of dispensatio. For an in-depth study of the Latin word and the concept, see Brys, Dispensatione, which returns to the question of the term’s definition many times, generally as it begins to consider each new period. 16. The Latin reads: “utrum . . . cuncta quae continet putanda sint esse praecepta, consequenter et damnosa transgredienti, an consilia tantum vel monita.” In this chapter the references to Precept and Dispensation are so numerous that I will generally dispense with the page numbers in Sancti Bernardi opera; the section numbers should make location easy. 17. The first phrase is oboedientia sine mora (5.1); the injunction reads: “Mox aliquid imperatum a maiore fuerit ac si divinitus imperetur” (5.4). 18. “Grave offense” renders crimen, a frequent word, when degrees of sin are being compared, for the more serious kind; see also n. 31. The Latin of the last two quotations reads: (1) “tam multis ac minutis, quae passim vel a negligentibus praepositis imperantur”; (2) “Quod ergo iam monacho poterit veniale peccatum esse vel leve, cuius universae actioni crimen insidiatur inoboedientiae?” 19. “illa eo securior quo arctior, eo certior quo magis ardua veniendi ad Deum via.” 20. See Leclercq, introduction to On Precept and Dispensation, 75–81. About a second concrete context there is no doubt: Precept and Dispensation partakes strongly of the ongoing controversies between the Benedictine

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monasteries of the family of Cluny and those of Bernard’s order, the recently created Cistercians. The latter was, of course, created largely as an attempt to return to an “integral” observance of the Benedictine Rule, in the hope of finding something there that the Cluniac monasteries, with their more selective or flexible (the choice of adjectives might indicate on which side one’s sympathies lie) adherence to the Rule, had lost. Bernard’s interlocutors— members of a Benedictine monastery—clearly had some related concerns: they had sworn to live according to the Rule but were living in a place where portions of the Rule were simply not kept. Were they thus perjuring themselves and in danger of damnation? The question is unmistakably in the background of Bernard’s treatise, especially the late sections (14.44–16.50) concerned with the possibility of a monk’s effecting a transitus or change of monastery; but most of the ideas relevant to the present discussion are better extracted from its earlier treatments of general questions about the interpretation of the Rule. For information on Cluny and the early Cistercian order in relation to Bernard’s treatise, I have found the following especially worthwhile: Jacqueline, Episcopat, 41–59; Leclercq, “L’obéissance”; and, with some reservations, Stevens, “Rectitudo.” A helpful introduction to the birth of the Cistercian order, with emphases that seem to me corrective of some of the readings in Stevens, appears in Merton, Silent Life, part 2, ch. 3. 21. It is also true that the published English translation, while helpful for an initial overview (I would never have discovered the treatise without it), is frequently so inexact with respect to details that it will lead readers to miss much of what the work contains. Readers in need of precision would thus do well to work from the Latin or from the modern French and German translations. 22. The inner quotation is from 1 Corinthians 4:1. In citing this passage Bernard slides (as do virtually all other medieval citations of it that I have seen) between the older and newer meanings of the word; Paul clearly intends the more general meaning, “someone who weighs something out” or “is in charge of something,” but Bernard takes his comments to apply to dispensatio in the newer, more restricted sense (the waiving of a regulation). He goes on to remark, still following Paul, that a “dispensor” should also be fidelis, faithful or trustworthy, and comments that perhaps the subject on whose behalf the dispensation is being made should be likewise, but he does not develop those suggestions. The Latin reads: “Non omnibus in huiuscemode creditus est dispensatio, nisi his dumtaxat qui cum Apostolis dicere possunt: Sic nos existimet homo ut ministros Christi et dispensatores mysteriorum Dei.” 23. “Hinc est quod idem Legislator in his quae abbati dispensanda reliquit, caute nusquam, ut memini, voluntatem, sed aut considerationem, aut dispositionem, aut providentiam, aut certe arbitrium seu aliquid huiusmodi ponit,

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volens nimirum providum fidumque dispensatorem, rationis, ubi forte dispensat, sequi iudicium, non suae placitum voluntatis.” The phrase quoted shortly before is from the same section, and reads: “[abbas] cui semel et ipse spontanea se professione submisit . . .” 24. What Bernard adds to Ivo in this regard seems to be only the idea that charity also counts as a “rule,” and indeed is “God’s rule”; but Ivo comes close, by quoting Paul’s “love is the fullness of the law” (Romans 13:10, quoted in Prologue 52, p. 128; cf. §4, p. 66; on necessity, see §44, p. 118). Besides the dependence on Ivo of this picture of the relations between a law and its overseer, two further connections to the surrounding culture are worth noting. The first is that relations between abbot and Rule were very much at issue in Cistercian-Cluniac discussions. The Cluniacs gave more scope to the local abbot to interpret the Rule or to leave parts of it aside; the Cistercians attempted the challenging task of removing that abbatial power over the Rule, thus reasserting the authority of the Rule over both abbot and monk, while still avoiding legal rigorism. (On this see again the works on Cluny and Cîteaux named in n. 20, especially Jacqueline.) The second point is that something rather like the Cistercian approach to the Rule seems to have had wide currency in medieval thinking about civil law in general—a major theme of Kern, Kingship and Law. Thus the medieval king was, at least in theory, subject to the same law that bound the people, even to the extent that a king who violated his obligations under the law thereby deposed himself from kingship. 25. Bernard’s category words are stabilis, inviolabilis, and incommutabilis, the last of which he describes as “quod divina . . . constat et aeterna ratione firmatum.” His sentence describing it reads: “Sub hoc genere est omnis illa sermonis Dominici in monte habiti spiritualis traditio, et quidquid de dilectione, humilitate, mansuetudine ceterisque virtutibus, tam in Novo quam in Veteri Testamento spiritualiter observandum contraditur.” 26. The quoted phrases and sentences, from DPD 2.4 and 2.5, in order of quotation: “expediret . . . ad lucrum vel custodiam caritatis”; “authentici canones”; “alia ecclesiastica instituta dignae auctoritatis”; “Quamdiu ergo caritati militant, immobiliter fixa sunt, mutarique omnino, na ab ipsis quidem praepositis, sine offensa possunt”; “si . . . contraria forte aliquando caritate visa fuerint . . . nonne iustissimum esse liquet, ut quae pro caritate inventa fuerunt, pro caritate quoque, ubi expedire videbitur, vel omittantur, vel intermittantur, vel in aliud forte commodious demutentur?” 27. The determination of exactly what counts as having a merely human origin is not transparently easy, however. Direct utterances of Jesus and by God or YHWH, as reported in scripture, presumably all count as divine, but it is by no means the case that everything in scripture qualifies: for example, Paul’s decrees (1 Timothy 3:6 in particular) about the requirements for the

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Notes to Pages 260–261

office of bishop had been understood at least since Augustine, and are declared by Ivo, to be man-made arrangements that can be dispensed at need. 28. “. . . ubi tamen Deo contraria non praecipit homo. Quod si contigerit, pergendum indubitanter consulo in Petri sententiam, quia oboedire oportet Deo magis quam hominibus.” The reference is to Acts 5:29. 29. §12.29 speaks of extending divine authority to a human command only when it is a “mandatum quod . . . justitiae non repugnet.” Bernard seems to think there is a balance to be struck, for an earlier passage (6.12) speaks regretfully of monks who receive every order with skepticism and analysis rather than being ready to do everything enjoined upon them; but his letter to the monk Adam (on which see the following note) makes it clear that “everything” does not include what is unjust or uncharitable, and that monks are expected to think about the orders they receive at least enough to determine that they avoid those categories. 30. Bernard is, as so often, in agreement with a broader tradition in rendering this judgment: see, e.g., the aforementioned Book of Mercy and Justice of Alger of Liège, an influential collection of “canons,” of which the abbey at Clairvaux owned a copy, that quotes Ambrose as saying “it is not always evil not to obey a precept. . . . If the precept is unjust [improbum], it is proper [utilis] not to obey” (1.32; ed. Kretzschmar, 201). A letter of Bernard’s, written to a monk named Adam who had left his monastery for a newly founded one in a way that (at least according to Bernard) broke Benedict’s Rule and uncharitably scandalized his fellow monks, gives a view of the principle in action. Adam apparently pleaded, or at least Bernard imagined that he might plead, that his abbot had commanded him to make the change: Bernard rejects that defense, saying that “one should not comply with those ordering evil things, especially when, going along with crooked orders in which you seem to be obedient to a human being, you plainly exhibit disobedience to God. . . . To do evil, no matter who may order it, is not obedience but rather disobedience.” The case demonstrates again that for the Cistercians the abbot’s will is bounded by charity and by the Rule and that obedience is owed fundamentally to God (through the Rule) and only secondarily to the abbot, whose role is to help monks obey God through the Rule. See further Jean Leclercq’s observation that for Bernard there are circumstances in which a “refusal of submission would . . . be a form of obedience” (“L’obéissance,” 292–93, my trans.; the translation of the surrounding passage in the introduction to the Cistercian Fathers On Precept and Dispensation, 90–91, is misleading at one point). For Bernard’s letter, see SBO 7.33, letter 7, §3; or a translation in Bernard, Letters, at 27–28 (letter 8). For the presence of Alger’s book at Clairvaux, see Jacqueline, Episcopat, 56. 31. The distinction between transgression and prevarication appears to align with several other distinctions in the treatise that will be in play shortly:

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between peccatum (sin) and crimen (grave offense), between neglecting a rule and “contemning” it, between mere disobedience-in-fact and a deliberate, premeditated refusal to obey. The degree to which these four distinctions fit the latterly better-known one between “venial” and “mortal” sin is unclear, because that last distinction is barely mentioned in the treatise. My sense is that it is related to but not identical with the other four, and that a crimen is something like a potentially mortal sin, a sin serious enough to be mortal if other conditions are also met; if so, it follows that the categories “mortal” and “venial” do not, for Bernard, exhaust the possible types of sin. For the sole exception I have found to the rule that Bernard uses forms of praevaricor for serious infractions and transgredior for unspecified or light ones, see 12.29: there praevaricatio is used in the course of discussing a lesser offense, perhaps because the reference is to the offense that a disobedient act gives to God, rather than to the human lawgiver. 32. “Haec [sc., obedientia] ergo quoties interrumpitur, inobedientia dicitur, et peccatum, et transgression seu praevaricatio. Sed interest sane qua causa, quo affect, qua intentione, quo praecipiente, in quove praecepto malum hoc commitatur.” 33. The sentence in question reads: “Sive enim Deus, sive homo, vicarious Dei, mandatum quodcumque tradiderit, pari profecto obsequendum est cura, pari reverentia deferendum, ubi tamen Deo contraria non praecipit homo.” 34. “Gravior . . . offensa” (7.13); “si tantum ex [professione] hominibus, quantum Deo oboedientiae deberi asserimus” (13.34—the point in context being clearly that Bernard does assert just that). 35. That explanation chimes well with the kind of external support Bernard offers for refusing the monks’ proposal. He draws at one point (DPD 9.21) on the same passage from Benedict’s Rule quoted near the beginning of this section, which says that for a monk practicing “obedience without delay,” “something commanded by a superior should be as soon as if it had been commanded divinely” (Rule 5.4, emphasis added). He also quotes Jesus’ injunction to “do what they [i.e., the scribes and Pharisees, taken by Bernard as the “prelates” of their day] tell you” (Matthew 23:3), and from it infers a second way in which human commandments borrow divine weight: after such an utterance, he reasons, anyone who breaks the command of a duly constituted human authority is ipso facto breaking the divine command of Jesus (DPD 13.32). 36. The three scriptural passages just quoted: “primum ex maximum mandatum” (Matthew 22:38); “unum de his minimis meis mandatis” (Bernard’s paraphrase of Matthew 5:19); “[ego autem dico vobis quia] omnis qui irascitur fratri suo reus erit iudicio qui autem dixerit fratri suo racha reus erit concilio qui autem dixerit fatue reus erit gehennae ignis” (Matthew 5:22).

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37. The first passage reads: “. . . quale, quaeso, illud diffiniemus esse crimen, quod, Veritate iudice, reum tantum facit iudicio?” The second: “En unum inventum est monacho leve ac veniale peccatum, quodque non humani, sed divini mandati statuat transgressorem.” 38. “Peccata quippe sunt, et Deus prohibet omne peccatum; et tamen venialia, non criminalia reputantur, excepto cum per contemptum vertuntur in usum et consuetudinem, et tunc non peccati species, sed peccantis intentio pensatur.” 39. Contemptus is a major theme of the treatise and the major factor considered under the heading of intention: see especially the individual references to it in §§7.14, 7.16, 8.17, and 8.18, besides those noted explicitly here. The quotation reads: “Si iubente seniore ut sileam, verbum mihi forte per oblivionem elabitur, reum me fateor inoboedientiae, sed venialiter. Si ex contemptu, sciens et deliberans, sponte in verba prorupero et rupero silentii legem, praevaricationem me constituo, et criminaliter; et si impaenitens persevero usque ad mortem, peccavi, et damnabiliter.” 40. The opening reference is to 1 Samuel 15:23. The verb in the phrase translated “to will not to obey” is nolo, which in isolation can mean either a failure to will or an active willing-against; but the context here appears to dictate the latter, just as it does in Petrarch’s use in ch. 1. Bernard’s Latin reads: “Denique in quo inoboedientiae crimen et absque dubio sit, apud Samuelem advertite: ‘Quasi,’ inquit, ‘peccatum ariolandi est repugnare, et quasi scelus idololatriae nolle acquiescere.’ Non ait ‘non acquiescere,’ sed ‘nolle acquiescere,’ ut non iussionis simplex ipsa transgressio, sed voluntatis superba contentio scelus idololatriae reputetur. Non est enim idipsum nolle oboedire et non oboedire. Hoc quippe interdum erroris est, nonnumquam et infirmitatis; illud vero aut odiosae pertinaciae, aut contumaciae non ferendae. . . . Non ergo qualiscumque mandati praeteritio criminalem facit inoboedientiam, sed repugnare, sed nolle oboedire.” The last sentence in the quotation, taken by itself, does contain an ambiguity, in that the negating non can be applied in two places. I have rendered it (as does the most recent French translator) as negating the verb facit: it is not the case that the omission of any kind of mandate (no matter how serious the mandate may be) is sufficiently bad to make disobedience “criminal.” One could in principle take it instead as negating the phrase qualiscumque mandati, which yields a less radical assertion: it is not the omission of just any mandate that makes disobedience criminal (whereas the omission of certain very serious ones might still do so). The current English and German translations follow this latter line, but Bernard’s next two sentences appear to make it untenable; they read: “On the other hand, how many people fail to obey without having that most wicked—even rebellious—will! And thus in what way can the grave offense of disobedience ‘lie in wait for a monk’ [as Bernard’s inter-

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locutors had suggested], if every time this kind of recalcitrant and contentious will is lacking in his transgression, he transgresses without grave offense?” (Ceterum quanti absque illa pessima et rebelli voluntate non oboediunt? Quomodo itaque monacho crimen insidiatur inoboedientiae, si toties sine crimine transgreditur, quoties in transgressione defuerit huiuscemodi recalcitrans et contentiosa voluntas?) Related remarks in §12.30 weigh further against the second interpretation. 41. The three short quotations: “primam gravissimam praevaricationem”; “rebellione defensionis, quae secuta est”; “et antiqua illa tam nota et tam noxia praevaricatio facilie, ut creditur, indulgentiam consequeretur.” 42. It is worth registering briefly that Bernard takes special care to deny that the intention is the only determinant of an action’s morality: he gives a long exposition (14.35–41) to the effect that prudence is also required for an action to be fully good, though intention is the more important of the two factors. Chaucer, of course, also meditates on the meaning of intention in the Friar’s Tale, whose omission from this book might thus itself seem a heinous act. But the question there concerns intention in the situation of, or at the moment of, making a law (in particular an oath or promise); in the technical sense the previous chapter borrows from medieval theology and ultimately from Jeremiah, it is the question of “truth” in oath-making. This book, by contrast, has primarily to do with the intention of the person subject to, or attempting to fulfill, a law, and the diabolical instruction given to Chaucer’s apprentice summoner does not seem germane. 43. From §11.28: “aut furtim subrepat nescienti, aut casu accidat infelici.” 44. “[Sic ergo] utraque ista complectitur nostra professio, ut professus quisque, cum in aliquo forte regularium mandatorum deliquerit, si ad remedium aeque regulare confugerit, etsi convincitur transgressor mandati, non tamen pacti praevaricator. Solum itaque censuerim fregisse votum, violasse propositum, pactum praevaricasse, qui et praeceptum contempserit, et remedium. . . . Regulares namque terminos, etsi saepe deliquerit, non evadit, qui censurae, quae ex Regula est, disciplinam non subterfugit.” 45. “Fateor sane impossibile cuivis mortalium vel venialiter interdum non deliquere in praeceptis oboedientiae; sed nulla iam de impossibilitate querela, quandoquidem et ex Regula licet id quoque, quod criminaliter delinqui contigerit, emendare. Quod ergo dicitis a nullis posse observari ad integrum quidquid a magistris praecipitur, verum est; sed levis culpa inoboedientia est, et facilis cura eius invenitur in Regula, si quidem sit transgressio absque contemptu. Si autem et ipsum deesse, aliquando non posse contenditis, id quidem falsum est; sed nec talem tamen inoboedientiam sine cura relinquit diligentia regularis. Et licet fortiori egeat curationis medicamento, caret tamen morbo praevaricationis, nisi cum et ipsum forte medicamentum contemnitur.”

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46. For the analysis of a deductive syllogism into rule, case, and result, see, e.g., Peirce, Collected Papers 2:619–20. 47. “[Sed forsitan dicitis]: . . . ne ita perfectus quispiam invenitur, cui non vel minimum aliquid interdum subripiatur de tam multis ac minutis [quae passim vel a negligentibus praepositis imperantur]?” The imagined conversation includes a nuance difficult to render in idiomatic English. In the interlocutors’ question, ita perfectus comes across at first glance as meaning simply “so perfect,” “perfect to such an extent”; but Bernard’s answer takes the phrase to mean “perfect in such a way.” The Latin ita can mean either, i.e., can refer to either quantity or quality. 48. Both appearances of gentle render suavis, which could also be translated sweet. The passage is a slew of scriptural paraphrases; those marked with quotation marks, beginning with the mention of “one iota,” derive respectively from Matthew 5:18, Psalm 33:9 (Septuagint), Romans 6:14–15, Matthew 11:30, Romans 8:3, and Romans 8:26. The Latin reads: “Creditis itaque . . . quod ad integrum mandata observari Dei vix valeant, abbatis non valeant, cum Veritas ipsa testetur, ne unum quidem iota praeteritum iri. Ceterum qui ita sentit, videtur mihi—ut vestra pace dixerim—necdum gustasse quam suavis est Dominus, sub iugo legis gemere adhuc, nondum respirare sub gratia, suave Christi jugum nequaquam esse expertus, ideoque certissime adhuc infirmari per carnem, quia Spiritus non adiuvat eius infirmitatem.” 49. “[Nam] perfecta oboedientia legem nescit, terminis non arctatur; neque contenta angustiis professionis, largiori voluntate fertur in latitudinem caritatis, et ad omne quod iniungitur spontanea, vigore liberalis alacrisque animi, modum non considerans, in infinitam libertatem extenditur.” 50. This kind of relationship to a law is a reason for hesitation about attempts like those noted briefly in ch. 2 to assimilate Christian ethics to the ethics of Stoicism and of Kant (Mark Miller on Boethius) or the imperatives of psychoanalysis (L. O. A. Fradenburg) on the grounds that all four systems are similarly based on an ethic of sacrifice to external necessity. The guiding imperative in Kant’s system, at least, if I have understood it correctly, does not undergo the kind of merger-with-life that we see here in the monastic conversio morum: while it is discovered within the self, it seems always to remain in some sense exterior to the faculty of choice, standing over against it and making demands. Stoicism perhaps enters a stronger bid, in its idea of the new sage’s conversion to wisdom, for a kind of merger between the will and external reality; whether there is an analogous structure in psychoanalysis would be a fascinating question, but one beyond this book’s scope. It should also be noted that Bernard’s position on law-following and “perfection” is very like that which Giorgio Agamben draws out of later Franciscan writers in The Highest Poverty. And indeed, Agamben quotes Precept and Dispensation in an early chapter to demonstrate its focus on a “way of living”

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rather than “the fulfillment of individual acts” (54–55). He focuses on the Franciscans instead because, he says, they are more aware of what they are doing—namely, as he would put it, transforming the notions of “rule” and “life” so that the two are no longer separate. In any case, the fact that Agamben can spend the bulk of his book (roughly p. 60 onwards) describing that transformation again forcefully indicates how many influential “cousins” Bernard’s ideas had in the high and late Middle Ages, so that the theologically informed and interested would almost certainly have encountered them in some form. The main difference between Agamben’s conclusions and mine is that he appears to think this unification of “rule” and “life” a permanent development that has shaped the existence of European humanity down to the present. My next chapter offers, by contrast (though admittedly in a very provisional form), some reasons to think that such ideas fall out of the main stream of thought as one moves from the late Middle Ages into early modernity—a change that would be consonant with the feature of Kantian ethics just noted. 51. If this relativizing of all the apparent certainties encoded in laws comes as a surprise, it may be that the surprise afflicts modern readers more than it did their medieval forebears. Given the presence at the top of (or one might better say “beyond and all through”) the hierarchy of divine charity as an interpretive principle, it is appropriate to revisit the remark of Amos Funkenstein used as an epigraph to part 2 of this book: whatever the modern period may have thought of the question, medieval readers were at least as likely to see the presence of God in a situation as stirring things up and creating (productive) disorder as the reverse. (That habit of thought is, for the record, nicely illustrated by Dante’s treatments of providence, fortune, and human heredity in Inferno 7, Purgatorio 7, and Paradiso 8.) Such a tendency is perhaps even a characteristic marker of Christian (and other monotheistic) tradition, from which the high-modern notion of a God who rigorously enforces order might be seen as an unfortunate deviation. On this compare the comment of twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner: “Our late-bourgeois mode of thought always perceives the Church and its theology as the guarantor for a perduring conservatism. That is a terrible delusion. . . . If we are serious in proclaiming that the incomprehensible God is the only center, the only fixed point which really does exist and is subject to no conditions whatever, then everything that exists outside of him . . . is relative, temporary, conditional, and subject to relentless provisions” (“Theology,” 63). One might wish to protest that Bernard does not really “relativize” law to such an extent, in that he speaks of a class of necessity called “immutable,” describing things that cannot be changed for any reason, “to any extent whatever,” “even by God himself” (DPD 3.7). But his assertion that things in this category are established “by a divine and natural ratio” leads one to wonder

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whether Bernard might, if pressed, assert them either to be identical with the divine essence itself or to be inseparable consequences or emanations of it. It is striking that his few examples of immutable necessity are not commandments for or against particular actions (like “do not kill”), but are about “love, humility, mildness, and other virtues,” and again “all that spiritual instruction of the Lord’s sermon held on the mountain.” What counts as “spiritual instruction” in that long sermon is not immediately clear, but it is notable that much of it likewise lists virtues (the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1–12) or instructs in a way that would require much interpretation before it could be used to guide specific behavior (most of Matthew 6 and 7). Finally it is worth observing that Precept and Dispensation rarely mentions immutable necessity after these introductory remarks. 52. It is admittedly not clear in every case that the intentions of the antagonist-of-the-moment are entirely murderous, given that in the two instances of exile at sea, Custance is put aboard her ship with substantial quantities of food: the intention could be less death than “tourment” (the word in Trevet’s version, line 103), along with, of course, the riddance of an unwelcome visitor. Even in Trevet, however, the Syrians later report to the Roman revenge expedition that Constance has drowned in the sea (lines 419–20), suggesting that they think this the likely outcome of her exile, even if it is not clearly their goal. In the second case of exile, Chaucer increases the sense of murderous intent by omitting Trevet’s specification that Donegild is responsible for the provision of the food, thus leaving his reader free to wonder whether it might have come instead from the sympathetic constable (812–19) or the sympathetic “prees” (865, and cf. 820) who accompany her to the ship. And he also increases the general expectation of Custance’s demise by omitting from Trevet the details that the food in each case has been doled out according to a plan (enough for three years in the first case, five in the second); and, yet more forcefully, by inserting many explicit statements to the effect that Custance fears, and the reader should expect, a death by drowning (455, 467, 484–87, 829–30, 857–60)—of which only a few have any parallel in Trevet (the fourth) or Gower (the fourth and fifth). Chaucer was, it seems, particularly intent on stressing the miraculous, unpredictable, highly irregular nature of his heroine’s survival, thus making her ordeals at sea a central element of the philosophical and religious meditation that his retelling has become. 53. “Nec primum . . . in quo quippe nos nil facimus, nec ultimum, quod et plerumque extorquet aut timor inutilis, aut simulatio damnabilis, sed tantum medium nobis reputatur in meritum.” 54. The emphasis here, as in all quotations from medieval sources, is of course mine. Bernard seems to mean that the trouble with assigning human merit to the accomplishment of a task is not merely the simple one that prob-

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lems frequently intervene, despite good willing, to “wrest away” the accomplishment itself. “Damnable faking,” first of all, presumably refers to an accomplishment that is somehow unreal or is done for the wrong reasons; this would wrest away the merit for an accomplishment rather than the accomplishment itself. But the last phrases quoted go still further, asserting that even when the goal is successfully reached, its success has depended on much that is external to the ostensible human agent; as these externals are ultimately subject to divine will, the credit for the action properly goes there. The longest phrase just quoted reads, “Consummatio fieri habeat de nobis, sive etiam in nobis, non autem a nobis”; whereas §14.46 is the source for the observation that while God works all three phases of an action “in nobis” (an idea derived from 2 Corinthians 3:5 and Philippians 2:13), each phase has its own relationship to us: “primum . . . sine nobis, secundum nobiscum, tertium per nobis [Deus] facit.” The reader who has noticed here a certain slippage between two things for whose effects a human agent may have to wait, one called law and one called (divine) will, will find the matter taken up deliberately in the next section. 55. One might justly recall here the distinctions among various kinds of passivity made near the end of ch. 3 (n. 38) and consider how that analysis fits this one. 56. “Quid igitur? Hoc ergo totum liberi arbitrii opus, hoc solum eius est meritum quod consentit? Est prorsus.” 57. The presence of such “active passion” is, moreover, just as much Chaucer’s innovation in Alla’s case as it is in the case of his wife. In Trevet and Gower roughly the same action occurs—Alla writes that Custance and the child be kept unharmed until his return—but in neither case is there any talk of the sonde of Crist or of Alla’s receptivity to it. For Bernard’s sermon, see my preface and ch. 3. Chs. 1 and 4 have looked at the same paradox as it operates, respectively, in the persons of Custance and Mary: the notion that becoming literally “passive” with respect to divine action, allowing oneself to receive, results in the most effective action imaginable—indeed, results in action more effective than any that was previously imaginable. 58. Such extreme openness calls to mind Bernard’s version of the “mixed life,” ready for action or for contemplation, according to divine direction: see ch. 4, n. 78. 59. My equation in square brackets of “image of God” with liberum arbitrium may not be exact; at some points of the treatise Bernard says that the image is in our free choice rather than identical with it. The inner quotation is from Wisdom 8:1. The Latin reads: “Venit ergo ipsa forma, cui conformandum erat liberum arbitrium, quia ut pristinam reciperet formam, ex illa erat reformandum, ex qua fuerat et formatum. Forma autem, sapientia est, conformatio, ut faciat imago in corpore, quod forma facit in orbe. Porro illa attingit a fine

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usque ad finem fortiter, et disponit omnia suaviter. Attingit a fine usque ad finem, hoc est a summo caelo usque ad inferiores partes terrae, a maximo angelo usque ad minimum vermiculum. Attingit autem fortiter, non quidem mobili discursione, vel locali diffusione, vel subiectae creaturae tantum officiali administratione, sed substantiali quadam et ubique praesenti fortitudine, qua utique universa potentissime movet, ordinat, administrat. Et haec omnia nulla sui cogitur facere necessitate. Nec enim aliqua in his laborat difficultate, sed disponit omnia suaviter placida voluntate.” 60. On the effortlessness of divine action, Bernard is yet again speaking for a broad theological tradition: to take an example closer to Chaucer’s time and place, Thomas Bradwardine also describes God’s acts as immediate and without effort (see Oberman, Bradwardine, 78); and so does Augustine, whose lengthy Letter 187 (“On the Presence of God”) draws on the same passage from the book of Wisdom to describe God as “ruling the world without work and preserving it without burden” (ch. 14; my trans. from Epistulae, Pars IV, p. 92). 61. A similar dissolution of the distinction between will and law, at least where the divine is concerned, happens in multiple places in Bernard’s writings; see for example Sermones de diversis 26, which is largely a discussion of what it means to submit one’s will to God’s will, but which several times supports a claim about the benefits of such submission by referring, without further explanation, to Psalm 119 [118]:165: “Great peace for those who love your law [legem].” 62. “Alioquin nec Deus, nec angeli sancti, cum ita sint boni, ut non possint esse et mali, nec praevaricatores item angeli, cum ita sint mali, ut iam non valeant esse boni, liberi arbitrii esse dicentur. Sed et nos illud post resurrectionem amissuri sumus, quando utique inseparabiliter alii bonis, alii malis admixti fuerimus. Ceterum nec Deus caret libero arbitrio, nec diabolus.” 63. The idea is (as the refrain goes!) neither new in Bernard nor uncommon in Christianity: it is present, for example, in so early and widely known a source as the last book of Augustine’s City of God, which does not discuss angels but affirms that the blessed will be more free, not less, when they no longer have the ability to sin (bk. 22, §30). For the idea’s long life and eventual enshrinement in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, see my “Dante’s Staircase,” 1027–32. For an accessible contemporary attempt to make sense of the paradox, see Kasper, Christian Understanding; and cf. Guardini, Freedom, and Maritain, Freedom. It should be remarked that the kind of regularity divine action is said to have (viz., it is always good) need not imply much practical predictability in the short run; there may be a thousand pathways to a hundred kinds of “good,” and, here as with Boethius (ch. 2), one often cannot perceive the path being taken, nor discern which parts of the swirl of events should be ascribed to divine forces in what way. But it is clear that Bernard, Augustine,

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and the others listed have felt that the assertion of even this somewhat qualified and difficult-to-perceive regularity alongside at least one commonsense notion of “freedom” would be paradoxical, and that the way out of the paradox is by revising that common sense. 64. “. . . [quoniam] quod ille esse non potest malus, non infirma facit necessitas, sed firma in bono voluntas, et voluntaria firmitas; quodque is non valet in bonum respirare, non aliena facit violenta oppressio, sed sua ipsius in malo obstinata voluntas ac voluntaria obstinatio.” 65. Pictures resonant with this one of the appropriate reception of divine initiatives appear across the Christian theological tradition. The New Testament’s pictures of Jesus coaching his disciples for their appearances before hostile authorities are one example. Matthew’s version makes the elements of cooperation and discovery-within particularly clear: “Do not consider how or what you will say; for what you will say will be given to you in that hour, for it will not be you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you” (10:19–20, my trans. from Vulgate; cf. Luke 21:14–15; 12:11–12; Mark 13:11). One can find a related idea applied to Jesus himself in a theological text from two millennia later: “[The Father’s] will steered his [Jesus’] acting, but not as a plan that contained everything that Jesus should do; rather as a living force that continually became effective anew, and whose content disclosed itself to him from one occasion to another in each new situation.” (Guardini, Der Herr, 125, my trans. The German lenken can mean steer, guide, control; here as with Bernard’s agere in ch. 3 I aim for a middle path.) 66. The phrase “not out of dejection nor out of necessity” is a direct quotation from 2 Corinthians 9:7, but as this passage from Grace and Free Choice falls quite near the others quoted in this section of the main text, Bernard is surely still entertaining his own surprising notion of necessity, even if it was not present in the Pauline source. Bernard’s Latin reads: “Sic ergo et liberum arbitrium suo conetur praeesse corpori, ut praeest sapientia orbi, attingens et ipsum a fine usque ad finem fortiter, imperans scilicet singulis sensibus et artubus tam potenter, quatenus non sinat regnare peccatum in suo mortali corpore, nec membra sua det arma iniquitati, sed exhibeat servire iustitiae. Et ita iam non erit homo servus peccati, cum peccatum non fecerit. Et ita iam non erit homo servus peccati, cum peccatum non fecerit. . . . Curet autem haec agere non minus suaviter quam fortiter, hoc est non ex tristitia aut ex necessitate, quod est initium, non plenitudo sapientiae, sed prompta et alacri volontate, quod facit acceptum sacrificium, quoniam hilarem datorem diligit deus. Sicque per omnia imitabitur sapientiam, dum et vitiis resistet fortiter, et in conscientia requiescet suaviter.” 67. Bernard’s view, however, is a merciful one, in that he seems serious about the status of necessitarian morality as a valid “beginning,” a place to start. Those who adhere to it may still be sub lege, and thus on the “wrong” side

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of the most important distinction to be made concerning laws, but they may also be led to cross to the other side: their trouble is merely a not-yet. The quoted passage itself suggests this, though subtly. Bernard’s original audience would have had no trouble identifying the “beginning of wisdom” as a reference to the 110th Psalm, which declares that the fear of the Lord, timor Domini, is the initium sapientiae (verse 10; cf. Proverbs 9:10, where the phrase is principium sapientiae). But Bernard makes clear elsewhere (in a letter appended to On Loving God as §§12.34 and following) that such fear, even when interpreted as “servile fear”—that is, not as loving respect, but as the attitude of a slave who obeys purely out of dread of being harmed—is both a stage that demands to be moved beyond and a workable beginning that can grow into a better relationship. That duality beautifully overturns the potentially threatening sense of the lines from Psalms and Proverbs (that is, the notion that they enjoin servile fear of God as a good in itself) while also avoiding an outright rejection of people who are in fact in that fearful state. Likewise, then, in Bernard’s passage, where “necessity” replaces fear as the beginning of wisdom: those who attempt to govern their bodies in a dour necessitarian way (perhaps again the stereotyped Stoics discussed in ch. 1) are far from the height of wisdom, but are invited to ascend.

s e v e n . Conclusion: The Union of the Themes and Its Implications 1. Merton, “Significance,” 353. 2. For example: What does the asker mean by “the world”? Philosophical difficulties with thinking of all-that-is as a totality received Kant’s sustained attention as playing a starring role in a quadruply manifested “antinomy” of pure reason (Critique, pp. 459–550) and were earlier remarked by Leibniz (e.g., New Essays, 151). There are also less recondite points of contention: for example, assuming we can find a sensible way to speak of “the world” at all, is there any sense in thinking of it as governed by any single thing? And if so, are will and law the only two possibilities? (Would “chance,” for example, fall into either category?) But a need for closer philosophical analysis need not imply that relatively more naïve questions cannot bear their own kind of fruit. 3. The Vulgate (here punctuated and capitalized for clarity) reads, “Misertus autem dominus servi illius dimisit eum et debitum dimisit ei. Egressus autem servus ille invenit unum de conservis suis qui debebat ei centum denarios, et tenens suffocabat eum, dicens, ‘Redde quod debes’” (Matthew 18:27–28). Incidentally the New Testament’s Greek for redde, “give back,” is αποδος (apodos), which is, as the preface mentions, a cognate of our word for the conclusion of a logical conditional (apodosis). 4. Translating the Vulgate of Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer: “dimitte nobis peccata nostra siquidem et ipsi dimittimus omni debenti nobis”

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(11:4). Peter’s question reads: “domine quotiens peccabit in me frater meus et dimittam ei usque septies?” (Matthew 18.21). 5. My translation (emphasis added) from “À propos du ‘Pater,’” in Weil, Attente, 218–19. The translation in Waiting for God (222–23), though useful, clears up the rockiness of Weil’s language too much to deliver what is needed here. It should be noted that the idea of this passage, though expressed with a powerful starkness, is not idiosyncratic but well rooted in Christian tradition: see for example the letter of James: “Look now, you who say today or tomorrow we will go into that city, and in fact we will spend a year there, and we will trade and make money—you who do not know what will be tomorrow! For what is your life? It is a vapor, appearing for a little time, then brushed aside, so that instead of this you might say, if the Lord wills and we live, we will do this or that” (4:13–15, my trans. from Vulgate). 6. Weil, “À propos du ‘Pater,’” in Attente, 219–20. 7. While Trevet and Gower both have the lady similarly reticent about who she is, they handle the scenes quite differently. In Trevet it is clear both times (lines 130–36, 448–62) that Constance deliberately chooses to conceal her full identity, leaving the impression that she has concrete (perhaps political) reasons for doing so, though these are never made explicit. In Gower the first concealment is treated very briefly (lines 738–39), while in the second case there is much attention (1148–69) to Constance’s craftiness, but in neither case is any explanation given, whether by reference to her recent trauma or to any possible motives for silence. Thus it is only Chaucer who makes her loss of identity a result of her experience on the ocean—a fact that reinforces the previous chapter’s suggestion (n. 52) that he has reimagined that experience, by comparison with his sources, as a kind of miraculous epitome of his character’s complete dependence on God. Here again his goal in the Man of Law’s Tale seems to be a meditation on action, passion, and divine-human cooperation, which he achieves to some extent at the expense of the story’s geopolitical and personal-pathetic elements. 8. Admittedly the force of Weil’s declarations here can make her seem to have departed, in as many as three ways, from the expositions of the “religious ideal” this book has pursued thus far. First, her “further step” from forgiving sins to attempting to renounce all expectations can sound like a counsel of antinomianism, at least antinomianism with respect to the laws whose outcome one awaits (as opposed to those which one is asked to fulfill). Her talk about the dissolution of personalities cannot help but call to mind Griselda’s pathological drive toward self-erasure. And, thirdly, the remark that we should be happy about our solubility makes one wonder whether Weil’s moral stance leaves room for the kind of healthy complaint that Custance—and for that matter Job—allow themselves, and that only Griselda tries (not wholly successfully) to stifle. One can find rejoinders to at least the first two of these observations: Weil avoids total antinomianism by positing a limited sphere (to be

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mentioned twice more in the main text) in which exact or rigorist laws do hold; and she does not, after all, counsel that one should seek the dissolution of one’s personality (“stripping” or “being bent on dropping” one’s particularities rather than merely being ready to let them fall, in the language used in ch. 3, circa n. 29). And perhaps even her counsel of happiness at the general fact of our contingent fragility could allow the occasional usefulness of a howl of protest when that fragility makes itself manifest in a particular instance— when something is actually stripped away. Nonetheless it does seem that a reading of Weil could coax the reader, much more readily than would the other writers considered here, toward agreement with L. O. A. Fradenburg’s picture of a Christianity that requires the positive pursuit of the sacrifice of one’s own history (cf. ch. 2, section titled “The Wrong Exit”). 9. For these quotations from Bernard and discussion, see ch. 3, under “Bernard on Divine-Human Cooperation.” There are any number of other theological accounts of the notion that at our best our willing comes from beyond us: besides the examples of “cooperative mysticism” mentioned in the notes to the introduction, see for example Ricoeur, “Theonomy and Autonomy,” and Philibert, “Anthropology.” 10. John 12:24, from the Vulgate: “Nisi granum frumenti cadens in terram mortuum fuerit, ipsum solum manet; si autem mortuum fuerit, multum fructum adfert.” 11. For Bernard, see especially the discussion of On Loving God in ch. 3 (again in the section on divine-human cooperation). For Weil, see the essay “L’amour de Dieu et le malheur,” which reads in part: “A human can never get clear of obeying God. A creature cannot fail to obey. The only choice offered to the human being (as an intelligent and free creature) is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he nonetheless obeys, perpetually, as a thing subjected to mechanical necessity. If he does desire it, he remains subjected to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is superadded, a necessity constituted by the laws proper to supernatural things” (Attente, 135, my trans.). The complete refusal of demands on the future that the previous quotations from Weil describe is a parallel response to a similar forced option: the one who keeps on acting but lets go of the demand for particular results is voluntarily embracing the sober reality that our actions are ordinarily all “upstream” from our goals, that we can never really control results, so that all our actions involve surrender, voluntary or otherwise. 12. For verification of this meaning, see the Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “lernen,” 1(c)—which aptly includes among its instances Chaucer’s little clergeon, who sits in school “his litel book lernynge” (Prioress’s Tale, line 516). 13. Merton, “Final Integration,” in Contemplation in a World of Action, 206–7. 14. Merton, Conjectures, 206.

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15. Weil, “À propos du ‘pater,’” in Attente, 218. 16. The resonance with the teaching on “karma” available in the Bhagavad Gita is extremely strong, and not at all lost on Weil, as we will see shortly. But this teaching also seems to me, as it seemed to Weil and Merton, quite at home in the Christian contemplative tradition under discussion here. 17. “Almost” because, if “lerneth to suffre” is understood as suggested in a note above, Chaucer surpasses him in brevity. Yet another compact statement of what seems the same ideal (a statement that also calls Bernard’s On Loving God to mind) comes from Francis of Assisi, as quoted in Agamben, Highest Poverty, 139–40. 18. Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu: Amour des pratiques religieuses,” in Attente, 193. 19. Weil, “Formes de l’amour,” 193 (emphasis added). 20. These passages show that, here as in the discussion of obedience and mechanical necessity mentioned in nn. 8 and 11, Weil believes in the actual existence of a sphere where “strict obligation” and effort that proceeds merely from the self (“will”) are appropriate. The present book attempts to leave the question open, by way of suggesting not that we do not perceive any such sphere but that what we perceive may in fact be only a temporary approximation of rigor set within a larger realm of “gentle” law. In any case, it is useful to bring to mind two systems of philosophy that Weil almost certainly associates with “strict obligation,” systems that not only believe in its existence but at times suggest that it is the only kind of obligation there is. One is the ethics of Immanuel Kant, with its attempt to ground morality in a pure deontological “thou shalt” that leaves behind all dependence on motivation by desired ends (“natural inclinations”) or an authoritative will standing behind the law (“the commandments of God”). The other is a degenerate kind of Stoicism— presumably on Weil’s account it would be Roman rather than Greek Stoicism (but cf. ch. 1, n. 66)—that enjoins above all else the overcoming of self in the name of duties. It is notable to what an extent those two systems may harmonize, whereas the ethics extracted here from Christian tradition seems to be of an entirely different kind, positing as it does a second realm of action where not what Weil calls “will” but what she calls “passive activity” (and this book has called “conjoint agency”) is required. That difference is, for what it is worth, an important reason to be skeptical of efforts like that in Miller’s Philosophical Chaucer to conflate Christian ethical ideas (those of Boethius, in Miller’s case) with those of Kant (cf. ch. 6, n. 50, for another reason). 21. Ratzinger, Introduction, 185 (emphasis original). 22. Ratzinger, Introduction, 186–87. 23. Ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson. 24. Thus D. W. Robertson, remarkably, “all but ignores Chaucer’s religious tales,” while “Marxists” (a group in which I suspect Georgianna means

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to include the early David Aers, who comes in for some rough treatment that may have helped spur his response, noted below) “betray a [similar] distrust of the religious tales that seems to stem from similar assumptions” (“Protestant Chaucer,” 66). 25. See Aers’s “Faith, Ethics.” The piece also responds to Georgianna’s “Grammar of Assent,” which extends the thought of “The Protestant Chaucer” into what means to be a fairer, because not clandestinely “Protestant,” reading of the Clerk’s Tale. Aers’s chief point is that the Catholicism abroad in Chaucer’s day was a quite varied affair, of which only a few strands featured the simple fideism that Georgianna attributes to it (or featured any other recommendation of a nonrationalist sort of “assent”). 26. McGinn, introduction to Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 45–46. 27. McGinn, introduction to Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 46, quoting Luther’s Table Talk, #584 (54:105 in the American Edition of Luther’s works). 28. Oberman’s remark is noted in the second-to-last section of ch. 1. “Recreation” (McGinn, introduction to Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 47n153) here of course means re-creation, that return of the damaged human to its superior initial state (or more properly to a better one) which Bernard calls “reformation.” See the closing pages of ch. 6, and, for the role of cooperation in the process, the selections from Bernard in ch. 3. 29. Admittedly the case is yet a bit more complex than this suggests; as McGinn points out (introduction to Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 47n153), Luther “admit[s] some kind of cooperation” even in the same passage of his De servo arbitrio that denies cooperation in general. McGinn supposes that Luther would admit cooperation in (using Bernard’s terms) the accomplishment of an act but not in the willing, whereas Bernard says almost the reverse (see above, chs. 3 and 6); it also seems that Luther is more willing to speak of a cooperation that involves the whole human person than of a separate arbitrium that has remained liberum despite the Fall. In any case the essential point is that Luther finds the doctrine of cooperation as Bernard expressed it, the combination of human and divine agency in a way so closely intertwined as to be inseparable even in analysis, impossible to stomach, at least as regards the “act” of salvation. 30. The law, on Luther’s view, is salvific in a way quite the opposite of that imagined by Bernard and his fellow travelers: it is “a light that . . . shows, not the grace of God or righteousness and life, but the wrath of God, sin, death, our damnation in the sight of God, and hell” (commentary on Galatians, quoted in Pelikan, Reformation, 134). It functions, in other words, to demonstrate to the sinner his incapacity to avoid sin, or to do much of anything relevant to his own salvation, so that he will know himself dependent on divine grace alone; and once forgiven, the Christian has “‘died to the law,’ [is]

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no longer bound by it, no longer owe[s] it obedience, and [does] not even know it any longer” (Pelikan, Reformation, 170–71). Luther keeps away from antinomianism because he thinks the world needs the law, as does even the church in its present state (“simul justus et peccator”), to keep human behavior from getting too far out of line and to provide some moral guidance; but all of this is merely concession to present need, its assistance directed merely to the flesh, not the spirit (Pelikan, 168), and the long-term goal to which we all must tend is liberation from law. The view of John Calvin and the Reformed churches has been on the whole slightly more sympathetic to law (Pelikan, 212–17), but no more than among the Lutheran confessions is there any trace there of the older ideal of a law that blesses the subject will by drawing it “gently” into union with itself (cf. esp. 214). On the matter of divine-human cooperation, Calvin is even closer to Luther, particularly in his attitude toward Bernard: McGinn notes that Calvin, like Luther, quotes Bernard relatively frequently and has on the whole a “remarkably positive” attitude, but also that he picks out “Bernard’s doctrine of operating and cooperating grace” for explicit condemnation (McGinn, introduction to Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 49, referring to Calvin’s Institutes, 2.2.6). 31. On the dominance of “nominalism”—here meant in the relatively strict sense of an answer to questions about the reality of logical universals—in modern thought, see ch. 5, n. 54. The preference of nominalist thought for analyzing realities into constituent elements that are sharply defined and logically or temporally prior to anything vague or dialectical is briefly mentioned in ch. 4, n. 108. 32. Charles Peirce gives a thought-provoking discussion of the two views of law at issue here—one that dictates every step of development and one that predicts only a distant result—in his “Detailed Classification of the Sciences” (Collected Papers 1:211–13, 215, 220). Useful for the Aristotelian background of medieval thinking on these topics is McCord Adams, “Powers.” Helpful (and conflicting) overviews of the history of the concept of physical law appear in Zilsel, “Genesis”; Milton, “Origin”; Specht, “Naturgesetz”; Ruby, “Origins.” Sources for broader claims about the role of religion in early-tohigh-modern shifts in European thought include the works in the bibliography by Funkenstein and Dupré. Finally, on the gradual fading of the high-modern preference for rigorist laws, one should note the invocation first by David Hume and then by Peirce of a different kind of law that each thinker, rather remarkably, also calls “gentle”: such laws, they say, govern the workings of the human mind (Peirce, CP 7:389). Peirce went still further, waging a long battle against what he called “necessitarian” thinking and proposing that even physical laws are “vague” rather than exact: see for example “The Architecture of Theories” and “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (CP 6:7–65). A century later, some physicists and biologists are beginning to agree: see Unger and

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Smolin, Singular Universe, and Kauffman, Investigations. 33. For those who would like to pursue the question further, however, there are worthwhile claims to be advanced on both sides. Most obvious is the simple observation that the rejection of the “contemplative” or “collaborative ideal” cannot possibly be purely either a Protestant or a modern move, in that it had already been made, in various quarters, early enough for Bernard (and for that matter Augustine) to argue against it. Also opposing the idea that Protestantism in particular has been at the root of the rejection is the fact that some of the most effective warriors against the “medieval” stances on agency and law have been Catholics. I am thinking in particular of René Descartes, who in one of his most programmatic works speaks against the swearing of oaths in terms that appear to assume a rigorist (and thus stereotypically “modern” or “Protestant”) interpretation of what a law is. Explaining why his new method in philosophy led him to avoid “the promises by which one curtails something of one’s freedom,” Descartes writes: “I would have believed I committed a grave indiscretion against good sense if, having once approved of something, I obligated myself to take it to be good at a later time when perhaps it would have ceased to be so or when I would have ceased judging it to be good” (Discourse, 13). There is little here of the “medieval” notion of conversio morum or of a vow that becomes a life partner. On the other side of the argument, it has long since been suggested that Protestantism has been, if not the root, at least one primary vehicle by which the rejection of “cooperation” came to have its vast influence over the thought of modernity. “In Luther’s ‘alone-real and alone-effective’ God,” writes theologian Erich Przywara, naming in this way the reformer’s refusal of a collaborative role for the human will, “lies the decisive break with the past and the seed of the entire future” (“Gott in uns,” 348, my trans.). 34. Obviously Luther would not agree with Jill Mann in calling Custance (or anyone else) self-reliant, at least in matters pertaining to salvation; his denial of cooperation was in the service of giving all the credit not to humanity but to God. My point is that the Reformers (along with modern “common sense” generally) agree with contemporary literary criticism on a prior, deeper, question, namely the question of whether divine-human cooperation is possible at all. Once that question is answered negatively, the chief remaining possibilities are to ascribe everything to God and to ascribe everything to the human. Mann and many other modern thinkers fall into line with Luther on the first move—often without adverting to the fact that a move is being made—but take the opposite choice from his on the second. 35. An attempt to retrieve or rediscover some version of the “lost ideal” does not imply that always proceeding purely from love of “marriages” or bothand thinking, so that they are imposed on every situation, would be wise or produce good results; there are places where the both-and must show itself

Notes to Pages 315–316

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broadminded enough to admit an either/or. It is merely the blanket exclusion of cooperative thinking that seems to me unwarranted and destructive. 36. Middleton, “Physician’s Tale,” 24. 37. The reader will doubtless gaze back upon chs. 3 and 6 with new appreciation for the light refreshment they afford. 38. The extended quotation is from Donaldson, “Patristic Criticism,” 152–53. For a thoughtful recent reassessment of Donaldson’s chief target D. W. Robertson, along with Donaldson and other opponents, see Justice, “Who Stole Robertson?”

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I n d e x

Abelard, Peter, 252, 401n27 action bisynesse, 152, 177–80, 191, 206 cooperative (or “conjoint” or “mixed”), 3, 8, 85–91, 94, 105–8, 117–18, 123–24, 140–47, 151, 174, 181, 185–97, 201, 205–9, 280, 282, 306, 393n101, 429n20 (see also Bernard of Clairvaux: on divine-human cooperation; cooperation) “pure” or independent, 120–26, 144–45, 151–82, 208–9, 280, 314, 316 See also passivity: in relation to action; union: of action and passion actio passiva, 143, 206–7, 272–73, 305–6, 429n20. See also passio activa Adams, Marilyn McCord, 431n32

Aelred of Rievaulx, 251 Aers, David, 29–33, 309, 330n10, 334n30, 350n83, 351n85, 429n24, 430n25 Agamben, Giorgio, 28, 365n29, 411n4, 420n50, 429n17 agency. See action Alger of Liège, 412n8, 416n30 allegory in Clerk’s Tale, 42–45, 68–72, 79, 341n49, 349n77 in story of Jephtha, 240 Allen, Judson Boyce, 406n42 Ambrose (bishop of Milan), 361n8, 408n46, 416n30 Ancrene Wisse, 14–15 antinomianism, 248–49, 260, 271–72, 282, 292, 310, 427n8 apodosis, xiv, 238, 242, 244–46, 275, 396n3, 426n3

463

464

Aristotle, 124–25, 145, 208, 388n82, 431n32 on patience, 73, 344n58, 345n61 views on women, 331n13 astrology, 349n80 atheism, and interpretation, 95–96, 99–100, 104–9, 117–20, 124–26 Auberger, Jean-Baptiste, 411n4 Auerbach, Erich, ix–xi, 141, 183–84, 317n4 Augustine, 29–33, 415n27, 432n33 “Augustinian,” contested term, 30–32 De patientia, 78 late-medieval influence of, 13, 227–29, 324n16, 325n24 letter to Sixtus, 387n76 On Grace and Free Choice, 328n39, 360n7, 365n26, 387n76, 394n106 On the City of God, 74–76, 89, 226–29, 342n50, 407n45, 424n63 On the Gift of Perseverance, 348n75 “On the Presence of God” (letter), 424n60 Predestination of the Saints, 373n17 Questions on the Heptateuch, 406n43, 407n45 “authorial,” literary category, 21–22, 155, 167–68, 170, 175, 202, 373n17. See also source study, impact of automaton, moral, 43–44, 52–68, 226 Averroës, 124–25 Avicenna, 344n58 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 96–97, 100 Baldwin of Ford, 251 Barclay, Alexander, 382n61 Barfield, Owen, xiv Barney, Stephen A., 405n37

Index

Barré, Henri, 325n21 Barron, Robert, 320n3 Barth, Karl, 321n5 Basil of Caesarea, 325n24 Becker, Lawrence C., 346n66 Beidler, Peter G., 403n28 Benson, C. David, 306–7 Bernard of Clairvaux, 37 on action and passion, x–xiii, 3, 78, 127–31, 299, 300–301, 306, 310–11, 313 (see also passio activa) Apology to William, 251 and Augustine, 32 on deification, 143–45, 321n5 on divine-human cooperation, 19, 32, 34–35, 129–34, 140–47, 161–62, 185–97, 312–13, 381n58 Flores Bernardi, 15, 318n8 influence of, 14–17, 251–52, 309–11 on intention, 142–43, 261, 264–67, 269–71 on law, 223, 246, 250–75, 310–11, 312–13, 319n12, 399n15 letter to the monk Adam, 269–70, 416nn29–30 On Consideration, 345n61 On Grace and Free Choice, 33, 129–31, 134–35, 142–45, 190, 251, 283–90 On Loving God, 131–33, 135–36, 251, 367n36, 425n67, 428n11, 429n17 On Precept and Dispensation, 35, 250–75, 280–82, 286 On the Steps of Humility and Pride, 251, 364n20 on paradox, 148–50, 193, 194–95, 369n40, 395n109 relation to Mary, 182–84, 209 (see also individual Marian sermons)

Index

Sermones de diversis, 424n61 Sermon for Sunday in the Octave of Assumption, 185–88, 192–95, 204–5 Sermon “On the Aqueduct” (Nativity of Mary), 188–89, 196, 384n67, 386n73 Sermon “On the Passion of the Lord” (or “HMIV”), x–xiii, 141–42, 280, 305–6 Sermons for the Assumption of Mary, 190–92, 388n78 Sermons for the Dedication of a Church, 136–38, 140–41 Sermons in Praise of the Virgin Mother, 16, 183–84 Sermons on the Song of Songs, 411n6 as witness or informant, 6, 16–17, 128–29, 182–83, 250–55, 313, 326n26 Bersuire, Pierre, 404n31, 406n42 Bertrand, Dominique, 411n6 Bestul, Thomas, 45 Bhagavad Gita, 303, 429n16 Bible Acts of the Apostles, 187–88, 416n28 1 Corinthians, 139, 360n7, 361n8, 363n18, 413n15, 414n22 2 Corinthians, 422n54, 425n66 Deuteronomy, 403n30 Genesis, 178–80, 403n30, 407n44, 409n53 Gospels generally, 119 Hebrews, letter to the, 240 Isaiah, book of, 184 James, letter of, 140, 427n5 Jeremiah, book of, 215 Job, book of, 70, 109, 138, 351n88, 352n89, 362n12, 364n21 1 John, 367n36

465

John, gospel of, 139, 304–5, 358n25, 365n29, 366n33, 367n34, 371n1, 428n10 Jonah, book of, 401n27 Judges, book of, 236–41 Luke, gospel of, 110, 184, 190–92, 319n9, 358n26, 365n28, 384n65, 385n70, 388n78, 413n15, 426n4 (see also Mary, mother of Jesus: Annunciation scene; Mary, mother of Jesus: Magnificat) Mark, gospel of, 110, 364n22 Matthew, gospel of, 110, 263, 284, 295–96, 319n9, 386n73, 396n3, 398n8, 417n35, 420n48, 421n51 1 Peter, 364n21 Philippians, 144–45, 206, 305, 367n34, 388n80, 422n54 Proverbs, 388n78, 388n80, 425n67 Psalms, 111, 134, 187, 284, 364n21, 420n48, 424n61, 425n67 Revelation, 187, 192 Romans, 362nn12–13, 363n18, 415n24, 420n48 1 Samuel, 418n40 Song of Songs, 386n73 1 Timothy, 415n27 Wisdom, book of, 423n59, 424n60 Blamires, Alcuin, 322n8, 344n57, 345n64, 399nn15–16 Bleeth, Kenneth, 404n31, 405n38 Bloom, Anthony, 321n4 Boccaccio, Giovanni De claris mulieribus, 404n31 Il Filocolo, 215, 217–18, 221, 249, 396n2, 408n49 Tale of Dianora and Ansaldo (Decameron), 217–18, 221, 249, 396n2, 408n49 Tale of Griselda (Decameron), 25, 46, 68, 69–70, 329n4, 330n7, 333n24, 339n45

466

Boethius, 324n16, 325n24 Consolation of Philosophy, The, 28–29, 113–22, 125–26, 154, 293, 355n15, 356n18, 420n50, 424n63, 429n20 “Contra Eutychen,” 367n34, 395n109 late-medieval influence of, 13 Bokenham, Osbern, 372n15, 373n18, 376n34, 378n44, 380n50, 382n60 both-and, 143–44, 149–50, 207–9, 272–73, 282–83, 303, 311, 395n109, 432n35. See also paradox Bouyer, Louis, 321n6 Boyle, Robert, 312 Bradshaw, Henry, 387n76 Bradwardine, Thomas, 13–14, 17, 30–31, 33, 89, 357n23, 424n60 Brasington, Bruce C., 412n8 Broughton, L., 385n71 Brown, Carleton, 198–200 Brown, Emerson, 240, 403n28, 404nn34–35, 405n37 Brown, Pamela Allen, 45, 331n15 Brys, J., 413n15 Bultmann, Rudolf, 100 Burlin, Robert, 199 Burrell, David, 320n3, 363n14, 368n39 Burrow, John, 409n53 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 148–50, 369n40, 389n86, 395n109 Callerot, Françoise, 411n4, 412nn7–9, 413n15 Calvin, John, 313, 430n30 Capgrave, John, 382n61 Carruthers, Mary, 330n7, 331n14, 334n27, 342n51 Casey, Michael, 344n57

Index

Cassian, John, 328n40 Cecilia, Saint, Lives of Passio sanctae Ceciliae, 162–63, 171, 378n44 “Roman curia / Franciscan abridgement,” 163–75 See also Bokenham, Osbern; Jacobus de Voraigne; North English Legendary; South English Legendary Chalcedon, Council of, 149, 369n40, 395n109 chance, 116–18, 124–26, 426n2 Charnes, Linda, 404n35 Chaucer, Geoffrey on action and passion, 3–4, 307, 313 attempts to discover his religious and philosophical ideas, 11–13, 19–22, 306–9, 392n99, 396n2 Boece, 114–16, 381n54 Canterbury Tales, pilgrim-narrators in, 22–27 Clerk’s Tale, xv, 5, 22, 23–27, 34, 42–85, 117–18, 138–39, 146, 154, 169–70, 197, 201–2, 205, 208–9, 221–22, 226, 230–31, 233–34, 245, 260, 269–70, 287–88, 290, 292, 298, 300, 306–7, 309, 353n5, 355n17, 396nn2–3, 409n53, 430n25 Franklin’s Tale, xv, 6, 35, 213–31, 236–39, 241–46, 248–50, 252, 255, 273–75, 278–81, 287, 290, 293–95, 300, 307 Friar’s Tale, 23, 215, 249, 419n42 General Prologue, 24, 26 Knight’s Tale, xv, 23, 27, 34–35, 120–26, 140–41, 143, 146–47, 154, 204, 249, 279, 281, 287, 290, 300, 314–15, 392n99 Legend of Good Women, 176, 226– 27, 326n27, 400n20, 403n28

Index

Man of Law’s Tale, xiii, 1–2, 5, 11–12, 23, 27, 34–35, 79–93, 105–9, 113–18, 124, 126, 131, 133–34, 138–39, 140, 143, 145–47, 153–54, 169, 174, 182, 203–5, 208–9, 272–73, 276–83, 287–90, 292–93, 298–99, 306–7, 315, 355n17, 356n18, 371n6 Melibee, Tale of, 239–40, 287 Miller’s Tale, 25, 26, 391n95 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 324n10, 399n15 “Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne,” 381n54 Pardoner’s Tale, 215, 398n8 Parson’s Tale, 141, 324n16 Physician’s Tale, xv, 6, 22, 27, 35, 214–15, 229–41, 244, 246, 249–50, 252, 255, 273–75, 278–81, 287, 290, 293–94, 307 Prioress’s Tale, 153, 181, 199, 306, 384n68, 385n71, 428n12 Reeve’s Tale, 23, 25, 391n95 Retraction (at close of Tales), 308 Second Nun’s Prologue, 177–82, 184–85, 189–90, 195–202 Second Nun’s Tale, 5, 23, 27, 35, 151–78, 187, 195, 197, 199–209, 287, 306–7 Shipman’s Tale, 23 Summoner’s Tale, 23, 345n64, 399n15 Troilus and Criseyde, 181, 196–97, 249 “Truth” (poem), 392n99 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 23, 26, 216, 221, 249, 327n33, 391n95, 396n3 Chaumpaigne, Cecilia, 176–77 Chino, Tamiko, 29 Christine, Saint, Life of, 159–62 Christology, 32–33, 148–50, 303–6, 369n40, 394n105, 395n109

467

Chrysostom, John, 17, 325n24 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 329n2 Cloud of Unknowing, 321n6 Cluniac monasticism, 413n20, 415n24 Coakley, Sarah, 320n3, 368n39 Colish, Marcia, 346n66 condemnations of 1270 and 1277. See Tempier, Stephen consent, 129–31, 279–81, 299–300 consequence, logical, xiv, 242–47, 275, 279, 280, 403n30. See also apodosis; protasis constancy, 45, 68, 79, 285–87, 345n64. See also patience contemplation, 19, 178–80, 191, 300–301, 315. See also cooperation: “cooperative” or “contemplative ideal”; union: of action and passion conversio morum, 270, 432n33 cooperation “cooperative” or “contemplative ideal,” 5–12, 20, 34, 35–36, 153–56, 202, 206–9, 291–307, 311–16 divine-human, 8–12, 19, 20, 29–33, 106–8, 129–34, 140–47, 160, 174, 203–4, 206–9, 310–14, 427n7 (see also Bernard of Clairvaux: on divine-human cooperation; union) varieties of, 7 See also action, cooperative Courtenay, William, 13, 323n9, 350n83, 409n54 courtly love, 326n26 cousins, intellectual, 16–17, 251–52, 254–55, 420n50. See also informant, cultural Crafton, John Micheal, 403n28, 409n52

468

Cramer, Patricia, 332n20 Crampton, Georgia Ronan, x, 29 Daley, Brian, 395n109 Dante Alighieri, 37, 181–85, 195–97, 198, 239–40, 421n51 David, Alfred, 27 debt and forgiveness, 295–99, 301–3 (see also sin: and debt) as a kind of law, xiii–xiv, 296–99 deification, 8–12, 304. See also under Bernard of Clairvaux Delany, Sheila, 327n29, 348n74, 349nn77–78 de Meun, Jean, 231–36 Dempster, Germaine, 400n21 Descartes, René, 312, 322n7, 432n33 dialogue. See under hermeneutics Diamond, Arlyn, 397n7 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 337n38 divinization. See deification Donaldson, E. Talbot, 308, 315–16, 322n8, 343n53 Donaldson, Ian, 401n27, 403n28 Dorothy of Montau, 331n12 double agency. See cooperation: divine-human Dryden, John, 327n32 Dupré, Louis, 431n32 dyads, 101–3, 140–47, 148–50, 207–8, 282, 314–15 Easton, Adam (cardinal), 175–76 ecclesiology, 32–33, 136–37 Eckhart, Meister, 315 Enlightenment reading. See under hermeneutics Eriugena, John Scotus, 321n6 Ernst, Cornelius, xiv–xv exemplum Dorigen’s exempla, 223, 225– 29

Index

Griselda as, 42–44, 67–68, 78–79, 91–93, 333n25 See also Mary, mother of Jesus: as moral exemplar faith, 186, 373n17. See also trust Farber, Lianna, 404n35 Faulkner, Dewey R., 403n28 fideism, 308 Finlayson, John, 333n24 Fortune. See chance; providence Foxe, John, 308 Fradenburg, Louise O. [Aranye], 109–11, 365n29, 420n50, 427n8 France, James, 383n63 Franciscan Order, 300–301. See also Agamben, Giorgio Francis of Assisi, 429n17 freedom, 269–70, 285, 289–90, 294, 310, 357n24, 363n14, 432n33 Funkenstein, Amos, 421n51, 431n32 Furrow, Melissa M., 372n14 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 34, 97–104, 110, 112, 316, 370n43, 399n14 Galen (physician), 331n13 Gavrilyuk, Paul L., 321n5 Gawain poet, 37, 409n53 Gaylord, Alan, 322n8, 396n3, 397n4, 398n9, 408n49 Georgianna, Linda, 308–9, 313 Gerson, Jean, 251–52 Ghellinck, J. de, 412nn8–9, 413n13 Giffin, Mary, 175–76, 202, 382n60 gift, 130–31, 134–39, 143, 162, 186–87, 190, 206, 296, 304–5, 310 Gillmeister, Heiner, 392n99 Gilson, Etienne, 320n3, 325n21, 326n26, 328n40, 369n41 Goodwin, Amy W., 335n31, 336n32

Index

Gower, John, 87–88, 240, 277, 403n28, 404n31, 422n52, 423n57, 427n7 grace, 87, 161, 189–90, 194, 201, 233, 351n85, 380n50, 384n68, 430n30. See also Augustine: On Grace and Free Choice; Bernard of Clairvaux: On Grace and Free Choice; gift; Mary, mother of Jesus: and prevenient grace grammar, and agency, 193, 280. See also passive voice Grant, Sara, 320n3 Gratian (jurist), 252, 401n27 Green, Richard Firth, 28, 224, 229, 342n51, 396n3, 403n30, 408n48 Gregory the Great, Saint, 15, 324n16, 328n40, 345n64, 369n42 Grosseteste, Robert, 321n6 Guardini, Romano, 306, 424n63, 425n65 Guillaume de Tournai, 318n8 habit, 73–74 hagiography, 45, 152, 156–62, 174–75, 371n6, 376n31, 379n48 distinguished from Marian miracles, 382n61 Hamel, Mary, 397n7 Hamm, Berndt, 13, 401n27 Hanna, Ralph, III, 78, 344nn57–58, 345n62, 346n66, 351n87, 401n25 hardness or duritia, character trait, 75, 332n18 Haskins, Charles Homer, 412n9 Hauerwas, Stanley, 33 Heffernan, Thomas J., 379n48 Hegel, G. W. F., 369n42 Heidegger, Martin, 315 hermeneutics, 36–37 conflict of presuppositions in, 11–13, 37, 96–112, 117–20, 128

469

dialogic reading, 96–120, 144 Enlightenment reading, 102–13, 117–20, 316 entanglement of presuppositions in, 112–20, 126 historicist reading, 96–104, 109, 111, 313–14 See also Gadamer, Hans-Georg; presuppositions, unperceived Hesdin, Simon de, 403n28, 404n31 Hinckley, Henry Barrett, 397n4 historicism. See under hermeneutics Hoffman, Richard L., 400n21, 403n28, 404n31, 406n41, 409n52 Holcot, Robert, 13–14, 17, 30–31, 89, 399n15 Holdsworth, Christopher, 14–15, 411n6 Holy Innocents, 45 Homer, x, 319n1 Hugh of St. Cher, 406n43 Hugh of St. Victor, 351n85 Hume, Cathy, 330n10 Hume, David, 431n32 Hume, Kathryn, 398n8 humility, ix, 183–84, 186, 188, 255, 272–73 and exaltation, 192–97, 203–6 hypothetico-deductive argument, 3–4, 7, 309, 314, 392n98, 399n14, 409n54 idleness. See action: bisynesse implication. See consequence, logical influence, intellectual. See Bernard of Clairvaux: as witness or informant; cousins, intellectual informant, cultural, 72. See also Bernard of Clairvaux: as witness or informant inner person, Griselda’s, 52–68, 91, 334n27

470

Index

inner person, Griselda’s (cont.) her control over future states, 59–62, 66–68, 91, 369n42 her past responsibility for present states, 62–68, 91 her present replication of Walter’s will, 65–68 (see also automaton, moral) intention author’s and/or reader’s, 21–22, 314–16 entente and purpos, possible negativity, 80–84, 233 in Friar’s Tale, 419n42 and swearing, 215–16 See also under Bernard of Clairvaux invocation, for aid at start of poem, 177, 181–82 Irenaeus, 393n101 irony, 44–72 passim, 90–93, 122–23, 154, 156, 201, 215–41 passim Isidore of Seville, 178 Ivo of Chartres, 252–55, 258–59, 261, 262

John of Gaunt, 380n51 John of God, 251 John of Salisbury, 15, 401n27 John of the Cross, 300–301 Josephus, Titus Flavius, 239, 406n42 Justice, Stephen, 322n8 Justinian (Roman emperor), 254

Jacobus de Voraigne, 163–75, 177–80, 374n20 Jacqueline, Bernard, 413n20, 416n30 James, William, 358n27 Jankowski, Eileen, 376n34 Jauss, Hans Robert, 100 Jephtha, rash vow of, 236–41 Jerome, Saint, 25, 227–28, 238, 324n16, 361n8, 399n17, 400n21 Jesus of Nazareth, 119, 139, 170, 208, 240, 263, 267, 283–84, 288–89, 296, 299, 303–6, 371n1, 390n89, 396n3, 398n8, 417n35. See also Christology John Duns Scotus, 13, 409n54 John of Damascus (John Damascene), 16–17, 325n24, 395n109

Landgraf, Artur Michael, 18 Langland, William, 29–31, 37, 295 Lao-Tse, 303 law and caution, 218, 271, 275 contempt for, 261, 264–67, 416n31 and determinism, 270, 284–90, 312 dispensation of (see Bernard of Clairvaux: On Precept and Dispensation) divinely instituted, 253–54, 256–57, 259–64, 273 and form or formal cause, 283–84, 289–90, 312 and “gentleness,” 268–69, 275, 283–90, 303–4, 312–13 and idolatry, 264–65, 272, 281–82

Kant, Immanuel, 28–29, 353n4, 356n18, 359n31, 363n14, 420n50, 426n2, 429n20 Kasper, Walter, 357n24, 363n14, 424n63 Kauffman, Stuart, 431n32 Kellogg, Alfred. L., 318n7 Kelly, J. N. D., 361n8, 401n25 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 371n3 Kern, Fritz, 415n24 Kieckhefer, Richard, 331n12 Kierkegaard, Søren, 368n38, 370n43 Kittredge, George L., 42, 216 Kolve, V. A., 371n7, 377n39, 386n73 Kooper, Erik, 397n6

Index

and life sub lege, 268–70, 275, 281–82, 286, 294, 311, 425n67 love of, 6, 246, 248 love or caritas as, 132–33, 258–60, 272, 288, 310–11 as/and mechanical force, 226, 229, 236, 244–46, 276–78, 284, 292, 294–98, 428n11, 429n20 (see also law: and “perfection”; rigor) most general sense of term, xiv–xv, 220, 254–55 of nature, 125, 244, 254, 284, 431n32 and “perfection,” 268–70, 274–75, 286, 296 and predictability, 285–90, 348n75 regularity and exceptions in, 220, 246, 255–57, 266–71, 273, 279–82, 283–90, 298, 301–3, 311–12 relation to will, 301–4 “establishing” will, 124–25, 131–36, 323n9, 419n42 (see also oaths: requirements and restrictions, medieval) “fulfilling” will, 280–81, 427n8 “interpreting” will, 258, 280–81, 416n30 scrambling of categories, 283–85, 288–90, 294, 310–11, 422n54 “subject” will, xv–xvi, 6, 19, 35, 231–34, 236, 241–47, 248–75, 279, 281, 310–11, 323n9, 427n8 will of “user,” 230–31, 276–79, 281, 293 See also consequence, logical; debt; oaths; Rule of St. Benedict Lawler, Traugott, 401n25 Lebreton, Jules, 355n17 Leclercq, Jean, 13, 411n5, 413n15, 413n20, 416n30 Bernard of Clairvaux, 14–15, 412n7

471

Love of Learning and the Desire for God, The, 18–19, 325n22 Leibniz, G. W. F., 211, 426n2 Livre Griseldis, 48, 52, 56, 62, 65, 69–70, 329n4, 335n31, 336n32, 337n38, 338nn39–40, 338n42, 339nn44–45, 340n46 Livy, Titus, 403n28, 404n31, 405n37, 406n41 Lobrichon, Guy, 411n6 Lollardy, 176, 371n3, 378n42, 378n44 loopholes. See oaths: and implicit conditions Lord’s Prayer, xiii–xiv, 296–98, 301–2 Louf, André, 206, 388n82 Lounsbury, Thomas, 308 Louth, Andrew, 322n7 Lucretia, 226–28, 400n20, 403n28, 407n45 Luecke, Janemarie, 152, 206–7, 390n91, 393n100 Luther, Martin, 309–11, 313, 321n5 Lynch, Kathryn, 327n29 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 33 magnanimity, 193–95, 197, 207, 272–73 Mann, Jill “Chaucer and Atheism,” 95–104 on feminist criticism, x, 95 Feminizing Chaucer, x, 28, 34, 95–109, 112–26, 348n75, 349n78, 352n90, 394n107, 399n15, 432n34 Mannelli, Francesco d’Amaretto, 331n15 Mannyng, Robert, 239–40 Map, Walter, 25 Marenbon, John, 324n15, 325n23, 357n21, 358n27, 358n29 Marion, Jean-Luc, 365n27

472

Maritain, Jacques, 107, 356n18, 357n24, 424n63 marriage, equality in, 216–24 Mary, mother of Jesus, 156, 177, 180–209 Annunciation scene, 2, 183–84, 188, 288, 384n66, 388n78 Magnificat (gospel canticle), 186–87, 190, 193–95, 204–5 Marian miracle stories, 153, 185, 382n61 as moral exemplar, 187–89, 192, 194–95 and passivity or receptivity, 2, 193–95, 203–4, 288, 384n66, 423n57 and prevenient grace, 153, 195–97, 384n68 and prophecy, 204–5 Maximus Confessor, 395n109 McCabe, Herbert, 320n3 McGinn, Bernard, 13, 14, 129, 309–10, 321n5, 367n36, 369n41 Ménagier de Paris, 62, 65, 69–70, 329n4, 335n31, 336n32, 337n38, 338nn39–40, 338n42, 339nn44– 45, 340n46 merit, 130–31, 142, 181, 189–90, 278, 365n26 Mersand, Joseph, 391n95 Merton, Thomas, 300–303, 306, 320n3, 321n4, 365n29, 368n39, 413n20. See also various epigraphs Middleton, Anne, 315, 341n49 Milbank, John, 365n27 Miller, Mark, 28–29, 34, 330n10, 341n48, 348n70, 353n5, 356n18, 359n31, 368n38, 420n50, 429n20 Minnis, A. J. 124, 125, 322n8, 349n80, 357n23

Index

“mixed life” (active and contemplative), 179–80, 388n78, 423n58 modernity, differences from medieval presuppositions, xvi, 11, 30, 36, 144–45, 309–13, 409n54 Moevs, Christian, 320n3 monastic theology, 17–19, 37 Moralium dogma philosophorum, 329n2 Moritz, Theresa Anne, 406n42 Morrison, Toni, 404n33 Morse, Charlotte, 333n25 Munier, Charles, 412n8, 413n13 Murray, Alexander, 401n24 Myles, Robert, 328n38, 411n55 mysticism, 8–12, 36, 312. See also contemplation; deification; union Nagel, Thomas, 356n18 narrators. See Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales, pilgrimnarrators in natural science, 312 necessity, 259, 262–63, 269–70, 272, 284–87, 289–90, 292, 303–4, 421n51, 428n11, 431n32. See also law: and determinism Newman, Barbara, 394n105 Newton, Isaac, 312 nominalism, 13, 30, 311, 327n29, 395n108, 409n54, 411n55 rival definitions, 328n37 North English Legendary, 158–59, 160, 374n20 Notker Balbulus, 184 Oakley, Francis, 13 oaths Custance’s lack of, 81–83 Dorigen’s, 213–29 Griselda’s, 49–53 and implicit conditions, 243–46

Index

as laws, xv, 221, 249 rash, 49–51, 215, 238–39, 242, 256, 260, 396n3 (defined) requirements and restrictions, medieval, 215–16, 238–41, 398n8, 419n42 See also rigor obedience, 256–57, 260–62, 264–71, 281–82, 303, 416n30, 428n11. See also law: and “perfection” Oberman, Heiko, 13, 89, 310, 424n60 Origen, 325n24, 393n101, 407n45 pagan philosophy, relations to Christianity, 124–25, 146, 193, 320n3, 341n49, 370n43. See also Stoicism paradox, 5, 269, 273, 369n40, 389n86 of action and passion, 143–47, 194–95, 197, 206–9, 280, 298, 302–6, 310–11, 423n57 (see also passivity: in relation to action, possible simultaneity or “mixture”; union: of action and passion) and Christology, 149–50, 394n105, 395n109 of freedom and necessity, 285, 289–90 of givenness, 138, 190, 364n24, 365nn25–27, 365n29 (see also gift) of will and law (see law: relation to will, scrambling of categories; union: of will and law) See also Bernard of Clairvaux: on paradox; humility: and exaltation Pascal, Blaise, 207–9 passio activa, 77–78, 141–43, 206, 272–73, 280, 288, 305–6, 317n4, 318n6. See also actio passiva

473

passion (in general). See passivity; patience; union: of action and passion Passion (of Christ), x–xii, 166–67, 303, 373n18. See also passio activa passive voice, 2, 87, 89, 174, 384n66. See also Mary, mother of Jesus: Annunciation scene passivity absence of, in Chaucer’s St. Cecilia, 152–82, 208–9 association with women, 2, 44–45, 157, 374n20 and divine will, 5–12, 188, 209 (see also cooperation: divine-human) inescapability of, 123–24 as method, 21, 314–16 in relation to action alternation, 120–26, 140–41, 143, 146–47 connection to will-and-law theme, xv–xvi, 6–7, 19, 222, 292–307, 310–13 necessity of passivity, 153–54, 278, 299–300 possible simultaneity or “mixture,” 3–9, 85–90, 123–24, 126, 190–95, 203–4, 280, 381n58 (see also action: cooperative; passio activa; union: of action and passion) scrambling of categories, xi–xiii, 16–17, 145–46 value of, ix–xiii, 3–6, 288, 300–301 shift in meaning of term, 1–3, 320n2 See also Mary, mother of Jesus: and passivity or receptivity; passive voice; patience pathos, 69, 91

474

patience in Custance, 82–92 and donkeys, 73–74, 77, 79 in Griselda, 42–79, 92 pacience, multiple meanings of, 218–23 and perseverance, Biblical terms, 382n60 positive and pernicious varieties, 72–79, 82, 90–92 See also passivity patristic criticism, 42, 322n8 Patterson, Lee, 385n69 Paull, Michael R., 371n6 Pearl poet. See Gawain poet Peck, Russell, 393n100 Peirce, Charles S., 392n98, 395n108, 399n14, 420n46 on law or “thirdness,” xv, 271, 403n30, 409n54, 431n32 Pelagianism, 30–32, 387n76 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 388n78, 430n30 Peraldus, William, 345n62, 346n66, 401n27 Peter Comestor, 239, 406n42, 407n45 Peter Damian, 346n66 Peter Lombard, 15, 252, 321n5, 355n15, 401n27, 424n63 Petersen, Kate Oelzner, 318n7 Peter the Venerable of Cluny, 251 Petrarch, Francis, 226 De remediis, 68 story of Griselda, 25–26, 44, 46, 47–48, 49, 51–52, 56, 58, 59–72, 78, 91, 169–70, 329n4, 334n28, 334n30, 345n64 Philibert, Paul J., 428n9 Philippe de Mézières, 62, 65, 69–70, 329n4, 335n31, 336n32, 337n38, 338n40, 338n42, 339n44, 339n45, 340n46 pitee (pity), 85, 120–24, 233 Pope, Alexander, 320n2

Index

Porète, Marguerite, 369n41 potentia dei absoluta, 323n9 Pratt, Robert, 403n28, 405n38 prayer, 154, 166, 168 presuppositions, unperceived, 244, 267, 274–75, 314. See also under hermeneutics prophecy. See under Mary, mother of Jesus protasis, xiv, 215, 242–46, 275, 396n3 Protestantism, 308–11, 313, 378n42 providence, 124, 154 and Fortune, 115–20, 125–26, 146–47 See also sonde Przywara, Erich, 320n3, 432n33 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 321n6, 366n33 Quodvultdeus (bishop), 406n43 Rabanus Maurus, 406n43, 407nn44– 45 Rahner, Karl, 361n9, 421n51 Randi, Eugenio, 13 rape or raptus, 85–86, 176–77, 225–28 Ratzinger, Josef, 304–6, 395n109 Raymond of Pennaforte, xii–xiii realism literary mode, 71–72, 411n55 as opposed to nominalism, 30, 395n108, 409n54, 411n55 Reames, Sherry, 152, 169, 199, 203–5, 371n3, 371n7, 372n8, 372n10, 372n13, 374n22, 375nn23–26, 376n31, 378n43, 379n46, 381n52 reductio ad absurdum arguments, 237–38, 267–68 regularity, 130–31. See also under law Reichert, Hans, 16 Reiman, Donald H., 330n10 Reynolds, Brian, 393n101

Index

rhyme royal, 70–71, 182, 306 Rice, Eugene F., Jr., 401n27 Richard II (king), 380n51 Richard of St. Victor, 251 Ricoeur, Paul, 368n38, 370n43, 428n9 rigor, 121, 220–26, 228–29, 244–47, 249–50, 256–61, 263–75, 279, 281–82, 286–87, 289–90, 292, 294–98, 303–4, 311–12, 345n64, 427n8, 432n33 Robertson, D. W., 322n8, 429n24, 433n38 Robertson, Elizabeth, 348n75, 349n79, 350n82, 356n18, 377n36 Robinson, F. N., 403n28, 408n46 Romance vocabulary, in Chaucer. See Weise, Judith Roney, Lois, 330n10, 396n3 Rosemann, Philipp W., 324n15 Rosenberg, Bruce, 404n35 Rosenwein, Barbara H., 346n66 Rossiter, William T., 331n14 Rule of St. Benedict, 19, 246, 251, 253–60, 265–71, 328n40, 417n35 Rupert of Deutz, 393n101 Saak, E. L., 328n39 sacrifice, 109–11, 141–42, 239–40, 297–99, 365n29, 420n50. See also self-annihilation Salter, Elizabeth, 343n53 Saunders, Corinne, 381n53 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 97, 102 Schnell, Rüdiger, 397n6 scholastic theology, 17–19 self-annihilation, 82, 89–90, 138–39, 146, 154, 207, 208, 294, 297– 300, 302, 353n5, 369n41, 427n8 selfhood, and dependence, 106–7. See also gift

475

self-legislation, 132, 134–35, 137 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 329n2, 345n64, 346n66, 399nn15–16 Severs, J. Burke, 329n4, 333n24, 335n31, 343n55 Shannon, Edgar F., 404n31 sin and debt, xiii–xiv, 296 degrees of, 261–68 sine qua non causality, 88–89 Skeat, Walter, 390n92 skepticism. See inner person, Griselda’s Sledd, James, 397n4, 398n8, 398n10, 399n17, 400n20 Smolin, Lee, 431n32 Sokolowski, Robert, 320n3 sonde (“sending”), 81, 82–83, 277, 279–80, 282, 288, 292, 423n57. See also providence source study, impact of, 21–22, 43–44, 55–56, 66–68, 156, 162, 174–75, 214–15, 233–36, 238, 240–41, 422n52, 427n7 South English Legendary, 157–59, 160, 374n20 Spearing, A. C., 295, 327n32, 351n87, 371n3, 398n8 Spirit, divine, 133, 136, 300–301, 407n45 Sprandel, Rolf, 412n8 Staley, Lynn, 152, 376n34 Steinmetz, David, 323n9 Stelzenberger, Johannes, 346n66, 347n67 Stepsis, Robert, 323n9 Stevens, Paul, 413n20 Stoicism, 126, 404n34, 425n67, 429n20 and Christianity, 74–76, 83–84, 334n28 passions and apatheia in, 47, 68, 74– 76, 83–84, 320n2, 334n28

476

Stoicism (cont.) patience in, 74–76, 344n57 wisdom or sagacity in, 66, 74–76, 84, 334n28, 337n38, 420n50 Straw, Carole, 369n42 Strohm, Paul, 28, 408n48 suffering, 300–301, 306, 429n17 in Chaucer’s characters, 113–16 two meanings of, ix–x See also passivity Sufism, 300–301 suicide, 214, 217, 224–29, 242–44, 407n45 Sweat, Laura C., 394n105 synergy, 8, 361n8. See also cooperation Tanner, Kathryn, 320n3, 368n39 Taoism, classical, 300–301. See also Lao-Tse; Zhuangzi Tempier, Stephen, 124–25 Teske, Roland J., 328n39 theodicy. See suffering theology. See monastic theology; scholastic theology; and individual writers theosis. See deification Thomas Aquinas, 30, 33, 149, 251–52, 321n5, 345n61, 347n68, 362n13, 382n59, 395n109, 401n27 influence of, 13, 17–18 on law, xiv–xv on magnanimity, 193 on oaths and vows, 238–39, 243, 396n3 Thompson, John L., 405n38, 407n45 thought-control, 50–52, 76, 83–84, 221–22, 355n17, 369n42. See also automaton, moral; inner person, Griselda’s; Stoicism: passions and apatheia in

Index

Todorov, Tzvetan, 96–97, 100 tradition, as resource, 16–19. See also cousins, intellectual transcendence, divine, in Abrahamic monotheisms, 320n3, 421n51 Trevet, Nicholas, 87–88, 226, 277, 349n78, 422n52, 423n57, 427n7 trouthe (“truth” or “troth”), 224, 228, 409n53. See also oaths: requirements and restrictions, medieval trust, 116, 118–20, 126, 154 Tupper, Frederick, 382n61, 390nn92– 93, 408n46 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, 431n32 union of action and passion, 3–12, 85–90, 106–8, 141–47, 289–90, 298, 300–301, 303–6 (see also under paradox) of divine and human will, 5, 7–11, 129–34, 142–47, 292, 298 (see also will: submission to divine) of will and law, 6, 289, 310–11, 432n33 See also contemplation; cooperation; mysticism; passivity: in relation to action Urban VI (pope), 380n51 Valerius Maximus, 403n28 Van Dyke, Carolynn, 372n8 Vauchez, André, 372n14, 378n42 vows, relation to oaths, 396n3. See also under oaths Waddell, Chrysogonus, 325n21 Wallace, David, 336n33 Walsh, P. G., 401n25 Weil, Simone, 297–99, 301–4, 306, 346n66

Index

Weise, Judith, 176–77, 199–200, 202 Weissman, Hope Phyllis, 352n89 Werkmeister, Jean, 412nn8–9 White, Gertrude M., 408n48 Whytford, Richard, 412n7 will action from another’s, 291, 302–4, 306 (see also action: cooperative; cooperation) subjugation or replacement of, 81–84, 88, 90, 139, 288, 298 (see also automaton, moral) submission to divine, 304–6, 424n61 (see also union: of divine and human will) See also consent; intention; law: relation to will William of Auvergne, 72–79, 332n18 William of Conches, 329n2

477

William of Ockham, 13, 30, 33, 323n9, 325n21, 395n108, 409n54 William of Paris. See Christine, Saint, Life of William of Saint-Thierry, 328n40 Williams, Bernard, 356n18, 359n31 Winkler, Gerhard B., 411n5, 412n7, 412nn10–11 Winstead, Karen, 159 Wurtele, Douglas J., 396n3, 397n4, 397n7 Wyclif, John, 171, 176, 371n3, 378n42 Yunck, John A., 105, 350nn81–82 Zen Buddhism, 300–301 Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), 352n1

J o h n

B u g b e e

has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Texas, and Mount St. Mary’s University (Maryland). He is currently a visiting scholar in English at the University of Virginia.