Medieval literary voices: Embodiment, materiality and performance 9781526149503

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Medieval literary voices

Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg and Matthew Vernon Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the global Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-​medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific and religious. Titles available in the series 37. Transfiguring medievalism: Poetry, attention and the mysteries of the body Cary Howie 38. Objects of affection: The book and the household in late medieval England Myra Seaman 39. The gift of narrative in medieval England Nicholas Perkins 40. Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams Megan G. Leitch 41. Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam (eds) 42. The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry Caitlin Flynn 43. Painful pleasures: Sadomasochism in medieval cultures Christopher Vaccaro (ed.) 44. Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (eds)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Medieval literary voices Embodiment, materiality and performance Edited by

Louise D’Arcens and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4949 7 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Front cover—Reynard the Fox preaching to the geese. British Library, MS Royal 10 E. IV, fol. 49v, dated 1300-40. Courtesy of the British Library Board.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This volume is dedicated to David Lawton a mentor, a teacher and a friend

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

List of figures and tables List of contributors Preface List of abbreviations Introduction – Louise D’Arcens and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir 1 Articulate voices –​Ruth Evans

ix xi xv xvii 1 18

Part I: Narrative embodiment and voicing 2 Voice of authority: free indirect discourse in Chaucer’s General Prologue –​Helen Fulton 3 Speaking in person –​Fiona Somerset

37 56

Part II: Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices 4 The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale –​Mishtooni Bose 75 5 The sensology of the moral conscience: William Peraldus’s ethical voices –​Richard Newhauser 95 6 Langland parrhesiastes –​Ian Cornelius 111 Part III: Materiality and textual voices 7 Margery Kempe, the leprous woman and the voice of St Paul –​Lawrence Warner 8 Listening for the scribe: punctuation and the voicing of late medieval devotional literature –​Sarah Noonan 9 Parrot poet: Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66 –​Wendy Scase

133 150 172

Contents

viii

Part IV: Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10 Voice, materiality and history in St Erkenwald and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar –​Sif Ríkharðsdóttir 11 Embodying the Mandevillean voice –​Sarah Salih 12 Reconstructing Christine de Pizan’s musical voice in the twenty-​first century –​Louise D’Arcens

193 212 232

Afterword: medieval voice –​a tribute to David Lawton –​John M. Ganim

251

Bibliography Index

260 290

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures and tables

Figures 8.1 Cambridge, St John’s College, Cambridge, MS F 30, fol. 89v (by permission of St John’s College, Cambridge) 8.2 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Greaves 51, fol. 6r (by permission of the Bodleian Library) 9.1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66, fol. 95v (Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC 4.0) 11.1 Mandeville begins his journey, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 1r (© the British Library Board) 11.2 Mandeville the traveller, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Additional 24189, fol. 4v (© the British Library Board) 11.3 Mandeville the author, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Additional 24189, fol. 4r (© the British Library Board) 11.4 Mandeville at the crossroads, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 2r (© the British Library Board) 11.5 Mandeville with Virgin and Child, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 13v (© the British Library Board) 11.6 Mandeville observes flat- faced and long- lipped peoples, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 42v (© the British Library Board)

160 161

173

219

220

222

223

224

225

x

Figures and tables

11.7 Mandeville observes giants and Blemmyes, from Mandeville’s Travels. London, British Library, MS Harley 3954, fol. 42r (© the British Library Board)

227

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Tables 2.1 Ways of representing speech in writing (adapted from Rimmon-​Kenan, Narrative Fiction, with gratitude) 2.2 Grammar of FID (based on the description of FID by Toolan in Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction)

45

47

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contributors

Mishtooni Bose is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Christopher Tower Official Student in Medieval Poetry in English. Her publications include A Companion to Lollardy (2016), co-​written with J. Patrick Hornbeck II and Fiona Somerset, and Wycliffite Controversies (2012), co-​ edited with J. Patrick Hornbeck II. Her most recent publication on voice is the essay ‘Reginald Pecock’s vernacular voice’ in Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England, edited by Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens and Derrick G. Pitard (2003). Ian Cornelius is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter (2017) and of essays and articles on the language, form and textual transmission of medieval English poetry, especially Piers Plowman and other English alliterative verse. His current projects include two collaborations: a digital edition of the text of Piers Plowman in New Haven, Beinecke Library, Takamiya MS 23; and a digital archive of medieval manuscript materials held in smaller institutional collections in the American Midwest. Louise D’Arcens is Professor of English in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Languages and Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her publications include the books World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Global Textual Cultures (2021), Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (2014), Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–​1910 (2011) and the edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016), International

xii

Contributors

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Medievalism and Popular Culture (2014) and Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (2004). She is Director of the Macquarie University node of the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions. Ruth Evans is a Professor in the Department of English at Saint Louis University and a former President and Executive Director of the New Chaucer Society. She works on medieval English and other European literature of the period 1300–​1580, and has published widely on gender and sexuality, memory, the idea of the vernacular in medieval England and translation theory and practice. She is currently working on a monograph, Chaucer and the Book of Memory. Helen Fulton is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. She previously held chairs at Swansea University and the University of York. Her research focuses on medieval Welsh literature and its political connections with medieval English and French literatures. She has published widely on urban writing, the politics of space, Arthurian literature, Welsh manuscripts and the literary culture of the medieval March of Wales. She is the co-​editor of the Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (2019) and the editor of Chaucer and Italian Culture (2021). John M. Ganim is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (1983) and Chaucerian Theatricality (1990), both now republished in the Princeton University Press Legacy Series. His Medievalism and Orientalism (2005) was translated into Arabic in 2012 by the Kalima Foundation. Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages, co-​edited with Shayne Legassie, was published in 2013. He has served as the 114th President of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association and as President (2006–​2008) of the New Chaucer Society. Richard Newhauser, Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe, is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He has directed two NEH Summer Seminars at Darwin College, Cambridge, on ‘The seven deadly sins as cultural constructions in

ix ii

Contributors

xiii

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the Middle Ages’. He has edited a collection of essays on the senses, A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages (2014), and has published essays on sensory studies in postmedieval, The Senses & Society and The Review of English Studies and in a number of essay collections. Sarah Noonan is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where she specialises in medieval English literature and manuscript studies. She has published on medieval reading practices, early devotional literature, manuscript studies, book history and pedagogy, and she is the founding principal investigator and co-​principal investigator of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, a grant-​funded initiative to digitise and describe medieval manuscript collections in the American Midwest. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Beinecke Library, the Huntington Library in coordination with Lincoln College, Oxford, and the American Philosophical Society. Sif Ríkharðsdóttir is Chair and Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of the Institute for Research in Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Iceland, Reykjavík. She is the author of Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia (2012); Emotion in Old Norse: Translations, Voices, Contexts (2017); and most recently A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre (2019), co-​edited with Carolyne Larrington and Massimiliano Bampi. She is currently working on a medieval English literary history in a global context and a project on emotion and selfhood. Sarah Salih is Reader in English at King’s College London. She is the author of Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (2001) and Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England (2019), edited Studies in the Age of Chaucer from 2013 to 2018 and has edited or co-​edited five collections of essays. She is currently studying medieval English drama. Wendy Scase has published extensively on medieval literature, including books and essays on Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Gower, Lollardy, satire and complaint, and literacy, and a complete edition

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xiv

Contributors

of the famous Vernon manuscript. She is currently investigating how Latin literacy pedagogy shaped the experience of reading and writing Old and Middle English for a forthcoming monograph, Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700–​c. 1550. With David Lawton and Rita Copeland she is a founding editor of New Medieval Literatures. She is Emeritus Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and an affiliate in women’s gender and sexuality studies. Her research spans literature and law, intellectual history, cultural studies, the history of emotions and book history. She is the author of Feeling Like Saints (2014) and Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Medieval England (1998), and has written about Wycliffism, Piers Plowman, Chaucer and medieval political poetry. She is editing Historicizing Consent for Studies in the Age of Chaucer with Carissa Harris, finishing a book about medieval consent and beginning a book about medieval personhood. Lawrence Warner is Professor of Medieval English Literature at King’s College London. US-​born, he has taught at the Universities of Adelaide and Sydney and served as Executive Director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published extensively on Piers Plowman and on manuscript and textual studies, his latest book being Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production 1384–​1432 (2018). A long essay on Marilynne Robinson and Maureen Duffy, co-​authored with Michael Johnston, was recently published in The Yearbook of Langland Studies. Lawrence is currently editing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Preface

One editor in Reykjavík, Iceland, the other in Sydney, Australia: our coming together to produce this volume of essays reveals the world-​ spanning and ongoing fascination with the question of medieval literary voice and its many nuances. We are thrilled to be able to include contributions by so many of our wonderful colleagues, each of whom brings a unique perspective to thinking through voice, capturing by turns its embodiment, its force, its evanescence and its echoes. From our initial conversations through to the volume’s realisation, this project’s life has emerged out of the crucible of natural disaster. Catastrophic bushfires in eastern Australia, waves of global pandemic, earthquakes and –​finally, and spectacularly –​a volcanic eruption near Reykjavík have punctuated the writing and editing process. We are incredibly grateful to our contributors for their persistence through a series of challenges that might once have seemed improbable but now are our established reality. Their fortitude and patience have helped us make it to the end with grace and good humour intact. Our gratitude goes also to Meredith Carroll at Manchester University Press, who has been accommodating and supportive throughout the entire process. Her advice and responsiveness is much appreciated by both of us. We also thank our anonymous reader for an attentive and generously detailed report that has certainly improved the volume. Finally, we wish to dedicate this volume to Professor David Lawton, one of the great scholars of late medieval voice, who played a vital nurturing role in how both of us have developed as scholars of late medieval literature and its cultural afterlives. This dedication

xvi

Preface

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

reveals the role David has played –​as a scholar and as a teacher alike –​in shaping this volume, as his voice echoes throughout it, both figuratively and as its critical premise. It is indeed his voice –​in the form of a teacher, a mentor, a colleague or a friend –​that has, ultimately, impacted each of the contributors to this volume in its own unique way. We thank him for his scholarship, teaching and friendship over many years.

newgenprepdf

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Abbreviations

AND The Anglo-​Norman Dictionary DIMEV An open-​access, digital edition of the ‘Index of Middle English Verse’ EETS Early English Text Society ELH English Literary History e.s. extra series FID free indirect discourse MED Middle English Dictionary MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology MLA Modern Language Association of America OED Oxford English Dictionary Online o.s. old series PL Patrologiae cursus completus … series latina (Migne) PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America SFL Systemic Functional Linguistics STC A Short-​Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–​1640

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Louise D’Arcens and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir

At a colloquium on ‘voice’ held in Christ Church, University of Oxford, in 2016 the fraught relationship between voice as an embodied yet ethereal essence and its textual representation was made evident when the audience was exposed to the vocal palimpsest of a text written by a scholar the audience knew well being read by the voice of another. The colloquium was organised by one of the editors of the volume, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, along with one of the contributors, Mishtooni Bose, in collaboration with Professor David Lawton. As the pre-​eminent expert on voice,1 David was supposed to give the opening talk. When he was detained at the last minute he sent the two of us his talk, and the next day Mishtooni read it aloud to those assembled. It was not until David’s text (and hence voice) was mediated through Mishtooni’s voice that it became apparent how profoundly embodied the narrative voice is –​and that being mediated via a different voice changed not only its delivery but also its content, the shape of the words, their meaning and the text’s impact. There was an odd disconnect between his voice as remembered by the audience –​i.e. the words as they would have been spoken by David, in the audience’s collective memory of his voice, with its particular rhythm, cadence, tempo and sound –​and the sense of palimpsest as Mishtooni’s voice ventriloquised his own, thereby reshaping the textual remnant of his voice, giving it a new form, a new emphasis, a new mode of existing. Indeed, as Alison Cornish notes, ‘[w]‌riting preserves voice, but not a particular voice, not the unmistakable pitch, cadence and dynamics of each individual speaking’.2 This convoluted relationship between voice as memory, voice as text and voice as the sound heard (and, in this case, a textual and vocal palimpsest of voices) is at the forefront of this volume.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Medieval literary voices

This little anecdote on ‘voice’ showcases the fraught nature of voice as an embodied yet fleeting phenomenon that leaves only traces of its existence as a memory, a textual remnant or as a transient sensation of aerial vibrations. It also shows how voice figures as a metaphor for both the narrative voices inherent in the texts and the authorial voices of the past that we seek to engage with and that we –​as teachers and scholars –​seek to embody and ventriloquise through our own teaching and writing. The concept of voice was indeed a topic of great importance to medieval thinkers and scholars, and it underlies many of the debates in the Middle Ages on the human soul, embodiment and language. Already in antiquity scholars were deliberating on the differences between sound and voice and what it means to have a voice and, consequently, who could have a voice, making voice itself a staple of identity and a means of categorising humans as a species. Aristotle defined voice as ‘a particular sound made by something with a soul; for nothing which does not have a soul has a voice […] not every sound made by an animal is voice (for it is possible to make a sound also with the tongue or by coughing); but that which does the striking must have a soul and there must be a certain imagination (for voice is a particular sound which has meaning)’, thereby clearly associating voice with the notion of being ‘human’ and, moreover, with the concept of a meaningful utterance.3 Voice is thus, from early on, fundamental to the conceptualisation of what it means to be human and, by association, intimately interlinked with language as its (human/​intelligent) expression according to some of the earliest philosophical writings preserved. Medieval theorising and representation of voice not only belong to classical authors but have pride of place in the origins of Christianity. Lawton locates ‘the bounds of a medieval view of voice’ in St Paul and, hence, in scriptural writing, noting that ‘in Christianity writing and voice are interfused from the beginning’.4 According to Lawton, Paul’s voice became in effect the foundational voice of Christian culture –​a culture that privileges voices as the medium of divinity, in terms of both the disembodied divine voice of God and the voices that, in turn, mediate it via scriptural writings and preaching. The very concept of the resurrection of the spiritual body –​detached from yet preserving the embodied image of its previous materiality –​is contingent upon voice, as it

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

3

is ‘voice alone that portends the eternal, speaking for and as the soul’.5 In Augustine’s Confessions it is indeed a voice, undistinguished and genderless, that initiates the process of his conversion, which depends in turn on Augustine’s reception and, significantly, acceptance of the divine disembodied voice that speaks to him.6 The medieval understanding of voice was thus from the beginning conjoined with notions of what it means to be human, with spirituality and, significantly, with textuality. Yet the subject of ‘voice’ in medieval literature is relatively under-​ theorised, and there is seemingly a lack of consensus as to what is intended by the term. The concept of voice as used within modern theoretical writings stems from the narratological tradition and draws its meaning from what Emile Benveniste has termed ‘subjectivity in language’.7 The focus of the early narratologists was thus on the narrative voice in the text –​i.e. on the enunciation and its relation to the narrating instance. This was further advanced with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony and the multiplicity of voices within the modern novel, which has underwritten much of the current criticism to the extent that such multiplicity is no longer questioned but simply assumed.8 Even so, the concept of voice within contemporary theory has not developed extensively beyond the original idea expounded by the narratological tradition and, rather, has been drawn on to elaborate on narrative voices mostly and, to a lesser extent, on the orality of texts. Voice is therefore often assumed, largely accepted but rarely theorised. Recently, however, we have seen a surge in interest in the concept of voice and its associated potentiality, not just in terms of the narrating personas but also in terms of the information to be derived from textual voices about medieval socio-​ ­political structures, gender configurations and implicit (or explicit) authorial intent(s). Within medieval studies, analyses of voice have often been directed at female voices –​i.e. women’s access to the written word and/​or the silencing of their voices.9 The notion of voice has also been associated with identity or the expression of an identity.10 Other studies have focused on the multiple voices present in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.11 As a matter of fact, the poly­ phony, or multivocality, of Chaucer’s texts continues to intrigue Chaucer scholars –​given the potential the multivocal text offers for exploring social hierarchies, gender issues and so forth –​although

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Medieval literary voices

such studies are not always (indeed, rarely) framed as studies of vocality. The polyphony of the Canterbury Tales is indeed put to the test in this volume in Helen Fulton’s detailed narratological analysis of the General Prologue. The following chapter (Fiona Somerset) continues in the vein of the narratological school, considering how medieval texts present and mediate their voices. Several recent studies have focused on the performative aspect of voicing, both in terms of potential performative signals being built into texts –​suggesting their implicit aural (and voiced) ­character –​and in terms of the power of utterance, or how a voice can, for instance, ventriloquise sacred speech or divine voice.12 The notion of divine speech or voice relates, of course, directly back to the Bible and Lawton’s suggestion that Paul’s voice was at the foundation of Christianity and its subsequent p ­ romulgation. The question of moral imperative and religious orthodoxy is indeed fundamentally related to voice, given that having a voice (or being given voice) presumes and endows it with a certain amount of authority and ensures, in turn, its continuity. Several chapters in this volume (Mishtooni Bose, Richard Newhauser and Ian Cornelius) explore the representation of voice as an ethical or moral instrument in Middle English literature and consider what those textual voices may be said to convey to their medieval and modern audiences. If voice presumes authority, its textual mediation endows it with a certain power to influence and shape the audience’s perception. Most recently we have seen exploratory research into voice as a trans-​historical and interdisciplinary concept. The interdisciplinary medical humanities project ‘Hearing the voice’, based at Durham University, focuses on the processes associated with internal voice-​ hearing, or auditory hallucinations, both in the past and today.13 Corinne Saunders, one of the primary investigators of the project, points out: Voice-​hearing provides a flashpoint for the exploration of ideas of vision, spiritual experience, and the place of the self in the world. Probing the parallels and contrasts between pre-​modern and contemporary experiences of and attitudes to voice-​ hearing both brings new insights to medieval literature and contextualises and illuminates contemporary experience through the rich cultural lens of medieval writing.14

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

5

The notions of hearing voices and the disembodied voice are intimately interconnected with the belief in divine presence in the early stages of Christianity, and thus feature prominently in both visionary literature and in scriptural writing. But they also bring to the fore the notion of memory as a repository of ‘heard’ voices, as already suggested. Although hearing voices may signal a multitude of phenomena –​from religious rapture to mental illness –​we are all inundated with memories of voices and engage in a dialogue with a multitude of voices in our own heads on a daily basis. The Book of Margery Kempe –​explored later in Lawrence Warner’s ­chapter –​ provides the ideal example of the ambivalence of the concept of ‘internal voice-​hearing’ and the perception of voice as articulate or inarticulate (as in weeping or wailing).15 The cognisance of voice as both internal and external, as spiritual and as an instance of a ‘public interiority’ (to use one of Lawton’s most perceptive terms), or as a personal and public expression, is undeniably at the foundation of our understanding of Margery Kempe’s own narrative voice.16 The notion of articulate and inarticulate voices in The Book of Margery Kempe brings us to the study of ‘sound’ and ‘soundscapes’, whereby voice is explored in its broadest sense as a metaphysical phenomenon of aural vibrations.17 Voice is, of course, premised on sound, and the absence of sound is the antithesis of voice –​i.e. silence: no less important, and often, indeed, a deeply significant part of vocalisation.18 The study of sound is directly linked to aurality, a highly relevant concept for the study of medieval literary production and reception, and one that is in turn linked to both the study of the senses and musicology.19 These are further explored in the volume in several chapters that delve into the various manifestations of soundscapes or aural performances, exploring, on the one hand, their potential functionality within their medieval context (Richard Newhauser and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir) and, on the other, considering the modern reception of medieval musicality (Louise D’Arcens). The malleable character of voice as (inarticulate) sound, as spoken (articulate) utterance and as text calls attention also to an integral aspect of voice, namely the pause, the hesitation of breath before the sound breaks the silence, a meaningful absence. The notion of voice as articulated sound, and hence of voicelessness as emblematic of a lack of accessibility, authority or humanity, is

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Medieval literary voices

at the forefront of Irith Ruth Kleiman’s edited volume Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe. The volume raises questions regarding the role played by voice for establishing subjectivity, authority and a sense of community, and consequently queries the implications of voicelessness when it comes to the notion of communal identity, authority and belonging.20 Ultimately, it raises the question of which voices are given authority by audiences and readers, and the possibility of obscure voices being hidden not only in texts but also in the manuscript pages, whose traces nevertheless give evidence to the multifaceted reception history and the role of later scribal transmission in the mediation of medieval voices. These questions are explored further in two chapters (Sarah Noonan and Wendy Scase) in this volume that focus on the manuscript itself as an object that contains and mediates the multiple voicings through which the written text has passed, as witnessed in scribal punctuation or through border decorations and illustrations. Within Middle English literature, Lawton’s authoritative volume Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities is one of the first books to put voice as a theoretical literary term at the forefront of its scholarly concerns as it ranges across a variety of medieval and modern texts to showcase the role played by ‘voice’ in English literary history. In a sweeping gesture that reaches from the Vulgate to Proust’s dreamscapes in À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Lawton traces the voices of medieval authors as they overlay one another, modulate each other and, ultimately, parody each other. He coins the term ‘public interiorities’ to foreground the interplay between voice, text and mediation: Public interiorities are pieces of language –​as speech or text –​which already exist before they are revoiced by a new user. They are therefore voices in the medieval grammatical sense … They are a common stock, and so rhetorically commonplace, but they invite, and I argue are used to express, a response to their potential for interiority; their revoicing then gains resonance from the fact that they are shared. To conceive of public interiorities in this way is to reimagine the relationship between voice and authority in a way that lays emphasis on the work of the voice.21

Lawton’s concept of ‘revoicing’ is critical to medieval literary production and radically changes how we conceive of authority, inasmuch as it foregrounds the literary creativity involved in the process

7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

7

of the revoicing of literary, textual or uttered vocal fragments. If we consider voice as consisting of the human expression of words, then it is at the foundation of literary production and hence fundamental to our understanding of both how literature comes about and how we as readers and audiences understand it. Lawton points out that the medieval concept of voice (vox) has the dual meanings of ‘the trace of an authority cited’ and ‘independent human utterance’ and suggests that this duality merges what modernity has tended to separate –​i.e. textuality and orality.22 Sarah Kay additionally notes that although vox entails the human production of sound –​what we refer to as ‘voice’ here –​it also entailed the ‘voicing of birds, other animals, angels, and sometimes instruments too’ for medieval writers.23 Whereas ‘voice’ generally refers to what in the Middle Ages would have been conceived as vox articulata –​i.e. articulate or meaningful sounds that could therefore be reproduced as text –​vox expands across its multiple associated meanings, including utterance, text, language and sound.24 As is evident in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, vox or voice was understood in the later Middle Ages to incorporate not only the meaningful content of spoken (or written) language but also its musicality, its performativity, its sound. To understand medieval textuality it is therefore vital to take its vocality into consideration. Paul Zumthor’s theories of orality foreground best perhaps the interlinking of medieval textual instability and the permanence of past texts as performed voices in subsequent writing.25 His emphasis on the ‘human voice as a dimension of the poetic text’ repudiates the dichotomy of orality and textuality and suggests an entwining of the two concepts that occurs through the speaking subject –​that is, through vocality.26 It is precisely this notion of medieval ‘vocality’ as the foundation of medieval textuality, and thus as a critical concept for our understanding of medieval literary productivity, that serves as the premise of the volume. The concept of voice as set forth in this volume expands across these multiple meanings of voice –​i.e. the notion of the authorial voice, the implicit or intended aurality of the text and vox as authority or moral imperative, but also, in a Bakhtinian sense, the multiplicity of narrative voices within a text and the aural soundscapes provided by absent, imaginary and actual voices. The voice of the past is, of course, always forever vanished, a thing of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

Medieval literary voices

the past. It evokes a fleeting contact, and hence suggests both loss and memory. What remains of the authorial voice is the text itself, its narrative voices the means through which we access the figurative representations: those different kinds of medieval narrative voices, as well as the elusive voices that lurk behind and beyond the literary texts; the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the aural soundscape of the uttered text are at the forefront of the volume.

Arrangement of the volume The complexity of the term ‘voice’, its abstruseness and its indeterminacy are evident in the multiplicity of the approaches in this volume. We as editors have not made any effort to impose or enforce a single concept or critical uniformity to the approaches but, rather, have sought to foster an inclusive and exploratory range of perspectives. Each chapter thus engages with voice from a different angle, exploring, theorising or querying how ‘voice’ is conveyed, interacts with or forms part of medieval English literature, broadly speaking. The different approaches are categorised into four sections that each feature a particular focal point, where ‘voice’ becomes a mode for engaging with particular textual, theoretical or codicological issues, or, instead, is the means by which those issues are rendered visible. Before these sections, the volume begins by framing its exploration of medieval voice in the present, as its timely chapter ‘Articulate voices’, by Ruth Evans, argues that the modern racialisation of voices –​the way that we hear a supposed ‘essence’ of race in voices –​has been shaped by a long history that can be traced back to antiquity and the European Middle Ages. Applying Geraldine Heng’s thesis of premodern race to a range of medieval texts including Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Evans dissects how medieval Christians racialised the voices of non-​Christian people as inarticulate and akin to those of nonhuman animals. In the second half of her chapter Evans returns her analysis to the urgency of the present, in which Black people’s voices continue to be racialised by a white culture that also, and quite literally, chokes the breath out of them.

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

9

Whereas Evans’s conclusion firmly situates voices in bodies, the first part of the volume, ‘Narrative embodiment and voicing’, goes back to the initial modern theorising of voice as a narrative mode and conceives of voice as a narratological phenomenon or as a means of embodying the absent presence of the speaking subject. In ‘Voice of authority: free indirect discourse in Chaucer’s General Prologue’, Helen Fulton presents voice as a linguistically constructed (artificial) voice ventriloquised through the narrator in the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Fulton begins by contending that although few today would argue for a complete identification between the General Prologue’s narrator and Chaucer as author, the precise nature of the gap between them throws up an existential difficulty, since ‘Chaucer the man’ is responsible for both Chaucer the poet and Chaucer the narrator. Fulton argues that this conceptual difficulty can be reviewed in the light of contemporary narrative theory. Taking a linguistic view of how narrative voice is constructed in the Prologue, she works from the premise that we can distinguish a number of such voices and that none of them should be identified with ‘Chaucer the man’ as a pre-​existing ‘real’ person. Turning her attention to the narrative strategy of ‘free indirect discourse’, she argues that its effect, in the Prologue, is to draw attention to that gap which has so often been commented on, between the narrator’s perception (typically regarded as ‘naïf’) and our own sense of an authorial (and authoritative) guiding voice directing us to a more critically nuanced (or ‘ironic’) reading of events. In her chapter ‘Speaking in person’, Fiona Somerset considers what voice has to do with the ways medieval people thought about personhood and personification, and explores why and how medieval people have found it most necessary to comment on personhood in texts when the person they are imagining has a voice. She argues that they populate the moments when someone speaks in the first person with comments that they are ‘speaking in the person of’ someone else. Characterising this ‘speaking in person’ as a poetics of impersonation, in which a reader might be advised to ‘take the vois of’ a saint or prophet in repeating the defiance of authority in her own voice, Somerset turns to the interpretive act of disidentification involved in any claim that an ‘I’ voice speaks in the person of someone else. Among the questions she poses are: what is at stake when readers or writers feel impelled to dissociate voice

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Medieval literary voices

from text? And why did medieval writers and readers feel the impulse to make up people such as this, in order to explain the ‘I’ voices they fashioned or encountered in texts? The second part, ‘Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices’, is focused on moral, prophetic and contemplative voices. Mishtooni Bose’s chapter, ‘The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale’, offers a reading of The Franklin’s Tale and other late medieval English texts that foregrounds the disruptive presence of the body as a conduit for truths about the self that challenge those that can be consciously tolerated and intelligibly uttered. Exploring the ways in which these texts’ acknowledgement of the fissure between spoken utterances and the body’s voice is central to their drama of experience, Bose argues that the ‘utterances’ of the body have weight because they sometimes run counter to verbal truths, constituting an alternative language; although they may lack semantic force, they are not necessarily devoid of semiotic purpose. Turning to their effect on the reader, Bose argues that something is being communicated through these somatic utterances that solicits a variety of responses: this includes the empathic, whereby we attune ourselves to the feeling being expressed, and the analytical, whereby we ponder at the meaning of such a phenomenon and at what might be being communicated through it. Somatic utterances such as weeping, she demonstrates, are one of the ways in which a fictional text can gesture at disruptive leakages between the conscious and unconscious worlds of its characters. In his chapter ‘The sensology of the moral conscience: William Peraldus’s ethical voices’, Richard Newhauser examines the handbooks on the vices and virtues by mid-​ thirteenth-​ century author William Peraldus, arguing that Peraldus uses voice as the sound of the absent moral presence. Newhauser explores how this acoustic instruction occurs as sound that all can hear, but also as the voice of ventriloquism (when an authoritative presence speaks in the voice of a sinner) or the voice of natural phenomena we do not think of as speaking our language. Voices also speak soundlessly in the minds of those who dream or have visions. These interior voices, he argues, necessitate our recourse to the concept of the inner senses and what the Aristotelian tradition understood as the imaginative faculty. Drawing on sensology (the study of the human senses as cultural constructions), Newhauser shows that

11

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

11

Peraldus’s ethical voices construct the external and internal soundscape of morality. For phenomenology’s philosophy of experience, these voices make perceptible a chorus of subjectivities that add embodiment to ethical choice. Sound, as one of the two key senses for education then (and now), teaches the moral path in William Peraldus’s handbooks, regulating the conscience and creating a moral self. Ian Cornelius’s chapter, ‘Langland parrhesiastes’, focuses on the gap in Piers Plowman between the direction of its attention and the direction of its address: the poem speaks memorably about the poor, while its speakers regularly admonish, warn and counsel a class of persons outside the poem identified simply as ‘ye riche’. Such address, Cornelius shows, is at once an expression of class affinity and a powerful challenge to that class. Although the passionate and occasionally reckless quality of Langland’s social criticism has led some to read Piers Plowman in relation to the historical possibility of its censorship, Cornelius argues that Michel Foucault’s analysis of ancient Greek parrhēsia –​honest, challenging, courageous speech –​may serve as a corrective to readings that, in their attention to censorship, fail to register the force of conviction inherent in certain acts of saying. Cornelius’s chapter identifies parrhesiastic moments in Langland’s poem and examines the problematic voicing of these moments within the text’s larger patterns of evasion or deferral of claims. Part III, ‘Materiality and textual voices’, shifts the attention to the materialisation of voice, whether literal –​in terms of the physical or material representation of voices in the codex –​or ­figurative –​ in the self-​actualisation provided by the fictive or textual voice. Lawrence Warner’s chapter, ‘Margery Kempe, the leprous woman and the voice of St Paul’, takes up Lawton’s concept of public interiority in relation to The Book of Margery Kempe, by revisiting a much-​discussed episode in Margery’s narrative, in which she kisses a woman with leprosy, and arguing for it as an instance when the Book is at pains to establish its voice as a public interiority authorised by St Paul. Using a close text-​based reading of this episode in conjunction with its annotation by the Red Ink Annotator, Warner aims to establish that reading it in terms of its orthodox public interiority enables a fine-​tuning of some of the productive queer readings of Kempe in recent years spearheaded by Carolyn Dinshaw. He argues that these readings might profitably benefit

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Medieval literary voices

from recognition of Paul’s voice both in the specific passage and in the Book as a whole, arguing that if this episode is an instance of the Book’s queerness, that concept needs now to accommodate not only the non-​erotic but also the normative. Sarah Noonan’s chapter continues Warner’s interest in ‘vocal textuality’ in her focus on scribal voicing implicit in the material evidence of the manuscript copies of late medieval devotional ­literature. In ‘Listening for the scribe: punctuation and the voicing of late medieval devotional literature’, Noonan considers how systems of punctuation are applied across the extant manuscript record of several late medieval works of devotional literature, in particular the Manuel des péchés and Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes sive Meditationes, examining the rhetorical implications of the inconsistent application of punctuation systems over time. Her chapter pays particular attention to how such alterations might reflect the ways in which a scribe anticipated his audience’s interest in a work, or might have shaped how that work would have been read. This instability in the application of systems of punctuation demonstrates, she argues, an area of relative interpretive freedom for scribes, an area in which they could provide an original ‘voicing’ of that text. Deviations in how a work was punctuated would necessarily influence how a work was read aloud, and thus aurally comprehended; some marks would have also guided how readers perceived the internal structure of a work and could have influenced how that work was navigated in the context of both private and public reading. Noonan suggests that the interpretive licence with which scribes punctuated thus provides us with valuable information regarding delimitations of acceptable scribal practice, voicing and the evolution of vernacular reading habits during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Wendy Scase picks up where Noonan leaves off, considering voicing as a means of gauging vernacular literary practices. In her chapter, ‘Parrot poet: Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66’, Scase discusses Humphrey’s late medieval Commonplace Book, an assortment of genealogical, legal, medical, religious and literary material, some authored by Humphrey himself. This composite manuscript has attracted little comment, with its significance being seen by scholars mainly in its typifying of the cultural interests of an unsophisticated late medieval provincial

31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

13

gentleman. Scase builds on and complicates the proposition that Humphrey’s materials enable us to hear the gentry’s ‘authentic voices’. She argues that having an ‘authentic voice’ was a trope problematised not just in Humphrey’s sources but for Humphrey himself, and that when he spoke in the voice of the bird of paradise or the ‘papeiaye’, casting himself as a parrot poet, he was invoking a set of tropes that were invested by him and his circle with overlooked local meaning. This example of Humphrey’s practice gives us, Scase suggests, an insight into the special and particular communicative and identity-​forming functions that literary imitation enabled. Scase’s attentive reading of the manuscript, its content and its context provides a new perspective on his literary production. Humphrey’s manuscript materials give us privileged insight into the functions of writing, reading and sharing literature, both for Humphrey himself and his community. The final part, ‘Performative voices and medieval aurality’, focuses on how earlier voices are heard by later audiences –​whether by supernatural agency, imagination or sonic r­ econstruction –​and how that earlier voice ‘speaks’ the past in the present, or gives rise to the ongoing reanimation of a perceived past person. Sif Ríkharðsdóttir’s chapter, ‘Voice, materiality and history in St Erkenwald and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar’, explores the ways in which medieval authors imagined their own pasts as voiced and embodied artefacts, through a comparative analysis of the alliterative Middle English St Erkenwald and the Old Norse saga Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, two texts in which the past is reconfigured and incorporated through the physical rearticulation of pagan remains. Ríkharðsdóttir argues that both texts display similar means of repurposing their pagan past as foundational myths, and that this is made evident through the mediation of past voices, on the one hand, and their physical embodiment, on the other. By revoicing the past, she argues, it ‘becomes embodied and eventually memorialised as a script –​a text that both affirms and realigns it’. The chapter thus suggests that both these works utilise voice as a metaphorical tool to rearticulate the past. Sarah Salih’s chapter, ‘Embodying the Mandevillean voice’, examines how the impression of a voice has been generated by late medieval representations of the ‘Mandeville’ of Mandeville’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Medieval literary voices

Travels, and how generations of readers developed this voice into a distinctive and beguiling character. Salih argues that although the voice of ‘Sir John Mandeville’ is an illusory textual effect the text’s laconic voice nevertheless generated significant material traces, including two graves, at Liège and St Albans, and a visual identity in two manuscripts. She traces, moreover, the many ways in which the medieval reception of the text shows deep readerly investment in Mandeville’s historical reality. She argues that the Mandevillean reading community claims and continues the Mandevillean voice through translations, adaptations, impersonations and fan ​fictions, collaboratively constructing him as author and scholar, knight, traveller and Englishman. Louise D’Arcens’s chapter, ‘Reconstructing Christine de Pizan’s musical voice in the twenty-​first century’, returns us to the present, examining recent reconstructions of the sole surviving musical setting of Christine’s work, the ballade ‘Dueil angoisseus, rage desmesurée’. D’Arcens explores how, despite musicological obstacles and anxieties around authenticity, virtually all modern renditions claim to have captured something of Christine’s voice as an expression of her femaleness, her Frenchness and her ‘medievalness’. Analysing two very different twenty-​first-​century recordings, she explores the combination of sounds (including vocalisations) and values that are deemed to converge in Christine’s ‘musical voice’, and what this tells us about modern perceptions of medieval voices today. The volume’s afterword, by John M. Ganim, pays tribute to the pioneer in the field of voice in medieval literature, David Lawton, reflecting on his many contributions to the study of late medieval literature, and of medieval voice in particular. Situating Lawton’s work in a broader network of literary scholarship and theory that spans the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, Ganim argues that Lawton’s agenda-​setting books, scholarly editions and essays have been at the vanguard of the often under-​acknowledged contributions made by medievalists to broader intellectual and theoretical movements. Ganim’s portrait of Lawton is one of a scholar who combines meticulous textual scholarship with a querying of received ideas that is bold but always cognisant of the efforts of predecessors. He reminds us that all of this is delivered, whether in writing or in person, in a voice that is commanding yet also lively and full of humour.

51

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

15

The volume thus ranges widely across late medieval literature and its legacy, moving beyond the linguistic and geographic borders of insular Britain to encompass classical authors, such as Augustine, Aristotle and Boethius, as well as French, Latin and Norse texts, and examining late medieval and early modern actualisations of premodern voices. It draws on classical, medieval and modern theoretical debates related to voice and vocality, suggesting that voice can serve as a critical concept to draw out and theorise medieval notions of selfhood, embodiment, authority and the function of aural soundscapes in literary figuration and representation.

Notes 1 See D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and his Chaucer’s Narrators, Chaucer Studies 13 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985). See also D. Lawton, Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); The Norton Chaucer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); and the Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). 2 A. Cornish, ‘Sound matters 3. Words and blood: suicide and the sound of the soul in Inferno 13’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016), 1015–​26 (p. 1016). 3 Aristotle, De Anima, in De Anima Books II and III, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1993), pp. 32–​3, II.8.420b5 and II.8.420b27. See also discussion of ‘first voices’ in I. R. Kleiman, ‘Editor’s introduction’, in I. R. Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 1–​9 (1–​4). 4 Lawton, Voice, pp. 13 and 2 respectively. 5 Ibid., p. 15. 6 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book VIII, 12.29. 7 E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. E. Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 223–​30. 8 M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 9 See, for instance, C. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); W. Layher, Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Medieval literary voices

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and B. Wheeler, Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-​ Century Woman (New York: St Martin’s, 2000). 10 L. Bleach et al. (eds), In Search of the Medieval Voice: Expressions of Identity in the Middle Ages (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). 11 See, for instance, B. Nolan, ‘“A poet ther was”: Chaucer’s voices in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales’, PMLA, 101 (1986), 154–​69; K. Homar, ‘Chaucer’s novelized, carnivalized exemplum: a Bakhtinian reading of the Friar’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 45 (2010), 85–​ 105; and Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, which reveals an early interest in polyphony in The Canterbury Tales, although it is focused on the narrators as individual narrating embodiments rather than voices specifically. 12 See, for instance, M. Unzeitig, A. Schrott and N. Miedema (eds), Stimme und Performanz in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Historische Dialogforschung 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); and M. Hayes, Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power, Anxiety, Subversion, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For the connection to orality, see, for instance, E. B. Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999). 13 Refer to https://​hear​ingt​hevo​ice.org (accessed 2 April 2021). ­ edieval 14 C. Saunders, ‘Voices and visions: mind, body and affect in m writing’, in A. Whitehead and A. Woods (eds), The Edinburgh Com­ panion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 411–​27 (412). See also H. Powell and C. Saunders (eds), Visions and Voice-​ Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 15 For a discussion of the medieval grammatical differentiation between vox articulata (articulate voice) and vox confusa (inarticulate voice), see, for instance, M. Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–​1100, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 91–​7. 16 Lawton, Voice, p. 8. The concept of ‘public interiorities’ is laid out in further detail in ­chapter 3 in Lawton’s volume, where it figures in the form of ‘communities of voice’ (p. 69), and is discussed briefly later in the introduction. 17 See, for instance, S. Boynton et al., ‘Sound matters’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016), 998–​1039; B. Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature,

71

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

17

Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 17 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in collaboration with Brepols, 2005); and E. E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 18 See S. Rikhardsdottir, ‘Medieval emotionality: the feeling subject in medieval literature’, Comparative Literature, 69:1 (2017), 74–​90 (pp. 83–​7). 19 For the concept of aurality, see, for instance, J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late-​ Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also R. Newhauser (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses, vol. 2, In the Middle Ages (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014; repr. 2019), and C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), for information on sound and aurality as part of the five senses in the Middle Ages. 20 Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness. 21 Lawton, Voice, p. 8. 22 Ibid., p. 239. 23 S. Kay, ‘Sound matters 2. The soundscape of troubadour lyric, or, how human is song?’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016), 1002–​15 (p. 1003). 24 See Leach, Sung Birds, pp. 28–​53; Kay, ‘Sound matters’, pp. 1005–​6; Lawton, Voice, pp. 12–​13. See also J. Paz, who approaches nonhuman voices from the perspective of ‘thing theory’ in Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-​Saxon Literature and Material Culture, Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), and Cazelles’s Soundscape, which focuses in particular on the non-​semantic oriented soundscapes in early French literature, or what she calls ‘noise’. For a different take on sound and reading, see J. Hsy, ‘Phantom sounds’, in K. Heller and S. C. Akbari (eds), How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2019), pp. 97–​106. 25 P. Zumthor, La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), and his Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983). 26 P. Zumthor, ‘The text and the voice’, trans. M. C. Engelhardt, New Literary History, 16 (1984), 67–​92 (p. 67).

1 Articulate voices Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ruth Evans*

My Voice, My Rights, My Freedom, My Life. ‘I can’t breathe.’ ‘Poetry has its roots in human breath and what would become of us if this breath diminished?’ Giorgos Seferis1

When we think of racial difference today, we think of visual markers: skin colour, facial features, eye colour, hair. But race is also something that we hear. As the musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim observes, if the colour of one’s skin is a visible marker of race, ‘voice is equally objectified, entrained, and used as a “measure” of race’.2 When the co-​prosecutor in the 1995 O. J. Simpson murder trial asked a witness ‘The second voice that you heard sounded like the voice of a black man; is that correct?’, the assumption behind his question was that all African American voices possess a unique vocal quality.3 That question, as Eidsheim notes, rests on two further assumptions, namely that racial –​and gendered –​ ­identity is essential and inherent, and that this identity is expressed in the voice. Drawing on the insights of the French composer Pierre Schaeffer, Eidsheim argues that the question ‘Who, or what, made that sound?’ assumes that listeners hear voices in terms of ‘preconceived essence and meaning’.4 Schaeffer turns that question –​ ‘Who, or what, made that sound?’ –​back on the listener to ask what he calls ‘the acousmatic question’. Referring to the Larousse dictionary definition of an ‘acousmatic’ sound as ‘un bruit que l’on entend sans voir les causes dont il provient’ (‘a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it’), Schaeffer asks listeners to disregard the source and intentions of a musical sound and to analyse only ‘the perceptual reality’ of that sound.5

91

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

19

For Eidsheim, the acousmatic question –​not ‘Who made that sound?’ but ‘What do I hear?’ –​asks us to be aware of our propensity to hear race as an essence in Black voices and thus to fail to recognise that the distinctive tonality, pitch and timbre of those voices is not an essence but the product of specific histories and experiences: ‘enculturation, technique and style, and an infinity of unrealized manifestations’.6 What we hear is an effect of our preconceptions. We racialise Black voices. In this chapter I argue that the racialisation of voices has a long history, which can be traced back to antiquity and the European Middle Ages and which still shapes the way that we hear a supposed ‘essence’ of race in voices today. By ‘racialisation’ I mean those practices and processes of race-​making that belong to a time before the ‘invention’ of race as a concept and through which, in Geraldine Heng’s words, ‘essentialisms are posited and assigned … so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment’.7 Heng argues that by intentionally deploying the vocabulary of ‘race’ before the invention of race we will be able to bear witness to ‘the impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices and institutions in the medieval period’ that would not otherwise be recognised as part of the history of race and racism.8 But I include more than the sound of race in that history. Judgements about whether a voice sounds ‘like the voice of a black man’ are also aesthetic judgements. At the end of this chapter I ask what it means to put race and poetics together at a moment in US history when Black people are struggling to breathe or are dying because the breath has been choked out of them.9 Heng’s metaphor –​‘the invention of race’ –​turns on the double meaning of ‘invention’ that was common in medieval Latin and European vernaculars, as well as in antique and premodern rhetorical theory, namely the finding of something (an object; material for the composition of a text) and the act of reinvention that transforms that material into something new.10 The fifteenth-​ ­century poet John Lydgate, for example, remarked on the pleasure that poets take in ‘this the sotil fourme [skilful manner], /​Be [By] newe invencioun thynges to transfourme’.11 Poetic creation is not ex nihilo but is combinatory. It takes things that are known and turns them into a new object. Rhetorical invention traces a paradoxical movement of finding and repurposing, a movement that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Medieval literary voices

works both backwards and forwards in time. If the past furnishes material for the present, then the past is always in some sense intelligible to, and contemporaneous with, the present. Yet the transformational nature of invention means that neither the past nor the present is identical to each other or to themselves. Heng says that ‘the story of race … re-​begins again and again’, as if that story were condemned to repeat itself in the same way that trauma repeats the past, but the repeated history of race does not mean that scholars today must always repeat the same story about it.12 One way to change that story is for academics to attune themselves to race’s social and institutional forms. Wan-​Chuan Kao has recently called for white scholars in the field of medieval studies to ‘recognize’ medievalists of colour, intellectually, culturally and professionally –​that is, to acknowledge them and their work, to cite them, to centre them, to honour them. He has also called for ‘a practice of … attunement that moves us from fragility to engagement, intention to investment, and identity to action’.13 Kao’s call to move the field in a direction that is ‘attuned’ to race is by no means an exclusively US issue. Britons played a major part in the history of US racism and are only now beginning in appreciable numbers to come to terms with their involvement in that history. As the US historian Annette Gordon-​Reed observes, ‘American-​style racism has a British pedigree’, one based in ‘English attitudes to race, particularly the negative views about blackness that Englishmen brought with them when they crossed the Atlantic to the New World’.14 Although I am still learning what it means to practise ‘a scholarship or pedagogy of recognition’ that does not replicate, in Kao’s words, ‘the blind spots’ of the past –​the ‘governance of difference’, the political and institutional failure to address structures of inequality –​I want to suggest that Schaeffer’s acousmatic question, which Eidsheim inflects in relation to Black voices, might be a metaphor for practising a pedagogy of recognition and attunement. When we hear race in Black voices as an essence, we either tune out the individual history and culture of Black people, or we tune them in only to misrecognise them as cultural stereotypes. The acousmatic question demands a listening that is engaged and intentional. It asks white people to listen better. The racialisation of voices precedes the invention of race in the fifteenth century.15 The most salient form of that racialisation

12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

21

within late medieval western Europe is the characterisation by Christians of the voices of non-​Christian peoples as inarticulate, and the comparison of their voices to those of nonhuman animals.16 The Dominican friar Simon of Saint-​Quentin, a white, European Christian who accompanied Ascelin of Lombardy’s mission to the Mongol (Tatar) empire in central Asia in 1247 and who wrote an eyewitness account of that mission, compared the voices of non-​ Christian Mongols to the voices of bulls and wolves: ‘The Tartars [sic] speak in an argumentative and noisy manner from a fierce and horrible gullet; singing they bellow like bulls or howl like wolves, issuing forth inarticulate vocalisations in their singing.’17 As the musicologist Justin Stoessel notes, Simon’s dehumanising rhetoric is an instance of the ‘discourse of animality’, Cary Wolfe’s term for ‘the use of that constellation of signifiers to structure how we address others of whatever sort (not just nonhuman animals) … [which] has historically served as a crucial strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans –​a strategy whose legitimacy and force depend, however, on the prior taking for granted of the traditional ontological distinction, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animals’.18 In medieval Christendom, the discourse of animality operated as a racialising strategy, seeking (in Stoessel’s words) ‘through a process of alienation to define morally or theologically the Latin West’s place in the world’ –​that is, its pre-​ ­eminent place.19 Mel Chen addresses the racialising process within this discourse more directly than Wolfe, borrowing and adapting a linguistic term of ‘political grammar’ called an ‘animacy hierarchy’, a model that ‘conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority’.20 Chen is concerned with the degrees of ‘liveness’ that these categories may be said to display, but uses ‘animacy’ rather than ‘life’, not only in order to undo binaries but also to trouble the distinctions between perceived degrees of animacy/​ intimacy within the genus homo, distinctions that sort human subjects into the human and the less than human. As Stoessel notes, Simon of Saint-​Quentin’s characterisation of the voices of his Tatar hosts as ‘inarticulate vocalisations’ had a precise meaning in thirteenth-​century Latin Europe, one derived from the definitions of spoken utterances by late antique grammarians, includ­ ing Donatus (fl. mid-​fourth century CE) and Priscian (fl. 500 CE),

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Medieval literary voices

who was, incidentally, from Caesarea, a Roman colony in Roman-​ Berber north Africa, now modern Algeria.21 In his taxonomy of vocal utterances (voces), Priscian sorts those vocalisations into a fourfold hierarchy according to their intelligibility: vox articulata (articulate sound), inarticulata (inarticulate), literata (able to be written) and illiterata (not able to be written).22 Priscian’s schema exerted an enormous influence on later grammatical, rhetorical and music theory.23 It also contributed significantly to the construction of race before race, positing and assigning essential qualities to human voices, so as to create, as Heng says, ‘a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment’. For Priscian, an articulate sound is one that is ‘joined with some meaning in the mind of the person speaking’, whereas an inarticulate sound ‘is the opposite, and does not proceed in any way from the mind’.24 Some utterances, such as human whistling/​hissing and groaning, cannot be written but are nevertheless meaningful.25 Some can be written but are meaningless, such as ‘coax’ (the sound a frog makes) or ‘cra’ (a crow’s caw). But there are others that are both ‘inarticulate and unable to be put into letters’ and that ‘can be neither written nor understood’, ‘such as a rattling/​creaking, a mooing/​bellowing and similar sounds’.26 As Susan Boynton notes, ‘the type of sound that medieval grammarians define as articulate is what characterises human utterance: it is the voicing of a rational soul articulated by a body’.27 Vox inarticulata, whether or not it can be written, is mere sound, lacking the intention to signify, such as the voicings of frogs and crows. Priscian’s opposition laid the groundwork for dehumanising certain groups of humans on the basis of their voices, because their utterances are heard as unintelligible and irrational, since they are not ‘joined’ to any mental process. The long history of hearing a joining and unjoining of voice and thought emerges, in paradoxical form, in the twenty-​first-​ ­century racial politics of white people’s praise of Black speakers for being ‘articulate’.28 The encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville’s discussion of onomatopoeia in his influential Etymologies (c. 615–​30) repeats Priscian’s idea that nonhuman animal noises –​but only those of quadrupeds, since birds are an exception –​are ‘inarticulate’. Onomatopoeia, he says, ‘is a word fashioned to imitate the sound of jumbled noise (vocis confusae) as … the hinnitus (“whinnying”) of horses, the

32

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

23

mugitus (“lowing”) of cows, the balatus (“bleating”) of sheep’.29 Isidore’s association of quadrupeds with ‘jumbled noise’ is echoed in the didactic grammatical tradition known as voces animantium (animal utterances), which are lists of birds and quadrupeds that pair their names, in Elizabeth Eva Leach’s words, ‘with the correct Latin verbs for their voces’.30 These lists in turn generate a means of categorising the voices of human singers as bestial. This tradition informs a short treatise by Arnulf of St Ghislain, who was probably a monk from Hainaut in France (fl. c. 1400), that sorts singers into four types: the bad, the good, the better and the best.31 Arnulf compares the best singers to nightingales (‘although better than nightingales in their natural gift’), and compares bad singers –​‘those who are utterly ignorant of the art of music’ –​to four-​legged beasts: When they bray with their cry louder than an ass [and] trumpet more terribly than the clamour of a wild animal, they spew out careless obscenities, [and] singing their parts in the reverse of the way should, they produce barbarism in music contrary to rule.32

Arnulf’s treatise has a specular and subjectifying function. It invites readers to identify which category of singer they are, ‘so that everyone who would know how to make music in his degree [according to what type of singer he is] may delight in it more often … and the howling fool may learn to control his bestial noise’.33 Arnulf’s comparison of the worst singers to quadrupeds, vomiting up cacephaton (the rhetorical figure more commonly known as cacemphaton, a thoughtless choice of words that can be misinterpreted as ‘obscene’ when said out loud) and ‘barbarism’, is informed not only by the grammarians’ distinction between vox articulata and inarticulata but, ultimately, by the distinction Aristotle made between a sound and a voice in his treatise On the Soul: ‘Voice [phōnē] is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice. … Not every sound … made by an animal is voice …; what produces the impact must have soul [empsychon] in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination.’34 Not all sounds are ensouled, but both human and nonhuman animals have voices and share what is called ‘the animal soul’. But only humans, who have speech and whose utterances are accompanied by ‘an act of imagination’ (that is, by the intention to signify), have rational souls. What Étienne Balibar

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Medieval literary voices

calls ‘the systematic “bestialization” of individuals and racialized human groups’ is underwritten by Aristotle’s idea of the animal soul and by the possibilities that creates for a space of separation within the human subject that can be exploited by humans to subjugate other humans: ‘Man’s animality, animality within and against man … is thus the means specific to theoretical racism for conceptualizing human historicity.’35 The comparison of human singing voices to animals in the late European Middle Ages assumed a more overtly racialising aspect when it was aligned with national, religious and ethnic groups.36 One Latin proverb that may originate in fourteenth-​century France claims: ‘The French sing, the English shout joyfully, the Spanish wail, the Germans howl like wolves, the Italians caper like goats.’37 In the section De cantoribus (‘On singers’) in his Boncompagnus (also known as the Rhetorica antiqua) (c. 1215), the thirteenth-​ ­century Bolognese rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa observes that ‘[d]‌iverse nations and different people in different ways dislike each other’s way of singing’, illustrating this with animal comparisons: ‘The Greeks say the Latins bark like dogs and the Latins say the Greeks growl like foxes.’38 Boncompagno then remarks on the differences in singing styles between different ethnoreligious groups: ‘Indeed Muslims say that Christians do not sing but rave. And, conversely, Christians say that Muslims swallow their vocalisations and gargle their singing in their gullets.’39 Boncompagno did not intend to be even-​handed. From a Christian perspective, Muslims would of course say that Christians sound crazy, and Muslim voices would of course sound to Christians both indistinct and unmusical, as if produced low down in the throat, rather than decorously higher up in the mouth. Arnulf and Boncompagno were not race-​making per se, but Arnulf’s assumption that each category of singer remains ‘in his degree’ essentialises human voices and identities, and the animal analogies perform the race-​making work of demarcating, separating and sorting while also appealing to the principle of a natural order in which the fully articulate human is at the top. As Balibar argues about modern concepts of race, ‘[c]lassification and hierarchy are operations of naturalization par excellence or, more accurately, of projection of historical and social differences into the realm of an imaginary nature’.40

52

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

25

The hierarchical sorting of voices into the human and the bestial, the human and the barbaric, the intelligible and the unintelligible, also informs the trope of miraculous conversion that simultaneously turns Jews and Muslims into Christians and confused sounds into intelligible Latin Christian songs. In the cryptic prophecy towards the end of Passus III (B text) of Piers Plowman, Conscience declares that, before peace comes at the end of the world, ‘By sixe sonnes [suns] and a ship and half a shef of arwes [sheaf of arrows] /​And the myddel of a moone shal make the Jewes torne [convert], /​And Sarsynes [Muslims] for that sighte shul synge Gloria in excelsis.’41 When Isaiah’s vision of the peace of the nations (2:1–​3), identified in the Middle Ages with the idea of the pax romana Christiana, finally comes to pass, Muslims will sing Christian songs. They will finally be articulate.

The acousmatic question in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale As Aristotle claims, the idea of ‘voice’ (vox) in the Middle Ages straddles the border between human and nonhuman, and between sentient and non-​sentient beings. Sarah Kay notes that medieval writers use vox not only to refer ‘to the human production of words and music, [but] also for the voicings of birds, other animals, angels, and sometimes instruments too’.42 Chaucer’s unfinished Squire’s Tale, a romance set in Sarai, ‘in the land of Tartarye’ (the Mongol Empire) (V.9), exploits its distant setting and its romance genre to stage a thought-​experiment: the possibility of interspecies communication between humans and birds.43 This staging invites readers to consider race-​making –​and the resistance to race-​making –​in the text’s deployment and disruption of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ that sorts humans from birds. When the Tatar princess Canacee wears or carries the magic ring that is the gift of a ‘straunge’ (V.89) emissary from the king ‘of Arabe and of Ynde’ who enters her father’s court on his birthday, she can understand bird-​talk: ‘Ther nis [There is] no fowl [bird] that fleeth [flies] under the hevene /​That she ne shal wel understonde his stevene [whose voice she will not be able to perfectly understand] /​And knowe his mening openly and plain, /​

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Medieval literary voices

And answere him in his langage again [be able to reply to it in its own language]’ (V.149–​52). From the grammarians’ point of view, Canacee’s speech and the ‘stevene’ of birds correspond to the opposition found in Donatus between vox articulata and vox confusa as categories of vocal distinctness (‘Articulate sound is what can be expressed by letters; confused sound, what cannot be written’), and to Priscian’s later distinction between vox articulata and vox inarticulata –​that is, between meaningful and non-​ meaningful utterances, the same opposition that underpins Simon of Saint-​ Quentin’s racialising judgement of Tatar singing voices as ‘inarticulate vocalisations’. Did Chaucer know Simon’s narrative? It has been suggested that King Cambiuskan, Sarai’s ruler in Chaucer’s tale, might stand for Genghis Khan (c. 1162–​1227), and that Chaucer may have had in mind the thirteenth-​century missions to the Mongol Empire, when the pope sent friars to the court of the then ruler of Sarai, Genghis Khan’s grandson, Batu Khan (c. 1207–​55).44 Chaucer may have known Simon’s account of his journey there in 1247, since it is recorded in a text Chaucer knew, Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale.45 Wearing the ring, Canacee understands what the birds are singing and ‘knew al hir [their] entente’ (V.400), with the rhetorical term ‘entente’ signalling the human intention to signify, here attributed to birds. The ring’s property of translating the vox inarticulata of birdsong into the meaningful vox articulata of human speech –​and vice versa, since the female peregrine falcon can also understand Canacee –​effaces the boundaries between species categories in the medieval ‘animacy hierarchy’ and thus appears to negate the sorting that is crucial to race-​making. But since that effacement is achieved through magic, it paradoxically reinforces the animacy hierarchy. The ring does not alter the status quo. Rather, it proves that the status quo cannot be changed except by magic. This is underlined by the tale’s Orientalism. Cambiuskan’s court responds to the stranger knight’s three gifts –​the mechanical horse, the magic mirror and the ring –​with awe, but they also assimilate the gifts to European classical or medieval Christian frameworks of understanding. The horse reminds them of ‘a steede of Lombardye’ or ‘a gentil Poilas (Apulian) courser’, or Pegasus, or the Trojan horse; the mirror reminds them of one in Rome or the mirrors discussed by Aristotle; the ring recalls Moses’s and Solomon’s magic (V.193, 195, 209,

72

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

27

231, 233–​5, 249–​50). As Susan Crane remarks, from an Orientalist perspective ‘[t]‌he tale can look … entirely committed to evoking an Eastern strangeness in order to master and incorporate it’.46 Yet I want to suggest that posing the acousmatic question produces a different understanding of the racialisation of voice in the text. What does Canacee hear when she can hear –​and ­understand –​bird-​talk? How do we read the text’s presentation of bird-​talk as articulate? When the falcon speaks in her ‘haukes ledene [hawk’s language/​hawk’s Latin]’ (V.478), the use of ‘ledene’ evokes the caesura that marks the separation between Canacee and the falcon: Latin is articulate but bird-​talk is inarticulate. Yet the use of ‘ledene’ (language/​Latin) also articulates a connection between woman and bird. Giorgio Agamben names this point of conjunction and separation between the human and the animal a ‘caesura’ but asserts that this caesura ‘passes first of all within man [sic]’, in the form of a division between the rational human self (logos) and the animal self, and that we must thus pose the question of the human differently. Man, considered in Western philosophy as ‘the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, … of a natural (or animal) element and a … divine element’, should, rather, be considered as ‘what results from the incongruity of these two elements’; we must therefore attend to ‘the practical and political mystery of separation’ and ask: ‘[I]‌n what way … has man been separated from non-​man?’47 Agamben does not racialise the caesura, but it is open to racialisation. The division within man enables us to define only some individuals as fully human. Agamben urges that we must seek to understand the historical construction of the conflict between the animality and the humanity of man in order to address the violent political and social consequences of that separation. In acousmatic terms, the sound produced by the female falcon is not that of its source, a bird, but is, rather, a translated or displaced voice. This questions the idea that there is an essential identity that we can hear in the voice. Although Chaucer’s text is not interested in the sonic dimension –​the timbre –​of the female falcon’s complaint, the tale’s emphasis on Canacee’s attentive listening and on the disruption of the animacy hierarchy that normally separates human and bird can be read as showing that voice is not in the mouth of the speaker but in the mind of the listener.

28

Medieval literary voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conclusion Vox, which for Aristotle is the external form of the imagination, depends on breath.48 In the Western tradition of poetics, voice and breath are conjoined because they are linked to human ‘aliveness’ and to poetic making. A line connects the opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales –​‘Whan Zephyrus [Zephyr, the west wind] eek with his sweete breeth /​Inspired hath in [has breathed life into] every holt [wood] and heeth /​The tendre croppes’ (I, 5–​7) –​to Percy Shelley’s ‘Ode to the west wind’ (1819) –​ ‘Be thou, Spirit fierce, /​My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’ (61–​2)49 –​to Black American Amiri Baraka’s essay ‘The Burton Greene affair’ (1966): [L]‌et us think of soul, as anima: spirit (spiritus, breath) as that which carries breath or the living wind. We are animate because we breathe. And the spirit which breathes in us, which animates us, which drives us, makes the paths by which we go along our way and is the final characterization of our lives. Essence/​Spirit.50

Anima is breath, air and wind: the spirit that animates us, that breathes through us, and defines our sentience and our being. It is the voice of the poet, who draws inspiration from the wind, who becomes the living wind: an uncanny animism that crosses the borders of the animacy hierarchy. Above all, breath is creative vitality. As Sarah Kay notes, in the Western tradition of poetics, ‘[p]‌oetry is born from circulating air that blows in and through the breath of countless individuals across time and space’.51 But what happens to poetic making when the breath is knocked out of your body? How do Black writers, scholars, readers envisage a Black imagination at work in the current historical moment, in contexts that suppress the very idea of that imagination? Here is one context. Two Black American men –​Eric Garner, who died in the New York borough of Staten Island in 2014, and George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis in May 2020 –​were put in fatal chokeholds by the police officers who arrested them. David Dungay Jr, an Australian Indigenous man, was subjected to the same treatment in a Sydney jail in 2015.52 All three men repeatedly pleaded ‘I can’t breathe’ before they died, Garner 11 times, Floyd 20 times and Dungay 12 times.53 The response to their deaths was

92

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

29

not poetry but revolt. The colonised subject revolts, says Frantz Fanon, not because he [sic] has discovered his own culture but because ‘it was becoming impossible for him to breathe’.54 But the world of imagination is political. The cultural critic Fred Moten imagines revolt at the level of a radical Black aesthetic, one that offers ‘resistance to power and objection to subjection’ through an ‘ongoing performance’ of ‘encounter … rupture, collision’.55 A practice of resistance must engage the past as much as the present, to discover points of encounter, rupture and collision. I have argued that the construction of some human voices as inarticulate, and therefore less than human, in a time and place before race –​late medieval Christian Europe –​is a form of race-​making. To hear in premodern voices an immutable essence –​for example, in Arnulf of St Ghislain’s ranking of singers as fixed in their ‘degree’ –​is part of a long history of the racialising of voices that is still with us today. The separation of human voices into the human and the nonhuman evokes the caesura that passes within the human and insists on the incongruity between the conjoined rational and animal selves, whose separation has had, and continues to have, violent political and social consequences. But race-​making is a social form, and when it moves from the political world into premodern literary texts, such as the Squire’s Tale, it collides with aesthetic forms, shaping the narrative and political possibilities of those texts.

Notes * I would like to thank Valerie Allen, Paul Lynch, Jennifer Rust and the editors of this volume for their advice and support. This chapter pays tribute to David Lawton’s observation, in Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), that voice ‘negotiates our experience of what lies outside us’ and ‘is our measure of the spaces between, intersubjectivities as well as intertextualities’ (p. 25). 1 From Seferis’s speech when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature at the City Hall in Stockholm on 10 December 1963: https://​nob​elpr​ize. org/​pri​zes/​lit​erat​ure/​1963/​sefe​ris/​spe​ech (accessed 5 October 2020). 2 N. S. Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Refiguring American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 17. See also J. L. Stoever,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Medieval literary voices

The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016): ‘[L]‌istening operates as an organ of racial discernment’ (p. 4). 3 California v. O. J. Simpson (1995), cited in Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, p. 1. 4 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, p. 8. On the history of the sound of race, see J. McWhorter, Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths about America’s Lingua Franca (New York: Bellevue, 2017): ‘[S]ounding black in 1890 was quite different from sounding black in the twenty-​first century’ (p. 133). 5 P. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), p. 91 (my translation), trans. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, by C. North and J. Dack (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 6 Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, p. 8. 7 G. Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 3. 8 Ibid., p. 4. 9 I refer to the disproportionate impact of COVID-​19 on Black US communities and to the murders of Eric Garner in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020, and many other Black Americans, by police officers. 10 See MED invencioun, n. 4 11 J. Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–​ (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–​7; repr. 1967), vol. 2, III. 3821–​2. 12 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 449. C. Kao, ‘White attunement’, New Chaucer Society blog, 9 13 W-​ November 2018: https://​newcha​ucer​soci​ety.org/​blog/​entry/​white-​att​ unem​ent (accessed 28 December 2020). 14 A. Gordon-​Reed, ‘Message to the world’, Times Literary Supplement (26 June 2020), p. 18. See also K. F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender on Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 15 For this date, see A. Hochman, ‘Is “race” modern? Disambiguating the question’, Du Bois Review, 16:2 (2019), 647–​65 (p. 648). 16 Cf. John Gower’s representation of the 1381 English rebels as incoherent asses, oxen, pigs, dogs, cats, foxes, birds, flies and frogs, led by Wat Tyler as a jay, in the ‘Visio Anglie’, the account of the English Rising that he added to his Latin poem Vox Clamantis in 1381: The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–​1902), I, lines 799–​830. I thank Antony Hasler for this reference. 17 ‘Tartari modo interrogativo et clamoso loquuntur gutture rabido et horribili. Cantantes mugiunt ut thori, vel ululant ut lupi, voces

13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

31

inarticulatas in cantando proferunt’: Simon de Saint-​Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, ed. J. Richard, Documents relatifs à l’histoire des croisades (Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1965), pp. 31–​2, trans. J. Stoessel, ‘Voice and song in early encounters between Latins, Mongols, and Persians, ca. 1250–​ca. 1350’, in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project, ed. R. Strohm (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83–​ 113 (88). Simon’s original account is lost, but a large part is preserved in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale (c. 1259): see J. Stoessel, ‘Howling like wolves, bleating like lambs: singers and the discourse of animality in the late Middle Ages’, Viator, 45:2 (2014), 201–​36 (p. 202). 18 C. Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, in C. Wolfe (ed.), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. ix–​xxiii (xx, emphases in original). Stoessel notes that ‘this discourse … is deployed for the systematic oppression of human beings’: ‘Howling’, p. 206. 19 Stoessel, ‘Howling’, p. 201. 20 M. Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 13. 21 Stoessel, ‘Voice and song’, p. 88. Donatus offers an abbreviated version: ‘Every vox is either articulate or confused. Articulate is what can be comprehended in letters; confused is what cannot be written’ (‘Omnis vox aut articulata est aut confusa. articulata est quae litteris conprehendi potest, confusa quae scribi non potest’): M. Irvine, ‘Medieval grammatical theory and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Speculum, 60:4 (1985), 850–​76 (p. 854). 22 Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, ed. M. Hertz, vols 2 and 3 of Grammatici latini, ed. H. Keil, 8 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855–​8; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961), 2, pp. 5–​6. 23 On Priscian’s influence on later medieval musical theory, see Stoessel, ‘Howling’, pp. 208–​10. 24 ‘Vocis autem differentiae sunt quattuor: articulata, inarticulata, literata, illiterata. articulata est, quae coartata, hoc est copulata cum aliquo sensu mentis eius, qui loquitur, profertur. inarticulata est contraria, quae a nullo affectu proficiscitur mentis. literata est, quae scribi potest, illiterata, quae scribi non potest. […] quaedam, quae non possunt scribi, intelleguntur tamen, ut sibili hominum et gemitus: […] aliae autem sunt, quae, quamvis scribantur, tamen inarticulate dicuntur, cum nihil significent, ut “coax”, “cra”. aliae vero sunt inarticulatae et illiteratae, quae nec scribi possunt, nec intellegi, ut crepitus, mugitis, et similia.’ GL II, pp. 5–​6 (my translation). 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Medieval literary voices

27 S. Boynton, ‘Sound matters 1. Introduction’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016), 998–​1002 (p. 1001). 28 See H. S. Alim and G. Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and L. Clemetson, ‘The racial politics of speaking well’, New York Times (‘Week in review’, 4 February 2007). 29 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. S. A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I.37.14 (p. 62). 30 E. E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 81. 31 Arnulf of St Ghislain, Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum: the treatise is edited and translated by C. Page, ‘A treatise on musicians from ?c. 1400: the “Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum” by Arnulf de St Ghislain’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 117:1 (1992), 1–​21. See Leach, Sung Birds, pp. 76–​8. 32 ‘Dum clamore rudiunt altius asino et brutali clangore terribilius intubant, cacephaton evomunt, organizantesque per antifrasin faciunt in musica irregulariter barbarismum’: Page, ‘A treatise on musicians’, pp. 19, 17, 15 [translation adapted]. 33 ‘[U]lulansque ferinum discat ydiota suum continere tumultum’: ibid., pp. 20–​1, 17 [translation adapted]; ululare is to howl, like a dog or wolf, or to hoot, like an owl. 34 Aristotle, On the Soul, book II, 420b5–​421a1, pp. 36–​7. All translations of Aristotle are from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). References are to the page number, column letter and line number in I. Bekker’s standard edition of the Greek text of Aristotle of 1831, printed in the outer margins of Barnes’s edition. I also provide page numbers from Barnes. 35 É. Balibar, ‘Racism and nationalism’, trans. C. Turner in É. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 37–​67 (57). 36 Stoessel, ‘Howling’. 37 ‘Galli cantant, Angli jubilant, Hispani plangunt, Germani ululant, Itali caprizant.’ I owe this reference to J. Hsy, ‘Between species: animal–​ human bilingualism and medieval texts’, in C. Batt and R. Tixier (eds), Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis, The Medieval Translator 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 563–​80 (575). 38 ‘[D]iverse nationes et dispares gentes diversimode sibi displicent in cantando. Greci Latinos dicunt ut canes latrare et Latini dicunt, quod

33

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Articulate voices

33

Greci ganniunt sicut vulpes’: Boncompagno da Signa, Boncompagnus [also known as Rhetorica antiqua], ed. S. M. Wight (Scrineum: Università degli Studi di Pavia, 1999–​ 2003), 1.19.3, line 1: https://​docu​ment​ acat ​ h oli ​ c aom ​ n ia.eu/​ 0 3d/​ 1 165–​ 1 240,_​ B o​ n com​ p agn​ u s_​ d ​ e _​ S i​ g na,_​ Bonco​mpag​nus,_​LT.pdf (accessed 1 January 2021). Translation: Hsy, ‘Between species’, pp. 573–​4. 39 ‘Sarraceni quidem Christicolas non cantare, sed delirare fatentur. E contrario referunt Christiani, quod Sarraceni voces transglutiunt et cantus in faucibus gargarizant’: Boncompagno, Boncompagnus, 1.19.3, lines 2–​3 (my translation). On Sarraceni as a generic term in the later Middle Ages for a multiplicity of ethnoracially diverse groups of Muslims grouped into ‘a corporate entity by virtue of religion alone’, see Heng, Invention, pp. 111–​12. In translating Sarraceni as ‘Muslims’, I follow the practice recommended by S. Rajabzadeh, ‘The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure’, Literature Compass, 16:9/​10 (2019), https://​doi. org/​10.1111/​lic3.12548 (accessed 18 January 2021). 40 Balibar, ‘Racism and nationalism’, p. 56. 41 W. Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-​Text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London: Everyman, 1995), lines 326–​8, p. 51. 42 S. Kay, ‘Sound matters 2. The soundscape of troubadour lyric, or, how human is song?’, Speculum, 91:4 (2016), 1002–​15 (p. 1003). 43 All quotations from Chaucer are from D. Lawton (ed.), The Norton Chaucer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). For individual Canterbury Tales, I refer to their parts and line numbers. 44 On Genghis Khan and Batu Khan, see Lawton, Norton Chaucer, pp. 311, 313 n. 4. On Simon and Batu Khan, see Stoessel, ‘Howling’, pp. 201–​2. 45 See n. 17. 46 S. Crane, ‘For the birds’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007), 23–​41 (p. 31). 47 G. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 16. 48 ‘Once air is inbreathed, … Nature employs the breath both as an indispensable means to the regulation of the inner temperature of the living body and also as the matter of articulate voice, in the interests of its possessor’s well-​being.’ On the Soul, book II, 420b20–​22, p. 37. 49 P. B. Shelley, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. C. Baker (New York: Modern Library, 1951). 50 L. Jones (A. Baraka), Black Music: Essays (New York: Akashic, 2010), pp. 135–​7 (p. 135).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Medieval literary voices

51 S. Kay, ‘Circulating air: inspiration, voice, and soul in poetry and song’, Paragraph, 41:1 (2018), 10–​25 (p. 11). 52 See https://​theg​uard​ian.com/​austra​lia-​news/​2020/​jun/​11/​the-​story-​ofdavid-​dun​gay-​and-​an-​ind​igen​ous-​death-​in-​cust​ody (accessed 3 April 2021). 53 According to a 2020 New York Times report, the phrase has been used by over 70 people who died in police custody: M. Baker et al., ‘Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of “I can’t breathe”’, New York Times (29 June 2020). 54 F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. 176. 55 F. Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 12, 21.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Part I

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice of authority: free indirect discourse in Chaucer’s General Prologue Helen Fulton

In a book that has become a classic of Chaucerian scholarship, Chaucer’s Narrators, David Lawton explores the heteroglossia of Chaucer’s writing, the multiple voices that negotiate ‘the dialogue between text and context’.1 Early in the book, Lawton mentions in passing the phenomenon of ‘free indirect discourse’ (FID), the narrative technique by which one utterance contains within itself ‘two speech manners, two styles, two “languages”, two semantic and axiological belief systems’, but finds the term of limited value, since it encompasses only two voices when there often seem to be more than that, or when we are not in fact certain whose voice we are hearing at all.2 Lawton goes on in his book to discuss, with great subtlety and a deep understanding of Chaucer’s writing, the various narratorial personae that appear throughout Chaucer’s work. What I propose here is to return to the concept of ‘free indirect discourse’ as a linguistic device and to investigate its usefulness as one of a range of interpretive strategies that can be applied to the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Lawton’s book belongs to that strand of commentary on Chaucer’s General Prologue identified in Larry Benson’s bibliographic survey as ‘the question of the relation of the narrator of the Prologue to Chaucer himself’.3 Lawton distinguishes between ‘narrator’ and ‘persona’ as two separate entities, saying that ‘not every narrator is a persona, and not every persona really amounts to more than a narratorial voice’, and arguing that ‘in medieval poetry most narrators are part of, rather than subsume, the rhetoric of a work’.4 Nonetheless, the concept of ‘persona’ and its different manifestations in various works by Chaucer constitute key issues in Lawton’s study, with the Canterbury Tales characterised

38

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

particularly by its multiple ‘narratorial personae’.5 This multiplicity was noted also by Robert R. Edwards, who adds a third entity to Benson’s binary of ‘narrator and Chaucer’: Twentieth-​ century critics have debated how one might differentiate the historical Chaucer of London and Westminster (Chaucer the man) from the artist who creates the narrative fictions (Chaucer the poet) and the character who recounts the story (Chaucer the narrator); most would allow some overlap or uncertainty among the roles, especially in their potential for comedy and irony.6

Although few critics would now argue that there is a complete identification between the Prologue’s narrator and ‘Chaucer the poet’, the precise nature of the gap between them throws up an existential difficulty, since ‘Chaucer the man’ is, according to the common-​ sense view, responsible for both the other two voices. E. Talbot Donaldson tried to reconcile this common-​sense view with a somewhat sketchy understanding of narrative persona –​‘[T]‌he fact that these are three separate entities does not, naturally, exclude the probability, or rather the certainty, that they bore a close resemblance to one another, and that, indeed, they frequently got together in the same body. But that does not excuse us from keeping them distinct from one another, difficult as their close resemblance makes our task’ –​though his conclusion that ‘Chaucer the pilgrim [resembles] in so many ways Chaucer the poet’ hardly accounts for how we might distinguish between the two, or, indeed, reconcile them with ‘Chaucer the man’.7 This narratorial gap also poses a problem of authority: where is it located? Morton W. Bloomfield states: ‘In the Canterbury Tales the reporting pilgrim is the Chaucer figure, and it is on his authority that we must accept the truth of his story about events and tales.’8 Conflating the pilgrim-​narrator with the authorial voice (of Chaucer), Bloomfield assumes that this is where authority –​that is, the guarantee of truth –​lies. This theoretical model does not allow the pilgrim-​narrator to have a perspective of his own, which he assuredly does; nor does it offer us a means of questioning his authority, of judging him to be an unreliable or partial witness of events, which, again, he undoubtedly is at times. Charles Muscatine argues for a single ‘Chaucerian Narrator’ figure, who functions as an intermediary between poet and audience but who is otherwise

93

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice of authority

39

indistinguishable from ‘Chaucer’ and who therefore conveys Chaucer’s authority: ‘[T]‌he final editorial voice is his.’9 These kinds of conceptual difficulties about narrative and authorial personae, and the location of authority, can be reviewed in the light of contemporary narrative theory. In this chapter I am taking a linguistic view of how narrative perspective is constructed in the General Prologue, starting from the premise that we can distinguish a number of voices in the Prologue and none of them should be identified as the voice of ‘Chaucer the man’, as a pre-​ existing ‘real’ person, since narrative voices are, by their nature, constructed as an effect of discourse. Instead, I am starting from the assumption that there are a number of ‘narrators’ in the General Prologue (and, indeed, throughout Chaucer’s work), each of which has a specific position relative to the narration, and the task of identifying these different positions –​and therefore how meanings are constructed in the text –​can be as fruitful as trying (and failing) to decide which narrator is ‘Chaucer’, since, in one sense, all of them are and, in another sense, none of them is.10

Voice and focalisation The concept of ‘voice’ in narrative has been theorised in various ways, one of the most influential being that of Gérard Genette, whose model of ‘voice’ starts with the distinction between first-​ person and third-​person narration (the former located inside the world of the text, or ‘homodiegetic’, and the latter located outside the text, or ‘heterodiegetic’).11 Closely related to voice is the concept of ‘focalisation’, as modelled by Genette and further described by Mieke Bal.12 This represents the idea that a ‘voice’ has to speak from somewhere, in a particular time and place, and this positioning determines what can be known or said. Replacing the older critical term ‘point of view’ (which focuses on the ‘viewer’ or viewing position at the expense of the ‘viewed’), focalisation includes the concepts of ‘focaliser’ and ‘focalised object’ and the relationship(s) between them. Most crucially, both Genette and Bal recognise within focalisation a difference between ‘who sees’ (the orientation from which events are perceived) and ‘who speaks’ (the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Narrative embodiment and voicing

person telling the events), entities that are not always located in a single individual. Focalisation in the General Prologue is a complex matter, as Lawton understood. The echoes that we find in the General Prologue of a number of the pilgrims, whose voices are ventriloquised through the narrator, constitute what Thomas J. Farrell has called a ‘hybridized narration’: ‘The Prologue chooses very consistently to present a single narrative discourse that blends those pilgrims’ voices, and other forms of discourse, into a distinctively hybridized narration.’13 Another way to describe this effect is that the ‘single narrative discourse’ is itself comprised of a number of focalisations. The narration appears to be in the first person, a voice that is normatively situated within the diegesis (as in Genette’s ‘homodiegetic’ narration), but the dominant focalisation is, in its orientation, that of a third-​person extradiegetic narrator who knows far more than any internal focaliser could know about the pilgrims being described. The ‘I’ of the narration is therefore similar to the third-​ person ‘omniscient’ narrator of a nineteenth-​century author such as Anthony Trollope, who not infrequently pauses to address his readers directly. At the same time, however, there is an ‘I’ in the text who is situated within the diegesis, as one of the pilgrims, and whose focalisation is therefore limited to what he sees and knows among the group of pilgrims assembled at the Tabard inn. There is thus an ‘I’ who sees from outside the diegesis, and an ‘I’ who speaks within the diegesis. The narration of the General Prologue is characterised by this constant slippage between an internal focalisation located in one or more of the characters (including the pilgrim-​ narrator) and an external narrator-​focaliser who provides information beyond the scope of any of the character-​ focalisers.14 These different focalisations can be illustrated by the opening to the General Prologue, when the narratorial ‘I’, speaking first from an external orientation about the month of April and the general practice of pilgrimage, then moves to an internal focalisation to describe his meeting with the pilgrims at the Tabard. There is then a further movement from an external to an internal focalisation: But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space, Er that I ferther in this tale pace, Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun

14

Voice of authority

41

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

To telle yow al the condicioun Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, And whiche they weren, and of what degree (lines 35–​40)

The phrase ‘whil I have tyme and space’ (35) locates the focalisation outside the story-​world, as do the references to ‘this tale’ (36) and to his audience as ‘yow’ (38). The orientation is of someone looking from the outside, in another time and place, into the world of the Tabard Inn as it existed at a particular time. But the phrase ‘so as it semed me’ (39) returns the focalisation briefly to the internal diegetic context, in which the narrator knows only what perceptions he received of the pilgrims at the time that he met them. There is thus a double focalisation at work throughout the General Prologue: the ‘I’ of an external narrator, who is oriented towards past events and people from an omniscient perspective; and the ‘I’ of an internal narrator, who is able to describe only what he saw and knew at the time of the events he is recounting. This example from the portrait of the Wife of Bath illustrates the first-​person extradiegetic narration of the focaliser ‘who sees’: In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon; And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth [angry] was she That she was out of alle charitee. Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground [were of the finest texture]; I dorste swere they weyeden [weighed] ten pound That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed. (lines 449–​55)

In this portrait, the narrator is oriented as an external focaliser, describing the Wife of Bath’s appearance and her deafness and her five husbands. The use of first-​person markers, such as the modal adverb ‘certeyn’ (‘indeed’), and the modal phrase ‘I dorste swere’ (‘I dare swear’), conveys a positioning that belongs to the narrator ‘speaking’ in direct discourse to an audience outside the text. The focalisation is external, since the narrator tells us something that an internal character-​focaliser could not have known: that the Wife regularly wears so many head-​dressings on a Sunday that they must have ‘weyeden ten pound’ (454). This positions the narrative ‘I’ as external to the diegesis, in which a group of pilgrims assemble to make a journey together, while constructing an audience who is also positioned outside the text.

42

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Elsewhere, the first-​person narration alternates between external and internal focalisations, as in this example from the portrait of the Physician: With us ther was a DOCTOUR OF PHISIK; In al this world ne was ther noon hym lik, To speke of phisik and of surgerye, For he was grounded in astronymye […] He was a verray, parfit praktisour [practitioner] […] And yet he was but esy of dispence [careful in expenditure]: He kepte that he wan in pestilence [what he gained during a plague]. For gold in phisik is a cordial [tonic], Therefore he lovede gold in special. (lines 411–​14, 422, 441–​4)

For most of the portrait, the narrator speaks as a focaliser who is oriented externally towards the focalised object, describing the Physician’s learning, practice and appearance in a privileged narrative that also claims to know the Physician’s personality. But an internal focalisation intrudes, belonging to the character-​ focaliser, who ‘speaks’ in direct discourse. This is evident in the deictic use of the plural pronoun, ‘with us’ (411), which locates the speaker in among the group of pilgrims; and, again, in the evaluative phrase ‘he was a verray, parfit praktisour’ (422), a somewhat hackneyed combination of adjectives (found also in the portrait of the Knight: line 72), suggesting that the pilgrim-​narrator is easily impressed by the Physician’s self-​ presentation. But the external focalisation is able to ‘see’ what cannot be known from inside the diegesis, namely the Physician’s tendency to be a miser (‘he was but esy of dispence’: 441), his profits from the misery of plague (442) and his love of gold (444). The Physician, as the focalised object, is thus presented to the reader or listener from two alternating (and, indeed, competing) focalisations: one extradiegetic, which positions the Physician as he might be seen in the world at large and which claims an omniscient knowledge of his practices and temperament; and one homodiegetic, which takes the Physician at face value, in the way that he appears to the group of pilgrims. The narration of the General Prologue therefore displays, at times, a kind of embedded focalisation, in which the external focaliser (the

34

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice of authority

43

narrative agent) shows us a character (the pilgrim-​narrator) who in turn acts as internal focaliser for other characters.15 Thus, the relationship between the ‘I’ of the external narrator and the ‘I’ of the character is one in which the vision of the latter is embedded in that of the former. In other words, the external focaliser ‘sees’ more than the internal focaliser, and thus might be assumed to be more authoritative, to carry the authority of meaning in the text. Yet the internal focalisation of the pilgrim-​narrator has its own integrity, and we are left with two competing views of the Physician, for example, that might both be true: that he is a ‘verray parfit praktisour’ (422) and yet also keen on amassing money. The two narrative perspectives work to create characters who are rich in personality and inconsistency, and thus far removed from simple stereotypes of class or occupation. Narration is not the only means by which focalisation can be indicated in a text. The characters themselves can provide focalisation, represented as direct speech, indirect or reported speech, or ‘free indirect speech’ (i.e. FID). Apart from brief appearances by the Host and the Knight, there is very little direct speech in the General Prologue, which precludes a variety of internal focalisations. Nonetheless, the focalisation of the characters is not completely excluded. The most persuasive method of conveying speech habits, apart from direct discourse, is free indirect discourse, and this Chaucer uses on a number of occasions to represent voices other than that of the first-​person narrator. The use of FID is thus an important aspect of focalisation in the General Prologue, providing some variety of voice and orientation within the diegesis beyond that of the narrator.

The structures of free indirect discourse The concept of free indirect discourse belongs to the discourse of linguistic narrative theory.16 At its simplest, it signifies a means of representing direct speech through the syntactic mode of indirect speech. A third-​person narrative voice mimics the voice of another participant or character, without allowing that participant to speak directly in their own voice. The discourse is ‘free’ because there are no authorial signposts such as ‘She said that …’. The device is associated particularly with the mode of realism in the modern novel (since the eighteenth century), and its early appearance in Chaucer’s

44

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

work indicates the incipient emergence of realist narrative in medieval English writing. As a subtype of focalisation it provides access to one of the strategies by which Chaucer has created his tapestry of voices and perspectives. Free indirect discourse is most readily illustrated in the modern realist novel, such as this example from The Concert Pianist, by Robert Conrad, first published in 2006: Marguerite had phoned him the day before. A pitiful call. He could hear her baby screaming. Vadim had deserted her, it seemed, walked out as if she did not exist and did not matter. She copiously wept, lapsing into French. Did Vadim no longer find her attractive or interesting? Was he bored with the mother of his baby boy? How could he leave her on her own like this? He was inhuman, a bastard. She should never have got involved with him. Poor Vadim, if only he knew how much she cared for him. She had left three messages on his mobile declaring her love but now regretted this sign of weakness because he deserved not love but a decanter over the head, or a dinner plate, or a knife in the ’eart, the imbecile, the blackguard.17

Although this passage is written entirely in the third person, the voice alternates between that of the narrator and that of Marguerite, the wronged wife. The series of questions starting with ‘Did Vadim no longer find her attractive or interesting?’ are those asked by Marguerite, not the narrator. The first half of the last sentence, ‘She had left three messages on his mobile declaring her love but now regretted this sign of weakness’, is announced in the narrator’s voice, cool and detached, but then the second half of the sentence captures Marguerite’s despairing anger and the French accent to which we have already been alerted: ‘[B]‌ecause he deserved not love but a decanter over the head, or a dinner plate, or a knife in the ’eart [note the non-​standard spelling, to convey Marguerite’s accent], the imbecile, the blackguard.’ Free indirect discourse, then, is a means of representing speech in writing, one that occupies a space somewhere between the direct speech of a character, speaking in their own voice as internal focaliser, and the indirect speech of the narrator as external focaliser, telling us how we should be responding to what is being narrated. I have plotted this in Table 2.1.18

54

Voice of authority

45

Table 2.1  Ways of representing speech in writing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Diegetic summary

Indirect Free Direct discourse indirect discourse discourse

Free direct discourse

Definition Narrative Narrative Narrative A participant A participant statement account imitation speaks in speaks in that a of the of a their own their own speech content speech words, words, act has of a act signified by with no occurred speech quotation quotation act marks marks Example

‘Marguerite ‘She had ‘Was he *‘Is he bored ‘a knife had left three bored with me, in the phoned messages with the the mother ’eart, the him … mother of his baby imbecile the day declaring of his boy?’ …’ before.’ her baby love.’ boy?’

Voice

First/​third Third Third Third person person person person narrative narrative narrative dialogue

First person narration/​ interior monologue

Free indirect discourse is thus essentially a negotiation between ‘who sees’ and ‘who speaks’, between the diegetic account of events ‘seen’ by a narrator, telling us what we need to know, and the mimetic quality of direct speech, which imitates a participant’s voice, capturing for us the way in which that person speaks and therefore how they reveal themselves to us, apparently unmediated by any narrative control. How is FID constructed linguistically? Typically, free indirect discourse combines features of both direct and indirect speech. Thus FID uses third-​person pronouns and a past-​tense narration, just as in indirect narrative reportage, whereas characters speaking mimetically in direct discourse use first-​person pronouns and the present tense when appropriate. Compare these two sentences:

46

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A  FID: Poor Vadim, if only he knew how much she cared for him. Direct speech:  *Poor Vadim, if only he knew how much I care for him. On the other hand, FID uses syntactic inversion to form questions, using the interrogative word order of Verb +​Subject +​Object, as in direct speech, whereas indirect speech uses the normal declarative order of Subject +​Verb +​Object. Compare: B  FID: Did Vadim no longer find her attractive or interesting? Indirect speech: *She wondered if Vadim no longer found her attractive or interesting. A third feature of FID is its use of deictics, words such as ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘that’, and so on. FID makes use of the deictics of here and now, as in direct speech, rather than the more distant deictics of indirect speech. For example: C 

FID: How could he leave her on her own like this? Direct speech: *How could he leave me on my own like this? Indirect speech: *She wondered how he could have left her on her own like that.

A fourth feature is the use of modality markers –​that is, words or phrases that express some kind of judgement relating to the desirability, obligation, usualness or probability of a particular statement. Modal verbs include ‘must’, ‘ought to’, ‘should’; modal adverbs include ‘normally’, ‘usually’, ‘rarely’, ‘positively’, ‘maybe’. The sentence ‘She should never have got involved with him’ expresses a modality of obligation that belongs to Marguerite, not to the narrator. Finally, FID is characterised by the use of markers of orality: words or phrases that capture the spoken voice. These include vocatives, evaluative words, interjections, phatic terms (fillers) and colloquial or idiolectal forms. Phrases such as ‘poor Vadim’ and ‘the imbecile, the blackguard’ imitate Marguerite’s voice, conveying her evaluation of Vadim and her emotional attitude towards him (as distinct from the attitude of the narrator). The orthographic form, ‘a knife in the ’eart’, captures an echo of Marguerite’s pronunciation as she speaks (or might have spoken) the words.

74

Voice of authority

47

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Table 2.2  Grammar of FID FID

Indirect speech

Direct speech

Third person pronouns

Third person pronouns

First person pronouns

Past tense

Past tense

Present tense

Interrogative word order

Declarative word order

Interrogative word order

Deictics of ‘here and now’

Deictics of distance

Deictics of ‘here and now’

High modality

Low modality

High modality

Features of orality Features of written discourse

Features of orality

We can summarise these linguistic features of FID as in Table 2.2, showing that FID shares features with both direct and indirect speech.19 Are these features of FID to be found in Chaucer’s General Prologue? A small number of commentators have found examples, though a full linguistic survey remains to be done.20 One of the most extended examples of FID in the General Prologue occurs in the portrait of the Monk: 173 The reule of Seint Maure or of Seint Beneit –​ 174 By cause that it was old and somdel streit [strict] 175 This ilke Monk leet olde thynges pace [let old things go], 176 And heeld after the newe world the space. 177 He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen, 178 That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men, 179 Ne that a monk, whan he is recchelees [when he breaks the rules], 180 Is likned til a fissh that is waterlees –​ 181 This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloystre. 182 But thilke text heeld he nat worth an oystre; 183 And I seyde his opinion was good. 184 What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood [mad] 185 Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure, 186 Or swynken [work] with his handes, and laboure, 187 As Austyn bit [demanded]? How shal the world be served? 188 Lat Austyn have his swynk [work] to hym reserved!

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Narrative embodiment and voicing

In effect, there is a dialogue going on here between two pilgrims, between the narrator and the Monk, mediated by a third voice, the external narrator-​focaliser, who tells us that the Monk was someone who did not care for the old ways of doing things and wanted to follow modern practices. Then we hear the Monk’s voice, saying ‘he yaf nat of that text a pulled hen …’ (177), using the past tense of FID, and in line 181 the external narrator glosses what the Monk has just said, explaining that the Monk does not believe that monks should always stay in the cloister. Then the Monk’s voice says that the precept was not ‘worth an oyster’ (182), a modal phrase that belongs to the Monk, not to the internal pilgrim-​narrator. The Monk’s voice continues in FID to the end of the section, railing against the teachings of Augustine. There are three levels of embedded focalisation here: first, the external narrator, who already knows everything about the Monk, before the Monk has spoken (‘this ilke Monk leet olde thynges pace’: 176); second, the internal character-​narrator, who uses an indirect discourse to report his own speech (‘I seyde his opinion was good’: 183), and also that of the Monk, as focalised object (‘thilke text heeld he nat worth an oystre’: 182); and, third, the focalisation of the Monk himself, represented through free indirect discourse. Many of the features of FID that I previously identified are present here. There is the use of third-​person pronouns, ‘he’, and the past tense, ‘he yaf nat of that text a pulled hen’ (177) (compare direct speech: *‘I don’t give a plucked hen for that text’). There is the interrogative (verb–​subject) syntax used for the question ‘what sholde he studie …?’ (184), rather than *‘he asked why he should study’ (indirect discourse) or *‘why should I study?’ (direct discourse). The homodiegetic orientation of the ‘here and now’ is conveyed not through deictic markers but through the present tense of direct speech, which breaks through from time to time, as in ‘that text … that seith’ (177–​8) and ‘whan he is recchelees’ (179), conveying the timeframe occupied by the Monk when asserting his views. There is a high modality of obligation and frequency, as in ‘what sholde he’ (184) and ‘alwey’ (185), representing the attitude of the Monk. There is a high level of orality in the colloquialisms, as in ‘he yaf nat … a pulled hen’ (177) and ‘nat worth an oystre’ (182). The final line, ‘Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!’ (188), is indistinguishable from

94

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice of authority

49

direct speech: it is in the present tense; it contains an imperative, ‘let’, which assumes an interlocutor; and it implies a modality of obligation and evaluation, expressing a personal opinion, with the orality of an exclamation. The focalisation, with its strong opinions and its understanding of Augustinian doctrine, is clearly that of the Monk, focalised through the pilgrim-​narrator. The use of free indirect discourse in this section works to locate both the pilgrim-​narrator and the Monk as part of the same diegetic conversation, a conversation happening inside the world of the text. Meanwhile, there is another focalisation somewhere outside the text, an extradiegetic perspective, which ‘sees’, and thus subtly positions and critiques not only the Monk but the internal narrator as well. This extradiegetic voice tells us that the views expressed by the Monk are not radical and new, as the narrator thinks, but deeply subversive and challenging to the entire theological basis of monasticism. The pilgrim-​narrator is impressed by the Monk, saying: ‘I seyde his opinion was good.’ But the extradiegetic voice positions us, through the FID, to critique both the Monk’s contemptuous attitude and the narrator’s compliance. There is another substantial example of free indirect discourse in the portrait of the Parson, another character of whom the pilgrim-​ narrator seems to approve wholeheartedly but, from an external orientation, misguidedly: 496 This noble ensample to his sheep [flock –​i.e. parishioners] he yaf, 497 That first he wroghte [worked], and afterward he taughte. 498 Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte, 499 And this figure [of speech] he added eek therto, 500 That if gold ruste, what shal iren do? 501 For if a preest be foul [corrupt], on whom we truste, 502 No wonder is a lewed [ordinary] man to ruste; 503 And shame it is, if a prest take keep [where a priest is concerned], 504 [to have] A shiten [filthy] shepherde and a clene sheep. 505 Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive, 506 By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve. 507 He sette nat his benefice to hyre [did not farm out his living] 508 And leet [leave] his sheep encombred in the myre 509 And ran to Londoun unto Seinte Poules 510 To seken hym a chaunterie [chantry –​i.e. singing] for soules,

50

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

511 Or with a bretherhed to been withholde [be retained by a guild fraternity]; 512 But dwelte at hoom, and kepte wel his folde [flock], 513 So that the wolf ne made it nat myscarie; 514 He was a shepherde and noght a mercenarie.

The external narrator, who is positioned to ‘see’ the Parson’s learning and his far-​flung parish, merges his voice with that of the Parson at line 500, ‘if gold ruste, what shal iren do?’, with its interrogative word order. The use of the introductory ‘that’ implies indirect speech (*‘he said that …’), but the use of the present tense, down to line 506, constructs direct speech in which the focalisation belongs to the Parson himself as he delivers a sermon to his flock. The rhetorical question suggests a listening audience and the language of the pulpit, with the metaphor about gold and iron forming the text of the sermon. The direct speech becomes the voice of the Parson in his pulpit, suggesting how easily the Parson slips into the discourse of a sermon to a live congregation. It is only the use of the first-​person pronoun, ‘on whom we truste’ (501), that introduces a different focaliser, who is now the internal, rather than external, narrator: the pronoun acts as a deictic signifying free indirect discourse, rather than words spoken directly by the Parson himself, who, in delivering a sermon to his flock, would be more likely to have said *‘in whom you can trust’. From line 507, there is a change to the past tense of FID, and the voice continues to be that of the Parson. Technical terms such as ‘his benefice to hyre’ (507), ‘ran … unto Seinte Poules’ (509) and ‘to seken hym a chaunterie’ (510) are idiolectal forms constructing the perspective of an occupational insider, someone who knows how the system works and what the short cuts and dubious practices are. The emphatic rejection of such practices is couched rhetorically through repetition and syntactic parallelism, capturing once more the echo of the pulpit. The indignant rejection of these activities also implies a value judgement on those who employ them, a judgement that makes better sense coming from a priest than from the pilgrim-​narrator. The metaphor of the priest as shepherd of his flock is sustained throughout this section, and suggests that this is the Parson’s own view of himself, relayed to us through the FID. The final line, ‘he was a shepherde and noght a mercenarie’ (514), is an odd claim for the narrator to make about the Parson, but

15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice of authority

51

becomes more convincing if we read it as the Parson’s own description of himself, a favourite way of describing his occupation, which identifies him with peace rather than war, with the Church rather than with the secular world of military campaigning and with those driven by a vocation rather than money. Reading through the ventriloquised speech of this FID to catch the voice of the Parson himself, what we hear is a register of complacency and self-​righteousness. He may indeed be a good and pious man who cares for his flock, but he also claims for himself a level of self-​sacrificing virtue that brings into question the motivation for his way of life. The reference later on in the portrait to his lack of tolerance for any obstinate people who refuse to follow his example of tub-​thumping piety (521–​3), an externally focalised observation, confirms an impression that the Parson has a fanatical side to him, and that his insistence on the purity of his priesthood and his own selfless motives in pursuing the life of a poor parish priest is as much about his own sense of identity and status as it is about saving the souls of his parishioners. Once again, through the narrative device of FID, the text marks out the difference between an external narrator focalisation, the internal voice of the pilgrim-​narrator and the character-​­focalisation of an individual pilgrim. The result is that the focalised object, the Parson, like many of the characters in the General Prologue, is presented as a complex and inconsistent personality, rather than a type. As in the portraits of the Monk and Physician, we are shown how the internal narrator becomes complicit in the Parson’s self-​ presentation, saying ‘A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys’ (524), ignoring what has just been said about the Parson’s hostility to anyone who disagreed with him. Like all the portraits, this is less an objective account of a man’s deeds and occupations than an uncritical acceptance, by the internal narrator, of the way in which the Parson projects himself to others.21

Conclusion An analysis of narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse enables us to say something meaningful about the way in which voices and perspectives are represented and mediated through a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Narrative embodiment and voicing

written text. If we think in terms of focalisation, we can legitimately and usefully distinguish between the various narrative orientations in the General Prologue, inside and outside the diegesis, and how they construct a set of embedded focalisations. The question is not so much whose voice we are hearing, the extradiegetic poet-​narrator or the homodiegetic pilgrim-​narrator or other character-​focalisers (since all are effects of language), but whose angle of vision we are being offered at any particular point, since that controls what can be seen or known. As for the voice of authority, that too is an effect of discourse, conveyed most persuasively by the extradiegetic third-​ person ‘omniscient’ narration. As we have seen, however, the layers of focalisation in the General Prologue work to resist any single site of authority, offering instead a range of perspectives from which the audience can consider the story-​world and its characters. The effect of free indirect discourse, and of other types of focalisation, in the General Prologue is to draw attention to the constructedness of each of the narrative discourses, including the one we are most tempted to assign to ‘Chaucer the poet’, or even to ‘Chaucer the man’, as if an author can somehow narrate from a place outside their own writing. That gap which has so often been commented on, the gap between the narrator’s perception (‘Chaucer the pilgrim’) and our own sense of an authorial (and authoritative) guiding spirit directing us to a more critically nuanced (or ‘ironic’) reading of events (‘Chaucer the poet’), is actually a movement between different focalisations or orientations relative to the text. Chaucer’s skilled handling of what we now recognise as free indirect discourse adds a performative dimension to a text that may well have been read aloud to a listening audience, at least in some contexts.22 The mingling of different voices in the General Prologue, through a combination of third-​person narrative, first-​ person direct speech, reported or indirect speech and free indirect discourse, provides rich opportunities for a creative delivery of the text as a dramatic performance, with the different voices marked out by differences in delivery, accent and intonation. As Paul Cobley has said in relation to free indirect discourse, it ‘has the potential to restore the freedom of the oral storyteller’.23 With our growing awareness of the orality of many medieval texts, it is not hard to imagine that the General Prologue, as much as the tales that follow it, was intended to be read aloud as a humorous way of holding its characters up to a searching spotlight.

35

Voice of authority

53

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 D. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, Chaucer Studies 13 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 2. I was fortunate to be a graduate student at the University of Sydney when David was teaching there. I was thus the beneficiary of an extraordinarily rich culture of literary theory in the Department of English at that time, including poststructuralism and critical discourse analysis, circulated mainly (and unusually) by the medievalists in the department, including David himself, Stephen Knight, Terry Threadgold, Alex Jones, Rosemary Huisman and Bernard K. Martin, while Michael Halliday, the first Professor of Linguistics at the university and the progenitor of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), was a crucial influence. 2 Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, p. 3. Lawton proposes instead the terms ‘hybrid construction’ (p. 3) and ‘apocryphal voices’, which are ‘equally alienated from their ostensible, presumed or possible source’ (p. 4). 3 L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1987]), p. 798. All quotations from Chaucer’s work, cited in the text with line numbers, are from this edition. I should emphasise that Lawton’s book extends well beyond the Canterbury Tales and its General Prologue. 4 Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, p. 8. This statement comes close to the poststructuralist position that narrative voice is constructed in discourse, though Lawton does not expand on this. 5 Ibid., p. 13. 6 R. R. Edwards, ‘Narrative’, in P. Brown (ed.), A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 312–​31 (315). 7 E. T. Donaldson, ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’, PMLA, 69 (1954), 928–​36 (928, 936). 8 M. W. Bloomfield, ‘Chaucerian realism’, in P. Boitani and J. Mann (eds), The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 179–​93 (186). 9 C. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 172. 10 The apparent authority of the first-​person narrator, as Chaucer positions himself in the General Prologue (and elsewhere), has been dismantled by a series of theorists starting with T. Todorov, who recognised that the ‘I’ of the narrator (the subject of the énonciation, or the telling of the story) is simultaneously situated in the text as a character within the text (that is, as a subject of the énoncé, the direct speech of various characters who also appear as ‘I’). In other words, the ‘I’ of the énonciation can never be simplistically equated with the author of the text, who, by representing themselves in the first person, is inescapably

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Narrative embodiment and voicing

creating a fictionalised discursive ‘self’. See Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. R. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977 [1971]), and, for a useful discussion of textual subjectivity, see C. Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 30–​1, 64–​7. 11 Gérard Genette’s structuralist approach to the narratology of the novel is set out in his Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), translated from the third volume of Genette’s collected essays, Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972). David Lawton himself explores the concept of ‘voice’ in his book Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), albeit from a literary rather than linguistic or narratological perspective. 12 See M. Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 4th edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017 [1985]). 13 T. J. Farrell, ‘Hybrid discourse in the General Prologue portraits’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30:1 (2008), 39–​93 (p. 42). 14 In my discussion of external and internal focalisation, I am following S. Rimmon-​Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 74, and Bal, Narratology, who distinguishes between an external focaliser (EF) and an internal ‘character focaliser’ (CF) (p. 136). Both depart from Genette’s structuralist model, which assumed that an external ‘omniscient narrator’ represented ‘zero focalization’ –​that is, could not be a focaliser. 15 Bal discusses an example of this kind of embedded focalisation in Narratology, pp. 18–​19. 16 For my discussion of free indirect discourse, I have relied particularly on the following accounts: Rimmon-​Kenan, Narrative Fiction; M. J. Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992); and Bal, Narratology. See also M. Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 398–​432. 17 C. Williams, The Concert Pianist (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 38. 18 Table 2.1 is adapted from Rimmon-​Kenan, Narrative Fiction, pp. 109–​10. I use the asterisk symbol to indicate a sentence that does not appear in the text but has been reconstructed. 19 Table 2.2 is based on the description of FID by Toolan in Narrative, pp. 122–​5. 20 As well as Farrell, ‘Hybrid discourse’ (who rejects FID in favour of Bakhtin’s concept of hybrid narration), see also H. Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). I have identified the following substantial examples of FID in the General Prologue: the

55

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice of authority

55

Monk, lines 173–​88; the Friar, lines 225–​32 and 240–​8; the Parson, lines 498–​506; and the Summoner, lines 649–​57. Smaller traces can be found in the portraits of the Merchant, lines 276–​7; the Clerk, lines 293–​6 and 308; the Guildsmen, lines 373–​8; the Manciple, lines 573–​5; and the Pardoner, lines 696–​8. 21 Another example can be found in the portrait of the Summoner, lines 649–​57, where the approbation of the internal focaliser –​‘a bettre felawe sholde men noght fynde’ (648) –​is immediately followed by some lines of FID that reveal the Summoner’s character in a less positive light. 22 According to Stephen Penn, ‘it is quite likely that Chaucer would have had opportunities to read publicly from his work, and, on occasion, to speak before a courtly audience. Nevertheless, it would be rash to assume that all, or even most, of his poetry would have been delivered formally in this way.’ See Penn, ‘Literacy and literary production’, in S. Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 113–​29 (119–​20). 23 P. Cobley, Narrative (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 86.

3 Speaking in person Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Fiona Somerset

This chapter responds to David Lawton’s recent work on voice and interiority by considering what voice has to do with the ways medieval people thought about personhood.1 Then, as now, any attempt to understand who is granted full social and legal status as a person leads us to consider who is allowed to speak. Who may speak on their own behalf and be heard, as they represent their own reasons and needs and desires? There are conventional circumstances in which these parameters are clearly laid out and have expected results, as J. L. Austin explored in How to Do Things with Words.2 But most illuminating of the limits of personhood, and how they might be challenged, are the extraordinary circumstances in which a speaker or writer presents to us a voice that is not conventionally entitled to represent itself. Speech of this especially electrifying and revealing kind is risky, in ways that cannot be anticipated in advance, and it changes the world into which it is uttered, for speaker and audience alike. Its demands on its audience appeal to imagination and feeling, and engage with modes of expression that we have come to call ‘literary’.3 Michel Foucault called it parrhesia, while Stanley Cavell called it ‘passionate utterance’; Aletta Norval urges us to see that, rather than being secondary to reasoned representation, this kind of ‘political utterance’ is what makes moral imagination possible.4 Medieval writers too were fascinated by how voices at the edges of personhood might express what we cannot otherwise imagine. The literary modes they experimented with have fallen out of fashion, and have sometimes been disdained by critics as well.5 But personification is more than a rather unfashionable literary technique: it reveals to us how medieval culture thought about persons and their capacities.6 At the edges of medieval personhood we also find ‘speaking in person’, a technique of analysis even

75

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

57

more unfashionable than personification, in that it has largely disappeared from literary history and is unfamiliar even to many medieval scholars.7 As we will discover, however, ‘speaking in person’ overlaps with personification in ways that reveal and extend its limits, and is at least as important to our understanding of person and voice. It will help to begin with some examples. Jill Mann has commented that it is often difficult to tell in Piers Plowman whether an abstract noun is being used to describe an abstract quality –​such as the state of Need –​or whether that quality is being personified: the personifications in this poem seem to slip in and out of personhood.8 Here, for example, is Need’s explanation of why ‘need hath no law’: Nede anoon righte nymeth hym under maynprise. And if hym list for to lape, the lawe of kynde wolde That he dronke at ech dych, er he deide for thurst. So nede, at gret nede, may nymen as for his owene, Withouten conseil of conscience or cardinal vertues So that he sewe and save spiritus temperancie.9 (B.20.17–​22)

Need is speaking about need, but where is he referring to himself in the third person, and where to need as an abstract concept? This ambiguity trips us up, because it matters whether an abstraction has been rendered into a person; it may matter yet more when we are not sure about it. Even when personification might happen fitfully or fleetingly, a noun that has acquired personhood gains human characteristics and a body. It allows us to imagine an ‘other mind’ subject to emotions and sensations, and an actant capable of participating in a narrative, whether very briefly or at more length. Need hath no law: I envisage his scant clothing and gaunt body, I empathise with his hunger and desperation, I imagine him plotting a theft, I tell a story of him stealing sheep. As if these rich and complex features of personification were not enough, though, medieval writers seem to have found it most necessary to comment overtly on personhood when the person they are imagining has a voice. Writers and commentators populate the moments when someone speaks in the first person, especially if what they say is emotionally difficult or hard to explain, with claims that they are ‘speaking in the person of’ someone else. For example, in the Middle English Book of Tribulation, Holi Chirche speaks in the person of martyrs in a verse from Psalm 128:

58

Narrative embodiment and voicing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Right as the hamer is ordeyned to þe seruice of good folke, thilke tribulacions ben the hamers with whiche thy croune is forged vpon he anfelt of thin herte, as holi chirche spekith in the persone of martirs in the Sawtere there [s]‌he saith: Supra dorsum meum fabricauerunt peccatores. That is to say, ‘Vpon my bak han wrought synners.’10

The gender of Holi Chirche varies between this work’s fifteenth-​ century copies, but in each case, once personhood is attributed to the abstract concept through personification, she or he acquires a voice, and the capacity for speech. Here, that personhood is corporate: she or he speaks as a single person, but ‘in the persone of’ martyrs as a group. Not all personifications speak, although we can imagine that they might; however, all persons who are described as ‘speaking in person’ use their own voices in place of those of the persons for whom they speak. We might understand ‘speaking in person’ as a cousin of prosopopoeia: if prosopopoeia is a rhetorical figure in which an object or concept speaks as if it were a person, ‘speaking in person’ is a technique of analysis that attributes one person’s voice to another person, whether singular, collective or metaphorical. This mode of analysis can be deployed even where there is no cue in the text being analysed to prompt its use: ‘Vpon my bak han wrought synners’ does not require us to imagine a personified abstraction speaking for a group. Both personification and ‘speaking in person’ are ethically unstable, in that they can be deployed in such a way that they deny personhood or voice to things or persons that would prefer to speak for ­themselves –​but perhaps also in ways that allow for a coalescence of collective voice, or for the differentiation of a greater number of points of view. Indeed, the Latin noun persona was understood by Romans to derive from the verb personare, meaning to sound through, as when an actor’s voice resounds through a mask, the primary concrete referent of the noun persona.11 A persona is that medium through which a voice moves. Yet transferred meanings of persona grew to include the dramatic part being performed, then also the performer: not only a mask or a role, but the body that speaks.12 Similarly, personare acquired both transitive and intransitive senses: to resound, to make a sound, to cause to resound, to cry out.13 Performance –​the immediacy and evanescence of spoken as opposed to textual voice –​is integral to this concept of personhood

95

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

59

from the beginning, even while it may be recreated or imagined anew in the textual representation of personhood as the medium of voice.14 Neither aural nor textual personhood is stable and unchanging, any more than voice is. It was only after Augustine, and then infrequently until the later Middle Ages, that persona was used to refer to a human being in a general sense –​what we might now think of as the primary referent of ‘person’ in modern English.15 But, even as the word acquired legal, grammatical and theological usages for personhood in particular circumstances across the classical and medieval periods, ­persona always allowed for personhood to be shared or distributed or transferred between bodies, rather than held intact within a single individual. Thus, a legal person is an entity bearing rights and obligations and comprising any number of individuals.16 A grammatical person is a singular or plural deictic marker designating speaker or addressee.17 One theological use of ‘person’ is to designate a member of the Trinity, one in three and three in one.18 We are all partial, as these concepts of personhood require us to see, and as Piers Plowman shows us so well. We are none of us whole except in and through our relation to others. From antiquity onwards personare also acquired a derived sense: to attribute personhood to something, as in this gloss attributed to Vulcanius: ‘[T]‌hat is, I attribute to some incorporeal thing a certain “persona,” so that this “vox” may be interpreted’ (‘id est, rei alicui incorporeæ personam aliquam attribuo, uti vocem hanc interpretatur’).19 Persona means more than ‘person’ here, and certainly more than just ‘mask’ or ‘role’. Similarly, vox means more than simply ‘voice’; here, the most apt translation is probably something along the lines of ‘statement’ or ‘utterance’.20 Even so, the association between the two is clear: personhood is our means for interpreting and comprehending voice, as well as the substrate (material or otherwise) through which voice resounds. This description of what it is to personare, to attribute personhood, applies just as much to personification (in which the attribution of personhood is usually implicit and may be accomplished largely through reporting the speech of the personified concept) as to overt, analytical statements, in which a voice is said to be ‘speaking in the person of’ someone. Both inform our understanding of personhood by attributing it in non-​standard ways.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Narrative embodiment and voicing

In what follows I focus mainly on how ‘speaking in person’ allows voice to be attributed elsewhere than the body from which it issues. But I still want to keep personification in mind, especially when coming back to Piers Plowman. As Alastair J. Minnis, A. Brian Scott and David Wallace have shown in their volume on the commentary tradition, the analysis of ‘speaking in person’ can be traced back at least as far as a fourth-​century commentary by Servius on Virgil’s Bucolics; it is liberally employed across the Middle Ages, in reading not just classical poetry but also biblical and other religious writings.21 Among its advantages is that it can provide us with an occasion for thinking about how religious and secular poesis and allegoresis are related and overlapping, rather than occupying separate spheres and employing entirely unrelated techniques. ‘Speaking in person’ has largely been ignored by Middle English scholars, partly because most of the examples I discuss do not feature in the Middle English Dictionary or in the data set that lies behind it, since they appear in texts that have only recently been edited. Even so, these examples do bear comparison with literary moments more familiar to us –​ones that arguably depend on their readers’ understanding of ‘speaking in person’ but use different vocabulary, such as Chaucer’s rewriting of the dead Seys’s appearance to Alcyone in the Book of the Duchess.22 In Feeling Like Saints, I wrote about ‘speaking in person’ as a poetics of impersonation, in which a reader might be advised to ‘take the vois of’ a saint or prophet in repeating the defiance of authority in their own voice. I was mainly interested in occasions when readers were advised to take the voice of, speak in the person of or perform the role of another person, and in the emotional identification that this role-​playing involves.23 Here I am interested in thinking more closely about the interpretive act of disidentification involved in any claim that an ‘I’ voice speaks in the person of someone else.24 What is at stake when readers or writers feel impelled to dissociate voice from speaker? In ‘speaking in person’, one person takes on another person’s voice but does not assume their identity, exactly. Instead, what is established is some form of relation; and the form that relation takes depends on dynamics that lie outside the speaking itself. I am curious about why medieval writers and readers felt the impulse to make up people like this, sometimes in the most evanescent or fungible way, in order to explain the ‘I’ voices they fashioned

16

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

61

or encountered in texts. When and why does it matter to comment explicitly that the speaker is not the voice of the writer, not even perhaps the voice of the person or personification speaking within the narrative, but some other person? In commentary on the Psalms, commentators use personhood to provide ways that historical persons or communities, or else readers in the present, can participate in the voices of this emotionally charged poetry, through a kind of disidentificatory replacement: the ‘I’ voice is both attributed to, and distinct from, that of the designated speaker(s). Commentators develop interpretations that attribute the ‘I’ voices of the Psalms to Christ, God or the Church as a whole, or suggest that in speaking the Psalms, David himself, as Prophet, takes on certain kinds of personhood. The ‘I’ voices of the Psalms can sometimes be understood to speak in multiple persons at the same time, or varied voices across a Psalm as a whole. The prologue to Richard Rolle’s English psalter, found little changed in the revised versions and also extant in five manuscripts where it was copied independently, provides an influential introduction in Middle English to how the Psalms were thought to be voiced: [S]‌umtyme it [the psalter] spekeþ of Crist in his godhede, sumtyme in his manhede, in þat þat he vseþ þe uoyce of his seruantes. Also he spekeþ of holy chirche in þre maneres, sumtyme in þe persone of cristen men, sumtyme of wicked men, sumtyme of cursed men, þe whiche ben in holy chirche bi body not in clene þouht, bi name not bi gode dedis, in noumbre not in merit.25

Christ uses the voice of his servants when the psalter speaks of him as God or as man; when the psalter speaks as holy Church, it may speak in the person of Christians, wicked men or cursed men. Bodley 554 provides an explanation of the prophetic voice David is imagined to use when he speaks in the person of Christ: ‘þe salmmakere biforsiʒ bi þe spirit of profesie and spak in þe persoone of Crist.’26 David speaks in Christ’s person as a consequence of his prophetic inspiration, the means by which many of the Psalms are interpreted as referring to the events of the gospel or speaking in Christ’s voice. Similarly, Walter Hilton tells us in the Scale of Perfection, book 1, that the Prophet speaks in the person of our Lord when he says that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved: ‘Thus seide the prophete in the persone of oure Lord: “Omnis

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Narrative embodiment and voicing

enim quicunque invocauerit nomen domini, salvus erit.” ’27 Or, as just one example among several in the revised Rolle psalters, the Prophet addresses wicked men living in their sin ‘specialy in Cristis persone’.28 Speaking in the person of various groups within holy Church opens up other possibilities entirely, by allowing for representation of a corporate identity in which the reader may or may not share. Persons come in different sizes: not only an individual, but parts of them, and also a group of them, can be regarded as a person. The Prophet’s role in this representation may drop out of the picture entirely. The impulse to explicit dissociation that we find in these examples of ‘speaking in person’ removes any ambiguity over what is being represented as a person –​the kind of ambiguity that Piers Plowman revels in, for example in its personification of Need. At the same time, however, it gives writers another means to explore the complexity of what it is to count as a person at all, and on what grounds. You can be more than one person at once; you can speak for another person through one or another means; you can form part of a corporate person. Perhaps the most famous example of claims to speak in the person of another appears in the early fifteenth-​ century debate over the Romance of the Rose known as the Querelle de la Rose.29 Here, ‘speaking in person’ has less to do with representation of any kind and more to do with disputing culpability. Christine de Pizan, backed up later by Jean Gerson, blames Jean de Meun directly for the immorality of statements made by his speakers, particularly Jaloux, Raison, Genius and La Vieille. Jean de Montreuil and Pierre and Gontier Col protest that the objectionable speeches are made by ‘personnaiges’ rather than by Jean himself in his own voice, and that they teach readers what to avoid, rather than how they should behave: ‘[M]‌aistre Jehan de Meung en son livre introduisy personnaiges, et fait chascun personnaige parler selonc qui luy appartient: c’est assavoir le Jaloux comme jaloux, la Vielle comme la Vielle, et pareillement des autres’ (‘[M]aster Jean de Meun in his book introduces personifications, and causes each one to speak according to the qualities that pertain to it, that is, Jealousy as a jealous man, the Widow as a widow, and likewise for others’).30 Christine insists that readers cannot be expected to be so high-​ minded; instead, she claims we should expect the worst of them, when they read about sin. And she both mocks and undermines

36

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

63

her opponents’ claims that Jean is not speaking in his own voice in these examples by inflating it absurdly: ‘[D]‌isent pluseurs en lui excusant que c’est le Jaloux qui parle, et voirement fait ainsi comme Dieu parla par la bouche Jeremie’ (‘[M]any say in excusing him that it is Jealosy who speaks, and truly that he acts as God did, speaking through the mouth of Jeremiah’).31 She refers here to Jeremiah 1:9, ‘Ecce dedi verba mea in ore tuo’ (‘Behold, I have placed my words in your mouth’).32 It would be absurd for her opponents to claim that Jean is acting as God while his personifications are his prophets. In any case, as Virginie Greene notes, ‘my words in your mouth’ would return responsibility to Jean, rather than distributing it among his ‘personnaiges’.33 Even if Christine’s version of her opponents’ claims here is parodic, what gives it force is that claims about ‘speaking in person’ do frequently cluster around the interpretation of prophetic voice, as we have seen for the voice of the Psalms, whose putative author (thought to be King David) was commonly referred to as ‘the Prophet’.34 The frequent preoccupation with personhood in medieval reading practice can be a means for pursuing complex questions of representation and voice –​questions that continue to exercise and worry at us in the twenty-​first century. As we read Piers Plowman, placing its personifications within this larger category of made-​ up persons can help us understand the evanescence and the mutability of even some of the poem’s most well-​established personified voices, let alone those who speak briefly and return in other forms. Even though Michael Calabrese’s introduction to the poem includes an appendix listing ‘Persons, personifications, and allegorizings in Piers Plowman’, he has commented on how difficult it is to isolate who is meant to be a person and who is not, or to read these persons as ‘characters’.35 Similarly, Lavinia Griffiths has traced in detail the ways that nouns become names in the poem, ranging from short phrases to brief characterisations to longer or shorter narratives in which the basis of the personification may shift from one kind of person to another (as when Wrath in the B text changes from a friar to the cook in a nunnery), or where persons in the poem may morph in and out of personification (as when Abraham becomes Faith, Moses Hope, and the Samaritan Charity).36 Most tellingly, though, this brief investigation of the edges of medieval personhood gives us new tools to examine the one

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Narrative embodiment and voicing

instance of ‘speaking in person’ in Piers Plowman. This example has been ignored, except to explain away ‘person’ by glossing it with more familiar nouns such as ‘likeness’ or ‘form’, as if its use were merely a feature of the line’s alliteration on ‘p’. Christ is the speaker who introduces the language of personhood, as he enters Hell to accuse Lucifer in passus B 18 or C 20: ‘For in my paleis, Paradys, in persone of an addre, /​Falsliche thow fettest there thyng that I lovede’ (B.18.336–​7). Lucifer’s right to hold his captives permanently is open to challenge on the grounds that he caused them to sin through deception, ‘in persone of an addre’. The C version elaborates. In the person of an adder, Lucifer ‘byglosed’ and ‘bigiled’ Adam and Eve; his deception of Eve is accomplished primarily through his misrepresentation of her situation in speech (C.20.378–​81).37 Nowhere does the poem present Lucifer’s performance as direct speech; we read only how others remember it, even though Eve was the sole audience physically present.38 But one reason Christ’s argument seems persuasive at this point is that the devils themselves have anticipated it, in their preceding discussion of what is about to happen. Here are the B and C versions of this moment in the devils’ debate: ‘That is sooth,’ seide Satan, ‘but I me soore drede; For thow gete hem with gile, and his gardyn breke, And in semblaunce of a serpent sete on the appultre, And eggedest hem to ete, Eve by hirselve, And toldest hire a tale –​of treson were the wordes[.]‌’ (B.18.285–​9) We haen no trewe title to hem, for thy tresoun hit maketh. Forthy y drede me,’ quod þe deuel, ‘laste Treuthe wol hem fecche. And as thowe bigyledest godes ymages in goynge of an addre, So hath god bigiled vs alle in goynge of a weye.’ (C.20.324–​7)

Both versions characterise Lucifer’s deception as ‘treson’. C puts the complaint against Lucifer in Gobelyn’s mouth rather than Satan’s and compares Lucifer’s ‘goynge’ as an adder with Christ’s ‘goynge’ as a man during his Incarnation. Both Lucifer’s and Christ’s ‘goynge’ involve a dynamic taking on of flesh. But Gobelyn overlooks that Lucifer’s ‘goynge’ is a counterfeit –​a ‘semblance’, as the B version puts it –​while Christ’s ‘goynge’, even if it deceived the devils, involves taking on an appearance that is already his own. Man is

56

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

65

made in God’s image, so for Christ there is no deception involved in ‘goynge’ in the shape of ‘godes ymages’. The devils are right to be worried about Lucifer’s deception, but we do not fully understand why until we see how Christ characterises it –​nor, for modern readers, until we have understood the literary tradition in which Christ participates here, rather than reading ‘person’ as if it meant nothing more than ‘likeness’ or ‘form’. For Christ’s deployment of this tradition is wrenchingly unusual. What would it mean for Lucifer to speak in the person of an adder? Adders are not persons in any ordinary or obvious sense. But neither are they found anywhere on the edges of personhood. I can think of no literary example in which an animal is personified in the way that qualities or aspects or abstractions are. Nor can I think of any other example, in any kind of commentary, in which anyone is said to speak in the person of an animal. Of course, animals are frequently anthropomorphised, and we hear their voices, and often they speak in human speech, as for example in beast fables. And persons, or personified abstractions, can be described as if they were animals or speak in animal voices, as when Symonye and Cyvylle saddle up summoners for their ride to Westminster (B.2.167–​70), or when the assembled rebels in the prologue to Gower’s Vox Clamantis burst into a cacophony of animal sounds.39 Nevertheless, animals do not fall within the range of personhood, even when persons are transformed into them, and even when they have voices. Nor, for that matter, do other artefacts or material objects or living things fall in the range of personhood, whether axes or stones or trees, even when we ascribe qualities to them that we associate with personhood or imagine persons transformed into them or speaking through them.40 How, then, does Christ’s accusation make sense? We might recall that there are no other persons for Lucifer to impersonate in Paradise; Eve might imagine that an adder is a person if it speaks in human language, even if we would not. Or we might attend to how in the B version Christ goes on to describe Lucifer as ‘ylik a lusard with a lady visage’ (B.18.338). Here the poem refers to the extensive medieval iconographic tradition that renders the speaking snake in the garden as a seductress with a woman’s face, sometimes half her body, fused with the snake’s body, as if to highlight Lucifer’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Narrative embodiment and voicing

transgression of ‘natural’ categories and accrue to his imagined body every Christian revulsion against female beauty as temptation.41 An adder’s personhood makes a monstrous kind of sense in this tradition. In taking on personhood by speaking in a human voice, in imitating Eve’s own form in our imaginations, Lucifer duplicitously and proleptically imitates the incarnate Christ. Time telescopes in reverse as Lucifer provides the inverse of Christ’s own preaching mission: learn without loving, and you will become like gods, he promises.42 Lucifer’s ‘goyng’ as an adder does not reveal that Christ’s ‘goyng’ as a man was equally deceptive, as Gobelyn has claimed –​even if Christ himself describes his ‘goyng’ as a ‘gile’ as well as a ‘grace’ (for, after all, it does deceive the devils).43 Rather, Christ’s accusation lays bare Lucifer’s disruption of everything we might think that a person should be, and could say. But we also have the option of reading this story against the grain, something that I think medievalists do lamentably rarely. What if, instead, we were to question Christ’s confidence, and our own, in denying personhood to the adder? Critical race theory teaches us to see, if we were not already acutely aware of this, that often our sense of who counts as a person, and what counts as a thing or object that is unaccountably speaking against its own objectification, is the product of a long history of oppression rather than a natural fact of our being in the world.44 I would hope that none of us might want to argue in favour of learning without loving so that we can become like gods, raising ourselves above the rest of humanity on the basis of our superior rationality and intellectual prowess (even if this behaviour is common enough in Western culture, and highly familiar to anyone in an academic setting).45 But to present learning without loving ‘ylik a lusard with a lady visage’, personified in a figure whose being-​in-​the-​world is depicted as monstrous by associating it with female beauty and seduction, with gender transition or ambiguity and with some sort of crossing of the human/​animal divide, can itself be regarded as a display of learning without loving. Although Christ and the devils are quick to condemn Lucifer, we might reflect that, in representing his ‘speaking in person’ through their eyes, the poem is also showing us that learning to love, as Kynde advises the dreamer (B.20.208, C.22.208), may also require from some persons a great deal of unlearning.

76

Speaking in person

67

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). I am grateful not only to David for our conversations over many years but to the editors of this volume, and to Katharine Breen, Tekla Bude, Joshua Easterling, Andrew Kraebel, Adin Lears, Will Rhodes, Sarah Salih, Catherine Sanok and James Simpson for their comments on this chapter. 2 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Austin’s posthumously published lecture notes consider how the speaking of words may not simply describe the world but change it; this ‘speech act theory’ has provoked many responses across a range of fields. 3 On the complexity of this concept, see R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 183–​8. 4 On parrhesia, see M. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–​1983, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). On ‘passionate utterance’, see S. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 155–​91. For comparisons of the two, see A. J. Norval, ‘Moral perfectionism and democratic responsiveness: reading Cavell with Foucault’, Ethics & Global Politics, 4:4 (2011), 207–​29, and D. Lorenzini, ‘Performative, passionate, and parrhesiastic utterance: on Cavell, Foucault, and truth as an ethical force’, Critical Inquiry, 41:2 (2015), 254–​68. 5 A flood of exciting new work on personification is now emerging: I might point, for example, to the cluster on personification in The Yearbook of Langland Studies 33 (2019, publ. 2020), or K. Breen, Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), as well as B. A. M. Ramakers and W. S. Melion (eds), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Personification has been an unfashionable literary technique since the late eighteenth century, however, and scholars of later periods have tended to disregard it. For example, B. Johnson, in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), denies that anthropomorphism and personification can involve the voice while assigning all the territory of speaking to prosopopoeia. The map needs to be drawn quite differently for medieval and early modern studies, where personifications have a great deal to say for themselves. 6 Also concerned with personification and personhood is E. Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Narrative embodiment and voicing

NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Her approach differs from mine in that she expands the sense of ‘personification’ to include all the ways that texts create recognisable types of person; and in that she uses ‘social persons’ (cultural ideas about types of person) to investigate literary character, rather than focusing on what is problematic about personhood. She does note, however, that not everyone is considered a person nor permitted to speak (see esp. pp. 27–​8). 7 For an introduction to this tradition, see R. Hanna et al., ‘Latin commentary tradition and vernacular literature’, in A. J. Minnis and I. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 363–​421 (400–​2). 8 J. Mann, ‘The nature of need revisited’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 18 (2008), 3–​29; J. Mann, ‘Allegory and Piers Plowman’, in A. Cole and A. Galloway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 65–​82. For a more detailed anatomy of the ‘referential instability’ of personifications in Piers Plowman, see L. Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 3–​16, esp. 10. 9 I cite the B text by passus and line number from W. Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-​ Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London: Dent, 1991). Here, I remove editorial capitalisation and italics so that readers can reconsider for themselves where Need is personified and where it functions as a concept. 10 The Book of Tribulation, ed. A. Barratt (Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 1983), p. 102, line 12. 11 See, for example, Gabius Bassus as quoted by Aulus Gellius, in J. C. Rolfe (ed., trans.), The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), book 5, chap. 7 (available at http://​pers​eus.tufts.edu/​hop​per/​text?doc=​urn:cts:latin​Lit:phi1​254. phi​001.pers​eus-​eng1:244, and, in Latin, http://​pers​eus.tufts.edu/​hop​ per/​text?doc=​Pers​eus%3At​ext%3A2​007.01.0071%3Ap​age%3D246 [accessed 13 October 2021]). And see C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. ‘persona, ae’, I, and ‘persono, ui, itum’, I A (available at https://​pers​eus.tufts.edu/​ hop​per/​text?doc=​Pers​eus%3at​ext%3a1​999.04.0059 [accessed 13 October 2021]). 12 See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘persona, ae’. 13 Ibid., s.v. ‘personare, ui, itum’. 14 Thus, the insights and theoretical debates within performance studies are integral to the analysis of personhood in any historical period. There is a great deal more to be said here, but one might begin with

96

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

69

R. Schechner and S. Brady, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2013). And see below, at n. 24. 15 See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘persona, ae’, II, δ. 16 Ibid., s.v. ‘persona, ae’, II, γ; and see also Fowler, Literary Character, pp. 24–​7. 17 Ibid., s.v. ‘persona, ae’, II, 3. 18 Ibid., s.v. ‘persona, ae’, II, δ. 19 Quoted in Charles du Fresne du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, rev. edn (Niort: L. Favre, 1883–​1887), s.v. ‘persona’ (available at http://​duca​nge.enc.sorbo​nne.fr/​PERS​ONA [accessed 13 October 2021]). 20 On the meanings of vox, see Lawton, Voice, esp. pp. 3, 26–​7. 21 See A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott (eds, with the assistance of D. Wallace), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100 –​c.1375: The Commentary-​Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 23 and n. 47. See also n. 4. 22 See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, lines 192–​211, in L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 329–​46 (332–​3). I am grateful to Adin Lears for suggesting this example and encouraging me to think about how ‘speaking in person’ may inform literary examples that do not use the language of speaking in person but do seem to be informed by its conceptual framework. 23 F. Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 137–​65 (147). On biblical modelling of the self, see also J. A. Alford, ‘Biblical imitatio in the writings of Richard Rolle’, ELH, 40 (1973), 1–​23. 24 Here my thinking is informed by J. E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and particularly by the richly suggestive examples and lucid engagement with a range of theoretical models in his ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–​34. Muñoz examines how queers of colour, who do not readily identify with the norms and stereotypes of mainstream culture, find more indirect ways of engaging with those forms of personhood. ‘Speaking in person’ is interested in similar sorts of relationality and attenuation, even if it articulates them mainly through textually represented voice, rather than (as in many of Muñoz’s examples) in the dynamic between spectator and visual media or live performance. 25 Two Revisions of Rolle’s English Psalter Commentary and the Related Canticles, ed. A. Hudson, EETS o.s., vol. 1 (London: Early English Text Society, 2013), pp. 6–​7, lines 74–​80.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Narrative embodiment and voicing

26 A Glossed Wycliffite Psalter: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 554, ed. M. P. Kuczynski, EETS o.s. 352 and 353, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 27 W. Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, ed. T. H. Bestul, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), book 1, chap. 44, lines 1205–​7. 28 Hudson, Two Revisions, pp 226–​7, Psalm 17, RV1 lines 644–​6, 765–​7. 29 Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose’, ed., trans. E. Hicks (Paris: H. Champion, 1977). For a modern French translation with lucid commentary, see Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose’, trans. V. Greene (Paris: H. Champion, 2006). For a facing-​page English translation and a wider range of documents related to the debate, see C. McWebb (ed.), Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’: A Critical Anthology, intro., Latin trans. E. J. Richards (London: Routledge, 2007). For a helpful summary of the course of the debate preceding his own English translation, see D. Hult, ‘Volume editor’s introduction’, in D. Hult (ed.), Debate of the ‘Romance of the Rose’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 1–​26. 30 Hicks, Le Débat, p. 100, lines 403–​6 (my translation). 31 Ibid., p. 15, lines 122–​4 (my translation). 32 Douay–​ Rheims Bible Online (available at http://​drbo.org/​lvb/​index. htm [accessed 13 October 2021]). 33 Greene, Le Débat, p. 65, n. 1. For interpretation of this passage, see also A. J. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de La Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 224–​30. 34 M. P. Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); and N. Van Deusen (ed.), The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999). 35 M. Calabrese, An Introduction to Piers Plowman (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2016), pp. 283–​5. See also M. Calabrese, ‘Posthuman Piers? Rediscovering Langland’s subjectivities’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 32 (2018), 3–​36. 36 Griffiths, Personification, pp. 11–​16. Also important on personification in Piers Plowman are J. J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); N. Zeeman, The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Breen, Machines of the Mind. 37 I cite the C version from Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-​Text, ed. D. Pearsall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). Christ’s and Lucifer’s conflicting claims have

17

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Speaking in person

71

often been interpreted in legal terms: see, for example, C. W. Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1995), esp. pp. 100–​13. 38 The representation of the serpent’s direct speech from which Piers Plowman builds can be found in Genesis, chap. 3. 39 Vox Clamantis, book 1, chap. 11, lines 799–​830, in The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 44–​5. See also A. Galloway, ‘Gower in his most learned role and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, Mediaevalia, 16 (1990), 329–​47. 40 More generally on the continuum in language between persons and objects and its sticking points, see M. Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 41 I am grateful to Katharine Breen for pointing my attention towards the iconographic tradition. 42 For a paraphrase of Lucifer’s promises contrasted with Christ’s love, see Satan’s address to Lucifer, C.20.313–​18, and cf. Gen. 3:5. In B.18.289, Satan summarises more briefly: ‘[Thow] toldest hire a tale –​of treson were the words.’ 43 For Christ’s descriptions of Lucifer’s ‘gile’, see B.18.335, 340, 348, 354–​65, as well as C.20.377, 380, 382, 392, 396, 399. 44 See, for example, S. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); I. Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and F. Moten, consent not to be a single being, 3 vols. [Black and Blur, Stolen Life, The Universal Machine] (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017–​18). 45 For two perspectives, see J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligensia, 1880–​ 1939, rev. edn (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), and S. Harney and F. Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Autonomedia, 2013), esp. ‘The university and the undercommons’, pp. 22–​43.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Part II

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4 The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Mishtooni Bose

For the anonymous author of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, the ‘voyce of the fleysh’ was nothing more than the gross, obstructive embodiment of religious narratives in dramatic performance, by whose ‘lustis’ and ‘myrþe’ the voice of Christ was drowned out.1 Despite that writer’s determination to denigrate ‘þe voyce of þe fleysh’, I would contend that it is nevertheless a potent and adaptable concept that, when taken out of the hostile environment of the Tretise, opens up a line of enquiry concerning the many ways in which medieval writers may have believed the body to speak. What might a ‘voice of the flesh’ sound like in contexts other than those imagined by the Tretise? And what if, without succumbing to the dogmatically binary thinking in that text, we were to retain a sense of the body as a repository of truths whose utterances, and modes of utterance, often run counter to those that individuals feel capable of uttering with their mouths? I offer here a reading of The Franklin’s Tale that foregrounds the disruptive presence in that tale of the body as a conduit for truths about the self that challenge those that can be consciously tolerated and intelligibly uttered.2 I would contend that a central component of this tale’s particular drama of experience is its acknowledgement of the fissure between spoken utterances and the body’s voice. I concentrate in particular on v.1479–​80, the point at which the knight Arveragus bursts into tears. This is a frequently glossed moment in the tale, but it is worth summarising the circumstances that have led up to it. Separated from her husband, who is in England, seeking to burnish his reputation ‘in armes’ (v.811), Arveragus’s wife, Dorigen, fears that his life will be endangered on his return by the rocks that lie on the coastline. Importuned in her husband’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

absence by a young squire named Aurelius, who has already loved her for two years or more without approaching her, Dorigen promises that she will meet him in private if he can make the rocks disappear. It is a knowingly impossible condition to fulfil, but it does at least address her stated anxieties about the rocks. Arveragus returns home, and it seems as if all will be well with the couple. After two further years have elapsed, however, Aurelius contracts with a magician to make the rocks seem to disappear, and Dorigen is distraught when it seems that her conditions have been met after all and that her marriage is consequently in jeopardy. While her husband is absent one day, Dorigen pours out her feelings in a lament that puts her plight in the context of other famous women who would rather have committed suicide than been dishonoured. Yet, when Dorigen’s husband returns and she lays the case before him, Arveragus initially manages to preserve a rational, even high-​ minded approach, maintaining that the solution to both the ethical and the emotional dimensions of his wife’s dilemma lies in adherence to ‘trouthe’, understood here as the keeping of one’s word (‘Ye shul youre trouthe holden, by my fay!’ [v.1474]). According to this principle, he urges her to fulfil her promise to the squire, although he does this in so many words, all of which pertain to ‘trouthe’, without directly naming the deed that he is sanctioning. ‘Trouthe’ is the thematic core of his speech to his wife, occurring three times in eight lines, before his body abruptly intervenes: ‘ “Trouthe is the hyeste thynge that man may kepe” – /​​But with that word he brast anon to wepe …’ (v.1479–​80). When we weep, the body is speaking. Here, as it forces a sudden disruption and decline in Arveragus’s speech register and ethical focus –​he precipitately threatens his wife with ‘peyne of deeth’ (v.1481) –​the voice of the body erupts in such a way as to crystallise one of the tale’s most urgent concerns with what might really constitute truth, unravelling what has gone before, putting the reader’s experience on a different footing and forcing a reappraisal of the characters’ self-​concepts. This brings into focus the secondary concern of this chapter: the dynamic between such irruptions of the somatic voice and the dissociative occasions that precipitate them. For the body’s voice would not have to muster itself so forcefully were it not reacting to an accumulation of resistance to lived reality on the part of the psyche. And, in the examples to be discussed here,

77

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

77

such resistance typically reveals itself in intense flights of verbal rhetoric: the vocal cadenzas, rationalisations, fantasies that human beings typically use to dissociate from the intolerable pressure exerted by unbearable emotions. Unable to sit with, and in, the body at such moments, they take refuge in rhetoric that has become detached from both the moment and the emotions that precipitated it. It is left to the body to interrupt this process if congruence with those forces –​with truth itself –​is to be restored. The presence of this dynamic in The Franklin’s Tale raises questions about the relationship between, on the one hand, the rhetoric and ideals explicitly at work within the world of the tale and, on the other, the felt presence not only of its teller, the Franklin, but also of its author, Chaucer. I am particularly concerned here with reading this moment in The Franklin’s Tale in the context of a phenomenon that I have recently discussed elsewhere, namely the sequence of rude awakenings in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, whereby characters are confronted by ‘the authentic terror of the unscripted moment’, culminating in the ‘drede’ that the cockerel Chaunticleer feels as he is gripped in a fox’s jaws, but that also enables him to contact the life-​instinct that he requires to survive.3 Specifically, I have argued that Chaucer was repeatedly drawn to the moment at which the life-​ scripts mapped out by auctoritates and exempla run out, and humans are faced with the hard, unscripted edge of life itself, as when the tears of Arveragus in The Franklin’s Tale interrupt his studiedly reasonable counsel to his wife (v.1480), Griselda “aswowne doun … falleth /​For pitous joye” on the return of her children (v.1079–​80), or Emily shrieks at the death of Arcite (i.2817).4

Such moments recall us to the fact that intelligible utterances can be a form of dissociation from somatically held, inarticulable truths. Likewise, the very worst kind of experience might elude verbalisation altogether. Thus, when Arcite dies in The Knight’s Tale, we are told that ‘[s]‌hrighte Emelye and howleth Palamon’ (i.2817). But the voice of the body is not solely heard at those moments when life presents individuals with unendurable experiences, such as the loss of a dearly loved companion. In the case of The Knight’s Tale, we see human beings reduced to inarticulacy, but their grief does not require a disruptive encounter with what they previously understood of themselves. Rather, it occurs in such a way that their bodily reactions

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

have a choric quality, being simultaneously congruent with their feelings and attuned to the calamitous event that has occurred. In The Franklin’s Tale, by contrast, Arveragus reaches a different and, I would argue, altogether less tolerable moment: one at which a self teeters on the verge of horrified awareness of the splits and defences that it requires and mobilises to function under normal conditions. A more integrated personality might have better tolerated such awareness with compassion and patience, but this level of toleration requires conscious practice, humility and persistent self-​reflection. This is not necessarily to be expected of a knight in a tale filled with wordy cultural scripts and the lofty imperatives of the super-​ego, whether these are being voiced in ways of which the characters are conscious (‘nevere … he … /​Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrie /​ Agayn hir wyl …’: v.746–​8), or as part of a commentary by the narrator on their lofty marital ideals (‘Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye’: v.764). Arveragus is ‘wise’ and ‘worthy’; Dorigen makes promises to him ‘ful wisly’; this is, we are assured by the Franklin, ‘an humble, wys accord’ (v.791). I am in sympathy, however, with Richard North’s observation that ‘[i]t is less certain that Chaucer saw this marriage as ideal’.5 This aspirational marital map, in support of whose ideals the narrator appears to be colluding with his characters early in the tale, cannot be the same as its experiential territory, and the reading of the tale that I offer here is one in which the gap between map and territory is skirted by forms of skilful psychological evasion that, notwithstanding their skill, cannot repress the body’s voice forever. Indeed, as has already been suggested, it is precisely such evasions that summon the somatic voice. Ovid famously expressed the view that tears have their own form of eloquence: ‘[N]‌ec, tua si fletu scindentur verba, nocebit: /​ interdum lacrimae pondera vocis habent’ (‘[A]nd if thy words are broken by sobbing it will do no harm; for tears sometimes have the weight of spoken words’).6 My concern here is with those moments at which tears have weight not because they say more forcefully what spoken words might say but precisely because they sometimes run counter to verbal truths, constituting an alternative language. Valerie Allen has pointed out that, for Priscian, weeping (fletus) exemplified the grammatical category of the vox illiterata inarticulata (‘unintelligible, unwritable speech’).7 Crying, she observes, ‘has neither phonetic nor semantic valence’, and

97

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

79

‘[f]letus … represents the ultimate breakdown of language’.8 From the perspective of formal grammar, therefore, tears are an interruption to the flow of intelligibility. Nonetheless, although they may lack semantic force, they are not necessarily devoid of semiotic purpose. Something, clearly, is being communicated through them and soliciting a variety of responses, including the empathic, whereby we attune ourselves to the feeling being expressed, and the analytical, whereby we ponder at the meaning of such a phenomenon and at what might be being communicated through it. Somatic utterances such as weeping are one of the ways in which a fictional text can gesture at disruptive leakages between the conscious and unconscious worlds of its characters. I begin here with an account of one example in which Chaucer addressed the indirect routes by which these worlds communicate with one another, before looking sideways at another text featuring a dissociating knight, and finally returning to The Franklin’s Tale.

Who yaf me drynke? Certain features of Chaucer’s narratives show signs of attempting to represent the workings of what would nowadays be called the unconscious.9 One of the most elaborate examples of the way in which the narrative arc of a text obliquely tracks a character’s unconscious process occurs in book II of Troilus and Criseyde, in a sequence that takes us through the action of a single day, from Pandarus’s bleary, gradual waking from an unconscious state to Criseyde’s succumbing not only to sleep but also to a dream. It will be remembered that the process whereby Criseyde falls for Troilus contrasts markedly in speed and texture with his own experience in book I. No Cupid’s arrow for Criseyde; instead, book II takes us on a comparatively leisurely, immersive experiential journey that dips in and out of the minds of its characters, tracing ever narrowing circles around the purpose of the quest on which Pandarus has embarked. And, although Criseyde’s dream indicates that something in Pandarus’s words, together with the cumulative impact of her subsequent experiences, has catalysed her unconscious mind’s co-​creative powers, this narrative sequence is, in so many ways, about indirectness, things not quite hitting their mark.

80

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Chaucer was repeatedly drawn to considering the layers of conscious and unconscious co-​creative processes by which anything occurs in a person’s interior life. Responding to an imagined, hostile interlocutor who might feel that their interior process has been implausibly truncated, he has his narrator respond to that charge: [F]‌or I sey nought that she so sodeynly Ȝaf hym hire loue, but that she gan enclyne To like hym first, and I haue told ȝow whi; And after that his manhod and his pyne Made loue withinne hire herte forto myne, ffor which by proces and by good seruys He gat hire loue, and in no sodeyn wyse. (II.673–​9)

Some of this process occurs at the level of the conscious mind, as when Chaucer tracks Criseyde’s thoughts and her reactions to them, but what happens ‘withinne hire herte’ occurs by a different process: ‘mining’ –​that is, a delving or burrowing, in which love is the active party and her heart the substance or milieu that is worked upon. Moreover, ‘myne’, here rhymed with ‘enclyne’, indicates a gradual, subtle process that is barely, if at all, accessible to the conscious mind. Mining can, of course be an intrinsically subversive process, a physical or psychological undermining, and the word here links this passage with Criseyde’s conscious fear, articulated elsewhere, that the Greeks might be trying physically to undermine the Trojans by burrowing beneath the walls of the city in order to break the siege. A narrative that begins with a snatch of birdsong half heard by a half-​slumbering human, therefore, continues via Antigone’s cover version of a love song, a symbolic encounter whose affective impact is reinforced by the song of an unnamed nightingale that Criseyde hears as she retires for the night (the reader, well trained up by now, can –​should they so choose –​supply the nightingale with a name and an Ovidian biography). The narrative, therefore, offers a cryptic sequence of internal and external phenomena, an oblique éducation sentimentale, that pitches Criseyde from bewilderment to curiosity, to thoughtfulness and ultimately to a desire that, though real, is at this point held deeply within the body and can be articulated only symbolically, in the unconscious repository of a dream.10 In its leisurely, richly textured voyage around the edge of Criseyde’s consciousness, the narrative unfolds in a way that is

18

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

81

mimetic of the interior processes whereby she remains simultaneously defended against this new experience, managing the pace at which it lands within her, but in other ways becomes cautiously open to it. It offers a reading of the self in which different parts operate at different speeds, and at different levels of explicitness. In such a context, Criseyde’s baffled ‘Who yaf me drynke?’ (II.651), uttered as she ponders the immediate impact of her seeing the battle-​weary but glamorous Troilus ride past, exemplifies a stage of the process at which she is both partially conscious and partially unaware of the cumulative effect of Pandarus’s words and the epiphany of Troilus himself. Something has changed within her, a process that she can articulate only by imagining that she has in some sense been practised upon, like someone given a love potion. In terms of what she can acknowledge about this experience, what has occurred is very like a kind of witchcraft, the kind practised by Dame Brusen, or whose effects are famously experienced by Tristram and Isode, in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. It is a process dependent on the subject’s not-​knowing; but, whereas in Arthurian romance at least one person knows about the magic and others do not, in Chaucer’s formulation such knowledge is unevenly distributed between a character’s conscious and unconscious parts, which typically operate independently of one another.

The knight’s spiel Criseyde’s ‘Who yaf me drynke?’ is congruent with her experience inasmuch as it registers her growing awareness that something is changing within her. In what follows, however, I wish to concentrate on moments at which dissociated parts of the self make their presence felt in more uncouth or disruptive ways, and are written in such a way that we can only conjecture at the split-​off emotional process that has given rise to such eruptions. The concept of the spiel is helpful here. This word can, of course, be translated from German literally as ‘play’ or ‘game’. Transactional analysis interprets the psychological, self-​protective games in which individuals compulsively and habitually –​and by no means always consciously –​engage as having been designed to prevent full contact with the threatening immediacy of the moment, in which emotional

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

nakedness or vulnerability, or anxiety, or embarrassment or fear, might have to be experienced.11 Without a spiel, we would have to get real. The OED is rather coy about these deeper significances of spiel: it allows ‘a speech intended to persuade or advertise, patter’ –​ so at least it is recognising the quality of rehearsed, pre-​scripted verbal and mental patterns designed to prevent, and pre-​empt real contact with, the moment. The second meaning that it allows is ‘[a]‌ swindle, a dishonest line of business’. As a verb, ‘to spiel’ (from spielen) is taken to mean ‘[t]o tell, to reel off; to announce; to perform’, and I think this captures more honestly the fundamentally dishonest or dissociative quality of the spiel.12 It is not merely an innocent game in which the player is open to any possible outcome, but a pretence and a defence, the verbal equivalent of a knight’s armour: a strenuous attempt to control, direct and contain reality, to superimpose one’s certainties on the seething mass of ungovernable phenomena, both internal and external, that constitute experience. My choice of the knight’s armour as a physical parallel to the verbal or psychological defence is not accidental. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem that most obviously foregrounds the split self in the form of Gawain’s bewitched and beheaded antagonist, we eventually arrive at a moment of supreme tension between the automatic quality of the spiel, mobilised to provide psychological refuge at moments of emotional shock or trauma, and the horrible emotional epiphany that temporarily threatens to disable such dissociative mechanisms.13 The poem prepares its reader for this by sporadically but emphatically drawing attention to the extent to which its characters are operating on different levels at once. Thus, we are told that, after the Green Knight’s shocking departure from his hall, ‘Þaȝ Arþer þe hende kyng at hert hade wonder /​He let no semblaunt be sene’ (lines 467–​8), instead projecting his feelings onto Guinevere with an urbane ‘Dere Dame, today demay yow neuer’ (line 470). Much later, in the grip of ‘mony þro þoȝtes’ (‘many oppressive thoughts’: line 1751), Gawain dreams in Bertilak’s castle, although just in time, we are told, he ‘keuered his wyttes’ (‘regained consciousness’: line 1755). At other times the poet is content to let the meaning of selected phenomena remain enigmatic, as with the precise meaning of the various kinds of laughter, another form of somatic language, with which the poem is meaningfully punctuated.14

38

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

83

When the Green Knight invites Gawain to what, he suggests, will be an altogether less taxing return visit to his castle, Gawain is unable to cope with the level of emotional reintegration implied by this emollient urbanity. Rather, responding to a psychological flinch that is the correlative of his physical flinch at the approach of the Green Knight’s axe, he takes refuge in a full spiel, a sequence of woman-​blaming clichés that late medieval culture has handed to the poet.15 And, fittingly, the script for which his shame-​bound mind reaches is straight out of the misogyny playbook. In a poem that has very early on signalled its awareness of the compelling but unpredictable quality of games, Gawain here would prefer the certainty of his own abject interpretation of his experiences at the castle to the uncertainties that would be unleashed by a return visit, or even by a more thoughtful evaluation of what took place on his first. Moreover, he is equally insistent on how his spiel about the wiles of women should play out: men stronger and more charismatic than he, such as Solomon and David, were beguiled by such women. Thus, if these heroes were unable to reconcile the needs of trust and due diligence, he should not be held to account for having (in his view, at least) failed to do so: ‘Þa3 I be now bigyled, /​Me þink me burde be excused’ (lines 2427–​8). At such moments as these, experience is searingly contactful and revisionist, the demands of being fully present in the moment having the transformative but deeply disruptive potential to overwrite our understanding of how things are, or of how we and how others are. Such moments, exhilarating though they are, can barely be tolerated, such is their intensity and capacity to engender shame. We need to be on autopilot for much, even perhaps most, of the time, for truly being present and meeting others is extremely draining on the energy stores of body and mind. The spiel –​and it is no accident that Gawain’s rant takes the form of a ready-​made list of ­examples –​is a psychological and rhetorical refuge that prevents us from having to be in such vivid contact with ourselves and with others. Likewise, when Gawain returns to Camelot, he has still not healed from the hot shame of discovering the extent to which his life-​instinct has prevailed over the symbolic order with which he had hitherto identified so closely. This reading is at least suggested by the glibly anaphoric nature of the lines in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

which he reduces his experiences to pre-​ digested motifs when conveying them to the court: ‘Þe chaunce of þe chapel, þe chere of þe knyȝt, /​Þe luf of þe ladi, þe lace at þe last’ (lines 2496–​7). It is a metaliterary moment, Gawain here serving up a traditional alliterative romance for his Camelot audience. But here, at least, his verbal and somatic languages are congruent: he is irritable; he groans and blushes. In The Franklin’s Tale, Arveragus and Dorigen are as uncomfortable with uncertainty as Gawain, and as inclined to fill experiential voids with words. In many respects I am in sympathy with Jill Mann’s supple, humane, experience-​centred reading of this tale in terms of ‘the ideal of patience, which is founded on change, on the perpetual readiness to meet, to accept, and to transform the endless and fluctuating succession of “aventures” that life offers’.16 But I differ from this reading on the matter of ‘readiness’. The splits I am describing come precisely from the human condition of unreadiness: when, after all, are we entirely ‘ready’ for the onslaught of experience? And they sit at an angle to what Mann evokes as the ‘human magic’ and ‘human resilience’ whereby individuals respond creatively to change.17 In the reading offered here, Chaucer has, in this tale as elsewhere, fashioned characters who seem to live as characters in the real world do, namely by sturdy defences brought about by ceaseless manoeuvres and negotiations between conscious and unconscious states, and by foregrounding the bearable and bracketing the unbearable versions of themselves. And this issue comes abruptly and disruptively into the foreground, and into brutal contact with reality, via a split between the verbal eloquence of the spiel, on the one hand, and the force of somatic testimony, on the other.

‘Pley’, complaint and tears Peter Travis has recently argued for ‘the absolute necessity’ of reading The Franklin’s Tale ‘ “against the grain” –​that is, closely, aggressively, unsentimentally, and counter-​ romantically’.18 In accepting his invitation to read the tale counter-​romantically, I consider three pressure points in the narrative: Dorigen’s opting, in her husband’s absence, to ‘pley’ with Aurelius; the complaint she utters when it appears that she will have to keep her promise to him;

58

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

85

and Arveragus’s tearful breakdown when responding to his wife’s revelation about that rash promise. At each moment, I argue, we can hear the tale generating meaning via defensive psychological ellipses that draw on, or veer away from, elements of Chaucer’s source material in Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo.19 In the tale told by Menedon in Il Filocolo, an unnamed, married noblewoman, who is one literary origin for Dorigen, is courted by Aurelius’s literary forebear, the knight Tarolfo. In response to his advances, she adopts ‘una sottile malizia’ (‘a cunning stratagem’) to keep him at bay: she asks for a May garden in January.20 Because this is impossible in the natural order of things, she supposes that her request will rid her of Tarolfo’s attentions. Crucially, Boccaccio gives his readers access to the noblewoman’s ratiocination about this; she is depicted in terms of scrupulosity and resourcefulness as she weighs up the respective costs and benefits of, on the one hand, revealing to her husband what is happening in order to protect her integrity and, on the other, risking the souring of relations between him and Tarolfo. But Chaucer does not give Dorigen the option of careful reasoning culminating in a ‘cunning stratagem’. At first she gives Aurelius an emphatic refusal: Ne shal I nevere been untrewe wyf In word ne werk, as fer as I have wit; I wol been his to whom that I am knyt. Taak this for final answere as of me. (v.984–​7)

So far, so unequivocal. But, abruptly and without explanation, Dorigen reopens the whole question: ‘But after that in pley thus seyde she’ (v.988). There then follows her challenge to Aurelius to remove the rocks, and a promise as to what will happen once he has done so: ‘Thanne wol I love yow best of any man; /​Have heer my trouthe, in al that evere I kan’ (v.997–​8). Richard North’s further reading of this scene speculates about the ordering of subsequent lines in the Riverside edition and the implications for possible readings of Dorigen’s feelings about Aurelius.21 But, in the reading that I am offering, it is v.988 that pre-​eminently opens this question. It is a psychological pivot for which, in a departure from Boccaccio, no prior reason is given by the tale’s narrator. It is true that Dorigen explains her thinking about the rocks to her suitor (‘For wel I woot that it shal never bityde’: v.1001), thereby belatedly injecting a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

deliberative element into her discourse. And, as readers privy to her stated anxieties about the danger presented by the rocks, we might assume that her fantastic request might be underpinned by pragmatism. But the ordering of materials in the English text and its source is still significant: although Dorigen shares a little more of her thinking with the suitor in question than does Boccaccio’s noblewoman, the subtle reasoning underpinning the latter’s request concerning the May garden does not take place in Tarolfo’s presence, and even the source line for v.1001 is communicated to herself alone (‘And she said to herself “It is an impossible thing to do, and that is how I shall get free of him” ’).22 In this scene, therefore, she is an altogether more self-​contained character than Dorigen, and yet in psychological terms there is more of her on view. So, although it could be argued that there is not that great a distance between her ‘sottile malizia’ and Dorigen’s ‘pley’, I would respond that there is, in fact, a crucial difference between them: the first is supported by a deliberative thought process, and the second arises, unheralded and inexplicable, from the depths of Dorigen’s, and the narrative’s, unconscious. As Dominique Battles points out, there is a good deal of difference between Dorigen’s ‘rash promise’ and the noblewoman’s ‘premeditated strategy for preserving her marriage’.23 Chaucer removes the deliberative bridge to this moment in The Franklin’s Tale, rendering it all the more startling and psychologically vertiginous as a result. ‘Pley’ comes from a different part of the self from the purely rational, and the reader is left to wonder about the extent to which Dorigen is, or is not, in full contact with the different parts of herself. The sudden succumbing to ‘pley’ could be interpreted both in terms of a split between what her rational mind can cope with in the moment and in terms of her deeper instinctual drives (Criseyde’s ‘who yaf me drynke?’ is more insightful and honest about this experience). Chaucer could, following his source, have made Dorigen pragmatic, calculating, performatively rational; he chose instead to make her impulsive, and thus to suggest a character in whose internal world different parts function separately from one another. Therefore, although I would wholeheartedly agree with North that the Franklin ‘makes Dorigen a woman of flesh and blood’, I would call into question his conclusion that ‘[s]‌he has her desires, but has been brought up to constrain them, and now

78

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

87

they are focused on her husband’.24 Rather, her susceptibility to the momentary imperatives of ‘pley’ cannot be accommodated by her rational, idealised and consciously sincere commitment to her husband. The aspirations with which the marriage began cannot admit the improvisatory, spontaneous imperatives of Dorigen’s ‘pley’. To claim this is not to blame her for the situation in which she finds herself but, rather, to acknowledge the powerfully constraining forces of the rhetorical and cultural decorums that underpin the particular reading of the world given in this particular tale. Two years pass before the consequences of Dorigen’s rash promise play out fully, but eventually Aurelius manages to enlist a magician to make it seem as if the rocks have disappeared. When Aurelius confronts her with this, she stands ‘astoned’, the blood drained from her face: ‘She wende nevere han come in swich a trappe’ (v.1341). This is precisely the kind of contact with reality and with her own obfuscations that is barely tolerable. Crucially, after a somewhat faltering but still purposeful speech by Aurelius in which he stipulates that she should keep her plighted ‘trouthe’ by meeting him at a garden, Dorigen is left alone to process where this turn of events leaves her. Arveragus is, once again, absent, though only ‘out of towne’, and we are free to speculate that it may be precisely because she can reveal her plight ‘to no wight’ that Dorigen’s complaint takes the form it does. In a situation that recalls in miniature the long period of Arveragus’s absence in England, no external source of emotional containment, consolation or perspective is immediately available to her. As Battles points out, ‘[h]‌er friends appear intermittently and namelessly … Chaucer isolates Dorigen from an interpretive community.’25 She is left alone with her own mind, which turns out be one well stocked with ready-​made exempla that permit only certain kinds of thinking and feeling, and cannot possibly anticipate the way in which the situation in The Franklin’s Tale will actually unfold. What results, therefore, is the very opposite of Gawain’s misogynistic rant, but fuelled by the same method of compiling exempla that support a particular reading of the world. Dorigen produces an extended complaint woven from the examples of women, such as Lucretia, who commit suicide after having been raped; women who commit suicide in order to prevent the possibility of being raped; and, latterly, faithful wives such as chaste Penelope or Brutus’ faithful Portia. Dorigen clearly identifies

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

with the women who commit suicide (‘it is for me /​To sleen myself than been defouled thus’: v.1422–​3) and she cannot think in anything other than binary terms (‘I wol be trewe unto Arveragus  /​ Or rather sleen myself in som manere’: v.1424–​5). Her complaint polarises humans into victims and predators, configuring human experience solely in terms of extremes. In teasing out the literary context and impact of Dorigen’s emotionality, Battles makes the case that some of this tale’s more operatic modes –​its bids for pathos and the high style of Dorigen’s rhetoric, in particular –​may have been informed not by the content of Menedon’s Tale but by the frame narrative in Il Filocolo concerning Florio and Biancafiore.26 For Battles, the ‘emotional intensity’ that Dorigen manifests is derived from that of Florio, and she notes their shared predilection for communicating through laments.27 She makes the point that the separations of Dorigen and Arveragus, which fuel Dorigen’s emotional intensity, are absent from Menedon’s Tale, but are analogous to those experienced by Florio and Biancafiore.28 Unlike Boccaccio’s Florio, however, who has a wise, pragmatic foil in the shape of his companion Ascalion, Dorigen is left to interpret her experience on her own –​through those very separations engineered by Chaucer –​and this deprives her of context, perspective and opportunities for self-​compassion or humour, leaving dimensions of her experience out of the frame of her awareness. Battles makes a persuasive case, therefore, that Chaucer deliberately engineers Dorigen’s periods of physical isolation, amplifies her emotional intensity and deprives her of the moderating voice of a wise companion. This results in a complaint whose length and emotional intensity cannot compensate for the sense it gives of not confronting reality directly. Acknowledging that the tale’s narrator seems at times to experience fatigue in his narration of Dorigen’s emotional longueurs, Battles points out that this supports the strand in criticism ably represented by A. C. Spearing’s comment that ‘ “the rhetorical structure [of the complaint] is a form of evasion of reality” ’.29 And, even for Battles, the laments of Florio and Dorigen are alike ‘inappropriate … in length and content to the immediate context’.30 What might the consequences be for our argument? I would contend that we are led back to acknowledging how the complaint’s piling up of exempla is no substitute for insight or self-​knowledge;

98

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

89

rather, it postpones the moment of re-​engagement with lived reality, its very plenitude apt to arouse readerly suspicion. The one thing that Dorigen cannot do at this moment in the narrative is situate her earlier impulse towards ‘pley’ in this rhetorical context. Rather, she is compelled, over and over again, to project her agency onto the men who oppress the blameless female victims with whom she consciously identifies. In saying this, I am mounting a defence of desire, and particularly here a woman’s desire, in all the inchoate, barely acknowledged, unconscious forms that it can take in a narrative as constrained by its own decorums as The Franklin’s Tale. Battles has pointed out that Dorigen tends to polarise critics, some taking her complaints ‘seriously’ and others detecting in them an ‘ironic undertone’.31 But it is possible to resist this polarisation, instead viewing Dorigen’s complaint as a metafictional exposé by Chaucer of the way in which certain kinds of literary rhetoric, which can all too easily be deployed to do our thinking and feeling for us, are too rigid to accommodate the lightness and ambiguity of momentary ‘pley’. In the complaint’s sadistic world of rape and suicide, and even latterly in its masochistic evocation of wifely fidelity tested to its limits, there is no room for the ambiguous, uncertain, evanescent modes of human experience, of which bodily desire is such a potent and enigmatic example. For all the emotions under which Dorigen is labouring, she finishes her many sentences. Yet, although Chaucer’s shaping of her character serves to underline one of the tale’s concerns –​ the mismatch between verbal eloquence and the workings of the unconscious –​her husband is brought to the end of ‘trouthe’ more directly, through a direct interruption by the body. What is in this respect a proleptic moment occurs towards the beginning of the poem, when Dorigen swears an oath to her husband: ‘Sire, I wol be youre humble trewe wyf – ​/​Have heer my trouthe –​til that myn herte breste’ (v.758–​9). ‘Til that myn herte breste’ can, of course, be glossed as ‘until death do us part’, and death is obviously the most extreme way in which the body can sabotage the complex human aspirations summed up in the word ‘trouthe’. But, in its polarisation of ‘trouthe’ and the ‘bursting’ of part of the body, the line can also be read as a direct foreshadowing of v.1479–​80. In those lines, Arveragus’ tears interrupt a performatively rational spiel about ‘trouthe’ that he sincerely offers to his wife. Even the coherence

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

of a rhyming couplet is disturbed by the body’s irruption into this super-​ego-​driven speech. The version of himself that Arveragus can hitherto tolerate is the rationalising, ‘trouthe’-​driven version. But experience has stress-​tested that version of himself in unforeseeable ways. Here, therefore, experience is aligned with the unforeseeable, the truly unknown, and Chaucer turns aside from his source in favour of an unblinking analysis of the traumatic ways in which it cuts across the characters’ habitual ways of seeing themselves. Is this really an interruption? The Ellesmere Manuscript gives no indication that Arveragus had anything more to say.32 In The Riverside Chaucer, however, editorial punctuation invites readers to experience this as a possible aposiopesis: although Arveragus has managed to complete a grammatically coherent sentence, the punctuation invites us to think that he has more to say, but that it is interrupted by his tears. The conjunction ‘but’ strengthens this impression. A powerful impression is thereby built up of the body’s truth interrupting the flow of rationalising ‘trouthe’ that comes from a very different part of him. This is significantly different from two other examples in Chaucer, the first being a similar couplet in the Reeve’s Tale: ‘ “And, goode lemman, God thee save and kepe!” /​And with that word almoost she gan to wepe’ (i.4247–​8). In this case, however, the speaker is the miller’s daughter, bidding farewell to her opportunistic student lover, and the ‘almoost’ here grounds the difference in tone from the Franklin’s Tale, keeping sardonic humour, possibly at her expense, to the fore. The second example is Aeneas’s bursting into tears in Chaucer’s ‘The legend of Dido’, when he and Achates discover the depiction of the destruction of Troy on the temple wall in Carthage: “Allas, that I was born!” quote Eneas; “Thourghout the world oure shame is kid so wyde, Now it is peynted upon every syde. We, that weren in prosperite, Been now desclandred, and in swich degre, No lenger for to liven I ne kepe.” And with that word he brast out for to wepe So tenderly that routhe it was to sene. (lines 1027–​34)

Although the language here closely mirrors that used in the Franklin’s Tale, the differences are also significant: this is an example of congruence between the uttered truth and that of the body, with

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

91

the reader given appropriate interpretive knowledge. But what is Arveragus feeling? Arveragus clearly feels at least one of what Gavin Alexander calls the ‘aposiopetic emotions’ of anger, sorrow and shame.33 Indeed, one of the examples from the revised Arcadia, as discussed by Alexander, comes very close to a replication of what happens with Arveragus: Strephon’s ‘O Urania, blessed be thou Urania, the sweetest fairenesse and fairest sweetnesse: with that worde his voice brake so with sobbing, that he could say no further’ (4/​B2r).34 What we can say here, therefore, is that, although Arveragus’s utterance might not fulfil the conditions for a grammatical aposiopesis, there is definitely an aposiopetic rupture between the voice of reason and the voice of the body, as enacted in the couplet’s division of labour. The conjunction ‘but’ is telling too, tipping the balance in favour of an actual aposiopesis, a break in the flow of utterance and intention, and in the congruence between the body and other parts of the self. Arveragus’s aposiopesis forces into the open something that the tale may have been wanting to tell us all along, namely that the split between verbal eloquence and somatic testimony has gone too far for ‘trouthe’ (or, rather, it brings about a moment when they pull too far apart from one another for grammatical coherence to cover up the rupture). For a narrative so concerned with ‘trouthe’, The Franklin’s Tale is adept at showing how much individuals’ continuous senses of themselves depend on psychological bracketing and dissociation. As Travis asks, ‘what does “Trouthe” actually signify here?’35 In terms of the hidden somatic history embedded within the wordy tale, Arveragus’s tears constitute a climax. Interiority in this tale is selectively distributed, with internal time permitted to interrupt narrative time only at the narrator’s behest. When Arveragus’s body interrupts the flow of his words, Chaucer does not choose to focalise, as he could have chosen to do, on his inner process. We are not told what emotion he is feeling at the moment of his aposiopetic breakdown; rather, it is enacted through the body, and the reader is left to co-​create this moment with Chaucer by doing the work of feeling and wondering, rather than glibly making sense of it all. Moreover, by not being put in possession of different, even superior, interpretive information about this moment, we are abandoned to experience in a manner analogous to the character.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

It is, rather, Aurelius who is later permitted to ‘wondren on this cas’ as the narrow focus of his narcissism expands, with an instantaneity every bit as miraculous in psychological terms as the conjured disappearance of the rocks, into empathy (‘compassioun’) and an expanded perspective (‘considering the beste on every syde’) –​the emotional resources of which Dorigen was earlier deprived, as noted above. What gradually follows, as Aurelius releases Dorigen and is released in turn from his contract with the magician, is a trickling down through the tale of emotions and perspectives that could –​should, even –​have been present from its beginning. As love mined its way through Criseyde’s heart, so in The Franklin’s Tale a submerged phenomenology of somatic experience gradually undermines the cascades of words deployed to keep such experience safely dissociated and at bay, quarantined from the conscious mind. I have suggested, therefore, why this tale might be read as one in which, faced with the endless capacity of individuals for deflection and dissociation, the psychological refuges provided by verbal games and cultural scripts, it is left to the body to act as a repository for unutterable kinds of ‘trouthe’. Rhetoric alone is not short of ready-​made escape hatches and evasions of reality. But fiction invites us to use our readerly discomfort at such moments to launch a fresh enquiry into the pain of being in direct contact with experience.

Notes 1 A. Hudson (ed.), Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: Medieval Academy of America, 1997), p. 99. 2 All quotations from Chaucer are taken from L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3 M. Bose, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, in F. Grady (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 191–​204 (199, 202). 4 Ibid., p. 202. 5 R. North, ‘Sleeping dogs and stasis in The Franklin’s Tale’, in M. D. J. Bintley et al. (eds), Stasis in the Medieval West: Questioning Change and Continuity, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 205–​30 (207). 6 Ovid, Ex Ponto III.1.157–​ 8, from Ovid, Tristia; Ex Ponto, Loeb Classical Library 151, trans. A. L. Wheeler. 2nd rev. edn, G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 382–​3.

39

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body speaks in The Franklin’s Tale

93

7 V. Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 121. 8 Ibid., pp. 121–​2. 9 For influential readings of Troilus with a similar focus on the phenomenology of Criseyde’s conscious and unconscious experience, see J. Norton-​Smith, Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 160–​212, and M. Lambert, ‘Troilus, books III: a Criseydan reading’, in M. B. Salu (ed.), Essays on Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), pp. 105–​25; see particularly p. 118, where Lambert weaves in the reader’s unsteady experience of the narrative. 10 On the indirectness with which Criseyde’s desire percolates through her, see L. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 146. 11 As famously articulated in E. Berne, Games People Play. The Psychology of Human Relationships (London: Penguin Books, 1968). 12 OED, s.v. ‘spiel’, n., emphasis in original. 13 J. R. R. Tolkien, E. V. Gordon and N. Davis (eds), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Translations are my own. 14 R. Longsworth, ‘Interpretive laughter in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Philological Quarterly 700 (1991), 141–​7. 15 See, for example, A. Blamires (ed.), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 16 J. Mann, ‘Chaucerian themes and style in the Franklin’s Tale’, in M. D. Rasmussen (ed.), Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-​ Poet, and Malory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 62–​79 (79). 17 Ibid., p. 78. 18 P. Travis, ‘The Franklin’s symptomatic Sursanure’, in F. Grady (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 151–​65 (164). 19 G. Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, ed. S. Battaglia, Scrittori d’Italia (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1938), libro IV, quistione 4, 311–​14, 316–​ 25. All translations from Italian are taken from N. Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980). 20 Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, p. 311; Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio, p. 155. 21 North, ‘Sleeping dogs’, pp. 217–​18. 22 Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, p. 312; Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio, p. 155. 23 D. Battles, ‘Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale” and Boccaccio’s “Filocolo” reconsidered’, Chaucer Review 34: 1 (1999), 38–​59 (45). 24 North, ‘Sleeping dogs’, p. 218.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

25 Battles, ‘Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale” ’, p. 52. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., pp. 46, 47–​50. 28 Ibid., p. 44. 29 Ibid., p. 53, quoting from A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 185. 30 Battles, ‘Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale” ’, p. 53. 31 Ibid., p. 47. 32 San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9, fol. 131v (available at https://​hdl.hun​ting​ton.org/​digi​tal/​col​lect​ion/​p151​50co​ll7/​ id/​2627/​rec/​1 [accessed 1 October 2021]). 33 G. Alexander, ‘Sidney’s interruptions’, Studies in Philology, 98: 2 (2001), 184–​204 (200–​1). 34 Ibid., pp. 197–​8. 35 Travis, ‘The Franklin’s symptomatic Sursanure’, p. 159.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5 The sensology of the moral conscience: William Peraldus’s ethical voices Richard Newhauser What might be called a rhetorical intention that can be localised in texts is conveyed to us through what David Lawton has termed ‘voice’ –​‘the human agency of words, that which is capable of translation from text to reader’, ‘a volatile series of suggestions that move between theme and address, between text and reader’.1 Voice obviously occurs not only in the modulation of intent between texts and audiences but also within texts in mimetic representations of the intentionally audible sounds of articulate (or incoherent) speech: rhetorical voice is an echo of speech articulation. As such, mimetic voice aids the transmission of rhetorical voice, as it also contributes to the very articulation of voice understood in the way Lawton usefully suggests. Although speech demonstrates many important linguistic characteristics, one of the distinguishing features of mimetic representations of voice is that these verbal depictions are literary markers for particular kinds of sound. As the eagle says to ‘Geffrey’ in Chaucer’s House of Fame –​a text that depends on and thematises the sounds of humans’ speech –​‘[t]‌hou wost wel this, that spech is soun’ (‘[y]ou know this well: speech is sound’).2 The close connection between sound and mimetic voice is crucial for the premodern analysis of speech. From the beginnings of organised grammatical analysis in antiquity, as Alison Cornish has observed, ‘it was very clear that the essential matter of words was sound.’3 Conceiving of voice as a mimetic representation of what is perceived through the auditory sense is to bring it under the purview of sound studies, a distinctive branch of sensology (or sensory studies). The rapidly developing methodology (or, as some would claim, an ontology in its own right) of sensology involves the study

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

of the human senses in all their facets as cultural constructions –​ that is, embodiments of a set of meanings negotiated within a cultural context changing through time –​and not simply as matters of an essentialised psychology or physiology. The sensory turn in the social sciences and humanities of the 1980s and 1990s foregrounded the body as the sentient focus of the individual and the individual’s place in sensory communities.4 Such analyses are found in the studies of Alain Corbin, above all, as well as Sidney Mintz, Walter Ong, etc. (preceded by the work of Johan Huizinga, Lucien Febvre, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty and many others).5 Against the background formed by these studies, the anthropologist David Howes and cultural historian Constance Classen are among the pioneers who have developed an intertwined study of the senses and the historical study of culture, and continue to foster its growth into newer areas.6 Sensology now includes all aspects of the humanities and the social sciences. In what follows, I apply this methodology to the representation of ‘voice’ in the work of William Peraldus, a thirteenth-​century author of two widely transmitted and influential works of Latin moral theology. This analysis demonstrates the wide reach sound was understood to have in his texts in edifying the senses of the Christian community and in helping to shape a Christian perception of selfhood in moral terms. Insofar as speech can become a public act, it also engages the ethics of both speakers and listeners; together they constitute a sensory community created by sound, whether ad hoc or long established. Writers in the moral tradition of medieval thought frequently pointed to the ethical imperatives accompanying voice in this context. The sin of slander, for example, can turn the association of sound between speakers and listeners deadly: ‘The slanderer’s tongue kills three with one word, namely the speaker, the one who hears him and gives his consent, and sometimes even the one who is slandered if he comes to know it.’7 Educating the communities of Christians in the dangers and pleasures of the auditory sense –​and, in fact, of all the senses –​was the work in particular of the confessors and preachers of the Church, and in the late Middle Ages this work frequently engaged the mendicant orders. The task of edifying the senses could take in wide fields of sensory activation, including teaching apprentices in a craft how to hone their senses to achieve the correct results in baking, carpentry,

79

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

97

smithing, etc. The Perspectivists in the field of medieval optics generally included a section in their works clarifying optical illusions, in which the eyes of the readers were taught how to translate deceptive appearances into the reality of reflection, refraction, and so on.8 But the moral edification of the senses under the auspices of the Church offered rewards of both spiritual and social capital. Before the full emergence of prisons as the dominant form of social correction, the edification of the senses was also a system of discipline that aimed at the reformation of the process of turning sensations into perceptions, and led to the creation of what Michel Foucault called ‘docile bodies’.9 The education of the senses also ensured the coherence of the connection between the process of perception and the will, responding to the need to have the tools of perception (that is, the senses themselves) become something other than the windows through which sense impressions could enter individuals and lead them astray into sin.10 Edification of the senses encourages a reinterpretation of sensory data, teaching, for example, a distinction between the touch that is legitimised and the one that is prohibited, differentiating between the voice of temptation and speech that is spiritually uplifting. Among the preachers and writers in the moral tradition in the later Middle Ages whose work on sensory edification became most influential is William Peraldus. Born in Peyraud, France, around 1200 (died c. 1271), he may have studied at the university in Paris before entering the Dominican Order and eventually becoming the prior of the Dominicans in Lyon. He was accepted as a major authority on pastoral theology in his own time, so that contemporary scribes copying his works often refer to him as the Archbishop (or suffragan) of Lyon, though he never held this office.11 As an active member of the Ordo Praedicatorum (order of preachers), whose primary duty was to teach through preaching, he wrote many sermons, and they were later printed under the name of William of Auvergne.12 He also composed two important pedagogical texts that demonstrate his keen interest in the programme of pastoral reform of the thirteenth century: De eruditione religiosorum (On Monastic Instruction; c. 1260–​65), and De eruditione principum (On the Education of Princes; c. 1265). But he was more widely known in the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period for his Summa de vitiis (Handbook on the Vices), which was

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

completed about 1236 and circulated together with his Summa de virtutibus (Handbook on the Virtues) by 1250, although the two works were also transmitted separately.13 They are extant in more than 1,000 manuscript copies and many printed editions. More than 600 manuscripts contain the Handbook on the Vices in full or partial copies, or in a number of reworked versions. Peraldus’s works on sin and virtue influenced a large number of authors, Frère Laurent (Somme le roi), Dante Alighieri (Purgatorio) and Geoffrey Chaucer (The Parson’s Tale) among them. It is fair to say that there is no more important author for late medieval pastoral theology and instruction on the vices and virtues than William Peraldus. What are the voices that Peraldus wants the readers to hear in his Summa de vitiis, his most widely transmitted work? How does vox fit into the soundscape of his analysis of sin, embedded as it is in a solid foundation of biblical passages, quotations from especially patristic authorities, and the recurrent use of narrative exempla? Using the grammatical distinctions that Sarah Kay has diagrammed, we can say that the sounds of voices in his works are, most frequently, both articulate and distinct, which is to say they are voces pitched to be audible and comprehensible by the human ear, at least indirectly through their mimetic representations.14 Although vox in Peraldus’s works is most often represented as human speech, and the entire universe is capable of articulating lessons of ethical correction in the Handbook on the Vices, sonorous beauty can threaten to become nothing more than an aesthetic worldliness that amounts to a distraction. In keeping with the later medieval fascination with the sounds of birds, for example (whether considered music or not), Peraldus, too, references avian songs, but he understands them as inarticulate noises that keep the sinner focused on a cloying joyfulness and not on the urgent need for sombre contemplation instead of frivolous mirth.15 In his treatment of the vice of sloth, birdsong resounds for Peraldus as the auditory sensation of the sin of procrastination as this is implied in the exegesis of Zephaniah 2:14: ‘Vox cantantis in fenestra, corvus in superliminari’ (‘The voice of the singing [bird] in the window, the raven on the upper post’).16 When it is articulate and distinct, vox in Peraldus’s works becomes the sound of the absent moral presence, the authoritative sound that reaches in (from afar or on high or deep

99

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

99

within) to direct humans in the ethically correct direction they should choose. For Peraldus, the intervention of the moral voice interprets what is unclear in human life or rejects and chastises the speech of sinners. It is, for example, the voice in a well-​known exemplum that identified the origin of corruption in the contemporary Church in the Donation of Constantine. This moment, documented in a spurious Roman imperial decree, with which the Emperor Constantine the Great (r. 306–​37 CE) supposedly bestowed the rule of the western empire on the papacy, was seen as inextricably involving the Church from that point on in the care for worldly possessions. Peraldus repeats the narrative as part of his answer to this question: ‘Since in human beings spirit is linked to flesh, why did the Lord not want temporal goods to be linked to spiritual ones in the early Church?’ His sixth point in responding to this query is to emphasise that the eye of the Church must attend to contemplating the divine law and stay away from earthly goods. […] But nowadays the Church is, to a large extent, more occupied with temporal goods than the Synagogue was. Hence, when the western empire was given by Constantine to the Church, a voice came from heaven saying: ‘Today poison has been poured into God’s Church.’17

This acoustic instruction is furthermore referenced as a sound that all could have heard –​and that should still echo in Christian ­communities –​when God’s voice reached out at the moment of revelation to insist on what is ethically imperative. In his condemnation of the sins that arise from pride, Peraldus cites the two-​ways teaching inscribed in Deuteronomy: the passages in which God articulates blessings and curses in the Bible and emphasises the importance of moral choice by encouraging the Jewish people (exegetically, all human beings) to choose which path they will follow. Only punishment can be expected by those who are disobedient and choose the path that leads to curses: Third, nearly all ills of this world come from disobedience, as one can find in Deuteronomy 28, where after the words ‘If you will not hear God’s voice, that you keep and carry out all his commandments’, after some words is added [the following passage]: ‘The Lord will send upon you famine and hunger and a rebuke upon all your works which you will do, until he destroys you,’ and so on.18

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

But audible instruction also occurs through the voice of ventriloquism (when an authoritative presence speaks in the voice of a sinner in need of correction) or the voice of natural phenomena we do not think of as speaking our language. King Solomon can be presented as speaking in the role of the gluttonous drunkard (‘When shall I awake and find wine again?’: Prov 23:35), while Peraldus contextualises this statement by pointing out how it typifies an unending cycle of thirst leading to more drunkenness.19 Ventriloquism here allows for the maximum transference between the speech of a person of power and that of the powerless sinner (the inebriated glutton), creating a moral ambiguity that both encourages audience identification with a fallible character and allows the author space to clarify moral doubt. In Peraldus’s moral soundscape, all things are capable of speaking to correct humanity, all things can become audible agents of warning that articulate the threat of discipline, even human blood. In Peraldus’s analysis of the vice of wrath, the fifth factor that should persuade people not to commit the sin of murder is its punishment in this life and the next. Building again on a foundation provided by the Bible, here the narrative of Cain and Abel, Peraldus notes: To indicate that the sin of murder will be severely punished it was said in Genesis 4[:10]: ‘The voice of the blood of your brother Abel is crying to me from the earth.’ The ‘voice of the blood’ may be said to be the voice of consanguinity, as if the meaning were: the offspring coming from Abel, if he had not been killed, demands that I take vengeance on you. The punishment for murder is also shown when it is added [Gen. 4:11]: ‘Therefore you will be cursed upon the earth.’20

The realm of the auditory expands here not only through space but through time and potentiality, across generations that might have been born had the murder not taken place. The voice of the blood echoes to an ever-​widening conceivable public. On the other hand, mimetic representations of sound problematise some clear distinctions we generally operate with, not just between what kinds of things can speak and what cannot but, as Michael Bull has written of the auditory altogether, ‘between subject and object, inside and the outside, self and the world. Sound shows no respect for these divisions; as Bishop Berkeley commented, sounds are as close to us as our thoughts.’21 Peraldus,

101

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

101

too, understood that, if it is quiet enough, we can hear ourselves thinking, and, even more importantly, that it is essential to pay attention to the voices we hear internally, the ones that speak to us as spiritual extensions of the external senses. Democritus was the first to establish a list of five external senses –​seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching –​and this list became authoritative through the work of Aristotle.22 As a learned inheritance of antiquity, the five-​sense taxonomy took some time to spread through medieval Europe, and even when it was well established it could be supplemented.23 In Wit’s description of the castle of the body in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the five senses are presented as the sons of Inwit (conscience): ‘Sire Se-​wel, and Sey-​wel, and Sire Here-​wel the hende, /​Sire Werch-​wel-​with-​ thyn-​hand, wight man of strengthe, /​And Sire Godefray Go-​wel –​ grete lordes alle’ (‘Sir See-​Well; and Speak-​Well; and Sir Hear-​Well, the courteous; /​ Sir-​Take-​Action-​Well-​With-​Your-​Hand, a man of great strength; /​And Sir Godfrey Walk-​Well –​all of them powerful lords’).24 Sight, speech, hearing and touch appear in their idealised forms as morally contoured senses, not simply as tools for external sensation, and they are joined here by motion, one of the common sensibles in Aristotelian psychology. That walking well is numbered among the five senses is a fitting enhancement of a narrative centred on the allegorical action of pilgrimage. In an effort to deepen the Christian ethics of the senses, moral theologians often contrasted the pleasures of the spiritual senses with those of the external senses. Plato and other classical authors wrote of apprehending intelligibles using language that has counterparts among Christian authors who described spiritual perception, but the expression ‘spiritual senses’ (sensus spirituales) is first attested in translations of Origen’s works by Rufinus of Aquileia.25 The spiritual senses were often articulated as a system parallel to the external senses that was used to give expression to the non-​physical human encounter with the divine, as if they were the sense impressions of the ‘eyes of the heart’, or the ‘ears of the mind’ or the ‘eyes of faith’ and the like.26 In the Summa de vitiis, voices also speak in the minds of those who dream or have visions, and these bring with them the sound of revelations apprehended in the imagination (or cogitative sense)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

and the memory. These are two of what were often considered the internal senses that can be counted among other sensorial systematisations current in the Middle Ages and its reception of sensory classifications in antiquity. These internal senses are faculties of cognitive processing that were often analysed in the context of commentaries on Aristotle’s works.27 There was no definitive list of them, but Avicenna’s (980–​1037) grouping of five was influential through the period Peraldus was writing in: (1) the common sense, which unifies the sensations from the external senses; (2) imagination, which retains the sensations; (3) the cogitative sense, which creates configurations from representations in the imagination; (4) the estimative sense, which makes judgements about the intent of things sensed; and (5) memory, the final step in sensory perception, which retains what the estimative sense has apprehended.28 These faculties were not simply constructs developed in an attempt to explain the process of cognition; in the systems that developed from Nemesius of Emesa (fourth century), Avicenna and others, the internal senses were seen to have a foundation in human physiology, each one located in a specific ventricle of the brain.29 The ability to imagine makes it possible not only to combine known things in new ways (so as, for example, to imagine a satyr from having seen a horse and a man) but to create sensory experiences internally through intellection alone, something that happens in dreams or visionary experiences. Although the sense of sight is used most often as exemplary of these kinds of configurations of imagined representations, all the senses can play a role here, including the auditory. At times, voice materialises into an imagined figure of authority, for in medieval texts ‘voice’ can designate not just the sound of speech and the rhetorical intent that echoes it but also an authoritative source worth citing.30 In the Summa de vitiis, these usages come together in a number of exempla from quoted auctoritates containing the voice of a figure of authority who teaches by encouragement or exegesis. One such example presents the Virgin Mary, who warns against the dangers to young women of dancing as a frivolous activity: Gregory narrates in a dialogue about a sister to whom ‘the Blessed Virgin appeared one night showing her some girls of the same age in white garments. As the young woman wanted to join them but did not dare to do so, the voice of blessed Mary asked her if she

301

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

103

wanted to be with them and live in her service. The young woman said “Yes”, and was ordered henceforth not to do anything shallow and girlish, to abstain from laughing and mere jokes, in the knowledge that on the thirtieth day she would come to the company of the virgins she had seen in her service. After this vision, the young woman was changed in her whole behaviour and let go all girlish levity. When her parents noticed her so changed and wondered, she told them what the Blessed Virgin had ordered her to do and on what day she was to go into her service. Then, after the twenty-​fifth day, she was attacked by a fever, and on the thirtieth day, as the hour of her death came near, she saw the Mother of God with the girls she had seen in the vision come to her. As [the Blessed Virgin] called her, she answered and called out loudly twice: “Behold, Lady, I come.” With that she gave up her spirit, and from her virgin body left to live with the virgins.’ From the fact that when this young woman wanted to take her place in the procession of the Blessed Virgin she received the command to abstain from mere jokes, we can clearly see that joining in a dance would have kept her from joining in the heavenly procession.31

The contrasting voices, one beckoning and assured, the other tentative and fearful, created for Peraldus the edifying alternative to the sound of frivolous jokes, a misuse of speech that would have forever condemned the young woman to be excluded from heaven. Beyond this, we can note that listening to humour is identified with the frivolity of adolescent behaviour; speaking with the Virgin is what adult women do. Many of the topics examined already are seen working together in an exemplum Peraldus deploys to demonstrate how delaying conversion only makes the act of conversion itself more difficult. The fifth factor here is that the longer someone remains in sin, the more that person is burdened with sins, which contributes to this difficulty. The burden of guilt and punishment continues to grow with the weight of unexpiated sins: For how will someone who could not lift the weight of sins when it was small lift it when it becomes greater? Therefore, we read in The Lives of the Fathers that blessed Arsenius, who lived in the Scythian desert, had this vision. A voice came to him, saying: ‘Go out and I will show you the works of humankind.’ And going out he saw a black Ethiopian with an axe cutting wood and making a large bundle. He kept trying to lift it but could not because of its large size. And he

104

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

again cut more wood and added it to the bundle. Thus, [the voice] explained this vision to him, saying: ‘The man who was cutting wood and added more of it to his bundle is a person who is burdened with many sins and always adds other sins, though he should put them down and get rid of them.’32

It is noteworthy that the absent moral presence makes itself known primarily through the auditory sense: a voice speaks through the collection of exempla that inscribes the lessons of the early Fathers of the Church; a voice introduces the visual elements that serve as the sign for what is to follow; and a voice provides the signification of that sign. This morality depends on some unspoken elements, as well, above all the relatively familiar need in the desert environment inhabited by Arsenius to gather a bundle of wood to use for cooking, but also the culturally transmitted racialisation of Ethiopian skin for the sensory community of Greek-​and Latin-​ speaking monks who had come to inhabit the desert. Some monastic exempla consist of warning narratives in which demons with black skin are described as being Ethiopians. The demons have been ‘Ethiopianised’, as David Brakke has written, as part of an ascetic project dealing with ‘the intractable yet reformable human self that lay at the heart of the monastic ­project’.33 Conceiving of Ethiopians as demons depends, in part, on understanding them as monstrous in some sense, and, as Geraldine Heng has emphasised, in the Middle Ages ideas of imaginary monstrous races located around the world offered an ideological foundation on which non-​Europeans, including Ethiopians, could be considered ‘monsters’.34 The racial biopolitics involved in defining Others as monstrous often resulted, as it does in Peraldus’s exemplum, in silencing their own utterances and providing a voice that contextualised them as immoral.35 For Peraldus, what has been culturally translated as grotesque and is personified in black Ethiopian skin is the stultified and ignorant sinning self, the self without the knowledge of penance’s salvific work. Converting a lesson from the Egyptian desert fathers to thirteenth-​century France could be effected easily because the racialised profile of black skin had long since come to symbolise a sinfulness unaffected by Christian grace. Peraldus’s ethical voices construct the external and internal soundscape of morality transmitted in his works and in the ideology

501

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

105

that informs them. Phenomenologically, these voices make perceptible through the auditory sense a chorus of subjectivities that respond with a different sound to what is perceived as the void of immorality.36 But they also seek to channel the intent inherent in voice, to edify and harmonise its tones. Sound, as one of the two key senses for education then (and now), teaches the moral path in William Peraldus’s handbooks on the vices and virtues.37 In this way, it fulfils one of his goals among the Dominican Order’s key functions in the thirteenth century, namely to regulate the conscience and create a moral self.

Notes 1 D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1–​2. 2 G. Chaucer, The House of Fame, line 762, in L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 347–​73 (357). 3 A. Cornish, ‘Sound matters 3. Words and blood: suicide and the sound of the soul in Inferno 13’, Speculum 91:4 (2016), 1015–​26 (p. 1015). 4 On sensory communities, see R. Newhauser, ‘“putten to ploughe”: touching the peasant sensory community’, in F. Griffiths and K. Starkey (eds), Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Material and Literary Culture 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 225–​48, plates XVII–​XX. 5 See, among other studies, A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Viking, 1985); W. J. Ong, ‘The shifting sensorium’, in D. Howes (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 47–​60; J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. R. J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); L. Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and M. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). 6 D. Howes and C. Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

7 W. Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, De peccato lingue, : ‘Lingua detractoris tres interficit uno uerbo, se scilicet, et eum qui audit quando consentit ei, quandoque et eum cui detrahitur quando peruenitur ad eius noticiam.’ Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 144vb; all translations from Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis are supplied from the edition and translation of the work currently being completed by Richard Newhauser, Siegfried Wenzel, Bridget Balint and Edwin Craun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in preparation). 8 For Witelo’s work, for example, see Witelonis perspectivae liber primus … quintus, ed., trans. S. Unguru and A. M. Smith, 3 vols (Wrocław: Zaklad Naradowy im. Ossolinskich, 1977–​1983), covering books 1–​3 and 5; and, for book 4, C. J. Kelso, ‘Witelonis perspectivae liber quartus: book IV of Witelo’s Perspectiva. A critical edition and English translation with introduction, notes and commentary’, PhD dissertation, University of Missouri –​Columbia, 2003. For a popularising treatment of optics that makes science ready to be preached, see Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, trans. R. Newhauser, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 51 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012). 9 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977; repr. 1995), pp. 135–​69. 10 For a statement of what is presented as an unresolvable paradox of the senses (on the one hand praiseworthy, because the senses lead to knowledge, but on the other hand in need of denunciation, because they lead potentially to sin), see J. Küpper, ‘Perception, cognition, and volition in the Arcipreste de Talavere’, in S. G. Nichols, A. Kablitz and A. Calhoun (eds), Rethinking the Medieval Senses. Heritage, Fascinations, Frames (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 119–​53. 11 A. Dondaine, ‘Guillaume Peyraut, vie et œuvres’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 18 (1948), 162–​236. 12 Peraldus, Sermones, in Guilelmi Alverni Episcopi Parisiensis … opera omnia, 2 vols (Paris, 1674), 2, 1a–​476b. 13 Both summae will be cited from the copies in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, copied by Hugo de Turno in the middle of the thirteenth century. 14 S. Kay, ‘Sound matters 2. The soundscape of troubadour lyric, or, how human is song?’, Speculum 91:4 (2016), 1002–​ 15 (p. 1006). See also J.-​ M. Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le versant épistémologique, Sciences, techniques et civilisations du Moyen Âge à l’aube des Lumières 5 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), pp. 190–​202.

701

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

107

15 On the question of whether the sound of birds was music, see E. E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 16 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de accidia, , Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 74rb. 17 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de auaricia, : ‘Cum spiritus carni in homine connexus sit, quare noluerit Dominus in primitiua Ecclesia temporalia spiritualibus esse connexa?’; : ‘[O]‌culus Ecclesie contemplationi legis diuine debuit intendere et a terrenis istis separare. … Sed hodie magis occupata est Ecclesia in temporalibus quoad magnam partem sui quam fuerit Synagoga. Vnde quando fuit datum a Constantino imperium occidentale Ecclesie, facta est uox dicens de celo: “Hodie infusum est uenenum Ecclesie Dei.” ’ Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fols 55ra, 55rb–​va. See also, in the same treatise, ; MS. 678, fol. 36vb. See Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2.38, in J. S. Brewer (ed.), Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 8 vols, Rolls Series 21 (London: Longman & Co., 1862), vol. 2. 18 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de superbia, : ‘Tercio fere omnia mala huius seculi ex inobedientia proueniunt sicut potest haberi ex xxviii Deuteronomii, ubi post illud: Si audire nolueris uocem Domini Dei tui ut custodias et facias omnia mandata eius, quibusdam interpositis subditur: Mittet Dominus super te famem et esuriem et increpationem in omnia opera tua que tu facies donec conterat te, et cetera.’ Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 121vb. See Deut. 28:15–​20. 19 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de gula, , Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 17va. 20 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de ira, , Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 135va: ‘Ad signandum quod multum punietur peccatum homicidii dictum est Genesis iiii: “Vox sanguinis fratris tui Abel clamat ad me de terra.” “Vox sanguinis” potest dici uox consanguinitatis, ut sit sensus: Generatio que ex Abel exisset, nisi interfectus fuisset, requirit quod uindictam sumam de te. Pena etiam homicide ostenditur, cum subditur: “Maledictus eris igitur super terram.” ’ 21 M. Bull, ‘auditory’, in C. A. Jones (ed.), sensorium: embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 112–​14 (112). 22 R. Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. J. Lynn (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp. 33–​43.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

23 Howes and Classen, Ways of Sensing, p. 171. 24 W. Langland, Piers Plowman, B.9.20–​2, in A. V. C. Schmidt (ed.), The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-​Text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, 2nd edn (London: J. M. Dent, 1978; repr. 1997), p. 131. 25 P. L. Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley, ‘Introduction’, in P. L. Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–​19 (7). 26 See two foundational essays by K. Rahner in Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique: ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène’, 13 (1932), 113–​45; and ‘La doctrine des “sens spirituels” au Moyen-​ Age, en particulier chez saint Bonaventura’, 14 (1933), 263–​99. For English versions, see ‘The “spiritual senses” according to Origen’, and ‘The doctrine of the “spiritual senses” in the Middle Ages’, trans. D. Morland, in K. Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 16 (New York: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), pp. 81–​103, 104–​34, respectively. 27 See most recently P. Gregoric, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on the common sense’, in S. N. Mousavian and J. L. Fink (eds), The Internal Senses in the Aristotelian Tradition, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 22 (Cham, CH: Springer, 2020), pp. 29–​44. For the vocabulary in analyses of the internal senses, see H. A. Wolfson, ‘The internal senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophic texts’, Harvard Theological Review, 28:2 (1935), 69–​133. 28 S. Knuuttila and P. Kärkkäinen, ‘Medieval theories of internal senses’, in S. Knuuttila and J. Sihvola (eds), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind: Philosophical Psychology from Plato to Kant (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 131–​ 45. For memory among the internal senses, see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 57–​8. 29 C. D. Green, ‘Where did the ventricular localization of mental faculties come from?’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 39:2 (2003), 131–​42. 30 S. Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts, Studies in Old Norse Literature 1 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), p. 21. 31 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de luxuria, : ‘[R]‌efert Gregorius in dialogo de quadam sorore cui “de nocte in uisione Beata Virgo apparuit atque coeuas in albis uestibus puellas ei ostendit, quibus cum illa se admiscere appeteret sed sese eis iungere non auderet, Beate Marie uoce requisita est an uellet cum eis esse et in obsequiis eius uiuere.

901

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The sensology of the moral conscience

109

Cui cum puella diceret: ‘Volo,’ mandatum protinus accepit ut nichil ultra leue et puellare ageret et a risu et iocis abstineret, sciens quod inter uirgines quas uiderat ad eius obsequium die tricesimo ueniret. Quibus uisis in cunctis suis moribus mutata est puella et a se omnem leuitatem puellaris uite remouit. Cumque parentes eius eam mutatam uiderent et mirarentur, quid sibi Beata Virgo iusserat et quo die itura esset ad eius obsequium indicauit. Tunc post uicesimum quintum diem febre correpta est et die tricesimo, cum hora exitus sui appropinquasset, eandem Dei genitricem cum puellis quas per uisionem uiderat ad se uenire conspexit. Cui se uocanti respondit et aperta uoce clamare cepit: “Ecce, Domina, uenio’ bis. In qua uoce reddidit spiritum et ex corpore uirgineo habitura cum suis uirginibus exiit.” In hoc quod puella que uolebat processioni Beate Virginis interesse mandatum accepit ut a iocis abstineret satis potest perpendi quod ingressus processionis chorearum prohibeat ab ingressu processionis celestis.’ Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 26va–​vb. For the exemplum, see Gregory the Great, Dialogi, 4.17, ed., trans. A. de Vogüé, 3 vols, SC 251, 260, 265 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1978–​80). 32 Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de accida, : ‘Ille enim qui non potest leuare onus peccatorum quando minus est, quomodo leuabit illud quando maius erit? Vnde legitur in Vitis patrum quod beatus Arsenius, qui habitauit in heremo Scitie, talem uidit uisionem. Venit ad eum uox dicens: “Egredere et ostendam tibi opera hominum.” Et egressus uidit Ethiopem nigrum cum securi cedentem ligna et facientem grandem sarcinam, et temptabat leuare eam, et pre magnitudine non poterat. Et iterum cedebat alia ligna et addebat sarcine. Exposuit ergo ei hanc uisionem dicens: “Qui cedebat ligna et adhuc super sarcinam addebat homo est qui oneratus est multis peccatis et semper addit alia peccata, cum oporteret ea deponere et demere.” ’ Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678, fol. 76ra. For the exemplum, see Vitae patrum 3.38 (PL 73:763). 33 D. Brakke, ‘Ethiopian demons: male sexuality, the black-​skinned other, and the monastic self’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10:3/​4 (2001), 501–​35 (p. 507). 34 G. Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 35. Heng cites in this regard the work of D. H. Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 35 On racial biopolitics, see C. Lumbley, ‘The “dark Welsh”: color, race, and alterity in the matter of medieval Wales’, Literature Compass, 16 (2019) (available at https://​online​libr​ary.wiley.com/​doi/​10.1111/​ lic3.12538 [accessed 11 October 2021]).

110

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36 On phenomenology’s attention to subjectivity, see D. Coole, Merleau-​Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-​Humanism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 95–​8. 37 On the continuing appeal to sight and hearing in higher education, see D. Howes, ‘Can these dry bones live? An anthropological approach to the history of the senses’, Journal of American History, 95:2 (2008), 442–​51 (p. 445).

6 Langland parrhesiastes Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ian Cornelius*

A missing term Parrhēsia means outspokenness, frankness or boldness –​­literally, speech that says all there is to say, holding nothing back (< πᾶς ‘all, whole’ +​ῥῆσις ‘speech’). A parrhēsiastēs is a person who gives voice to such speech. First recorded from fifth-​ century BCE Athens, parrhēsia named the right of Athenian citizens to speak their minds in democratic assembly, or, more darkly, the loud and unhinged voices that may take over such a platform of free expression. The word was a contested site in fourth-​century debates about Athenian democracy. Around the same time it was transposed into other contexts, where it underwent corresponding developments in sense. For Plato’s Socrates, parrhēsia could name an unwavering commitment to say what one believes, however unpopular the belief and regardless of consequences. So conceived, parrhēsia became an attribute of moral character necessary to the pursuit of wisdom. It was cultivated as a virtue by the Hellenistic and late antique philosophical schools and recognised as an essential component of philosophical friendship. The concept was also adapted to political expression in non-​democratic polities, where the courtier or advisor who confronted a king with a hard truth was said to enact parrhēsia at risk to themselves. In this and other senses, parrhēsia was explicitly opposed to flattery –​that is, feeding listeners the words they may want to hear. Yet students in the schools of rhetoric were taught to assume the trappings of parrhēsia for calculated advantage. Christianity transposed all these usages into a new register. In the New Testament and subsequent Christian writings, parrhēsia names the righteous boldness

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

of the faithful in petitionary prayer, proclamation of Christ, correction of errant brethren, and martyrdom –​hence courage facing God, community and persecutors.1 Parrhēsia is a missing term in David Lawton’s capacious recent study of literary voice. For Lawton, ‘voice’ names ‘the human agency of words, that which is capable of translation from text to reader’.2 It is what binds textuality, interiority and community. Lawton’s pursuit of this concept begins with the apostle Paul, a choice ‘all but inevitable, for it is Paul who determines the bounds of a medieval view of voice, and whose example is finally most vociferous’.3 What interests Lawton in Paul’s voice-​laden epistles is the tension between unity and multiplicity –​between the unique voice of the Spirit and ‘many kindes of voyces in the world’ (1 Cor. 14:10; KJV). Paul exhorts and instructs; he ‘attempts to hold together the disparate and scattered communities of his followers around the Mediterranean’, and he constructs for this purpose ‘an authoritative voice’ that ‘is nonetheless supremely self-​conscious’.4 In passages quoted by Lawton in the King James translation, Paul writes of using ‘great plainness of speech’ with his followers in Corinth (2 Cor. 3:12) and proclaims: ‘Great is my boldness of speech towards you’ (2 Cor. 7:4). The Greek expression is πολλῆ παρρησία, ‘much boldness’. The rendering ‘great plainness’ is justified at 2 Cor. 3:12 by the rhetorical conception of parrhēsia as undisguised truthfulness. Although Lawton parses with care the Greek and Latin texts of 1 Cor. 14:10, he does not reach behind the King James translation of the passages from Second Corinthians, so parrhēsia remains an absent presence in his literary history of voice. To unfold the meaning of these passages would require a long commentary, and this is not my intention.5 Parrhēsia, as used by Paul, is underwritten by his evangelical mission and perhaps not unconnected to his self-​proclaimed foolishness. I retrieve the Greek word in the present context because I wish to recommend it as an addition to our critical vocabulary for a literary history of voice. More narrowly, I suggest that the word may help us to register the irruptive force, pointedness and complexity of certain acts of saying in the great fourteenth-​century English vision poem Piers Plowman. William Langland, the presumed author of that poem, was a parrhesiastes in more senses than one.

311

Langland parrhesiastes

113

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Piers Plowman and parrhēsia The voice of Piers Plowman has always seemed at least double. Edwin D. Craun, quoting an early study by Lawton, remarks that the ‘general voice’ of the poem ‘is public, retaining “the social activism, the militant readiness to rebuke high and low on issues of public policy or spiritual welfare, that we associate with late medieval teaching and preaching” ’.6 This is the element of Pauline parrhēsia, refracted through medieval Christianity. In a second aspect, the voice of the poem is more searching and tentative, expressed as a dialogus and inquisitio –​that is, a quest undertaken in discourse. Enquiry is driven by the narrator-​protagonist’s relentless dissatisfaction with received wisdom and his often belligerent contradiction of tutelary interlocutors; the poem speaks with a voice that is multiple and provisional, fractured by the discourses that it successively inhabits. This second aspect of the poem’s voice is demonstrated in influential studies by David Aers, Anne Middleton and Lawton, and it exists in tension with the first.7 In Voice in Later Medieval English Literature, Lawton continues to push readers towards deeper apprehensions of the tension between the hortatory and inquisitive voices of Piers Plowman. In a telling moment, Lawton avers that his early demonstrations of the dialogism and fractured subject of Piers Plowman are ‘more unexceptionable in today’s critical climate than I might have anticipated or wished’; he now throws the emphasis towards the other pole of voice, urging that ‘as it goes on –​at least from the Feast of Patience onwards –​ Piers makes the highest demand of all its readers, that they should somehow undergo or participate in the experience of the poem, which aims to have an effect, as well as affect, on them’.8 In this short chapter I offer three interlinked responses to this claim. First, I aim to show that the moral claims of the poem are present from the beginning; second, I seek to demonstrate that the development recognised by Lawton within the fictive narrative of the poem (‘at least from the Feast of Patience onwards’) is a function of the poet’s process of writing and rewriting; third, and finally, I offer the term and concept of parrhēsia as a way of thinking the connection between the two contrasting qualities of voice. Parrhēsia is a capacious category, encompassing acts of warning and reproof, corrective satire, polemics against flattery, zeal for truth, and earnest,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

bad-​ mannered, agonistic voice. Beside the Pauline parrhēsia of teaching and admonishment, there is a Socratic parrhēsia of investigation and self-​reflection. Both varieties use speech as a goad. A final prefatory remark: the word parrhēsia was little used in Latin literature, which resorted instead to attenuated or one-​sided translations. In Latin rhetoric and in the philosophical works of Cicero and Seneca, the notion may be rendered as licentia, licentia dicendi or libertas.9 Isidore of Seville retained the Greek word parrhēsia in his account of the devices of rhetoric in book 2 of the Etymologiae, defined the figure as oratio libertatis et fiduciae plena (‘speech full of freedom and boldness’) and warned that it ‘should be used with caution, as did Cicero, for he explained his conduct beforehand’.10 Langland could have encountered this passage; I do not claim that he did. The most significant feature of Isidore’s entry on parrhēsia is perhaps the gloss fiduciae plena, for fiducia is the usual rendering of parrhēsia in the Latin Vulgate.11 In the Vulgate text of 2 Cor. 3:12 and 2 Cor. 7:4, Paul proclaims his multa fiducia ‘great confidence or boldness’. That rendering introduces a decisive shift with respect to the Greek text, for fiducia invites association with fides, the first of the theological virtues articulated by Paul in 1 Cor. 13. (Paul’s Greek lacks that etymological association.) In the Anglo-​Norman French and Middle English biblical versions, the Vulgate’s fiducia could be rendered as fiaunce, foi, trust and faiþfulnes. These renderings place us within the general semantic field of Langland’s personified Lewte. For most of this chapter I focus narrowly on a single discursive feature: moral admonishment, addressed in the second person to audiences outside the represented world of the poem. Stephen A. Barney, who collects many of the relevant instances, remarks that ‘such addresses lend [Piers Plowman] largely the character of a work of monitory counsel to the rich, the clerical, and the powerful’.12 I argue that monitory address is an important and well-​ defined feature of Piers Plowman, that the poet’s confidence in his monitory voice grows during his composition of the poem and that this feature of the poem culminates in Conscience’s parrhesiastic addresses to bishops and the king in the C version Prologue. As a briefer coda to this argument, I propose a reading of Wille’s inquisitio as wisdom-​seeking parrhēsia. Both forms of parrhēsia –​ admonishment and quest –​originate in the opening of passus 1 of the A version, in Wille’s dialogue with Holy Church.

511

Langland parrhesiastes

115

Moral admonishment in the sequence of composition

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The A version In passus 1 a female figure named Holy Church, the first of Wille’s personified guides, descends from a tower, glosses the allegorical landscape stretched out before Wille and unfolds Truth’s claims on the conduct of his life. Wille is the intradiegetic recipient of her instruction, and she addresses him with the singular/​familiar pronoun þou, as fits his subordinate status. Near the end of the passus she pitches her tutelary voice over Wille’s head and outside the poem, towards an audience whom she addresses as the riche:13 Forþi I rede þe riche · haue ruþe of þe pore Þeiȝ ȝe ben miȝty to mote · beþ mek of ȝour werkis For þe same mesour ȝe mete · amys oþer ellis Ȝe shuln be weiȝe þerwiþ · whanne ȝe wende hennes (A.1.149–​52)

As printed by George Kane, the first line of this passage extends the prior discursive scheme, in which Holy Church has spoken about the people of the fair field in third-​person reference. Yet, in place of þe riche we should probably read ȝow riche, with second-​person plural address. Ȝow riche is securely established as the reading of the corresponding lines in the archetypes of Piers Plowman B and C, and it is the reading of three copies of the A version (three other A version copies have other unambiguous second-​person pronouns). Textual variants elsewhere in the poem show that switches from third-​person reference to second-​person address are vulnerable to scribal smoothing.14 The second-​person pronouns in subsequent lines of this passage are secure in all versions of the poem. The lines are occasioned by Wille’s questions and spoken before him, but addressed to a class, the riche, that never includes him elsewhere in the poem. The identity of the riche may be inferred from the fact that Holy Church addresses them specifically in their capacity as social agents with superior access to the force of law. To mote (150) means ‘bring legal charges’. The riche are the class that Anne Middleton names ‘possessioners’ and, in a fundamental study, identifies as the principal ‘audience and public’ of Piers Plowman: laymen and churchmen distinguished by their privilege and concomitant responsibilities, encompassing ‘all those tasks and offices where spiritual and temporal governance meet’.15 Speakers in Piers Plowman regularly address themselves in apostrophe to audiences located

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

somewhere beyond the frame of the poem, and these apostrophised addressees are often identifiable with Middleton’s ‘possessioners’. In the A version of Piers Plowman there are six further instances of extradiegetic admonishment, employing second-​ person plural pronouns in address to curatores (1.169–​73), lordes (3.60–​4L), werkmen (7.302–​7), lawyers (8.62–​3), the riche again (8.165–​78) and alle cristene (10.197–​201). The addresses to werkmen and alle cristene are anomalies in several respects. Address to the werkmen is oriented restrictively downwards, whereas that to alle cristene is inclusive, lending itself to first-​person plural pronouns elsewhere in the poem.16 The usual form of extradiegetic second-​person address in Piers Plowman is oriented upwards, pitched towards the riche or another elevated status group, and it consists of admonitions to live better. This recurrent motif remains unreflective and untheorised in the earliest version of Piers Plowman. There is no personified representative of public reproof in Piers Plowman A and no discursive reflection on brave truth-​telling. The character Sothnesse, one possible site for this, is not, in fact, an agent of public truth-​telling but, rather, a ‘quiet informant to the powerful’.17 In later versions, the poet expanded his use of the admonishment motif and also offered theoretical reflection on it. The key developments may be seen if we read in the presumptive order of composition: first, the continuation of the narrative beyond the point at which the A version ended (the ‘B continuation’); then new passages and other revisions in the segment up to the end of A.11/​B.10 (the ‘B revision’); finally, the new and revised passages in the C version. This genetic approach is pioneered in Middleton’s writings; Sarah Wood formalises the approach and extends it into a reading of the poem in all three versions.18 Reading the poem in the presumed order of its composition allows us to trace the poet’s developing use of and thought about gestures of monitory address.

The B continuation The B continuation contains over a dozen instances of extradiegetic admonishment. These are especially frequent in Anima’s long discourse on the clergy in B.15.19 Twice in this sermon, Anima pairs a stern rebuke to clergy with an address to secular lordes, urging

711

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Langland parrhesiastes

117

them to discipline the clergy if the clergy will not reform themselves. In the first iteration of this double address, Anima admonishes ‘ye Religiouse’ to live on plain and inexpensive foods and drink (B.15.315–​17), quoting a scriptural proof text against luxurious diets. He then pivots to lordes and ladies, whom he urges not to bequeath their lands to the religious orders, who are already sufficiently endowed (B.15.322–​5). The theme is amplified in its second iteration. Anima denounces the covetousness of ‘ye clerkes’ and warns ‘ye bisshopes’ that they will be deprived of ‘[t]‌he lordshipe of londes’ if the secular powers govern as they should (B.15.551–​6L). This is followed by a single-​line emphatic address to the secular lordes: ‘Takeþ hire landes ye lordes · and leteþ hem lyue by dymes’ (B.15.564). The danger that Piers Plowman is thought to incur in these passages is a reason for treating them as parrhēsia, for danger follows parrhēsia as its shadow. Parrhēsia, in turn, supplies an alternative to the analytic of censorship. Piers Plowman’s direct and passionate criticism of ecclesial and secular authorities has led modern critics to frame the poet’s work in relation to the historical possibility of its censorship.20 The concept of parrhēsia refocuses attention on the locutionary act itself: its truth, force and the dramatics of its production, including its discursive address –​my focus in this study. Anima’s abiding concern is with the clergy, yet the final instance of extradiegetic admonishment in the B version is spoken by the Good Samaritan and probably targets lay possessioners (B.17.262–​6). Addressing ‘ye wise men · þat wiþ þe world deleþ /​ That riche ben and reson knoweþ’, the Good Samaritan reiterates and amplifies the admonishments delivered by Holy Church at the beginning of the poem. In addition to new and intensified instances of reproof, the B continuation includes two theorisations of the act, placed near the beginning and end of the new passus, and concerned with reproof of clergy and secular authorities, respectively. At the beginning of the continuation Langland scripts a little drama in which his fictional avatar gives up the search for a righteous and salvable form of life. Wille commits himself to Fortune and her party and he easily buys absolution from the friars. When the money runs out the friars abandon Wille, who then erupts in indignant anger against them. Enter Lewte, a new actant. Lewte fixes his eyes on Wille and asks him: ‘Wherfore lourestow?’ Wille’s answer –​he

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

wants to know whether he may ‘þis metels auowe’ (that is, recount his dream-​vision) –​conjoins the poet and protagonist and receives hearty approval from Lewte: ‘Ȝis by Peter and by Poul,’ he exclaims (B.11.85–​7). The topic of Lewte’s and Wille’s subsequent dialogue is the legitimacy of public corrective speech. In an instructive commentary, Craun shows that Lewte’s defence and justification of public reproof, and the limits that Lewte places on this activity, transmit protocols for ‘fraternal correction’ set out in late medieval sermons and treatises of pastoral theology.21 Elaborating a hint first made by W. W. Skeat, Craun reads Lewte’s citation of Peter and Paul as a reference to Paul’s reproof of Peter in Antioch, recounted in Galatians 2:11–​14; this was a central proof text in late medieval discussions of the ethics of fraternal correction. The name ‘Lewte’ has been glossed as ‘loyalty, fidelity, justice, “faith” in the sense of “keeping faith” ’.22 Given Lewte’s fundamental connection with bold corrective speech, we should perhaps also think of fiducia and fiaunce –​the Latin and French renderings of Pauline parrhēsia. The other theorisation of reproof appears in the narrative of the foundation of Christendom in B passus 19. The Holy Spirit designates Piers the Plowman as pope (‘my procuratour and my reue’: 258) and instructs the people to make Conscience their king. To Piers Grace gives four oxen (the evangelists), four draft horses (the Church Fathers) and four seeds to sow (the cardinal virtues). Our interest is in the last of the seeds, called Spiritus justicie:23 Spiritus Iusticie · spareþ noȝt to spille Hem þat ben gilty · and for to correcte The kyng if he falle · in gilt or in trespas For counteþ he no kynges wraþe · whan he in Court sitteþ To demen as a domesman · adrad was he neuere Neiþer of duc ne of deeþ · þat he ne dide þe lawe For present or for preiere · or any Prynces lettres (B.19.302–​7)

The Spiritus justicie is distinguished by unwavering fairness in courts of law and readiness to correcte the rich and powerful, at risk of incurring their violent displeasure. This evocation of danger resonates with Anima’s bold sermon in B.15. The verb correcte occurs in only one other passage in Piers Plowman (B.10.289; see below), yet the theme is pervasive. As Barney remarks, the poet here ‘returns to a repeated topic, the need for courageous figures, usually

911

Langland parrhesiastes

119

clergymen (esp. bishops) but here the Spirit of Justice itself, to chastise wrongdoers, even the nobility, when needed’.24

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The B revision The poet’s revision of early passus –​those already extant in the A version –​prepares the way for the new emphasis on corrective speech in latter passus. Lewte’s important speech in B.11 is underlined by the poet through internal prophecy: in lines new in the B version, Holy Church tells Wille to observe misbehaviour but keep his distance and hold his tongue ‘til leaute be Iustice /​And haue power to punysshe hem’ (B.2.48–​9).25 Lewte will not be made Justice, unless the Spiritus justicie of B.19 be Lewte under a new name. What is clear is that, when Lewte enters the poem in B.11, he speaks to precisely the question that Holy Church raises at the outset: when and how to reprove sinners. Lewte and the Spiritus justicie are likewise anticipated by the poet’s more thoroughgoing revision of a second speech, near the point where the A version breaks off. This is the speech of Clergie, to whom Wille appeals for instruction in the three grades of righteous Christian life, Do-​well, Do-​better, and Do-​best. In the A version, Clergie identifies Do-​best as a virtuous prelate, ‘a bisshopis pere’ (A.11.197). In the B version, the highest grade of life is imagined in much fuller detail and with surprisingly precise reference. ‘Dobest’, Clergie proclaims, is ‘to be boold · to blame þe gilty’ (B.10.264).26 Clergie immediately ring-​ fences that bold identification with a limiting condition. Citing the Gospel parable of the mote and the beam, he warns that correctors must purge their own sin before correcting the sins of others. The speech culminates in corrective address to would-​be correctors: Forþi ye Correctours claweþ heron · and correcteþ first yowselue And þanne mowe ye manly seye · as Dauid made þe Sauter Existimasti inique quod ero tui similis; arguam te & statuam contra faciem tuam. (B.10.289–​91)

Like Holy Church in passus 1, Clergie pitches his voice towards an extradiegetic audience, this time conceived as an audience of clerical correctors. The story of Ophni and Phinees (1 Samuel: 1–​4) illustrates the dangers of lax correction, but also confirms that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Clergie is here speaking to bishops; they are responsible for correcting clerical subordinates, a responsibility that requires them to keep themselves free of sin. Clergie’s conception of correctio as clerical prerogative supplies the context in which Wille asks Lewte whether he is permitted to reprove sin in a clerical superior, and Lewte’s affirmative reply releases parrhesiastic speech from the status-​ bound restrictions placed on it by Clergie. If the poet wrote Clergie’s speech precisely to set up a contrast with Lewte, he subsequently decided that a perfectionist and status-​ based account of corrective speech was not useful even as a point of departure. In the C revision the poet cancels Clergie’s discourse on Do-​well, Do-​better and Do-​best.

The C version With few exceptions, the new passages of extradiegetic address in the B version are in the ‘continuation’ –​that is, those passus that did not yet exist in A.27 In the C version, the poet’s approach to the early passus changes, for he now intercalates several new passages of monitory address. I discuss two loci of revision: the cluster of new passages of second-​person address in the pardon passus (C.9) and Conscience’s speeches to bishops and the king in the Prologue.28 These passages clarify the poet’s thinking about the targets, tenor and agents of admonishment. Revisions to the pardon passus are important, because they show the poet distinguishing between classes of people he may talk about and those he talks to. A series of distinguished studies have shown how Langland’s attention gravitated powerfully towards the poor, occasionally with poignant sympathy.29 Yet there is a gap between the direction of attention and the direction of address. The poem speaks memorably about the poor, but its address is oriented preferentially towards persons of considerably more elevated social and economic station. In the C version of the Pardon passus, the celebrated portraits of patient poverty appear alongside three new passages of extradiegetic second-​person address, addressed to people whom Middleton terms ‘possessioners’ and Langland himself routinely calls the riche. A diatribe addressed to bishops denounces their failures of responsibility as governors of the Church and shepherds of the people (C.9.259–​80).30 This speech concludes the

121

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Langland parrhesiastes

121

entire pardon episode –​it immediately precedes the priest’s demand to read the pardon –​and forms a ring structure with a passage on bishops at the head of the passus (C.9.13–​21). This earlier passage, rewritten and expanded in C, likewise focuses specifically on the bishop’s duties of correctio. The other two passages counsel the riche (C.9.134–​8 and C.9.101); both concern their dealings with the poor. The poet’s sharpened sense of his ‘audience and public’ in the C version is further demonstrated by his treatment of a passage that, in the B version, addresses the poor themselves: Forþi biddeþ noȝt ye beggers · but if ye haue nede For whoso haþ to buggen hym breed · þe book bereþ witnesse He haþ ynouȝ þat haþ breed ynouȝ · þouȝ he haue noȝt ellis (B.7.84–​6)

This is an exceptional passage, and an anomaly within the poet’s general programme of address. In the C version these lines are reassigned to Piers, but also transposed into third-​person reference (C.9.159–​61). The voice of the C version pardon episode speaks to bishops, lawyers and the riche; it speaks about the poor. The narrator’s rebuke to bishops in the pardon passus is anticipated in the C version by Conscience’s surprising intrusion into the Prologue. In earlier versions of the poem, Conscience appears first in passus 3; his irruption into the C version Prologue is a narrative swerve characteristic of Piers Plowman, and it establishes monitory address as a central component of the poem’s discourse at almost the earliest moment possible. Unlike most other instances of monitory address examined in this chapter, the speeches of Conscience have intradiegetic audiences: his targets are present in the Prologue’s fair field of folk. Yet the conceit of the Prologue is that its diegesis coincides with and encompasses the entire world outside the poem. Narrative context for Conscience’s first speech is supplied by lines that date back to the earliest version of the poem and criticise, in third-​person reference, clerics who abandon their pastoral duties for lucrative posts in the royal administration. The B version elaborates the profane administrative services performed by clerics and warns that ‘drede is at þe laste /​Lest crist in Consistorie · acorse ful manye’ (B.P.98–​9). In the C version these lines are assigned to an intradiegetic speaker –​Conscience –​and probably transposed

122

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

into second-​person address, as required by their new setting within Conscience’s speech to clerics.31 The lines that introduce Conscience into the poem establish his discursive address and state that his speech is public, heard by the comune: Conscience cam and accused hem · and þe comune herde hit And seide ydolatrie ȝe soffren · in sondrye places manye And boxes ben yset forth · ybounde with yren To vndertake þe tol · of vntrewe sacrefice (C.P.95–​8)

‘Accused’, a legal word, chimes with the poet’s evocation of the Last Judgment as Christ’s consistorie court at this point in the B version. Conscience’s accusation that the clergy accept payments from vntrewe sacrefice raises a familiar complaint in Piers Plowman, namely that, in pursuing their own material enrichment, the clergy neglect, abuse and mislead the souls of people in their care. They suffer –​that is, permit –​the laity’s misdirected worship (ydolatrie), rather than rebuking and correcting them.32 In this opening statement, the target of criticism may be any friar or parish priest who hears confession and grants an easy absolution in exchange for a donation. As the speech develops, its focus narrows to bishops, who, Conscience complains, neglect to exercise their corrective function facing subordinate clergy. The words ydolatrie and sacrefice give the speech a Hebraic costume that anticipates the biblical exemplum of Ophni and Phinees (C.P.105–​ 17), previously seen in Clergie’s B version instructions on the ethics of correction. Conscience appropriates Clergie’s exemplum, but not the restrictions that Clergie had placed on corrective speech. His bold words instead enact Lewte’s advice (B.11) and the Spirtus justicie (B.19). Conscience’s speech is rough poetry. The exemplum of Ophni and Phinees lacks the poet’s customary alliteration, and this fact invites speculation that the poet left the passage incomplete. The unevenness of revision in Piers Plowman C is undeniable, and we cannot be certain that we have any passage in a state that the poet would have considered final. Yet the very prominence of Conscience’s speech –​its placement in the Prologue at the culmination of the survey of the fair field of folk –​makes interpretation ­unavoidable. In Andrew Galloway’s apt formulation, the speech exhibits ‘a looseness of form that matches the directness of its statements’.33

321

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Langland parrhesiastes

123

If these qualities are deliberate, the speech exemplifies the figure termed licentia in the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its tradition and parrhēsia by Isidore: an expression that eschews courtesies and customary decorum for the sake of direct, frank statement of the matter at hand. The roughness of Conscience’s speech is further emphasised by its juxtaposition with his next speech in the C Prologue, for this second speech is the longest passage of Latin verse in the whole poem (C.P.153–​9). The verses are addressed to the king and they counsel just and pious administration of his realm; in the B version these lines were spoken by an angel who descends from heaven for this purpose. By reassigning the Latin verses, the poet gives Conscience a voice that ranges over much of the poem’s stylistic repertoire; he also shifts moral authority from a divine visitant onto a literary character created by the poet himself in earlier versions of the poem. This last point is especially important and brings us back to the poet’s sequence of composition. Conscience’s moral authority in the C Prologue grows out of the action of the final passus of the B continuation, in which Conscience tutors Wille on the life of Christ, is nominated by the Holy Ghost to be king over the primitive Christian community and –​in the last lines of the poem –​inherits Wille’s quest for Piers the Plowman.34 These later developments show us why the poet selected Conscience for a new speaking role in the C Prologue, but they should not reduce the impact of his words there. Within the narrative sequence, Conscience remains as yet an unknown quantity. More precisely, he is known only by name. Speaking without evident authorisation, this character named Conscience explodes into the world of the poem and, in lines that seem initially to lack proper polish, exercises a parrhesiastic function in relation to both ecclesial and secular government, joining in his person the poem’s twin vectors of corrective address. In the C version, all subsequent instances of corrective address read as call-​ backs to this moment in the Prologue. Conscience enacts, within the represented world of the poem, the type of brave corrective speech that other characters will later direct to audiences outside the poem. For instance, the dreamer’s aggressive criticism of bishops in the C version pardon passus, discussed above, emulates Conscience –​whose authority vis-​à-​vis Wille has, in the interim,

124

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

been established by their encounter in the C.5 waking interlude.35 Taken together, these new passages in the C version clarify the poem’s moral claims at an earlier point and show that the poet has progressively found his parrhesiastic voice over the course of revising his poem. Yet the primal scene of the poem always remains the encounter with Holy Church in passus 1. As a coda to my argument, I consider a second line of development from that passage.

Coda: parrhēsia of enquiry If Holy Church is the first of the poem’s parrhesiastai, there is a sense in which Wille, too, is a parrhesiastes in this opening scene. The sense is this: Wille’s obdurate refusal to say he understands. His complaint ‘Ȝet haue I no kynde knowyng’ (A.1.127) earns a pedantic rebuke from Holy Church. It is denounced as the confession of a dullard and ne’er-​do-​well, but this purportedly unjustifiable ignorance is also the motivating force of the entire poem. As Lawton suggests in another context, dullness may function as the form of acceptability of truth-​telling.36 The implication of Wille’s complaint is that the traditional religious teaching is not adequate; it does not provide knowledge truly possessed, claimable as one’s own. The poet invites –​or dares –​readers to identify with Wille’s complaint, and thus to join him in a risky search still under way in the final lines of the poem. Much of Piers Plowman expresses an investigatory or wisdom-​ seeking parrhēsia. For that general category, readers are referred to Michel Foucault’s final series of lectures at the Collège de France.37 Wisdom-​seeking parrhēsia is distinguished from the parrhēsia of counsel and moral correction in several respects, yet shares the qualities of embodied truthfulness, orientation towards another person, concern with ethics, independence from external authorising supports, and personal risk. The characteristic expression of investigatory parrhēsia in Piers Plowman is Wille’s refrain-​ like complaint that his would-​be teachers leave him without kynde knowyng. This complaint is confessional, expressing a truth about a subject. Yet the truth expressed here is not merely personal or narrowly subjective. It is enacted and undertaken in what Foucault might term a ‘dramatics of discourse’ and Lawton terms a ‘public

521

Langland parrhesiastes

125

interiority’ –​an interiority that hails a community and makes itself available for adoption by readers of the poem.38 It is an invitation to a brave enquiry with an unknowable end.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes * I thank Rosemary O’Neill, Sarah Wood and the volume editors for comments that improved this chapter. They bear no responsibility for errors. 1 For various aspects of parrhēsia, see K. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, trans. R. Franciscono, rev., updated (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 221–​5; I. Sluiter and R. M. Rosen (eds), Free Speech in Classical Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Philodemus, On Frank Criticism, ed. D. Konstan et al. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); E. Schleier, ‘Παρρησία, παρρησιάζομαι’, trans. G. W. Bromiley, in G. Kittel and G. Friedrich (eds), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 9 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), V, pp. 871–​86; S. B. Marrow, ‘Parrhēsia and the New Testament’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 44:3 (1982), 431–​46 (available at https://​jstor.org/​ sta​ble/​43716​236 [accessed 21 December 2019]); and I. van Renswoude, The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Michel Foucault demonstrates the vitality of the concept; his principal lectures on this topic are published in English as M. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–​1983, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and M. Foucault, The Courage of Truth (the Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–​1984, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); see too M. Foucault, Discours et vérité: Précédé de ‘La parrêsia’, ed. H.-​P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini and F. Gros (Paris: Vrin, 2016); and É. Balibar, ‘Dire, contredire: sur les formes de la parrêsia selon Foucault’, in Libre parole (Paris: Galilée, 2018), pp. 81–​120. 2 D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 13. 4 Ibid. 5 See V. P. Furnish, II Corinthians (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 206–​7, 229–​33, 237–​8, 385.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

6 E. D. Craun, Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 60, quoting D. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 13. See also D. Lawton, ‘The unity of Middle English alliterative poetry’, Speculum, 58:1 (1983), 72–​94 (pp. 77–​80). 7 See D. Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), chaps 1–​2; A. Middleton, ‘Narration and the invention of experience: episodic form in Piers Plowman’, in L. D. Benson and S. Wenzel (eds), The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1982), pp. 91–​ 122, 280–​ 3; and D. Lawton, ‘The subject of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 1 (1987), 1–​30. For the designations dialogus and inquisitio, see R. Hanna, London Literature, 1300–​1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 247. 8 Lawton, Voice, pp. 108, 119. 9 H. Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. D. E. Orton and R. D. Anderson, trans. M. T. Bliss, A. Jansen and D. E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1998), sec. 761, pp. 337–​8; G. Scarpat, Parrhesia greca, parrhesia cristiana (Brescia: Paideia, 2001), pp. 131–​7, 141. 10 Isidore, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911) (available at https://​cata​log. hat​hitr​ust.org/​Rec​ord/​001221​010 [accessed 12 June 2021]), § 2.21.31. I have revised slightly the translation in Isidore, The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville, trans. S. A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 78. 9; L. Engels, ‘Fiducia dans la 11 Scarpat, Parrhesia, pp. 142, 163–​ Vulgate: le problème de traduction παρρησία -​ fiducia’, Graecitas et Latinitas Christianorum Primaeva: Supplementa, 1 [Festschrift Christine Mohrmann zum 60 Geburtstag] (1964), 97–​141. 12 S. A. Barney, The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’. Volume 22; B Passūs 18–​20 (Philadelphia: University of 5: C Passūs 20–​ Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 72. 13 I quote from the Athlone edition but impose metrical punctuation on the model of J. A. Burrow and T. Turville-​Petre (eds), Piers Plowman: The B-​ Version Archetype (Bx), XML version 2.0 (Raleigh, NC: Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, 2018). For quotations from the B version, I consult the edition by Burrow and Turville-​Petre and restore the archetypal reading in one passage where Kane and Donaldson’s emendations are doubtful. See the note to B.19.302–​7,

721

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Langland parrhesiastes

127

below. The ‘Athlone edition’ is G. Kane (ed.), Piers Plowman: The A Version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman and Do-​Well. An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.14 Corrected from Other Manuscripts, with Variant Readings, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press, 1988); G. Kane and E. T. Donaldson (eds), Piers Plowman: The B Version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-​Well, Do-​Better and Do-​ Best. An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press, 1988); and G. Russell and G. Kane (eds), Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-​Well, Do-​Better and Do-​Best. An Edition in the Form of Huntington Library MS HM 143, Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings (London: Athlone Press, 1997). 14 An example is A.9.84–​5 (B.8.94–​5, C.10.91–​2), where the second-​ person address translates a biblical quotation. 15 A. Middleton, ‘The audience and public of Piers Plowman’, in D. Lawton (ed.), Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 101–​23, 147–​54 (104). 16 With Wit’s counsel at A.10.197–​201, compare the colophon-​like lines at the end of the Visio (A.8.179–​84). For commentary on Wille’s prophetic grandstanding (A.7.302–​7), see R. Hanna, The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, Volume 2: C Passus 5–​9; B Passus 5–​7; A Passus 5–​8 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 276–​9. 17 See A.2.150–​3, lines substantially unchanged in later versions. I quote A. Galloway, The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, Volume 1: C Prologue–​Passus 4; B Prologue–​Passus 4; A Prologue–​Passus 4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 234. 18 See A. Middleton, ‘Acts of vagrancy: the C version “autobiography” and the Statute of 1388’, in S. Justice and K. Kerby-​ Fulton (eds), Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 208–​317; and S. Wood, Conscience and the Composition of ‘Piers Plowman’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 13–​19, 82–​6, 134–​59. For the relation between the B continuation and B revision, see R. Hanna, William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), pp. 12–​13; and Barney, Penn Commentary, p. 102. 19 See T. Lawler, The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, Volume 19; B Passūs 13–​17 (Philadelphia: University of 4: C Passūs 15–​ Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 159, 163, 221, 275–​6. 20 J. Simpson, ‘The constraints of satire in Piers Plowman and Mum and the Sothsegger’, in H. Phillips (ed.), Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

Authoritative, ethical and orthodox voices

S. S. Hussey (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 11–​30; Middleton, ‘Acts of vagrancy’, pp. 276, 279; R. Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to ‘Piers Plowman’ (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 97–​105, 116–​20. 21 Craun, Ethics and Power, pp. 71–​9; E. D. Craun, ‘“Ȝe, by Peter and by Poul!”: Lewte and the practice of fraternal correction’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 15 (2001), 15–​34. 22 Quoting Galloway, Penn Commentary, p. 123; see also J. A. Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), s.v. leaute; and Craun, ‘Ȝe, by Peter and by Poul’, pp. 22–​3. 23 I restore the readings of the archetype in the first three lines of this passage and in 306. See Burrow and Turville-​Petre, Piers Plowman, ad loc. 24 Barney, Penn Commentary, p. 152. 5, 246–​ 7; and Wood, 25 See Galloway, Penn Commentary, pp. 123–​ Conscience and the Composition, pp. 154–​6. 26 See Craun, Ethics and Power, pp. 65–​9; and A. L. Kellogg, ‘Langland and the “Canes Muti” ’, in R. Kirk and C. F. Main (eds), Essays in Literary History Presented to J. Milton French (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), pp. 25–​35. 27 Exceptions are B.7.84–​ 8 (discussed below), B.10.88, B.10.289–​ 96 (discussed above) and B.10.418–​19. 28 For discussion of some other passages, see Galloway, Penn Commentary, pp. 303–​4 (on the address to mayors at C.3.108–​11); and M. Calabrese, ‘Langland’s last words’, in C. M. Cervone and D. V. Smith (eds), Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 65–​81 (on the address to wyse clerkes at C.20.350–​8). 29 G. Shepherd, ‘Poverty in Piers Plowman’, in T. H. Aston et al. (eds), Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 169–​89; D. Pearsall, ‘Poverty and poor people in Piers Plowman’, in E. D. Kennedy, R. Waldron and J. S. Wittig (eds), Medieval English Studies presented to George Kane (Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 167–​85; D. Aers, ‘Piers Plowman: poverty, work, and community’, in Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–​1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 20–​72, 185–​95; A. M. Scott, ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Poor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). 7; and 30 For commentary, see Hanna, Penn Commentary, pp. 321–​ R. O’Neill, ‘Counting sheep in the C text of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 29 (2015), 89–​116 (pp. 92–​3, 108–​11).

921

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Langland parrhesiastes

129

31 The evidence of surviving copies is inconclusive: of ȝow acorse manye is the reading of the P family of copies; the X family has a third-​person pronoun (C.P.127). 32 Wood, Conscience and the Composition, pp. 108–​11, emphasises the theme of ‘suffraunce’ in Conscience’s speech. 33 Galloway, Penn Commentary, p. 101. 12, 135–​ 8, 34 See Wood, Conscience and the Composition, pp. 111–​ 153–​4. 35 R. Hanna, ‘The “absent” pardon-​tearing of Piers Plowman C’, Review of English Studies, 66:275 (2015), 449–​64, emphasises the voicing of these passages. 36 D. Lawton, ‘Dullness and the fifteenth century’, ELH, 54:4 (1987), 761–​ 99; and see Lawton, Voice, p. 123, in connection with Piers Plowman. 37 See the programmatic statement at Foucault, The Courage of Truth, pp. 86–​9 (lecture of 15 February). 38 Lawton, Voice, chap. 3; Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, pp. 67–​9 (lecture of 12 January).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Part III

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe, the leprous woman and the voice of St Paul Lawrence Warner

‘For medieval Christian culture,’ observes David Lawton, ‘Paul is the inventor of voice as the site of public interiorities’ –​defined thus: ‘What you hear when you listen for inwardness … They are personal but inhabited arenas. They already exist as text before they are inhabited, often in a shared first-​person, by a particular speaker or group.’1 The Red Ink Annotator of the manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe (London, British Library Additional MS 71823), ‘working in the early sixteenth century in the Carthusian priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire’,2 inscribed what Lawton calls ‘one of the few annotations I know that points so directly to a public interiority’ in that Book, ‘albeit a socially narrow one’: the comment that ‘two eminent late members of the priory’ of Mount Grace engaged in the practice of roaring and crying.3 Another annotation, of another instance of Margery’s affective piety, provides, I believe, still further evidence of public interiority in the Book –​and, indeed, further evidence as well of Lawton’s argument that this mode belongs to St Paul, as it were. Margery’s encounter with the leprous woman has been taken as paradigmatic of ‘the touch of the queer’, as instancing the imperative to be ‘strange and bold’, as this annotation has been assumed to say, and yet, so I suggest, it might better be understood as voicing the Pauline injunction to be ‘strong and bold’ (as it actually reads). Margery does not transgress norms here; she occupies a space created by St Paul, operative throughout the Book. Recognition of this aspect of Margery’s performance and writing prompts engagement with some of the most exciting work on Kempe in recent years, spearheaded by Carolyn Dinshaw, on the putative ‘queerness’ of the Book, much of the evidence of which, I argue, is not, however, as strong as it has seemed to date.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

Materiality and textual voices

The leprous woman is one of the most memorable, if also one of the most easily overlooked, figures in The Book of Margery Kempe. She remains anonymous and does not even speak in her own voice. Intended to be the object of Margery’s pity, solely a reminder of the passion of Christ, she nevertheless becomes an individual beset by her own passions and temptations. Margery, having told her confessor of her desire to kiss those affected with leprosy (a hagiographical convention),4 is warned ‘þat sche xulde kyssyn no men, but ȝyf sche wolde al-​gatys kyssyn, sche xuld kyssyn women’ (74; 86r). So be it: Margery seeks out her female charity cases, stirring them to meekness and patience and so forth. One of these women confesses to sins of a sort that mark her out from the others, and draw Margery’s particular attention: Þan þe oo woman had so many temptacyons that sche wist not how sche myth best be gouernyd. Sche was so labowryd wyth hir gostly enmy þat sche durst not blissyn hir ne do no worschep to God for dreed þat þe deuyl xuld a slayn hir. And sche was labowryd wyth many fowle & horibyl thowtys, many mo þan sche cowde tellyn. & as sche seyd sche was a mayde. Þerfor þe sayd creatur went to hir many tymys to comfortyn hir & preyd for hir also ful specialy þat God xulde strength hir ageyn hir enmye. & it is to beleuyn þat he dede so blissyd mote he ben. (74; 86v)

Readers today will be drawn more to this episode’s intimacy than to any life lessons, but not so those of five centuries ago. The Red Ink Annotator’s longest English gloss in the manuscript adorns this margin, and sticks to the conventional: ‘nota: A sotel & a sore temptacion. In siche a case we shold be more stronge & bold aga[n]‌ste our gostly enmy.’ If something seems off with my quotation, that is because the editions of both Sanford Meech and Barry Windeatt, as well as the title of an important recent essay, misread ‘stronge’ as ‘strange’.5 (Kelly Parsons’s 2001 essay on the Red Ink Annotator alone gets it right.)6 Although this annotator’s phrase does not appear in the main text, it is a conflation of two that do: Margery’s prayer that Christ ‘make me mythy & strong’ (50; 57v; also used 87; 104r); and the comment that our Lord made two of her supporters ‘mythy & bolde’ to defend her (69; 81v). Perhaps the annotator remembered those passages, but it is more likely that he or she drew on convention, including the militaristic or chivalric –​Sir Gawain was ‘a knyght bothe stronge and bolde’; King Alexander’s ‘dedes

531

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

135

weren stronge and bolde’; and Boccaccio ‘wrote the fall of pryncys stronge and bolde’7 –​and others, more pertinently, applying ‘spiritual’ meanings to such phrases (MED s.vv. strong, 5(a), ‘spiritually or inwardly strong’; bold, 6(a), ‘excellent, noble’). For this is the voice of St Paul. ‘Put on, or apparel you with, the armour of God’ is Hugh Latimer’s presentation of Ephesians 6:11 in a sermon of 1535: ‘Armour is an apparel to clothe a man, and maketh him seemly and comely; setteth forth his body, and maketh him strong and bold in battle.’8 This pericope, Ephesians 6:11–​17, figures the Christian life as the warrior’s life; Latimer’s verse 14 is ‘Be strong, having your reins, or your loins girded about’.9 Paul’s allegory has pervaded Christian literature since the church in Ephesus got its letter. ‘Be thou my battle-​shield, be thou my sword’ enjoins the early medieval Irish prayer ‘Rop tú mo bhoile’ (‘Be thou my vision’);10 the Norwich Grocers dramatised the Holy Ghost comforting Adam and Eve that ‘Theis armors ar preparyd … The Brest plate of Rightousnes, Saynt Paule wyll the retayne’;11 and, most famous of all, Spenser explained that the Redcrosse Knight wears ‘the amour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. Ephes’.12 The Red Ink Annotator certainly knew this tradition, but did not need to import it into his or her text, or even this passage. It was Paul himself whose diagnosis of the war between flesh and spirit, between the law followed by his bodily members and that he wishes to follow (Rom. 7:14–​23), provided the basis for the depiction of sexual temptation as a battle against the gostly enmy, the devil or a spiritual enemy (MED, s.v. ‘enemi’ (n.), 3). The gostly enmy seduces Margery into worrying that her visions are illusions and deceptions (Prol., 23, 27; 2r, 27r, 31r), entices her opponents to slander her (15, 31; 16v, 39v) and, most pertinently, brings about her own ‘iii yer of greet temptacyon’ via lecherous thoughts: For no drede owyr gostly enmy slepyth not, but he ful besyly sergyth owr complexions & owyr dysposycionys. & wher þat he fyndyth us most freel, þer be owyr lordys sufferawns he leyth hys snar whech may no man skape be hys owyn power. And so he leyd beforn þis creatur þe snar of letchery. Whan sche wend þat all fleschly lust had al hol ben qwenchyd in hir. & so long sche was temptyd wyth þe syn of letchory for owt þat sche cowd do. (4, 7v, emphasis added)

The account of the leprous woman’s temptations follows the template established here. Just as she was ‘labowryd wyth hir gostly

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Materiality and textual voices

enmy þat sche durst not blissyn hir ne do no worschep to God’, so too Margery ‘was so labowrd wyth’ the words of a man who said he would have his pleasure with her ‘þat sche mygth not heryn hir euynsong ne sey hir pater noster, er thynkyn ony oþer good þowt’ (8r). The phrase labowrd (wyth), vexed or oppressed by (MED s.v. ‘labouren’, sense 4b), appears five more times in this episode: this is what happens to someone afflicted with lecherous thoughts.13 The logic of the claim that the leprous woman ‘seyd sche was a mayde’ is that, although it was commonly believed that leprosy often resulted from lechery, and although she has indeed suffered lecherous temptations, in this case her disease is not the result of any succumbing to these temptations.14 It is because a war is on that this qualification becomes necessary –​a war in which, as Jesus explains to Margery, Paul is general, having been sent ‘for to strengthyn þe & comfortyn þe, þat þu schuldist boldly spekyn in my name fro þat day forward. And Seynt Powle seyd vnto þe þat þu haddyst suffyrd mech tribulacyon for cawse of hys wrytyng, & he behyte þe þat þu xuldist han as meche grace þer aȝens for hys lofe as euyr þu haddist schame er reprefe for hys lofe’ (65, 78r, emphasis added). St Paul’s prohibition against women preaching in church (1 Tim. 2:12–​ 14; 1 Cor. 14:34–​ 5; cited in chap. 52 of Margery’s Book) has prompted some critics to set him up as Margery’s ghostly enemy,15 but that is as nothing compared to his role as one of her central models in the face of her tribulations. Sarah Salih, encouraged by David Lawton, has explored ‘[t]‌he extent to which the legend of St Paul may have been an influence on the Book …, along with the apostolic aspects of Margery’s mature spirituality’.16 Margery was ‘al rauyschyd wyth gostly comfort in þe goodnes of owr Lord’ (60; 71v), ‘the word “ravished” suggesting her transportation into a spiritual dimension (as was St Paul in 2 Corinthians)’, as Carolyn Dinshaw observes.17 ‘Like the fool of St Paul who suffers the revilement of the world (1 Cor. 4:10–​13),’ writes Karma Lochrie, ‘Kempe endures the scorn of her contemporaries as well as our laughter to earn her own salvation.’18 Such endurance is modelled on Paul’s own steadfastness: ‘So þer was neiþyr worschep ne preysyng, lofe ne lakkyng, schame ne despite, þat myth drawyn hir lofe fro God, but, aftyr þe sentens of Seynt Powle, “To hem þat louyn God, al thyng turnyth into goodnes”: so it ferd wyth hir’ (72; 84v).

731

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

137

With the Red Ink Annotator’s injunction that we should be more strong and bold in mind, let us turn to a powerful concept within which the assumption that we should be more strange and bold has been read. The ‘touch of the queer’, in Dinshaw’s analysis, is ‘a touch showing something disjunctive within unities that are presumed unproblematic, even natural’, and the Book is full of episodes displaying this touch’s power in Margery’s hands.19 Most obvious are those incidents in which ‘Margery is too bodily, too loud’: ‘She interrupts a calm mass, she ruins a nice meal, and her companions want to be rid of her.’20 Margery’s is ‘the queer touch that makes’ such social discomfort –​‘that is, the breaking up of the comfortable unities of gender, desire, and body on which her community, its sexual norms, and its family structure are founded’.21 But not every touch showing something disjunctive within unproblematic unities has such destructive effects: ‘Her touch, salvific at times like Christ’s, is welcomed by some people around her. She kisses and embraces two leprous women, at least one of whom is entirely changed by the encounters.’22 Does this episode just mentioned, the one that is our focus, manifest ‘the touch of the queer’? Does the salvific touch (if such it is) that Margery bestows on the leprous women constitute ‘a relation to a norm’, manifesting ‘just that relation of unfittingness, disjunctiveness –​that uncategorizability, that being-​ left-​ out’, as Dinshaw defines queer?23 So far as the episode’s power to touch readers across time and place goes, which no one would gainsay, of course it does, as Dinshaw’s reading pays eloquent testimony. And yet, if read from a more literary-​historical perspective, this episode and others manifest the ways in which Margery’s ‘whole copious manner of bodily living is praised’ on account of its accordance with the conventions of medieval piety and its operation under the approval of her confessor.24 Her meetings with the leprous women exist not in relation to a norm but as the norm: the visitation of the sick, after all, is among the Corporal Works of Mercy enjoined by Christ; their point is so that the sick will be entirely changed. This is in keeping with Dinshaw’s description of those passages whose relation to the norm is that of ‘being-​left-​out’: ‘But to others, whom the narrative is at pains to record again and again, as if their discomfiting is the main subject of the book, Margery is too bodily, too loud.’25 Dinshaw leaves the matter, appropriately, as

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Materiality and textual voices

one incapable of resolution; however normative her encounter with the leprous woman might be according to conventional Christian teachings, one might think, the episode leaps off the page, across time and space, in ways that are productively considered ‘queer’. I am not as convinced, however, that subsequent interpretations of the episode as paradigmatic of the ‘queer touch’ are quite as successful in respecting this tension, if, indeed, that is Dinshaw’s achievement. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen defines the concept as ‘a simultaneously salvific and disruptive tactility connected to her discomfiting effect on those with whom she came into contact’, the ‘touch’ of her voice being akin to ‘the hands and lips with which she lovingly embraces lepers’,26 while Julie Orlemanski believes that Margery’s ‘leprous kiss would seem to participate in Carolyn Dinshaw’s idea of “the touch of the queer,” about which she writes, “I speak of the tactile, ‘touch,’ because I feel queerness work by contiguity and displacement; like metonymy as distinct from metaphor, queerness knocks signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange, working in this way to provoke perceptual shifts and subsequent corporeal response in those touched”.’27 This trend, whose approach and argumentation strike me as being quite distinct from its source in Dinshaw, reaches its apogee in Jonathan Hsy’s influential claim that Margery’s displays of desire in this episode ‘once again register as queer’ and that they portray an ‘unexpected “turn” to queer acts’.28 He characterises these desires as ‘inordinate’,29 but, so far as I have found, no one in the Book is said to think so. Regarding her confessor’s prohibition against kissing leprous men, Hsy asks: ‘How are modern readers to understand this mandate of female-​only contact in [The Book of Margery Kempe], this unexpected “turn” to queer acts?’30 The query is an important one, even if he renders it rhetorical via provision of an appositional phrase that gives his own answer. The official answer, as it were, is that Margery’s confessor does this ‘not out of fear of bodily infection per se but rather a concern that kissing might facilitate illicit contact between Margery (a married woman) and unknown men’, and because leprosy, as mentioned above, was understood to be connected to lechery.31 Here, too, Hsy pursues the issue further, again via suggestive rhetorical questions: ‘Does he consider the possibility that physical contact between women might also spark illicit sexual “desyre” or lead to spiritual transgression? Does the priest

931

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

139

simply dismiss sexual desire between women as non-​existent, inconsequential, or (alternatively) tolerable, even exciting?’32 Since the passage does not suggest that Margery’s confessor considered the sexual desire of anyone save the leprous men, it is at first unclear which of its characteristics prompt Hsy’s questions. His explanation is that, although Margery’s desires might be orthodox, those of the other women ‘are not so safely contained’, the response of one of them taking ‘a provocative form’, in the sentence ‘þe oo woman had so many temptacyons that sche wist not how sche myth best be gouernyd’.33 Hsy here identifies the occurrence of ‘something unexpected’: [T]‌he text suggests a causal relationship between Margery’s actions and the leper woman’s’ ‘temptacyons’ and ‘thowtys.’ In other words, Margery’s mouth kissing and intimate conversation have actually generated (‘labowryd’) the undisclosed ‘temptacyons’ in this leper woman –​an unspecified desire (say) for men on the streets, for women who frequent or reside in her community, or even for Margery herself (among many possibilities).34

This is provocative and nicely put, but it does not withstand checking against the text. Two errors seem to have intruded in his reading here. First, there is Hsy’s construal of labowryd as ‘generated’ –​ that is, the preterite form of MED s.v. ‘labouren’ (v.), 6, ‘achieve by work, perform, do’, which falters on the phrase’s passive construction. In the line he cites, the woman was, rather, vexed or oppressed by (labowryd wyth) her temptacyons (sense 4b); this is the phrase Margery uses some six times about her own temptations in ­chapter 4. This probably would not have occurred had Hsy not also, as it seems, fallen prey to eyeskip –​the second error: ‘Sche was so labowryd wyth hir gostly enmy þat sche durst not blissyn hir ne do no worschep to God for dreed þat þe deuyl xuld a slayn hir. And sche was labowryd wyth many fowle & horibyl thowtys …’ The sentence he does not cite provides the logic he takes to be missing. The passage’s unequivocal meaning is that the leprous woman ‘was vexed by her ghostly enemy … And she was vexed by many foul and horrible thoughts.’ I do not see how the text can be reconciled with a reading whereby Margery ‘brings about’ those thoughts. Might this ‘ghostly enemy’ be Margery herself, whose kisses and intimacy bring about the woman’s lecherous thoughts? No: Margery

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Materiality and textual voices

‘prayd for hir also ful specialy þat God xulde strength hir ageyn hir enmye’ (86v, emphasis added). Even if this were a new, second enemy, Margery being the ‘ghostly’ one and the object of her lechery the second, it would make no sense for one enemy to be the source of the prayers that conquer the second: ‘& it is to beleuyn þat he dede so, blissyd mote he ben’ (86v). Likewise, Margery’s vexation in Chapter 4 is a response to, not the prompt of, the workings of the ghostly enemy. Nothing about the passage supports the now widespread belief that Margery’s touch of the queer, or anything other than the devil, is generative of erotic desire. I also consider it worth pressuring Dinshaw’s characterisation of her touch within the Book as ‘salvific’, at least with regard to the leprous woman. The text says nothing about the latter woman’s response to Margery’s kisses, and it identifies efficacy not in those kisses but in prayers alone. The touch of the queer is read into this episode by a modern audience, and in some very interesting ways, then, but the evidence cited for that touch’s availability to the leprous woman herself or to any of the Book’s contemporary readers does not in fact exist. Hsy also cites an ‘evasive prose style’ that ‘also evokes the discursive specter of sodomy, “that utterly confused category” that gathers together any number of non-​ heteronormative acts and desires’; but even what remains of that style after the crucial sentence is restored –​he cites in particular its parataxis (‘& … &’) as suggesting a conjoining of the woman’s internal thoughts and external actions –​is a standard feature.35 It is the voice of The Book of Margery Kempe, and it is the voice of St Paul.36 Likewise have Margery’s sobbing and weeping been taken as exhibits of Margery’s unfittingness, disjunctiveness, uncategorisability, ‘being-​ left-​out’ –​her queerness, as defined by Dinshaw, more prominent in these characteristics than in her kisses.37 They ‘are nonlinguistic utterances that have a visceral effect on her auditors, including herself’, remarks Cohen, echoing Dinshaw on the ‘corporeal response in those touched’ by Margery (note 24 above); they ‘mark Kempe’s line of flight from those literal and metaphorical constricted spaces where she would not be heard’.38 Perhaps; but it is worth noting that, when Margery is afraid that her meditations might be inspired by her ghostly enemy, Julian of Norwich authorises ‘not only the spiritual speech within Margery’s soul’, as Lawton observes, ‘but also her vocalized response to it,

141

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

141

which includes unverbalized crying, voice even without words, as the surplus of spiritual communing’.39 And Julian calls upon the authority of the Epistle to the Romans: ‘Seynt Powyl seyth þat þe Holy Gost askyth for vs wyth mornynggys & wepyngys vnspekable, þat is to seyn, he makyth vs to askyn & preyn wyth mornynggys & wepyngys so plentyvowsly þat þe terys may not be nowmeryd’ (18; 21v). This verse from Romans appears within a discussion growing from Paul’s conviction that language is ‘a key field even for the spiritual’, as Lawton notes; among other issues, ‘[t]‌ he faithful must also come to terms with spiritual gifts of voice, and with their own voiced but inarticulate efforts to vocalize the birth pangs of creation, which merge with Christ’s anguish on the cross (“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”, 8:22). Such is the vocal activity of the pneuma, the Spirit: “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” ’ (this latter, Romans 8:26, is the verse Julian quotes to Margery).40 Much more is at stake than religious enthusiasm: ‘For Paul, conjoining his own voice with the voices of those he directs, voice is the world,’ Lawton points out. ‘It is both universal and discontinuous, at risk of falling apart or of never fully coming together –​ an unfinished work.’41 Into this unfinished work enter later readers such as Augustine and Kempe. To see Margery’s voiced but inarticulate efforts to merge with the pain of the crucified Christ as signs of a queer disjointedness, it seems to me, risks responding solely to their private interiority. But the Book is at pains to establish that voice is a public interiority, and one authorised by St Paul. If it is queer, it seems to me, that concept needs now to accommodate not only the non-​erotic but also the normative. We might extend such a text-​based approach to other aspects of the Book that have been read as queer. Her ‘dedly enmy’, the mayor of Leicester, ‘alto rebukyd hir & rehersyd many repreuows wordys & vngoodly, þe whiche is mor expedient to be concelyd þan expressyd’ (48; 55v–​56r). ‘What, exactly, did the mayor accuse Margery of?’ asks Dinshaw. ‘Did the priestly amanuensis or Margery herself, following a long tradition …, dare not speak this sin’s name [i.e. homosexual activities]?’42 But Margery’s own immediate reply indicates, at least if readers are to infer from it the nature of the accusation, that Dinshaw’s questions miss the mark: ‘ “Sir,” sche

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Materiality and textual voices

seyde, “I take witnesse of my Lord Jhesu Crist, whos body is her present in þe sacrament of þe awter, þat I neuer had part of mannys body in þis worlde in actual dede be wey of synne, but of myn hysbondys body” ’ (56r, emphasis added). He has accused her of having sex with men.43 It is more expedient to conceal his words, because, as the text says, those words are so malicious (ungoodly). Another reason for discretion would have presented itself if the mayor named her supposed partners. In any case, had the sin whose name dare not be spoken been intended, the text would probably read ‘the sin whose name dare not be spoken’, ‘the unmentionable vice’ or a variant. The mayor’s subsequent words –​‘I wil wetyn why yow gost in white clothys, for I trowe yow art comyn hedyr to han awey owr wyuys fro us & ledyn hem wyth ye’ (56r) –​have also been read as if he ‘asserts an attraction between Margery and Leicester’s wives’, as Kathy Lavezzo puts it; Dinshaw suggests that he ‘might be voicing fears about what a professedly chaste woman will do –​ with other women, suspicions that are articulated in the Lollard Eleventh Conclusion castigating female homosexual acts’ and other transgressions: ‘Sodomy is a queer act that … hovers as an implication in this narrative.’44 In my judgement, though, Amy Hollywood’s response that this passage ‘seems tied as much to fears of a potentially widespread refusal of heterosexuality as of possible same-​sex activity’ is apt.45 Margery has rejected her husband and taken to wearing white, which, as Salih points out pace Dinshaw et al., ‘is not the normal dress of chaste women’ but, rather, probably indicates that she is ‘no longer even identified with reference to sexuality’.46 The mayor’s fear that the women will be led away from their husbands is the first of the two that Hollywood identifies in the passage; those critics who prefer the latter, that Margery is in effect seducing these women, might at least acknowledge that it is a secondary implication. By rights, The Book of Margery Kempe, of all medieval books, ought to be ‘queer’, but at best, it seems, it is an allegory of a queer book –​or, to be more precise, a book that lends itself to a mode of allegoresis whereby the veil of Margery’s ‘superficially normative status as housewife, mother, and widow’ needs to be recognised as just that, and stripped away so as to reveal its authentic character.47 The voice of St Paul –​that is, a voice confident that the important meanings are hidden away –​is at work not

341

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

143

only in the Book but also in Margery criticism, even in that which understands itself as questioning or undermining Pauline ideologies. Lawton interprets the Wife of Bath as ‘challenging Paul’s voice, and his type of allegorical exegesis that reduces the many to the One’, but his own reading of St Paul is not so reductive as Chaucer’s.48 In a later discussion Lawton observes that ‘the relevance and appeal of Paul’s voice to persecuted subgroups is evident, and in many respects it seems to me the most difficult scriptural virus for orthodoxy to disinfect, one that yields a certain discreet immunity from institutional control’. ‘Paul’s voice, and its history, become a resource for orthodox and heterodox alike’; ‘It can be a claim, as when Margery Kempe’s travel narrative switches from “this creature” to “we” (surely an invocation of Acts?), but it is also easily and obviously deployed as a disguise, a p ­ ersona.’49 Indeed, although one might wonder how distinctive these categories, ‘orthodox and heterodox’, turn out to be once Paul’s voice is occupied and heard. They are akin to the categories of ‘the norm’ and ‘the uncategorisable’ on which subsequent responses to Dinshaw’s theory of ‘the touch of the queer’ relies. The latter, the uncategorisable, is easy enough to grasp; but ‘[t]‌he concepts of the norm, normality, and abnormality are … deeply marked by contradiction’, as Hollywood remarks: ‘[P]erhaps the intensity of Kempe’s certainty that she touched and was touched by the divine,’ she concludes, ‘is precisely what makes her so “abnormal,” so “queer” to modern readers –​those of us for whom the category of the “norm” still has tremendous prescriptive power.’50 Ample room remains, of course, for text-​based queer readings of The Book of Margery Kempe. Perhaps the leprous woman’s inability to cross herself instances contrapasso, her misuse of her hand in masturbatory activities disenabling its participation in holy ones. And, if the sensual delight that Margery takes in bodies in the wake of her visions of the crucifixion is unremarkable, the mystic eros, focused on, say, the ‘holy doll’ with whom women play in their laps, dressing and kissing it as if it were God himself (Chapter 30), suggests, as Sarah Salih has pointed out to me, that ‘queerness’ need not be devotionally ‘unorthodox’. One devotional purpose of such dolls was to instil the concept of ‘the mystical marriage in which the doll substituted for the Bridegroom’,51 a concept that, when rendered pictorially, prompts Jeffrey Hamburger to say that ‘Christ

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Materiality and textual voices

appears, not as a mature, marriageable male, but as a strapping, beefy boy, the object of exalted maternal instincts rather than sublimated sexual desire’.52 It strikes me, though, that the very need to deny such sexual desire (how to detect sublimated desire’s absence?) suggests, as does Lavezzo’s incisive discussion of the episode of Margery and the doll, that such an analysis turns in on itself.53 ‘Whan þes good women seyn þis creatur wepyn, sobbyn, & cryen so wondirfully & mythtyly þat sche was nerhand ouyrcomyn þerwyth,’ so it concludes, ‘þan þei ordeyned a good soft bed & leyd hir þerupon, & comfortyd hir as mech as þei myth for owyr Lordys lofe, blyssed mot he ben!’ (38r–​v). Margery herself becomes a holy doll, a female recipient of other women’s intimate care. Yet the voices of St Paul and The Book of Margery Kempe point to more complicated realities than ones in which either Margery’s visits to the leprous women or her sobs are ‘heterodox’ or ‘queer’ for going against the ‘normative’. A nuanced approach to Margery’s sobbing ought perhaps to recognise both its liberating, visceral effects and its ecclesiastical sanction, the latter denuding the former of any touch of ‘queerness’, unless that category is redefined so as to encompass, to be, the normative itself. These sobs, we should remember, could also manifest unpalatable beliefs: in Jerusalem she wept an hour ‘for Jewys, Saraȝinys, & alle fals heretikes, þat God for hys gret goodnes xulde puttyn awey her blyndnes, þat þei myth thorw hys grace be turnyd to þe feyth of Holy Chirche & ben children of saluacyon’ (57; 68v). Likewise, the leprous woman herself is granted not a voice but merely temptations, the disappearance of which is intended to demonstrate the efficacy of Margery’s prayers. The Book of Margery Kempe speaks the voice of St Paul, or at least speaks strongly and boldly even when no one –​then or now –​fully understands.54

Notes 1 D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 19, 62. Fulton, in K. Kerby-​ Fulton, M. Hilmo and L. Olson 2 K. Kerby-​ (eds), Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 235.

541

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

145

3 Lawton, Voice, p. 76. The annotation, in chap. 28, fol. 33v, is transcribed as ‘so fa [i.e. father] RM & f[ather] Norton’ by Sanford Brown Meech (ed.), with the assistance of H. E. Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. xl; B. Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 444; and K. Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and his lay audience’, in K. Kerby-​Fulton and M. Hilmo (eds), The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 2001), pp. 143–​216 (172), though the latter term clearly says ‘Notton’. This must be dittography; the referent is clearly ‘Norton’, for, beside the remark that ‘sche wyth þe crying … wex al blew & al blo as it had ben colowr of leed’, the Red Ink Annotator clearly writes, ‘[S]‌o dyd prior Norton in hys excesse’ (44; 51v). Citations, cited by chapter (of book I only) and folio, are from the digital facsimile of London, British Library Additional MS 61823; https://​bl.uk/​manu​scri​pts/​Full​Disp​lay.aspx?ref=​ Add_​M​S_​61​823, with punctuation added and abbreviations silently expanded. I have used Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe, as my reading copy. 4 See, e.g., Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 326, note to his line 5931. 5 Meech (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe, p. xxxix; Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 449; J. Hsy, ‘“Be more strange and bold”: kissing lepers and female same-​ sex desire in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Early Modern Women, 5 (2010), 189–​99. 6 Parsons, ‘Red I​nk Annotator’, p. 182. Compare the angular ‘a’ –​ ‘temptacion’, ‘a case’, ‘aganste’ –​with the rounded ‘sotel’, ‘sore’, ‘shold’. 7 Respectively, The Jeaste of Sir Gawain, line 312, in T. Hahn (ed.), Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995); Kyng Alisaunder, ed. G. V. Smithers, EETS o.s. 227 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), line 790; and G. Schleich (ed.), Die mittelenglische Umdichtung von Boccaccios De claris mulieribus (Leipzig: Mayer und Müller, 1924), line 17, in all cases with emphasis added. first Sunday after Trinity, 8 ‘Sermon on the Epistle for the twenty-​ 1535’, in G. E. Corrie (ed.), Sermons by Hugh Latimer, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), vol. 1, pp. 25–​32 (26, emphasis added). 9 Ibid., p. 28, emphasis added. 10 See C. Fenner, ‘Be thou my vision’, for the Hymnology Archive (available at https://​hymno​logy​arch​ive.com/​be-​thou-​my-​vis​ion [accessed

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Materiality and textual voices

9 July 2018]), for facsimiles of the two oldest manuscript texts, Mary Byrne’s and Monica Nevin’s scholarly transcriptions and translations of all three copies (source for my quotation), and materials related to the hymn based on this prayer. 11 Transcribed from the facsimile of the Kirkpatrick MS in J. Dutka, ‘The Fall of Man: The Norwich Grocers’ play’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 9:1 (1984), 1–​11 (p. 10). 12 E. Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London, 1590), p. 594 (facsimile accessed via https://​proqu​est.com/​leg​acyr​edir​ect/​eebo [accessed 18 September 2021]). For an overview of the reception of Ephesians 6: 11–​ 17, citing the Grocers’ and Spenser’s uses, see H. D. Brumble, ‘Armor and weapons’, in D. L. Jeffrey (gen. ed.), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 56–​7. This helpful reference work ought to be read in conjunction with D. Lawton, Faith, Text and History: the Bible in English (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1990). 13 I.e.: ‘but was mor labowrd þan euer sche was befor’; then: ‘was so labowrd & vexyd al þat nygth þat sche wyst neuer what sche mygth do’; ‘was labowrd wyth þe oþer man’; ‘was labowrd wyth horrybyl temptacyons of let[c]‌herye & of dyspeyr’, and ‘was labowrd wyth temptacyons of dyspeyr’ (8r–​v). 14 See R. Voaden, ‘Beholding men’s members: the sexualizing of transgression in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in P. Biller and A. J. Minnis (eds), Medieval Theology and the Natural Body (York: York Medieval Press, 1997), pp. 175–​90 (183). 15 K. Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 113, proposes that it is on account of this aspect of Paul’s writings that she has suffered much tribulation; see pp. 107–​13. Another interpretation would be that these tribulations result from her bearing witness to Paul’s writings’ main theme, the risen Christ. 16 S. Salih, ‘Staging conversion: the Digby saint plays and The Book of Margery  Kempe’, in S. J. E. Riches and S. Salih (eds), Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–​34 (123). 17 C. Dinshaw, ‘Margery Kempe’, in C. Dinshaw and D. Wallace (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 222–​39 (231). 18 Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, p. 156. 19 C. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-​and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 151. 20 Ibid., emphases in original.

741

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

147

21 Ibid., p. 152. 22 Ibid., p. 151. 23 Ibid., pp. 39, 158. 24 Ibid., p. 151. 25 Ibid., pp. 158, 151, emphases in original. 26 J. J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 162. 27 J. Orlemanski, ‘How to kiss a leper’, postmedieval, 3 (2012), 142–​57 (p. 154), citing Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 151. 28 Hsy, ‘Kissing lepers’, pp. 189, 190. I have encountered about five citations of Hsy’s chapter, of which Rory G. Critten, Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 98–​9, relies most heavily on it. 29 Hsy, ‘Kissing lepers’, p. 189. 30 Ibid., p. 190. 31 Ibid. As Voaden remarks, ‘her extreme sensitivity to sexual implications prevented her from kissing male lepers, but allowed her to embrace female ones’: ‘Beholding men’s members’, p. 183. 32 Hsy, ‘Kissing lepers’, pp. 190–​1. 33 Ibid., p. 191. 34 Ibid., pp. 191–​2, emphasis in original. 35 Ibid., p. 192. Take chap. 43, lines 3–​11 of fol. 50r: ‘And whan … & anon … & þe next day … & þan … & whan … & so’, in whose ‘heavy parataxis’ Hsy himself identifies ‘a distinct rhetorical or stylistic strategy’: ‘Lingua franca: overseas travel and language contact in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. Sobecki (ed.), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity, and Culture (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 159–​78 (177). 36 Hsy can hardly be faulted, of course, for his reliance on the Red Ink Annotator’s supposed ‘strange and bold’ gloss, his discussion of which is brilliant: in courtly love traditions, ‘the ideal maiden must remain “straunge” or disdainful –​i.e., regulate her behavior and desires, resisting the advances of a (male) suitor –​and perhaps’, he suggests, ‘the maxim “be more strange & bold” targets female readers along the lines of this cultural script’. Thus, the annotator adopts the position of the ‘mayde’ of this episode, and perhaps ‘the rare use of the first-​person plural pronoun “we” compels the readers of the Book to assume (adopt, or even contract) the very same desires as the anonymous leper maiden in the text’ (‘Kissing lepers’, p. 193). 37 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 158. 38 Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, pp. 162, 184. 39 Lawton, Voice, p. 84.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

Materiality and textual voices

40 Ibid., pp. 15–​ 16. I have checked his biblical quotations against D. Norton (ed.), The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible: King James Version, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), adding ‘that’ to his citation of verse 22. Just before her discussion of St Paul, Lochrie cites Julian as source of the ‘most significant endorsement of Kempe’s visions’ (Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, p. 107), but Julian herself points to an authority still higher, St Paul, whose role here Lochrie does not mention. 41 Lawton, Voice, p. 18. 42 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, p. 155 (that the referent is ‘homosexual activities’ becomes clear a few sentences later). 43 Mannys here cannot mean human’s: the text says that she had no man’s body except her husband’s, and with the sole exception of this passage all the MED’s citations for the phrase haven part of man(nys body), defined as ‘have intercourse with a man’, concern procreation (s.v. ‘part’, 2b(a)). 44 K. Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and sighs between women: the homoerotics of compassion in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in L. Fradenburg and C. Freccero (eds), Premodern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175–​98 (175); Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pp. 155, 156. 45 A. Hollywood, ‘The normal, the queer, and the Middle Ages’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001), 173–​9 (p. 178). Lawton, too, emphasises both the orthodoxy of her religious behaviour and beliefs and the disjunction between modern readers’ sense that she was blasphemous or dangerous and the seeming opposite reaction by her early readers: ‘Voice, authority, and blasphemy in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. J. McEntire (ed.), Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 93–​115. 46 Salih, ‘Staging conversion’, p. 130 (emphasis in original). 47 Hsy, ‘Kissing lepers’, p. 189. 48 Lawton, Voice, p. 20. Lawton does take such a view of the pastoral rhetoric of the Parson’s Tale, which ‘would close [the dialogue among the multiplicity of voices in the Canterbury Tales] all down’ (p. 178). This seems at odds with his compelling argument that the penitential theme of Piers Plowman probably originated from ‘prose sources’ consisting ‘mainly of catechetic and penitential material’ and in turn generated the Alliterative Revival: ‘The unity of Middle English alliterative poetry’, Speculum, 58 (1983), 72–​94 (p. 94). 49 Lawton, Voice, p. 100. 50 Hollywood, ‘The normal, the queer, and the Middle Ages’, pp. 175, 179.

941

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Margery Kempe

149

51 N. Keller, ‘“Pick Him up and hold Him in your arms”: the function of the holy dolls in the convent life of the late Middle Ages’, in K. Kopania (ed.), Dolls, Puppets, Sculptures and Living Images from the Middle Ages to the End of the 18th Century (Warsaw: Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art, 2017), pp. 76–​93 (88; see 91 for the following quotation from Hamburger). 52 See J. F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 57, regarding a drawing of the Consecration of Virgins, Eichstätt, St Walburg. 53 Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and sighs between women’, pp. 182–​7; see p. 187 on how ‘the playful and affectionate prelude to this moment, as well as its bedroom setting, may suggest that the woman assuming the doll’s position may have received from the wives kisses like those originally directed at the Christ-​child’. 54 Thanks to Anthony Bale, Louise D’Arcens, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Sarah Salih and the anonymous peer reviewer for valuable feedback on this essay, which should not be taken as endorsement of its arguments, and to David Lawton for his exemplary scholarship in the fields of Middle English and biblical studies.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8 Listening for the scribe: punctuation and the voicing of late medieval devotional literature Sarah Noonan How to interpret scribal emendations and textual additions across the manuscript witnesses of a work has long been a vexed question. Modern editors have spent substantial effort trying to trace patterns of scribal error in an attempt to establish clear manuscript stemmata and craft critical editions that aspire to present an edited text in its original state, as nearly as can be established. Scribal alterations in this context are generally perceived as aberrations from the author’s original text.1 Recent work, however, has increasingly explored scribes as creative craftsmen in their own right, whose adaptations of their source material can reveal valuable information regarding circulation patterns, ideas of authorship and contemporary oral and silent reading practices.2 Approaches such as these have begun to reveal the multiplicity of roles scribes could play in manuscript culture and illustrate the difficulty modern researchers may encounter when trying to arrive at a firm understanding of the scope and limitations of scribal agency in medieval England. On one end of the spectrum, scribes reproduced their exemplars with impressively consistent accuracy; on the other end, scribes chose to leave out whole sections of the works they copied out and rearrange or rewrite the text that they did reproduce. Because the work of scribes, then, so often is contextually confined to a particular manuscript, reading community or professional context, scribal labour seems to resist theorisations and interpretations that can be applied globally to the extant manuscript record. It is nonetheless increasingly being recognised that the effort to propose and test broadly applicable theorisations of the role of the medieval scribe is essential to the field of manuscript studies, writ

151

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

151

large. Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen, for example, have recently argued that ‘we need to synthesize the many things we have learned from palaeography and codicology in ways that attend to the local typography without succumbing to their particularity’.3 Such syntheses require that a productive balance be attained between recognising the individual complexity of the manuscript witness and evaluating trends in evidence across numerous witnesses. I suggest that the study of medieval punctuation would benefit from precisely this approach, as the punctuation system employed in an individual manuscript can comprise a unique voicing of a work, even as an examination of the punctuation systems employed across a work’s manuscript record can reveal incremental alterations to those systems that, when taken as a whole, demonstrate the complex multivocality of scribal performances over time. Recent considerations of the performativity of the manuscript page have explored the interpretive implications of the mise-​en-​page, scripts and textual attributes found in individual manuscripts.4 Systems of punctuation play an important role in such performances, as they guide readers in their public and private vocalisations of a text. Although today authors are viewed as having exclusive control over the punctuation of their works, some responsibility for punctuating texts fell to readers in the Middle Ages –​a practice that can be traced back to the necessity for early medieval readers of scriptio continua to learn how to punctuate a text as an early step in the reading process. Scribes can be seen responding to the agency granted to audiences with regard to punctuation by adjusting the placement of such marks in the works they copied out more frequently than they alter the words of their source text. Such changes enable them to influence the performative rhythm and future voicings of those texts by varying where a reader might pause to take a breath, which words would receive emphasis or how a reader might understand the semantic coherence of a passage, thus subtly shifting the potential interpretations audiences might arrive at when reading a work or listening to it being read. Many studies of medieval punctuation focus on a single exemplum and interrogate the significance of the situatedness of those marks for the production of semantic meaning.5 A survey of such studies reveals several shared assumptions, however, that seem

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

Materiality and textual voices

applicable beyond the particular manuscripts that serve as the foundation of these enquiries. There is general agreement that medieval marks of punctuation draw the reader’s attention to structural and argumentative features of a work and note where pauses should be inserted in oral readings of its text. Elizabeth Zeeman (subsequently Salter), for example, explores the punctuation of an early copy of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ found in Cambridge University Library, Additional MS 6578, and demonstrates how patterns of punctuation assist not only in the private reading of this work but also in its ‘oral delivery to a far greater extent than has previously been recognised’.6 Salter suggests that punctuation facilitates the oral transmission of the work by helping the reader to recognise ‘the strongly rhythmical nature of the phrases thus “punctuated” by these signs’.7 In a similar vein, Olivier Bettens has recently noted how punctuation can disrupt the flow or alter the emphasis of a text for audiences, writing that medieval punctuation ‘le forcent à s’arrêter et à prendre de la hauteur pour “faire le point” ’ (‘forces [readers] to stop and to alter their intonation to “make the point” ’).8 Salter and Bettens both highlight how systems of punctuation can be intimately related to the voicing and performance of a text; by inserting or deleting punctuation marks from the texts they copied out, scribes could shape how readers subsequently navigated the flow and rhythm of a text and the intonation with which they gave voice to its words.9 The scribal shift of the location of a punctus would transpose the breath of future lectors of that copy, changing when and where a pause occurred as a text was voiced and subtly modifying how the words around that pause resonated with the each other and with the silence itself. By marking moments of silence rather than of voice, however, marks of punctuation differ in their signification from the characters that are used to symbolise letters. If a letter signifies the presence of voice, then marks such as the punctus and the punctus elavatus (two ubiquitous late medieval marks of punctuation) signify an absence of voice, a break in the otherwise uninterrupted vocal performance of the lector. In the Institutiones grammaticae, for example, Priscian states that ‘[l]‌itera igitur est nota elementi et velut imago quaedam vocis literatae’ (‘a letter is a mark [nota] of an element and a certain image, as it were of articulate spoken utterance’).10 Letters, for

351

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

153

Priscian, are the images of sounds –​but marks of punctuation must fall outside this categorisation. Punctuation marks instead function as images of pauses –​an attempt to visualise a cessation of the voice or the embodiment of silence. In his recent study of the concept of voice in late medieval England, David Lawton states that ‘writing is, as it were, the body that constructs voice; voice, like the soul, is all that will remain of the spirit’.11 If written letters create ‘the body that constructs voice’, then to alter the punctuation of a text is to reshape the parameters of that body’s form through the manipulation of its pauses and breaks in rhythm so that the voice resonates differently across subsequent manuscript witnesses. Even when the words of a work remain consistent across the manuscript record, by altering the punctuation of their exempla as they copy, scribes construct new textual bodies that influence future voicings and bring forth new performances of those works. In his masterful study of the development of systems of punctuation from the classical era to the modern day, M. B. Parkes spends a substantial amount of time examining the situated, contextually determined meanings of punctuation marks within respective manuscript copies, but he also acknowledges that ‘the realities of manuscript transmission ensured that any two copies of the same text could exhibit differences of punctuation in situations where we would expect the grammatical and rhetorical structure to be identical’.12 Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham have likewise noted that scribes could adapt and emend the punctuation found in their exempla according ‘to their own particular usage’ and that these emendations ‘sometimes subtly [alter] the meaning of the text’.13 At first glance, these types of scribal interventions into the texts they copied seem entirely expected, in that manuscript culture is in many ways defined by the liberties scribes could take in revising the mise-​en-​page and ordinatio of a text, adapting a text’s dialectical features or making more content-​ oriented edits to a work. Recognition of and fascination with such moments of scribal agency have generated ample scholarly interest, particularly in response to Paul Zumthor’s theorisation of mouvance in the 1970s and Bernard Cerquiglini’s exploration of variance within manuscript culture in the late 1980s.14 Johnston and Van Dussen demonstrate the continued productivity of approaches to manuscript culture that focus on the potential malleability of the codex, as they

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

Materiality and textual voices

argue that one of the fundamental characteristics of the manuscript book is that it ‘could be expanded and reimagined at any stage’.15 I would argue, though, that the differences of punctuation across manuscript copies of a single work provide us with something more than just another example of the ‘realities of manuscript transmission’, in that alterations of punctuation are more extreme and more common, in my experience, than other types of scribally initiated textual alterations –​precisely because punctuation was not viewed as being exclusively authorially determined but, instead, as being, to a certain degree, within the sphere of control of future scribes and audiences. If authors created the content of a work, then scribes and readers gave form to that content through how they performed and gave voice to it through punctuation –​a situation that emphasises the inherent multivocality of medieval works, since an author’s text was rarely encountered by contemporary readers absent scribal and/​or oral mediation. In works of devotion and vernacular theology produced in England from the late twelfth century through to the fifteenth, in particular, scribes adapted, emended and reimagined the punctuation of the works they copied out in ways that encourage alternative voicings and performative interpretations of those works. The manuscripts of St Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes sive Meditationes and William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchés illustrate the relative freedom with which medieval scribes treated punctuation that was inserted purposefully by the author. In the respective prologues to these works, both authors explicitly instruct audiences in how to use the paraph mark while reading. Subsequent copies, however, demonstrate a conspicuous variability in terms of if, and where, paraph marks are included within these texts, indicating that, even in situations when authors attempted to control the punctuation of their works, those marks could be redefined and performed flexibly by scribes with each recopying. The paraph is ubiquitous within manuscript copies of late medieval works; its colourful form, often inked in red or blue, frequently inhabits otherwise monotonous black blocks of text on the manuscript page. Used throughout the medieval period in various graphical iterations, the medieval paraph conforms to the two primary functions of a mark of punctuation, at times being used to identify an argumentatively or structurally significant point in a text and

551

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

155

at others being used to establish a point of pause for the reader of a work.16 It is also one of the rare marks that multiple medieval authors emphasise can serve as a mechanism that readers should use to assist in their navigation of the text. At the end of the eleventh century Saint Anselm of Canterbury wrote the Orationes sive meditationes, a collection of prayers and meditations that influenced generations of later authors of devotional and mystical literature through its effusive, personal language and its imaginative effort to recreate and encourage participation within the events of Christ’s Passion.17 In his prologue, Anselm instructs readers in how to progress through his work, stating: Nec necesse habet aliquam semper a principio incipere, se ubi magis illi placuerit. Ad hoc enim ipsum paragraphis sunt distinctae per partes, ut ubi elegerit incipiat aut desinat, ne prolixitas, aut frequens eiusdem loci repetitio generet fastidium, sed potius aliquem inde colligat lector propter quod factae sunt pietatis affectum.18 Nor need anyone always begin at the beginning but wherever suits best. For this reason, the prayers are subdivided into paragraphs, so that one may begin or end where one chooses, in case too many words or frequent repetition of the same section should lead to boredom. Let the reader take from them instead what they were meant to provide, the warmth of devotion.19

Anselm encourages audiences to engage selectively with his text with the intent of stirring within readers a heightened, affective response, and he invites readers to stop reading, as they desire, once the reader experiences ‘pietatis affectum’. Readers are told that they can abandon any compulsion to read his work continuously and are freed to navigate the page as they wish, as long as reading inspires devotion and a desire for prayer (‘Nec necesse habet aliquam semper a principio incipere, se ubi magis illi placuerit’). The layout of the text is said to facilitate this selective style of reading by providing paraph marks (the Latin paragraphis is standardly associated with the paraph mark) that will enable a reader to locate a desired starting point or leave off reading, thereby allowing them to avoid ‘fastidium’. Anselm’s prologue thus suggests that the paraph mark was intended not just to facilitate the comprehension of his work but also to guide readers as they sought to locate prayers that could be recited or meditated upon as a part of their devotional practice. The paraph was envisaged as alerting readers to specific places

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

Materiality and textual voices

where they could begin and end their engagement with the text, and, it should be noted, Anselm’s direction that paraph marks should be used to stop reading highlights a little-​discussed use of this graph to mark not beginnings (of arguments, lists, dialogue, etc.) but also ending points of a reader’s interaction with a text. In light of the importance placed on this mark, the variability of how it is employed by subsequent scribes demands attention. The Orationes survives in over 250 manuscripts, of which I discuss only the three earliest copies held by the Bodleian Library. These three manuscripts are among the 20 oldest surviving copies of this work. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS A. 392, contains a late eleventh-​ century copy of Anselm’s Orationes. This copy lacks the prologue, which may have been written (c. 1104) after the bulk of the composition of that work.20 In general, the paraph is an understated feature of the work’s layout in this manuscript. The opening two prayers, for example, include no paraph marks at all (fols 48v–​50r). The third oratio includes three paraphs, all of which are positioned in the left-​hand margin of the text (fols 50r–​51r); the fourth oratio, however, includes seven paraphs that occur both in the margin and within the text itself (fols 51r–​53v) –​ but this frequency is unusual. Some paraphs are highlighted in red (as can be seen on fol. 50v), which increases their visibility, but many are written out in black ink only. The sporadic inclusion of paraphs in this manuscript, one that admittedly might have been produced before Anselm added his prologue, suggests that the scribe envisaged readers using this paratextual feature to navigate longer prayers and meditations, but that he might not have anticipated the future weight that Anselm would place on the paraph mark as a main structuring device of his work.21 But two other early manuscripts of the Orationes that were copied out after Anselm attached his prologue to that work continue to demonstrate fewer paraphs than might be expected. Although Anselm seems to have considered the paraph’s inclusion crucial to how his work was to be navigated by the reader, scribes responded to his instructions in idiosyncratic ways. It is true that, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 271 (c. 1110–​40), the Orationes has more paraphs included within it than the other works by Anselm found in that manuscript. The first section of Bodley MS 271 spans fols 1r–​166r, and the Orationes can be found

751

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

157

on fols 139r–​160r. In the 144 folios that contain other works by Anselm, only 22 paraphs are in evidence, and only once do two paraphs occur on the same folio.22 In the 21 folios comprising the Orationes 46 paraphs can be found, however; and 11 pages include multiple paraph marks, with fol. 158r having no fewer than five inserted into the text.23 The scribe of Bodley MS 271 clearly included paraphs with greater frequency in the Orationes than in other works in that manuscript. Even so, the average of roughly one paraph per page is underwhelming, and less than might be expected based upon Anselm’s specific emphasis that this graph can be used to guide the rhythm and progression of one’s devotional engagement with the included prayers. When comparing the placement of paraphs between Bodley MS 271 and the Rawlinson MS across the 16 texts they share from the Orationes, the paraph placement is identical in nine of them (although the common feature of five of them is that they include no paraphs at all). The remaining seven texts demonstrate different paraph placement, however, with the scribe of Bodley MS 271 including ten paraphs that are not found in Rawlinson MS A. 392 and omitting seven that are. In total, of the 52 places in Anselm’s work where paraphs are included, these two manuscripts share 36 spots in common, for an agreement rate of 69.2 per cent. For a mark of punctuation that Anselm clearly considered to be of crucial importance to the function of his text, the divergence between paraph placement in these two early copies is notable. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. D. 2. 6., dated to the middle of the twelfth century, is the latest of this grouping of manuscripts that I want to discuss. Only 15 paraphs occur within the Orationes in this copy (down from the 46 included in Bodley MS 271), a marked decrease in the frequency. Not only do the paraphs occur more sporadically but they are also unassumingly rendered, and thus difficult to spot within the text. The first paraph occurs on fol. 158r and is written out in black ink, lacking coloration.24 If one were skimming the text, looking for an appropriate starting place, then it would be difficult to spot this graph quickly. This understated rendering of the paraph seems to indicate that it functions as an ending spot, since readers would most likely notice it as they were reading the text closely. The other 14 paraphs included in the subsequent 40 folios are equally difficult to locate, therefore also

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Materiality and textual voices

suggesting that they would have functioned more successfully as ending points to one’s reading, as marks signalling the cessation of the voice rather than as beginning points, even though Anselm’s prologue suggests that paraphs should be used for both purposes. If Anselm included specific instructions regarding how paraphs were to be used by readers, then how should we understand the variable nature with which these three early manuscripts treat that graph? It seems possible that Anselm included his opening instruction on how to use the paraphs associated with his text because he did not anticipate readers and scribes knowing what to do with them. Explanations are often needed only when new information is being provided; if paraphs were habitually used in the way that Anselm’s prologue suggests that they should be, then his guidance would have been entirely unnecessary. In light of the variations in paraph placement found in these early manuscripts, it could be concluded that scribes did not quite grasp their structural significance to Anselm’s Orationes –​even when that significance was spelled out in the work’s prologue. But an examination of the Manuel des péchés, a thirteenth-​ ­century work of religious instruction by William of Waddington, a secular canon of Beverley, that survives in 28 fragmentary and complete manuscripts, offers another possibility: that Anselm’s usage of the paraph was unremarkable but that scribes felt relatively free to add and subtract them as they saw fit in the works they copied. In the prologue to the Manuel, Waddington also carefully instructs readers in how the paraph was to be used during the reading process. He writes: ‘Par perografs ert destinctez /​Que nus mustrent diuers pechiez /​Pur ceo nul trop hastiuement /​Cest escrit ne lise nomement’25 (‘By paraphs it is made clear /​that we show diverse sins /​By these neither read too hastily /​this writing nor [read] by name’).26 Readers are advised to use the paraphs to structure their reading process by using them to modulate the speed with which they read and guide how they navigate the work’s contents. Readers should not use the paraphs to read only the beginnings of each section or to skim for specific sins of interest, thereby avoiding reading the work in its entirety. Instead, these paraphs have been included, Waddington emphasises, so that audiences can more effectively enter into conversation with and be spiritually affected by their engagement with the text. He writes: ‘Dou feiȝe deit rehercer/​

951

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

159

Qe sa alme uodera amender, /​La ou il trouera diuers pechiéȝ  /​ Sicum il ert pirographés’27 (‘Two times one must repeat [this text] /​ who wants to amend one’s own soul /​There where one finds diverse sins /​As it is paragraphed’). Paraphs, he suggests, facilitate the reader’s engagement with the text, visually distinguishing the work’s rhetorical structure and influencing the rhythm with which the text might be read. Paraphs occur in all but one of the ten copies of the Manuel that I have examined, although the placement of those paraphs varies from copy to copy.28 Scribes seem to have recognised the value of paraphs to the reading process, as the majority of manuscripts include this graph, even as scribes also seemingly felt free to take liberty with the frequency with which those paraphs occurred, or with regard to which passages they accompanied. Five representative copies of the Manuel, presented briefly here in roughly chronological order, demonstrate the diversity with which scribes employed the paraph in the opening 60 lines of the first narrative included in the section on the First Commandment. St John’s College, Cambridge, MS F 30 (1275–​1325), includes six paraphs within this section, generally using them to distinguish between changing speakers within the text, thus providing a visual cue to indicate when the text transitions from one voice to another, although there is one instance where the entrance of a dove is noted (see Figure 8.1). Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 99 (1300–​25), includes seven paraphs over the same amount of text, indicating a change of speaker that is unidentified in the St John’s College manuscript, not emphasising the entrance of the dove, and highlighting instead the beginning of a list. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Greaves MS 51 (1300–​25), uses a rubricated initial, not a paraph, to introduce the narrative and, in the same section of text, includes four paraphs to introduce new speakers (see Figure 8.2). Cambridge, University Library MS Mm. 6. 4 (1300–​25), writes out the Manuel in long lines of verse and includes just one paraph that introduces the tale itself; all others are omitted. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Poet. MS 241 (1300–​50), not only makes substantial emendations to the work by excerpting the short narrative from its didactic material but also includes no paraphs in the section of text discussed in the prior manuscripts; paraphs are

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Figure 8.1  Cambridge, St John’s College, Cambridge, MS F 30, fol. 89v.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 161

Listening for the scribe

Figure 8.2  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Greaves 51, fol. 6r.

161

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Materiality and textual voices

not entirely avoided by this scribe, however, as later sections do include the occasional paraph to identify changes of speaker and shifts in scene. No manuscript that I have examined includes the same number of paraphs in the same positions; each manuscript is a unique scribal performance with regard to how this mark of punctuation is employed. As this quick overview also indicates, the placement of these paraphs –​to distinguish the speakers of dialogue, to introduce a list or the entrance of a notable symbol (here a dove) and to note shifts of scene –​do not seem to correspond to Waddington’s initial explanation of how readers should use this graph. Paraphs do not exclusively mark sins, nor do they seem particularly useful for separating the text into meaningful indexical units. Instead, scribes seem to have added and removed paraphs to suit their perceptions of how that mark should be best employed –​which seems often to have been to clarify the shifts in voice found within a passage –​if they included them at all. On the one hand, the kind of quick, primarily quantitative tallying up of paraph marks across the manuscripts that I have engaged in above overlooks substantial detail in terms of the nuance of the use of this mark in each particular manuscript. But this broad view of the frequency with which scribes altered the inclusion and position of this graph, in these two works in particular, begins to suggest that scribes felt free to take substantial liberty with the inclusion or exclusion of this mark of punctuation, even when the author specifically highlighted the importance of this paraph for future readers of his text. In his study of scribal corrections in late medieval England, Daniel Wakelin has suggested that, although there are ‘limits to such a broad survey’ of a particular feature across numerous manuscript copies, ‘counting’ a feature enables one to ‘spy patterns’ that are difficult to perceive ‘unless one takes them in aggregate’.29 Such surveys, he continues, equally ‘stop us from preselecting the juiciest examples and ignoring or assuming patterns in the past’, and he notes that ‘Anglo-​American palaeography tends to prefer the case-​study; yet case-​studies might lead to a focus on the quirky or exceptional –​perhaps including the more outlandish examples of variance’.30 My brief surveys of the use of the paraph mark across a selection of extant manuscript copies of Anselm’s Orationes and Waddington’s Manuel, therefore, can

361

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

163

be valuable not for what they can tell us regarding how an individual scribe might have approached his craft but, instead, for how scribes, in general, might have approached punctuation and used these marks to reshape the form of the texts they copied in ways that could encourage new voicings of or rhythmic engagements with those works. I would briefly note that the licence with which medieval scribes employed the paraph is comparable to the frequency with which they added, deleted and rearranged other marks of p ­ unctuation –​a licence that is not evident in their often careful treatment of the words of the texts they copied. Wakelin has compellingly argued that scribes aspired not to innovate but to remain faithful to their source texts. Based upon his analysis of a sample corpus of manuscripts, Wakelin writes that, between direct copies, ‘about 98 percent of the words were reproduced verbatim’ while closely cognate copies ‘connected through one or more intermediate manuscripts’ diverge in ‘about 3 percent of words’.31 Although he is careful to note that, in some instances, scribes did substantially emend and revise the works they reproduced, Wakelin finds that, ‘in this fluid textual tradition, we find influidity and exactitude in attitude if not in achievement’.32 If scribes demonstrate a generally consistent and high level of fidelity with regard to the words that they copied from their exemplars, they treat marks of punctuation with a greater degree of fluidity and interpretive licence. One final example: a brief examination of eight out of 11 fifteenth-​century copies of the Cloud of Unknowing, a work of vernacular theology composed at the end of the fourteenth century, demonstrates that, in the first 31 lines of chapter one, there is 53.4 per cent agreement in punctuation placement across these copies –​with the punctuation marks varying across these lines 46.6 per cent of the time.33 This is a drastically higher rate of variation than Wakelin finds in his analysis of textual variance. Wakelin’s estimate of a 2 to 3 per cent textual deviation rate for scribes does correspond well, however, with the fidelity with which these scribes reproduced the text of the Cloud in this section. With the exception of one copy (British Library, Harley MS 959), which paraphrases a few clauses and omits several words, the other seven copies conform textually in all but four out of 229 words –​for an error rate of 1.7 per cent. Even when one compares

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

Materiality and textual voices

Harley MS 959 with the other eight manuscripts, that copy differs in 52 out of 229 words, for an error rate of 22.7 per cent; although this copy demonstrates a much higher rate of textual deviation, this rate remains less than that found for marks of punctuation across all eight manuscripts. Something different and distinct, then, seems to be going on with punctuation and how the scribes viewed its relationship to the text they copied out. Although prior studies might have operated under the assumption that ‘scribes could take at least as many liberties with the paraphing and pointing of their exemplars as they did with words’, the difference between rates of textual divergence and variance in punctuation in these fifteenth-​ century manuscripts of the Cloud suggest that scribes, at times, could take substantially greater liberties with punctuation than with the text they copied out.34 It should be emphasised that the three works discussed above are all devotional works of religious instruction or vernacular theology. As a result, my current observations cannot be mapped uncritically onto works of other genres, as the affective modes of devotion supported by such works could reasonably be seen as influencing the licence with which scribes operated in altering systems of punctuation to give voice to readings that they might have perceived as being more affectively powerful.35 In other genres and formal styles, for example, punctuation can be associated with a particular verse form (as seen when each stanza of a work begins with a paraph and each line of that stanza ends with a punctus), leading those systems of punctuation to display a greater degree of stability across copies of a work. That said, some overlap does exist between my observations here and the research that has been done on punctuation usage in other genres, and several studies have demonstrated relatively high rates of deviation in punctuation patterns employed across two or more copies of a non-​devotional work. Ronald Waldron has examined the consistency of punctuation within a section of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon across multiple manuscripts, concluding that ‘there seems to be no evidence that the scribes worked with the intention, or under instruction, to copy punctuation exactly from the exemplar’.36 Within a literary context, Elizabeth Solopova has examined the rates of divergence in punctuation marks found within the Hengwrt and Ellesmere (Hg and El) copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and

561

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

165

she notes that ‘out of 830 lines of the WBP (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue) Hg and El have different punctuation in 160 lines. This agrees with the figure arrived at by Killough: according to his study, Hg and El differ in 21% of lines.’37 This rate of divergence with regard to punctuation is, again, substantially higher than rates of textual divergence established by Wakelin; they are also lower than the rate of divergence in punctuation marks in my sampling of Cloud manuscripts, however, suggesting that genre and form could influence how freely scribes modified the punctuation marks found in the works they copied. Despite substantial recent scholarship that has provided us with a clearer picture than ever of the locations and cultural contexts in which scribal labour took place in the medieval period, much work remains to be done to deepen our understanding of the agency scribes had over their craft and of the material conditions and social constraints under which medieval scribes laboured.38 As Arthur Bahr has recently noted, ‘the temporal and cultural gaps between a medieval manuscript’s construction and any modern analysis of it mean that the precise set of intentions that structured it, what we might call its center, will never be wholly or securely recoverable’.39 Although Bahr arrived at this observation through an attempt to theorise medieval manuscript miscellaneity and not scribal labour per se, it would be impossible to even aspire to recover ‘the precise set of intentions that structured’ the medieval book without attending closely to the scribe, a figure who plays myriad roles, operating as a fulcrum point between the author and the reader, functioning somewhere along the spectrum between a professional craftsman and an amateur copyist, whose interactions with their copy text could range from mimicry to reinterpretation. The interpretive licence with which scribes punctuated the works they copied out provides us with valuable information regarding late medieval delimitations of acceptable forms of scribal agency and the ways in which each recopying of a work could function as a reperformance that subsequently influenced the readings of future audiences as it circulated over time. Engaging with the punctuation history of a passage can reveal how that passage was interpreted at multiple stages in its reception history, and such nuance could –​and should –​be taken into account as we seek to better

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

Materiality and textual voices

understand manuscript culture and the role of medieval scribes within it. Although, for many works, this labour requires that the researcher examine manuscript witnesses directly, an increasing number of editorial initiatives have compiled or are compiling detailed diplomatic transcriptions of the extant witnesses of their respective works, including the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive and the Canterbury Tales Project.40 Initiatives such as these make it easier than ever to evaluate the variability of systems of punctuation across these works’ manuscript records, thus opening up new avenues of enquiry into how scribal performances of a work evolved throughout its transmission history. We cannot recover the voices of those who publicly or privately read aloud the medieval works we study, as ‘the written may only be an imperfect copy of the spoken’; but we can trace how the scribal approaches to punctuation might have shifted the rhythm, resonance and voicing of those works over time.41

Notes 1 David Burnley, for example, comments that scholarly editing often approaches the role of the editor as ‘restor[ing] the author’s text as perfectly as possible for the benefit of each reader’; this goal, he continues, is complicated by the realities of manuscript production when, because ‘the transmission of texts relied on the skills and attitudes of scribes, authorial control over their product was quite evidently no more than a dream’ –​a fact that led ‘the copyists’ to function as ‘the necessary enemies of the author’: ‘Scribes and hypertext’, Yearbook of English Studies, 25 (1995), 41–​62 (p. 41, 42). 2 See, for example, M. Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012), pp. 6, 7; E. Steiner and L. Ransom (eds), Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); C. Moore, ‘Communities of practice and incipient standardization in Middle 32, English written culture’, English Studies, 100:2 (2019), 117–​ esp. 128; A. Kraebel, ‘Rolle reassembled: booklet production, single-​ author anthologies, and the making of Bodley 861’, Speculum, 94:4 (2019), 959–​1005; S. Huot, ‘The scribe as editor: rubrication as critical apparatus in two manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose’, L’Esprit 78; and G. Croenen and S. Loomans, Créateur, 27:1 (1987), 67–​

761

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

167

‘Scribes or copy editors? Scribal behavior and the production of manuscript copies of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles in fifteenth-​century Paris’, in P. Ainsworth and G. Croenen (eds), The Online Froissart, v. 1.5 (Sheffield: HRIOnline, 2013) (available at https://​dhi.ac.uk/​onli​nefr​ oiss​art/​appara​tus.jsp?type=​int​ros&intro=​f.int​ros.GC-​SLo [accessed 8 October 2021]). 3 M. Johnston and M. Van Dussen (eds), The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 12. 4 A 2014 special edition of Pecia, for example, takes as its theme ‘Performance and the page’, and in the introduction Kate Maxwell, James R. Simpson and Peter V. Davies argue that ‘the manuscript page is a site of performance’ and that this performance ‘includes creation, reception, interpretation, and all stages around and in between’ (‘Performance and the page’, Pecia, 16 (2014), 7–​15 (pp. 7, 9)). 5 See, for example, J. J. Smith, ‘Punctuating Mirk’s Festial: a Scottish text and its implications’, in M. W. Driver and V. O’Mara (eds), Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Susan Powell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 161–​92; E. Zeeman, ‘Punctuation in an early manuscript of Love’s Mirror’, RES, 7:25 (1956), 11–​18; F. A. Almedia, ‘Punctuation practice in a late medieval English medical remedybook’, Linguistica Historica, 22:1–​2 (2001), 207–​32; P. J. Lucas, ‘Sense-​units and the use of the punctuation-​ markers in John Capgrave’s Chronicle’, Archivum linguisticum, 2 (1971), 1–​24; P. G. Arakelian, ‘Punctuation in a late Middle English manuscript’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 76:4 (1975), 614–​ 24; I. de la Cruz Cabanillas, ‘Punctuation practice in Manuscript Sainte Geneviève 3390’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 13:3 (2014), 139–​59; J. C. Martín, ‘Punctuation practice in a 15th-​century arithmetical treatise (MS Bodley 790)’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 105:4 (2004), 407–​22; and N. Yakovlev, ‘Metre and punctuation in the Caligula manuscript of Laȝamon’s Brut’, in R. Dance and L. Wright (eds), The Use and Development of Middle English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 261–​79. 6 Zeeman, ‘Punctuation’, 11. 7 Ibid., 17. 8 O. Bettens, ‘Ponctuation et lecture à haute voix: aide ou obstacle?’, in V. Fasseur and C. Rochelois (eds), Poncteur l’œuvre médiévale: Des signes au sens (Abbeville: Droz, 2016), pp. 119–​33 (133), my translation. 9 For additional discussion of the role of punctuation in influencing the voicing of medieval texts, see Fasseur and Rochelois, Poncteur l’œuvre médiévale.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

Materiality and textual voices

10 Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, in Grammatici Latini, 2:6, trans. and cited in M. Irvine, ‘Medieval grammatical theory and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Speculum, 60:4 (1985), 850–​76 (p. 857). 11 D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 19. 12 M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 70. 13 R. Clemens and T. Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 82. 14 P. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972); B. Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989). 15 Johnston and Van Dussen, The Medieval Manuscript Book, p. 4. 16 Elizabeth Zeeman comments that paraphs were used ‘to record some stage in the development of the material’ and to mark ‘a significant pause in the flow of the writing, when one idea or portion of narrative or argument has been completed, and some breathing space is needed, perhaps for thought on what has gone before, perhaps for anticipation of what is to come’ (‘Punctuation’, p. 13). 17 For a discussion of the influence of Anselm’s writing on later authors, see T. H. Bestul, ‘Antecedents: the Anselmian and Cistercian contributions’, in W. F. Pollard and R. Boenig (eds), Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 1–​20 (esp. 4–​10). 18 Saint Anselm, ‘Orationes sive meditationes’, in P. Schmidt (ed), Obras Completas de San Anselmo (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1953). Browne et al. 19 This English translation can be found in J. Wogan-​ (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–​1520 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 213. Another translation can be found in Saint Anselm, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. B. Ward (London: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 89–​90. 20 R. Sharpe, ‘Anselm as author: publishing in the late eleventh century’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 19 (2009), 1–​87 (p. 13). 21 Paraphs are added to other works in this manuscript, and the works preceding the Orationes sive meditationes in the Rawlinson MS include them with comparable frequency. Paraphs become less prominent, however, in the works following the Orationes, with none being evident in ‘De Grammatico’ (fols 78r–​86v) and only four being included in ‘De veritate’ (fols 87r–​100r). The inconsistency in the inclusion of

961

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

169

paraphs in the works of this manuscript suggests that scribes viewed these marks as pertinent to some works more so than others, an indication that they appealed to a mode of reading particular to specific genres or works rather than being a necessity for reading in general. MS Bodley 271 also includes paraphs in the Orationes, but this inclusion is more distinct to this work in that manuscript, since the paraph is nearly absent in the surrounding works from the Anselmian corpus. 22 These paraphs can be found on fols 30v, 39r, 65r, 66r, 66v, 67r, 67v, 68r, 68v, 69v, 70r (X 2), 112r, 115r, 116r, 116v, 117r, 119v, 120r, 120v, 124v, 160r. 23 These paraphs can be found on fols 141v, 142r (X 2), 142v (X 3), 143r (X 3), 143v (X 2), 144r (X 2), 145v, 146v, 147r, 147v (X 2), 148r (X 2), 149v, 150r, 150v, 152r, 152v, 153r (X 3), 153v (X 2), 155r (X 2), 155v, 157v, 158r (X 5), 159r. 24 Other paraphs occur on fols 158v, 163r (X 2), 163v, 164r (X 2), 164v, 165r, 165v, 166r, 172r, 187r, 190r (X 2). 25 British Library, Harley MS 273, fol. 113rb. For a modern edition of the Manuel, see F. J. Furnivall (ed), Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne,’ A.D. 1303, with Those Parts of the Anglo-​French Treatise on which it was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel des Pechiez’, EETS o.s. 119 (London: Early English Text Society, 1901). 26 Italicised text indicates an expansion from abbreviations in the manuscript. 27 British Library, Harley MS 273, fol. 113rb. 28 There are no paraphs in British Library, Harley MS 4971, a manuscript dating from the first half of the fourteenth century, although this copy makes use of one-​line initials to divide the text into short segments, as if using those initials as an alternative to the paraph. 29 D. Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 13–​14. 30 Ibid., p. 13. 31 Ibid., pp. 49, 52. Wakelin notes that these small levels of variation could build on each other over time, with ‘the multiplication of small amounts of divergence across multiple lost copies [generating] much of the variance in surviving manuscripts’: 52. 32 Ibid., p. 51. 33 These manuscripts are, as follows: British Library, Harley MS 674 (early fifteenth century); British Library, Royal MS 17.C.xxvi (middle fifteenth); Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.6.26 (late fifteenth); Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii.6.39 (middle fifteenth); Oxford, University College, MS 14 (middle fifteenth); Oxford, Bodleian Library,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Materiality and textual voices

Douce MS 262 (c. 1500); British Library, Royal MS 17.D.v (late fifteenth); and British Library, Harley MS 959 (middle fifteenth). 34 J. A. Burrow, ‘Punctuation in the B version of Piers Plowman’, in N. Jacobs and G. Morgan (eds),’Truthe is the beste’: A Festschrift in Honour of A. V. C. Schmidt (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 5–​15 (13). 35 For an excellent discussion of scribal punctuation in another devotional work, Richard Rolle’s The Form of Living, see L. K. Smedick, ‘Parallelism and pointing in Rolle’s rhythmical style’, Mediaeval Studies, 41 (1979), 404–​67. In this essay she examines all but one of the surviving 36 witnesses to Rolle’s work and looks in depth at 16 of the ‘most fully punctuated manuscripts’ of that text in an attempt to espy the ‘underlying consistency’ in how scribes choose to employ their systems of punctuation (pp. 416, 411). Although she does not engage in quantitative analysis, based upon the evidence she provides these 16 ‘most fully punctuated manuscripts’ agree in their punctuation marks 50.7 per cent of the time and differ 49.3 per cent of the time –​ rates that are very similar to those I have observed in the manuscripts of the Cloud of Unknowing. 36 R. Waldron, “Whose punctuation is it, anyway? A sampling of some manuscripts of the Polychronicon”, in M. Connolly and R. Radulescu (eds), Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 35–​68 (64). 37 E. Solopova, ‘Punctuation in the early MSS of the Canterbury Tales’, in A. J. Minnis (ed.), Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 27–​ 40 (37). Solopova is responding to article by G. B. Killough, ‘Punctuation and caesura in Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 4 (1982), 87–​107. One of Killough’s central claims is that the punctuation found in the two earliest copies of the Canterbury Tales, the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, ‘must have been placed by the scribe(s) instead of being handed down as part of Chaucer’s text’: p. 88. 38 See, for example, L. R. Mooney and E. Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–​ 1425 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2013); A. Gillespie and D. Wakelin (eds), The Production of Books in England 1350–​1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); E. Kwakkel, Books before Print (Croydon: Arc Humanities Press, 2018); and R. G. Critten, Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018). 39 A. Bahr, ‘Miscellaneity and variance in the medieval book’, in Johnston and Van Dussen, The Medieval Manuscript Book, pp. 181–​98 (188). Stephen G. Nichols offers a similar claim in ‘What is a manuscript

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Listening for the scribe

171

culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix’, in Johnston and Van Dussen, The Medieval Manuscript Book, pp. 34–​59 (35). 40 Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, 2019 (available at http://​piers.chass.ncsu.edu [accessed 8 October 2021]); and Canterbury Tales Project, University of Sheffield, 2019 (available at https://​dhi.ac.uk/​proje​cts/​can​terb​ury-​ tales [accessed 8 October 2021]). 41 B. Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet: Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66 Wendy Scase

Mi coloures byn bothe briȝt and shene, And me desyres bothe kynge and qwene, Lordȝ and ladyes of gret enprise: For I am a brid of paradise. Papeiaye1 Outside the well-​known letter collections of Paston, Plumpton, Stonor, and Armburgh, there are few opportunities to listen to the gentry’s authentic voices. Happily Humphrey Newton is one of those fortunate voices because he has left us a comparatively rich amount of material.2

I Am a Bird of Paradise, as I shall title the quatrain in the epigraph to this chapter, is found only in Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66, a book of materials from the Cheshire gentry household of Humphrey Newton (1466–​1536) (fol. 95v; see Figure 9.1).3 The poem is enclosed in an ink-​drawn banderole, or scroll, that emerges from the beak of a bird. Although drawn in ink also, and uncoloured, it is clear that the bird that claims it is a bird of paradise is to be identified as a parrot. Immediately distinctive of parrot iconography is its ‘collar’, indicated with double ink lines around its neck, and its psittacine bill. Eliminating any doubt about the species of bird represented is the label ‘papeiaye’, which is written in the same hand and ink to the right of the bird’s beak. Skelton’s ‘My name ys Parott, a byrde of Paradyse’ in Speke Parott of c. 1521 is the earliest usage of ‘parrot’ recorded in the OED.4 The poet in Lat. Misc. c. 66 uses the more familiar name ‘popinjay’.5 I Am a Bird of Paradise is among a number of literary materials in Lat. Misc. c. 66, and is one of several courtly poems in it, some

371

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

173

Figure 9.1  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66, fol. 95v; for I Am a Bird of Paradise and the popinjay, see top left.

others of which also engage with the parrot. Most of the literary material in the manuscript, including this quatrain and the other parrot poems, is in the hand of Humphrey Newton himself, and

174

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

some is almost certainly of his authorship. In poem XIII (in Rossell Hope Robbins’s edition) a lover praises his lady, who, ‘clad much in green’, is his ‘own precious popinjay of paradise’: O ye my emperice, I your seruaunt þis to you I say: My derist qwene, the whiche is makeles […] O my glorious lady clad myche in grene […] Myn ane precious papyngay of paradice.6

In poem XVIII, on the lover’s fidelity, the lover finds his heart captive within the lady’s ‘cage’: ‘[Y]‌e haue my hert with-​inne youre cage’ (XVIII, line 5). Other poems engage with aspects of the parrot. In poem VI, the lady is ‘bright and shen’ like the popinjay of the quatrain (VI, line 49). In poem XIV, in which the lover and his lady exchange glances in church, the poet recalls how one day in church the lady and a gentlewoman ‘did pitter-​patter’ together: To the kirk sho comme with a gentilwomon; Euen be-​hynd the kirk dore They kneled bothe on the flore And fast thay did piter-​pater –​ I hope thay said matens togeder! (XIV, lines 12–​16)

The ironic comment ‘I hope [expect] thay said matens togeder’ implies that, if the ladies were not mechanically reciting their prayers as the poet expects (MED, piter-​pateren, v.), they were chattering equally meaninglessly, perhaps like imitative birds. Compare MED pateren 1(b), where the illustrative quotation is ‘We, harke, he jangelis like a jay […] Me thynke he patris like a py’, a line from the soldiers’ dialogue in the York Play of the Crucifixion, to whom Christ’s speech sounds as meaningless as sounds of bird mimics (including the jay, magpie and jackdaw/​chough, besides the parrot).7 In poem I, an epistle from the distressed lover to his lady, the lover has written so often to the lady that his hand quivers when he holds his pen/​feather: ‘Mi hond it qwakis to hold the penne, /​For whi I write you more and more’ (I, lines 41–​2). The parrot material in Humphrey’s poems is, like its subject, imitative. It clearly recalls familiar courtly tropes of speaking birds, the feather for the pen, imprisonment and the earthly paradise, and it is malleable and ambivalent as to gender associations and moral

571

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

175

meanings. Perhaps it is not likely that Humphrey knew twelfth-​ and thirteenth-​century poems in which the lover is represented as a parrot, such as Richard de Fournival’s Quant jou voi, in which reflection on his mistress makes the lover-​poet ‘[m]‌user au papegai’; the Occitan Novas del papagei, in which a parrot arranges a lovers’ tryst; the French Le Jugement d’amour, ou Florence et Blancheflor, in which a parrot unsuccessfully defends the claims of a knight as lover; or the Anglo-​Norman Blancheflour et Florence, in which the parrot wins the debate.8 Humphrey was certainly an avid reader of Middle English literature that is indebted to these traditions, however. The manuscript provides copious evidence for this wider literary context: Humphrey’s is a practice of reading, making copies of selected material and imitation. Contents from well-​known literary authors collected and copied by Humphrey include an extract from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, A 3047–​56 (fol. 2r); an extract from Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale (fol. 128r–​v), with the rubric ‘a lytull conclusion tak out of ye boke of schrift yat ye vij. Dedly synnys are in and yis is taken out of ira’;9 John Lydgate, On the Nightingale as a Symbol of Christ (DIMEV 1538, fols 107v–​111v); and the first two couplets (varied) of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (fol. 127v).10 Given his evident range of reading, it is unlikely that Humphrey had not encountered the ambivalent representations of the popinjay in courtly verse. In Ichot a burde in a bour ase beryl so bryht (Annot and John in British Library, Harley MS 2253) the lady is ‘papejai in pyn, that beteth me my bale’;11 if we accept Fein’s reading of ‘pyn’ as a pine tree, the image recalls Humphrey’s depiction of his popinjay perched in a tree. In the paradisal garden where Susanna goes with her maidens there are ‘popeiayes prest’, along with nightingales and other birds among trees of all kinds (Pistle of Susan, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet.a.1, fol. 317ra). Lydgate’s Ballade in Commendation of our Lady addresses the Virgin Mary as ‘popynjay, plumed in clennesse’, and in his The Court of Love the popinjay sings ‘[y]our might is told in heven and firmament’ as a contribution to a matins in praise of the god of love.12 But, as well as being associated with desirable women in paradisal landscapes, the popinjay is also an image of male overconfidence and pride. The deceived merchant in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale bounds home confident in the deals he has made with Lombard bankers, ‘murie as a papejay’.13 January in the Merchant’s Tale ‘[s]yngeth ful murier

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Materiality and textual voices

than the papejay’ a song of love to May in their garden, until he stands unwittingly beneath the tree in which May’s lover Damian is hiding.14 In Piers Plowman, the popinjay is an example of a ‘fayrest foul’ that ‘foulest engendreth’, bearing ‘proude fetheres’.15 Similarly, in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, the popinjay is associated with ‘delicasye’, or wantonness and love of luxury.16 Critics have largely regarded Humphrey’s imitative mode as provincial pretension that fails to innovate and can be rather backward-​ looking. Robbins, who edited much of the original material in the manuscript (but not I Am a Bird of Paradise), drew particular attention to Newton’s imitation of the alliterative idiom of something such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in poem XXII (‘it may well be that Poem XXII is a conscious literary imitation of the alliterative style of a hundred years earlier’).17 Illustrating with the example of Humphrey’s direct echo of Chaucer’s General Prologue in poem V (fol. 93r), ‘When zepheres eeke withe his fresshe tarage’, Deborah Youngs remarks: ‘Not that Humphrey would have tried to claim originality. They [such borrowings] were conscious borrowings of literary formulae.’18 Robbins notes that Newton was also interested in the idioms of more contemporary poetry, but engages with it in a ‘rustic’ manner, saying that ‘the style of his love poems, albeit rustic, follows the current fashions of the late fifteenth century’.19 Robbins’s description of Humphrey’s work as ‘rustic’ is echoed by other critics. Ralph Hanna observes that ‘[h]‌e [Humphrey] read his Chaucer and then imitated him’, and, providing the example of an echo of Troilus and Criseyde in poem XIV, he takes the view that his lyrics ‘exhibit the rather naive transfer of behaviours strictly literary into behaviours biographical, a state in which … rural gentry life is shaped into an appropriately artful experience, its categories provided by the texts it has read’.20 Despite editing much of his poetry, Robbins concedes that Humphrey was ‘no more than a minor poet’, whose importance derives from the fact that his materials give ‘an indication of the literary interests of the provincial reading public of about 1500’.21 For John E. Stevens, Humphrey is ‘slightly further’ even than the Finderns (the Derbyshire family associated with Cambridge University Library Ff.1.6), ‘from the well-​head of cultural sweetness’; his lyrics ‘suggest deliberate borrowing of the courtly mode by those outside the charmed circle’.22 Youngs (see the second quotation in my epigraph), while

771

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

177

broadly agreeing, takes a rather more positive view of Humphrey’s provincialism than Stevens, Hanna and even Robbins: in her view, Humphrey’s materials give us a rare opportunity to ‘listen to the gentry’s authentic voices’. In the present chapter I want to build on and complicate Youngs’s proposition that Humphrey Newton’s materials enable us to hear the gentry’s ‘authentic voices’. I argue that having what Youngs calls an ‘authentic voice’ was a trope problematised not just in Humphrey’s sources but for Humphrey himself. I argue that, when Humphrey spoke in the voice of the bird of paradise or the ‘papeiaye’, casting himself as a parrot poet, he was invoking a set of tropes that, although they were literary commonplaces, were invested by Humphrey and his circle with overlooked local meaning. I show that the parrot poem and image engage with the language and imagery of heraldry, which drew in turn on bestiary traditions regarding parrots and other bird mimics, and that Humphrey and his readers would have recognised that they bore problematic family and household significance. This example of Humphrey’s practice gives us an insight into the special and particular communicative and identity-​forming functions that literary imitation enabled. It provides, I argue, a new perspective on his literary production. Humphrey’s manuscript materials give us privileged insight into the functions of writing, reading and sharing literature for himself and his community.

Bestiary parrots The characteristics of courtly parrots derive much from bestiary traditions. Humphrey’s popinjay’s ‘coloures byn bothe briȝt and shene’, and in Humphrey’s (uncoloured) drawing the bird has a band or collar around its neck. In his Naturalis historia, Pliny the Elder described the parrot as green with a red collar around its neck, ‘viridem toto corpore, torque tantum miniato in cervice distinctam’,23 whereas Isidore described it as green with a purple collar in his Etymologies.24 In the Aberdeen Bestiary, produced in England around 1200, the parrot is described as being green, with a red neck (Aberdeen University MS 24, fol. 46v), and the artist has depicted the bird in green plumage, although here it is the feet

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Materiality and textual voices

and claws that are red while its neck is green (fol. 47r). A parrot in the margin of a Netherlands book of hours of c. 1440, Pierpont Morgan M. 349, has a red beak, and red feet and claws below a gold body; its neck has a ‘collar’ but it too is in gold (fol. 127r). In the Luton Guild Register, dated 1475, a green parrot with red collar, beak and feet is positioned among foliage of the left side of a full border (Luton Art Museum, Luton Guild Register, fol. 13r).25 In shape, Humphrey’s popinjay is strikingly similar to that in the Luton Guild Register. The shape of the beak was a specially distinguishing feature. Humphrey’s parrot has a prominent, large bill with a distinctive hooked shape. Pliny described the parrot as having a hard beak, while Isidore described the parrot as having a large tongue that is wider than those of other birds.26 The Aberdeen Bestiary too describes its ‘grandi lingua, et ceteris avibus laciore’ (Aberdeen University MS 24, fol. 46v). The parrot’s large tongue, according to Isidore and the writers who followed his description, gave the bird a special property: the parrot was capable of ‘articulate speech’, so that if you did not see the source of the sound you would think a man was speaking (‘Vnde et articulata verba exprimit, ita ut si eam non videris, hominem loqui putes’).27 Along with species such as the magpie, the jay and the jackdaw or chough, the parrot was one of a group of birds that were associated with human speech on the basis of their power of mimicry. Isidore quoted Martial, who in his Epigrams had the parrot state that it naturally says the word ‘ave’ (‘hail’), while it has learned other words from a human.28 With the comment about ‘articulata verba’, Isidore engages with the grammatical theory of vox (sound). In his Ars maior, written around 350, Donatus divided vox into two categories: articulate and confused. Articulate sound is sound that can be written. Confused sound is sound that cannot be written.29 Priscian (fl. c. 500) developed and complicated this distinction in his Institutiones. According to Priscian there are four types of sound: ‘Vocis autem differentiae sunt quattuor: articulata, inarticulata, literata, illiterata.’30 Articulate sound has meaning; inarticulate sound does not. Literate sound can be written; illiterate sound cannot. Virgil’s ‘Arma virumque cano’ is articulate and ­literate sound. But some sounds that can be written have no meaning, such as coax, the sound of the frog. Some sounds cannot be written, such as rumbling and roaring. In this scheme the sounds

971

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

179

of animals such as the croak of the frog are therefore categorised as inarticulate and literate –​meaningless but able to be written. When it mimics human speech undetectably, the parrot blurs the categories of literate inarticulate sound and literate articulate sound.31 In line with these traditions, Humphrey’s popinjay speaks: as well as alluding to the tradition of the large tongue and special vocal abilities of the parrot in his drawing of its beak, Humphrey has represented the bird’s voice both through the first-​ person voice of I Am a Bird of Paradise and by means of enclosing the poem in a banderole. In Pierpont Morgan MS M 349, fol. 127r, a parrot bears a banderole with text in the lower border of the opening of the Penitential Psalms. The parrot ‘speaks’ Latin, ‘Cor mundum crea in me deus’, from the Psalm Miserere, while the main text is in Dutch.32 In Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms-​619 réserve, a fifteenth-​century French missal, wittily depicted pen-​drawn birds sit amidst foliage among which banderoles bear catchwords, including a parrot on fol. 62v and another on fol. 86v.33 Of course, other species of birds are also represented in art as carrying or otherwise associated with banderoles that bear text. For example, In Pierpont Morgan MS M 917/​945, the exquisite Catherine of Cleves book of hours from the Netherlands of around 1440, an eagle representing the Evangelist bears a scroll naming Saint John (fol. 150v).34 Indeed, several of the birds besides the popinjay on fol. 95v have scrolls emanating from their beaks. But the speaking parrot is different, since, according to bestiary lore, its voice could not be distinguished from that of the human voices it mimicked.

Heraldic parrots It is tempting to infer that Humphrey’s interest in the parrot enabled him to offer a knowing defence of his imitative poetic practice charged with the traditional ambivalence of the image in courtly and bestiary literature. But this would not, by any means, be the whole story. For Humphrey and his circle, the parrot carried particular resonance. Popinjays were a heraldic device, and the image and name of the bird are used in descriptions of arms and crests. For example, in British Library, Harley MS 2169, an illustrated heraldic book of arms from the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Materiality and textual voices

the arms of Sir Thomas Lumley are recorded as ‘[s]‌ilver a fesse gules between three popyngayes of grene beke and fet gowles’, reflecting the iconography of the bestiaries, while Sir William Lumley’s are ‘[g]ules a fesse silver between iii popyngays of silver’ and Hewe Aystelaye’s arms are ‘[g]ules a cheveron silver with a green popinjay thereon’.35 Fictional fifteenth-​century characters are also identified by the popinjay: in The Assembly of the Gods, the knight Abstinence bears a popinjay on his helmet as his identifying crest.36 The three popinjays on the arms of the Twenge family37 share the distinctive parrot beak and three-​ quarters profile depiction of Humphrey’s popinjay, although their tails are forked, whereas Humphrey’s popinjay has a long straight tail. Popinjays were an old device, appearing in the earliest heraldic roll, Herald’s College, MS L. 14, of about 1280.38 The term ‘popinjay’ –​rather than ‘parrot’ –​ continued far beyond the medieval period in heraldry; the most recent example recorded in the OED is dated 1946. Lat. Misc. c. 66, fol. 95v, bears other drawings of birds alongside that of the popinjay, some of which are named, and this material confirms that the figures are heraldic and not simply doodles (a point not previously noticed by other scholars).39 One bird drawing is named ‘ospray’, and one ‘eron or egle’. These birds too were commonly used as heraldic charges. Thomas Wall’s book of crests records that ‘Terbokke beryth to his crest an egle vert sittyng cloose membryd’,40 just as Humphrey’s ‘egle’ is sitting with its wings not open or displayed (OED close adj. and adv. A.I.b). Since Humphrey’s bird is clearly, from the depiction of its beak and talons, an eagle or other bird of prey and not a heron, the ‘eron or’ part of this label perhaps is part of a blazon, with ‘or’ for ‘gold’. Sir Emonde Heron of Northumberland aptly had a coat with three herons, depicted with long legs and bill and a crest on the head.41 Poole of Warblington, Sussex, bore ‘an osperey golde taking a fyshe silver’ on his crest, while Digby ‘beryth to his crest an osperey silver holdyng a horshewe sable’.42 Humphrey’s osprey is in an attitude of rising for flight; its legs are not fully extended and its large talons do not grasp anything. One of the unlabelled birds on fol. 95v appears to have incomplete feet, meaning that it might be a martlet (a stylised bird of the hirundine family), as, for example, on the arms of Valence in Harley 2169, which display ‘vii or ix merlettys’, or the arms of Lord Fornywale with six martlets, or

181

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

181

those of Morten with three.43 A figure that appears twice, bottom left and more sketchily on the far right edge, a little further up, appears to be a lion’s or leopard’s face: a frontal view of the face only with teeth showing and a tongue protruding, which is comparable with the three leopards’ heads attributed to the arms of John Waldyve.44 Towards the top right corner a hound’s head in profile with a neck with two collars emerges from a wreath, which, again, may be a crest or heraldic device. Humphrey’s recording of heraldic birds and animals on fol. 95v clearly demonstrates an interest in heraldic arms. His naming of some of the birds with heraldic terms reflects an interest in the language of arms, which was resourced by heraldic rolls such as Bodleian Library, Ashmole, rolls 4, a late fourteenth-​or early fifteenth-​century treatise on heraldry that instructs in the language of heraldry in English, for example, ‘and yf ther be .iij. herons in armes ye most say he beryth iij . herons sewes’. The Boke of St Albans provides blazons in French, English and Latin (‘the blasyng of all maner armys in latyn french and English’).45 Clearly, these drawings and labels on fol. 95v show that Humphrey was interested in heraldic birds and other devices and their proper English and French names and blazons. All Humphrey’s terms, ‘eron’, ‘egle’, ‘papeiaye’, ‘ospray’ and ‘or’, could be English or French. We know from the Newton Cartulary, British Library, Additional MS 42134A, a collection of Newton family records, that Humphrey and other family members had conflicted views about the popinjay as a device in their own self-​representation. This 32-​page cartulary, which was transcribed in the middle of the sixteenth century by Humphrey’s son William from Humphrey’s materials, includes this reflection on the issues: Also heere it appears that the armes of Neuton was iij papinjoes with a cheveron, and the seale a papinioy, howbeit a question is whether is more of aucthoritie to bear azure iii popinioes betwene a cheveron gould after the picture or gould a popinioy vert after the seale. Or a tunne siluer in sable after the name, because it may be seene for[e]‌most of all colours and metalls; or iij tunnes because of Neuton Milton and Phiton to whom I am heire, or azure a tunne of gould because the richest of all metalls and colours or siluer iij cheverons gules as Neuton [in] longdendale beires. Also I did see a deede sealed with the papinioy looking to the left as if it sate one the right hand of

182

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the man which was the seale of Olyuer Neuton which seale Thomas Neuton his grandfather sealed the deede of Neuton, which ringe was of gould, and when the said Olyuer was deade then the seale was a popinioy and then there [it] was dynged and the[n] Humfrey graued a tunne in it.46

These materials provide evidence that there were precedents in the Newton family for using the popinjay as a device on their arms and seal, and that Humphrey was aware of these precedents but chose a different device. The passage tells us that seals in the family archive showed that some Newtons used popinjays. The cartulary passage mentions that the seal Humphrey inherited bore a ‘popinioy vert’. This is puzzling, as it is hard to see how a seal could bear a coloured image, but this statement certainly reflects a tradition in popinjay iconography: these details reflect the attribution of bright plumage and particular colours and markings to popinjays by artists and writers in the bestiary tradition. The writer also knows of a precedent of using a ‘tunne’, or barrel, however. The author of the passage recognises that a ‘tunne’ (or several ‘tunnes’) would reflect the name Newton and other Newton ancestors by the names of Milton and ‘Phiton’ (Fitton). Humphrey inherited a seal that bore a popinjay, but he had it changed and engraved with a tun. His decision to use the device of a tun is corroborated by his memorial effigy in St Bartholomew’s Church, Wilmslow, where he is depicted with three tuns at his feet, signifying his relationships with the families of Newton, Fitton (his wife, Elin) and Milton (his grandmother), and by a shield in a window of the Jesus Chapel, which bears his device of the tun and his wife’s of a wheatsheaf.47 The choice of a tun was an example of armes parlantes or canting arms, whereby a visual device gives voice to the bearer’s name.48 One speaks the name of the object depicted to hear the name (or part of the name) of the person represented. A tun is commonly found as a heraldic device for those with names with the suffix -​ton. For example, Beckington, Bishop of Wells, used a beacon on top of a tun, and cardinal John Morton also used the tun.49 Humphrey may have thought that a rebus as a form of self-​representation was appropriate to an amateur or household scribe such as himself. The scribe Robert Thornton (c. 1397–​c. 1465) represented his name with an image of a thorn tree over a barrel (Lincoln Cathedral 91, fol. 23v), and a scribe in the later fifteenth-​ century/​ early

381

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

183

sixteenth-​century Findern household manuscript uses an image of fish (luce) and a barrel to represent Leweston (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6, fol. 139r). Use of this kind of heraldic device may have shown that the bearer was particularly adept at the scribal arts associated with literate articulate sound and offered members of his household and wider community opportunities to share this identification. These graphic devices appeared to be meaningless but those who knew their bearer’s name could turn them into literate, articulate sound. Given this family history, the drawing and poem of the popinjay on fol. 95v of Humphrey’s manuscript must undoubtedly have recalled the alternative heraldic device in the family deeds, and perhaps evoked doubt about the most authentic choice of arms. Humphrey’s book formerly included a printed copy of the Book of St Albans, which modelled the kind of debate reflected in the passage from the Newton Cartulary.50 The final part of the section on arms answers questions about the authority for bearing a particular coat of arms. The first basis for bearing arms is hereditary: ‘[W]‌e haue owre owne armis the wiche we beer of owre fadyr or of owre moodyr or of owre predycesessoris.’51 A second basis for bearing arms is ‘by owre merittys’, such as through conquest or taking a prisoner.52 The third basis for bearing arms is their granting by a prince or lord; and the fourth basis is ‘armys the wich we take on owre awne ppur [sic, for ‘propur’] auctorite’, for in those days many poor men became nobles through prudence, manhood, strength or cunning and took arms that they then might pass to their heirs. Such arms were not of such dignity and authority as those granted by a prince or lord, yet they were taken on proper authority provided no other man already bore them.53 The author of the passage in the Newton Cartulary appears to weigh up two of these possible authorities for bearing arms. The popinjay was a device born by his ancestors; the tun, perhaps, had been taken on Humphrey’s ‘own authority’. A link between popinjays and the Newton family has been noted by others; the connection between this and the material on fol. 95v and elsewhere in his commonplace book has not previously been noticed. The drawing and labelling of the popinjay and other heraldic insignia on fol. 95v, and Humphrey’s engagement with literary popinjay traditions, should be understood in this context. Preferring the tun device on his own

184

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

authority, Humphrey associated himself and his household with a device that seemed to be meaningless but, decoded, revealed literate, articulate sound, whereas the popinjay represented the opposite: its song’s seemingly literate, articulate sound was revealed to be meaningless when its avian source was seen.

Poetry as social practice I have been arguing that I Am a Bird of Paradise and the related material in Humphrey Newton’s manuscript would have had particular resonance for Humphrey, his family, his household and his wider circle. The popinjay lent itself to Humphrey’s –​and, one assumes, his immediate circle’s –​interest in the idioms of courtly poetry, but it was not just an imitative, commonplace courtly image; it was a token of identity formation and exchange with resonance for a particular community. These properties of the popinjay poem and drawing provide a particularly illuminating perspective on Humphrey’s literary practice more broadly. Here I have space only to consider, briefly, its relevance to his acrostics and epistles.54 Both were, of course, fashionable and commonplace forms in fifteenth-​ century courtly poetry. But their ubiquity did not preclude their having identity-​forming functionality. Six acrostics occur in Lat. Misc. c. 66. Four of the six acrostics play with the names of Humphrey and his wife, Ellen; there are two poems on Elin, DIMEV 1219 (fol. 93v) and DIMEV 1220 (fol. 94v); and two on Humphrey, DIMEV 1938 (fols 92v and 95r). One of the acrostics plays with the name Margere, DIMEV 3561 (fol. 93v). Margery was the name of one of Humphrey’s sisters.55 One concerns Brian, DIMEV 785 (fol. 93v). This is the only name that does not appear in Youngs’s Newton family tree; perhaps he was a suitor of one of Humphrey’s five sisters or six daughters.56 These poems would have given particular pleasure to those who recognised the names and their relationship to the poet, creating a sense of in-​group belonging and identity. Many of Humphrey’s poems adopt the form and idiom of the love epistle. In poem II the poet’s hand quivers when he holds the pen because he has written so often; now he may write no more. This is a familiar trope from later medieval verse, but its use did not

581

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

185

devalue it as local currency; the poem is annotated ‘mittitur’, ‘it is sent’, suggesting that the manuscript version is a draft of a poem that was conveyed to a reader (fol. 92v). Poem II is marked ‘billet’; perhaps it too was actually sent to a reader. In poem VI the lady gives her right glove to the lover as a token and promises to write to him. Poem XI, a ballade, refers to an exchange of tokens; the lady takes her leave because she must be with ‘hym that me has tan’ and imparts a token ‘in remenbrance of my name’;57 she requests that he send her a token in return for her to keep. The tokens referred to here could be the poem and its expected reply, or, perhaps, given the reference to remembrance of the lady’s name, acrostic poems that enfold the names of the two lovers. As for the relation of the texts in Humphrey’s hand and the social practices of the dissemination and exchange of verse of which they appear to form a trace, we can only speculate. The general disorganisation of the texts, which are crammed and in different inks and sizes of script, and the inclusion of two versions of the Elin acrostic (and much other evidence of drafting and revision), suggest personal composition and collection of material for experimentation, while the recurrent annotation ‘mittitur’ may record text of which a fair copy has been made and sent to its addressee.

Conclusion We do not hear the ‘gentry’s authentic voices’ in Humphrey Newton’s poetry. As others have said, Humphrey is an imitator; he parrots the voices of the more illustrious courtly poets of his age, and it is hard to believe that when he adopted the voice of the parrot in I Am a Bird of Paradise he was not aware of the ambivalent meanings of being a parrot poet. In this chapter, however, I have argued that the tropes and conceits that Humphrey mimics have particular, local significance and value. They become tokens that are ascribed with special meanings and values for the community that exchanges them and they take on social functions of identity formation and relationship building for that community. I Am a Bird of Paradise and the drawing of the popinjay in Lat. Misc. c. 66, at first sight simply drawing practice allied with an imitative quatrain, provide a rare portal onto a lost world of literary experience.

186

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66, fol. 95v. My punctuation and capitalisation. The poem is DIMEV 3584. DIMEV reads ‘gret emprisese’ in line 3, but the final ‘se’ should be read as part of ‘paradise’ on the line below; DIMEV reads ‘od paradise’ in line 4, which is perhaps a typographical error. R. Hanna, ‘Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library MS Lat. Misc. c. 66’, Medium Ævum, 69:2 (2000), 279–​91 (p. 279), reads ‘Lordz’ in line 3 but I use yogh because Humphrey uses the same figura for /​z/​, /​j/​, and historic /​χ/​ (‘briȝt’, line 1). As discussed below, ‘papeiaye’ is not part of the poem proper. 1536): An Early Tudor 2 D. Youngs, Humphrey Newton (1466–​ Gentleman (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), p. 3. 3 Also see image at https://​digi​tal.bodle​ian.ox.ac.uk/​inqu​ire/​p/​01eff​c15–​ 9f29–​482f-​96fe-​8c5cd​2cc6​4a2 (accessed 13 September 2021). 4 J. Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems of John Skelton, rev. edn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), poem XVIII, line 1. Scattergood dates Speke Parott 1521 on the basis of historical allusions in the envoys (p. 425). 5 MED papejai(e n. Of Anglo-​Norman origin, papejaie had been in use in English at least as far back as the middle of the fourteenth century, when it appears in British Library, Harley 2253. For uses in Anglo-​ Norman, including in heraldry, see AND2, Phase 4, papejai. 6 R. H. Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton, esquire, 1466–​1536’, PMLA, 65:2 (1950), 249–​81 (XIII, lines 1–​2, 9, 23). I have lightly emended Robbins’s edition, eliminating the italics used to indicate uncontentious expansions. 7 For some of the complexities and instabilities of bird mimicry in Chaucer and other later medieval literary texts, see E. Gorst, ‘Interspecies mimicry: birdsong in Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” and The Parlement of Fowles’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), 147–​54. 8 For Richard de Fournival’s poem and the proposition that ‘[a]‌ll poets he suggests, are already parrots’ (because they imitate in rhyme and sound, and through repetition of courtly tropes in their work), see E. Zingesser, ‘Pidgin poetics: bird talk in medieval France and Occitania’, New Medieval Literatures, 17 (2017), 62–​80 (p. 79). For the other texts, see S. Kay, ‘Lover as parrot’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), 137–​45. 9 Hanna, ‘Humphrey Newton’, p. 285; cf. D. Youngs, ‘The Parson’s Tale: a newly discovered fragment’, Chaucer Review, 33 (1999), 207–​16. 10 Youngs, Humphrey Newton, p. 170, n. 139.

781

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

187

11 S. Fein (ed.), The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Rochester, NY: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014), p. 28, line 21. 12 W. W. Skeat (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 7, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), poem 10, line 84, and poem 24, lines 1366–​7. 13 L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), VII, line 379. 14 Ibid., IV, line 2322. 15 D. A. Pearsall (ed.), William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Edition of the C-​Text (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008), XV, lines 170–​2. 16 Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, line 359; cf. MED, delicaci(e), n. 2(a). 17 Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’, p. 259; cf. R. H. Robbins, ‘A Gawain epigone’, Modern Language Notes, 58 (1943), 361–​6. 18 Youngs, Humphrey Newton, pp. 192–​3. 19 Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’, p. 252. 20 Hanna, ‘Humphrey Newton’, p. 286. 21 Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’, p. 249. 22 J. E. Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 224. 23 K. F. T. Mayhoff (ed.), Naturalis historia: Pliny the Elder (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906), 10.58. 24 W. M. Lindsay (ed.), Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive originum, 2 vols (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1911), book 12, 7:24. 25 I owe this reference to Dr Holly James-​Maddocks. See K. L. Scott, Dated and Dateable English Manuscript Borders, c. 1395–​ 1499 (London: British Library 2002), p. 19, plate XXXII. 26 Lindsay, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, book 12, 7:24. 27 Ibid. 28 W. C. A. Ker (ed.), Martial, Epigrams, with an English Translation, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1919), vol. 2, 14.73. 29 H. Keil (ed.), ‘Donati, Ars grammatica’, in H. Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1864), pp. 367–​402 (367). 30 M. Hertzius (ed.), ‘Prisciani, Institutionum grammaticarum Libri I-​XII’, in H. Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855), pp. 5–​6. 31 For recent work on applications of the theory of vox to birdsong, see Zingesser, ‘Pidgin poetics’, and references therein. 32 See http://​ica.themor​gan.org/​man​uscr​ipt/​page/​7/​76932 (accessed 13 September 2021). 33 Images at https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv​1b55​0098​07z/​f131.item (accessed 13 September 2021).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

Materiality and textual voices

34 Image at https://​themor​gan.org/​col​lect​ion/​hours-​of-​cather​ine-​of-​cle​ves/​ 241 (accessed 13 September 2021). 35 O. Barron, ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, The Ancestor, 3 (1902), 185–​213; 4 (1903), 225–​50; 5 (1903), 175–​90; 7 (1903), 184–​215; 9 (1904), 159–​80 (4, pp. 231, 235, 243), emphasis in original, reproducing Middle English text from the drawings of the blazons. The British Library catalogue of illuminated manuscripts dates the manuscript to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. For courtly verse in the manuscript, see R. Moll, ‘“O Lady Fortune”: an unknown lyric in British Library MS Harley 2169’, Notes and Queries, 56:2 (2009), 192–​4 (192). Other examples include the following. William Stoker, Lord Mayor of London (d. 1484) had three popinjays on his arms: Harley 2169, fol. 4, ed. Barron, ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, 3 (1902), p. 191. John Coursun of Warwickshire bore three gold popinjays on his coat of arms: Barron, ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, 9 (1904), p. 177. Thomas Wall’s book of crests of 1530 records that ‘Trevylion of Devon beryth to his crest two armes asur the handes silver holdyng a pellet on the which standyth a popingay in her kind in a wreth silver and sable manteled geules lynyd silver’: O. Barron, ‘Thomas Wall’s book of crests’, The Ancestor, 11 (1904), 178–​90 (189). ‘[I]‌n her kind’: displaying a natural gesture or activity; ‘as the terrestrial Animals have their natural Actions and Gestures, so doubtless have Birds and Fowls their Gesture according to their Kind: for sometime we find them born pearching, which Action is more usual with Birds or Fowls of Prey’: J. Guillim, A Display of Heraldry, 6th edn (London: T. W., 1724), p. 218. 36 J. Chance (ed.), The Assembly of the Gods (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), lines 814–​17. 37 W. H. St J. Hope, A Grammar of English Heraldry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), p. 97. 38 Ibid., pp. 65–​6. 39 Robbins does not mention the quatrain or the drawings (Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’); Youngs describes the artwork as ‘drawing practice/​doodles’, ‘attempts to improve his [Humphrey’s] artistic skills’ (Humphrey Newton, pp. 217, 188), and the quatrain as a ‘short, fun lyric’ (190); Hanna quotes the quatrain and describes the artwork as ‘drawings of birds and aristocratic figures’ (‘Humphrey Newton’, p. 279). The human figures on the folio are, of course, not heraldic. 40 Barron, ‘Thomas Wall’s book of crests’, p. 181. 41 Barron, ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, 4 (1903), p. 233. 42 Barron, ‘Thomas Wall’s book of crests’, p. 185.

981

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Parrot poet

189

43 The second bird down on the right-​hand side of the page: Barron, ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, 3 (1902), pp. 201, 204, 212. 44 Barron, ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, 7 (1903), p. 190. 45 W. Blades (ed.), The Boke of Saint Albans: Containing Treatises on Hawking, Hunting, and Cote Armour by Dame Juliana Berner, printed at Saint Albans by the School-​Master Printer in 1486, Reproduced in Facsimile (London: Elliot Stock, 1901), sig. a i. 46 British Library Additional 42134A, fol. 19v, quoted with light emendation from Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’, p. 253, n. 23, who quotes from J. P. Earwaker, East Cheshire: Past and Present, or, A History of the Hundred of Macclesfield, 2 vols (London: printed for the author, 1877–​90), vol. 2, p. 265, n. j. Oliver Newton was Humphrey’s grandfather (d. 1452–​3) and Thomas Newton, who was alive in 1302, was Oliver’s great grandfather (Youngs, Humphrey Newton, p. 12). On the cartulary, see Youngs, Humphrey Newton, pp. 3–​4. Azure would distinguish the son’s arms from those of his father (Hope, A Grammar of English Heraldry, p. 73). For discussion of this passage and its relevance to the Newton family arms, see Youngs, Humphrey Newton, pp. 35–​9. Youngs assumes that its author is Humphrey but this is called into doubt by the fact that the author, who writes in the first person, refers to Humphrey in the third person. 47 Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’, p. 253; Youngs, Humphrey Newton, pp. 252–​3. 48 For devices of this kind, see G. J. Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with special reference to Arthurian Heraldry, 2nd edn (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997), p. 23; and Hope, A Grammar of English Heraldry, pp. 60–​1. 49 Hope, A Grammar of English Heraldry, pp. 61–​2. 50 Boke of St Albans, printed 1486, STC 2nd edn 3308. According to Youngs, Newton’s copy of the Boke was removed from Humphrey’s manuscript in the nineteenth century: Humphrey Newton, pp. 172–​3 and n. 154. This copy is now held in the British Library at shelf-​mark IB.55712. It is thought from manuscript notes to be the copy used by Wynkyn de Worde as the press copy for preparing the second edition. It lacks the first four quires and the last: British Library, Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the British Museum, part XI, England (‘t Goy-​Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2007), p. 306; I am grateful to Dr Takako Kato for this reference. 51 Blades, The Boke of Saint Albans, sig. f. [6v]. 52 Ibid., sig. f. [7r]. 53 Ibid., sig. f. [7r-​v].

190

Materiality and textual voices

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54 I deal in more detail with the functions of the manuscript and its contents in W. Scase, Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700 –​c. 1550 (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 55 DIMEV reads Margaret but the first words of the final line are corrected and illegible. 56 For the Newton family tree, see Youngs, Humphrey Newton, p. 12. 57 Robbins, ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton’, XI, lines 14, 19.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Part IV

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10 Voice, materiality and history in St Erkenwald and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar Sif Ríkharðsdóttir This chapter explores the ways in which medieval authors imagined their own pasts as voiced and embodied artefacts through a comparative analysis of two very dissimilar works, the alliterative Middle English St Erkenwald and the Old Norse saga Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Although the two works stem from different cultural contexts and represent very different literary conventions, both display similar means of repurposing their pagan past as foundational myths, suggesting that medieval authors may have struggled with the inherent contradictions of the pagan past and its foundational historicity and actively sought to reaffirm or reformulate those memorials. Moreover, they do so through the positioning of voice as a medium of the past, and through its materialisation into text –​a script –​as a means of both affirming and repurposing this past. The past thus becomes both embodied and voiced. It is through voice, however, that the material remains presented in each poem assume meaning. Eventually the materialisation of voice as script –​that is, as the text we have in hand –​subsumes and thus replaces the actual physical remains. In both St Erkenwald and Egils saga this is made evident through the mediation of past voices and their physical embodiment; that is through the corpse of the judge, who rises undecayed from his grave to narrate his history, and through the unearthed skeleton of Egill Skallagrímsson, which similarly gives credence to his previously cited poetic voice and its historicity. In both texts the past is eventually reconfigured and incorporated through the physical rearticulation of pagan bones as the spatial structures of divine atemporality –​i.e. the Church. Through revoicing, the past becomes

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Performative voices and medieval aurality

embodied and eventually memorialised as a script –​a text that both affirms and realigns it.1 At the same time, the physical remnants of those pasts are subsumed into new structures, which will in turn form the foundations of the reformulated manifestations of that past and its implicit future. The chapter thus suggests that both these works utilise voice as a metaphorical tool to rearticulate the past –​affirming its existence and its reconfigured functionality through the materialisation of that voice as poetry and, ultimately, as text: the materialised memorial of what is always already and forever vanished at the moment of its utterance. By ‘voice’ I mean the imagined or actual articulation of sounds by a speaker, mediated as text in this case but perceived and envisaged as aural sensations in the minds of readers, or, as the case may be, as actual vocalised utterances understood as ventriloquised communications of past spoken voices.2 Admittedly, most texts can be said to mediate voices, both past and present. Yet the confluence of vocal articulation of an inaccessible past, its metamorphosing into a poetic text and, ultimately, the cannibalistic effort to subsume this past as newly articulated and embodied foundational myth reveals a common literary effort to immortalise the past through death, revoicing and embodied memorialisation. And –​more significantly perhaps –​it stages the reappropriation of those pasts as both the material and immaterial foundation for a Christianised modernity. The alliterative poem St Erkenwald hardly needs an introduction here. The roughly 350-​line fourteenth-​century poem draws on the legend of the seventh-​century Saint Erkenwald to explore questions of the pagan past and its foundational viability through the discovery of the preserved corpse of a pagan judge during the construction of the church of St Paul.3 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar may, on the other hand, require slightly more contextualisation. The thirteenth-​century Icelandic saga features a prose tale of the Viking-​ age Egill Skallagrímsson, the settlement of his family in Iceland, his life and his death.4 The prosimetrical text relates a pseudo-​­historiographical account of Egill’s life interspersed with poems attributed to Egill (as well as to other quasi-​ historical characters). Like St Erkenwald, the story features a localised account of a foundational past through the narrative of the settlement of Egill’s family in Borgarnes in the south-​west of Iceland.

591

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

195

In the case of St Erkenwald, the past is relayed by the judge, who rises from the dead to have his story immortalised in the alliterative verse. In Egils saga, the past is brought to life through Egill’s poetic utterances and the supposed communal memories of his life. These, in turn, become embodied and objectified through the discovery of a ‘tomb’ containing his skeletal body at the end of the narrative and, eventually, are made immortal as text on the manuscript page. Both the Middle English poem and the Old Norse saga thus feature a confluence of multiple temporal realms: that of the pagan past, its immediate Christian posterity (and fictive present) and the temporal context of its intended medieval audience (as well as its future modern readers).5 Both engage with this disruptive past in a manner that sees it subsumed into the foundation of the ideological structure of its fictive present –​in turn the past of its intended audience. And both do so via a vocal recitation of the past and the solidification of this past voice into a new script –​a textual artefact on which the reconfigured memorial rests.

History –​temporality –​rupture Let us look at some examples of how the sense of history is undermined and then reconfigured through voice in both texts. Nicholas Watson proposes an approach to history that suggests that ‘past matters, not only because it underlies the present … but because it remains inseparably entangled with the present and will continue to be so’.6 This sense of history, or what he aptly calls ‘pastness’, underlies the approach here to the two texts. It foregrounds the way in which both texts spirit forth an imaginary past, only to symbolically lay it to rest once its ontological status has been reaffirmed and reconceptualised within the present. What Watson terms the ‘phantasmic’ character of the past is eerily appropriate for the poem of St Erkenwald, in which the past quite literally materialises as a phantom in the corpse of the pagan judge. His body is temporarily resurrected and endowed with life for the sake of reaffirming values that belong not to the past itself nor to the judge, who fleetingly represents it, but to the contemporary present of the poem. This present summons the past only to lay it to rest, reconfigured, reaffirmed and reimagined.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Both the Middle English poem and the Old Norse saga, in fact, present multiple temporalities that each overlay one another in a firmly localised setting, metaphorically staged through the actual archaeological layers of the building sites of the religious edifices in each tale.7 Cynthia Turner Camp notes that Middle English texts that feature cadavers or dead bodies seem to foreground temporal ruptures that accompany the body as corpse.8 This rupture and the subsequent rectification is indeed at the forefront of St Erkenwald. There is a notable emphasis on the conflux of the impalpable aspect of the progress of history and its material evidence within the poem –​i.e. the crypt itself, the overlaying soil of history, the physical structure of St Paul’s and, ultimately, the preserved corpse and its spectral voice.9 Moreover, the poem stages a confluence between this material evidence and script as an (ultimately faulty) record of history.10 Marvelling at the discovery, the Londoners are unable to find any traces of the ancient judge in their written records: ‘Noþir by title ne token ne by tale noþir /​Þat euer wos breuyt in burghe ne in boke notyde, /​Þat euer mynnyd suche a mon, more ne lasse’ (lines 102–​4). The absence of written evidence reveals gaps in history that are being uncovered quite literally through the archaeological evidence of the crypt and, eventually, through the voice of the judge himself. Additionally, the ‘roynyshe’ (line 52) letters written on the crypt are indecipherable, revealing a symbolic code no longer accessible, a written cypher from the past that they are unable to decode.11 Seeta Chaganti notes that the ‘word roynyshe has been glossed speculatively as “runish,” or “unreadable” ’ and that it ‘convey[s]‌the sense that the words are unfamiliar in shape to the finders of the tomb, and are themselves the last remaining vestige of some more ancient language’.12 This is significant, as it reveals not only that there is no evidence in the historical record of this past but that this newly discovered written attestation is inaccessible. Its documentary absence in turn signals a historical void that threatens to destabilise historical continuity.13 Yet the judge’s vocal narration challenges the previous obliteration of historical continuity. As Ruth Nissé suggests, the judge’s voice expresses simultaneously ‘the desire for cultural continuity, and the fragmentary, uncertain nature of history itself’.14 Like his body, the judge’s voice effortlessly transcends the centuries,

791

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

197

sounding for all intents and purposes as comprehensible to its presumed seventh-​century fictive subjects as it must have done to the fourteenth-​century audience of the alliterative verse itself. The poem plays on the metafictive quality of the alliterative verse, which acts as both the mediator for the story and as a channel for the voice of the judge. When speaking, the judge’s voice is transmitted in the form of fourteenth-​ century alliterative verse lines, subtly defying the temporal dissonance, the linguistic difference (previously asserted by the ‘roynyshe’ script on the tomb) and the metaphysical impossibility of the aural embodiment. The past is thus presented both as physical remnants and as an immaterial object (i.e. as voice) to be reconfigured in any given present –​evidenced by the unknown figure of the judge, a time no longer recorded and the body itself, which appropriately vanishes once this historiographical reconfiguration is complete. Despite this intent focus on the historicity of both the Middle English poem and the Icelandic saga, the two texts diverge in their approach to history. Whereas the corpse in St Erkenwald bespeaks a forgotten past –​as an anonymous representative of that past –​Egill’s unearthed bones instead reaffirm a past already recorded in the saga itself. And, whereas the encounter acts as the backbone and climax of the Middle English poem, it has the converse function in the Old Norse saga, in which it forms the penultimate chapter. The preceding chapter describes how, following his death, Egill is buried with weapons and clothes in a mound at Tjaldanes, as befits a pagan warrior. The subsequent chapter leaps forward in time to relate how his foster daughter, Þórdís Þórólfsdóttir, later has his bones moved to a newly built church and interred there. At this point the narrator deviates from the conventional story line of saga narratives to recount how over a century later, when the church is being rebuilt and moved, bones are discovered under the altar.15 Based on the collective memory of the community, the assumption is that the bones belong to the tenth-​century figure of Egill: ok er þat til iartegna at siðan er kirkia var gior at Mosfelli. en ofan tekin at Hrís[br]u su kirkia er Grimr hafði gera latið þa var þar gra[fin]n kirkiu garðr en vnder alltarisstaðnum þa funduz mannabeín· . þau voro miklu stæri en annarra manna bein. þikiaz menn þat vita af sogn gamalla manna at mundi verit hafa bein Egil(s). (p. 184)16

198

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This is supported by the fact [literally: miracle] that when a cemetery was dug, after the church that Grím had had built at Hrisbru was taken down and set up at Mosfell, human bones were found under the site of the altar. They were much larger than normal human bones, and on the basis of old accounts people are certain they must have belonged to Egil.17

Here –​unlike in St Erkenwald –​the newly discovered archaeological evidence affirms the cultural memory of the past (or, at least, is believed to do so).18 Following the unearthing of the bones, the parish priest picks up the skull, which turns out to be marvellously large, heavy and ridged and so impenetrable that it does not even crack when the priest strikes it with an axe. This surprising durability prompts the comment from the narrator that ‘hauss sa mundi ecki auðsk[æð]r firer hoggum smamenniss meðan suorðr ok holld fylgdi’ (p. 185) (‘such a skull would not have been easy for weak men to damage when it was covered with hair and skin’: line 204). This macabre incarnation of the skeletal remains and their historicised envisaging stages a process of the embodiment of the past through imagined corporeality that, in turn, affirms and actualises the vocalised tales and poems on which the memory rests. The use of the word ‘jartegnir’, or ‘miracle’, to describe the find of the pagan bones in the foundation of the church repositions the story of the pre-​Christian past in a similar manner to what we see in St Erkenwald, in which the pagan past is literally subsumed into the seventh-​century Christian context through the miracle of the baptismal tear.19 The disintegration of the judge’s body after his recital is an affirmation of the presence of the divine in St Erkenwald. In Egils saga, instead, the bones enact a metatextual attestation of authenticity and, moreover, of the physical embodiment of Egill’s past and thus (‘historicised’) voice. In fact, both accounts feature a gesture of symbolic translatio that recasts the pagan past as a foundational myth, not only in the sense of the historicity of Christianised salvation but, additionally, as its material foundation. Furthemore, both texts interrogate the validity of that past and its historical accuracy through phantasmic voicing –​a metaphoric dissemination of past voices as historicised memorials. Egill’s bones are found under the altar, the most sacrosanct location within the church. The striking association with saintly remains and their translocation to a holy site cannot be coincidental.

991

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

199

The translatio of Egill’s bones effects a dual purpose: it subsumes the pagan past by the gesture of translocation (from the pagan burial mound to the crypt under the altar) while simultaneously affirming its historicity –​just as the Middle English poem does. Indeed, in St Erkenwald the corpse of the judge is miraculously preserved, not showing any evidence of the natural decay associated with the passage of time. The ascendance of the spirit or soul reactivates the natural progress of time, and the remains disintegrate. In St Erkenwald, the phantasmic appearance of the judge therefore contests the organic nature of the human body, while simultaneously refuting the durability of the embodied past –​as exhibited by Egill’s skull –​by decaying into dust the moment his story has been told. The translatio of the corpse is thus metaphorical inasmuch as it is not the remains themselves –​the body as a physical object –​that serves as a conveyer of miracles but the act itself, brought about by the command of St Erkenwald for the body to speak: ‘Ansuare here to my sawe, councele no trouthe’ (line 184). It is the narrative conveyed by that dead body and its miraculous voice that is the object of the translatio, the transmutation of the message conveyed into a relic –​i.e. into a poetic artefact. In the case of Egill’s bones, the skull similarly serves to affirm the voice, and once that affirmation is accomplished the skull is reburied in the churchyard at Mosfell, thereby vanishing back into the earth as archaeological evidence of the past. Meanwhile, the narrative itself becomes the site of conversion, incorporation and reassimilation, a marvel of metaphorical and spatial palimpsest. The discovery of the bones in Egils saga thus features as an attestation of the veracity of the preceding story of settlement and family lineage, rather than providing a chronicle that no longer forms part of the recorded history as is the case in St Erkenwald. Yet, like the Middle English poem, the account is mediated in the guise of a miracle, attested by the word ‘jartegnir’ (miracle). It rests on the hagiographical convention of the discovery of saints’ reliquiae. And, as Monika Otter has pointed out, such stories often formed part of local historiography, frequently associated with religious institutions and their foundation or, conversely, their rebuilding –​as indeed we witness in both texts.20 The location of Egill’s bones under the altar thus reveals a similar process by which the pagan past and its vocal affirmation are reconstituted through

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

Performative voices and medieval aurality

a gesture of translatio that sees the physical remains (i.e. the corpse of the judge and Egill’s bones) rearticulated as foundations upon which the current ethical and religious structures can be built. The repurposed material remains of the past in turn form the basis for the presumed preservation of this newly formulated past in the form of the texts themselves, significantly recounted and vocalised by the judge’s narration of his story, on the one hand, and Egill’s voice as conveyed through his poetry (the ostensibly historicised evidence of the settlement-​era past), on the other.21

Script –​textuality –​vocality I turn now to the interconnections between script, text and voice. Torfi H. Tulinius has pointed out that the crypt or shrine containing the remains of a saint would be called ‘confessio’ in Latin or ‘skrift’ in Icelandic.22 The tomb of the pagan judge defies this reliquary functionality by its pre-​Christian origination, yet in many ways the judge’s voice can be seen to enact a confessio as it recites its own history. The tomb itself therefore becomes the material manifestation of that confessio, with the ‘roynyshe’ letters as the failed textual articulation of that history. Significantly, as Tulinius notes, the word ‘skrift’ is also used to indicate text or writing as well as a confession.23 The play on the multivalence of the word ‘skrift’ as crypt, text or confession reinforces the metatextual ploy in Egils saga, whereby the pagan bones surreptitiously function as a metaphorical embodiment of the preceding text, unearthed (like the corpse of the judge) in the post-​history of the presumed historical events of Egill’s life. The correlation between vocal confession, its textual representation and the crypt or tomb as the material manifestation of the past is played out in both tales. In St Erkenwald the voice arises from the crypt as an oral confession. In Egils saga, instead, the voice of Egill reverberates across his narrative –​to be confirmed and embodied through the discovery of his skull at the end of the story. The location of Egill’s bones and the manifold association that the word ‘skrift’ (crypt, text, confession) would have carried with it calls attention to the implicit associations between voice (as confessional and self-​expressive recording of history), text

102

Voice, materiality and history

201

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(as its written evidence) and the crypt as the material evidence of that past –​affirming (or denying) its written evidence. In St Erkenwald the vocalisation of the lost history of the Saxon judge serves as a performative gesture that gives voice to the illegible inscription of the crypt itself, thus both framing the text as memorial and infusing it with meaning: And þe bordure enbelicit wyt bryȝt golde lettres, Bot roynyshe were þe resones þat þer on row stoden. Fulle verray were þe vigures þer auisyde hom mony, Bot alle muset hit to mouthe and quat hit mene shulde: Mony clerkes in þat clos wyt crownes ful brode Þer besiet hom a-​boute noȝt to brynge hom in wordes. (lines 51–​6)

The emphasis remains on the illegibility of the inscription and the failed effort to ‘brynge hom in wordes’ (line 56, emphasis added) –​ that is, to articulate the textual symbols into words, presumably into audible and meaningful utterances. Notably, the poem emphasises this process of failed effort at vocalisation: although those present strive to articulate the text as voiced utterances (‘alle muset hit to mouthe’), they are unable to do so, and are consequently unable to imbue it with meaning (‘quat hit mene shulde’). Indeed, we never learn the actual meaning of the inscription. D. Vance Smith locates the crux of the poem’s signification in the inscrutability of the inscription and the failure to render it comprehensible. He points out that ‘[t]‌he tomb commemorates a body that is no longer, and can be no longer, commemorated. In other words, the tomb is nothing so much as death of memory itself.’24 Yet it is precisely through the judge’s voice that this inscrutable past becomes rearticulated and reformulated into a new commemoration, a new memory of the past. Without its implicit voicing the inscription remains inaccessible, and the past therefore mute. The poem itself thus serves as commemoration of the past and its reconstitution. Chaganti has noted this duality of the performative and the text as artefact, considering it as evidence of what she has termed ‘poetics of enshrinement’.25 The vocalisation thus serves as the performative gesture that gives voice to the illegible inscription, thereby both framing the text as memorial and infusing it with meaning drawn from both its material functionality –​its reliquary

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

Performative voices and medieval aurality

function in Chaganti’s terms –​and its literary or poetic functionality. As David Lawton notes, ‘[v]‌oice is not quite presence … but a memory of it’, signalling the ephemeral character of the voice itself that is made material via its translation into text.26 In St Erkenwald, the judge’s voice has an agency inasmuch as its vocalised history –​ its narrative, in a sense –​releases the presumed spirit (or soul or consciousness) from its earthly confinement, thereby instigating the disintegration of the material remains of that pagan body. Egill’s bones, on the other hand, in a sense authenticate the voice already preserved through the textual narrative. Rather than releasing the spirit through the disintegration of the bonds that hold the spirit hostage, the text suggests that the past has already been incorporated into the Christian present through the physical translation of the bones into the foundation of the Church. The narrative itself is thus given authority through its reconstitution as currently and perpetually Christianised. Although the Middle English poem thus raises disquieting questions regarding the stability of the past as a known object, the story of Egill instead seeks to validate the recorded past as authentic. Furthermore, it seeks to affirm this newly negotiated validity through the archaeological evidence. Egill’s bones rupture the passing of time, just as the judge’s preserved corpse defies the irrevocability of the past the Londoners are so avidly seeking to contain. No longer enclosed within the clear past of the age of settlement, the bones bring the historicised body of Egill into the Christianised post-​settlement period. The tombs of both the judge and Egill deep within the spatial structures of Christianity thus speak on behalf of the past. They preserve, in one instance, the actual material remains of the judge that is thereby given voice to tell his own story, whereas the bones of Egill are a mute evidence of a voice already captured in the audience’s memory. Although the judge is summoned from the dead to tell his tale, Egill has already told his in the poetical utterances cited throughout his saga. They assume the form of vocal mediation of a presumed historicised self. Unlike the prose text, which professes to be a semi-​ historicised account of the past –​not unlike the documentary evidence in St Erkenwald –​the poems give voice to Egill himself. By this I do not mean to claim that the poems are an actual production of a historicised tenth-​century figure but, rather, that they become

302

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

203

a medium for self-​expression and authentication in the saga, again much as we observe with the judge. Their vocalisation gives a sense of urgency and propinquity, and hence a fictitious sense of selfhood and historicity. Their aural immediacy defies the temporal distance of the centuries that have passed, giving their content a sense of contiguity, authenticity and, thereby, veracity. The commemorative poem Sonatorrek (On the Loss of Sons), ostensibly composed by Egill following the death of his second son earlier in the story, presents a perfect example. Its self-​conscious representation of the physical process of poetic composition and articulation foregrounds the interdependence of memory, history, voice, poetry and text in Egils saga: Þö mun eg mitt og mödr hrer faudr fall first um telja þad ber eg üt ür ordhofe mærdar timbur mäle laufgat.27 Yet I will first recount my father’s death and mother’s loss, carry from my word-​shrine the timber that I build my poem from, leafed with language. (p. 172)

As before –​and as with the judge –​Egill’s voice is here transmitted across time and space in its immediacy as spoken versified utterance. Moreover, the metaphorical imagery refers self-referentially to the body as the storehouse of memories and the source of poetical language that will in turn, once uttered, form the memorial that recounts and affirms his history –​i.e. the written saga. The spatial configurations of both memory, as a storehouse of the past, and the poem itself, as a memorial constructed out of words, aptly epitomise the confluence of text, voice and time. This memorialising potentiality can be realised only through the act of vocalisation. Not only does the poem stage this metaphoric process

204

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of poetic composition and delivery but, moreover, it emphasises the physiological aspects of the art of voicing and illustrates selfreflexively how this process can be hindered when the voice is broken or otherwise disrupted: Era andþeist þvïat ecke velldur haufuglegr ür higgju stad fagna fundr þriggja nidja ärborinn ür Jǫtun heimum. (p. 143, verse 2) Since heavy sobbing is the cause –​ how hard to pour forth from the mind’s root the prize that Frigg’s progeny found, borne of old from the world of giants. (p. 171)28

The emphasis is on the vocal delivery and the difficulty of uttering the words, as his voice is broken by ‘ecke’ (‘sobs’ or ‘sobbing’). The lines thus call attention to the aurality of the process of poetic memorialisation.29 Significantly, the poetic lines need to be articulated, literally voiced, to be memorialised in writing by his daughter, Þorgerður, who states that she will ‘rista a kefli’ (p. 149) (‘carve on to a rune stick’: p. 171) the words as they are spoken. Like the roynysh script on the judge’s tomb that needs to be revoiced to be rendered as ‘legible’ text, the poem is, ultimately, transliterated onto the manuscript page to form part of the history of Egill. The metaphorisation of memory as a shrine of words that Egill will use to commemorate his lineage and family history thus foregrounds the metonymic representation of poetic composition as memorial and, ultimately, Egill’s skeleton as its tangible a­pparition.30 The graphic attention devoted to Egill’s head throughout the saga gives his skull an added figurative significance as the physical remnants of that which is vanished, including his voice.31 Unlike the Middle English poem, the imaginative force of Egils saga is thus directed at the past rather than the imagined presence. The bones act as

502

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

205

material evidence, giving weight to both the narrative itself and the verses supposedly spoken by the long-​absent Egill. The temporal linearity belies the imaginative aspect of the reconstruction of the past, creating a sense of representative authenticity. The objective narrative style and the inclusion of the verses purportedly composed and (notably) vocalised by the long-​dead Egill himself combine to give the account an air of historical veracity. It is the crypt-​like grave itself and the bones within, however, that act as an affirmation of the past, and thereby as an avowal of the present’s use of the past to reaffirm its own ideological values.32

Materiality –​voice –​text The encounter between the ancient judge and the bishop in St Erkenwald figuratively stages ontological questions regarding materiality, spirituality, continuity and impermanence. The transience of the encounter is revealed through the disintegration of the material evidence of the past, while its lasting spiritual and ethical impact is signified through the reintegration and reformulation of that fleeting past into both the physical and metaphorical foundation of St Paul’s. Whereas the voice of the judge is momentarily summoned from the past to echo in its newly constructed Christian setting and then vanishes again, Egill’s voice, on the other hand, refuses this impermanence. Although the judge welcomes the salvation provided by the bishop’s tear and his own corporeal disintegration, the durability of the physical remains of Egill –​epitomised in the emphasis on the thickness and sturdiness of the skull itself –​ defies any such impermanence. Yet, as with St Erkenwald, both Egill’s body and the associated pagan past are decisively subsumed into the Christian present by the physical relocation of his remains and through the reconfiguration of what those remains represent. In the case of the ancient judge, this reorientation takes place through the disintegration of his body as his spirit or soul is translated into the new order. In the case of the pre-​Christian Egill, it is through the physical relocation of the pagan remnants within the spatial representation of the Christian present. In both cases, the pagan body is incorporated quite literally into the very structure that represents that new order,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

Performative voices and medieval aurality

that of the judge in the foundation of St Paul’s Cathedral and that of Egill in the foundation of the church at Mosfell. Both texts thus conflate materiality, history, voice and text. The preserved bodies act as both material and immaterial (and, hence, always vanished) reminders of the past, the layers of soil preserving the physical remnants of that past while the textual artefacts shape its interpretation. At the same time, they point towards the dual functionality of the narratives themselves, as both memorials and agents of historical change and reconfiguration. The poem of St Erkenwald itself thereby features as a memorial, giving the past a voice frozen in time while its material host dissolves into dust. The poetic lines capture the judge’s voice at the same time as his body disintegrates. The tomb that housed the defiant past is similarly incorporated and assimilated into history as part of the foundation of St Paul’s. The narrative of Egill likewise features a metafictive account of its own literary creation and its future confirmation through the discovery of the tomb-​like location of Egill’s skeleton, simultaneously conflating and defying the linearity of the narrative and the passage of time. The permanence of the skull versus the impermanence of the judge’s corpse reveals different approaches to contend with the irrefutability of the past and its divine assimilation. In both cases, though, this irrefutability is solved through the conversion of the pagan voices into contemporary artefacts –​i.e. the churches themselves (as spatial evidence of the Christian presence) and the texts of the Middle English poem and the Icelandic saga –​subtly recording this past as it is subsumed.

Notes 1 For the concept of revoicing see D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 7 onwards. 2 For theorisations of the term ‘voice’ in medieval literature, see, for instance, Lawton, Voice; I. R. Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); H. Powell and C. Saunders (eds), Visions and Voice-​ Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (London: Palgrave

702

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

207

Macmillan, 2020); M. Unzeitig, A. Schrott and N. Miedema (eds), Stimme und Performanz in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Historische Dialogforschung 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); and C. Saunders, ‘Voices and visions: mind, body and affect in medieval writing’, in A. Whitehead and A. Woods (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 411–​27. 3 Saint Erkenwald, ed. C. Peterson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). The edition is based on the manuscript copy British Library, MS Harley 2250, a paper manuscript stemming from the late fifteenth century. All quotations from the Middle English poem are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically with line numbers. 4 The saga of Egill exists in three variant versions, A, B and C, two of which have been edited in independent editions (A and C; B is an abbreviated version). The following analysis is based on the manuscript copy Möðruvallabók, AM 132 fol., in the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, the main manuscript of the A version of Egils saga (Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ed. B. Einarsson [based on the work of J. Helgason and completed after Einarsson’s death by M. Chesnutt], vol. 1, A-​Redaktionen, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, series A, vol. 19 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzelsforlag, 2001)). All quotations from the text are taken from this edition unless otherwise noted and cited parenthetically with page numbers. 5 For a theorising of temporalities and time in the Middle Ages, see C. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 6 N. Watson, ‘The phantasmal past: time, history, and the recombinative imagination’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010), 1–​37 (p. 5). 7 For an in-​depth discussion of the paradox of historiography and its association with both spatial memory and commemorative processes in St Erkenwald, see C. T. Camp, ‘Spatial memory, historiographic fantasy, and the touch of the past in St Erkenwald’, New Literary History, 44 (2013), 471–​91. Camp emphasises this vision of ‘London history as stratigraphically fabricated from fragments of past use’ (p. 475), whereby the multiple pasts are literally one on top of the other in archaeological strata that can be uncovered through excavation. On the topic of historiography and archaeology in St Erkenwald, see also J. Scattergood, The Lost Tradition: Essays in Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 184–​95; and P. Schwytzer, ‘Exhumation and ethnic conflict: from St Erkenwald to Spenser in Ireland’, Representations, 95 (2006), 1–​26. 8 C. T. Camp, ‘The temporal excesses of dead flesh’, postmedieval, 4:4 (2013), 416–​26 (p. 417).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208

Performative voices and medieval aurality

9 Ibid. 10 Kellie Robertson has argued that the late Middle Ages exhibit an increasing interest in objects and their ‘ability to shape human consciousness’ that aligns with the attention devoted to the tomb and the interred judge here and to Egill’s skeleton within the Norse context: ‘Medieval things: materiality, historicism, and the premodern object’, Literature Compass, 5:6 (2008), 1060–​80 (p. 1061). See also S. Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 11 Indeed, Frank Grady considers the indecipherable symbols to be a ‘figure for the poem itself’ that in turn ‘corrects the failure of memory that renders the letters unreadable’: ‘Piers Plowman, Saint Erkenwald, and the rule of exceptional salvations’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 6 (1992), 61–​88 (p. 85). 12 S. Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 55. 13 For a discussion of documentary culture in medieval England and the intersection between the material and textual, see E. Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 14 R. Nissé, ‘“A coroun ful riche”: the rule of history in St Erkenwald’, ELH, 65 (1998), 277–​95 (p. 277). 15 The conventional story line would generally move directly to a recounting of descendants, as the narrator does indeed do in the subsequent chapter. It is, of course, possible that the narrative account of the twelfth-​century discovery of the bones under the altar is a later addition to the story. If so, it would still reveal an effort, whether by the author or later scribes, to contend with and affirm a reconfigured poetical past. 16 The C version agrees overall with the A text, although, notably, it does not mention the location of the bones under the altar. 17 Egil’s saga, trans. B. Scudder, ed. S. Óskarsdóttir (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 204, hereafter cited parenthetically with page numbers. I have adjusted the translation slightly. 18 For information on the concept of ‘cultural memory’ in the medieval North, see J. Glauser, P. Hermann and S. A. Mitchell (eds), Handbook of Pre-​Modern Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches, 2 vols, De Gruyter Reference (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). 19 For an elaboration of the sacramental function of the tear, see, for instance, A. Schuurman, ‘Materials of wonder: miraculous objects and poetic form in Saint Erkenwald’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 39

902

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

209

(2017), 275–​96; F. Grady, ‘Looking awry at St Erkenwald’, Exemplaria, 23:2 (2011), 105–​25; and J. Sisk, ‘Unauthorized desire: audience and affect in St Erkenwald and Lydgate’s St Austin at Compton’, Religion & Literature, 46:1 (2014), 1–​23. 20 M. Otter, ‘“New werke”: St Erkenwald, St Albans, and the medieval sense of the past’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 24:3 (1994), 387–​414. 21 Critics are not in agreement regarding the historical veracity of the poems recorded in Egils saga. The debate has ranged from the poems being considered as historical testimonials (see, for instance, P. M. Sørensen, ‘The prosimetrum form 1: verses as the voice of the past’, in R. Poole (ed.), Skaldsagas: Text, Vocation, and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 27 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), pp. 172–​90) to them being considered as fictive thirteenth-​century compositions (see, for instance, T. H. Tulinius, ‘The prosimetrum form 2: verses as the basis for saga composition and interpretation’, in Poole, Skaldsagas, 191–​217). That said, their actual historical accuracy is irrelevant here, inasmuch as what matters is the narrative framing of their delivery as an ostensible historical act, later recorded in writing. See also G. Nordal, Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). For an overview of the discussion of fictionality and historical authenticity in the Icelandic sagas, see, for instance, R. O’Connor, ‘History and fiction’, in Á. Jakobsson and S. Jakobsson (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Saga (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 88–​110. 22 T. H. Tulinius, The Enigma of Egill: The Saga, the Viking Poet, and Snorri Sturluson, trans. V. Cribb, Islandica LVII (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 4. 23 Ibid. Tulinius’s opening chapter deftly imagines how the discovery of the bones in the twelfth century could have taken place and debates its implications for the historicity or fictiveness of the saga as a literary artefact (see pp. 2–​11). 24 D. V. Smith, ‘Crypt and decryption: Erkenwald terminable and interminable’, New Medieval Literatures, 5 (2002), 59–​86 (p. 61). 25 Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, p. 48. See further pp. 47–​71 for Chaganti’s analysis of St Erkenwald, which both aligns with and informs my interpretation here. 26 Lawton, Voice, p. 24. 27 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ed. M. Chesnutt [based on the work of J. Helgason], vol. 3, C-​Redactionen, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, series A, vol. 21 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzelsforlag, 2006), pp. 143–​4, verse

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210

Performative voices and medieval aurality

5. The C redaction is the only version to preserve a complete version of the poem Sonatorrek, from which this verse is taken. The A redaction in Möðruvallabók lists only the first verse. The absence of the remaining verses in the other manuscript copies raises the question of whether the audience was expected to be familiar with them and/​or whether the speaker would have delivered them by memory. Alternatively, they may have simply been later interpolations, although both the A and C versions mention the poem irrespective of whether they are copied in or not. Vésteinn Ólason has suggested that the poems were known to the author of the saga as well as the intended audience, and so not included in the manuscript copies, implying that they pre-​date the writing of the saga: Samræður við söguöld: Frásagnarlist Íslendingasagna og fortíðarmynd (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, Háskólaforlag Máls og menningar, 1998), p. 136. 28 The kenning ‘þriggja niðja’ is generally assumed to be an orthographic error for ‘friggjar niðja’ (the progeny of Frigg –​i.e. the æsir or gods). The ‘prize’ carried from the world of the giants is, in turn, poetry. In simplistic rephrasing, the lines thus express the difficulty of enunciating the poetry by virtue of the voice literally being broken by a sob or sobbing. 29 See S. Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts, Studies in Old Norse Literature I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 86–​91. 30 Memory as a cognitive faculty seems generally to be placed in the heart in Old Norse sources, although there is some evidence of the influence of the Latin scholastic theory of memory residing in the head: B. Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘The head, the heart, and the breast: bodily conceptions of emotion and cognition in Old Norse skaldic poetry’, Viking and 64; see also C. Vondenhoff, Medieval Scandinavia, 15 (2019), 29–​ ‘Matter(s) of the heart in Yvain and Ívens saga’, in K. Barclay and B. Reddan (eds), The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 67 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); and Nordal, Tools of Literacy, pp. 271–​308. Egill’s poetry envisages the poetical composition as taking place in the heart, and it is then, notably, delivered (poured forth) through his mouth –​i.e. via his voice. 31 See S. Rikhardsdottir, ‘Medieval emotionality: the feeling subject in medieval literature’, Comparative Literature, 69:1 (2017), 74–​90 (p. 79). For an in-​depth discussion of the metaphoric significance of the head of Egill, see B. S. Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Primum caput: um höfuð Egils Skalla-​ Grímssonar, John frá Salisbury o.fl.’, Skáldskaparmál, 4 (1997), 74–​96.

112

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Voice, materiality and history

211

32 D. Vance Smith indeed notes with respect to the Middle English poem that ‘[t]‌o imagine history, as the English Middle Ages did, as a series of translations from one place to another (Troy to London) or of cultural imperatives (the translatio studii and translatio imperii) is also to imagine it as a series of emptied receptacles, a series of graves’ (‘Crypt and decryption’, p. 66). This applies equally well to Old Norse history, except that what we see here in the reconstruction of history is an overlayering of graves, with the old ones subsumed by and incorporated into the new order.

11 Embodying the Mandevillean voice Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sarah Salih*

I, Sir John Mandeville, have travelled to here and here, seen this wonder and that, and returned home. Believe me. What I have said is true, or as good as, or was once.1

Mandeville’s Travels makes its world in a distinctive, beguiling voice, a voice that persists through the many iterations of the text, right up to Matthew Francis’s ‘pitch-​perfect medieval voice’ of 2008.2 The Mandevillean voice generated bodies and material traces despite, or because of, the obscurity of its source, for Mandeville himself was probably fictitious. Medieval reception of the text shows readerly investment in his historical reality, however: the Mandevillean reading community collaboratively constructed him as author and scholar, knight, traveller and Englishman. The historical author-​compiler-​editor-​translator of the original French text of Mandeville’s Travels remains unknown; recent ­discoveries and arguments only complicate the picture further. M. C. Seymour has disposed of the Liège Mandeville impersonation circle, disproving Jean d’Outremeuse’s identification of the Liège physician Jean de Bourgogne as Mandeville’s alter ego, a claim that had been influential enough to persuade Paul Hamelius, editing the Middle English Cotton version in 1923, that d’Outremeuse himself was ‘in all probability the real author of the Travels’.3 Seymour further argues that the author ‘was not an Englishman [...] and his name was not “Sir John Mandeville” ’, and more tentatively proposes the monk Jean le Long of St Bertin or ‘someone like him’ as a possible author.4 C. W. R. D. Moseley is more sympathetic to the possibility of an English author, while Anthony Bale doubts the attribution to Jean le Long on the grounds of the Mandeville-​author’s inferior Latinity.5 Linda Lomperis wonders, on the basis of no evidence

312

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

213

whatsoever, but in a playfully Mandevillean spirit: ‘[M]‌ ight the Mandeville-​narrator “himself” have been … a woman who has successfully passed as a world traveler, a “man about town”, a “Man de ville”?’6 Further attention to the Anglo-​Norman Mandeville dynasty has strengthened the circumstantial case for an English origin and identified a John Mandeville of the right period, but no known John Mandeville can be definitely identified as a knight, author or traveller, or connected with St Albans, let alone all four.7 Iain MacLeod Higgins sets aside the whole question on the grounds that, ‘[i]n a decidedly untrivial sense, The Book is the product of more than one person’ and studies instead the ‘multinodal network’ of its variants.8 He is right, of course; yet this communally authored text continues to give the impression of personality and voice. Higgins distinguishes ‘the Mandeville-​author’ from ‘his textual stand-​in, Sir John’, a differentiation of author and in-​text narrator familiar to readers of Chaucer or Langland.9 Yet this distinction obscures another division in the mode of the text: that between positions that might be named, following Michel de Certeau, as the ‘voyeur’ and the ‘walker’. The voyeur, a ‘solar Eye, looking down like a god’,10 corresponds to the authoritative Mandeville, who relays encyclopedic knowledge to his readers, informing them of the roundness of the Earth, the life cycle of the barnacle goose or the legend of the ‘feld floridous’; the Mandeville-​walker is the eye-​ witness who traverses the Earth’s surface and recounts his embodied experience of conversing with the sultan, drinking from the Well of Youth and crossing the Vale of Devils.11 Neither of these can be identified with their author, the still inaccessible figure who, presumably, invented the character of Mandeville. Both perspectives share the even tone of the Mandevillean voice, so that transitions between them slip seamlessly by: there is ‘anoþer yle whare þe folk beþ alle feþeris but þe visage and þe pawmes of here hondis’, yet this is not direct knowledge, for ‘we wolde gladliche haue go þider but I trowe an hundred m. men of armes schulde not passe þat wildernesses for grete plente of wilde beestis’ (p. 127). The second phrase belongs to the embodied Mandeville, prudently deciding against exposing that body to the risks of the wilderness journey, while the first conveys information derived from the writings or reports of others, yet the continuity of voice slides over the transition between positions.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Medieval readers not only believed Mandeville’s Travels when it claimed to be written by Sir John Mandeville but also created supplements to flesh out the voice of the book. As David Lawton writes, ‘the “I” of Mandeville’ does not belong to Mandeville but is imported from the various first persons of the source texts, yet readers have always ‘been tempted to construct these multiples into a continuous narrator’.12 The Mandevillean first person is ‘less selfportrayal than organizational’, argues C. David Benson; the voice of the Travels is a device that unifies and animates the impersonal materials of the text.13 ‘For to speke of Ierusalem, ȝe schal vndirstonde þat it stondiþ faire among hullis’ (p. 27): the speaking of mere geography creates a relation between the informative ‘Y’ of the book and the learning ‘ȝe’ of the reader. Common knowledge takes on the distinct flavour of Mandeville’s personality. This tone prompts the development of the mere narrative ‘I’ into a character, a character who then becomes embodied in illustrated manuscripts and in real-​world sites, and further developed in textual adaptations. Affable, knowledgeable, modest ‘al it be þat Y be not worþi’ (p. 5) but valued by great men such as the sultan; pious yet discriminating in his assessment of holy sites and relics; brave enough to admit to his fear in the Valley of Devils; he is a convincing, companionable presence. The Mandevillean position is, in Lawton’s terms, a public interiority: ‘Public interiorities are pieces of language –​as speech or text –​which already exist before they are revoiced by a new user … [T]‌heir revoicing then gains resonance from the fact that they are shared.’14 The original Mandeville-​author revoiced the travels of Odoric of Pordenone and of William of Boldensele, and generations of readers then joined the Mandevillean game with their own revoicings and reinterpretations. Medieval translators usually had latitude to adapt, but Mandeville’s, as Higgins shows, were remarkably interventionist, ‘as though they were equal in authority to the author himself’.15 Impersonating what was already an impersonation, they found in Mandeville a shareable position; even readers who probably thought he was a real person nevertheless felt able to appropriate him. Adaptations continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; belief in Mandeville’s historical existence survived the exposure of the fantastic elements of his geography, and he was remembered as ‘one of the heroes of England and one of the pioneers of English expansion overseas’.16 Even in the late

512

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

215

nineteenth century, Carolyn Dinshaw shows, the Mandevillean voice was appropriated to speak to the present: ‘[Andrew] Lang determines that the British Empire realizes the project of Mandeville, fulfils the past in a glorious neomedieval present.’17 Thomas White comments on that nineteenth-​ century rediscovery that ‘to read Mandeville’s Book in [Sir George F.] Warner’s edition is to confront the imbrication of a burgeoning medieval studies, an elite medievalism, and the geopolitics of the New Imperialism’.18 Now, in the empire’s aftermath, the Mandevillean voice is still a usable site, in, for example, Francis’s poetry sequence, characterising Mandeville as a detached, disinterested veteran traveller who delivers a meditation on diversity and wonder.19 Such claims to the Mandevillean position continue the practice of his medieval editors and readers. The character of Mandeville exceeded the text: the narrative’s gestures to what is left out –​two whole untold romances of Mandeville’s service with the sultan and the Great Khan, say –​invited supplements. Even minor adjustments tend to elaborate the character. The fifteenth-​ century Metrical Version casts him as the protagonist of a popular romance: Som time in Engelonde was a knyght, A fers man boothe stronge and wyght. He was a man of noble fame, Sir Iohn Mavndevile was his name, And in Seinte Albones he was born, And his auncestres hym biforn. And yitte in Engelonde, wete ye wele, Of his kynne þere liven ful fele.20

Without doing much more than adding emphasis, the Metrical Version thus plays up Mandeville’s knightly prowess and his Englishness, confirming his presumed membership of the Anglo-​ Norman Mandeville dynasty. John Capgrave, from the same fifteenth-​ century East Anglian milieu as the Metrical Version, shared the patriotism, but shifted the emphasis from the military and aristocratic to the writerly and scholarly, citing Mandeville as an authorising precedent for writing up an account of pilgrimage and the strange things encountered there: Eke jon maundeuyle knyth of yngland aftir his labour made a book ful solacious on to his nacyoun. Aftyr all þese grete cryeris of many

216

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wonderfull þingis I wyl folow with a smal pypying of swech straunge sitis as I haue seyn and swech straunge þingis as I haue herd. No man blame me þow he be leue not þat I schal write for I schal not write but þat I fynde in auctores & þat is for a principall, or ellis þat I sey with eye and þat is for a secundari, or ellis þat I suppose is soth lete þat be of best auctorite.21

Capgrave implicitly recognises Mandeville’s use of pre-​ existing sources, concluding that responsible travel writing combines eye-​ witness accounts with the use of reliable textual authorities, and, indeed, Capgrave followed what he must have presumed to be Mandevillean practice, writing up his book on his return home, supplementing his memory and notes by using other books.22 Capgrave’s style of devout and erudite pilgrimage writing, mixing information and devotional material with first-​ person commentary and observation, also has a Mandevillean flavour. And, perhaps, the outline of a widely travelled knight-​pilgrim, notable for both piety and prowess, of modest demeanour yet unquestioned authority, might have caught the attention of Geoffrey Chaucer.23 Reading the Travels with attention to the Mandevillean persona foregrounds it as a ‘romance of travel’, a knight errant’s tale of his quest and return.24 It is possible to put together a selective but coherent narrative of travel’s effect on him: Stephen Greenblatt identifies a journey from ‘the dream of recovery, return, reoccupation, and hence repossession’ to the ‘renunciation’ of ‘the knight of non-possession’.25 Opening with the proposition that Christian lords ‘owe to calenge þe heritage þat oure fader left to vs’ (p. 4) by reconquering Jerusalem, Mandeville is schooled through successive encounters with other Christians, other Abrahamic monotheists, outright pagans and actual monsters, all of whose practices mirror or correct his own. He is untroubled by the variant practices of Eastern Orthodox Christians and discovers that Muslims too ‘haue many goode poyntes of oure fey’ (p. 59), that the people of ‘þe yle of Canaa’ who worship ‘þe firste þing þat þei meten in þe morwenyng’ (pp. 72–​3) are on reflection effectively neo-​Platonic monotheists and that the king of the anthropophagous cynocephali is ‘a grete lord and deuout in his feiȝ’ (p. 85) who rules an orderly society. This tour through ‘many dyuerse folk and cuntrez’ (p. 64) leads to the conclusion that ‘men schulde noȝt haue many men in dispyt for þeire dyuerse lawis, for we wote not whom God loueþ ne whom he

712

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

217

hatiþ’ (p. 127). Immersion in the world teaches Mandeville that it is bigger than he thought, and to postpone territorial aggression while Latin Christendom instead undergoes self-​examination and moral reform. This is a selective narrative: it overstates the coherence of the book, overlooking, as Greenblatt notes, its recurrent paranoia about the apocalyptic intentions of the Jews, and its condemnations of ‘yuel folk’ (p. 85) such as those of Melk.26 But it is selected from material that is there in the book, and gives Mandeville a coherent arc; it is a reading that teaches well. In this telling, Mandeville is a kind of Grail knight who, on reaching Jerusalem, turns aside to challenge his assumptions and expand his horizons, and finally returns home with his faith enlarged and transformed. Like Langland’s Will, with whom he shares five manuscripts, he goes out into the world seeking truth; like Julian of Norwich, he ends up not with an answer but an attitude, of humble acceptance of the limits of what can be known.27 The credibility of such a persona-​centred reading of the Travels was reinforced by evidence of Mandeville’s historical existence. For someone who probably did not exist, Mandeville left a substantial trace in the material world of the later Middle Ages. He had a tombstone in Liège, giving his date of death as 1372; in mid-​fifteenth-​ century Liège, local people pointed visitors to the house where it was claimed he had lived in retirement after his travels.28 He was also buried in the church of St Albans Abbey: John Norden’s 1598 Speculum Britanniae attests: ‘In this Abbey church lyeth buried famous Sir Iohn Mandeuile liuely formed in a marble stone: whose trauayles in forraine regions and rare reportes, are at this time admired through the world.’29 Presumably the effigy of some less celebrated knight had been repurposed. A pier in what is now St Albans Cathedral still carries an inscription testifying to his burial ‘hic’, in the building, and the cathedral’s guide to the inscriptions holds out the hope that the sixteenth-​century signature scratched below it ‘may or may not be Mandeville’s own’.30 Whoever carved the signature must have been prompted by the memorial to occupy a Mandevillean position with their own body; their transitory appropriation of the Mandevillean voice then produced a further, enduring, trace. The Travels, which describe a world full of relics of presence, generated an author who left material relics of his presence that persist to the present day.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

218

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Illustrations of the Travels develop diverse interpretations of its author and protagonist that embody the textual voice. The British Library holds three extensively illuminated Mandevilles, with image programmes entirely independent of one another and showing markedly different responses to the text. MS Royal 17.C.xxxviii, a copy of the Defective Version, has 113 marginal images, with a preference for Christian imagery and the natural world; it has no interest in the Mandevillean persona or narrative voice, and, that negative example noted, it thus makes no further contribution to the current analysis.31 British Library, MS Harley 3954, another Defective text, is mid-​fifteenth-​century East Anglian, so it circulated somewhere in the vicinity of Capgrave, and of the Metrical Version.32 Its incomplete and amateurish but enthusiastic cycle of 99 images favours the exotic, and depicts the Mandeville-​persona 23 times. Several critics have thought that its compact ‘holster’ format may have been suitable for travel; the book also contains Piers Plowman and some didactic and devotional material.33 It could be a pilgrimage anthology, a portable library of the theory and practice of pilgrimage, equally useful either for virtual pilgrimage or to take on a real-​world journey. Mandeville and Piers Plowman are both, in their different ways, books that want to be about everything, and that take the structure of the pilgrimage journey as the framework for making sense of that everything. Mandeville was certainly used by pilgrims; Anthony Bale examines three who made the trip to Jerusalem and ‘experienced and mediated their actual travels through Mandeville’s “solacious” text’.34 The shorter texts in Harley are broadly useful guides to daily conduct, with occasional moments of more direct relevance to a pilgrim. The narrator of the devotional poem ‘As reason ruled my reckless mind’ is ‘[b]‌e a wey wanderyng’ when he meets the mourning Virgin, prompting a visionary pilgrimage to Christ’s grave, and the ‘Infancy of Christ’ turns the Flight into Egypt into a Mandevillean contemplation of wonders: ‘Our lady gan gon /​Be vnkout weys þat she ne knewe: /​She sey lyonys, lebbardes, many on.’35 If this is a pilgrim’s volume, its embodiment of the Mandevillean voice would contribute to such a use. Mandeville is the subject of the very first illustration of the Harley manuscript (Figure 11.1; fol. 1r), in a scene that draws reasonable inferences from the text and highlights his biography as central to the book. He appears on the left of the picture in smart

912

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

219

Figure 11.1  Mandeville begins his journey, from Mandeville’s Travels.

secular dress, a pleated tunic with scalloped edges, an elaborate neck chain and flamboyant hat, taking leave of his companions; his toe touches the toe of his other self to the right, where he kneels, wearing the simple pilgrim’s mantle and broad hat that will see him through the journey, to receive a priest’s blessing as he sets off for Jerusalem. The illustrator visualises the knight-​pilgrim by showing the moment of transition from one state to the other; his reading leaves it unexplained how and when Mandeville might have fitted military service with the sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan into his pilgrimage, but, then, so does the text. Thereafter the Harley illustrator characterises Mandeville as pilgrim rather than knight; beginning the picture cycle with his adoption of the pilgrim identity makes this as much a book about Mandeville’s pilgrimage as one about the sights of the world. This choice emphasises pilgrimage as a break from everyday life, a state in which one might expect to encounter the extraordinary. A reader of the Harley manuscript thus might be prompted to read Mandeville as a book of self-​transformation, and to pay further attention to that strand of

220

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

it that calls for reform. This focus on pilgrimage is an interpretive choice, one not taken, for example, by the British Library’s third illuminated copy, the magnificent Textless Version, British Library, MS Additional 24189.36 The Textless presents approximately the first half of the book, based on the Czech translation, in 28 full-​page grisaille images; its Mandeville is not styled as a pilgrim but as an elegant secular gentleman on his grand tour (Figure 11.2; fol. 4v).

Figure 11.2  Mandeville the traveller, from Mandeville’s Travels.

122

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

221

The Textless and Harley manuscripts depict all the iterations of Mandeville: author, voyeur and walker; the illustrative cycles naturalise and concretise the textual voice. The images continue the voice’s project of uniting the disparate materials of the text into a story of embodied experience. The Textless opens with an image sequence that concerns the writing and transmission of the text. The first image (fol. 3r) shows Otto van Diemeringen, the German translator, hard at work translating in his comfortable study; the second (fol. 3v), possibly out of sequence, introduces Mandeville the traveler; and the third is Mandeville the writer, busy with scroll, pen and knife (Figure 11.3; fol. 4r). Mandeville is represented here, as Sonja Drimmer notes, ‘as an author in the style of the Evangelists’; his journey completed, he is able to contemplate the world as a totality.37 This early image of the writing process thus establishes Mandeville’s authorship in an introductory sequence, framing the book itself and out of temporal sequence, as it represents the elder Mandeville, ‘ycome to rest’ (p. 135) after his life of travel. In the rest of the book the younger Mandeville appears twice more in walker mode, while the rest of the images present the sights of the world directly to the reader. Constantinople (fol. 9v), for example, is depicted not from a traveller’s ground-​level viewpoint but from an imagined aerial perspective. As de Certeau points out, ‘Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed’.38 In this book a reader may contemplate the world from a distance, from the comforts of an aristocratic home. Some images in the Harley manuscript use the same totalising perspective; its artist evidently felt that cityscapes were within his comfort zone (e.g. fol. 5v). Alongside such neutral images, however, it builds up a nuanced and multifaceted picture of the Mandevillean persona. After the knight-​pilgrim transformation, the second image of Mandeville unites the walker with the author, when at fol. 2r he takes ship from England, above the text ‘I Jon maundeuille kynth’ and the marginal comment ‘who mad þis bok’. In a lower image on the same folio (Figure 11.4) he stands in the centre of a road network leading to four cities; the image does not correspond to any specific moment in the text but is more like an ideogram of the geographical directions that dominate much of the first half of the book. It illustrates the text a few lines above it, ‘I xal tellen þe Weye’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

222

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Figure 11.3  Mandeville the author, from Mandeville’s Travels.

Thus, the figure of the Mandeville-​pilgrim is also an avatar, or persona, of the book itself, an embodiment of its knowledge-assembling voyeur-​voice. At fol. 2v this avatar appears in the margin, again showing the way, gesturing towards the route and the destination. Here he is not quite in the landscape but in some no-​man’s

322

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

223

Figure 11.4  Mandeville at the crossroads, from Mandeville’s Travels.

land from which he can oversee it –​the place, perhaps, of textual knowledge. He is a ghostly figure, in the book but not in its content, fading into or emerging from the undecorated parchment of its margins. He stands between the world depicted in the illustrations of the book and the world that the book itself is in. The Harley manuscript thus identifies itself not only as a book about the protagonist, Mandeville, but also as a book by Mandeville the author. If the Harley manuscript is indeed a pilgrim’s book, it uses the Mandeville-​ walker to model pilgrim experience for the book’s owner. The illustrative cycle often goes further than the text, giving Mandeville more detailed and intimate interactions with the world he describes. At fol. 24r, for example, monks give him food, in a picture that adds human interest to a rather dry chapter of geography and directions. It may be a picture of Antioch, described in this chapter as a fine city, with many bridges and turrets, but it does not represent any moment in this chapter when Mandeville describes eating at a monastic house, although it may have been prompted by an earlier remark that the monks of St Katherine’s mountain give food to pilgrims (p. 22). The figure of Mandeville thus supplements the text, showing a common pilgrim experience of stopping to eat, rest and worship at religious houses. Tamara Kohanski and C. David Benson point out that ‘we hear nothing about Sir John’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

224

Performative voices and medieval aurality

spiritual reaction to the Holy Land’; the Harley artist evidently made the same observation, and filled in the lacuna by ensuring that his Mandeville would experience and model a subjective spiritual response to holy sites.39 The image at fol. 13v (Figure 11.5) inserts the Mandeville-​ walker into a passage told in voyeur mode: ‘oure lady restid here when heo was delyuered of childe. And for as myche þat sche hade to mochelle melk in here pappis þat greued here, sche melkid it out vpon þe reede stones of marbel so þat ȝit may men se þe traces white vpon þe stones’ (p. 27). Mandeville the pilgrim, staring intently at the red marble stones, raising his hands in the characteristically Mandevillean attitude of wonder, shares the picture with the Virgin and Child. They are made co-​ ­present with him by the wonderful quality of the relic, which retains a trace of her bodily presence, and also by the power of text, which teaches him how to interpret the sign of the red rocks. The image visualises the ‘broad present’ of the text’s account of the Holy Land in which the biblical past rises up to greet the present-​day pilgrim.40 In the second half of the book, on the wonders of the East, Mandeville the transmitter of encyclopedic knowledge appears less often in the images, while Mandeville the walker and eye-​witness continues, gaining new notes. If this was a pilgrim’s book, its owner

Figure 11.5  Mandeville with Virgin and Child, from Mandeville’s Travels.

522

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

225

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

is unlikely to have continued beyond Jerusalem to the Far East, so its practical utility as a guidebook would have diminished. As the world becomes more marvellous and more exotic, the illustrator emphasises the dangers and distresses threatening the Mandeville-​ walker, adding emotion to the laconic text. Mandeville seems to wince and turn aside from naked, cavorting flat-​faced people, and hides in the bushes to peer out at giant-​lipped people (Figure 11.6; fol. 42v).

Figure 11.6  Mandeville observes flat-​faced and long-​lipped peoples, from Mandeville’s Travels.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

226

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Here he is a colonial anthropologist: he is clothed in the sign of his calling, the pilgrim’s hat and cloak, while his subjects are naked; restrained in his movements while they throw their bodies around wildly. The embodied proximity of the walker position, however, precludes any claim to neutrality; his bodily response betrays affect. At fol. 54r he is again in hiding, avoiding the sightline of a monstrous hippopotamus busy disembowelling its human prey, and at 54v he retreats once more to the marginal position as a griffin feeds a knight and horse to its chicks. The illustrator emphasises the human vulnerability of the eye-​witness; the devotional wonder of the previous section gives way to curiosity and fear. In the course of facing up to the dangers of the world, the Mandeville-​walker becomes identified with the Mandeville-​author. At fol. 42r (Figure 11.7) the illustrator makes giants and Blemmyes one of the visual highlights of the manuscript, awarding them almost a whole folio of illustration, in three panels with the text reduced to captions. The two lower panels feature the Mandeville-​ walker observing their antics, and the central panel shows also the book in which he records his observations, a travelling book, just like, even the same as, the one the reader holds as they examine this image. The picture shows the things of the world, and also the process of textualisation by which the world is made present in this book. It is an infinitely recursive image, a picture of a book within the book itself, which presumably has this picture of itself in its own fol. 42r, and one which speaks directly to the traveller-​ reader, who is also holding a book while looking at the sights of the world. The reader, then, would see themselves physically mirrored in Mandeville’s position as they read his words. Probably unintentionally, but unavoidably, this artist expands on the laconic Mandevillean voice, simply by giving him a visual form that unifies the positions of walker, voyeur and author. The pictures humanise the intermittently present narrator of the text. The pilgrim garb shows him to be devout and humble, and minor variations in, for example, the position of his hat produce a reality effect. The artist, despite his technical limitations, gives Mandeville character. As he sits making notes while naked giants cavort before him, he displays his fascination with what he sees, his care to record it accurately and a certain apprehension, dutifully held in check. With his knightliness obscured, this is a journalistic hero, a walker braving

722

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

Figure 11.7  Mandeville observes giants and Blemmyes, from Mandeville’s Travels.

227

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

228

Performative voices and medieval aurality

the dangers of the world in order to delight and inform his readers. He continues to wear his pilgrim clothes; he needs to, of course, to be recognised, but the cycle thus casts both parts of the book as a single journey, and the encounters with diverse wonders as contributory to Mandeville’s spiritual experience.41 The image cycle of this possible pilgrim’s book, then, supports the reading of the book as concerned with the expansion of Mandeville’s sympathies, while inviting the reader to take that journey along with him, following his footsteps, sharing his position and mirroring his reactions. Through all its journeys, the corpus is anchored in the figure of Mandeville. The memory of Mandeville the traveller testifies to the success of the Mandevillean author, but also to the contribution of the international Mandevillean reading community, whose translations, adaptations, impersonations and fan fictions claimed and continued the Mandevillean voice.

Notes * I first studied Mandeville in order to teach it on a module designed by David Lawton at the University of East Anglia. Thanks to the editors of this volume and to Lawrence Warner for their constructive criticism of drafts of this chapter. 1 M. Francis, ‘Mandeville’s farewell’, in Mandeville (London: Faber, 2008), p. 52, lines 16–​18.

2 S. Crown, ‘The banana of God’, Guardian, 29 March 2008 (available at https://​theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2008/​mar/​29/​feat​ures​revi​ews.guard​ ianr​evie​w27 [accessed 12 September 2021]). 3 Mandeville’s Travels: Translated from the French of Jean d’Outremeuse, edited from MS Cotton Titus c. XVI vol. 2, ed. P. Hamelius, EETS o.s. 154 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1923), p. 8; M. C. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), pp. 25–​36. 4 Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, pp. 13, 23–​4. 5 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 10–​ 11; Sir John Mandeville, The Book of Marvels and Travels, trans. A. Bale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. xii–​xiii. 6 L. Lomperis, ‘Medieval travel writing and the question of race’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (2001), 147–​64 (p. 160).

922

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

229

7 M. J. Bennett, ‘“Mandeville’s Travels” and the Anglo-​French moment’, Medium Ævum, 75:2 (2006), 273–​92; M. Ormrod, ‘John Mandeville, Edward III, and the king of Inde’, Chaucer Review, 46:3 (2012), 314–​39. 8 I. M. Higgins, Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 17–​18. 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 92. 11 The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour, EETS o.s. 319 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 25. This is the default edition of Mandeville for the rest of this chapter and is cited parenthetically. 12 D. Lawton, ‘The surveying subject and the whole world of belief: three case studies’, New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2000), 9–​37 (p. 25). 13 C. D. Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 135. 14 D. Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 8. 15 Higgins, Writing East, p. 18. 16 C. W. R. D. Moseley, ‘“Whet-​stone leasings of old Maundevile”: reading the Travels in early modern England’, in L. Niayesh (ed.), A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 28–​50 (39). 17 C. Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 94. 18 T. White, ‘National philology, imperial hierarchies, and the “Defective” Book of Sir John Mandeville’, Review of English Studies, 71 (2020), 828–​ 49 (p. 839); thanks to Tom for pre-​ publication access and discussion. 19 Francis, Mandeville. 20 The Metrical Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour, EETS o.s. 269 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), lines 15–​22. 21 M. C. Seymour, ‘Mandeville in England: the early years’, in Niayesh, A Knight’s Legacy, pp. 15–​ 27 (21); J. Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrims: A Description of Rome, c. 1450, ed. C. A. Mills (London: British Archaeological Society of Rome, 1911), p. 1. 22 Solace is substantially based on the Mirabilia urbis Romae and the Stations of Rome.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

230

Performative voices and medieval aurality

23 R. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study of the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 137–​8, makes this comparison. 24 See G. Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 241, on this category and Mandeville’s exemplification of it. 25 S. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 28. 26 Ibid., 50–​1. 27 A. Middleton, ‘The audience and public of Piers Plowman’, in D. Lawton (ed.), Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 101–​23; The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. N. Watson and J. Jenkins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), Revelation, 32.41–​2. 28 Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, p. 32. 29 Ibid., p. 34; J. Norden, Speculi Britan[n]‌iae pars the description of Hartfordshire (London: Thomas Dawson, 1598), p. 10. 30 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Hertford, vol. 2 (London: A. Constable, 1908), p. 505, dates the inscription; P. O’Keefe, Latin Inscriptions in St Albans Abbey, Occasional Paper (new series) 7 (St Albans: Fraternity of the Friends of St Albans Abbey, n.d.), no. 8. 31 See https://​bl.uk/​cat​alog​ues/​ill​umin​ated​manu​scri​pts/​rec​ord.asp?MSID=​ 7518&Col​lID=​16&NSt​art=​170​338 (accessed 12 September 2021). 32 See https://​bl.uk/​cat​alog​ues/​ill​umin​ated​manu​scri​pts/​rec​ord.asp?MSID=​ 4469&Col​lID=​8&NSt​art=​3954; digitised at http://​https://​bl.uk/​manu​ scri​pts/​Vie​wer.aspx?ref=​har​ley_​ms_​3​954 (accessed 12 September 2021). Simon Horobin argues for a clerical, possibly monastic, readership and notes that the LALME puts its dialect close to Thetford: ‘Harley 3954 and the audience of Piers Plowman’, in G. D. Caie and D. Renevey (eds), Medieval Texts in Context (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 68–​84 (77). 33 K. L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–​1490 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), II.209. 34 A. Bale, ‘“ut legi”: Sir John Mandeville’s audience and three late medieval English travelers to Italy and Jerusalem’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38 (2016), 201–​37 (p. 204). 35 In Political, Religious and Love Poems, from Lambeth MS. 306 and Other Sources, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS o.s. 15 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1866), pp. 238–​42, line 2; Sammlung altenglischer Legenden, ed. Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1878), pp. 101–​ 23, lines 29–​30.

132

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Embodying the Mandevillean voice

231

36 See https://​bl.uk/​cat​alog​ues/​ill​umin​ated​manu​scri​pts/​rec​ord.asp?MSID= 7 ​ 925&Coll​ ID=2 ​ 7&NSta​ rt=2 ​ 4189; digitised at http://​bl.uk/​manu​scri​pts/ ​Full​Disp​lay.aspx?ref=​Add_​M​S_​24​189 (accessed 12 September 2021). 37 S. Drimmer, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–​1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. 244, n. 11. 38 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, p. 92. 39 T. Kohanski and C. D. Benson, The Book of John Mandeville, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). 40 H. U. Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 41 Thanks to Murray MacGillivray for this point.

12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Reconstructing Christine de Pizan’s musical voice in the twenty-​first century Louise D’Arcens

Despite her abundant output over more than three decades and across several genres, only one musical setting of Christine de Pizan’s work survives: the plaintive ballade ‘Dueil angoisseus, rage desmesurée’ (‘Anguished grief, rage beyond measure’), one of her Cent ballades (1402), which was turned into a chanson in the 1420s or 1430s by her younger contemporary, the renowned Franco-​ Flemish composer Gilles Binchois (1400–​60). Called ‘the most desperately sad song of the late Middle Ages’ by Anna Zayaruznaya,1 its melancholy setting, as I go on to discuss, reinforces the expression of boundless suffering expressed by Christine’s lyric persona using techniques of accumulation and disjointed syntax: Dueil engoisseux, rage desmesurée, Grief desespoir, plein de forsennement, Langour sanz fin, vie maleürée Pleine de plour, d’engoisse et de tourment, Cuer doloreux qui vit obscurement, Tenebreux corps sus le point de partir Ay, sanz cesser, continuellement; Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir. Fierté, durté de joye separée, Triste penser, parfont gemissement, Engoisse grant en las cuer enserrée, Courroux amer porté couvertement, Morne maintien sanz resjoïssement, Espoir dolent qui tous biens fait tarir, Si sont en moy, sanz partir nullement; Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir. Soussi, anuy qui tous jours a durée, Aspre veillier, tressaillir en dorment,

332

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

233

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Labour en vain, a chiere alangourée En grief travail infortunéement, Et tout le mal, qu’on puet entierement Dire et penser sanz espoir de garir, Me tourmentent desmesuréement; Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir. Princes, priez à Dieu qui bien briefment Me doint la mort, s’autrement secourir Ne veult le mal ou languis durement; Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir. [Anguished grief, measureless rage, grievous despair, full of madness, endless pining and cursed life full of tears, anguish and torment, doleful heart which lives in darkness, ghostly body at the point of death, are mine ceaselessly, continually, and from them I can neither be healed nor die. //​Disdain, the harshness of being torn from joy, sad thoughts, deep sighing, Great anguish locked in the weary heart, bitterness borne secretly, mournful demeanour without joy, sad hope which dries up all good, These are in me, never leaving, and from them I can neither be healed nor die. //​Cares and worries which have gone on forever, bitter waking, shuddering in sleep, vain labour, with languishing face, Doomed in grievous travail, And all the ills that one could ever speak or think of, without hope of cure, torment me immeasurably, and from them I can neither be cured nor die. //​Princes, pray to God that he will very soon grant me death, if he otherwise will not deliver me from the evils in which I wither drastically, and from them I can neither be cured nor die.]2

It is accepted that Christine was not herself the composer of this chanson’s music, or, indeed, any other music; but the fact that this poem was set to music within her own lifetime or soon afterwards, and the fact that its expression of bereavement readily maps on to her own loss as a young widow, has meant that it has been prized as the sole remnant of what is perceived to be Christine’s ‘musical voice’. This perception has meant that the song has had a dynamic performative afterlife. In the last two decades alone it has appeared in multiple renditions, in live performance and audio recordings, sometimes with accompanying videos. Despite the myriad musicological obstacles involved in this undertaking –​including, crucially, uncertainty about what a medieval singing voice would have sounded like –​which in turn fuel anxieties around accuracy and authenticity, virtually all modern renditions

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

234

Performative voices and medieval aurality

claim in their own way to have captured something of Christine’s voice. This claim, as I argue, is not purely or even primarily musicological but, rather, imbues Christine’s voice imaginatively with historical and ideological values that are inextricable from perceptions of her femaleness, her Frenchness and, more amorphously, her ‘medievalness’. Analysing two starkly different twenty-​first-​century recordings of ‘Dueil angoisseus’, one by the European early music ensemble VocaMe and the other by the French black metal band Peste Noire, I wish to explore the combination of sounds (including vocalisations) and values that are deemed to converge in Christine’s ‘musical voice’, and what this tells us about her musical and cultural legacy in our own time. In so doing, I wish to show how musical performance, which Helen Dell has described as a rich but under-​ examined area of medievalism,3 is significant because of what it reveals about wider modern perceptions of ‘medieval voices’ and their ongoing, and wide-​ranging, significance today. Distinguishing and analysing Christine’s singular ‘voice’ has an established pedigree in scholarship on her work since the 1980s. Although the conceptual formulation of voice has generally gone undeclared in this scholarship, a number of recognisable approaches are amalgamated within it. The first approach has been preoccupied with anatomising what can be described as Christine’s enunciative voice –​that is, the distinctive subjectivity and speaking position she adopts in her separate works and develops across her oeuvre. The concepts of énonciation and enunciative voice have been elaborated most exhaustively in fields such as pragmatic linguistics and semiotics, where they refer to the communicative position from which linguistic meaning is produced, as well as to utterances that call attention to themselves as acts of meaning making.4 The obvious application of this to literature, especially genres such as lyric poetry that call attention to their own use of first-​person perspective, has seen the concept of enunciative voice adapted to literary studies, where it dovetails with available rhetorical and literary terms such as topos and persona. An influential earlier example in Christine studies is Daniel Poirion’s 1965 description of the ‘personnage triste’5 that she repeatedly and self-​consciously adopts –​a solitary, forlorn and closely deictic voice that brings emotional force to the ballades written during her early widowhood, including ‘Dueil angoisseus’ and the poem for which she is most famous today, ‘Seulete suy’ (‘Alone am I’).

532

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

235

This enunciative conceptualisation of voice has tended not to operate alone, but is more commonly found in the company of another more expansive concept that was taken up widely in the humanities in the wake of Michel Foucault: the idea of voice as expressing a discursive position. This has proved more productive than an isolated treatment of enunciative voice, as it discloses how the author’s voice reflects its involvement in larger textual, social and institutional conversations and practices, and its enmeshment within what Foucault calls dispositifs: apparatuses of power and knowledge production.6 By this account, ‘voice’ discloses the position the text occupies in relation to discourses, practices and apparatuses that shape it –​a position that might be compliant, subversive or resistant. Returning to Christine’s early ballades, this blended enunciative-​discursive concept of voice has added depth to our understanding of the ‘personnage triste’ of her early lyrics. Because it reveals how that voice has emerged out of her engagement with medieval discursive traditions around emotion, widowhood and social critique, it exposes the critical perspective of a voice that might otherwise seem to be offering only a courtly enunciation of grief. Feminist interpretations since the 1980s have particularly availed themselves of this idea of voice to explore how Christine constructs and positions her literary subjectivity as a subversive or openly defiant response to the hegemonic gender ideologies of her time.7 This has also proved attractive to feminist analysis because it corresponds to the widely used social justice trope in which resistance is figured as a voice being raised to break the silence imposed by the dominant order. Judging by Tracy Adams’s 2017 report on the state of the field, the critical focus on Christine’s voice as enunciative-​ discursive, which seems to have peaked in the 1990s, has given way to digital humanities approaches such as stylometric analyses, which identify her textual voice (or voices) as the effect of detectable word clusters across her career.8 Nevertheless, the abiding appeal of ‘voice’ as a metaphor encompassing Christine’s singular lyric identity is evident in its continued scholarly invocation up to the present. Of particular interest here is the fact that this formulation appears even in recent musicologically inflected analyses of ‘Dueil angoisseus’. These have tended to consider Binchois’s musical setting, including its use of fundamental physical properties of vocal music (breath,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

236

Performative voices and medieval aurality

pitch, intonation, rhythm), in terms of how it renders the intense emotional and expressive register of Christine’s enunciation of sorrow. Patricia E. Black, for instance, argues that Binchois’s use of rhythmic and harmonic structures is effective because they convey the ballade’s disjointed syntax and its persona’s changing patterns of emotional surging and stillness, which in turn express the sorrowful semantic content.9 In a bravura reading of Binchois’s composition, Zayaruznaya similarly argues that the brilliance of Binchois’s setting lies, among other things, in its use of metrical ambiguity and its inclusion of maximae (the longest notes available to medieval composers, several times longer in value than today’s semibreve) to create a voice that is literally sanz mesure. This musical voice corresponds sonically and temporally to the persona’s verbal expression of ceaseless suffering, rendering physically, through the sheer length of the note, the lyric voice driven by suffering to the limits of voicelessness.10 Turning to recent audio recordings of ‘Dueil angoisseus’, one might expect to find that a preoccupation with voice as an instrument of musical expression would take precedence over the scholarly idea of Christine’s enunciative-​discursive voice. Yet looking at the paratextual materials in the CD pack of VocaMe’s 2015 recording Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, it is clear that the scholarly idea of voice still anchors their musical project. The essay in the CD’s booklet ends with the statement: ‘When VocaMe’s four women’s voices offer a new musical interpretation of Christine’s ornate songs and ballades, then we hear again, in striking clarity, the voice of this great Franco-​Italian woman living on the threshold of modernity.’11 The music’s main purpose is to be a conduit that reanimates Christine’s voice. By this account, the chief purpose of the female vocalists in the ensemble is less musical than historical: their singing reanimates Christine’s poetic voice. This persistent privileging of Christine as a poet in this musical context is less unexpected when we take into account the fact that VocaMe commissioned the CD essay from Margarete Zimmermann, German translator of Le livre de la cité des dames and eminent author of books and essays on Christine. Given Zimmermann’s shaping role in medieval feminist scholarship in the 1990s, when voice was a leitmotif (her own essay ‘Vox feminae, vox politica: the Lamentacion sur les maulx de la France’

732

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

237

reflects this emphasis), it is not surprising that this motif again figures in the VocaMe essay. Opening by quoting the first line of Le Ditié Jehanne d’Arc, Christine’s celebration of Joan of Arc’s victory at Orléans, the essay asks: ‘[W]‌hose voice is this which at the end of July 1429, raised in the midst of the uproar and tumult of the Hundred Years War, and speaking up with the self-​assured phrase “I Christine”, created the very first poetic monument to … Joan of Arc?’12 Although Zimmermann argues that Christine herself cautioned her audiences not to confuse ‘the lyrical ego portrayed and her own real historical existence’, the biographical thrust of the essay closely entwines poetic and historical utterance, concluding its narrative by looping back to Le Ditié Jehanne d’Arc as Christine’s final words before her ‘smart, polemical and critical voice … falls silent forever’.13 Lest this emphasis on authorial voice seem to come only from literary scholars imposing their priorities on a musical endeavour (and the scholarly credentials are truly impressive: Zimmermann’s essay is translated into English by Earl Jeffrey Richards, the Cite des dames’ English translator), in fact it accords closely with the mission expressed by VocaMe’s musical director, Michael Popp, who says ‘we made a CD that can be seen as a soundtrack to her life and work’.14 Indeed, the ensemble’s practice has been shaped by the belief that modern vocal performance can call up the presence of extraordinary medieval women. Forming as a group in 2008 after they ‘discovered’ the hymns composed by the ninth-​century Byzantine abbess Kassia, they went on to release CDs of both Kassia’s and Hildegard of Bingen’s sacred music before turning to Christine’s courtly verse. In this respect, VocaMe is typical of the numerous female polyphonic vocal groups whose success in a formerly male-​dominated field has been achieved, as John Potter has noted, through focusing on the female medieval repertoire.15 What sets Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades apart is its creation, in lieu of a surviving musical corpus from Christine’s pen, of an essentially imaginary musical repertoire for Christine through the use of contrafacta, arranging her poems to fit with already existing medieval music. The exact process for deciding which music best captures Christine’s voice is somewhat opaque: the tracks themselves remain unattributed, with only a brief note at the end of the album’s sleeve stating that they ‘received musical inspiration from works by

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

238

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Gilles Binchois, Bernart de Ventadorn and others’. This allusion to unattributed ‘inspiration’ as the principle for musical reconstruction contrasts strongly with the conspicuous scholarliness surrounding their use of images in the CD booklet, which are given precise manuscript and folio attributions, and their use of Christine’s verbal text, which scrupulously references Maurice Roy’s Œuvres poétiques, Jacqueline Cerquiglini’s edition of the Cent ballades d’Amant et de Dame and Angus Kennedy and Kenneth Varty’s edition of Le Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc. This difference in approach is striking, considering music is the central pillar of their reconstructive practice. Looking at VocaMe’s accounts of their earlier work, however, it is clear that this notion of ‘inspiration’ has been at the heart of their interpretive philosophy for some time. The commentary on the ensemble’s website for their album Inspiration –​Hildegard von Bingen: Songs and Visions, which repeats text from that CD’s booklet, states that ‘inspired music such as this needs to be revitalised with inspiration’. The process of inspiration is one in which ‘intuitive and, by definition, artistic and creative’ approaches balance out academic methods for reconstructing medieval vocal music. A parallel is drawn between this privileging of inspiration and Hildegard’s view of her own compositions: notwithstanding her great learning, Popp describes her as an avowed indocta whose fleeting period of composition was the result of divine auditiones. Inspiration is ultimately claimed to be ‘essential and ultimately “more authentic” than the modern method for providing a rational explanation for everything’.16 In claiming this, Popp weighs in to a seemingly intractable decades-​old debate among early music scholars and practitioners about authenticity: what it is, how to achieve it and whether it is possible. Although a voluminous amount has been written on this issue, the contours of the discussion are readily summarised. All parties acknowledge the difficulties of knowing what medieval music was like, and the impossibility of reconstructing it without some element of distortion,17 but concerns around reproduction of musical voice vary widely. Some, such as scholar and practitioner Benjamin Bagby, have expressed concern that modern performers who abandon an aspiration to historical authenticity risk ‘trivialising’ the Middle Ages, claiming of medieval music that

932

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

239

‘no other “historical” music is … fated to absorb such intense projections and fantasies from its modern performers’.18 Others are less troubled and are ultimately guided by aesthetic priorities, arguing that performers must necessarily reconcile themselves to being guided by informed speculation. Renowned instrumentalist and consort director René Clemencic, for instance, has advocated strongly for performance practice as a starting point, arguing against both the possibility and the desirability of reconstructing medieval music guided only by scholarly knowledge.19 VocaMe is far from unique, then, in taking a position on the thorny issue of authenticity. What stands out, though, is the extent to which their perception of their endeavour’s authenticity rests on a belief in the evocative –​indeed, invocational –​power of harmonising human voices. Again, their paratextual materials are revealing on this point. In a promotional video for their Christine de Pizan album, one of the ensemble’s singers, soprano Gerlinde Sämann, puts it thus: ‘The better we sing together and really enter into this homogeneous fourfold sound, the nearer we come to a fifth voice, an invisible voice, which actually enfolds or unites our four voices.’20 It is tempting to infer that this ‘fifth voice’ is Christine’s: indeed, as much is suggested in the closing line of Zimmermann’s biographical essay, quoted above, in which she claims that the ensemble’s performances enable Christine to ‘live again’. But in the video it soon becomes apparent that, for VocaMe, the power of voice is more numinous than this: Popp adds that ‘we like to talk about the “invisible fifth voice” or “the quintessence”, the fifth element arising from the interaction of the four elements’. Judging by the vocal style of the performances, this quintessence is not achieved by just any kind of vocalisation; the singers’ uniformly reduced vibrato and restrained volume conform to what Potter calls ‘the accepted Early Music sound’. Potter astutely describes this style, which is also often performed and recorded in reverberant spaces such as cathedrals, as ‘fulfilling the requirement for metaphorical and acoustic distance’21 –​that is, conveying an ambience of ‘medievalness’. This vocal style is more atmospheric than historically attested: Timothy J. McGee states that it is especially difficult to ascertain ‘what sound was considered desirable’ in medieval song; voices cannot be reconstructed, and there is comparatively

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

240

Performative voices and medieval aurality

less extant written and pictorial material to offer precise guidance.22 Its perceived evocative quality would explain why VocaMe has resorted to the ineffable ‘medieval’ acoustic so widely favoured today to construct a musical voice that can, in turn, satisfactorily convey Christine’s enunciative voice. Listeners will not be surprised to discover, in light of VocaMe’s comments, that they make extensive use of polyphony across the majority of the album’s contrafacta versions of Christine’s poems. These songs, performed a capella or with drone and/​ or string accompaniments, feature a lively contrapuntal interweaving of the four singers’ voices that would appear to embody perfectly their belief in the invocational powers of four-​part harmony. These companionable and sometimes even playful vocal dances can seem for modern readers to be at odds with the tropes of solitude and loneliness that have become attached to Christine’s ballade voice, and which are abundant throughout the de Pizan/​Binchois chanson. There is, of course, a solid historical rationale for the use of polyphony based on the surviving music of fifteenth-​century courts in France, which reflects the popularity of polyphonic vocal music, and in particular the Burgundian contenance angloise style. And, of course, the extant notated music of Binchois’s setting of ‘Dueil angoisseus’, the uniqueness of which in Christine’s oeuvre endows it with significant evidentiary weight, is polyphonic; Popp confirms in the same interview that it is the model used for selecting the music for other arrangements of Christine’s poems. Nevertheless, VocaMe still give equal weight to their ‘inspired’ pursuit of a ‘quintessence’ beyond the notated page as a vital means of making Christine present. Given the predominance of fourfold polyphonic singing across the album, it is all the more surprising that when the ensemble actually came to record ‘Dueil angoisseus’, they opted for an arrangement that emphatically does not use polyphony but instead features a solo voice with a delicate plucked lute accompaniment. This arrangement differs not just from Binchois’s rich multi-​part vocal setting but also from well-​known earlier interpretations of the song, such as the Gothic Voices’ 1987 recording on The Castle of Fair Welcome under the direction of Christopher Page, which features the full complement of cantus (sung as soprano), tenor and two countertenors. This quite remarkable decision to stray away

142

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

241

from the only extant medieval musical setting of Christine’s work, which would seem to violate their mission to restore her medieval voice, might be explained by a greater desire to convey the solitude of her ballade persona to a twenty-​first-​century ­audience. Zayaruznaya, discussing the difference between medieval and modern aesthetic-​ emotional regimes, argues that post-​ romantic expressive tastes might lead modern listeners to (in her view mistakenly) regard Binchois’s polyphonic version as insufficiently bereft for the cri de cœur of the abandoned: as too ordered, too restrained and, most of all, too collective to convey an experience of grieving isolation.23 Edward Breen concurs in his review of VocaMe’s album for Gramophone: although this arrangement of the song forgoes the ‘extraordinary blazes of F major’ that are a highlight of Binchois’s’ polyphony, he concedes that by having the cantus voice sung as a solo it ‘gains a more modern sense of melancholy’.24 This explanation is further corroborated by the fact that the album’s only other solo vocal arrangement is for its rendition of Christine’s most famous mourning ballade, ‘Seulete suy’, which is often today paired as a companion piece with ‘Dueil angoisseus’, as they both feature personae in states of unrelenting grief. It seems here that the ensemble has decided that Christine’s sorrowful ‘quintessence’ is best produced by a single voice. The longer duration of Binchois’s setting is one feature that distinguishes it from its poetic source. His inclusion of melismatic passages, as well as note values that are uniquely long in his oeuvre,25 prolongs Christine’s syllables in a way that greatly dilates the grief they express. Christine’s poem itself can be read silently or aloud with much greater brevity than Binchois’s song can be sung, even with breaks between its fragmented phrases (‘Dueil angoisseus /​rage desmesurée /​Grief desespoir /​plein de forsennement’, and so on), which are remarkable on the page for being packed with condensed emotion that accumulates across its three eight-​line main verses. VocaMe’s mezzo-​ soprano, Petra Noskaiova, sings the ballade’s three verses and envoi across seven minutes and 30 seconds, making it second in length to only their ten-​verse truncated rendition of Le Ditié Jehanne d’Arc, and considerably longer than other songs that are of similar length to ‘Dueil angoisseus’ on the page. Even the track of ‘Seulete suy’, despite being a similar length on the page to ‘Dueil angoisseus’ (three rime royale stanzas plus envoi) and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

242

Performative voices and medieval aurality

despite being similarly plaintive, is only two-​thirds the length of ‘Dueil angoisseus’. This is not unique to VocaMe’s recording: on the Gothic Voices’ The Castle of Fair Welcome CD ‘Dueil angoisseus’ is by far the longest track, at 8 minutes and 12 seconds, while on the 2010 Soyes Loyal album by early music duo Asteria it is 7 minutes and 55 seconds –​again, much longer than the other tracks. But the fact that they retain Binchois’s use of duration despite eschewing his polyphonic arrangement suggests that they regard it as aesthetically and emotionally authentic to Christine’s sorrowing voice as both ‘of her time’ yet also singular and exceptional. Looking at the album as a whole, it is a potpourri of adaptive styles that respond differently to the various ‘authenticity’ conundra facing modern scholars and performers of medieval vocal and instrumental music. To take just one example, the setting of track 5, ‘Mon chevalier, mon gracieux servant’ takes a single vocal melody from Machaut (not listed on the album itself, but later identified by Popp on a video discussing the song)26 and then adds harmonic vocal lines, instrumentation and percussion all composed by Popp to create a conspicuously ‘oriental’ sound. Popp plays a range of Eastern string instruments across the course of the album –​oud, santur (Persian dulcimer), ikliğ and dilruba (Turkish and Indian bowed string instruments) –​but the fast-​strummed and -​plucked strings of ‘Mon chevalier’, together with complex rhythms created by tambourines and Flamenco palmas-​style handclapping, make it the ensemble’s most conspicuous orientalisation of Christine’s voice. Notwithstanding the freshness and creative vigour of this arrangement, it is a clear example of what John Haines has described as the ‘two-​fold regression’ of modern medieval music, which alludes both ‘to the medieval past and to the moment at which that medieval past was interpreted’.27 In this case, the song flirts with what has variously been referred to in music scholarship as the ‘Arabic’, ‘eastern’ or ‘southern’ (i.e. Andalusian) hypothesis about medieval music. Based on arguments reaching back to the eighteenth century that emphasise a putative Arabic origin for medieval song, this hypothesis was enlivened in the twentieth century by the foundational efforts of practitioners and scholars such as Arnold Dolmetsch and Thomas Binkley, who took inspiration from the modern performance cultures of north Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.28 One might argue that by being

342

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

243

submitted to such a thoroughgoing orientalisation, the specificity of Christine’s life and voice risk being subsumed into a general ‘Arabic-​medievalness’. Such a possibility is warded off in Breen’s review, which, having predominantly discussed acoustic rather than semantic matters, ends by asserting the primacy of Christine’s written text: ‘Whichever approach VocaMe take, Christine de Pizan remains out front, her words scorching through the splendid medieval textures.’29 The ambiguity of ‘through’ here captures an important ambiguity of the VocaMe’s contrafacta project: the music is both a vehicle for her voice and a medium it must ‘scorch through’ to be heard. Musical authenticity is far from a priority in the version of ‘Dueil angoisseus’ produced by the French black metal band Peste Noire on their 2006 debut full-​length album La Sanie des siècles –​ panégyrique de la dégénérescence (The Secretion of the Centuries –​ Ode to Degeneration). Unlike early music interpreters, with their informed deliberations over how Binchois’s written music should be performed, Peste Noire disregards both the medieval setting of the ballade and its afterlife in modern recordings and performances, creating instead a whole new composition that stands out as a ‘deviant’ moment in Christine’s musical afterlife. Despite the radical difference of their interpretation from recordings that seek to achieve authenticity in a musicological sense, I argue that Peste Noire nevertheless lay an intimate claim to Christine’s authentic voice, which they locate firmly within their twin obsessions with nihilistic self-​ expression and northern French (langue-​d’oïl) ‘national’ literature. Their privileging of her voice within this twin genealogy explains why, despite its seemingly anomalous appearance in their oeuvre, ‘Dueil angoisseus’ remains one of the band’s most widely praised –​ even defining –​tracks on their most-​admired album to date. Just as early music has developed its own preferred singing style, so too the genre of black metal has its own established modes of vocalisation, which are dominant in Peste Noire’s version of Christine’s song. Unlike the restrained, melismatic and reverberant singing featured in both VocaMe’s solo female version and the Gothic Voices’ polyphonic version, Peste Noire’s ‘Dueil angoisseus’ assaults the listener with the hoarse, demented shrieking voice of La sale Famine de Valfunde (generally referred to just as ‘Famine’), the pseudonymous persona of singer and guitarist Ludovic van Alst.30

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

244

Performative voices and medieval aurality

This style of vocalisation, which sits at the very outer edge of what can be described as singing, since it is non-​or even anti-​melodic, developed, according to Simon Trafford, in the Scandinavian metal scene from the late 1980s that was the crucible of black metal.31 Its deliberate dissonance notwithstanding, one thing this version does have in common with VocaMe’s is the use of drawn-​out vowels, which are in this case held in a constant scream to the point of vocal failure. Even though this song includes only Christine’s first eight-​ line stanza plus a repetition of lines 3 to 4 (‘Langour sanz fin et vie maleürée /​Pleine de plour, d’angoisse et de tourmen’ [‘Endless pining and cursèd life full of tears, anguish and torment’]), the song lasts for just over five minutes and 40 seconds (including instrumental interludes), so, again, the ceaseless pain expressed in the lyrics is reflected via acoustic prolongation. The lengthy blood-​ curdling screams being produced at times threaten to further obscure the lyrics, which remain in Old French and hence are not immediately accessible to the band’s audience; but the aim to channel Christine’s agonised voice is fulfilled to harrowing and dissonant effect. It might seem that the tortuous sound is more important in this version than the semantic content of Christine’s ballade, but in fact the lyrics of ‘Dueil angoisseus’ are highly significant to the band’s sense of its own place in a longer cultural genealogy. For Famine, Christine’s immersion in extravagant and morbid emotion, her expression of a pain with no prospect of healing or of death’s relief (‘Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir’ [‘And from them I can neither be healed nor die’]) and her aestheticisation of loss and misery situate her as an early voice in a long French poetic tradition culminating in the decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century (he seems unaware of Christine’s Italian birth and background). On La Sanie des siècles she is brought into the company of Charles Baudelaire, whose bleak poems ‘Spleen’ and ‘Le mort joyeaux’ from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) are also given black metal treatments, while the album Folkfuck Folie (2007) sets to music ‘Paysage mauvaise’ (1873) by symbolist Tristan Corbière, and a black metal version of Paul Verlaine’s melancholic ‘Soleils couchants’ (1866) appears on Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor (2009). Peste Noire are not alone in detecting a link between Christine and these later poets: Patricia E. Black has recently argued that the technical

542

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

245

innovation and expansion of late medieval lyric sensibility she exhibits in Cent ballades means that this collection ‘can … be considered a precursor to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal’.32 For the band, however, the emphasis is not on her formal innovations or her development of the ballade’s possibilities for expressing female experience; rather, it is their selective focus on the despairing enunciative voice of ‘Dueil angoisseus’ that allows them to link Christine, a court poet with royal and aristocratic patrons, to the florid nihilism of these bohemian poètes maudits. Furthermore, the de-Christianising of the poem though the removal of its envoi, in which Christine’s persona asks ‘Princes’ to pray to God to send her death, clears away the main obstacle that might impede attempts to link her to the modern decadent movement. This transformation of the poem enables the translator of Peste Noire’s lyrics on the site Black Ivory Tower to enthusiastically describe Christine as ‘a pioneering DSBM (Depressive Suicidal Black Metal) lyricist’.33 This amusing comment makes her a direct ancestor not just of the poètes maudits but of their lyrical descendants in French black metal. By this construction, the secretion of the centuries oozes straight from Christine to Famine himself. It is nevertheless ironic that despite basing a song on the only poem of Christine’s that has a musical setting, she is not in any way treated by them as a musical forebear. She becomes again, first and foremost, an enunciative voice. Christine’s voice might be part of a dark transhistorical lineage, but for Peste Noire she is also quintessentially grounded in her own time. This is registered at several levels, including musically. Despite its stark aesthetic difference from early music reconstructions, this version of Christine’s song also avails itself of an aural aesthetic that evokes ‘medievalness’, laying over its distorted rhythmic guitar a plucked ‘folk-​medieval’ melodic line played on acoustic guitar in a way that evokes lute music. This incorporation of archaic-​ sounding instrumentation is, according to Trafford, a standard means for ‘impart[ing] an appropriately “historical” air’ to songs by black metal artists, whose fetishising of the medieval period is well attested.34 The medievalness that is condensed into Christine’s ballade is a dismal gothic age, summarised in a fan review of La Sanie des siècles on Encyclopaedia Metallum as ‘medieval in the darkest imaginable fashion, reminding of a time dominated by

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

246

Performative voices and medieval aurality

war and epidemics … the time of torture, gallows, and François Villon’s poetry’.35 Other late medieval poems singled out by the band reinforce this bleak vision of the Middle Ages. Folkfuck Folie bases one song on the devil’s speech about the superiority of the damned in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Notre Dame, while two further songs are based on sections from Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Livre dou Voir Dit, one describing war and pestilence and the other rejecting love and goodness. The gloom, pain and violence of these Middle Ages is no obstacle to their romanticisation by Peste Noire. Rather, the band regards these dismal qualities as indexes of medieval life’s deeper intensity compared to anaemic modernity. This trope is common not just in medievalist metal music, in which, Trafford says, an ‘exotic, authentic and exciting’ past contrasts with ‘a modern world stigmatized as dull, compromised and constrained’,36 but to musical medievalism in general: according to scholar and performer David Munrow, early music practice is also motivated by ‘nostalgia for a largely imaginary past … for times when life was more wholehearted’.37 The perceived ‘medievalness’ of the unadulterated pain expressed in Christine’s voice is amplified further by her words remaining in Old French despite their modern setting. Here again, as in their other settings of medieval songs, Peste Noire scrupulously reproduces the black metal idiom, in which medieval languages are commonly used as a way of channelling medieval authenticity.38 The Folkfuck Folie track ‘Condamné à la pondaison’ [sic] (‘Condemned to hang’) contains the lyrics ‘Je parle le francien mieux que le français /​… Je préfère les langues mortes’ (‘I speak Francien better than French … I prefer dead languages’), in which immersion in archaic tongues marks one’s adoption of the ‘voice’ of a time when peril infused life with extra vitality. Peste Noire’s use of Old French, and medievalism more generally, is inextricably bound up with their extreme nationalist and race-​nativist ideology. By naming an album Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor after Villon’s uncharacteristically patriotic poem, and basing songs on apocalyptic lines from La Chanson de Roland and a crusade song by the troubadour Gauseran de Saint-​Leidier, they invoke bellicose episodes in medieval French history. The focus in the latter two on conflict between France and Muslim

742

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

247

foes corresponds to the far-right grand remplacement thesis that runs through the band’s lyrics, in which an enfeebled France must regain the identity it has lost as a result of Muslim migration. Discussing La Sanie des siècles, Famine claims it draws ‘a parallel between mediaeval and modern apocalypse’; by this account, Christine becomes the anguished voice of our times as well as her own (Famine seems unaware of her criticism of France’s enemies in works such as ‘Lamentacion sur les maulx de France’ and ‘Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc’, or he would no doubt have recruited them to nationalist ends). Yet the album’s related fixation with ‘the decline of the current world … the fantasized return of our Own (our Own: a fallen nobility humiliated socially, psychically and ­physiologically)’39 locates the Middle Ages differently, as a prelapsarian heroic age rather than an apocalyptic parallel to ­modernity. What emerges, then, is an incoherent historicism in which the Middle Ages function as simultaneously precursor, parallel and contrast to modernity, with Christine’s voice sitting unstably at the nexus of these three, her medieval Frenchness exempting her from the misogyny directed at other women by Peste Noire. Sounding in this ideological echo chamber, her voice’s enunciative-​discursive distortion at the hands of Peste Noire is as thoroughgoing as its musical transformation. What are the implications of ‘Dueil angoisseus’ being interpreted via these two wildly divergent twenty-​first-​century versions? What is most significant is that they both rely on the language of sound and on modern perceptions of the Middle Ages to reconstruct what her adaptors claim is Christine’s authentic voice. This voice, as I have shown, is not purely musical, although music is its medium; rather, its appeal for modern musicians, whether early music or black metal, lies in its quality as a discursive voice that conveys an experience of profound grief. The song’s vocalising of extravagant anguish has attracted culturally and ideologically charged interpretations of her voice as a pure expression of her gender, her nationality and her ‘medievalness’. Through the surprising recent career of this single instance of Christine’s musical voice, we can thus comprehend the unpredictable ways in which medieval voices continue to resonate in the ears of listeners long afterwards, singing in a music that is of both their time and our own.

248

Performative voices and medieval aurality

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 A. Zayaruznaya, ‘“Sanz note” & “sanz mesure”: toward a premodern aesthetics of the dirge’, in I. R. Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 155–​75 (165). 2 Christine de Pizan, ‘Ballade VI’, in M. Roy (ed.), Oeuvres Poétiques de Christine de Pisan, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1886), pp. 7–​8 (translation mine). 3 H. Dell, ‘Music and the emotions of medievalism: the quest for identity’, postmedieval, 10 (2010), 411–​22 (p. 411). 4 For an overview of enunciation across these fields, see J. L. Fiorin, ‘Two concepts of enunciation’, Semiotica, 219 (2017), 257–​71. 5 D. Poirion, Le Poète et le prince: L’Évolution du lyrisme courtois de Giullaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), p. 252. 6 Foucault elaborates this concept in ‘The confession of the flesh’ (1977), an interview in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–​228. 7 To cite just two instances in relation to her early verse, see A. Paupert, ‘Le “Je” lyrique féminin dans l’œuvre poétique de Christine de Pizan’, in J.-​C. Aubailly et al. (eds), Et C’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble: Hommage à Jean Dufournet, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions Honoré Champion, 1993), pp. 1057–​71; and M. McKinley, ‘The subversive “Seulette”’, in M. Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 157–​69. For discussions of the voice of her political writings, see N. Margolis, ‘“The cry of the chameleon”: evolving voices in the Epistles of Christine de Pizan’, Disputatio, 1 (1996), 37–​70; and L. Leppig, ‘The political rhetoric of Christine de Pizan: Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile’, in Brabant, Politics, Gender and Genre, pp. 141–​56. 8 T. Adams, ‘État présent: Christine de Pizan’, French Studies, 71:3 (2017), 388–​400. 9 P. E. Black, ‘Christine de Pizan’s Ballades: lyrical text and its musical context’, in A. Tarnowski (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Christine de Pizan (New York: MLA, 2018), pp. 127–​34 (132). 10 Zayaruznaya, ‘ “Sanz note” & “sanz mesure’ ”. See also L. Curtis, “Christine de Pizan and ‘Dueil angoisseux’”, in T. Borgerding (ed.), Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music. (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 265–​82.

942

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christine de Pizan’s musical voice

249

11 M. Zimmerman, ‘I Christine’, trans. E. J. Richards, in booklet of VocaMe, Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, audio CD, Berlin Classics, pp. 22–​9 (29). 12 Ibid., p. 22. 13 Ibid., p. 26. 14 VocaMe, Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, Youtube trailer (available at http://​yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​VQG​1qt-​6p-​s [accessed 14 April 2021]). 15 J. Potter, ‘Issues in the modern performance of medieval music’, in M. Everist and T. F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 609–​26 (612). 16 VocaMe, Hildegard von Bingen: Songs and Visions website: http://​voc​ ame.de/​en/​hildeg​ard-​von-​bin​gen (accessed 14 April 2021). 17 See, for instance, Potter, ‘Issues in the modern performance of medieval music’; J. Shull, ‘Locating the past in the present: living traditions and the performance of early music’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 15:1 (2006), 87–​111; and J. Haines, ‘The revival of medieval music’, in Everist and Kelly, The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, pp. 561–​81. 18 B. Bagby, ‘What is the sound of medieval song?’, Early Music America, 14:2 (2008), 44–​50. 19 Quoted in J. Haines, ‘The Arabic style of performing medieval music’, Early Music, 19:3 (2001), 369–​78 (p. 375). 20 VocaMe, Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, Youtube trailer. 21 Potter, ‘Issues in the modern performance of medieval music’, p. 615. 22 T. J. McGee, ‘Medieval performance practice’, in Everist and Kelly, The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, pp. 582–​608. 23 Zayaruznaya, ‘ “Sanz note” & “sanz mesure’ ”, p. 166. 24 E. Breen, ‘Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades’, review in Gramophone, n.d. (available at http://​gra​moph​one.co.uk/​revi​ews/​ rev​iew?slug=​christ​ine-​de-​pizan-​chans​ons-​et-​balla​des [accessed 14 April 2021]). 25 Zayaruznaya notes that maximae do not appear in the rest of his compositions; see ‘Sanz note & sanz mesure” ’, p. 171. 26 VocaMe, ‘Mon Chevalier’, interview, Christine de Pizan (available at http://​yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​C3w_​TvDq​OJY [accessed 14 April 2021]). 27 J. Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 244. 28 See Haines, ‘The Arabic style of performing medieval music’. 29 Breen, ‘Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

250

Performative voices and medieval aurality

30 Peste Noire, ‘Dueil angoisseus’ (available at http://​yout​ube.com/​ watch?v=​uLSU​QYzq​XZ0 [accessed 14 April 2021]). 31 S. Trafford, ‘Viking metal’, in S. C. Meter and K. Yri (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 564–​88 (568). 32 Black, ‘Christine de Pizan’s Ballades’, p. 128. 33 Black Ivory Tower, La Sanie des siècles –​panégyrique de la dégénéresecence (English translation) (available at https://​blac​kivo​ryto​ wer.com/​2013/​12/​22/​la-​sanie-​des-​siec​les-​pane​gyri​que-​de-​la-​deg​ener​ esce​nce-​engl​ish-​tran​slat​ion [accessed 14 April 2021]). 34 Trafford, ‘Viking metal’, p. 574. See also K. Yri, ‘Corvus Corax: medieval music, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-​nationalism’, Popular Music, 38:3 (2019), 361–​78. 35 Encyclopaedia Metallum, La Sanie des siècles –​panégyrique de la dégénéresecence (available at http://​metal-​archi​ves.com/​revi​ews/​Pest​ e_​No​ire/​La_​S​anie​_​des​_​si%C3%A8cl​es_​_​Pan%C3%A9gyri​que_​de_​l​ a_​d%C3%A9g%C3%A9n%C3%A9r​esce​nce/​127​130/​Sea​n16/​36894 [accessed 14 April 2021]). 36 Trafford, ‘Viking metal’, p. 564. 37 Cited in Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères, p. 248. 38 S. Trafford, ‘Nata vimpi curmi da: dead languages and primordial nationalisms in folk metal music’, in A. DiGioia, C. Doesburg and R.-​L. Valijärvi (eds), Multilingual Metal: Sociocultural, Literary and Linguistic Perspectives (Bingley: Emerald, 2020), pp. 221–​38. 39 N. T. Birk, ‘Interview with La sale Famine de Valfunde of the French black metal band Peste Noire’, Zero Tolerance Magazine, 014 (31 October 2006) (available at http://​n-​66.blogs​pot.com/​2009/​10/​peste-​ noire-​fra​nce.html [accessed 14 April 2021]).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword: medieval voice –​a tribute to David Lawton John M. Ganim In the Blue Mountains World Heritage site, in Australia, slightly west of Sydney, there is a trail that takes you towards the Gladstone Pass, and, if you are up for it, you will make your way carefully through a rainforest and mossy boulders that rise up from Lawton’s Creek. On some maps the area is actually called Lawton’s Creek Valley, and, it is named after Professor David Lawton. Medieval studies have approaches and methods named after its luminaries, but David is the only one I can think of who has one of the most beautiful places on Earth named for him, in gratitude for a political campaign in the 1980s that opposed the degradation of the Jamison Valley. There are many stories such as this in David’s life, but they will have to wait for his biographer, or (to drop a hint) his memoirs. I am taking on an easier task here: enumerating some of David’s many field-​changing contributions to the study of medieval literature and its attendant discourses. David Lawton’s recent work on the question of voice, especially as described in Voice in Late Medieval Literature, has a long prehistory. His work over the long span of his career led up to Voice. At the risk of restating the obvious, I would like to enumerate what some of these contributions have been. I wish to do so also because my own work has been in dialogue with David’s earlier contributions, and many of my own articles and books have started with suggestions and hints embedded in his work. He has always managed to articulate the answers to new questions before the rest of us have even understood the question. As a starting example, the recent resurgence of interest in fifteenth-​century literature owes its starting point to his classic article ‘Dullness and the fifteenth century’.1 This widely cited essay has taken its place as one of the transforming articles in the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

252

Medieval literary voices

study of Middle English literature, along with articles by Anne Middleton, D. W. Robertson, E. Talbot Donaldson and a very few others. The dismissive scorn towards the century after Chaucer, reflected most memorably in C. S. Lewis, has been turned on its head, and Lawton explains how the muted voice of that century can be understood in a political and social context. But he has also unleashed a substantial effort to understand its poetic virtues. It seems at times as if the fifteenth century has come close to replacing the fourteenth as the medieval moment that we can understand best. In many ways the fifteenth century fits our current obsession with authority, subjection and power, and our increasingly pessimistic narratives, better than the fluid and experimental (though no less chaotic or disruptive) fourteenth century. It is difficult to find a subsequent book or article on any of the authors he discusses, or any reconsideration of the fifteenth century, that does not take ‘Dullness and the fifteenth century’ as its starting point. Indeed, what marked David’s career from the beginning was his ability to revive scholarship and criticism on writings that had either been dismissed or had been stuck in critical logjams. In his editions and in his scholarly essays, David Lawton helped overturn older paradigms of entire genres. His studies of alliterative poetry, many of them also published in the 1980s, are a case in point.2 His close attention to manuscripts and texts, metre and provenance, leapfrogged the old debates about whether alliterative verse was a revival or a tradition. Rather than limiting our interpretation, as sceptical calls for unambiguous evidence sometimes do, he opened up new vistas, and, along with a handful of other scholars, made us rethink what the uses of this poetry might be. It helped that we were beginning to think of the golden age of Middle English poetry as the ‘age of Langland’ as much as the ‘age of Chaucer’, and David’s research played no small part in that shift. Here, again, research that David published at an earlier phase of his career remains as influential and as generative as if it were an intervention published yesterday. The revisionist approach to alliterative poetry that David helped to pioneer resulted in fresh editions of such works, and David himself contributed one of the most daunting and rigorous volumes for the Early English Text Society with our colleague Ralph Hanna III.3 The Siege of Jerusalem took a prominent part on the critical stage, partly because of its embodiment of medieval anti-​Semitisms,

352

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword

253

but partly because of the bold emendations and arguments made by the editors. Hanna and Lawton provided a test case for the editorial controversies surrounding other alliterative poems, notably Piers Plowman. At the same time, the edition represented something of an amalgam of a practice of intelligent reading along with sophisticated textual scholarship. In so doing, it signalled one of the sea changes in the study of medieval English literature. What we now call the New Criticism (quite different in the United Kingdom and North America) tended to separate the sense of the text from its original material context, despite the fact that so many of the best New Critics were themselves excellent textual scholars. Middle English literature has always stood as something of a challenge to reigning critical paradigms. This was no less true 30 years ago, when medievalists tested the New Critical tenets of an organic work of literature, the ambiguity and complexity of poetic imagery and the possibility of close reading as a key to all essential meanings of a text, against the almost intractable demands of medieval writing, with its complex status in manuscripts and its uncertain authorial intent, its historically alien language and diction and its apparent allegiance to an aesthetic that did not conform to the precision and balance advocated by the New Criticism. David Lawton’s technical scholarly editions and his sweeping critical essays have reshaped how we think about authorship. It had been as if the criticism of medieval literature paralleled on a separate track some of the most startling claims of literary theory. That is, the criticism of medieval literature articulated what in other fields would be avant-​garde statements by means of a documentary and historicist turn. Who or what is an author? The troubling of the concept of the author, formerly a more or less naturally assumed position, can be traced to the structuralist emphasis on the system of literature, and, in poststructuralism, on the virtual autonomy of the discourse of writing –​distinct, as it were, from a person writing. The most famous statements of this reconceptualisation of authorship are the well-​known essays by Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, and Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’.4 Foucault and Barthes, among their other agendas, were questioning the notion of a heroic, autonomous self behind and within writing itself. Although it is often regarded by those outside the field as a reserve protected from the effects of postmodern theory, medieval literary scholarship

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

254

Medieval literary voices

has advanced claims that were in their own way as striking. One was the well-​documented medieval tendency to defer to previous authority above and beyond one’s own experience, a tendency often dramatised, and perhaps parodied, in Chaucer’s personae in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Another direction was the study of the making of books and manuscripts, which over the past few decades began to question the genetic model of descent and definable authorial intention and paid new attention to such factors as scribal improvisation, patronage and traditions of miscellaneous compilations. Emphasis shifted, in other words, to the way texts were written, read and understood by contemporary readers from a sole focus on the intentions of the author. Sophisticated revisions of an older evolutionary notion of manuscript transmission gave new weight to the role of scribes, book collectors and patrons in the shaping of what we think of as medieval literature. In Hanna and Lawton’s edition, one finds these issues fully articulated from the very beginning. If editorial principles and the literary history of alliterative verse were being called into question at the start of David’s career, an even more spectacular intervention was his contribution to the vexed issue of the Chaucerian narrator. The New Criticism, in its American adaptation, had emphasised lyric poetry and formal coherence, but that consensus had already been challenged by the work of, for example, Wayne Booth in his The Rhetoric of Fiction, with its taxonomy of modes of narration.5 Booth’s ideas had appeared roughly at the same time as the field-​forming essay by E. Talbot Donaldson ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’.6 Following Booth, the narrator becomes as much the subject of critical analysis as what was being narrated, and, as a result, criticism could identify a coherence and unity beneath such unruly forms as the novel, or, say, the Canterbury Tales. By the mid-​1980s that coherent subjectivity was open to question, partly because, under the pressure of structuralism, the subject itself was open to question. Enter David Lawton. In 1985 he published Chaucer’s Narrators, yet another of his works that remains as urgent today as it was when it was published.7 Chaucer’s Narrators was fully aware of the definition of the subject following Lacan and Foucault and of the possibility of heteroglossic voicing following Mikhail Bakhtin. His book opened up the question of the consistency of the Chaucerian narrator as a

552

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword

255

principle of unity. The result was both an explosion of the previous consensus and a newly available heuristic approach that guides our reading of Chaucer to the present day. Indeed, the formalism that David Lawton revised in his account of narration had stood as a stumbling block to integrating theology and spirituality into a coherent critical framework. Criticism has only recently come to terms with the religious dimension of Middle English literature, and David played a key role in that re-​ evaluation. More often than not critics read back from a secular and sceptical cultural perspective, emphasising the comedy and realism of even obviously devotional religious writings. This lack was partly a result of the value that the New Criticism placed on irony and scepticism, so that only works that seemed to question religious orthodoxy were considered worthy of attention. One of the oddities of the study of Middle English literature during the middle of the twentieth century was its insistent secularity, against the grain of a medieval culture so profoundly religious. In some ways this was an effort to rescue medieval literature from its still powerful dismissal by the Enlightenment and subsequent modernities. Indeed, formalism provided us with a medieval literature, at least in Chaucer, that we could think of as modern. When D. W. Robertson, in the early 1960s and late 1950s, proposed an elaborate system of allegorical interpretation of medieval literature, the arguments against that system directly or indirectly objected to the totalised belief system propounded in Robertson’s picture of the Middle Ages.8 We do not ordinarily think of theology as a species of theory, but theory and theology are inescapably linked, even if deconstruction would question the metaphysical assumptions that underlie most theological speculation. The genealogy of theory can be traced to the natural supernaturalism of romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and to the Higher Criticism of Christian scriptures in the nineteenth century, even if theory rarely acknowledges that past. The language of the scholars who led the conversion of American academia to theory, the so-​called ‘Yale School’ of Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, would be unimaginable without the widely read theologians of the 1950s and 1960s, including Martin Buber, Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Thomas Altizer. These theologians and theorists wrestled with

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

256

Medieval literary voices

the difficult legacy of Martin Heidegger, upon whose thought so-​ called deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man both depended and struggled. Theory and theology have been in a mutually dependent relation. Thanks to David and others, Middle English literature is now seen not as distinct from or even merely reflective of the pervasive religiosity of medieval English culture but as actively participating in spiritual exploration. Just as the New Historicism understands texts to construct rather than simply reflect historical events, so too are Middle English writings now often seen as complex sites of interaction between a multiplicity of religious and theological viewpoints. Throughout his career David Lawton has been more aware than most critics of the theological climate that we now take for granted, but his contribution to understanding it was in fact on transhistorical rather than period-​based terms. David published works devoted to what might loosely be called religious cultural study. His book Blasphemy was widely reviewed and discussed, both outside and inside academia.9 In Blasphemy, Lawton analyses a number of case studies, ranging from the medieval persecution of heretics through reformation religious controversies to modern figurations of blasphemy, such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the reaction to it, and the uses of blasphemy in popular culture. He points out how the accusation of blasphemy itself historically has always involved questions of power, closing off arguments arbitrarily and abruptly. Those who invoke blasphemy, suggests David, typically speak as if their particular segment of the community represents the entire community, precisely because they seek a narrowing of that community. At the same time, David is remarkably sympathetic to the plaintiffs (who, he points out, tend to cast themselves in the role of defendants), without falling into the simple rhetoric of cultural relativism. For blasphemy almost always involves representation through texts, languages and performances. And David develops a complex and striking series of interrelated theses: that literature itself is almost by definition blasphemous; and that reading itself is a further act of blasphemy. The discourse of blasphemy, that is, includes those who purport to be offended by it, and yet its tolerance is at the very basis of civil society. His Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English similarly tracks what might be called the reception of the Authorised Version and its uses and misuses.10

752

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword

257

One of the more prescient and urgent themes in David’s writings grew out of his time teaching in Turkey after he completed university studies. He has turned to that experience often, tracing the connections of time and language, and the way in which the literary imagination moves from Europe to its borders and to the East and back again. If postmodernism taught us that space is the primary category of intellectual analysis, David’s project doubles back, like his subject itself, to the existential category of time that postmodernism sought to displace. The result has been a fresh and original look at some very well-​known and some obscure writings, and it takes us from werewolves in Sicily to the English marshes, and also to Istanbul as it loses its identity as Constantinople, and shows us how these are all connected.11 Transcending the received discourses of postcolonialism and orientalism, David excuses neither the past nor the present for their prejudices and oppressions. I like to think that the critique of intolerance in Faith, Text and History is related to his stunning analysis of the bizarre medieval dramatisation of anti-​Semitism, ‘Sacrilege and theatricality: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’ (2003).12 He had an expert knowledge of the trail of strange geographies and mythic histories as a result of his scholarly editions of The Siege of Jerusalem, in which the Roman–​Jewish wars become akin to a crusade, and Joseph of Arimathea, which provides a prehistory of the Grail.13 His Turkish experience led to some astonishing collocations of medieval anxieties about Ottoman expansion and modern Turkish literature, especially the novels of Orhan Pamuk, notably in ‘1453 and the stream of time’.14 At Washington University of St Louis, he helped arrange an honorary award for Pamuk. That award is only one example of David’s impact as an impresario of academic life. David once mentioned his experiences as a child actor (I believe it was a performance of Oliver!) in responding to a question from the audience objecting to the blasphemy of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and his theatrical timing and humour inform many of his public presentations. Some of us remember his hilarious recounting of being assigned to lead the Queen around his college during her visit on the occasion of its anniversary. These many experiences also are part of the reason for his success as an academic leader, chairing departments on three continents, and, as executive director, leading the New Chaucer

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

258

Medieval literary voices

Society into a more inclusive future. He directed the famous London Chaucer Society conference in 2000, commemorating the 600th anniversary of Chaucer’s death, and arranged a reading by Andrew Motion, then the poet laureate of the United Kingdom, in Westminster Abbey. The result was a media event as well as a scholarly conference, and, not unimportantly, a signal event for the general public and poetry lovers. David has mastered and pioneered forms of scholarship in his career that are usually thought of as distinct and incompatible. The understanding of medieval narrative from a largely semiotic point of view, now part of the fabric of the field, was pioneered in his book Chaucer’s Narrators. The interface of medieval literary culture with cultural study found its editorial home in the series he co-​founded called New Medieval Literatures, required reading in the field since its first issue. David, a superb technical editor, is also a scholar’s scholar, and most recent articles on late medieval and early modern book circulation and production regularly cite his work. The contours of medieval English literary study as we now know it, with its shift from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century as a privileged period, with its shift from Chaucer to Langland as its signature author and with its combination of sweeping Annales vistas and local literary histories, is either directly or indirectly the result of David Lawton’s influence and example. His many ongoing projects, from specialist editions to large-​scale studies of the shifts in time and space by which literature engages us, affirm his continuing importance. I recently taught a Chaucer class using his new Norton edition, the Norton Chaucer, and I felt as if the course were being taught by David himself, with his elegant explanations of small difficulties and his masterful view over the distance of centuries.15 It was like having a friend in the classroom, and I too became his student, as we all are.

Notes 1 D. Lawton, ‘Dullness and the fifteenth century’, ELH, 54:4 (1987), 761–​99. 2 See D. Lawton (ed.), Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982); and D.

952

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword

259

Lawton, ‘The unity of Middle English alliterative poetry’, Speculum, 58:1 (1983), 72–​94. 3 R. Hanna and D. Lawton (eds), The Siege of Jerusalem, EETS o.s. 320 (New York: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2003). 4 R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977); M. Foucault, Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 5 W. C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 6 E. T. Donaldson, ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’, PMLA, 69:4 (1954), 928–​36. 7 D. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, Chaucer Studies 13 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985). 8 D. W. Robertson Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). 9 D. Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 10 D. Lawton, Faith, Text, and History: the Bible in English (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1990). 11 See, for instance, D. Lawton, ‘1453 and the stream of time’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37:3 (2007), 469–​91; and D. Lawton, ‘History and legend: the exile and the Turk’, in P. C. Ingham and M. R. Warren (eds), Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 173–​94. 12 D. Lawton, ‘Sacrilege and theatricality: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33:2 (2003), 281–​309. 13 D. Lawton (ed.), Joseph of Arimathea: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983). 14 Lawton, ‘1453 and the stream of time’. See also Lawton, ‘History and legend’. 15 D. Lawton (ed.), The Norton Chaucer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

Manuscripts Aberdeen, Aberdeen University, MS 24 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 6578 Cambridge, St John’s College, MS F 30 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.6.39 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.6.26 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Mm. 6. 4 Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral MS 91 London, British Library, MS Additional 24189 London, British Library, MS Additional 42134A London, British Library, MS Additional 61823 London, British Library, MS Harley 273 London, British Library, MS Harley 674 London, British Library, MS Harley 959 London, British Library, MS Harley 2169 London, British Library, MS Harley 2250 London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 London, British Library, MS Harley 3954 London, British Library, MS Harley 4971 London, British Library, MS IB.55712 London, British Library, MS Royal 17.C.xxvi London, British Library, MS Royal 17.C.xxxviii London, British Library, MS Royal 17.D.v London, College of Arms (Herald’s College), MS L. 14 Luton, Art Museum, Luton Guild Register Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 678 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M 349 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M 917/​945 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole rolls 4

162

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

261

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. D. 2. 6 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 271 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 554 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 262 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. a. 1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Greaves 51 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 99 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A. 392 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 241 Oxford, University College, MS 14 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS-​619 réserve Reykjavík, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, AM 132 fol. (Möðruvallabók) San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9 San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS HM 143

Primary works Saint Anselm, ‘Orationes sive meditationes’, in P. Schmidt (ed.), Obras Completas de San Anselmo (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1953) Saint Anselm, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Sister B. Ward (London: Penguin Books, 1973) Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) Aristotle, De Anima, in De Anima Books II and III, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, ed., trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927) (available at http://​pers​eus. tufts.edu/ ​ h op ​ p er/ ​ t ext?doc= ​ u rn:cts:latin ​ L it:phi1 ​ 2 54.phi ​ 0 01.pers​ eus-​eng1:244 and http://​pers​eus.tufts.edu/​hop​per/​text?doc=​Pers​ eus%3At​ext%3A2​007.01.0071%3Ap​age%3D246 [accessed 13 October 2021]) Augustine, The Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Benson L. D. (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 2008) Blades, W. (ed.), The Boke of Saint Albans: Containing Treatises on Hawking, Hunting, and Cote Armour by Dame Juliana Berner, printed at Saint Albans by the School-​Master Printer in 1486, Reproduced in Facsimile (London: Elliot Stock, 1901)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

262

Bibliography

Blamires, A. (ed.), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Boccaccio, G., Il Filocolo, ed. S. Battaglia, Scrittori d’Italia (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1938) Boncompagno da Signa, Boncompagnus [Rhetorica antiqua], ed. S. M. Wight (Pavia: Università degli Studi di Pavia, 1999–​2003) (available at https://​docu​ment​acat​holi​caom​nia.eu/​03d/​1165–​1240,_​Bo​ncom​pagn​us_​ d​e_​Si​gna,_​Bonco​mpag​nus,_​LT.pdf [accessed 1 January 2021]) The Book of Tribulation, ed. A. Barratt (Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 1983) (available at https://​pers​eus.tufts.edu/​hop​ per/​text?doc=​Pers​eus:text:2007.01.0071:id=​v1.p.398 [accessed 13 October 2021]) Burrow, J. A., and T. Turville-​Petre (eds), Piers Plowman: The B-​Version Archetype (Bx), XML version 2.0 (Raleigh, NC: Society for Early English & Norse Electronic Texts, 2018) Capgrave, J., Ye Solace of Pilgrims: A Description of Rome, c. 1450, ed. C. A. Mills (London: British Archaeological Society of Rome, 1911) Chance, J. (ed.), The Assembly of the Gods (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999) Chaucer, G., ‘The Book of the Duchess’, in L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 2008), pp. 329–​46 Chaucer, G., ‘The House of Fame’, in L. D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 2008), pp. 347–​73 Christine de Pizan, ‘Ballade VI’, in M. Roy (ed.), Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1886) Corrie, G. E. (ed.), Sermons by Hugh Latimer, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844) The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour, EETS o.s. 319 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Dutka, J., ‘The Fall of Man: the Norwich Grocers’ play’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 9:1 (1984), 1–​11 Egil’s saga, trans. B. Scudder, ed. S. Óskarsdóttir (London: Penguin Books, 2002) Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ed. B. Einarsson [based on the work of J. Helgason and completed after Einarsson’s death by M. Chesnutt], vol. 1, A-​Redaktionen, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, series A, vol. 19 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzelsforlag, 2001) Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ed. M. Chesnutt [based on the work of J. Helgason], vol. 3, C-​Redactionen, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, series A, vol. 21 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzelsforlag, 2006)

362

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

263

Fein, S. (ed.), The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Rochester, NY: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014) Francis, M., Mandeville (London: Faber, 2008) Furnivall, F. J. (ed), Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne,’ A.D. 1303, with Those Parts of the Anglo-​ French Treatise on which it was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel des Pechiez’, EETS o.s. 119 (London: Early English Text Society, 1901) Gerald of Wales, Gemma ecclesiastica, in J. S. Brewer (ed.), Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 8 vols, Rolls Series 21 (London: Longman, 1862) A Glossed Wycliffite Psalter: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 554, ed. M. P. Kuczynski, EETS o.s. 352 and 353, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Gower, J., Vox Clamantis, in G. C. Macaulay (ed.), The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902) Gregory the Great, Dialogi, ed., trans. A. de Vogüé, 3 vols (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1978–​1980) Hahn, T. (ed.), Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995) (available at https://​d.lib.roches​ter.edu/​teams/​publ​icat​ion/​hahn-​ sir-​gaw​ain [accessed 18 September 2021]) Hanna, R., and D. Lawton (eds), The Siege of Jerusalem, EETS o.s. 320 (New York: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2003) Havely, N., Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980) Hertzius, M. (ed.), ‘Prisciani, Institutionum grammaticarum Libri I–​XII’, in H. Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855) Hilton, W., The Scale of Perfection, ed. T. H. Bestul, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000) Hudson, A. (ed.), Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: Medieval Academy of America, 1997) Isidore, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911) (available at https://​cata​log.hat​hitr​ust. org/​Rec​ord/​001221​010 [accessed 12 June 2021]) Isidore, The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville, trans. S. A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Kane, G. (ed.), Piers Plowman: The A Version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman and Do-​ Well. An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.14 Corrected from Other Manuscripts, with Variant Readings, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press, 1988)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

264

Bibliography

Kane, G., and E. T. Donaldson (eds), Piers Plowman: The B Version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-​Well, Do-​Better and Do-​Best. An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17. Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press, 1988) Keil, H. (ed.), ‘Donati, Ars grammatica’, in H. Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1864), pp. 367–​402 Kelso, C. J., ‘Witelonis perspectivae liber quartus: book IV of Witelo’s Perspectiva. A critical edition and English translation with introduction, notes and commentary’, PhD dissertation, University of Missouri –​ Columbia, 2003 Kohanski T., and C. D. Benson, The Book of John Mandeville, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007) (available at https://​d.lib.roches​ter.edu/​teams/​text/ ​ k ohan ​ s ki- ​ a nd- ​ b en ​ s on- ​ t he- ​ b ook- ​ o f- ​ j ohn- ​ m an ​ d evi​ l le-​ i ntro​ d uct​ i on [accessed 12 September 2021]) Kyng Alisaunder, ed. G. V. Smithers, EETS o.s. 227 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) Langland, W., Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-​text, ed. D. Pearsall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979) Langland, W., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-​Text, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1991) Langland, W., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-​Text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London: J. M. Dent, 1978; repr. London: Everyman, 1991, 1995, 1997) Lawton, D. (ed.), Joseph of Arimathea: a Critical Edition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983) Lawton, D. (ed.), The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019) Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose’, ed., trans. E. Hicks (Paris: H. Champion, 1977) Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose’, trans. V. Greene (Paris: H. Champion, 2006) Lindsay, W. M. (ed.), Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive originum, 2 vols (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1911) 4, 4 vols Lydgate, J., Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, EETS e.s. 121–​ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924–​7; repr. 1967) McWebb, C. (ed.), Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’: A Critical Anthology, intro., Latin trans., E. J. Richards (London: Routledge, 2007)

562

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

265

Mandeville’s Travels: Translated from the French of Jean d’Outremeuse, Edited from MS Cotton Titus c. XVI vol. 2, ed. P. Hamelius, EETS o.s. 154 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1923) Mayhoff, K. F. T. (ed.), Naturalis historia: Pliny the Elder (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906) Meech, S. B. (ed.), with the assistance of H. E. Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940) The Metrical Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour, EETS o.s. 269 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) Moll, R., ‘“O Lady Fortune”: an unknown lyric in British Library MS Harley 2169’, Notes and Queries, 56:2 (2009), 192–​4 Norton, D. (ed.), The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible: King James Version, rev. edn (1611; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) iae pars the description of Hartfordshire Norden, J., Speculi Britan[n]‌ (London: Thomas Dawson, 1598) Ovid, Ex Ponto III.1.157–​8, in Ovid, Tristia; Ex Ponto, trans. A.L. Wheeler, 2nd rev. edn, G.P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 151 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 382–​3 Pearsall, D. A. (ed.), William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Edition of the C-​Text (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008) Peraldus, W., Sermones, in Guilelmi Alverni Episcopi Parisiensis … opera omnia, 2 vols (Paris, 1674) Peraldus, W., Summa de vitiis, ed., trans. R. Newhauser et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming) Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, trans. R. Newhauser, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 51 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012) Philodemus, On Frank Criticism, ed. D. Konstan et al. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998) Political, Religious and Love Poems, from Lambeth MS. 306 and Other Sources, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS o.s. 15 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1866) Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, ed. M. Hertz, vols. 2 & 3 of Grammatici latini, ed. H. Keil, 8 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855–​8; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961) Robbins, R. H., ‘The poems of Humfrey Newton, esquire, 1466–​1536’, PMLA, 65:2 (1950), 249–​81 Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne,’ A.D. 1303, with Those Parts of the Anglo-​French Treatise on which it was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel des Pechiez’, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS o.s. 119 (London: Early English Text Society, 1901)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

266

Bibliography

Russell, G., and G. Kane (eds), Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-​Well, Do-​Better and Do-​Best. An Edition in the Form of Huntington Library MS HM 143, Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings (London: Athlone Press, 1997) Saint Erkenwald, ed. C. Peterson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977) Sammlung altenglischer Legenden, ed. C. Horstmann (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1878) Scattergood, J. (ed.), The Complete English Poems of John Skelton, rev. edn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) Schleich, G. (ed.), Die mittelenglische Umdichtung von Boccaccios De claris mulieribus (Leipzig: Mayer und Müller, 1924) Seymour, M. C., Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993) Shelley, P. B., The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. C. Baker (New York: Modern Library, 1951) Simon de Saint-​ Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, ed. J. Richard, in Documents relatifs a l’histoire des croisades (Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1965), pp. 31–​2 Sir John Mandeville, The Book of Marvels and Travels, trans. A. Bale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Skeat, W. W. (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 7, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897) Spenser, E., The Faerie Queene (London, 1590) Tolkien, J. R. R., E.V. Gordon and N. Davis (eds), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London: Penguin Books, 1983) Two Revisions of Rolle’s English Psalter Commentary and the Related Canticles, ed. A. Hudson, EETS o.s., vol. 1 (London: Early English Text Society, 2013) VocaMe, Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, audio CD, Berlin Classics, 2015 Windeatt, B. (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000; repr. 2004) Witelonis perspectivae liber primus … quintus, ed., trans. S. Unguru and A. M. Smith, 3 vols (Wrocław: Zaklad Naradowy im. Ossolinskich, 1977–​83) The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. N. Watson and J. Jenkins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)

762

Bibliography

267

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Secondary works Adams, R., Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to Piers Plowman (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013) Adams, T., ‘État présent: Christine de Pizan’, French Studies, 71:3 (2017), 388–​400 Aers, D., Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Aers, D., ‘Piers Plowman: poverty, work, and community’, in Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–​ 1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 20–​72 Agamben, G., The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) Alexander, G., ‘Sidney’s interruptions’, Studies in Philology, 98 (2001), 184–​204 Alford, J. A., ‘Biblical imitatio in the writings of Richard Rolle’, ELH, 40 (1973), 1–​23 Alford, J. A., Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988) Alim, H. S., and G. Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Allen, V., On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Almedia, F. A., ‘Punctuation practice in a late medieval English medical remedybook’, Linguistica Historica, 22:1–​2 (2001), 207–​32 AND2 Phase 4: Rothwell, William (gen. ed.), The Anglo-​Norman Dictionary, 2nd edn, Phase 4 (N-​O/​U-​P-​Q) (Taylor and Francis for Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013–​2017) (available at https://​anglo-​nor​man.net [accessed 13 September 2021]) Arakelian, P. G., ‘Punctuation in a late Middle English manuscript’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 76:4 (1975), 614–​24 Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) Bagby, B., ‘What is the sound of medieval song?’, Early Music America, 14:2 (2008), 44–​50 Bahr, A., ‘Miscellaneity and variance in the medieval book’, in M. Johnston and M. Van Dussen (eds), The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 181–​98 Baker, M. et al., ‘Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of “I can’t breathe”’, New York Times (29 June 2020)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

268

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Bal, M., Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 4th edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017 [1985]) Bale, A., ‘“ut legi”: Sir John Mandeville’s audience and three late medieval English travelers to Italy and Jerusalem’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38 (2016), 201–​37 Balibar, É., ‘Racism and nationalism’, trans. C. Turner, in É. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 37–​67 Balibar, É., ‘Dire, contredire: sur les formes de la parrêsia selon Foucault’, in Libre parole (Paris: Galilée, 2018), pp. 81–​120 Barney, S. A., The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, vol. 5, C Passūs 20–​ 22; B Passūs 18–​20 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) Barron, O., ‘A fifteenth century book of arms’, The Ancestor, 3 (1902): 185–​213; 4 (1903): 225–​50; 5 (1903): 175–​90; 7 (1903): 184–​215, 9 (1904): 159–​80 Barron, O., ‘Thomas Wall’s book of crests’, The Ancestor, 11 (1904), 178–​90 Barthes, R., Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) Battles, D., ‘Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale” and Boccaccio’s “Filocolo” reconsidered’, Chaucer Review, 34 (1999), 38–​59 Belsey, C., Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980) Bennett, M. J., ‘“Mandeville’s Travels” and the Anglo-​French moment’, Medium Ævum, 75:2 (2006), 273–​92 Benson, C. D., Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) Benveniste, E., Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. E. Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971) Berne, E., Games People Play. The Psychology of Human Relationships (London: Penguin Books, 1968) Bestul, T. H., ‘Antecedents: the Anselmian and Cistercian contributions’, in W. F. Pollard and R. Boenig (eds), Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 1–​20 Bettens, O., ‘Ponctuation et lecture à haute voix: aide ou obstacle?’, in V. Fasseur and C. Rochelois (eds), Poncteur l’œuvre médiévale: Des signes au sens (Abbeville: Droz, 2016), pp. 119–​33 Birk, N. T., ‘Interview with La sale Famine de Valfunde of the French black metal band Peste Noire’, Zero Tolerance Magazine, 014, 31 October 2006 (available at http://​n-​66.blogs​pot.com/​2009/​10/​peste-​noire-​fra​ nce.html [accessed 14 April 2021])

962

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

269

Black, P. E., ‘Christine de Pizan’s Ballades: lyrical text and its musical context’, in A. Tarnowski (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Christine de Pizan (New York: MLA, 2018), pp. 127–​134 Bleach, L. et al. (eds), In Search of the Medieval Voice: Expressions of Identity in the Middle Ages (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009) Bloomfield, M. W., ‘Chaucerian realism’, in P. Boitani and J. Mann (eds), The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 179–​93 Booth, W. C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) Bose, M., ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, in F. Grady (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 191–​204 Boynton, S. ‘Sound matters 1. Introduction.’ Speculum 91:4 (2016), 998–​1002 Boynton, S. et al., ‘Sound matters’, Speculum 91:4 (2016), 998–​1039 Brakke, D., ‘Ethiopian demons: male sexuality, the black-​skinned other, and the monastic self’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 10:3/​4 (2001), 501–​35 Brault, G. J., Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with special reference to Arthurian Heraldry, 2nd edn (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997) Breen, E., ‘Christine de Pizan: Chanson et Ballades’, review in Gramophone, n.d. (available at https://​gra​moph​one.co.uk/​revi​ews/​rev​iew?slug=​christ​ ine-​de-​pizan-​chans​ons-​et-​balla​des [accessed 14 April 2021]) Breen, K., Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) British Library, Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the British Museum, part XI, England (‘t Goy-​Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2007) Brumble, H. D., ‘Armor and weapons’, in D. L. Jeffrey (gen. ed.), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 56–​7 Bull, M., ‘auditory’, in C. A. Jones (ed.), sensorium: embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 112–​14 Burnley, D., ‘Scribes and hypertext’, Yearbook of English Studies, 25 (1995), 41–​62 Burrow, J. A., ‘Punctuation in the B version of Piers Plowman’, in N. Jacobs and G. Morgan (eds), ‘Truthe is the beste’: A Festschrift in Honour of A. V. C. Schmidt (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 5–​15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

270

Bibliography

Calabrese, M., An Introduction to Piers Plowman (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2016) Calabrese, M., ‘Langland’s last words’, in C. M. Cervone and D. V. Smith (eds), Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 65–​81 Calabrese, M., ‘Posthuman Piers? Rediscovering Langland’s subjectivities’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 32 (2018), 3–​36 Camp, C. T., ‘Spatial memory, historiographic fantasy, and the touch of the past in St Erkenwald’, New Literary History, 44 (2013), 471–​91 Camp, C. T., ‘The temporal excesses of dead flesh’, postmedieval, 4.4 (2013), 416–​26 Carey, J., The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligensia, 1880–​1939, rev. edn (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005) Carruthers, M., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Cavell, S., Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) Cazelles, B., Soundscape in Early French Literature, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 17 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in collaboration with Brepols, 2005) Cerquiglini, B., Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989) Chaganti, S., The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Chen, M. Y., Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) Clemens, R., and T. Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007) Clemetson, L., ‘The racial politics of speaking well’, New York Times (‘Week in review’, 4 February 2007) Cobley, P., Narrative (London: Routledge, 2001) Cohen, J. J., Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) Coleman, J., Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late-​Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-​ Humanism Coole, D., Merleau-​ (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) Corbin, A., The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) Cornish, A., ‘Sound matters 3. Words and blood: suicide and the sound of the soul in Inferno 13’, Speculum 91:4 (2016), 1015–​26

172

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

271

Crane, S. ‘For the birds.’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007), 23–​41 Craun, E. D., ‘“Ȝe, by Peter and by Poul!”: Lewte and the practice of fraternal correction’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 15 (2001), 15–​34 Craun, E. D., Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Critten, R. G., Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018) Crown, S., ‘The banana of God’, Guardian, 29 March 2008 ­(available at https://​theguardian.com/​books/​2008/​mar/​29/​featuresreviews.guardian review27) Curtis, L., ‘Christine de Pizan and “Dueil angoisseux”’, in T. Borgerding (ed.), Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 265–​82 De Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984) De la Cruz Cabanillas, I., ‘Punctuation practice in manuscript Sainte Geneviève 3390’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 13:3 (2014), 139–​59 Dell, H., ‘Music and the emotions of medievalism: the quest for identity’, postmedieval, 10 (2010), 411–​22 DIMEV: Mooney, L. R., D. W. Mosser and E. Solopova, with D. Thorpe and D. H. Radcliffe (n.d.). The DIMEV: An Open-​Access, Digital Edition of the ‘Index of Middle English Verse’ (available at https://​dimev.net) Dinshaw, C., Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-​and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) Dinshaw, C., ‘Margery Kempe’, in C. Dinshaw and D. Wallace (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 222–​39 Dinshaw, C., How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) Donaldson, E. T., ‘Chaucer the pilgrim’, PMLA, 69:4 (1954), 928–​36 Dondaine, A., ‘Guillaume Peyraut, vie et œuvres’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 18 (1948), 162–​236 Drimmer, S., The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–​1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) Du Fresne du Cange, C., et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, rev. edn (Niort: L. Favre, 1883–​87) Earwaker, J. P., East Cheshire: Past and Present, or, A History of the Hundred of Macclesfield, 2 vols (London: printed for the author, 1877–​90) Edwards, R. R., ‘Narrative’, in P. Brown (ed.), A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 312–​31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

272

Bibliography

Eidsheim, N. S. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Refiguring American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018) Engels, L., ‘Fiducia dans la Vulgate: le problème de traduction παρρησία –​ fiducia’, Graecitas et Latinitas Christianorum Primaeva: Supplementa, 1 [Festschrift Christine Mohrmann zum 60 Geburtstag] (1964), 97–​141 Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008) Farrell, T. J., ‘Hybrid discourse in the General Prologue portraits’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30:1 (2008), 39–​93 Fasseur, V., and C. Rochelois (eds), Poncteur l’œuvre médiévale: Des signes au sens (Abbeville: Droz, 2016) Febvre, L., The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968) Fiorin, J. L., ‘Two concepts of enunciation’, Semiotica, 219 (2017), 257–​71. Fisher, M., Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012) Fludernik, M., The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1993) Foucault, M., Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977; repr. 1995) Foucault, M., ‘The confession of the flesh’ (1977), an interview in Power/​ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–​228 Foucault, M., The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–​1983, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Foucault, M., The Courage of Truth (the Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–​1984, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) P. Foucault, M., Discours et vérité: Précédé de ‘La parrêsia’, ed. H.-​ Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini and F. Gros (Paris: Vrin, 2016) Fowler, E., Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) Fritz, J.-​M., Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le versant épistémologique, Sciences, techniques et civilisations du Moyen Âge à l’aube des Lumières 5 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000) Furnish, V. P., II Corinthians (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984)

372

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

273

Galloway, A., ‘Gower in his most learned role and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, Mediaevalia, 16 (1990), 329–​47 Galloway, A., The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, vol. 1, C Prologue–​ Passus 4; B Prologue–​ Passus 4; A Prologue–​ Passus 4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) Gavrilyuk, P. L., and S. Coakley, ‘Introduction’, in P. L. Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–​19 Genette, G., Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972) Genette, G., Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) Gillespie, A., and D. Wakelin (eds), The Production of Books in England 1350–​1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Glauser, J., P. Hermann and S. A. Mitchell (eds), Handbook of Pre-​Modern Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches, 2 vols, De Gruyter Reference (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018) Gordon-​Reed, A. ‘Message to the world’, Times Literary Supplement (26 June 2020), p. 18 Gorst, E., ‘Interspecies mimicry: birdsong in Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” and The Parlement of Fowles’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), 147–​54 Grady, F., ‘Piers Plowman, Saint Erkenwald, and the rule of exceptional salvations’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 6 (1992), 61–​88 Grady, F., ‘Looking awry at St Erkenwald’, Exemplaria, 23:2 (2011), 105–​25 Green, C. D., ‘Where did the ventricular localization of mental faculties come from?’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 39:2 (2003), 131–​42 Greenblatt, S., Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) Gregoric, P., ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on the common sense’, in S. N. Mousavian and J. L. Fink (eds), The Internal Senses in the Aristotelian Tradition, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 22 (Cham, CH: Springer, 2020), pp. 29–​44 Griffiths, L., Personification in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) Guillim, J., A Display of Heraldry, 6th edn (London: T. W., 1724) Gumbrecht, H. U., Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) Haines, J., ‘The Arabic style of performing medieval music’, Early Music, 19:3 (2001), 369–​78

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

274

Bibliography

Haines, J., Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Haines, J., ‘The revival of medieval music’, in M. Everist and T. F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 561–​81 Hall, K. F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender on Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) Hamburger, F. J., Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) Hanna, R., William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993) 1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge Hanna, R., London Literature, 1300–​ University Press, 2005) Hanna, R., ‘Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library MS Lat. Misc. c. 66’, Medium Ævum, 69:2 (2000), 279–​91 Hanna, R., ‘The “absent” pardon-​tearing of Piers Plowman C’, Review of English Studies, 66:275 (2015), 449–​64 Hanna, R., The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, vol. 2, C Passūs 5–​9; B Passūs 5–​7; A Passūs 5–​8 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Hanna, R. et al., ‘Latin commentary tradition and vernacular literature’, in A. Minnis and I. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 363–​421 Harney, S., and F. Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Autonomedia, 2013) Hartman, S., Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019) Hayes, M., Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power, Anxiety, Subversion, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Heng, G., Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) Heng, G., The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Higgins, I. M., Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) Hochman, A., ‘Is “race” modern? Disambiguating the question’, Du Bois Review, 16:2 (2019), 647–​65 Hollywood, A., ‘The normal, the queer, and the Middle Ages’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001), 173–​9 Homar, K., ‘Chaucer’s novelized, carnivalized exemplum: a Bakhtinian reading of the Friar’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 45 (2010), 85–​105

572

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

275

Hope, W. H. St J., A Grammar of English Heraldry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913) Horobin, S., ‘Harley 3954 and the audience of Piers Plowman’, in G. D. Caie and D. Renevey (eds), Medieval Texts in Context (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 68–​84 Howes, D., ‘Can these dry bones live? An anthropological approach to the history of the senses,’ Journal of American History, 95 (2008), 442–​51 Howes, D., and C. Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (New York: Routledge, 2014) Hsy, J., ‘“Be more strange and bold”: kissing lepers and female same-​ sex desire in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Early Modern Women, 5 (2010), 189–​99 Hsy, J., ‘Lingua franca: overseas travel and language contact in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. Sobecki (ed.), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity, and Culture (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 159–​78 Hsy, J., ‘Between species: animal–​human bilingualism and medieval texts’, in C. Batt and R. Tixier (eds), Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis, The Medieval Translator 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 563–​80 Hsy, J., ‘Phantom sounds’, in K. Heller and S. C. Akbari (eds), How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2019), pp. 97–​106 Huizinga, J., The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. R. J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Hult, D., ‘Volume editor’s introduction’, in D. Hult (ed.), Debate of the ‘Romance of the Rose’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 1–​26 Huot, S., ‘The scribe as editor: rubrication as critical apparatus in two manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose’, L’Esprit Créateur, 27:1 (1987), 67–​78 Irvine, M., ‘Medieval grammatical theory and Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Speculum, 60:4 (1985), 850–​76 Irvine, M., The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–​1100, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Johnson, B., Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) Johnston, M., and M. Van Dussen (eds), The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Jones, L. (A. Baraka). Black Music: Essays (New York: Akashic, 2010), pp. 135–​7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

276

Bibliography

Jütte, R., A History of the Senses. From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. J. Lynn (Cambridge: Polity, 2005) Kay, S., ‘Lover as parrot’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), 137–​45 Kay, S., ‘Sound matters 2. The soundscape of troubadour lyric, or, how human is song?’ Speculum 91:4 (2016), 1002–​15 Kay, S. ‘Circulating air: inspiration, voice, and soul in poetry and song’, Paragraph, 41:1 (2018), 10–​25 Keller, N., ‘“Pick Him up and hold Him in your arms”: The function of the holy dolls in the convent life of the late Middle Ages’, in K. Kopania (ed.), Dolls, Puppets, Sculptures and Living Images from the Middle Ages to the End of the 18th Century (Warsaw: Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art, 2017), pp. 76–​93 Kellogg, A. L., ‘Langland and the “Canes Muti”’, in R. Kirk and C. F. Main (eds), Essays in Literary History Presented to J. Milton French (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), pp. 25–​35 Ker, W. C. A. (ed.), Martial, Epigrams, with an English Translation, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1919) Kerby-​Fulton, K., M. Hilmo and L. Olson, Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012) Killough, G. B., ‘Punctuation and caesura in Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 4 (1982), 87–​107 Kleiman, I. R., ‘Editor’s introduction’, in I. R. Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 1–​9 Kleiman, I. R. (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Knuuttila, S., and P. Kärkkäinen, ‘Medieval theories of internal senses’, in S. Knuuttila and J. Sihvola (eds), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind: Philosophical Psychology from Plato to Kant (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 131–​45 Kraebel, A., ‘Rolle reassembled: booklet production, single-​author anthologies, and the making of Bodley 861’, Speculum, 94:4 (2019), 959–​1005 Kristjánsdóttir, B. S., ‘Primum caput: um höfuð Egils Skalla-​Grímssonar, John frá Salisbury o.fl.’, Skáldskaparmál, 4 (1997), 74–​96 Kuczynski, M. P., Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) Küpper, J., ‘Perception, cognition, and volition in the Arcipreste de Talavere’, in S. G. Nichols, A. Kablitz and A. Calhoun (eds), Rethinking the Medieval Senses: Heritage, Fascinations, Frames (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 119–​53 Kwakkel, E., Books before Print (Croydon: Arc Humanities Press, 2018)

772

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

277

Lambert, M., ‘Troilus, Books III: a Criseydan reading’, in M. B. Salu (ed.), Essays on Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), pp. 105–​25 Lausberg, H., Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. D. E. Orton and R. D. Anderson, trans. M. T. Bliss, A. Jansen and D. E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1998) Lavezzo, K., ‘Sobs and sighs between women: the homoerotics of compassion in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in L. Fradenburg and C. Freccero (eds), Premodern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175–​98 Lawler, T., The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, vol. 4, C Passūs 15–​19; B Passūs 13–​17 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Lawton, D. (ed.), Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982) Lawton, D., ‘The unity of Middle English alliterative poetry’, Speculum, 58:1 (1983), 72–​94 Lawton, D., Chaucer’s Narrators, Chaucer Studies 13 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) Lawton, D., ‘Dullness and the fifteenth century’, ELH, 54:4 (1987), 761–​99 Lawton, D., ‘The subject of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 1 (1987), 1–​30 Lawton, D., Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) Lawton, D., ‘Voice, authority and blasphemy in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. J. McEntire (ed.), Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 93–​115 Lawton, D., Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) Lawton, D., ‘The surveying subject and the whole world of belief: three case studies’, New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2000), 9–​37 Lawton, D., ‘History and legend: the exile and the Turk’, in P. C. Ingham and M. R. Warren (eds), Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 173–​94 Lawton, D., ‘Sacrilege and theatricality: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33:2 (2003), 281–​309 Lawton, D., ‘1453 and the stream of time’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37:3 (2007), 469–​91 Lawton, D., Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Layher, W., Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Leach, E. E., Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

278

Bibliography

Leppig, L., ‘The political rhetoric of Christine de Pizan: Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile’, in M. Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 141–​56. Lewis, C. T., and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879) (available at https://​pers​eus.tufts.edu/​hop​per/​text?doc=​Pers​ eus%3at​ext%3a1​999.04.0059 [accessed 13 October 2021]) Lochrie, K., Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) Lomperis, L., ‘Medieval travel writing and the question of race’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31:1 (2001), 147–​64 Longsworth, R., ‘Interpretive laughter in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Philological Quarterly, 700 (1991), 141–​7 Lorenzini, D., ‘Performative, passionate, and parrhesiastic utterance: on Cavell, Foucault, and truth as an ethical force’, Critical Inquiry, 41:2 (2015), 254–​68 Lucas, P. J., ‘Sense-​units and the use of the punctuation-​markers in John Capgrave’s Chronicle’, Archivum linguisticum, 2 (1971), 1–​24 Lumbley, C., ‘The “dark Welsh”: color, race, and alterity in the matter of medieval Wales’, Literature Compass, 16 (2019) McGee, T. J., ‘Medieval performance practice’, in M. Everist and T. F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 582–​608. McKinley, M., ‘The subversive “Seulette”’, in M. Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 157–​69 McWhorter, J. Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths about America’s Lingua Franca (New York: Bellevue, 2017) Mann, J., ‘The nature of need revisited’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 18 (2008), 3–​29 Mann, J., ‘Allegory and Piers Plowman’, in A. Cole and A. Galloway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 65–​82 Mann, J., ‘Chaucerian themes and style in the Franklin’s Tale’, in M. D. Rasmussen (ed.), Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-​Poet, and Malory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 62–​79. Margolis, N., ‘“The cry of the chameleon”: evolving voices in the Epistles of Christine de Pizan’, Disputatio, 1 (1996), 37–​70 Marrow, S. B., ‘Parrhēsia and the New Testament’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 44:3 (1982), 431–​46 Martín, J. C., ‘Punctuation practice in a 15th-​century arithmetical treatise (MS Bodley 790)’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 105:4 (2004), 407–​22

972

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

279

Marx, C. W., The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1995) Maxwell, K., J. R. Simpson and D. V. Davies, ‘Performance and the page’, Pecia, 16 (2014), 7–​15 MED: Kurath, H., S. M. Kuhn and R. E. Lewis (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1954–​2001) (available at http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​med [accessed 13 September 2021]) Merleau-​Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) Middleton, A., ‘The audience and public of Piers Plowman’, in D. Lawton (ed.), Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 101–​23, 147–​54 Middleton, A., ‘Narration and the invention of experience: episodic form in Piers Plowman’, in L. D. Benson and S. Wenzel (eds), The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1982), pp. 91–​122 Middleton, A., ‘Acts of vagrancy: the C version “autobiography” and the Statute of 1388’, in S. Justice and K. Kerby-​Fulton (eds), Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 208–​317 Minnis, A. J., Magister Amoris: The Roman de La Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Minnis, A. J., and A. B. Scott (eds, with the assistance of D. Wallace), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100 –​c.1375: The Commentary-​Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) Mintz, S., Sweetness and Power (New York: Viking, 1985) Mooney, C. (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) Mooney, L. R., and E. Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–​1425 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2013) Moore, C., ‘Communities of practice and incipient standardization in Middle English written culture’, English Studies, 100:2 (2019), 117–​32 Moseley, C. W. R. D., ‘“Whet-​stone leasings of old Maundevile”: reading the Travels in early modern England’, in L. Niayesh (ed.), A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 28–​50 Moten, F., In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

280

Bibliography

Moten, F., consent not to be a single being, 3 vols. [Black and Blur, Stolen Life, The Universal Machine] (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017–​18) Muñoz, J. E., Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) Muscatine, C., Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966) Newhauser, R. (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses, vol. 2, In the Middle Ages (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014; repr. 2019) Newhauser, R., ‘“putten to ploughe”: touching the peasant sensory community’, in F. Griffiths and K. Starkey (eds), Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Material and Literary Culture 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 225–​48 Nichols, S. G., ‘What is a manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix,’ in M. Johnston and M. Van Dussen (eds), The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 34–​59 Nissé, R., ‘“A coroun ful riche”: the rule of history in St Erkenwald’, ELH, 65 (1998), 277–​95 Nolan, B., ‘“A poet ther was”: Chaucer’s voices in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales’, PMLA, 101 (1986), 154–​69 Nordal, G., Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2000) North, R., ‘Sleeping dogs and stasis in The Franklin’s Tale’, in M. D. J. Bintley et al. (eds), Stasis in the Medieval West: Questioning Change and Continuity, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 205–​30 Norton-​Smith, J., Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Routledge, 1974) Norval, A. J., ‘Moral perfectionism and democratic responsiveness: reading Cavell with Foucault’, Ethics & Global Politics, 4:4 (2011), 207–​29 O’Connor, R., ‘History and fiction’, in Á. Jakobsson and S. Jakobsson (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Saga (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 88–​110 O’Keefe, P., Latin Inscriptions in St Albans Abbey, Occasional Paper (new series) 7 (St Albans: Fraternity of the Friends of St Albans Abbey, n.d.) O’Neill, R., ‘Counting sheep in the C text of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 29 (2015), 89–​116 OED: Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Ólason, V., Samræður við söguöld: Frásagnarlist Íslendingasagna og fortíðarmynd (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, Háskólaforlag Máls og menningar, 1998)

182

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

281

Ong, W. J., ‘The shifting sensorium’, in D. Howes (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 47–​60 Orlemanski, J., ‘How to kiss a leper’, postmedieval, 3 (2012), 142–​57 Ormrod, M., ‘John Mandeville, Edward III, and the King of Inde’, Chaucer Review, 46:3 (2012), 314–​39 Otter, M., ‘“New werke”: St Erkenwald, St Albans, and the medieval sense of the past’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 24:3 (1994), 387–​414 Page, C., ‘A treatise on musicians from ?c. 1400: the “Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum” by Arnulf de St Ghislain’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 117:1 (1992), 1–​21 Page W. (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Hertford, vol. 2 (London: A. Constable, 1908) Parkes, M. B., Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993) Parsons, K., ‘The Red-​Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and his lay audience’, in K. Kerby-​Fulton and M. Hilmo (eds), The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe and Gower (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 2001), pp. 143–​216 Patterson, L., Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991) Paupert, A., ‘Le “Je” lyrique féminin dans l’œuvre poétique de Christine de Pizan’, in J.-​C. Aubailly et al. (eds), Et C’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble: Hommage à Jean Dufournet, vol. 3 (Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, 1993), pp. 1057–​71 Paxson, J. J., The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Paz, J., Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-​Saxon Literature and Material Culture, Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) Pearsall, D., ‘Poverty and poor people in Piers Plowman’, in E. D. Kennedy, R. Waldron and J. S. Wittig (eds), Medieval English Studies presented to George Kane (Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1988) Penn, S., ‘Literacy and literary production’, in S. Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 113–​29 Perry, I., Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018) Phillips, H., An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) Poirion, D., Le Poète et le prince: L’Évolution du lyrisme courtois de Giullaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

282

Bibliography

Potter, J., ‘Issues in the modern performance of medieval music’, in M. Everist and T. F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 609–​26 Powell, H., and C. Saunders (eds), Visions and Voice-​Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Raaflaub, K., The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, trans. R. Franciscono, first English edn, rev., updated (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Rahner, K., ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, 13 (1932), 113–​45 Rahner, K., ‘La doctrine des “sens spirituels” au Moyen-​Age, en particulier chez saint Bonaventura’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, 14 (1933), 263–​99 Rahner, K., ‘The doctrine of the “spiritual senses” in the Middle Ages’, trans. D. Morland, in K. Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 16 (New York: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), 104–​34 Rahner, K., ‘The “spiritual senses” according to Origen’, trans. D. Morland, in K. Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 16 (New York: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), 81–​103 Rajabzadeh, S., ‘The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure’, Literature Compass, 16 (2019), 9–​10 Ramakers, B. A. M., and W. S. Melion (eds), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Rikhardsdottir, S., Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts, Studies in Old Norse Literature I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017) Rikhardsdottir, S., ‘Medieval emotionality: the feeling subject in medieval literature’, Comparative Literature, 69:1 (2017), 74–​90 Rimmon-​Kenan, S, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983) Robbins, R. H., ‘A Gawain epigone’, Modern Language Notes, 58 (1943), 361–​6 Robertson, D. W. Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962) Robertson, K., ‘Medieval things: materiality, historicism, and the premodern object’, Literature Compass, 5:6 (2008), 1060–​80 Salih, S., ‘The Digby saint plays and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. J. E. Riches and S. Salih (eds), Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–​34 Saunders, C., ‘Voices and visions: mind, body and affect in medieval writing’, in A. Whitehead and A. Woods (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to

382

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

283

the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 411–​27 Scarpat, G., Parrhesia greca, parrhesia cristiana (Brescia: Paideia, 2001) Scase, W., Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700 –​c. 1550 (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming) Scattergood, J., The Lost Tradition: Essays in Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 184–​95 Schaeffer, P., Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966) Schaeffer, P., Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, trans. C. North and J. Dack (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017) Schechner, R., and S. Brady, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2013) Schleier, E., ‘Παρρησία, παρρησιάζομαι’, in G. Kittel and G. Friedrich (eds), G. W. Bromiley (trans.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 871–​86 Schuurman, A., ‘Materials of wonder: miraculous objects and poetic form in Saint Erkenwald’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 39 (2017), 275–​96 Schwytzer, P., ‘Exhumation and ethnic conflict: from St Erkenwald to Spenser in Ireland’, Representations, 95 (2006), 1–​26 Scott, A. M., ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Poor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004) 1490 (London: Harvey Scott, K. L., Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–​ Miller, 1996) Scott, K. L., Dated and Dateable English Manuscript Borders, c. 1395–​ 1499 (London: British Library, 2002) Seymour, M. C., ‘Mandeville in England: the early years’, in L. Niayesh (ed.), A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 15–​27 Sharpe, R., ‘Anselm as author: publishing in the late eleventh century’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 19 (2009), 1–​87 Shepherd, G., ‘Poverty in Piers Plowman’, in T. H. Aston et al. (eds), Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 169–​89 Shull, J., ‘Locating the past in the present: living traditions and the performance of early music’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 15:1 (2006), 87–​111 Simpson, J., ‘The constraints of satire in Piers Plowman and Mum and the Sothsegger’, in H. Phillips (ed.), Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 11–​30

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

284

Bibliography

Sisk, J., ‘Unauthorized desire: audience and affect in St Erkenwald and Lydgate’s St Austin at Compton’, Religion & Literature, 46:1 (2014), 1–​23 Sluiter, I., and R. M. Rosen (eds), Free Speech in Classical Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2004) Smedick, L. K., ‘Parallelism and pointing in Rolle’s rhythmical style’, Mediaeval Studies, 41 (1979), 404–​67 Smith, D. V., ‘Crypt and decryption: Erkenwald terminable and interminable’, New Medieval Literatures, 5 (2002), 59–​86 Smith, J. J., ‘Punctuating Mirk’s Festial: a Scottish text and its implications’, in M. W. Driver and V. O’Mara (eds), Preaching the Word in Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Susan Powell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 161–​92 Solopova, E., ‘Punctuation in the early MSS of the Canterbury Tales’, in A. J. Minnis (ed), Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 27–​40 Somerset, F., Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) Sørensen, P. M., ‘The prosimetrum form 1: verses as the voice of the past’, in R. Poole (ed.), Skaldsagas: Text, Vocation, and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 27 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), pp. 172–​90 Spearing, A. C., Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Stanbury, S., The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) STC 2nd edn: Pollard, A. W., and G. R. Redgrave (eds), A Short-​Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–​1640, 2nd edn, rev., enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by K. F. Pantzer (London: Bibliographical Society, vol. 1 [A–​H], 1986; vol. 2 [I–​Z], 1976; vol. 3 [Indexes, Addenda, Corrigenda], 1991) Steiner, E., Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Steiner E., and L. Ransom (eds), Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Stevens, J. E., Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961) Stock, B., Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)

582

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

285

Stoessel, J., ‘Howling like wolves, bleating like lambs: singers and the discourse of animality in the late Middle Ages’, Viator, 45:2 (2014), 201–​36 Stoessel, J., ‘Voice and song in early encounters between Latins, Mongols, and Persians, ca. 1250–​ca. 1350’, in R. Strohm (ed.), Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83–​113 Stoever, J. L., The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016) Strickland, D. H., Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) Þorgeirsdóttir, B., ‘The head, the heart, and the breast: bodily conceptions of emotion and cognition in Old Norse skaldic poetry’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 15 (2019), 29–​64 Todorov, T., The Poetics of Prose, trans. R. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971; repr. 1977) Toolan, M. J., Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992) Trafford, S., ‘Nata vimpi curmi da: dead languages and primordial nationalisms in folk metal music’, in A. DiGioia, C. Doesburg and R.-​L. Valijärvi (eds), Multilingual Metal: Sociocultural, Literary and Linguistic Perspectives (Bingley: Emerald, 2020), pp. 221–​38 Trafford, S., ‘Viking metal’, in S. C. Meter and K. Yri (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 564–​88 Travis, P., ‘The Franklin’s symptomatic Sursanure’, in F. Grady (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 151–​65 Tulinius, T. H., ‘The prosimetrum form 2: verses as the basis for saga composition and interpretation’, in R. Poole (ed.), Skaldsagas: Text, Vocation, and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 27 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 191–​217 Tulinius, T. H., The Enigma of Egill: The Saga, the Viking Poet, and Snorri Sturluson, trans. V. Cribb, Islandica LVII (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) Tzanaki, R., Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study of the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Unzeitig, M., A. Schrott and N. Miedema (eds), Stimme und Performanz in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Historische Dialogforschung 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017) Van Deusen, N. (ed.), The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

286

Bibliography

Van Renswoude, I., The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Vitz, E. B., Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999) Voaden, R., ‘Beholding men’s members: the sexualizing of transgression in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in P. Biller and A. J. Minnis (eds), Medieval Theology and the Natural Body (York: York Medieval Press, 1997), pp. 175–​90 Vondenhoff, C., ‘Matter(s) of the heart in Yvain and Ívens saga’, in K. Barclay and B. Reddan (eds), The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 67 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) Wakelin, D., Scribal Correction and Literary Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Waldron, R., ‘Whose punctuation is it, anyway? A sampling of some manuscripts of the Polychronicon’, in M. Connolly and R. Radulescu (eds.), Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 35–​68 Watson, N., ‘The phantasmal past: time, history, and the recombinative imagination’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010), 1–​37 Wheeler, B., Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-​Century Woman (New York: St Martin’s, 2000) White, T., ‘National philology, imperial hierarchies, and the “defective” Book of Sir John Mandeville’, Review of English Studies, 71 (2020), 828–​49 Williams, C., The Concert Pianist (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) Williams, R., Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Wogan-​Browne, J., et al. (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–​ 1520 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) Wolfe, C. ‘Introduction’ in C. Wolfe (ed.), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. ix–​xxiii Wolfson, H. A., ‘The internal senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophic texts’, Harvard Theological Review, 28:2 (1935), 69–​133 Wood, S., Conscience and the Composition of ‘Piers Plowman’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Woolgar, C. M., The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) Yakovlev, N., ‘Metre and punctuation in the Caligula manuscript of Laȝamon’s Brut’, in R. Dance and L. Wright (eds), The Use and Development of Middle English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 261–​79

782

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

287

Youngs, D., ‘The Parson’s Tale: a newly discovered fragment’, Chaucer Review, 33 (1999), 207–​16 Youngs, D., Humphrey Newton (1466–​1536): An Early Tudor Gentleman (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008) Yri, K., ‘Corvus Corax: medieval music, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-​nationalism’, Popular Music, 38:3 (2019), 361–​78. Zayaruznaya, A., ‘“Sanz note” & “sanz mesure”: toward a premodern aesthetics of the dirge’, in I. R. Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Zeeman, E., ‘Punctuation in an early manuscript of Love’s Mirror’, RES, 7:25 (1956), 11–​18 Zeeman, N., The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) Zimmerman, M., ‘I Christine’, trans. E. J. Richards, in booklet of VocaMe, Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, audio CD, pp. 22–​9. Zingesser, E., ‘Pidgin poetics: bird talk in medieval France and Occitania’, New Medieval Literatures, 17 (2017), 62–​80. Zumthor, P., Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972) Zumthor, P., Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983) Zumthor, P., La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984) Zumthor, P., ‘The text and the voice’, trans. M. C. Engelhardt, New Literary History, 16 (1984), 67–​92

Electronic sources https://​ b l.uk/​ c at​ a log​ u es/​ i ll​ u min​ a ted​ m anu​ s cri​ p ts/​ r ec​ o rd.asp?MSID=​ 4469&Col​lID=​8&NSt​art=​3954; digitised at https://​bl.uk/​manu​scri​pts/​ Vie​wer.aspx?ref=​har​ley_​ms_​3​954 (accessed 12 September 2021) https://​ b l.uk/​ c at​ a log​ u es/​ i ll​ u min​ a ted​ m anu​ s cri​ p ts/​ r ec​ o rd.asp?MSID=​ 7518&Col​lID=​16&NSt​art=​170​338 (accessed 12 September 2021) https://​ b l.uk/​ c at​ a log​ u es/​ i ll​ u min​ a ted​ m anu​ s cri​ p ts/​ r ec​ o rd.asp?MSID=​ 7925&Col​lID=​27&NSt​art=​24189 (accessed 12 September 2021) https://​bl.uk/​manu​scri​pts/​Full​Disp​lay.aspx?ref=​Add_​M​S_​24​189 (accessed 12 September 2021) https://​bl.uk/​manu​scri​pts/​Full​Disp​lay.aspx?ref=​Add_​M​S_​61​823 (accessed 12 September 2021) Black Ivory Tower, La Sanie des siècles –​panégyrique de la dégénéresecence, English translation: https://​blac​kivo​ryto​wer.com/​2013/​12/​22/​la-​sanie-​ des- ​ s iec ​ l es- ​ p ane​ g yri​ q ue-​ d e-​ l a-​ d eg​ e ner​ e sce​ n ce-​ e ngl​ i sh-​ t ran​ s lat​ i on (accessed 14 April 2021)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

288

Bibliography

Canterbury Tales Project, University of Sheffield, 2019: https://​dhi.ac.uk/​ proje​cts/​can​terb​ury-​tales (accessed 8 October 2021) Croenen, G., and S. Loomans, ‘Scribes or copy editors? Scribal behavior and the production of manuscript copies of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles in fifteenth-​century Paris’, in P. Ainsworth and G. Croenen (eds), The Online Froissart, v. 1.5 (Sheffield: HRIOnline, 2013): https://​dhi.ac.uk/​ onli ​ n efr ​ o iss ​ a rt/​ a ppara​ t us.jsp?type=​ i nt​ r os&intro=​ f .int​ r os.GC-​ S Lo (accessed 8 October 2021) https:// ​ d igi ​ t al.bodle​ i an.ox.ac.uk/​ i nqu​ i re/​ p /​ 0 1eff​ c 15–​ 9 f29–​ 4 82f-​ 9 6fe-​ 8c5cd​2cc6​4a2 (accessed 13 September 2021) Douay–​Rheims Bible Online; https://​drbo.org/​lvb/​index.htm (accessed 13 October 2021) Encyclopaedia Metallum, La Sanie des siècles –​panégyrique de la dégénéresecence: https://​metal-​archi​ves.com/​revi​ews/​Pest​e_​No​ire/​La_ ​ S ​ a nie​ _ ​ d es​ _ ​ s i%C3%A8cl ​ e s_ ​ - ​ _ ​ P an%C3%A9gyri​ q ue_​ d e_​ l ​ a _​ d%C3%A9g%C3%A9n%C3%A9r​ e sce​ n ce/​ 1 27 ​ 1 30/​ S ea ​ n 16/ ​ 3 6894 (accessed 14 April 2021) Fenner, C., ‘Be thou my vision’, for the Hymnology Archive: https://​hymno​ logy​arch​ive.com/​be-​thou-​my-​vis​ion (accessed 9 July 2018) https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv​1b55​0098​07z/​f131.item (accessed 13 September 2021) https://​theg​uard​ian.com/​austra​lia-​news/​2020/​jun/​11/​the-​story-​of-​david-​ dun​gay-​and-​an-​ind​igen​ous-​death-​in-​cust​ody (accessed 3 April 2021) https://​hdl.hun​ting​ton.org/​digi​tal/​col​lect​ion/​p151​50co​ll7/​id/​2627/​rec/​1 (accessed 1 October 2021) https://​hear​ingt​hevo​ice.org (accessed 2 April 2021) http://​ica.themor​gan.org/​man​uscr​ipt/​page/​7/​76932 (accessed 13 September 2021) Kao, W.-​C., ‘White attunement’, blog, New Chaucer Society, 9 November 2018: https://​newcha​ucer​soci​ety.org/​blog/​entry/​white-​att​unem​ent (accessed 28 December 2020) https://​themorgan.org/​collection/​hours-​of-​catherine-​of-​cleves/​241 Peste Noire, ‘Dueil angoisseus’: https://​yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​uLSU​QYzq​ XZ0 (accessed 14 April 2021) Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, 2019: http://​piers.chass.ncsu.edu (accessed 8 October 2021) https://​proquest.com/​legacyredirect/​eebo Seferis, G., Nobel Prize in Literature at the City Hall in Stockholm, 10 December 1963: https://​nob​elpr​ize.org/​pri​zes/​lit​erat​ure/​1963/​sefe​ris/​ spe​ech (accessed 5 October 2020)

982

Bibliography

289

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

VocaMe, Christine de Pizan: Chansons et Ballades, trailer: https://​yout​ube. com/​watch?v=​VQG​1qt-​6p-​s (accessed 14 April 2021) VocaMe, Hildegard von Bingen: Songs and Visions, website: https://​voc​ ame.de/​en/​hildeg​ard-​von-​bin​gen (accessed 14 April 2021) VocaMe, ‘Mon chevalier’, interview, Christine de Pizan: https://​yout​ube. com/​watch?v=​C3w_​TvDq​OJY (accessed 14 April 2021)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Abel 100 Adams, Tracy 235 admonition 118–​20 see also Langland, William; parrhēsia Agamben, Giorgio 27 Alexander, Gavin 91 Allen, Valerie 78 Anselm of Canterbury, Saint Orationes sive meditationes 155–​8 aposiopesis 90, 91 archaic languages used in black metal music 246 Aristotle 2, 15, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 101 On the Soul 23 Arnulf of St Ghislain 23, 24, 29 Ascelin of Lombardy 21 audience 38, 50, 52, 56, 96, 195, 197, 202 extradiegetic 119 fictive 84, 197 modern 194, 195 Augustine 3, 15, 48, 59 Confessions 3 aurality 5, 7, 13–​14, 204 see also sound; vocalisation; voice Austin, J. L. 56 Avicenna 102 Bahr, Arthur 165 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 254

Bal, Mieke 39 Bale, Anthony 212, 218 Balibar, Étienne 24 banderole visual representation of speech 172, 179 Baraka, Amiri 28 Barney, Stephen A. 114, 118 Barthes, Roland 253 Battles, Dominique 86, 87, 88, 89 Benson, C. David 214 Benson, Larry 37, 38 Benveniste, Emile 3 Berkeley, Bishop 100 Bettens, Olivier 152 Binchois, Gilles, composer setting of Christine de Pizan’s ballade 232, 236, 238, 240–​2 birdsong 7, 22, 25, 26, 27, 80, 98 see also nightingale; parrot (popinjay); sound Black, Patricia E. 244 Blancheflour et Florence 175 Bloomfield, Morton W. 38 Boccaccio, Giovanni 85 Il Filocolo 85, 88 Menedon 85 Tarolfo 85, 86 Boethius 15 Boncompagno da Signa 24 Boncompagnus (Rhetorica antiqua) 24

192

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index Book of Deuteronomy, The 99 Book of Tribulation 57–​8 Holi Chirche 57, 58 Borgarnes 194 Bose, Mishtooni 1 Boynton, Susan 22 Brakke, David 104 breath 5, 8, 18, 19, 28, 29 Bull, Michael 100 cacemphaton 23 cacephaton 23 cadence 1, 77 Cain 100 Calabrese, Michael 63 Camelot 83 Camp, Cynthia Turner 196 Capgrave, John 215–​16 see also Mandeville’s Travels Cavell, Stanley 56 censorship 117 Cerquiglini, Bernard 153 Certeau, Michel de 213, 221 Chaganti, Seeta 196, 201, 202 Chaucer, Geoffrey 3–​4, 7, 9, 26, 27, 37–​9, 44, 52, 60, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 98 Book of the Duchess 60 Canterbury Tales 3, 37, 38 Franklin 77, 78 General Prologue 4, 9, 28, 37–​9, 40–​3, 47–​52 Host 43 Knight 42, 43 Monk 47–​9, 51 Parson 49–​51 Physician 42, 43, 51 The Franklin’s Tale 10, 75–​9, 84–​92 Arveragus 75–​6, 78, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90–​1 Aurelius 84–​5, 87, 92 Dorigen 75–​6, 78, 84–​92 The Knight’s Tale 77 Arcite 77 Emily 77

291

Palamon 77 The Merchant’s Tale 176 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale 77 Chaunticleer 77 The Parson’s Tale 98 The Reeve’s Tale 90 The Shipman’s Tale 175 The Squire’s Tale 8, 25–​7, 29 Canacee 25–​6, 27 King Cambiuskan 26 The Wife of Bath 41–​2 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue 164–​5 Canterbury Tales Project 166 House of Fame 95 Legend of Good Women ‘The Legend of Dido’ 90 Parliament of Fowls 7 Troilus and Criseyde 79–​81, 176, 254 Criseyde 79–​81, 92 Pandarus 79, 81 Troilus 79, 81 Chen, Mel 21 Classen, Constance 96 Clemens, Raymond 153 Cloud of Unknowing 164 Cobley, Paul 52 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 138, 140 Col, Gontier 62 Col, Pierre 62 Conrad, Robert 44 The Concert Pianist 44 Constantine the Great 99 Corbin, Alain 96 Cornish, Alison 1, 95 Crane, Susan 27 Craun, Edwin D. 113, 118 Croxton Play of the Sacrament 257 Dante Alighieri 98 Purgatorio 98 David, Prophet 61, 63 de Fournival, Richard Quant jou voi 175

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

292

Index

de Montreuil, Jean 62 de Pizan, Christine 14, 62–​3 ‘Dueil angoisseus, rage desmesurée’ 14, 232–​3, 235–​6, 240–​2, 243–​4, 247 see also Binchois, Gilles Democritus 101 Dinshaw, Carolyn 11, 133, 136–​8, 140, 142, 215 discourse 37, 40, 43–​52 Dominican Order 97 Donaldson, E. Talbot 38, 252, 254 Donatus 21, 26, 178 Dungay, David Jr 28 Edwards, Robert R. 38 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar 13, 193–​5, 197–​201, 202–​6 Egill Skallagrímsson 193, 194–​5, 197–​200, 202–​6 Sonatorrek 203–​4 Þórdís Þórólfsdóttir 197 Þorgerður Egilsdóttir 204 Eidsheim, Nina Sun 18, 19, 20 emotion 56, 57, 76, 77–​8, 80, 81–​92 anger 91 fear 82 grief 77, 91, 232–​3, 235, 241 humour 90, 103 lament 76, 88 laughter 82 nostalgia 246–​7 pietatis affectum 155 shame 83, 91 somatic 78–​9, 84 see also voice trauma 82 wailing 5 weeping 5, 10, 75, 76, 78–​9, 85, 89, 90, 140, 204 see also tears enunciation 3, 235, 236 see also voice

Fanon, Frantz 29 Farrell, Thomas J. 40 Febvre, Lucien 96 female voice see voice feminism voice of empowerment within 235 Floyd, George 28 Foucault, Michel 11, 56, 97, 125, 235, 253, 254 Frère Laurent 98 Summe le roi 98 Galloway, Andrew 122 Garner, Eric 28 Genette, Gérard 39, 40 Gerson, Jean 62 Gordon-​Reed, Annette 20 Gower, John Vox Clamantis 65 Graham, Timothy 153 Greenblatt, Stephen 216, 217 Greene, Virginie 63 Griffiths, Lavinia 63 hallucinations, auditory 4, 238 Handlyng Synne 12 Hanna, Ralph III 176–​7, 253, 254 hearing 4–​5, 18, 22, 98, 101 Heng, Geraldine 8, 19–​20, 22, 104 heteroglossia 37 Higden, Ranulf Polychronicon 164 Higgins, Iain MacLeod 213 Hildegard of Bingen 238 Hilton, Walter 61 Scale of Perfection 61 Hollywood, Amy 142, 143 Howes, David 96 Hsy, Jonathan 138–​40 Huizinga, Johan 96 illustrations as visual form of voice 218–​28 imitation 13 parrot (popinjay) as imitative 174, 178

392

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index see also Newton, Humphrey; voice impersonation 214 interiority 56, 91 public interiority 5, 6, 11, 125, 133, 141, 214 see also Lawton, David invention 19–​20 rhetorical 19 Isidore of Seville 22, 23, 178 Etymologies 22, 114 Jean de Meun 62, 63 Johnston, Michael 151 Joseph of Arimathea 257 Julian of Norwich see Kempe, Margery Kao, Wan Chuan 20 Kay, Sarah 7, 25, 28, 98 Kempe, Margery Book of Margery Kempe 5, 11–​12 Julian of Norwich in 140–​1 the leprous woman 133–​6, 137, 139–​40 queerness in 137–​40 Red Ink Annotator 134–​5, 137 voice of St Paul in 133, 135, 136, 140–​1, 144 Khan, Batu 26 Khan, Genghis 26 King Solomon 100 Kleiman, Irith Ruth 6 Kohanski, Tamara 223 Langland, William 11 Piers Plowman 11, 25, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63–​6, 101, 176 Adam 64 addressing the rich and powerful 115–​16, 117, 118, 120–​2 admonition 118–​20 see also admonition

293

Anima 116–​17 Christ 64–​6 Clergie 119–​20, 122 Conscience 25, 114, 118, 120, 124 Eve 64, 66 Gobelyn 64, 66 Holy Church 115, 124 Lewte 117–​19, 120, 122 Lucifer 64–​6 Need 57, 62 Spiritus justicie 118–​19 Wille 115, 117–​18, 119, 123 Lavezzo, Kathy 142, 144 Lawton, David 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 14–​15, 37, 40, 56, 95, 112, 113, 124, 133, 140–​1, 143, 153, 202 career and contributions 251–​8 Le Jugement d’amour, ou Florence et Blancheflor 175 Leach, Elizabeth Eva 23 lechery 136, 138, 140 Liège 14 listening 20, 27 see also hearing Lomperis, Linda 213 London 196 Love, Nicholas Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ 152 Lucretia 87 Lydgate, John 19 Ballade in Commendation of our Lady 175 Court of Love 175 Lyon 97 Malory, Thomas (Sir) Le Morte Darthur 81 Mandeville, John (Sir) 14 material traces attributed to him 217 theories about his identity 213

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

294 Mandeville’s Travels 14 Metrical Version (fifteenthcentury) 215 narrative persona illustrations of 218–​28 see also illustrations voyeur and walker 213 voyeur and walker fused with author 226 textual afterlives 216 voice as ‘usable site’ 215 exceeding the text 215 unifying device 214 Mann, Jill 57, 84 medieval studies and deconstructive theory 256 and New Criticism 253 and New Historicism 256 and poststructural literary theory 254 and secularist criticism 256 and textual theory 254 medievalism 14, 215, 233–​47 and nationalist interpretation of voice 246–​7 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 96 Middleton, Anne 115 Minnis, Alastair J. 60 Mintz, Sidney 96 miracle 198, 199 Mongol Empire 21, 25, 26 Mosfell 199, 206 Moten, Fred 29 Muscatine, Charles 38 musicality 5, 7 musicology 5 reconstructions of medieval music 238–​43 see also voice narratology 39–​40, 43 narrator 37–​9, 43, 44, 48–​51, 52, 78, 88 see also voice Nemesius of Emesa 102

Index Newton, Humphrey 12–​13, 172–​85 and the bestiary tradition 177–​9 and gentry identity formation 177–​85 and heraldic imagery 179–​84 as imitative 176–​7 parrots in his work 172–​4 nightingale 23, 80 Nissé, Ruth 196 noise 22, 98 normativity in Book of Margery Kempe 138, 140, 141, 142, 144 see also queerness North, Richard 78, 85, 86 Norval, Aletta 56 Novas del papagei 175 Ong, Walter 96 onomatopoeia 22 orality 3, 7, 46, 52 Ordo Praedicatorum 97 Origen of Alexandria 101 Orlemanski, Julie 138 Otter, Monica 199 Ovid 78 palimpsest, vocal 1, 199 Paris 97 Parkes, M. B. 153 parrhēsia 11, 56 ancient Greek meaning 111 capaciousness of 113 Pauline version of 112 in Piers Plowman 113–​25 parrot (popinjay) 13 as imitative see imitation in medieval literature 176 as speaking bird 174–​5, 178–​9 see also Newton, Humphrey Parsons, Kelly 134 Paul, St 2, 4, 11, 12 in Book of Margery Kempe see Kempe, Margery

592

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index Penelope 87 Peraldus, William 10–​11, 96, 97–​105 De eruditione principum 97 De eruditione religiosorum 97 Summa de virtutibus 97 Summa de vitiis 97, 98–​105 Peste Noire, Black Metal band adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s ‘Dueil Angoisseus’ 243–​7 Peyraud 97 pitch 1, 19 see also voice Plato 101 Pliny the Elder Naturalis historia 177 polyphony 3, 4 in medieval music 240 see also musicology Portia 87 prayer efficacy of 140, 144 inspired by reading 155 petitionary 134, 135, 140 preaching prohibited for women 136 Priscian 21, 22, 26, 78, 152–​3, 178 see also vox prosopopoeia 58 Psalms 61, 63 punctuation influence on voicing 151, 152 the paraph 154–​63 marking the absence of voice 152–​3 see also voice queerness 11, 12 see also Kempe, Margery Querelle de la Rose 62–​3 reading 12, 13, 196, 201 oral 201 Red Ink Annotator see Kempe, Margery

295

revoicing 6, 193, 194, 204 rhetoric 77, 83, 88, 92, 95, 102 rhythm 1 see also voice Ríkharðsdóttir, Sif 1 Robbins, R. H. 176–​7 Robertson, D. W. 252, 255 Rolle, Richard 61 English psalter 61, 62 Romance of the Rose 62 Rufinus of Aquileia 101 Salih, Sarah 136, 142, 143 Sarai 26 Saunders, Corinne 4 Schaeffer, Pierre 18, 20 Scott, A. B. 60 scribes as mediators of textual voice 151 see also voice scripture 2–​3, 5 Seferis, Giorgos 18 senses 5, 10, 95–​6, 97, 100–​2, 104–​5, 194 see also sensology; touch sensology 10, 95–​6 Servius 60 Shelley, Percy 28 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ 28 shrieking 77, 243 Siege of Jerusalem 252, 257 silence 3, 5 Simon of Saint-​Quentin 21, 26 singing 24, 26, 80 see also voice Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 82–​4 Bertilak 82 Gawain 82–​4, 87 Green Knight 82, 83 slander 96 in Book of Margery Kempe 135 as sinful speech 96 Smith, D. Vance 201 Socrates 111, 114 Solopova, Elizabeth 164

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

296

Index

sound 1, 2, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23, 27, 58, 95–​6, 100, 102, 105, 194 acousmatic 18, 19, 20, 27 animal 2, 7, 8, 13, 21, 22, 23, 25, 65, 98 and signification 22, 26 soundscape 5, 7, 8, 11, 15, 98, 100, 104 Spearing, A. C. 88 speech 1, 56, 62, 65, 76, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102 direct 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52 indirect 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 52 see also voice St Albans 14 St Erkenwald 13, 193–​203, 205–​6 Bishop 205 Judge 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202–​3, 204, 205, 206 Saint Erkenwald 194 St Paul’s Cathedral 194, 196, 205, 206 Stevens, John E. 176 Stoessel, Justin 21 stylometrics see voice tears 75, 77, 78, 79, 89, 90, 91, 198, 205 see also emotion textuality 7 Tjaldanes 197 tongue 2, 96 touch 101 see also senses Trafford, Simon 244, 245, 246 translatio 198–​200, 202 Travis, Peter 84, 91 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge 75 Trollope, Anthony 40 Tulinius, Torfi H. 200

Van Dussen, Michael 151 ventriloquism 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 40, 51, 100, 194 Vincent of Beauvais 26 Speculum historiale 26 Virgil 178 Bucolics 60 Virgin Mary 102 visions 101 in Book of Margery Kempe 135, 143 vocalisation 5, 14, 194, 200, 201, 203, 205 early music vocalisation 238–​43 see also voice vocality 3, 4, 7, 15 VocaMe, early music ensemble reanimation of Christine de Pizan’s voice 236–​8, 240–​3 theory of the ‘fifth voice’ 239 see also vocalisation voice and agency 95, 202 articulate see vox authorial 2, 7, 8, 9, 38 and authority 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 38, 39, 52, 60, 77, 100, 102 classical theories of 2–​3, 21–​4, 25, 28 confessional 200–​1 corrective 118 see also admonition; parrhēsia deictic 46, 234 disembodied 2, 3, 5 see also embodied divine 2–​3, 4, 5, 99, 101, 198 embodied 1, 2, 10, 13, 15, 22, 57, 58, 60, 75–​7, 82, 84, 89–​92, 193–​4, 195–​7, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205–​6

792

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index see also disembodied enunciative 234–​5 see also enunciation ethical 4, 7, 10–​11, 76, 96–​105, 205 female 3, 236–​7 and focalisation 39–​43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 91 and gender 3, 66 as human characteristic 2, 3, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 57, 66, 95 and identity 2, 3, 6, 18, 24, 27 and imagination 2, 13, 23, 28, 56, 101, 214–​16, 218–​28 inarticulate see vox interior 5, 10, 27, 79, 101, 104, 194 and language 2, 7 measurable 235 and memory 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 102, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206 mimetic 43, 45, 95, 100 musical 14, 18, 23 acoustics 239–​40, 244 expressiveness 241, 244 intonation 239–​40 notation 236 pitch 236 rhythm 241–​2, 244 see also rhythm narrative 2, 3, 7, 8, 37–​9, 43, 200, 202 see also narrator in narrative theory 3, 9–​10, 37–​52 see also narratology parodic 63 performative aspect of 4, 7, 13–​14, 52, 58, 60, 75, 82, 201, 204

297

and persona 37–​9, 56–​66 and personification 9, 14, 56–​7, 58, 59, 60, 63, 65 physical properties of 5, 204, 235 poetic 193, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203–​4, 206 prophetic 61, 63 and punctuation 12, 151–​66 and race 8, 18–​22, 24–​9, 66, 104 scribal 6, 8, 12–​13, 151–​66, 195 and selfhood 4, 10, 15, 27, 29, 81, 100, 105, 202, 203 and soul 2, 22, 23, 24, 27 and subjectivity 6, 11, 100, 105 and temporality 193–​206 textualisation of 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11–​13, 15, 44, 58, 193–​4, 195, 196–​7, 200–​6 theorising of 2–​8, 95–​6, 194 visualisation of 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201, 205–​6 vox 7, 25, 28, 59, 98 articulata 5, 7, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 95, 98, 178 confusa 26, 178 illiterata 22, 78, 204 inarticulata 5, 8, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 77, 78, 95, 98 literata 22 see also voice Vulcanius 59 Wakelin, Daniel 162–​3 Waldron, Ronald 164 Wallace, David 60 Watson, Nicholas 195

298

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

William of Auvergne see Peraldus, William William of Waddington Manuel des péchés 12, 158–​62 Wolfe, Cary 21 Wood, Sarah 116

Youngs, Deborah 176–​7, 184 Zayaruznaya, Anna 232, 236, 241 Zeeman (Salter), Elizabeth 152 Zimmerman, Margarete 236–​7, 239 Zumthor, Paul 7, 153

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document