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English Pages 258 [259] Year 2021
Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature
Medieval Romance, Arthurian Literature
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Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald
Edited by A. S. G. Edwards
D. S. BREWER
© Contributors 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 2021 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
ISBN 978-1-84384-616-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80010-373-3 ePDF
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for 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 Cover image: Antiochus and his daughter, from ‘La cronique et histoire des mervilleuses aventures de Appolin roy de Thir’, British Library, London, MS Royal 20 C II f.210. © British Library Board Cover design: Toni Michelle
Contents
List of Contributors
vii
Elizabeth Archibald
xi
Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism Helen Cooper
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List of Abbreviations
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1
Silence in Debate: The Intellectual Nature of the Roman de Silence Venetia Bridges
2
From Sorceresses to Scholars: Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance Megan G. Leitch
3
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain Aisling Byrne
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Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius 46 Helen Cooper
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Emaré: The Story and its Telling A. C. Spearing
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6
Dark Nights of Romance: Thinking and Feeling in the Moment Corinne Saunders
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7
‘This was a sodeyn love’: Ladies Fall in Love in Medieval Romance 93 Carolyne Larrington
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Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 111 Jordi Sánchez-Martí
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Armorial Colours, Quasi-Heraldry, and the Disguised Identity Motif in Sir Gowther, Ipomadon A and Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney’ Michael J. Huxtable
1 16 34
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10 The Body Language of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur 143 Barry Windeatt 11 ‘Spirituall Thynges’: Human–Divine Encounters in Malory Andrew Lynch
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vi Contents
12 Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Bible Edward Donald Kennedy
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13 Arthurian Literature in the Percy Folio Manuscript Neil Cartlidge
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14 Dutch, French and English in Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye Ad Putter
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Bibliography of Elizabeth Archibald’s Writings
227
Index
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Tabula Gratulatoria
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Contributors Venetia Bridges is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. Her research focuses on the receptions of texts and narratives from antiquity and the early Middle Ages during the later medieval period. Her publications include Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in France and England (2018) and essays on romance, book history, and medieval Latin poetry. Aisling Byrne is Associate Professor in Medieval English Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (2016). Her published articles focus on romance, on literary translation in the Middle Ages and on the movement of books between medieval Britain and Ireland. She has co-edited Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages (2019) with Victoria Flood. Neil Cartlidge is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His publications include Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (1997), The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation (2001), Boundaries in Medieval Romance (2008), Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance (2012), and The Works of Chardri (2015), as well as over sixty academic essays and articles. Helen Cooper is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. She holds Emeritus and Honorary Fellowships at University College, Oxford, and a Life Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She has particular interests in the cultural continuations across the medieval and early modern periods. Her books include Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (1978), Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1989), The English Romance in Time (2004), and Shakespeare and the Medieval World (2010). Michael J. Huxtable is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His research focuses on intersections between medieval literature and the history of ideas. Recent publications include a monograph, Grosseteste and the Green Knight (2021), and a chapter on colour (with Ronan O’Donnell) in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain (2018).
viii Contributors
Edward Donald Kennedy is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written, edited, or co-edited six books and about 120 articles and reviews, primarily on medieval Arthurian literature and medieval chronicles. He edited the journal Studies in Philology for twelve years. In 2012 Arthuriana dedicated an issue of articles to him in honour of his retirement, and in 2017 he received the Norris J. Lacy award from the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society in recognition of his contributions to Arthurian literature and editing. Carolyne Larrington is Official Fellow in medieval English literature at St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford. Her recent publications include the co-edited Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre (2020) and All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones (2021). She is currently writing a book on emotions in Middle English literature. Megan G. Leitch is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University and co-editor of the journal Arthurian Literature. She is the author of Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (2015) and Sleep and its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams (2021), and co-editor of A New Companion to Malory (2019). Andrew Lynch is Emeritus Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow there. He has published widely on medieval literature and its modern afterlives, including Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in the Morte Darthur (1997). Recent publications include two co-edited collections, The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700 (2019) and A Cultural History of Emotions, 6 vols (2019). Ad Putter is Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bristol and Fellow of the British Academy. With Elizabeth Archibald he edited the Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Literature (2009). He is the editor, with Myra Stokes, of The Works of the Gawain Poet (2014). His next book, North Sea Crossings: The Literary Heritage of Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1066–1866, will be published in 2021.
Contributors ix
Jordi Sánchez-Martí is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Alicante. He is the editor of A Critical Edition of Anthony Munday’s ‘Palmerin d’Oliva’ (2020), and is currently preparing Iberian Books of Chivalry in English Translation: Descriptive Catalog with a Census of Copies, 1572–1700. Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. She specializes in romance and the history of ideas, with an emphasis on medicine, psychology, the body and the emotions. She was Co-Investigator on the Hearing the Voice project and Collaborator on the Life of Breath project, both funded by the Wellcome Trust. Her third monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, was published in 2010. Her most recent co-edited book is Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts (2020). A. C. Spearing is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Emeritus, University of Virginia, and a Life Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He was previously Reader in Medieval English Literature at Cambridge. Since 1960 he has published many books and articles, mainly about medieval English literature. Much of his recent work has concerned the relations between current narrative theory and the study of medieval narratives. This includes Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (2005), Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text (2012), and ‘What is a Narrator? Narrator Theory and Medieval Narratives’, Digital Philology 4 (2015), 59–105. Barry Windeatt is Fellow and Keeper of Rare Books at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and works largely on Chaucer, the literature of contemplation, and the interface between medieval English textual and visual cultures. Divining that he was a closet Arthurian, Elizabeth Archibald invited him to publish his first Arthurian essay in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (2009). He is completing a cultural history of medieval East Anglia.
Elizabeth Archibald
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lizabeth Archibald studied first Classics and then Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Newnham College, Cambridge. She received her BA in 1973. After several years working in a London bookshop she went to Yale to do a PhD in Medieval Studies, which she completed in 1984. She returned to Cambridge in 1985 as a Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in English at King’s College. In 1990 she took up a position at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, where she remained for ten years, receiving tenure as Associate Professor in 1992. In 2000 she returned to England as Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, where she was promoted to Reader in 2003, and to a personal chair in 2008. She was Coordinator of the Centre for Medieval Studies from 2001 to 2003, Head of Department from 2003 to 2006, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies from 2009 to 2010. She joined the University of Durham in 2012 as Professor of English and Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society. She retired from these positions in 2021. The range of Elizabeth’s scholarship is reflected at its widest in her books, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (1991) and Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001), studies that explore aspects of medieval literature in its classical and vernacular European contexts. She has written on Chaucer, Gower and Scottish literature. However, her most recurrent interests have been in Middle English romance and Arthurian literature, reflected most obviously in her co-editorship of A Companion to Malory (with A. S. G. Edwards, 1996), Arthurian Literature vols XXV– XXXV (with David F. Johnson, 2008–2020) and The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (with Ad Putter, 2009), but also in a large number of articles, chapters and reviews on these subjects. These topics are the focus of this festschrift in her honour. Such a volume cannot fully reflect Elizabeth’s career or her life. She has been a dedicated teacher, drawing students to the study of medieval literature by her knowledge, by her patient encouragement of and active interest in them and by the articulate force of her unaffected enthusiasm for her subject. She has made a lasting impression on generations, not simply those interested in medieval subjects. The range of her reading has always ramified widely. The
xii Elizabeth Archibald
depth of her knowledge has been buttressed by her seemingly effortless grasp of multiple languages. It is hard to convey the force of personality and the energy that Elizabeth has always embodied. It finds its fullest expression in her genius for friendship, in her capacity to create and sustain an extraordinarily wide range of relationships that extends across the world and has never been limited to her academic life. Her constant interest in the wellbeing of others has been expressed in many personal acts of kindness and generosity, often undertaken by stealth. A volume of this kind cannot be an adequate tribute to such a vital presence both within and beyond the scholarly world. But those who have contributed to it may stand as representative of a far wider body of Elizabeth’s admirers who join in wishing her happiness as she enters the next phase of her life.
Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism H e l e n C o ope r
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he preceding pages give a fine summary of the impact that Elizabeth has had on the world. She has a reputation for being more of a fox than a hedgehog, skilled across many things, in a way that delights everyone who reads her work or knows her. Medievalists across the globe know her as a scholar and critic, and a first point of recourse for anyone interested in such multilingual topics as Arthurian studies, romance, incest, the long history of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, and macaronic poetry; but her publications in all those fields demonstrate a hedgehog’s powers of focus. To her longest- standing Northumberland neighbours, she is the owner of a castle, or at least the traceable remains of one. To her world-wide friends and colleagues, only a handful of whom it was possible to represent in this volume, she is not only a multitasker of formidable ability but also a loyal, supportive and generous associate. To her students and university colleagues outside her own field, she is a shrewd and efficient administrator, not least in the post from which she is just now retiring, as principal of one of the student communities of the University of Durham, St Cuthbert’s Society. Cuth’s has all the qualities associated with being a college of the University, but it is something more than that. Its central focus is firmly academic, but it also includes people whose own qualities and abilities can enhance the community in other ways – a capacity for generous inclusiveness that again suits Elizabeth’s qualities as fox. Those lucky enough to have been at Cuth’s during her tenure will know how she has enhanced its sense of its own unique identity in unusual and imaginative ways (blindfold dinners, anyone?), and how she has strengthened their sense of belonging. Her appointment as Honorary Colonel of the Northumbrian University Officers’ Training Corps (making her ‘the last line of defence in any national emergency’, as a friend described it) is also just right for her. This volume of tributes to Elizabeth’s work properly focuses on the illumination her research has brought to the field of medieval studies, and not least to what she herself has described as ‘literary archaeology’.1 It moves from Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford, 2001), 2.
1
xiv Helen Cooper
Latin to romance to Arthurian material to language, all areas of interest to her and to which she has made significant contributions. The opening order is also appropriate for an honorand who has done so much for the institutions in which she has worked, in that it starts with two essays on the academic elements found even within the genre that is often assumed to be furthest from those, romance. The French Roman de Silence, whose female protagonist is raised as a boy, was produced in a culture where the courtly and the scholastic overlapped; and that overlap is built into the narrative in the form of two debates between Nature and Nurture, conducted on the principles of the formal Latin disputatio, and a further intervention from Reason. The romance has attracted much attention recently for its interest in gender roles and the legitimacy of their constraints on women; Venetia Bridges’ approach uses the premises of the plot to reveal how the binary assumptions underlying debate may break down, and Reason itself prove insufficient to resolve paradoxes and irrational questions. The following essay, by Megan Leitch, considers how clerks, sometimes from named universities (Salerno, Orleans), can take on the functions that other romances often give to women, in particular healing and magic, and in doing so tend to displace any sense of enchantment: the clerk in Chaucer’s ‘Franklin’s Tale’ works from a basis of astrological knowledge, the Alliterative Morte Arthure replaces Morgan’s taking the wounded king to Avalon for healing with a notably unsuccessful university-trained medic. She finishes with the story of Jonathas from the Gesta Romanorum, a compilation too little studied in connection with romance, though the overlap is significant too, as Elizabeth has shown, in the textual history of Apollonius of Tyre. The intersections of Latin with vernacular romance materials are taken further in the next two essays. Aisling Byrne explores the shift of focus on Arthur’s death when it moves into clerical Latin, in a different legend about Arthur’s departure from this world: this time, that the king was passing his afterlife within Mount Etna – an essay that has a more occluded connection with Elizabeth in the form of her love for Sicily. Helen Cooper considers how far the repetitions so common within romance, specifically here in relation to multiple sea voyages, constitute a marker for the genre, even in texts that do not make any specific claim to belong to it: here, Latin hagiography in the form of St Brendan, legendary history in the case of Constance, and the work in all its multiplicity of languages from Latin forwards that Elizabeth has made her own, the Apollonius. The following essay, by A. C. Spearing, is a more focused study of one of the vernacular analogues of the Constance story that stresses the heroine’s escape from threatened incest as the first step in her casting adrift: the Middle English Emaré, which identifies itself as a Breton lai and so moves firmly into the genre of romance. That identification is made all
Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism xv
the more insistent by the emphasis given to Emaré’s marvellous robe, which is never given either a decisive narrative or symbolic function: a puzzle that the essay sets out to solve. Stories such as those of Apollonius, Constance and Emaré are a forceful reminder that the widespread image of romance as a genre of happy sentiment is very far from the idea of it prevailing in the Middle Ages. Corinne Saunders’ essay explores the strong element of trauma within romance, and the ways in which forceful passions or violent events can disrupt the romance ideal. Such extremes of affect impinge not only on the mind but on the body too, in episodes of pallor, weeping, swooning and even madness: body, mind and affect exist in a continuum akin to the ‘dark night of the soul’ of St John of the Cross. The process is further illuminated by Carolyne Larrington’s discussion of just such a traumatic episode, comparing cases of women who undergo all the violence of love at first sight, complete with all its physical and psychological manifestations. The women in question are, first, Tristan’s mother in the Old Norse and Gottfried von Strassburg’s German versions of the Tristan of Thomas of Britain (Thomas’s original version of the episode does not survive); and second, Melior in William of Palerne. In all these texts, the women not only undergo the full range of pathological symptoms, but are also given substantial internal monologues in which they try to understand what is happening to them. In William, this includes a formal debate along the lines discussed by Venetia Bridges in the case of Silence. Setting eyes on the hero is typically the trigger for love on the part of these heroines, though sight gives way rapidly to analysis of emotion. In the first of the series of Arthurian essays in the volume, Jordi Sánchez-Martí discusses a different element of the sensorium, sound rather than sight, in creating the effect Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has on its readers. The poem is rich in non-verbal sound, sometimes as a placeholder for Gawain’s own feelings, sometimes independent of any listener within the work – sound for its own sake, as soundscape. The poet is often praised for his descriptions of clothing or landscape, but here noise and silence, and not least the disruptive transitions from one to the other, are shown to have an equally strong presence. In addition to their contribution to the atmosphere and suspense engendered by the poem, such moments also become ‘earwitnesses’ to the sonic world of medieval England. Michael Huxtable offers a complementary study of that world’s visual palette, in the colours of the armour adopted by the knights who choose to appear anonymously at tournaments in Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney’ and its analogues in Sir Gowther and Ipomadon A. The variation between the three raises the question of whether, or how far, the colours in each are symbolic, and their relation to the hierarchy of colours recognized in heraldry.
xvi Helen Cooper
Outward symbolism of a different kind is the subject of Barry Windeatt’s essay on gesture in the Morte Darthur. Such gestures may be as extreme as those of lovers both male and female in other romances, including weeping and swooning, but they are focused less on individual inward response than on social interaction, as a form of non-verbal communication: they become part of the work’s narrative of event. Some are integral to the rituals of courtly behaviour, but many others, including smiling and sighing, indicate an emotion that is otherwise left to the reader to interpret. Gesture thus becomes part of Malory’s idiolect, at odds with the widespread perception of him as having little interest in the inwardness of his characters: rather, he expresses their inward lives by different but no less compelling means. Yet another kind of symbolism comes under scrutiny in Andrew Lynch’s study of encounters between the earthly and the spiritual in the Morte Darthur, specifically in Lancelot’s two visions at Corbenic and the deaths of Galahad and Lancelot. The spiritual, the numinous and the transcendent, as in the case of the pathology of emotion, are expressed corporeally or in what can be seen, sometimes here in ways closely similar to representations in visual art; but they contain a remarkable sense of awe and unspoken power only achievable in language, however understated they may be. In the way that its style gives access to a deep imaginative hinterland, the Morte finds a close comparison text in a work that has been regarded as one of the greatest models of English prose: the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, a translation itself based on the version by William Tyndale composed just a few decades after Malory was writing. Both show a strong preference for speech and action over inwardness, for parataxis, and for a monosyllabic Germanic-based vocabulary; they share idioms, and a mixture of the colloquial and the ceremonious. The commonalities described here by Edward Donald Kennedy enable him to argue that admiration for the King James Version in the nineteenth century helped to fuel the enthusiasm for Malory’s recently reprinted work and to set the high regard in which it was held, so allowing him to reach the summit of his reputation. By contrast, a very different take on the Round Table is offered in the seventeenth-century Percy Folio Manuscript, whose Arthurian texts, a mixture of romances and broadside-type ballads, share with Malory their emphasis on action and adventure but show none of the power of his style. They are largely independent of the Morte Darthur, though Neil Cartlidge demonstrates that two of the ballads show an acquaintance with it; the rest of the poems are sometimes taken from printed sources, sometimes their only known analogues are in manuscript or in French. Cartlidge looks in most detail at what he calls ‘weird Arthur’, the five long items that show Gawain, or in one the king, in
Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism xvii
competition with monstrous opponents whose courts offer a grotesque mirror of Arthur’s. The last essay in the volume pays homage to a rather different aspect of Elizabeth’s work, though it is one that is implicit in everything she has written: her linguistic skills across various languages of the medieval world. Here, Ad Putter offers an analysis of the Dutch elements in Caxton’s earliest translation from French, the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, made while he was still based in Ghent. Latin and French have long been recognized as part of a shared culture with Middle English, but the contribution of the Low Countries is only now beginning to be acknowledged. The essay offers a new insight into how the English language itself was moving, in ways that sometimes opened it out, sometimes led to dead ends, through the activities of Malory’s own printer. A volume of this kind is not only a tribute to a great mind and a personal friend, important as that is. It is also an expression of our conviction that Elizabeth’s work will inspire and inform further scholarship that will continue to enlarge her legacy into the future.
Abbreviations All references to the text of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur are, unless otherwise stated, to volume 1 of P. J. C. Field’s edition, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2013), cited parenthetically by page and line(s). Add. AN AND BL EETS es EETS os ME MED MS(S) OED OF RC STC
Additional (manuscript) Anglo-Norman Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. William Rothwell, Louise W. Stone and T. B. W. Reed (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1992) British Library Early English Text Society, extra series Early English Text Society, original series Middle English Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2001) manuscript(s) Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. H. Murray et al., 2nd edn prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford, 1989), and 3rd edn online (Oxford, 2000–): www.oed.com Old French The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987) A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katherine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London, 1976–91)
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Silence in Debate: The Intellectual Nature of the Roman de Silence Venetia Bridges
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he history of Heldris of Cornwall’s Roman de Silence, appropriately enough, is one of centuries of apparent silence followed by decades of excited debate. From its probable thirteenth-century composition to the end of the twentieth century it left no lasting trace, but the advent of Lewis Thorpe’s edition in 1972 (and others subsequently) has generated over fifty publications at the time of writing.1 Most of this modern critical interest has understandably focused on the prominent issue of gender and its expression, with a spectrum of opinion that ranges from, at one end, seeing Silence as ultimately presenting a protofeminist victory of sorts for its flexibly gendered protagonist to, at the other, claiming it as a more conservative work.2 The second dominant tendency of critical studies has been to highlight Silence’s concern for inheritance and social hierarchy, themes aligned with that of gender.3 These critical tendencies thus firmly situate Silence within romance culture and the pervasive concerns 1
2
3
Thorpe published his edition in various issues of Nottingham Medieval Studies during the 1960s before the full edition appeared in 1972. Since then, two other editions, two special issues of Arthuriana and over thirty stand-alone pieces have been published according to the International Medieval Bibliography (accessed 16 November 2020).
An example of the more positive interpretation is Lorraine K. Stock, ‘The Importance of Being Gender “Stable”: Masculinity and Feminine Empowerment in Le Roman de Silence’, Arthuriana, 7 (1997), 7–34, and representative of the more antifeminist tendency is Simon Gaunt, ‘The Significance of Silence’, Paragraph, 13 (1990), 202–16. This observation is made by F. Regina Psaki in the introduction to Arthuriana, 12 (2002), 3–5 (3). The work has also been read in terms that emphasize the text’s queer potential beyond these apparent binaries of gender and social roles: examples of recent criticism that unites gender, social concerns and ‘queer’ fluidity are Robert L. A. Clark, ‘Queering Gender and Naturalizing Class in Le Roman de Silence’, Arthuriana, 12 (2002), 50–63; and Jessica Barr, ‘The Idea of the Wilderness: Gender and Resistance in Le Roman de Silence’, Arthuriana, 30 (2020), 3–25.
2 Venetia Bridges
about gender roles and social hierarchy with which so many romance works engage. Although there has been some discussion of the work’s intertextualities, Silence’s relationships with other forms of wider literary culture have not been analysed in detail, despite critics calling attention to some important points of comparison.4 This essay seeks to highlight one particular parallel by considering Silence in the context of the scholastic culture of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, interpreting the romance as an active participant in that culture and hence demonstrating the wider point that the genre is intimately enmeshed within apparently quite different literary contexts. This approach is especially apt given Elizabeth Archibald’s interest in Latin literature, medieval romance and gender, and her personal encouragement for my research in these areas, for which I continue to be extremely grateful; the current attempt to read them in creative dialogue is in great part inspired by her example, although of course she bears no responsibility for the results. The intellectual culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was defined by the philosophical, theological and literary studies of the monastic and cathedral schools and the first universities, studies characterized particularly during this time by interest in newly available learning from antique texts and thus by the creative interplay between a wide variety of works from different eras. This multifaceted and complex situation in turn spread from ecclesiastical schools and universities into different communities, including regal and ducal courts. These communities, mixed socially and educationally, encouraged scholastic learning to interact with other textual cultures, such as romance. For example, the household of Henry I ‘the Liberal’ of Champagne (1127–81) and his wife Marie is a plausible origin for Chrétien de Troyes’ romances but may also have supported the Latin poet and scholar Walter of Châtillon, a frequent textual presence on thirteenth-century school curricula; it is not difficult to imagine Heldris of Cornwall, the author of Silence, in a similar context.5 In Henry the Liberal’s circle, Latin intellectual culture, French romance works and their respective authors co-existed and must surely 4
5
Examples include lyric poetry, hagiography and Arthurian narratives (those of Chrétien de Troyes): see Christopher Callahan, ‘Lyric Discourse and Female Vocality: On the Unsilencing of Silence’, Arthuriana, 12 (2002), 123–31; Lynne Dahmen, ‘Sacred Romance: Silence and the Hagiographical Tradition’, Arthuriana, 12 (2002), 113–22; and Karen Pratt, ‘Humour in the Roman de Silence’, Arthurian Literature, 29 (2003), 87–103. On Marie’s patronage activities, see June Hall McCash, ‘The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women: An Overview’, in June Hall McCash, ed., The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (Athens, GA, 1996), 1–49 (19). For an overview of the Champagne court, see Venetia Bridges, Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France (Cambridge, 2018), 111–12.
Silence in Debate 3
have given rise to mutual creativity.6 So the famed ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’, traditionally conceived of as Latinate, ecclesiastical and ‘intellectual’, in fact extended into multilingual and plural literary environments that in turn adapted it creatively for their own ends. The influences of this culture beyond the schools were therefore multiple. Early romances such as the romans antiques draw the stories of Thebes, the Æneid and Troy from their Latin sources and retell them in French for courtly audiences, potentially Henry II of England’s well-known literary circle, but the impact of scholastic culture did not stop at the provision of source material and intertextual relationships.7 The effect of the schools upon literature in terms of epistemological process has received much less attention than either sources or interpretative traditions, and yet is equally as important. The process through which learning was gained, the characteristic habits of thought and speech formed by and used in the schools, is more difficult to trace within vernacular literature; commonalities between the format of philosophical discussions and the narratives and themes of romance may seem unlikely. Yet the style of such scholastic discussions is a feature of romance and other vernacular genres, and is particularly relevant for Silence in terms of subject matter as well as approach. The following analysis will focus on Silence’s interactions with wider intellectual culture from this perspective.
Disputed Debate: The Twelfth-Century Schools, the Roman d’Enéas and the De planctu Naturae
A key aspect of both this intellectual culture and Silence’s narrative is debate. In its school contexts, debate became ‘a formative practice in the scholastic culture of medieval Europe, eventually transcending the frontier between private and public spheres and extending to multiple levels of society’.8 Debate A better-known example of this multifaceted and plural literary culture is Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court, but Henry the Liberal’s household shows that the regal court’s catholic literary character, if extreme, was far from unique. See Ian Short, ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Henry II’, in Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent, eds, Henry II: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2007), 335–61. Short characterizes the court as a ‘galaxy of celebrities’ that included John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Gervase of Tilbury, Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure (341).
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For a review of Henry and Eleanor’s potential patronage activities, see Karen Broadhurst, ‘Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patrons of Literature in French?’, Viator, 27 (1996), 53–84.
7
Alex J. Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation (Philadelphia, PA, 2014), 2.
8
4 Venetia Bridges
as a practice was of course not new, but in the twelfth century it became a key part of intellectual life in more rarefied form, characterized in this context as an especially ‘argumentative and disputative’ form of enquiry (disputatio).9 It was closely identified with a dialectical approach, in which arguments for and against a particular proposition were advanced to test its validity, often in the form of a dialogue.10 Both an intellectual process and a rhetorical practice, debate in this dialectical sense underpinned scholastic discussion of all the subjects of the curriculum (beyond the standard trivium and quadrivium). However, it was a contested approach. The bitter theological battle during the 1130s between Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, in which the latter accused the former of heresy, was as much about the form of Abelard’s enquiries as their content; for Bernard, Abelard’s dialectical habit of opposing contradictory statements in order to establish truth, the solutiones contrarium as seen in his Sic et non, was ‘an inappropriate method of instruction in the study of Christian doctrine’.11 Scholastic debate as a process of discerning truth involved contradiction and instability, aspects which some figures evidently found problematic in theological study.12 The art of disputatio, itself disputed, therefore created cultural and theological anxiety as well as inspiring intellectual creativity. Beyond this immediate scholastic context, debate is important in a creative sense for wider literary culture, as seen in the increasing number of works (both Latin and vernacular) that use dialogue between oppositional pairs as a structural principle, known as debate poems or dialogues. Disputes in the form of dialogues between body and soul, wine and water, winter and summer, and an array of other topics are common, demonstrating the creative and structuring role of debate within literary processes.13 However, debate is also a thematic presence in texts that are not oppositional dialogues. In Silence, debates 9
Novikoff, Culture of Disputation, 63.
10
11
12
13
On the intersection of debate, dialogue and dialectic, see Novikoff, Culture of Disputation, 70–75.
Another well-known example is Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum, which engages with contradictions in legal texts: see Novikoff, Culture of Disputation, 85 and 93.
Hugh of St Victor also criticized the habit of disputation in De vanitate mundi (itself a dialogue between Reason and Soul): see Novikoff, Culture of Disputation, 74–75. On the body and soul debate tradition, see for example David P. Baker and Neil Cartlidge, ‘Manuscripts of the Medieval Latin Debate Between Body and Soul (Visio Philiberti)’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 60 (2014), 196–201. For an example of the genre in one vernacular tradition, see Thomas L. Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia, MO, 1990).
Silence in Debate 5
between Nature and Nurture are a crucial narrative element, indicating that disputatio was not confined to works that used it as their main structural principle but was also present, and potentially influential, within different genres. Particularly important for Silence in terms of literary antecedents are moments of debate within two key areas, namely romance works and philosophical texts discussing the role of nature. A striking example of debate within early romance occurs in the Roman d’Enéas (c. 1160). In a lengthy episode inspired by Ovid’s erotic poetry, Lavine and her mother twice debate the value of love, and then Lavine and Enéas, would-be lovers, each hold discussions with their internal selves.14 Although much of this passage is monologic, there are moments that express the protagonists’ mental suffering using question and answer dialogue between the divided halves of the self, with personified Love sometimes cast in the role of a teacher. In other words, the style deliberately replicates that of the scholastic classroom, as is seen most clearly in this exchange between Lavine and Love: ‘Tu [Amors] m’apreïs or grant leçon, Onc n’i ot vers se de mal non. Car m’aleges de ta mecine!’ ‘Repose toi, fole Lavine, Ceste leçon doiz molt fermer.’ ‘Trop la sai ja bien recorder.’ ‘Antan i molt, se la retien.’ ‘Tot sai lo mal, po sai del bien.’ (‘Love, you have taught me a great lesson; every line of it was ill. Now heal me with your medicine.’ ‘Rest, foolish Lavine, you must learn this lesson very thoroughly.’ ‘I can remember it only too well.’ ‘Pay close attention to it, and retain it.’ ‘I know all of the bad, but little of the good.’)15
This exchange uses not only the language of learning (leçon, recorder, retien) but also its form, the dialogic debate. Importantly, it also uses the language of 14
15
Le Roman d’Enéas, ed. and trans. Wilfrid Besnardeau and Francine Mora-Lebrun, Champion Classiques Moyen Âge (Paris, 2018), 7771–9108. All quotations are taken from this edition. Enéas, 8343–50. The English translation is that of John A. Yunck, Eneas: A Twelfth-Century Romance (New York, 1974), which uses different line numbers from the French text; those quoted here are 8431–38.
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dialectic to make its points (mal and mecine, mal and bien), pairing opposed concepts in a subtle stylistic reminiscence of solutiones contrarium. Although Lavine’s suffering here is great, the form of its expression is knowing and humorous, a deliberate parody of contemporary intellectual habits within an erotic context. The form of a scholastic disputatio has been transferred into a romance narrative, a witty mode of translatio studii that surely would have added to Bernard of Clairvaux’s anxieties about the improper use of debate culture outside as well as within theological study if he had read the romance (an unlikely prospect). This witty translatio is important in terms of the precedent it may set for other romance works, including Silence. Scholastic debate culture is also influential within philosophical works of nature, which are relevant to Silence given its extended consideration of nature and noreture. R. Howard Bloch and Simon Gaunt have both noted the possible impact of Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae (composed in the 1160s; henceforward DPN) upon the thirteenth-century work, but Bloch’s analysis, which does not focus primarily on the process of debate, remains the only detailed comparison of the two, and Gaunt considers that there are crucial differences between Nature in the DPN and Silence without developing his arguments at length.16 An in-depth comparison of the two Natures is outside the scope of this essay, but it is notable that the DPN’s incarnation is heavily invested in language and debate culture.17 Nature in Alan’s text is characterized as Dei auctoris vicaria (‘the vicar of God the creator’), queenly, in control, and with authority derived from God. In this role she instructs Venus, who is charged with rerum propaginem (‘the generation of creatures’).18 Crucially, this instruction is described in terms of the scholastic arts of grammar and disputatio; Venus is commanded to allow only grammatically correct On the date of the DPN, see Literary Works: Alan of Lille, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 22 (Cambridge, MA, 2013), x. All quotations and translations are taken from this edition. Bloch claims that ‘Le Roman de Silence reads, in places, like a vernacular version of the Planctus Naturae’ in Etymologies and Genealogies (Chicago, IL, 1983), 197, and reads the DPN’s depiction of Nature alongside Silence in ‘Silence and Holes: The Roman de Silence and the Art of the Trouvère’, Yale French Studies, 70 (1986), 81–99, where he concludes that the romance is ‘is in fact all about misreading’ (98); Gaunt, ‘Significance of Silence’, refers to these analyses at 209 and n.8. The Roman de la Rose is another important model for Silence, as both Bloch and Gaunt acknowledge, but since the DPN is the mutual source for both French works the Rose will not be considered separately here.
16
17
18
Both Bloch and Gaunt note the DPN’s interest in language without explicitly considering how this relates to debate as a practice; see Gaunt, ‘Significance of Silence’, n.8. DPN, 6.3 and 10.3, 78–79 and 122–23.
Silence in Debate 7
unions and must defend her decisions agonisticae disputationis ingressuram conflictum (‘in a war of strenuous disputation’), an art in which she has been instructed by Nature herself.19 Nature goes on to describe disputatio in its most noble form, which might suggest that in DPN the cultural anxieties about the practice highlighted earlier are absent. Yet Nature follows this description with an explicit expulsion of quasdam gramaticae dialeticaeque observantias (‘certain practices of grammar and dialectic’) from Venus’s schools, indicating that despite her adoption of disputatio as an activity leading to truth (here depicted as procreation), the debate process might be flawed.20 In addition to this rejection of some dialectical habits, Venus subsequently fails at her task out of idleness, and this failure is again portrayed in terms of ‘bad’ sexual grammar and dialectical practices; she is gramaticis constructionibus destruens, dialeticis conversionibus invertens, rethoricis coloribus decolorans (‘destructive in her grammatical constructions, perverse in her dialectical conversions, using rhetorical colors only to discolor’), and as a result gives birth to a bastard child.21 While the irony of describing the misuse of scholastic skills using those same skills at their most stylistically florid is palpable, such passages and the discomfort with disputatio that they reveal should not be dismissed as merely witty parody; the theological insights that these scholastic approaches were intended to promote connect the process of debate directly with divine truth, raising the process to a serious level but still uneasily mixing it with humour (in this instance). Nature in Alan’s text, then, depicts scholastic debate culture as capable of producing both truth and error (a bastard), reflecting the fact that it remained a disputed practice in the later twelfth century after Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux’s struggle had ended with the former’s condemnation. These two examples from very different modes of literary discourse demonstrate two key points. First, they highlight the importance of scholastic debate as a creative source beyond debate poetry proper, whether in depictions of erotic love or in philosophical musings on the natural order. Second, they reveal that cultural anxieties about such debate (expressed via humour as well as by accusations of ‘corrupt’ usage) are part of its creative power. Since both romance and natural philosophy are antecedents for Silence generically and thematically, these important points suggest that the thirteenth-century romance may reflect similar attitudes.
19 20 21
DPN, 10.6 and 10.7, 126–27.
DPN, 10.7–8 and 10.9, 126–29.
DPN, 10.12, 132–33. On Alan’s grammatical analogies, see Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
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Debate in the Roman de Silence
Silence’s thematic connections to scholastic culture are evident even before considering the role of debate in the narrative in detail. This is particularly clear in the romance’s interest in the linguistic arts so fundamental to that culture, as seen in characters’ names. Although the romance is composed in French, Silence’s name is given in its Latin and therefore visibly gendered form (‘Silentius/Silentia’, male/female) at several points to highlight the appropriate grammatical relationship between language and gender, despite the fact that s/he is most often named in the text using the effectively gender-neutral French version, ‘Silence’. This unnecessary gendering within the French-language romance is reminiscent of Alan’s portrayal of sexual behaviour using grammatical analogies; the author uses the different inflectional endings to highlight but also to problematize the apparent binary of gender.22 The names ‘Eufeme’ and ‘Eufemie’ (‘Alas! woman!’ and ‘use of good speech’) are used to define individuals’ natures and thus their moral valency.23 In addition, the fact that Silence is so explicitly interested in the large question of nature vs. nurture, and explores it so deliberately, further aligns the romance with works of scholastic philosophy more widely.24 The romance is therefore thematically inclined towards contemporary intellectual culture beyond the immediate context of its debates.
22
23 24
Silence’s Latin name’s potential to denote either gender depending on grammatical ending is noted at baptism (2074–82), referred to at the end of Nature’s scolding of Silence (2541) and features again at the romance’s denouement (6666–68). On the possible ambiguities of this in both its Latin and French versions, see Peter L. Allen, ‘The Ambiguity of Silence: Gender, Writing, and Le Roman de Silence’, in Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Rony, eds, Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse, NY, 1989), 98–112 (105–06, 109); and Peggy McCracken, ‘“The boy who was a girl”: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence’, Romanic Review, 85 (1994), 517–36 (526); Gaunt, ‘Significance of Silence’, conversely interprets the phenomenon as a paradoxical critique of ambivalence (207). On grammar in Silence and DPN, see Katherine R. Terrell, ‘Competing Gender Ideologies and the Limitations of Language in Le Roman de Silence’, Romance Quarterly, 55 (2008), 35–48 (36–37). All quotations and the translation are taken from Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing, MI, 1992). See Silence, ed. and trans. Roche-Mahdi, xx–xxi.
The idea that the work was explicitly designed to provoke debate on this question is advanced by Kristin L. Burr, ‘Nurturing Debate in Le Roman de Silence’, in Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan, eds, Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honour of E. Jane Burns (Cambridge, 2016), 33–44 (33, 44).
Silence in Debate 9
There are two major debates between Nature and Nurture in Silence. The first occurs when Silence reaches puberty. The two antagonists state their respective positions, which are the ones that are to be expected: Nature wants Silence to resume the female form, and Nurture encourages him/her to maintain the male persona. However, the debate is more consequential than the individual positions taken by the opposing sides reveal. In reply to Nature’s scolding and gendered instruction that Silence Va en la cambre a la costure (‘go into a chamber and do needlework’, 2528), which ends with the claim Tu nen es pas Scilentius (‘you are not Silentius’, 2530) the youth produces a confusing set of statements: Tel n’oï onques! Silencius! qui sui jo donques? Silencius ai non, jo cui, U jo sui altres que ne fui. Mais cho sai jo bien, par ma destre, Que jo ne puis pas altres estre! Donques sui jo Scilentius, Cho m’est avis, u jo sui nus. (I never heard that before! Not Silentius? Who am I then? Silentius is my name, I think, or I am other than who I was. But this I know well, upon my oath, that I cannot be anybody else! Therefore, I am Silentius, as I see it, or I am no one.)25
Silence’s response here is marked by logical impossibilities (jo sui altres que ne fui, ‘I am other than who I was’; jo sui nus, ‘I am no one’). In both cases, these statements form the second half of an ‘either/or’ phrase, the first part of which refers to Silence’s identity in a logically possible sense (Silencius ai non, ‘Silence is my name’; sui jo Scilentius, ‘I am Silentius’). The complete phrases therefore juxtapose an argument with its counter-argument, holding them in tension, which results in a finely balanced contradiction: ‘I am Silence | I am no one.’ This is reminiscent of scholastic disputatio, in which the practice of aligning contradictory statements was key in reconciling them via the process of solutiones contrarium. Silence’s situation is summed up here using a stylish display of contemporary intellectual technique, which situates the youth’s dilemma 25
Silence, ed. and trans. Roche-Mahdi, 2531–38.
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even more strongly within a scholastic environment than the simple fact of a debate between Nature and Nurture indicates. However, this sense of balanced paradox, of logical opposites held in delicate mutual tension, disintegrates under closer scrutiny. The first part of each phrase (Silencius ai non, ‘Silence is my name’; sui jo Scilentius, ‘I am Silentius’) is in fact also a logical impossibility when the concept of ‘Silence’ is considered. The truth claims of both identities rest on the idea that ‘Silence’ is a coherent identity, whereas of course the act of claiming this identity in speech is inherently contradictory: how can anyone (regardless of gender) say that they are named Silence? The act of claiming this identity thus actually negates it.26 So the first part of each phrase, the thesis, is not able to balance the second half, the antithesis (itself an impossible statement), and the delicate tension that holds both halves of the paradox together is destroyed; we are left with the hollowed out form of a disputatio whose sense has collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The idea of clearly defined, oppositional pairs or binaries, on which this sic et non approach relies, is depicted as invalid.27 This is an illustration of the impossible narrative situation that Silence experiences, but it is also an indictment of the process of disputatio itself, in line with the cultural anxieties about the impact and dissemination of the practice discussed above. I have used the word ‘indictment’ here rather than ‘parody’ because although there is humour involved in what is a ridiculous situation, there is also an innate seriousness to this emptying out of meaning from an intellectual process that was so important within high medieval culture, a seriousness that the contemporary anxieties mentioned above highlight. Disputatio was intended to lead to greater insight into the truth; if the process could be distorted or shown to be flawed in its assumptions about the possibility of solutiones contrarium, then the concept of truth itself was at stake. The disintegration of what looks like an elegant if ludicrous argument here is underlined firmly in the same scholastic terms by the idea that Nature li fait sofime (‘Nature has constructed a sophism’, 2540). In fact, Nature’s argument – that Silence’s outward appearance should conform with biological sex – is the one that will triumph at the end of the romance, and can be said to be foreshadowed throughout it.28 The word sofime, redolent of the schools, is misapplied here: despite the narrator’s accusation, Nature’s argument is not This paradox is discussed in detail by Allen, ‘Ambiguity of Silence’, 104–06.
26
Gaunt, ‘Significance of Silence’, 202 and 209; and Terrell, ‘Competing Gender Limitations’, 39, also address this question of collapsing binaries but with reference to gender.
27
Gaunt, ‘Significance of Silence’, 204–05.
28
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deceptive or false, but conversely accurately predicts what will happen to Silence later in the romance (the idea that women will love and then loathe him/her because of his/her inability to love them in return is of course the precise scenario Silence encounters with Queen Eufeme). If anything, the charge of sophism is itself a sophism, the equivalent of the false accusation of ‘fake news’ against verifiable fact so frequently made in the twenty-first century. The whole passage, then, is its own sic et non, simultaneously establishing debate as the means of discerning truth and also deconstructing it as a process that can do so. The next section, the counter-argument advanced by Nurture, rejoices in similar paradoxes (Jo l’ai tolte desnaturee, ‘I have completely dis-natured her’, 2595), but without the idea of solutiones contrarium seen in Silence’s own response.29 In this case, it is personified Reason who ultimately persuades Silence that s/he should remain masculine, using practical considerations (for example, Ja n’ieres mais vallés apriés, ‘you will never train for knighthood afterwards’, 2620). It is notable that Reason does not use the intellectual habits of disputatio to do so; on the contrary, Reason herself arrives after the scholastic process that defined Silence’s earlier response, indicating her absence during it and thus indirectly highlighting the process’s flaws, since debate should be grounded in rationality. In addition to using Reason’s absence to imply the problematic nature of debate as a process, the text here suggests she herself does not act with wholly positive results. Although Silence makes a rational choice to be deseure (‘on top’, 2640 and 2641) in the hierarchy of gender, this choice causes him/her pain and suffering, and again is exposed as the ‘wrong’ choice at the end of the work. Reason’s rational approach leads to an irrational result, a paradox that exposes the intellect’s limitations in a more general sense than the specific critique of scholastic methodology discussed above. To make the point even clearer, this passage ends with a vivid depiction of the combined emotional impact of Silence’s scholastic argument and Reason’s flawed rationality: le cuer diviers (‘a divided heart’, 2681), which, far from leading to truth, causes pain. Et tols jors ert pres a contraire A cho que ses cuers voloit faire. Et qui ouevre contre voloir Soventes fois l’estuet doloir. (He was always ready to go against what his heart wanted him to do, 29
Silence, ed. and trans. Roche-Mahdi, 2547–614.
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and whoever works against his will finds himself often in a state of unhappiness.)30
The idea of balanced opposites, so important in Silence’s scholastic rebuttal to Nature earlier, does not lead to truth here, but rather to secrecy and grief. Even though the heart is described as a creäture | Mervelles d’estrange nature (‘creature | of a wondrous and strange nature’, 2667–68) that harms itself through excessive thinking (2669–72), it is the unnatural division of Silence’s heart, not its fundamental ‘nature’, that causes pain. In an emotional context, then, this conclusion to the first debate episode underlines the point made throughout: that the division habitual and crucial to scholastic debate does not lead to greater insight into perfect truth, but rather exposes the rational limits of debate as a process, and, in terms of the heart, may cause acute suffering. Debate in its scholastic form, and the binary opposites upon which it relies, is thus exposed as a process that conceals rather than reveals truth within this important episode. This position is exemplified more starkly in the second major debate, in which Nature and Nurture fight over Merlin. As has been pointed out by others, Nature and Nurture’s positions appear to contradict their traditional attributes.31 Nurture begins by trying to persuade Merlin that his life noris en bos (‘nurtured in the woods’, 6003) means he should reject the food of civilization (honey, milk, wine and cooked meat), as his forest upbringing means that herbes and rachines (‘herbs and roots’, 6010) are his food. This position seems the reverse of what might be expected in a definition of ‘nurture’, and in fact might more accurately reflect humanity’s ‘natural’ state. Similarly, Nature (who ultimately triumphs) is represented by this food of civilization rather than by the foraged roots and herbs that might seem more apt to her definition; moreover, she violently pushes Merlin towards the former in a passage that underscores the powerful ‘natural’ pull of civilized food. However, this passage not only plays with the reversal of nature and nurture’s characteristics as seen in their swapped positions; it also demonstrates that the very distinction between the two concepts has become problematic: Et Nature, qui le venqui, Tient Merlin por maleöit fol, Si l’a enpoint deviers le col Et tant le coite et tante le haste Qu’il va si tost enviers le haste 30 31
Silence, ed. and trans. Roche-Mahdi, 2677–80.
See especially Clark, ‘Queering Gender’, 59; and also Gaunt, ‘Significance of Silence’, 209; and Terrell, ‘Competing Gender Ideologies’, 39.
Silence in Debate 13
Que les ronsces et les espines Ronpent ses costés, ses escines. (And Nature, triumphant, treated Merlin like a wretched madman: she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pushed and shoved him along so fast toward that piece of meat that the brambles and thorns tore his back and sides.)32
Although Merlin’s ‘natural’ state is apparently civilized (as exemplified by his preference for cultivated food), the violent desire that the food induces makes him almost bestial, reducing him to an uncivilized state that for him is ‘unnatural’. Merlin’s behaviour, driven by blind greed, not only exposes the deliberate inversion of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ but also highlights the fact that the accepted distinctions between the two are collapsing, as it emphasizes that ‘natural’, civilized behaviour can look perilously like ‘unnatural’, bestial urges. If this is the case, then the traditional binary between the two states is being deconstructed, not just reversed. This deconstructed binary is important beyond the immediate circumstances of Merlin’s state because it again demonstrates that the process of debate, which relies on clearly defined positions and their opposites, may lead not to truth but to confusion. Nature’s ‘triumph’ over Nurture in their debate results in the questioning of the mode by which she has gained her victory, a clear example of the end undoing the means. Yet this paradoxical outcome is not the only representation of debate in the episode. Ironically, the actual arguments made by the two participants are logical, consistent, and rely on biblical interpretation. Both Nature and Nurture use the Fall of Adam and Eve in defence of their positions, Nurture claiming that human nature caused them to err (Quant par Nature de pute aire | Comencierent le mal a faire, ‘When through treacherous, base Nature | they began to sin’, 6039–40) and Nature insisting that as God cannot create evil the Devil’s temptation of the pair was due to Nurture (li diäbles le norri | Par son malvais consel porri, ‘the devil nourished him | with evil, rotten advice’, 6069–70). Whatever the outcome, the arguments made and their basis in logic and rationality are clear, and the use of authoritative sacred textual culture is orthodox and conventional. Preceding the implicit questioning of debate as a guide to truth just discussed in Merlin’s behaviour at the end of the scene, this straightforward representation of 32
Silence, ed. and trans. Roche-Mahdi, 6090–96.
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the process of discernment ends up adding to the resulting confusion about debate’s status and power. A clear process has led to a clear result (Nature wins), but this result is paradoxical (Merlin’s ‘civilized’ nature is bestial) and depends on the blurring of boundaries between concepts of nature and nurture that are themselves the reverse of what we might expect. This second episode, then, is contradictory in its presentation of debate as a means of discerning truth. Its demonstration of orthodox disputatio ends in a victory for Nature that undoes the sic et non binary necessary for debate itself, therefore both upholding and undermining the process. This is of course reminiscent of the first dispute over Silence’s future, but a key difference is that here there is a strong contrast between straightforward process and paradoxical result, which leads to a greater sense of confusion about the status of debate: who or what has actually ‘won’, and what is the import of that victory? In practical terms, Nature’s triumph allows Silence to capture Merlin and thus leads to the revelation of the narrative’s various secrets at his hands, but this question about the grounds of her victory means that Merlin’s ‘nature’ is still unclear: is he civilized, or not, or some hard-to-define combination of the two? This question has a direct impact upon his role as truth-teller at the denouement of Silence, and thus upon the reassertion of apparently correct order in terms of gender roles and social hierarchy that occurs at his hands.33 If Merlin is not clearly the representative of ‘civilized’ Nature because of the confusing presentation of this by the end of the second debate scene, then is his reimposition of ‘natural’ law and order upon Silence and the narrative in fact natural? Is the ending perhaps profoundly ‘unnatural’ in terms of tension between the narrative’s earlier apparent tolerance of gender fluidity and this reversion to conservative positions, as several critics have felt?34 By highlighting these questions with reference to Merlin’s role, the sic et non nature of debate that the Merlin scene in particular has established affects the romance’s ending, and therefore its overall interpretation.
Conclusion
In Silence, the process of scholastic debate is used to deconstruct the binary categories (including ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’) upon which that very process relies, calling into question not just the concept of a stable outcome itself but 33
On Merlin’s role here, see Sarah Roche-Mahdi, ‘A Reappraisal of the Role of Merlin in Le Roman de Silence’, Arthuriana, 12 (2002), 6–21 (17–18); and Pratt, ‘Humour in Silence’, 100. See for example Burr, ‘Nurturing Debate’, 40; and Pratt, ‘Humour in Silence’, 101– 03.
34
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also the relationship of any such outcome to the process that has produced it. In this sense, the tension between the ending’s clear assertion of traditional social roles and categories and the apparently fluid, unstable nature of these throughout much of the romance is highly appropriate; the inconsistency between process and result (narrative and resolution, in textual terms) actively highlights the fact that the production of truth from the messiness of disputatio may be entirely accidental, even arbitrary. The Roman de Silence goes further here than either the Enéas or the De planctu Naturae, since neither of those works suggests that truth itself is fluid or that its discernment via disputatio is unstable; they demonstrate that disputatio may be misused as a process (DPN) or (mis)applied in a different context for humorous purposes (Enéas), but they stop short of attempting to deconstruct an epistemological system in its entirety. This may seem a bold claim to make on behalf of a romance, a genre seemingly so different in themes and focus from the philosophical and theological debates of the schools, but that generic difference is more superficial than profound, as the extra-textual interactions of scholarly and courtly circles also highlight. Although the stakes in play in Silence are not theological niceties but social and gender roles, those roles were also part of the divine ordering of the world, ruled by Nature under God; the romance’s exploration of social hierarchy and the intellectual enquiries of the schools were both subject to God’s ‘natural’ law, simply in different contexts. Just as educated clerics heard, read and composed romances, so too might individuals in secular households be interested in philosophical and theological discussions, especially if these were intimately intertwined with familiar romance themes. This perspective admittedly claims Silence as an unusually intellectually engaged romance, but, given the work’s pervasive interest in aspects of scholastic culture and the fluidity of romance in generic terms, this eccentricity should not be a surprise. Although Bernard of Clairvaux disapproved of scholastic methods of debate, other authors, including Heldris of Cornwall, thankfully took a less stringent and more creative view.
2
From Sorceresses to Scholars: Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance M e g an G . L e itc h
R
q
omance is a genre that features duels and dragons, trusts in martial prowess and magic, and is peopled by knights, ladies, enchantresses, dwarves, hermits and kings; clerks and scholars have a much more tenuous foothold, and universities, as the institutions behind them, are given even less space. Scholars may be invoked as putative narrative sources: ‘in storye as clerkes seye’, romances sometimes aver, but usually when clerks are unlikely to have said anything of the sort.1 University masters and students, those who are, or become, clerks, conventionally uphold views that are antithetical to romance’s values and pleasures, and generally do not feature directly in romance narratives. This essay analyses how universities and clerks interact with the genre’s conventions when they unexpectedly appear in Middle English romance, and in texts that offer a similar concentration on matters such as magic in ways that generate strong romance expectations. Focusing on Chaucerian and Arthurian romance, and especially on a relatively neglected narrative in the Middle English Gesta Romanorum, I show how, across these diverse representatives of romance material, the scholars that appear within these texts – and, by association, the institutions that produced them, the universities – are at odds with the values of the genre, and act to disrupt romance expectations. I argue that the under-studied romance intrusions of the intellectual Third Estate are ideological, contributing to generic hybridity and commenting on the genre’s class dimensions and especially on its gender politics. In late medieval England, the terms ‘clericus’ and ‘clerk’ could denote a range of intellectual occupations, from those in orders to those who worked with documents, or to the wider group of those who could read Latin. In most contexts, however, medieval clerks are men who have received a formal education denied to women, an education centring on the university, and whose Sir Isumbras, in Four Middle English Romances, ed. Harriet Hudson (Kalamazoo, MI, 2006), 135.
1
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 17
status as clerics exempts them from secular jurisdiction.2 This essay focuses on men specifically associated with universities, and by extension on the universities that produced them and which are on occasion named. Where romance often employs enchantment to test yet uphold aristocratic values, universities encroach on the role of magic in particular to interrogate the genre’s axioms, such as that of the innate superiority of the aristocracy, the happy ending, or the constructive agency of women – not least since women are often, elsewhere in romance, those who wield magic.3 Universities, then, when they incongruously appear in romance narratives or in conjunction with romance expectations, act to ‘disenchant’ the genre in multiple senses: by questioning the place of magic; and by usurping women’s roles in, and/or introducing outright misogyny to, romance. In Chaucer’s ‘Franklin’s Tale’, after a clerk, a university-trained scholar, offers the magical means to make a reality of Dorigen’s moral dilemma, this magic-wielding academic calls the assumptions of romance into question by acting with as much ‘gentillesse’ as the aristocratic characters. As I show, this clerk’s actions interrogate not only the class values of romance, but also the agency of women in the genre. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, a surgeon of Salerno (a medieval university famed for its medical school) offers a form of disenchantment when he searches Arthur’s wounds, occupying the place of queens and sorceresses elsewhere in Arthurian tradition. And in the narrative entitled ‘Godfridus a Wise Emperoure’ in the Gesta Romanorum, an emperor’s son is given a magic ring, brooch, and cloth: objects which invoke expectations of chivalric romance adventures (as in, for instance, King Horn or Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney’). However, instead of riding in search of adventure or battling his foes, this young lord goes to university and, after much study, becomes a healer. Here, the magical trappings of romance, when combined with a protagonist who does not make war, but rather matriculates and becomes proficient in medicine, deepen a moralizing (and misogynistic) narrative by thwarting expectations in a fashion not dissimilar to a penitential romance such as Sir Isumbras. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (London, 1979), 226–30; Michael H. Shrank, ‘Schools and Universities in Medieval Latin Science’, in D. C. Lindberg and M. H. Shank, eds, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science (Cambridge, 2013), 207–39 (226); and Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 2019), 64–65.
2
See Corinne Saunders, ‘Bodily Narratives: Illness, Medicine and Healing in Medieval Romance’, in Neil Cartlidge, ed., Boundaries in Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2008), 175–90; and Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (London, 2006).
3
18 Megan G. Leitch
While today we may wish to think of university scholars as free-thinking interrogators of received ideas, questioning political and religious dogma, medieval universities were instead often bastions of conventional thought.4 Despite their considerable advances and innovations in science, philosophy and other areas of learning, the thinking of medieval universities was closely policed by the Church, especially, of course, on matters of theology.5 The curriculum of a university’s studium generale, embracing the seven liberal arts, was also standardized and highly regulated. Some of the work expected of medieval universities can be seen by the way in which, in Fragment C of the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose (a translation of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose), an allegorical university opposes a book, the thirteenth-century Liber introductorius, which controversially purported to supersede the New Testament: here, ‘the universite … | armes tok | Ayens this fals horrible bok, | Al redy bateil for to make.’6 This belligerent stance shows a university bristling against an inappropriate theological book, but it might also serve as a model for clerkly attitudes towards other non-doctrinally-sanctioned books. The ways in which the narrative interventions of men trained at universities disrupt romance conventions are suggestive of the tension between the fictionality and values of romance (in the vernacular genre’s celebration of aristocratic privilege and its glorification of secular love) and the intellectual and theological types of truth to which fables and sinful tales are anathema.7 Romance, moreover, in its penchant for featuring women as authorities on healing and other types of knowledge, is also at odds with the type of masculine authority (or, perhaps, the clerical misogyny) for which medieval universities stand.8 This is notwithstanding the reputation of youthful medieval university students – who often matriculated at the age of fourteen or fifteen – for ‘tavern-haunting, drinking and gambling, whoring, playgoing, and aimless wandering’, a reputation familiar from Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ and invoked in the Portrait of the Clerk in the ‘General Prologue’: see Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1973), 75.
4
Although modern universities are heavily indebted to their medieval forebears in other ways – in aspects of structure, ritual and curriculum – the idea of academic freedom is a more modern concept: see M. J. Toswell, Today’s Medieval University (Kalamazoo, MI, 2017), especially 33.
5
6
The Romaunt of the Rose, in RC, 7127–33; cf. Roman de la Rose, 11795–80.
On different types of truth in the later Middle Ages, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, PA, 1999).
7
8
Robert A. Pratt, ‘Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves: Medieval Antrimatrimonial Propaganda in the Universities’, Annuale Mediaevale, 3 (1962), 5–27; more recently, Neil Cartlidge has cautioned against viewing such clerical misogyny as a universal
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 19
Where romance more characteristically celebrates female (magical) agency, it seems no accident that when these university-trained men disrupt romance expectations, they often do so especially by taking the expected place of women’s magic, or by putting magic to a different purpose. As Elizabeth Archibald and others have shown, romance was ‘an exception in a literary tradition which was heavily misogynistic’.9 It is when clerks pull a narrative away from magic- related expectations that a romance becomes more misogynistic; the Church, of course, was also opposed to magic, at least black magic or ‘nigromancy’.10 By contrast with the type of (demonic) magic or sorcery often wielded by women in romance, learned traditions of natural magic inherited from the classical and Arabic world, particularly astrology and medicine, were studied at medieval universities as part of the occult sciences, and were thus generally the preserve of (male) clerks.11 And medicine (of a non-magical variety), as one of the higher degrees that could be pursued at a university, is what takes the generic place of magic in the Alliterative Morte and in ‘Godfridus a Wise Emperoure’. The way in which the latter’s university and its representatives act to thwart the magic-related expectations raised by its romance objects also sheds light on the tale’s conspicuous misogyny – which is only strengthened in the clerk Thomas Hoccleve’s rendition of the narrative in the ‘Tale of Jonathas’ in his Series. These encounters with plausible university representatives and the displacements they effect suggest a contemporary recognition of university thinking among writers and readers of late medieval romance;12 they also intertextually underscore, and reflect upon the social ramifications of, the striking agency of women elsewhere in romance.
stance, in ‘Misogyny in a Medieval University? The “Hoc contra malos” Commentary on Walter Map’s Dissuasio Valerii’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 8 (1998), 156–91 (especially 158).
Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Women and Romance’, in Henk Aertsen and Alasdair A. MacDonald, eds, Companion to Middle English Romance (Amsterdam, 1993), 153– 69 (153). See also Amy N. Vines, Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2011). As Archibald and Vines note, romance’s proto-feminist potential is relative.
9
10
11 12
Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge, 2010). Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural, 99–116.
On the dissemination of university thinking, see Philip Knox, ‘Thinking Inside and Outside the University’, in John Marenbon, ed., King’s Hall, Cambridge, and the Fourteenth-Century Universities: New Perspectives (Leiden, 2020), 187–217.
20 Megan G. Leitch
Gender Politics and the Liberal Arts
Where the romance genre’s openness to the fantastical might indeed, in a different romance, entail the rocks’ magical removal from the coast of Brittany, for ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ Chaucer not only chooses to make the magic an illusion; he also goes to great lengths to explain this magic as one among ‘particuler sciences’ (V.1122) that a wayward ‘bacheler of lawe’ (V.1126) might learn at university, from reading a ‘book’ (V.1124). Chaucer disenchants magic itself by connecting it to astronomy, part of the quadrivium, the more advanced set of four among the seven liberal arts to be learned in a university’s studium generale, when he specifies that this ‘book spak muchel of the operaciouns | Touchynge the eighte and twenty mansiouns | That longen to the moone’ (V.1129–31). Magic, here, is not mysterious and supernatural, but rather scholarly and a part of natural philosophy. By specifying that the magic-wielding clerk belongs to the University of Orleans, Chaucer invokes that university’s fourteenth-century reputation as a strong centre for the study of both law and astronomy. Although Chaucer locates this story in a pre-Christian past that has, for his contemporary readers, been superseded by ‘holy chirches feith’ (V.1133), this inclusion of a university – a type of institution invented within medieval Christendom – tugs the narrative back towards realism and the present day. The clerk is portrayed as self-aware about the subversive implications of his generosity when he releases Aurelius from his debt: Leeve brother, Everich of yow dide gentilly til oother. Thou art a squier, and he is a knyght; But God forbede, for his blisful myght, But if a clerk koude doon a gentil dede As wel as any of yow, it is no drede! Sire, I releesse thee thy thousand pound … For, sire, I wol nat taken a peny of thee For al my craft, ne noght for my travaille. (V.1607–17)
Although the clerk offers a reminder of the value of his skills and his work (‘al my craft … my travaille’), he will not take payment for this expert achievement. Observing that a member of the emerging middle classes, the intellectual estate, can be as generous as members of the aristocracy, the clerk of Orleans interrogates the three estates model and undermines the idea of the inherent superiority of the aristocracy – an aspect of the status quo that medieval romance conventionally upholds.13 Here, there is a possibility that 13
See Stephen Knight, ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’, in David Aers, ed., Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History (Brighton,
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 21
a clerk might be ‘the mooste fre’ (V.1622). Yet while the clerk’s interventions are normally seen in terms of their class implications, the decision to make a clerk the magic-wielder in a romance narrative also has implications for the tale’s gender politics. The clerk is also called a ‘magicien’ (V.1184) and a ‘maister’ (V.1202); while in romance magic is often the preserve of women, and male sorcerers are rare,14 here in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ magic is claimed for a masculine, educated, intellectual sphere from which women are excluded. This is white magic, within the pale of what Christian society could accept, but here it is ‘at the very edge of acceptability’.15 The acceptability of this magic is supported by its association with university learning. Women in romance sometimes wield magic without mention of formal, institutional instruction – as is the case with Malory’s Lynette, who is able to heal even a (magical) knight who has been chopped into small pieces and disposed of into the moat – but others learn their magic from books and ‘actively consult [their books] in the course of magical performance’, as is the case with Morgan le Fay and other Arthurian enchantresses.16 Yet enchantresses sometimes learn a darker, more dangerous type of magic, as Morgan does when she ‘was put to scole in a nonnery, and ther she lerned so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye’ (4.21–22): this might be seen as subversive not only because it is black magic, but also because a (religious) education results in a woman becoming a clerk.17 Moreover, this figures a convent – as a community of (learned) women – as a site of female resistance to masculine (intellectual) authority.18 Chaucer’s clerk of Orleans does not usurp the role of a female character in a specific analogue; however, as magic- wielder, the clerk does fill a role conventionally occupied by women in other romances. We might see this as another of the tale’s gendered substitutions, following Bonnie Wheeler’s argument that, with regard to the courtly lady, ‘in this poem of substitutions and amplifications, the traditional object substitutes for the conventional subject, and Chaucer experiments with romance from the
14 15 16 17
18
1986), 99–122.
Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural, 169. Merlin is, of course, the exception. Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural, 147–48 and 152. Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, 14.
In Malory’s source, the Prose Vulgate, Morgan is even said to have been such a good student that she studied ‘les set ars’ (the seven arts) that are normally the preserve of male university students, including ‘astrenomie’: see Eugène Vinaver, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, rev. P. J. C. Field, 3 vols (Oxford, 1990), vol. 3, 1285, n. 10.8–10; Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural, 247; and Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, 14. I am grateful to Dr Usha Vishnuvajjala for this idea.
22 Megan G. Leitch
double perspectives of pursued and pursuer.’19 In a slightly different sense, the tale substitutes a scholar for a sorceress. Moreover, the clerk’s intervention also creates a significant constraint on a woman’s agency. In creating the conditions of which Dorigen speaks in her rash promise, the clerk’s magic makes Dorigen unable to act of her own volition. Despite the determination (and education) on display in her deliberations of ‘a day or tweye, | Purposynge evere that she wolde deye’ (V.1457–58) in the manner of all the classical women she cites in her discussion of those who committed suicide to preserve their honour, she must wait for her husband’s verdict to resolve the dilemma of whether she should keep her word or her bodily autonomy, thus showing that, indeed, she has no autonomy. Rejecting the romance expectation of a sorceress, the tale also rejects the idea of a woman authoring her own outcome (however limited).
A Surgeon of Salerno in Avalon
Where the disenchantment of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ consists of bringing romance magic within the masculine sphere of the university, the disenchantment of the Alliterative Morte Arthure involves replacing women’s magic with clerical medicine. When Arthur is sorely wounded after the final battle with Mordred, he commands his remaining knights to take him to Glastonbury: Then they hold at his hest holly at ones, And graithes to Glashenbury the gate at the gainest; Entres the Ile of Avalon and Arthur he lightes, Merkes to a manor there, for might he no further; A surgen of Salerne enserches his woundes; The king sees by assay that sound bes he never.20
While the Alliterative Morte’s genre is a hybrid, drawing upon chronicle and epic,21 inasmuch as it is also a romance – complete with the likes of fantastical giants, a magic goblet that detects poison and a miraculously healing spring – its decision to represent the ‘Ile of Avalon’ within the knowable bounds of 19
20
21
Bonnie Wheeler, ‘Trouthe without Consequences: Rhetoric and Gender in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale’, in Bonnie Wheeler, ed., Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages (Dallas, 1993), 91–116 (99).
Alliterative Morte Arthure, in King Arthur’s Death, ed. Larry D. Benson, rev. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI, 1994), 4307–12. Further references are cited parenthetically.
K. S. Whetter, ‘Genre as Context in the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, Arthuriana, 20.2 (2010), 45–65.
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 23
Glastonbury, a place where there is ‘a manor’ and ‘a surgen’, collapses the magical expectations that Avalon has in other Arthurian romances by the time the Alliterative Morte was written. Where the tradition of the wounded Arthur’s withdrawal to Avalon begins, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, we are told only that rex Arturus letaliter uulneratus est; qui illinc ad sananda uulnera sua in insulam Auallonis euectus (‘king Arthur was mortally wounded. He was taken away to the island of Avallon to have his wounds tended’).22 Arthur’s death is signalled when the succession is detailed in the very next phrase, in what has been called ‘Geoffrey’s use of death to signal to his audience that the enchantment is, and always had to be, at an end. Arthur dies plainly, because that is what kings usually do’ in a chronicle such as this one.23 While neither Geoffrey nor the subsequent chroniclers Wace and Layamon specify who tends Arthur’s wounds, in the tradition of ‘romance’s “once and future king”’ that Geoffrey’s reference to Avalon sparks,24 these healers are women. For instance, in the fourteenth-century Stanzaic Morte Arthur, following the thirteenth-century Mort le Roi Artu, Arthur is borne away on ‘A riche ship, with mast and ore, | Full of ladies’, including Arthur’s sister, and in parting from Bedivere, Arthur says: I will wend a little stound Into the vale of Aveloun, A while to hele me of my wound.25
Here, unlike in the Alliterative Morte, Avalon is not a place to which knights or readers can follow; Avalon is ‘an otherworld … perpetually hidden beyond the horizon of the text’.26 Similarly, in Malory’s Morte Darthur, in a passage which draws on both the Stanzaic Morte and the Mort le Roi Artu, the narrator declares that: of the verry sertaynté of hys deth harde I never rede, but thus was he lad away in a shyp wherein were thre quenys: that one was Kynge Arthurs 22
23
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), 253.81–82. Siân Echard, ‘“But here Geoffrey falls silent”: Death, Arthur, and the Historia regum Britannie’, in Karen Cherewatuk and K. S. Whetter, eds, The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition (Cambridge, 2009), 17–32 (31).
Echard, ‘Death, Arthur, and the Historia regum Britannie’, 31.
24
Stanzaic Morte Arthur, in King Arthur’s Death, 3500–01 and 3515–17.
25
Aisling Byrne, Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford, 2016), 120.
26
24 Megan G. Leitch
syster, Quene Morgan le Fay, the tother was the Quene of North Galis, and the thirde was the Quene of the Waste Londis. Also there was Dame Nynyve, the chyff lady of the laake. (928/6–11)
Two of these queens, Morgan and the Queen of North Galis, are among the four ‘quenys sorserers’ (195/6–7) mentioned earlier in Malory’s narrative (when they find Launcelot and seek to make him their lover). After the wounded Arthur is carried off on the sorceresses’ ship, Malory also records, if not endorses, the idea of the second coming of Arthur, observing that: som men say in many partys of Inglonde that Kynge Arthure ys nat dede, but had by the wyll of Oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll nat say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the tumbe thys vers: ‘Hic iacet Arthurus, Rex quondam Rexque futurus.’ (928/22–28)
While Malory’s rendition of the queens who take Arthur to Avalon for healing, and his engagement with the possibility of Arthur’s return, postdate the composition of the Alliterative Morte, his treatment offers a useful example of the way in which romance and its readers conventionally understand these subjects. We see this especially in Malory’s reference to what ‘som men say in many partys of Inglonde’, and what ‘many men say’: the idea of supernatural healing enabling Arthur’s eventual return is a familiar one in later medieval England. In disregarding the queens with magical powers who tend to Arthur elsewhere in the tradition, the Alliterative Morte not only pulls away from romance and towards chronicle as it nears its conclusion; it also, more specifically, eschews female agency in favour of a specifically university-trained (male) surgeon. While university-educated medical professionals were more often physicians, surgeons could also be university trained – aptly, this was especially the case in Italy.27 The surgeon ‘of Salerne’ who occupies the role of healer fits the demands of the alliterative metre, of course, but this is likely not the only reason for which Salerno recommended itself to the poet, given that the university at Salerno was famed for its medical faculty. Although it was in decline by the time the Alliterative Morte was written, Salerno was the leading 27
Katharine Park, ‘Medical Practice’, in Lindberg and Shank, eds, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science (Cambridge, 2013), 611–29 (619); see also Huling E. Ussery, Chaucer’s Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England (New Orleans, LA, 1971), 5–31. On the growing attention to surgeons and surgery elsewhere in later Middle English literature, see Jeremy J. Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (New York, 2006).
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 25
centre for medical learning in the central Middle Ages, not least because its position in polyglot southern Italy facilitated engagement with Greek and Arabic intellectual traditions.28 In romance (and in medieval society, albeit often in informal capacities), healers – like the genre’s magic-wielders – are often female.29 Yet in the Alliterative Morte, at the moment in which magic is elided, women are not actors, but mourners: Countesses kneeland and claspand their handes, Ladies languishand and lowrand to shew; All was busked in black, birdes and other. (4337–39)
By contrast, Isolde heals Tristan’s wounds, Elaine of Astolat heals Lancelot’s, and nuns ‘stoppyd weel hys [the protagonist’s] woundes’ in Sir Isumbras.30 In the Alliterative Morte, then, masculine medicine intrudes on the territory of magic to pull the text away from the expectations of romance – with its possibility of Arthur’s return, and thus a happy ending – and towards chronicle. The poem simply concludes with ‘Thus endes King Arthur, as auctors allege’ (4342). Arthur, the Alliterative Morte declares, came to an end. We are told conclusively that ‘thus passes his spirit and spekes he no more’ (4327); the text does not mention the possibility of a return.31 As a corollary, the surgeon of Salerno, no matter how good the quality of his medical training, has failed; masculine medicine may usurp the place of feminine magic, but it is not successful in healing the great king. The surgeon’s searching of Arthur’s wounds, his ‘assay’, only serves to confirm that Arthur is mortally wounded. Perhaps the point of invoking the famed medical school of Salerno is to suggest that even the best could not heal Arthur; however, if we contrast this to versions of the Arthurian narrative in which there are magic-wielding queens and there is also the possibility of Arthur’s return, women’s magic appears more potent and valuable than medicine – an implication that would be available to readers of the Alliterative Morte familiar with other Arthuriads. 28
29 30 31
Women could in theory train in medicine early in Salerno’s history as a medical centre, but this was no longer possible beyond the eleventh century. Nancy Siraisi, ‘The Faculty of Medicine’, in Hilde de Rydder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991), 360–87 (364–67). Park, ‘Medical Practice’, 622–23; Saunders, ‘Bodily Narratives’, 178–79. Sir Isumbras, 477.
It is a later reader, not the poet or scribe himself, who appended the words ‘Hic jacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus’ to the end of this poem in the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript, copying the inscription from Arthur’s thirteenth-century tomb at Glastonbury.
26 Megan G. Leitch
When the Alliterative Morte diverges from the expectations of other Arthurian romances by invoking Avalon but locating it within the knowable bounds of England and having the attempted healing performed at a manor and by a male surgeon, it denies room to educated women: women such as Morgan, with her schooling in the nunnery. Although Morgan is shown to be dangerous and may be associated with black magic elsewhere in Arthurian romance, romance nonetheless gives her and women like her scope.32 Moreover, Morgan’s intervention when Arthur is critically wounded is an unambiguously positive one that the Alliterative Morte eschews. The ‘surgen of Salerne’ is the Alliterative poet’s invention, and one that makes use of universities and their representatives to disenchant the narrative and thwart the expectations of romance: here, especially, the expectation of wise women, along with the expectation of a happy ending.
Magic, Medicine and Misogyny in the Gesta Romanorum
In a coming-of-age story about a young aristocrat in the Gesta Romanorum, a story that deploys many of the conventions of free-standing romances, a university and the education it offers are similarly used to renegotiate the expectations of romance that the narrative intertextually invokes. First written in Latin in the mid-fourteenth century in either Germany or England, and recopied, adapted and translated into a variety of vernaculars including French, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Icelandic and Welsh as well as German and English, this capacious late medieval collection of fictional, moralized narratives (some of which have a loose connection to the emperors of Rome) survives in over 350 fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts.33 The Middle English version is extant in four fifteenth-century manuscripts, and Wynkyn de Worde also printed a smaller set of forty-three narratives translated from the Anglo-Latin version c. 1510–15. I concentrate primarily on ‘Godfridus a Wise Emperoure’ in the prose version of the Middle English Gesta Romanorum; Thomas Hoccleve’s version, the ‘Tale of Jonathas’, follows the narrative of the prose Gesta fairly closely, though Hoccleve renders it in rhyme royal and expands on the tale’s misogynistic elements. Both versions draw upon and rework romance conventions in order to convey the Archibald, ‘Women and Romance’, 159; Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural, 250.
32 33
Alistair Bennett, ‘Gesta Romanorum’, in Siân Echard and Robert Rouse, eds, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 vols (Oxford, 2017), ii, 859–61; Albrecht Classen, ‘The Gesta Romanorum: A Sammelbecken of Ancient Wisdom and Didactic Literature and a Medieval “Bestseller” Revisited’, Literature & Aesthetics, 27 (2017), 73–98.
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 27
moral lesson, exploiting readers’ expectations of how romance narratives proceed, and of the motifs and objects by which they are structured.34 The romance conventions invoked and altered here include those associated with magical objects, the ‘custom of the castle’ meme, and the magic and medicine elsewhere performed by women. The Gesta Romanorum remains under-studied, despite its late medieval popularity and despite some promising attention to ways in which some of its narratives provide parallels with or source material for medieval romances such as Guy of Warwick, and for early modern plays such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Lear.35 Where such work has tended to concentrate on correspondences that link specific romances to particular narratives in the Gesta, I focus here on how the expectations and motifs of romance are used within one Gesta narrative in ways that make meaning through the gaps and overlaps between romance and exemplum, yielding a story that I treat as a hybrid between the two genres. By using romance expectations, ‘Godfridus a Wise Emperoure’ also comments upon them. Since each narrative in the Gesta is accompanied by a detailed exegesis of the moral messages it allegorizes, the collection was readily used by preachers to prepare sermons; yet since these moralizing commentaries that seek to insist that each narrative signifies something other than its literal meaning are appended to, rather than interwoven with, their narratives, lay readers were also able to selectively read the narratives for their entertainment value rather than their didactic import.36 The moralizing coda to this story allegorizes its misogyny in terms of Christian men’s need to do penance by chastising the flesh (represented here by a woman), but on the story’s literal level, the misogynistic reworking of romance conventions also contributes to a discourse shared with other romance narratives – a discourse that reflects on the tensions between clerkly authority and female agency. Despite the title given to this story in the Gesta, it focuses not on the Emperor Godfridus, but on his third and youngest son, Jonathas. On his 34
35
36
On romance’s motifs and on how the genre makes meaning through either fulfilling or frustrating the expectations it invokes, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004).
Diane Speed, ‘Middle English Romance and the Gesta Romanorum’, in Rosalind Field, ed., Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 1999), 45–56. For a more sustained, pioneering engagement with the Gesta and romance, see Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1991). Bennett, ‘Gesta Romanorum’; Classen, ‘The Gesta Romanorum’, 75 and 79.
28 Megan G. Leitch
deathbed, Godfridus leaves land and wealth to his two eldest sons, but to Jonathas he leaves only three objects, ‘a presious ringe, a gay broche, and a riall clothe’, with properties that Godfridus explains to Jonathas: the vertu of the ringe is this, that whosoever ber hit upon him, he shalle have love of al men. The vertu of the broche is this, that whosoevere ber hit upon his brest, late him thinke what he wolle, and he shalle mete therwith at his likynge. And the vertu of the clothe is swiche that lete a man sitte uppon hit, and he shalle be in what partye of the worlde he wolle desire.37
The magic ring, brooch and cloth are objects which medieval readers might associate with romances such as King Horn, Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’, Emaré or Melusine. Where, in those romances, such magical objects, in conjunction with a royal or aristocratic protagonist, signal chivalric adventure and/or love, in ‘Godfridus’ the expectations invoked by these magical objects and the nature of the protagonist are redirected in the narrative (and then assigned further different meanings in the moralizing coda). Instead of riding in search of adventure or battling his foes, this emperor’s son goes to university and, after his studies, becomes a healer. This is an unusual career for a young lord both from a literary perspective, and from a societal one – since the upper classes did not usually go to university, and, if they did, they tended to focus on law, rather than on medicine. Jonathas’s mother, the widow empress, retains the magical objects for safekeeping and doles them out to Jonathas one by one as he uses them and loses them to the woman who becomes his lover. The ring and brooch, in turn, theoretically help Jonathas in his university career, but they are not what ultimately result in his success. This offers a partial parallel with the way in which romance magic sometimes ‘doesn’t work’, in that narratives test the protagonist’s own qualities instead.38 Jonathas’s magical objects mark his errors in judgement: instead of gaining a career through them, he loses the objects themselves, both because he engages in an adulterous dalliance with Felicia (felicity, or happiness), and because he trusts her when she promises to keep his magical possessions safe for him. Felicia is deceitful, and the Gesta uses Jonathas’s mother as a mouthpiece for repeated misogynistic lectures, 37
38
‘Godfridus a Wise Emperoure (Of the Magic Ring, Brooch, and Cloth, Which an Emporer Left to His Son: How He Lost Them and How They Were Recovered)’, in Eve Salisbury, ed., The Trials and Joys of Marriage (Kalamazoo, MI, 2002), 8–13. Further references are cited parenthetically. ‘Magic that doesn’t work’ is Cooper’s term; as she observes, romances ‘rarely make magic the driving factor in the plot, or the decisive factor in the hero or heroine’s success’: The English Romance in Time, 143.
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 29
reminding Jonathas, ‘Sone, I have ofte tyme saide to thee, that thow sholdeste beware of womman’ (56–57). Here, a woman is a wisdom figure only inasmuch as she voices conventional patriarchal mistrust of other women. Hoccleve’s version heightens the misogynistic discourse, peppering the narrative with such comments as Jonathas’s ‘Swich is wommannes inconstant nature, | They can nat keepe conseil worth a risshe’,39 paralleling the medieval antifeminist stereotypes that the Wife of Bath cites in her Prologue. When magical objects feature in romance, a love story is often expected and celebrated; here, however, the magical objects and the love interest instead combine to yield condemnations of adultery and of the wiles of women. This way in which ‘Godfridus’ invokes the expectations of romance in order to turn them on their head for doctrinal instruction is reminiscent of penitential romances such as Sir Isumbras and Robert of Cisyle, in which spiritual values and dispositions suddenly and surprisingly become more important than secular chivalric success; or of Grail Quest narratives such as the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s ‘Sankgreal’, in which Launcelot is shown to be in the wrong for helping out a party of knights attired in black against a party of knights wearing white (because he thinks the chivalrous thing to do is to ‘helpe there the wayker party’ (719.34) – a judgement that has served him well before the Grail Quest, but not now). Finally wising up somewhat, Jonathas deploys the third magical item to try to regain the first two. Using the cloth to transport himself and Felicia to ‘fer contrees, wher never man come afore’ (92), Jonathas threatens to abandon her there, ‘and bestes shulle devoure’ her (5–96), unless she promises that when they get home she will return to him the ring and brooch she has hidden away. She does so promise, but Jonathas has not entirely learned his misogynistic lesson as yet; deploying a conventional medieval way of representing lack of vigilance, the story has Jonathas fall asleep: And then he saide, ‘Forsothe, I hadde lever slepe then al the worldes goode, as me thinkithe; and therefore, I pray thee, ley forthe thi sherte, that I may ligge down, and have a litle slepe.’ She dude so, and he leyde downe his hede in hir shirte, and byganne stronglye to slepe. Thenne she heringe his grete slepe, she drow the parti of the clothe that was undir him unto hir; and thenne she thowte, ‘Lord! Yf I wer now wher that I was today!’ And anon, sodenly she was browte to the same plase; and Jonathas lay stille slepinge. Whenne he wakid, he saw neithere clothe, ne woman; he wepte bitterly, and
39
Thomas Hoccleve, ‘Tale of Jonathas’, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and Israel Gollancz, EETS es 61 (London, 1892), 192–93.
30 Megan G. Leitch
saide, ‘Alas! Alas! What shalle I nowe do I wot nevere; and I am worthi al this bale, for I tolde to the woman al my counseill.’ (103–12)
Here, the tale employs the ethical implications that accompany the untimely daytime naps of other romance protagonists, as when Malory’s Launcelot falls asleep during the middle of the day in what he describes as the strongest desire to sleep he has had ‘this seven yere’. His ‘grete lust to slepe’ signifies a lack of vigilance, resulting in his companion Lionel being captured and then Launcelot himself being captured by the four queens while he is still sleeping (190/19–191/4).40 Similarly, Jonathas ‘byganne stronglye to slepe’ and then remains in a ‘grete slepe’ instead of being alert to danger when Felicia snatches the cloth and steals away home without him. Whereas the romance knight wanders the forest of adventure in search of an opponent, often found at fords and crossing-places,41 Jonathas encounters two rivers and two fruit trees. The first river and tree consume his flesh and make him a leper, respectively, while the latter pair heals these two afflictions. Jonathas, belatedly developing some foresight in this wilderness of adventure, collects some of each type of water and fruit to take with him. He then comes to ‘a feire castell’ (126), surrounded by decapitated heads. This parallels Malory’s Gareth’s arrival outside Lyonesse’s castle, where he sees the dead enemies of the Red Knight of the Red Lands hanging in the surrounding trees. Where Arthurian romance often offers a ‘custom of the castle’ motif in which an errant knight must venture and succeed in a bizarre martial task, here too there is a custom of the castle in which the protagonist must risk death. Notwithstanding the fact that all the decapitated heads surrounding the castle are those of ‘lechis’ (127) or doctors, when two squires from the castle ask him to identify himself, he informs them, ‘“I am,” quod he, “a leche of fer contrees hennys”’ (128–29). Instead of fighting anyone, Jonathas must heal the invalid king of the castle – but if he fails, he risks having his head put on display alongside the others. The healing challenge makes this particularly reminiscent of Grail Quest narratives, both by suggesting a parallel with the maimed Fisher King, and by figuring Jonathas in the role of Perceval’s sister – except that whereas the ‘custom of the castell’ in which she participates in Malory’s Morte results in her giving her life’s blood to heal a gentlewoman whom ‘no leche cowde
40
41
On the unethical connotations of daytime sleep in medieval literature, and particularly in romance, see Megan G. Leitch, Sleep and its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams (Manchester, 2021).
Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge, 1993).
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 31
remedye’ (767/8, 767/13),42 Jonathas’s success, by contrast, means he can keep his life. Conveniently, what this king suffers from is leprosy, and Jonathas has just acquired the magical means to cure him. Richly rewarded for restoring the king to health, Jonathas returns to his university studies, and begins to work as a doctor. He inhabits the space that female healers occupy elsewhere in romance: ‘he toke cure of syke peple, and he helid alle’ (146). The tale refers to the protagonist through the common term of ‘leche’ or doctor, as does Jonathas himself. Given his university education and his traditional method of determining the cause of illness through examining ‘uryne’ (152), we can presume that he is to be understood as a physician. In the later Middle Ages, university-trained physicians were the wealthiest and most high-status healers, outnumbered by, and in competition with, other types of healers such as ‘barber-surgeons, pharmacists, herbalists, midwives, and wise men and women’.43 The tension between male and female healers, then, is both generic and societal. In ‘Godfridus’, as in the Alliterative Morte, a university-trained professional usurps romance women’s role of healing, and, as in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, romance magic is incorporated into the clerical domain. The focus on leprosy returns in the tale’s conclusion, when Felicia is ill and summons a ‘sotill leche’ (149) without realizing it is Jonathas. Romance’s penchant for having a former lover unable to recognize a long-lost flame (as when Isumbras or Horn make their way to their respective beloveds’ courts after years of separation, and are not recognized by the lady without recognition tokens) is figured more darkly here when Felicia does not recognize Jonathas, who has come to do her harm.44 Jonathas, in the tale’s most uncomfortably misogynistic moment, takes revenge for Felicia’s earlier lies and acts of theft: although she confesses her sins here, including those misdeeds, instead of healing her of her unspecified sickness, he gives her the water and the fruit that cause leprosy and the consumption of the flesh. Transformed into ‘swiche a likenesse, that no man wolde no lenger abide with hir’ (168–69), she dies on the spot. This violent misogynistic revenge does not sit well with the Christian ideal of forgiveness, but the story offers no comment. Here, the tale deploys the cultural perception of leprosy as a disease that can be contracted venereally and a sign of sexual sin, punishing a woman in parallel with the way in which 42
43 44
See Martin B. Schichtman, ‘Perceval’s Sister: Genealogy, Virginity, and Blood’, Arthuriana, 9.2 (1999), 11–20. Siraisi, ‘The Faculty of Medicine’, 361.
While ‘Godfridus’ does not give a reason for this lack of recognition, Hoccleve’s version moves further from the conventions of romance by explaining that ‘Mislykynge & thoght | changed eek his face’ (582).
32 Megan G. Leitch
Henryson’s Testament of Cressid has Cressid contract leprosy as retribution for her perceived betrayal of Troilus.45 While the moralizing coda appended to Jonathas’s story – in both the Gesta and Hoccleve’s version – encourages an allegorical understanding of the characters and magical items, as mentioned, not all readers, depending on their inclination, necessarily engaged with such codas. Readers might understand this story in relation to the allegorization of Jonathas as a Christian man who is given, by his father the Emperor representing Jesus Christ, ‘the ringe of feithe’ (181), ‘a broche, scil. the Holy Goste in his herte’ (186), and a ‘presious clothe’ representing ‘perfite charité’ (191), and who is deceived by Felicia as Jonathas’s own ‘wrecchid fleshe, that stirithe him to synne’ (196–97). However, readers might also understand the story on its literal level, which focuses on the ‘moral’ of how men need to beware women. Yet both the literal level of the story and its religious allegorization deploy the matter of romance to make meaning, and, in so doing, offer potent intertextual reminders of romance itself. Intertextuality ‘involves the transposition of elements from existent systems into new signifying relations’,46 but more so, according to Julia Kristeva (who coined the term in the late 1960s), ‘intertextuality’ modifies understanding not only of the text in which the citation occurs, but also of the texts or traditions that are cited.47 By using the substance of romance to produce a more cautionary and misogynistic narrative, then, the Gesta also gives readers the tools to resist such a misogynistic narrative, by reminding them of other stories in which the likes of magic, medicine, rings and rocks might be configured differently. Historically, and therefore in terms of possible reader reception, the three narratives analysed here can all be read in relation to each other. The exploration of the gender politics of (extra-)curricular magic in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and the substitution of a university medical school for women’s magic in the Alliterative Morte Arthure were both written in the late fourteenth century (and read during the fifteenth), and the Gesta Romanorum, perhaps translated into English around the same time, was read throughout the fifteenth century (and beyond) and adapted by Hoccleve c. 1419–21. Across these texts, the appearance of clerks with their specified or implied male-only university training disrupts romance expectations by offering scholars in the place of sorceresses, 45
46 47
Kathryn Hume, ‘Leprosy or Syphilis in Henryson’s Testament of Cressid’, English Language Notes, 6 (1969), 242–45. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London, 2000), 113.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1986), 34–61 (37).
Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance 33
and, in the case of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and the Gesta, by severely limiting the options of the women whom these scholars’ magic or medicine affects. Yet from an intertextual perspective, this motif – which might be described as a motif of matriculating magicians or medics – not only disenchants the narratives in which it features; it also illuminates (for both medieval readers and modern critics) the striking agency of women elsewhere in romance, calling attention to how the genre imagines and promotes productive forms of power and knowledge that women can wield and share.
3
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain A i s l i ng B y r n e
A
q
range of medieval texts associates King Arthur with the island of Sicily. The earliest, Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia, recounts how a man followed a runaway horse into the side of Mount Etna and encountered Arthur there.1 A similar story is told a decade later in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum. Sicily also takes on the role of Arthur’s final resting place in Floriant et Florete and is depicted as the enchanted realm of Arthur in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula. Further brief references from medieval Italy and France seem to also reflect this tradition. To greater or lesser degrees, these texts present the very real and much-visited island of Sicily as proxy for Avalon and as an otherworld realm. On the face of it, Sicily is not an obvious location with which to associate Arthur; the Mediterranean world does not impinge on most of the influential narratives of the Matter of Britain. The precise origins of this tradition are difficult to discern, but it seems to have developed in tandem with a wider interest in Arthurian material in this part of the world. The story Gervase relates is one of a number of responses to the figure of Arthur that emerge in Italy and Sicily at a relatively early stage. Some of the earliest Arthurian imagery comes from the western Mediterranean in the form of twelfth-century artworks at the cathedrals of Otranto (then in the kingdom of Sicily) and Modena.2 When accounts of Arthur in Sicily 1
2
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), 334–37.
On art and the early Arthurian tradition in Italy, see Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, ‘La légende arthurienne dans la sculpture de la cathédrale de Modène’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 6 (1963), 281–96; Linda M. Gowans, ‘The Modena Archivolt and Lost Arthurian Tradition’, in Willy Van Hoecke, Gilbert Tournoy and Werner Verbeke, eds, Arturus Rex, vol. 2: Acta Conventus Lonvaliensis 1987 (Leuven, 1991), 79–86; Gloria Allaire, ‘Arthurian Art in Italy’, in Gloria Allaire and F. Regina Psaki, eds, The Arthur of the Italians: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture (Cardiff, 2014), 205–32. For an overview of the
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain 35
are examined, two things become apparent. The first is how far the location, topography and history of Sicily might have suggested points of connection with well-established depictions of otherworld spaces. The second is that a number of these texts seem to engage with the Matter of Britain for political ends. The island of Sicily was a much-contested territory and it changed hands at several points throughout the Middle Ages. The figure of Arthur is used to authorize and critique the claims of a variety of political actors. This potent intersection of otherworld geography and political claims is central to British debates about Arthur’s return from Avalon in the period, but how such associations operated beyond Britain remains under-explored. Discussion of Arthur’s association with Sicily has primarily been confined to Italian-language scholarship. An early survey by Arturo Graf has been joined more recently by articles by Antonio Pioletti and Eliana Creazzo.3 Of specific texts that depict Arthur in Sicily, the two longest works, Floriant et Florete and La Faula, have attracted the most comment, though scholarship is not particularly extensive in either case. The political significance of both works has been emphasized, with recent analyses suggesting that the depiction of the western Mediterranean in these romances, particularly Sicily, reflects a range of contemporary territorial concerns.4 Among scholars working on texts from Wales and England, a growth in interest in the supernatural and in territorial politics in recent years has fed into a renewed interest in medieval reception of the Historia in Italy, see Fabrizio De Falco, ‘The Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Work in Italy’, in Joshua Byron Smith and Georgia Henley, eds, A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth (Leiden, 2020), 477–81.
Arturo Graf, Miti, leggende e superstizioni del medioevo, 2 vols (Turin, 1892–93) ii, 303–25; Antonio Pioletti, ‘Artu, Avallon, l’Etna’, Quaderni Medievali, 28 (1989), 6–35; Eliana Creazzo, ‘Lo specchio della fata. Cronotopi dei racconti del Mongibello’, Viator, 45 (2014), 125–41. For a study which surveys this tradition within the wider context of responses to Avalon, see Matthias Egeler, Avalon, 66° Nord. Zu Frühgeschichte und Rezeption eines Mythos (Berlin, 2015), 246–54.
3
Sara Sturm-Maddox, ‘Arthurian Evasions: The End(s) of Fiction in Floriant et Florete’, in Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones, eds, ‘Por le soie amiste’: Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam, 2000), 475–89, and ‘The Arthurian Romance in Sicily: Floriant et Florete’, in Juliette Dor, ed., Conjointure arthurienne. Actes de la ‘Classe d’excellence’ de la Chaire Francqui 1998 (Louvain, 2000), 95–107; Albert-Guillem Hauf i Valls, ‘Artús, aycell qui atendon li bretó? La Faula, seducció o reivindicació políticomoral?’, Bolletí de la Societat Arqueològica Lul·liana: Revista d’Estudis Històrics, 56 (2000), 7–24; Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, ‘The Past and Future Margins of Catalonia: Language Politics and Catalan Imperial Ambitions in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula’, in Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson and Debra Blumenthal, eds, Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (New York, 2020), 70–90.
4
36 Aisling Byrne
treatments of Arthur’s fate.5 But these discussions have not typically considered the impact of that discourse beyond Britain. In what follows, I would like to consider how works depicting Arthur in Sicily, particularly Gervase’s account, draw on and adapt that discourse to reflect their own local concerns. Sicily features prominently in Gervase of Tilbury’s own biography and in the interests of various rulers to whom he was connected. Gervase had spent some years on the island in the late 1180s, when he was at the court of King William II, the Norman king of Sicily. It is unclear when Gervase left, but he could well have remained on the island until the Hohenstaufen takeover in 1194.6 The Otia Imperialia itself is addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV.7 Gervase was working on the text by 1211 and seems to have completed the work before 1215.8 At this point Gervase was marshal of the kingdom of Arles in the south of France. Otto was the grandson of Henry II of England and he may have met Gervase as a young man at Henry’s court. Otto never ruled Sicily, but he attempted to invade the island in 1211 during the period of the Otia’s composition. The Otia’s three component books give a history and description of the world and an account of numerous marvels. The work is comparable to a number of other compilations of the period, such as Walter Map’s De nugis curialium and Gerald of Wales’s writings on Ireland and Wales. Gervase was very familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth and he draws heavily on the Historia regum Britanniae in the account he offers of British history. Many of the marvels he relates are presented as eyewitness accounts and they largely come from the world Gervase knew: from the regions bordering the western Mediterranean, from France and from England. The account of Arthur’s residence in Etna actually appears in Book II, which gives a description of different parts of the world, rather than in Book III, the section specifically on marvels. The anecdote forms part of an extensive See, for instance, the discussions of Avalon in James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance (New York, 2011), 39–72; Victoria Flood, ‘Arthur’s Return from Avalon: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Legend’, Arthuriana, 25 (2015), 84–110; Aisling Byrne, Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford, 2016), 119–29; Francesco Marzella, ‘Letters from the Otherworld. Arthur and Henry II in Stephen of Rouen’s Draco Normannicus’, Tabularia: Sources Écrites des Mondes Normands Médiévaux (2017), doi: 10.4000/tabularia.2858.
5
6
7 8
Gervase, Otia, xxviii. On the broader cultural connections of Sicily in this period, particularly the impact of romance traditions, see William Burgwinkle, ‘Remembering the Future: Cultural Hybridity in Sicily?’, Journal of Romance Studies, 4 (2004), 79–96. Gervase, Otia, xxxix.
Gervase, Otia, xxxviii–xl.
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain 37
chapter on the islands of the Mediterranean, in which Sicily receives the fullest treatment. Gervase roots his account of Arthur in local tradition, though not one of any great antiquity. He opens with the comment: Hunc autem montem uulgares Muntgibel appellant. In huius deserto narrant indigene Arcturum magnum nostris temporibus apparuisse. (Now the common folk call this mountain Mondjibel [i.e. Etna] and the locals relate that in our own times the great Arthur has appeared in an unfrequented region of it.)9
In the episode of the man pursuing his runaway horse, Arthur’s realm inside the mountain is described in conventional otherworldly terms: Artissima semita sed plana inuenta, puer in spatiosissimam planiciem iocundam omnibusque deliciis plenam aduenit, ibique in palatio miro opere constructo repperit Arcturum in strato regii apparatus recubantem. (Finding a very narrow but level plain, full of delights of every kind; there, in a palace constructed with marvellous workmanship, he found Arthur reclining on a couch of royal splendour.)10
Arthur tells the man that he continues to suffer from his wounds, which break open every year. The king returns the lost horse and also sends gifts which, according to Gervase, were widely considered to be even more marvellous than the story that lay behind them.11 Although Gervase’s account is presented as a piece of local folklore, it seems to draw on more literary traditions and it picks up some further motifs associated with other accounts of otherworld visitations. For instance, the pursuit of a stray animal into a hollow hill is an established convention in such narratives. In fact, the story follows a similar narrative pattern to another story in the Otia, an account of a swineherd who visits the antipodes.12 Even the gifts sent by Arthur recall similar items in other texts; authors often present such objects as material evidence that an otherworld encounter really took place.13 The anecdote also bears the stamp of
9
Gervase, Otia, 334, 335.
10 11
12 13
Gervase, Otia, 336, 337.
It is not clear whether Mount Etna is to be identified with Avalon, specifically, in this account. The term is not used in this episode, although Gervase identifies it as Arthur’s final destination at another point in the Otia (429). Gervase, Otia, 642–45.
Byrne, Otherworlds, 107–09.
38 Aisling Byrne
Galfridian influence. The ‘couch of royal splendour’ on which Gervase places Arthur seems to echo similar imagery in the Vita Merlini.14 Later works which place Arthur in Sicily may well be drawing on the same strand of local tradition that Gervase presents as the source of his account. However, the success of the Otia itself may also have played a role in popularizing the association between Arthur and Sicily. There are thirty known Latin manuscripts of the work now in existence. Of those that can be localized, a high proportion are from Italy or southern France and were copied throughout the Middle Ages.15 The work was also translated into French on two separate occasions in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.16 Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum, written between 1219 and 1223, may also have contributed to the popularization of stories of Arthur in Etna, though the manuscripts of the work are less firmly associated with the western Mediterranean world than those of the Otia. This work survives in around sixty manuscripts in addition to various excerpts in collections of exempla.17 Caesarius’s account bears some similarities with Gervase’s in both structure and plot. He relates how, around the time of the Hohenstaufen conquest of Sicily, a deacon at Palermo lost his palfrey and sent his servant to search for it. The servant encountered an old man who told him that the horse was in Etna in the possession of King Arthur. The old man instructed the servant to tell the deacon to come to Arthur’s court within fourteen days; however, the deacon scoffed at the message and died suddenly. The episode is one of a pair of stories about Etna. The second outlines how voices were heard in the mountain preparing the infernal punishment of a recently deceased nobleman.18 The text goes on to identify Etna as an entrance to hell. The Arthur of this work is a considerably more sinister character than Gervase’s Arthur and, on the most obvious level, this divergence seems to reflect the two works’ respective audiences, the one courtly, the other clerical. But the German Caesarius, writing when Hohenstaufen rule was firmly established in Sicily, 14
15 16
17
18
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Life of Merlin: Vita Merlini, ed. Basil Clarke (Cardiff, 1973), line 934. Otia, lxiii–lxxix.
Les traductions françaises des ‘Otia imperialia’ de Gervais de Tilbury par Jean d’Antioche et Jean de Vignay, ed. Cinzia Pignatelli and Dominique Gerner (Geneva, 2006).
On the reception of this work, see Victoria Smirnova, Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu and Jacques Berlioz, eds, The Art of Cistercian Persuasion in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles and its Reception (Leiden, 2015). Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. J. Strange, 2 vols (Cologne, 1851), ii, 325–26.
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain 39
might also have been rather less inclined to celebrate Arthur, the British hero, than was the Norman-English Gervase. The earliest vernacular source which seems to suggest a connection between Sicily and Arthurian figures is the Occitan Arthurian romance Jaufre. This poem was probably written in the first three decades of the 1200s, though earlier dates have been proposed. Towards the end of the work the protagonist enters an otherworld realm to aid a fairy woman. She later reveals her identity as the fada de gibel (‘the fairy of Etna’).19 Although later texts associate Sicily with Morgan le Fay (for instance, the late fourteenth-century Arthurian text Le Chevalier du Papegau refers to Morgan as la fee de Montgibel), this connection is not explicit in Jaufre.20 Other romances offer much more detailed accounts. The lengthy French romance Floriant et Florete appears to have been composed in the second half of the thirteenth century, possibly in Italy or in Sicily itself.21 It survives in a single manuscript as well as a late fifteenth-century prose redaction. Floriant is the dispossessed son of the king of Sicily and he is abducted as a baby by Morgan Le Fay. She raises him in the castle of ‘Mongibel’. As an adult, he leaves Sicily and arrives at King Arthur’s court in Britain, where he learns of his own identity. He returns to Sicily with King Arthur and his navy to reclaim his inheritance. He marries Florete, a Byzantine princess, and is crowned king of Sicily. Floriant has additional adventures in the company of Florete. He returns to Arthur’s court on a further occasion and is eventually crowned emperor at Constantinople. Many years later, in Sicily, Floriant hunts a deer to summit of a mountain, where he encounters Morgan le Fay again. She tells him that his life is almost over, but he will not die as long as he remains with her at Mongibel; King Arthur will join them later when he receives a mortal wound. Fairies fetch Florete, who is brought to Mongibel. After that, no one ever hears tell of the couple again. A similarly detailed Arthurian episode appears in Guillem de Torrella’s La Faula, which dates from the early 1370s.22 This work is written largely in Catalan, with some French dialogue. It describes how the author travelled to an enchanted island on the back of a whale and found Arthur and Morgan there. The poet sets off from Soller in Mallorca and travels east. Although 19
20
21 22
Jaufre, roman arthurien du XIIIe siècle en vers provençaux, ed. Clovis Brunel (Paris, 1943), line 10654. Le conte du papegau, roman arthurien du XVe siècle, ed. Hélène Charpentier and Patricia Victorin (Paris, 2004). Floriant et Florete, ed. Annie Combes and Richard Trachsler (Paris, 2003).
Guillem de Torrella, La Faula, ed. Pere Bohigas and Jaume Vidal Alcover (Tarragona, 1984).
40 Aisling Byrne
the island to which he comes is never named, it is clearly in the Mediterranean and scholars have been in little doubt that it is Sicily.23 The island is thoroughly otherworldly, featuring a palace made of jewels and imagery of Arthurian heroes. Arthur is depicted, as in the Otia, in bed and very ill. Arthur says Morgan brought him to this island in a boat and bathed him in a fountain to heal his wounds. He laments the contemporary decay of chivalry, urging the author to help revive knightly glory and to tell everyone what he has seen when he returns to his homeland. As in Gervase’s text, Arthur’s suffering seems to be perpetual. Only one text in Italian makes reference to the myth of Arthur in Etna. This is the brief thirteenth-century Tuscan comic poem Detto del Gatto Lupesco.24 At the start of the text, the poet meets two knights on the road who say they are returning to England from Sicily where they sought, but failed to find, Arthur in ‘Mongibello’.25 The tenor of the poem as a whole suggests there is something intrinsically ridiculous about their quest. These accounts seem to owe much to complex interactions between geography and established literary conventions. The location and topography of the island of Sicily mesh neatly with the well-established components of medieval otherworld narratives. Islands and hollow hills are by far the most frequent locations for otherworld realms in medieval writing.26 Sicily, an island famous for its (often active) volcano, combines both locations in one place.27 The mists that characterized the straits of Messina between Sicily and Calabria seem to have become known as the fata Morgana as early as the fourteenth century. Such a water crossing was particularly evocative of an otherworld entry point, and the chanson de geste Maugis d’Aigremont describes the marvellous qualities of this strait at length and presents passage across it in explicitly supernatural terms.28 Texts like La Faula also emphasize the island’s beauty, depicting it as a place of marvels. Sicily was, of course, a particularly fertile and productive 23
24
25 26 27
28
Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana. Part antiga, 4 vols (Barcelona, 1984–85), ii, 216. Il Gatto Lupesco e Il Mare Amoroso, ed. Annamaria Carrega (Alessandria, 2000) 38–40. Il Gatto Lupesco, ed. Carrega, line 27. Byrne, Otherworlds, 1–2, 59–60.
On Etna, in particular, see Danièle James-Raoul, ‘Monts et merveilles romanesques’, in Claude Thomasset and Danièle James-Raoul, eds, La montagne dans le texte médiéval: entre mythe et réalite (Paris, 2000), 255–83. For a recent discussion, see Kathleen Jarchow, ‘Magic at the Margins: The Mystification of Maugis d’Aigremont’, in Albrecht Classen, ed., Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time (Berlin, 2017), 439–73.
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain 41
region. It was also wealthy – trade with North Africa, in particular, had made the island rich in jewels and expensive cloths. It was the only European kingdom in this period to have a gold coinage. The German chroniclers who described the takeover of the island at the end of the twelfth century were uniformly astonished at the island’s wealth.29 In this light, it is unsurprising that the wealth and material splendour of Arthur’s abode are emphasized in the Otia, Floriant and La Faula. However, not all the supernatural connotations of Sicily were positive. The island was also home to the inhospitable fires of Etna and writers drew connections with the infernal regions from an early point. For instance, Gregory the Great connected the sulphur pits of Sicily with the entrance of hell.30 As we have seen, Caesarius also identifies Etna as a gateway to hell. Gervase is not so categorical. His Arthur is clearly suffering in Etna, but the realm in which he lives is a place of beauty. A similar combination of beauty and peril is evident in a short anecdote recounted by Stephen of Bourbon. Like Gervase and Caesarius, he describes how a man followed a lost horse into Etna and found a marvellous city there. He was given gifts by its inhabitants, but they went up in flames on his departure.31 Sicily was also both a border and a disputed territory. For much of the later Middle Ages the island was part of the southern limit of Christendom. Indeed, until 1091 it had been under Muslim control and the imprint of Islamic religion and culture remained evident throughout the period; the very name of Etna in the texts under discussion here – Mongibel – is derived from Arabic. The island was also a contested space, changing hands on numerous occasions throughout the medieval period. Gervase was not the only writer of this era to draw political capital from an island’s combination of peripherality and natural wonders. In the 1180s, Gervase’s contemporary Gerald of Wales offered an account of the island of Ireland as an alter orbis, characterized by natural wonders which stem from its peripherality. Indeed, the island of Ireland was the only other location where an access point to the afterlife was persistently located in the medieval period: this was the cave at Lough Derg, also known as ‘Saint Patrick’s Purgatory’, in the north-west of the island. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory is mentioned in the second recension of the Topographia Hibernica, but the association of Ireland with an entrance to the afterlife was 29
30
31
Graham A. Loud, ‘Coinage, Wealth and Plunder in the Age of Robert Guiscard’, English Historical Review, 114 (1999), 815–43 (817–18).
Discussed alongside Gervase’s account in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1984), 203–08. Discussed in Pioletti, ‘Artu’, 9. On literary approaches to Sicily in the central Middle Ages, see Eliana Creazzo, ‘En Sesile est un mons mout grans’: La Sicilia medievale fra storia e immaginario letterario, XI–XIII sec. (Soveria Mannelli, 2006).
42 Aisling Byrne
popularized throughout Europe in another twelfth-century work associated with the Angevin invasion of Ireland, the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii. The two long romances which place Arthur in Sicily, La Faula and Floriant et Florete, seem to make a similar connection between political contestation, peripheral geography and marvels. Indeed, it is possible that Guillem was influenced by Floriant in composing his work.32 As Keith Busby and Sara Sturm-Maddox have noted, it seems likely that Floriant et Florete reflects specific political interests (although Floriant, unlike, say, Guillaume of Palerne, is not readily identifiable with any historical ruler).33 Arthur plays very much a supporting role in the plot of this romance, but he also has a significant authorizing function. The protagonist learns of his royal identity at Arthur’s court and Arthur provides him with military aid. Floriant’s imperial reach, which extends as far as Byzantium, seems to offer a Mediterranean mirror to Arthur’s dominance of the northern seas, islands and coasts. The parallel is enhanced by according Floriant and his wife an ‘Arthurian ending’: they depart to Morgan’s realm, where Arthur will later join them. The text’s likely date of composition coincides with the decline of Norman power in Sicily and Sturm-Maddox has speculated that Floriant constitutes an elegy for the end of that power.34 It enacts, in her terms, a fantasy of Mediterranean domination where the northern and southern Norman kingdoms of Britain and Sicily unite and where a marriage alliance with Florete, the Byzantine princess, spreads this unity into the eastern Mediterranean.35 Indeed, even as Angevin power declined in Sicily, a series of alliances extended their interests across Italy and into the Morea and the Byzantine world. Much depends, of course, on the precise date of the work. In 1266 the Angevins wrested control of Sicily from the Hohenstaufens, but, ultimately, they ceded the island to the Aragonese in 1302 following the protracted conflict known as the Sicilian Vespers. If Floriant et Florete dates from the period of the Sicilian Vespers, between
32
33
34 35
On this possible connection and on approaches to Arthur in Catalan territories in this period, see Lourdes Soriano Robles, ‘The Matière de Bretagne in the Corona de Aragón’, in David Hook, ed., The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds (Cardiff, 2015), 162–86, especially 174–78. Keith Busby, ‘The Intertextual Coordinates of Floriant et Florete’, French Forum, 20 (1995), 261–77 (273); and Sturm-Maddox, ‘Arthurian Evasions’, 479–81. Sturm-Maddox, ‘Arthurian Evasions’, 486–89.
The alliance is discussed in Megan Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance (Toronto, 2014), 102–19.
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain 43
1282 and 1302, it could well reflect, as Sturm-Maddox argues, nostalgia for waning Angevin power.36 An analogous treatment of Mediterranean geography is discernible in La Faula, though here it is turned to rather different territorial interests. Written about a century later than Floriant, this poem seems to reflect the Crown of Aragon’s ongoing interest in Sicily.37 The narrative begins in Mallorca, an Aragonese territory, and traces the author’s journey east to what appears to be Sicily. Nahir Otaño Gracia’s recent analysis of this text sees La Faula as a fantasy of Catalan power. She highlights Arthur’s association with contested borderlands in the Matter of Britain and suggests that La Faula develops that association in a Mediterranean context. Sicily is on the border of Christendom and Arthur’s presence there authorizes the status of the Catalans as ‘protectors of the borders of Europe’.38 Gervase’s early account may also use Arthur as an authorizing figure. The British king transported to Sicily offers a clear link between the northern and southern Norman spheres of influence. Indeed, there is good evidence that Gervase was not the only person who made such a connection in the period. In March 1191, Richard I of England visited Tancred, William II’s successor as king of Sicily.39 He appears to have presented Tancred with ‘Caliburn’ – the name given to Arthur’s sword in Geoffrey’s Historia. As Pioletti points out, this material translation of Arthur’s sword, from Britain to Sicily, may reflect similar ideological interests to the literary translation of Arthur himself from Britain to Etna.40 The context in which the anecdote about Arthur appears in the Otia also emphasizes connections between northern and southern territories. The account is actually one of a pair of Arthurian stories in this chapter of the Otia. The second is a brief report of a band of hunting knights who have been sighted by foresters in either Britain or Brittany (in siluis Brittanie maioris aut minoris).41 The troop tended to appear either at noon or at night under 36
37
38 39
See further Jean Dunbabin, The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 1266–1305 (Cambridge, 2011). For an overview of scholarship which has linked this text to specific political players in the region, see Soriano Robles, ‘The Matière de Bretagne’, 178. Otaño Gracia, ‘Past and Future’, 90.
See further Henri Bresc, ‘Excalibur en Sicilie’, Medievalia, 7 (1987), 7–21; Michelle R. Warren, ‘Roger of Howden Strikes Back: Investing Arthur of Brittany with the Anglo-Norman Future’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 21 (1998), 261–72; Edoardo D’Angelo, ‘Re Artù ed Excalibur dalla Britannia romana alla Sicilia normanna’, Atene e Roma, 3 (2007), 137–58.
Pioletti, ‘Artu’, 22–28.
40
Gervase, Otia, 336.
41
44 Aisling Byrne
a full moon and, when questioned, they claimed to belong to the household of Arthur. By the time of the Otia’s composition, of course, Sicily was no longer a Norman realm. The account could reflect the sort of nostalgia for lost political hegemony that Sturm-Maddox discerns in Floriant; however, it could equally be a response to Otto’s interest in Sicily around 1211. Throughout the Otia, Gervase is eager to emphasize Otto’s connections with his own homeland; in particular, the emperor’s descent from Henry II. Had Otto recovered Sicily, he would have restored a dynastic connection between that island and Britain. This use of the figure of Arthur in a Mediterranean context transfers his prestige from one geographical and cultural context to another. This sort of translatio was nothing new. In the century before Gervase composed the Otia, the British Arthur was, of course, co-opted by the Anglo-Normans to reflect their own political interest. In both cases, accounts of the final resting place of Arthur were a key element in appropriating the myth. In 1191, the same year that Richard visited Tancred, Arthur’s supposed body was uncovered at Glastonbury Abbey. This proof that Arthur would not return to aid the Britons fed neatly into Angevin political priorities as they sought to expand their influence across the British Isles. Like the proponents of the Glastonbury discovery, Gervase takes a rather dim view of the Breton Hope, noting that ‘the Britons fancifully believe that after a given time Arthur will return to his kingdom’ (quem fabulose Britones post data tempora credunt rediturum in regnum).42 Of course, the stories of Arthur in Etna differ from both Welsh predictions of his possible return and English accounts of his certain death. In the Mediterranean tradition, Arthur is not dead, but he is far removed from Britain and there is no suggestion he will ever return there. Indeed, Gervase’s Arthur seems trapped in a perpetual cycle of suffering. His wounds break open each year and, rather than cutting a messianic figure, he lies prone on a couch. His depiction in La Faula is very similar. The author of Floriant et Florete implies that Arthur will remain in Etna forever. A common feature of accounts which place Arthur in Sicily is the absence of emphasis on his return. On one level, this may merely reflect a lack of local political interest in such an idea. Yet, in presenting an Arthur who is simultaneously alive and unable to return to the quotidian world, these texts offer a distinctive, and very pliable, response to the question of Arthur’s fate. A living Arthur confined to Etna was more than just a symbol. As in La Faula, he could be made to comment on and intervene in contemporary affairs. And the supernatural dimension of his continued life was a further marvel to add to the many others associated with Sicily. Depicting Arthur as still living also solved another challenge 42
Gervase, Otia, 428–29.
The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain 45
which confronted writers who might be eager to draw on the British king’s prestige in a Mediterranean context. English monarchs could make political capital very readily from an Arthur who was dead and buried at Glastonbury, because they could still root their territorial claims and their regal self-image in accounts of Arthur’s legendary activities in their own realm. But narratives of Arthur’s life did not associate him with the Mediterranean world: any connection would have to be grafted onto the established Galfridian history. The ambiguity of Arthur’s end created a tantalizingly open conclusion to his biography, from which authors could, potentially, develop their own responses. The Otia Imperialia’s accounts of Arthur in Etna may bear close comparison to the near-contemporary Glastonbury excavations and reflect a similar highly politicized Norman appropriation of the Arthurian legend. In Etna, as at Glastonbury, Arthur’s potential threat to the status quo has been neutralized, but his name and legend have been exploited to underpin Norman rule. The geographical spread of the anecdotes associating Arthur with Etna, from England to Italy and from Germany to Catalonia, reflects the complex and shifting politics of the island of Sicily in the Middle Ages. A paradox of Geoffrey’s account of Arthur is that one of its most potent points of contact with medieval history was one of its most fantastical aspects: the account of the king’s departure to Avalon. The question of Arthur’s ultimate fate excited considerable speculation and controversy in Britain, but the Matter of Britain seems also to have had political resonance far beyond its homeland. Geography, history and topographical peculiarities made Sicily a particularly hospitable location to which to relocate Arthur. The array of medieval powers that claimed the island appears to have exploited this hospitality to the full.43
43
I am grateful to Elizabeth Archibald for offering generous feedback on an early version of this paper which I delivered at a conference of the International Arthurian Society a number of years ago. I offer an expanded version here as a small token of esteem for an Arthurian scholar with a love of Sicily.
4
Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius H e l e n Co oper
S
q
ometime around 530, two boats, both at the mercy of the seas and without human control, were voyaging around the North Atlantic and North Sea. One carried St Brendan and his companions, on their quest for the Land of Promise but passing from Ireland towards the Faroes on the way. Their boat was equipped with oars and a sail, but every so often, at Brendan’s urging, they set them aside and let God take them wherever He willed. The other boat contained a single woman, Constance, Chaucer’s Custance, the daughter of a Roman emperor named Constantine, who had been set adrift from Asia Minor and would finally come ashore in Northumberland; later, she would reverse the voyage to return to Rome, this time accompanied by her baby son Maurice, who would in due course become emperor himself. Without any means of steering, she was entirely in God’s hands, and was reliant on miracle alone to preserve her. The two stories invite combining in a meeting far out on the high seas: what might the saint have thought of the lone woman, or she of the small community of monks who formed Brendan’s crew? Might they have exchanged words, or prayers, or food and water, or their stories? And how might the stories themselves engage with each other? It did not, of course, happen, and not just because Brendan actually existed, and Constance, in so far as she did exist, had a very different biography from the one the story records; nor because a voyage to the Faroes would pass well north of any destination in Northumberland – though that is more likely than that a boat set adrift in the eastern Mediterranean would reach the North Sea. Brendan was markedly long-lived (484–577); the consensus is that he did indeed undertake a voyage into the North Atlantic, perhaps between 512 and 530, and conceivably reaching North America.1 St Brendan’s Isle, the
1
That this is at least possible was demonstrated by Tim Severin in a replica boat: see his The Brendan Voyage (London, 1978). Nothing comparable is possible for Constance’s unsteerable boat, of course.
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 47
‘Isle of the Blest’, a step before the Land of Promise, was regularly marked on early printed maps for some centuries; even if there was some doubt as to the accuracy of the account of his voyage, it was much safer for the purposes of navigation to mark an island that might not exist than omit one that did. Tiberius Constantine ruled the eastern (Byzantine) part of the Roman empire until his death in 582; he did indeed have a daughter named Constantina, and he was succeeded as emperor by one Maurice. The Byzantine connection might supply the link of the story of Constance with the pagan Syrian world, though Tiberius Constantine did not become emperor until 574, and Constantina was not Maurice’s mother, but his wife. The idea that Constance’s fictional three-and-a-half year voyage to Northumberland might have coincided with Brendan’s in the early 530s does however fit with the year of the historical Maurice’s birth, 539, allowing time for her sojourn in the household of Olda and Hermengyld and her marriage and pregnancy. Nicholas Trevet, who is the source for the story but includes it in his Chronicle as if it were indeed history, gives only one date, for her eventual death in 564. The inconvenience of fact, however, does nothing to destroy the potential for interlocking patterns in the two narratives, patterns that just because they will not reduce to historicity can transmute into interlocking voyages. The romance elements in both stories were inherent from the start, even though the origins of ‘Brendan’ in particular were established too early to attract ‘romance’ as a generic term. The first surviving versions of his story, current by the early twelfth century but perhaps originating as early as the ninth, are the Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendanis Abbati and the closely related Vita Sancti Brendanis Abbati; but if ‘vita’ suggests a standard saint’s life, there was no other hagiography quite like this. The Navigatio in particular is explicitly a wonder story – the purpose of Brendan’s voyage is indeed described as being to show him God’s wonders in the deep – strongly influenced by the Irish immram, the marvellous sea journey, if indeed the influence did not happen in the opposite direction.2 The Navigatio was adapted into Anglo-Norman verse around 1120 by a certain Benedeit for one of England’s royal women, either Adeliza of Louvain, the second wife of the ageing Henry I, or perhaps for the empress Matilda, Henry’s daughter by his first marriage.3 In its contents, its On the role of the sea in the Brendan legend, see Sebastian Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2008), 48–56. The sea as it is treated in Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ is also given recurrent attention across the book.
2
For the Latin text of the Navigatio, see Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis from Early Latin Manuscripts, ed. Carl Selmer (Notre Dame, IN, 1959); for the Anglo-Norman, The Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, ed. Ian Short and Brian Merrilees (Manchester, 1979). For translations of these, together with texts or translations of
3
48 Helen Cooper
language (the vernacular often known simply as romanz) and its form (octosyllabic couplets) it is strongly suggestive of romance, as every commentator on it has noted even if they do not endorse the idea: it predates the earliest works officially acknowledged as romances (the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman de Troie and the Roman d’Enéas) by some three decades. It is not just its wonders that create the imaginative impression of romance, however: its structure of repetition also removes it from either history or hagiography. The basic outline of Brendan’s journey happens seven times over, once in every year he and his companions spend at sea. Thus they pass the days preceding Easter Sunday on the back of the great fish Jasconius, before making an annual move to the Paradise of Birds (who were formerly angels) until Pentecost, and then to St Ailbe’s island for Christmas until the octave of Epiphany. The story is therefore cyclical in both space and time, once geographically, once liturgically with the cycle of the Christian year. In most narratives, this would be described as going round and round in circles; here, it is assumed to be a process crucial to the saint’s arrival in the Isle of the Blest, one stop short of heaven itself, and the last place visited before the group’s return to Ireland. Nicholas Trevet’s Chronicle, which contains the originary version of the story of Constance, was a rare venture for its author into romanz, again Anglo-Norman. He was a learned Dominican friar who normally wrote in Latin, but this particular work was written for a royal patroness, Edward I’s daughter Mary, who was a nun at Amesbury, and the choice of language was presumably dictated by the choice of patron. Both Gower and Chaucer rewrote Trevet’s prose narrative in English verse, Gower in the Confessio Amantis, Chaucer as ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’.4 All three versions, by Trevet and the two poets, hover somewhere between hagiography (Constance is a Christian repeatedly persecuted by pagans, and she is instrumental in the conversion of her husband and his people) and romance (she is raised from the status of an exile to become a queen); and in all three, what might elsewhere be marvel, in particular her twice surviving being cast adrift, is redefined as miracle. The account of a number of versions in other European vernaculars, see The Voyage of St Brendan: Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation, general eds W. R. J. Barron and Glyn S. Burgess (Exeter, 2002). Adeliza is named in three manuscripts of Benedeit’s Voyage, Matilda in one.
Trevet’s Anglo-Norman ‘Life of Constance’ is edited and translated by Robert M. Correale in R. Correale with Mary Hamel, eds, Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2005), 277–329, followed by Gower’s version, 330–50 (from Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 2 vols (2nd edn, Kalamazoo, MI, 2006–13), ii, 3.587–1598). The ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ constitutes Fragment II of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in RC.
4
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 49
Constance seems to have been developed by Trevet himself, possibly from a story in the Vitae duorum Offarum tentatively ascribed to Matthew Paris. This ‘Offa’ version follows more closely the paired story types often labelled as the ‘flight from incest’ and the ‘accused queen’.5 ‘Offa’, but not Trevet and his adaptors, opens with a father’s incestuous desire for his daughter; but it lacks the sea voyages that are one of the most striking characteristics of many such stories, settling instead just for an overland exile. The Middle English romance most consistently close to the paired model, in that it retains both the flight from incest and the voyages in an open boat, is Emaré. Whereas ‘Offa’ and Trevet’s work are presented as chronicles, and the incest-free Constance versions offer themselves implicitly as halfway to hagiography, Emaré provides a contrasting generic definition of itself as a Breton lai: in effect, a mini-romance, even though here too there is a strong pious element, and it is God who saves Emaré each time she is cast adrift – though her ordeals last a mere week in contrast to Constance’s and Brendan’s multiple years.6 Here, as in Trevet and Chaucer, the structure is one of marked repetition in her two desperate voyages. That repetition is underscored by the emphasis given to the marvellous robe that accompanies Emaré through all her ordeals. Its narrative function is far from obvious (other flight-from-incest narratives either tell similar stories without it, or have its equivalent function as a recognition token; here, its main function apart from its notability seems to be that it allows her to huddle under it in her open boat), and any symbolic meanings have to be imported by the reader. John Stevens may have got closest in his discussion of what he calls the granz biens in the lais of Marie de France, the images around which Marie focuses the emotional import of her stories but which carry meaning for the feelings she wants each poem to convey rather than advancing the plot.7 Emaré is anonymous, but while it shares a plot with other similar stories it is the robe that makes it distinctive; and the very lack of 5
6
7
The foundational study is that of Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York, 1927). On the works in which the heroine’s travails (and travels) start with flight from an incestuous father, see Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford, 2001), 145–91, and the plot summaries on 245–56: a study that has been invaluable in the writing of this essay.
Emaré, in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995), 145–99; see in particular lines 313–33, 670–81. On its structure, see also Ad Putter, ‘The Narrative Logic of Emaré’, in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds, The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (Harlow, 2000), 157–80. See also the essay by A. C. Spearing, below. John Stevens, ‘The granz biens of Marie de France’, in John Lawlor, ed., Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis (London, 1967), 1–25.
50 Helen Cooper
explanation for the robe makes its recurrent appearances register all the more insistently as repetitions. The argument of this essay is that repetition should be included among the family resemblances that trigger the imaginative response that signals ‘romance’, even for works that might otherwise seem to fall outside its boundaries, or at least to push those boundaries beyond what one might think allowable; and that one of the most striking of those repetitions is multiple sea voyages. Attempting to define romance as a genre can never be entirely successful, partly because literary taxonomies, unlike biological ones, are intellectual constructs with no clear edges (there are no legs to count or reproductive systems to categorize); partly because family resemblances all too often likewise fall outside strict criteria.8 When the medieval artes poeticae concerned themselves with generic definitions, they limited themselves to those familiar from classical Latin (and therefore often get them ‘wrong’ by both classical and modern criteria), and so do not show any interest in romance. Furthermore, works that operate at the transitional point between genres are often the most interesting, and when theoreticians attempt to define those (as happened around 1600 with tragicomedy) the theories rarely manage to say anything imaginatively compelling. There is no obvious or necessary connection between repetition and genre, and indeed the accusation most often made against all those narratives structured by repetition is redundancy, or at best naïvety of the Goldilocks variety – though even there, the repetitions open up an imaginative space behind the words of the kind that one associates with romance, and which has nothing to do with the features most highly prized in more recent fiction such as plausible events or development of character. In the Goldilocks case, the repetitions constitute the story, though they are hardly sufficient to set it up as a romance. For many readers repetition is none the less one of the features that places works within the horizon of expectation for the romance genre, in the Middle Ages and now.9 Given the early date of the Brendan story, that generic sense of romance has to be imposed retrospectively: it cannot have been in the mind of either the author of the Navigatio or of Benedeit when they were writing. Even so, the Brendan story may have been instrumental in setting the parameters of expectation for French romance, expectations that For romance as defined by family resemblance, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), 7–10.
8
The phrase was introduced by Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982); see 22–25, 79, 88–89. On genres as ‘contracts between a writer and his readers’, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History, 7 (1975–76), 135–63 (135).
9
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 51
in turn encouraged authors to incorporate repetition with an increasing sense of purpose. In the story of Constance, the repetitions become more marked through its rewritings and in its analogues of the ‘accused queen’ variety (such as Emaré and La Manekine)10 as the balance shifts from the predominantly providential to the primarily secular. That repetition is a widespread feature of romance has been abundantly recognized for individual texts and their sources and derivatives.11 The repetition of a single plot element, as in the double casting adrift of the Constance narrative and its analogues, is one possibility but by no means the only one, and it often exists alongside other kinds. The types of repetition on which romances are structured offer themselves for categorization and grouping in an inventive range of ways. In several, the whole story is cast as a repetition: not ‘Once upon a time there was – ’, but Chaucer’s ‘Whilom, as olde stories tellen us’ (Canterbury Tales I.859) or the ‘I shal tel it as tit, as I in toun herde’ of Gawain and the Green Knight (31). In others, the plot itself is repeated intradiegetically as an initial story is re-enacted sequentially, as with the story that inspires Yvain/Ywain to seek the adventure he has just heard in Chrétien’s original romance and its Middle English adaptation Ywain and Gawain. Most familiar, perhaps, is the chiastic mirror symmetry of the exileand-return pattern, such as in King Horn or Havelok. In King Horn, moreover, every step of the hero’s movement from exile to restoration is marked by a sea journey. When he is first cast out to sea in a makeshift boat, ‘The se bigan to flowe, | And Horn child to rowe’, and after a number of other journeys his final voyage replays that almost word for word: ‘The se bigan to flowe, | And Horn gan to rowe’.12 Sea journeys are not, of course, required for such patterns of repetition, though Britain’s extensive coastline seems to have encouraged them. Also widespread is a symbolic or psychological doubling of the protagonist across an entire work, as in Amis and Amiloun in all its languages. Many romances furthermore structure themselves on more than one of those symmetries. Eger and Grime provides both a re-enacted story and a doubled hero, as Grime 10
11
12
Philippe de Remi, Le Roman de la Manekine, ed. and trans. Barbara Sargent-Baur (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1999); Philippe was also known as Philippe de Beaumanoir. Its mid-thirteenth century date makes Manekine one of the very earliest of this story type. See also Archibald, Incest, 153–58.
For analysis of the pattern, see ‘Mythic Symmetries’, in Cooper, English Romance, 57–67. King Horn, 117–18, 1505–06, in Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English Romance, ed. Jennifer Fellows (London, 1993), 1–41; and see further Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature, 110–11.
52 Helen Cooper
undertakes to repeat the disastrous quest described to him by his blood brother Eger. Constance is twice cast adrift by an evil mother-in-law before she finally returns to her original home. A less extreme return of a female protagonist from exile figures in Marie de France’s Lai le Freine and its Middle English version: there, the ‘family resemblance’ extends into the narrative itself, its twin sisters supplying as close as one can get to a physical doubling, with paired names (Freine, ‘Ash’, and Codre, ‘Hazel’), and further replicating each other’s lives as mistress and prospective wife.13 All the versions of the Brendan legend start with the telling of a story of the same voyage undertaken by an earlier traveller of a similar name to his (Barrind/Barint/Berinus); and in contrast to most hagiographies, where the eponymous saints usually end by getting a short cut to heaven through martyrdom, this narrative brings Brendan back to his home monastery, just as most quest romances bring their protagonists back to the court from which they set out – though the return is so perfunctory in the Brendan story that it scarcely registers as a narrative motif at all: it is required by history (Brendan did return) rather than offering imaginative completion. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offers the most detailed mirror symmetry around the mid-point of the bedroom scenes on which the whole story hinges; and Gawain’s equal dual blood link to his uncle Arthur and his aunt Morgan, reinforced by the symmetry of the moments when each is cited, is both an original and a deeply disturbing variant on the doubled hero.14 A number of romances further structure their narratives on the solar cycle, as Sir Gawain runs from New Year to New Year (the classic ‘year and a day’, with its inherent circular movement underlined here by the account of the passing seasons); the Brendan stories replace that with the liturgical year, played through seven times. Most hagiographies, and most history, are linear. The bildungsroman of a saint runs from pious childhood to martyrdom, or occasionally from years of sin through penitence to a life of exemplary sanctity and so to Heaven; the lives of historical figures end with their deaths, frequently preceded by their downfall. If historical biography is modelled on the pattern of the Wheel of Fortune, as it commonly was from the fourteenth century through the sixteenth, the 13
14
This doubling perhaps contributes to answering the question raised by Elizabeth Archibald as to whether the Lai le Freine is actually a romance at all: see her ‘Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling and the Problem of Romance Genre’, in Putter and Gilbert, eds, Spirit of Popular Romance, 39–55. Sir Gawain, lines 356 (between the opening court scene and the first blow) and 2463–66 (between the return blow and the closing court scene), in The Works of the Gawain Poet: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London, 2014).
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 53
narrative concentrates on the downward half of its turning, from earthly glory and power to miserable death. Romance, by contrast, takes the wheel round full circle. Often, as in the case of Constance, the protagonist will undergo a near-death experience, or be believed to be dead; romance follows the story through a symbolic resurrection, a structure followed too by all Shakespeare’s ‘romances’, his late plays. It is a structure that has an obvious capacity as an analogy for the Christian concepts of death and resurrection, hell and salvation, though within secular romance the family resemblances are grounded in literal, not allegorical, narratives – even if that principle of literalism too, as in the case of the Faerie Queene, can on clearly signalled occasions be explicitly broken. Romance is, in Northrop Frye’s phrase, ‘secular scripture’;15 but that formulation too raises questions for works such as the story of Constance, where it is God’s intervention in the world that overwrites a process that had initially seemed to present itself as historical. In Middle English romance more than in French, the protagonists are marked as belonging in a Christian culture through both prayers and conduct,16 but the tenor of the story is seldom predominantly religious. It is driven by the secular interests of inheritance, marriage and rulership, just as the narratives remain literal (the Grail romances are an obvious contrast, though the Middle English Percyvell of Galles rejects both allegory and religious meaning; it also cuts out the wandering ships of the French Queste del Saint Graal, which it never even occurs to their passengers to attempt to steer). On the occasions when religion becomes the driving force behind a story, it can turn into full hagiography, though such saints’ lives, as in the case of Constance, invite simultaneous recognition as romances. There is no inherent contradiction between the two genres – or rather, while the extremes may have nothing in common, their edgelands constitute a border so ill defined as to be almost invisible. If the definition of hagiography as the life and death of a saint appears unproblematic, enquiry into its origins from a more literary-historical angle looks rather different: in Sheila Delany’s phrasing, ‘saints’ legends are a deeply syncretic genre from the beginning, always already full of romance,
15
16
This is the basis of Frye’s The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA, 1976).
This is especially true of the heroines, and in particular in their response to ordeals: see Andrea Hopkins, ‘Female Saints and Romance Heroines: Feminine Fiction and Faith among the Literate Elite’, in Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman and Michelle Sweeney, eds, Christianity and Romance in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2010), 121–38.
54 Helen Cooper
folktale and mythic motifs’.17 Two saints’ legends, those of St Clement and St Mary Magdalene, immediately stand out by these criteria as quasi-romances, not least because they replicate the structural pattern of repeated voyages (in both cases around the Mediterranean), of apparent deaths and resurrection, and of family reunions. That of St Clement further incorporates a false accusation of incestuous desire against his mother by her brother-inlaw;18 in an effort to avoid the threat, she sets sail with her two older children, but is separated from them when their ship is wrecked, and it is not until all three children have grown up that they are all reunited. The saint’s symbol of an anchor, which properly memorializes his martyrdom by being tied to an anchor and drowned, offered an easy association with his own seafaring. The legend of Mary Magdalene has the saint and her companions cast adrift in an unsteerable boat that takes them from the Holy Land to Marseilles; later, when a couple she has converted set out for the Holy Land to give thanks for the wife’s pregnancy, her death in childbirth in the course of a storm results in both mother and baby being set ashore on a tiny island, where the husband finds them miraculously alive two years later and brings them back to Mary in Marseilles.19 Both legends were widely disseminated through the Golden Legend and its numerous translations; those in English, from the verse South English Legendary to Caxton’s prose two centuries later, also contain the legend of St Brendan. Caxton’s translation went through a number of editions until 1527, and several hundred copies were still being read into the seventeenth century. Besides its pious functions (of decreasing significance in the wake of the Reformation), it seems to have served something of the same role as the Arabian Nights did later, and it remained a staple in Catholic Europe through the Counter-Reformation and to the present day. More surprisingly, the sense of divine control behind the sea voyages of the various saints’ lives and romances also features in the repetitions that structure
17
18
19
Sheila Delany, ‘A, A and B: Coding Same-Sex Union in Amis and Amiloun’, in Nicola McDonald, ed., Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester, 2004), 63–81 (66).
The earliest version, the ‘Clementine Recognitions’, dates from the fourth century, but its origins may be even older; see the account in Archibald, Incest, 68–69, which also gives a useful plot summary. Peter Womack, ‘Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29 (1999), 169–87, suggests that the Apollonius story was itself the source for the legend of Mary Magdalene, and that sacred and profane stories formed a ‘common repertoire’ (172).
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 55
the work that Elizabeth Archibald has made her own, Apollonius of Tyre.20 The text declares its affiliations with classical pagan culture; but in addition to its citations of the pagan gods, and although the seafaring Apollonius has nothing of the pilgrim saint about him, it frequently invokes God in an apparently Christian sense (deus creator omnium et auctor; ‘God, creator and origin of all things’),21 and later writers sometimes exploit that or are puzzled by it – Gower has his Apollonius receive a vision sent by the providential ‘hihe God’, even though it commands him to sacrifice at the temple of Diana in accordance with his own ‘lawe’, the principles of his own religion.22 Like Brendan’s, the ancestry of the story goes back before the invention of western romance, though its closest affiliates are with the works often now categorized as Greek romances, from the late classical world. Archibald couples it in that respect, as well as for its plot outline, with the legend of St Clement.23 Apollonius too is built on multiple sea voyages, here criss-crossing the Mediterranean until its final return to the point from which it set out. Here, however, the voyages are not those of a daughter escaping from an incestuous father – those roles are taken at the very start by Antiochus and his own initially unwilling but then compliant daughter, and they never leave their own city. Instead, the sea crossings are undertaken by Apollonius himself, and in due course by his own wife (who in the earliest texts remains anonymous) and their daughter, here named as Tarsia. Between them, they undo and exorcize that opening stain of incest. The young woman Apollonius marries is the daughter of the ruler of Pentapolis in Cyrene, where he has been shipwrecked in a storm. She falls in love with him at first sight, and insists to her father that she will have no one else for her husband other than ‘the shipwrecked man’: a right use of her own female sexual desire that reverses that of Antiochus’s daughter, just as her own father’s hearty approval of her choice overwrites the perverted appetite of Antiochus himself. These scenes in which the imbalances of the opening moral disorder are corrected function in effect as the central hinge in the narrative structure, between the actual shipwreck that brings Apollonius to his wife-to-be and the threatened shipwreck that separates them, each impelling the following stage of the story. The threatened shipwreck occurs when Apollonius and his wife are sailing back to Tyre: they are caught by another fearful storm, in the course of which she appears to die in the aftermath of childbirth, and at the sailors’ 20
21 22 23
Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1991). Apollonius, 160 (ch. 41.12)
Gower, Confessio Amantis, 8.1789–95. Archibald, Incest, 102–03.
56 Helen Cooper
insistence her coffin is cast overboard to the mercy of the seas. In due course Apollonius is made to believe that their daughter, whom he had committed to the care of a couple who owed him gratitude, is dead; when he discovers her alive, the overwhelming love he feels for her never translates into the sexual, and he is keen to marry her to an appropriate suitor – a suitor whose own improper lust (shown when he pursues Tarsia in the brothel to which she has been abducted) is thus converted to right ends. A divinely inspired dream then instructs them to sail to the temple of Diana in Ephesus, where Apollonius rediscovers his wife, and the whole family is reunited. Each of those steps in the narrative is associated with a sea voyage, and there are others too. They begin from the point when Apollonius sails from his own city of Tyre to Antioch to woo the king’s daughter, and continue in his attempt to escape from pursuit by Antiochus after the discovery of the latter’s incest; after that, they take on driving forces of their own – driving forces rather than motivations, since after the opening episodes it is what happens, rather than why, that impels the story forwards, as the intended purposes of successive voyages are diverted or thwarted. Northrop Frye indeed chose Apollonius as his primary example of the ‘and then’ variety of narrative, rather than the ‘hence’ variety: episode-driven rather than plot-driven. This is still perhaps the charge most often levelled against Pericles, its close dramatization in the Shakespearean canon. Even Frye, however, recognized its marked symmetry; and Archibald’s analysis of its parallel episodes develops that much further.24 The map of the various voyages she provides on the endpapers of her book makes the point clear from the bare geography of the story even without its mirroring of events, as Apollonius travels to and fro between Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Cyrene (for Pentapolis), Egypt, Ephesus and Mitylene, the last two replicating separate voyages of his wife and daughter (both of whom at different points are believed dead, but to whom the story allows a ‘resurrection’); and then back to Tarsus, Pentapolis, and (by implication) Antioch and Tyre, in a series of repeated and occasionally overlapping lines. Most of these voyages start out as intentional, even if enforced (as is Apollonius’s escape from Antiochus); but sometimes natural forces take over, as with the storms that wreck his ship on the Cyrene coast, or that carry the chest containing his wife’s body to Ephesus in the story’s own variant on the unsteered boat. Its final resolution, however, is brought about by divine intervention, implicitly 24
Frye, Secular Scripture, 47–49; Apollonius, 12–13. One of the more striking of these parallels, the riddles that set Apollonius on his initial voyage and that serve to restore his daughter to him and himself to himself at the end, acquires a distinctively maritime colouring in its second iteration: Archibald, Apollonius, ch. 42, 162–65.
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 57
when the chest is washed up at Ephesus, more explicitly in the angelic figure in the dream that directs Apollonius to Diana’s temple and so to the wife he had believed dead. None of the three stories discussed in most detail here – of Brendan, Constance, and Apollonius – has been associated with the genre of romance at all consistently or securely. When Thomas Allsop modernized Chaucer’s ‘Custance’ around 1525, he announced it not as a chronicle but as a ‘tragicall historie’.25 The Latin Apollonius is most often labelled as historia, a term that embraces both history and story. Its earliest vernacular translation, into Old English and dating perhaps from the early eleventh century, still predates the invention of the romanz kind of romance, and has more similarities to ‘the popular Anglo-Saxon poetic theme of exiled wanderers, and to their epic saints’ lives’26 – a description that puts it within reach of the near-contemporary Brendan. Unlike Emaré and the narratives of the voyages of exiled daughters in medieval French, Apollonius was not titled as a romance until a French version of c. 1482, and not in English until Copland’s edition of 1510; and those remain singular exceptions. When it appears as an element in longer compilations of exempla, its heading is more likely to relate to the sin it castigates than to the nature of the story. Elsewhere its title classification, if it is given any at all, is a term such as historia, narratio, gesta or chronicle, in various languages.27 The one variant that might seem an exception is the title of a Latin dramatization, the Comoedia sine nomine, though that comes over less as a label than as an apology for the lack of one.28 When it reappears in exempla collections, not least the Gesta Romanorum, any sense of an individual genre for it is subordinated to its homiletic function of castigating vice and promoting virtue. Antiochus and the brothel scenes show sex going badly wrong; the other fathers and suitors show it going right. Other sea narratives contain a comparable exemplary element, whether or not it is made explicit: Custance’s would-be rapist offers a similar counter-example to the good love of her husband, and even in the Brendan story, Brendan’s longing 25
26 27
28
By Thomas Allsoppe, surviving only as a fragment (STC 538.5): see Franklin B. Williams Jr, ‘Alsop’s Fair Custance: Chaucer in Tudor Dress’, English Literary Renaissance, 6 (1976), 351–68. Archibald, Apollonius, 184.
For the full range of titles, see Archibald, Apollonius, Appendix I (182–216); for ‘romance’ titles, see her V24, V32 (also V22, though in that case it is not clear whether the title is original).
For a discussion, see Elizabeth Archibald, ‘The Flight from Incest as a Latin Play: The Comoedia sine nomine, Petrarch, and the Avignon Papacy’, Medium Ævum, 82 (2013), 81–100.
58 Helen Cooper
to see God’s wonders in the deep is counterbalanced by the sinful desires of the monk who is carried off by demons for stealing a chalice and by the greed of the damned Judas. Gower’s own version of the Apollonius forms the culmination of his own exempla collection, though that element is barely mentioned until the end. Earlier, Genius refers to it both as a ‘tale’ and as being excerpted from a ‘cronique’.29 The Shakespearean dramatization is simply categorized as the ‘play’ of Pericles; its omission from the First Folio means that we have no extratextual generic classification for it (excluding Ben Jonson’s insulting ‘mouldy tale’)30 until the modern separation of Shakespeare’s last plays from the comedies and tragedies, as ‘romances’. Any potential it might have as an exemplary morality play figures only in the epilogue, and that is so perfunctory as barely to register. The innovation of using Gower as the presenter of the action, often in effect as its narrator, helps to solve the problem of staging an action that encompasses half the Mediterranean (a problem also evident, but differently solved, in the dramatization of the legend of St Mary Magdalene of c. 1500);31 but it also turns the play into a story retold, ‘as I in toune herde’. The Prologue Gower speaks makes that explicit in a way that gives extra weight to Jonson’s label of the play as a ‘tale’. The lines trace the transition of the story from the halls of lords and ladies down to the world of pedlars at country fairs and fireside readings or retellings, a trajectory replicated by many of the Middle English metrical romances in the sixteenth century.32 The play redeems the story from any dismissive associations of those contexts (and they appear in the Prologue as more of an advertisement than a dismissal), to restore to it the authority of antiquity – et bonum quo antiquius eo melius (in effect, ‘the older the better’).33 29
30 31
32
33
Gower, Confessio, 8.268, 271, 1999. The chronicle in question is the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo (Archibald, Apollonius, Appendix I, V4). See Archibald, Apollonius, 3, and Appendix II, A37.
Saint Mary Magdalen, in The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, EETS os 283 (1982), 24–95. Ad Putter gives a closely similar outline of the dissemination of romance in his ‘Historical Introduction’ to Putter and Gilbert, eds, Spirit of Popular Romance, 8–10; for the continuing popularity of Middle English romance into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Cooper, The English Romance in Time, Appendix.
Pericles, Prologue 10. The proverb has a variant, bonum quo communius (‘the more widely disseminated the better’): if the proverb recalls that variant for the audience, that alternative phrasing also fits the history of the romance well. Citations are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986), 1167–98. The corrupt state of the early prints, and the absence of
Romance Repetitions and the Sea 59
The Prologue may well have been written by Shakespeare’s collaborator on the text, now generally taken to be George Wilkins, but there is no reason to think that Shakespeare disagreed with its claims. He was certainly happy to adopt, if he had not originally inspired, the use of Gower as storyteller: a move that helps to resolve some of the difficulties involved in staging a narrative that consists so largely of sea voyages, but which by virtue of emphasizing its quality as a story retold also adds another layer to its structure of repetition. Shakespeare’s attraction to the Apollonius story goes back to the early years of his career. It shows first in The Comedy of Errors (itself a story full of doublings, and with a strong claim to be associated with romance), when he shifts the setting from the Epidamnus of Plautus’s original to Ephesus, adds a frame of the lost wife and child from Apollonius, and makes the lost wife not merely the priestess but, as in Gower, the abbess of Diana’s temple. Gower’s Apollonius also offers a consistent emphasis on the telling and retelling of every part of the story, in a way that perhaps inspired the use of him as presenter when Shakespeare returned to his own retelling at full length in Pericles.34 His retelling accordingly incorporates all the repetitions and redoublings from the earlier versions, and despite the limitations of performance it retains the constant emphasis on the sea, now summoned up in the audience’s imagination. He recalls it repeatedly in Gower’s choric speeches, he renames the lost daughter Marina, and he models her life both literally and metaphorically on the sea: Born in a tempest when my mother died, This world to me is but a ceaseless storm Whirring me from my friends.35
Pericles himself recognizes the circularity of their paired stories in the ‘great sea of joys’ that threatens to drown him (15.180–82): Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget, Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, And found at sea again. (15.183–85)
The play is a fine act of homage to the whole tradition, now clearly recognizable as a romance. It might even have been the return to the Apollonius that directed Shakespeare’s imagination towards the Mediterranean voyages, the
34
35
act and scene division, means that line references (and sometimes, though not in this case, the wording) vary widely across different editions.
Helen Cooper, ‘Gower and Mortality: The Ends of Storytelling’, in Russell A. Peck and R. F. Yeager, eds, John Gower: Others and the Self (Cambridge, 2017), 91–107 (104–07). Pericles, 15.70–72, Wells and Taylor, eds, Works, 1195.
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storms, survivals and disrupted families of others of his late romances, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Those in turn help to set the modern expectations for romance, a horizon of expectation partly defined by the sea. By their preservation of still older models of story, furthermore, they serve to provide our own expectations with an even longer ancestry: et bonum quo antiquius eo melius.
5
Emaré: The Story and its Telling A . C . S pe ar i ng
T
q
he Middle English romance Emaré is briefly discussed by Elizabeth Archibald in her authoritative study, Incest and the Medieval Imagination,1 and also in an earlier article, as one instance of the ‘Accused Queen and Incestuous Father group of narratives’.2 Elizabeth, as a Cambridge undergraduate, was one of the most clear-thinking pupils I have ever had the pleasure of teaching (and learning from), and her many publications display no less clarity of thought and expression. If in my discussion of Emaré I sometimes lack that clarity, going beyond ‘the medieval imagination’ and venturing on what she calls ‘anachronistic thoughts of dysfunctional family behaviour and the problem of healing the damage it causes’,3 I hope she will forgive me. My concern will be with two aspects of Emaré. One is what kind of story it tells: a story that acknowledges and eventually reconciles tensions within the patriarchal family, focusing on female experience. The other is how it tells its story: how the narrative methods of popular romance, very unlike those assumed by most modern thought about narrative, make possible this reconciliation. The story is briefly this. Emaré, the emperor Artyus’s only child, loses her mother in infancy and is brought up in the household of Abro, a lady who teaches her courtesy and fine sewing. The king of Sicily visits Artyus and gives him a splendidly embroidered cloth. Artyus longs to see his daughter, now grown; when she arrives he falls in love with her and obtains papal dispensation to marry her. He has a robe made from the cloth, and on seeing her in it reveals his incestuous intention. When Emaré refuses, Artyus has her cast adrift in the robe, only to regret doing so. After a week at sea Emaré reaches Galys and is given refuge by Kador, the king’s steward; renaming Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford, 2001), 147, 174.
1
Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Contextualizing Chaucer’s Constance: Romance Modes and Family Values’, in M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager, eds, The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff (Cambridge, 1995), 161–75, at 164.
2
Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, 158.
3
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herself Egaré, she teaches embroidery in his household. The king sees ‘Egaré’ in her robe and falls in love. Kador says she is an earl’s daughter, there to teach his children courtesy, and the king marries her, against his mother’s wishes. With ‘Egaré’ pregnant, the king is sent by his overlord to fight the Saracens. ‘Egaré’ bears a son, Segramour, but Kador’s letter to the king with this news is replaced by the king’s mother with one saying that ‘Egaré’ has borne a monster. The king’s generous reply is also replaced by his mother, with an order that ‘Egaré’ in her robe should be put to sea with her baby. Amid storms, in a foodless and rudderless boat, ‘Egaré’ suckles the baby until they drift to Rome. There Jurdan, a rich merchant, finds her, is dazzled by her robe, and has his wife look after her. ‘Egaré’ sews embroidery in Jurdan’s household and teaches Segramour courtesy. Her husband returns home and exiles his mother. Later, seeking penance in Rome, he happens to take lodgings with Jurdan. ‘Egaré’ sends Segramour to wait on him; the boy reminds the king of his son, and he proposes to adopt him. Now Segramour is sent to invite the king to speak with Emaré, supposedly dead; when he sees her in her robe they are reunited. Artyus also comes to Rome, seeking absolution; Segramour reunites him with his daughter and succeeds him as emperor. This version of a widespread story4 survives only in BL MS Cotton Caligula A.ii, dating from about 1450; Emaré itself is dated somewhat earlier. The manuscript is what has been called a household anthology – a miscellany, including romances and religious and instructive writings, probably compiled for members of a prosperous merchant household, with its contents available both for performance and for private reading.5 The story, as in many popular romances, is that of a nuclear family conceived in terms of medieval patriarchy, a word I use not in the modern sense of ‘a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women’, but specifically as the rule of fathers, ‘a system of government in which men [rule] societies through their position as heads of households’, or more simply ‘a system that privileges fatherhood’.6 In Emaré Artyus transmits his patriarchal role as head of the empire via his son-in-law the king of Galys to his grandson Segramour, Archibald discusses European versions in Incest and the Medieval Imagination, chapter 4, and notes its appearance in Indian folktales in ‘Relative Roles in Medieval Incest Stories: Fathers and Daughters’, in Florence Bouchet and Danièle James-Raoul, eds, Desir n’a repos: Hommage à Danielle Bohler (Bordeaux, 2016), 177–88, at 181.
4
For a description of this manuscript see Gisela Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (Munich, 1976), 169–72.
5
Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford, 1990), 20, 19; Rachel E. Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge, 2013), 190.
6
Emaré: The Story and its Telling 63
through whom the nuclear family’s three generations are reunited, thus binding together the beginning and end of the story. But the story’s protagonist and organizer of the family reunion is not a father or son but a daughter and mother. In that Emaré is exceptional among medieval romances. A recurrent pattern in romances is that one or more male characters leave a place that counts as the paternal home (such as Camelot), have adventures, and then return. An adventure, the basic narrative unit of romance, is an encounter that tests the protagonist; it may seem random, but in retrospect usually appears as part of a significant pattern, aesthetic or providential or both. Male adventures typically happen because sought out by the knight who has them;7 they may include things done to him, but these occur in the course of actions undertaken on his own initiative – to display his prowess, to uphold his reputation, to serve a lady, to right some wrong. Female adventures, more often found in saints’ lives, are tests of a different kind. They may offer opportunities for a daughter to show some initiative, but in general they are matters less of chosen action than of obedient suffering, in the double sense of subjection to others’ agency and of patiently enduring physical and/ or emotional pain. Modern academics inhabit a culture unlikely to take for granted the subordination of daughters to fathers (or husbands), to think it commendable for a daughter or wife to be ‘meke and mylde’ (Emaré, 478),8 or indeed to favour any kind of patient submission to suffering. We may thus resist stories of female passivity and obedience, as in this vigorous response: I have always thought of Emaré as an extremely irritating tale: her prissy goodness … and the fact that her sufferings ‘entitle’ her to get her man have always seemed to me to be an execrable pattern for a girl … What I have wanted is for women to do something wrong and still be the ‘heroine’.9
It is easy to sympathize with the writer’s irritation and her preference for bad girls, but pleasure as well as understanding can surely come from efforts
Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English Romance: Family, Marriage, Intimacy’, in Roberta L. Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2000), 235–52, notes that the knight had become ‘a ubiquitous signifier of male autonomy and power’ (238).
7
Emaré is cited from Six Middle English Romances, ed. Maldwyn Mills (London, 1973), with line numbers given parenthetically in the text.
8
Margaret Robson, ‘Cloaking Desire: Re-reading Emaré’, in Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers and Judith Weiss, eds, Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills (Cardiff, 1996), 64–76, at 65.
9
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to grasp the narrative techniques and imaginative potential of stories from a culture differing from our own. It was a culture in some ways as patriarchal as that of ancient Rome. Fathers no longer had power of life and death over daughters, but there was greater asymmetry in the father–daughter relationship, in terms of gender, age and authority, than in any other within the family. For storytelling, a consequence was that for a daughter to be at the centre of her own story she must be placed beyond her father’s power to shape the pattern of her life. That could be achieved by various narrative devices: she might be separated from her family by shipwreck or other misfortune, or consigned by her father to marry a foreign ruler, or exiled by him for some supposed fault; she might even defy her father, committing herself to the cloister like the protagonists of some saints’ lives. In stories of the type studied in Incest and the Medieval Imagination the device is the father’s wish to commit incest with his daughter; she rejects this, and either flees or, as in Emaré, is cast out by her father; this then becomes, as Elizabeth Archibald puts it, a ‘catalyst’ for her subsequent adventures.10 Emaré and other Middle English romances do not linger on incest, and the contrast with, for example, Ovid’s sensational treatment of father–daughter incest in the case of Myrrha is instructive.11 There it is initiated by the daughter and, through female deception, really committed, while in Emaré what it might mean in physical actuality is only glanced at in the daughter’s words: ‘Yyf hyt so betydde that ye me wedde | And we shulde play togedur in bedde, | Bothe we were forlorne!’ (253–55). Emaré has none of the tremblings, hesitations, suicidal impulses and cosmic forebodings that precede the consummation of incest in Ovid, none of the phrases by which Ovid evokes its nauseating fleshliness, and none of the murderous horror felt by Myrrha’s father on realizing what he has been trapped into doing. And the medieval poem avoids considering father–daughter incest even as a theoretical possibility. Myrrha argues with herself about the justification for the incest taboo, questioning the difference between human beings and animals, between hers and other civilizations, between familial and erotic love, between the natural and the unnatural. Her arguments raise serious questions about morality and culture, but in Emaré as in other Middle English narratives (Gower’s Confessio Amantis is an exception) incest is simply unthinkable: the incest taboo is itself a taboo subject. When Artyus in old age decides to seek penance from the Pope, the synne (951) he recalls is vaguely described as being ‘Of hys thowghtyr Emaré | That was putte ynto the see’ (952–53), as if it was only setting her 10 11
Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, 158, 190. Ovid, Metamorphoses X, lines 311ff.
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adrift. So there is much to support Elizabeth Archibald’s treatment of incest as a mere catalyst, bringing about an effect without itself being involved. Still, there is that disturbing glimpse of ‘playing together in bed’; and, more important, the terms of Emaré’s refusal imply a link between the incest taboo and patriarchy itself: The worde shulde sprynge fer and wyde: In all the worlde on every syde The worde shulde be borne. Ye ben a lorde of gret pryce, Lorde, lette nevur such sorow aryce (256–60)
Incest is sinful, but greater stress is laid on the emperor’s pryce and its dependence on worde: it is his reputation and thus his patriarchal authority that is at stake. As Rachel E. Moss puts it: Emaré does not speak because her body is her own to bestow; she speaks because her father is about to give up his privilege to bestow it. The paradox here is that if the father rapes the daughter, apparently an act of enforced authority, he in fact is sacrificing his seigniory.12
The patriarchal system depends on the ‘traffic in women’ by way of exogamy. Artyus’s duty as father and ruler is to ensure the legitimate continuation of his line; he could fulfil it by taking a second wife, from another family of suitable rank, to bear him sons, and/or he could give his daughter in marriage to a man of suitable rank in the hope of grandsons. The importance of social rank in Emaré becomes explicit when Emaré excuses her husband’s supposed command to have her set adrift by explaining, ‘For he weddede so porely | On me a sympull lady, | He ys ashamed sore’ (631–33). As a dutiful wife, she invents a justification based on rank for her husband’s cruelty, with the irony that, far from being a ‘sympull lady’, she is actually an emperor’s daughter. Patriarchy forbids a father to take his daughter as a substitute for his dead wife, even if she appears as an unfamiliar and desirable young woman, perhaps resembling the one he first married;13 he must give her to another man, however painful that may be. By a harsh paradox, Artyus suffers no less from remorse at what he actually does in setting Emaré adrift (described in lines 12 13
Moss, Fatherhood, 125–26.
In some folktale versions the dying wife asks her husband not to remarry unless to a woman as beautiful as herself, and the only one who fulfils the condition is their daughter; see D. L. Ashliman, A Guide to Folktales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System (New York, 1987), 108, no. 510B: ‘The Father who Wanted to Marry his Daughter’.
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280–309, with his lamentation amplified by his lords) than he would have done in giving her in marriage. Thenceforward Emaré’s story is her own; she gains, even as ‘a vulnerable heroine in a world of powerful men’,14 a kind of independence that she could not possess if her father had not proposed incest. Artyus disappears from the story, and until he reappears at the end we are not even told of any thought that Emaré has of him; her affective relationships are with her husband and son. Her husband’s supposed and her mother-in-law’s actual cruelty give her an independence available to few medieval women, yet in it she has little agency. She is twice put at the mercy of the uncontrollable, non-human forces of wind and water, each time for a week or more (326, 674). Casting adrift is, as Helen Cooper observes, ‘a narrative building-block of strong imaginative power’ which goes back far into the storytelling past and is widely found in romances.15 When Emaré is exiled by her father, she is ‘dryven wyth wynde and rayn | Wyth stronge stormes her agayn’ (316–17) until she is ‘For hungur and thurste almoste madde’ (335). Similarly, when set adrift by Kador, now with her infant son, she is battered by ‘the watur wylde’ (650) and ‘The wawes that were grete and strong’ (658), and again is driven ‘For hungur and thurste allmost madde’ (683). Her father’s anger is such that he swears ‘That deed shulde she be’ (267), but his choice to set her adrift is quite arbitrary. The same is true of the choice of setting adrift as Emaré’s fate in the fake letter to Kador. The part in Emaré’s life played by unsteered journeys over troubled seas is motivated by the type of story it is, not by anything revealed about the characters’ motives. Thus it might be tempting to rationalize the story as a religious allegory in which the stormy sea represents the vicissitudes of earthly life, with the boat as the soul’s refuge from destruction, perhaps in the form of the Church16 – and then Emaré’s hunger and thirst could be for righteousness. In a sermon it might have been interpreted as an exemplum, giving human appeal to a religious message. It seems unlikely, though, that the audience of the Cotton Caligula manuscript would have undertaken such a systematically interpretative reading; and the poem itself suggests contradictory approaches to Emaré’s sufferings. One is indeed to see them as directed by divine grace. Her first sea journey lasts as long ‘As hyt was Goddys wylle’ (327); she prays to 14
15
16
See Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, 190, on stories of this general type. Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), 107.
Cf. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford, CA, 1984), chapter VII.
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God and the Virgin, and reaches Galys ‘Thorow the grace of Goddes sond, | That all thyng may fulfylle’ (332–33). The formulae are repeated for the second voyage: it lasts over a week, ‘As hyt was Goddys wylle’ (675); Emaré prays to God and the Virgin, and is driven towards Rome ‘Thorow the grace of God yn trone, | That all thyng may fulfylle’ (680–81). Yet these clear pointers to religious meaning are blurred when each voyage concludes with an exclamation, of unstated origin, that conveys a more earthly attitude toward her trials: ‘Woo worth wederus yll!’ (336) and ‘Wo worth chawnses ylle!’ (684). Throughout the poem there are many other indications that its events are ordered by God, up to the point at which Emaré’s recovery from her ‘cares colde’ (945) is said to occur ‘Thorow grace of God in Trinité’ (944). It would be surprising if Emaré, the product of a culture for which religion was an essential part of the fabric of reality, did not see God’s shaping hand in the course of history or story. It is more surprising, perhaps, that so little prominence is given to any effect of the Church on the characters’ lives. When Artyus desires to marry his daughter, he has only to send to Rome for assent and it is granted. Later the king of Galys decides that ‘Thorow the grace of God yn trone, | I woll to the Pope of Rome, | My penans forto take’ (820–22), he distributes alms ‘Forto wynnen hym sowles hele’ (827), and it is ‘Thorow the grace of God in trone’ (836) that he has fair weather for his voyage and lodges at the very house where his supposedly dead wife is staying. But after his arrival the emphasis is on the courtesy by which Segramour brings about his reunion with Emaré; there is no mention of any meeting with the Pope or any penance. Similarly Artyus, recalling his sin, goes to the Pope to receive penance ‘heven forto wynne’ (957), yet in his case too we are told only how Segramour reunited him with his daughter: penance gets no further mention. The story’s goal is to bring an end to Emaré’s adventures and her independence by re-locating her within the patriarchal family structured by father, husband and son. This conclusion may be ordained by divine grace, but then so is everything; grace or providence does not have the specific explanatory power in Emaré that it gains by being questioned in Chaucer’s incest-free version of the story, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’. Religious faith was a certain reality for Emaré’s audience but, in terms of narrative ‘tellability’, by explaining too much it does not provide an interesting explanation for anything. Whether providential or fortuitous, the events over which Emaré has no control provide her with adventures of a distinctively female kind. They are extreme versions of the experiences that might make up any medieval lady’s life (and in most ways the typical life of any medieval woman, regardless of social rank) if she were not separated from her father. She is sent to be brought up in another household, learns courteous conduct and sewing, and teaches them
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to children; a man finds her attractive and she is married by him (something done to her, without mention of her consent17); she becomes pregnant (again not a matter of choice) and gives birth to a boy, but is hated and persecuted by her mother-in-law; her husband must be absent at length on business; she breast-feeds her baby son (an elemental female experience, though unlikely for an emperor’s daughter), is devoted to him and teaches him courtly manners. There is little here that is untypical, though almost everything is a great intensification of typical female experiences. Fathers’ affection for their daughters may be erotically tinged, but few fathers propose to marry them. Mothers’ affection for their sons can make them jealous of the women who replace them in their sons’ affections, but few mothers take jealousy of their daughters-in-law so far as the ‘olde qwene’ (442, 445, 454) – a designation which itself suggests that Emaré, referred to simply as the queen (472, 497, 519, etc.), is felt to be a usurper. Breast-feeding was essential to keep medieval babies alive, but it can rarely have happened that a queen had to suckle her baby herself because they were alone in a storm on an unprovisioned boat. Emaré’s one untypical experience occurs when Kador finds her cast ashore in Galys. He asks her name, and ‘She chaunged hyt ther anone, | And sayde she hette Egaré’ (359–60) – meaning ‘lost’ or ‘gone astray’. Her name is not mentioned again until the second time she is cast ashore, when Jurdan asks it and she once more says ‘Egaré’. Thereafter both names are used until in Rome she instructs Segramour to invite her husband to ‘come speke with Emaré, | That chaunged her name to Egaré’ (907–08, 922–23). The change of name, from that given by her parents and the Church to one she chooses herself, marks her adoption of a new identity in independence of her birth family. By choosing ‘Egaré’, she is defiantly taking ownership of what has been done to her by her father and husband, as if to say, ‘You’ve cast me out? Very well, I shall rename myself “Outcast”!’ Her eventual acknowledgment of her original name marks her reconciliation first with husband and then with father, and thus her reabsorption into patriarchal society. A conspicuous absence from what I have written about the kind of story Emaré tells is the part played by the embroidered oriental cloth that becomes Emaré’s robe – a central topic of many interpretations, with much disagreement about its meaning. It and its history are described at a length implying its major significance, and it is repeatedly mentioned as worn by Emaré at turning-points in the action: when Artyus, granted dispensation to marry her, 17
After the wedding, as Archibald observes (‘Contextualizing’, 173), we are told that ‘Moch love was hem betwene, | And also game and gle’ (473–74); but that statement’s immediate function is to explain what follows, that Emaré ‘Conceyved and wente wyth chylde’ (479).
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has it made into a robe and then, on seeing her wearing it, proposes incest; when he has her set adrift; when Kador sees her on the shore of Galys; when the king falls in love with her; when the king’s mother first sees her; in the mother’s fake letter commanding that she and Segramour should be set adrift again, and when the command is obeyed, and she hides her face in it; when Jurdan sees her on the Roman shore; and when her husband sees her in Rome. To discuss the cloth/robe further, I need to turn to the second aspect mentioned above: how the poem tells its story. Emaré, like many popular romances, is composed in tail-rhyme stanzas, ‘originally a lyric form’,18 that lent itself to oral performance, not just spoken but sung or chanted. A thump comes on the last beat of every line regardless of regular speech-stress: a line such as ‘She was full of love and goodnesse’ (35) would need to be chanted with all four beats falling on unstressed syllables. One effect of tail-rhyme as a mode of storytelling is to produce narrative parataxis: each twelve-line stanza is a new beginning and comes to an emphatic end with the fourth tail-line, and the gaps between stanzas can leave room to be filled by listeners. The story’s substance is found in the four-beat lines, while ‘the tail-line is generally the place outside the story where poets can address the audience’19, and convey or demand emotional response.20 The responses are strong and simple, with no expectation of ambiguity or irony. Whether these romances were publicly performed by professional minstrels, as has often been thought, remains uncertain:21 Emaré refers to ‘Menstrelles that walken fer and wyde’ (13), and claims to be told ‘As Y have herd menstrelles syng in sawe’ (319), but such references need not be taken literally, and may possibly allow
18
19 20
21
Ad Putter, ‘The Metres and Stanza Forms of Popular Romance’, in Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, eds, A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (Cambridge, 2009), 111–31, at 122. Putter, ‘Metres and Stanza Forms’, 124 (italics in original).
Putter’s penetrating comments might perhaps be developed along the more systematic lines promised by Eric Weiskott, ‘Early English Meter as a Way of Thinking’, Studia Metrica et Poetica, 4 (2017), 41–65: ‘At the level of metrical structuration, where language becomes verse, meter and thinking are one and the same’ (43). Andrew Taylor, ‘The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript’, Speculum, 66 (1991), 43–73, argues against this view; the minstrel theory is defended by Ad Putter, ‘A Historical Introduction’, in Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds, The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (Harlow, 2000), 1–15, and ‘Middle English Romances and the Oral Tradition’, in Karl Reichl, ed., Medieval Oral Literature (Berlin, 2011), 335–51.
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imagined enlargement of a household audience, or perhaps ‘offer the solitary reader the pleasures and consolations of an imaginary community’.22 In verbal style, tail-rhyme romances tend to be highly formulaic, and Emaré is especially so: large portions of the text consist of repeated identical or almost identical phrases, lines, and substantial passages. Thus lines 40–41 – ‘He was curtays in all thyng | Bothe to olde and to yynge’ – reappear scarcely changed as lines 64–65, 379–80, and 724–25; and a passage of seven lines at 90–96 recurs almost verbatim at 138–44. One analysis finds that 42 per cent of Emaré’s 1,035 lines are formulaic, more than in any other Middle English romance.23 This matters for our understanding: it means that individual repetitions do not necessarily have any special significance.24 The tail-lines are especially likely to be formulaic, but there are also many formulaic phrases in the longer lines, sometimes obviously chosen to make an easy rhyme, for example ‘Y untherstonde’ at the end of lines 277, 338, 353, 421 and 548. The verbal style is not that of a specific poet who imposes a personal stamp on Emaré’s wording, and the appeal is not to discriminating individual tastes but to a familiarity based on shared values.25 It is generally agreed that this style originated in the requirements of oral composition, going back centuries to performers who would neither have possessed a written text of a particular story nor have learned it by heart; they knew the story’s shape and improvised the detail from a common stock of formulas, recomposing the poem for each performance.26 Later this traditional style was sustained in writing, and one of its continuing effects in romances such as Emaré was to keep characters 22
23
24
25
26
Andrew Taylor, ‘Fragmentation, Corruption, and Minstrel Narration: The Question of the Middle English Romances’, Yearbook of English Studies, 22 (1992), 38– 62 (62).
Susan Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures in the Middle English Romances (Austin, TX, 1978), 18.
Thus Yin Liu, ‘Incest and Identity: Family Relationships in Emaré’, in Barbara K. Altmann and Carleton W. Carroll, eds, The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature across the Disciplines (Cambridge, 2003), 179–85, probably misinterprets in proposing that repetitions indicate a ‘troubling resemblance’ (181) between Emaré’s father and her husband. Cf. Derek Pearsall, ‘The Pleasure of Popular Romance: A Prefatory Essay’, in Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon, eds, Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts (Cambridge, 2011), 9–18: ‘the narrative economy and formulaic style of the popular romances are dominantly those productive of cultural and moral conformity and the reinforcement of communal values’ (18).
The seminal study of formulaic style in a living tradition of oral composition is Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 2000). For discussion, see Slavika Ranković, ‘Who is Speaking
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and scenes stereotyped: there was to be no development, as in Troilus and Criseyde, towards concern with individualized characterization, or with historical authority. A story had its own authority, handed down from elsewhere, and was neither fiction nor history in the modern senses of those words: in Emaré it is authenticated indifferently ‘In romans as we rede’ (216), ‘As Y have herd menstrelles syng yn sawe’ (319), or ‘In trwe story as Y say’ (544). The (hi)story’s ‘truth’ is not to fact but to what has been told before. It is not like a novel, a narrative newly devised by a specific author and set out in that author’s own words; it is a retelling of something older. The extant text of Emaré was written down by a single person, but we have no way of knowing what changes, if any, that person made to her or his source(s); and if the poem had survived in more manuscripts it might have been in differing versions, as occurs with other popular romances. The anonymity of the text may well be a reflection of ‘authorship’ distributed among many retellers, oral and lettered, over many years, while its storytelling I is less a pronoun referring to a ‘narrator’ than a proximal deictic binding the I to a plural you (listeners) or a singular thou (reader) in the intimacy of we.27 There are, however, features of Emaré that go beyond the traditional and the formulaic. One is the occurrence of moments at which a point of view within the story is briefly realized. For example, when the oriental cloth is presented to Artyus, we are told: The emperour loked therupone, And myght hyt not se; For glysteryng of the ryche ston Redy syght had he non, And sayde, ‘How may thys be?’ (98–102)
For a moment we see, or rather fail to see, through his eyes, and share in his blinded bewilderment. When Emaré is first cast adrift, ‘Ther come a wynd, Y unthurstonde, | And blewe the boot fro the londe; | Of her they lost the syght’ (277–79); we experience her departure as seen by Artyus and his lords,
27
in Traditional Texts? On the Distributed Author of the Sagas of Icelanders and Serbian Epic Poetry’, New Literary History, 38 (2007), 293–307.
On ‘distributed authorship’ see, for example, Christiane Heibach, ‘The Distributed Author: Creativity in the Age of Computer Networks’, Dichtung-digital, 13 (2000) (accessed 5 August 2021); and Ranković, ‘Who is Speaking’. On the I of medieval narrative see A. C. Spearing, ‘What is a Narrator? Narrator Theory and Medieval Narratives’, Digital Philology, 4 (2015), 59–105, and ‘Narrator Theory and Medieval English Narratives’, in Sylvie Patron, ed., Optional-Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals (Lincoln, NB, 2021), 168–83.
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who now feel it as a loss. When she reaches Galys, Kador is strolling on the seashore and ‘A boot he fond by the brym | And a glysteryng thyng theryn’ (349–50). We know what the boat contains, but briefly share Kador’s view of an unidentifiable ‘glysteryng thyng’. Later, on receiving the fake letter ordering that Emaré shall again be set adrift, Kador swoons in dismay and others weep loudly; this commotion in the hall is heard by Emaré in her chamber, and it is her perception of it that is narrated: ‘The lady herde gret dele yn halle; | On the steward gan she calle | And sayde, “What may thys be?”’ (613–15). We already know the letter’s content, but share imaginatively in her ignorance. And then, when Jurdan is strolling beside the sea, ‘A bote he fonde by the brymme | And a fayr lady therynne’ (694–95) – a boat and a fair lady, as they are to him, not the boat and the lady familiar to us. Within the narrative’s vigorous onward flow come these eddies of insight into the experiences of its various characters, the effect being less to individualize them than to give the story a fuller, more varied dimensionality: it becomes a multidimensional physical and emotional space within which persons may be differently situated and affected. Other elements transcending the merely formulaic involve the uses to which formulas themselves are put. Oral composition had been made possible by systems of formulas, in which a fixed grammetrical frame could be filled by a variety of parallel contents, and these systems continue to appear in literate verse. One such in Emaré consists of four parallel passages doing the work that in a novel might be done paratextually by means such as chapter headings; they move from one narrative centre to the next, dividing the romance into five sections. The first takes us from Emaré and Abro back to her father: ‘At the mayden leve we, | And at the lady fayr and fre, | And speke we of the emperour’ (70–72). The next moves from him back to Emaré, now cast adrift: ‘At the emperour now leve we, | And of the lady yn the see | I shall begynne to tell’ (310–12). The third moves from Emaré, given refuge by Jurdan, to her husband back in Galys: ‘Leve we at the lady clere of vyce, | And speke of the kyng of Galys, | Fro the sege when he come home’ (742–44). And the last brings the story full circle, returning to the father with whom it began: ‘Leve we at the lady whyte as flour, | And speke we of her fadur the emperor, | That fyrste the tale of Y tolde’ (946–48). The careful organization of these transitional formulas – each filling the last three lines of a stanza and moving from ‘leve we’ to a first-person verb of narration, with the fourth formula explicitly reverting to the subject of the first – suggests that the distributed authorship of Emaré included at least one craftsman shaping a written text to make its narrative structure clear to an audience, whether of listeners or of readers imagining themselves as listeners. The five sections into which the formulas divide the text give it a significant shape by forming a roughly
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symmetrical structure of 72, 240, 432, 204, and 87 lines respectively. The first section concerns the separation of father and daughter, the last their reunion, and the large central section contains Emaré’s main adventures, including her two sea voyages and the two moments at which her glittering robe leads to her discovery on a seashore. Thus the father–daughter relationship is made to frame the daughter’s encounters with others. Alliterative verse is strongly formulaic, and many of the formulas in tailrhyme verse are alliterative. Frequently they too belong to systems with a fixed grammetrical frame and minor variations in the component details. An example is the system consisting of alliterative phrases of the form ‘x under y’, where x is a laudatory adjective and y names clothing. In Emaré this system is especially predominant. Emaré herself is described successively as ‘godely unthur gore’ (198), ‘comely unthur kelle’ (303), ‘semely unthur serke’ (501), ‘worthy unthur wede’ (612), and again ‘godely unthur gore’ (938); and Segramour is twice ‘worthy unthur wede’ (736, 988). The one other occurrence of the system is in ‘The chylde wente ynto the hall, | Among the lordes grete and small, | That lufsumme wer unthur lyne’ (862–64); and there, with omission of the metrically superfluous wer, ‘That lufsumme’ would be Segramour. The choice among the formulas in this system, always placed in a tail-line, is not governed by precision of meaning, but by the need for the y-word to rhyme with the stanza’s other three tail-lines, and for the x-word to alliterate with the y-word; more important is their general point that those to whom they are applied are admirable not just in the outward array marking their social rank but in bodily reality. The predominance of this system in Emaré, and its application (if I am right about line 864) only to Emaré and her son, is surely significant. This brings me back to the oriental cloth that Emaré wears as a robe. When the cloth is introduced, as a gift to Artyus from King Tergaunte, it and its origins are described, as is often noted, in the poem’s only descriptio of more than a line or two, at what seems disproportionate length – 99 lines (82–180) out of 1,035. It is richly set with rare precious stones that dazzle Artyus’s eyes, and was made by ‘The amerayle dowghter of hethennes’ (109) to depict pairs of lovers: in one corner ‘Ydoyne and Amadas’ (122), in the next ‘Trystram and Isowde’ (134), in the third ‘Florys and Dam Blawncheflour’ (146), and in the fourth the emir’s daughter herself and her beloved, the sultan of Babylon’s son. It was seized from the sultan by Tergaunte’s father, who gave it to Tergaunte, who now gives it to Artyus. With that Tergaunte leaves the poem and the narrative resumes. The chief points emerging from this ekphrasis are these: the cloth comes from the exotic pagan east; it was embroidered by a ruler’s daughter; its imagery concerns love, passionate but
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forbidden;28 the embroidery is so glitteringly rich that it dazzles the sight. The initial consequences of the cloth’s transfer to Artyus evidently follow from these characteristics: he is blinded by his first look at it; once Tergaunte has left, Artyus immediately feels longyng (188) for his daughter; once he sees her sitting opposite him at a feast, he is so anamored that ‘Wyth her he thowghth to worche hys wyll’ (226–27); on receiving papal permission to marry her, he has the cloth made into a robe; when he sees her wearing it, ‘She semed non erthely wommon’ (245), he says he will marry her, and she refuses. If that were the whole story, it would make sense as a warning of the dangerous consequences for a man of being overcome by irrational passion, female and pagan in its origins. But, as we know, what follows concerns not Artyus but Emaré, and it is Emaré with whom the robe made from the cloth is repeatedly associated. Its effects are puzzlingly various: one critic observes that it ‘appears at precisely those moments when Emaré is threatened with violation … and at precisely those points … when she is represented as safe and secure’, another writes that ‘the robe blurs the clarity of the narrative, obscuring the characters’ morality and motivations’, while a third sees it as an arbitrary universal catalyst, which ‘makes things happen … simply because making things happen is what it does’.29 When a narrative combines the work of an unknown number of retellers, the outcome is likely to be not a solid, unitary simulacrum of reality offering clarity about ‘the characters’ morality and motivations’ but the incorporation of varied responses to the story, some perhaps incompatible with others. The cloth and the robe made from it have a dazzling exoticism that ‘makes things happen’, but it has other associations too. ‘Seven wynter hyt was yn makynge’ (118), and the maker was a princess, doubtless assisted by other ladies. ‘Embroidery in late medieval England was … a household craft in which women of good family could serve apprenticeships’, and was passed from one generation
28
29
Manifestly true of the three pairs famous from romances; the fact that the cloth was seized not from the sultan’s son, for whom it was made, but from the sultan himself, suggests that this love too may have been forbidden.
Anne Laskaya, ‘The Rhetoric of Incest in the Middle English Emaré’, in Anna Roberts, ed., Violence against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville, FL, 1998), 97–114, at 109; Amanda Hopkins, ‘Veiling the Text: The True Role of the Cloth in Emaré’, in Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson, eds, Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation (Cambridge, 2000), 71–82 (82); Putter, ‘The Narrative Logic of Emaré’, in Putter and Gilbert, eds, Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, 157–80 (175).
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of ladies to the next as ‘a female equivalent to the knightly skill at arms’.30 Appropriately, then, it is a skill displayed by the female hero of this story, and one that would surely have a special appeal for the female members of a household audience. (We might imagine them sewing even as they enjoyed listening to a rare romance with a female protagonist, in which a husband’s summoning to war by his overlord is reported only as his wife would have experienced it, with the actual feats of arms occurring off-stage.) Abro first teaches Emaré ‘Golde and sylke forto sewe’ (59). Emaré in turn instructs the ladies of Kador’s household in the skill she has learned: ‘She tawghte hem to sewe and marke | All maner of sylky[n] werke’ (376–77). More specifically, ‘She kowghthe werke all maner thyng | That fell to emperour or to kyng, | Erle, barown or swayne’ (382–84): this link between ladies’ needlework and garments marking the hierarchy of male social rank (here listed in order from highest to lowest) is in keeping with the prominence of the formulaic system that refers to fabrics covering bodies. Emaré’s accomplishment continues to be emphasized. When the king of Galys asks about the lady who served him in hall, Kador tells him that this alleged ‘erles thowghtur’ (422) is ‘the konnyngest wommon … Of werk that Y have sene’ (427–29); and later we learn that in Jurdan’s household ‘she sewed sylke werk yn bour | And tawghte her sone nortowre’ (730–31). ‘Sylke werk’ is the refined skill that both marks a lady and adorns the garments that mark distinctions of rank. In a culture like ours, where narrative invention is the norm, an appealing development might be for Emaré to bear a daughter to whom she could teach this accomplishment and who would then use it to bring about a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, however, patriarchy collaborated with the autonomous authority of stories to require the child to be a son, whose recognition by his father and succession to his grandfather as emperor would restore patriarchal integrity. To a son Emaré can teach only nortowre, and this is instrumental in mending the family broken by Artyus’s attempted incest. Segramour’s courtesy, learned from Emaré, at once acknowledges and lubricates social and familial distinctions, and is thus the means to bring about the family reunion and celebratory feast.31 At the end of the 30
31
Riddy, ‘Middle English Romance’, 245. This is a better motivated context for needlework in Emaré than the proposals of bookish reflexiveness by Elizabeth Scala, ‘The Texture of Emaré’, Philological Quarterly, 5 (2006), 223–46, for whom the cloth figures the poem’s ‘own textual complexity, cultural narrativity and value’ (227); and by Tom White, ‘Textile Logics of Late Medieval Romance’, Exemplaria, 28 (2016), 297–318, who associates it with the sewing of manuscript miscellanies. As suggested by Amy N. Vines, ‘“Who-so wylle of nurtur lere”: Domestic Foundations for Social Success in the Middle English Emaré’, The Chaucer Review, 53
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poem’s central section, after Emaré has been welcomed into Kador’s household, the distinctively female accomplishment of fine needlework begins to give way as its theme to nortowre – taught here, unusually, by a woman to her son, but not itself gendered. Or rather, needlework is absorbed into nortowre: richly adorned garments continue to be mentioned in Emaré’s instructions to her son about courteous conduct – he is to wear ‘a kurtyll of ryche palle’ (848) when meeting his father – and she is dressed ‘In the robe bryght and shene’ (933), now a recognition token, when reunited with her husband. So it may be tempting to interpret Emaré in terms of subversion and containment. As Moss puts it, ‘Perhaps part of the appeal of the romances is that they appear to skirt tantalizingly close to critiquing established values, then provide the reassurance of reasserting the established order’.32 We could say that the subversive glamour of the oriental cloth, which makes female adventure possible, is ultimately contained by the story’s growing emphasis on the restoration of a social order based on hierarchies of gender and rank. Within this order female work is ‘sylke werk’, harmonizing the tensions of patriarchy. But the subversion/containment model simplifies something more complex. Emaré is the expression of a composite intentionality, which leaves gaps and contradictions in the surviving text, ready to be filled in different ways by different readers or listeners. This means, I believe, that no stably unifying interpretation of the romance as a whole is likely to be possible. What most readers remember about Emaré is the oriental cloth, and it is hard to see the dazzling power of that memory as totally contained by the later emphasis on courtesy and legitimate succession. The appeal of Emaré may better be seen as produced by its internal strains or even contradictions, with the cloth as a material embodiment of contrasting values: it is associated with the social order according to which the appropriate activity for females is domestic needlework, but its imagery represents illicit love that transgresses that order. Its shimmer is an expression of unresolved tensions within the patriarchal culture from which it emerged – including fathers’ desire for their daughters and mothers’ desire for their sons.33
32 33
(2018), 82–101, the poem’s stress on nortowre may relate it to the courtesy treatises also included in the manuscript. Alessandra Petrina, ‘Young Man, Reading: Caxton’s Book of Curtesye’, in Alessandra Petrina, ed., MedieVaria: Un liber amicorum per Giuseppe Brunetti (Padua, 2011), 115–34, notes that the occasions of chief concern to such treatises are ‘the meeting with the lord, and the meal’ (117) – just those at which Segramour’s nortowre is most conspicuously displayed.
Moss, Fatherhood, 151.
I am grateful to Elizabeth Spearing for significant help with this chapter.
6
Dark Nights of Romance: Thinking and Feeling in the Moment C or i n n e S aun der s
T
q
he work of Elizabeth Archibald spans many languages and many genres: Latin, French, Scots, English; history, morality, comedy, lyric and most of all romance. That recurrent interest in romance is no coincidence, for it is here, in the fiction of the Middle Ages, that medieval imagination is most evidently at work, and that Elizabeth’s project of ‘literary archaeology’ has been most richly repaid.1 Her interests in romance have been various: beginnings and endings; mothers and daughters; fellowship and strife; speech and silence; beauty and bathing; love and incest. Yet they have in common an emphasis on the disruptions, the undoings, the subversions of order, in the ways that violence, desire and error can overturn the ideal. Such disruption is the subject of her extended study of incest, but figures in many other ways across her work, seen in microcosm in violations of home and private spaces and in violence resulting from untrammelled feeling, and in macrocosm in the fall of the Arthurian kingdom. For repeatedly within romance, it is the moments of extreme difficulty, violence and suffering that provide narratives with their dramatic arc. As Northrop Frye wrote, the movement of romance is characteristically from darkness to light, disorder to order, winter to spring.2 This movement is enacted in stories of test, quest, adventure, challenge, journey and homecoming, powerful human narratives that recur across times and places, gesturing towards the strength of hope in adversity and to the ways in which story is rooted in patterns. To focus on these large patterns, however, can mask romance’s engagement with individual thinking and feeling in the moment, with the ways in which mind, body and affect respond to extreme experience of violent, disruptive or traumatic kinds. Nor is the pattern of hope Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford, 2001), 2.
1
Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 53–54, and see chapters 4 and 5, on themes of descent and ascent.
2
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straightforward. As Elizabeth has shown in her work on incest, disorder can also often seem ominously near, and darkness, as at the end of the Arthurian legend, can return. Contemporary models of resilience in traumatic circumstances, like Frye’s model, emphasize order and emergence: coping in the face of adversity and positive outcomes, the journey from darkness to light. However, the pattern is often narrowly conceived. It is not acknowledged that resilience may be rooted within paradoxical, complex or painful states of being rather than in any straightforward kind of psychological wellbeing. By contrast, St John of the Cross’s ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ poems, written in the late sixteenth century mainly when he was in prison, suggest that it is precisely within the places of adversity, the ‘dark nights’ when it is difficult or impossible to see meaning, that growth and creativity may be found. They represent ontological boundaries, leading to new states of understanding and vision. The psychoanalyst Ursula Wirtz draws parallels between medieval mystical experience and the ways in which her clients, many the victims of extreme trauma resulting from war, violence and torture, find spiritual illumination: trauma leads to ‘the mystery of transformation’.3 Her patterns are of dying and becoming, crisis and meaning, wounding and wisdom: patterns that evoke Jungian archetypes and myths. Trauma’s ‘journey to hell’ can also open onto the numinous.4 These patterns find a firm grounding in the pre-Cartesian thought world of the medieval period, with its assumptions of the interconnectedness of body and mind, the role of affect in cognition, and a spiritual world view. Traumatic experience was fearful but could be sought after, effecting extremes of feeling that led to profound changes in understanding. This is most obviously exemplified in visionary writing, but is also a recurrent emphasis of romance – though a less studied one. Here too, traumatic or ‘dark night’ experiences lead to changed perceptions and shifts in world views, reflected in the psychological,
3
4
Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation (New Orleans, LA, 2014). See especially chapter 2, ‘Trauma as a Spiritual Experience’.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, vol. 12 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), §441, cited by Wirtz, 4. On trauma, memory and history see the influential work of Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD, 1996); and Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD, 1995). On the history of the concept of psychic trauma, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL, 2000); for social, cultural, political and ethical dimensions of trauma, see Rolf J. Kleber, Charles R. Figley and Berthold P. R. Gersons, eds, Beyond Trauma: Cultural and Societal Dynamics (New York, 1995).
Thinking and Feeling in the Moment 79
physical and emotional responses of the protagonists.5 What is particularly striking, however, is the interest of romance writers in the ways in which affect of extreme kinds is not only written in and on the body, but also shapes – and is shaped by – cognition and agency. Romance engages repeatedly with extreme, overriding feeling, as in depictions of madness and love, or of violent, invasive human or otherworldly forces. Traumatic experience is everywhere in romance. But romance narratives are also engaged with the ways these play out in the mind, with the mental effects of deep feeling and the ways that affect intersects with cognition. Courtly, particularly French, romance offers many instances of learned fascination with inner psychology and its writing on the body, especially in the context of love. In Middle English, more ‘popular’ romance, by contrast, it is a critical commonplace that ideas of character are shaped not through the exploration of the inner psyche but by the gradual accruing of action. The exterior is privileged over the interior. Yet Middle English romances, including non-Arthurian romances, are engaged with the mind and its relations to affect and to the body, in ways that go beyond the conventional.6 Although references may be brief, even cryptic, they function as a kind of shorthand, creating a texture of feeling and thought that is often essential to the pointing and interpretation of narrative. Romance writers are interested in emotion For ‘The Dark Night’, explaining ‘the passive purifications of both senses and the spirit’, see The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, rev. edn (Washington DC, 1991, repr. 2017), 353–460; ‘Introduction to the Dark Night’, 353.
5
6
On medieval models of mind, body, and affect, see also my essays ‘Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing’, in Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh, 2016), 411–27 (412–14); ‘Mind, Breath, and Voice in Chaucer’s Romance Writing’, in Stephanie M. Hilger, ed., New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies (London, 2017), 119–41 (121–26); ‘Thinking Fantasies: Visions and Voices in Medieval English Secular Writing’, in Hilary Powell and Corinne Saunders, eds, Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts (New York, 2021), 91–116; and ‘From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts’, in David Fuller, Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton, eds, The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (New York, 2021). I am grateful to the editors for permission to draw on this work, which like research for this essay is funded by the Hearing the Voice project (2012–21, Wellcome Strategic Award WT098455 and Wellcome Collaborative Award, 108720/Z/15/Z), Life of Breath project (2014–20, Wellcome Senior Investigator Award, 103339/Z/13/Z), and a Wellcome Development Award to Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities (209513/Z/17/Z). This essay has been made available under the licence CC-BY-NC-ND.
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and cognition, in the continuum of mind, body and affect, and the ways that extreme and traumatic external and internal forces shape being in the world.
Medieval Models of Mind, Body and Affect
Postmodern concepts of the embodied mind, and of the role of affect in cognition, have overturned long-held ideas of mind–body dualism: yet what was radical in the recent past would not have seemed so in the Middle Ages.7 The humoral theory that informed medieval medicine assumed the idea of the mind–body continuum: both physical and mental health depended on the balance of the four humours.8 The interdependence of mind, body and affect was essential to the Galenic theory of the spirits, partly rooted in Aristotelian physiology and using a tripartite model of the soul, and developed further by thinkers following Galen, most influentially by the eleventh-century Persian philosopher-physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina).9 Avicenna’s Canon (1037), a comprehensive compendium based in Galenic medicine but also drawing extensively on Aristotle, set out a three-part structure according to which the pneuma (breath) was envisaged as modified into three kinds in the three principal organs: in the liver, the ‘natural spirits’ that enabled nutrition and growth; in the heart, the ‘vital spirits’, formed of air and blood, that heated and animated the body, controlling breath; in the brain, the ‘animal spirits’ into which the vital spirits were transformed, governing sensation, movement and 7
8
9
For recent neuroscientific accounts, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London, 2000); and Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London, 2006). For general studies of medieval medicine, see Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, 1995); and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL, 1990).
See Armelle Debru, ‘Physiology’, in R. J. Hankinson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galen (Cambridge, 2008), 263–82. Early twelfth-century Latin translations of Arabic and Greek provided the basis of Western medical theory. Particularly influential were the translations of Constantine of Africa, whose Pantegni theorica, translating parts of the tenth century Arabic medical encyclopaedia of ‘Haly Abbas’ (ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿAbbas al-Maǧūsī), in turn based on Galenic works, and Isagoge Johannitii in Tegni Galeni, translating a treatise on the Galenic theory of humours and spirits by the ninth-century scholar and physician ‘Johannitius’ (Hunayn ibn Ishaq), became foundation texts for the Articella or Ars medicine, the collection of six medical works that entered the university curriculum in the thirteenth century. See Vivian Nutton, ‘The Fortunes of Galen’, The Cambridge Companion to Galen, 355–90.
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thought.10 This model was fundamental to understandings of the emotions, seen as occurring through the movements of the vital spirits and natural heat within the heart. In extreme joy or anger, the vital spirits and heat moved from the heart to other parts of the body, causing the physical responses of blushing or reddening in anger. In extreme grief, distress or fear, by contrast, the vital spirits and heat withdrew from the arteries into the heart, causing pallor and, potentially, loss of breath resulting in unconsciousness or even death.11 The concept of the bodily spirits also underpinned models of perception and thought. Governed by the animal spirits, the senses, each with its own organ, were understood to be put together by the inner senses, situated in the ventricles of the brain, which were seen as the centre of both sensory and cognitive faculties. Thoughts were made up of ‘forms’ (phantasmata), sense impressions involving perception and response, which, according to Avicenna’s model in De anima (translated into Latin in the twelfth century) passed from the front cell of the brain (the inner senses and temporary memory) to the middle (the cells of imagination and cognition) to be stored at the back in the memory.12 Such models of the brain allowed for the idea of an inner 10
11
12
For an edition of the Canon, see Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine (al-Qānūn f īʾlṭibb), adapted by Laleh Bakhtiar from translations by O. Cameron Gruner and Mazar H. Shah, 5 vols (Chicago, 1999–2014). On pneuma / spiritus, see Fen [Part/ Lecture] 1, Doctrina 6. A translation of Avicenna’s Canon, attributed, along with a range of Galenic treatises, to Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187, translator of many scientific works), probably made in the thirteenth century by Gerard de Sabbioneta (often known as / confused with Gerard of Cremona), was taken up in Toledo and introduced in the curricula of Montpellier, Paris and Bologna at the end of the thirteenth century. See Danielle Jacquart, ‘Medical Scholasticism’, in Mirko D. Grmek, ed., Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Bernardino Fantini, trans. Antony Shugaar (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 197–240 (214– 16). For a comprehensive account of Avicenna’s Canon with reference to Gerard of Cremona’s translation, see Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy, ch. 2, ‘The Canon of Avicenna’, 19–40; and on the dissemination of the Canon, ch. 3, ‘The Canon in the Medieval Universities’, 43–76, in particular 43–47. See also Roy Porter’s discussion of classical and medieval medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997), 44–134. On the movements of the spirits in and out of the heart, see Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT, 2010), in particular chapter 2, ‘The Porous Heart’, 50–95.
See the summary in Jacqueline Tasioulas, ‘“Dying of Imagination” in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales’, Medium Ævum, 82 (2013), 212–35 (216–17); and further Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1975), 43–64; also Edwin Clarke and Kenneth Dew hurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function: Imaging the Brain from Antiquity to the Present, 2nd edn (San Francisco, CA, 1996), 8–53. For the definitive work on
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eye and ear, and offered explanatory paradigms for visionary experience and hearing inner voices.13 They were also shaped by belief in the supernatural, and the possibility that supernatural influences might combine with physiological processes. The intersections of mind, body and affect have been most studied in relation to affective piety, but they are equally crucial to romance writing. This is most obvious in the case of writers with a sophisticated knowledge of physiological theory. Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ exemplifies the potential complexity of the imaginative worlds of thinking and feeling. While the tale relies on the familiar conventions of love-sickness, in particular the neo-Platonic model of love striking through the eyes to wound the heart, Chaucer carefully situates Arcite’s malady as an illness of the brain, a detail that distinguishes Arcite from Palamon: … lene he wex and drye as is a shaft; His eyen holwe and grisly to biholde, His hewe falow and pale as asshen colde … So feble eek were his spiritz, and so lowe, And chaunged so, that no man koude knowe His speche nor his voys, though men it herde. And in his geere for al the world he ferde Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye, Engendred of humour malencolik Biforen, in his celle fantastik.14
The passage draws on medical ideas about the influence of affect on the brain, available to Chaucer through, for example, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, translated into Middle English by John Trevisa in the late fourteenth century. Trevisa describes how the melancholy humour is evoked
13
14
medieval memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 2008); Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, PA, 2002); and Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998).
See further my essay ‘Thinking Fantasies’, in Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’, in RC, I.1362–76. All subsequent references to Chaucer’s works are to this edition, cited by fragment and line number(s). On Arcite as ‘morbidly lovesick’, see Tasioulas, ‘“Dying of Imagination”’, in particular 213–19.
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by the passions of the soul, and works on the ‘celle fantastik’, the front ventricle of the brain controlling the imagination, to cloud the ability to judge and reason.15 In such a state, the estimatio or evaluative cell may become overactive, repeatedly seeking from the senses images of the beloved, with the effect that heat is drawn in by the overactive brain, causing pallor and hollow eyes. This is a kind of mania or frenzy: Arcite’s inner senses return obsessively to the image of his beloved, bodying it forth again and again in his mind’s eye. Powerful affect also transforms physical appearance. Arcite takes up a mirror, to see ‘that chaunged was al his colour … his visage al in another kynde’ (1400–01). Despite his mania, he also remains notably self-aware: his recognition of the change wrought on his body stimulates his idea of disguise. Affective extremes have both physical and mental consequences, shaping cognition and judgement, dominating the imagination, and causing physical and mental illness, in ways that closely resemble modern conceptions of the effects of trauma. Middle English popular romances do not manifest such detailed engagement with the physiology of thought and fear. Yet here too traumatic experiences of love, loss, fear and grief play on heart and mind, and they have inevitable physical and mental consequences. The affects of love – the movement of the spirits out of and into the heart in response to strong feeling, and the consequences of that movement, especially swooning, are integral to romance’s imaginative worlds. Lines that seem formulaic and are easily passed over are also invested with realism, engaging with familiar physiology. Romances treat and play with mind, body and affect to create textures of extreme experience and offer interpretative emphases across different thematic groups: love narratives; works focused on the testing of virtue or the penitential quest; romances treating encounters with the other or faery world. In all, the dark nights of experience cause strong affects that shape cognition, will and action, and act as catalysts for transformation.
Separation and Exile
The early Middle English romance Floris and Blanchefleur (c. 1250), widely known across Europe in different vernacular versions, seems least likely to engage with models of mind, body and affect in any extended way. Its focus on the love, separation and reunion of its fair, child-like lovers is archetypal; it works through binaries and symbols. Yet even here the tapestry of affect and its workings in the context of profound loss are clearly if concisely written. The 15
See M. C. Seymour et al., eds, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, 3 vols (Oxford, 1975–88), ‘De proprietatibus cerebri’ (i, 172/31–177/26).
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connection between heart and mind is pointed up: Floris’s ‘thought’ (104) is ever on Blanchefleur, a line that is repeated, while ‘Love is on his hert steke; | Love is at his hert roote’ (116–17).16 When he is told Blanchefleur is dead, he swoons (246); and on seeing her grave, this response is further heightened: ‘Thre sithes Florys sownydde nouth; | Ne speke he myght not with mouth’ (267–68); when he ‘awoke’ (269) from his swoon – a verb that points up the death-like effect of the spirits that move back into the heart – he weeps and sighs. The opposite affect is remarked when he hears of Blanchefleur being taken to Babylon: he ‘in his hert bygan to lyght’ (417). The English author adds a repetition of the line ‘On Blaunchefloure was al his thought’ (394, 464) – pointing up the cognitive as well as the bodily aspect of love, and heightening the connection between mind, body and affect. The ‘drery’ countenance and ‘drery … thought’ of the lovers (958, 985), alongside Blanchefleur’s tears, are emphasized at the denouement, when they are threatened with death, but at the same time the emphasis shifts to their individual actions, each trying to persuade the other to take the protective ring, each attempting to take the blow of the sword first: it is not their tears but their virtuous agency that moves the Emir to pity. The responses of heart and mind to traumatic moments are carefully manipulated in relation to the plot, with swooning placed to signal extreme feeling, balanced out by the active will to save the life of the beloved. King Horn (c. 1225), similarly not given to psychological exploration but rather working through patterning, repetition and symbol, demonstrates a comparable care in rendering affective play in miniature. Rymenhild’s love for Horn is a celebrated example of active wooing on the part of a woman, but her experience of love is also treated in terms that suggest the dramatic play of the bodily spirits: she ‘lovede so Horn child | That negh heo gan wexe wild’; ‘in heorte heo hadde wo’.17 The description is one of love-frenzy or madness, occasioned by the affect experienced in the heart; the urgent movement of the spirits outwards causes frenzy, whereas at her rejection by Horn they withdraw into the heart and she falls in a swoon (428). The dramatic play of affect is balanced by her demonstration of agency on waking from the swoon, as she promises to dub Horn knight. In grief at her loss of Horn, that withdrawal of spirits is again evident. In response to her warning dream she sits ‘also he were of [out of ] witte’ (652); she falls swooning to the ground at his departure (740); and at her enforced marriage again sits weeping and ‘ase heo were of 16
17
Florys and Blauncheflour, in Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English Romance, ed. Jennifer Fellows (London, 1993), lines 104, 116–17. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
King Horn, in Of Love and Chivalry, lines 251–52, 263. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
Thinking and Feeling in the Moment 85
[out of ] witte’ (1086). The deathly movement of the spirits into the heart is made explicit: her heart ‘bigan to chelde’ (1150) when she thinks Horn dead. But it is the affects of the heart too that inspire extreme action – her wooing of Horn, but also her plan to kill her unwanted husband and herself, carefully thought out with a knife concealed under the bed. Affect shapes cognition and action, rather than these being in opposition. The same pattern occurs in Bevis of Hamtoun, where the conventions of love-sickness are balanced by an emphasis on virtuous thought, both in Josian, another actively wooing woman, and in Bevis, who is carefully directed throughout the romance toward ‘riȝt’. Chrétien tells us that Love and Reason are at war, but in these works this is by no means the case. Rather, extremes of emotional experience bring about reasoned choice.
Suffering Virtue
In the early examples of Floris and Blanchefleur and King Horn, extremes of experience are rooted in exile, love and separation, responses to which elicit the play of bodily spirits and the shaping of thought. Across the period, such engagement with the intersection of mind, body and affect is sustained and developed, as exemplified by the calumniated queen pattern of the late fourteenth-century Sir Tryamour and the Erl of Toulous. In Sir Tryamour spontaneous affect plays a crucial part in the portrayal of the queen’s virtue, by contrast to the dissembling of the steward who accuses her of adultery. Her response is extreme as she swoons on her steed (254), evoking pity in those who look on; Sir Roger’s death is mirrored in the flight of spirits into her heart, causing her to swoon again in sorrow (375): she has ‘grete mornyng in hur herte’ (397).18 This stable characterization in answer to traumatic experience is set against the shifting responses of the king, whose feeling on discovering the truth realigns mind and body, connecting with his cognitive processes the affect that he expresses early on, ‘For sorowe my herte brekyth in sondyr’ (200). On realizing he has been betrayed by the steward, he ‘syttyth … in a thoght’ (507) and articulates the powerful affect of his realization, ‘For sorowe y wyll now dye’ (597). As he ‘thenkyth’ (608) of the death of Sir Roger and of his pregnant queen, he swoons (612) – and that loss of breath marks his internalization of her innocence. But the denouement also carefully notes the king’s thought. As he looks on the queen, ‘hym thoght that he schulde hur have seene’; ‘stylle he satt in thoght’ (1640, 1650): mind, body and affect are explicitly connected. Though the reunion emphasizes joy and gladness, the 18
Syr Tryamowre, in Of Love and Chivalry, lines 254, 375, 397. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
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focus of this romance is on the affects of grief and the movements of the mind in response to extreme suffering, and these in turn shape the affective power of the narrative on the reader. In the Erl of Toulous (c. 1400), affect must be very delicately realized in order to protect the lady Beulybon, wife of the Emperor, and the Earl from the suspicion of illicit desire. From the start, this work probes misguided affect, expressed in the Emperor’s grief at his losses in his wrongful battle against the earl. The lady, by contrast, is established as making clear cognitive moral judgements: ‘Ye have the wronge and he the ryght’ (154).19 In the same way, corrupt and innocent love are set against each other: feeling is understated and honourable in the Earl and the Empress, by contrast to the excessive love-sickness of the two knights who betray her, who are described as ‘pale … of blee’ (495, 641), fading ‘all away’, drooping and pining, their ‘wytt … all away’ (554). Moral judgement is carefully pointed: the Emperor has a warning dream of wild bears tearing his wife and, as ‘a wytty man’ (811), his heart is directed to ‘care’ and doubt about her safety (805–13). As a kind of divine intervention on behalf of the Empress, the dream is powerfully affective, yet it also requires interpretation and action, which are not sustained by the Emperor. By contrast, the ‘pyte’ of the Earl (915) leads to his defence of Beulybon. The placing of feeling is also crucial: while much is made of her woe, reflected in her swoon, and of the Earl’s ‘morn[ing] nyght and day’ (919), no affective detail is given regarding their eventual reunion and marriage. The affect that overcomes mind and body to convey innocence, virtue in suffering and pity, and to catalyse action, is approved, whereas affect that might suggest illicit desire is disallowed. The final emphasis is on the power of virtue and truth within the context of traumatic displacement and threat to spiritual and bodily integrity. The care with which affect is treated recurs in the Constance story and its analogues: in their explorations of virtue naturalness of affective response is crucial, but so also is steadfastness. In Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, the image of Custance’s ‘deedly pale face’ (II.822) haunts the narrative: ‘Have ye nat seyn somtyme a pale face?’ (II.645). In distress at the sight of the murdered Hermengyld, Custance’s vital and animal spirits withdraw: ‘For verray wo hir wit was al aweye’ (II.609). Yet Chaucer is careful to emphasize Custance’s agency: ‘So stant Custance, and looketh hire aboute’ (II.651); on the sea, ‘she taketh in good entente | The wyl of Crist’ (II.824–25). It is at her reunion with Alla that she manifests the most extreme physical affect of tears and swoons, evoking a 19
The Erle of Tolous, in Of Love and Chivalry, line 154. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
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similar response in him, and signalling a return to natural order: affect released by justice. Emaré (also late fourteenth century) offers a version of the story that (fittingly in the context of this volume) does not write out incestuous desire and that heightens affect.20 Here too this is carefully executed: the poignant image of Emaré on the sea, so overcome in mind and body by sorrow that ‘ever lay she styll’ on the ship, is introduced by the extended description of the Emperor’s penitence, experienced in ‘thought’ but also in body, in his lashing tears; as he stands ‘yn studyynge’, he falls to the ground swooning.21 His grief at his own action is represented as overwhelming in affective and intellective terms, rewriting the desire that overcomes ‘all hys hert and all hys thowghth’ (223). This work introduces a supernatural element in the exotic mantle that turns Emaré into a ‘glysteryng thyng’ (350), ‘non erdly thyng’, a creature of faery (396). The robe seems to make material the effects of desire, rendering Emaré what she seems in the eyes of the desirer, an extraordinary, glittering, otherworldly being. The destructive potential of extreme affect is exemplified in both the Emperor and the jealous mother-in-law, by contrast to the king, whose desire for Emaré, so extreme that he cannot eat (400–01), is positively written in marriage. The king’s response to the message that his child is a monster demonstrates the virtuous intersection of mind, body and affect: he falls swooning in sorrow, lamenting that Jesus should have sent a ‘fowle lothly fende’ (563) to come between him and his wife, but also sends letters commanding the protection of Emaré. Profound affect is dangerous when misplaced, but it also inspires virtuous action, most obviously in the response of Emaré herself to her exile: though she manifests ‘sory herte’, ‘karefull herte’, and ‘sykyng sore’ (662, 676), she is depicted as ‘meke and mylde’ (640), praying as well as lamenting, and singing a lullaby to her child. Similarly, the king’s grief, expressed in ‘hevy chere; | Wyth karefull hert and drury mone’, sighs and tears (807–13), is balanced by and inspires the ‘thowght [that] yn hys herte come’ (817), the idea that his lady has drowned for him, necessitating a penitential journey to the Pope, the journey that will reunite him with Emaré. Overwhelming affect is left until the reunion, which is depicted, as in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, in terms of the literally breath-taking play of spirits that betokens deeply felt, spontaneous emotion: ‘for joy they sowened, both to’ (935); the ‘all pale’ Emperor too is revived from sorrow (1009). They are at last 20
21
For a detailed discussion of father–daughter incest stories, see Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, 145–91.
Emaré, in Six Middle English Romances, ed. Maldwyn Mills (London, 1973), lines 330, 280–85. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
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‘kevered of cares colde’ (945): warmth and life can return. As in Shakespeare’s romances (Marina in Pericles, Imogen in Cymbeline, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale), these works chart the workings of traumatic actions and events on the virtuous women around whom they revolve and who are animated by the textures of thought and feeling evoked in response to those dark nights. In all of them, the shift away from an emphasis on overwhelming affect at particular moments is crucial, signalling the innocence and virtue of their protagonists – a rewriting of the moments where affect shapes agency.
Penance and Grace
The so-called ‘penitential romances’ engage most directly with the transformative spiritual power of traumatic experience in their treatments of the movement from penitence to grace. Moments of conversion are particular foci. In Guy of Warwick (c. 1300) this moment is briefly recounted and fully naturalized: after living in joy for only fifteen days with Felice, Guy returns home from hunting and ascends a tower to see ‘þat firmament, | Þat thicke wiþ steres stode’ and think ‘On Iesu omnipotent, | Þat alle his honour hadde him lent’, whereas he has never served Jesus in return.22 While the moment of thought is key, this is a romance that treats such interior reflection only briefly, externalizing virtue by writing it on the body in Guy’s many battles and in the miracles that affirm his virtue. In Sir Isumbras (early fourteenth century), by contrast, the processes of inner thought that accompany feeling are treated more extensively. The catalyst for Isumbras’s redemptive quest is explicitly supernatural, ‘a stevenne’, sent by God to Isumbras in the form of a singing bird which offers the choice of suffering in youth or age, and the ensuing tale of providential intervention, marvel and miracle does not seem to deal in realism.23 Yet precise care is taken in the writing of affect on mind and body. The bird’s voice provokes in Isumbras ‘carefull herte and sykynge sore’ (55) and ‘drurye’ (68) spirit, ‘pleye’ turned to ‘peyne’ (78), while much of the rest of the romance focuses on steadfastness in suffering, and ultimately on the power of pity and generosity. Thus when Isumbras sees his naked, grieving children, fled from his burning house, ‘Yette chaunged nothyng his ble’ (109); he urges against excessive weeping, for their sorrows result from sin. Similarly, his lady urges the children to be ‘blythe’ (112) because their father lives. The ‘drewrye mode’ (129) that accompanies Isumbras’s covering of his naked wife The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The First or 14th-Century Version, ed. Julius Zupitza, EETS es 42, 49, 59 (London, 1883, 1887, 1891), stanza 21.
22
Sir Isumbras, in Six Middle English Romances, line 42. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
23
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and children with his own clothing is complemented by prayer and active penance – by contrast to the extreme grief of all who see the family begging for food and the pity even of the heathen king, who thinks the lady ‘an angell … | Komen out of hevenne that day’ (275–76). Her weeping and three swoons are carefully placed as caused by her separation from children and husband and are set against her ‘meke and mylde’ demeanour (340). Affect is extreme, causing the spirits to withdraw, but is also always tempered by virtue: the texture of ‘sorrow and care’ that pervades the story as one suffering is replaced by another is carefully shaped to emphasize the power of prayer, faith and virtuous action, and ultimately to prove the benign workings of providence, directly articulated in the visitation to Isumbras by ‘an angell bryghte’ in response to his tears of anguish. Emotions are consuming and bodily but also shaped by cognitive processes. The narrative plays with the shaping power of memory: upon Isumbras’s discovery of the griffin’s nest containing the gold and the scarlet mantle that were his wife’s, ‘His sorowe he hadde in mynde’ (627); the mindful grief that keeps him in his chamber, in turn, leads to the discovery of the gold, and the lady’s own swoon of recollection (650). The affects of sorrow are finally replaced by the swoons and tears of joy and the reunion of the family. Affect is given a new turn of the screw in Amis and Amiloun (late thirteenth century), which presses to their limits the motifs of testing, penance and virtuous reward. Here trauma is intensely physical: the leprosy of Amiloun and its cure through the killing of Amis’s children. Exterior and interior are connected from the start through the physical likeness that mirrors the deep friendship of Amis and Amiloun and the beauty that reflects their virtue. Bonds between them are psychic and physical: Amis dreams his friend is attacked by wild beasts in the forest, to discover him in despair; and Amis’s claim that he has contracted ‘a malady that mengeth al [his] blod’ in order to avoid sleeping with the wife of the friend whose place he has taken is eerily fulfilled in Amiloun’s actual leprosy.24 Amiloun’s wrongful taking on of his friend’s battle is depicted in terms that emphasize the workings of intellect and feeling as Amiloun places love and duty above the prophetic warning he hears. No physical details of his leprosy are offered beyond the statement that ‘Also that angel hadde him told, | Fouler messel thar nas non hold | In world than was he’ (1543–45). The focus is rather on contrasting affective responses to leprosy: whereas Amiloun’s wife rejects him, the selflessness of Amis’s wife is manifest in her greeting kiss: ‘As foule a lazer as he was, | The levedi kist him in that plas’ (1261–62); she bathes and clothes him, just as ‘Amoraunt’ (Childe Owain) physically cares for him ‘fro fot to hond’ (1631). Here again, spontaneity of 24
Amis and Amiloun, in Of Love and Chivalry, lines 1173–74. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
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generous feeling marks Christian virtue. The reunion scene similarly recounts the rush of spirits – the tears and swoons of profound emotion (2158–60) – but thought and memory are also present: Amis and his wife ‘were him [Amiloun] bothe ful minde’ (2181). In the denouement, this combination of thought and feeling is essential, as body and blood are sacrificed to purify body and blood through the killing of Amis’s children, which evokes but goes several steps further than Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Dream both authorizes the act and reiterates the deep connection between Amis and Amiloun. Strikingly, this visionary experience is presented intellectively: for three nights, Amis ‘in slepe thought as he lay’ (2187) that he sees an angel who reveals that the blood of the children will cure his friend; Amiloun is similarly ‘warned’ by an angel (2210). While Amis’s killing of the children is presented in highly affective terms, cognition and judgement are also emphasized: his turning away in sorrow and ‘wepe[ing] with reweful chere’ (2280) as he looks on the beauty of the children are balanced by his articulation of the ‘gret rewethe’ (2276) of killing them, his extended argument concerning his brother’s sacrifice, and his prayer. The combination of feeling and reason shapes the ‘dreri mode’ (2294) in which he cuts their throats and collects their blood to anoint Amiloun; crucial too is Amiloun’s exclusively affective response of horror. By contrast, despite Amis’s wife’s ‘wo’, she exhibits steadfastness: ‘Sche comfort him ful yare’; ‘Yif it ware at min hert rote, | For to bryng thi brother bote, | My lyf y wold not spare’ (2379, 2383–85). The patterning is clear: the children’s innocent blood, like Christ’s, restores the sufferer, and the sacrifice, deeply disturbing as it is, functions to prove Amis’s love for his friend above himself, re-enacting the Saviour’s sacrifice for humankind. Virtue of course is rewarded: the children are miraculously restored ‘Without wemme and wound’ (2406), and the affects of joy combine with prayer. But it is the dramatic conflicts of thought and feeling that colour the narrative. These ‘dark night’ explorations of love, compassion and charity, in which the inner self is so visibly and dramatically written on the body, take the processes of cognition and affect to their extremes, probing oppositions and paradoxes, but also showing the crucial roles of both feeling and thought in choice and agency. The patterns of testing, sacrifice, penance, steadfastness and miracle interweave, treated in ways that demand the interplay of body and mind, affect and cognition.
Otherworldly Interventions
Encounters with the otherworld offer romance writers compelling possibilities of exploring extreme, often traumatic experience. The faery works in part to personify desire: positively, for example, in Marie de France’s lai of Lanval
Thinking and Feeling in the Moment 91
and Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal; more disturbingly in Sir Degarré with its rape of a princess by a faery knight, and Sir Gowther with its rewriting of the faery knight as the devil. Most complex is Sir Orfeo (c. 1300), where the intervention of the supernatural eerily disturbs body, mind and affect. Heurodis wakes from her sleep beneath an ‘ympe-tree’ to recount a strange invasion of her psyche – her encounter with the King of Faery, described as a real event but, disturbingly, experienced as she sleeps, a multi-sensory vision into which she dramatically enters.25 The episode suggests the menacing power of the supernatural to invade the self, and the violence of the King of Faery’s summons is violently enacted by Heurodis in the mutilation of her own body, an extraordinary evocation of the loss of sanity effected by trauma: Ac as sone as she gan awake, She crid and lothly bere gan make; She froted hir honden and hir feet And crached hir visage – it bled wete. Hir riche robe hie all to-rett And was reveysed out of hir wit. (53–58)
As Heurodis recounts her experience, however, frenzy, the rushing out and loss of wits, is replaced by the affects of grief, and it is grief that colours the unfolding of the narrative as, despite the guard of a thousand armed knights, she is ‘taken’ into faery: ‘Tho was ther crying, wepe, and wo! | The King into his chaumber is go | And oft swooned opon the ston | And made swiche diol and swiche mon’ (171–74). Orfeo’s grief at the loss of his wife is written on his body as he flees into the forest, becoming a Wild Man figure. Yet here the physical enactment of grief is a conscious choice: Heurodis wakes in madness but Orfeo elects to lead a life of exile, leaving his steward to rule in his stead; mind and body are consciously aligned with the affective experience of grief. The story implies though it does not make explicit the notion that physically enacted penitence, abstinence and self-denigration are rewarded with healing grace, for it is in this state of exile that Orfeo, his kingly body unmade, catches sight of the faery hunt. Again, thought and feeling coincide as Orfeo’s laughter at the recollection of the past, triggered by the hunt, proves the affective turning point. As in the Orpheus myth, the power of music, which connects mind, body and affect in its making, also connects them in those listening, overcoming separation and death. The conclusion moves to very different affects – those of the steward and court at the return of their king – written 25
Sir Orfeo, in Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B. Sands (Exeter, 1986), line 46. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited parenthetically by line number(s).
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in the joyous frenzy of the steward, who overthrows tables and chairs. But again, these are the reward of virtuous action, the fruits not just of feeling but of long-held faith and thoughtfulness. The body of Heurodis, seized and unmade through the sinister, unruly forces of desire, is regained, remade through Orfeo’s virtuous love; Orfeo’s kingly body is restored through the loyalty of his steward. Yet it is Heurodis’s madness and mutilation, her uncanny disappearance, and the sinister images of bodies caught in the throes of violent death in the world of faery that we retain. This tale of bodies is also one of the overthrow of minds, set against the power of deep feeling to transform reality, and the profound human longing for the return of those lost in death. Romance treatments of mind, body and affect at traumatic moments, then, go far beyond convention. Explorations of the continuum of mind and body and the deep connections between affect and cognition draw on contemporaneous physiological models, and on late medieval interest in psychology and the processes of thought. This understanding of the continuities between and interdependence of thought and feeling, of the bodiliness of being, and of being subject to powerful affective forces from within and without, allows romance writers to probe in creative and original ways the topics of emotion, intellect and agency, the constraints placed by affect on individual free will, but also the powerful possibilities presented by extreme feeling and its influential role in processes of cognition. Such literary archaeology, in the spirit of Elizabeth Archibald, allows us, as she has led the way in doing, to look beyond ready assumptions concerning medieval fictions, to see their sophistication, realism and imagination, their animating textures of mind, body and affect, and the ability of their ‘dark nights’ to speak to our understandings of extreme experience.
7
‘This was a sodeyn love’: Ladies Fall in Love in Medieval Romance C ar oly n e L ar r i ngton
M
q
en tend to fall in love swiftly in medieval romance. Yvain is the classic case: even in fear of his life and literally caught in a highly precarious situation, his first glimpse of Laudine is enough to awaken a powerful passion within him; Laudine herself, in contrast, needs to be reasoned into marriage with the man who has just killed her husband. Troilus’s falling in love is complicated by the direct intervention of Cupid, but here too the phenomenon of ‘love at first sight’ is introduced unquestioningly by Boccaccio and Chaucer.1 Across other medieval genres women are mainly depicted as responding only slowly to men’s initiatives in wooing them, accepting their professions of love after invoking the important and highly gendered performance of danger. As laid out in the allegorical love-vision model, pioneered in the Roman de la Rose and confirmed by such poems as Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Dunbar’s The Golden Targe, the components that elicit and constitute male desire and female behaviour are highly specified.2 In post-Roman de la Rose compositions, a woman’s love is granted only in return for convincing and well-expressed vows of fidelity and chivalric service. ‘One had to have the in-group knowledge and skills to perform and compose expressions of this love, but also fulfil ideo-affective conditions that were not absolutely confirmable in the external world’, notes Graham Williams; while emotional turmoil and physiological distress are the lot of the male lover, the
See Giovanni Boccaccio, Filostrato, ed. Luigi Surdich with Elena Anzieri and Federica Ferro (Milan, 1990), stanzas 29–31, 82–83; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I, 206–10; 271–80; 295–308, in RC.
1
Tracy Adams, Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (New York, 2005), 241–42 notes the more sceptical approach taken towards the passionate feelings evinced in twelfth-century texts, and indeed in Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose, in Jean de Meung’s continuation of the Roman.
2
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social risks involved in negotiating interpersonal emotions of love are understood as mainly borne by the lady.3 In earlier Middle English romances, among them versions of Anglo- Norman or French narratives, the catalyst to the young man’s love is differently presented. For Launfal, Horn and Partonope a woman’s appearance, words and behaviour awaken male sexual desire, and the lady’s immediate declaration of her love both reinforces that desire and draws a lasting commitment from the man. In each of these cases, the imbalance between man and woman in terms of apparent or real social status and wealth works to empower the woman to express her feelings openly. Fairies of course are endowed with particular social confidence; Rymenhild regards herself as having autonomy in the matter of her choice of lover and husband when she summons young Horn to her bower and announces her feelings for him.4 After testing her resolve by pointing out his apparent thrall status Horn happily accedes to her demand that they betroth themselves. Wisely, though, he ensures that he has been knighted and has publicly announced his status as rightful heir of Suðdene before he enters into a formal legal obligation. Helen Cooper observes that ‘spontaneous and active female desire, rightly directed, becomes a driving force in the larger providential scheme’, such that ‘the active and desiring heroine[s]’ of Middle English romance wield considerable agency in making their choice of lover.5 Rymenhild and the fairy mistress figures win their lovers by taking the first bold step in declaring their love.6 This passion can seem a slow-burning affair; the lady may have loved for a while before she can openly acknowledge it, either to herself or to others. What seems more unusual for women in later Middle English (and Old Norse) romance, whether translated or original, is the coup de foudre, the sudden onset of love, Graham Williams, Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature (London, 2018), 173–74.
3
King Horn in Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston, ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, MI, 1997), ll. 385–436. See in particular on romance heroines’ frequent passivity in matters of the heart, Elizabeth Archibald’s seminal essay, ‘Women in Romance’, in Companion to Middle English Romance, ed. Henk Aertsen and Alasdair A. MacDonald (Amsterdam, 1990), 153– 79, at 158–59.
4
Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), 220, 222.
5
Cooper and Adams both note the importance of Lavine in the Roman d’Enéas as a model of ‘the direct exercise of sexual patronage’, Cooper, English Romance, 228 and 231–40; see also Adams, Violent Passions, 124–31.
6
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that afflicts so many romance heroes, an intense emotional experience that is described, even pathologized, in medical, theological and literary discourses from the twelfth century onwards and which, from the thirteenth century onwards, tends to be restricted to men. This model was produced in medieval French literature from the rewritings of classical legends in the so-called ‘Ovidian lais’ and the Roman d’Enéas. Tracy Adams has shown how its motifs consequently migrated into indigenous romance compositions. At first the syndrome is strongly associated with women: in particular Dido and Lavine, whose experiences of love in the Roman d’Enéas (1160) would provide foundational cases for the experience of falling powerfully and suddenly in love. The pathology of passionate love is contagious, however; male heroes, both within texts and across the romance genre, rapidly begin to contract it and the medical and theological literature assumes that it is men who are its principal victims.7 In this essay I investigate two interesting cases of women suddenly succumbing to love; both have French sources, but among surviving romance texts in Old Norse and Middle English respectively, they represent almost unique cases.8 One of our heroines survives now only in an Old Norse-Icelandic version, Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar: Tristram’s mother Blensinbil.9 Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan offers a parallel account: the lady here is named Blanchefleur and her passion for Rivalin enables a comparison of potential significance in terms of emotional performativity and cultural variation.10 The other case is The material discussed in Mary Wack’s foundational Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA, 1990) largely pertains to male sufferers; because men’s brains are drier than women’s, the image of the desired object becomes more deeply imprinted in the imagination. Although women can quickly catch it, because they are ‘more frequently sexually stimulated’, according to Peter of Spain, ‘in men the disease is more difficult to cure’ (114–15).
7
Christine Ferlampin-Acher traces the motif of the woman being the first to fall in love back to the Roman d’Enéas’s Lavine; see Guillaume de Palerne, trans. Christine Ferlampin-Acher (Paris, 2012), 98.
8
Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, ed. and trans. Peter Jorgensen, in The Tristan Legend, gen. ed. Marianne Kalinke, in Norse Romance I, Arthurian Archives III (Cambridge, 1999). All citations are from this edition, with references given in text; translations are adapted from Jorgensen’s version.
9
10
Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, online version: http://www.hs-augsburg. de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/13Jh/Gottfried/got_tr00.html, based on Tristan, ed. Rüdiger Krohn (Stuttgart, 1980); translation from Tristan, trans. A. T. Hatto (London, 1960). See Sif Rikhardsdottir’s comparison between the saga and Thomas’s fragments in Emotion in Old Norse Literature (Cambridge, 2018), 43–56, her briefer comparison between Gottfried and the saga (110–11), and her more
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that of Melior in William of Palerne, again deriving from a French source, but demonstrating considerable modification in the later English context.11 The experiences of Blensinbil and Melior reveal much about the symptomatology of passionate love in women, their clear cognitive appraisal of their feelings and the social constraints on their strategies and subsequent behaviour. The texts make extensive use of psychonarration, opening up questions about the audience’s empathetic identification with, or ironic distancing from, the intense emotional situation of the female protagonist.12 My consideration of the pathology and the social consequences of passionate erotic love in women draws upon a range of theorizations of emotion and physiology, performativity and performance in order to unpack the gendered ways in which women’s emotion is represented in the two narratives.
Blensinbil and Kanelangres
Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar is a translation of Thomas de Bretagne’s Tristan, originally made into Old Norwegian by one Brother Robert in 1226 at the behest of King Hákon IV of Norway, if we are to believe the information given in the saga’s preamble.13 The saga preserves the ‘courtly version’ of the story of Tristan and his parents in its most extensive form. The oldest complete Icelandic manuscript of the saga (Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, 543 4to) dates only from the late seventeenth century; two paper manuscripts from the eighteenth century also exist. Comparison with some earlier (fifteenth- century) saga fragments suggests that the AM 543 4to version has not modified
11
general comments about cross-cultural mediation of emotion in ‘Translating Emotion: Vocalisation and Embodiment in Yvain and Ívens saga’, in Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders, eds, Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice (Cambridge, 2015), 161–79.
Middle English, William of Palerne: An Alliterative Romance, ed. Gerrit H. V. Bunt, Medievalia Groningana (Groningen, 1985); modern French translation and commentary, Guillaume de Palerne, trans. Ferlampin-Acher; Old French edition, Guillaume de Palerne, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva, 1991).
By audience I mean rather the multiple groups designated by Sif Rikhardsdottir’s concept of the ‘reading community’: the audience of the French original, the implied audience of the translation or version and the actual audiences who listened to the versions preserved in the texts that have come down to us. See Sif Rikhardsdottir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia (Cambridge, 2012), 12.
12
See Geraldine Barnes, ‘The Tristan Legend’, in Marianne Kalinke, ed., The Arthur of the North (Cardiff, 2011), 61–76, at 61; and Jorgensen, ‘Introduction’, Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, 25–26.
13
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its medieval hypothetical source to any notable extent, though there may be some influence from the ‘common version’.14 Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan also recounts the love-affair of Blanchefleur and Rivalin, providing another remediation of Thomas’s narrative. Since the surviving Thomas mat erial is fragmentary, we cannot reliably ascribe the narrative positions taken in this early section of the Old Icelandic text either to Thomas, or to ‘Brother Robert’; hence I shall simply refer to ‘the text’ as expressing distinct attitudes towards its characters.15 Sister of King Markis, Blensinbil is introduced in chapter five of the saga as embodying every courtly quality, extraordinary beauty, and grace. The Old Norse high courtly prose, with its rhythmic style, distinguished by paired, often alliterating or chiming, synonyms, offers a conventional portrait: svá fríð ok ynnilig, sjálig ok sæmilig, kurteislig ok elskulig, ríkulig ok göfuglig, svá at þvílíkt rósalíf var ekki til í veröldinni, svá at menn vissu til. (34) (so beautiful and lovely, attractive and honourable, courteous and lovable, splendid and generous, that there was no other woman so praiseworthy in the whole world, as far as men knew.) (35, adapted)
Blensinbil possesses wit and wisdom; she is an ágæti gimsteinn (a precious jewel), and everyone in the kingdom has a loving regard for this ástsamliga (lovable) girl. Her fame is such that many powerful chieftains in other lands felt great affection for her, without even having seen her. But, the text warns darkly – it has a strong predilection for proverbial utterances – that few things have no flaw. The impersonality of the proverb leaves open the question as to whether the flaw is inherent in Blensinbil herself, despite the laudatory terms in which she is described, or whether, from a Boethian point of view, her present happy situation cannot endure. The text claims, with considerable exaggeration, that no one could guess whither the sorrow, anxiety, grief and misery that were about to come upon the girl might arise, though the experienced consumer of romance would not be left in much doubt as to which quarter might offer this threat. Accompanied by a bevy of lovely girls, Blensinbil steps out of her tent to view the jousting.16 After a while her eye falls on Kanelangres, king of Brittany, 14 15
16
Jorgensen, ‘Introduction’, 26.
Compare Miranda Griffin’s distinction between the various voices and scriptor figures in the Vulgate Cycle and the narrative position of li contes, ‘the pure voice of the Vulgate Cycle’, that is, the intertextual Arthurian tradition, in The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (London, 2005), 104. On the harmony and idealized courtliness of this scene, see Barnes, ‘The Tristan Legend’, 63–64.
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already introduced in the text, who has come to her brother’s court to seek renown, and she immediately plunges into a reverie (as Jorgensen translates íhugan), during which her desire and all her love turn to him. She sighs once: a series of sharp sensations, of tearing and burning, assails her, her beauty immediately vanishes, and she feels misery and constriction. Sighing a second time, her limbs and heart begin to tremble, she sweats and the sensation of heaviness that she had already felt intensifies. Deeply disturbed, frantic even, Blensinbil embarks on a long interior monologue in which she interrogates her symptoms.17 She notes the feverish alternation between sensations of heat and cold, the paradoxical link between heatedness and shivering as if with cold, of chilliness and sweating. For a moment she considers that this is simply a reaction to the heat of the day, but no: Blensinbil becomes sure that she is seriously ill. She needs a doctor who can provide a curative potion (umbótardrykk) – but such a physician would need to be highly skilled (vel kunnandi). Could such a man even exist? Blensinbil remains for a long while in torment, the text tells us.18 Not such a long while in fact, for she continues to watch the tournament and her fever diminishes as she becomes absorbed in the chivalric performance before her. For, observes the text, drawing on contemporary medical views about love-sickness and its remedies, if the lover is á gamansgangi ok nokkut starfandi (enjoying some activity or doing a bit of work) then love becomes easier to bear.19 The respite does not last long, however, for as soon as she 17
18
19
As Cooper observes (231), ‘in many romances the most ardent language of desire is put into the mouth or the mind of the lady, in speeches of private self-analysis’. The physiological mechanisms of erotic love remain underdefined in medieval medical literature. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, discusses the Galenic belief that love arises from an imbalance of humours (particularly the melancholic); excess humour can be expelled through prophylactic intercourse (39–45). Later theorizations would combine Avicennan faculty psychology (a misfunctioning of the estimative faculty) (56), and the consequent actions of the spiritus, rushing through the brain and bringing the humoral composition within ventricles into imbalance (57–58).
Blensinbil’s case is highly unusual in figuring an extreme emotional reaction without being able to identify its catalyst through cognitive processes. Compare the psychological phenomenon of misattribution of arousal. In Dutton and Aron’s classic experiment, young men attributed their sensations of arousal to the appearance of an attractive female confederate, rather than the fact that they had just crossed a swaying suspension bridge. Donald P. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron, ‘Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction under Conditions of High Anxiety’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30 (1974), 510–17. Wack notes Galen’s recommendation of distraction: specifically in wrestling, hunting, horse-racing (8) and as a remedy more generally, Lovesickness, 60.
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catches sight of Kanelangres again, the symptoms return just as powerfully as before. Now Blensinbil is able to connect cause and effect; Kanelangres must wield evil powers, she reasons, and have come there with the express purpose of causing her torment. Her thoughts quickly turn next to redress and remedy – what to do about her situation? Quickly switching from the theological and ethical to the social, she realizes that she cannot directly importune him for his love or he will think her flighty – prone to nýbreitinn ást (new changeable love) – and he will scorn her. Yet, she concludes, there is no other possible course. As the tournament ends, Kanelangres rides over to greet the assembled ladies and addresses Blensinbil in particular, invoking God’s blessing upon her. Swiftly and with a friendly expression, she responds that, if he will atone for the wrongs he has done her, God may bless him in return – a gesture towards social conventions of restitution. Kanelangres anxiously asks what his trespass might be. He is the only man, replies Blensinbil mysteriously, who knows that he has done her wrong and has made her cross and unhappy. Baffled, Kanelangres promises to behave respectfully towards her, but the girl says that she will not retract her accusation until she sees how he will make amends. As he takes his leave Blensinbil sighs a third time from the bottom of her heart and whispers a blessing over him. Blensinbil’s response to Kanelangres nicely epitomizes the multiple ways in which the behaviour and speech of literary characters can function in relation to emotion. In the first instance her words function as an emotive, as defined by William Reddy: an ‘emotional expression [that] has an exploratory and a self-altering effect in the activated thought material of emotion’.20 The earlier internal monologue now triggers speech that can be heard by others; what Blensinbil utters is ‘both managerial and exploratory’, as Reddy defines the emotive, revealing a condition that has only just been realized by the speaking self and expanding upon the implications of the realization through action.21 Blensinbil’s behaviour also has both performative and performance functions, in the senses developed and elaborated by Elaine Tennant and Kathryn Starkey.22 A performative is a gesture or utterance that ‘function[s] to affect socially 20
21
22
William R. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), 105.
See Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory, 49 (2010), 237–65, at 241–42. Elaine Tennant, ‘Prescriptions and Performatives in Imagined Cultures: Gender Dynamics in Nibelungenlied Adventure 11’, in Jan-Dirk Müller and Horst Wenzel, eds, Mittelalter: Neue Wege durch einen alten Kontinent (Stuttgart, 1999), 273– 316; Kathryn Starkey, ‘Brunhild’s Smile: Emotion and the Politics of Gender in the
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recognized states of affairs, changing the status of someone or something’, notes Starkey.23 The related concept of performance is defined as ‘self-conscious presentation or action undertaken with the knowledge that someone is watching’, implying ‘a self-conscious distance between the enactment and the motivation … or intent’.24 Blensinbil’s combative words and friendly expression serve to communicate her emotional condition to Kanelangres; her earlier consideration of how to make the knight aware of her feelings underlines the performance element, while her behaviour has a strong performative effect: changing Kanelangres’s own perceptions of the situation. For, still pondering what his offence might be, and noting the girl’s profound sigh (if not her sotto voce words), Kanelangres also falls into an íhugan (reverie) and passes a sleepless night. By the next day he too is in love, and soon seeks out Blensinbil to declare himself. They become secret lovers, determined not to let Markis know what is afoot. When Kanelangres is severely wounded in a tournament, Blensinbil, beside herself with grief, seeks the aid of her foster-mother to arrange a completely private meeting with her beloved. As a result, she becomes pregnant. Kanelangres is now recalled home, for his territory is under attack; Blensinbil leaves with him and they marry in his homeland. When Kanelangres falls in battle, Blensinbil goes into labour, giving birth to Tristram, and then dies. Blensinbil’s experience of falling in love demonstrates that emotion’s powerful physiological effects; the familiar Ovidian sensations of cold and heat caused by the rapid movement of her vital spirits, the trembling in heart and limbs, the sweat and the sensations akin to mortal illness are the more terrifying because at first she can neither identify the sickness nor discern a visual cause. Since she is renowned for her vit ok visdom (‘wit and wisdom’), she reacts by interrogating the symptoms she is experiencing, and thinking in practical terms about physicians and the likelihood of cure. While the text’s gnomic remarks about the mysterious fate that will befall her have set up an audience expectation that love is in the air, Blensinbil is too overwhelmed, too unversed in the effects of fin’amor, to identify what is happening within her body; consequently, both text and audience share a recognition that she herself is denied. The discourse of medical formulations of love-sickness – for distraction and physical activity are both recommended remedies – is employed to lightly ironize Blensinbil’s condition, but with a nod to those in the know.
23 24
Nibelungelied’, in C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid von Kasten, eds, Codierungen von Emotionen / Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages (New York, 2003), 159–57.
Starkey, ‘Brunhild’s Smile’, 163–64. Starkey, ‘Brunhild’s Smile’, 163.
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Christine Ferlampin-Acher suggests that distance (décalage) is key to identifying the presence of ironic, even parodic, elements in romance (specifically with regard to Guillaume de Palerne, but equally relevant here). The distance between audience understanding and Blensinbil’s mental processes disrupts the operation of audience empathy, opening up distinctly comic possibilities.25 As soon as she identifies the source of her physical and emotional disturbance, Blensinbil acts cleverly and decisively. She quickly assesses the social consequences of declaring her love openly and instead adopts a strategy of indirection: one that operates nevertheless as a successful performative and which has emotive implications in its framing in terms of restitutive justice. Wrongfooted by the demand for redress, Kanelangres is made to feel guilty and anxious. By inducing emotional turmoil in him, Blensinbil succeeds in converting his arousal into sexual love. There is no comparable monologue giving insight into Kanelangres’s cogitations during his sleepless night, no sudden realization nor lengthy reasoning process that uncovers the meaning of Blensinbil’s coded remarks. Rather, he slips into reciprocation in a way that foreshadows the easy acquiescence to the proposition of love that is so often presented by comparable romance heroes when a woman takes the initiative. Blensinbil knows how to act strategically, finding a way to communicate her strong feelings to the love object by rebuking the knight.26 Kanelangres does not seem to pick up the cues in this exchange; there is no eureka moment that short-circuits the requirement for him to ponder his feelings overnight and to realize his love. It is noteworthy too that Blensinbil experiences a complete coup de foudre; she has not heard other women commenting on Kanelangres’s prowess, attractiveness or general desirability. Nor is the female gaze foregrounded; only on catching sight of Kanelangres after her symptoms have begun to manifest themselves can she connect cause and effect. She has no confidante to reassure her or facilitate her moves; the young woman acts on her own initiative, cleverly balancing her public reputation, private emotions, prevailing conventions of gender behaviour and her relationship to God in order to achieve what she desires.
25
26
Christine Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Guillaume de Palerne: une parodie?’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 15 (2008), 59–71.
Cf. the modern American dating strategy of negging, making a woman feel awkward or guilty in order to elicit emotional arousal and speedier acquiescence, a male-on-female phenomenon helpfully outlined by Nicky Woolf: https://www. newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/05/negging-latest-dating-trend (accessed 5 August 2021).
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Rivalin and Blanchefleur
The scene in which Mark’s sister Blanchefleur falls in love with Rivalin in Gottfried’s version of the story is staged rather differently. Introduced much more briefly, Blanchefleur is lovely, in fact so lovely that no man who laid eyes on her could fail to think better of women thereafter, but there is no commendation of her cleverness, kindness or other non-physical attributes. The bohort (mass tournament fighting) is under way, involving, among others, Mark and Rivalin when the fighting moves to where Blanchefleur and her ladies are. The ladies all exclaim in praise of the handsome and skilled young visitor, but Blanchefleur keeps her counsel, for Rivalin has now entered her thoughts and thence her heart, where he now reigns. She experiences no untoward physical symptoms of the sort endured by Blensinbil. When Rivalin approaches and greets her, she simply notes that she has ‘a bone to pick with him’: aber des rehtes unverzigen, | des ich an iuch ze redene hân (ll. 750–51). As in Old Norse, she refuses to explain, simply inviting him to make amends for the mysterious wrong he has done. Puzzled, Rivalin takes his leave, but he has noted the heartfelt sigh that she heaves as he goes, and, although she delivers her parting benediction vil tougenlîchen (‘most secretly’, l. 787), he certainly hears it, for later he considers very fully: ir gruoz, ir rede … ir sûft, ir segen, al ir gebâr | daz marcte er al besunder (‘her greeting, her words; he examined her sigh minutely, her farewell, her whole behaviour’, ll. 797–99). And he concludes that the sigh and the benediction – and all the rest of it – ûf den wec der minne wegen (‘are manifestations of love’, l. 802). Now both parties find themselves suffering pangs of love, each questions the state of mind of the other – and both lovers take a good many lines to explore the nature of their own feelings. Entirely clear about the identity of the instigator of her pain, Blanchefleur is now given a substantial interior monologue, analogous to Blensinbil’s initial self-interrogation, in which she wonders why Rivalin should have had such an effect on her – and does he have it on all women? Is he evil, to make her feel so much pain? But perhaps he is innocent, and Blanchefleur alone is to blame for her feelings. She concludes, with some certainty, that this is the love about which she has heard so much. Now she encourages Rivalin with tender glances and special greetings; he returns them and soon each is sure of the other’s feelings: dâ von begunden s’under in | sich meinen unde minnen | mit herzenlîchen sinnen (‘with all their hearts they fell to loving and doting on each other’, ll. 1112–14). The rest of the lovers’ history unfolds as in the Old Norse account, but Gottfried offers much more on Blanchefleur’s misery when she hears of Rivalin’s injury, taking up and actualizing the familiar conceptual metaphor of love-as-medicine that underlies Blensinbil’s physical symptoms. Blanchefleur’s nurse arranges access to the stricken Rivalin by disguising the princess
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and claiming that she is a female physician who needs to examine the patient. Spurred on by fear and sorrow, kissing the dying man in hundert tûsent stunt (‘a hundred thousand times’, l. 1312) Blanchefleur arouses her lover. Risky though this is, for he was … von dem wîbe | und von der minne vil nâch tôt (‘was all but dead, both of the woman and love’, ll. 1326–27), the pair conceive a child, and God decides that Rivalin shall live after all – at least for a while. Given the impossibility of knowing what Thomas de Bretagne’s version of this episode looked like, we cannot reliably decide how Brother Robert or Gottfried truncated, expanded or re-arranged what they found in the source material at this point. Where such comparisons are possible, the Norse text tends generally to condense internal monologues and to show much less interest in addressing the audience directly and generalizing about idealized courtesy. As the two lovers consolidate their relationship through secret meetings, the saga asks drily: Hvat þurfum vér fleiri hluti hér um at tala, þvíat allir þeir, sem nokkura skynsemd hafa, þá mun kunnigt vera, at sá er siðr elskandi manna, at hvárt mun fremja sinn ástsamliga vilja sem fyrst, þó með leynd saman komandi? (40–41) (Why do we need to talk about this matter further, since everyone who has any insight at all knows that it is the custom of people in love to further as quickly as possible their amorous intentions, even through secret meetings?)
Gottfried’s account of Blanchefleur’s feelings seems more attuned to familiar romance convention; the other women’s praise cues, though it does not trigger, her attraction to Rivalin, and when she begins to interrogate her feelings, she clearly recognizes that she has fallen prey to erotic love. Her emotions after their conversation oscillate between happiness and unhappiness, joy and sorrow, but without the physiological indices of trembling and shivering, of feverish heat, sweating and burning. The naïve wonderment with which Blensinbil assesses the onset of severe somatic symptoms, her initial failure to connect these to the visual stimulus of the desirable young man, and the skilful actualization of the lover-as-physician metaphor in her interior monologue may none of them be original to the Norse author. Yet the Norse text’s staging of the onset of love in the young woman suggests a sophisticated sensibility: one that is interested in symptomatology, in lightly ironizing the feelings of young people, and which focuses on the thoughts and actions of a resourceful young woman who works out how to communicate her feelings without resorting to a potentially shameful and non-normative performative strategy.
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William of Palerne
In the extensive introduction to her translation of Guillaume de Palerne into modern French, Christine Ferlampin-Acher suggests that this unusual romance responds to the intertextual environment in which it was composed through elements of parody and pastiche.27 The story of Tristan and Yseult is one of its intertexts, so argues Ferlampin-Acher, though the courageous Mélior escapes the unhappy fate of other medieval romance women who are forced to marry the wrong man. William of Palerne, the mid-fourteenth-century Middle English version of this romance, has a missing folio at the critical point at which Melior falls in love with the foundling William.28 She has known him for some years; her father, the Emperor of Rome, found the twelve-year-old while hunting in the forest. William is in truth the lost son of the king of Sicily, kidnapped at the age of four by a huge (were)wolf. When he is brought to the court he is entrusted to Melior, who is the same age as he is: ‘a more curteyse creature, ne cunnyngere of hire age | was nouȝt þanne in þis world þat ani wiȝt knewe’ (ll. 406–07). The emperor explains how he found the boy, but here the account breaks off. The lost material presumably related the conclusion of the emperor’s speech, the equivalent of the French text’s praise for William’s handsomeness, courtesy and accomplishments, the emperor’s strong regard for the young man, and the way in which he flutters the hearts of all the ladies of the court. Importantly, the French text notes that – although Mélior sees Guillaume every day – it is hearing the other ladies praising the young man that triggers her feelings for him, an adaptation of l’amour lointain to a situation of proximity.29 Three years have now passed and the English text resumes near the beginning of Melior’s long internal monologue analysing her situation; their fosterling relationship has become recalibrated as potentially erotic.30 Melior’s debate with herself is a lively dialogue back and forth between her heart and eyes – which faculty is to blame for her situation?31 The folio begins 27 28
29
30
31
Guillaume de Palerne, trans. Ferlampin-Acher, 7–112, in particular 106–07.
The sole manuscript is Cambridge, King’s College, MS. 131; the missing folio is f. 10. Guillaume de Palerne, trans. Ferlampin-Acher, 97; Ferlampin-Acher regards the French romance’s staging of the onset of Mélior’s love as a kind of pastiche, identifying key motifs as borrowed from the Roman d’Enéas, in particular Lavine’s sudden passion for Enéas at lines 8039ff.
Cf. Carolyne Larrington, Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York, 2015), 227–32.
This debate smacks strongly of the kind of classroom debate discussed in Adams, Violent Passions, 89–97, in particular quasi-scholastic analysis: ‘Romance lovers,
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as she notes one of her symptoms: alternation between sorrow and joy: ‘sike I and sing samen togedere’ (l. 433). Her heart is to blame, she concludes initially, but then there is a volte-face: ‘Whom schal I it wite but mi wicked eyiȝen?’ (l. 458), for it is through looking that her heart has fallen prey to this suffering. But no sooner has she reached this conclusion than she doubles back, for the eyes are subject to the heart: ‘Þan has my hasty hert holly þe wrong’ (l. 475). The masculine gender of hert in Middle English allows slippage between considering and addressing the bodily organ and – at one remove – referring to the male love object; who he is is not always clear, particularly in an aural performance context. Melior’s figuring the relation between herself and her heart as social, as hers to command, thus also illuminates William’s problematic social standing: ‘What? Fy! schold I a fundeling for his fairenesse tak? | Nay, my wille wol nouȝt asent to my wicked hert’ (ll. 451–52). Could she, whom ‘kinges and kaysers’ might ‘kraven inow’ (l. 484) stoop so low? Assigning the blame once more to her heart, and having resolved the theoretical issue at least, Melior tries to fall asleep.32 But the respite is only temporary; very soon she returns to her situation, now invoking a legalistic and restitutive principle; her heart has done her harm and now must make amends, but how can these be enforced, given that she is its ‘soverayn’, and it is ‘holly at [her] hest in hard and in nesche’ (ll. 494–95)? Once again the frame of reference slides; the heart has set itself in ‘so nobul a place’ that ‘perles of alle puple is preised over alle’ (ll. 498–99), and suddenly, the subject becomes once more William himself. Melior convinces herself that in fact her heart has acted correctly; it is so ‘hauteyn’ (presumptuous, lofty) (l. 529) that, if there were a better man than William on earth, her heart would have set itself on him instead. Melior thus manages to resolve her anxieties about the gulf in rank between herself and the accomplished foundling, and apologizes handsomely to her heart (and by extension to her beloved). ‘And for I so worngely have wrouȝt to wite him, me greves | I give me holly in his grace … I wol hereafter … wirche holly mi hertes wille to harde and to nesche’ (ll. 530–34). ‘To harde and to nesche’ is of course a formula meaning, broadly, ‘under all circumstances’, yet here it chimes neatly with notions of hard- and soft-heartedness; nor can Melior yet know the hardships that her love will force her to endure. This movement of the debate is chiastically structured; circling around the merits of the heart as independent agent, and of William
32
startled by the onset of overpowering emotions, also act out attempts to break down and refine their initially uncontrollable feelings in a process that resembles dialectical reasoning’ (89).
See also Cooper, English Romance, 234–35, on the alternation between eye and heart.
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as love-object, and designating Melior’s subject position as superior to, and yet somehow at the mercy of, both, it is skilfully and wittily constructed by the English translator. Having resolved to her satisfaction that she does indeed love William, and is right to do so, Melior considers briefly her physiological symptoms – sighing and soreness produced by sorrow around her suffering heart – then, like Blensinbil, she turns to more practical questions. How to communicate her feelings? William must be made to understand, but if she were to speak openly about her ‘tene’ and ‘anger’, and ‘longyng of love’ (ll. 551–52), he might think her mad. It might be better perhaps to employ indirect courtly rhetoric and tell him she is ‘sek’ (l. 557), thinks Melior, turning to the medicalized metaphorical domain, but because (despite his general courtliness) William apparently is not experienced in the craft of love-rhetoric, he will simply express his sympathy for her ailment – and that would only make things worse! Switching from the imagery of illness to the familiar Petrarchan metaphor of the storm-driven boat, tossed about in the waves of passion, Melior concludes, despairingly, that if God does not send her ‘havene’ fairly soon (l. 569) she will not live long. Melior’s monologue concludes here and she consequently succumbs to the full range of love-sickness symptoms: sleeplessness, lack of appetite or pleasure in her pastimes, losing her colour and growing thinner: she ‘dwined awaie’ (l. 578). Just as with Blensinbil, the narrator observes that there is no physician anywhere who would be in a position to cure her. Fortunately, however, Melior has a confidante who does indeed speak the language of ‘seknesse’ (l. 593), her cousin Alexandrine. Alexandrine begs that Melior confide in her so that she can hele her, a word that the two cousins bandy back and forth in the ensuing discussion. Melior reveals that the attacks of sickness that assail her come more than nine times a day, and ten times a night, and all stem from ‘a kene þouȝt þat ich have in hert’ (l. 616) of William, ‘þat bold barn’ (l. 617). Indeed, William is so firmly imprinted on her heart that when she looks at any other man she sees him – the obverse of the remedy of substitution as recommended in contemporary commentaries on Constantine’s Viaticum.33 And, if no bote is provided for her bale, ‘I am ded as dorenail’ (l. 628). Alexandrine is quick to reassure her lady that healing can be brought about, if this all that the sickness amounts to. For ‘mow I geten a grece þat I gaynli knowe’ (l. 636) and if Melior can see this grece, and experience the savour and sweetness in its root, then she will soon be well once more. There is certainly, as Erik Kooper has argued, some double entendre at work in Alexandrine’s response; her appeal to the senses in the healing that the grece (‘grass’, in the sense of ‘herb’) can effect, 33
Wack, Lovesickness, 103–04.
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with a pun on ‘grace’ and the reference to the quite possibly phallic rote make delicate play with the terminology of (love)sickness.34 Once Melior has declared her feelings to her confidante, she can no longer be said to be falling in love, but rather to be definitively in love; she begs Alexandrine to ‘gete hire þat gode gras’ (l. 644) as soon as she can. Unlike her French counterpart, Alexandrine, ‘þat amiabul maide’ (l. 586), has magical skills and through her craft she is able to send William a dream in which Melior appears to him. She kneels to him, weeping and, boldly calling him her ‘loveliche lemman’ and her lord, demanding that he take her in her arms and ‘wirche wiþ me þi wille’ (ll. 663; 667). Still sound asleep, William happily accedes to the request, only in fact to embrace a pillow which he covers with kisses – and indeed more: he ‘made þerwiþ þe most merþe þat ani man schold’ (l. 676).35 So vivid is the dream that as William lies half-awake he continues to strain his beloved to him: ‘ac Peter! It nas but is pulvere’ (l. 681). Now he too has to consider the implications of this revelation of his heart’s vaulting ambition, just as ‘hauteyn’ (l. 707) as is Melior’s. With good reason, William rationalizes that the social gulf is too great and it would be folly to love Melior; the idea is implanted in him, though, and judging from his highly sexual response to his pillow, the thought is not unpleasurable. Soon William has developed similar symptoms of love-sickness, and he takes to sitting in a closed garden, concealed under the boughs of an appletree, from where he can gaze up at Melior’s window, unseen. Alexandrine’s magic alerts her to William’s presence in the garden and, with the pretext that this is an auspicious time to find that elusive grece, she brings Melior into the garden. There they find William asleep under the tree. Alexandrine sends him a second dream, in which Melior offers him a ‘ful real [royal] rose’ (l. 865). In the dream this heals William of all his sorrow and languor. Awakening, he finds his lady present, kneels to her and greets her and Alexandrine. Melior now calls him ‘loveli swete lemman’ (l. 876), just as in the first dream (‘loveliche lemman’, l. 663). William is mased by this turn of events, his face repeatedly changes colour from pale to red; only now does an arrow fired by Love strike him through the heart. William describes his symptoms to Alexandrine; these alternate between fiery heat and keen cold, sighing and singing at the same time, thoughts that fiercely pain his heart, and all brought on by a dream whose contents he will not disclose. Listening, Melior realizes that her lover’s 34
35
Erik Kooper, ‘Grace: the Healing Herb in William of Palerne’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 15 (1984), 83–93, in particular 85–86, where he notes that the focus on sickness and health is only hinted at in the French. This motif originates with Dido in the Roman d’Enéas, ll. 1236 ff.; see Guillaume de Palerne, trans. Ferlampin-Acher, 100.
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symptoms match her own. William finally admits that unless he ‘þe sunner have socour of þat swete mayde … alle þe surgens of Salerne ne schul save mi live’ (ll. 962–64). Now Alexandrine returns to Melior to report William’s likely demise from love; rather than be called a murderer (‘manquellere’, 1.993), she will indeed grant him her love. And soon both have declared their intentions, embraced, exchanged kisses, and shared the sorrows they have each endured. Alexandrine can safely walk to one side, for she can tell that William is longing ‘to pleie … þe prive love game’ (l. 1020), and indeed the couple ‘layked þere at lykyng al þe long daye’ (l. 1026). Alexandrine returns with a joke about the superior healing skills of each of the lovers in comparison to those surgeons of Salerno. The onset of love, its symptoms and development – the loss of appetite, feeling hot and cold, the sleeplessness and lack of pleasure in courtly pastimes – are all classic indicators of the malady. The English author concentrates the multiple metaphorical domains of the original (in particular a cluster relating to hunting) to make witty play with the discourse of medicine. The emotional depth of the lovers’ feelings, interspersed with pragmatic considerations about the social consequences of confessing their passion, are skilfully developed in William of Palerne, beyond their treatment in the source-narrative.36 Melior’s deployment of courtly love-terms is sophisticated, and there is high comedy in Alexandrine’s intervention in William’s dreaming subconscious and the powerful physical arousal confirmed by his sexual response to his pillow. Both lovers are awkwardly innocent: they must almost forcefully be brought together, induced to declare their love to one another by a knowing go-between and granted the privacy for consummation to be feasible, all within a sustained metaphorical framing of love as sickness and lovers as one another’s physicians.
Conclusion
Understandably, the pathology of falling in love is broadly similar for our two heroines and the men they love; the external sensation that impacts on the lady is apprehended by sense organs that do not differ between the sexes.37 Strikingly, and in contradistinction to the medical models for love-sickness, the precipitating mechanism is not the female gaze, but rather (in the case 36
37
Space does not permit a detailed comparison with the French source, which is preserved in a unique manuscript (Paris, Arsenal 6565, ff. 77–157). Guillaume de Palerne, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva, 1990). Wack, Lovesickness, 110–25 discusses the interaction of gender and lovesickness in general.
Ladies Fall in Love in Medieval Romance 109
of Blensinbil) left radically undetermined or (in the case of Melior) apparently produced through a kind of socially contagious admiration current in a group of young women. Perhaps surprisingly, both women and men experience profound initial anxiety as they move from diagnosing the cause of the physiological disturbance to seeking its remedy. The women who love immediately recognize a particular, gendered difficulty in disclosing their feelings: the love-object will regard her as immodest or changeable or will simply not reciprocate (here the Ovidian model of Dido is a cautionary one).38 She must devise a strategy to communicate her feelings, but indirection is key. Effective performance – wrongfooting and unsettling the beloved, recruiting a trustworthy, experienced and discreet ally – goes hand in hand with performativity: bringing about change by working to induce a reciprocal love in the love-object. Blensinbil achieves this through her own ingenuity; the helpless Melior has to rely upon her friend’s magical capacities. Blensinbil’s profound physical arousal without an identifiable stimulus, whether visible or aural, is unusual; so too is the cessation of her symptoms through distraction and then their intensification once the stimulus in the form of Kanelangres has been identified. This sequencing of her symptomatology is quite distinctive; Gottfried’s version of the analogous events presents the onset of love in Blanchefleur in conformity with the prevailing model. Melior’s initial passion for the mysterious foundling is treated with sympathy, but the narrator cannot resist some humour at her expense. Her internal debate, structured around scholastic models, focuses on the role and categorization of different psychological faculties and their functions in creating her physiological turmoil.39 The protracted argument passes through a number of phases; just when she seems satisfactorily to have resolved the debate, an objection presents itself and sleep must be postponed while she restates the argument. The English author takes his own line in a number of ways: the dream sent by Alexandrine is altogether more decorous than the dream that arises from Guillaume’s adolescent erotic imaginings, and William’s love-sickness is directly caused by Alexandrine’s intervention rather than by the coincidental dream. In William, the play on the word grece and the dialogue’s rhetorical concentration permit love literally to be depicted as sickness and the discourse of illness also to function as the main metaphorical vehicle for the lovers’ emotions. So too, the enthusiasm with which, once they have 38
39
Adams, Violent Passions, 108–21: ‘As Dido sadly but accurately observes, Eneas would not have left her had he felt about her as she did about him’ (119).
See Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), 202–03; and Adams, Violent Passions, 36.
110 Carolyne Larrington
confessed their love, William and Melior begin love-making contrasts with the indirection of the French source, which assures us that Guillaume and Mélior behave with a proper restraint. While the two lovers do give pleasure to one another, this is done Sans reproche et sans vilonie, | Car por riens nule ne feïst | Chose dont on le represist (‘Without reproach or wrongfulness, for they did nothing for which they could be reprehended’, ll. 1780–82). Performative and performance-related strategizing is short-circuited by Alexandrine’s magical intervention and friendly listening ear; since each lover explains to her their feelings before they are brought face-to-face neither has to act on his or her initiative to communicate their feelings and elicit an answering passion in the other.40 Nevertheless, despite their comic awkwardness and naïvety, both know what is appropriate to say and do when Alexandrine, confident that they are now on the right track, steps aside. The two heroines, then, fall in love apparently quite suddenly, without a specific visual stimulus, without being confident that their love will be reciprocated, and with a full consciousness of the social and emotional risks each runs in seeking a cure for her love. The text, in each case, encourages the audience to give weight to the emotion in play, at the same time as permitting itself a knowing wink over the heads of the stricken women. What could possibly disturb Blensinbil’s self-possession and happiness, asks the Old Norse text, and further, what can possibly have caused her sudden feverish illness? Is eye or heart to blame for Melior’s predicament, the young princess asks? How is William to respond when he discovers that the pillow he embraces so passionately is not his young friend? ‘Few things are without flaw’ indeed; Blensinbil’s passion will not spare her the short life and tragic fate of many a medieval mother. Melior’s love will carry her through a range of extraordinary adventures to a happy marriage with her William. The heroines of later romances in these traditions do not become victims of the love-malady to this degree; in Old Norse their stories are shaped by the tradition of misogamy in the popular maiden-king sagas, while in French and English they increasingly conform to highly gendered ideas about female shamefastness, honour and danger.41
40
41
See Randy P. Schiff, ‘Cross-Channel Becomings-Animal: Primal Courtliness in Guillaume de Palerne and William of Palerne’, Exemplaria, 21 (2009), 418–38, on the importance of Alexandrine’s magical powers in the English text, in particular 428–29.
See Mary C. Flannery, Practising Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2020). Research for this chapter formed part of the international project ‘Emotion and the Medieval Self in Northern Europe’, funded by the Icelandic Research Fund, grant 1371-1373904.
8
Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight J or di S ánc h e z - M art í
W
q
e know that in the Middle Ages minstrels frequently declaimed poetic compositions accompanied by some string instrument. These sonic events were inevitably ephemeral and left no trace whatsoever, other than the impression they made on their earwitnesses, whose audial and memorial abilities were likely more developed than those of present-day audiences.1 In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the poet mentions how he attended such a social occasion and heard the romance being recited, exactly as he promises to reproduce it from memory: If ȝe wyl lysten þis laye bot on littel quile, I schal telle hit as-tit, as I in toun herde, with tonge.2
This reference is not enough to substantiate a claim that the Middle English verse romances were intended for oral delivery before a listening audience. The presence of other textual and linguistic clues, however, has led scholars to believe that the metrical romances were indeed expected to be transmitted aurally.3 I do not propose to search Gawain for signs of oral-memorial trans See C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT, 2006), 66.
1
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford, 1967), ll. 30–32. All references are to this edition, unless otherwise stated.
2
For the most compelling research see Murray McGillivray, Memorization in the Transmission of the Middle English Romances (New York, 1990). See also Karl Reichl, ‘Orality and Performance’, in Raluca Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, eds, A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (Cambridge, 2009), 132–49; and Ad Putter, ‘Middle English Romances and the Oral Tradition’, in Karl Reichl, ed., Medieval Oral Literature (Berlin, 2012), 335–52. For a summary of the views held by those sceptical about the oral circulation of the English romances, see Ad Putter, ‘A
3
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mission. I approach this poem from a literary and sensory perspective with the intention of recovering the soundscape envisioned by the Gawain-poet.4 I will focus on aspects of the romance’s sonic representation to show the affective and cultural qualities the Gawain-poet attached to the sense of hearing, thus increasing our understanding and appreciation of the poet’s achievement. John Burrow’s influential monograph on Gawain opens with the sentence: ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem for the ear rather than the eye.’5 Indeed, the Gawain-poet not only described narrative events for us to visualize them, but also registered their sonic imprint, as we shall see, endowing the story with heightened realism. The poet appears to have placed the faculty of hearing high in the hierarchy of the senses. The idea that Gawain will be killed is conveyed through the metaphor of loss of hearing: ‘Þe dunte þat schulde hym [i.e., Gawain] deue’ (1286).6 Deafness is comparable to death, suggesting that in the poet’s imagination hearing was an intrinsic and essential part of being alive. It could also be a source of pleasure, which the poet invites auditors of his poem to enjoy: ‘Thenne watz hit lef vpon list to lyþen þe houndez’ (1719).7 Without having to describe the acoustic qualities of sounds, he contrives to evoke sonic situations charged with positive emotional connotations. Such treatment of the soundscape is proof not only of the poet’s descriptive skills, but also of his conviction that the audience would appreciate his nuanced representation of their auditory environment. This essay offers a partial study of Gawain’s soundscape, centred on the presence, relevance and narrative uses, first, of some of the romance’s sounds and, next, of some of its silences. The poem’s sonic environment has not received much scholarly attention,8 and can easily go unnoticed by present-day readers as a result of their
4
5 6
7
8
Historical Introduction’, in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds, The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (Harlow, 2000), 1–15 (3–7).
The word ‘soundscape’ was coined by R. Murray Schafer in his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (New York, 1977); see OED, s.v. soundscape, n. (b). J. A. Burrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London, 1965), 1.
The Green Knight talks about his hypothetical wordlessness to refer to his own possible death: ‘if I spende no speche’ (410). Note that speech was sometimes included in the late medieval sensorium and was directly related to hearing. For this line I adopt the manuscript reading as suggested in The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London, 2014), 732, whose meaning the editors gloss as follows: ‘Then it was delightful to the sense of hearing to hear the hounds’; for this interpretation, see MED, s.vv. lef adj. 3a(a) and list n. 1(a).
To my knowledge, the only essay that approaches the sonic dimension of Gawain as a whole is Alain Renoir, ‘An Echo to the Sense: The Patterns of Sound in Sir
Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 113
historical distance and the pervasive noise pollution of the present, which has reduced acoustic perceptiveness.
‘Watz hit lef vpon list’: The Sounds of Romance
The narrative action of the romance starts in Camelot, where the Knights of the Round Table gather to celebrate Christmastide. The festivities are planned to last for fifteen days, during which time the knights are engaged in activities pertaining to their social condition: they ‘tournayed’ (41), ‘[j]usted’ (42) and took part in the dancing of ‘caroles’ (43). The poem appeals to the auditory sense: ‘Such glaum ande gle glorious to here, | Dere dyn vpon day, daunsyng on nyȝtes’ (46–47). The two lines invite the audience to imagine the activities of the court aurally: the chivalric exercises produce that ‘pleasing sound’ during the day; music facilitates and accompanies the evening dances.9 These are fundamental elements of the court’s soundscape during the festal fortnight and no further details seem necessary, since the audience members were expected to be familiar with similar aural experiences. Yet the poet chose to influence his audience affectively, as he observes that such soundscape was ‘glorious to hear’. In describing the festive mood of the sophisticated and luxurious celebrations of New Year’s Day, the poet alludes to the ambient sonority and the social interactions within the acoustic space.10 When the singing of mass in the chapel ends, another acoustic event follows: ‘Loude crye watz þer kest of clerkez and oþer, | Nowel nayted onewe, neuened ful ofte’ (64–65). The shouts of Noel! exhibit the convivial atmosphere in which everyone partakes, clerics and non-clerics alike, establishing an acoustic community.11 When they proceed to the table, we learn of the seating arrangements, elaborate Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Donald R. Howard and Christian Zacher, eds, Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Notre Dame, IN, 1968), 144–58 (first published in English Miscellany, 13 (1962), 9–23). The sonority of the hunting episode has excited more interest: see Sandy Feinstein, ‘Sounding the Hunt in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Dalhousie Review, 82 (2001), 35–53; and Ad Putter, ‘The Ways and Words of the Hunt: Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Master of Game, Sir Tristrem, Pearl, and Saint Erkenwald’, The Chaucer Review, 40 (2006), 354–85.
Renoir, ‘Echo to the Sense’, 148; cf. line 1536.
9
Schafer defines ‘acoustic space’ as follows: ‘The acoustic space of any sound is that area over which it may be heard before it drops below the ambient sound level’ (Soundscape, 271).
10
Emma Dillon, ‘Song and the Soundscape of Old French Romance’, in Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald, eds, Thinking Medieval Romance (Oxford, 2018),
11
114 Jordi Sánchez-Martí
decorations and choice viands. Trumpets and kettledrums announce the first course of the banquet: Þen þe first cors come with crakkyng of trumpes, … Nwe nakryn noyse with þe noble pipes, Wylde werbles and wyȝt wakned lote, Þat mony hert ful hiȝe hef at her towches. (116–20)
The poet captures the acoustic texture of the sounds filling the room, the sudden blaring of trumpets combined with kettledrums in a sequence of loud notes. Moreover, the alliteration in line 119 seems to mimic onomatopoeically the trumpets’ musical tones.12 The poet aims to convey the effect music has on the mood of those present, whose hearts are uplifted. The scene is an example of what Emma Dillon has described as ‘the festal soundscape trope’.13 It appears at first that the entertainment in Gawain consists only in the fanfare and kettledrums announcing the first course, but towards the end of the first fitt we are given to understand that, when the celebration resumes, the guests go back to enjoy their meal and ‘mynstralcie’ (484). Abruptly, ‘An oþer noyse ful newe neȝed biliue, | Þat þe lude myȝt haf leue liflode to cach’ (132–33). We are not told about the sonic qualities of this new noyse, but instead the poet interprets its narrative significance for us, since the intrusion of this sound event in the acoustic space marks the true beginning of the poem’s ‘aunter’ (27).14 As Dillon argues, ‘sounds which enter the acoustic community from outside are able similarly to determine actions and reveal the community’.15 Here this new sound triggers the subsequent action of the romance while bringing cohesion to the company in Camelot. Courtly entertainments in late medieval England included not only celebrations but also pastimes such as hunting, as contemporary literary texts, including romances, suggest.16 The courtly hunt was organized as a public spectacle that enacted ideal social structures, speaking to a nobility conversant with its intricacies, protocols and terminology. During Gawain’s stay at
12 13
14
15 16
155–69, who states, ‘While sound can establish environment, it can also establish those within it as an “acoustic community”’ (164).
Renoir, ‘Echo to the Sense’, 152.
Dillon, ‘Soundscape of Old French Romance’, 164; she suggests that such a trope derives from Chrétien de Troyes’ depiction of the wedding of Erec and Enide.
Schafer defines ‘sound event’ as ‘the smallest self-contained particle of a soundscape’ (Soundscape, 274). Dillon, ‘Soundscape of Old French Romance’, 164.
See Anne Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature (Cambridge, 1993).
Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 115
Castle Hautdesert, Bertilak goes hunting on three consecutive days, displaying and reasserting his court’s nobility and capacity to replicate the glamour of Camelot. Besides providing a detailed account of each day of hunting, the Gawain-poet makes a point of recording the sonic imprint of the chase, showing his profound knowledge of all the hunting liturgy, including horn blowing. In the first hunt, as part of the preparations for the deer drive, the poet reports how the professional hunters ‘Blwe bygly in buglez þre bare mote’ (1141), referring to a horn signal consisting of ‘three notes blown with three separate breaths of wind’ to convey that the dogs were being driven to the hunting grounds.17 Once the deer have been killed, the huntsmen ‘blw prys’ (1362) – not to signify the capture of the animals but as part of the ritual of the curée or reward for the dogs – and immediately after we hear them ‘Strakande ful stoutly mony stif motez’ (1364) to signal the retreat.18 In the boar hunt first the huntsmen and next Bertilak ‘rechated’ (1446, 1466) in order to summon the hounds and the hunting party,19 until the quarry is killed and marked with the horn signal of the ‘prys’ (1601), this time proclaiming the death. If the practice of the hunt had a social function, the adoption of technically precise but recondite terminology to describe its action and sonority reinforces the poet’s ideological alignment with the nobility and its pre-eminence. The social differentiation implicit in the hunting language becomes even more conspicuous when the terms used are borrowed directly from Anglo-Norman, since they are obscure to the uninitiated. Perhaps intentionally, the Gawain-poet takes advantage of this sociolinguistic stratification as suggests the fact that Gawain contains the earliest occurrence of rechate in English (