Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn 9781501514210, 9781501520563

Citation preview

Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture Essays on Marginality, Difference, and Reading Practices in Honor of Thomas Hahn Edited by Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane

ISBN 978-1-5015-2056-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1421-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1423-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950490 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Old paper tree studded, © aydinmutlu, GettyImages Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Valerie B. Johnson and Kara L. McShane Introduction 1 Theresa Coletti Chapter 1 Reimagining Medieval Studies: The Career of Thomas Hahn

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Part I Marginalized Texts, Traditions, and Voices Leah Haught Chapter 2 Racialized Outcasts: Non-White Bodies and the Construction of the 21 Outlaw-Hero in Modern Robin Hood Film Leila K. Norako Chapter 3 The Mongols of Middle English Literature

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Eve Salisbury Chapter 4 Lybeaus Desconus: Illegitimacy and the Spurious Mother

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Merrall Llewelyn Price Chapter 5 Thomas Becket and the Pardoner’s Problem: Eunuchry and Healing on the Road to Canterbury 99 James A. Knapp Chapter 6 Anxious Appearance: Illustrating Dissimulation and the Case of the Counterfeit Crank 119 Emily Rebekah Huber Chapter 7 Acallam na Senórach and Border-Discourse

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Valerie B. Johnson Chapter 8 Ecomedieval Revenge and Justice in “Robyn and Gandelyn” Cynthia A. Rogers Chapter 9 Outcast Lyrics: Responsive Reading in the Findern Manuscript

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Part II: Networks of Connection Kara L. McShane Chapter 10 Decoding the Dead: Funerary Inscriptions in St. Erkenwald and The Book of 205 John Mandeville Russell A. Peck Chapter 11 Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower’s Confessio Amantis 223 Lynn Staley Chapter 12 Richard Coer de Lyon and Invented Identities

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Sarah Stanbury Chapter 13 The Crow’s “Cokkow!”: Bird Debates and Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” Alan Lupack Chapter 14 Perceval’s Mare

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Misty Schieberle Chapter 15 Gower’s Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod 305

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Derrick Pitard Chapter 16 “The Prioress’s Tale” and Vernacular Devotion Index

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Introduction

This book exists because Thomas Hahn is an exceptional mentor. An insightful scholar, his characteristic blend of humor, deep-seated compassion, and hard-earned wisdom has shaped medieval studies through his published works, but also through the thinking and research of his students. Colleagues and collaborators repeatedly speak to the influence of Hahn’s published work, but also his classroom presentations, his gracious modeling of work in progress and frank discussions of failed inquiries, and above all his cultivation of multivalent perspectives and challenges to the status quo. The range of contributors, demographics, and subjects in this volume represents a small portion of Hahn’s interests, but they all demonstrate that he is a scholar who turned from conventional and normalized discourse in medieval studies to the margins and edges of the field, persistently working to confront racism, gendered discrimination, homophobia, and postcolonial guilt and responsibility. In the classroom, he delicately, and with unrelenting persistence, guides students through the messy and painful work of responsibly reading the literature of a past culture within the present. Tom Hahn’s commitment to teaching the understudied and marginalized literature of the medieval period was, for many of his students, a first entry to seeing the diversity and complexity of the medieval world and the way its struggles and conflicts often remain our own. This volume’s content manifests the widely expansive nature of Hahn’s interests. The first section, “Marginalized Texts, Traditions, and Voices,” focuses on communities and materials that have often been forced to the margins of critical inquiry. The second section, “Networks of Connection,” explores fresh relationships between texts both canonical and neglected, as well as embedding canonical works more deeply to their historical contexts.

Part I Marginalized Texts, Traditions, and Voices The volume’s critical scholarship begins with a piece that draws together many of Hahn’s interests, namely, matters of representation and the Robin Hood tradition. Leah Haught brings the outlaw tradition into dialogue with contemporary medievalisms in “Racialized Outcasts: Non-White Bodies and the Construction of the Outlaw-Hero in Modern Robin Hood Film.” In reading the 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves alongside the recent 2018 Robin Hood through the lens of race and racialization, Haught asserts that these modern narratives reflect https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-001

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contemporary racio-political explorations. By providing a Black, Muslim, nonEuropean counterpart for Robin Hood, both films reinforce contemporary discourses that identify the “medieval” as an origin for Anglo-American heroism grounded in whiteness. Thus, these Little John figures participate in familiar tokenism, engaging in nostalgia that reinforces inherently unjust race relations where non-white bodies continue to serve white supremacy and white privilege. Leila K. Norako takes up the work of perspective and representation, expanding recent scholarship on medieval representations of Mongols in “The Mongols of Middle English Literature.” Norako argues that depictions of the Mongol in The Book of John Mandeville and Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” as likely Christian converts and allies situate Mongols within, and as part of, discourses of crusading that circulated throughout the period that agitated for continued efforts at establishing Christian hegemony in and around Jerusalem. As Norako outlines these cultural fantasies, she draws attention to new ways in which Chaucer likely engaged with The Book of John Mandeville—which, in turn, makes extensive use of earlier missionary accounts. Thus, in their presentation of Mongols, both works engage in both nostalgic and anticipatory fantasies of Christian empire, fantasies that necessitate the elimination and erasure of the very figures these works racialize. The volume shifts from racialized power to gendered power and authority with Eve Salisbury’s “Lybeaus Desconus: Illegitimacy and the Spurious Mother.” Salisbury’s return to the Arthurian world confronts not the namelessness of the Fair Unknown, but rather the namelessness of his mother in relation to the young knight’s illegitimacy. Salisbury places the romance into the context of legal understandings of legitimacy and illegitimacy, suggesting that drawing on known legal discourses allows romance to provide its increasingly literate audiences with vicarious opportunities to engage challenging circumstances. In leaving the knight’s mother nameless, Salisbury suggests, the romance leaves her, rather than her son, outside the potential borders of legitimacy: thus, it is the mother, not the son, who remains “spurious” at the end of Lybeaus, while her son enters into the patrilineal systems of Arthur’s court. Questions of gender and sexuality have long been of interest to scholars of Chaucer’s Pardoner, and Merrall Llewellyn Price revisits this infamous pilgrim in “Thomas Becket and the Pardoner’s Problem: Eunuchry and Healing on the Road to Canterbury.” In a nuanced reading of two accounts of Becket’s miracles, appearing in the Miracles by William of Canterbury and the History of the Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas by Benedict of Peterborough, Price argues that Becket is an especially appropriate patron saint for the Pardoner, whose genitalia have long been a topic of critical discussion. Becket’s healing power, foregrounded in the opening of the Canterbury Tales, may have particular resonance for the body

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and soul of this pilgrim long linked to the partial and fragmentary through physical appearance. James A. Knapp moves the discussion of dissimulation into the early modern period in “Anxious Appearance: Illustrating Dissimulation and the Case of the Counterfeit Crank.” Knapp explores English anxieties over semblance in sixteenth-century accounts of Nicholas Jennings, known for feigning epilepsy. Through a careful reading of multiple editions of Thomas Harman’s accounts of Jennings’s activity, Knapp argues that anxieties about—and preoccupations with—visual evidence reflect growing concerns about falsehood. Reading text alongside accompanying woodcuts, Knapp articulates concerns about fact and fiction (and the ability to tell the difference) that have powerful resonance into the present day. The last three essays in this first part of the volume turn to marginalized texts, the kind of understudied works which have long been of interest to Hahn’s scholarship. In “Acallam na Senórach and Border-Discourse,” Emily Rebekah Huber explores matters of orality and authority in the context of Ireland. Huber argues that the Acallam’s purposeful disturbance of temporal boundaries, in which narratives of the pagan past are authorized by Christian Saint Patrick, constructs a deliberate ahistoricity that both reveals and constructs multiple phases of Ireland’s past. Many of the Acallam’s episodes focus on placenames; in providing narratives that literally gloss the landscape, Huber argues, the work legitimizes native legends in the face of encroaching clerical and secular authorities. Matters of authority likewise animate Valerie B. Johnson’s essay, which explores how justice and authority are linked to space and place. In her “Ecomedieval Revenge and Justice in ‘Robyn and Gandelyn’,” Johnson reads the oftenmarginalized short poem “Robyn and Gandelyn” within its manuscript and ecological contexts. Johnson asserts that the poem’s use of the greenwood itself most closely links the poem to the Robin Hood tradition. The violence, generic fluidity, and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion of “Robyn and Gandelyn” make the poem a test case in the limits of community, of the borders of the tradition. In turn, Johnson suggests, the poem challenges traditional perceptions of the greenwood as strictly liminal, inviting a reconsideration of how the greenwood itself functions within the Robin Hood tradition. The first part of the volume transitions this focus on marginalized texts to gentry readership, seeking to make textual engagement visible. In “Outcast Lyrics: Responsive Reading in the Findern Manuscript,” Cynthia A. Rogers examines the “outcast” lyrics of the Findern manuscript (CUL MS Ff.1.6), those often neglected by modern efforts, to shed new light on medieval reading practices. The manuscript emphasizes the social, interactive elements of reading; making

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meaning from its lyrics depends on close attention to manuscript context. For Rogers, then, both reading and writing involve active exchange in the Findern; participatory responses and engagement with others who are experiencing the text were often ephemeral, but are at least partially made visible in this particular artifact. Thus, careful attention to the manuscript’s many hands and to how poems refer back to each other—in both content and structure—reveal exchanges that were key to medieval reading practices. The structures of modern anthologies have obscured how medieval audiences and scribes produced meaning. With her focus on reading contexts, Rogers provides a bridge to the second part of the volume.

Part II Networks of Connection The second part of the volume more deeply explores connections across canonical and less frequently studied texts. In “Decoding the Dead: Funerary Inscriptions in St. Erkenwald and The Book of John Mandeville,” Kara L. McShane reads an infrequently studied episode in The Book of John Mandeville, the discovery of the trilingual grave inscription of Hermes Trismegistus, alongside the more inscrutable tomb writing in the Middle English St. Erkenwald. McShane argues that two moments present complementary views of language and writing’s preservative power that were active in late medieval England. In particular, both reflect a keenly felt awareness of linguistic precarity. Thus, she suggests, these two narratives demonstrate the extent to which vernaculars remained a fraught choice with an uncertain future for late medieval English literary production— and to which writing as a medium was understood as a potentially powerful, yet unstable, means of commemoration. Memory and commemoration underlie the use of historical figures as object lessons. In “Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Russell A. Peck suggests that Alexander functions in Gower’s work as an exemplar of failed kingship, preoccupied with conquest elsewhere rather than right rule at home. While Alexander the Great appears periodically throughout the first seven books of Gower’s Confessio, he is replaced in Book 8 by Apollonius, who Peck reads as Gower’s example of right and legitimate kingship. Alexander the Great’s subtle pervasiveness, then, functions as a critique of paternity, one with clear applications to Gower’s view of England in his own day as he navigates between Vox Clamantis, the Cronica Tripartita, and the Confessio itself. The next grouping in part two traces textual networks, putting frequently studied texts into new contexts. In “Richard Coer de Lyon and Invented Identi-

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ties,” Lynn Staley situates the romance in two key contexts: the enduring conversation of alterity and imperialism surrounding Richard I and the crusades, and also discourses of nationalism and violence against the Welsh and Scots during the reign of Edward I. Edward I—and later Edward III—were, like Richard, mythmakers and propagandists, figures seeking to use history to justify national myths. Staley argues that the poem does not present a definitive position on English chivalry; rather, its variant versions represent an ongoing conversation about English identity, particularly the justification of violence. In her reading of scenes of anthropophagy and of Richard’s consumption of the lion’s heart, Staley demonstrates that the romance presents a model of male might and chivalry that is devoid of empathy. Staley suggests the poem provides a complex reading to a growing mercantile class whose priorities were perhaps not those of the noble class, calling into question the depictions of heroism and political violence that mark the narrative. Sarah Stanbury moves from national myth to literary networks in “The Crow’s ‘Cokkow!’: Bird Debates and Chaucer’s ‘Manciple’s Tale’.” Stanbury argues that birdsong links the “Manciple’s Tale” to bird debate songs popular during Chaucer’s moment: these avian debates, she suggests, address not only matters of love but of musical and poetic form, exploring the ability of language to convey truth. As she draws on French ballads, the Chaucerian oeuvre, and writings by Sir John Clanvowe and John Lydgate, Stanbury conceives of the cuckoo’s song as linking word with fact: the crow’s “cokkow” only speaks the truth of Apollo’s situation as cuckold in the “Manciple’s Tale,” but more broadly, the cuckoo’s voice speaks its own name as a kind of plain truth. In presenting cuckoo in the context of linguistic play, Stanbury reclaims the bird not only as foolish or dull, but also as a strategic truth-teller. As collaborators move from birds to horses, the focus on literary networks remains. In “Perceval’s Mare,” Alan Lupack reexamines the relationship between the knight and his horse to suggest an additional source for Malory’s Morte Darthur. Lupack tracks references to knights riding mares across a sweeping range of Arthuriana, with particular emphasis on the central role of Perceval’s mare in the Middle English Sir Perceval of Galles. Lupack identifies a similar use of the mare as Torre’s mount upon his arrival at Arthur’s court in Malory’s work, a connection that expands the potential minor sources Malory may have worked with and known. Audience awareness of textual networks are central to Misty Schieberle’s “Gower’s Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and the Litel Bibell of Knyghthod.” Schieberle tracks legacies of influence from Aristotle to John Gower to Christine de Pizan and finally to the Litel Bibell of Knyghthod. Reading through the works’ discussions of Fortune and fate, partic-

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ularly the figure of Atropos, Schieberle details how Gower’s use of the Aristotelian mean influenced Scrope’s translation of the Epistre Othea as well as the Bibell. In the process, she argues that we should see the Bibell not as a poor translation but as an adaptation that effectively tailors Christine’s aristocratic conduct manual for non-aristocratic English audiences. As the volume concludes, matters of gendered authority come to the foreground of these legacies of influence. Derrick Pitard addresses the complex negotiation of faith and power in “‘The Prioress’s Tale’ and Vernacular Devotion.” Pitard argues that the Prioress is a vernacular theorist, able to engage with discourses of popular piety in order to assert her own authority in opposition to dominant, Latinate clerical discourses. Pitard reads the Prioress alongside Richard Rolle’s devotional material, particularly the worship of the Holy Name. Rolle’s vernacular theory, Pitard suggests, provides a devotional model similar to that of the Prioress. Thus, he suggests, we might productively read the Prioress alongside Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Tale” to gain a deeper understanding of how Chaucer’s female pilgrims engage with the academic—and non-academic—discourses of their moment. The range of literary materials represented in this volume, from the most canonical to the least studied, themselves reflect the breadth of Thomas Hahn’s career. The contributors, like Hahn, continually revisit and query the well-known literary output of the period, seeking out networks of connection through the lens of less studied, but no less dynamic, texts and perspectives. As is typical of Hahn’s approach to medieval studies, many of the essays range across traditional period boundaries, blurring the line between medieval and early modern, early English and early Irish; the contributors pay tribute to Hahn through an admixture of linguistic and cultural perspectives, for example drawing on Middle English, Latin, and French, and by questioning the assumptions of insular perspectives through views from the Continent. The conversations represented by the work of this volume, and the research this book engages, are equally wide-ranging, while also recognizing that no single contributor will ever have the “final word” on a subject. This enthusiasm for inquiry and exploration have animated Hahn’s career, characteristic not only of his approach to scholarship, but also to life beyond the library and the classroom. Hahn is not a mentor who produces replicas of his own narrow interests; instead, he models mindsets and methodologies, openly displaying his own successes and failures through reflection, inspiring colleagues as well as students. Consequently, the contributions to this volume recognize and reflect the value of Hahn’s career as scholar and as mentor because they show ongoing engagement with and reassessment of past conclusions. As a scholar, Hahn consistently reaches and works across boundaries,

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whether textual, geographical, disciplinary, or otherwise. As a mentor, Hahn has guided scholars to explore similarly broad topics, helping them shape themselves into colleagues. As a colleague, Hahn challenges us all to think deeply and explore widely. It is in Tom Hahn’s model, then, that the essays of this book negotiate boundaries to contribute to a medieval studies that lingers upon and enjoys the periphery, as much as the center.

Theresa Coletti

Chapter 1 Reimagining Medieval Studies: The Career of Thomas Hahn The scholarly career of this volume’s honoree suggests a narrative punctuated by key moments in medieval English literary studies over nearly five decades. This correspondence between the contributions of one medievalist and major developments in a capacious academic field is not accidental. From its beginnings, the scholarship of Thomas Hahn (hereafter Tom) has both addressed many of that field’s central interests and played a key role in identifying its future preoccupations. Tom’s academic pursuits—in literary, cultural, and historical studies; manuscripts and textual editing; pedagogy and disciplinary practices—have nurtured creative scholarly engagements across generations and advanced the work of medieval English studies for communities within and beyond the academy. It is an honor to have the opportunity of constructing that narrative for this volume paying tribute to Tom Hahn’s multi-faceted scholarly work. Tom and I first crossed paths at the University of Rochester in the 1973 – 1974 academic year, when he was appointed Assistant Professor of English and I was completing my PhD in that department. Tom’s timely arrival at Rochester made it possible for him to join my dissertation committee. Although he did not know me, he energetically embraced that role. Thus, I became Tom’s first (and now surely oldest!) graduate student. During the brief time that Tom and I overlapped at the University of Rochester, we established a professional friendship that has endured to this day. Over the decades, my encounters with Tom have unfailingly confirmed what I learned about him when he was on the threshold of his brilliant career: that he is a source of wisdom and valuable critique on everything medieval, the most generous and encouraging of colleagues, and a loyal friend. Because Tom’s achievements as scholar and teacher have contributed so importantly to the co-curricular programming and resources that have long made the University of Rochester a rewarding place to pursue medieval English studies, it seems appropriate to preface these reflections on his career by addressing the local environment in which these contributions have occurred. In 1973 – 1974, Tom joined a department that was already home to Russell Peck, one of the most innovative and influential advocates for medieval English studies that the field has ever seen. At the time of Tom’s appointment, the university sponsored Medieval House, a residential facility for students interested in medieval studies that also served as primary campus site for lectures and programs in the field. Behttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-002

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tween 1975 and 1988, Tom would serve three times as the House’s director. Thus began his long career of inviting external speakers and organizing the events that featured them. From his relatively modest Medieval House beginnings and over more than three decades, Tom would move on to organize and convene at Rochester a number of groundbreaking academic conferences. Hundreds of medievalists and researchers working in allied areas have visited the University of Rochester to attend these meetings, gathering there because of Tom’s gift for identifying innovative work in medieval studies and creating occasions for its dissemination. Rochester became a medievalist’s destination of choice because the university has long supported endeavors promoting and advancing medieval English studies. In 1987, the university established the Rossell Hope Robbins Library, a comprehensive medieval studies collection now in its fourth decade of welcoming researchers and conversations in and beyond that field.¹ Since 1990, the university has provided an institutional home for the TEAMS Middle English Text Series (METS), which makes available, in print and digital formats, newly edited versions of Middle English texts. Created by founding director Russell Peck, METS has received multiple major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Under Tom, its current director, METS has recently been awarded additional NEH funding.² Anyone working in Middle English literary and cultural studies will know the transformational impact that the METS project has had on scholarship and teaching. But METS is also an important signpost in this account of Tom’s career because, like the Robbins Library, it is part of an institutional landscape that has nurtured forward-looking, medievally focused projects and programming, with Tom often acting as their co-creator.³ Tom’s commitment to developing knowledge and facilitating intellectual exchange in academic communities, local and far-flung, marks one crucial feature of his own distinguished scholarly record. My narrative thus far has emphasized Tom’s connections to medieval English studies, but his scholarship in fact ranges

 “The Robbins Library,” University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, https://www.library. rochester.edu/spaces/robbins.  “NEH Announces $30 Million for 238 Humanities Projects Nationwide,” New York State Museum, http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/research-collections/state-history/news/neh-announces-30million-238-humanities-projects-nationwide. To date METS has made available hundreds of Middle English works in ninety-four published volumes; another sixty-five volumes are in progress or forthcoming.  The fact that most of the contributors to this volume have either been involved with Robbins Library projects and/or are themselves editors of METS texts reflects the synergistic institutional connections that I describe.

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broadly from the classical period to the modern world. His departmental webpage notes his engagement with “sponsorship, production, and interpretation of texts and images from the earlier Middle Ages through the early modern period” and highlights recurring themes of his teaching and research: “representations of those at the edges of emerging European identities, including women, outlaws, virtuous pagans, ‘Indians,’ and other racialized groups.”⁴ Tom’s many publications—on medieval romance and classical reception, Chaucer, Robin Hood, literatures of the New World, and medieval and early modern East/West literary and cultural encounters—attest to his declared preoccupations. Yet these do not fully comprehend the reach of Tom’s bibliography, which also features, for example, work on Dante, Puritan poetics, John Donne, Henry David Thoreau, and Angus Wilson. Because a detailed account of Tom’s scholarly record is necessarily beyond my brief for this essay, what follows will focus on larger themes in the work that, for me, signal his most influential contributions to literary and cultural studies across the centuries. Tom’s 1974 UCLA dissertation on “virtuous heathens” anticipated a major thematic trajectory of his subsequent research and previewed his abiding investments in fourteenth-century English literature. This erudite study delineates concepts in patristic and early medieval theology and philosophy that informed later medieval vernacular writers’ attempts to “understand cultural differences and similarities” associated with non-Western Others whom they identified as “Indian.” It then examines how these concepts circulate in works by Chaucer, Gower, the Pearl Poet, and the Mandeville author, as well as romances of Arthur and Alexander.⁵ In the 1970s, Tom published two important articles based on his dissertation research. One argues that medieval ideas of the East’s virtuous heathens speak far more directly to the West’s fantasies about itself than to knowledge of the “Indian”; the other charts how modernity repurposed this medieval imaginative and cultural legacy to justify European conquest of the New World and its people.⁶ Tom’s interests in medieval and early modern thinking about racial and cultural differences—and the dangerous biases embedded in the West’s reflections on parts of the world it deemed alien—were prescient. In his contribution to this

 “Thomas Hahn,” University of Rochester Department of English, http://www.sas.rochester. edu/eng/people/faculty/hahn_thomas/index.html.  Thomas Hahn, “God’s Friends: Virtuous Heathens in Later Medieval Thought and English Literature” (PhD Dissertation, UCLA, 1974), 421.  Thomas Hahn, “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History,” Viator 9 (1978): 213 – 34; “Indians East and West: Primitivism and Savagery in English Discovery Narratives of the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978): 77– 114.

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volume, James A. Knapp makes exactly this point when he recalls Tom’s graduate seminar on the “pre-modern other”: “Tom’s class was a preview of important developments in critical race studies and theories of the other that now dominate critical discourse about intercultural exchange in pre-modern Europe.”⁷ Tom implicitly made a case for the significance of his foundational work on culturally different medieval Others when he edited “Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages” for The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2001).⁸ His wideranging introduction to that special issue addresses the state of race studies within medieval studies at the time, ca. 2000. Describing what scholarship on medieval race might contribute to “modern intellectual and academic cultures,” the essay maps prospects for—and urges pursuit of—a racially engaged medieval scholarship that dynamic recent work in the field is presently realizing.⁹ Tom’s involvement with Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Race and his forthcoming edition of the Middle English Alexander texts that were a cornerstone of his early research evidence his abiding commitment to investigating pre- and early modern racial encounters and discourses.¹⁰ The intellectual creativity that accounts, in part, for Tom’s ability to anticipate (and shape) important developments in pre- and early modern studies finds a counterpart in his talent for identifying high-stakes moments in scholarly discourse and for framing and broadcasting their significance for academic audiences. This is how I understand the timely occurrence of “Reconceiving Chaucer,” a conference that he organized and convened at the University of Rochester in 1988. Tom’s scholarly contributions to Chaucer studies are well represented by his many essays on The Canterbury Tales and his supervision, as general editor, of eight volumes of The Chaucer Bibliographies. He has served, by appointment, on numerous committees of the New Chaucer Society and as one of the society’s

 James A. Knapp, “Anxious Appearance: Illustrating Dissimulation and the Case of the Counterfeit Crank,” 119 – 34 at 119. The endnote accompanying Knapp’s statement indicates the direction such work has taken in recent decades, especially with an eye to developments in early modern studies and the scholars who are advancing conversations about race in that field.  The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001). This special issue featured essays by medievalists Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, William C. Jordan, and Sharon Kinoshita, scholars whose early work on medieval race and cultural difference remains a valuable influence on current conversations about the Middle Ages and critical race studies.  Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 1– 37, at 26.  Thomas Hahn, ed., A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 of A Cultural History of Race (London: Bloomsbury), 2021. Thomas Hahn, ed., Medieval English India: Alexander and Dindimus, Alexander’s Letter, and Other Texts, METS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications), forthcoming.

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elected trustees. Most generously, he took on the large and unforgiving job of chairing the Program Committee for the society’s highly successful 2010 Biennial Congress in Siena, Italy. But in the long list of Tom’s valuable interventions in Chaucer studies, that 1988 conference pinpoints a crucial moment in the trajectory of Chaucer scholarship, one primed for reflection on prevailing conceptions of the goals and practices of medieval studies at the time and future possibilities for the field. As Tom explains in the special issue of Exemplaria that featured papers from “Reconceiving Chaucer,” the conference coincided with the very creation of that journal, the first devoted to “theory in medieval and Renaissance studies,” and with the emergence, in the 1980s, of “other explicit arguments about method and motive in medieval studies.”¹¹ Assessing the state of the field in that period, Tom’s introduction to the issue considers traditional historicist approaches and analyzes ideas of history—and the Middle Ages—that implicitly shaped them. The essay persuasively argues for a medieval studies that engages directly with contemporary theoretical discourses and methodological perspectives, approaches that at the time had yet to find a sure foothold in the field. It perhaps requires some historical purchase on debates within medieval studies over the past four decades to appreciate the import of “Reconceiving Chaucer.” In hindsight, Tom’s “The Premodern Text and the Postmodern Reader” seems aimed to inspire scholarly orientations that many (most?) practitioners in the field now take for granted. The essays in the Exemplaria issue growing out of “Reconceiving Chaucer” speak more concretely to the conference’s significance for the then immediate future of medieval, especially English, studies. Contributions by Aranye [then Louise O.] Fradenberg, Seth Lerer, H. Marshall Leicester, and David Wallace, for example, previewed scholarly projects that would come to fruition in some of the most notable work in Middle English studies of the next decade.¹² In urging new directions for a more theoretically aware medieval studies, “The Premodern Text and the Postmodern Reader” also made clear the stakes of its argument for “reading the Middle Ages otherwise.” Rather than insisting upon the alterity of the field and its subject matter, medieval studies, Tom argued, needed to pur-

 Thomas Hahn, “The Premodern Text and the Postmodern Reader,” Exemplaria 2, no. 1 (1990): 1– 21, at 6.  Louise O. Fradenberg, “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria 2, no. 1 (1990): 169 – 202; H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Association Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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sue broader conversations within literary studies and encourage “dialogue with other contemporary academic discourses,” even if that meant resorting “to ‘anachronistic’ methods or alternative histories in the contemporary analysis of lived experience of the past.”¹³ Current debates in the field suggest that what he urged in 1990 remains relevant to the still unfinished project of a medieval studies that “reads otherwise.” Tom’s perspicacious insight into possibilities for the field surfaces, with a different twist, in his labors on behalf of Robin Hood studies, an area of research, play, and performance that he should claim credit for promoting, indeed co-creating, on a grand scale. Robin Hood figures in the larger profile of Tom’s interests because, as the legendary English outlaw, he represents one of the marginalized pre-modern identities that have been so central to Tom’s scholarly work. Since his rare, early appearances in late medieval English texts, the mythic outlaw has acquired an afterlife of historical breadth and immense cultural variety. The scope of that history and variety underwrite the work of “The Robin Hood Project,” a digital resource and database sponsored by the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library under the direction of Alan Lupack.¹⁴ The signature moment of Tom’s many contributions to Robin Hood studies must be the major conference on “Cultural Transformations of Robin Hood” that he organized in 1997. Convened at Rochester, the event would be the first of many biennial conferences focused on the outlaw hero. The second of these conferences (in Nottingham) led to the founding of the International Society for Robin Hood Studies in 1999. The year of “Cultural Transformations” also saw the publication, by the Middle English Text Series (METS), of Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, an influential collection of Robin Hood texts that has encouraged research and teaching on the legendary outlaw hero.¹⁵ This coincidence of Robin Hood-related activities aptly illustrates the convergence, at Rochester, of medieval-focused scholarly resources and academic leadership that I have noted. In this case, the convergence of Robbins Library sponsorship, METS, and international conference also draws upon Tom’s commitment to exploring the many sides of the legendary outlaw in his graduate and undergraduate teaching. Even a quick look at the individuals who have contributed over the years to “The Robin Hood Project” makes clear

 Hahn, “Premodern Text,” 6 and 13.  “The Robin Hood Project,” Robbins Library, University of Rochester, https://d.lib.rochester. edu/robin-hood.  Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997).

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that his own students have played major roles in developing this valuable resource.¹⁶ Long before his celebration by an international conference and by a society created in his name, the Robin Hood figure had attracted the attention of literary scholars, historians, and practitioners of the creative and performing arts. Tom’s edited collection of essays from the first Robin Hood conference showcases work by some of the earliest proponents of mainstream scholarly engagement with the legendary figure.¹⁷ Yet the title of that volume, Robin Hood in Popular Culture, also gestures toward the complex signifier that the legendary medieval outlaw long ago became, one whose shifting meanings in multiple forms and media, in fact, constitute perhaps his most noteworthy feature. This proliferation of Robin Hood phenomena importantly contributes to modern and contemporary medievalism, a robust arena of cultural activities and expressions that seek to recreate, remember, or reimagine the medieval past. Increasingly recognized by the academy as a subject worthy of scholarly pursuit, indeed as a major area of study in its own right, medievalism is important to this account because Tom’s efforts on behalf of Robin Hood studies, I believe, have contributed to this academic validation.¹⁸ Several essays in this volume ably demonstrate the value of medievalism as scholarly work. But Tom’s academic engagements with the legendary outlaw have also produced other outcomes—and outlets—for medievalism. From his first spot on a local Rochester television station in 1997 to his provision of commentary for an internationally produced documentary film in 2017, Tom has been a frequent voice for Robin Hood studies. In dozens of media appearances and contributions over three decades, he has shared his knowledge of the Robin Hood “brand” with audiences for print, electronic, and digital media around the global. Bringing his expertise in medieval studies and medievalism to wider audiences, Tom’s media work foregrounds the importance of both to public-facing conversations in the humanities.

 “About the Robin Hood Project,” Robbins Library, University of Rochester, https://d.lib.rochester.edu/project/robin-hood/about.  Thomas Hahn, ed., Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2000).  This is the place neither to attempt a full description of the ideas and cultural practices that have constituted medievalism’s own complex past nor to address its equally complex profile in the contemporary world. For one recent intervention, see Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg, Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection, and Discontent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

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If Tom’s scholarly career is inflected by his influential anticipation of possible futures for medieval studies, it is also the site of production for a distinguished body of bibliographical and editorial work in the field. Under his general editorship, The Chaucer Bibliographies project, published by the University of Toronto Press, has received three major NEH grants. More recently, his bibliographical endeavors have migrated to digital formats for the Oxford Bibliographies Online.¹⁹ Tom’s textual editing projects have ranged widely, from the Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle to a nineteenth-century operetta devoted to Robin Hood.²⁰ Editions of other important medieval and early modern works are in the pipeline. He is perhaps best known, though, for his METS edition of Gawain romances, a valuable collection that has advanced teaching and research on these distant textual cousins of the Pearl/Gawain poet.²¹ Several of Tom’s recent bibliographical and editorial projects involve collaborations with scholars who were once his students. The collaborative nature of this work merits special notice. In Tom’s case, collaboration does not merely describe the formal arrangements for producing the academic product. Rather, it signifies more generally his approach to scholarly pursuits. The visionary conferences highlighted in this narrative and the inviting, multi-dimensional environment for medieval studies at Rochester that Tom’s labors have long nurtured strike me as collaborations of a different sort. The building of such academic communities beyond the classroom requires collaboration on many levels. For Tom, teaching is also often a collaborative effort, one to which he has devoted his many intellectual and interpersonal gifts. It is little wonder that the University of Rochester, on four different occasions, has tapped him to receive its highest awards for teaching, including in 2017 a Lifetime Achievement Award in Graduate Education. This volume’s essays bear witness to the expansive scholarly interests of the person whom this book honors, attesting to his influential shaping of pre- and early modern literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the subjects that the essays address—race and racialization; transgression, virtuous heathens, Robin Hood,

 Thomas Hahn and Leah Haught, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2012; Sir Thomas Malory’s “Morte Darthur,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2017, https:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/medieval-studies#1.  Thomas Hahn, “The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle: Text, Sources, Introduction, and Commentary,” Mediaeval Studies 41 (1979): 106 – 60; Ye Original Operetta, in Five Acts, entitled Robin Hood. Writ by Charles Robinson. Facsimile of 1888 play, with Introduction (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009).  Thomas Hahn, ed., Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995; reissued, 2002).

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outlying and non-normative identities, Arthur, Alexander, Chaucer, romance, medievalism, etc.—generate a word cloud that could readily double as a verbal image of Tom’s own scholarly profile. The work gathered here also recognizes the generosity, deep humanity, and good humor that Tom Hahn has brought to every aspect of his academic career. His achievements—as scholar, teacher, and professional citizen—epitomize what is valuable and enduring about the practice of medieval studies in today’s world.

Bibliography “About the Robin Hood Project.” Robbins Library, University of Rochester. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/project/robin-hood/about. Fradenberg, Louise O. “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry.” Exemplaria 2, no. 1 (1990): 169 – 202. Hahn, Thomas. “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 1 – 37. Hahn, Thomas. “God’s Friends: Virtuous Heathens in Later Medieval Thought and English Literature.” PhD diss., UCLA, 1974. Hahn, Thomas. “Indians East and West: Primitivism and Savagery in English Discovery Narratives of the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978): 77 – 114. Hahn, Thomas. “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History.” Viator 9 (1978): 213 – 34. Hahn, Thomas, ed. Medieval English India: Alexander and Dindimus, Alexander’s Letter, and Other Texts. METS. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming. Hahn, Thomas. “The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle: Text, Sources, Introduction, and Commentary.” Mediaeval Studies 41 (1979): 106 – 60. Hahn, Thomas. “The Premodern Text and the Postmodern Reader.” Exemplaria 2, no. 1 (1990): 1 – 21. Hahn, Thomas, ed. Race in the Western Middle Ages. Vol. 2 of A History of Race in the West. 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming. Hahn, Thomas, ed. Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2000. Hahn, Thomas, ed. Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. Reissued 2002. Hahn, Thomas, and Leah Haught. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2012; Sir Thomas Malory’s “Morte Darthur.” Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2017. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/medieval-studies#1. Knight, Stephen, and Thomas Ohlgren, eds. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. Leicester, H. Marshall. The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in The Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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New York State Museum. “NEH Announces $30 Million for 238 Humanities Projects Nationwide.” http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/research-collections/state-history/news/nehannounces-30-million-238-humanities-projects-nationwide. Prendergast, Thomas A., and Stephanie Trigg. Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection, and Discontent. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. “The Robbins Library.” University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. https://www.library.rochester.edu/spaces/robbins. “The Robin Hood Project.” Robbins Library, University of Rochester. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/robin-hood. “Thomas Hahn.” University of Rochester Department of English. http://www.sas.rochester. edu/eng/people/faculty/hahn_thomas/index.html. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Association Forms in England and Italy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Ye Original Operetta, in Five Acts, entitled Robin Hood. Writ by Charles Robinson. Facsimile of 1888 play. Introduction by Thomas Hahn. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009.

Part I Marginalized Texts, Traditions, and Voices

Leah Haught

Chapter 2 Racialized Outcasts: Non-White Bodies and the Construction of the Outlaw-Hero in Modern Robin Hood Film Whether addressed explicitly as part of Robin’s personal backstory or simply alluded to in passing as one of the reasons why corruption flourishes in Richard’s absence, the crusades have come to play a significant role in how Robin Hood films contextualize the central tensions that will motivate their hero to transgress the expectations associated with his aristocratic position of power and privilege.¹ Given the continued interest in and reliance on the rhetoric of crusading, broadly defined, among politicians and other public figures invested in promoting Western cultural superiority in an increasingly globalized world, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the most recent cinematic retellings of Robin Hood opt to explore what a long deployment in a foreign land where being coded “Western,” “white,” “aristocratic,” or “Christian” is not necessarily deemed heroic might do to the identities of men used to seeing themselves as in the right precisely because of their embodiment of the aforementioned identity markers. As modern examples of Anglo-American medievalism or neomedievalism, these films reflect contemporary socio-political concerns more than they do any attempt to recreate the medieval period as it is reflected in literary or historical documents from the era, including the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads.² In addition to providing the titular protagonists with the warrior credentials necessary for their sub-

 Two of the most celebrated early cinematic depictions of Robin Hood model this dual approach to evoking the crusades. The 1922 Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood has the Earl of Huntingdon travel with King Richard to the Holy Land before becoming an outlaw upon his return to England in order to fight Prince John’s reign of terror. By contrast, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) uses its introductory titles to explain Richard’s departure for crusade and John’s subsequent seizure of the regency. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) popularized the connection between Richard and Robin.  The earliest surviving ballads are Robin Hood and the Monk (ca. 1450 – 1465) and Robin Hood and the Potter (ca. 1468 – 1500), both of which present Robin more as a trickster figure of folklore who resides in a forest and battles the local authorities than a noble outlaw with a historical setting and personal wrongs to be righted. For more on the gentrification of the legend, see Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, introduction to Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-003

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sequent heroics, then, the evocation of the crusades in these films—the Third Crusade to be specific, although audiences are clearly not expected to have any knowledge about what differentiates it from other crusades—also allows them to explore topics of importance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences, including the long-term personal as well as political consequences of conflict in the Middle East, the tolerance of cultural difference, the nature of social justice, and the movement toward self-realization for individuals and institutions alike. The results of these explorations, I argue, consistently attempt to delegitimize racialized markers of difference as politicized categories of considerable import throughout history by making somatic, religious, and cultural definitions of race central to Robin’s success in the form of a Black, Muslim, non-European counterpart who appears to be a positive role model for and ally to the nominal hero. This seemingly progressive depiction of inclusion and collaboration is, however, ultimately racist and Islamophobic in its insistence that non-white bodies are only valuable as tools to support a white nationalist agenda that the films take great pains to portray as timeless by imagining a “medieval” origin for an Anglo-American identity that is at once inherently heroic and unequivocally white. Otto Bathurst’s 2018 Robin Hood is the most recent example of this troubling tendency. Its Robin, played by Taron Egerton, is no willing warrior eager to serve king and country. Instead, he is drafted, literally, into the crusader army, where he becomes disillusioned after four years of urban combat. When he tries to prevent the unnecessary execution of a young Muslim prisoner by Guy of Gisborne in the English camp, he makes enemies of his fellow crusaders but a friend of the boy’s father, Yahya, whom he had fought previously as an enemy. Yahya, played by Jamie Foxx, becomes the film’s Little John character, following a wounded Robin back to England where he trains him to prevent “rich men getting richer” on the “blood of innocents.”³ Here, then, we appear to have a non-white, nonChristian foreigner functioning as the mastermind behind one of the most celebrated and universally recognized heroes from the “English” Middle Ages while also claiming a central position of his own as one of the legend’s “original” merry men. But Yahya’s movement from periphery to center is not as successful as it might first appear. Like its more commercially lucrative predecessor, Kevin Reynold’s 1991 Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, Bathurst’s retelling, which uses the tagline “the legend you know, the story you don’t” and, according to Egerton intentionally establishes a “non-period universe” where there are “different skin

 Robin Hood, directed by Otto Bathurst (Summit Entertainment, 2018). Performances by Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, and Eve Hewson.

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colours and different voices,”⁴ does little more than gesture towards a multiculturalism capable of genuinely challenging the essentialist position that equates racialized difference with “foreign” or “other” in the worst possible senses of these words. Simply put, neither Foxx’s Yahya nor Morgan Freeman’s Azeem, a character from Kevin Reynolds’s film upon whom Yahya is clearly modeled, is able to transcend the role of resourceful “sidekick” to a distinctly Western and emphatically white Robin Hood, since neither is allowed to exist as intrinsically valuable outside of this particular hierarchical relationship. And while, as many scholars have noted, it has become commonplace for Robin Hood films to borrow from and build off one another,⁵ this problematic lack of development in depicting cross-cultural relationships that do not resort, intentionally or otherwise, to perpetuating colonialist narratives in which exoticism is tolerated only insofar as it benefits and helps uphold white privilege, speaks to the larger issues of representation that continue to plague the forms of mass-market medievalism consumed by the general public. For as Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh reminds us, the persistent reliance on racial stereotypes is itself an act of violence that aims to misrepresent and thereby control if not actively erase the experiences of “embodied people” in order to promote an agenda that often relies on the translation of those people into “a set of ideas that can be played with and manipulated.”⁶

 Hermione Eyre, “The Name Is Egerton. Taron Egerton,” The Telegraph Magazine, November 17, 2018. https://taronfanfic.tumblr.com/post/180211305963. The crowd scenes in this film are more multicultural than those of many of its cinematic predecessors, but Foxx is the only non-white actor to have a speaking role, and the heavy reliance of his character on that of Freeman suggests that very little progress has been made towards meaningful inclusion since 1991. I would like to thank my graduate student assistant, Keri Jones, for her help in tracking down many sources, particularly those that deal with reactions to Bathurst’s film.  See, for example, Kevin Harty’s review of Bathurst’s film, “Robbing the Hood,” Medievally Speaking, December 26, 2018, http://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2018/12/robin-hood-diro-bathurst-2018.html, and Jeffrey Richards, “Robin Hood on the Screen,” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 429 – 40.  Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9 – 10 (2019): 1– 8 at 5, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12548. Rajabzadeh is writing specifically about the use of the offensive label, “Saracen,” both in medieval literature and modern scholarship of that literature, but the questions she raises about what the ethical responsibilities of content creators should be for engaging their imagined audiences—“Who are we writing for? Who are we speaking to when we reuse the term Saracen in our scholarship? What are we protecting?” (5)—are applicable beyond literary study and beyond the term Saracen.

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Crafting a Marketable Narrative Despite the twenty-seven-year gap that separates their respective release dates, the 1991 and 2018 films follow a strikingly similar pattern for maturing their central characters. Both choose to incorporate the crusades into Robin’s personal narrative, not just as a way to remove him from the goings on in England, but also to afford him the opportunity to interact with non-English, non-Christian, and non-white men who ultimately prove essential to his growth as an outlawhero. The pairing of a Black man with a white protagonist in this context is suggestive of the biracial buddy film, which Ed Guerrero has argued came “to be the predominant narrative and marketing strategy for constructing and containing the cinematic image of Blacks in the eighties.”⁷ The racial dynamic of the 1991 and 2018 films can, therefore, be seen as an extension of or throwback to a problematic Hollywood tactic that Guerrero asserts “put what is left of the Black presence on screen” after the collapse the Blaxploitation boom in the early to mid1970s “in the protective custody, so to speak, of a White lead or co-star, and therefore in conformity with dominant, White sensibilities and expectations of what Blacks should be like” in order to profit off as broad an audience as possible through the appeal of a diverse cast without having to offer concrete solutions to the very real racial problems the films in question promise to negotiate.⁸ Guerrero’s use of language associated with policing is a presumably intentional nod to the fact that many of the most successful of these early interracial buddy films involved detectives or cowboys, but Stephen Knight’s suggestion that

 Ed Guerrero, “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 237– 46 at 238. On the common attributes of interracial buddy films, see Melvin Donalson, “Introduction: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Cinematic Genres,” in Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 3 – 12 at 10 – 12. Several scholars have commented on the buddy dynamics of Prince of Thieves, including Donalson in his chapter, “Mayhem, Multiculturalism, and the Male Gaze,” in Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Movie, 100 – 58. See also Dan Georgakas, “Robin Hood: From Roosevelt to Reagan,” in Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 70 – 79, and E. L. Risden, “Nobody But the Other Buddy: Hollywood and the Crusades, and Buddy Pictures,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Nicholas Haydock and E. L. Risden (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 186 – 99.  Guerrero, “The Black Image,” 239. Georgakas connects reliance on this dynamic, at least in part, to the downfall of the studio system. Instead of being able to produce a “steady stream of modest moneymakers,” Hollywood was “now dependent upon blockbuster hits” whose successes “increasingly depended on bankable stars” (“Robin Hood,” 74).

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Azeem is depicted as Black and Muslim instead of, say, Asian and Muslim, and is played by a recognizably American actor indicates that such problematic tendencies are not limited to a particular genre or era of film.⁹ Indeed, as Ross Brann points out, “[a]ny specifically North African origins, let alone Iberian connections ‘Azim [sic] might have, do not come in to play at all and are exchanged for a thoroughly African identity. It is the Moor’s racial otherness above all, and secondarily his different religion, which determine his identity for the contemporary audience.”¹⁰ In other words, after going out of its way to introduce a character from a non-European culture whose complex racial identities might offer a nuanced critique of European and specifically English society or, conversely, a shrewd exploration of the origins of modern Anglo-American multiculturalism, Prince of Thieves collapses these diverse identities in order to make Azeem fit, however uncomfortably, within the recognizable role of Robin’s Black “buddy” or, to use the language of the film itself, his “ṣadīq” (“friend”).¹¹ Thus Prince of Thieves’ medievalism emphasizes Azeem’s racialized otherness by having him be a stand-in for not one but two distinct yet overly simplified versions of essentialized difference, Blackness and Islam, that are coded as inferior to the white Christianity upon which Robin’s heroics depend. Indeed, Robin’s

 Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 243. Knight goes on to acknowledge that the relationship between Robin and Azeem is “not permitted to have a major part in the story,” labeling it “no more than a market-oriented gesture” (245 – 46). It is worth noting that Azeem is clearly a variation on the character of Nasir from the ITV series, Robin of Sherwood (1984– 1986). Nasir was depicted as a West Asian Muslim brought back from the crusades by an evil baron who ultimately joins Robin’s band after freeing himself of the baron’s influence. Rumor has it that the English screenwriters for Prince of Thieves thought the character of Nasir was original to the larger tradition and were going to use the name themselves until they realized their mistake. Either way, the decision to make Azeem a Moor can be seen as a conscious break with tradition. In addition to his portrayal as Azeem, Morgan Freeman has been in a variety of interracial buddy films, including Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Unforgiven (1992), Shawshank Redemption (1995), and Seven (1995). Melvin Donalson calls Dances with Wolves (1990), another Kevin Costner vehicle, one of the first buddy films of the 1990s (“Mayhem, Multiculturalism, and Masculinity,” 102). Costner’s Tin Cup (1996) also fits the paradigm.  Ross Brann, “The Moors?,” Medieval Encounters 15, no. 2– 4 (2009): 307– 18 at 316. For an overview of the complicated origins and early uses of the term “Moor,” see pages 310 – 11 of this same article.  Azeem starts calling Robin “ṣadīq” about halfway through the film. According to Georgakas, Azeem “proves too old to be Robin’s buddy and too young to be his surrogate father,” highlighting the extent to which the film’s understanding of the Middle East is undeniably that of a white man (“Robin Hood,” 76). On the film’s depiction of medieval English tolerance as an “allegory for modern American society,” see Meriem Pages, “Saracens Abroad: Imagining Medieval Muslim Warriors on the Silver Screen,” Essays in Medieval Studies 32 (2017): 5 – 22 at 14.

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whiteness and Christian faith are so central to the masculine heroics imagined as “authentic” to the Anglo-American identity he represents that they need not be developed in any detail; they are always-already the universal experience against which all other experiences are judged and from which all power originates. Azeem’s Blackness, by contrast, negatively reinforces his Muslim faith as a racial marker of his non-Englishness, combining physiognomy and religion to demarcate him as “fundamentally and absolutely different in an interknotted cluster of ways.”¹² The same can be said of Bathurst’s film, since Yahya’s characterization draws heavily on that of Azeem, even though they have slightly different motivations and behavioral patterns throughout their respective films.¹³ The reductive impulse associated with conflating Blackness, Islam, and nonWestern as categories of exotic alterity against the familiar whiteness of the Western, Christian hero likewise reflects the neocolonial tenor of Anglo-American international policies during the eras in which each film was being made. Prince of Thieves was shot during the Persian Gulf War and released in the United States on June 14, 1991, a little over three months after the Operation Desert Storm coalition proclaimed victory. In its combat phase, this war saw US-led coalition forces fighting the Iraqi army following its invasion of Kuwait over disputes about oil production and pricing.¹⁴ The swift international condemnation of Iraq’s behavior was as motivated by concerns that Iraq would also attempt to annex Saudi oil fields, thereby giving Iraq control over the majority of the global oil reserves, as it was any concern over Kuwaiti territorial sovereignty, and the US- and UK-led demand that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait or be forced out, which was backed by a series of United Nations resolutions, went against the  Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 27.  Both men are bald, but they have beards and mustaches as well as similar ritualized facial scarring. Although Yahya removes his once in England, they both appear in turban-style headwear, which is customary among men of many Muslim cultures. The styling and name of this headwear varies by region or tribe, but the color blue, which both Azeem and Yahya wear, is common throughout North Africa. Both men are also depicted as highly intelligent and as skilled fighters capable of saving Robin’s life. And they both, of course, follow their Robins to England.  Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing its petroleum in early 1990, invading the country on August 2, 1990. Analysts speculate that Saddam Hussein’s motivation for doing so extended beyond Kuwait’s high petroleum production levels, which cut into Iraq’s revenues, to reflect an anxiety over Iraq’s inability to pay the US the billions of dollars it borrowed to fund the earlier IranIraq War (1980 – 1988). For more on the history leading up to this conflict, see Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Post-Saddam, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). On the relationship between the US and the UK specifically as coalition members, see the Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archive, “George Bush (Sr) Library,” accessed June 15, 2020, https://www.mar garetthatcher.org/archive/us-bush.asp.

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wishes of the Arab League, who opposed outside intervention as a solution to the conflict. According to Kathleen Biddick, Prince of Thieves’ lukewarm depiction of the East mirrors that of the war that so closely parallels its production. For Western viewers, technological advancements in photography and imaging reduced specific Arabs to casualties of their own making because they rejected the “civilizing” impulses of the West, thereby challenging traditional Western conceptions of natural order: Within the brackets of this cybernetic war, the presence of Azeem in the film can be read in a variety of ways. He is the ‘good’ ally, like Syria or Kuwait, and represents the ‘best’ of Orientalism. He can also enact nostalgically a proximity and embodiment that the video image targets of cybernetic bombing uncannily distanced for the television viewers of the war. Others would read Azeem as a sign of the new Orientalism, governed by a new imperialism that pits progressive Arabs against Islamic fundamentalists … It is not surprising, then, that, within such a historical frame, Prince of Thieves very precariously stages the pastoral and relies on a very old anthropological move, the introduction of the Other, to guarantee this fragile imaginary space.¹⁵

Viewed through the film’s portrayal of Muslims and the Middle East, Azeem becomes a token in a form of neocolonial logic; he helps tease out the concept of Englishness by embodying its opposite in a containable, non-threatening manner. The film’s construction of the West as the locus of white, Christian power cannot exist without its antithesis, and both are created in the present to emphasize contemporary values not original to the cultures and time period being depicted. More specifically, Azeem’s outsider perspective on England allows the film to imagine a form of incipient Englishness that is at once divergent from and receptive to “minority” viewpoints, at least to a degree. He makes no attempt to blend in once in England, for example, repeatedly calling Robin “Christian,” which, of course, emphasizes that he is not a Christian, and he is quick to point out the hypocrisy within English perceptions of themselves, such as when, after observing Robin lie to his followers about the number of men they are about to face, he remarks, “And they call me barbarian.”¹⁶ In his role as wise foil and ally to Robin, Azeem might seem capable of rehabilitating Muslim-Christian rela-

 Kathleen Biddick, “English America: Worth Dying For?,” in The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 58 – 82 at 75. Jack G. Shaheen suggests that Azeem is one of only a handful of positive depictions of Muslims in his highly influential “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (2003): 171– 93. The bar against which Azeem is being compared is quite low, however.  Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, directed by Kevin Reynolds (Warner Brothers, 1991). Performances by Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

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tions, and yet, he is alone in this endeavor and removed from the culture(s) he is supposed to be representing, which ultimately makes him seem “less a character capable of redeeming the Muslim world than simply the exception that proves the rule.”¹⁷ And because the racial logic of the film connects his religious identity as a Muslim to his ethnoracial identity as a Black “Moor” specifically, similar limitations are apparent within the film’s treatment of Black-white and East-West relations. Ten years after the release of Prince of Thieves, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center prompted the United States and several of its allies, including the United Kingdom, to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, ushering in a new era of neocolonist policies that included a healthy dose of blatant Islamophobia alongside a barely contained desire for revenge. The tactics behind these wars as well as the public reactions to them influence both the version of conflict apparent within Bathurst’s 2018 film and the film’s racial discourse. The invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred after the Taliban refused to extradite Osama bin Laden without clear evidence that he was involved in the September 11 attacks, was launched less than a month after said attack, initiating what would become the United States’ longest war. Attempts to install anti-Taliban Afghanis into elected positions had to contend with the insurgency of a reorganized Taliban, thus although major US combat operations ended in 2014, residual forces remained through 2021.¹⁸ The invasion of Iraq, by comparison, was relatively short-lived, with President George W. Bush declaring the end of major combat operations a little over a month after they were launched, but the subsequent “reconstruction” of Iraq by coalition forces lasted almost nine years and resulted in widespread resistance by Iraqis. Whether this period is best understood as a “pre-emptive military action” or as a war can vary considerably depending on whose perspective one encounters.¹⁹ The Bush administra-

 Pages, “Saracens Abroad,” 14.  Because Osama bin Laden, who was widely believed to have orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, was living in Afghanistan at the time, and an Afghan opposition group, the Northern Alliance, had been waging war against the Taliban since 1996—they joined the US and UK forces shortly after the initial invasion—this military operation was not subject to much criticism at first. For more on Afghani-US relations leading up to 9/11, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 (New York: Penguin, 2004).  “Pre-emptive” military action was one of the foreign policies associated with the so-called “Bush Doctrine.” Not all US allies in NATO agreed with the plan to invade in the first place, with Canada, France, and Germany joining Russia to urge continued diplomacy. Anti-war protests were held globally ahead of the invasion proper, and they continued during the occupation as well. For a critical overview of the strategies that led up to the invasion and were executed

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tion’s rhetoric leading up to and during both of these campaigns was full of problematic medievalizing impulses, however. The first official name given to the military response to 9/11 in Afghanistan was, for example, “Operation Infinite Justice,” and President Bush referred to this response as a “crusade” specifically on at least two occasions. The first was less than a week after the attacks, when he said, “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while,” and it was widely criticized in Europe as well as among Islamic communities for idealizing racialized violence.²⁰ The backlash to this statement might also have contributed to “Operation Infinite Justice” being renamed “Operation Enduring Freedom,” since “infinite justice” is a phrase used by multiple religions, not just Christianity, to describe God. Despite these early blunders, Bush referred to the invasion of Afghanistan as an “important crusade to defend freedom” and “do what is right for our children and our grandchildren” in early 2002.²¹ A little over a year later, US military involvement in Iraq was named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and justified by the president during an address to the nation on the following grounds:

throughout, see Thomas E. Hicks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006). On the extent to which the US occupation of Iraq was “driven by the desire to remake the country in the name of capitalism and democracy,” and run from a Green Zone out of touch with the realities of the country it was supposed to be remaking, see Evan Osnos, “Only the Best People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2018, 56 – 65 at 65. In a very real sense, then, Bush Jr. arguably did what Bush Sr. stopped just short of doing with regard to Iraq.  George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President upon Arrival,” National Archives and Records Administration, September, 16, 2001, accessed June 15, 2020, https://georgewbush-whitehouse. archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916 – 2.html. The evocation of crusading to justify or idealize specific forms of questionable behavior has a long history in the United States. Supporters of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, frequently evoked chivalric knighthood in general and the “Holy Crusades” specifically in their support of explicitly racist causes. For an analysis of how this plays out in Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, see Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, “Political Medievalisms: The Darkness of the Dark Ages,” in Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), 140 – 57 at 142– 43. On the many uses of medievalism within Western and non-Western political discourse, see Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007).  George W. Bush, “President Rallies the Troops in Alaska,” National Archives and Records Administration, February 16, 2002, accessed June 15, 2020, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.ar chives.gov/news/releases/2002/02/20020216 – 1.html. By the end of 2002, criticisms of US-led operations in Afghanistan began to emerge more frequently. In the September 7, 2002, issue of CounterPunch (https://www.counterpunch.org/2002/09/07/the-tenth-crusade/), Alexander Cockburn used the phrase the “Tenth Crusade” to contextualize the “War on Terror” within the medieval crusades through the unflattering lens of Christian fanaticism. Of course, as Cockburn’s article suggests, there were plenty of people who saw this analogy in a more promising light.

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To all of the men and women in the United States Armed Forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you … The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.²²

Such rhetoric, especially when paired with the operational nomenclature that accompanied it, shows a remarkable lack of awareness of or concern for the complex historical origins of the ideologies it evokes to align the US with a Western civilizing impulse that has “medieval” origins. As E. L. Risden suggests, this language fails “to realize that to Islamic nations” such discourse looks “like little more than contemporary attempts to reignite long-abandoned Crusades, to gain religious, political, and economic control of land and resources to which they [Western policy makers] have no right.”²³ Bush defended his Iraqi polices as a continuation of the newly declared War on Terror; he not only claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened world peace, he also suggested that Hussein secretly supported al-Qaeda.²⁴ Both of these allegations proved untrue, and the administration’s continued dealings with Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers, exposed the ease with which the categories of “Muslim,” “Middle Easterner,” and “Arab” functioned as portable forms of cultural racism for a government determined to go to war with a particular predetermined enemy. Similarly racist rhetoric is employed by Bathurst’s Sheriff of Nottingham, played by Ben Mendelsohn, to justify his taxes for the “glorious crusade” he clearly supports: “Today we face a threat from these barbarians in Arabia. They hate us. Our freedom, our culture, our religion.”²⁵ Robin’s war weariness might, therefore, be seen as an homage to the multiple deployments against “enemy insurgents” that has been demanded of military personnel in the age of seemingly endless West-

 Emphasis mine. George W. Bush, “President Bush Addresses the Nation,” National Archives and Records Administration, March 19, 2003, accessed June 15, 2020, http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319 – 17.html.  Risden, “Nobody but the Other Buddy,” 186.  George W. Bush, “President Discusses Beginning Operation Iraqi Freedom,” National Archives and Records Administration, March 22, 2003, accessed June 15, 2020, https://georgew bush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030322.html. Ironically, US sanctions against Iraq are one of a handful of explicit motives cited by bin Laden for al-Qaeda’s attacks on Americans.  In an act of fearmongering that cannot help but evoke the immigration policies of Donald Trump and pro-Brexit politicians alike, the Sheriff goes on to claim that enemies will “infiltrate” Nottingham with their “fanatical dogma,” burning the houses and land of the English if they are not stopped abroad.

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ern “occupations” of the East, while Yahya’s desire to destroy the mechanisms by which his culture and his family alike are being systematically destroyed liken him to a native insurgent in interesting ways. Like those of his cinematic predecessor, however, Yahya’s diverse identities are simultaneously essentialized and delegitimized so that he can settle into his role as Robin’s life coach. To be clear, these films are not concerned with historical accuracy when it comes to late twelfth-century England or the 1990s and 2010s. Instead, they pull elements from the medieval past as well as the filmmakers’ respective presents to create eclectic cinematic universes in which certain ideas and values can speak to each other across time through characters who look and sound like people their audiences would know. This is how we get Costner’s Robin embracing his father’s assertion that “[n]obility’s not a birthright. It’s defined by one’s actions,” and Yahya telling Egerton’s Robin, “You’re only powerless if you believe you are powerless,” for example. These ideas are not only anachronistic to the twelfth century; they are also aspirational at best for large sections of the global population today. It might be tempting, therefore, to dismiss the films as escapist fantasy that should not be taken as anything other than a form of popular entertainment. And yet, as many scholars have noted, fiction helps shape what people think is possible and can, therefore, exert considerable influence on present realities. Indeed, filmic representations of the Middle Ages arguably influence more people’s notions of history than other forms of medievalism, to say nothing of academic discourses on the subject. Thus, while expecting these films to recreate versions of the past that audiences and scholars alike would recognize as “authentic” is counterproductive, it is nevertheless important that filmmakers recognize that they have, as Bettina Bildhauer puts it, “a responsibility to history and to the present because as long as one of the elements depicted in the film still persists or has ramification in contemporary society, its filmic representation has a political charge.”²⁶ Racial logic has influenced notions of citizenship and, indeed, humanity in both England and the United States for as long as they have existed in their various forms pre- and post-nationhood. How these categories of identification are depicted in Anglo-American cinema is, therefore, politically

 Bettina Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 45 – 59 at 51. Bildhauer points out that “no film can ever get everything ‘right’” from a historical perspective, because what we can confirm through historical records is limited to what records actually survive in the first place as well as who can access them (50 – 51). Melvin Donalson suggests that all films, including those mass produced by Hollywood, issue “significant direct and coded ideas that permeate the viewers’ attitudes, emotions, and political postures” (“Introduction: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Cinematic Genres,” 3).

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relevant. Western nations continue to be involved in wars in the Middle East, which are frequently depicted as wars against Islamic extremism, making the depiction of conflicts along geopolitical and religious lines politically significant. Corruption and self-interest in politics remain issues that disproportionately impact the poor and other disenfranchised peoples, so how they are portrayed is also politically important. And this is true whether the film in question, like Prince of Thieves, gives its audience a specific timeframe in which its action is supposed to be taking place —1194 CE in this instance—or, like the 2018 film, it does away with any attempt at historical specificity. As modern cultural artifacts engaged with specific recreations of a character made iconic by his connections to both a supposedly genuine medieval past and a willingness to challenge various power structures, at least in theory, for the greater good, these Robin Hood films are in a position to stage powerful collisions between an imagined Western legacy centered around the democratic values of freedom, equality, and political responsibility, and the actualities of a Western legacy that includes such troubling institutions and practices as slavery, colonialism, and xenophobia.²⁷ Unfortunately, these films choose to evoke diversity as a way of favoring the former legacy as best embodied by a white man who is allowed to fail up instead of authentically representing a non-white character whose relationship with that white man might meaningfully address both legacies in a way that enacts consequential change for both men.²⁸ The films ultimately uphold a whitewashed version of the medieval, which, by extension, privileges the wants and needs of white male masculinity across time. Consequently, each film’s attempt to reassure its audiences “that the social consciousness and political astuteness of society was moving in a progressive manner” ultimately rings hollow.²⁹ How not one but two “blockbuster” films evoke similarly ahistorical tropes to manipulate audience expecta-

 On the broader implications of depictions of sovereignty within the modern Robin Hood tradition, see Valerie B. Johnson, “Agamben’s Home Sacer, the ‘State of Exception’, and the Modern Robin Hood,” in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. Stephen Knight (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 207– 27.  In this context, diversity favors the power structures that already exist and amounts to little more than tokenism, while representation sees and values people from diverse backgrounds as people. Much has been written on the importance of representation in media in the last decade in particular. See, for example, Jason Smith, “Between Colorblind and Colorconscious: Contemporary Hollywood Films and the Struggles Over Racial Representation,” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 8 (2013): 779 – 97, and Maryann Erigha, “Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change,” Sociology Compass 9, no. 1 (2015): 78 – 89.  Donalson, “Mayhem, Multiculturalism, and Masculinity,” 123.

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tions and biases alike under the guise of affirming diversity is, therefore, worth exploring in some detail.

Multiculturalism as Unidirectional In Prince of Thieves, Robin’s experiences as a crusader come at the beginning of the film. After the opening credits, title cards provide us with the following historical context: “800 years ago Richard ‘the Lionheart,’ King of England, led the third Great Crusade to reclaim the Holy Land from the Turks. Most of the young English noblemen who flocked to his banner never returned home.” This immediately establishes Costner’s Robin as extraordinary, for though he is, as the first live shot of the film makes clear, a captive within a Jerusalem prison, he is alive. The dangerous exoticism of the locale is emphasized continuously throughout this opening sequence, first with the establishing shot of an Islamic call to prayer that cuts to the screams of an unnamed Englishman being tortured by a Middle Eastern guard who gleefully reminds him and by extension us that here he is “the infidel,” and then by Robin’s probing gaze of the Black man who happens to be bound to the wall across from him. When Robin’s childhood friend, Peter, is sentenced to lose a hand for allegedly stealing bread, the implicit threat becomes explicit, causing Robin to revolt against authority figures for the first time in the film. During the subsequent escape attempt, as Robin fights numerous guards and frantically attempts to save fellow Christians, the Black man, who we learn later is named Azeem, proves an effective ally, shouting “Behind you!” to Robin as a guard attempts to sneak up on him. Thus, as Eric Martone suggests, Azeem is from the get-go “depicted as trustworthy and loyal, even though Robin initially views Muslims negatively.”³⁰ Put another way, Azeem challenges Robin’s assumptions that all Muslims are like the men holding him captive, and his skin color—Azeem is Black while the jailers are Brown—helps differentiate between “good” and “bad” foreigners in this context. Over Peter’s racist objection—“He is a Moor! Don’t listen!”—Robin saves Azeem after the latter appeals directly to his mercy as a fellow prisoner: “For pity’s sake. Mine is a sentence of death.” Azeem also makes it clear that he knows the way out of the prison, thereby positioning himself as the source of invaluable information and a pragmatic thinker. In a sense, then, Azeem and Robin can be seen as rescuing each other

 Eric Martone, “Treacherous ‘Saracens’ and Integrated Muslims: The Islamic Outlaw in Robin Hood’s Band and the Re-imagining of English Identity, 1800 to the Present,” miscelánea 40 (2009): 53 – 76 at 68.

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here, preparing audiences for their subsequent adventures together. Just in case this exchange does not fully convince us that Azeem is a worthy companion for Robin, we get to see Azeem prevent Robin from recklessly charging after a mortally wounded Peter once outside of the prison before vowing to travel with Robin until he has repaid the debt of having had his life saved: “You have saved my life, Christian. I will stay with you until I have saved yours. That is my vow.” Robin, coincidently, recognizes no such debt to Azeem despite his role in their successful escape. He does, however, promise Peter to deliver a ring to his sister, Marian; he also vows to protect Marian and tell her that Peter “died a free Englishman.” Thus, while both men are depicted as similarly honorable, at least insofar as their making and upholding of oaths are concerned, it is Azeem who uses the language of friendship and duty early on, and the resulting sense of indentured servitude this initiates complicates the tentative equality posited between the two men in this opening scene. Once the focus of the action switches from the East to the West, the dynamics of this budding friendship become more complicated still. Despite imploring Azeem to return to his family after they reach Dover, for example, Robin is clearly miffed that Azeem ignores his fight with Guy of Gisborne in order to pray, providing audiences with the first clear example of what Robin expects Azeem’s behavior to be: useful to or for him whenever he sees fit. Azeem’s response, “I fulfill my vows when I choose,” reminds Robin and viewers alike that he is in England on his own terms. Yet his acknowledgment, wise though it may be, that “[i]t seems safer to appear as your slave rather than your equal” because in England he is “the infidel,” nevertheless establishes the distinctly hierarchical power dynamic through which other Englishmen will view him. The outlaws of Sherwood, for instance, assume that Azeem, like Duncan, is Robin’s servant when they first meet the trio at the river. Later, when the same outlaws fail to offer Azeem mead on the grounds that he is a “savage,” it takes Robin’s intervention—“That he is, but no more than you or I”—to right this wrong to “English hospitality” and not, say, human decency. This gesture, while magnanimous, also overlooks the fact that many devout Muslims do not drink.³¹ Unlike Azeem, who quickly proves

 They choose to uphold a conservative reading of the prohibition offered in the Qur’an, surah v.90 – 91: “Oh you who have believed, indeed, intoxicants, gambling, [sacrificing on] stone alters [to other than Allah], and divining arrows are but defilement from the work of Satan, so avoid it so that you may be successful” (Shahi International translation, accessed June 10, 2020, https:// quran.com/5/90 – 91). F. Harb notes that there is a long history of wine-drinking in Islam, with “acute controversy among exegetes and legalists” over what exactly is being banned here (“Wine Poetry (khamriyyãt)” in ‘Abbasid Belle-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]: 219 – 34 at 222– 23).

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himself an astute observer of other cultures, Robin’s views of respectable behavior remain culturally narrow even after his time abroad, which, in turn, helps explain how some of his later praise of Azeem, such as when Robin calls him an “honor to his countrymen” because he fought “better than twenty English knights” against a band of attacking Celts, cannot help but highlight his difference even as it seeks to uphold Azeem as a model outlaw. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his acceptance by the English outlaws is tenuous at best. For those loyal to Robin, Azeem is a presence to be tolerated, despite their own casual racisms, as Duncan’s awkward early attempt to communicate with Azeem makes clear: “A curse on Moors and Saracens! Were it not for their ungodly ways, Master Robin would never have left. What manner of name is Azeem? Irish? Cornish?” Duncan’s literal blindness—his eyes were cut out when Lord Locksley was executed—also functions here as a commentary on English xenophobia and willful ignorance, since confusing Arabic with Gaelic takes effort.³² Azeem must, therefore, “educate” the outlaws in much the same way he has started to edify Robin, by proving himself both invaluable and willing to turn the other check. And he gets little active help from Robin in this regard, because, as the self-proclaimed “prince” of thieves, Robin expects all the other outlaws to follow his lead, no questions asked. Robin might have welcomed Azeem into his life at this point, but he already knows the benefits of doing so because of his experiences in Jerusalem.³³ Accepting Azeem’s presence, however, does not mean that Robin considers his needs or wants alongside those motivating Robin himself, which are predominately selfish at first. His initial confrontation with Gisborne occurs because Robin thinks the latter is overstepping his authority on Locksley land when chasing an accused poacher: “This is my land and my tree. Therefore whatever’s in it also belongs to me.” In the subsequent scuffle, Robin kills four of Gisborne’s men, which essentially makes him a marked man. When he learns shortly thereafter about his father’s death and the Sheriff’s seizure of their land, he realizes he is an outlaw. He also vows not to rest until his father is avenged, making the

 In subsequent scenes we see Robin tell Azeem that the men cannot count and two outlaws get confused during a debate over which side is left and which side is right, so the association between medieval Englishness and a need for education is widespread. Azeem’s full name is Azeem Edin Bashir Al Bakir, but he tells Robin to call him Azeem.  The title “Prince of Thieves” is not unique to Reynolds’s film. Howard Bretherton made a seventy-minute Robin Hood film called Prince of Thieves in 1948. In addition to leading Robin to freedom via the sewer system and, as discussed above, preventing an act that would have effectively been a death sentence, Azeem also feeds Robin by breaking open a melon.

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motivations for his initial dislike of the Sheriff more self-centered than selfless.³⁴ After they take up residence in Sherwood Forest, Robin seems to expect that Azeem will follow his lead as the other outlaws do, simply because he has declared himself their leader. Fortunately for Robin, Azeem’s dedication to his vow outweighs his annoyance with Robin’s entitled behavior. Azeem, it turns out, is not just a superior fighter, a skill set he draws upon to help train the other outlaws, but he is also a masterful tactician. He provides Robin with the technology—telescopes and gunpowder—that ultimately makes defeating the Sheriff possible, as well as the medical knowledge about birthing and the water distribution techniques necessary to ensure the futurity of the people Robin is now fighting to protect. Azeem’s non-Englishness is, therefore, central to Robin’s development as an effective leader precisely because, to quote Lisa Schubert, it “often yields valuable knowledge not available in the white male network.”³⁵ And Azeem provides all of this calmly in the face of ongoing suspicion if not active abuse by his fellow outlaws, repeatedly performing what Cord J. Whitaker calls “exceptional exemplarity.”³⁶ When a little girl asks Azeem, “Did God paint you?” for instance, his calm response, “For certain … Because Allah loves wondrous variety” is interrupted by Friar Tuck’s insistence that he “keep thy heathen words away from the ears of this innocent,” exemplifying the extent to which Blackness and Islam are interchangeable categories of dangerous otherness for the “typical” Englishman.³⁷ Tuck likewise objects when Azeem suggests that they attempt to deliver Little John’s and Fanny’s breech baby by cesar-

 Rickman’s Sheriff has Robin’s father executed on the charges of witchcraft while wearing white robes reminiscent of those made famous by the Ku Klux Klan in order to claim the Locksley lands, and he wishes to marry Marian to further consolidate his power. Lord Locksley did not approve of the crusades, which he apparently saw as an attempt to impose one religion over another. The relationship between father and son had been strained since, after the death of Robin’s mother when he was a child, his father took comfort in the arms of another woman, who also happened to be a peasant. Their last words to each other were, according to Robin, spoken in hate. Nevertheless, Lord Locksley is seen trying to inquire after his son’s wellbeing in a letter before the Sheriff ambushes him. When Robin learns his father is dead, he expresses regret for not being around: “I should have been here.”  Lisa Schubert, “Managing a Multicultural Work Force in ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’,” The Centennial Review 37, no. 3. (1993): 571– 92 at 577.  Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 159.  Robin also refers to Azeem as “painted” on two occasions, which likens him to a child in interesting ways. Mortianna is the third character to use this language: “I have seen our [hers and the Sheriff’s] death. The painted man, he haunts my dreams. Adorned with strange, foreign markings.” This prophesy links Azeem’s foreignness to her witchcraft while also raising fraught questions about Azeem’s agency.

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ean, declaring that Azeem is “the devil’s seed sent to lead us astray. Don’t listen to him. He’ll kill her.” Although Tuck admits his error after John publicly announces that a healthy baby has been born, he pairs his attempted apology with an offer to drink, which highlights how little the English seem to have learned about their non-English compatriot. Moreover, it is Robin who is given most of the credit for the successful birth because it was he who ultimately approved of the procedure over the objections of Tuck and the nervousness of John. Azeem’s knowledge is, therefore, only deemed collectively valuable when Robin approves of it.³⁸ In short, the former’s skills operate first and foremost as the tools by which the latter gains renown as an effective leader. In a cruelly ironic but not wholly unexpected twist, then, the more Azeem shares his expertise, the less Robin thinks he needs the man behind that expertise. And on the rare occasion that Azeem challenges Robin’s plan, as he does after Robin single-handedly decides to declare open war on the Sheriff and Gisborne—“Christian, these are simple people, not warriors. Be careful that you do not do this for your own purposes”—Robin has no issue publicly rebuking him: “You forget yourself, Azeem. I do not ask for your company or your counsel.” Respected though he may be for what he is able to teach Robin, he is never fully accepted as English or Robin’s equal within England. Indeed, as his speech during the final battle suggests, Azeem’s function within the larger logic of the film is to not just help shape Robin into a leader the other outlaws can respect, but to also remind those outlaws, Robin included, exactly what it is they are fighting for. “I am not one of you, but I fight! I fight with Robin Hood! I fight,” he proclaims, “against a tyrant who holds you under his boot. If you would be free men, then you must fight! Join us! Join Robin Hood!” And yet, the film’s ending offers no indication that Azeem will reap the benefits of what he helps enact. After assisting Robin in the reclaiming of his land, the rescuing of his love, and the killing of those most directly responsible for the local unrest—the Sheriff and Mortianna—Azeem fades into the background while Robin is commended by a returned Richard for having saved his throne. Indeed, Marian, for all intents and purposes, becomes the most important person to Robin by the film’s end, which not only contributes to Azeem’s marginalization, but also privileges the performance of heteronormative coupling over “the potential of interracial buddyship.”³⁹ We know that in killing Mortianna Azeem believes he has paid his  Schubert, “Managing a Multicultural Workforce,” 580.  Donalson, “Mayhem, Multiculturalism, and the Male Gaze,” 126. This replacement of a malemale pairing with a male-female one is particularly interesting given that the buddy film phenomenon is typically seen as a reaction to the Women’s Movement of the 1970s, which insisted that women be seen as more than wives and mothers. Films focused on friendships between

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debt to Robin on his own terms, but beyond that, we have no sense of what his future might hold. Then again, we are not supposed to concern ourselves with such details; Robin’s ending is a happy one, and that is all that matters, right? Having contributed to the myth of a monocultural medieval England, Azeem’s visibility no longer matters to the version of Anglo-American heroism being celebrated.⁴⁰

Performative Wokeness In the 2018 film, Robin’s experiences as a crusader come slightly later within the overall trajectory of his character arc. He has, for example, already met and fallen in love with Marian—the film’s first thief with a heart of gold—when he is drafted, which itself undermines Yahya’s centrality to Robin’s transformation by establishing Marian as his first teacher in the benefits of functioning outside of the law in addition to being his original “better half.” As in Prince of Thieves, we are not privy to all of Robin’s experiences on crusade; instead, we jump ahead four years to the end of his deployment, which, in this film, is in the Arabian Peninsula, not Jerusalem. Unlike in Prince of Thieves, however, we do see this Robin fight while abroad. The weapon of choice for both the English and their enemies is the bow, which they utilize against one another with remarkable

men were seen as a way of avoiding the political issues being raised by second-wave feminism. For more on the historical rise of this type of film, see Guerrero, “The Black Image,” 239. Marian in this particular film first appears as a woman perfectly capable of taking care of herself. She fights Robin in a disguise, for example, when he comes to return Peter’s ring. But she ends the film, as many scholars have noted, as a typical “damsel in distress” who must be rescued from the threat of rape. Lynn T. Ramey suggests that Robin’s willingness to risk his own life for Marian’s completes his transformation from “self-centered hero to compassionate leader” under Azeem’s tutelage (“Conclusions: Medieval Race and the ‘Golden Age’,” in Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages [Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014], 111– 26 at 114). While I absolutely think the logic of the film wants us to endorse this idea, I also think the relationship between Marian and Robin is less developed than that between Robin and Azeem. Indeed, Marian’s shift from not trusting Robin—whom she remembers as a spoiled boy who used to pull her hair—to lusting after him is almost instantaneous, making it seem as much a plot contrivance as the relationship it ultimately supersedes.  According to Risden, “Azeem must either return to his home to his own affairs or remain forever an outsider among the English, at best an Other buddy: he will find no lasting sympathies for his Islam or his dark skin, despite the fact that he has willingly played the servant and saved his friend’s life” (“Nobody But the Other Buddy,” 195). Since Azeem openly confesses, “there is nothing left for me to go home to,” I would argue that his options are even narrower than Risden suggests.

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speed at close range. In another bow as stand-in for gun visual, the enemy combatants have a weapon capable of shooting multiple arrows in quick succession à la a Gatling gun that results in massive casualties for the English army. Here, then, we have what might be seen as another nod to the technological superiority of “medieval” Islamic culture, though it should be noted that it is not at all clear that the robed opponents fighting the English see themselves as united by religion; religious difference is only mentioned directly once by an opponent and that is Yahya, as part of his attempt to save his son in the English prison camp.⁴¹ Although they are clearly outmaneuvered and outmanned, the English nevertheless resort to the expected cultural denigrations of their non-Western counterparts, such as when Gisbourne, barking orders to the men he commands, asserts, “We don’t want these bloody savages knowing that we’re coming, do we?” Interestingly enough, Robin, although clearly Gisbourne’s superior in terms of class, is under the latter’s command while fighting and both are, according to Gisbourne, “powerless” to obey the orders coming from their military superiors. Robin, however, repeatedly proves himself willing to disobey direct orders throughout this sequence, suggesting, once again, that experiences abroad are central to the soon-to-be outlaw’s questioning of authority figures. His first encounter with a Black man is not as a fellow prisoner of war, though, but as an opponent responsible for the kidnapping of an English soldier and the subsequent ambush of the forces who attempt to rescue that soldier. Robin first disobeys a direct order from Gisbourne when he decides to pursue this opponent, who we later learn is Yahya, personally. Like Costner’s Robin before him, Egerton’s seems to equate loyalty to a friend with heroism early on, which, while certainly honorable, does not necessarily display the best tactical prowess or even common sense. Chasing his enemy down the streets of an unnamed city—the battles are stylized to look more like what one expects from modern-day Syria or Afghanistan than medieval combat—Robin and Yahya end up fighting in an intense one-on-one encounter in which Yahya proves himself the better combatant. He uses part of his turban to choke Robin into submission and is about to stab him to death, when Gisbourne barrels in and cuts off the hand Yahya was using to hold his knife. In addition to explaining how Yahya ends up in the English camp to watch his son’s execution, this act of violence effectively renders him incapable of doing anything more than training the fully abled body of Robin to fight later on. Put another way, losing his hand casts Yahya as Robin’s Black “buddy” before he or we are fully aware of that fact.

 When he sees his son brought out to be executed, Yahya tries to offer his own life instead by shouting, “I’ve been killing crusaders all my life. My every breath is an insult to your God.”

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The second instance in which Robin disobeys an order is when he attempts to stop the execution of Yahya’s son, Saleem. Horrified by the torture and execution of unarmed prisoners of color, which are staged alongside declarations such as “Get on your knees, you pig” in a series of exchanges clearly meant to evoke Abu Ghraib, Robin is moved by Yahya’s plea to exchange his life for his son’s. Prisoners are also referred to as “Saracens” and “Moors” interchangeably in this context, suggesting that physiognomic and religious difference are coded as equally significant and equally dangerous racialized markers of non-Englishness without any attempt by the English to distinguish between the two. Although he is ultimately unable to do more than delay Saleem’s execution, Robin does manage to free the remaining captives, including Yayha, before being shot for insubordination by Gisbourne, who makes it clear he would have had Robin executed for treason if he was not a lord. When both Robin and Yayha—who willingly stows away on a ship in a shot full of imagery that evokes the Middle Passage—are in England later, Yayha singles out Robin’s attempt to save Saleem as his reason for following the Englishman home: “In all of my years of war, I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s why I choose you.” Thus, the debt expressed in this film is one of gratitude for the attempt to save the life of Saleem, who, like his father, is a Black, Muslim, non-English man, which perhaps leaves the two on more equal footing than their Prince of Thieves predecessors, especially since it appears to make allies of former foes. Once united in the quest for “justice” against those most directly responsible for the horrors of the war they have experienced—in particular, the Sheriff of Nottingham—Yayha begins to teach Robin the combat techniques he successfully employed in the Arabian Peninsula so that they can disrupt the revenue flow that is making the ongoing crusade possible, something, it is worth noting, Robin is only interested in doing after he learns that he has lost Marian to another man because the Sheriff had him declared dead during his deployment, making his motivation to rebel early on more personal than political. Although Robin proves capable of quickly learning Yayha’s fighting style, learning to pronounce his Arabic name, Yayha ibn Umar, correctly is apparently next to impossible. He makes a series of awkward guttural sounds before Yayha rechristens himself John: “Please, no more. In your language, it’s John son of Umar.” While this Robin and John are a lone twosome for much of the film, thereby reducing the number of people the latter needs to educate, John’s tactical skills, even after his hand is severed, combined with his ability to create and employ “liquid fire” remain central to their successes against the Sheriff and his allies. Like Azeem before him, then, John largely functions as an example of what Spike Lee calls the “magical, mystical Negro,” a character type Lee sees as a modern reincarnation of the popular stereotypes of Black people as the “happy slave” or

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the “noble savage” in mainstream media, employed to bolster whiteness instead of promote positive images of Black people.⁴² Thus, despite his prowess, it is John who ultimately expresses doubt about their ability to succeed. After Gisbourne, now a mercenary within England proper, raids the mining camp where the displaced workers of Nottingham, including Marian, are living, John laments, “We’re too late. There are too many of them.” Robin disagrees and is able to convince John that all is not lost in a peak white savior moment, only to see his mentor sacrifice himself so that Robin and Marian can escape to continue fighting: “You and Marian. Finish it.” While this might be seen as an empowering moment for Marian, a character who traditionally is capable of little more than highlighting Robin’s heteronormativity, it also ultimately supports the reading that hers is the more important influence on Robin. Indeed, it is Marian who convinces a near despondent Robin—“John dragged me into this … all I wanted was to get you [Marian] back”—to keep fighting because the people need a leader. This, in other words, marks the beginning of John’s recession to the periphery of Robin’s heroic narrative. As the Sheriff’s prisoner, John is subjected to enough racist vitriol as to raise serious questions about how he was able to walk around with Robin unharassed up to this point. Robin’s whiteness and noble status allow him to easily pretend to be the Sheriff’s ally until the end of the film, but John can claim neither of these protections. Finding himself in chains again, John must listen to the Sheriff pontificate about the extent to which a fear of death differentiates humans from insects and dogs before declaring, “the Arab, however, doesn’t fear death at all because your false prophet promised you the garden.” The assumption that all Arabs are Muslim, while common among many Westerners, is incorrect and, more often than not, racist, as it clearly is in this particular example. The Sheriff conflates Arabic-speakers with Muslims because to him, both are little more than pawns to be used and discarded as part of his plot to increase his own power.⁴³ John does not correct him or behave in a way that would easily allow the Sheriff to confirm his own biases, however. Instead, he suggests that a man without faith is lonely, proving himself both intelligent and articulate in the process: “Faith. We stare death in the face with courage and honor.” The Sheriff then in-

 Spike Lee as quoted in Susan Gonzalez, “Director Spike Lee Slams ‘Same Old’ Black Stereotypes in Today’s Films,” Yale Bulletin and Calendar 29, no. 21 (2001), accessed June 15, 2020, http://archives.news.yale.edu/v29.n21/story3.html.  Mendelsohn’s Sheriff is styled to evoke the fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s in a monochromatic wardrobe that frequently favors trench coats and knee-high boots. He is in league with corrupt clergy in a plot to fund an “Arab” victory in the Middle East so that the Church, presumably with the Sheriff in tow, can consolidate its power in the aftermath.

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sinuates that Saleem “begged for his life right up to the moment we took his head from his body.” He goes on to suggest that Saleem died afraid, not understanding why John did not save him, which prompts the latter to lunge forward in his chains. For the Sheriff, John is ultimately a means to an end, as his final threats make clear: “If you don’t give me the thief’s [Robin] name, I will gorge you with pig’s blood, and I will burn you, and you will never see paradise.” Such a death would make it impossible for John to be reunited with Saleem in the afterlife, but the Sheriff promises a quick death if John tells him what he wants to know. At this point, we see something we were never privy to in Prince of Thieves: Black rage. John swears that he will kill the Sheriff: “I’m a killer. I was born into this war. But I’ve never met a man who had his killing coming as much as you do. You’re gonna wanna believe in a god. You’re gonna want to see His face and think that something can save you. But you’ll see my face. And that’s the last thing you’ll see.” He seethes both as a grieving father confronting one of the people responsible for his son’s death and as a non-white, non-Christian, non-English man confronting the would-be oppressors of his people in their own land. For a brief moment, it appears as though a triply othered foreigner will topple one of the central symbols of English corruption within the Robin Hood tradition. But the occasion passes quickly, making the film’s ending even more disappointing than that of Prince of Thieves; it temporarily hints that John’s emotions and experiences might meaningfully revise not only the hierarchical nature of the relationship between Robin and Azeem, it also suggests they might meaningfully alter the power dynamics within the larger legend itself before nullifying both of these potential outcomes. John’s ingenuity helps him escape the Sheriff’s dungeon disguised as a guard, but the first thing we see him do in this position is save Robin, who has turned himself in in an attempt to stop the fighting in the streets.⁴⁴ He uses his iron-topped stump to knock the Sheriff off Robin before pulling the Sheriff back to his feet and unmasking himself. “Look at me! Look at my eyes!” he exclaims, before asserting, “God isn’t here, it’s just me!” Although John is the one to tie a chain around the Sheriff’s neck, it is Robin who shoots the weight that results in the Sheriff’s hanging. Thus, while the outcome he desired—the Sheriff’s death—is achieved, the extent to which John can be seen as enacting the revenge he swears he will have on the Sheriff back in the dungeon is questionable because it is not a solo effort. Robin, however, is quite pleased  While John is a captive, Robin and Marian rally the people to fight back against the Sheriff’s economic and political oppression in a battle sequence that recalls recent confrontations between antifa and alt-right mobs, with one side wearing hoods and face masks and the other helmets and large shields.

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with what they managed to accomplish mainly because he is still alive: “You are a hard man to kill, John, and I thank God for it.” In one of the final scenes of the film, we see John accompany the newly outlawed commoners into the forest, apparently satisfied to continue living as an outsider in England. He and Tuck have a bonding moment over their shared knowledge of Arabic, but Robin is clearly the one calling the shots now, referring to himself as “the leader of a revolution.” The once audaciously independent and righteously angry “Moor” suddenly seems satisfied to depend on Robin for survival, and there is no indication that anyone is or should be confused by this.⁴⁵ Having inspired Robin’s growth into a legendary hero, Yahya’s presence is no longer necessary to the superficial performance of diversity being advanced as progressive here. Taken together, then, these films reveal how easy it is for narratives that appear earnestly interested in exploring the possibilities associated with multicultural exchange to fall back on Westernized depictions of heroism that privilege name recognition and white mediocrity over non-white exceptionalism, even when the film in question intentionally distances itself from any sense of historical authenticity in order to complicate periodization. Both Azeem and Yahya are removed from their cultures and denied families in order to allow them to circulate within Robin’s world. As such, they carry the burden of representation associated with being the single stand-in for an entire culture; something, it should be noted, Robin never experiences, not even while abroad—he is always surrounded by other white men, whether in a Middle Eastern jail, Nottingham, or Sherwood Forest. To challenge the assumption that “different” is just a synonym for “bad,” Azeem and Yahya must excel at everything they do, besting even Robin until it is no longer acceptable to do so, and then they must content themselves with being “the internal Other,” to borrow a phrase from Lynn Ramey.⁴⁶ They also function as “native informants” offering a critique of English behavior—from Azeem’s “How did your uneducated kind ever take Jerusalem?” to Yahya’s “This war, all wars and everything happening here is as old as time”—that becomes the means by which a great English leader might be born.⁴⁷ And they do this for a group of people who cannot be bothered to get their names right, because, as Helen Young reminds us, “White privilege is inscribed and re-inscri-

 For a short yet insightful critique of how the film creates “insincere inclusivity” by “grasping at the concept [diversity] without critically examining it, or actually de-centering white men,” see Sesali Bowen’s “Robin Hood Has Too Much Diversity—& Also Not Enough,” Refinery 29, November 21, 2018, accessed June 15, 2020, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/11/217521/ robin-hood-movie-review-diversity-stereotypes.  Ramey, “Conclusions: Medieval Race and the ‘Golden Age’,” 114.  Biddick, “English America: Worth Dying For?,” 73 – 74.

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bed by marginalizing people and cultures with the assumption that disadvantage is not the concern of the privileged.”⁴⁸ That these films can imagine a pseudo-medieval past that comfortably reflects modern democratic ideals but struggle to meaningfully incorporate diverse representation into these same origin stories is telling, as is the import of crusading to the version of Anglo-American heroism being advanced. The Middle East functions as a convenient contact zone for Robin to encounter non-white, nonChristian, and non-European bodies through the lens of war, which, in turn, allows him to appropriate what is deemed useful to his own identity and survival as a heroic outlaw, while also merging and dismissing a multiplicity of peoples and beliefs as non-English, and, as a result, dangerously foreign. There is nothing innovative about this understanding of power as white, Western, Christian, and male, nor is there anything novel about depicting non-white bodies laboring on behalf of (and dying for) white sovereignty as an idealized form of race relations. These films present old racisms in new packages in much the same way they blend nostalgia for an imagined past with remarkably conservative aspirations for the future. In order to accomplish this, the filmmakers enact a perfect example of what Brandi K. Adams describes as the conflation of “inclusion— which would ideally welcome a variety of people to the world” with “universality, an ideology that wholly depends upon a discursive privileging of white, male, British/Colonial interpretive experiences and concerns.”⁴⁹ Such choices are not without consequences. If we wish to move beyond the shortcomings of our forebears, then we must stop uncritically reproducing them as historical fodder for narratives about the present. We must challenge any and all accounts of the “medieval” whose primary goal is to justify or make us feel comfortable with racial discourse as it currently exists because, intentionally or not, such accounts uphold white privilege. Otherwise, we remain complicit in the violent acts of erasure that have been authorized throughout history as a means of bolstering the Western perspective that the power of white Christianity alone is responsible for the notion of historical progress that we are so frequently encouraged to label heroic.

 Helen Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (New York: Routledge, 2018), 116.  Brandi K. Adams, “The King and Not I: Refusing Neutrality—,” The Sundial, June 9, 2020, accessed June 15, 2020, https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/the-king-and-not-i-refusing-neu trality-dbab4239e8a9. Adams is discussing Shakespearean adaptations here, but her larger argument is relevant to many depictions of the premodern in contemporary media.

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Bibliography Adams, Brandi K. “The King and Not I: Refusing Neutrality—.” The Sundial, June 9, 2020. https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/the-king-and-not-i-refusing-neutrality-dba b4239e8a9. Bathurst, Otto, dir. Robin Hood. Summit Entertainment, 2018. Biddick, Kathleen. “English America: Worth Dying For?” In The Shock of Medievalism, 58 – 82. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Bildhauer, Bettina. “Medievalism and Cinema.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, edited by Louise D’Arcens, 45 – 59. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Bowen, Sesali. “Robin Hood Has Too Much Diversity—& Also Not Enough.” Refinery 29, November 21, 2018. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/11/217521/robin-hoodmovie-review-diversity-stereotypes. Brann, Ross. “The Moors?” Medieval Encounters 15, no. 2 – 4 (2009): 307 – 18. https://doi. org/10.1163/157006709X458864l. Bush, George W. “President Bush Addresses the Nation.” National Archives and Records Administration, March 19, 2003. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/re leases/2003/03/20030319-17.html. Bush, George W. “President Discusses Beginning Operation Iraqi Freedom.” National Archives and Records Administration, March 22, 2003. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives. gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030322.html. Bush, George W. “President Rallies the Troops in Alaska.” National Archives and Records Administration, February 16, 2002. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2002/02/20020216-1.html. Bush, George W. “Remarks by the President upon Arrival.” National Archives and Records Administration, September 16, 2001. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html. Cockburn, Alexander. “The Tenth Crusade.” CounterPunch, September 7, 2002. https://www. counterpunch.org/2002/09/07/the-tenth-crusade/. Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011. New York: Penguin, 2004. Curtiz, Michael and William Keighley, dirs. The Adventures of Robin Hood. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938. Donalson, Melvin. “Introduction: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Cinematic Genres.” In Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film, 3 – 12. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Donalson, Melvin. “Mayhem, Multiculturalism, and the Male Gaze.” In Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film, 100 – 158. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Dwan, Allan, dir. Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood. United Artists, 1922. Erigha, Maryann. “Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change.” Sociology Compass 9, no. 1 (2015): 78 – 89. Eyre, Hermione. “The Name Is Egerton. Taron Egerton.” The Telegraph Magazine, November 17, 2018. Georgakas, Dan. “Robin Hood: From Roosevelt to Reagan.” In Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, edited by Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, 70 – 79. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

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Gonzalez, Susan. “Director Spike Lee Slams ‘Same Old’ Black Stereotypes in Today’s Films.” Yale Bulletin and Calendar 29, no. 21 (2001). http://archives.news.yale.edu/v29.n21/ story3.html. Guerrero, Ed. “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties.” In Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara, 237 – 46. New York: Routledge, 1993. Harb, F. “Wine Poetry (khamriyyãt).” In Abbasid Belles-Lettres, edited by Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant, 219 – 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Harty, Kevin. “Robbing the Hood.” Medievally Speaking, December 26, 2018. http://medieval lyspeaking.blogspot.com/2018/12/robin-hood-dir-o-bathurst-2018.html. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hicks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin, 2006. Holsinger, Bruce. Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007. Johnson, Valerie B. “Agamben’s Home Sacer, the ‘State of Exception’, and the Modern Robin Hood.” In Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, edited by Stephen Knight, 207 – 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren. General Introduction to Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, 1 – 20. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. The Margaret Thatcher Foundation. “George Bush (Sr) Library.” Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archive. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/us-bush.asp. Martone, Eric. “Treacherous ‘Saracens’ and Integrated Muslims: The Islamic Outlaw in Robin Hood’s Band and the Re-imagining of English Identity, 1800 to the Present.” miscelánea 40 (2009): 53 – 76. Osnos, Evan. “Only the Best People.” The New Yorker, May 21, 2018. Pages, Meriem. “Saracens Abroad: Imagining Medieval Muslim Warriors on the Silver Screen.” Essays in Medieval Studies 32 (2017): 5 – 22. https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2016. 0001. Pugh, Tison and Angela Jane Weisl. “Political Medievalisms: The Darkness of the Dark Ages.” In Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present, 140 – 57. New York: Routledge, 2013. Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure.” Literature Compass 16, no. 9 – 10 (2019): 1 – 8. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12548. Ramey, Lynn T. “Conclusions: Medieval Race and the ‘Golden Age’.” In Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages, 111 – 26. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014. Reynolds, Kevin, dir. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Warner Brothers, 1991. Richards, Jeffrey. “Robin Hood on the Screen.” In Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, edited by Stephen Knight, 429 – 40. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1999. Risden, E. L. “Nobody But the Other Buddy: Hollywood and the Crusades, and Buddy Pictures.” In Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, edited by Nicholas Haydock and E. L. Risden, 186 – 99. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

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Robin Hood and the Monk. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 31 – 56. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Robin Hood and the Potter. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 57 – 79. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Schubert, Lisa. “Managing a Multicultural Work Force in ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’.” The Centennial Review 37, no. 3 (1993): 571 – 92. Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe: A Romance. 1819. New York: Penguin Random House, 2001. Shaheen, Jack G. “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (2003): 171 – 93. Simons, Geoff. Iraq: From Sumer to Post-Saddam. 3rd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Smith, Jason. “Between Colorblind and Colorconscious: Contemporary Hollywood Films and the Struggles Over Racial Representation.” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 8 (2013): 779 – 97. Whitaker, Cord J. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Young, Helen. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Leila K. Norako

Chapter 3 The Mongols of Middle English Literature This chapter¹ argues that the convergent treatment and representation of the Mongols in The Book of John Mandeville (TBJM) and in Chaucer’s “The Squire’s Tale” reflect racialized aspirations of global Christian conquest with the end goal of a global Christianitas. ² While scholars have long noted the presence of the Mongols in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” only recent work by Geraldine Heng, Jamie Friedman, Cord Whitaker, and Sierra Lomuto have sought to link their treatment in late medieval literature to matters of crusading, conversion, and premodern race-making.³ Thinking with them, I examine the popular and pervasive treatment of the Mongols as likely converts and allies, and how this perception informs the representation of the Mongols alongside other cultures perceived as “Other” in the same texts. My study also illuminates the ways that Chaucer may have drawn inspiration for “The Squire’s Tale” not only from TBJM’s expansive section devoted to the lands of the Great Khan but also from the way in which TBJM situates the Mongols in relation to Muslims and

 I would like to thank Valerie B. Johnson and Kara McShane for their immense labor and care in the preparation of this volume and article, and also Asa Simon Mittman, Mary Kate Hurley, Jeffrey J. Cohen, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Susan Nakley, Irina Dumitrescu, Robert Stanton, Sarah Moore, Pamela Yee, and Siobhain Bly Calkin for their support as this project took shape. And of course, a tremendous thanks to Thomas Hahn, whose mentorship and advice helped me incalculably in my thinking and writing about this topic and so many others.  Originally, this term “was synonymous with the notion of the Church as the mystical body of Christ,” but from the eleventh century onwards, inspired in part by papal reform and the passagia generalia (“general passages,” what we call the crusades in Outremer) Christianitas came to be understood as Christendom, which referred to the idea of Christian people (populus Christianus) but also the understanding of territory (the Holy Land especially) being Christian by right, whether or not it was in fact occupied by Christians (Tomaž Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 92– 96).  Jamie Friedman, “Making Whiteness Matter: The King of Tars,” postmedieval 6 (2015): 52– 63; Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Sierra Lomuto, “The Mongol Princess of Tars: Global Relations and Racial Formation in The King of Tars,” Exemplaria 31, no. 3 (2019): 171– 92. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-004

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Jews.⁴ The aspirational world-building in these texts draws on late medieval cultural desires for the realization of a global Christian world order, which is at heart a fantasy of genocide, accomplished either through war or through conversion and cultural erasure. Far from being “cosmopolitan,”⁵ depictions of the Mongols in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” and TBJM traffic in fantasies of cultural, religious, and racial annihilation, just in a quieter, more subtextual way than that seen in other works of crusades-inspired literature. While reactions in the earlier Middle Ages to the Mongols placed them in diabolical and apocalyptic contexts,⁶ the Mongols were frequently depicted as aspirational allies by the fourteenth century. This shift occurred both because of repeated missionary efforts made possible by the Pax Mongolica and because of continued plans for the recovery of Jerusalem. Emissaries and missionaries like John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, and Riccoldo da Monte Croce returned to Europe from the Far East with detailed accounts of the Mongol culture and arguments for their promise as military allies and converts. The Mongols themselves, in fact, oftentimes fueled such aspirations for their own political ends. The Ilkhans of Persia, for instance, frequently asked for aid against the Mamluks during this time and stressed their receptiveness to Christianity to bolster their chances of gaining support from Latin Christendom.⁷ These correspondences, and the prevalent desire in Latin Christendom for the Mongol’s alliance and conversion help to explain how, in 1300, most of Latin Christendom believed that “the Holy Land, including Jerusalem with the Holy Sepulchre, was conquered by the Mongol khan Ghazan from the Moslems  While TBJM uses “Saracen” to refer to Muslims, I follow Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh’s recent call to refrain from using that term except in circumstances where I am quoting the text directly. As she explains, doing so encourages readers to reckon with the way Muslims are being treated and disparaged in such texts. For more, see Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9 – 10 (2019), DOI 10.1111/lic3.12548.  See, for example, Iain Mcleod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) and Karma Lochrie, “Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville’s Cosmopolitan Utopia,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 592– 99.  For an excellent discussion of medieval writers (including Matthew Paris) who interpreted the Mongols and their invasions as a sign of impending apocalypse, see Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221 – 1410 (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2005), 97– 99 and 138 – 40. See Shirin Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 20 – 21; J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 65; and Noreen Giffney, “Monstrous Mongols,” postmedieval 3 (2012): 227– 45.  Paul Mayvaert, “An Unknown Letter of Hulagu, Il-Khan of Persia, to King Louis IX of France,” in The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom: The Asian Missions, ed. James D. Ryan (Farnham, UK: Ashgate), 267– 83 at 272.

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and handed over to Christians.”⁸ These events obviously never happened, and the story was eventually recognized as an exaggerated account of Ghazan’s victory in northern Syria. Nevertheless, the initial, enthusiastic belief in the account reveals a deep-seated investment in the Mongols as potential guarantors of Christian imperial ambition. This perception perhaps explains the enthusiasm that resulted from the mission of John of Montecorvino (beginning in 1291), a Franciscan who managed to convert King Körgüz, a ruler of the Önggüd Mongols and a Nestorian Christian. While most of Montecorvino’s converts returned to the Nestorian fold after Körgüz’s death, his initial success was rewarded, and he became the “archbishop of a new Latin see of Khanbaligh, with ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the entire Mongol world.”⁹ The creation of this new see signaled the “geographical expansion of Christendom,” and its eventual eradication in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century (due to complications that included the Black Plague, the Great Schism, the conversion of several Mongol rulers to Islam, and the campaigns of Temür Lenk) contributed to the oft-lamented perception during this time period that Latin Christendom was under existential threat, its borders retracting with alarming speed. Temür Lenk’s ascension to power in the late fourteenth century fueled anxieties about Latin Christendom’s shrinking borders, and he also reinvigorated ideas of potential alliance with the Mongol world. Though he was Muslim and culturally Turkish, Latin Christians consistently cast him as a Mongol ruler.¹⁰ So too did Temür Lenk, referred to himself in official correspondence “as the restorer of Chinggisid rights,” and configured his conquests in Iranian, Mamluk, and Ottoman territories as “a reimposition of legitimate Mongol control over lands taken by usurpers.”¹¹ Perceived as an immediate threat to Christendom, then, he simultaneously inspired hope as a potential champion of Christian imperial expansion. These accounts allowed the perception of the Mongols as likely converts and allies to persist through the fourteenth and well into the fifteenth centuries, long after many of the Mongol leaders and their people converted to Islam, and even after the passagia generalia—the so-called crusades, which involved multi-

 Sylvia Schein, “Gesta Dei Per Mongolos 1300: The Genesis of a Non-event,” The English Historical Review 94 (1979): 805 – 19 at 805.  Jackson, The Mongols, 258.  Beatrice Forbes Manz, “Tamerlane and the Symbolism of Sovereignty,” Iranian Studies 21, no. 1⁄2 (1988): 105 – 22. See also Jackson, The Mongols, 235 – 37.  Beatrice Forbes Manz, “Temür and the Problem of a Sovereign’s Legacy,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, no. 1 (1998): 21– 41 at 25.

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national armies and the establishment of Latin kingdoms in Outremer—became all but impossible to launch. As I have argued elsewhere, however, these seeming prohibitions in fact inspired the production of cultural fantasies of the kind of world the writers and audiences desperately wished to see realized.¹² These texts do so by imbuing their fictive worlds with simultaneously nostalgic and anticipatory registers, inviting audiences to look back to a time where victories over perceived religious and racialized Others were possible, and forward to a time where they might become possible once more. The Mongols became an especially generative site for such nostalgic and anticipatory fantasies in late medieval England, and they were almost always yoked to desires for successful crusading, a recovered Jerusalem, and for a global Christian world order, even in texts seemingly uninvested in matters of crusading and conquest. In the sections that follow, I demonstrate how such desires and aspirations inform the depiction of the Mongols in TBJM (drawing as the anonymous author does on several of the missionary accounts mentioned previously), and also how Chaucer incorporates and traffics in many of the same desires and aspirations in “The Squire’s Tale.” In the spirit of constructive speculation, I offer that the way in which both texts insist upon and depict identical conversion schemas suggest that Chaucer not only knew of TBJM but drew from it directly, and that both TBJM and “The Squire’s Tale” emblematize the wide reach and appeal of racialized desires for supremacy and genocide that the fictive and aspirational depictions of the Mongols were forced to embody in late medieval literature.

Encountering the Mongols in The Book of John Mandeville Surviving in nearly three hundred manuscripts, TBJM is an amalgam of pilgrim itineraries, missionary accounts, and Wonders of the East accounts—a nebulous mixture of fact and fantasy.¹³ TBJM began circulating in England ca. 1365, and had a measurable and sustained impact on the perception of cultures and religions outside of Latin Christendom well into the sixteenth century.¹⁴ While likely first composed in either Continental or Norman French and then translated into

 Leila K. Norako, “Sir Isumbras and the Fantasy of Crusade,” Chaucer Review 48, no. 2 (2013): 166 – 89. This argument also forms a central part of my current book project.  Higgins, Writing East, 9.  Andrew Fleck, “Here, There, and In Between: Representing Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” Studies in Philology 97, no. 4 (2000): 379 – 400 at 380.

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many languages, over forty English versions survive, enough to signal the work’s popularity in late medieval England specifically. The English TBJM’s depictions of the Mongols are significant, then, because they would have been the likeliest texts through which the Mongols would have been “encountered” by a medieval English audience. For the purposes of this article, I will focus primarily on the so-called Defective Version, given that thirty-five of the forty English witnesses are versions of this particular “interpolation” (to borrow a term from Iain Macleod Higgins); as such, and as Ralph Hanna has stressed, the sheer quantity of Defective Versions makes it the only one to have “any real claims to be the English Mandeville.”¹⁵ While TBJM’s descriptions of other cultures are sometimes rooted in fact, the text consistently depicts religious and cultural difference not out of an anthropological desire to account for the world’s many cultures, but out of a desire to demonstrate how Christian the world already is and how much more Christian it should become.¹⁶ Indeed, spaces of exchange and contact in TBJM often bring together peoples who appear utterly antithetical to each other, only to demonstrate and insist upon the degrees of Christian potential that ultimately connect them. Even as it admits that the world is heterodox, then, and even as it readily chastises Christians for failing to live up to the tenets of their faith, TBJM insists upon the superiority of Latin Christianity itself; the text begins, after all, with an emphatic call for a Crusade, one that the narrator invokes at regular intervals. But while Mandeville¹⁷—the text’s fictive, knightly narrator— may hope and seek to inspire related hopes in his audience that the entire world will someday come into the Christian fold, he showcases (in ways other works of crusading literature do not) the diversity of the cultures he encounters, and he emphasizes the many challenges in realizing a Christian world order. TBJM nevertheless contains many of the narrative features present in crusading romances

 Ralph Hanna, III, “Mandeville,” in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 121– 32. Some key passages on the Mongols are found in numerous other Middle English versions but are absent from the Defective Version (Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson, eds., The Book of John Mandeville [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007]). I will refer to the Egerton version in these instances (M. C. Seymour and George F. Warner, eds., The Egerton Version of Mandeville’s Travels [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]).  Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 270; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100 – 1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 63.  When I use the name “Mandeville,” I refer to the fictional traveling knight and narrator of TBJM, not the author who—as numerous scholars have observed—is unknown to us.

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and endorses the same, double-edged desires for recovery—both of the Holy Land and from the threat of foreign invasion.¹⁸ While I agree, then, with Higgins’s and other’s assertions that TBJM appears more neutral than other contemporary texts in its treatment of various cultures, I argue that the text still insists on a schema of religious difference that values non-Christian peoples only if their assimilation will help to realize global Latin Christendom. TBJM may acknowledge the heterodox nature of the world more readily than other texts, but it also overtly hopes for the disappearance of that heterodoxy over time. The text’s aspirational vision of Christian triumphalism is predicated, moreover, on a politics of wonder and of assimilation that invites audiences to read each culture in the context of its most proximate Other, and which is always predicated on a kind of extractivist logic.¹⁹ In this way, the Abrahamic or—in the case of the Mongols—pseudo-Abrahamic²⁰ cultures in TBJM are made to form a spectrum of conversion through which an audience arrives at ever more assimilable peoples. In TBJM’s conversion schema, Byzantines and Eastern Christians are the least likely to accept Latin Christianity, followed in order by Jews, Muslims, and Mongols. The further east Mandeville travels, then, the more receptive to the Latin Christian faith the foregrounded culture—i. e., the Mongols and the

 This argument is central to my current book project, The Crusading Imaginary of Medieval England, and it is also central to my Chaucer Review article on Sir Isumbras.  I agree with Andrew Fleck that the Mandeville narrator operates on a scale of similarity and difference, but I see the spectrum as one directly informed by the sources upon which the author drew (William of Boldensele and Odoric of Pordenone especially), and—however indirectly—reflective of the conversion schema argued for by Riccolodo da Montecroce (another source of the Mandeville author). As a result, I argue against the notion that descriptions of religious Others in TBJM are predicated on ambivalence or neutrality. Latin Christianity certainly functions as “a known, obvious truth against which all other faiths must be compared” in TBJM (Fleck, “Here, There, and in Between,” 19) but the Mandeville author, as I demonstrate in this chapter, offers both a series of potential bridges between Latin Christian Self and Eastern Other, and a veritable roadmap towards Christian triumphalism that will allow for the absorption (even erasure) of these same peoples. The depictions of the Mongols, moreover, are essential to this project. In this sense, I see TBJM’s various components (what Higgins describes as “intermittent crusading propaganda; an occasional satire on the religious practices of Latin Christians; an implicit treatise on the right rule in both the Christian and non-Christian worlds; a proof of . . . the possibility of circumnavigation; [and] a demonstration that most non-Christians have a ‘natural knowledge of the One, True God’”) not as discrete parts, but rather as components that are mutually complementary and inextricably linked through shared purpose (13). For more on the concept of extractivism and how it is used in this essay, see note 25.  The Mongols are—in TBJM and in many other writings—directly linked to other so-called Abrahamic faiths.

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people of Prester John—becomes. This spectrum, all but identical to that formulated by Riccoldo of Montecroce, was well-established by other travel and missionary writers, with Raymond Lull and Roger Bacon, for instance, both writing of the greater capacity of the Mongols to convert to Christendom than those of other cultures and faiths.²¹ While initially counterintuitive, this matter of proximity is directly linked to the perceived failings of Latin Christian practitioners that Mandeville and those he meets on his travels critique in TBJM. He chastises Latin Christians at the outset of TBJM for spiritual failings that resulted in failed or inert crusading endeavors; elsewhere, Byzantines send a deeply (and persuasively) critical letter to the pope touching on similar points, and the Sultan of Babylon castigates Latin Christians as well, saying that the Holy Land will remain in Muslim hands until Latin Christians right their ways.²² TBJM constantly reminds audiences that the moral and spiritual failings of Latin Christians are to blame for their inability to expand Christendom’s borders and recover Jerusalem. Both Byzantine Christians and Muslims are presented in TBJM as peoples keenly aware of these failings—which, Mandeville tells us, results in them being wholly uninspired to convert. By contrast, TBJM presents the Mongols as a people with deep reverence for the Latin Christian faith and its teachings, and with a robust record of successful (if fictive) prior conversions to Christianity. The distance between the Mongols and Mandeville’s contemporary Latin Christian world, by implication, makes them far less aware of Latin Christian spiritual ineptitude that Mandeville highlights elsewhere in TBJM; they are, by implication, more likely to convert based on an understanding of what Christendom could be (rather than what it tended to be in practice). What is more, the Christianity with which the Mongols share an affinity is pointedly idealized and flattened, implicitly rendered synonymous with Latin Christianity; nowhere is it mentioned, for instance, that the sect of Christianity most frequently encountered in the Mongol world was that of the Nestorians, a sect that clashed (oftentimes violently) with the Franciscan and Dominican missionaries who ventured into the Mongol Empire. In contrast to its depictions of Byzantines, Jews, and Muslims, the depiction of the Mongols in TBJM seems at first strikingly neutral, even complimentary, with initial descriptions emphasizing the wealth of the Mongol kingdom. A

 Jackson, The Mongols, 261– 62. Antoine Dondaine, “Ricoldiana: Notes sur les oeuvres de Ricoldo da Montecroce,” Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 37 (1967): 119 – 79 at 163. As referenced in Jackson, The Mongols, 264.  TBJM draws here on a long-standing tradition of locating the failure of recovery in the moral inadequacies of Latin Christians. Several versions of Urban II’s speech at Clermont (1095) evoke this concept, and recovery writers contemporary to TBJM evoke it as well.

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“gret contré and good, and ful of good and of marchaundise,” foreign merchants flock to Cathay for “spices,” and its capital city—Cadom—boasts a palace for the khan so sumptuously designed and equipped that he never needs leave it, with gardens vast enough for hawking, and with gold, jewels, and aromatic panther skins adorning its walls.²³ The repetition of “precious stanes” throughout this introductory account of the khan’s empire creates a rhythmic iteration of exoticized luxury that emphasizes the economic allure of the Mongol world in tandem with the spiritual and military hopes that it holds for Latin Christendom. The Mongols fascinate the Mandeville author, in other words, not only because of perceived exoticism (which, as Lomuto stresses, frequently encompasses both fear and desire²⁴) and their potential willingness to convert, but also because of their ability to be commoditized. The emphasis on material goods in this episode, however, invites audiences to consider the conversionary potential of Muslims versus Mongols; it underwrites the latter’s superiority (cultural, moral, spiritual) over the former as it announces the Mongols’ replacement of Muslims as the likeliest cultural ally to aid Latin Christendom and its realization of global empire. The neutrality of TBJM’s account of the Mongol world, then, is a thing of smoke and mirrors, because TBJM insists from the start on the ease with which Mongol culture and religion can be erased for the sake of Christian expansion. TBJM’s explicit invitations to compare the Mongols to Muslims and (implicitly) to Jews by way of their relationship with material goods makes its insistence upon Christian supremacy even clearer. Whereas the riches of the Mongols in TBJM inspire an extractivist²⁵ mixture of wonder, hope, and desire, the riches of Muslims are made to signal misplaced priorities. Mercantile encounters between Christians and Muslims are consistently fraught in Mandeville’s world, a detail brought fully to light when they are compared to the Mongols in passages describing the khan and his empire.²⁶ In one such section, found in numerous

 Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 1952– 53 and 1958 – 86.  Lomuto, “Mongol Princess,” 171– 72.  In using this term, I invite readers to consider the ways in which TBJM relies on a premodern version of (and desire for) cultural extractivism that sees the lands and khanates of the Mongols as potential “sacrifice zones”—in this case an aspirational perception intertwined with and fueled by a belief in Latin Christian supremacy and a desire for Latin Christian global dominion. For an introduction to the concept and ideology of extractivism, see Imre Szeman’s and Jennifer Wenzel’s, “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Extractivism?,” Textual Practice 35 (2021): 505 – 23. See also Naomi Klein’s discussion of extractivism and its creation of “sacrifice zones” in her book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).  TBJM goes to great lengths, for instance, to accuse Muslims of trickery and subterfuge; trade conducted between the sultan and various European kingdoms serves, ultimately, as a cover for

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versions of TBJM (though absent in Defective), Mandeville tells of the Mongol commander Halaon’s military exploits into a Muslim kingdom, wherein a Muslim sultan refuses to flee his conquered city because he would lose all of his gold and jewels. Once victorious, Halaon imprisons the sultan with said wealth saying: Thou was the godd of the Sarzenes and godd hase na mister of mete ne drink, and therfore thou schalle neuer for vs hafe mete ne drink bot ete if thou wille thi precious stanes and thi tresoure that thou gaderd so fast togyder and luffed so mykille.²⁷

The sultan starves to death, and this anecdote emphasizes the Muslims’ perceived weakness for material possessions and the Mongols’ contrasting ability to negotiate a set of values that resonate with those of an idealized Christian faith; the khan might be extraordinarily wealthy, in sum, but in this aspirational anecdote offered by Mandeville, they—unlike Muslims—keep their preoccupation with worldly goods in check. This ability to “correctly” contextualize and navigate the material world fuels TBJM’s hopes for the Mongols’ conversion. Mandeville first intimates their receptiveness to Christianity when he explains the origins and meaning of the name “The Grete Cane.” He attributes it to Cham, “the myghtiest and the richest” of Noah’s sons, ancestor to “the paynymes and the dyverse maner of men of yles, som hedles and other men defigured.”²⁸ As Noah’s descendants, the Mongols find themselves inscribed here in biblical history—a people awaiting (whether they realize it or not) subsumption into the Latin Christian fold.²⁹ The text also emphasizes the Christian God’s favorable treatment of the Mongols and the promise of their eventual conversion, describing Chinggis Khan’s rise to power, attributing the beginnings of this ascension to a divine and Christian (or Christ-like) messenger who comes to Chinggis in the guise of a “knyght all white,

espionage (Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 1319 – 26), and in versions containing the “Egypt Gap” material missing in the Defective (see Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 457– 58), the charges of deceitfulness are made even starker with a detailed description of the balm trade (see Anthony Bale, ed., Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 27– 28).  Seymour and Warner, Egerton, 124.1– 4.  Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2024– 26.  Unlike other accounts of the Mongols, including those of Matthew Paris and Abulafia, the Mongols of TBJM are not themselves cast as one of the lost tribes of Israel. This view of them as a lost tribe, once popular, seems to have fallen out of favor by the late Middle Ages. For more information on the lost tribes, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite’s The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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sittynge upon a white stede.”³⁰ According to Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson, this knight may be a reimagined version of the shaman Tab-Tengri, who rode “to consult the sky-god (Tengri) before the election of the Khan,” and they offer that “Mongolian worship of Tengri as the ‘one God’ may underlie many medieval accounts of the essential Christianity of the Mongols.”³¹ TBJM, then, glosses this shaman figure in conspicuously Christian terms to reveal the divine favor of the Mongols and the likeliness of their conversion. This passage, after all, states overtly that the Christian God not only looks favorably upon them but, through “His wille,” granted Chinggis Khan power enough to create an empire that will, so he seems to hope, come to the aid of Latin Christendom. Moreover, TBJM emphasizes that successful conversions of the Mongols have already taken place and continue to occur, a dramatic difference from preceding treatments of Byzantines, Muslims, and Jews in prior episodes; Byzantines are depicted as intractable and heretical, even as their critiques of Latin Christian moral and spiritual failings are valid; Muslims are depicted as a people with certain beliefs in common with Christians but who, with rare exception, are unwilling to convert, and who, by the sultan’s own admission, are destined to be conquered and defeated by Christians. Jews, in turn, are cast as a people who, with even rarer exception, are wholly unreceptive to the Christian faith and who—as Mandeville venomously reminds his audience—are present and active threats to its existence. In direct contrast, TBJM offers up several (fictive) accounts of Mongol khans converting to Christianity. Mangu Khan, in an anecdote appearing in the Egerton version, is described as a Christian ruler who instructs Halaon to conquer the Holy Land.³² TBJM reveals that while both Mango Khan and Kublai (Chebysa) Khan were Christians, those who followed them reverted to their previous, non-Christian faith, with some even converting instead to Islam. Halaon’s conquest of Muslim lands becomes even more significant in the versions that include it, then, as it sets Mongols and Muslims against one another and insists on the Mongols’ prior existence not just as Christian allies but as Christians—a detail that may reflect those aforementioned fictional accounts of Mongol conquest circulating in 1300, and that certainly corresponds with late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century writings on and aspirations for the Mongols.³³ And while the Defective Version does not include this anecdote, it stresses, as do many other versions of TBJM, that the khan has “many barones and other that beth Cristen,     6).

Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2035 – 48, at 2037. Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, pp. 120 – 121, note to line 2037. Seymour and Warner, Egerton, 123.25 – 31 and 124.9 – 15. For more, see Lomuto, “The Mongol Princess” and Heng, Invention of Race (especially chap.

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and other that beth converted to our faith thorghe prechynge of good Cristen men that dwelleth ther,” but that the khan himself is not Christian, and that many who have converted are hesitant to broadcast that fact.³⁴ By conjuring this fictive history, TBJM suggests that while Latin Christians have failed to convert the Mongols permanently, hope remains for their eventual conversion, which will enable the recovery of the Holy Land and the creation of a global Christian empire. To reinforce this point, TBJM highlights the contemporary khan’s receptiveness to Christianity in ways much more emphatic than its source materials. Odoric of Pordenone, for instance, describes the khan as a ruler tolerant of a wide variety of faith traditions.³⁵ While Mandeville admits that many Mongol rulers converted to Islam, Mandeville presents the khan he encounters (and whom he serves as a mercenary) as deeply receptive to Christian teaching. For example, the khan demonstrates a clear preference for Christians over other faith traditions, Muslims in particular, made clear in there being more Christian physicians at his court than Muslim physicians.³⁶ Odoric, by contrast, merely says of the physicians that there are “four hundred idolaters, eight Christians, and one Saracen,” and he never alludes to the khan’s preference for the Christian ones as does Mandeville.³⁷ The version in TBJM, then, replicates a formula seen in the description of the Muslims far earlier in the text: just as Muslims are depicted identifying the spiritual “failings” of the Jews,³⁸ the Mongols, in turn, are made to recognize the perceived failings of Muslims. Unlike the Muslims described and encountered by Mandeville, however, the Mongols are positioned (theologically and geographically) far enough away from Latin Christendom to be unaware of its inhabitants’ moral and spiritual failings, a knowledge that pre-

 Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2145 – 49.  Henry Yule, trans. and ed., Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), 133.  See Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2144– 45; Seymore and Warner, Egerton, 128.23 – 28.  Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 133; compare to Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2145 – 47 and Seymour and Warner, Egerton, 128.23 – 28.  TBJM’s description of Islam makes this dynamic rather clear. The narrator names the Alkaron (Qur’an) as their holy book and mentions that in it the Jews are described as “And that wickid folke, for they wole noght byleve that Jhesu Crist is God. And they seith that Jewes lieth on Our Lady and on her Sone Jhesu, seynge that they dede Hym noght on the Cros” (Kohanski and Benson, Mandeville, lines 1266 – 68; see also Seymour and Warner, Egerton, 74.9 – 14). The passage works to link Muslim and Christian faiths in a kind of alliance born out of shared antiSemitism, since they are both made to share the belief that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion.

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vents the sultan (with whom Mandeville converses earlier in the narrative) from being willing or able to convert.³⁹ Both their distance from Latin Christendom and their distrust of the Muslims cast the Mongols as more assimilable people. According to Mandeville, “And thow hit be so that they be noght Cristen, yit the Chane and the Tartaryns byleveth on Allmyghty God.”⁴⁰ The greater ease and comfort with which Mandeville integrates himself into the khan’s court also implies the Mongols’ greater likeliness as converts. Just as he did at the sultan’s court, Mandeville enters into the service of the khan. Tellingly, however, no offer or temptation to convert to the Mongol faith is made here, as it was when Mandeville was in the company of the Sultan of Babylon.⁴¹ In the khan’s court and empire, then, no threat of cultural interpenetration exists, only the promise of the Mongols’ future absorption by Latin Christendom. To emphasize the Mongols’ perceived nearness to Christianity, the narrator describes the khan’s veneration of the cross during his journeys through his empire. According to Mandeville, whenever the khan encounters Christians while touring his lands, he allows them to come before him in procession with the cross. Mandeville explains that there are Christians in “many citeez in that land,” and that whenever they process before the khan, he “dooth of his hatte”—which is worth the price of a kingdom—when he sees the cross itself; he then allows the prelates to sing orisons on his behalf and to bless him.⁴² This passage not only depicts the favorable treatment of Christians by the khan, but also reveals the khan’s admiration of the Christian faith and, implicitly, his privileging of that faith over his own material wealth. The scene calls back to prior episodes stressing the exoticized luxury of the Mongol world and the khan’s staggering wealth but also, critically, his ability to privilege Christian devotional materiality over his own treasures. This scene insists, then, on the Mongols’ ability to distinguish which material objects are more important and worthy of veneration than others; an ability that, as demonstrated in the anecdote with Halaon and the sultan, Mandeville repeatedly accuses Muslims of lacking. In this case, the Mongol khan’s willingness to tip his priceless hat to the humbly crafted cross prefigures his hoped-for adoption of Christianity and signals his willingness to be subsumed into and made to serve that faith’s imperial aims.

 Kohanski  Kohanski  Kohanski  Kohanski 131.20 – 27.

and Benson, Mandeville, lines 1295 – 330. and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2098 – 99. and Benson, Mandeville, lines 445 – 51, 2009 – 13. and Benson, Mandeville, lines 2170 – 83 at 2179; Seymour and Warner, Egerton,

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TBJM positions the Mongols as the likeliest of converts and allies, and its progression not only eastward but through a conversion spectrum leads Mandeville inexorably to the mythical Land of Prester John. This territory, as Akbari has observed, is the balance and perfect counterpart to England.⁴³ Both are Christian nations at opposite ends of the world, and, with their powers combined, hope remains for a recovered Holy Land and an ascendant Latin Christian empire; their linkage, in fact, aligns with older, twelfth-century assumptions that the Mongols (as they made their way into Outremer) were actually Christians under the command of Prester John himself.⁴⁴ Unlike Marco Polo’s and William of Rubruck’s accounts, which depict Prester John dying in battle against Chinggis Khan after refusing to marry the khan’s daughter, Mandeville explains that Prester John and the khan are allies through his marriage to that khan’s daughter; again, TBJM offers to readers an emphatic, calculated reimagining of prior accounts, one that appeals to contemporary fears and desires for Latin Christendom and calls back to the opening passage of TBJM, which plainly articulates desires to reclaim the “rightful inheritance” of Christians—i. e., the Holy Land. By the end of TBJM, Mandeville has discovered the very peoples who—through their conversion and alliance—might bring that ineffably genocidal dream to fruition. The Mongols appear, ultimately, as the clearest palimpsests in the entire work—a culture upon whom Christianity can be overwritten with relative ease. These assumptions and desires inform the entire account of the Mongol court in TBJM. Fixated as they are on matters of wealth and mercantile possibility, the passages concerned with the Great Khan and his court are equally focused on the ease with which the Mongols might be subsumed into the larger Christian body, an effortlessness assumed due to the purported prophecies and spiritual signs that point to their inner Christian essence. TBJM’s conversion spectrum relies, in the end, on an array of elisions, deliberate oversights, and simplifications. As we move into the Far East with Mandeville, the (sometimes violent) differences between its Christian sects—e. g., the Nestorians—and Latin Christian missionaries documented in actual travel and missionary accounts all but evaporate from TBJM, an absence that allows the foregrounding of aspirational conversion fantasies. Whereas Franciscan missionaries oftentimes found themselves at odds with the well-ensconced Nestorians in the Mongol court, TBJM flattens

 See Akbari, Idols in the East, 52– 53.  Jackson, The Mongols, 97– 99.

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the diverse identities and practices of Christian sects in the Far East.⁴⁵ Eastern Christians are acknowledged, especially when Mandeville encounters Prester John and his people, but whereas William of Rubruck and Odoric, as Kohanski and Benson explain, “identify Prester John with the Khan of the Keraits, and admit that he is not as generally imagined by Europeans” and were also quick to point to the differences and contentions between Eastern and Latin Christian sects, TBJM deliberately occludes such contentions and differences in order to present audiences with a world that could become a single, vast Latin Christian empire.⁴⁶ The success of TBJM’s conversion schema hinges, then, on the selective absence of nuances and details in order to maintain the synchronously nostalgic and anticipatory fantasy of Christendom’s expansion. TBJM operates out of this comparative model of conversion in order to present its audience with a viable fantasy that acknowledges simultaneously the heterodox nature of the world and its audiences’ desires for a kind of cultural (Latin Christian) supremacy that was impossible to realize. In this way, TBJM becomes Janus-faced, gazing back to a time where conversion of the Mongols seemed possible, but forward to a time where Latin Christian superiority might be secured through future attempts alliance, conversion, and genocide. This simultaneously nostalgic and anticipatory gazing works in tandem with its fictive conversion schema, allowing TBJM to function as a fantastical roadmap towards Christian hegemony, one that the audience may well have enjoyed even as it acknowledged the impossibilities of such aspirations.

 For discussions of Latin Christian encounters and conflicts with Christian communities in the Mongol Empire, see Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word, chap. 3, and Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), chaps. 2 and 3.  As Seymour notes: “all the accounts of the friars (Carpini, Rubruck, Odoric) stress the degeneration of their practice and belief to levels of barbarism” (166, n. 115/9, as cited by Kohanski and Benson note for line 2392). See also Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia: Beginnings to 1500, vol. 1 of A History of Christianity in Asia (San Francisco: Harper, 1992); Douglas Dunlop, “The Karaits of Eastern Asia,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 11 (1943 – 1946): 276 – 89; and Ian Gillman and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Christians in Asia before 1500 (London: Routledge, 1999).

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The Politics of Wonder and Aspirational Conversion in “The Squire’s Tale” On the surface, “The Squire’s Tale” could not seem more different from the tone, shape, and subject matter of TBJM. Whereas TBJM’s account of the Mongols combines and alters a panoply of travel accounts to present an aspirational portrait to its audience, the Squire pilgrim in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—son of the crusader knight on the same pilgrimage—concocts a florid chivalric romance set in the kingdom and court of Chinggis Khan (Cambyuskan). While scholars have turned their attention to the Squire’s choice to set his tale in the Mongol Empire, and have acknowledged that the choice likely owes itself to late medieval interests in the Mongols,⁴⁷ many have contended that the tale reflects the Squire’s— and possibly Chaucer’s—seeming “tolerance” of cultural and religious difference.⁴⁸ Alan Ambrisco, however, warns against such a reading, and argues that the tale’s depiction of a Mongol court is born not out of tolerance but out of well-established hopes—both anticipatory and nostalgic—for Mongol assimilation and conversion; he also contends in passing that the tale masks underlying “antagonism and intolerance” with “overt displays of sympathy.”⁴⁹ I contend, however, that we need to resist the impulse to frame this tale as less dangerous or genocidal than texts more overt in those impulses (whether Richard Coer De Lyon or Chaucer’s own “Prioress’s Tale”). Instead of presenting the Mongols as “assimilable,” then, and instead of arguing that the tale projects ideas of “tolerance” of perceived others (a deeply problematic move that centers, in this case, Latin Christian cultures and religion as an assumed inherent norm), I argue that the “The Squire’s Tale” instead presents the Mongols as a people whose culture must, in the end, be sacrificed and erased for the sake of Christian world-building. For all its seeming neutrality and acceptance of Mongol paganism, then, I contend that it shares much not only with texts like TBJM but also

 Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson, eds., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 13; Katherine Lynch, “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales,” Speculum 70, no. 3 (1995): 530 – 51 at 531; and Carmel Jordan, “Soviet Archaeology and the Setting for the ‘Squire’s Tale’,” The Chaucer Review 22, no. 2 (1987): 128 – 40 at 132.  See, among others, John M. Fyler, “Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale,” ELH 55, no. 1 (1988): 1– 26; Brenda Deen Schildgen, Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001).  Fyler, “Domesticating,” 13. Alan Ambrisco, “‘It lyth nat in my tonge’: Occupatio and Otherness in the Squire’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 205 – 28.

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with crusades-inspired romances in its implicit fantasies of and desires for a global Christian world order that requires cultural genocide for its realization. Admittedly, the tale does not offer the kind of fictive and aspirational ethnography of Mongols seen in texts such as TBJM. It references their presumably animist faith only in passing (“As of the secte of which that he was born / He kepte his lay to which that he was sworn”),⁵⁰ and it contains few of the details of Mongol court and culture that TBJM and its source materials provide. On the surface, the tale also seems disinterested in the eradication of religious difference through conversion. Nevertheless, and especially when we consider the treatment of religious difference in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Prioress’ Tale,” it becomes clear that acceptance of perceived Otherness is, even in Chaucer’s works, reserved only for “receptive” foreigners who offer hopes of Christian expansion and recovery. What is more, the Mongols are presented here, as in TBJM, as a people who are, for all their constructed similarities with Latin Christian and classical cultural norms, geographically distant. As such, Chaucer seems to draw upon the well-established notion that the Mongols would have been easier to covert than other cultures because of their spiritual distance from Latin Christendom; as in TBJM, the Mongols appear here not as threats to Latin Christian hegemony but instead as aspirational tabula rasae, who only require conversion in order to be fully assimilated into the Latin Christian fold. What is more, while the Squire allows the Mongols to retain their pagan “lay,” he deploys the same erasure tactics seen in The King of Tars. While the romance focuses on the marriage and eventual conversion of the Sultan of Damascus (whose skin turns white once he is baptized), it presents the Mongols in its opening lines as a people already Christianized and bleached—as faithful Christians with skin “white as a swan’s feather;” this phrase, a commonplace description of romance heroes and heroines, carries even more overt, racialized weight in Tars given its insistence that skin color signals not only one’s relative goodness but one’s religion.⁵¹ The Squire takes a similar approach when introducing Chinggis Khan, describing him in the precise terms reserved for romance heroes. He is “hardy, wys and riche, / [a]nd pitous and just, alwey yliche; / [s]ooth of his

 Lines 17– 18. All quotations of “The Squire’s Tale” are taken from Benson and Robinson, The Riverside Chaucer.  For more on The King of Tars see Lomuto, “The Mongol Princess,” and also Whitaker, Black Metaphors.

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word, benigne and honorable” (19 – 21).⁵² What is more, the Squire’s Mongol court shares numerous qualities with the courts depicted of Middle English romance—from its elaborate banquets to, as Brenda Deen Schildgen observes, the “sudden entrances and exits of unidentified knights in armor bearing magical gifts.”⁵³ Like Tars, then, “The Squire’s Tale” simultaneously acknowledges Mongol difference at the outset through, in this case, that brief reference to the khan’s “lay,” only to insist on his essential synonymy with Christian romance heroes in the immediate lines that follow. The Squire also peppers the tale with references to figures from classical and contemporary European literature, a move that further reveals the Mongols’ receptiveness to Latin Christian belief and (however imagined) shared culture.⁵⁴ For example, as they gaze on the brass steed gifted to Cambyuskan early in the tale, the Mongols compare it to a Lombardy steed, an Apulian courser, Pegasus, Synon, and the Trojan Horse (193, 195, 207, 209, 210 – 15). These allusions imbricate Mongol court culture with classical Greco-Roman myth, biblical history, and chivalric literature, encoding “exotic” marvels in terms of the familiar.⁵⁵ Though a far cry from the erasures of race and religion that occur in The King of Tars, or the bold assertions of Christian superiority seen in TBJM, “The Squire’s Tale”—in its deployment of comparatives, and in its replacement of foreign particulars with allusions familiar to a Latin Christian audience—enacts not only a form of assimilation but a form of conquest through its wanton erasure of anything that might read as “foreign.” This kind of conquest-via-effacement reflects the Squire’s familiarity with crusading practices and ideations; he is, after all, the son of the Knight, who embarks on the pilgrimage to Canterbury after returning to England from one of several crusading ventures. The aspirational world-building and imagined conquest

 Compare, for instance, the initial description of the eponymous hero in Sir Isumbras (J. O. Halliwell, ed., The Thornton Romances. Camden Society 30, 88 – 120. London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1844): He was mekille mane and lange, With schuldirs brode and armes strange, That semly were to see; So was he bothe faire and heghe, Alle hym loffede that hym seghe, Se hende a mane was hee! . . . Of curtayse was he kynge . . . (13 – 18, 22).  Schildgen, Pagans, 40.  See Anne Middleton, “War by Other Means: Marriage and Chivalry in Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1 (1984): 119 – 33 at 129; see also Ambrisco, “‘It Lyth Nat’.”  Ambrisco, “‘It Lyth Nat’,” 211.

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in the tale, moreover, mirrors the kinds of crusading enacted by the heroes of crusades romances, and reflects both the tale-teller’s and Chaucer the author’s intimate familiarity with crusades romances and with the long-standing tradition of representing the Mongols as related, but crucially distinct, religious and cultural Others necessary to the projects and desires of recovery. Such “recovery romances,” as I have argued elsewhere, consistently labor to flatten the identities of Christians and non-Christians in order to insist on the eradication of all who refuse conversion and subsumption into the Christian fold.⁵⁶ In Isumbras, for instance, the eponymous hero attempts to convert all of his Muslim subjects but ultimately wages war against them because of their refusal to become Christians. The enduring message of such romances is that in order for Christendom to expand—and in order for the Holy Land to be “recovered”—genocide is necessary. The Mongols, however, were frequently configured as likely allies to this project of expansion and recovery. As a result, texts that represent them in the later Middle Ages oftentimes reflected these nostalgic aspirations—ones inflected with both a sense of the Mongol’s cultural difference and with a sense of how easily they might be converted and used for such imperial projects. In contrast to representations of so-called “Saracens” who, as fictive and inherently polemical depictions of Muslims, are regularly cast as a polytheistic people either incapable or unwilling to convert, the Mongols are depicted in “The Squire’s Tale” as a people who possess deep affinities for Latin Christian beliefs and practices. As discussed previously, this depiction contrasts dramatically with the complicated and fraught realities of fourteenth-century relations between Christendom and Mongol rulers (the vast majority of which were Muslim). In the end, even the more seemingly “benign” treatment of the Mongols in romances like Tars and “The Squire’s Tale” cannot be read as a sign of cosmopolitanism but rather as a different form of erasure rooted in simultaneously nostalgic and anticipatory aspirations. By insisting on the synonymies of the Mongols with Latin Christendom by forcing them into a shared Abrahamic and classical lineage, “The Squire’s Tale” not only reflects late medieval tendencies to cast the Mongols as aspirational allies but enacts a form of genocide that eradicates through cultural elision. TBJM shares in this impulse in its descriptions of the Mongols, but TBJM repeatedly acknowledges the existence of Mongol beliefs and cultural practices that differ from that of Latin Christendom. Mongols are presented as likely allies by Mandeville, who hints of shared beliefs and affinities that would make them more pliable, whereas in “The Squire’s Tale,” those kinds of hints balloon into

 Norako, “Sir Isumbras.”

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the defining features of the court and its cultural norms, and any features that might code the Mongols as foreign are brought into the interpretive ambit of an (equally imagined) Latin Christian supra-culture. Conquest, in “The Squire’s Tale,” then, takes the form of an interpretive, ideological labor performed on bodies simultaneously coded in familiar and foreign terms and who are presented as a people defined by their implied pliability and need for Christian governance. This is brought into sharpest relief as the Mongol court gazes in awe at the brass horse brought by the Mamluk messenger (189 – 224). While the Squire acknowledges the diverse theories the Mongols have about the gift, he insists on the collective nature of the Mongols’ (ultimately ignorant) marveling, which implies a lack that must be remedied through “proper” (presumably Christian) governance. The verb “swarm” appears twice in this section as a descriptor of the Mongol court gazing on the brass steed, and the second instance the crowd “murmureden as doth a swarm of been” (204). Bees were a popular symbolic creature in late medieval European literature, oftentimes evoking a harmonious polity wherein all members perform their necessary roles and are governed effectively by an adored and capable king, who they accompany as a collective when said king exits the hive.⁵⁷ The Mongols, however, in their “murmuring” and “jangling”—i. e., idle speech or prattling—seem a far cry from that harmonious collective. The narrator stresses, after all, that Of sondry doutes thus they jangle and trete, As lewed peple demeth comunly Of thynges that been made moore subtilly Than they kan in hir lewedness comprehende; They demen gladly to the badder ende. (220 – 24)

The Squire presents the Mongols here as a murmuring swarm of benignly ignorant non-Christians, a collective who admittedly have a leader in Cambyuskan, but who implicitly lack the kind of knowledge and authority that Latin Christian governance would provide and which Chaucer, through his tale, insists upon as inherently superior and necessary. Here, Chaucer appears to take inspiration from the way in which Mandeville describes the Mongol court, specifically the passage about a ceremony wherein they collectively call and respond to various ritualized commands as one, and who, like the murmuring crowd in Cambyuskan’s court, and like the bees of medieval bestiaries and other medieval compen-

 See for instance Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century compendium De proprietatibus Rerum (translated into Middle English in the late fourteenth century by John Trevisa), numerous medieval bestiaries, and the allegorical poem Mum and Sothsegger at lines 987– 1087.

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dia, move as one towards shared knowledge and endeavor. As Bartholomaeus Anglicus (via Trevisa’s translation) writes in the popular De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1240): “The obedience of the people [i. e., bees] is wonderful aboute the kynge. For whanne he passeth forth al the swarme in o cluster passeth with him and he is biclipped about with the swarm, as it were with an hoste of knightes.”⁵⁸ Depictions of the hive’s collective endeavor and cooperation are predicated on an inherent compliance and pliability, and Bartholomaeus stresses that apian communities rely on the constant attendance to one’s given tasks, wherein each completes their given work; disobedience to the king or failure to do one’s work results in a bee’s death, whereas obeisance is rewarded.⁵⁹ In like fashion, TBJM stresses the necessity of rigid compliance within the khan’s court. Thousands of people arrive at court for feasts, and yet each “woot wel what he shal do” (2106). Attendant philosophers guide the people through a series of strict rituals, and these philosophers each have their designated areas of expertise and authority. Like the hive described by Bartholomaeus, the khan’s advisors also swiftly detect when any of the khan’s subjects are threatening rebellion or violence, and quickly dispatch members of the court to eliminate those threats to the collective. What is more, the description of the khan taking leave of his palace and going out into his landholdings mirrors the description of Bartholomaeus’s king bee leaving his hive almost exactly: the khan leaves with an enormous retinue and is physically transported (in this case within an elaborate carriage) whenever he desires secrecy and rest.⁶⁰ TBJM of course never overtly likens the khan and his court to a beehive, but the invitation to make such comparisons would have been readily apparent, especially given the influence that Bartholomaeus’s work appears to have wielded on TBJM. ⁶¹ Chaucer would by all accounts have known both works quite well, and the description of the Mongols as a swarm of bees in “The Squire’s Tale” seems, as a result, to make explicit the otherwise implicit parallel in TBJM between Mongols and a hive in order to allow the tale to emphasize and insist upon the Mongols’ malleability—a quality that, in its fictive and racist nature, shapes the Mongols into highly desirable potential allies and facilitators of a global Christian empire.

 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum; A Critical Text, edited by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 – 1988), 2:1144, lines 10 – 13.  Bartholomaeus Angelicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, 2:1143 – 44.  Compare to this passage of Trevisa’s translation on page 31 (2:1144, lines 10 – 13).  For more on the parallels and seeming influence of De Proprietatibus Rerum on TBJM, see Akbari, Idols in the East (63 – 64, 147, 161). See also Higgins, The Book of John Mandeville: With Related Texts (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 261.

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In addition to stressing the Mongols’ affinity for Christian belief in these ways, “The Squire’s Tale” incorporates salient features of recovery romance—especially the deliberate warping of linear time in ways that fuel its fantasies of conquest—in order to insist on the Mongols’ potential as allies and converts. While I agree with Ambrisco that the introduction of the Mamluk (a Muslim foreigner) invites a boundary collapse by presenting a culture more foreign and less assimilable than the Mongols, I contend that the Mamluk’s arrival also elides discrete historical moments in order to fuel a simultaneously nostalgic and anticipatory fantasy.⁶² The Mamluk arrives on behalf of his “lige lord” who is “kyng of Arabe and of Inde”; according to Vincent J. Dimarco, this refers to late medieval southern Arabia, which was ruled by the Bahri Mamluks who repeatedly engaged in diplomatic correspondence with none other than the Mongols, specifically the Golden Horde in Sarrai—i. e., the location of Cambuyskan’s court.⁶³ While the Mamluk Sultanate (which existed from 1250 to 1382) remained a formidable presence in Outremer in Chaucer’s day, it post-dates Chinggis Khan by several decades (Chinggis died ca. 1227). What is more, the Mongol ruler Berke Khan did not found Sarrai—the city where “The Squire’s Tale” takes place—until 1257. The anachronistic presence of both Chinggis Khan and a Mamluk in a city that post-dates the khan’s death encapsulates the requirements of the tale’s cultural fantasy in numerous respects. As Ambrisco suggests, the entry of the Mamluk creates an implicit alliance between the intended Christian audience and the Mongols at the khan’s court, reinforced through a series of fictive cultural similarities.⁶⁴ Both the pilgrim listeners and, more broadly, the audience of The Canterbury Tales, are invited to share in the Mongols’ fascination and fear over the foreign messenger and his unusual gifts. His entrance allows for such a union because it creates a spectrum of difference that places the Mongol court in closer cultural proximity to that of the intended Christian audience. But whereas Ambrisco sees this introduction of the Mamluk messenger as a disruption and destabilizing aspect of the text’s Othering, the Mamluk’s divergence from the overtly polemical and racist figure of the “Saracen” (ubiquitous in medieval romances concerned with matters of crusading) and his anachronistic presence in fact facilitate the tale’s project of assimilation and genocide by placing the Mongols on a spectrum akin to that seen in TBJM. “Strange” as the Mamluk might initially be, he stands in contrast with the ever-polemicized and raced Muslims of recovery romance; unlike the Muslim

 Ambrisco, “‘It Lyth Nat’,” 212.  Riverside Chaucer, 892, n. 110.  Ambrisco, “‘It Lyth Nat’,” 214.

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knight Otuel, for instance—who ferociously disrupts Charlemagne’s court and goads Roland into single combat⁶⁵—this Muslim messenger enters the court with utmost courtesy, bearing wondrous gifts rather than threats of war. He wins over the apprehensive Mongol court with his beneficence and the marvels he presents. The courtiers acknowledge the potential for danger (some fearing that the steed is a Trojan Horse, 212– 15), and the encounter hints at the technological superiority of the Muslim world, particularly in the description of the “lewed” Mongol people’s anxious and uninformed conjectures over how the gifts operate (220 – 24). However, the horse is not magical, as some of the Mongols surmise, but only appears so to those lacking knowledge and an ability to accurately read their surroundings, a point driven home by the constant repetition of the words “wonder” and “knowe” in descriptions of the gazers (189 – 262). What is more, while the diversity of opinions offered up by the Mongol court signals that, for all their collective murmuring, they are not a monolithic horde, the Squire undercuts that acknowledgment of individuality by insisting in the end on their collective “lewedness,” as seen in the passage above (220 – 24). The courtier’s transition from fear to wonder, moreover, replicates in miniature the approach to the Mongols that “The Squire’s Tale” seeks to inspire. Just as the courtiers’ fear and misinterpretations give way to wonder and delight over the Mamluk’s mirabilia because of how they can be made to serve them, so too are audiences of the tale—both intratextual and extratextual—encouraged to read the Mongols of Cambyuskan’s empire.⁶⁶ Nevertheless, the tale exposes its own inherent nostalgia and fictionality even as it draws upon well-established desires for Christendom’s expansion. Chinggis Khan lived between 1155 and 1227, and while he was not a Christian, his well-documented tolerance of Christianity inspired hopes of affinity and alliance. By contrast, the Mongol rulers of Chaucer’s day—Temür Lenk most notably—had largely converted to Islam and were perceived in large part as threats to projects of Christian imperial ambition. Hopes for the actual assimilation of the Mongols were easily contested as a result, and it is perhaps for that very reason that we see them persist as aspirational fantasies in literature from this time. “The Squire’s Tale,” therefore, conjures a former age in which such assimilations were still considered possible through its focus on Chinggis Khan. By presenting a legendary figure already associated with Christian aspirations, “The Squire’s  See Otuel and Roland, ed. Elizabeth Melick, lines 58 – 219 in Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Fein, and David Raybin’s The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-French Otinel, online ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019).  In this sense, I agree with Ambrisco’s argument that the Mamluk “comes to occupy the space of the other, and the Europeans/Mongols occupy the space of the self” (“‘It Lyth Nat’,” 214).

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Tale” invokes a nostalgic panorama of the Mongol world at a time in which Christian hegemony seemed (at least in retrospect) more likely. Simultaneously, through the introduction of the Mamluk (a more contemporary figure), the Squire labors to transform his tale’s nostalgic gaze into one that is also anticipatory. In so doing, “The Squire’s Tale” behaves in ways akin to recovery romances, eliding and erasing historical particulars and warping linear time for the sake of its aspirational world-building. As Susan Nakley argues, Chaucer regularly deploys this kind of temporal slippage in The Canterbury Tales, and this temporal disorder, in her assessment, facilitates Chaucer’s insistence on a cultural order that places both England and Christianity at the helm.⁶⁷ The Squire, in kind, deploys contrasting registers for Mongol and Muslim cultures similar to those seen in Tars and TBJM in order to facilitate its anticipatory vision and to reinforce potential affinities with the medieval English audience. Mongol culture is once again represented as easily erasable (if not already erased), given that its members speak, act, and think in ways identical to those of an idealized Latin Christian culture. The tactics of cultural genocide in the tale do not require the physical extermination or displacement as seen in so many crusading romances or as wished for in TBJM, but both the Mongols and the Mamluks remain here as deliberately differentiated Others who, in the end, reflect the aspirations of the storyteller, his immediate audience, and the extratextual audience of The Canterbury Tales far more so than they reflect interests in historical verisimilitude.

Conclusion In 1331, a tournament—the first of many held throughout Edward III’s reign— took place in Cheapside, and it featured a remarkable procession. The king, the tournament captain William Montagu, and several knights rode through the street costumed as Mongols (ad similtudenem Tartarum larvati), each leading a colorfully dressed woman by a silver chain.⁶⁸ Timothy Guard and Sierra Lomuto have both linked this tournament to the representation of the Mongols in fourteenth-century English literature. For Guard, the costuming and procession of “imprisoned” women parallels—in its conflation of “erotic charge, ethnic difference, and the jeopardy of male honor”—works like The King of Tars, a romance  Susan Nakley, Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 86.  William Stubbs, Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II (London: Longman, 1882– 1883), 2:354.

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that focuses heavily on a Christianized Mongol princess and her forced marriage to (and eventual conversion of) a Damascene sultan.⁶⁹ Lomuto also links the tournament procession to Tars, and deftly examines the use of the term “larvati,” arguing that the masks the knights wore were meant to be terrifying; she compellingly demonstrates how the Mongols’ simultaneous ability to evoke terror and desire are conjured in this pageant exactly as they are in so many contemporary literary landscapes, Tars in particular.⁷⁰ I agree in full with Lomuto’s reading of the Mongol costumes in this tournament, and with Guard’s detection of how the women in the Cheapside tournament draw on a medieval trope as familiar (if not more so) than that of the Mongols as allies—that being, of course, the conflation of women’s bodies with Christian territory under threat. The women in the Cheapside pageant evoke the common trope of Christendom as an enslaved or captured woman, which was frequently found in crusades preaching and romance, and which aligns with Edward III’s announcement of plans to go on Crusade days after this very tournament.⁷¹ While the tournament procession—in its emphasis on the Mongols’ fearsome nature—seems at first to contradict the aspirational depiction of the Mongols seen in works like TBJM and “The Squire’s Tale” (and, as Lomuto and Guard stress, in Tars as well), these depictions are in fact quite interlinked. What fuels the aspirational treatment of the Mongols in both the tournament and throughout late medieval literary depictions is a keen desire for a world that might have been and a world that might come to be. The Mongols in the fourteenth century were enduringly depicted as a people who offered hopes of conversion even as they were understood as oppositional forces who had largely converted to Islam. The Cheapside tournament procession acknowledges these contemporary tensions, which are the very fuel that provides works like Tars, “The Squire’s Tale,” and TBJM with their narrative momentum, reliant as they are on the cultivation and perpetuation of cultural desires for Christian supremacy and global dominion. While some late medieval texts—the Alliterative Morte Arthure rather notably —do refer to the Mongols as threats,⁷² the idea of the Mongols as potential allies

 Timothy Guard, Chivalry, Kingship, and Crusade: The English Experience in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2013), 166 – 67. See also, Fyler, “Domesticating,” 13, and Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1982), 70 – 72.  Lomuto, “Mongol Princess,” 171– 72.  Guard, Chivalry, 167.  The Alliterative Morte Arthure, line 581. In Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster, eds., King Arthur’s Death, rev. online ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994). This association of the Mongols with the enemies of Christendom accords with Mandeville’s early cri-

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in late medieval English literature seems to have enjoyed far greater traction, as Chaucer’s depiction of Cambyuskan reveals. “The Squire’s Tale” implicitly suggests the same as what we see in TBJM and in a romance like Tars: that Cambyuskan and his people, unlike the Sultaness and her fellow Muslims in “The Man of Law’s Tale,” and unlike the Jews of “The Prioress’s Tale,” are a people pliable enough to be converted and absorbed. To journey to Cambyuskan’s court, in the end, is not so much to journey “home” to England,⁷³ but rather to a place and to a people who might make the entire world a home to Christ and his followers. Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” and TBJM both carefully position Muslims and Jews as largely uncompromising threats to Christianity. The presence of the Mongol, however, allows these texts to take on aspirational registers that other recovery texts—focused on the maintenance of stricter fictive and oppositional binaries—do not. By presenting audiences with worlds in which the Mongols exist as tabula rasae, these narratives invite their audiences to imagine a world in which a global Christianitas might well come to pass, but only through alliance with and the conversion of a powerful adversary. The Mongols are reshaped in these texts in order to accommodate such an aspirational fantasy. As fictional, and as raced as Muslims and Jews in other works of late medieval literature,⁷⁴ they exist in these texts to serve the aspirational projects of the narratives in question, not to showcase global diversity. They do not in any way depict the Mongol khannates as they existed in the fourteenth century, but are instead reflective of enduring desires for the Mongol’s cultural annihilation and conscription to a Latin Christian imperial cause. As such, these texts reflect powerfully late medieval desires for crusading, for a reconquered Holy Land, and for an ascendant Christianitas. They offer as well a crucial glimpse into the ways in which these desires and aspirations evolved in tandem with and in response to the shifting political landscapes of Outremer and of the Mongol khanates in late medieval England.

tiques of the Mongol Empire in TBJM, where he calls them “foul peple and of yvel kynde” (1201), sentiments that evaporate once Mandeville arrives in the lands of the Great Khan.  Cf. Akbari, Idols in the East; Heng, Empire of Magic; and Ambrisco, “‘It Lyth Nat’.”  Cf. Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure” and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 113 – 46.

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Bibliography Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100 – 1450. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. The Alliterative Morte Arthure. In King Arthur’s Death, edited by Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster, revised and online ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. Ambrisco, Alan. “‘It lyth nat in my tonge’: Occupatio and Otherness in the Squire’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 205 – 28. Bale, Anthony, ed. Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum; A Critical Text. 3 vols. Edited by M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 – 1988. Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor. The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Benson, Larry D. and F. N. Robinson, eds. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 113 – 46. Dondaine, Antoine. “Ricoldiana: Notes sur les oeuvres de Ricoldo da Montecroce.” Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 37 (1967): 119 – 79. Dunlop, Douglas. “The Karaits of Eastern Asia.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 11 (1943 – 1946): 276 – 89. Fleck, Andrew. “Here, There, and in Between: Representing Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville.” Studies in Philology 97, no. 4 (2000): 379 – 400. Friedman, Jamie. “Making Whiteness Matter: The King of Tars.” postmedieval 6 (2015): 52 – 63. Fyler, John. “Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale.” ELH 55, no. 1 (1988): 1 – 26. Giffney, Noreen. “Monstrous Mongols.” postmedieval 3 (2012): 227 – 45. Gillman, Ian and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit. Christians in Asia before 1500. London: Routledge, 1999. Giovanni DiPlano Carpini. The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars. Translated by Erik Hildinger. Boston: Branden Books, 1996, 2014. Guard, Timothy. Chivalry, Kingship, and Crusade: The English Experience in the Fourteenth Century. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2013. Hanna, Ralph, III. “Mandeville.” In Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, edited by A. S. G. Edwards, 121 – 32. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Higgins, Iain Mcleod. The Book of John Mandeville: With Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011.

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Higgins, Iain Mcleod. Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the West, 1221 – 1410. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2005. Jordan, Carmel. “Soviet Archaeology and the Setting for the ‘Squire’s Tale’.” The Chaucer Review 22, no. 2 (1987): 128 – 40. Khanmohamadi, Shirin. In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Kohanski, Tamarah and C. David Benson, eds. The Book of John Mandeville. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Lochrie, Karma. “Provincializing Medieval Europe: Mandeville’s Cosmopolitan Utopia.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 592 – 99. Lomuto, Sierra. “The Mongol Princess of Tars: Global Relations and Racial Formation in The King of Tars.” Exemplaria 31, no. 3 (2019): 171 – 92. Lynch, Katherine. “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales.” Speculum 70, no. 3 (1995): 530 – 51. Manz, Beatrice Forbes. “Tamerlane and the Symbolism of Sovereignty.” Iranian Studies 21, no. 1⁄2 (1988): 105 – 22. Manz, Beatrice Forbes. “Temür and the Problem of a Sovereign’s Legacy.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, no. 1 (1998): 21 – 41. Mastnak, Tomaž. Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Mayvaert, Paul. “An Unknown Letter of Hulagu, Il-Khan of Persia, to King Louis IX of France.” In The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom: The Asian Missions, edited by James D. Ryan, 267 – 83. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Middleton, Anne. “War by Other Means: Marriage and Chivalry in Chaucer.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1 (1984): 119 – 33. Moffett, Samuel Hugh. A History of Christianity in Asia: Beginnings to 1500. Vol. 1 of A History of Christianity in Asia. San Francisco: Harper, 1992. Nakley, Susan. Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in The Canterbury Tales. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Norako, Leila K. “Sir Isumbras and the Fantasy of Crusade.” Chaucer Review 48, no. 2 (2013): 166 – 89. Otuel and Roland, edited by Elizabeth Melick. In The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-French Otinel, edited by Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Fein, and David Raybin, online ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019. Phillips, J. R. S. The Medieval Expansion of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Phillips, Kim M. Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure.” Literature Compass 16, no. 9 – 10 (2019). DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12548. The Romance of Sir Isumbras. In The Thornton Romances. Camden Society 30, edited by James Orchard Halliwell, 88 – 120. London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1844. Schein, Sylvia. “Gesta Dei Per Mongolos 1300: The Genesis of a Non-event.” The English Historical Review 94 (1979): 805 – 19.

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Schildgen, Brenda Deen. Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001. Seymour, M. C. and George F. Warner, eds. The Egerton Version of Mandeville’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Seymour, M. C. Mandeville’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Stubbs, William. Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1882 – 1883. Szeman, Imre and Jennifer Wenzel. “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Extractivism?” Textual Practice 35 (2021): 505 – 23. Vale, Juliet. Edward III and Chivalry. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1982. Whitaker, Cord. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. William of Rubruck. The Journal of William Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253 – 1255, translated by William Woodville Rockhill. London: Hakluyt Society, 1900. Yule, Henry, trans. and ed. Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China. London: Hakluyt Society, 1866.

Eve Salisbury

Chapter 4 Lybeaus Desconus: Illegitimacy and the Spurious Mother Lybeaus Desconus is a late medieval narrative poem about a young man who gains renown as the “Fair Unknown.” Bequeathed an endearing nickname— Bewfiz (Beautiful Son)—by his mother in the poem’s initial scene, as soon as the boy arrives at court King Arthur changes that name to something deemed more appropriate for a knight—Lybeaus Desconus, the Fair Unknown. From this instance of public renaming, the story then follows the development of the aspiring young chevalier to a predictably successful outcome: after a number of protracted battles and a serious amorous distraction, Lybeaus wins the release of the captive Lady of Synadoun whom he marries after her transformation from dragon-with-a-woman’s face to wholly human form.¹ Lybeaus is thus the hero of a romance that ends in marital union with the lady he is commissioned to rescue. That said, this essay is neither explicitly about the youthful protagonist and his quest to earn his chivalric spurs nor the ways in which the tale is brought to a seemingly optimistic resolution. Instead, the focus here is on the Fair Unknown’s unnamed mother and the curious absence of a genealogical identity for her. While the poem discloses in its opening passage that Lybeaus is the illegitimate son of Gawain, a revelation announced in the incipit of one of six extant manuscripts, the young knight’s mother is never identified.² Rather, the English poet’s adaptation of this maternal figure from her counterpart in the Old French source, Li Biaus Descouneüs, renders her into a cipher whose function is to proclaim Gawain’s paternity and facilitate her child’s legitimation and change in status from filius nullius to son of a renowned knight.³ After her brief appearance  For an interesting reading of the dragon-woman see James Weldon, “‘Naked as She Was Bore’: Naked Disenchantment in Lybeaus Desconus,” Parergon 24, no. 1 (2007): 67– 99.  The incipit appears in MS Lambeth 306 as follows: “A tretys of one Gyngelayne other wyse namyd by Kyng Arthure Lybeus Dysconeus that was bastard son to Sir Gaweyne.” All quotations from the text are from Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Eve Salisbury and James Weldon, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013).  I touch upon the topic of illegitimacy in “Lybeaus Desconus: Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine,” Arthuriana 24, no. 1 (2014): 66 – 85, which the present study develops in relation to its legal precedents. For history of the “rule of filius nullius,” see R. H. Helmholz, “Support Orders, Church Courts, and the Rule of Filius Nullius: A Reassessment of the Common Law,” Virginia Law Review 63, no. 3 (1977): 431– 48. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-005

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at the poem’s outset, she subsequently disappears until the end when she discloses Gawain’s paternity in a public pronouncement that prompts a touching father-son reunion: Lybeaus runs to the acclaimed knight and “ever kissed that manne.”⁴ When Gawain then enunciates an alternative name for the young man—Gyngelayne, as inscribed in the incipit in the Lambeth manuscript—he supplants both the term of endearment conferred upon him by his mother as well as the symbolic moniker given to him by the king. While paternal recognition of the heretofore unknown and illegitimate child is a satisfying turn of narrative events, Gawain’s public bequeathing of a name that transposes Lybeaus from signifier of the unknown to a recognized member of a renowned kinship network has wider social and legal implications. Such actions carried out by Lybeaus’s biological father mark the moment at which the illegitimate youth is returned to the realm of the socially and politically acceptable. Whereas the name bestowed by Arthur literally renders the aspiring knight into an abstract signifier that could apply to any physically attractive and anonymous young man, the new name pronounced by Gawain at the poem’s end provides him with a patrilineage that promises to restore his nebulous position in a very material environment. No longer illegitimate or “spurious,” a term used in the legal discourse for describing an illegitimate child, Gyngelayne a.k.a. Lybeaus Desconus a.k.a. Bewfiz is incorporated into Gawain’s lineage and rendered an eligible marriage partner for the woman he rescues. However poignant and meaningful the scene of filial reunion is, the more telling moment of the poem’s resolution in my view is that Lybeaus neither kisses nor acknowledges his mother at all. Rather, he embraces his father and leaves her standing alone, the object of the court’s collective and shaming gaze. Such a dismissive act by the protagonist toward his birth mother, especially since she introduces him to the king’s court, might be taken simply as a son’s symbolic turning away from his mother, an anticipated psychological signaling of a youth’s initiation into adulthood. After all, the expectation for any chivalric Bildungsroman or identity-centered narrative such as medieval romances tend to be necessitates the protagonist’s rejection of his mother to allow him to assume the mantle of knighthood in a patriarchal chivalric order. Perhaps all too predictably then, Lybeaus enacts a masculine imperative to follow a culturally determined script in his unhesitating embrace of the father from whom he had been estranged since birth. Had Lybeaus’s spurious mother refrained from making his  The incipit noted here appears only in MS Lambeth 306, while the ending reunion appears in three of six extant manuscripts known to contain this piece: Naples, Lincoln’s Inn, and Ashmole 61. For a synopsis of the endings of these versions of the poem, see Salisbury and Weldon, Lybeaus Desconus, 18.

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quest possible perhaps such a dramatic moment could be considered typical of the genre of romance, driven merely by the need to catapult its protagonists to a successful conclusion. Unlike so many other Arthurian women who attempt to prevent their sons from becoming members of Arthur’s entourage (Perceval’s mother comes to mind here), Lybeaus’s mother neither stands in his way nor prevents his maturation. Instead, she accompanies him to court, facilitates his bold request for a boon, and implicitly endorses his subsequent action once the boon has been conferred. But while her son is rendered legitimate by being enfolded quite literally into the embrace and the laws of the father, in the end she is left without a name to validate her role as the mother of Gawain’s child or to acknowledge her place in this reconstituted aristocratic family.⁵ Instead, the only nuptial to be forged at the end of the poem is the wedding of Lybeaus a.k.a. Gyngelayne to the Lady of Synadoun. While one could argue that the illegitimate status of the protagonist proclaimed in the poem’s incipit in the Lambeth manuscript is merely a prerequisite of medieval romance providing a disenfranchised hero with a formidable obstacle to overcome, one could also say that the circumstance indicated from the start is designed to convey a legal conundrum to an increasingly literate vernacular audience. As many recent studies have shown, such matters were often embedded in late medieval literary works in order to create a context for legal terminology and recognition of precedents in the law.⁶ So too can the case be made for another purpose for writing the law into the genre of romance, that is, to enable a legally savvy audience the opportunity to conquer challenging circumstances, to affect a reunion of estranged family members, mete out justice to deserving villains, and enter auspicious marriages, if only vicariously. Oftentimes the obstacles facing the protagonist emerge from troubled domestic circumstances, conflicts and rivalries between parents and/or among other members of the household and extended family. Uncontrolled desires, transgressive impulses, intra-and-inter-familial violence frequently set such narratives into motion, providing motives for the departure and ultimate return of the designated hero.⁷ But

 This scene is recounted explicitly in Renaut de Bȃge’s Le bel inconnu (Li biaus descouneüs: The Fair Unknown), ed. Karen Fresco, trans. Colleen P. Donagher (New York: Garland, 1992), 193.  Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, eds., The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).  Hagiography also participates in this generic convention since the life of a legendary saint must begin at some enormous disadvantage to demonstrate the efficacy of divine intervention. One such example is the legend of Saint Gregorius, a spurious child who grows up to become pope.

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while certain romances succeed in finding creative solutions for the domestic strife faced by their protagonists, they are less successful in recuperating the mothers of such characters, especially when their illicit behavior prompts the action in the first place.⁸ Such is the case in Lybeaus Desconus, and while Lybeaus can be incorporated into legitimate society by the public acknowledgment of his biological father rendered legible in the reunion kiss, his mother appears to retain the social stigma associated with her son’s illegitimacy—spurious.

The Name of the Mother Being marked as an outsider by the absence of a name is especially puzzling in relation to Lybeaus’s mother since such a designation contrasts sharply with the equivalent character in the French source who is openly acknowledged as a formidable woman of the fairy world. Likewise, her counterpart in another branch of the narrative family tree, the “Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” is not only named but married to Gawain and identified specifically as Gyngelayne’s mother. Variations between these two related tales and the English Lybeaus require some explanation, since they point to changes in emphasis surrounding the question of legitimacy for both mother and child. That in all three narratives Lybeaus’s mother’s identity factors into the process of legitimation of her illegitimate son, deviations in her characterization from the Old French antecedent to the later English adaptation help to clarify the legal issues at stake when Gawain’s paternity is publicly divulged. Unlike the unnamed mother of the knight in the English version, in the twelfth-century Li Biaus Descouneüs, she is identified as Blancemal le Fée, a character whose name quite literally embodies an uneasy conjunction of opposites—the “whiteness” traditionally associated with goodness, purity, and light with its antithesis, the maleficence and immorality implied by the suffix “mal.” Followed by the identification with the fairy world, this mother’s name signifies the complexities of otherworldliness or perhaps something more literally aligned with ethnic, social, and racial difference. Like all women of the fairy world, Blancemal has inexpli-

 Bevis of Hampton’s mother comes to mind here as an apt exemplum. She orchestrates the death of her elderly husband to resume an affair with a former lover. When her son finds out and verbally insults her (he is seven years old at the time), she arranges for his sale into slavery by merchants who take him to Armenia where he is subsequently fostered by a benevolent king. Bevis returns later and throws his mother out of the tower to her death. See “Bevis of Hampton” in Four Romances of England, ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999).

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cable preternatural powers indicated in this Old French version of the tale when a disembodied voice discloses Lybeaus’s “real” name, the identity of his father, and some elements of his early upbringing under maternal governance. Lybeaus, we learn from the voice, has been raised exclusively by a mother who urges him to seek out Arthur’s court. The transference of power that this move represents from one sphere to another, from a feminine-coded otherworld to the patrilineal chivalric universe, thus occurs, as Donald Maddox has suggested, because its inhabitants “had secretly guided him toward the paternally symbolic order of chivalry” to provide the would-be knight with an opportunity to work through “the conflict between the maternally associated enticements of the fairy otherworld and the feudal culture of the father.”⁹ While Blancemal le Fée and Gawain never marry in the French poem, like her counterpart in the English adaptation, she disappears into the otherworld as the narrative turns to the impending nuptials of the Fair Unknown and the lady he rescues. Unlike her English counterpart, however, Blancemal le Fée retains her identity as a powerful and potentially threatening fairy woman. If the absence of a name for the mother in the English poem is troubling in the face of a French antecedent where she is so explicitly identified, it is especially so in view of the other branch of the Fair Unknown narrative noted earlier wherein this maternal figure is provided with both name and status as the legitimate spouse of Gawain. In the “Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” Ragnelle is the mother of Guinglain (a.k.a. Lybeaus), the son of Gawain, the Arthurian knight to whom she is legally married.¹⁰ Unlike the mother of the eponymous hero of Lybeaus Desconus she has a name and an established kinship, a brother named Gromer Somer Joure who accuses Arthur of an unlawful appropriation of his land. As a number of scholars have noted, Ragnelle is a loathly lady character who saves the knight (Gawain) after giving him the answer to the question of what women most desire.¹¹ As in other English loathly lady tales (Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” and Gower’s “Tale of Florent,” for instance) the two marry publicly in the presence of Arthur’s entourage in a gesture that fulfills Gawain’s promise; and because a narrative that is quite literally a

 Donald Maddox, “Levi-Strauss in Camelot: Interrupted Communication in Arthurian Feudal Fictions,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 35 – 53.  See Thomas Hahn, ed., Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).  See S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, eds., The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, Studies in Medieval Culture 48 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).

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fairy tale needs some transformative moment to lend it an element of magic, the transformation of the hideous crone into a nubile beauty occurs on the couple’s wedding night when the newlywed groom relinquishes marital sovereignty to his bride. Only in “Wedding” is the loathly lady named and the two not only marry and happily work out the question of mastery in marriage but soon produce an heir whom together they name Guinglain.¹² One might argue that the presence of an identifiable maternal figure would solve the matter of identity for all tales in which Guinglain a.k.a. Lybeaus plays a role. This is not the case, however, and while Ragnelle has a name and an identity as Gawain’s wife and the mother of his child, she is ultimately expunged from their nuclear family when, five years after having given birth to their son, she dies. As Mary Leech has persuasively argued, the death of Ragnelle appears to be a necessity since even after her transformation into a more acceptable courtly lady, “the contrast in natures remains.”¹³ As an Arthurian outsider, a position indicated by her kinship to Gromer Somer Joure, she can never be fully assimilated into courtly culture. In other words, Ragnelle’s hideousness is represented not only as outwardly manifest but rather as an indication of a socially disruptive “essential” nature, one that presumably can never change despite physical transformation.¹⁴

Biopolitics and Legal Language The absence of a name of Lybeaus’s mother in Lybeaus Desconus is thus rendered all the more suggestive by the naming of her counterparts, Ragnelle and Blancemal le Fée, in other versions of the Fair Unknown story. Why does this lack of a name and an identity matter? One of the answers has as much to do with the legal issues surrounding legitimacy and the legal discourse on biological kinship as it does with the conventions of romance. In what R. Howard Bloch calls a “biopolitics of lineage” the attention on marriage and the consolidation of power among the nobility in twelfth-century France, the time at which the Old

 There are many variations on the spelling of Guinglain, as the earlier citations suggest: Giglain, Gyngalyn, Gyngelayne, Gyngolyn, and Gynleyn.  Mary Leech, “Why Ragnell Had to Die: Feminine Usurpation of Masculine Authority in ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’,” in The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, ed. S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, Studies in Medieval Culture 48 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 213 – 34 at 213.  See Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001). See also my discussion of this phenomenon in Salisbury, “Lybeaus Desconus: Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine,” 66 – 85.

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French Li Biaus Descouneüs was written, led to “a surveillance of marital ties … based upon a certain respect for canonical impediments and upon a careful husbanding of the paternal fief in accordance with an interlocking series of military, political and social ties.”¹⁵ In Bloch’s reading, genetically determined kinship systems cannot be separated from property rights put in place to ensure the longevity and security of the ancestral domain.¹⁶ Much appears to be at stake, in other words, in the recognition and perpetuation of a patrilineage with an eye to keeping property in the family and passing along accumulated wealth from generation to generation. And since chivalric romance is so often concerned with a knight’s identity and success in the world, it stands to reason that traces of these biopolitical issues would become embedded in the genre. A concomitant feature of the presence of the trope of patrilineage emerges in an expressed anxiety about paternity since so much depends upon the consolidation of property in families of the nobility. In an age without DNA testing, questions arise about the identity of the father while identifying a child’s mother is presumed to be straightforward and easily determined, the pregnant and lactating body functioning as obvious signifying markers in this regard. When inheritance and property rights are a concern, the identity of a child—precisely who that child’s biological parents are—becomes increasingly significant. Illegitimate or “spurious” children had the potential to disrupt the process of inheritance and jeopardize the future of a family line. The near obsession with paternal bloodlines as a qualification for inheritance explains in part the curious erasure of Lybeaus’s mother’s identity and the dismantling of her ability to influence her son beyond his early childhood. And perhaps this motif provides additional evidence of the generic demands of medieval romances, especially those considered to be Arthurian at the center of which reside themes of illegitimacy and rights of inheritance pertaining to the king’s claim to the throne. While Arthur’s mother, Igraine, is known by name and social status, her influence and control over her son are displaced by Merlin when he takes over the presumptive young king’s education. Indeed, the circumstances of Arthur’s conception indicate the troubled paternal bloodline destined to bring Camelot to its knees; the trope of deceptive paternity, in fact, runs as a leitmotif through the Pendragon line and those most closely associated with it. While Arthur is conceived with the help of Merlin’s magical disguise of Uther Pendragon, the wizard himself is begotten by a demon father on an unnamed

 R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 70 – 71.  Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 70 – 71.

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nun.¹⁷ Both Arthur and Merlin are born of spurious liaisons, in other words, into circumstances they must overcome in order to be recognized and respected as authoritative power players by those around them. A similar scenario occurs with Mordred, the biological son of Arthur, who in some versions of the story is conceived of an incestuous relation between Arthur and his half-sister, Morgan le Fay, and therefore considered to be illegitimate, while in others he is the legitimate child of Morgause, the wife of the king of Orkney and mother of four other sons, one of whom is Gawain himself. Mordred’s nebulous status, the question of whether he is genuinely eligible to inherit his father’s kingdom, is answered in a final confrontation that ends in his death at Arthur’s hand. Determinations of illegitimacy and spuriousness in this thread of the Arthurian saga, in other words, appear to hinge as much upon the mother’s identity as upon identifying the father. So too do such determinations focus on rights of inheritance and disqualifications thereof.

Legal Evolution of Illegitimacy: Natural v. Spurious That it is possible to find traces of illegitimacy announced in this poem’s beginning in works such as Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologiae as well as Raymond of Penyafort’s thirteenth-century Summa de matrimonio and the subsequent De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England) attributed to Henry Bracton suggests that the writing of laws, both secular and ecclesiastical, had the capacity to transpose certain cultural attitudes into governing social scripts extending from ancient source materials to the late Middle Ages. Such writings convey legal precepts and agreed-upon assumptions, in this case, from Roman jurisprudence to medieval writers well versed in legal matters and the language in which so many laws were written. How then are the legal precepts identifying the illegitimate child transmitted to an audience unfamiliar with the language of the law, in this case, Latin? How does a term that remains constant in the discourse on illegitimacy—“spurious”—factor into a fifteenth-century English poem’s representation of its protagonist as an illegitimate outsider? How does such a designation impact the identity of that child’s mother?

 Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts this tale in the Historia Regum Britanniae; it is a story retold in several iterations thereafter. See, for instance, the fifteenth-century Prose Merlin, ed. John Conlee, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998).

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In her work on legal history, Laura Wertheimer traces the concept of illegitimacy from ancient Rome through the late Middle Ages, noting the changes in emphasis that occur as pertinent laws were adapted and rewritten to account for new circumstances and social environments.¹⁸ Roman law codified two species of illegitimate birth—natural (naturalis) and spurious (spurius)—which distinguished between children born from a “concubinary relationship” and those born from other sorts of sexual liaisons, as from prostitution or slavery or incest. One might infer from such distinctions that children located within the latter range of interpersonal relations would be subject to social stigmatization, but according to Wertheimer, the term did not take on the pejorative connotations it was destined to accrue until its jurists prohibited incestuous liaisons pronouncing “that children born from them were spurious.”¹⁹ Such pronouncements were given additional authority by imperial edicts that denied inheritance to spurious children born to a couple too closely related. The legal framework established by distinctions such as these and taken up by authoritative writers such as Isidore of Seville passed through a number of Latin iterations with heterosexual wedlock becoming the dominant model against which the meaning of legal terms associated with a child’s legitimacy were determined. As Wertheimer summarizes the evolution of changing emphases in the law: Natural birth in early medieval texts meant birth to an unmarried man and woman, as it had in the Roman Empire. In canon law this came to mean birth from “simple fornication,” sexual intercourse between a couple who, though unmarried, bore no legal inability to marry. Couples who were not able to marry, in contrast, produced spurious children, and because Christian doctrine rejected social division as a factor precluding marriage, spurious birth largely came to indicate birth from reprehensible relationships: adultery, incest, and ones in which one party was in religious orders. The medieval institutional church also based on Roman law its insistence that an illegitimate individual, whether natural or spurious, was distinguished from a legitimate one by the absence of any right to his father’s status of property beyond basic material support.²⁰

Of course, canon law took its cues from Roman law on marriage and kinship relations, especially those involving changes in the degree of separation. And perhaps because the notion of incest was so abhorrent to jurists it became the means by which the children of family ties too closely bound could be excluded from inheriting. Despite its ameliorating attitude on marriages that united spous-

 Laura Wertheimer, “Children of Disorder: Clerical Parentage, Illegitimacy, and Reform in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 3 (2006): 382– 407.  Wertheimer, “Children of Disorder,” 386.  Wertheimer, “Children of Disorder,” 387.

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es of different classes and a more lenient attitude toward “natural” birth, ecclesiastical law came down hard on spurious illegitimacy. And while the laws of the Church established a jurisdiction often separate from civil laws focused on criminal cases, in this matter, the two systems appear to have agreed. Civil lawyers, who were often clerics themselves, frequently followed canon lawyers in their presumptions and attitudes toward transgressions associated with kinship by retaining the fundamental language that distinguished natural from spurious birth. The following summary of civil law, noted by Ruth Mazo Karras, may be applied to both legislative realms: “Natural children were born to parents who could have been married to each other, while spurii were born from incestuous, adulterous, or other forbidden relationships. Spurii could not be legitimate and therefore did not have even the possibility of inheritance from the father.”²¹ The problem of illegitimacy presents itself in the English Lybeaus Desconus vis-à-vis its subject matter and the legal diction addressing legitimacy. As many of the aforementioned historians and literary scholars have shown, etymology, genealogy, biopolitics, and legal discourses became closely entwined by the late Middle Ages. Thus, it is not surprising that the language used to define categories of illegitimacy can be found in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, the widely disseminated encyclopedic work of the early Middle Ages, as well as in the work of two late medieval legislators and codifiers of the law, Raymond of Penyafort and Henry Bracton. And while I am not suggesting that all terms used in late medieval legal discourse have their roots in Isidore’s compendium, the words that the bishop of Seville chooses to define kinship relations offer a useful touchstone for tracing the rewriting of family law in both ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions over time. In a discussion of language used in documents integral to the development of a medieval legal tradition based upon Roman jurisprudence, Isidore’s work is positioned at a pivotal historical moment in the transmission of legal precedents and the cultural attitudes they so often reflected. A comprehensive understanding of illegitimacy and the spurious mother and its significance in Lybeaus Desconus depends in large part upon the etymologies and genealogies that contribute to the legal discourse embedded in the narrative. The charting of the language used to shape notions of legitimacy in the works of the authors noted above, especially against the illegitimacy it delegitimizes, underscores the significance of a romance that endorses laws having an impact on

 Ruth Mazo Karras, “Marriage, Concubinage, and the Law,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 117– 29.

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premodern conceptions of kinship and marriage. Romances like Lybeaus are not innocuous, in other words, but rather contain legal realities that resonate in realworld environments.

Legitimating Etymologies and Genealogies Concerns about legitimacy and kinship appear in the Etymologiae in Book IX under “family relationships” (De adfinitatibus et gradibus), wherein the bishop of Seville defines the meaning of the Latin terms for biological parents as well as their roles in the household (familia).²² A father (pater), Isidore says, “is the one from whom the beginning of the line springs” and thus, he is called the paterfamilias, a designation that straightforwardly affirms the connection between progenitorship and a presumed right to govern the household.²³ In addition, Isidore continues, “a father is so called because he engenders a son when patratio [sexual consummation] has been performed.”²⁴ As originator of the family line the father assumes a position of authority over members of his household familiars, which included not only biologically related kin but also domestic slaves. By way of contrast, the second on Isidore’s list, the mother (mater) is “so named because something is made from her, for the term ‘mother’ is as if the word were ‘matter’ (materia), but the father is the cause.”²⁵ The assumption about biological reproduction here, which echoes Aristotle’s De Generatione Animalium,²⁶ is that patratio conveys the force of generation, the human equivalent of the impregnation of the mother by a paternal divinity; just as terra mater provides the substrate into which generative potency is infused, so too a woman is the raw material needed to produce another human life to this way of thinking. Sexual consummation (patratio), a word etymologically related to the verb patro/

 Stephen A. Barney et al., ed. and trans., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). All English citations are from this edition. Latin citations are from Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum Sive Originum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911; most recent reprint, 1989), unless otherwise specified.  The Latin reads: “Pater est, a quo initium nascitur generis” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.3, in Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum Sive Originum [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911])  The Latin reads: “Pater autem dictus eo quod patratione peracta filium procreet.” Etymologiarum, 9.5.3.  The Latin reads: “Mater dicitur, quod exinde efficiatur aliquid. Mater enim quasi materia; nam causa pater est.” Etymologiarum, 9.5.4.  See De Generatione Animalium, Book I, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 665 – 80.

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patrare—to achieve, to accomplish, to bring about, to execute—suggests a man’s innate ability to “father” a child each time consummation occurs.²⁷ Following the precedent set by Roman laws and linguistic connotations such as these, Isidore proceeds to work his way through Roman, biblical, and select Greek sources to four categories of offspring. Moving from the literal to the figurative, from the children of men to the children of God with accompanying analogies to lend additional authority to his definitions, the four designations are (1) by nature, (2) by imitation, (3) by adoption, and (4) by instruction. Natural children, or “children by nature,” as he calls them are “as when the Jews are called the children of Abraham,” a description that underwrites a patriarchal privileging of biological descent made sacred by scriptural accountings of the Hebrew community reaching back to the foundation of the twelve tribes of Israel. Children by imitation (imitatio), the second category, are “as those gentiles who imitated the faithfulness of Abraham,”²⁸ an analogy that marks the beginning of a paradigm of inclusion separate and apart from blood kinship. To cite Abraham as an ancestor was no longer deemed necessary to belong to this metaphorical family; instead, faith and the willingness to participate in the mystical body of Christ satisfied the prerequisites for inclusion. Likewise, legitimate children could be claimed by adoption, which the third category defines as “the kind everyone is familiar with in human society, or as we address God ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven,’ as our father by adoption, not nature.”²⁹ Now the symbolic dimension of this new family has been expanded and clarified, its membership predicated upon voluntary adherence to the tenets of Christianity. Hence, in Isidore’s fourth and final category, “children by instruction” (doctrina), were identified as those to whom Paul preached the gospel as if they were his children despite their adult status and maturity. To be a member of the family of Christ was to accept its principles and values and become like a child [my emphasis], which, in this context, represented the highest form of legitimation. When Isidore finally gets to the subject of illegitimate children there are but two categories: the first is defined by the term nothus, by which he means a child “born from a noble father and from an ignoble mother, for instance a concu-

 See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2.  Barney et al., Etymologies, 207. The Latin reads: “Quattuor etiam modis filii appellantur: natura, imitatione, adoptione, doctrina. Natura, veluti quum dicuntur filii Abrahae Iudaei. Imitatione, ut ipsius Abrahae fidem imitantes ex gentibus, dicente” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.15).  Barney et al., Etymologies, 207. The Latin passage in its entirety reads: “Adoptione quoque, quod humana consuetudine nulli licet nescire, vel sicut nos Deo non natura, sed adoptione dicimus: ‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis’” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.16).

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bine.”³⁰ There is no explicit mention of marriage here since the term itself means “born out of wedlock.” Nonetheless, because the Romans looked the other way when it came to concubines, there is less of a stigma attached to progeny born of this union whom Isidore describes as “natural children (naturalis),” since in this case the identity of the father is likely to have been known. This is the category of birth against which he defines spurius as a child “born from an unknown father and from a widowed [spouseless] mother, as if he were the son of a spurium only.”³¹ The use of spurium here is significant in its identification of the child with the unwed or widowed mother, though not as socially stigmatizing as it would later become since the child born of a woman without a legitimate spouse would not necessarily constitute a direct affront to medieval marriage. Rather, the term’s more negative implications become clear when Isidore explains that “spurium was derived from ‘seed’—the spurious child therefore has no name from his father … hence those children who are not born of legitimate wedlock follow the condition of the mother rather than the father.”³² As if there were not enough to mark a child born without a father’s name, identified instead by the social status of the mother, Isidore explains that spurius is closely associated with “extra puritatem (apart from purity),” a description whose origin he traces to the ancient past where it was a pejorative reference to the female pudenda, and “applied to illegitimate children as a term of abuse.”³³ The stigmatizing effect imposed upon the spurious child, born of an unknown father, has now transferred to the mother, rendering her the only spurious parent of the two. As Thomas Laqueur notes, “the reason Isidore gives for why such illegitimate children, those who do not ‘take the name of the father’ are called spurious is that they spring from the mother alone …. So, while the legitimate child is

 Barney et al., Etymologies, 207. The Latin reads: “Nothus dicitur, qui de patre nobili et de matre ignobili gignitur, sicut ex concubina” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.23).  Barney et al., Etymologies, 207. The Latin reads: “Item spurius patre incerto, matre vidua genitus, velut tantum spurii filius” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.24).  Barney et al., Etymologies, 207. The Latin reads: “quia muliebrem naturam veteres spurium vocabant; velut . . . hoc est seminis; non patris nomine . . . . Unde et hi, qui non sunt de legitimo matrimonio, matrem potius quam patrem sequuntur” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.24– 25).  This citation appears in J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 96. Although no definitive source is known, both Isidore’s citation and Plutarch’s embellishment are imagined to have been “drawing on a common source, probably Varro. If Varro did indeed provide the information, it would be reasonable to suppose that spurium had once, somewhere, had the sense in question. Ernout and Meillet (s.v. spurius) suggest that the word may have been Etruscan in origin (cf. the Etruscan name Spurinna). If so, it might once have been used by Etruscan prostitutes in Rome, just as eugium seems to have been used by Greek prostitutes” (97).

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from the froth of the father, the illegitimate child is from the seed of the mother’s genitals, as if the father did not exist.”³⁴ Up to this point in my discussion of matters of legitimacy in Lybeaus Desconus the distinctions made between natural children and those considered to be spurious depend upon whether the mother is a concubine or a woman somehow affiliated with prostitution, slavery, or an overly close kinship relation. While the former appears to have produced a more lenient attitude toward natural children in Roman law, the latter did not, and children born to prostitutes or slaves of female kin retained the condition and status of the mother. If we understand Roman society to be hierarchical and the household in which a paterfamilias holds sway to be reflections of society at large then such categories accrue additional significance. Given the presence of slaves in the affluent Roman familia, the obsession with class distinctions in the laws of legitimacy, and the anxiety over the potential for interracial and interclass intimacy between masters and their slaves, it follows that Isidore should speak of children in the language of slavery. Children are liberi, “when they have sprung from a free (liber) marriage, for the children of a free man and a slave serving-girl have slave status, as children who are so born always assume the status of the lower parent.”³⁵ The child’s identification with the mother in this situation, according to Steven A. Epstein, makes sense since the maternal body “was an observable fact,” while “paternity was a question of guesswork or hope.”³⁶ When paternity is a matter of conjecture, to have the identity of the child follow that of the mother, especially when she is determined to be of a lower social class, provides a convenient remedy for determining that child’s eligibility for inheritance. While the legitimate child is aligned with the blood of the father, the parent from whom that child acquires a name, a patrilineage, and a legal status, a spurious child such as Lybeaus Desconus (the Fair Unknown) acquires the status and condition of the mother, particularly when born of a socially unacceptable woman. Such alignments are significant since legitimacy depends upon a claim that accords with what Peggy McCracken calls “patriarchal privilege”³⁷ to forge

 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 56.  The Latin passage reads: “Item liberi dicti, quia ex libero sunt matrimonio orti. Nam filii ex libero et ancilla servilis condicionis sunt. Semper enim qui nascitur deteriorem parentis statum sumit” (Etymologiarum, 9.5.18).  Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 84.  Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 61.

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covenants that others cannot claim, a privilege that contrasts sharply with the blood of the mother and its associations with contamination and spurium. In other words, while the legitimate child is bequeathed the opportunity to participate in the making of legal contracts, the child who shares its mother’s blood is excluded from such privileges. These distinctions, made so explicitly by Isidore in his delineations of gender roles and class difference, impact the identity of the illegitimate child and contribute to a lexicon that marks both mother and child in a negative way. As constructed in the symbolic world within which Isidore works, the child who shares the condition of the mother marks both as spurious. Fast forward from Isidore’s seventh-century Etymologiae to the Summa on Marriage written in the thirteenth century by Dominican canonist, Raymond of Penyafort, and a striking similarity in diction reveals a kinship in attitudes, if not setting a legal precedent for dealing with children deemed to be illegitimate. And while there are many differences in emphasis and motives for amending the language of illegitimacy, like a palimpsest many of the early assumptions show through later legislative documents. After several lengthy definitions of marriage, its obligations, vows, impediments, and so forth, Raymond transitions to a section called “Who Are Legitimate Children and Who Are Not” (Qui filii sint legitimi & qui non).³⁸ In a manner reminiscent of Isidore’s four categories, but differing in emphasis, he states, “The status of children is fourfold: some are natural and legitimate such as those born of wives; others are only natural such as the children of concubines, such as those born of a single man and a single woman, who could be a wife; others are legitimate alone, such as those adopted; others, who are neither legitimate nor natural, are called spurious, such as those who are born of adultery or incest.”³⁹ The addition of the phrase “born of adultery or incest” marks an emphasis in the language used to define spurious not found explicitly in Isidore’s encyclopedia. Because Raymond’s Summa is written to clarify ecclesiastical thinking on the regulation of marriage, his focus on matrimony, which he calls matris munium (a mother’s duty) and his assumption that marriages are expected to produce children, become all the more important to

 Raymond of Penyafort, Summa on Marriage, trans. Pierre Payer, Medieval Sources in Translation 41 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 85. All English citations are from this text.  Penyafort, Summa, 85. The Latin reads: “[item notandum] quod quadruplex est status filiorum: alii sunt naturales tantum, ut filii concubinae, sicut sunt qui de solute, & solute nascuntur, quae posset uxor esse, alii sunt legitimi tantum, ut sunt adoptiui, alii nec legitimi, nec naturales, qui dicuntur spurii, ut sunt illi, qui de adulterio, vel de incestu nati sunt.” See Summa[e] Sti.[Sancti] Raymundi de Peniafort . . . De Poenitentia et Matrimonio . . . . Liber quartus, 579 – 81, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5320782966&view=1up&seq=528.

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the signifying value of his words. That he deftly redirects the discussion of illicit sexuality from concubinage, a practice that was not legislated against by the institutional Church until the sixteenth century, to focus instead on situations predicated upon adultery and incest is no minor maneuver.⁴⁰ As historians of family kinship and canon law such as those cited previously have noted, legislating sexual activity has always posed a problem for canon lawyers, especially those trying to protect the Church in the face of the many illegitimate children spawned by clergy members. According to Wertheimer, “By the tenth century there was a long-standing tradition within the institution of the Catholic Church of manipulating the concept of illegitimacy and imposing it upon children born from relationships that the church did not recognize …. Clerics’ children fell under attack because they represented a threat to reformers’ efforts to distinguish between a clerical and a lay sphere; in anthropological terms they became ‘matter out of place.’”⁴¹ The language Raymond uses to define illegitimate children provides a subtle redirection from concubinage of the clerical sort to more secular forms of illicit sexuality, specifically adultery and incest. He begins by citing two alternatives for how certain illegitimate children could find a pathway to legitimacy as defined by canon law: (1) by the marriage of the parents for those couples who had no impediment to wedlock, and (2) by special dispensation.⁴² Then, demonstrating how closely aligned canonical and secular legal spheres could be on matters in which both had vested interests, the canonist outlines four more options in civil law: (1) by the father offering the child to the court of the emperor, (2) by the father’s naming of said child in his will (as long as it was then authorized by the sovereign), (3) by the father’s dying without a legitimate heir, and (4) by a father’s “public pronouncement or with the written subscription by three witnesses.”⁴³ Such remedies, made available for natural children, were not as applicable to spurious children especially when it came to inheritance. For spurious children, in fact, Raymond seems to be adamantly opposed to legitimation of any sort: “those who are from censured intercourse are excluded entirely from

 See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 514. The practice was officially outlawed for the laity at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1514.  Laura Wertheimer, “Children of Disorder,” 384.  Laura Wertheimer, “Illegitimate Birth and the English Clergy, 1198 – 1348,” Journal of Medieval History 31, no. 2 (2005): 211– 29.  Penyafort, Summa, 85. The Latin reads: “publico instrumento, vel cum trium testium subscriptione scriptorium.”

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any benefits.”⁴⁴ Such an adamant stand against the spurious child is perhaps not surprising coming from a canon lawyer whose principal interests were in the sanctification of wedlock and ecclesiastical reform, a trend in legislation that appears in subsequent writings. In its iteration of much of the language used by Raymond de Penyafort, the De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England), attributed to thirteenth-century jurist and priest Henry Bracton provides evidence of the crossover in canon and secular law.⁴⁵ And while I am not suggesting that this work’s author had direct knowledge of Penyafort, or Isidore for that matter, what I am suggesting is a notable similarity among the three writers in the terminology they use to define illegitimacy. By the late Middle Ages, the time at which Lybeaus Desconus emerged as a distinctively English literary production, it seems that such language had crystalized into decidedly pejorative characterizations. Witness the following section of Bracton’s work in which the author addresses the “differentiation of children”: Some children, as said above, are natural and legitimate, those born in lawful wedlock and of a lawful wife. Some are natural only and not legitimate, as those born of a legitimate concubine with whom a marriage was possible at the time of procreation, as between an unmarried man and unmarried woman. Some are neither legitimate nor natural, as those born of prohibited intercourse, of persons for whom no marriage was possible at the time of procreation; such children are spurii who are fit for nothing.⁴⁶

 Penyafort, Summa, 85. The Latin reads: “[Spurii vero, &] qui ex damnato sunt coitu, omni prorsus beneficio excludum.”  Samuel Thorne, trans., Bracton: On the Laws and Customs of England, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). A brief editorial history appears at http://bracton.law.har vard.edu/Framed/mframe.htm as follows: “While the attribution of the work to Bracton is of considerable antiquity, it now seems that the bulk of the work was written in the 1220’s and 1230’s by persons other than Bracton himself” (n.p.a.). See also Thorne’s Introduction in the print volume cited above and the following essays: “Henry de Bracton, 1268 – 1968,” 75 – 92, and “The Text of Bracton’s Le Legibus Angliae,” 93 – 110. Both essays are in Essays in English Legal History (London: Hambledon Press, 1985). As Bruce Holsinger notes in “The English Jurisdictions of ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), “the matter of bastardy was open to constant jurisdictional contestation, involving as it did both secular law of land and inheritance and canonical definitions of marriage and legitimacy,” 154– 84 at 169.  The Latin reads: “Liberorum autem secundum quod praedictum est, quidam sunt naturales et legitimi, qui ex iustis nuptiis et legitima uxore procreantur. Item quidam naturales tantum et non legitimi, sicut sunt illi qui procreantur de legitima concubina cum qua tempore procreationis posset esse matrimonium, sicut de soluto et soluta. Quidam vero nec legitimi nec naturales, qui nati sunt ex prohibito coitu, ex talibus videlicet inter quos non posset esse matrimonium tempore

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Bracton echoes Penyafort in many of his assertions but goes a step beyond his predecessor in the strength of his moral judgments. From the most morally acceptable—natural and legitimate—to the least acceptable—spurious—Bracton creates a means by which distinctions in the laws on illegitimacy can be readily discerned since every term is followed by a brief and explicit definition. So, for example, when he defines a legal category such as “legitimate concubine” (legitima concubina), its meaning is clarified as a woman “with whom a marriage was possible at the time of procreation.”⁴⁷ However succinct and direct his explications are, however, Bracton opens the possibility for interpretation. Case in point is when he defines those born of “prohibited intercourse” (prohibito coitu). As Raymond had made abundantly clear in his earlier Summa, children born as a result of adultery or incest stood as an affront to marriage since one or both parties were not able to wed at the time of procreation. The penalty accruing to such children, those born explicitly from adultery or incest, according to Penyafort, was exclusion from any benefits, including property. To that very straightforward and narrowly defined consequence, Bracton creates a potential for alternate readings when he suggests that prohibited intercourse occurs between “persons for whom no marriage was possible at the time of procreation.”⁴⁸ For those already married and engaging in adultery or for those whose kinship was considered to be too closely related and therefore incestuous the prohibition obtains. Such a description appears to be straightforward and clearly targeting certain kinds of illicit sexuality, following along the lines of the Summa. However, if we recall the study of clerical parentage and the notion of “children of disorder” cited earlier, the definition offered here expands the category of spurious from those born merely of adultery and incest to include those born to a couple in which “one party was in religious orders.”⁴⁹ In a judgment that goes well beyond the determination in Raymond’s Summa, these are the species of spurii that Bracton considers to be “fit for nothing” (spurii qui ad nihilum apti sunt). Such pronouncements by a legal author of Bracton’s stature, whether or not he is personally responsible for writing the laws, indicate not only what appears to be a decided repugnance for the spurious child, but contribute to the shaping

procreationis, sicuti sunt spurii qui ad nihilum apti sunt” (De Legibus, in Thorne, Bracton, 2:187 [my emphasis]).  De Legibus, in Thorne, Bracton, 2:187. The Latin reads: “qua tempore procreationis posset esse matrimonium” (as noted in the previous citation).  De Legibus, in Thorne, Bracton, 2:187. As cited in note 46, the Latin reads: “inter quos non posset esse matrimonium tempore procreationis.”  Wertheimer, “Children of Disorder,” 384.

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of an institutional mandate excluding such children from inheritance as well as from full participation in society at large. Lawyers of all kinds by the late Middle Ages, according to Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis “were agreed on the need to penalize the illegitimate child in certain respects, and the main way in which this was done was by the enforcement of the common-law courts of the principle that bastards could not inherit from their parents.”⁵⁰ Even in the face of a political need to enfold illegitimate children back into mainstream society, laws both ecclesiastical and secular, created an atmosphere of intolerance by the language used to describe them and by the legislation put into place to prohibit them from inheriting property or from entering the clergy except by special dispensation. The stigmatizing effect of the legal diction of such legislation in a real-world environment pushes a potentially productive segment of society into its outer reaches, making it difficult if not impossible for those identified in such negative terms from full participation in their respective social circles. This is one of the many real-life predicaments for which medieval romances provide a modicum of poetic justice.

“Mater” Out of Place While the incipit announcing Lybeaus’s bastardy signals one of the legal realities behind the phenomenon of the illegitimate child in the English Lybeaus Desconus, at least in the Lambeth manuscript, its pronouncement does little to answer the question of his mother’s identity. As I have been suggesting throughout this discussion, however, there is an explanation for why the young knight’s mother is never named, one that I consider to be related to the stigmatizing effects conferred upon the mother of an illegitimate child. In a passage following closely on the heels of the poem’s opening, we learn that the eponymous hero’s mother hesitates to bring him to the Arthurian courts at first “for dred of wycke loose” (for fear of shame),⁵¹ a statement that indicates her awareness of an impropriety or ethical breach of some sort. While in other situations an indication of shame would in and of itself not provide an explanation for the mother’s lack of a name, understood in conjunction with the legal language used to describe illegitimate births, in this case, it offers a rationale for the exclusion of Lybeaus’s  Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England (London: Routledge, 1984), 43.  Line 22 in MS Lambeth 306 in the Middle English Texts Series Lybeaus Desconus. In the Naples manuscript this line reads, “For dout of wikkid” and is glossed as indicating her fear for Lybeaus’s reputation. See Salisbury and Weldon, Lybeaus Desconus, 85.

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mother from the father-son reunion at the poem’s end: she has served her purpose in the narrative, identified the father of her child publicly, and pushed Gawain toward accountability, acceptance, and reconciliation with his illegitimate son.⁵² When we recall one of the pathways to legitimacy cited by Raymond de Penyafort through the father’s proclamation, Gawain’s subsequent changing of Lybeaus’s name to Gyngelayne may be understood to signal the beginning of a legitimating process that brings the errant young knight back into the legal fold. Gawain has claimed responsibility for his child in a public forum in the presence of witnesses in a way that makes Lybeaus’s marriage to the Lady of Synadoun, a noblewoman slated to become the queen of North Wales, possible. Meanwhile, the mother of Lybeaus is left to stand alone as the spurious parent. Defined by her illicit maternal body and her shame, her function has been to assure the reinstatement of institutional law, to step aside as a new covenant is forged between men. In the anthropological terms alluded to earlier and stated so forcefully in an enduring study by Mary Douglas,⁵³ Lybeaus’s mother has polluted the sanctified space that is the law simply because she is “matter out of place,” or more appropriate in view of Isidore’s equation of mater with materia, “mater” out of place. The paradigm of sexual reproduction that associated the maternal with the raw material from which another form emerges, identifies an overarching presumption about marriage and family relations that Isidore helped to instantiate; both mothers and fathers are cast in terms of their biological sex, reproductive capabilities, and culturally constructed gender roles in centuries of legal documents on legitimacy. When a woman is out of place, at the wrong place at the wrong time, overstepping her prescribed social roles and position, whether she is a nun, a prostitute, a non-Christian foreigner, a household slave, or a loathly lady, that woman is “matter out of place,” potentially disruptive and threatening to the social order.⁵⁴ While in narratives such as the “Wedding of Dame Ragnelle and Sir Gawain,” she is named and brought under the aegis of a husband through marriage, in the end she must be expunged in order to allow the exemplary knight to assume his paternal function and prove his ability to establish a patrilineage of his own. In Lybeaus Desconus, the mother of the hero is cast aside while her son is integrated into the realm of the legitimate. We never know for certain whether the Fair Unknown is born into the category of the natural or the spurious. What can be

 The Naples MS also contains Gawain’s claim that he had begotten Lybeaus on “a giantis lady” (line 2249), a statement that provides evidence of a previous relationship for Lybeaus’s mother. See Salisbury and Weldon, Lybeaus Desconus, 137.  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966; reprint 2002).  Douglas, Purity and Danger, 50.

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known, however, is that the taint of the spurious attaches to the mother left unnamed and standing alone.

Bibliography Adams, J. N. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Aristotle. De Generatione Animalium, Book I. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, 665 – 80. New York: Random House, 1941. Barney, Stephen A., W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, ed. and trans. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Bracton: On the Laws and Customs of England. 4 vols. Translated by Samuel Thorne. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Metamorphosis and Identity. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Cadden, Joan. Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Conlee, John, ed. Prose Merlin. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge, 1966. Reprint 2002. Epstein, Steven A. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Given-Wilson, Chris and Alice Curteis. The Royal Bastards of Medieval England. London: Routledge, 1984. Green, Richard Firth. A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Hahn, Thomas, ed. Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Helmholz, R. H. “Support Orders, Church Courts, and the Rule of Filius Nullius: A Reassessment of the Common Law.” Virginia Law Review 63, no. 3 (1977): 431 – 48. Herzman, Ronald B., Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. Four Romances of England. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. Holsinger, Bruce. “The English Jurisdictions of ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’.” In The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, edited by Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, 154 – 84. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Isidore of Seville. Etymologiae. Liber IX. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/isidore/9.shtml. Isidore of Seville. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum Sive Originum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911. Karras, Ruth Mazo. “Marriage, Concubinage, and the Law.” In Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, edited by Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter, 117 – 29. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

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Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Leech, Mary. “Why Ragnell Had to Die: Feminine Usurpation of Masculine Authority in ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’.” In The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, edited by S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, 213 – 34. Studies in Medieval Culture 48. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Maddox, Donald. “Levi-Strauss in Camelot: Interrupted Communication in Arthurian Feudal Fictions.” In Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, edited by Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, 35 – 53. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. McCracken, Peggy. The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Passmore, S. Elizabeth and Susan Carter, eds. The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs. Studies in Medieval Culture 48. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Raymond of Penyafort. Summa on Marriage. Translated by Pierre Payer. Medieval Sources in Translation 41. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005. Raymond of Penyafort. Summa[e] Sti.[Sancti] Raymundi de Peniafort Barcinonensis Ord. Praedicator. De Poenitentia et Matrimonio cum glossis Ioannis de Friburgo. Rome, 1603. Reprint Farnborough, UK: Gregg, 1967. Liber Quartus, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt? id=ucm.5320782966&view=/up&seq=528. Renaut de Bȃgé. Le bel inconnu (Li biaus descouneüs: The Fair Unknown). Edited by Karen Fresco. Translated by Colleen P. Donagher. New York: Garland, 1992. Salisbury, Eve. “Lybeaus Desconus: Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine.” Arthuriana 24, no. 1 (2014): 66 – 85. Salisbury, Eve and James Weldon. Lybeaus Desconus. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. 2013. Steiner, Emily and Candace Barrington, eds. The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice in Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Thorne, Samuel E. Essays in English Legal History. London: Hambledon Press, 1985. Weldon, James. “‘Naked as She Was Bore’: Naked Disenchantment in Lybeaus Desconus.” Parergon 24, no. 1 (2007): 67 – 99. Wertheimer, Laura. “Children of Disorder: Clerical Parentage, Illegitimacy, and Reform in the Middle Ages.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 3 (2006): 382 – 407. Wertheimer, Laura. “Illegitimate Birth and the English Clergy, 1198 – 1348.” Journal of Medieval History 31, no. 2 (2005): 211 – 29.

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Chapter 5 Thomas Becket and the Pardoner’s Problem: Eunuchry and Healing on the Road to Canterbury More than two hundred years before Chaucer would write The Canterbury Tales, a dispute over wages in Bedfordshire would lead to a sentence of brutal physical mutilation for an unfairly accused man.¹ This sentence and the subsequent developments are of historical note only because of another much more famous assault a few months earlier—the murderous assault that ended the mortal life, but not the career, of Thomas Becket. These two events are inextricably linked: contemporary records tell us that St. Thomas, without whom the Canterbury pilgrimage would not have occurred, resolved the miscarriage of justice with a publicly authenticated miracle whereby he restored both the eyes and the genitals of the mutilated man. This early Becket miracle appears to have resonated strongly for believers, reinforcing the reputation of Thomas as both merciful and powerful. As Chaucer’s pilgrims, each variously broken or damaged, strain toward Canterbury, this reputation seems particularly apposite for one of his pilgrims in particular: the Pardoner, doubly associated with castration through both the assumption and the ongoing threat of emasculation, has good reason to appeal to a saint with an unusual reputation for restoring the masculinity of mutilated men.

Rough Justice: Eilward of Westoning Sometime in the early 1170s, a peasant (plebejus)² named Eilward of the manor of Westoning in Bedfordshire made the mistake of agreeing to plow a half measure of land belonging to a neighbor in return for 2d.³ The neighbor, however,  Some portions of this paper were previously presented as “Stones and Bones: The Pardoner in Pieces” at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2010.  James Craigie Robertson, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1:174.  What follows is the account of Benedict of Peterborough’s Miracula (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, no. 8171), in English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R. C. van Caenegem, vol. 2 (London: Selden Society, 1991), nos. 347– 665. This manuscript, written ca. 1182, offers a https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-006

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paid him 1d, and when Eilward offered to let him off the remainder if he would only underwrite a night of drinking, the neighbor laughed at him, and used the money to get drunk himself. Nevertheless, Eilward went drinking in the same tavern, but unwisely chose to leave early, break into his neighbor’s house, and take some small items as surety for the debt. The neighbor returned and caught him, breaking his head and piercing his arm with a knife before taking him into custody. Because the items stolen were insignificant in value, perhaps leaving the neighbor open to charges for injuring Eilward, the neighbor was persuaded by a corrupt reeve that he should accuse Eilward of stealing additional objects, which were hung around his neck before he was dragged off to face justice. Eilward was then imprisoned for several weeks as he awaited trial. During this time, he was visited by a venerable priest named Payn, who confessed him and advised him to commit himself to prayer, especially to Thomas of Canterbury. The saint, though only recently martyred, already had a growing reputation for miracles both within Canterbury, some ninety miles from Westoning, and beyond. Eilward agreed to pray, even promising a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and having a cross branded into his shoulder to demonstrate his repentance. Unfortunately, he failed his immersion ordeal, but nevertheless called out, “Thanks be to God and holy martyr Thomas!” (Deo gratias et sancto martyri Thomae!)⁴ His sentence was a harsh one: his accuser and the corrupt reeve, together with two further executioners, put out his eyes—one entirely and the second hacked and lacerated (“laceratus et in frusta concisus, vix tandem effossus est”).⁵ They then mutilated his genitals, presumably removing them completely, since the organs were “put away under a sod of grass” (sub cespite absconderunt).⁶ During this time, Eilward continued to call on Thomas, realizing that it was “more glorious for the martyr to restore eyes that were lost than to preserve those that had not been removed” (martyri sciens gloriosius esse oculos restituere perditos, quam non ablatos conservasse).⁷

fuller account than that of William of Canterbury’s Miracula, written shortly after 1172. Benedict’s more elaborate version differs from that of William in some points, adding, for example, the details that Fulk the reeve had been compensated for his part in the injustice by payment of an ox, and that Eilward failed the water ordeal because as a child he had been baptized on the eve of Pentecost: “quod vigilia pentecostas ipse parvulus regeneratus aqua submerge” (Robertson, Materials, 1:177). Translations are those of van Caenegem.  Van Caenegem, English Lawsuits, 2:511; Robertson, Materials, 1:177.  Robertson, Materials, 1:177.  Van Caenegem, English Lawsuits, 2:512; Robertson, Materials, 1:177.  Van Caenegem, English Lawsuits, 2:512; Robertson, Materials, 1:177.

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Blinded and half-dead from pain and loss of blood, Eilward was finally given shelter by a good Samaritan named Eilbricht. After ten days in Eilbricht’s home, the wounded man had a vision of St. Thomas, who marked his forehead with a cross, and by the end of the day, Eilward began to be able to distinguish light. As his eyesight gradually returned, the people were amazed to discover “two small pupils deeply hidden in the head and hardly as large as those of a small bird and which grew continuously” (deprehendunt pupillas duas parvulas profundius in capite latitantes, pupillis avis parvae vix quantitate coaequas, quae, etiam incessanter crescentes …).⁸ In daylight, the townsfolk noticed further that one restored eye was multicolored, as Eilward’s original eyes had been: the other was “totally black” (prorsus nigrum).⁹ In profound thankfulness, Eilward undertook a journey toward Canterbury, the story of the wondrous restoration of his sight beginning to precede him, and was greeted by crowds along his route. As he walked he felt an itch in his scrotum, and reaching to scratch it, discovered that his testicles, though still small, were also rapidly regrowing.¹⁰ Praising God, he allowed the townspeople to authenticate the miracle by palpating his restored genitals.¹¹ This miracle appears in Latin in both of the earliest collections of the miracles of St. Thomas, Miracles by William of Canterbury, ca. 1172, and the History of the Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas by Benedict of Peterborough, later prior of Christ Church, about 1182. Both were contemporaries and colleagues of Becket, and the healing of Eilward is one of a limited number of miracles that is reported by both chroniclers. Although it is not chronologically the first of the miracles associated with Thomas, William places it first in his accounts; Benedict uses it to begin his fourth book. The importance of the healing is also demonstrated by its appearance in the miracle windows of Trinity Chapel, some of the oldest surviving stained glass in England. These windows, which Rachel Koopmans has described as “the sole miracle collection created in high medieval England for

 Van Caenegem, English Lawsuits, 2:513; Robertson, Materials, 1:179.  Robertson, Materials, 1:180. William states that it is Eilward’s right eye that is “penitus niger”— deeply black (158).  ”. . . cum prurientum sibi testium folliculum adjecta manu scalpere coepit; et etiam membra illa sibi restituta comperit, parva quidem valde sed in majus proficientia, quae etiam volenti cuilibet palpare non negavit” (Robertson, Materials, 1:180).  William, while agreeing on Eilward’s openness to physical verification, expresses doubt about the extent of the final regrowth, saying “His testicles, however, which he let everybody touch, could be considered smaller than the testicles of a cock” (van Caenegem, 2:509); “Genitalia vero, quae cuilibet palpanda praebebat, infra quantitatem testium galli poterant aestimari” (Robertson, Materials, 1:158).

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the consumption of the ordinary pilgrim,”¹² were part of the rebuilding of the cathedral following the 1174 fire, and appear to have been in place by the time of the translation of Thomas’s bones from the crypt into his new shrine in Trinity Chapel in July 1220. Originally part of a set of twelve, the first two windows are conjectured to have shown scenes from Becket’s life, while the other ten showed posthumous miracles.¹³ Only seven remain, including Eilward’s window, the third on the north side), which contains five scenes from the miracle narrative, three within a roundel and two in lunettes below. In the first, Eilward, accompanied by the items he is accused of stealing, is brought before a judge (figure 5.1). In the second, the judge gives his ruling and it is carried out; Eilward is pinned to the ground by two men, his clothing partially removed. One of the men is holding a knife to Eilward’s eyes, and the other shields Eilward’s genitals from view by grasping them in one hand while wielding a knife in the other (figure 5.2). In the left lunette representing the third chronological scene, Eilward’s dream vision of Thomas, the saint does not mark his forehead with a cross, but appears to use his staff to heal Eilward’s eyes; there is no representation of his nether healing (figure 5.3). In the fourth and fifth images, one in the roundel and the last in a second lunette, Eilward witnesses for Thomas as healer to onlookers (figure 5.4) and finally gives thanks to the saint.¹⁴ In the roundel image, the healed Eilward points only to his eyes; his hips are turned away from the pilgrim viewer and toward the villagers. Thus while the assault on Eilward’s body by the townsfolk is presented graphically, making it clear that Eilward lost the organs of sight and of reproduction, his healing as well as his post-healing appearances veil the restoration of his genitals.¹⁵ Only the verdancy of the strategically placed tree gestures toward

 Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 252.  Madeline Harrison Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral circa 1175 – 1220 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 189.  The Latin inscription “Astat Narranti populus magnalia sancti” (the people stand by as he narrates the mighty deeds of the saint) that originally accompanied this image, is now in the lunette of thanksgiving.  The image of healing is itself ambiguous: Helen Barr sees two staffs (Transporting Chaucer [Manchester: Manchester University Press], 2014), arguing that the second symbolizes the healing of Eilward’s genitals: “the second pastoral staff is a metonymy for a testimonial proof that cannot be shown” (28), but Rachel Koopmans sees no staff at all, suggesting instead that we are seeing something like “firebolts . . . blasting vision back into his eyes” (“Visions, Reliquaries, and the Image of ‘Becket’s Shrine’ in the Miracle Windows of Canterbury Cathedral,” Gesta 54, no. 1 (2015): 37– 57 at 43).

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Figure 5.1: Eilward and the judge. By kind permission of the Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral.

his restored masculinity.¹⁶ This visual coyness is particularly striking given the focus in Benedict’s written text on the verification of the healing. On Eilward’s arrival in London, he was greeted by a skeptical bishop of Durham, who insisted on sending a messenger to Bedford to verify the story. Benedict and his fellows proved equally difficult to convince, but were persuaded by letters and testimony (“litteris et testimonio”)¹⁷ from the burgesses of Bedford.

 Madeline Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 106.  Robertson, Materials, 1:180.

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Figure 5.2: Eilward’s castration. By kind permission of the Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral.

Those burgesses themselves seem to have insisted on eyewitness testimony both to Eilward’s mutilation and to his healing, hearing the evidence of both his host Eilbricht and of a chaplain confessor before setting their seal to their letter. And of course, there is the part of the story so unexpected to modern readers—those witnesses who not only peer deeply into his eyes, but palpate his restored testes in an effort to assess and validate the extent and effectiveness of the miracle. Given that the window functions as a visual and popularly accessible warranty of the Latin accounts of William and Thomas, one might have expected it to express a more explicit affirmation of the extent of Eilward’s healing.

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Figure 5.3: St. Thomas heals Eilward. By kind permission of the Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral.

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Figure 5.4: Eilward witnesses. By kind permission of the Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral.

It seems clear that the viewing of the miracle windows, including the story of Eilward, would have been a central experience for pilgrims to Canterbury.¹⁸ After Becket’s body was translated into Trinity Chapel, the path of the pilgrim within the cathedral passed the altar where Thomas was murdered and dipped down to the crypt where his body was originally lodged, which had even before 1220 begun to be associated with healing miracles. The path then culminated at  David Raybin has suggested that the Canterbury miracle windows may have been an inspiration for the entire frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales (“Miracle Windows and the Pilgrimage to Canterbury,” in Chaucer: Visual Approaches, ed. S. Fein and D. Raybin [University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016], 154– 74).

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the Trinity Chapel altar where Becket’s shrine was located after 1220.¹⁹ The miracle windows themselves enclosed the chapel where the path ended, with the lowest of their images at eye level, reiterating the power of the saint’s bones even as the bones themselves lay nearby, and opening up the pilgrims’ bodies to the possibility of personal, even radical, healing. As Anne Harris has argued, this path through Trinity Chapel offered the opportunity for intimate proximity both physical and spiritual to the martyr and his miracles: “As they encircle the shrine their bodies replicate or rather re-enact the memory of the miracles in the crypt directly below them: at any moment, they can become the miracle recipient in a precise and powerful remembered relationship with Thomas Becket.”²⁰ Dramatic and intimate though the experience of the miracle windows must have been for all believers, I want to argue here for the relevance of the Eilward miracle to one fictional pilgrim in particular. Among the devotees to St. Thomas depicted as making the journey from Southwark to Canterbury is one rooted deeply and uncomfortably in his own body. Chaucer’s Pardoner is physically described in detail as to his hair color, length, texture, and style (yellow, long, smooth, thin), his facial hair (none either now or ever), the pitch of his voice (small), the expression in his eyes (glaring), and his choices in riding attire (elaborate but daringly disheveled). However, to judge by critical output, the Pardoner’s most distinguishing feature is what may or may not be under the wallet in his lap: whether or not the Pardoner actually possesses the “coillons” the Host will threaten with violence by the end of his tale has engendered much critical discussion.²¹ Even the playful Chaucer-as-pilgrim does not know for sure,

 Sarah Blick, “Comparing Pilgrim Souvenirs and Trinity Chapel Windows at Canterbury Cathedral: An Exploration of Context, Copying and the Recovery of Lost Stained Glass,” Mirator, September 2001: 1– 27. For a map of both the pilgrims’ path and the monks’ path, see M. F. Hearn, “Canterbury Cathedral and the Cult of Becket,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 19 – 52.  Anne Harris, “Pilgrimage, Performance, and Stained Glass at Canterbury Cathedral,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles: Texts, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 243 – 81 at 273 – 74.  Since Walter Clyde Curry first raised the possibility, in 1919, of the Pardoner being an “eunuchus ex nativitate,” the possibilities of the pilgrim’s anatomy, his gender identity, and his sexuality have been thoroughly explored (“The Secret of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 18 [1919]: 593 – 606). More recent readings have moved from Curry’s congenital eunuchry to considerations of possible intersexuality and homosexuality through what Kim Zarins has called “a retreat from the body,” an approach which focuses on metaphorical, spiritual, and performative approaches to the riddle (“Intersex and the Pardoner’s Body,” Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 4, no. 1 [2018]: article 2, 1– 63 at 2). More recently, trans theory has embraced the Pardoner as, at the very least, “critically trans,” suggest-

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but he is prepared to guess at—and gossip about—the Pardoner’s possible secret: “I trowe,” he says, daringly,—I think, I guess—“he were a geldyng or a mare.”²² While these words suggest multiple possibilities comprehensively explored in print, many in what are now dated and problematic ways, it is inarguable that both geldings and mares lack testicles, and I am suggesting here that it is the Pardoner’s desire for the traditional anatomical trappings of masculinity that places him on the journey to Canterbury. Were the journey to be completed, he would not only have been able to view and touch—even perhaps consider inserting himself into—the shrine of one of the very few saints credited with miracles that restored male genitalia,²³ but he would also have experienced the most famous of those miracles rendered in richly colored stained glass.

The King of Partes While we have now had a hundred years of critical discussion of the Pardoner’s possible lack of testicles,²⁴ the first critic to link this lack to the Pardoner’s obsession with the partial and the fragmentary seems to have been Carolyn Dinshaw in 1988.²⁵ In a closely theorized article, later book chapter, she draws attention not only to the torrent of language in the Pardoner’s catalog of body parts and expressions for dissection—hand, face, skin, neck, bone, flesh, throat, marrow, blood, gullet, visage, nose, mouth, womb, tongue, belly, marrow, cod, heart, arms, sides, parting, departing, rent, and broke²⁶—but also to his collection of fragmentary relics. He bears with him an assortment of rags and bone shards he passes off as both wholesome and beneficial: a pillowcase as the veil of

ing that he “stands at the crossroads of medieval trans discourse” (M. W. Bychowski, “Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI,” in Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer, ed. Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018], 221– 49 at 221).  All references to the Canterbury Tales are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) by group and line; here I.691.  The first tomb of Thomas was a foramina shrine, so that Henry II was able to insert his head and kiss the coffin during his public penance of 1172. After the 1220 translation, however, Thomas’s tomb appears to have been simply raised on pillars.  Riverside Chaucer, IV.C.622 in the Petworth MS reads “King of Partes” for “King of Parthes.”  Carolyn Dinshaw, “Eunuch Hermeneutics,” first in ELH 55, no. 1 (1988): 27–51, and then reprinted in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 156 – 86.  Even the Pardoner’s teachings against blasphemy draw from the popular idea that to invoke separately the body parts of God is to dissect Him limb from limb: “Oure blissed Lordes body they totere– / Hem thoughte the Jewes rente hym noght ynough” (Riverside Chaucer, VI.474– 75).

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the Virgin Mary, a “gobet” of Peter’s sail, a well-used magical mitten, the bones of pigs and sheep. These rubbishy scraps are obviously false, but they speak to the metonymy of relic culture by the end of the fourteenth century, where fragments, splinters, teeth, hairs, and finger-bones of the holy were divided into smaller and smaller pieces in order to meet demand. Even Thomas Becket himself appears to have had his remains divided: the crown of his skull, said to have been severed during his murder, was popularly believed to be housed in the cathedral’s Corona chapel, and on the occasion of the translation of his body in 1220, several tiny bones appear to have been removed for distribution, perhaps given as gifts by then-Archbishop Stephen Langton.²⁷ As both his language and his collection attest, the Pardoner’s concern with the partial and the fragmentary reflects a faith in the ability of such fragments to reconstitute a whole. Fittingly, his prologue, tale, and epilogue are themselves part of a larger fragment, and it is unclear where this piece fits into the body of the tales; though generally referred to as Fragment VI, the portion of the Canterbury Tales that deals with the Physician and the Pardoner is isolated, unmarked by clues as to context or time. The only link the Pardoner’s material forms is with the Physician’s tale that precedes his own confession—an unedifying narrative of domestic discipline and fetishization of bodily wholeness in the form of virginity, ending with the decapitation of a child and with her father bearing the bloody head before a corrupt judge in testament to his deed. Perhaps this link is fitting, however, since heads in isolation from bodies also appear to loom large for the Pardoner. His interest in this is reflected both overtly, as in the vernicle he wears—a reproduction of a miraculous image of the face of Jesus—or in his invocation of the death of John the Baptist in a warning against drunkenness, and more indirectly, in his repeated and loving catalogs of coinage—the pennies, groats, nobles, florins, and marks he lists are each adorned and warranted by the floating head or bisected body of a king.²⁸ In Freudian terms, of

 Most famously, a fragment of elbow is thought to have been given to Esztergom Cathedral in Hungary. See Kay Brainerd Slocum, The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries (London: Routledge, 2018).  Numismatically at least he is indeed “alle of the newe jet” (Riverside Chaucer, Prol., 682): his catalog includes the relatively new denominations established by Edward III in the 1340s, including the silver groat (4d) and the gold florin (6s) and noble. The noble, which the Pardoner suggests should be offered to him at the end of every mile—and there are some sixty miles between Southwark and Canterbury—is worth six shillings and eight pence, or half a mark. The Pardoner tells us that every year he has won some hundred marks, or close to seventy pounds—an amazing figure, if he is to be believed, and more than twice Chaucer’s own salary as clerk of the works. See A. W. Pollard (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. [1910], s.v. “Geoffrey Chaucer”), who has the poet in 1389 at two shillings a day, or 31 pounds per annum.

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course, decapitation is castration, and severed heads stand in for severed testicles; the Pardoner’s compulsion to acquire these heads therefore also suggests compensation, both financial and psychological, for a perceived lack.²⁹

Authenticating the Pardoner The Pardoner is clearly a man compulsively rehearsing issues of identity in his problematically masculine body—hence, perhaps, his need to establish the authority of that body. Very early in his prologue, he explains that his priority in preaching is always to self-verify: First I pronounce whennes that I come, And thanne my bulles shewe I, alle and some. Oure lige lordes seel on my patente That shewe I first, my body to warente, That no man be so boold, ne preest ne clerk, Me to destourbe of Cristes hooly werk. And after than thanne telle I forth my tales; Bulles of popes and of cardynales, Of patriarkes and of bishopes I shewe.³⁰

“Warente” here means, the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “To keep safe from danger, to protect.”³¹ This is the only time Chaucer uses this term. But contemporary usage could also mean “To guarantee (goods, an article sold or made) to be of the quality, quantity, etc. specified,” and here I think the Pardoner is using both senses of the word.³² His lord’s seal both keeps his body safe from harm and guarantees that he is what he says that he is. In addition to showing his “lordes seel,” however, he also shows “my bulles … bulles of popes and of cardynales, / Of patriarkes and of bishoppes.” It is not clear whether he is

 Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (1920 – 22), ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953 – 1974), 273 – 74.  Riverside Chaucer, VI.335 – 43.  The Oxford English Dictionary Online (July 2020), s.v. “warrant,” 1a: “a. transitive. To keep safe from danger, to protect. Const. from. Obsolete. c1275 Five Joys of the Virg. 9 in Old Eng. Misc. 89 Bidde we vre louerd crist þat hire warantye.”  The Oxford English Dictionary Online (July 2020), s.v. “warrant,” 3a: “a. With object and complement or infinitive: To guarantee (goods, an article sold or made) to be of the quality, quantity, etc. specified. 1387 in J. D. Marwick Charters Edinb. (1871) 36 The qwilke werke the forsaide masounys sal warande watir thicht.”

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using “bulles” here to refer to the seals or to the documents, themselves: both usages are contemporaneous.³³ But given that the derivation is the Latin “bulla,” “denoting various globular objects,” the possibility of a pun on “ball” meaning “testicle” here cannot be overlooked.³⁴ If this is the case, the Pardoner is implying that it is his balls that both keep his body safe from harm and guarantee that he is what he says he is. Further, the term from which the word “testicles” is derived, used by both William and Thomas in their accounts, is itself strongly linked to the notion of authentication; the Latin “testis” means both “testicle” and “witness,” most plausibly in the sense that the testes are witnesses to virility or masculinity. Of course, his seals and his documents are both spurious, conjured in order to fool the unwary and the gullible; Chaucer suggests here that his testicles may be equally spurious, equally ineffective as a warranty. Always requiring verification, already marked as other, the Pardoner is profoundly aware of his status as unwanted interloper into the body of the pilgrims, and by extension the body of Christianity as a whole. Even the concept of such a character taking a turn at the tale-telling game leads his fellow pilgrims to cry out in dismay: though his interjections thus far have not been particularly scurrilous or offensive, his companions immediately assume that he will tell a tale of unsuitable ribaldry. Perhaps in response to their unflattering assumptions, he presents a moral tale that is bracketed by a confession and a sales-pitch designed to reinforce their negative opinion of him. This pitch ends with a masochistic invitation to submit to his spurious authority that is aimed at the pilgrim not only least likely to comply, but least like the Pardoner himself in terms of masculinity: Harry Bailey, who, we have been told, of “manhood … lakkede right naught.”³⁵ In response, the Host is quick to attack the Pardoner where he appears weakest with a threat of literal castration: I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.

 The Oxford English Dictionary Online (July 2020), s.v. “bull, n.2”: “1. A seal attached to an official document; esp. the leaden seal attached to the Pope’s edicts. 1340 Ayenbite (1866) 62 Me ualseþ þe kinges sel oþer þe popes bulle,” but also “2. A papal or episcopal edict or mandate. 1297 R. Gloucester’s Chron. 494 The king vorbed ek in this lond al the popes playdinge Of bullen.” Chaucer seems primarily to use the term to refer to the documents themselves.  This meaning predates Chaucer: The Oxford English Dictionary Online (July 2020), s.v. “Ball n.1”: Usually in plural. A testicle. a1325 (c1250) Prov. Hendyng (Cambr.) xliv, in Anglia (1881) 4 190 (MED) Þe maide þat ȝevit hirsilf alle Oþir to fre man oþir to þralle..And pleiit with þe croke and wiþ þe balle, And mekit gret þat erst was smalle.”  Riverside Chaucer, I.756.

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Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!³⁶

Like bullies everywhere, Harry Bailey has sized the Pardoner up and unerringly honed in on his deepest insecurity.

Hool/Hole/Hol/Holi The conceptual and theological link between physical and moral integrity in the person of the Pardoner occurs partly through semantic connection: as Rosemary Woolf has pointed out, puns in the Middle Ages were considered much more weighty than they are today, valued not just for the coincidental humor of their wordplay, but as a divinely arranged insight, a “rhetorical means of revealing underlying correspondences.”³⁷ The underlying correspondence here is shared by a number of common Middle English terms. The first of these is the adjective “hool,” from the Old English “hæl,” meaning healthy, or cured, or whole, complete, or inviolate: it is the promise of the Pardoner that livestock that drink from the well in which the sheep’s shoulder-bone has been dipped will be “hool.”³⁸ The second is the noun “hole,” from the Old English “hol,” “hola,” meaning a perforation, bore, hole; examples given in the Middle English Dictionary include the eye of a needle, and the hole of a privy; a secondary meaning is an external bodily orifice, such as an eye socket, nostril, anus, or vagina. A third is a pit or a grave. Adjectives stemming from this include “holey” and “hollow.” The third is the adjective “hol(e),” meaning lacking no part, complete: of a group, “lacking no member.” Closely related meanings are healthy, cured, morally healthy, spiritually saved, and intact: the shoulder-bone “heeleth” jealousy.³⁹ The fourth is the homonym “holi,” meaning divine or sacred, from the Old English “halig”: the Pardoner speaks of how his words “semen hooly and trewe.”⁴⁰ A related term is “halowe”: to make holy. They might best be described as rough equivalents to modern English “hale,” “hole,” “whole,” and “holy.” These terms, I would argue, reveal the very nature of the Pardoner, including his secret nature: he is neither hool, hale, or whole; indeed, he may be “holed,” perforated, and holey, in need of hel-ing. And his claim to holiness,     

Riverside Chaucer, VI.952– 55. Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyrics in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 85. Riverside Chaucer, VI.357. Riverside Chaucer, VI.365. Riverside Chaucer, VI.421.

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a guise, as he admits himself, is, like his claim to integrity, without foundation— or at least, verification. Without wholeness, he is without holiness: the Pardoner is not simply a figure who is psychologically damaged by his lack of testicles, but a soul who feels himself spiritually damned for it. By his own choices, he seems primarily to be an Old Testament Pardoner—the oxymoron pointing to the impossibility of such a self-identity. Many of his biblical references are from the Old Testament—indeed all of his lengthy biblical digressions—and while the relics attributed to him in the General Prologue refer to the New Testament, the one he promotes most shamelessly is connected to a holy Jew—and to a fourteenth-century Christian, holy Jews would have been Old Testament Jews.⁴¹ Unfortunately for him, the Old Testament is quite clear about the spiritual disqualifications associated with castration: Leviticus tells us that a man who “hath his stones broken” cannot approach God as a priest,⁴² and Deuteronomy is even harsher: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.”⁴³ As Caroline Bynum argues in Fragmentation and Redemption, theologically speaking, salvation was associated with wholeness and health, damnation with lack and fissure and the corruption of death.⁴⁴ In medieval versions of hell, the damned writhe piecemeal in a state of partialness that both reflects and punishes their sin: degeneration produces de-generation. In such a context, damage to the sexual organs is a punishment for sexual sin, just as in the fabliaux and lays where the cuckolded husband often threatens to castrate his wife’s lover, and sometimes actually does so. Reading the Pardoner theologically, then, his presumed lack can be seen as an external indication of his inward sinfulness and an omen of his eventual fate: the bodily fragmentation, and even physical dissolution, of the unredeemed dead.

 Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), passim.  Leviticus 21:20.  Deuteronomy 23:1.  Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), passim.

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The Road to Canterbury If Chaucer portrays the Pardoner’s immortal soul hanging in the balance (and indeed, over a century ago he was famously diagnosed as a “lost soul”⁴⁵), perhaps a miraculous healing would be the character’s only hope. And it is worth pointing out that his choices would have been fairly limited. It is true that medieval castration miracles are not in themselves unusual, falling into one of four general categories: castration as divine punishment, castration as divine grace, the miraculous healing of castration in limited form, and, finally, as in Eilward’s case, the miraculous return of form, function, and, presumably, virility. A typical example of castration as divine punishment occurs in a miracle attributed to St. Gerald of Aurillac. A woman returning from prayer at the saint’s shrine is attacked by a would-be rapist, and she cries out for divine aid, invoking her devotion to the saint. In this particular case she is not saved from rape, but immediately afterward, the rapist is struck by a sudden putrefying disease of the genitals, causing them to drop off.⁴⁶ In other versions, the miracle of punitive castration sometimes functions as a warning and can be reversed; either the apparent castration is revealed to be a miraculous vision of the consequences of lust⁴⁷ or the victim is restored once he throws himself on the mercy of the divine.⁴⁸ The tradition of castration as divine grace, on the other hand, depends on the notion of the Christian value of spiritual eunuchry derived from Matthew 19: “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” It largely manifests itself as the tale of a male Christian, often a monk or priest, who is struggling with sexual desire and blessed with the vision of being castrated by a mysterious figure, often an angel. On awakening, the dreamer finds himself physically intact,

 George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” The Atlantic Monthly 72 (1893): 829 – 33 at 832.  Mathew Kuefler, The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 193 – 218.  See, for example, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum: The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. Henry von Essen Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1929), 1:302– 3.  See, for example, a miracle attributed to Saint Marculph: Marculph’s vita, chap. 3, Miracles, c. 19 in Acta Sanctorum (AASS) and discussed by Jacqueline Murray, “Sexual Mutilation and Castration Anxiety: A Medieval Perspective,” in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Mathew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 254– 72 at 260.

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but miraculously free of the complications of the flesh.⁴⁹ In a similar vein, Peter Abelard, perhaps the most famous medieval castrate, wrote of the unexpectedly liberating effect of the assault that left him emasculated: “of these vilest members … divine grace cleansed me rather than deprived me.”⁵⁰ As Karl Steel has pointed out, “for the celibate cleric, and for their imitators, castration can masculate. It becomes one of the surest routes to bestowing on men the illusory gift of the phallus, male power’s mythical thing, which should never be confused with the actual, always inadequate genitalia.”⁵¹ One drawback of the link between castration and holiness is the possibility that a struggling sinner might, like Origen, take matters into his own hands. A popular example of this is the tale of the pilgrim to St. James Compostela, who, repenting of his previous unchastity, is tricked by the devil into first selfcastration (“his members and his penndanz bathe”⁵²) and then suicide. St. James and the Virgin Mary work together to save the pilgrim’s soul, and he is restored to life, but not to manhood: he is left with a neatly healed hole: “Bot that his throt was scorn wit knif / A red merk was al his lif, / And thar his membres was bifore / Havid he noht sithen bot a bore.”⁵³ This suggests that for James and Mary, the priority is the fate of the suicidal pilgrim’s soul, followed by saving his life. There is no suggestion that the missing genitals could not have been restored by the power of James and Mary, but rather that doing so would be unnecessary (and indeed, that this particular pilgrim might have been better off without them). Finally, tales in the fourth category of castration miracle, wholesale restoration of severed genitalia as experienced by Eilward, are extremely rare and associated almost exclusively with Thomas Becket. However, it is worth mentioning that a tale similar to that of Eilward, does accrue to another English saint: Wulfstan, whose shrine was at Worcester. He is credited by William of Malmesbury with the 1221 healing of the blinded and castrated Thomas of Eldersfield, who was unjustly mutilated for assault, his eyes being torn out, and his testicles

 This is discussed at length by Karl Steel, “Nothing to Lose: Medieval Castration, Clerical Celibacy, and a Strange Story from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelation” (2017), CUNY Academic Commons, https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers/52776/.  David Luscombe, ed., The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 201.  Steel, “Nothing to Lose.”  The tale is extremely popular; this particular quotation is from the version in the Northern Homily Collection, “Homily 4, Fourth Sunday in Advent,” The Northern Homily Cycle, ed. Anne B. Thompson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), line 198.  Thompson, Northern Homily Cycle, lines 271– 74.

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being torn off and then kicked about by local youth. Thomas invoked the assistance of the saint and the Virgin Mary, and both his eyes and his testicles gradually grew back.⁵⁴ However, either William of Malmesbury or his source is clearly familiar with Eilward’s case and also alert to both the unusualness of Eilward’s healing and the testimonial power and cachet—hence financial opportunity—of such a miracle: “But far more wonderful because absolutely extraordinary is the restoration of new limbs for ones cut off and in every way utterly destroyed. Yet God has deigned to honor England, the corner of the whole world, beyond all kingdoms of the earth, and to favor it with a certain prerogative of dignity. First in Thomas, the glorious archbishop of Canterbury and martyr, and now in our own days in the equally comparable confessor of Worcester.”⁵⁵ Finally, several close parallels in the two tales point to possible pilfering from the story of Eilward; Paul Hyams suggests the account may be a canny “literary fraud.”⁵⁶ If this is indeed a case of pious plagiarism, as seems likely, it points to both the fact that the healing of Eilward was well-known beyond Canterbury and its environs, and the fact that such miracles were considered compelling, noteworthy, and potentially lucrative.⁵⁷ It is clear, then, that long before the 1380s, Thomas Becket was known to be one of the only saints—perhaps the only saint—who could and did regularly heal men who no longer possessed their testicles. If Chaucer is connecting the Pardoner’s pilgrimage to Thomas’s tomb to his desire to acquire masculine wholeness, he connects it simultaneously to a deep desire for normalcy, for belonging in the body of a community that has always been ready, and continues to be ready, to reject the man he is.⁵⁸ Harry Bailey’s final threat to the Pardoner, in  R. R. Darlington, ed., The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury (London: Camden Society, 1928), 168 – 75.  Darlington, Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, 75.  Paul Hyams, “The Strange Case of Thomas of Eldersfield,” History Today 36 (1986): 9 – 15 at 13.  Furthermore, while Eilward’s healing is by far the most famous, it is not the only healing of a castrate associated with Thomas Becket. See also the healing of the self-castrated monk Sefrid, from the Cistercian monastery at Himmerod, in a collection dating from as early as 1175 (Edwin A. Abbott, St. Thomas of Canterbury: His Death and Miracles (London: A. and C. Black, 1898), 61). There are also two more testicular healings in William and Benedict’s accounts: those of Roger, a simpleton (hominem simplicissimum), like Eilward blinded and castrated for theft, and of Thomas, a cleric, who had been sexually mutilated by a jealous husband (Robertson, Materials, 1:420, and 1:424).  As M. W. Bychowski suggests, “if we accept that a pig’s or sheep’s bone can be a relic and that wounded and sick cattle can be made whole, we may be more willing to accept that a gelding or a mare might be reconstructed as a man with something to give to the society” (Bychowski, “Reconstructing the Pardoner,” 244).

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which he rehearses carving his testicles from his body and enshrining them as relics, is both a comment on the threat of castration—even an impossible one —as a powerful silencer and a barely disguised reflection of a larger wish: to exercise jurisdiction over a troubling body, and to excise the Pardoner, and all like him, from the body of the pilgrimage and from that of Christianity in general. More like the body of the traitor displayed in pieces at a city gate than like a reverenced relic, the putative displayed testicles would assert that people like the Pardoner—lacking, dislocated, fragmented—had no power to threaten the integrity of the community. Ironically, both Harry Bailey’s threat and the possibility of bodily wholeness through the Canterbury pilgrimage remain an unfulfilled fantasy, forever interrupted, forever incomplete.

Bibliography Abbott, Edwin A. St. Thomas of Canterbury: His Death and Miracles. London: A. and C. Black, 1898. Barr, Helen. Transporting Chaucer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Benedict of Peterborough. Miracula. In English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, edited by R. C. van Caenegem, vol. 2, nos. 347 – 665. London: Selden Society, 1991. Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Blick, Sarah. “Comparing Pilgrim Souvenirs and Trinity Chapel Windows at Canterbury Cathedral: An Exploration of Context, Copying and the Recovery of Lost Stained Glass.” Mirator, September 2001: 1 – 27. Bychowski, M. W. “Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI.” In Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer, edited by Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp, 221 – 49. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Caesarius of Heisterbach. Dialogus Miraculorum: The Dialogue on Miracles. Translated by Henry von Essen Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland. Introduction by G. G. Coulton. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1929. Caviness, Madeline Harrison. The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral circa 1175 – 1220. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Caviness, Madeline Harrison. Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Curry, Walter Clyde. “The Secret of Chaucer’s Pardoner.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 18 (1919): 593 – 606. Darlington, R. R., ed. The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury. London: Camden Society, 1928. Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Eunuch Hermeneutics.” ELH 55, no. 1 (1988): 27 – 51. Reprinted in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 156 – 86. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

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Freud, Sigmund. “Medusa’s Head.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (1920 – 22), edited by James Strachey, 273 – 74. London: Hogarth, 1953 – 1974. Harris, Anne. “Pilgrimage, Performance, and Stained Glass at Canterbury Cathedral.” In Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles: Texts, edited by Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, 243 – 81. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. Hearn, M. F. “Canterbury Cathedral and the Cult of Becket.” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 19 – 52. Hyams, Paul. “The Strange Case of Thomas of Eldersfield.” History Today 36 (1986): 9 – 15. Kittredge, George Lyman. “Chaucer’s Pardoner.” The Atlantic Monthly 72 (1893): 829 – 33. Koopmans, Rachel. “Visions, Reliquaries, and the Image of ‘Becket’s Shrine’ in the Miracle Windows of Canterbury Cathedral.” Gesta 54, no. 1 (2015): 37 – 57. Koopmans, Rachel. Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Kuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Luscombe, David, ed. The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Murray, Jacqueline. “Sexual Mutilation and Castration Anxiety: A Medieval Perspective.” In The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, edited by Mathew Kuefler, 254 – 72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Raybin, David. “Miracle Windows and the Pilgrimage to Canterbury.” In Chaucer: Visual Approaches, edited by S. Fein and D. Raybin, 154 – 74. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016. Robertson, James Craigie, ed. Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. 7 vols. 1875 – 1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Slocum, Kay Brainerd. The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries. London: Routledge, 2018. Steel, Karl. “Nothing to Lose: Medieval Castration, Clerical Celibacy, and a Strange Story from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelation.” 2017. CUNY Academic Commons, https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers/52776/. Thompson, Anne B., ed. The Northern Homily Cycle. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008. Woolf, Rosemary. English Religious Lyrics in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Zarins, Kim. “Intersex and the Pardoner’s Body.” Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 4, no. 1 (2018): article 2, 1 – 63. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/ac cessus/vol4/iss1/2.

James A. Knapp

Chapter 6 Anxious Appearance: Illustrating Dissimulation and the Case of the Counterfeit Crank Among my fondest memories of the time I spent in Rochester was a seminar I took with Tom Hahn focused on the pre-modern other. It was there that I was introduced to the imaginary others of medieval Europe’s anxious fantasy, codes for the negotiation of difference in a culture shaped by a legacy of tribalism marked by expanding trade and cultural exchange, as well as near constant conflict and conquest. The seminar tracked how the fantastic others that populated medieval travel narratives like those collected in Mandeville’s Travels and the legends of Alexander the Great prefigured the discourses of otherness in early modern Europe. The monsters of the early modern imagination gradually gave way to the exotic, but more distinct new world others described in the accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas, Christopher Columbus, and Sir Walter Raleigh among others. As recent work on race in early modern Europe has shown, efforts to define national identities came to rely on the discursive identification and rejection of the non-European other, a project that often found fodder in the fantastic and fictional accounts produced in the medieval imagination. Tom’s class was a preview of important developments in critical race studies and theories of the other that now dominate critical discourse about intercultural exchange in pre-modern Europe.¹  At the time of the seminar in the mid-1990s most historians and cultural critics still held the view that race as a category was a later invention, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way to bolster colonial expansion and the subjugation of non-Europeans under the auspices of Enlightenment and science. Since that time critical race theory has corrected this view by revealing the long history of racial discourse in pre-modern Europe. Especially important here is the work of early modern scholars including Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, Arthur Little, Jonathan Burton, Dennis Britton, Peter Erickson, and Ayanna Thompson. In 2018, Farah Karim-Cooper helped organize a symposium on Shakespeare and Race at the Globe Theater in London, and in recent years a new collective has formed under the title RaceB4Race, initiated by Thompson at Arizona State University, and presenting widely attended conferences in the US and Europe. This new movement to reshape the field of pre-modern race studies is energized by young medievalists and early modernists, many of whom are scholars of color, far too many to count, but including David Sterling Brown, Ambereen Dadaboy, Vanessa Corredera, and Noémie Ndaiye. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-007

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The others that populated the texts we considered that semester were the strange and disturbing sort, memorably described in Shakespeare’s Othello by the title character: … the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.²

The otherness of Shakespeare’s Othello is drawn from the popular catalogs found in Mandeville’s Travels—including dog-headed men and other oddities—as well as accounts of Native Americans in Columbus, de las Casas, and Montaigne and the engravings of Theodor de Bry based on the drawings of John White.³ Positioned at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, Othello’s account of the strange others he has encountered is intended to bolster his aura of European sameness, though at the very same time it reveals how profound the fear of the other was in Shakespeare’s England. No longer fantastic assemblages of monstrosity pulled from the pages of medieval fictions, England’s others were increasingly figured as anyone lying outside the normative mainstream of Englishness that resulted from and undergirded the emerging sense of English nationhood. The Moors, Jews, and Turks who walked the streets of London replaced the exotic cannibals and men with their heads in their chests that had populated distant lands in the medieval imagination. An abstract obsession with otherness became a feature of embodied experience, as the spectacle rather than the linguistic account was increasingly available.⁴ As a result, otherness marked not only non-Europeans (or those perceived as such) but those considered threats to English identity including the Irish, some continental Catholics (especially Jesuits), as well as the disabled and the deviant. While the monstrous others of the medieval world were easily identifiable by their dog heads, single giant foot, or overt cannibalism, the early modern others had an uncanny ability to blend in. And because such threatening others could increasingly go undetected, anxiety over the connection between appearance and identity fueled efforts to unveil the dangerous among the normative popu William Shakespeare, Othello, Arden 3rd Series, ed. E. A. J. Honigman (London: Thompson: 1997), 1.3.144– 46.  The crux at the end of the play involving the “base Indian, [who] threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe” (5.2.345 – 46) is evidence of the convergence of these two traditions of otherness in early modern England.  Conjecture about the willingness of the English to pay to see a monster like Caliban, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, is supported by contemporary accounts of the public display of native Americans in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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lation, spawning new sciences of physiognomy and confessional testing. With the Reformation, the success of conversion relied on the spiritual comportment of the newly converted, rather than outward evidence of participation in material practices. At the same time, the rise of the public theater reminded all that anyone could be one thing while appearing to be another. Efforts to support the poor and disabled were challenged by suspicions that these populations were replete with actors, charlatans bilking the new system of poor laws to avoid the thrift and avoidance of idleness that had become moral standards in Protestant England. A crucial distinction was thus developed to determine the difference between “impotent” deserving poor and “sturdy” idle imposters.⁵ But just as the discourse surrounding non-English others developed in the middle ages as an expression of the cultural pressure to define normative identity for those in power, attitudes towards disability evolved as religious and political authorities strove to mark the boundaries of normative identity in medieval and early modern Europe.⁶ My topic here is one such case, embedded in a textual history reflective of English anxiety over semblance at the end of the sixteenth century, a small piece of the story that I began to understand in Tom’s seminar all those years ago.

Nicholas Jennings, Same or Other? A great deal of critical commentary has accrued to my topic, the case of the notorious “counterfeit crank” Nicholas Jennings (alias Nicolas Blount) as chronicled by Thomas Harman in A caueat or warening for commen cursetors vulgarely called vagabones (1567).⁷ Jennings’s con, faking epilepsy or the “falling sick-

 This distinction, the validity of which has produced much debate, is discussed by Frank Aydelotte in his classic study, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913; reprint New York: Routledge, 1967), 56. Historians of disability have noted that the skepticism that developed around disability was another avenue through which the non-normate population was marginalized and mistreated in the period. See in particular Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (New York: Palgrave, 2018).  See, for example, Edward Wheatley’s Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).  Harman’s book appeared in at least four early modern editions. The first edition was published in 1566 for William Griffith. This edition is lost, but it is entered in the stationer’s register, and it is also mentioned in a handwritten note dated 1814 in the copy of the second edition (1567) located in the Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 12787.5). This second edition (also printed for Griffith) survives in two states (STC 12787 and 12787.5) and has the full title: A caueat or warening for commen cursetors vvlgarely called uagabones, set forth by Thomas Harman, es-

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ness,” is among the purported scams that appear in the court records of the period, clearly falling into the category of criminal activity Harman claimed to be documenting. But it appears to have been Harman who gave a name to this particular con. The term “crank” is evocative. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) includes an entire entry for Harman’s coinage, as the compound term “counterfeit crank”: “A rogue who feigned sickness in order to move compassion and get money.”⁸ But the origins of the word suggest that it had long been associated with deception, a usage that explicitly highlighted visual deception. The earliest noted use is dated circa 1000 and is still familiar today, as in the mechanical crank: “A portion of an axis bent at right angles, used to communicate motion, or to change reciprocal into rotary motion, or the converse.”⁹ The etymology offered by the OED is instructive: Old English cranc in cranc-stæf, Middle English crank(e, a word rarely exemplified before the 17th cent. Apparently an ablaut-derivative of the verb crinc-an, cranc, crunc-en, found (but very rare) in Old English as a by-form of cring-an, crang, crung-en to fall in battle, of which the primitive meaning appears to have been ‘to draw oneself together in a bent form, to contract oneself stiffly, curl up’. These verbs are not known elsewhere in Germanic; but numerous derivatives occur in the other languages, connected with the two notions of ‘to bend together, crook, curl up’, and ‘to shrink, give way, become weak or ill’. English crank belongs to the literal sense-group, with the primary notion of something bent together or crooked; German and Dutch krank adjective ‘sick’, formerly ‘weak, slight, small,’ shows the figurative development.

The origin of the word as a bend or turn, becomes the crook or crank in a stream, and then figuratively a perceptual turn, and the person identified as a crank is one who turns. But even more interesting for Jennings’s con is feigning weakness or sickness, quite possibly managed by “contracting oneself stiffly” when bend-

quiere, for the vtilite and proffyt of his naturall cuntrey. Augmented and iinlarged by the fyrst author here of. Anno Domini. M. D. LXVII. A third edition appeared in 1573, with significant additions indicated in the title: A caueat or warening, for common cursetors vulgarely called vagabones, set forth by Thomas Harman, Esquier, for the vtilitie and profit of his naturall countrey. Newly augmented and enlarged by the first author whereto is added the tale of the second taking of the counterfeit crank, with the true report of his behavior, and also his punishment for his so dissembling, most marvelous to the hearer or reader thereof. Newly imprinted 1573 (STC 12788). In 1592 John Danter printed the anonymous Groundworke of Conny-catching, which includes selections from Harman’s Caveat (STC 12789/12789.5). For a modernized version of the text see Arthur Kinney, ed., Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 109 – 53.  Oxford English Dictionary, July 2020, s.v. “Crank” n3.  Oxford English Dictionary, July 2020, s.v. “Crank” n1.

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ing and falling to the ground. The description of the lengths Jennings would go to is graphic: Uppon Alhallonday in the morning last Anno Domini 1566. ere my boke was halfe printed, I meane the first impression, there came earely in the morninge a counterfet Cranke vnder my lodginge at the whyte Fryers within the cloyster, in a little yard or court wherabouts lay two or thre great Ladyes, being without the liberties of London, wherby he hoped for the greatter gayne: this Cranke there lamentably lamenting, and pitifully crying to be relieued, declared to diuers there his paynful and miserable disease. I being rysen and not halfe ready, hard his dolful words and ruful mournings, hearing him name the fallen sicknes, thought assuredlye to my selfe, that hee was a depe desembler. ¹⁰

As Harman goes on to detail the method by which he proved his suspicion of Jennings’s deception, he privileges visual evidence: [S]o comming out at a sodayne, and beholding his ougly and yrksome attyre, his lothsom and horible countinance, it made me in a maruelous perplexity what to think of him, whether it were fained or trueth for after this maner went he: he was naked from the wast vpward, sauing he had an old Ierkin of leather, patched and that was lose about him, that all his bodye lay out bare a filthy soul cloth he ware on his head, being cut for the purpose, hauing a narow place to put out his face, with a bauer made to trusse vp his beard, and a string that tyed the same down close about his necke, with an old felt hat which he still caried in his hand, to receyue the charitye and deuotion of the people, for that would he hold out from him, hauing his face from the eyes downward, all smerd with fresh bloud, as though he had new fallen, and bin tormented with his paynefull panges, his ierken being all berayde with durte and myre, and hys harte and hosen also, as thoughe hee hadde wallowed in the myer: surely the sight was monstrous and terrible.¹¹

Yet it was as much the con as it was Jennings’s alter ego as a middle-class Londoner that was the source of a more insistent cultural anxiety made manifest by Harman’s increased attention to the case in subsequent editions of the pamphlet. In the following I address the editorial history of Harman’s pamphlet— and especially the increased emphasis on visual dissimulation signaled in this first version of the story—in order to assess the work of a variety of cultural theorists who have placed special attention on Jennings’s case in the course of making larger arguments about the status of the vagabond in early modern England. I am particularly interested in the careful manner in which the visual is manipulated in Harman’s pamphlet over the course of its publication history. An examination of editorial embellishments and attention to the woodcut illustrations and a number of highly imagistic linguistic descriptions reveals a peculiar anxi Harman, Caveat (1573), D2v, emphasis added.  Harman, Caveat (1573), D2v–D3r, emphasis added.

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ety over illusion and specifically the reliability of the visible as a marker of difference. The changes from edition to edition (primarily additions) made to the account of Jennings’s story are among the most important revisions of the Caveat through its first four editions. As Sheila Ahern points out, the chapter on Jennings was the second longest in the book when the story first appeared in the 1567 second edition; we cannot know how much space the chapter on counterfeit cranks consumed in the now lost first edition (1566), though it is unlikely that there was any mention of Jennings.¹² By the third edition of 1573, the Jennings chapter is the longest in the pamphlet, as a result of a continuation of the narrative and the addition of new woodcut illustrations.¹³ My argument in what follows is that the expansion of the story and the added emphasis on the visual component of dissimulation makes Harman’s retelling of Jennings’s case paradigmatic of a growing cultural wariness of falsehood addressed to the eyes in early modern England; more importantly perhaps, the story highlights the problems faced by early moderns seeking to combat visual falsehood without a fully developed alternative to visual proof. But before addressing the status of the visual in the Caveat, it is useful to briefly discuss some of the critical commentary that Harman’s pamphlet has received.

Between Fact and Fiction Two factors help to explain why Harman’s account of Jennings has attracted so much critical commentary. First, unlike some of the other more generalized figures of rogues cataloged in the rogue literature, Jennings’s case appears to derive from a person of that name whose trial is recorded in the Repertory of the Court of Aldermen. This archival confirmation lends credence to the arguments that characterize rogue literature as a fictionalization of actual historical fact; according to A. L. Beier, for example, the point is indisputable, because Jennings is “a

 Sheila Ahern, “The Apprehension of Nicholas Jennings: A Study of an Elizabethan Conman,” Parergon 11, no. 2 (1993): 17– 25, esp. 19. Harman notes in his “Epistle to the Reader” (1567) that “I mean not to be tedious unto thee, but I have added five or six more tales, because some of them were done while my book was first in the press” (B1v). And, later in the section on Jennings, he comments that the story begins “Upon Allhallowsday in the morning last, Anno Domini 1566, ere my book was half printed” (D2v).  See Ahern, “Apprehension of Nicholas Jennings,” 19.

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real live rogue who appears in official court records.”¹⁴ The alignment between the account offered in the official court records and the account printed in Harman’s Caveat is remarkably close, adding considerable weight to the argument that rogues were a real problem in early modern England and that some—though by no means all—of the information found in the rogue pamphlets corresponds to the historical underworld they purport to describe. Yet Linda Woodbridge has argued powerfully that even if there were vagrants making some kind of living from activity in a criminal underworld, Harman’s pamphlet is too obviously literary to be taken as a useful source: “rogue literature creates a fanciful world drawing fulsomely on comic storytelling and jest books, a creation of imaginative writers that ought to be inadmissible as historical evidence of social conditions in the real world.”¹⁵ The second reason that Jennings’s case has attracted attention is that both Jennings’s particular con and the depth of detail Harman offers in relating it seem to have a lot to say about performance, social mobility, and the anxieties that such evoked. That Jennings could act the part of the epileptic while secretly living a comfortable middle-class existence has suggested to New Historicist critics including Stephen Greenblatt that the vagrant conman was not unlike the itinerant player or the Elizabethan courtier, whose fortunes often rested on carefully considered social performance. Clearly the inclusion of itinerant players in the Elizabethan vagrancy laws of 1572 suggests that the comparison is worthy.¹⁶ Both forms of commentary displace the rogue pamphlet in an attempt to reach something else—two very different something elses in this case: for the historian, Beier something like the “actual” state of early modern criminal vagrancy, and for the New Historicist, Greenblatt something like a contextualizing frame for linking anti-theatrical prejudice to the structures of early modern

 A. L. Beier, “New Historicism, Historical Context, and the Literature of Roguery,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 98 – 119 at 109. Beier reprints the court’s account of the case, pp. 114– 15. Also see Beier’s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560 – 1640 (New York: Methuen, 1985).  Linda Woodbridge, “Jest Books, the Literature of Roguery, and the Vagrant Poor in Renaissance England,” ELR 33, no. 2 (2003): 201– 10 at 205. Woodbridge provides a helpful overview of the scholarly reception of Harman’s Caveat in the first section of this essay.  See Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Patricia Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy (In)visible,” in Dionne and Mentz, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, 193 – 210 at 194, mentions this point before presenting an alternative reading.

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power.¹⁷ Patricia Fumerton suggests a more nuanced alternative, that the anxiety over the dissimulating vagrant was not generated by a fear (grounded or not) of the deceptive criminal underworld, but by a recognition of the potential for downward as well as upward mobility in an increasingly unstable, and in her words “vagrant economy.”¹⁸ Jennings in this view is a border figure—his dual identity less a scam than a reality of lower-middling life in the increasingly unstable and shifting economy of early modern England. Fumerton’s argument is attractive, for it fills the gap between a material history interested in the actual circumstances of England’s early modern vagrant population and deeper cultural questions concerning middle- and lower-class identity upon which any significant economic restructuring must have relied. Nevertheless, like Beier on the one hand and the New Historicists on the other, Fumerton leaves the actual pamphlet behind as she seeks to make visible the otherwise invisible itinerant poor. Her final move is telling in this regard, as she asks that we dismiss Harman’s “fiction,” in which “the ‘real’ vagrant, laboring poor are reduced … to but a trace.”¹⁹ We are urged instead to look elsewhere: “If we are truly to see the mobile lower orders, we must instead look to more lowly street literature.”²⁰ The place to look, according to Fumerton, is in the even more ephemeral broadside ballad.²¹ My intention here is not to dispute the relative merits of the broadside versus the pamphlet as access points to historical reality, but rather to urge a return to the work of formal analysis as a corrective to the rhetorical privileging of one or the other’s claim to historical veracity. The truth of the matter is that we have no access to the real vagrant poor other than in the various traces we might find in the kinds of material sources I have been discussing: court records, rogue pamphlets, and broadsides. What I find intriguing in these debates, however, is that the one thing to which we do have access seems to occupy the least interest for cultural historians: I am speaking here of the character of the material record as an impression of what

 See Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” passim.  See Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy,” 197.  Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy,” 204.  Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy,” 204.  It is worth noting here Fumerton’s extensive work on the early modern broadside ballad, including her development of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EEBA) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. See also her recent monograph on the subject, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactile Publics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

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the art historian Michael Baxandall would call “patterns of intention.”²² Was Jennings a borderline middle-class hatmaker who found himself constantly in jeopardy of becoming a vagrant as Fumerton suggests? Or is Jennings proof of a real criminal underworld operating in early modern England, as Beier claims? Is he, in the more subtle New Historicist sense, a textual symptom of a pervasive cultural anxiety over performance? The answer has to be a resounding maybe in each case. We do know, however, that the writer (Harman), and his printer-publishers (William Griffith, Henry Middleton, and John Danter), each saw fit to increase the amount of space given to Jennings’s story as the pamphlet went through its various editions. We also know that they chose to commission at least one illustration to embellish this section and they added several other woodcuts (probably already in the possession of the printer) to complete the pamphlet’s new visual look. Alone these tidbits do not invalidate the claims made by the critics I have been discussing, but taken as patterns of intention on the part of printer and writer alike they might serve to bolster some claims while tempering others.

Material Form and the Anxiety of Indeterminacy To reveal such patterns, a renewed commitment to formal analysis is required, one in which the conventional literary conception of form is expanded, following the development of book history and new materialist approaches to the textual archive, to include an array of material aspects of the textual record including visual material sometimes overlooked in traditional formalist textual analysis. For example, a formal analysis of the narrative Harman weaves from the events (preserved in the court records) complicates Fumerton’s argument in favor of identification over theatricality. Recall the emphasis on visuality that characterizes the narrative quoted above: this Cranke there lamentably lamenting, and pitifully crying to be relieued, declared to diuers there his paynful and miserable disease. I being rysen and not halfe ready, hard his dolful words and ruful mournings, hearing him name the fallen sicknes, thought assuredlye to my selfe, that hee was a depe desembler … so comming out at a sodayne, and beholding his ougly and yrksome attyre, his lothsom and horible countinance, it made me in a maruelous perplexity what to think of him, whether it were fained or trueth for after this maner went he … surely the sight was monstrous and terrible. ²³

 See Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).  Harman, Caveat (1573), D2v, emphasis added.

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The warning offered here is that even a skeptic like Harman can be swayed by the power of dissembled appearance. It is all the more shocking later when Jennings confesses and is stripped of his clothing: When this Cranke heard this, and the boy vowing it to his face, he relented and plucked out another purse wherein was eight shillings & od money, so had they in the whole that he had begged that day. xiij. shillings iij. pence half peny: then they stript him starke naked, and as many as saw him, sayd they neuer saw hansommer man, with a yellow flaxen beard, and fayre skinned without any spot or greffe, then the good wyfe of the hause fet her goodmans old cloke, and caused the same to be cast about him, because the sight shoulde not abashe her shamefast maydens, nether loth hir squaimish sight. ²⁴

The 1567 edition ends with Jennings getting away after asking the printer’s wife if he could relieve himself behind their house, she “neyther thinking or mistrusting he would haue gone away naked.”²⁵ The additions to the 1573 edition continue the narrative and further emphasize that the heart of the problem is in Jennings’s willful alteration of his appearance: The Printer being sure [of his guilt], repaired vnto the Counter, and rebuked him for his beastly behauiour, & told him of his false fayning, willed him to confesse it and aske forgiuenes: he perceyued him to know his depe dissimulation, relented and confessed all his disceit, & so remayning in the counter three dayes, was remoued to Brydwel where he was stript starke naked, and his ougly attyre put vpon him before the maisters thereof, who wondred greatly at his dissimulation: for which offence he stode vpon the Pillery in Cheapsyde, both in his ougly and handsome attyre. And after that went in the myll whyle his ougly picture was a drawing, and then was whypped at a Cartes tayle through London, and his displayd banner caried before him, vnto his own doore, and so backe to Bryde well again, and their remayned for a time, & at length let at libertie on that condicion he would proue an honest man and labour truly to get his liuing. And his picture remayneth in Brydewell for a monyment. ²⁶

In addition to the narrative continuation, the 1573 edition adds a woodcut image illustrating the Jennings episode, which was likely commissioned specifically for this edition of the pamphlet. The image further focuses the episode on the problem Harman faced in debunking Jennings’s visual fraud, as the default proof of the period was that which one could see with the eyes. The appeal to visual evi-

 Harman, Caveat (1573), D4r, emphasis added.  Harman, Caveat (1573).  Harman, Caveat (1573), E1v, emphasis added.

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Figure 6.1: Woodcut from Thomas Harman, 1573 edition of A caueat or warening, for common cursetors vulgarely called vagabones (London, 1567), D2v. Call #: STC 12787.5. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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dence is repeated throughout the account in Harman, as when the crowd confronts him over his take from the day: [T]hey demaunded what money he hadde aboute hym, sayth thys Cranke so God helpe me I haue but xii. pens. and plucked owte the same of a lytle pursse, why haue you no more quoth they, no sayth thys Cranke as God shall saue my soule at the daye of iudgement, we must see more quoth they and beegane to strype hym, then he plucked out a nother pursse wherein was xl. d. Tush sayth thys Prynter I must see more, this Cranke Sayth I pray God I bee damned both body and soule yf I haue anye more, no sayth thys Prynter thou false knaue here is my boye that dyd watche thee all thys day and sawe when suche men gaue the peeses of syxe pence grotes and other money and yet thou hast shewed vs none but small money.²⁷

The emphasis on the visual proof of both Jennings’s deception and his authentic identity (“Then they stripped him stark naked, and as many as saw him said they never saw handsomer man, with a yellow flaxen beard, and fair skinned without any spot or grief”) may have prompted the commissioning of the woodcut image, which came at a cost to the printer, and is unique to this episode. The narrative development in the text explicitly relies on the movement from cautious distrust of the seemingly epileptic Jennings to the confirmation of his falsehood through the visual evidence of his body “without spot or grief.” The image works together with the text here echoing the theme of “feigning” by placing the true and false images before the reader’s eyes in a diptych: an impossible image of the crank and upright man side by side. This is, not coincidentally it would seem, also the visual tableau provided to Londoners watching Jennings proceed from Cheapside to “his own door” and back to Bridewell, with “his displayed banner carried before him,” apparently bearing his “ugly picture” made earlier in the day. Importantly, this woodcut is the first to appear in the text, emphasizing its relationship to the narrative recounted therein (no in-text images adorned the earlier extant editions). Other illustrations to the edition follow this pattern of correlation, which was missing in the 1567 edition where images followed the text and represented material generally related to criminality (stocks, gallows, etc.) rather than the unique case of Jennings as in the 1573 edition.²⁸ This clear correlation between text and image highlights the thematic element of the narrative, which concentrates on Jennings’s use of visual dissimulation to

 Harman, Caveat (1573), D4r, emphasis added.  The 1567 edition does caption an image of a man in the stocks as Jennings, but this was likely a standard cut of the stocks rather than one commissioned specifically for this book. There is nothing in the cut to make it unique to Jennings’s case.

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carry off his con. In particular, the narrative—confirmed in the image—stresses his skill as a role-player, one good enough to impel Harman himself to contact authorities at Bethlehem Hospital to verify his story.²⁹ Though granting that some aspects of Harman’s account were probably based on an actual rogue named Jennings, Fumerton argues that “it would nevertheless seem that the lines between role-playing rogue and vagrant laborer continually blur in Harman’s story. And the more Harman adds to the tale, the more confusing it all gets.”³⁰ Among the confusions noted is the apparent ambiguity of the word “faine” (or “fayne”). Though usually read as the modern “feign,” to pretend, Fumerton notes that it could have suggested to readers the well known, alternate early modern meaning of the word: “take to gladly.” As intriguing as this is, the unambiguous use of the word “feign” no less than three times in the short account of the Jennings episode makes the suggestion less convincing. Further, Fumerton’s treatment of the woodcut image relies on William Carroll’s description of the cut as depicting a “merging” rather than a tableau of his two personas, a description which strikes me as simply wrong. Carroll’s notion that “the two figures merge in the middle where the walking stick of ‘Blunt’ seems to pass through the hand, but behind the hat of ‘Genings’” implies that the image ambiguously blurs the line between the two.³¹ Following this description, Fumerton asserts that “such merging suggests not how Jennings can ‘play’ two roles, and thus … is equivalent to an actor; but rather, it illustrates how any respectable, hardworking citizen, and especially those of the lower and lowermiddling ranks, can unexpectedly turn vagrant.”³² Though the woodcut is extremely crude—fittingly so for a publication of this type—the Jennings figure is clearly depicted holding the stick and hat in one hand; thus any merging is metaphorical rather than literal. To be sure, the implication is that there is an overlap: the point of the story is, after all, to reveal Jennings’s dissimulation. However, keeping in mind the clear emphasis in the text on dissimulation (literally to be unlike), Fumerton’s argument apparently rests on a reading of the image as

 It was not uncommon to invoke the authority of bedlam as it was a recognized state charity, offering real care to the ill and mentally ill. At least one scam related to bedlam was apparently carried out by cons who branded bedlam insignia (never used by the institution) to validate their stay. According to existing records, the hospital was quite small (twenty-eight patients in 1598), which supports the idea that some hysteria (or intentional misrepresentation) contributed to the widespread notion of the bedlam beggar. My thanks to Ken Jackson for this material.  Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy,” 201.  Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, 79 – 80, qtd. in Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy,” 224.  Fumerton, “Making Vagrancy,” 202– 3.

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independent from the text, in which dissembling is the act for which Jennings is indicted. In offering a critique of Fumerton’s argument I do not mean to side with Beier and the notion that documentary evidence of real criminals obviates the need for semiotic analysis of the cultural forms generated around the rogue fascination. Rather, I am arguing that a close analysis of the form of Harman’s pamphlet, images and all, supports my claim that the episode is primarily concerned with questions of visuality and identity that may or may not relate to actual criminal behavior or the “real” vagrant poor. The same can be said for Beier’s insistence on the validity of historical context as a referent for historical truth. While his careful reconsideration of Harman’s text, in an effort to revive interest in rogue literature on the part of historians who had all but dismissed the tracts as fiction and to refute the claims of theoretically minded cultural critics seeking to link Harman’s Caveat to larger cultural shifts, succeeds to one degree or another on both counts, it finally places the cultural historian in a fairly small box, relegating a large portion of the history to the realm of conjecture. For example, the claim that Jennings’s appearance in the court records confirms that Harman was “in contact with the elites of London,” may be true for that case. But if the only fact is the fact confirmed in the court record, this leaves the majority of the rest of the pamphlet in doubt. Even if Harman was telling the truth “as it happened” in the Jennings case—a highly doubtful proposition—this does not mean that the rest of his pamphlet is similarly objective. What we do know with certainty is that the Jennings case took on increasing importance over the life of the publication. And it is this fact that has something important to tell us about the period in which the pamphlet was produced, circulated, and consumed. It seems likely that some real rogues plagued early modern England and also that some of the vagrant poor were improperly cast as rogues by either the gentry or the stable middling sort anxious about rapidly changing economic realities. But at the same time, I wonder if what really sold Harman’s pamphlet—and the Jennings account in particular—was less the fear of either becoming vagrant or being victimized by vagrants and more a deep anxiety that one could no longer trust the evidence of the eyes. Ironically, pace Greenblatt, the attempt to heighten awareness about the unreliability of perception—either as a symptom of cultural anxiety over social mobility or as a real fear of a predatory underworld—actually resulted in a representation that revealed the impossibility of telling true from false with the eye alone. This lesson has implications for the debates over social unrest that rage in the US as I write this essay. Those taking sides in the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements flood social media and ideologically friendly news outlets with visual proof of their contrasting narra-

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tives. Video of a Black man’s murder at the hands of police is countered with images of violent “anarchists” destroying property and injuring the innocent. As the quantity of visual and anecdotal evidence mounts on each side, the larger damage is being done: confidence in evidence of any kind is undermined, dimming prospects for productive agreement about how social policy might be reformed to include the marginalized, give voice to the voiceless. Those in power knew this in early modern England and they know it now.

Bibliography Ahern, Sheila. “The Apprehension of Nicholas Jennings: A Study of an Elizabethan Conman.” Parergon 11, no. 2 (1993): 17 – 25. Aydelotte, Frank. Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913. Reprint New York: Routledge, 1967. Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Beier, A. L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560 – 1640. New York: Methuen, 1985. Beier, A. L. “New Historicism, Historical Context, and the Literature of Roguery.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 98 – 119. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Carroll, William C. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Dionne, Craig and Steve Mentz, eds. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Fumerton, Patricia. The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactile Publics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Fumerton, Patricia. “Making Vagrancy (In)visible.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 193 – 210. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Invisible Bullets.” In Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Groundworke of Conny-catching. London, 1592. Harman, Thomas. A caueat or warening for commen cursetors vvlgarely called uagabones, set forth by Thomas Harman, esquiere, for the vtilite and proffyt of his naturall cuntrey. Augmented and iinlarged by the fyrst author here of. London, 1567. Harman, Thomas. A caueat or warening, for common cursetors vulgarely called vagabones … Newly augmented and enlarged by the first author whereto is added the tale of the second taking of the counterfeit crank, with the true report of his behavior, and also his punishment for his so dissembling, most marvelous to the hearer or reader thereof. London, 1573. Kinney, Arthur, ed. Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

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Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2018. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Arden 3rd Series. Edited by E. A. J. Honigman. London: Thompson, 1997. Wheatley, Edward. Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Woodbridge, Linda. “Jest Books, the Literature of Roguery, and the Vagrant Poor in Renaissance England.” ELR 33, no. 2 (2003): 201 – 10.

Emily Rebekah Huber

Chapter 7 Acallam na Senórach and Border-Discourse When [this man] was harassed beyond endurance by these unclean spirits, Saint John’s Gospel was placed on his lap, and then they all vanished immediately, flying away like so many birds. If the Gospel were afterwards removed and the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth put there in its place, just to see what would happen, the demons would alight all over his body, and on the book, too, staying there longer than usual and being even more demanding. —Gerald of Wales¹ I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots. —Book of Leinster, colophon to the Táin bó Cúailgne ² An intricate business is storytelling. —Saint Patrick, Acallam na Senórach³

Stories urgently narrate the past and, as is evident from Gerald of Wales’s comment above, have a fraught relationship with truth and history. Yet their fantasies ennarrate history. Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia provokes further demonic harassment on a possessed man, it also renders literate, and Latinate, a scattered oral and vernacular version of mythological history, and in doing so ostensibly attempts to unify, formalize, pre-Norman British history in the face of a crisis in Christian identity in the wake of the failed First Crusade. As Geraldine Heng argues, medieval cultural fantasy, especially that centered on its own past, becomes a way of confronting particular historical moments.⁴ Like-

 Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1978), 117– 18.  The Táin, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 282n253. This Latin colophon in the Book of Leinster version follows a much more generous Irish colophon: “A blessing on everyone who will memorise the Táin faithfully in this form, and not put any other form on it” (282n253). For more detailed discussions of the two colophons, see Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 16 – 18.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 111. Further references to Acallam na Senórach are to this translation.  Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 2; my comments on Geoffrey of Monmouth are deeply https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-008

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wise, the use of charged accounts of the past—especially of the pagan past—is, as the Book of Leinster copyist indicates above, contradictory and polyphonous. The Irish Táin bó Cúailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley) reflected northern Irish political and ecclesiastical hegemony in its repeated copying and revision, at the same time that it cathected Western Christian medieval anxieties about the ethical and spiritual values of telling stories about ancient and decidedly pagan heroes. In this essay I look into the (far) west, on the borders of Norman expansion in Ireland, at the Acallam na Senórach, a different, difficult vernacular text that expresses invested, yet far less anxious interest in the use of the mythological past to process a fraught historical present.⁵ This is the longest text in Middle Irish that survives, a product, most likely, of the west of Ireland, and one that brilliantly interweaves multiple indigenous Irish discursive conventions in the service of its ostensible central project: the archiving of ancient stories of the pagan hero Fionn (a.k.a. Finn) mac Cumaill and his fían, or warrior band, under a Christian aegis. In the text, Caílte and Oisín, surviving warriors of Fionn’s warband, now hundreds of years old, encounter St. Patrick and tell stories of their ancient deeds; the pagan heroes are baptized and, after Oisín departs for separate travels, Caílte travels throughout Ireland, mostly with Patrick, though often with regional kings of Ireland, and tells stories of his past. Most of these stories arise from Patrick’s and others’ queries about features of the landscape and place names. After he meets up with the high king of Ireland, Diarmait mac Cerbaill, the ancient warrior’s tales receive formal benediction by civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The text is unfinished and cuts off as the increasingly frail Caílte (now reunited with Oisín) continues telling stories to the high king. The intricacy that Patrick notes (quoted above) about storytelling reflects this text’s braiding of multiple categories of narrative and history. Acallam is a text fundamentally concerned with boundaries, both their rigidity and permeability. It is the longest and most complex text in the large body of vernacular literature known as the Fenian Cycle, that is, texts dealing with the adventures of the legendary ancient pagan hero Fionn and his fían. ⁶ It was a production of the

indebted to Heng’s seminal chapter on the function of the Historia as a response to the shock of recent crusade history; see “The Genesis of Medieval Romance,” 17– 61.  Often translated as “Colloquy of the Old Men” and as “Tales of the Elders of Ireland” (Dooley and Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland); Alan Bruford wryly notes that “‘The Old Fogeys’ Ramblings’ might be nearer the mark” (“Oral and Literary Fenian Tales,” Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society 54– 55 [1986 – 1987]: 25 – 56 at 34).  The Fenian Cycle is one of the four major groupings of secular vernacular literature in medieval Ireland: the other three are the Ulster Cycle, the Mythological Cycle, and the Cycle of Kings.

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western kingdom of Connaught in the early thirteenth century, during the reign of Cathal Crobhdearg Ua Conchobair, a regional ruler whose political autonomy depended largely on his toeing the line with the nearby bellicose Norman lords John de Courcy and Hugh de Lacy, as well as King John, albeit from a further distance.⁷ Despite its genesis in this turbulent region, Acallam is remarkably free of physical violence except, for the most part, in the past. For this, among other, reasons, it maintains a perpendicular relationship with the competing, far more martial, and (in the Middle Ages, at least) more popular accounts of Cúchulainn and the warriors of Ulster which are most famously depicted in the Táin. Whereas the Ulster Cycle focuses on the exploits of royal heroes, the sons and nephews of kings, Fenian stories are occupied with examining figures on the outskirts of dominant society: outlaws, younger sons, and exiles.⁸ In doing so, Acallam faces down a series of discursive ruptures: that between past and present, between oral history and literate inscription, and between and among disparate genres of the medieval Irish cultural imaginary. It would be easy to misread this text as simply a sprawling set of disparate place name stories associated with Fenian lore, linked loosely by a charming if meandering frame narrative—a toponymic tour de force but not a text doing any urgent cultural work.⁹ But Acallam  See A. J. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 74– 75, for Cathal Crobhdearg’s troubled relationships with John de Courcy and Hugh de Lacy, themselves rivals in the late twelfth to very early thirteenth century; for which see Seán Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 114– 15. On Cathal’s position as vassal king of Connaught under John and later Henry III, see Robin Frame, Colonial Ireland 1169 – 1369, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012), 50 – 51. Cathal’s political and social position in the west is of central importance in Ann Dooley’s determination of the original composition of Acallam; see “The Date and Purpose of Acallam na Senórach,” Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies 34 (2004): 97– 126; and “Speaking with Forked Tongues: Gender and Narrative in the Acallam,” in Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland, ed. Sarah Sheehan and Ann Dooley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 171– 89.  A helpful analogy here is to the relationships between the Arthurian tradition and the Robin Hood cycle. On the relationship between the Fenian and Ulster Cycles and specifically between Cu Chulainn and Fionn, see Dooley, “Speaking with Forked Tongues,” 185 – 86; Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, An Introduction to Early Irish Literature (Dublin: Four Courts, 2009), 59 – 60; James MacKillop, Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 13 – 14; and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, “Heroes Outside the Tribe,” in Gods and Heroes of the Celts (London: Methuen, 1949), 90. Nagy discusses the narrative and structural parallels between Acallam and the Táin in “Keeping the Acallam Together,” in The Gaelic Finn Tradition, ed. Sharon J. Arbuthnot and Geraldine Parsons (Dublin: Four Courts, 2012), 111– 21 at 111– 12.  This is the reading suggested by Bruford (“Oral and Literary Fenian Tales”) and reflects older evaluations of the text. More recent assessments of Acallam by Ann Dooley, “Date and Purpose,” “Speaking with Forked Tongues”; Nagy, Conversing with Angels and The Wisdom of the Outlaw:

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is not that kind of text. In its expansive sprawl, it marshals disparate pieces of Fenian lore for the purposes of legitimizing a vernacular body of native legends in the face of threatening cultural hegemony by external forces. At the same time, however, Acallam resists any unified notions of “Irishness” and instead occupies—uncomfortably, playfully—territory characterized by a “temporal shimmer” in its studied ahistoricity that both coheres and repels multiple loci of discursive authority.¹⁰ I borrow Cord Whitaker’s concept of temporal shimmer in order to consider ways that this text’s temporal intersections both reveal and construct categories of the past. Acallam reflects on three stages of the Irish past: most recently, the Patrician past of the fourth century, the Fenian past of Caílte’s world, and a far more distant, mythologized pre-historic past, the world of the otherworldly people called the Tuatha Dé Danann. Rather than organizing these pasts in chronological order (a move that Geoffrey of Monmouth makes), the author of Acallam layers and intersects them, refusing discrete sequentiality, and often stages them in places that are particularly resonant with the strife of his thirteenth-century present. Acallam also interweaves multiple, seemingly irreconcilable generic conventions of Irish textual production and places them troublingly in the same narrative(s): saints’ lives, place name lore (called Dindsenchas), and vernacular stories in oral circulation. Far from being a clean assimilation of and apologia for the pagan past within a Christian tradition, Acallam suggests reconciliation of these traditions while at the same time indicating that they can never quite occupy the same space. It does so by staging some of its most telling encounters in geographical spaces that are rife with reThe Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Geraldine Parsons and Anne Connon, position the text within the larger framework of the western Irish political landscape, church reform, and trends in vernacular textual transmission (see, Parsons, “The Structure of Acallam na Senórach,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 55 [2008]: 11– 39 and Connon, “Plotting Acallam na Senórach: The Physical Context of the Mayo Sequence,” in Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, ed. Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett [Dublin: Four Courts, 2013], 69 – 102). Catherine Karkov reads the text as a “postcolonial response” to colonial discourses articulated by Gerald of Wales in “Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 93 – 109.  Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 129 – 36. In his chapter on Julian of Norwich, Hegel, and Du Bois, Whitaker is concerned with the relational contrariety between the medieval period and modernity: “temporal shimmer occurs at the junctures where their mutual creation of one another is sometimes revealed, though often obscured” (29). I return to this concept below. On Acallam’s “convoluted temporality” also see Parsons, “Structure of Acallam na Senórach,” 35 – 37.

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cent and contemporaneous developments in church reform and in regional warfare. I first will look at two of Acallam’s “stagings” before moving on to discuss two of the most provocative figures in the text: St. Patrick and the otherworldly poet and member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, Cas Corach.

Text and Context The Acallam’s sophisticated frame narrative facilitates its easy movement across borders: it is both episodic and peripatetic, and contains over 160 enframed stories, most of them from the Fenian tradition. In this most lengthy of medieval vernacular Irish texts, the surviving members of the famous fían of Fionn mac Cumaill, led by the warriors Oisín, son of Fionn, and Caílte, son of Crundchú, dine with Cáma, Fionn’s foster mother, and then part ways. While Oisín departs for an otherworldly mound (a síd) and thus journeys into the mythical, prehistoric past, Caílte moves in the direction of the present. He and the other Fenians travel to the Plain of Brega (a territory now divided between counties Dublin, Louth, and Meath) and meet St. Patrick. Surprised at the appearance of the giant warriors of old, Patrick and his priests welcome Caílte and the surviving members of the fían, and invite them for a meal. What follows is an expansive dialogue, wherein Patrick asks Caílte questions about his past in the fían; these questions often arise from the party’s observations about local topographical and toponymic features. The small party frequently travels, and its peregrinations around Ireland facilitate Patrick’s further questions about the history of place names and about Caílte’s time in Fionn’s fían. Particular attention in these travels is paid to the nobility and kings of Connaught and Leinster, in the west and southeast, respectively. Though much of his time is spent with Patrick, the saint occasionally separates from the party to attend to his ecclesiastical duties; during these episodes Caílte travels with regional kings of Leinster and Ulster. Caílte’s most prominent companion in his travels is Cas Corach, a member of the otherworldly race, the Tuatha Dé Danann, who aims to become a chief sage among his people, just like his otherworldly and immortal father has. Caílte’s encounters with these regional kings as well as his meeting with the anachronistic high king of Ireland, Diarmait mac Cerbaill, indicate that this text is interested in cross-pollinating mythological oral narrative, hagiographic tradition, and pseudo-history.¹¹

 Diarmait mac Cerbaill died in the sixth century and would thus have post-dated Patrick’s presence in Ireland by at least one century. Dooley states that Diarmait’s anachronistic presence

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In addition to telling stories about his past experiences with the famous Fionn mac Cumaill, the aged Caílte and sometimes Patrick himself assist needy locals, have extended encounters with the Otherworld, and facilitate marriage alliances. While none of the manuscript copies of the text (of which there are four, all dating from the fifteenth century and afterward) contains its ending, Acallam points towards one, as Caílte becomes increasingly frail and griefstricken. After Caílte and Oisín reunite at the Feast of Tara under Diarmait, the high king of Ireland, their stories are formally inscribed: “[they] told much knowledge and true lore in the presence of the men of Ireland, and all that they said was preserved by the ollaves of Ireland.”¹² Diarmait makes provisions for the care of the aged Caílte and Oisín, and the text ends in the midst of Oisín’s explanation of the origins of the Lia Fáil, the storied stone associated with the ancient coronation of the high kings of Ireland.¹³ The massive assembly of tales enlists topographical explication and the formal toponymic genre known as Dindsenchas ¹⁴ as one of its vehicles for formalizing and codifying the scattered body of early Irish narratives collectively known as the fiannaíocht—that is, the tales of Fionn mac Cumaill and his fían, or warrior band. This Fenian Cycle rises to its greatest prominence in the period following the Norman invasion, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries becomes associated with the rise of Irish nationalism. The tales of Fionn became, in the post-medieval period, far more popular and enduring than those of his medieval Irish cultural rival, Cúchulainn. Yet prior to the composition of Acallam, Fionn’s stories—in writing, at least—were few, and scattered, and ignoble, at least compared to the heroic tales of the Ulster Cycle.¹⁵ This may in part be because of the less than savory associations with the social practices associated with historical fían in early medieval Ireland, wherein young landless noblemen gathered and participated in raiding, hunting, and waging war outside of normal aristocratic society, in order to acquire land and wealth. Dooley and Roe describe this phe-

“serves to destabilize the text in its relationship to previous historical and hagiographic projects” (“Date and Purpose,” 102).  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 220.  The stone was said to roar in approval at the coronation of the legitimate high king. See, Tomás Ó Broin, “Lia Fáil: Fact and Fiction in Tradition,” Celtica 21 (1990): 393 – 401.  These etiological texts concerned with place-name lore are discussed in Dooley and Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland, ix; and Nagy, Wisdom of the Outlaw, 112– 14 in relation to Fenian material.  On fiannaíocht materials that pre-date Acallam, see Kevin Murray, “Interpreting the Evidence: Problems with Dating the Early Fíanaigecht Corpus,” in Arbuthnot and Parsons, The Gaelic Finn Tradition, 31– 49 and Eleanor Knott and Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Literature (New York; Barnes & Noble, 1966), 148 – 54.

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nomenon as a kind of “legally licensed delinquency” for young aristocratic men who have been either deprived of their inheritance, or whose inheritance is simply too poor.¹⁶ Kuno Meyer notes that the fiana, however, “are not mere robbers or marauders” but rather a culturally and legally sanctioned social institution in which outcasts of various sorts might coexist: They were often men expelled from their clan … or landless men … [or] sons of kings who had quarreled with their fathers, … or men who seized the means to avenge some private wrong by taking the law into their own hands. Though it might not be pleasant to come across them, and though the Church had little good to say of them … they were by no means held in abhorrence; their deeds and adventures were celebrated in songs and stories, and their existence was even considered essential to the welfare of the community.¹⁷

In addition, James MacKillop notes that, for these professional soldiers, “In the eyes of [traditional authority], the fianna were indistinguishable from guerrillas,”¹⁸ and Mary-Louise Sjoestedt claims that “the myth of the fianna is the myth of man outside the tribe … Finn with this bands of warriors (fiana) is by definition outside the tribal institutions: he is the living negation of the spirit which dominates them.”¹⁹ Both MacKillop and Sjoestedt explicitly contrast this marginalized kind of power with the more aristocratic, centralized figure of Cúchulainn, the Ulster hero who is the right-hand man of King Conchobar, and in fact some critics have seen the rise of the Fenian texts from Leinster and Munster in the twelfth century and afterward as a kind of artistic response to the traditional dominance of Ulster and Armagh, out of which Cúchulainn and the rest of the Ulster materials come.²⁰ Thus both the actual social institution of the fían as well as the mythological figures that inhabit that institution, prior to

 See Dooley and Roe’s introduction to Tales of the Elders of Ireland, xi–xiii. The understanding of liminality is critical to a reading of the Fenian material, since the social status of the fían was at its heart liminal: its members were post-fosterage but pre-landowning young men who were in the process of coming into being as full members of Irish aristocratic society, but perpetually retained a threatening status should they never make that transition. The early Irish church staunchly disapproved of this social practice. For a detailed discussion of the role of fían in early Irish society, see Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth, Republic of Ireland: Maynooth Monographs, 2000), 203 – 32. The historical practice of the fían seemed to be declining at the time that Acallam was composed, thus Dooley’s point that the rise in popularity and status of fiannaíocht took place just as the social institution of the fiana was declining (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, xi–xiii).  Kuno Meyer, “Introduction,” Fianaigecht (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co., 1910), ix.  MacKillop, Fionn Mac Cumhaill, 14.  Sjoestedt, “Heroes Outside the Tribe,” 81, 90.  Nagy, Wisdom of the Outlaw, 3; see also 225 – 26n4.

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the Acallam, are culturally and socially marginalized at the same time that they are, to some extent, celebrated. It is speculated that Fenian narratives enjoyed a rich oral circulation, but the Acallam is the earliest, and by far the longest, place where these tales see themselves cast into a consolidated, conscious written repository, and deliberately elevated into literary discourse.²¹ The self-reflexive move that Acallam makes with respect to the fiannaíocht materials must be understood in the context of dynamic shifts in vernacular writing in the late Middle Irish to early Classical Irish period during which our text is written. The rich variety of indigenous Irish material that was produced during the Old Irish period (ca. 600 – 900) took place in monasteries during a period when the Irish church was so substantially different in calendar and liturgical practice as to be considered extra-Roman by mainstream Western Christian Europe. Prior to the coming of the Normans in 1169, and to the serious efforts at Irish church reform in response to Cistercian influence, monastic houses composed and copied not only Latin texts, but more importantly for our purposes many critically influential vernacular Irish texts such as the Ulster materials, the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of the Invasions of Ireland), and some of the Dindsenchas materials, as well produced such valuable repositories of these texts as the mid-twelfth-century Book of Leinster and the earlier Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow). However, by the early thirteenth century, vernacular literary production had begun a shift away from monastic institutions and into more secular, court settings; as a result, according to Nagy, “we find that literature grows less and less certain of the existence of an audience appropriately receptive or sympathetic to representations of ‘ancient’ truth.”²² This transition accompanied increased efforts on the part of the Irish church to bring its practices more in line with the Roman church, whose officials had frequently portrayed the Irish as barbaric and uncivilized in part due to the vast differences between ecclesiastical hierarchical organizations.²³ It is in the midst of these groundswells of church

 It should not be assumed that oral tradition and literary writing were always separate and exclusive categories. See Nagy, Conversing with Angels: “At times [medieval Irish] literature depicts itself as emerging from oral tradition; at other times, it appears to be running alongside it, intersecting with it, running counter to it, or all the above simultaneously” (7). See also Nagy, “Oral Tradition in the Acallam na Senórach,” in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. W. F. H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 77– 95; Donnchadh Ó’Corráin, “Legend as Critic,” in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. W. J. McCormack (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 23 – 38; and Bruford, “Oral and Literary Fenian Tales.”  Nagy, Conversing with Angels, 11.  Duffy makes the point that while we see sweeping ecclesiastical reform in Ireland in the late twelfth through the thirteenth centuries, it was part and parcel of the Cistercian reforms on the

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reform and vernacular textual practice shifts that Acallam emerges. In this respect, a close examination of its complicated layering of temporal strata on resonant geographical spaces reflects the uncertainty of the thirteenth century’s position on the veracity of the multiple pasts that it purports to represent.

Time and Relative Dimension in Space: Brega and Mellifont Temporal shimmer, in the Acallam, happens by way of dialogic engagements with geographical space. Ann Dooley has referred to it as “a work … palimpsested by way of time and space” and Parsons notes its “collapsed divisions between past and present.”²⁴ While these permeable temporal boundaries are perhaps most visibly negotiated by the interactions between Patrick and Caílte, whose histories are separated by over a hundred years, they shimmer significantly in geographical spaces whose toponymy is explicated pluralistically. Acallam accomplishes this by way of onomastic tale-telling, in the tradition of Dindsenchas, noted above. For example, when Patrick and Caílte first gather with the king of Connaught and his entourage, they all sit together on the “Fort of Glas”; Caílte is asked why the fort is named “Glas,” and he responds with a story about Fionn’s battle against Glas, the son of the king of Scandinavia. Fionn, he says, “was at that time at Almu,” and he explicates the name Almu by way of three different possibilities: it is the burial mound of a woman of the Tuatha Dé Danann whose name was Alma; it was a fort in the possession of someone named Alma who lived before the coming of the Tuatha Dé Danann to Ireland; or it is named for continent and in Britain, and did not indicate that the Irish church had been isolated from continental contacts; see Ireland in the Middle Ages, 48 – 52. The central difference between the Irish church and the Roman church, as Harry Roe notes, was that “Ireland lacked the centuries of hierarchical social organization provided by the Roman Empire” and as a result the Irish church was largely organized around the presence of wealthy and politically powerful monasteries rather than the hierarchy of the secular clergy as it was in Britain and on the continent (“The Acallam: The Church’s Eventual Acceptance of the Cultural Heritage of Pagan Ireland,” in Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley [Dublin: Four Courts, 2013], 103 – 15 at 112). Shortly after the Norman conquest, elected Irish bishops began the practice of being examined and consecrated by the archbishops of Canterbury, and in order to be consecrated these bishops needed to bring their dioceses in line with more typical organizational practices (Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages, 50 – 51).  Ann Dooley, “The European Context of Acallam na Senórach,” in In dialogue with the Agallamh: Essays in Honour of Sea´n O´ Coilea´in, ed. Aidan Doyle and Kevin Murray (Dublin: Four Courts, 2014), 60 – 75 at 61; Geraldine Parsons, “Structure,” 32.

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the herd (alma) that a druid removed from it after he built the fort.²⁵ The onomastic explication of the landscape here is rooted both in Caílte’s personal knowledge of the legendary past (in his experience with Fionn) and in his knowledge of pre-Fenian legend. Likewise, the unpacking of the Fort of Glas works in a reference to Scandinavian presence in Ireland—anachronistic if we are thinking of Patrick’s Ireland, yet indicative of the multiple temporal intersections that are located in the (pre-/) historicized landscape. The explication of the Fort of Glas is one of over 150 moments in the Acallam when the orthogonal relationship between time and space is realized in an enframed tale of the Fenian past. Yet prior to the onomastic dialogic exchanges, Acallam stages its encounter between Caílte and Patrick in spaces that are particularly resonant because of political (both civil and ecclesiastical) and ethnic tension in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Mellifont Abbey and the ancient kingdom of Brega. The temporal intersections that take place at these geographically loaded spaces are significant because they are in politically and culturally loaded border territories. The spaces I discuss here are only two among many, yet they are especially significant because they appear at the very beginning of the text and as such ground the ensuing dialogue in temporally fluxing geographical space. Immediately after Caílte and Oisín decide to separate, while Oisín departs for a síd, Caílte went to the Estuary of Bec the Exile, now the site of the monastery of Drogheda. It had been named after Bec the Exile who died there. He was the son of Airist, King of the Romans. He had come to conquer Ireland, but a great wave drowned him at that place. From the estuary Caílte went on to the Pool of Fíacc, on the bright-flowing Boyne, then southward across the Old Plain of Brega to the Fortress of the Red Ridge, where Patrick, son of Calpurn, then happened to be.²⁶

Caílte will travel throughout the whole of Ireland, yet this first journey intersects multiple notions of the Irish past and present. His first destination has received much scholarly attention. The “monastery of Drogheda” has been identified with Mellifont Abbey, a flourishing monastery established in 1142 and, significantly, the first Cistercian establishment in Ireland. The mention of Mellifont, Ann Dooley notes, “functions as a sign of the co-ordinates of the entire work: the span of ‘literary’ time bridges the Fenian ‘historical’ time of the great battles set in the past, and the ideological Christian/Patrician time of the enduring present in which the fiction itself is set…. Mellifont represents the author’s confident in-

 Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 39.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 4.

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scription of the [Acallam] as modern.”²⁷ St. Malachy of Armagh (d. 1148), the abbey’s founder, maintained a close friendship with St. Bernard of Clairvaux (beside whom he is buried) and was a devotee of the Cistercian order on the continent; Mellifont was thus Ireland’s first monastic institution that was forged in close ties with France and whose work was part of Malachy’s dedicated effort to reform the Irish religious who, as Bernard says, were “so shameless in their morals, so wild in their rites, so impious in their faith, so barbarous in their laws, so stubborn in discipline, so unclean in the life.”²⁸ Mellifont, then, roots Acallam’s temporal front end in its engagement with a monastic locale that represents, if not a cosmopolitan, then a multi-national/-ethnic set of contacts; trans-historical contact (Fenian to Patrician) is ignited, then, at a site in some ways analogous to the groundswell of Irish monastic (in the form of the Cistercians) and ecclesiastical²⁹ reform. At the same time, however, the monastery of Drogheda/Mellifont, so central to contemporary developments in the Irish church, appears solely as a contemporary reference point for an older mythological locale: the estuary of Bec the Exile, would-be Roman conqueror of Ireland. Bec, an entirely fictional character, is a foreign invader, the son of a similarly fictitious Roman emperor, whose attempt at conquering Ireland is foiled by the sea: “a great wave drowned him at that place.”³⁰ Bec’s drowning might be seen as a cautionary tale to would-

 Dooley, “Date and Purpose,” 100. See also comments by Nagy, Conversing with Angels, 320 and “Oral Tradition,” 80.  St. Bernard, “Life of St. Malachy,” qtd. in John Watt, The Church in Medieval Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin: University College Dublin, 2019), 17. Bernard’s tenor in describing the Irish is hauntingly similar to that of Gerald of Wales in the History and Topography of Ireland; both men are invested in a colonialist narrative, whether for the purposes of validating the reformist crusade of a canonized holy man or justifying the Norman invasion.  Mellifont, along with Kells, was also the location of a synod that established diocesan territories in keeping with the ecclesiastical practices of the church in Rome (see Watt, The Church in Medieval Ireland, 23 – 26); previously, the monasteries had been the ruling houses of church territories. This was one of the practices that so alarmed Bernard in his communications with St. Malachy (Watt, The Church in Medieval Ireland, 17). On the influence of Mellifont and its daughter houses in the early thirteenth century, see Otway-Ruthven, History of Medieval Ireland, 136. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh discusses the “cutting edge theology” of the Acallam in reference to the influence of the archbishops of Canterbury on Irish secular and ecclesiastical authorities (“Pagans and Holy Men: Literary Manifestations of Twelfth-Century Reform,” in Ireland and Europe in the Twelfth Century: Reform and Renewal, ed. Damian Bracken and Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel [Dublin: Four Courts, 2006], 143 – 61 at 154).  Amy C. Mulligan notes that “The landscape and natural features of Ireland both police its borders and repel unsuitable colonizers, while at the same time they are imaginatively reclaimed

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be invaders, but it also serves as a point of temporal resistance against the dominance of Cistercian (and, by the thirteenth century, Norman) hegemony over the Irish church. Though recent research has demonstrated some scant HibernoRoman relations in the classical period, Ireland was of course never conquered by Rome and (most importantly in terms of church history) never formally brought into the fold of the Roman church prior to the twelfth century. This repudiation of Roman dominance by way of Bec’s drowning is juxtaposed with Mellifont, symbol of Roman church reform and Norman political hegemony. This radical contrast is rooted in the landscape and explicated by way of temporal shimmer. When Caílte finally meets Patrick, it is on the “Old Plain of Brega.” This meeting marks the intersection of borders temporal and geographical; temporal boundaries, here, are literally embodied by the figures of Caílte and Patrick, two giants of the mythological Irish past. According to the Annals of Tigernach, Fionn died in 283 CE at the Battle of Ventry, 149 years before Patrick is traditionally said to have come to Ireland; Caílte is thus a living relic of a pre-Christian past, one who continuously mourns for his long-deceased comrades just as he seeks Heaven at the salvific hands of Patrick, “one of the few other figures who could compete with Finn in the categories of longevity and popularity.”³¹ The extreme temporal brackets noted above—the founding of Mellifont Abbey and a mythological attempted Roman invasion—are here narrowed and collapsed as Caílte and Patrick connect. However, while this connection is activated by a fusion of mythological tradition, it is enacted upon politically loaded territory. Geographically, the Plain of Brega as their first meeting place complicates any notions we might have of this text as an exploration of a dual mythological past solely, as Patrick himself asserts much later, “so that [it] may provide entertainment for the hosts and for the nobles of a later day.”³² Brega was both a purported location of a former dwelling of Fionn himself and the initial territory of Patrick’s own missionary efforts in the fifth century, and is thus a sensible structural feature of the narrative for this meeting.³³ But the fraught, diverse history of Brega itself serves as a reminder of the very modernity of the Acallam. Ethnically diverse with connections to the British and, soon after, the early English in the

for native narration” (A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Space, 700 – 1250 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019], 145).  Joseph Falaky Nagy, “Finn and the Fenian Tradition,” in A Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Julia M. Wright (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 50 – 61 at 52.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 216.  George Eogan, “Early Christian Knowth and the Kingdom of Brega,” Eolas 4 (2010): 12– 25 at 17.

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early Christian period, the historical kingdom of Brega was to become shortly after Patrick’s time the territory of the southern branch of the expansively powerful Uí Néill clan of northern Ireland; by the mid-700s it was split into two smaller rival kingdoms and later absorbed into the kingdom of Meath. Since it shared a geographical border with Dublin it survived consistent attacks and an annexation attempt by the Vikings and saw the influence of heavy Scandinavian settlement. By the time Henry II granted the territory to Hugh de Lacy in 1172, Brega was in the midst of civil war.³⁴ Thus Brega, in the minds of early thirteenthcentury authors and readers, was an area ripe with inter- and intra-ethnic tensions. Yet it was also symbolic of the dream of a united Ireland because in its territory was the Hill of Tara, traditional crowning place of the high kings of Ireland (who had been extinguished by the time this text was written). The encounter between Patrick and Caílte is thus a touchpoint of thinking about overlapping layers of the past at the same time as it occupies a landscape of urgent contemporary geopolitical turmoil. The two soon depart Brega on their first set of travels —a meandering journey to Assaroe—but will return to Tara towards the end.

Patrician Interlocution The figure who serves to link the Fenian, pagan past with the Christian present is Patrick himself, vetter and facilitator of Caílte’s tales and near-constant companion on his travels. Patrick’s central presence in the text speaks to perhaps its most radical innovation, which is its integration of hagiographic materials within the narrative, and (unlike saints’ lives that refer to Arthur, where the mythological king often becomes an oppositional force, against which the saint can demonstrate his divine power³⁵) the productive interplay between Patrician hagiography and the other genres of this text shapes and frames this landscaped Fe-

 On the history and geographical area of the ancient kingdom of Brega, see Edel Bhreathnach, “The Medieval Kingdom of Brega,” in The Kingship and Landscape of Tara, ed. Edel Bhreathnach (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 410 – 22. Bhreathnach draws attention to Brega’s likely ethnic diversity in the pre-Viking period, further indication that this geographical plain served as a lively community: “The idea that the main roads of Ireland converged at Tara itself may not be entirely accurate, but they did meet within Brega” (410). On Hugh de Lacy’s activity in the former kingdom of Meath, see Otway-Ruthven, History of Medieval Ireland, 52– 53.  See, for example, the Life of Saint Padarn, where Padarn punishes Arthur’s greed by commanding the earth to swallow him up to his chin (The Celtic Sources for the Arthurian Legend, ed. and trans. Jon B. Coe and Simon Young [Felinfach, UK: Llanerch Publishers, 1995], 17– 18).

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nian narrative within a clerical structure.³⁶ This clerical structure sanctions, both discursively and literally through the actions of St. Patrick, the otherwise troubling paganism of Caílte’s past, as well as provides the text a platform to highlight some of the urgent problems under reform in the Irish church, such as its sanctioning of unorthodox marriage practices.³⁷ This sanctioning by Patrick is not without hesitation, however, as at the beginning of the text he expresses some reluctance about speaking with the ancient warrior: “If our religious life were not being disrupted, our prayers neglected, and our communion with the King of Heaven and Earth disturbed, we would enjoy conversing with you, good warrior.”³⁸ Patrick repeats this sentiment shortly afterward, immediately following the very first of Caílte’s stories: “‘May victory be yours, Caílte, with my blessing,’ said Patrick. ‘You have lightened our spirits and our mind, even though our religious life is being disrupted and our prayers neglected.’”³⁹ This grumbling hesitation is quickly resolved, however, by the appearance of two angels, Aibelán and Solusbrethach: [Patrick] asked them if it were the will of the King of Heaven and Earth that he be listening to the tales of the Fían. They answered him with one voice. ‘Dear holy cleric,’ they said, ‘these old warriors tell you no more than a third of their stories, because their memories are faulty. Have these stories written down on poets’ tablets in refined language, so that the hearing of them will provide entertainment for the lords and commons of later times.⁴⁰

This is the first of a small handful of explicit scenes where Caílte’s stories receive explicit stamps of approval either from clerical or secular authority. The angels’ reference to “faulty memories” suggests that since the stories are limited and there is little raw material to work with, there is not much harm to be done by inscribing them. But there is a time limit in which to set this material down, and the sense of slow melancholy in this text builds as Caílte’s age—and his realization of his loss—begins to catch up with him. We might read here a sense of

 For discussions of the specific versions of Patrick’s Life that may have been sourced by the author of the Acallam, see Ann Dooley, “The Deployment of Some Hagiographical Sources in Acallam na senórach,” in Arbuthnot and Parsons, The Gaelic Finn Tradition, 97– 110.  On archaic marriage customs and the perceptions of such as barbarous by outsiders, see F. J. Byrne, “The Trembling Sod: Ireland in 1169,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. 2, Medieval Ireland 1169 – 1534, ed. Art Cosgrove (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1– 42 at 41– 42. Of particular concern to the Roman church were the regular occurrences of divorce and serial monogamy among Irish kings; Anne Connon discusses Acallam’s interest in promoting “monogamous, church-sanctioned marriages” (“Plotting Acallam na Senórach,” 72).  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 6.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 11.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 12.

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anxiety about an ephemeral, easily lost oral tradition, one that is in peril, in the face of Norman military and cultural encroachment, church reform, and changing notions of kingship. These repositories of legend are few and far between, and fading fast. To Patrick, it becomes a matter of spiritual urgency to render them in writing. This notion that the stories are to be inscribed to “provide entertainment” rather than, for example, edification, suggests that on the one hand the preservation of the fiannaíocht, in this text, ensures the value and celebration of cultural history, and on the other, that it is material that requires a safe distance from the more important pastoral work that Patrick is engaged in off and on throughout the Acallam. While Patrick baptizes and does some conversion off-screen,⁴¹ he primarily listens and queries. Though he is occasionally replaced by other characters (such as Conall, son of Níall; Eochaid Lethderg, the king of Leinster; and Eochaid Fáebarderg, the king of Ulster) Patrick is the most consistent companion of Caílte’s and instigator of the enframed stories. Patrick’s queries invite Caílte’s tale-telling: these questions range from the general to the topographical to the etiological, and Caílte’s answers to these questions take the form of the stories of Fionn and his fían; Patrick often follows up these stories with a common benediction: “may victory and blessing be yours, dear Caílte … for you have lightened both our spirits and our minds.”⁴² While the tale-telling is in the form of a casual conversation, many of these oral tales (there is no indication in the text that Caílte or Oisín are literate) are rendered into writing: “‘Where is Broccán, our scribe? … Get your book, your inkhorn and pen and copy out this story.’ Broccán did so at once.”⁴³ Thus, while the traditional title of this work, “Tales of the Elders” or “Colloquy of the Old Men,” seems to suggest spoken conversational exchange, these conversations are punctuated by the transmission of stories from oral medium to written by way of the holy sanctioning of Patrick. Significantly, the first of Caílte’s accounts that Patrick requests to be written down is a short tale about Fionn mac Cumaill’s grandson, Gaíne mac Lugach. The product of incest between Fionn’s son Dáire Derg and his daughter Lugach, Gaíne’s birth is nevertheless celebrated, and he is raised by Fionn’s wife Mongfinn before he goes out to seek his own place in the fían. Mac Lugach, unfortu-

 At the end of their first story-telling session together, Caílte departs “because [he is] tired of being in one place” and so “Patrick went off to preach the faith and the religious life, to expel the demons and the druids from Ireland, to choose the holy and the righteous, to erect crosses, penitential stations, and altars, and to destroy idols and spectres, and the arts of druidism” (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 46).  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 8.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 20.

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nately, creates misery and dissension among the warriors because of his ill manners and “mistreatment of their hounds and their servants” and eventually causes the fían to deliver Fionn an ultimatum: them or Mac Lugach. Fionn’s solution is to counsel his wayward grandson, as “whoever was given counsel by Finn would have every success.”⁴⁴ The poem that follows, as Dooley points out, is in the tradition of Irish advice to princes texts,⁴⁵ though in a broader sense it might also be compared with a larger European tradition of proverbial wisdom about the role of young men in aristocratic households and guest/host relationships (such as in the Gestaþáttr section of the Icelandic Hávamál). Fionn advises Mac Lugach to, among other things, ‘Be peaceable in a great man’s household, be hardy in the wilderness … Do not mock the holy man, nor be involved in quarrels … Be kind to poets, makers of art, and to the common soldiery … Do not forsake your overlord … Avoid blustering complaint to a lord … Listen to words of good counsel … Be a listener in the forest, a watcher on the plain … Do not be mean with your wealth, be constant in your courtliness, Mac Lugach.’⁴⁶

That this is the first tale to be discursively sanctioned by Patrick’s insistence that it be written down indicates the centrality of this tale, and its advice. Mac Lugach’s short narrative, and the counsel that Fionn gives him, is focused on the ability of a post-fosterage youth’s inability (in this case) to adapt to the liminal civilization of the fían; more urgently, in light of the church’s concern with the potential ability of this socially sanctioned brigandage to get out of control, the advice Fionn poses to Mac Lugach is central to the integration of a young aristocrat to a landed household rather than to the wilderness. This advice would be especially pertinent to members of a regional king’s warband, whose ability to be productive members of a military—and courtly—community are essential to the functioning of later Gaelic regional kingdoms in the early Norman period.⁴⁷ The translatio of this narrative from oral to written medium, via the symbolic authority of Patrick, renders explicit the relevance, perhaps even the urgency, of this kind of narrative to contemporary Irish society. Patrick’s pastoral project in this text is comparatively low key compared to the most widely disseminated versions of his vita. ⁴⁸ His central role here is not to convert or to teach but to query, listen, and then authorize. Nevertheless, bap-

 Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 19.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 231n19.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 20.  See Dooley, “Date and Purpose,” 105 – 7.  For a catalog of the vitae of St. Patrick in Latin and Irish, see Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 397.

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tisms occur sporadically throughout the Acallam, and the saint is in the midst of searching for a spring to baptize the inhabitants of Brega when Caílte first encounters him. Patrick’s first act upon seeing the ancient and gigantic Fenians’ approach is to rise up and sprinkle holy water on them, causing the demons that trail them to flee.⁴⁹ Soon afterward the saint formally baptizes Caílte and his companions: ‘Do you know why you have all been brought to speak with me?’ asked Patrick. ‘Indeed we do not,’ replied Caílte. ‘So that you might submit to the Gospel of the King of Heaven and Earth, the true and glorious God.’ Patrick, the head of baptism and faith of the men of Ireland, poured on them the waters of the baptism of Christ and Caílte put his hand to the rim of his shield and gave Patrick, in payment for his baptism and that of his companions, a block of ribbed, red, flamelike gold, weighing one hundred and fifty ounces, from the lands of Arabia. ‘This was my last gift from Finn the Chieftain,’ said Caílte, ‘and I give it to you, Patrick, for the good of my soul, and the soul of the chief of the Fían.’ This block of gold reached from the end of Patrick’s middle finger to the top of his shoulder, and was the size of a man’s forearm both in width and in thickness. This is the gold that was later used for the canonical bells of the Adze-Head [i. e., Patrick], and on psalters and missals.⁵⁰

Caílte’s lavish gift to Patrick is significant for a number of reasons: it is the first of a number of physical artifacts directly passed down from Fionn, and as such it becomes a material, commodified link between this ancient world and that of Patrick’s Christian Ireland. In addition, its smooth transition from Fenian possession to Patrician artifact is one of the first moments where Patrick’s benediction formally, even corporeally integrates this ancient history into ecclesiastical ritual. While the reference to canonical bells as made of gold is ahistorical, the description of the golden artifact being broken down and used to decorate psalters and missals speaks to the text’s larger function: oral stories, here, are presented as a series of fragments, ornaments in a way, linked together not by an organic linear narrative of Fionn and his fían, but by the legitimizing authority of written clerical discourse. This structure is reflected in the fact that the tales that Caílte relates do not tell the stories of Fionn in any holistic or linear fashion, and in fact lack a full telling of some of the most famous of the Fenian stories, such as that of Diarmait and Gráinne.⁵¹ While Patrick facilitates the translatio of Caílte’s oral, pre-Christian yarns into spiritually sanctioned literary texts, he also functions as a comfort and com Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 5.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 12.  Diarmait is alluded to, however: Caílte grieves at the memory of his death (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 46).

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panion to the aged Caílte, who increasingly collapses in grief as his narrativizing of the past forces the realization of how far distant this past is. Patrick attempts to comfort the aged warrior through their now-shared Christian spiritual framework. Midway through the text, as Patrick, Caílte, and the rest of the clerics are temporarily residing in an ancient Fenian locale called the Valley of the Hag, they hear a hunt nearby; melancholy, Caílte declares that “Faint is the sound of men and hounds … a hunt without the Lord Finn and brave Mac Lugach.” The present landscape reminds him of his lost past, and as he recounts the names of the brave hunters of Fionn’s fían, he remembers their deaths. Patrick’s comfort here, and Caílte’s response, illustrates that the saint’s discursive authority is not entirely unopposed: “‘Sad is your sorrowful lamentation for your departed Fían [says Patrick], but you should not trust in such things now, but in the true and glorious God who created heaven and earth.’ ‘Well, my holy cleric [replies Caílte], if you had known the Fían you would love them as you love me, who has now become useless in martial skill and weapon-handling.’”⁵² Far from responding waspishly (as he occasionally does), Patrick encourages Caílte to go listen to the hunt; when Caílte explains that his physical disability from an old wound prevents him from doing so, Patrick miraculously heals the wound. So, while for much of the text non-ecclesiastical discourse yields before the divine authority of Patrick, in this case the sometimes-tense intersection between Patrician present and pagan past is softened by the increasing warmth of the personal relationship between the two men, one that intensifies throughout the text.⁵³ It is through this personal relationship, in some ways, that it becomes clear that Acallam is a complex, dialogic text rather than a monologic one. Its dependence on and utilization of the figure of Patrick—as evangelizer, facilitator, and comforter—reflects its plural and sometimes conflicting agendas. Acallam’s flexible employment of hagiographic tradition, across and beyond generic boundaries, enables it to most effectively link not only present and past, but to do so in a way that acknowledges the difficulty of subjecting this nostalgia for the past (embodied in Caílte’s grief) under a clean hierarchy of written, divine authority and oral, secular discourse.

 Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 119.  In addition to comforting Caílte during other periods of melancholy (see Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 129, for example), late in the text, Patrick specifically organizes a tent arrangement so that he can be camped close to Caílte “so that [he] would derive entertainment from listening to him” (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 216).

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On the Margins of Pre-History The transmission of oral Fenian narratives into written text is featured in the structure of Acallam itself, as Caílte’s stories are frequently punctuated by short or long poems that contain features of oral bardic poetry.⁵⁴ Yet the move across the boundary from oral to written culture is also featured within the frame narrative itself in the figure of Cas Corach, a lower-ranking member of the supernatural and semi-divine Tuatha Dé Danann (people of the goddess Danú). Cas Corach accompanies Caílte on his journeys with Patrick and plays a critical role in the few contemporary adventures Caílte takes part in (in his most heroic moment, he charms werewolves to sleep with his music), but more interestingly occupies, due to his status as a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a troublingly liminal space between the boundaries of imagined pagan pre-history and early Christian history. The Tuatha Dé Danann, or people of the goddess Danú, are central figures in Middle Irish accounts of the pre-Gaelic settling of Ireland, a kind of Hibernic equivalent to the ancient Trojan settlers of the British mythological past. They feature most prominently in the pseudo-historical Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of the Taking of Ireland), a mythological account of the six waves of settlement of Ireland from the time of the Flood up until the arrival of the Milesians (the Gaels).⁵⁵ The Tuatha Dé Danann are the fifth group to settle Ireland (displacing the prior dominant group, the Fir Bolg, “bag men”): they battle against the Fomorians, a foreign, semi-demonic race, and their defeat at the hands of the Milesians results in their being granted underground Ireland, where they inhabit sídmounds.⁵⁶ Composed in Old Irish and well-known in monastic and aristocratic secular communities by the time of the Acallam’s composition, the Lebor Gabála Érenn grafts a collective of native mythology and folklore onto biblical divine his-

 On bardic poetry, see Ní Bhrolcháin, Introduction to Early Irish Literature, 137– 50.  See Lebor Gabála Érenn, ed. and trans. R. A. Stewart Macalister, Irish Text Society vols. 34, 35, 39, 41, 44 (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1938 – 1956). On the text’s development and reception see R. Mark Scowcroft, “Leabhar Gabhála Part I: The Growth of the Text,” Ériu 38 (1987): 81– 142 and “Leabhar Gabhála Part II: The Growth of the Tradition,” Ériu 39 (1988): 1– 66. See also John Carey, The Irish National Origin-Legend: Synthetic Pseudo-history (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 1994) and “Lebor Gabála and the Legendary History of Ireland,” in Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, ed. Helen Fulton (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 32– 48.  Acallam oddly suggests that St. Patrick plays a role in the banishment of the Tuatha Dé Danann, as Caílte predicts that “Patrick will put the Túatha Dé Danann, except for this minstrel [Cas Corach], into the steep slopes of hills and rocks” (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 211).

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tory. This mythology is arguably distantly related to an actual indigenous pagan past: the Tuatha Dé Danann have been commonly read by generations of scholars as versions of the euhemerized gods of the pre-Christian Irish. They are supernatural, threatening but not demonic, and they play an especially disruptive role in medieval Irish Christian literature. While several members of the Tuatha Dé Danan appear in Acallam na Senórach (one of the most prominent being the future wife Áed, son of the king of Connaught), none of them maintain the kind of sustained relationships with Caílte and Patrick that we see with Cas Corach. His centrality in Acallam, then, speaks to this text’s complex relationship to its far distant, pre-historic past. For such a central figure in the negotiation of pre-history and historical past, Cas Corach appears fairly late in the text, during one of the few sections when Caílte is separated from Patrick; at this point he is in the company of Eochaid Fáebarderg, the king of Ulster. At the approach of a handsome and evidently wealthy young man, Eochaid asks for his name and mission. The visitor identifies himself as “Cas Corach, son of Caincinde, the Sage of the Túatha Dé Danann, and I aspire to be a sage myself … This is what has brought me, a desire to learn knowledge and true lore, storytelling and the great deeds of valour of the Fían from Caílte, son of Rónán.”⁵⁷ Cas Corach is not the son of just any wiseman, but the son of an ollam, the highest rank of poet and legal professional in Gaelic Ireland.⁵⁸ Yet his father is not among the names of the common rogues’ gallery of the Tuatha Dé Danann,⁵⁹ and as such Cas Corach himself serves as an especially appropriate figure to negotiate between the mythologized pre-Gaelic, pre-historic past of the Irish (and even further distant past than that of Fionn himself) and the present in the Acallam’s narrative, the Christian world of Patrick. While Cas Corach’s music retains supernatural properties such as being able to put its listeners to sleep, he does not occupy the traditionally threatening position that many of the otherworldly figures in this text and others do.⁶⁰

 Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 101.  On the economic and social status of the ollam, see Ní Bhrolcháin, Introduction to Early Irish Literature, 12. Bards were lowest ranking of the poetic orders (Knott and Murphy, Early Irish Literature, 61).  Some of the common figures of the Tuatha Dé Danann who appear throughout medieval Irish literature (including the Lebor Gabála Érenn) are Lugh, the Dagda, Morrígu, Nuada, Brigid, and Manannán mac Lir.  Members of the Tuatha Dé Danann appear frequently throughout Acallam: they are hosts, valiant adversaries, demonic figures, or potential love interests. One of Cas Corach’s own battles (discussed below) is against a wicked member of his own people; in contrast, one of those most prominent otherworldly characters (aside from Cas Corach himself) is Aillenn Fhialchorcra, granddaughter of the Dagda. Patrick eventually negotiates her marriage to the king of Con-

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The integration of Cas Corach into a Gaelic community occurs by way of his introduction to Patrick: when Caílte and Cas Corach depart from the company of the king of Ulster, they meet up with Patrick at the “Race-Course of the Chariots,” a site associated with the Táin. After listening to Cas Corach’s playing for the first time, Patrick and his fellow clerics “had never before heard anything as melodious, except for the praise of the service of the Lord and the praise of the King of Heaven and Earth.”⁶¹ The minstrel’s music soon puts them to sleep, and when they wake, Cas Corach asks for payment in return for his music, requesting “Heaven for myself … for this is the best reward, and good fortune for my art for ever, and for all the people of my art who follow me.”⁶² His initial request to Patrick is couched in terms of his position as a poet and singer, rather than as a member of the magical and threatening síd-folk. Acallam first frames Cas Corach’s presence within the text’s dominant clerical discourse (the appeal to Patrick’s clerical authority) and next in its relation to the position of vernacular bards and musicians—not among the true elite of early Ireland’s secular poets and legal scholars, but still a position with its own weight and status.⁶³ Patrick blesses Cas Corach and promises Heaven to him and all other poets, though he is characteristically cantankerous when asked (by Broccán) if he thought the music extraordinary: ‘Good it was,’ said Patrick, ‘unless indeed the magical melody of the síd were in it. If it were not for that, there would be nothing closer to the music of the King of Heaven and Earth than that music.’ ‘If there is music in heaven,’ said Broccán, ‘why should there not also be music on earth? Thus it is not proper to banish music.’ ‘I did not say that at all,’ said Patrick, ‘but one should not put too much stock in it.’⁶⁴

Patrick’s reluctance to unequivocally celebrate Cas Corach’s glorious if magically soporific music parallels his reluctance to spend too much time listening to the tales of Caílte earlier in the text. However, whereas Caílte’s storytelling is sanctioned by the angels as both culturally important and spiritually harmless, Cas Corach’s music receives no such blessing here. Rather, his art remains on the margins of what is culturally appropriate, enticing and yet deserving of a limited

naught after the latter’s first wife dies and after Aillenn abandons “her false and druidical belief and does homage to the Gospel of the King of Heaven” (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 217).  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 105.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 106.  Nagy notes that the elevation of Cas Corach “indicates the fluidity of the artistic scene in the Ireland of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when . . . the various orders of performers experienced reshuffling within their traditional hierarchy” (“Oral Tradition,” 93).  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 106.

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place. While texts about the history of the Tuatha Dé Danann multiplied in early Irish monasteries, Cas Corach and St. Patrick occupy the same textual space uncomfortably. Cas Corach inhabits the musical margins of the Patrician episodes of the frame, yet he enacts a more traditional heroic role when Patrick is not present. Two episodes are of particular importance: first, shortly after meeting Echna, daughter of the king of Connaught (whom he will eventually marry), Cas Corach is called upon to defend the cattle herds of his and Caílte’s host, a man named Bairnech who turns out to be Caílte’s own cousin. The supernatural cattle raider who terrorizes Bairnech’s household every Samhain is a woman of the Tuatha Dé Dannan. Cas Corach impales her on a spear, cuts her head off, and brings it back to Caílte. Next, he and Caílte defeat three werewolf women who have been attacking Bairnech’s sheep herds: Cas Corach convinces them to take off their wolf-skins and listen to his dulcimer women while in their human form. They do so, since “they enjoyed the beguiling music of the síd.”⁶⁵ In human form, they are vulnerable to the lethal spear of the ancient Caílte.⁶⁶ This prolonged episode sees Cas Corach’s heroism predicated on a delicate balance of separating his status as an otherworldly figure from another, more predatory member of his people, while simultaneously utilizing his signature musical magic—a magic Patrick enjoys and yet is suspicious of—to trick the werewolves. The second episode is an extended adventure late in the text where Caílte, accompanied by Cas Corach, seeks Bé Binn of the Tuatha Dé Danann (Cas Corach’s own mother), whose magical drink can heal him of an old, poisoned wound. Cas Corach is reunited with his brother and Caílte is welcomed and lovingly hosted by the family before he and Cas Corach are enlisted in a fight against the king of Scandinavia, who is in the habit of attacking the Tuatha Dé Danann every three years. This is one of the very few moments in the Acallam where the characters in the present frame narrative fight as opposed to tell stories. Cas Corach battles Bé Dreccain (Dragon Woman), the Scandinavians’ champion, and Fer Maisse, Cas Corach’s brother, kills the king of Lochlann (Scandinavia). It is only after these battles that Caílte can be healed from his old wound.⁶⁷ These two episodes show that, when he is separated from the evangelizing presence of Patrick, Cas Corach readily enacts the role of an otherworldly magician and hero. When he and Caílte return from the síd-mound, however, he is fully

 Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 213.  For a discussion of the werewolf episode in relation to Gerald of Wales and postcolonial moves, see Catherine E. Karkov, “Tales of the Ancients.”  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 192– 97.

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reintegrated and his supernature subducted at the same time that his poetry and music is elevated. It is only after these episodes that Cas Corach, and his music, enjoy the unequivocal blessing of Patrick. When Caílte and Cas Corach return, Patrick, overjoyed at seeing them, blesses the young minstrel after Cas Corach lays his head in Patrick’s lap: “The virtue of eloquence on you, dear boy … every third word that a man of your art will say will be sweet to all who hear it, and they will be men of the king’s be, and candles of each assembly for ever because of your art.”⁶⁸ The group makes their way soon after to an assembly at Tara where Cas Corach and Caílte receive a final benediction from both the spiritual authority of Patrick and the civil authority of Diarmait mac Cerbaill, the high king of Ireland. Cas Corach’s imminent departure signals both nostalgia and triumph: “At that time Cas Corach … arose and said, ‘Well, my dear Caílte, it is time for me to leave now. The blessing of each fosterling on you.’ ‘The blessing of each foster-father who has ever had a fosterling on you,’ said Caílte, ‘for you are the best musician that we have ever seen.’ And the King of Ireland, Diarmait, son of Cerball, said, ‘I give you the sage-ship of Ireland as long as you may be in my kingdom.’”⁶⁹ As others have noted, Cas Corach is a musician rather than a poet (the latter occupying significantly higher social status in Gaelic Ireland), so his rise to prominence and benediction at the end of the text would suggest a cultural move of elevating a formerly popular, lower-status artistic practice. Cas Corach’s liminality is reflected in his participation in Caílte’s adventures in the síd, and in his accompanying (physically and musically) the narrativizing of past Fenian lore. His baptism, and forecasted marriage to Echna, the daughter of the king of Connaught (who fell in love with him in an earlier episode) would seem to suggest that this supernatural representative of the ancient pre-Fenian past has been fully integrated into the spiritual and civic fabric of the Acallam’s ahistorical narrative. Legendary pre-history is linked with the Patrician present by both Patrick and Diarmait’s formal recognition of Cas Corach’s music. The assembly at Tara, finally, serves as a kind of ending to this fragmentary text by ultimately suggesting the full integration of Caílte’s oral history with its public, formal, and legal recognition: “Caílte and Oisín went then to Tara, and told much knowledge and true lore in the presence of the men of Ireland, and all that they said was preserved by the ollaves of Ireland.”⁷⁰ These ollaves

 Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 215.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 220.  Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 220.

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(sing. ollam), venerated public officials who were the highest ranking poets and scholars, do not explicitly write down the oral narrative of the remaining Fenians (and certainly long traditions of Gaelic ollaves relied on memory), but they serve as a larger body granting discursive legitimacy, akin in some ways to Patrick and Broccán but in a public, civic setting. Acallam, finally, might suggest a triumphant, if truncated, move toward the sanctioning by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, in the public if anachronistically situated figures of Diarmait mac Cerbaill and St. Patrick, of Ireland’s mythic, native past. In the benediction of Caílte and Oisín’s lived experiences, the rendering written of their oral narratives and the witnessing of their explication of and topographical identification with the Irish landscape, such a reading would imply that the Acallam unifies disparate and conflicting discourses—the oral, bardic past and the literate, monastic present—in a kind of cultural-nationalist project, one that comes at an apt time as western Ireland, in particular, faces down increasing incursions from Norman presence. Yet Acallam, I argue, resists a reading like this: the multi-axial project of this text, as I have shown, is invested in looking at those troubled ways that borders geographical, discursive, and temporal are mapped against each other, and to suggest that the text is in any way a representation of a single “Irish” set of cultural impulses is to neglect the fact that Irishness, itself, is pluralistic and conflicted during this period. Mark Williams points out that, while the settlement of the Normans produced a “split polity” that was to indelibly mark the island for the rest of its history, the literary world was surprisingly quiet about it.⁷¹ Acallam, in its studious ambivalence about the possibility of cleanly meshing these worlds of Patrician ecclesiastical discourse and vernacular, lay past (and prepast, even) is a dialogic text, in some ways a bit unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth. Whereas Geoffrey attributes past narratives to an “ancient British book,” in the Acallam, the “ancient British book” is not an inert object but a living man, far past his time and on the verge of collapse, a celebrated, mourning, elderly figure, one that is viewed with deep affection but also, on occasion, with healthy suspicion by Patrick, suggesting the tentative and uncomfortable relationship at the borders of their respective discursive territories.

 Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 194– 95. In fact, the only place in the text where we have reference to the “Irish” (Éireannaigh) as a larger ethnic group is in the recounting of Fionn’s fight against the Scandinavians at the battle of Ráth Glais; Dooley and Roe note that terms referring to the Irish are extremely rare in literature prior to the late fourteenth century (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, 40 and 233n40).

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Bibliography Bhreathnach, Edel. “The Medieval Kingdom of Brega.” In The Kingship and Landscape of Tara, edited by Edel Bhreathnach, 410 – 22. Dublin: Four Courts, 2005. Bruford, Alan. “Oral and Literary Fenian Tales.” Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society 54 – 55 (1986 – 1987): 25 – 56. Byrne, F. J. “The Trembling Sod: Ireland in 1169.” In A New History of Ireland, vol. 2, Medieval Ireland 1169 – 1534, edited by Art Cosgrove, 1 – 42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Carey, John. The Irish National Origin-Legend: Synthetic Pseudo-history. Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 1994. Carey, John. “Lebor Gabála and the Legendary History of Ireland.” In Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, edited by Helen Fulton, 32 – 48. Dublin: Four Courts, 2005. The Celtic Sources for the Arthurian Legend. Edited and translated by Jon B. Coe and Simon Young. Felinfach, UK: Llanerch Publishers, 1995. Connon, Anne. “Plotting Acallam na Senórach: The Physical Context of the Mayo Sequence.” In Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, edited by Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett, 69 – 102. Dublin: Four Courts, 2013. Dooley, Ann. “The Date and Purpose of Acallam na Senórach.” Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies 34 (2004): 97 – 126. Dooley, Ann. “The Deployment of Some Hagiographical Sources in Acallam na senórach.” In The Gaelic Finn Tradition, edited by Sharon J. Arbuthnot and Geraldine Parsons, 97 – 110. Dublin: Four Courts, 2012. Dooley, Ann. “The European Context of Acallam na Senórach.” In In Dialogue with the ´ Coilea´in, edited by Aidan Doyle and Kevin Agallamh: Essays in Honour of Sea´n O Murray, 60 – 75. Dublin: Four Courts, 2014. Dooley, Ann. “Speaking with Forked Tongues: Gender and Narrative in the Acallam.” In Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland, edited by Sarah Sheehan and Ann Dooley, 171 – 89. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Duffy, Seán. Ireland in the Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Eogan, George. “Early Christian Knowth and the Kingdom of Brega.” Eolas 4 (2010): 12 – 25. Fianaigecht. Edited by Kuno Meyer. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1910. Frame, Robin. Colonial Ireland 1169 – 1369. 2nd ed. Dublin: Four Courts, 2012. Gerald of Wales. The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. New York: Penguin, 1978. Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Karkov, Catherine E. “Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland.” In Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, edited by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 93 – 109. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Knott, Eleanor and Gerard Murphy. Early Irish Literature. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966. Lebor Gabála Érenn. Edited and translated by R. A. Stewart Macalister. Irish Texts Society, vols. 34, 35, 39, 41, 44. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1938 – 1956. MacKillop, James. Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986. McCone, Kim. Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature. Maynooth, Republic of Ireland: Maynooth Monographs, 2000.

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Mhaonaigh, Máire Ní. “Pagans and Holy Men: Literary Manifestations of Twelfth-Century Reform.” In Ireland and Europe in the Twelfth Century: Reform and Renewal, edited by Damian Bracken and Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel, 143 – 61. Dublin: Four Courts, 2006. Mulligan, Amy C. A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Space, 700 – 1250. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Murray, Kevin. “Interpreting the Evidence: Problems with Dating the Early Fíanaigecht Corpus.” In The Gaelic Finn Tradition, edited by Sharon J. Arbuthnot and Geraldine Parsons, 31 – 49. Dublin: Four Courts, 2012. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “Finn and the Fenian Tradition.” In A Companion to Irish Literature, edited by Julia M. Wright, 50 – 61. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “Keeping the Acallam Together.” In The Gaelic Finn Tradition, edited by Sharon J. Arbuthnot and Geraldine Parsons, 111 – 21. Dublin: Four Courts, 2012. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “Oral Tradition in the Acallam na Senórach.” In Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, edited by W. F. H. Nicolaisen, 77 – 95. Binghampton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. The Wisdom of the Outlaw: The Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Ní Bhrolcháin, Muireann. An Introduction to Early Irish Literature. Dublin: Four Courts, 2009. Ó Broin, Tomás. “Lia Fáil: Fact and Fiction in Tradition.” Celtica 21 (1990): 393 – 401. Ó’Corráin, Donnchadh. “Legend as Critic.” The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, edited by W. J. McCormack, 23 – 38. Cork: Cork University Press, 1987. Otway-Ruthven, A. J. A History of Medieval Ireland. London: Ernest Benn, 1968. Parsons, Geraldine. “The Structure of Acallam na Senórach.” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 55 (2008): 11 – 39. Roe, Harry. “The Acallam: The Church’s Eventual Acceptance of the Cultural Heritage of Pagan Ireland.” Gablánach in scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, edited by Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett, 103 – 15. Dublin: Four Courts, 2013. Scowcroft, R. Mark. “Leabhar Gabhála Part I: The Growth of the Text.” Ériu 38 (1987): 81 – 142. Scowcroft, R. Mark. “Leabhar Gabhála Part II: The Growth of the Tradition.” Ériu 39 (1988): 1 – 66. Sharpe, Richard. Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise. Gods and Heroes of the Celts. Translated by Myles Dillon. London: Methuen, 1949. The Táin. Translated by Thomas Kinsella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Tales of the Elders of Ireland. Translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Watt, John. The Church in Medieval Ireland. 2nd ed. Dublin: University College Dublin, 2019. Whitaker, Cord. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Williams, Mark. Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Valerie B. Johnson

Chapter 8 Ecomedieval Revenge and Justice in “Robyn and Gandelyn” “Robyn and Gandelyn” (DIMEV 2194) is a poem that does not fit easily into established generic categories. Critics have expressed skepticism for more than a century: folklorist F. J. Child did not consider the story a Robin Hood tale in the late nineteenth century,¹ while antiquarian Joseph Ritson excluded the poem from his volume of Robin Hood material in the late eighteenth century.² Modern editors include the poem in anthologies, drawn in by its undeniable parallels with conventional Robin Hood stories. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren suggest that scholars designate the piece a “narrative lyric,” as a way to characterize and understand the ambiguous story.³ This hybrid designation reveals how the poem draws on multiple designations and categorizations to negotiate a place on the margins of the Robin Hood tradition, emphasizing the difficult position peripheral poems like “Robyn and Gandelyn” hold for Robin Hood scholarship.⁴

 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, vol. 3 (New York: Dover Publications, 1890), 12. Child Ballad No. 115, “Robyn and Gandeleyn,” follows “Johnie Cock” and precedes “Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesly” in volume 3; Robin Hood ballads are clustered in volume 5. Child referenced Thomas Wright’s Songs and Carols (1836), noting the similarity between the name Gandelyn to Gamelyn (The Tale of Gamelyn is inserted in some Chaucer manuscripts as “The Cook’s Tale”) and the story’s resemblance to a Robin Hood ballad; he also doubts that Wright intentionally categorized the poem as a Robin Hood tale, since Robyn “no more is [Robin Hood] than John in the ballad which precedes [‘Johnie Cock’] is Little John” (12).  Ritson first published his collection of Robin Hood ballads in 1795; the most commonly cited and final edition is Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which Are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1832). Ritson did include “Robyn and Gandelyn” as “Robin Lyth,” in Ancient Songs and Ballads from the Time of King Henry the Second to the Revolution (London: J. Johnson, 1790).  Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 228.  “Robyn and Gandelyn” appears in British Library Sloan Manuscript 2593; the manuscript is generally dated to around 1450. The Tale of Gamelyn is another peripheral outlaw tale included in some twenty-five manuscripts; dating is contested, but Knight and Ohlgren consider the second half of the fourteenth century (and likely the final quarter) most credible (Robin Hood, 185). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-009

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The connections between “Robyn and Gandelyn” and the Robin Hood tradition are slender. The story is simple: two young men, Robyn and Gandelyn, enter a wood to hunt. After a long and fruitless day, they encounter a herd of deer: Robyn slays the fattest with a single arrow to the heart. Before Robyn can dress the carcass, an arrow strikes him down. Robyn’s companion Gandelyn promises to avenge the murder by Wrennok of Donne. The two foes decide upon a judicial archery duel, and Wrennok fires first, barely missing Gandelyn’s manhood. Gandelyn returns fire and strikes Wrennok down with a single arrow to the heart. He briefly vaunts over the body, and the poem ends as it begins, with the haunting image of Robyn’s body in the greenwood, wrapped in a shroud. This brief summary shows that there is far more difference than similarity between the traditional literary Robin Hood corpus and “Robyn and Gandelyn.” There are few Robin Hood stories that do not feature Robin Hood; though Robin may die at the end of a tale, his death is not generally the narrative focus of the plot. There is no unjust authority to be resisted or overthrown in this tale; there is no happy ending or natural conclusion. The most obvious connection to the tradition is through names, but not every Robin is Robin Hood. However, names are also what link other peripheral stories to the tradition: “Gandelyn” has been interpreted as a corruption of “Gamelyn” from The Tale of Gamelyn, or “Gamwell” from a much later ballad, Robin Hood and Will Scarlet. ⁵ “Wrennok,” Robyn’s killer, might derive from the tale of Fouke le Fitz Waryn. ⁶ The incomplete and fragmentary nature of the literary Robin Hood tradition, compounded by the stories’ popularity and connections to play/games, folklore, and other orally transmitted materials that evade written records, means that it is impossible to tell if “Robyn and Gandelyn” was deliberately drawing on known stories as a form of transformative worldbuilding. The Robin Hood tradition’s “rhizomatic tendency”⁷ to incorporate new material has not fully absorbed “Robyn and Gandelyn.”⁸

References to Robin Hood precede surviving witnesses of the tales, and the earliest full text of a complete “mainstream” Robin Hood story is Robin Hood and the Monk, dated by Thomas Ohlgren and Lister Matheson to 1463 – 1465 (pushing back the long-repeated but unsupported conventional date of 1450) (Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465 – 1560; Texts, Contexts, and Ideology [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007], 39 – 40; Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600 [Tempe, AZ: ACRMS, 2013]).  Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood, 227.  Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood, 228.  See Stephen Knight, Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 1.  As Christine Chism notes, “Medieval writers did not, apparently, want to talk about the death of Robin Hood” (“Mortal Friends in Robin and Gandelyn and the Medieval Robin Hood Ballads,”

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Though modern critical attention has largely focused on the incomplete brevity of the poem and its narrative action, I propose instead reading through the greenwood itself; this new perspective makes the poem’s connection to the tradition clear. Since “Robyn and Gandelyn” is not a religious lyric, nor an easily categorized Robin Hood tale, it is often considered a satellite to both genres. However, the literary greenwood space of the Robin Hood tradition is transformative because it refuses to be a purely ecological representation of wilderness, even as it resists the fully human symbolic meaning so often found in medieval romance. “Robyn and Gandelyn” is set entirely within the greenwood, and this space does not seem inherently different from the typical literary setting. The greenwood of the Robin Hood tradition offers transformative potential to male individuals who inhabit the space.⁹ Other peripheral poems, such as The Tale of Gamelyn, follow this emphasis on the individual (Gamelyn’s life is changed through justice, not social understanding of justice). I contend that “Robyn and Gandelyn” offers a variant of this potential that focuses less on individual characters by offering an examination of the borders, or limits, of community. “Robyn and Gandelyn” challenges the perception of the greenwood as liminal: common understanding of the greenwood is that the space offers limited individual transformative potential while sitting oddly outside of time and society.¹⁰ Consequently, the greenwood becomes a space that aggressively reshapes revenge and justice through the lens of community. In study of the greenwood outlaw tradition, the emphasis is typically upon the singular outlaw, relegating the greenwood to setting or context. This approach privileges analysis of a fictional character over the cultural contexts that establish the character’s narrative as feasible. I suggest instead a recalibration of perspective that maintains the human character as a narrative actant but also considers the greenwood an active factor in the story.¹¹ The literary greenwood is a fictive space

in Robin Hood and Outlaw/ed Spaces, ed. Lesley Coote and Valerie B. Johnson [New York: Routledge, 2017], 40 – 56 at 40).  Valerie B. Johnson, “A Forest of Her Own: Greenwood-Space and the Forgotten Female Characters of the Robin Hood Tradition,” in Coote and Johnson, Robin Hood in Outlaw/ed Spaces, 21– 39.  Cf. Joseph Falaky Nagy, “Paradoxes of Robin Hood,” Folklore 91, no. 2 (1980): 198 – 210.  This is a limited application of actor network theory (ANT); there is little orthodoxy in ANT, as the approach is more a method than a typical theory. Robin Hood Studies encompasses historical, literary, and cultural approaches; Knight, drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome (and thence indirectly on Bruno Latour), describes the tradition as rhizomatic. This turn to the ecological, in a field marked by cultural studies, invites further development of imaginative narratives, as described by John L. Caughey in Imaginary Social Worlds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

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meshing genuine ecological characteristics, legal designations and systems, and additionally it provides evidence of ongoing imaginative cultural repositories that transform through use and need. The greenwood, as well as the outlaw, becomes a primary engine driving the narrative as well as providing the conditions under which the narrative’s actions are imaginatively feasible. This perspective breaks with the assumption of a separation between the human and the ecological, because revenge in the greenwood is fundamentally urban in framing; only the setting is “natural,” or ecological. This is not a matter of either greenwood or outlaw being dominant or primary; it is a matter of both, together, as a distinct, third entity formed from its constitutive parts. Under such a reading, greenwood revenge (distinct from revenge in the greenwood) reveals needs, and requirements, for justice that are not “natural” but intrinsically and inescapably linked to humans as well as the spaces that prompt and enable these needs. The traditional literary forest is a space where revenge and justice can be explored in their broadest strokes, unencumbered by specific laws or legal precedents. However, this exploration is also fundamentally transformative—the justice that “Robyn and Gandelyn” presents is neither fully natural justice nor entirely human revenge.¹² Instead, both are transformed within and yet also because of the greenwood, providing an ecological parallel to the nexus between transgression and play that Thomas Hahn identifies as key to the enduring appeal of the Robin Hood tradition.¹³ By offering stories that imagine “life outside the law,” the traditional Robin Hood story can “open potentialities for political change, but the familiar and fantastical nature of such narratives, and their customary happy resolution of social contradictions, insure awareness that these performances are merely playing at the violation of conventional norms and boundaries.”¹⁴ This play at change and reform renders the Robin Hood tradition fundamentally conservative at its core: the stories provide release and relief, play, but are always careful to shut down actual change by offering a happy ending and insuring the audience enjoys, as Hahn says, “the pleasures of outlawry.”¹⁵

 The Tale of Gamelyn parallels many of the concerns at play in “Robyn and Gandelyn.” Scholars including Jean Jost and Richard Kaeuper have long argued that Gamelyn is infused with historical realism. Pairing “Gandelyn” and Gamelyn in parallel to a grey ecological reading suggests vernacular thinking about revenge and justice was incredibly sophisticated and nuanced.  Thomas Hahn, “Playing with Transgression,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture, ed. Thomas Hahn (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 1– 11 at 1.  Hahn, “Playing with Transgression,” 1.  Hahn, “Playing with Transgression,” 2.

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“Robyn and Gandelyn” breaks sharply from the pattern: there is no pleasure in outlawry, and what play the story might contain must be read against the text as a form of bleak humor. The poem instead embraces human eradication and loss. Play appears through a meta-commentary reading of the poem as transgressing against the expectations of the Robin Hood tradition itself—the conventions and boundaries the poem violates are those set up in a Robin Hood story. In other words, to find play in “Robyn and Gandelyn,” one must read fully and thoroughly against the text: violent murder becomes play. This stands in stark contrast to a key characteristic that Hahn identifies in Robin Hood stories: that the violence and transgression are negated, even rendered a form of exploratory play.¹⁶ The Robin Hood tradition is able to accomplish this because play has been signaled in each story as well as becoming an expectation of the tradition overall. The generic expectation of a Robin Hood story—or what appears to be a Robin Hood story—includes this recuperative gesture.¹⁷ No such turn or redemptive negation of violence occurs in “Robyn and Gandelyn”; instead, the poem takes seriously the violence of a “life outside the law” and demonstrates the fatal consequences. The poem is a unique and valuable contribution to the Robin Hood tradition precisely because it refuses to play and experiment with transgression. Just as The Tale of Gamelyn demonstrates how the broader greenwood outlaw tradition evokes Robin Hood through community, “Robyn and Gandelyn” highlights how community’s absence hones the delicate line between revenge and justice.

Unconventional Ecologies My reading of “Robyn and Gandelyn” is neither traditionally ecocritical nor conventionally green. Rather, I combine the explicit formulation of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “grey ecology,” with its characteristic meshing of natural and human elements to produce cultural haunting in ecological spaces,¹⁸ with the communal

 For a discussion of recuperative gestures to fold digression back into normative practice, including the use of the carnivalesque, see Claire Sponsler, “Counterfeit in Their Array: CrossDressing in Robin Hood Performances,” in Drama and Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 24– 49.  By contrast, a politician telling a racist joke and then adding an unconvincing “just kidding” also seeks to negate the violence he has created, but his efforts do not persuade without playful foundations or genuine effort to recuperate. Audiences are sensitive to rhetorical sincerity.  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Grey,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2013), 270 – 89.

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reach of the rhizomatic Robin Hood tradition. The distinctions that Cohen makes to separate the grey ecology from other reading approaches circle around acknowledgment and integration of the human and the natural, for example “green ecology judges a culture by its regard for nature, where ‘nature’ is typically regarded as an external entity, culture’s other. A grey ecology refuses such separations, and believes that the haunting of monsters reveals communal values, shared aspirations and lived ethics (the anthropomorphic) as well as the coinhabitance and alien thriving of the nonhuman (the disanthropocentric).”¹⁹ The greenwood, in my reading, parallels Cohen’s analysis of the integrated cultural impact monsters provide: rather than existing separate from society, the greenwood is an inhuman force that experiences coinhabitance with society, through human interaction with the ecology and also through the ecology’s literary afterlife. The Robin Hood tradition’s greenwood has often been analyzed as a societal sandbox: a separate area of play and testing that can be discarded once the story ends or the result is achieved. I contend that the greenwood of law, literature, and legend is so closely bound up with human concerns and society that attempting to label it as “culture’s other,” rendering it as an outsider (and thus a liminal space of transition), is manifestly inaccurate. Consequently, I interpret “Robyn and Gandelyn” as a contribution to the Matter of the Greenwood that overtly examines the intersections of the natural with the human. Under such a reading, ecological spaces are integrated with human cultural spaces—thus, the literary forest should not be analyzed and treated as a separate and liminal space, since this closes off the possibility that audiences explored nuanced cultural anxieties like the limits and justifications of revenge by writing stories about, and set within, the greenwood. The literary greenwood is a natural space that mobilizes human action, where human revenge and natural justice become so intertwined with the space that we cannot separate them further. The greenwood has the agency to transform revenge into justice within the medium of story, and that is why we tell and consume greenwood tales. The greenwood is not the only ecology acting upon the story: the story’s refusal of play seems at odds with the material “ecology” of its textual life. The poem exists in a single manuscript witness, British Library Sloane MS 2593 (fols. 14v–15v),²⁰ and the document is physically small, measuring 148 ×  Cohen, “Grey,” 273.  British Library, London, MS Sloane 2593, fols. 14v–15v. The manuscript is referenced in the British Library’s digital archival records as “[a] collection of 14th and 15th century English poetry, including Christmas and other carols, without music.” Few modern scholars have described the modern manuscript; the two notable exceptions are Andrew Taylor, “The Myth of the Min-

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115 mm, roughly the dimensions of a large (modern) postcard.²¹ As Lesley Coote notes, the “dirtied and worn state of the corners and page edges” indicates significant interactions between humans and manuscript.²² There are only thirtyseven folios, though there may once have been more.²³ Andrew Taylor describes the manuscript’s overall aesthetic as “pleasantly tidy,” for though there is no formal decoration the document enjoys clear attention to spacing and margins.²⁴ Horizontal lines provide visual separation between items. Coote describes the manuscript’s contents as “secular drinking songs, satires (such as poems on the power of money) and some have moral subjects” with a handful that “range from rude to rather obscene.”²⁵ Most of these poems are short: at seventy-six lines, “Robyn and Gandelyn” is a long aberration. So little is known about Sloane MS 2593 that scholars frequently pair assessment of the book’s physical characteristics with analysis of its contents. This content analysis highlights a fascinating lyrical echo—Knight and Ohlgren term it “verbal resonance”²⁶—from within the manuscript. The lyric “Adam Lay Ibounden” (DIMEV 215) is also collected in Sloane MS 2593 (fol. 11r), and the lines that open and close “Robyn and Gandelyn” closely echo, almost repeating, the opening line of “Adam”: Adam lay I bowndyṅ * bowndyn in a bond” (fol. 11r) is remarkably evocative of “Robynn lyth in grene wode bowndyn (fol. 14v). I contend that this is a form of play appropriate within three components of the manuscript’s “ecology”: contents (other lyrical poems); themes (the impact of death); and contextual origins (clerical origins would indicate more learned audiences familiar with Robin Hood poems).²⁷ Taylor finds the evidence for a “clerical provestrel Manuscript,” Speculum 66, no. 1 (1991): 43 – 73 and Lesley Coote, Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), specifically chapter 1, “Robin Hood and the Written Word” (18 – 41). As Taylor notes, interest in Sloane MS 2593 is concurrent with its reputation as a working copy used by a minstrel, an idea which he traces to Thomas Wright, Songs and Carols Now First Printed from a Manuscript in the British Museum of the Fifteenth Century (London, 1856); however, Taylor demonstrates that Wright’s assessment is not fully supported by the manuscript’s physical history nor its contents. Coote uses letter forms and content analysis to locate the manuscript firmly within the county of Norfolk on a circuit of exchange or movement between coastal towns such as Lynn (now King’s Lynn), Snettisham, and Cley (now Cley next the Sea), among others in the region (40).  Sloane MS 2593.  Coote, Storyworlds, 40.  Coote, Storyworlds, 262n51.  Taylor, “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript,” 61.  Coote, Storyworlds, 37.  Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood, 228.  Historians and literary specialists have long known that various stories of the Robin Hood tradition were consumed across the spectrum of social hierarchy and class; the debate between

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nance” of Sloane MS 2593 convincing;²⁸ Coote’s interests are in the manuscript’s potential circulation among modest settlements of the northern Norfolk coast.²⁹ I see little conflict between Taylor’s and Coote’s positions—both place Sloan MS 2593 within interlocking material and social ecologies, some broader in scope via broader clerical associations and some more local via the Norfolk communities referenced in the book’s material history and contents. If true, a clerical origin of the manuscript would offer further explanation for the echo that Knight and Ohlgren emphasize, and also explain Robyn’s early death in the narrative: the Robin Hood tradition provided narratives critiquing clerics and also non-narrative distractions used by laity to avoid spiritual obligations.³⁰ Given these ech-

J. C. Holt and R. H. Hilton in Past and Present began to tease out nuances within the stories, and the presence of “Robin Hood” (and variations) as names within various legal rolls and documents is well known (see J. C. Holt, “The Origins and the Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood,” Past and Present 18 [1960]: 89 – 110 and R. H. Hilton, “The Origins of Robin Hood,” Past and Present 14 (1958): 30 – 44). However, the clerical connections to the physical manuscripts are equally strong, reliably indicating that clerical audiences would be familiar with Robin Hood, often in attempts to rebuff the popular story: for example, the earliest surviving Robin Hood tale, Robin Hood and the Monk, is housed in a clerical miscellany (Cambridge, University Library MS. Ff.5.48) owned by the priest Gilbert Pilkington (Ohlgren and Matheson, Early Rymes of Robyn Hood, 3); the well-known reference to “rymes of Robyn Hood” is made in the Btext of The Vision of Piers Plowman; scribbled rhyming couplets (translating Middle English into Latin) are found in the margins of Lincoln Cathedral MS 132 (George Morris, “A Ryme of Robyn Hode,” The Modern Language Review 43, no. 4 [1948]: 507– 8); and a marginal annotation in a 1420 copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, Eton MS 213, fol. 234r (Julian M. Luxford, “An English Chronicle Entry on Robin Hood,” Journal of Medieval History 35 [2009]: 70 – 75) demonstrates clerical engagement, if not enjoyment, of the tradition. Indeed, Luxford observes that “a West Country religious of the mid- to late fifteenth century could hardly have been ignorant of the role which Robin Hood played in a contemporary culture from which he considered himself professionally and morally distanced” (75).  Taylor, “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript,” 61– 62.  Coote, Storyworlds, 38 – 41. Coote appears to have worked without knowledge of Taylor, yet is more focused on the book’s use and travels while Taylor seeks to address origins. Consequently, while Coote does not rule out clerical or monkish ownership, she connects the book’s theorized migrations to ownership or custody among those who are themselves migratory (“a merchant, or maybe . . . a ‘performer’ of some kind himself, or a patron of performers travelling the road” [40]).  Bishop Hugh Latimer complained in 1549 that he found a parish church empty during a 1530 visit, since the parishioners and priest were out to gather for Robin Hood’s day (see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], 111– 12). For a discussion of the interplay between literature, play/games, and how clerics and laity together engaged the tradition in performance, see John Marshall, “Show or Tell? Priority and Interplay in the Early Robin Hood Play/Games and Poems,” in Telling Tales and Crafting

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oes and collection of the two items within the same manuscript, a consideration of the poem’s material ecology—its physical placement within the manuscript, as well as the linguistic and symbolic repetition—are reasonable contexts to consider. Considering the manuscript alongside the story is itself a form of grey reading: though the manuscript is itself the product of human hands and labor, it can be perceived as an object with some measure of agency to influence and direct human perception—very similar to the role of nature, or the monster, in Cohen’s grey ecology. The manuscript is much easier to accept into a grey ecological interpretation because of the many human factors involved in its creation, yet it is not human. Moreover, grey ecology can serve as a directive bridge between the literary storyworld the poem encourages and the material existence of the manuscript.³¹ Only a few folios separate “Adam Lay I-bounden” from the apparently secular “Robyn and Gandelyn,” but “Robyn and Gandelyn’s” deliberate echoing of “Adam” in the opening and closing lines are an acknowledgment of how components within an environment mutually influence each other. The literary greenwood presented in “Robyn and Gandelyn” thus draws on the storyworld of the Robin Hood tradition, but it also draws on the cultural specter of the legal and cultural greenwood(s), binding the manuscript into this environment. Cohen’s grey ecology embraces and incorporates a seemingly liminal environment, like the greenwood, by acknowledging the cultural constructs that function within that space, essentially refusing an artificial separation between nature and culture.³² This is what makes the literary greenwood a legitimate space for revenge: a literary space is not truly liminal when its real-life counterpart, whether shire wood or royal forest, is bound by so many customs and specific laws (and legal systems).³³

Books, ed. Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), 177– 202.  Indeed, Coote emphasizes the interconnection of the Robin Hood tradition’s material artifacts with the environments where the stories are known to have circulated.  Cf. Cohen, “Grey,” 273: “A green ecology judges a culture by its regard for nature, where ‘nature’ is typically regarded as an external entity, culture’s other. A grey ecology refuses such separations, and believes that the haunting of monsters reveals communal values, shared aspirations and lived ethics (the anthropomorphic) as well as the coinhabitance and alien thriving of the nonhuman (the disanthropocentric).”  The matter of what is, and is not, liminal should be taken up at length in other work (cf. Nagy). However, it is worth noting that the historical forests and woodlands of medieval and early modern England were in no way liminal, bound as they were by layers of custom, charters, legal systems—whether forest law or common law, depending on whether the space was designated as forest (and so under the sovereign’s control) or as a wood, park, or chase (and thus

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My “grey” reading of the poem allows interpretation of the greenwood as a space where revenge can occur, or where a man can go to trigger a series of legal events that will ultimately lead to justice. This produces an idealized form of revenge that audiences can use as a model for their own thinking of punishment and also an exploration of the consequences of revenge and of justice. The greenwood and the outlaw are locked together, much as revenge and justice can be dependent and yet distinct. Literature has long participated in the imaginative exploration of possibilities that John Caughey describes in his discussion of how imagined scenarios, relationships, and anticipated results are vital parts of social decision making.³⁴ “Robyn and Gandelyn” provides a story set exclusively within the greenwood, and thus the tale can be said to be about that space because what occurs there cannot (in any way) happen in another place: the space, the actions taken there, implicitly the people who perform those acts, and the results of such acts are all compressed into the term “greenwood.”

“Robyn and Gandelyn” The greenwood in “Robyn and Gandelyn” is thus a space that mobilizes, inspires, and directs human action—and human justice and natural justice are entwined. The manuscript of the poem opens with a starkly declarative line: “Robynn lyth in grene wode bowndyn,” often glossed as “Robin lies in greenwood, bound in a burial shroud.” The echo with the lyric “Adam Lay I-bounden” is clear. Some textual editors have moved this opening to the fifth line, allowing it to serve as a sort of refrain, but Knight and Ohlgren explicitly refuse this rearrangement, noting that such rearrangements contradict the manuscript witness.³⁵ With the manuscript reading in place, the line allows a dramatic hook for the reader before stepping back to set the stage, within both the story and the manuscript, by connecting Robyn to Adam’s long burial and punishment for his defiance of God’s order. After all, as Adam’s lyric reminds us, had Adam not taken

more often regulated by customary laws). For a discussion of how modern perceptions of landscape have more to reveal about modern readers than medieval perceptions, see John Howe and Michael Wolfe, Inventing Medieval Landscapes (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Jonathan Smith, “The Lie that Blinds: Destabilizing the Text of Landscape,” in Place/Culture/ Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (New York: Routledge, 1993), 78 – 94.  Caughey, Imaginary Social Worlds.  Knight and Ohlgren, Robin Hood, 233 (“Notes” to the text).

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that apple, the Blessed Virgin would not have become heaven’s queen: without Adam’s death, we would not have the Virgin to intercede for us or Jesus to save us—and the lyric stands as a monument. The narrator of “Robyn and Gandelyn” claims to know this story through the “carpying of a clerk” at “yone wodes ende” (lines 2, 3)³⁶—a call to human authority that places the narrative action, as well as the reflective retelling, within a wooded space. Without Robyn’s death in the legal space of the greenwood, Gandelyn cannot hunt the boy Wrennok, Robyn’s presumed killer, to kill on Robyn’s behalf. The burial shroud and greenwood of line 1, the connection to the clerk in line 2, and the reinforcement of a wooded space in line 3 provide close and sustained interconnections between human and greenwood. The clerk is more than just a gossip: the story is likely recounted in a monastic house at “yone wodes ende” (line 3), and this rote phrasing also implies location. The site is at the end (or edge) of the wood though not in the wood, which would align with a monastic property situated on grounds leased from a royal forest. This is a grey ecology: the natural (the physicality of the manuscript, similarity of the letterforms, inks, and what those tools combine to spell) and the social (the parallels between the poems’ explorations of Adam’s and Robyn’s deaths) separately do not factor, but together they create meaning. The manuscript ecology also influences reading of the next stanzas of “Robyn and Gandelyn.” Readers are taught first how to react to the peril of Robyn and Gandelyn, who are described as “chyldrein” (line 6), youths, and then to discard that reading of the “lytil boy [little boy] / He clepyn Wrennok of Donne” (lines 36 – 37). A little boy seems to be younger than a youth, yet Gandelyn engages Wrennok as Robyn’s killer in a judicial battle as an equal. The work emphasizes that Robyn and Gandelyn are “Strong thevys wer tho chyldrein non” (line 6), implicitly magnifying their innocence by pairing their not-bandit status with their youth. The poem pivots away from their possible status as strong thieves (outlaws) with a prominent “but,” indicating that the generic expectation would be that they are outlaws (criminals). “But bowmen gode and hende” (line 7; emphasis mine) stresses that Robyn and Gandelyn are not thieves: they are specifically skilled (“gode”) and honorable (“hende”) bowmen, linking their honor to an identity-building skillset. For a clerical audience prepared to be hostile to Robyn because of the resonances with the Robin Hood tra-

 Line numbers will follow Knight and Ohlgren’s edition, though in the manuscript these two lines are combined.

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dition, such reinforcement is necessary—there are many Robins, but this one is honorable and strong, and should receive justice after death.³⁷ Indeed, these youths are established within the greenwood outlaw tradition while scrupulously avoiding the “outlaw” component. They are skilled and honorable bowmen, and their reason for going to the wood is “to getyn hem fleych, / If God wold it hem sende” (lines 8 – 9). To a reader unfamiliar with the Robin Hood tradition, the narrative is presenting Robyn and Gandelyn as honorable young hunters; a reader familiar with the tradition will draw parallels to Robin’s archery skills and hunting abilities in A Gest of Robyn Hode. ³⁸ Unlike the Robin Hood of the Gest, however, the two youths are not successful. They spend a day hunting (lines 10 – 13), until, just as they are preparing to return home, God sends them “half an honderid of fat falyf [fallow] der” (line 14) that are unblemished (line 17). As with Robyn and Gandelyn’s skills and presence in the greenwood to hunt deer, this scene finds echoes in both the Gest and Robin Hood and the Potter: presumably other now lost tales included similar hunting scenes. The poem’s fifth stanza reinforces this association: “Robyn bent his joly bow” (line 20) and, picking out the fattest deer from the herd (line 22) so that “The herte he clef a to” (line 23): all language that echoes but does not directly mimic the Robin Hood tradition. Robyn and Gandelyn are poaching, in spirit if not the letter of the law: the narrative carefully calls the space the greenwood or wood, and deliberately avoids the loaded legal term “forest.” Such distinctions are key, since William Perry Marvin notes that the forest laws essentially created a “privatization of the hunt itself,” thus implicitly rendering every act of hunting a potential act of poaching.³⁹ Robyn’s crime is not to kill a deer: his crime is hunting, and Gandelyn is also complicit.

 This echoes the modern tendency to call for justice when a crime victim is attractive or has no prior criminal record, and dismissing victims with controversial pasts because they are “no angel.”  The Gest’s Robin remembers that “Somtyme I was an archere good / A styffe and eke a stronge” (8.1745); after staying at court for so long, however, he can no longer be counted the best archer in England (8.1747– 48), and asks for a leave of absence from court. He must return within a week—yet he goes to the forest, slays a deer, and blows his horn to re-form his outlaw band, passively refusing to return. The narrative, and critical, focus is on killing the deer, because that is what he misses most.  William Perry Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 63. Cf. Marcelle Thiébaux, “The Medieval Chase,” Speculum 42, no. 2 (1967): 260 – 74 at 260, who observes that hunting also has an “ennobling effect” and any “means of pursuing and capturing game were found to have merits” (260), as well as helping maintain readiness for war.

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Gandelyn’s shared guilt means he is vulnerable to Robyn’s fate. No sooner is the deer struck down than Robyn falls to an arrow as well, a “schrewde arwe out of the west / That felde Robertes pryde” (lines 26 – 27). Knight and Ohlgren gloss this arrow as “devilish,” but it is also “deadly,” even of inherently foul character.⁴⁰ The narrative continues to build sympathy for Robyn (and implicitly Gandelyn) by adding that the evil arrow has felled “Robert’s pride,” evoking the father’s loss of his son.⁴¹ The directional language—the cursed arrow comes out of the west—may serve to magnify the impact of Robyn’s loss rather than provide information into the manner of his death: though Robyn could be facing east and took the arrow to the back, since the hunt has taken all day and he is preparing to dress the deer with his back to the sun, he could equally be facing west and (implicitly) be struck by an arrow to the heart, mirroring what he did to the deer. However, the word “west” is repeated two more times in quick succession, as Gandelyn looks “east and west” to search for Robyn’s killer. Gandelyn’s reaction reveals much about the nature of the revenge and justice he shall seek. He is distraught, searching about and crying out “Whoo hat myn master slayin? / Ho hat don this dede?” (lines 30 – 31). This moment is key: until Gandelyn names Robyn as his master, the implicit assumption (outside a Robin Hood story) is that the two were social equals. Gandelyn’s statement reveals a power structure that reworks his grief from the friendship of equals into loyalty and obligation.⁴² This resonates further when Gandelyn states, “Shall I never out of grene wode go / Til I se sydis blede” (lines 32– 33). Whether a reader interprets this statement as vow, pledge, or promise is key in how the ecology of revenge is presented—and whether there is a potential for justice at all. Gandelyn’s outburst is not a binding oath, vow, or curse, because all those statements require a direct and overt evocation of God or an intermediary (for example, a saint, the Blessed Virgin, a holy relic). I suggest that Gandelyn’s statement should be read as a promise or (perhaps) a boast.⁴³ Gandelyn has left himself

 The Middle English Dictionary Online, accessed July 25, 2020, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/dictionary, s.v. “shreued [shrewde],” adj. 2(a) “of a place or weapon: dangerous, deadly; (b) intrinsically bad, corrupt by nature.”  For discussion of medieval naming practices, including name-sharing between fathers and sons (and resulting nicknames for differentiation), see Scott Smith-Bannister, Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538 – 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997).  For discussion of brotherhood and fellowship, see Robert Stretter, “Engendering Obligation: Sworn Brotherhood and Love Rivalry in Medieval English Romance,” in Friendship the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Issue, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 501– 24.  For discussion of oaths, see Helen Silving, “The Oath: I,” Yale Law Journal 68, no. 7 (1959): 1323 – 90, and John Spurr, “A Profane History of Early Modern Oaths,” Transactions of the Royal

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room for failure, and for freedom, by making a promise and not a vow: he does not imperil his soul or honor if he cannot see blood spilled.⁴⁴ This reopens the poem to the potential of the Robin Hood tradition: there might be a happy ending after all, despite the horror of the murder, with a little light bloodshed and a good fight—a chance to negate the violence of the story, as is typical of the tradition. Gandelyn’s revenge allows the narrative to tempt audiences to consider that the story might fit back into the type typical of the Robin Hood tradition, and revenge may produce justice.⁴⁵ Unlike modern court systems, where a defendant can be found not guilty due to failure to prove a case, medieval English law courts sought final resolution.⁴⁶ A judicial duel, or ordeal, was a final resort for establishing proof of guilt, evoked after the failure of a judicial oath of truth, an absence of or insufficient numbers of compurgators available for both parties to establish their credibility, and if the truth is unclear.⁴⁷ Reading the duel as an ordeal situates Gandelyn’s revenge within a recognizable legal context—beyond God and the Virgin, there are no others present to swear oaths in solidarity, no judge to record the judicial oath, so whomever misses is guilty, and whomever lands the shot is right. Gandelyn’s killing of Wrennok in this extra-legal yet fully legal context implies that he bears little moral responsibility: a feasible modern legal distinction would be between murder and man-

Historical Society 11 (2011): 37– 63. For discussions of vengeance and avengers, see William Ian Miller, “Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England,” Law and History Review 1, no. 2 (1983): 159 – 204; Daniel Lord Smail, “Common Violence: Vengeance and Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century Marseille,” Past and Present 151 (1996): 28 – 59; and Stefan Jurasinski, “The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and the ‘Feud’ of Hengest,” The Review of English Studies 55, no. 222 (2004): 641– 61.  This medieval legal use of the judicial oath draws deeply upon the Aristotelian concept of the judicial oath as forensic speech that is part of a non-technical or extrinsic category of persuasion that is not part of the art of rhetoric. The category also includes laws, witnesses, contracts, torture, and finally oaths. The oath is distinguished because it evokes the deity and uses the soul of the oath-taker as a form of surety to seal the compact’s legitimacy, insuring that an oath-breaker imperils his soul should he violate the terms; vows are similar in form to oaths.  In fact, the Middle English Dictionary notes the appearance of “revenge” as relatively late, first appearing in Lydgate’s 1425 Troy Book (Cotton Augustus A.4). This would be approximately twenty-five years before the estimated date that Sloane MS 2593 was copied. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a similar first use of the word at the start of the fifteenth century in the Titus C. xvi MS of Mandeville’s Travels.  H. L. Ho, “The Legitimacy of Medieval Proof,” Journal of Law and Religion 19, no. 2 (2003 – 2004): 259 – 98 at 270.  Ho, “The Legitimacy of Medieval Proof,” 270.

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slaughter. Wrennok misses his shot, establishing his guilt and justifying his punishment (death). The greenwood provides a unique space for such contradictions: the literary presentation of forest law presents the greenwood as a space where forest law applies—and in the Robin Hood tradition, violation of those laws is honorable if the intentions of the violator are within the spirit of normative law. By these standards, Robyn’s death is not justice, even though he (presumably) violates laws by hunting. Precisely because Robyn and Gandelyn are strong and honorable bowmen (line 7), Robyn is accorded the cultural privilege of exception. Wrennok’s enforcement of the law is thus seen as dishonorable: though he does not fire until after Robyn’s hunting has become poaching (i. e., the slaying of the “fattest der of alle” [line 22]), the death of a human in exchange for the death of an animal is unbalanced, favoring the life of the animal over the life of the man. The desire for balance—for justice—encourages Gandelyn to seek retribution while maintaining honor. He presents his revenge as personal, for he grounds the offense in language that positions himself as victim “Whoo hat myn master slayin?” (line 30; emphasis mine), making the crime against Robyn also a crime against Gandelyn. Gandelyn is thus able to justify a promise of reciprocal revenge before he knows the identity of the killer. Moreover, by claiming victim status for himself, he is implicitly authorized to act in his own interests. Gandelyn’s interests override societal balance or nuance—as he looks for Robyn’s killer, he finds “a lytil boy / He clepyn Wrennok of Donne” (lines 36 – 37). Little Wrennok may or may not be responsible for Robyn’s murder: the narrative restricts audiences to Gandelyn’s perspective, and his mindset is oriented toward retributive justice. A child equipped with a good bow (line 38), a broadhead arrow nocked on the string (line 39), and holding a bundle of twenty-four additional arrows (lines 40 – 41) does not prove culpability: but proof is not necessary, only proximity. The narrative is here again tempting an audience to use the Robin Hood tradition as a meta-interpretive tool: typically, Robin Hood will meet his match, lose (with poor grace) to a good-hearted stranger, and invite that stranger to join the fellowship of outlaws. The Robin Hood tradition uses the outlaw as a powerful rhetorical force: as Jamie Taylor notes, the outlaw becomes “counter to the neighbor” and disruptive to community,⁴⁸ and the recuperative turn is achieved by inviting the new outlaw into the band, thus making him a community member. However, though the poem encourages these connec-

 Jamie K. Taylor, “Neighbors, Witness, and Outlaws in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 86 – 114 at 105.

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tions repeatedly, the narrative ultimately resists them: Robyn and Gandelyn’s virtues still resonate, and Wrennok—who objectively is enforcing normative laws— is reconfigured as the disruption to community, an outlaw. Yet Robyn and Gandelyn are also alone and far from their community when Robyn is killed by an outlaw (Wrennok); Gandelyn would not need to seize on the death of “myn mayster” (line 30; emphasis mine) if he had other connections to his community and thus recourse to normative justice. Wrennok’s inclusion as a heavily armed menace permits the audience to think back to Robyn’s death and consider that the killing of one youth by another is something rather more serious than the outlaw tradition generally indicates. “Robyn and Gandelyn” continues to set up resonances and disrupt expectations: the echo to Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne is particularly notable during the duel, further establishing the poem’s debts and resistance to the larger tradition. Both Gandelyn and Wrennok behave as Wrennok articulated his desire to kill Gandelyn, and the pair establishes a judicial trial by combat with clear expectations: Gandelyn asks, “Wher-at shal oure marke be?” (line 48) and Wrennok grimly replies, “Everyche at otheris herte” (line 50). In Guy of Gisborne, the mark is a wand from a summer bush (lines 111– 14). Instead of inanimate wooden sticks, Gandelyn and Wrennok target bodies. The order of the duel is also oddly indebted to the game-play of Guy of Gisborne: in that ballad, Guy offers Robin first shot, Robin declines, and yet Robin still takes the first shot of the competition (lines 115 – 19). In “Robyn and Gandelyn,” Gandelyn asks “Ho shal yeve the ferste schote?” (line 51), and Wrennok concedes the turn to Gandelyn (“And I shul geve the on be-forn” [line 54]); yet, like Robin in Guy of Gisborne, it is Wrennok who shoots first. Wrennok has behaved as an outlaw throughout the poem: potentially, for an audience primed to read against the Robin Hood tradition and see its hero as a villain, it is Wrennok, not Robyn, who is Robin Hood. This reading requires the grey ecology of the manuscript’s history, and the poem’s deliberate playing with the Robin Hood tradition to establish a meta-narrative expectation that it systematically denies. Thus, while the order of the shots builds connections between the Robin Hood tradition and “Robyn and Gandelyn,” the true goal is to challenge audience assumptions of easy justice that can be dismissed with a happy ending. Though dramatic to audiences, especially those raised on comedy like Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Wrennok’s shot is a literal and figurative failure: the outlaw cannot actually make a trick shot and achieve his bloody goal. Rather than hitting Gandelyn in his heart, Wrennok’s arrow passes through “the samclothis of [Gandelyn’s] bryk / It towchyd neyther thye” (lines 58 – 59). This seems to be funny: the “lytil boy” cannot manage to hit the testicles of a youth. Yet this is also a sexual meta-commentary that falls

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apart under scrutiny—of course a child is not youth nor man—and the shot’s proximity seems intended to threaten but not actually damage Gandelyn’s manhood, since his thighs remain unblemished.⁴⁹ Ironically, Gandelyn evokes the might of the Blessed Virgin so he might give Wrennok a better shot than Gandelyn was given (lines 62– 63), and cleaves Wrennok’s heart in two (lines 66 – 67). This is a clean death, precisely how Robyn killed deer some forty lines prior, and it is also the death given to the Sheriff in Guy of Gisborne (line 234). Gandelyn’s shot provides some narrative closure—Robyn is avenged, and Gandelyn’s promise to “see sides bleed” is met—and yet it is unsatisfying. The audience is left to question why Wrennok’s skill with the bow is so erratic and what the implications are for Robyn’s death: if such a deadly enemy, worthy of a duel, is so erratic with his bowmanship that he could aim for the heart and narrowly miss the testicles, perhaps he was not deadly at all, and Robyn’s death was a fluke, maybe even an accident. If so, this renders Robyn’s death a sad tragedy, an accident, devoid of meaning and not even the murder of a noble bowman spitting in the face of unjust laws to uphold the spirit of freedom. Wrennok’s death then becomes a senseless retaliation, brought on by emotion and a young man’s access to deadly weaponry; if we read Wrennok as a clerical substitution for Robin Hood, his death is as violent and purposeless as his life. The poem resists an easy resolution by lingering on Gandelyn’s moment of victory: with little significant change, two stanzas are repeated. Rather amplifying his triumph, the doubling reinforces the tragedy of two dead youngsters and a third marked by what he has witnessed and done. Now shalt thu never yelpe, Wrennok, At ale ne at wyn That thu hast slawe goode Robyn, And Gandelyn his knawe. (lines 68 – 71)⁵⁰

The vaunt is a longstanding tradition with origins in classical Greek literature, but Gandelyn does not phrase his vaunt to emphasize his own victory or glorify his actions in slaying a worthy foe. Instead, Gandelyn claims that Wrennok will never be able to brag (over drinks) that Wrennok killed both Robyn and Gandelyn. Gandelyn is claiming he has won Wrennok’s silence outside the greenwood. The prize is the absence of a false claim by the killer, the absence of boasting over wine or ale (lines 69, 73), in the company of others. In sum, Wrennok’s

 Of course, thigh wounds have long held pseudo-sexual connotations with particular emphasis on castration, cf. the Fisher King.  Line 69 (“At ale ne at wyn”) is reversed in line 73 (“At wyn ne at ale”).

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death eliminates performative and communal speech acts that might enhance Wrennok’s reputation or honor. For Gandelyn, this is justice: the social implications of Wrennok’s murder of Robyn and intended murder of Gandelyn stop with Wrennok himself, and remain in the greenwood space. Such segmentation is only possible because the murders occurred in the greenwood: a death for a death is equalizing and resets the delicate balance of crime and lives. Here the greenwood functions akin to “normal” civic spaces, because it encourages negotiation and redress of wrongs. Notably, this is not the greenwood of the Robin Hood tradition, where the sun shines kindly and the leaves are always green; nor is this greenwood a place apart, where society’s failures can be improved through an idealized brotherhood of men. That greenwood provides a parallel between nature and human spaces, urging an impetus towards better human behavior because the greenwood functions as a model or mirror, where the greenwood is subservient to human society. This is common in the Robin Hood and greenwood outlaw tradition: the greenwood is a space where outlaws who have failed in human society can shelter, but also a place they can conspire. Filled to the brim as it is with outlaws, the traditional literary greenwood transforms into a locus of power because it is separate from “normative” judicial spaces, showing the marginal colonized by the center, a move that Jean Jost and Richard Kaeuper note parallels some social realities in the fifteenth century.⁵¹ However, the greenwood of “Robyn and Gandelyn” remains part of those judicial spaces, and so it becomes a place where community is killed: the bond between Robyn and Gandelyn is severed with Robyn’s death, and Gandelyn’s revenge prevents Wrennok from recounting his deeds within a greater social setting.

Conclusion The literary greenwood of “Robyn and Gandelyn” allows audiences to explore concepts of justice unrestrained by the Robin Hood tradition’s need for a happy ending. Reading the poem through the lens of its material ecology, and reading the poem within a clerical context, encourages a grey ecological reading

 Jean Jost, “Retribution in Gamelyn: A Case in the Courts,” in Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 175 – 88 and Richard Kaeuper, “An Historian’s Reading of the ‘Tale of Gamelyn’,” Medium Aevum 51, no. 1 (1983): 51– 62. Both authors focus on The Tale of Gamelyn, which is representative of a greenwood outlaw text that accepts the storyworld of the Robin Hood tradition, unlike the resistance to the tradition that “Robyn and Gandelyn” provides.

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that functions as a meta-commentary on the Robin Hood tradition. “Robyn and Gandelyn” builds audience expectation using standard tropes, scenarios, and language from the Robin Hood tradition, and uses that expectation to systematically reject the tradition, particularly the need for a happy ending and to perceive outlaws as socially acceptable anti-heroes. Despite the negativity and suffering in each Robin Hood tale, the literary greenwood offers a measured optimism that justice can be achieved. Whether justice occurs in the greenwood or occurs because of the greenwood is secondary to the fact that it can happen—that “right” and “fair” are meaningful again. This is part of the pivot, or reversal, that Hahn identifies as characteristic of the larger tradition: though radical change is walked back in each story, forcing each tale to serve as a limited and encapsulated experience of carnival or inversion festival, the sense of justice and meaningfulness lingers when the story is reversed. The greenwoods of the broader Robin Hood tradition allow audiences to explore and work through concepts of vengeance and justice; this makes the larger greenwood tradition part of normative space, because it is an environment whose role and function have been normalized. The notion of the liminal greenwood is thus overused, because it is not a space of wild revenge, but rather a place of negotiating normative structures (and thus a civilized space). The greenwood of “Robyn and Gandelyn” presents as a challenge to readers of the tradition, linked as it is to legal structures but encouraging and standardizing extralegal behaviors, and transforms into a space mobilizing human action toward justice. I have offered insights into the material ecology of the poem and its manuscript, as well as the poem’s own placement within the cultural ecology of the Robin Hood tradition. In “Robyn and Gandelyn,” the greenwood is the space through which the poem filters its meta-commentary challenge to the Robin Hood tradition: “Robyn and Gandelyn” leaves readers uneasy and unsure, because it establishes itself within the storyworld of the Robin Hood tradition in order to resist and protest the characteristic turn away from the (literary) pleasures of outlaw life. Through resistance to the tradition’s pivot away from genuine change and sublimated critique of the Robin Hood story and character archetype, the poem is a transformative work that encourages audiences to challenge the assumptions and norms of the Robin Hood tradition. Such challenge is valuable: only by speaking from the margins and challenging unspoken assumptions can cultures and societies renegotiate their boundaries to effect genuine change. The literary greenwood of outlaw stories becomes the core repository for this hope. Unlike the tales directly linked to the Robin Hood tradition, or affiliated outlaw stories like The Tale of Gamelyn, “Robyn and Gandelyn” rejects the notion that a happy ending is possible. The poem is a revenge lyric, darker than other

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stories peripheral to the Robin Hood tradition, one that recognizes that death is an integral part of natural cycles. But even this story, beginning and ending with the stark image of a wrapped corpse lying in the woods, recognizes that the greenwood is an ecology receptive to justice: a justice that is neither comfortable or playful, nor without cost.

Bibliography “Adam Lay I-bounden.” In British Library, London, MS Sloane 2593, fol. 11r. “Adam Lay I-bounde.” In One Hundred Middle English Lyrics, edited by Robert D. Stevick. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964. British Library, London, MS Sloane 2593. Caughey, John. Imaginary Social Worlds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Child, Frances James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. New York: Dover Publications, 1890. Chism, Christine. “Mortal Friends in Robin and Gandelyn and the Medieval Robin Hood Ballads.” In Robin Hood and Outlaw/ed Spaces, edited by Lesley Coote and Valerie B. Johnson, 40 – 56. New York: Routledge, 2017. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Grey.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 270 – 89. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Coote, Lesley. Storyworlds of Robin Hood: The Origins of a Medieval Outlaw. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV: An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse). Edited by Linne R. Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova. Dimev.net. A Gest of Robyn Hode. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 80 – 168. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Hahn, Thomas. “Playing with Transgression.” In Robin Hood in Popular Culture, edited by Thomas Hahn, 1 – 11. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Hilton, R. H. “The Origins of Robin Hood.” Past and Present 14 (1958): 30 – 44. Ho, H. L. “The Legitimacy of Medieval Proof.” Journal of Law and Religion 19, no. 2 (2003 – 2004): 259 – 98. Holt, J. C. “The Origins and the Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood.” Past and Present 18 (1960): 89 – 110. Howe, John and Michael Wolfe. Inventing Medieval Landscapes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Johnson, Valerie B. “A Forest of Her Own: Greenwood-Space and the Forgotten Female Characters of the Robin Hood Tradition.” In Robin Hood in Outlaw/ed Spaces, edited by Lesley Coote and Valerie B. Johnson, 21 – 39. New York: Routledge, 2017. Jost, Jean. “Retribution in Gamelyn: A Case in the Courts.” In Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, edited by Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough, 175 – 88. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Jurasinski, Stefan. “The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and the ‘Feud’ of Hengest.” The Review of English Studies 55, no. 222 (2004): 641 – 61.

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Kaeuper, Richard. “An Historian’s Reading of the ‘Tale of Gamelyn’.” Medium Aevum 51, no. 1 (1983): 51 – 62. Knight, Stephen. Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren, eds. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Luxford, Julian M. “An English Chronicle Entry on Robin Hood.” Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009): 70 – 75. Marshall, John. “Show or Tell? Priority and Interplay in the Early Robin Hood Play/Games and Poems.” In Telling Tales and Crafting Books, edited by Alexander L. Kaufman, Shaun F. D. Hughes, and Dorsey Armstrong, 177 – 202. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016. Marvin, William Perry. Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Miller, William Ian. “Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England.” Law and History Review 1, no. 2 (1983): 159 – 204. Morris, George “A Ryme of Robyn Hode.” The Modern Language Review 43, no. 4 (1948): 507 – 8. Nagy, Joseph Falaky. “Paradoxes of Robin Hood.” Folklore 91, no. 2 (1980): 198 – 210. Ohlgren, Thomas H. and Lister M. Matheson. Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600. Tempe, AZ: ACRMS, 2013. Ohlgren, Thomas H. and Lister M. Matheson. Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465 – 1560; Texts, Contexts, and Ideology. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Ritson, Joseph. Ancient Songs and Ballads from the Time of King Henry the Second to the Revolution. London: J. Johnson, 1790. Ritson, Joseph. Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which Are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life. 2 vols. London: William Pickering, 1832. Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 169 – 83. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Robin Hood and the Monk. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 31 – 56. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Robin Hood and the Potter. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 57 – 79. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Robin Hood and Will Scarlet. In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 499 – 506. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. “Robyn and Gandelyn.” In British Library, London, MS Sloane 2593, fols. 14v–15v. “Robyn and Gandelyn: Introduction, Text, and Notes.” In Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 227 – 34. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Silving, Helen. “The Oath: I.” Yale Law Journal 68, no. 7 (1959): 1323 – 90.

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Smail, Daniel Lord. “Common Violence: Vengeance and Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century Marseille.” Past and Present 151 (1996): 28 – 59. Smith, Jonathan. “The Lie that Blinds: Destabilizing the Text of Landscape.” In Place/Culture/Representation, edited by James Duncan and David Ley, 78 – 94. New York: Routledge, 1993. Smith-Bannister, Scott. Names and Naming Patterns in England, 1538 – 1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Sponsler, Claire. “Counterfeit in Their Array: Cross-Dressing in Robin Hood Performances.” In Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, 24 – 49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. Spurr, John. “A Profane History of Early Modern Oaths.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (2011): 37 – 63. Stretter, Robert. “Engendering Obligation: Sworn Brotherhood and Love Rivalry in Medieval English Romance.” In Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Issue, edited by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, 501 – 24. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Taylor, Andrew. “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript.” Speculum 66, no. 1 (1991): 43 – 73. Taylor, Jamie K. “Neighbors, Witness, and Outlaws in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” In Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, 86 – 114. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Thiébaux, Marcelle. “The Medieval Chase.” Speculum 42, no. 2 (1967): 260 – 74.

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Chapter 9 Outcast Lyrics: Responsive Reading in the Findern Manuscript The Findern manuscript, a fifteenth-century scrapbook collecting excerpts of Chaucer, Gower, and other authors, has long been studied for its love lyrics— in particular those composed by its gentry creators. In the mid-twentieth century, a number of these lyrics were anthologized with thematically similar lyrics from other manuscripts, which encouraged scholarship on those lyrics that fit those thematic lenses. The following essay, however, considers the manuscript’s lyrics that have been overlooked—the outcasts—the lyrics rejected by modern editors because they do not fit comfortably into established categories. I take my initial cue from Thomas Hahn’s collaborative article “Text and Context: Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale” written with historian Richard Kaeuper, which brings a historical context to their reading of “The Friar’s Tale” and reciprocally analyzes the tale for what it reveals about medieval culture. Similarly, I will be interrogating the text and context of these Findern lyrics to consider what they reveal about the social reading practices of the medieval world and, conversely, how a knowledge of those reading practices helps us to tease meaning from these outcasts.¹ My analysis shows that, rather than autonomous works meant to be read as stand-alone lyrics, these outcast lyrics are embedded in their manuscript context and should be read as responses to the other poems copied on nearby pages. Like a chess piece pulled off its game board and held in the hand, one of these lyrics when read alone seems insignificant and uninteresting. In order to understand either a chess piece or an outcast lyric, it must be returned to its position within the game. Its interest and power lies in its relationship to the other pieces: Which does it attack? Which does it support? Because of this intertextual relationship, these lyrics give us a rare glimpse of reading as a leisure activity in the Middle Ages, where reading is both social and interactive. They demonstrate how, for late medieval people, the reading of poetry required both listening and the potential for verbal response as conversation and composition.

 Thomas Hahn and Richard W. Kaeuper demonstrate that “a reading of society helps us understand the [“Friar’s Tale”], and that a reading of the tale helps us understand society” in “Text and Context: Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 67– 101 at 67. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-010

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An Outcast Lyric in the Dock Ye are to blame to sette yowre hert so sore seþyn þat ye wote that hyt rekeurles to encrece yowre payne more and more syn þat ye wote þat sche ys merceles²

On first glance, this little four-line lyric from the late fifteenth-century Findern MS (CUL MS Ff.1.6) appears to be just a bit of doggerel. Even Rossell Hope Robbins, collector and lover of Middle English lyrics, declined to include it in his anthology of secular lyrics.³ Removed from its manuscript context and scrutinized in isolation, the lyric appears to deserve its forlorn and outcast state. Certainly the quatrain’s metrics are not particularly tidy, and its one-syllable exact rhymes are merely conventional courtly love pairings—making the point that the more one loves, the more sore one’s heart, and that loving a woman who is mercyless is a state that is cure-less. In a different poem these rhymes might add a subtle critique or an additional layer of meaning, but in this case, the rhymes simply reinforce the explicit text. The lyric’s brevity also makes it difficult to interpret. We can assume that the sentiment expressed by the chiding narrator, who blames the man rather than the “merceles” woman, is a deliberate inversion of the courtly conventions of love literature. Though this kind of reversal of blame is a less common addition to the corpus of Middle English love lyrics, the humor inherent in the narrator’s vigorous direct address is undercut by the absence of the two main characters.⁴ Even its novelty makes the lyric an unlikely candidate for a modern Middle English lyric anthology, since, in that kind of reading environment, a lyric must be able to sit comfortably on a page with lyrics from a variety of manuscripts as part of a thematic pattern. Conforming

 Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6, fol. 20v. Texts quoted from CUL Ff.1.6 (commonly called the Findern MS) are my own transcriptions.  Robbins does include it, however, with the other un-anthologized lyrics at the end of his PMLA article on the Findern MS, his purpose being to provide a transcription of all the unique Findern lyrics. “The Findern Anthology.” PMLA 69, no. 3 (1954): 610 – 42.  Longer poems (Roman de Rose, La Belle Dame sans Mercy, etc.), which stage love debates, sometimes have female characters that invert the conventions of courtly love by positing, in deliberately uncourtly commonsensical language, that love-longing is the man’s own fault rather than the lady’s. Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women also have characters who are critical of the standard fine amor position, but the character does so in more courtly (and perhaps more earnest) language. Certainly, the sentiment then is not unique to this little lyric and has a long and complex lineage, but its expression in this kind of shorter lyric form is fairly rare outside the Findern MS.

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to none of a modern editor’s criteria, the quatrain above slips through the nets of modern collections. Indeed, late twentieth-century editorial selection practices, although they facilitate modern reading, inadvertently obscure our view of the medieval reading culture—a lively social reading environment that the Findern MS can help make legible.

Medieval Reading Practices of Secular Literature Medieval reading practices differ substantially from our own. Unlike the typical modern practice of solitary silent reading, reading in the Middle Ages was usually a social activity. Joyce Coleman’s extensive study of reading habits in late medieval England and France reveals that public reading, in which texts were read aloud in a social setting, was a common practice—the preference having nothing to do with a lack of literacy or manuscripts, but rather deriving from the activity’s social pleasure.⁵ Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century descriptions of kings’ courts, universities, and the law schools at the Inns of Court typically group public reading with other social leisure pursuits such as singing, piping, harping, playing games, and conversing.⁶ In this historical context, the term “reading” was not restricted to whose eyes were on the page, but rather who was experiencing the text together. For instance, in Troilus and Criseyde, when Pandarus comes upon Criseyde and her maidens, one of the maidens is reading out loud to the group. Criseyde tells him, “This romaunce is of Thebes that we rede.”⁷ In Chaucer’s formulation, all of the maidens are said to be reading, not merely the one holding the book. Rebecca Krug has usefully pointed out that the term “literate practice” can be applied to our scholarly formulations of medieval literacy, as the term allows us to acknowledge moments like this where experiencing, understanding, and even interacting with written texts was not restricted to individuals performing the mechanical

 Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xi–xii.  For example, the statute book of Edward IV, the Liber Niger, describes these activities as common in the court of Edward III. While an account of James I of Scotland’s last night lists roughly the same leisure pursuits, as do statutes for communal life at New College, Oxford, King’s College Cambridge, a description of the Inns of Court by Sir John Fortescue, etc. See Coleman, Public Reading, 130 – 37.  Troilus and Criseyde II, line 103. I am indebted to John Stevens for suggesting this example. See chapter nine of his Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. Cambridge Studies in Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Reprint, 1979), 157.

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skills of reading and writing.⁸ In the age of Chaucer, “reading” usually conveyed the simultaneous notion of “hearing,” (the exceptions being notable, because reading by looking at a page must be specified). Only beginning in the latter half of the fifteenth century does “reading” begin to be commonly associated with “looking” at a page (usually as an act of serious study that may have been conducted silently and alone). Thus, though pragmatic reading of vernacular texts for professional purposes had been part of medieval culture (for instance, the merchant in Chaucer’s “The Shipman’s Tale” reads his accounts privately), the vernacular literature of the time was largely written for public reading.⁹ One of the key components of reading together as a social activity is the assumption that the listeners will formulate responses. D. H. Green, among others, points out that the medieval formula of one person reading to a group, implies an active participation on the part of engaged, sophisticated listeners.¹⁰ This expectation can be seen overtly in medieval love literature, whose authors often embed conversational gambits in their works, knowing that after the voice of the reader falls silent, the group of listeners will continue thinking and talking. For instance, at the first section break in Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” the knight explicitly poses a traditional demande d’amour (love question) for his auditors (the other pilgrims): “Yow loveres axe I now this questioun / Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?”¹¹ This sort of vexed love question—would you rather be imprisoned, but able to see your beloved from your prison window; or be free to come and go, but forbidden from seeing your beloved?—asks the

 Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).  Coleman’s exhaustive study, from which these conclusions are drawn, observes that Chaucer’s texts have forty-four instances of an audience “hearing” being associated with his texts, while only six instances are clearly delineated as the act of reading. Of those, only three refer to private reading. Public Reading, 149 – 59.  D. H. Green’s comments are in service to his larger argument about broadening our notions of what constitutes women’s reading, but seem equally appropriate for talking about medieval attitudes towards group reading practices in general. For his discussion of the use of the dative in the formula of “reading to” someone, see Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17– 20. See also Coleman, Public Reading, xiv; and Stevens, Music & Poetry, 162– 3.  Lines 1347– 53 of “The Knight’s Tale” pose the question: “Yow loveres axe I now this questioun: / Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun? / That oon may seen his lady day by day, / But in prison he moot dwelle alway; / That oother wher hym list may ride or go, / But seen his lady shal he nevere mo. / Now demeth as yow liste, ye that kan.” See Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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reader a deceptively simple question, but one which will encourage a philosophical defense from the auditors who have gathered to enjoy the tale together. Although a widespread practice, public reading as a social activity can be glimpsed only in a few general descriptions. Activities such as reading together and crafting conversations are typically ephemeral, leaving little sign of their prior existence.¹² However, I propose that the Findern MS can be viewed as a forensic artifact of those sorts of convivial sessions. By looking at the Findern lyrics, particularly its outcasts, we can see particular iterations of this interactive social reading practice.

Judging Outcast Lyrics in Context The Findern MS leaves ample evidence of the responsive reading practices of a group of family and friends in late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century Derbyshire. Covered with physical traces of its social uses, the manuscript strenuously resists any notion of solitary silent reading and instead provides evidence of its use as an aid to the social performance of public reading. Forty different people copied various literary texts into it, composed songs, wrote their names as marks of ownership, and jotted lines of musical notation.¹³ Various reading occasions have left wax drips from candles, spills from glasses, food stains, and soiled page-edges on favored selections—a testament to all the hands that have held it. The Derbyshire gentry who created the manuscript seem to have favored love literature such as Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowles, which take around 45 minutes or less to read out loud.¹⁴ A longer poem in the manuscript is copied in its entirety, but has four of its pages lightly crossed out to remove repetitive sections

 Coleman expresses the regret that we may “never recover the full experience of such sessions” (Public Reading, xiv).  Harris’s invaluable article, “The Origins and Make-Up of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8, no. 3 (1983): 299 – 333, includes appendices in which she provides a collation chart, list of scribes, and watermarks. Ralph Hanna III, “The Production of Cambridge University Library MS. Ff.i.6,” Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987): 62– 70, uses Harris’s data (at “Origins and Make-Up,” 327– 33) to suggest that the copying of certain items appears to have been some kind of informal “social game” (64) and argues compellingly for the existence of nine to eleven separate copying units within the manuscript.  My forthcoming monograph on the Findern from University of Wales Press argues that the manuscript’s gentry creators focused their collecting on “game of love” texts, particularly those with querelle des femmes elements.

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and bring it back down within the favored reading length.¹⁵ The Findern is certainly not an Ellesmere MS, created as a beautiful, high prestige item on vellum. Instead, it was originally a utilitarian group of paper booklets, circulated in a lively, messy, communal reading environment.¹⁶ In order to properly judge the little outcast lyric, “Ye are to blame to sette yowre hert so sore,” it must be returned to the reading environment indicated by this manuscript context.¹⁷ Indeed, because this short lyric was never intended to be heard outside that conversational setting, it cannot stand on its own merit without it. The lyric appears as the last selection of texts in a booklet written in different hands. It follows ten pages of male-voiced love complaints—a sequence of poems that begins with Chaucer’s “Complaint Unto Pity,” is followed by two other love complaints, and ends with three lyrics unique to the Findern MS. Read through the lens of this context, when the lyric scolds, “ye are to blame,” it is not addressing an absent “you,” but the very present, very loquacious male voices of the previous ten pages of the manuscript (fols. 15r–19v). The lyric’s meaning then, is not indistinct and opaque, but rather, quite sharp. The lyric would have been read as the final word of a discussion, a tart reply to the complaints that have come before it. It playfully answers the eloquent, painstakingly crafted complaints with a deliberately short, doggerel reply. Read aloud, the lyric’s end-rhymes form an aural repetition of what has been heard before. The use of these conventional rhymes as overstatement mocks Chaucer’s complaint, which rhymes “cure” with “endure” (a pairing that obliquely holds out hope to the lover), and in which the rhymes “more” and “soore” are part of the narrator’s earnest reminder to the allegorized figure of Pite, that he continues to love her despite the pain it causes him.¹⁸ In contrast,

 Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules is the longest of the dit in the manuscript and takes around 45 minutes to read aloud. If one omits reading the four crossed-out pages of it, Roos’s translation of the debate poem, La Belle Dame sans Mercy runs about the same length.  The Findern MS first appears in the 1618 library catalog of Sir Thomas Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe. The booklets, which appear to have circulated separately, may have been bound into a single codex before that time. For further information see David John McKitterick, The Library of Sir Thomas Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe ca. 1539 – 1618, Cambridge University Library Historical Bibliography Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1978).  Scholarship of the late twentieth-century began calling for texts to return to their manuscript contexts—giving rise to editions of whole manuscripts in the early twenty-first century. For a concise overview of the importance of manuscript context see the introduction to Derek Pearsall, ed., Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study. Totowa, NJ: D. S. Brewer, 1983.  Fols. 15r–17r. Lines 81, 82, 95, 96. Line numbers are applicable to both the Findern’s version of “Pity” and The Riverside Chaucer.

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the quatrain asserts the absurdity of being willing to be more sore, and in straightforward language blames the complaining lover who pursues such an unproductive love. The doggerel sound of the lyric would add to its humorous affect for its listeners. The various formal elements which made the little tart reply lyric an unlikely addition as a stand-alone verse in a modern collection of Middle English lyrics are then, the very aspects of it that make it a pointed finish to this particular debate on male love-longing in the Findern MS. The tart reply lyric, like the other outcast lyrics of the Findern, demonstrates a number of aspects of the Derbyshire gentry’s social reading practices. It presupposes that its readers have a shared notion of complaint as a genre, as well as specific knowledge of Chaucer’s complaint, “Pity.” Since Chaucer’s poem is in the same booklet of the Findern, that is certainly a safe assumption in this particular circle of readers. However, fifteenth-century gentry also seem to have been acquainted with Chaucer’s work (and works attributed to him) more generally. A letter received by one of the Pastons, a contemporaneous Norfolk gentry family, demonstrates similar expectations. As part of a protracted marriage negotiation, the mother of the prospective bride writes advice to John Paston III on how he can negotiate the dowery and settlement more successfully. In her letter from February, she appropriates a pair of lines from Chaucer’s The Parliament of Foules to urge John to come try again, since “vppon Fryday is Sent Volentynes Day, and euery brydde chesyth him a make.”¹⁹ She seems to be suggesting that if he demonstrates his persistency and comes to visit (as a good lover should do on St. Valentines), it may be easier to persuade her husband about the marriage settlement at that time.²⁰ Perhaps in an earlier visit by John, this work was part of the family’s reading, but it is equally plausible that she simply assumes that John will know these lines and appreciate their aptness. Following the pattern that the scholarship above notes, the Findern’s Derbyshire gentry creators clearly assume that the act of reading is productive—that it prompts responses. While the impromptu aural conversations following their  The lines Elizabeth Brews quotes are 309 – 10: “For this was on Seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make.” The word “brydde” is commonly used as a euphemism for “woman,” possibly hinting that her daughter will choose him as her mate. Her letter (no. 791) is transcribed in Norman Davis, Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part 2. Reprinted with corrections by the Early English Text Society. EETS s.s. 21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 435 – 36.  Elizabeth Brews’s letters to her prospective son-in-law in 1477 lay out financial negotiations that her husband suggests that John III should propose to his mother. Nonetheless, she also urges him (in no. 791) to be persistent, telling him that it would be a “sympill oke” that could be cut down with the first stroke of the axe. One assumes her husband’s consent is a stouter oak, and she is advising John III to keep negotiating for her daughter. Davis, Paston Letters, 436.

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public reading are not recoverable, the Findern’s lyrics do give us glimpses of the range of positions its readers took. A clever response, like this tart reply, shows that its reader-author can both reply to a previous work, while also bringing something new to the conversation—to be able to stay within the topic but also to vary the position.²¹ In the interest of creating lively responses to the courtly love questions, the compilers and composers of the manuscript seem to have been interested in providing responses that encircle a topic, looking at it from different perspectives. Within this multi-voiced communal conversation, a clever lyric response like the tart reply is perfectly legible to its reader/listeners. These features are even more pronounced in a pair of carols from another of the Findern’s booklets. Both are also outcast from most modern anthologies, the one having been judged uninteresting and the other as inexplicable.²² They appear in a sequence of nine lyrics written by different hands in the blank pages after Richard Roos’s translation of La Belle Dame sans Mercy. ²³ This long love debate originally written by Alain Chartier caused a flurry of poetic responses to the original poem in France, and though it has gone unnoticed in previous scholarship, Roos’s translation provoked the same urge to provide responses from the Findern’s gentry creators.²⁴ At the heart of Chartier’s debate poem stands Lamant, a lovelorn gentleman who tries to persuade Belle Dame, the beautiful lady, that she should return his love, while the lady staunchly refutes his arguments point by point. The wit and variety of their arguments and counterarguments would doubtless have delighted, but also seemed quite familiar to, the gentry who copied Roos’s translation of  Paul Zumthor’s work on troubadour poetics notes how a successful love lyric maintains the tightly constrained vocabulary and corpus of the genre, while also producing something new and unexpected—that the lyric relies on both repetition and mutability. See Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, 1972, trans. Philip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 78 – 191.  Richard L. Greene’s encyclopedic The Early English Carols includes them in its survey of all medieval carols. See carols 442 and 469 in The Early English Carols, 2nd revised and enlarged ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).  Using Harris’s identification of scribal hands, the nine lyrics contain eight different hands, no two hands contributing consecutive items. Harris, “Origins and Make-Up.”  Chartier composed the poem sometime in 1424– 1425. London, British Library MS Harley 372 attributes the Middle English translation of La Belle to Sir Richard Roos. On the strength of this attribution, modern scholars have accepted a Richard Roos (1410 – 1482), knight at Henry VI’s court, as the most likely translator. In French manuscripts, a series of poems by different French authors continues the debate, with Belle Dame being placed on trial as the cause of Lamant’s death, and a countersuit brought by Belle Dame’s family for her wrongful execution. Christine McWebb has collected these late medieval French texts that pertain to the Roman debate in Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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it into a booklet of the Findern MS. This kind of love debate is modeled on the more serious scholarly debates used as a pedagogical tool to demonstrate mastery of a subject.²⁵ The gentry men of Derbyshire would have learned this style of aural debate in grammar school, from tutors, and/or as part of their training in law at the Inns of Court.²⁶ Love debates such as La Belle borrow the form and logic of these debates, transferring them to discussions of demandes d’amours. The debate in La Belle cycles through a series of such love topics and questions that function as prompts for further conversation. No doubt the Findern’s gentry creators saw the lively debate poem as an entertaining text to be read and discussed, but just as French reader/authors had done, they also used it as an opportunity for collecting and authoring additional poems.²⁷ In a clever twist, the local gentry authors of the two carols transfer parts of Belle Dame and Lamant’s arguments into songs to be sung.²⁸ La Belle, the source text for the carols, ends its narrative with Lamant being soundly rejected by Belle Dame, who tells him his protestations of love are merely foul wind (a euphemism for farting). We are told that: This wofull man rose vp in al his payn And so partyd with wepyng countynaunce His woful hert all most it brast atwayn Ful like to dye walkyng forth in a traunce.²⁹

 Alex J. Novikoff’s work on medieval disputation provides a historical survey of the practice of scholastic disputation in Europe, particularly focusing on the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries; see The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 225. For an overview of the different forms of specifically Middle English debate literature, see John W. Conlee’s “Introduction” to Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991).  Less wealthy gentry families often sent their sons to the Inns of Court rather than university, as a less expensive way for them to gain a knowledge of the law and acquire a bit of social polish. Sir John Fortescue claimed in his 1460 treatise on English law that in addition to law, the students at the Inns of Court were taught “all the manners that nobles learn.” For more information see Nicholas Orme, “Education and Recreation,” in Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove, Manchester Medieval Studies (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 63 – 83 at 74– 75.  Julia Boffey notes that short courtly love poems might be viewed as “a social rather than a literary phenomenon.” She also observes that though works in their entirety might have been considered “literature,” elements extracted from them seem to have been treated as “a kind of common fund of material.” Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Bury St. Edmunds: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1985), 33, 86.  Carols were an extremely popular song form in England during the fifteenth century.  Findern MS, fol. 133v. (Stanza 101, lines 797– 800).

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The narrator of the poem tells us that although he does not know what happened after that, he heard that Lamant died of a broken heart within a day or two. The poem ends with an envoy that addresses “trew lovers” and “ladyes,” exhorting the lovers to stay away from such troubles and asking ladies not to be cruel to their suitors. One of the Findern’s gentry authors seems to have heard the implicit open ending in those final stanzas and wrote carol lyrics that give Lamant’s point of view, taking up the narrative from the point of his rejection. This is almost certainly a contrafacta (new words set to an existing tune), perhaps using both the original burden as well as the tune of an older carol.³⁰ The opening verses of the carol quickly reprise Lamant’s love, his argument with Belle Dame, and his rejection. In the first of a series of “borrowings” from the original, the Findern’s lyricist even echoes the original poem’s wording of “walkyng forth.” Who so lyst to loue god send hym right good spede Sometyme y loued as ye may see A goodlyer ther myght none be Here Womanhede in all degre ffull well she quytt my mede Unto the tyme vpon a day To sone ther fill a gret affray She badde me walke forth on my way On me she gaff none hede

The carol likewise ends by picking up the language of “trew lovers” and “ladyes” from the original envoy in La Belle: And for trew lovers shall y pray That ther ladyes fro day to day may them rewarde so that they may With ioy there lyves lede.

In addition to borrowing key terms and tropes from La Belle, the carol also borrows a number of its rhymes. The form for carols requires the ending line of each

 “Whoso” is a conventional starting formula for lyrics in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A well-known example is Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.” The Digital Index of Middle English Verse (a catalog of lyrics from 1200 to ca. 1550) lists over eighty lyrics that begin with this formula. The gentry author of this particular contrafacta has either borrowed an old chestnut for the beginning of the burden, or more likely, has retained the original tune’s burden line.

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stanza to rhyme with the burden (A, BBBA, CCCA, etc.). Since this carol’s burden is “Who so lyst to loue god send hym right good spede,” the author needs nine words that rhyme with “spede.” Three of these needed rhymes seem to have been appropriated from a single stanza of La Belle. “Mede, hede, drede, womanhede” appear together at the top of folio 122r of the Findern MS.³¹ This particular folio may have caught the eye of the browsing gentry poet, as they were scanning for “_ede” rhymes, because it is the first folio on which the scribe begins labeling “Lamant” and “La Dame” next to their speeches, making it visually different from the previous folios.³² The back side of that same folio appears to have provided more rhymes, “payne” and “disdeyn,” to fill out the carol’s verse rhymes. And the envoy stanzas, which the carol echoes to “ladyes” and “trew lovers,” also provides another rhyme pair, “case” and “grace.” Thus this carol’s gentry author constructs a response by borrowing a tune (and likely the burden as well) from a known song, appropriating Lamant as the carol’s narrative voice, and re-using several of La Belle’s rhymes to fill out the carol song form. However, rather than being merely derivative, the carol’s author strives to add to the listener’s enjoyment by creating a song that focuses on Lamant’s perspective in a more sympathetic light. While the lover in La Belle seems precipitous and overwrought in his pursuit of the beautiful woman at a social gathering, the male voice of the carol is much more reasonable: he has had a prior relationship with the woman, has loved her for “sometyme,” and has had a level of friendship with her. She has rebuffed him without explanation, and he feels “grete disdayne” (great indignation) towards her. Nonetheless, he still loves her and hopes to be able to make his “case,” trusting that she will take him back into her “grace” again. So what might appear to be a somewhat humdrum male love complaint, ends up being a rather clever response to Roos’s La Belle, borrowing tropes and rhymes to make the relationship between the two apparent, but also reimagining the narrative situation to provide a bit of backstory for Lamant’s love of Belle Dame. Indeed, the poetic voice in the carol is less like the idealized courtly lover prepared to die of a broken heart, which we find in La Belle, and much more like an English gentleman such as John Paston III, who knows his own worth and is prepared to negotiate. Having created a response to La Belle, the author of this male-voiced carol also issues an explicit invitation for others to respond. Towards the end of the carol, the narrative voice of Lamant asks his listeners, “Allas what is youre  Roos’s translation of La Belle is written in seven-line rhyme royal stanzas (ABABBCC).  Fol. 122r is also one of the four pages that had been lightly crossed out, which might mean those stanzas (with largely redundant content) might not have been read aloud as often in the gentry author’s reading circle.

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rede / Shall y leue of and let hure go?” Although, Lamant provides an answer to his own question—“Nay never the rathere will y do so … Hure will y loue and drede”—his query to the reader still serves as a conversational gambit, an opening for another person in the group of listeners to step in and show their wit and ability by responding. A few pages later in the Findern manuscript, there is a second carol that provides such a response, but this one is written in the pragmatic voice of the beautiful lady from La Belle. ³³ This second carol formally connects itself to the debate in La Belle through a series of borrowings from the longer text, just as the first carol does, but situates itself primarily as a direct response to the previous carol. This female-voiced carol signals clearly that it is a reply to the earlier male-voiced carol by repeating its first half line “Sometyme y loued” in its own first line: “Sometyme Y louid, so do Y yut.” To prevent confusion, in the following discussion, I am simply calling them the male-voiced carol and the female-voiced carol. While the earlier male-voiced carol gives a sympathetic view of Lamant, taking up the narration from the point where he must “walke forth” on his way after their great “affray,” this second carol responds in the pragmatic voice of Belle Dame, changing the backstory, yet again—this time to vindicate the lady. Taking up the male-voiced carol’s invented history that the two had been in a relationship prior to the debate, the lady in the female-voiced carol claims that she had been a “stedfast” lover, who offered her “service … in humble wyse.” In this version of events, he is the cause of the rift. She states that he was a “wyckid creature,” and because of this, “grete payne for nought Y dude endur.” The details of their breakup are given in the somewhat ambiguous lines, “But now Y thancke [God] of hys sond / I am ascapid from his band,” which seems to indicate that he is the one who broke off their relationship by message or letter in the past. In the present moment, she is thankful for it, as it allowed her to escape from his shackle. Having now escaped from this pernicious lover, she is a much happier woman. The rest of the lyric details her current happy state in a series of humorous inversions of courtly love. Rather than showing the typical symptoms of sorrow after losing a lover, such as being unable to eat, sleep, or bear to be in company, the lady tells us: Now may Y ete drynke and play Walke up and doune fro day to day And herkyn what this louers say And laugh at there maner

 “Sometyme Y louid, so do Y yut” (fol. 139v.) is item no. 39 in the Findern MS.

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When Y shal slepe Y have good rest Somtyme Y had not altherbest But ar that Y cam to this fest Y bought hit al to dere.

The lady’s reference to “this fest” uses the same word used to describe the social gathering at the beginning of La Belle. So although Lamant in the male-voiced carol has left the feast where their debate took place, it appears that the lady (as she is portrayed in this female-voiced carol) has remained to explain her stance to listeners. In the penultimate verse she tells us “that affray” is long ago now—using the same word the male-voiced carol used to describe their falling out.³⁴ Although she does not directly refer to the entreaty in the male-voiced carol, where the man wishes to regain her love, she does give him her answer: “sith Y am ascapid so / I thencke to hold me here.” The envoy of the female-voiced carol alludes to the male-voiced carol’s envoy, which of course borrows La Belle’s address to “trew lovers” and “ladyes.” Instead of grouping her well-wishing by gender though, the lady in the femalevoiced carol groups all true lovers together: But all the true that suffren smert³⁵ I wold thay sped lyke yure desert That thay myght synge with mery hert This song with [us in] fere. ³⁶

This ending stanza borrows the word “sped” from the burden of the male-voiced carol “who so lyst to loue god send hym right good spede.” But where the malevoiced carol prays for male lovers to be granted success, the female-voiced carol wishes that all suffering true lovers might “sped lyke yure desert”—a somewhat ambiguous line that seems to be wishing the lovers success at gaining (sped) a reward (desert) like the wicked creature from whom she has escaped.³⁷ The logic

 The female-voiced carol repeats several words from the male-voiced carol: ferth, affray, true, and sped, which the male-voiced carol has taken from La Belle.  Greene transcribes “crue” for “true” in this line. As the scribe’s “t” and “c” forms are identical in spots, “crue” is a reasonable transcription of the letter. However, given the carol’s links to the other carol and La Belle, “true” is the more plausible.  The last few words of this line are difficult to read. I have followed Greene’s transcription, as “fere” is the most plausible interpretation.  The poem has been talking about the wyckid creature in the third person up to this point. However, it is not unusual in love poetry for the speaker to change to a direct address in the envoy. The best reading of the line, then, takes “yure” to be a reference to the man.

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of this line seems to be that she hopes that true-hearted suffering lovers will be rejected/released by their lovers just as she is now rejecting him (and just as he once rejected her). Once they are free, they too will be happy. This reasoning— that losing one’s lover leads to peace and joy—seems to be a continuation of the tongue-in-cheek inversion of courtly love that the female voice has interjected throughout the poem. The cheerful burden for this female-voiced carol, “Vp son and mery wether Somer draweth nere,” continues turning love conventions upside down. The line is wildly incongruous with the carol’s first stanza, which promises that her tale of love will be “a pitous thyng to hire”—setting up the listeners to expect a love complaint.³⁸ However, its joyous celebration of fine warm weather becomes more humorously appropriate with each of its repetition at the head of subsequent stanzas. In love lyrics it is a commonplace for the weather to metaphorically reflect the internal state of the “I” voice. But rather than a cold rainy day, as one might expect in a poem about the loss of love, the female voice of this carol sings out her happiness in being free, symbolized by the rising sun and start of summer. Though this female-voiced carol is primarily a response to the male-voiced carol, it nonetheless also links itself to the source text of La Belle. Unlike the male-voiced carol, whose author seems to have opportunistically borrowed rhymes from the front and back of a single folio in the Findern, the female-voiced carol appears to borrow language more thematically from memorable passages in La Belle. The first stanzas of the carol, in which the lady describes her constancy, borrows language from a section of La Belle where Lamant swears his love constancy, while a later stanza of the carol borrows language from a famous speech of Belle Dame’s that expresses her desire to maintain freedom from love. The first two stanzas of the female-voiced carol describe the lady’s love as “stedfast wyse and not to flit,” telling us that she offered “service,” and to “obbey in humble wyse.”³⁹ Both the sense and the language of those lines seem to be modeled on the beginning of stanza 81 in La Belle (quoted below), in which Lamant is expressing his love constancy.

 The text of carol burdens is often retained when their tunes are repurposed with new lyrics. So it is not uncommon for a carol’s lyric to have only a passing connection to its verses. In the case of the female-voiced carol though, the incongruity appears to be a very deliberate choice.  In lyric no. 35 (part of the La Belle booklet, but not one of the lyrics I read closely here), the final stanza picks up this rhyme from La Belle exactly: stable wyse and seruyce. As it is written into the manuscript earlier than the female-voiced carol (no. 39), perhaps this poem suggested this stanza of La Belle to the carol poet.

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When won hath sett his hert in stable wisse In siche a place which is boeth gude and trewe he schuld not flytte bot do forth his seruyse Alway with-outen chaunge of any newe.⁴⁰

However, in the later stanzas of the female-voiced carol, which describe the pain her lover causes her and her ultimate happiness at being fre, the carol poet borrows rhymes and concept words from one of the most famous of Belle Dame’s speeches in stanza 40: Of loue I seke noþer plesaunce nore ease Nor Ryght gret loue nor ryght gret affyaunce though ye be seke hit dothe me no thyng please Also I take none hede to your plesaunce Chese who-so wyle thair hertys to a-vaunce ffre am I now and fre wyll I endure To be Rulyd by mannys gouernaunce ffor erthly gode nay that I you ensure⁴¹

The above rhyme pair “endure/ensure” is repeated in the female-voiced carol’s third stanza, as the lady describes enduring great pain. An echo of the word “fre” follows in the fourth stanza as she protests that she is now “fre to pas by se and land.” More significant than these borrowed words, though, is the carol’s adoption of the sentiment that Belle Dame’s speech expresses—that one does not find ease in love, and a woman ruled by reason (like Belle Dame) would prefer to be free. The carol goes so far as to describe the cessation of a love relationship as an escape “from his band” (shackle). The wording and sentiment of that line perhaps echo a line in stanza 31 of La Belle (from which the male-voiced carol pulls the three rhymes to match its burden): “Loue hathe me bounde withoute wage or mede.”⁴² This language of the cost of love and its rewards is continued throughout La Belle and is echoed in the female-voiced carol, which says that she “bought hit al to dere.” Read in the Findern, the two carols are obviously linked to La Belle and to each other, the female-voiced poem clearly being a response to the malevoiced.⁴³ However, when the two are pulled out and read in isolation from

 Stanza 81, lines 637– 40. In the Findern MS, these appear on fol. 130r.  La Belle, stanza 40. In the Findern MS, the stanza is on fol. 123v.  La Belle, stanza 31, line 243. In the Findern MS, the stanza is on fol. 122r.  I am often asked for other examples of this kind of playful exchange between English poets within a manuscript, but their survival is rare. As Richard Beadle and A. E. B. Owen point out in their introduction to the facsimile, the Findern is “a rare survivor of a variety of manuscript

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their manuscript context, the male-voiced carol looks entirely (and uninterestingly) conventional, while the female-voiced carol seems a bit too unconventional. Regrettably, when its connections to La Belle and the male-voiced carol are not recognized, modern scholars find the female-voiced carol to be incomprehensible. The two carols are included in Richard L. Greene’s encyclopedia of all medieval carols, but he notes that the female-voiced carol’s “allusive and generalizing style … keeps it from giving a clear picture of the situation which it treats.” He finds even the gender of the “I” voice to be in question.⁴⁴ In his second edition Greene repeats a convoluted argument made by Francis Lee Utley, which reads the “I” voice as male, and explains the male pronouns in the carol as references to Malebouche (wicked tongue). Greene is unconvinced by this argument, and presents further hypotheses for interpreting the poem, but is unwilling to commit to the gender of the narrative voice. This interpretive struggle, I would argue, can be cleared up by merely reading the female-voiced carol within its manuscript context.⁴⁵ Utley and Greene’s erudite discussion demonstrate how one can go astray with a knowledge of the larger literary tradition, if the particular moment of public reading is ignored.

doubtless once owned by many groups of people of social background similar to that of the Finderns.” Julia Boffey also notes about this species of manuscript that “volumes of English courtly love lyrics on their own were not common in private libraries unless they served practical purposes—usually as song books . . . they were probably most often copied into thin, unbound booklets (even single leaves) which quickly disintegrated, and must have formed a perishable, non-bequeathable part of any library.” She hypothesizes that the Findern MS’s survival may rely on the “prosaic fact that country families, long resident in one place, would be much more likely to preserve” such a collection. Several French manuscripts of the time period, such as Charles de Orlean’s, do contain examples of poetic responses. However, the Devonshire manuscript (BL MS Add 17492) compiled by courtiers in Henry VIII’s court, is one of the few other English manuscripts of this type. A series of poems by Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard in the Devonshire address each other back and forth, during his imprisonment for contracting a betrothal without the king’s permission. See Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics, 124, 34; Richard Beadle and A. E. B. Owen, eds., The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6 (London: The Scholars Press, 1977), xiv; and Elizabeth Heale, The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry: Lady Margaret Douglas and Others (Toronto: Iter Inc. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012).  In Greene’s 1935 first edition, he hypothesizes that the voice in the carol is female (Early English Carols, 316). However, in his 1977 second edition, he notes it might be male (Early English Carols, 2nd revised ed., 502).  See Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in the English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), 70, no. 270; Greene, Early English Carols, 2nd revised ed., 288 (carol 469), 502 (note on 469).

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The Outcast Lyrics as Witnesses Understanding that medieval reading practices of vernacular texts included an expectation of responses from those gathered to read together allows us to “hear” the two voices of the carols as they continue Belle Dame and Lamant’s debate. As I have demonstrated above, a knowledge of this historical responsive reading practice makes the two lyrics imminently more interesting and legible. Conversely, my close examination of the carols allows them to speak as witnesses to the Derbyshire gentry’s ephemeral occasions of social reading—bolstering our evidence for social reading of vernacular texts. As with the tart reply lyric this article began with, the outcast carols assume their readers are deeply conversant with the source text (such as Chaucer’s Pity or Roos’s La Belle) and of the genre conventions of love debate and complaint. For instance, the male-voiced carol carefully borrows key terms and phrases from the original that allow us to identify the song as a love complaint from Lamant’s perspective. Similarly, the female-voiced carol relies on the audience’s ear to hear its echoes of Belle Dame’s wish to be “fre.” The first carol provides an homage to male love complaint (though perhaps in more palatable form), while the second carol’s inversions rely on the reader to recognize that those genres are being turned upside down. One of the notable features of this game of response in the Findern is that these gentry creators deliberately provide a multiplicity of voices—different genders and different registers.⁴⁶ One can only assume that in their social occasions, they also preferred to hear a range of voices. Although beyond the scope of this article, it is notable that the lyrics authored and/or selected for inclusion in the booklets are predominately written with gender-neutral pronouns, and of those whose narrative voice is a definite gender, an equal number are female.⁴⁷

 Although beyond the scope of this article, these pragmatic “un-courtly” female voices are probably humorous at the expense of women, as they are a common feature in the querelles des femmes (nature of women debate).  Of the total twenty-one lyrics in the Findern MS, five are female-voiced, five are male-voiced, and sixteen are neutral-voiced. Of the unique lyrics thought to be authored by the Findern’s gentry creators, three are male, five are female, and fifteen are neutral-voiced. This prevalence of female voices helped spark a scholarly debate in the late twentieth-century, in which scholars argued the potential existence of female scribes and authors. The claim positing female scribes, however, was later disproven by an analysis of the codicology of the manuscript. The claim that women may have written some of the lyrics remains unprovable with our current knowledge of the hands in the manuscript. Of course, it is as possible that women may have composed lyrics in the Findern as in any other manuscript with anonymous lyrics. The historiography of this de-

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The Findern MS also allows us to see another kind of variety in voicing—the shift from voices speaking to voices singing. Many of the short medieval lyrics collected in vernacular manuscripts were actually song lyrics. Most, if not all, of the Findern lyrics began life as songs. In the case of the carols, we have a rare piece of evidence for singing—a musical incipit has been sketched below the female-voiced carol. The three notes were likely a reminder of the tune to which this group of words has been set. Because both the male and femalevoiced carols share the same metrical form, the two carols could possibly have been sung to the same tune.⁴⁸ If the gathered reader/listeners appreciated the first carol’s continuation and rehabilitation of Lamant’s story, then they must have appreciated the wit of the second carol’s author—singing back a stinging reply from Belle Dame to the same tune. Singing is an inherently social activity, though it is seldom linked in our modern minds with the act of reading. However, as discussed above, in the medieval mind reading, conversing, singing, and playing instruments were linked together. The singer of each carol is no less a reader than the person(s) who read out La Belle—the experience for the gathered friends and family would be the same. Finally, viewing the carols within their manuscript context points out the closely intertwined relationships between the written manuscript, reading, memory, and poetic production—relationships that appear to shift from author to author and lyric to lyric. The author of the male-voiced carol physically looked at the folios from which he borrows, copying even the spelling of the borrowed words.⁴⁹ Conversely, the differing spellings used by the author of the femalevoiced carol argues that the words are being pulled from a memory of hearing the source text, rather than the sight of the folio. The outcast lyrics of the Findern MS owe their exclusion from modern anthologies to their embeddedness within their manuscript and cultural contexts. Like chess pieces, they can really only be understood and appreciated when they are in play on the chessboard, negotiating positions with the other pieces. Acknowledging that embeddedness and returning the lyrics to their context allows

bate can be found in my article Cynthia A. Rogers, “The Findern Manuscript (CUL Ff.i.6),” Oxford Bibliographies (Online) (2017).  As noted earlier, the metrical form of the male-voiced carol is a standard one, though many examples survive of carols that deviate from it. Burdens vary more widely, so one might expect the burdens of these two carols to deviate from each other, however, they do not, both having six stresses per line.  Spelling consistency within a single scribe’s copying stint is unusual in the Findern and is an even greater rarity between two of its amateur scribes.

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us to hear an echo of the lively social environment for reading in the late Middle Ages.

Bibliography Beadle, Richard and A. E. B. Owen, eds. The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6. London: The Scholars Press, 1977. Benson, Larry D. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Boffey, Julia. Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages. Bury St. Edmunds: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1985. Cambridge University Library MS CUL Ff.1.6; Findern. Coleman, Joyce. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Conlee, John W. Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991. Davis, Norman. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Part 2. Reprinted with corrections by the Early English Text Society. EETS s.s. 21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Green, D. H. Women Readers in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Greene, Richard Leighton. The Early English Carols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1935. Greene, Richard Leighten. The Early English Carols. 2nd revised and enlarged ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Hahn, Thomas and Richard W. Kaeuper. “Text and Context: Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 67 – 101. Hanna, Ralph, III. “The Production of Cambridge University Library MS. Ff.i.6.” Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987): 62 – 70. Harris, Kate. “The Origins and Make-Up of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.6.” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8, no. 3 (1983): 299 – 333. Heale, Elizabeth, ed. The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry: Lady Margaret Douglas and Others. Toronto: Iter Inc. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012. Krug, Rebecca. Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. McKitterick, David John. The Library of Sir Thomas Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe ca. 1539 – 1618. Cambridge University Library Historical Bibliography Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1978. McWebb, Christine. Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology. New York: Routledge, 2007. Novikoff, Alex J. The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Orme, Nicholas. “Education and Recreation.” In Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England, edited by Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove, 63 – 83. Manchester Medieval Studies. New York: Manchester University Press, 2005.

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Pearsall, Derek, ed. Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study. Totowa, NJ: D. S. Brewer, 1983. Robbins, Rossell Hope. “The Findern Anthology.” PMLA 69, no. 3 (1954): 610 – 42. Rogers, Cynthia A. “The Findern Manuscript (CUL Ff.i.6).” Oxford Bibliographies (Online), 2017. Stevens, John. Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. Cambridge Studies in Music. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Reprint, 1979. Utley, Francis Lee. The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in the English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568. New York: Octagon Books, 1970. Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics. 1972. Translated by Philip Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Part II: Networks of Connection

Kara L. McShane

Chapter 10 Decoding the Dead: Funerary Inscriptions in St. Erkenwald and The Book of John Mandeville For medieval Christians, being remembered after one’s death had immediate and pressing implications for one’s posthumous fate. While English Christians employed a range of strategies to ensure their commemoration, including bequests to religious houses and requests for prayers, one central mechanism was the tomb.¹ Tombs were, as Paul Binski notes, designed with permanence and accessibility in mind, but “their character shared much with medieval beliefs about the relationship between the living and the dead, in being premised upon a transactional system of mutual obligation between them.”² Ensuring one’s salvation, then, necessitated temporal crossing, the ability to connect the dead to the living through perpetual recreation. These concerns about commemoration, I will argue, animate two instances in late medieval literature where the deceased seem not to be effectively commemorated: the just judge in St. Erkenwald and Hermogenes, or Hermes Trismegistus, in The Book of John Mandeville (hereafter TBJM). These two figures are often read as virtuous heathens meant to explore larger social concerns about the fate of those who did not have access to baptism or Christian belief. As Frank Grady notes, these figures abound in Middle English works, where they are consistently reinvested and adjusted for a work’s distinct ends; these figures are a source of both interest and concern for late medieval Christians, who often attribute protoChristian sentiments to them.³ Here, I am particularly interested in what these

 For the most comprehensive recent discussion of late medieval death culture, see Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380 – 1540 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Appleford compellingly argues that death culture linked household concerns, personal morality and ethics, and the civic body; indeed, the ideal of the good death was a goal for Christians both secular and religious, and attempts to achieve it in turn “materially and symbolically shaped the cityscape” (10).  Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 71.  Famous examples include Trajan in Piers Plowman, but also figures such as the Brahmins and Gymnosophists encountered by Alexander the Great during his travels in India, an account present in TBJM. For the most comprehensive critical discussion of these figures, see Frank Grady, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-011

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two episodes suggest about writing and linguistic change, particularly as they intersect with fantasies of Christian universality, concerns I see as linked given Christian preoccupations with commemoration. Thus, I follow George Whatley and Christine Chism, who suggest that in Erkenwald, the fate of the judge is not the point, but rather, the poem’s miracle is for the benefit of the gathered Christian assembly.⁴ The same is true, I suggest, of the Hermogenes episode in TBJM: in both works, the miraculous inscriptions and the fate of those they commemorate are designed for an English Christian readership. I argue that these two figures serve to reinforce Christian universality and to displace Christian anxieties about commemoration, particularly focused on the power and the limitations of writing to commemorate effectively. Reading the two together reveals variation in how Middle English works addressed anxieties about writing as an unstable commemorative tool. Both these works raise the specter of failed cultural memory and failed commemoration, shifting anxieties about the success of such endeavors to non-Christian figures.⁵ Thus, in both TBJM and Erkenwald, writing ensures Christian continuity even as the individual’s identity is lost, displaced, deemphasized through the very writing meant to memorialize them.

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). On the reinvention of these figures, see p. 12. Grady does not identify the Hermes Trismegistus episode as a virtuous heathen narrative, though he gives considerable attention to The Book of John Mandeville; most attention to the virtuous heathen in TBJM goes to the Brahmins and Gymnosophists mentioned above. However, given its parallels with the later virtuous heathen episode and the fact that this inscription gives the dead figure voice, I argue that the Hermes Trismegistus episode can be productively considered as such a narrative.  Whatley suggests that the bishop Erkenwald’s actions “are directed toward the spiritual welfare of his parishioners whom the corpse has so disturbed” (“Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context,” Speculum 61, no. 2 [1986]: 330 – 63 at 340). Christine Chism holds much the same view: “the bishop’s interrogation reveals more about the bishop than it does about the corpse,” who remains nameless even after his conditional baptism (see Chism, Alliterative Revivals [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 64).  I am not the first to notice similarities between these two moments: Gordon Whatley suggests that the episode in The Book of John Mandeville might well be a source for the shorter Erkenwald, though he notes that versions of this story were well-attested, present in works such as Roger Bacon’s Metaphysica and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica. See Whatley, “Heathens and Saints,” 346 – 48. Whatley links this figure to an unidentified pagan allegedly found under the walls of Thrace, but also notes that John Ridewall and William Wheatley describe this monument as the tomb of Plato (“Heathens and Saints,” 347). Here, my goal is less to trace sources and analogues and more to examine how each work deploys tomb writing and reinscribes Christocentric perspectives. I will refer to the buried figure as Hermogenes throughout, following the edition of the Defective version of TBJM I use here.

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In the episode in TBJM, an emperor seeks to have his father buried on a particular site inside the church of “Seint Sophie”—that is, Hagia Sophia. While the grave is being dug, the diggers discover a long-deceased man, identified in some variants as “Hermogenes the philosopher” or Hermes Trismegistus and not identified by name at all in others. The diggers find an inscription inside the tomb with the figure that predicts the birth of Christ and professes belief in him— even though the man was buried, according to Mandeville, some two thousand years before Christ’s birth. St. Erkenwald narrates the discovery of a tomb with a mysterious inscription found beneath the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral. When the tomb is opened, Londoners marvel at the well-dressed, perfectly preserved corpse, and they are unable to identify the man in the tomb until the titular saint bids the corpse to tell the assembly his story. At Erkenwald’s bidding, the corpse sits up and describes his life as a virtuous, pre-Christian judge in the city of New Troy. Bishop Erkenwald is moved by the judge’s story, especially his description of the harrowing of hell, and claims that he would baptize the judge if he could. As Erkenwald speaks, his tears fall onto the judge, and they function as a miraculous, posthumous baptism that grants the judge salvation and access to heaven. The judge praises both God and Erkenwald before his body disintegrates into silent ashes. The key to Hermogenes’s recognition is his multilingual presentation of faith in the languages of authority, whereas in Erkenwald, the inscription on the judge’s tomb, rather than clarifying his identity, fails to locate him or his beliefs. The point of the comparison here, then, is the contrast. TBJM creates a lineage of authoritative languages, emphasizing change, even as it privileges the traditional languages of power and authority of its day. Erkenwald instead emphasizes anxiety about language change that can obscure the past and, in the process, interrupt both technologies of commemoration and fictive narratives of Christian continuity. Yet both works address writing’s instability, and in the process the two texts reproduce other forms of Christian symbolism that reinforce fantasies of Christian universality.

Language, Authority, and Power In both TBJM and Erkenwald, tomb-writing is the vehicle that makes the deceased known. This speaking from beyond the grave, I suggest, literalizes the commemorative function of funerary monuments. In both cases, the inscriptions that should clarify who these figures are and identify them for their viewers instead serve to obscure or displace the individuals they commemorate. Hermoge-

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nes’s name is not the point of his burial inscription; indeed, his name is entirely absent from the inscription, and the miraculous trilingual prophesy buried with him instead makes Jesus the center of this episode. The inscription in Erkenwald has long been of interest to critics because of its inscrutability, and its unreadability suggests a breakdown in written systems. Thus, reading these two together reveals a consciousness of linguistic change as well as anxiety about the media and modes of memorialization. In TBJM, the inscription is a prophesy, not an account of Hermogenes’s life— it does not describe the past but asserts things to come. The sepulchral inscription in TBJM appears in the description of Constantinople that follows Sir John’s retelling of the Crucifixion. The account is striking for several key consistencies across versions of TBJM, particularly the languages in which the inscription is recorded: And withinne the cherche of Seynt Sophie a emperour wolde have i-graven his fader when he was deed. And they makid the grave and fond a body in the erthe, and theruppon lay a greet plate of fyn goold. And theruppon was i-writen in Ebru, Gru, and Latyn thus: Jhesu Cristus nascetur de Virgine Maria et ego credo in eum. That is to say: “Jhesu Crist shal be bore of the Virgyn Mari and I belyve on Hym.” And the date of this, when hit was leyd in the erthe, was 2000 yer byfore that Our Lord was y-bore. And yit is that plate in the tresorie of that cherche. And men seyn that hit was the body of Hermogenes the wise man.⁶

This trilingual inscription does not identify Hermogenes himself, recording only his prophesy on a “greet plate of fyn goold”: “Jhesu Cristus nascetur de Virgine Maria et ego credo in eum.” Thus, his individual identity is absorbed by his proto-Christian status, his name replaced by his belief. Indeed, while in the Defective, Cotton, and Egerton versions, the man is named “Hermogenes the wise man,” he is not identified by name at all in the Bodley account.⁷ Even in versions

 Tamara Kohanski and C. David Benson, eds., The Book of John Mandeville, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 27 at lines 227– 34. I cite from this edition throughout. The so-called Defective version, a Middle English version of the Book that does not include a large section on Egypt present in other Middle English versions, has the largest number of manuscripts extant. This suggests, as Kohanski and Benson argue, that the Defective version was most likely the best known in England; however, I will reference accounts from the Bodley, Insular, Cotton, and Egerton versions as relevant. On the name “Defective” and the problems with it, see recently Tom White, “National Philology, Imperial Hierarchies, and the ‘Defective’ Book of Sir John Mandeville,” The Review of English Studies (2019): 1– 22, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz140.  The Insular version identifies him as Hermes Trismegistus. See Iain MacLeod Higgins, ed. and trans., The Book of John Mandeville: With Related Texts (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 14n26.

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of TBJM that name Hermogenes, he appears only in this moment, so that the only textual evidence of his wisdom is the prophetic inscription with which he is buried.⁸ At the same time, the present tense statement makes his belief ongoing, allowing Hermogenes to speak perpetually from the dead, as D. Vance Smith suggests that actual late medieval tomb inscriptions permitted those they commemorated to do.⁹ Also striking here is the similarity across versions of the Book: the accounts of Hermogenes are nearly identical, down to the order in which the languages are presented. This emphasis on language, consistent across versions of the text, is notable in a work where change and shift across versions is often the norm.¹⁰ I argue that this suggests a religious translatio imperii consistent with TBJM more generally as English versions of the work consistently translate Latin passages, while Insular French versions do not. The order of languages here mirrors the order of languages in which biblical translation occurred, with the notable addition of English in English-language versions of TBJM. ¹¹ The presence of Latin is here is undoubtedly driven by the imagined audience of the Book and its use of Latin more broadly, yet nonetheless I argue that the moment effectively privileges the language of Western Christian power. The systematic translation of Latin verses undoubtedly explains part of these variants’ adjustments for their imagined audience, yet this shift nonetheless dramatically alters the reader’s experience of the text. The line of languages consistently invokes supersession, suggesting a movement through time from the Hebrew past to the English now. In its consistent translation, TBJM centers English as essential to making the Christian past accessible.¹²  Burial within a church was, of course, not unusual by the fourteenth-century time of TBJM’s writing; however, the discovery of this body seems to come as a surprise, as the body is “fond” rather than knowingly unburied. The location of the tomb beneath Hagia Sophia may suggest that he predates the church even as The Book locates Hermogenes inside a Christian space. That is, Hermogenes’s prophetic ability is linguistic but also geographical, in that he is buried in an appropriate place that facilitates his discovery.  D. Vance Smith, “Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable,” New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 59 – 85 at 63 – 64.  For a description of this variation, see Higgins’s notion of multi-text in Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 17– 19.  To be sure, Latin is not unusual in the travels; out of the forty-four instances of Latin I have counted in the Defective version, nearly all of them are biblical, with a few that are part of the Mass or quotations from church fathers.  This is, of course, not an ideologically neutral claim, particularly in this historical moment: see, for example, Anne Hudson’s discussion of the biblical translation debates at Oxford (1401) in Lollards and Their Books (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 67– 84. Indeed, assertions like this come to have a place in philological study that persists to the present day: see Shyama Ra-

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The consistency of the languages mentioned across versions, I suggest, is a crucial part of reading this inscription as miraculous authentication. Of note in the Defective version’s attention to language is that it presents the inscription only in Latin, then presents its translation. That is, though the inscription itself is trilingual, only the Latin version is preserved in the text, thus privileging the Western Christian holy language.¹³ The emphasis on these languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—presents Hermogenes’s sepulchral inscription in the languages of authority from both his day and the Mandeville-narrator’s own.¹⁴ Thus, the languages suggest both linguistic consistency and universal (or universalizing) truth: the miraculous fiction here is the idea that over the span of two thousand years, the languages of power are consistent and unchanging, and indeed, that consistency continues into Mandeville’s own time.¹⁵ jendran, “Undoing ‘the Vernacular’: Dismantling Structures of Raciolinguistic Supremacy,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9 – 10 (2019): e12544. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12544.  Other moments in TBJM do present non-Latin, notably single words of Arabic, though Latin is by far the most prevalent non-English language in English-language versions of TBJM. Compare, for example, the garbled Greek at the site where Christ was crucified at line 634.  Hebrew occupies a somewhat complicated position here; its presence alongside Greek and Latin seems to draw on common constructions in medieval Latin Christianity of the “pre-Christian Jew” as virtuous predecessor and the “post-Christian Jew” as stubborn and/or dangerous. Indeed, despite the presence of Hebrew, the moment locates foreknowledge of Christianity outside Judaism: as Steven Kruger suggests, “Although Mandeville’s mention of Hebrew recalls Judaism’s role in the Christian story, priority in recognizing the truth of that story here goes to the wise Greek philosopher” (“Times of Conversion,” Philological Quarterly 92, no. 1 [2013]: 19 – 39 at 27).  This linguistic situation is nearly identical across versions of TBJM. The description of Hermogenes’s tomb is nearly identical in the Egerton and Cotton versions. In the Bodley and Insular traditions, the languages are identified as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, though the inscription is not presented in Latin but either in English or French, respectively. In the Latin tradition, of course, the inscription appears in Latin but not translation, and the languages are likewise identified. Only the Metrical does not identify languages in which the inscription appears. In his edition, Higgins notes that it is fairly unusual for the inscription to only appear in French in the text, particularly since multiple languages are identified (Book of John Mandeville, 13n25). This is also changed in the later English Defective version where, as the quotation indicates, the Latin inscription is included. I would suggest that this addition in the English version enhances the moment’s authority. The vast majority of Latin passages in this version are biblical: aligning Hermes with scripture emphasizes his pre-Christian Christianity because this inscription’s presentation thus parallels much of the signage present elsewhere in TBJM. See M. C. Seymour, ed., The Egerton Version of Mandeville’s Travels, EETS o.s. 336 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10 and Paul Hamelius, ed., Mandeville’s Travels: The Cotton Version, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service, 2003), 11; Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 13 – 14; M. C. Seymour, ed., The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, EETS o.s. 253 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 10 – 13.

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When considering the broader context of TBJM’s references to specific languages, this multilingual trio becomes particularly notable, as it aligns Hermogenes’s funerary inscription with the writing present at Christ’s crucifixion. The same languages are mentioned in the same order when Sir John describes the inscription above Christ’s head when he is crucified: “and the table above his heed that was a foot and half long, uppon the which the title was wryten in Ebru, Greu, and Latyn, was of olive: Jhesu Nazarenus, rex Judeorum” (lines 119 – 21). The “title” is a biblical reference; this inscription appears in all four Gospel narratives, and the Middle English Dictionary refers to the inscription above Christ’s head at the Crucifixion as a distinct usage of the word “title.”¹⁶ As far as I can determine, these are the only two places in TBJM where inscription in these three languages is invoked. Thus, these inscriptions create a kind of doubling between Hermogenes and Christ himself. The invocation of these languages and the doubling effect this creates partly authenticates the great age of Hermogenes’s tomb; that is, its Hebrew-ness is essential proof that he predates Christ.¹⁷ However, the connection nonetheless positions him as linguistically “Christ-like,” a pre-Christian follower who correctly identifies the languages of power and thus declares his belief well beyond Christ’s own death into the future. Moreover, just as in Hermogenes’s case, only the Latin of the title’s inscription is actually presented in the text, though here it goes untranslated. This could be because Sir John assumes familiarity with “the title” as a famous inscription, but its impact is nonetheless notable. In contrast to TBJM, in which Hermogenes is one episode among many, the discovery of a mysterious tomb beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral in Erkenwald initiates the conflict that structures the poem. Like Hermogenes, this mysterious figure is found under a church, but under far different circumstances: the building itself is being “abatyd and beten doun and buggyd efte new,” as it is converted from pagan temple to Christian church (line 37).¹⁸ In his discussion of archaeology and conquest in the poem, Phillip Schwyzer argues that the discovery of the body, “both ancient and recent,” disrupts the colonizing effort represented by

 In Matthew 27:35 and Mark 15:26, the languages in which the sign above Christ’s head appears are not mentioned. In Luke 23:38 and John 19:19 – 20, the sign appears in three languages, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The Middle English Dictionary defines “title” as an inscription, especially the one above Christ’s cross. Thus, Sir John may assume that the text’s readers would be familiar enough with the inscription above the cross that he need not provide a translation.  This has, I would suggest, implications for the text’s presentations of Jews and Hebrew language that have been previously overlooked.  Citations of the poem are from Thomas Hahn and Leah Haught, eds., St. Erkenwald and the Trentals of Gregory (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications), forthcoming.

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the re-construction of the Christian St. Paul’s.¹⁹ Thus, he suggests that “The disorienting spectacle can be seen to crystallize their [the assembly’s] own dislocation from their cultural past, whilst at the same time suggesting a failure in the new system’s explanatory power.”²⁰ The judge’s discovery interrupts the process of overwriting and re-construction that seeks to convert this pagan temple into St. Paul’s, and the tomb’s inscription itself quickly becomes the focus of the assembly that gathers around this newly discovered body. While the point of the multilingual inscription in TBJM is its conspicuous readability, unknowability is the central feature of the tomb’s inscription in Erkenwald. The work of building and rebuilding halts due to a marvel of writing, an inscription foreign and unrecognizable to those who have discovered it: For as thai dyght and dalfe so depe into the erthe Thai founden fourmyt on a flore a ferly faire toumbe. Hit was a throghe of thykke ston thryvandly hewen, Wyt gargeles garnysht aboute alle of gray marbre. The sperle of the spelunke that spradde hit olofte Was metely made of the marbre and menskefully planede, And the bordure enbelicit wyt bryght golde lettres, Bot roynyshe were the resones that ther on row stoden. (lines 45 – 52)²¹

The poem gives particular attention to the sarcophagus, made of gray marble and engraved with bright gold letters around the edges; yet the tomb itself conveys authority much like the golden tablet of TBJM: its details, the careful engraving and precious materials, indicate that the figure being memorialized is an important individual. Through its description of this ornate tomb as a memorial and a type of shrine, the tomb becomes readable through late medieval relic discourse, as Seeta Chaganti notes; she argues that the mysterious letters “em-

 Phillip Schwyzer, “Exhumation and Ethnic Conflict: Colonial Archaeology from St. Erkenwald to Spenser in Ireland,” Representations 95 (2006): 1– 26 at 7.  Schwyzer, “Exhumation,” 7. Monika Otter likewise asserts that Erkenwald is essentially about how to grapple with the past: see Otter, “‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 24, no. 3 (1994): 387– 414.  These letters have drawn considerable critical attention from a range of the poem’s critics, and their centrality to the poem is obvious. John Bugbee notes how these letters limit the audience of the spectacle: “Even before the opening of the tomb, the ‘roynishe resones’—mysterious sentences—written in ‘bryõt gold lettres’ (lines 52, 51) on the outside occasion great excitement; and this particular spectacle is, naturally, the special province of the scholarly” (Bugbee, “Sight and Sound in St. Erkenwald: On Theodicy and the Senses,” Medium Ævum 77, no. 2 [2008]: 202– 21 at 204).

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bellish and obscure the meaning of an enshrined object.”²² Yet these inscriptions, she asserts, simultaneously point to absence, particularly the absence of the sight of the relic itself.²³ Chaganti argues that the tomb-writing “symbolize[s] increasingly mediated and mystified means of access to shrines in English cathedrals.”²⁴ The tomb’s viewers expect the writing to gloss, to make sense of the sight before them, and its failure to do so calls both their cultural expectation and writing itself into question. The inscrutability of this inscription has long been a critical concern. Unlike the clear trilingual inscription of Hermogenes, the inscription in Erkenwald is defined primarily by its obscurity, an example of what Thomas Hahn calls xenography, “the writing of others” that renders the culture it is intended to represent simultaneously familiar (as literate) and unfamiliar (as inaccessible).²⁵ In Erkenwald, this inscription draws attention to the absence of other explanatory narratives—a failure of record-keeping noted by many critics—as the characters in the poem seek clues to the identity of the figure in the official Church records.²⁶ Yet these letters, a central part of the sarcophagus’s wonder, are roynyshe, mysterious. Smith claims that the inscription signifies “nothing other in this poem than the inability of writing itself to conquer time, to make it articulate.”²⁷ For Smith and others, the failure in Erkenwald is representative of larger issues, “a symptom of other massive failures of registration and memorialization at the level of social and political initiatives in the last decades of the fourteenth century,” and I find this reading compelling.²⁸ The tomb inscription literally speaks from

 Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 56.  Chaganti, Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, 66.  Chaganti, Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, 65.  Hahn and Haught, Erkenwald, n52.  See especially Thorlac Turville-Petre, “St. Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles,” in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance,’ ed. Anne D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 362– 74; and John Scattergood, “St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past,” in The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 179 – 99.  Smith, “Crypt and Decryption,” 71. The letters here are for Smith a literalization of the problems of reading the past, and he notes that the tomb has a text but, rarely among such descriptions in Middle English, it never becomes legible; he sees the failure to read it as the heart of the poem (61). As Chaganti writes, “As marks that seem to function decoratively rather than linguistically, the letters introduce the possibility of translation between verbal and visual or material forms of expression” (Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, 56). The problem of the unrecognizable litterae is exacerbated because, given their location, those letters are culturally English ones despite their unfamiliarity to the Londoners who flock to see them.  Smith, “Crypt and Decryption,” 72.

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England’s past. Given the location of the tomb—beneath what is becoming St. Paul’s—these letters must represent an earlier form of native writing, a writing and language system which was unfamiliar not only to the seventh-century discoverers of the tomb but also to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readers of St. Erkenwald. This illegible writing simultaneously evokes Old English (by this point obsolete) and, more pressingly, a disconnect between the poem’s English past and English present. This breakdown leads to phonetic experiments as the assembly seeks to work out the inscription. Because the letter forms are clear, their inaccessibility must be a problem of language: “Fulle verray were the vigures ther avisyde hom mony, / Bot alle muset hit to mouthe and quat hit mene shulde.”²⁹ The ability of the assembly to “muset hit to mouthe” suggests muttering, a literal “sounding out” of the inscription. The moment suggests an attempt to make the familiar strange, perhaps suggesting that the roynyshe letters could be identifiable to their viewers; at the same time, this attempt to make sense of the letters by sounding them out literalizes the failure of the “vigures” to make meaning. Even when made oral, the written language remains incomprehensible, though the judge’s posthumous narrative is easily followed by his listeners later in the poem. Ruth Nissé suggests that the intelligibility of the judge’s oral narrative is “the poem’s central miracle,” particularly given the emphasis on the writing’s unreadability, even when viewers try to sound it out. In talking with the corpse, Erkenwald is able to cross “Britain’s fragmented genealogy,” a genealogy of invasions best represented in historical changes to the English language itself.³⁰ This mutual understanding reflects back to these attempts to “muset to mouthe” the inscription earlier versus clear, direct understanding of the judge’s spoken narrative. Thus, the moment is a statement on the precarity of writing and cultural anxieties about its limitations as a technology of preservation.

Christianization and Erasure In both Erkenwald and TBJM, then, the discovery of these remarkable burials represents a rupture or surprise, a discontinuity in Christian universality. Neither work permits this anxiety to remain; rather, each seeks to resolve these crises by encoding these figures in recognizable Christian symbolism, thus eliding

 Erkenwald, lines 53 – 54.  Ruth Nissé, “‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” ELH 65, no. 2 (1998), 277– 95 at 289.

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and erasing their disruptive ability. As Hermogenes’s body vanishes from TBJM, the golden plate becomes a relic that confirms Christian truth. Erkenwald, in contrast, is very concerned with both the fate of its virtuous heathen’s soul and the fate of his miraculous body; by translating the former to heaven and obliterating the latter, the poem absorbs its just judge into the Christian body and erases the interruption his discovery created. The posthumous fate of Hermogenes is not made explicit in any version of TBJM: the status of his soul, the question that so troubles Erkenwald in his encounter with the just judge, remains unclear. Instead of focusing on the body, TBJM replaces it with the inscription found with Hermogenes. The work describes the fate of the golden plate bearing the inscription: “And yit is that plate in the tresorie of that cherche.” This “yit” represents a reassurance—belief, and writing, can transcend long years—but it does not guarantee Hermogenes’s own salvation. Rather, it replaces potential bodily relics with a written one. Writing functions here as one point of connection between the pagan and Christian worlds of the poem, implying a shared and mutually intelligible way of understanding the world; as Brian Stock has observed, “the assumptions shared by those who can read and write often render the actual presence of a text superfluous.”³¹ Literacy is thus a worldview as much as, if not more than, a skill, and this shared perspective links Hermogenes to his discoverers (and TBJM’s readers) as much as shared belief. The inscription is on a golden tablet, itself a medium that grants authority and elevates it to relic-like status. Indeed, while the tablet remains “in the tresorye of the cherche” in the Defective version, it is there “among othere relikys” in the Bodley version of TBJM. ³² The tablet invokes those that hung in churches memorializing donors and the dead; as Ruth Evans argues of such tablets, they capture cultural memory: writing thus “freezes it and renders it lifeless,” reinforcing the connection between writing and death.³³ Indeed, writing is often a tool of access for Mandeville, as letters from the Sultan grant him access to holy sites.³⁴ Thus, the writing is authoritative in part because it is “already dead,” always part of the past, imbued with the authority of sepulchral inscription. Yet the poem’s identification of the inscription as one of many “relikys” reinscribes Hermogenes not as a pagan but in fact as an exemplary Christian; relics, after all,

 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 7.  Seymour, Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 13.  Ruth Evans, “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 43 – 69 at 58.  Grady, Heathens, 71.

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belong to saints. In her analysis of relic narratives, Robyn Malo asserts that the relic’s narrative, rather than the relic itself, came to be the authenticator of holiness and the maker of meaning in late medieval England.³⁵ As Malo notes, narratives were key to confirming a relic’s sanctity and meaning; reliquaries, like language itself, “can both signify and mislead.”³⁶ The fate of Hermogenes’s body itself is less important than the fate of the tablet that declares his Christianity. He belongs in the church even if he may or may not belong to the Church: while in Erkenwald, the writing leads to the discovery of the just judge’s uncorrupted body, in TBJM, the writing itself is the wonder. In fitting Hermogenes into what Malo calls late medieval relic discourse, TBJM inserts this figure into Christian frameworks.³⁷ The just judge’s preserved body seems, at first glance, to provide the potential bodily relics that TBJM ignores. However, the body proves as inscrutable a text as the roynyshe inscription. The assembly’s misreading of the judge’s rich clothing and miraculously preserved form resists elevating him to saint-like status. The poem gives considerable attention to the judge’s physical state: Als wemles were his wedes, wytouten any tecche Othir of moulynge othir of motes othir moght-freten, And als bryght of hor blee in blysnande hewes As thai hade yepely in that yorde bere yisturday shapen. And als freshe hym the face and the fleshe nakyde Bi his eres and bi his hondes, that openly shewid Wyt ronke rode as the rose, and two rede lippes As he in sounde sodanly were slippide opon slepe. (lines 85 – 92)

The assembly assumes the dead man to be a person of secular importance— “kynge of the kithe”³⁸—though this is a particularly strange conclusion given that narratives of miraculously preserved bodies were frequently associated with saints. Schwyzer cites the events surrounding Joan of Acre in 1357, observing that the uncorrupt body was almost always associated with “special divine favor”; in particular, “exhumations … were often undertaken precisely in the hopes that a church or monastery might be able to add a saint to its spiritual assets.”³⁹ That is, the judge should be understood as a religious figure, a partic-

 Robyn Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).  Malo, Relics and Writing, 6.  Malo, Relics and Writing, 3 – 18.  Erkenwald, line 98.  Schwyzer, “Exhumation,” 5.

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ularly holy man; his miraculously preserved body invokes the discourses of relics and saints. Yet he is immediately presumed secular. Perhaps ironically, this apparently counterintuitive reading turns out to be correct, as the judge is a figure of secular governance and it is Erkenwald who becomes the source of the poem’s miracle. Unlike TBJM, with Hermogenes’s ambiguous fate, Erkenwald makes the fate of the just judge and of his tomb explicit, in a moment that removes any possibility of bodily relics. Indeed, it is this moment that reinscribes Christian power in Erkenwald. The inscribed tablet in TBJM becomes part of the church, still available in the treasury with the rest of the relics. In contrast, the sarcophagus becomes, at the poem’s end, a symbol with particular resonance for Christian audiences: an empty tomb, its occupant translated to heaven. As the judge’s discovery instigates temporal panic, so the ending of the poem seeks to craft a unifying Christian narrative through two powerful images. The problem of the judge’s unreadable body quite literally disappears with his baptism. After articulating his salvation and praising God and Erkenwald, the judge’s previously miraculously preserved body falls silent again: Wyt this cessyd his sowne, sayd he no more. Bot sodenly his swete chere swyndid and faylide, And alle the blee of his body was blakke as the moldes, As roten as the rottok that rises in powdere. (lines 341– 44).

With his salvation accomplished, the judge is literally absorbed back into the natural order of things, in which long-dead bodies decompose and do not speak. While virtuous heathen tales abound in Middle English literature, Erkenwald is unique on this detail of the body’s disintegration, as Schwyzer notes. In the world of the poem, the judge’s physical “disappearance” leaves behind only an empty tomb—itself a symbol with considerable resonance for Christian audiences—that testifies to Erkenwald’s miracle.⁴⁰ Examining the historical context of the poem’s construction indicates that while the empty tomb marks the judge as Christ-like, it might well be a familiar image. As Eamon Duffy describes, the construction of Easter sepulchers was a key element of the liturgical observance of Holy Week in late medieval England; he notes that these sepulchers were often permanent fixtures within churches.⁴¹ The image of the empty tomb was a literal presence, part of liturgical observances and in many cases a perpetual re-

 Schwyzer, “Exhumation,” 10.  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400 – 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 31– 32.

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minder of resurrection. In this moment, I suggest, the poem invokes for its audiences an image of the resurrection alongside the judge’s redemption. (This moment is an especially troubling erasure if one reads the judge as Jewish, as scholars have recently suggested.⁴²) Much as language links Hermogenes to Christ, so the image of the judge’s empty tomb echoes another vacant sepulcher. In place of the pagan judge is a sign of Christ himself. Critics have suggested that the judge disintegrates to ensure that there can be no miraculous return, no additional complicating narrative; Grady in particular notes that the poem serves as a corrective for the very gap in the historical record that the judge’s body makes evident.⁴³ I find this argument compelling, but I would further suggest that the judge’s end draws on Christian symbology. The judge’s final state as black, powered remains—the “blakke … rottok that rises in powdere”—is crucial to the judge’s integration into the Christian community. This disintegration is in fact the imagined end of the Christian body, meant to physically echo the words delivered to Christians with the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. In the Sarum rite, still in use at the time of Erkenwald’s composition, those who received ashes were admonished that “Memento homo quia cinis es; et in cinerem revertis.”⁴⁴ While saints may be miraculously posthu-

 Several recent scholarly arguments have linked the judge not only to pagan identity but to Jewish identity. David Coley argues that by virtue of his association with the law, the judge “fills the Augustinian function of the Jew in the medieval Christian imagination” (Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377 – 1422 [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012], 107); he reads the judge’s strong associations with the law as potentially invoking a Jewish identity and notes that Jews are often linked to writing (particularly Hebrew and thus writing obscure for many Christian viewers) in several alliterative works of the period (104– 5). Robert Allen Rouse, “Emplaced Reading, or Toward a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance,” in The Materiality of Medieval Romance, ed. Nick Perkins (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), reads the reference to the “synagoge of the Sunne” in line 21 of the poem as invoking the superseded Jewish past in post-expulsion England, particularly since several synagogues were converted to religious houses (39 – 40), a reading expanded in Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s arguments on the figure of the transnational wandering Jew (“The Transnational Wandering Jew and the Medieval English Nation,” Literature Compass 13, no. 12 (2016): 771– 83 at 778 – 79). I offer that the potentially Jewish identity of the judge makes the reinscription of Christian authority in Erkenwald especially troubling, as the writing and the body of the judge are superseded by Christian symbology. Indeed, this reading makes the judge’s posthumous baptism especially troubling as the moment reinscribes Christian authority and literally erases Jewish bodies.  Grady, Heathens, 43.  The Sarum rite calls for imposing ashes over the head of the clergy as well as the laity using these words: see Missale Sarum ad usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae, ed. Francis Henry Dickinson (Oxford and London: J. Parker & Soc., 1861– 1883), cols. 133 – 34. The words in contemporary services are similarly direct: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

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mously intact as a sign of their special sanctity, the everyday Christian does not expect this end. The judge’s return to dust is somewhat more immediate upon his integration into the Christian community, but this is nonetheless the imagined natural end for the Christian body. Thus, this miraculous disappearance both eliminates the contradiction represented by the “heathen saint” at his discovery and represents his newly Christian status.

Conclusion In Erkenwald, writing is a marvel, the impetus for Erkenwald’s salvific miracle. It presents the past as a time with writing and a memorializing practice that looks familiar even as it marks the past as other, inaccessible: a misread past underlying England’s sacred spaces. TBJM’s grave of Hermogenes is likewise marvelous, though its marvel comes from its time-bending status as pre-Christian proof of Christian truth. However, the work never directly addresses Hermogenes’s own fate: he does not get the opportunity to “say me of thi soule” (Erkenwald, line 279). Even as TBJM universalizes Christianity across time, the moment raises the specter of the unknown, undiscovered Christian that critics have identified as central to Erkenwald. ⁴⁵ Juxtaposing the two instances emphasizes their shared view of writing as a mode of authentication, albeit a precarious one. The mode of preservation—that is, the obvious cost and perceived value of the inscribed object—here becomes central. In TBJM, the inscription found in Hermogenes’s grave is on a golden plate, an object clearly meant to be preserved. So too in Erkenwald the “bryght golde lettres” have a signifying power, emphasizing value through medium. In both cases, the strange monument is a “guarantor of a humanity that is common and universalized,” a marker of sameness and shared cultural values, readable through that similarity.⁴⁶ Both works engage this issue of language change and in the process reinforce pairing Latinity with Christianity. However, Erkenwald raises doubts about the very translation project in which TBJM is engaged.⁴⁷ Monuments seek to present a constructed past to an imagined future; yet Erkenwald and TBJM emphasize the extent to which the fictional monuments they

 On this point, see especially Frank Grady, “Looking Awry at St. Erkenwald,” Exemplaria 23, no. 2 (2011): 105 – 25 at 115.  Thomas Hahn, “Xenography and the Ciphering of Medieval Indians,” typescript, 2010. I am grateful to Hahn for sharing this as-yet unpublished work.  As many critics have noted, the majority of TBJM consists of translations and adaptations of French sources. See especially Higgins, Book.

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describe are limited, multiple, constrained, a form of reaching the future that rapidly escapes their creators’ control. These moments of misinterpretation, then—and each work’s attempt to reinforce Christian universality—reveal cultural anxieties about, or at least a keen awareness of, one’s inability to shape one’s posthumous fate. Taken together, these moments construct language itself as a type of monument—one with an unknowable, potentially unstable future. In presenting writing as simultaneously powerful and limited as a tool of preservation, these works comment on the paradoxical nature of their own medium. While preoccupations about the fate of virtuous heathens were unquestionably in the air in late medieval England, these episodes illuminate equally pressing concerns about memory, writing, and commemoration.

Bibliography Appleford, Amy. Learning to Die in London, 1380 – 1540. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Bugbee, John. “Sight and Sound in St. Erkenwald: On Theodicy and the Senses.” Medium Ævum 77, no. 2 (2008): 202 – 21. Chaganti, Seeta. The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Chism, Christine. Alliterative Revivals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Coley, David. The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377 – 1422. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400 – 1580. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Evans, Ruth. “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 43 – 69. Grady, Frank. “Looking Awry at St. Erkenwald.” Exemplaria 23, no. 2 (2011): 105 – 25. Grady, Frank. Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Hahn, Thomas. “Xenography and the Ciphering of Medieval Indians.” Typescript, 2010. Hahn, Thomas and Leah Haught, eds. St. Erkenwald and the Trentals of Gregory. Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming. Hamelius, Paul, ed. Mandeville’s Travels: The Cotton Version. 2 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service, 2003. Higgins, Iain MacLeod, ed. and trans. The Book of John Mandeville: With Related Texts. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011. Higgins, Iain MacLeod. Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Hudson, Anne. Lollards and Their Books. London: Hambledon Press, 1985.

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Kohanski, Tamarah and C. David Benson, eds. The Book of John Mandeville. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Kruger, Steven F. “Times of Conversion.” Philological Quarterly 92, no. 1 (2013): 19 – 39. Lampert-Weissig, Lisa. “The Transnational Wandering Jew and the Medieval English Nation.” Literature Compass 13, no. 12 (2016): 771 – 83. Malo, Robyn. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Missale Sarum ad usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae. Edited by Francis Henry Dickinson. Oxford and London: J. Parker & Soc., 1861 – 1883. Nissé, Ruth. “‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” ELH 65, no. 2 (1998): 277 – 95. Otter, Monika. “‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 24, no. 3 (1994): 387 – 414. Rajendran, Shyama. “Undoing ‘the Vernacular’: Dismantling Structures of Raciolinguistic Supremacy,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9 – 10 (2019): e12544. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12544. Rouse, Robert. “Emplaced Reading, or Toward a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance.” In The Materiality of Medieval Romance, edited by Nick Perkins, 41 – 58. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Scattergood, John. “St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past.” In The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry, 179 – 99. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. Schwyzer, Phillip. “Exhumation and Ethnic Conflict: Colonial Archaeology from St. Erkenwald to Spenser in Ireland.” Representations 95 (2006): 1 – 26. Seymour, M. C., ed. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels. EETS o.s. 253. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Seymour, M. C., ed. The Egerton Version of Mandeville’s Travels. EETS o.s. 336. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Smith, D. Vance. “Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable.” New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 59 – 85. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. “St. Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles.” In Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood: ‘The Key of All Good Remembrance,’ edited by Anne D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, 362 – 74. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Whatley, Gordon. “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context.” Speculum 61, no. 2 (1986): 330 – 63. White, Tom. “National Philology, Imperial Hierarchies, and the ‘Defective’ Book of Sir John Mandeville.” The Review of English Studies 2019: 1 – 22. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz140.

Russell A. Peck

Chapter 11 Alexander the Great: A Study of Legitimacy, Futility, and the Problem of Getting Home Safely in Gower’s Confessio Amantis Gower uses Alexander the Great, conqueror of the world, as the exemplar of inadequate kingship throughout the first seven books of his Confessio Amantis. Book 8, on the other hand, shifts the reader’s attention to Apollonius of Tyre, a model of true kingship. The two monarchs are juxtaposed to provide commentary on the real-life situation in England, caught up in the Hundred Years’ War with France, of which Gower is strongly critical. The “heroic” Black Prince, England’s great hope, like Alexander, never gets home safely, but dies, so to speak, in exile. His son, the boy king Richard, surrounded by evil counsel, will likewise lose his throne through bad judgment, foreign wars, and the hope of becoming the Holy Roman Emperor. Henry, count of Derby, to whom Gower dedicates his poem, will, Gower hopes, learn the importance of home rule and govern his people with good care. The Confessio Amantis began initially as a poem organized around the seven deadly sins. But with the so-called Peasants’ Revolt and persistent wars abroad, Gower became increasingly concerned with threats to the very concepts of civilization and patriarchal rule, worries reflected in the Vox Clamantis and subsequently in the Tripartite Chronicle. While scarcely halfway through the Confessio, he drastically revised his plan. From the beginning Alexander had been used as a signifier of the folly of foreign conquest. But in Book 6, he explores more deeply the central problems of good kingship. In Confessio, toward the end of Book 6, we get the “Tale of Nectanabus” with his abandonment of home rule, alienation, and the story of Alexander’s birth, his illegitimacy, and subsequent desire for foreign conquest. When I began this essay, I had thought the title should be “John Gower’s Alisandre: Philosophical Bastard and Exemplar of Futility,” with my focus being on his illegitimate conception and murder of his biological father. But, given the emperor’s figural prominence throughout the Confessio (with more entries on Alexander in Book 7 than in all the other books combined), I decided to focus on patriarchy, legitimacy, and the importance of getting home safely, despite the disruptions of fortune. The relationship of fathers and sons and of the validhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-012

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ity and workability of patriarchy—i. e., the “fatherhood” of society—are prominent concerns throughout Gower’s writings. In Genius’s exposé of King Alexander’s covert insemination, with all its obscurant ironies, Gower questions the relative legitimacy of patriarchy itself, especially as it affects common law (lex positiva), bastardized as it is when amalgamated with the willful imperatives of human desire by those in power. In the Confessio, Gower juxtaposes the “Tale of Nectanabus” with its preceding tale, namely the “Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus,” where the wise Ulysses’s illegitimate son Telegonus, a love-child by Circe, like Olympia’s love-child Alexander, also unwittingly kills his father.¹ Sons, it seems, inevitably displace their fathers. And, for the father, it is hard, regardless of the situation, to know exactly what his actions may be fathering. So too with patriarchy itself, which, if Alexander is the exemplar, seems doomed to inseminating its own destruction.² The degeneration of patriarchal rule lies at the heart of Gower’s first specific reference to Alexander. In the Confessio’s Prologue, Gower alters time’s sequences and extends the events in king Nebuchadnezzar’s inexplicable nightmare of the monstrous statue depicting the five ages of time well beyond Nebuchadnezzar’s biblical century even up into Gower’s own day, leaving Daniel with a lot to explain. In this first reference to Alexander, we learn that the conqueror, given his love of warfare, brings to its conclusion the “world of selver” (that period after the glorious golden age), thereby ushering in the age of “bras” (Confessio Amantis, Prol., lines 688 – 713),³ a time of warfare culminating in the conquests of the Roman Caesars. That militant moment characterizes well Gower’s conception of the progressive degeneration of history and the futility of Alexander’s ambition to conquer the world.⁴ For although Alexander destroyed Darius and the

 For a fifteenth-century drawing of this scene involving Ulysses and his son, see New York, Pierpont Morgan Manuscript 126, fol. 143v. This wonderfully illustrated manuscript of the Confessio Amantis includes 106 illuminated scenes, several of which pertain specifically to Alexander and his search for science and truth. See below for additional citations of Pierpont Morgan MS 126.  See Russell A. Peck, “Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of Robert Yeager, ed. Susannah Chewning (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), 59 – 78.  All citations from Gower are taken from my edition, John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols., 1st and 2nd eds., Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003 – 2013).  Alexander figures prominently as an epitome of futility in all of Gower’s works. E. g., Mirour de l’Omme, trans. William Burton Wilson (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992): “When Alexander was on top and had the world under his rule, do you think he was safe in the fortune of which he felt sure? . . . Fortune changed her hand in a short time. One day she made him king

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Persians, “it befell that ate laste / This king, whan that his day was come, / With strengthe of deth was overcome” (Prol., lines 702 – 4). The great Alexander died in an alien land, far from home, a death in exile that resonates against that of Nectanabus, his father, who, at the end of Confessio Book 6, also died in a self-determined exile. Alexander’s greatness transforms into an epitome of futility: despite all his conquests, his estate is divided amongst his envious knights, who care nothing for him nor his memory and, in their greed, devour and lay waste to all that their king had won. His bequest becomes a monument to emptiness: the Silver Age can be no more. In Confessio Book 7, Gower closely allies Alexander with the teachings of Aristotle: he is a man of high intelligence and a lover of truth. In Book 6, we learned of his origins where he, in his ignorance, murdered his own father, thereby exposing the fact that Aristotle, the wise man who raised him and taught him as if he were his own son, is not his true father. Ignorant of his misshapen heritage, the boy Alexander, believing himself to be the advocate of truth, thinks he is proving a liar to be false by murdering Nectanabus, who is in fact his father. Ironically, he does indeed become a soothsayer, despite his ignorance, where, in his faulty misprision of himself, truth turns out to be the opposite to what he had thought. In the statue of the Monster of Time, which Gower and his illustrators so vividly depict in the text and marginalia of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (Prol., lines 603 – 57),⁵ the Age of Brass that Alexander ushers in is depicted as the Monster of Time’s belly, “tokne of a werse world” (Prol., line 638). Though Alexander’s whole life falls within the Silver Age, Gower is more concerned with the consequences of his behavior—the brazen time span and that of steel and clay which follows, the times of division and disintegration to come. As the Confessio progresses, Gower moves in and out of that Monster of Time model, but his Alexander continues to represent, throughout the Confessio, both wisdom (albeit limited) and futility, a futility prominent especially in Book 3, dealing with the sins of Ira/

and the next day she poisoned him, so that he died and was buried. His honors turned into emptiness, the empires were without a chieftain, and the conquest was in danger” (292).  Gower also dealt extensively with Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the Monster of Time statue in his Vox Clamantis, Book 7, which goes on to consider the history of the world as time degenerates, ending in death, decay, and the scourge of divine vengeance. For a couple of remarkable illustrations of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, see Fairfax 3 and Bodley 294 manuscripts, reprinted in black and white in editions by Peck and G. C Macaulay (The Works of John Gower [Oxford: Clarendon, 1899 – 1902]), and Pierpont Morgan MS 126, fol. 4v (b), reproduced in bold color. The Fairfax, Bodley, and Morgan illuminations all depict the stone that will destroy the statue flying out of heaven like God’s judgment, catching the unsuspecting figure from behind.

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Wrath. As we will see, Ira is an arena perpetually overshadowed by “contek” (internal strife), discord, hatred, and warfare.⁶ But Sloth, Avarice, and Gluttony also bear the burdens of Pride and Envy that Alexander embodied in his worldly conquests, thus his prevalence throughout the poem’s first seven books. The second reference to Alexander occurs in Book 2 on Envy, picking up on the idea of vainglory, when the envious Perseus “devoured” all the land of Macedoyne “which thurgh king Alisandre honoured / Long time [had] stod” (2.1841– 42). Like Alexander, the “devourer” Perseus loses all his gains and ends up living out his life in exile, disguised as a tradesman in Rome. And so it goes, we are told, for all warriors, whose “baneres ben desplaied” and “men arried” assail “and slowh and tok al that [they] fond,” only to end their “despeired” lives in exile (2.1835 – 46), while others, envious of their predecessor’s ill-gotten gains, snap up the spoils. Gower follows these bleak considerations of the futility of conquest with his discussion of “Falssemblant,” where “There is no man so wyse that knoweth / Of thilke flod which is the tyde, / Ne how he scholde himselven guide / To take sauf passage there” (2.1882– 85). There is one further allusion to Alexander in Book 2, picked up by the would-be lover Amans who, usually oblivious to the implications of what Genius is saying but keenly envious of others, allows that even if he had the strength of Alexander he would not use it against his rivals for fear of slander (2.2415), slander that would embarrass his lady, though he nonetheless allows that he often sneaks shamelessly into his beloved’s bedtime presence in his fantasy, where, beyond envy, he can enjoy himself alone. The point is important for our concerns here, in that fantasy is a figure of self-delusion and self-seeming that is deeply embedded in wish-fulfillment and envious desires that perpetually haunt Alexander’s will as he perpetuates his conquests. The first two full-scale tales that feature Alexander as a central character appropriately occur in Confessio Amantis Book 3, Gower’s book devoted to Wrath (Ira). The epigram at the beginning of the book identifies the efficacy of this brazen age: “Ira suis paribus est par furiis Acherontis, / Quo furor and tempus nil pietatis habet … Est vbi vir discors leuiterque repugnat amori, / Sepe loco ludi fletus ad ora venit” (Wrath along with its peers is on par with the furies of Acheron. / By means of it, Fury has no pity for the moment …. Where a man is full of discord and lightly assails love, / Lamentation instead of playfulness often fills  On the evils of warfare elsewhere in Gower, see Book 1 of the Vox Clamantis, with its rampaging wild-beast nightmare of what is now called the Peasants’ Revolt (Macaulay, The Works of John Gower, vol. 4, Latin Works: Vox Clamantis); and Mirour de l’Omme, 24097– 132 (Macaulay, The Works of John Gower, vol. 1, French Works: Mirour de l’Omme; see also Mirour de l’Omme, trans. by William Burton Wilson).

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his face).⁷ Ira, we are told, is the name of that “on of the sevene [sins] / Which ofte hath set this world unevene” (3.13 – 14). This “uneven” place of disruption and irregularity defines well the realms that Alexander sets out to conquer, only to come to a pitiless end himself. In these two Alexander tales—“The Tale of Diogenes and Alexander” and “The Tale of Alexander and the Pirate”—Alexander behaves reasonably and with remarkable patience. But in both tales, his goals and disruptive rationale of purpose are askew. “The Tale of Diogenes and Alexander” (3.1201– 1313)⁸ is a study in willfulness. The philosopher Diogenes, we are told, has grown too old to travel about the world, so he dwells at home, where he builds near his house, on the long end of an “axeltré,” a good-sized “tonne” (tub) that rotates so that he can sit outside and turn about to enjoy sunrise and “take th’eir and se the hevene, / And deme the planetes sevene” (3.1215 – 16).⁹ As he sits alone, musing in his philosophy on the “propretes” of earth and its heavens, King Alisandre and his troops ride by. The king wonders about this odd scene of a man seated in a revolving barrel, and sends his knight to inquire. Diogenes refuses to respond to the king’s agent: the knight accuses him of villainy, saying he will report his heedless sullen behavior to his king. The philosophical Diogenes replies: “‘Mi king?’ quod he, ‘That were unriht’” (3.1247). The knight challenges him further, asking Diogenes that if Alexander is not his king, then what is he—“thi man”? To which the philosopher replies, “no,” that is not what he said, but rather that Alexander is “mi [Diogenes’s] mannes man.” Outraged by the old man’s impertinence, the knight asserts, “Thou lyest, false cherl” (3.1252), and reports the exchange back to the king. So Alexander himself approaches the man in the tub, to find out what he means with regard to who serves whom: “Al heil … what man art thou?” he asks. Diogenes responds, “Such on as thou sest now” (3.1262). Alexander, respectful of the man’s agedness, asks for an explanation. Diogenes replies that he is master of his own will: “Will is my man and my servant, / And evere hath ben and evere shal. / And thi will is thi principal, / And hath the lordschipe of thi witt [reason/intelligence]” (3.1280 – 83). Upon learning that the

 Translation by Andrew Galloway, in Confessio Amantis (ed. Peck), Epigram I, Incipit Liber Tercius, 2:150.  For an amusing manuscript illumination of Diogenes in his tub, being questioned by Alexander the Great, see Pierpont Morgan MS 126, fol. 58r (London, ca. 1470). Diogenes is bald, but sports quite a fine beard. Alexander is dressed as a dandy on a white horse.  Diogenes’s interest in the stars aligns with a prominent notion in the Confessio that is expressive of human interest in the universal concerns of human kind, reaching to the very boundaries of creation. Illustrations in Pierpont Morgan MS 126, highlight this concern (see below) and Alexander is frequently instructed by Aristotle and others in such mathematical wisdom.

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man in the tub is Diogenes, the famous philosopher, Alexander respectfully asks Diogenes to join his retinue. But the philosopher declines. The only thing the great Alexander can do for him is to move on, since the king and his horse are blocking Diogenes’s view of the sunshine: “hove out of mi sonne, / And let it schyne into mi tonne; / For thou benymst [rob] me thilke gifte, / Which lith noght in thi miht to schifte. / Non other good of thee me nedeth” (3.1307– 1311). In this tale, concepts of ownership, residency, place, power, and will are quintessential: Alexander imagines that, given his great influence, he can seize the world and everything therein to make it his own. Diogenes’s position is quite the opposite: for the philosopher, such provenances are a “gifte” from on high which he is permitted to enjoy as a participant. He scorns the selfpossessive encumberment of worldly matters imbued by ownership so sought after by Alexander. Diogenes’s will, governed by his reason and his intelligence, enables him to dwell happily in a universe larger even than time and space. He simply lives, observes, and enjoys where he is. In the final section of Book 3, section v, on Homicide, Gower enters most fully into the atrocities of war and conquest that so limit Alexander’s presumptions: “Qvod creat ipse deus, necat hoc homicida creatum, Vltor et humano sanguine spargit humum. / Vt pecoris sic est hominis cruor, heu, modo fusus, / Victa iacet pietas, et furor vrget opus. / Angelus ‘In terra pax’ dixit, et vltima Crisi /Verba sonant pacem, quam modo guerra fugat” (The creature that God himself creates, Homicide slays, / sprinkling the ground with human blood as an avenger. A human being’s bloodthirstiness is like a beast’s: once—alas!—it is poured out, pity lies conquered and rage urges on the work. The Angel said “Peace on earth,” and the final words of Christ express a peace from which wars now depart).¹⁰ Gower begins this final part of Book 3 with the assertion that “The high God of His justice” forbids Homicide, that “foule horrible vice” (3.2251– 53). It is worth looking in detail at this section on the evil of war, where no one wins (3.2284). “Dedly werre” is confederate with pestilence, famine, poverty, and woe: “The cherche is brent, the priest is slain, / The wif, the maid is ek forlain, / The lawe is lore, and God unserved” (3.2275 – 77). War, by its very nature, has no “decerte” (merit/consequence); rather, it only yields impoverishment and death (3.2292– 94).¹¹ The motives behind war and Alexander’s

 Translation by Andrew Galloway, in Confessio Amantis (ed. Peck), Epigram V, 2:210.  Gower’s anti-war position is doubtless linked to England’s foreign policy and the perpetual war with France that so troubled him. For details on the atrocities of the Black Prince’s pillaging and wanton destruction of the French countryside in Languedoc, where his name is still held in anathema, see Richard W. Barber’s two books, The Black Prince (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1978; reprint 2003) and Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine: A Biography of the Black Prince (Rochester, NY:

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conquests are plain and simply Coveitise, the sin underlying all of his tyrannous pillaging (3.2305 – 60), a point precisely demonstrated in Book 3’s second tale of Alexander. “The Tale of Alexander and the Pirate” (3.2363 – 2480) studies the injustice of “princes or any others who instigate illicit wars.”¹² In this tale, King Alexander captures “a rovere of the see” (3.2369)—i. e., a pirate. The pirate defends himself, pointing out that his profession is essentially the same as Alexander’s, only he, as a mere pirate, works on a much smaller scale, since he cannot afford to maintain an army to help him out: “I have an herte lich to thin; / For if the pouer were myn, / My will is most in special / To rifle [i. e., rob] and geten overal / The large worldes good about. / Bot for I lede a povere route … The name of pilour and of thief / I bere” (3.2381– 89). Alexander, he says, has “routes grete,” so he (Alexander), in his grand conquests, can be called “Emperour,” but, says the pirate,”oure dedes ben of o colour / And in effect of o decerte” (3.2394 – 95). Though “al this erthe dradde [Alexander], / Whan he the world so overladde / Thurgh werre” (3.2363 – 64), his behavior is, in fact, nothing more than piracy. His ransacking leads to uproar, but ultimately accomplishes little that truly matters, for “he that is riche / This dai, tomorwe he mai be povere … forthi let rihtwisnesse / Be peised [weighed] evene in the balance” (3.2398 – 403). But rather than learn from the evil exposed by the pirate’s critique, Alexander compounds the evil and invites the pirate to join him. He promotes his new fellow by granting him knighthood and land,¹³ all of which is, for Gower, further condemnation of the irresponsible and perpetually greedy ruling class.¹⁴ One might wonder if the implicit criticism here is, in part, of England’s foreign policy, where the throne regularly promised knighthood and/or landed es-

Boydell Press, 2000). For further accounts of such disasters in Gower’s literary lifetime, see John A. Wagner, Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), especially the statistical accounts of the chevauchée of 1355, where the Black Prince destroyed nearly 500 villages and more than twenty walled towns; and the chevauchée of 1373, led by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Gaunt brought great destruction to eastern and central France with his ten to fifteen thousand troops, half of whom died at the end of the year due to exposure, starvation, and enemy action (Wagner, Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War, 94– 96).  NB. The Latin marginalia, translated by Andrew Galloway, attached to lines 3.2366 ff: “isto Principes seu alios quoscumque illicite guerre motores” (Confessio Amantis [ed. Peck], 2:373).  See Pierpont Morgan MS 126, fol. 65r, for an illumination of Alexander the Great and the Pirate admiring their loot, from London (ca. 1470).  For an insightful discussion of Gower’s treatment of the Alexander legend, see Charles Russell Stone, “‘Moral’ Gower and the Rejection of Alexander,” in From Tyrant to Philosopher King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern History (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), 141– 63.

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tates to people of privilege who would provide the Black Prince with soldiers to scourge and plunder France in the perpetual Hundred Years’ War. Though such valorous agreement might appeal to the nobility, it comes at great cost to the common people of England, where loss of life is the main characteristic of those conscripted for warfare in one chevauchée after another that commonly ended in debacle for all involved.¹⁵ The Black Prince himself, like Alexander, died in a foreign land. For Gower, these disastrous wars are crimes perpetuated by patriarchy, as the nobility and the landed class bring destruction even upon themselves. Such behavior by the wealthy is criminal and essentially harmful to nations on both sides of the channel. And, as Gower well knows, it is the common people of England and France, who, like Alexander’s soldiers, suffer most.¹⁶ Alexander’s willful behavior is the cause of such grievous disasters (3.2444). Though he conquered “Babiloine” and expanded his empire even to India, when he set out to return to his home state of Macedonia, he was “with strong puison envenimed. / And as he hath the world mistimed / Noght as he scholde with his wit, / Noght as he wolde it was aquit. / Thus was he slain that whilom slowh, / And he which riche was ynowh / This dai, tomorwe he hadde noght.” He who wrought “destorbance of worldes pes, / His werre he fond thanne endeles,” and he was left “forevere desconfit” (3.2457– 68). The Confessor finds Alexander culpable: he slew people without reasonable cause, thereby earning his own death. The Confessor is quite outspoken in his condemnation of such wars, where men set their hearts “upon such wrong to winne,” creating in greedy willfulness “desese on every side” (3.2425 – 27). Such behavior equates with that of Alexander, as the Latin marginalia for lines 2438 ff. observes: “Although Alexander by his

 One might wonder whether Gower knew the popular Richard Coer de Lyon, with its dystopian views of the French wars, which is found in seven manuscripts from the early fourteenth century to the late fifteenth century and several early print editions. See Peter Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015), 3 – 10. Gower, of course, had plenty of first-hand views on those wars during the so-called Peasants’ Revolt and its ravaging animal behavior that he witnessed from across the Thames and writes about in The Vox Clamantis. That kind of uncontrollable atrocity is epitomized in the monstrous bird described in the Confessio by Solinus, a bird that has a human face but feeds on whatever man he “finde in his weie” (Confession Amantis [ed. Peck], 3.2599 – 617). But when the bird looks upon the reflection of his face in the water of a well, it is overwhelmed with guilt and dies of sorrow because of its homicidal behavior.  It is of interest to remember how difficult it is to obtain statistics on war casualties, since the only statistics precisely recorded are for people of the nobility or with landed influence. The count of ordinary soldiers who die on chevauchées is unaccountable. Usually it is simply estimated by “thousands,” like 20,000 or 30,000.

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power subjugated to himself an empire as the conqueror of the whole world, he was nonetheless subjugated by the victory of Death, and was not able to avoid the sentence of the Almighty.”¹⁷ When Amans wonders if the crusades are justified, Genius has to admit that little good comes from such conquests. For Gower, the only certain victor in Alexander’s warfare is Death. Although Alexander, in his alliance with the pirate, initially does not seem to learn much, Gower concludes Book 3 with “The Tale of Telaphus and Teucer,” a positive example in which peace and mercy, rather than perpetual war, can and do restore brotherhood and life within the kingdom at home. Misericorde, rather than Ira, Homicide, Malencolie, Contek, and Folhaste, provides the only real and sustainable victory. Pity and compassion are not behaviors demonstrated by Alexander. This is not to say, however, that he is an evil person. He does seem to grow somewhat positively and is shown to become educable in ways other than warfare. In Book 5, in a letter from Dindimus, king of Bragmans, Alexander learns about the folly of pagan idolatry as they make gods for every part of the body (5.1453 – 596). In this instance Gower shifts the focus of the narrative away from a thoughtful Alexander to the amusing preoccupations of Amans when he applies Alexander’s newfound insights to himself. As the Confessor explains the pagan gods to Amans, especially the beautiful female ones, Amans is indeed concerned and explains that he would not rape such a beauty, even if he were as powerful a figure as Caesar or Alexander (5.5530 – 37). There is no suggestion that Alexander rapes anyone, but we do learn that “the riche qwen Candace, / Which to deserve love and grace / To Alisandre, that was king, / Gaf many a worthi riche thing” (5.2543 – 46); so apparently, Alexander was, among other things, like Aeneas and, in at least one instance, purchased love.¹⁸ He perhaps even knew something of the importance of restraint. And his role in the Confessio culminates in his recognition of the value of moral instruction, instruction that Amans himself requests. We have already mentioned the story of Alexander’s insemination and birth in the “Tale of Nectanabus” (6.1789 – 2362). But, inspired by that story and after learning about other matters of sorcery and witchcraft, Amans asks for further information about Alexander and his teacher Aristotle. He would know “Hou Alisaundre was betawht / To Aristotle, and so wel tawht / Of al that to a king belongeth, / Wherof min herte sore longeth / To wite what it wolde mene. /  “Quamuis Alexander sua potencia tocius mundi victor sibi subiugarat imperium, ipse tandem mortis victoria subiugatus cunctipotentis sentenciam euader non potuit.” Explanatory note to lines 2438 ff. (Confessio Amantis, 2nd ed. [ed. Peck and trans. Andrew Galloway], 2:303).  Historia Alexandri Magnis de Preliis is Gower’s main source for Alexandrian lore; see G. C. Macaulay’s note (English Works: Confessio Amantis, 2:519).

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For be reson I wolde wene” (6.2411– 16). Genius allows that even though he is Venus’s priest, he will attempt to approach matters of reason and wisdom, whereupon we enter into the philosophical Book 7 on Aristotle’s instruction of Alexander, to share with Amans the Confessor’s thoughtful effort to explain what “to a king belongeth,” for “of suche thinges wise … wisdom is at every throwe / Above alle other thing to knowe” (7.12– 16). The philosophical Book 7 is the culmination of Gower’s use of Alexander in the Confessio, with fifteen citations of his name. Alexander is not mentioned as a subject of interest in Book 8, where a true king, Apollonius of Tyre, displaces the would-be conqueror of the world. Yet in Book 7, Alexander’s desire to learn is altogether commendable. Every good ruler should be a student of such matters, a point the Confessor makes emphatically. First, the ruler should become learned in philosophy—i. e., a lover of wisdom—whether through Theorique, Rethorique, or Practique. Aristotle’s training of Alexander takes the acolyte systematically through Theorique, with its sciences of Theology, Physics, and Mathematics. Theology studies the properties of God through his creation and his temporal ubiquity—present at all times and the sole source of life and being. This primary science, Aristotle humbly explains, requires faith beyond reason, which makes it difficult for time-bound humanity to understand. The second science, Physics, studies matter—the “bodiliche thinges” (7.138). Being physical, it may be studied systematically. But such study is complex, requiring one to look at embodiment from several perspectives in order to gain an understanding of the bodily thing itself. The third science, Mathematics, with its four divisions—arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy—is a good starting point for understanding the fourfold creation, from the four elements and the four complexions to the four body parts that serve the heart and the four divisions of the world, matters of great importance to Alexander, famous for being a great traveler throughout the fourfold world. To know where one is going or where one is situated, one needs to be able to triangulate one’s position. Genius devotes many lines to astronomy and its triangulations (7.633 – 1506) whereby one might place oneself within the cosmos. We are told that Alexander was, in his youth, trained in astronomy by Nectanabus (7.1271 ff.). The illustrator of Pierpont Morgan MS 126 places a drawing of Alexander contemplating the stars at precisely this moment.¹⁹ The broad expan See Pierpont Morgan MS 126, fol. 158r for a lovely drawing of Nectanabus instructing Alexander on the stars. Alastair Minnis offers an amusing note on Nectanabus’s maybe not so wise instruction of Alexander regarding the heavens, given the fact that it was on a fair and starry night while they were observing the heavens from a tower that Alexander proved the old astrologer wrong by pushing him out of the tower. See A. J. Minnis, “‘Moral Gower’

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sion by the Morgan 126 illustrator of this section on the instruction of Alexander may seem strange to us in the twenty-first century, as Nectanabus (and the Morgan illustrator) informs the king of the planets and their stones, their particular areas of influence on earth and mankind, then progresses through the signs of the zodiac, the fifteen stars along with their fifteen medicinal herbs, and the authors of astronomy.²⁰ Clearly Gower would emphasize its importance to his fifteenth-century audience. Rhetoric, the second part of philosophy being taught Alexander (and Amans —and the reader too) focuses on speech, which, we are informed, is unique to mankind. But speech is tricky in that words become a powerful weapon to advance both understanding and deception. Words can have double meanings, as Ulysses, the great beguiler, well knew when he tricked Antenor into assisting with the destruction of Troy. Tully (Cicero), along with Cato and Silanus (7.1599), are depicted as linguistic practitioners who might be of great help in the study of communication for whatever goal they wish to advance. Practice, the third part of philosophy we are told, has three parts: Ethics, Economics, and Policy. Genius gives special attention to Policy, since it has five parts, which he will explore through numerous narrative exempla. Policy in its many aspects is perhaps the most important feature of philosophy for Alexander, since he is obliged to govern well all kingdoms and intellectual arenas under his supervision. And so it should be, by implication, for Gower’s own King Richard II and everyone living responsibly in his kingdom, whether then or now. Truth is the first part of Policy, Genius explains—the chief virtue, encompassing both troth and fidelity: “Moribus ornatus regit hic qui regna moderna, / Cercius expectat ceptra futura poli. / Et quia Veridica virtus supereminet omnes, / Regis ab ore boni fabula nulla sonat” (He who rules modern kingdoms adorned with virtues more securely looks toward the future rule above. And because truth-telling stands above all virtues, no lying fable should be heard from the mouth of a good king).²¹ Book 7 links Alexander directly with the search for Truth and soothsaying—Truth, that is so crucial to success in the life of both individual and state—if only one reads situations aright, that is, point by point, from theory to practice (policy). And to read well, one must have benefit and capability of using the tools of rhetoric. These are matters of wisdom that Gower

and Medieval Literary Theory,” in Gower’s “Confessio Amantis”: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 50 – 78 at 74– 75.  See Pierpont Morgan MS 126, fols. 157v–159v for colorful drawings of the signs of the zodiac and the fifteen stars. Each sign includes the appropriate medicinal plant and stone, which is significant for the plot, given that Alexander dies of poison.  Epigram translated by Andrew Galloway, Book 7.vii., Confessio Amantis (ed. Peck), 3:303.

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would address not only to his fictitious Alexander, but to young Richard II as well, though he is able to have more success with Alexander than his real-life king, a boy king, who hangs out resolutely in his fantasy-land of illusion.²² Gower relates the fateful consequences that inevitably befall young Richard and his pitiful counselors in his Cronica Tripertita, which was attached to the Vox Clamantis about the time of Richard’s downfall, describing the evil effects of Richard’s decisions, as he clung to false advisors and disturbed the peace by slaying or alienating the kingdom’s just men, thereby incurring his own demise.²³ In one’s appreciation of the conclusion to Confessio Amantis, it is important to recognize that the exclusion of Alexander from Book 8 is deliberate. Alexander’s story is replaced by that of Apollonius of Tyre, a king who is basically different from all that Alexander stands for. Though Alexander was born an illegitimate youth, he was “betawht / To Aristotle, and so wel tawht / Of al that to a king belongeth” (6.2411– 13). But he never seems capable of moving beyond his illegitimacy. We are told of his defeat and conquest of Darius, but Gower leaves out the story of Alexander’s marriage to Darius’s daughter Roxane. In the source, though Alexander dies childless, Roxane is pregnant and bears a son six months after Alexander’s death. Roxane makes sure that his other two wives are murdered so that they cannot pose any competition to the throne by bearing children of their own, but that lineage is destroyed by war between the child’s offspring, who bring to an end any chance of Alexander’s legacy.

 On Gower’s effort to provide instruction to the boy king (O pie rex iuuenis—Vox Clamantis, 6:1039), see also Vox Clamantis, Book 6, chaps. 9 – 18, where the poet repeatedly insists that the youthful king have good counselors and the ability to understand how good counsel works. But such advice was apparently not heeded, whether from Gower, who, some accounts say, was encouraged by the young king to write the Confessio Amantis, or from the boy-king’s more official counsellors like John of Gaunt.  It may be that Shakespeare has Gower in mind in his play Richard II, which dramatizes so succinctly the Confessio’s consideration of the king’s favoring false advisors and willfully failing to read political situations accurately. The real Richard may well have been like Alexander in his empty conquests, given Richard’s alleged hopes of becoming the Holy Roman Emperor over all of Europe. The idea may have been inspired through Richard’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor in 1382, an office to which Richard might well, at least according to Pope Boniface, have been suitable. See Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), and James Tait, “Richard II,” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 16, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 1031– 44. See also Peck, “Social Conscience and the Poets,” in Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages: Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), 113 – 48 at 129.

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In Book 8, unlike Alexander, Apollonius is a good king, in all ways legitimate. He embodies all six points that, according to Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, are required in the definition of a good king, one modeled on the biblical king David: (1) Apollonius is the good shepherd of his people, bringing them food and care insofar as he is able to do; (2) he knows measure and harmony: he is a good musician, knowledgeable of the proper rules of music and a master at playing the harp and helping others to do so; (3) he is a good knight, both in heart and body, defending the faith and his country, doing what he ought to do; (4) he knows his psalter and is a prophet, loyal and sure, true to his word, a stabilizing factor through his friendship with God; (5) he is also penitent, contrite, and repentant of heart, thereby protecting himself and his people from God’s vengeance; and (6) he becomes a king who, with understanding, keeps good laws and maintains justice even when under extreme stress.²⁴ Apollonius is not a conqueror, concerned with obtaining worldly glory. Though frequently he may be afflicted to a point near despair, he is charitable and survives by doing his best to help others. Even though pursued by an assassin, he provides a shipload of grain to a starving island. Though shipwrecked on another island, his public identity obliterated, he maintains his secrecy and through his noble behavior and well-educated skills in the arts, he earns respect at court. He is defined through his deeds, rather than title, inheritance, or muscular aggression. Like David, he is a superb harpist and instructs a princess in measure, both in musical skill and moral behavior. Given his good will, wisdom, selfless loyalty, and trust, he marries the princess according to her and her father’s honorable intentions, as well as his own thoughtful love. He fathers a child, Thaise, who, when the king seems trapped by despair in perpetual affliction by bad fortune, ignorant of her kinship comes to his aid, and, assisted by her skills as a sympathetic counselor and a musician (traits she seems to have known innately from Apollonius and her missing mother), helps her father and Thaise herself to regain their family, return home, and, ultimately, restore their several kingdoms. His right to kingship is defined by his behavior. Alexander serves Gower well in defining one kind of kingship based on warfare and conquest. Apollonius provides the antidote to Alexander’s kind of rule which leads to tyranny and oppression rather than enlightenment. “With humble chere,” Apollonius follows virtue “To governe al the remenant / Which longith to his duité / So that in his prosperité / The poeple schal nought ben oppressid, / Wherof his name schal be blessid, / For evere and be memorial” (8.3096 –

 On the six points of good kingship, see Macaulay, French Works: Mirour de l’Omme, 22873 – 968.

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105). In that ennobling spirit of the Confessio’s conclusion, Gower, even as an old man, his genius and wits departing, would send forth his book, in hope that for generations to come it might keep his voice and vision alive: “Vade liber purus, sub eo requiesce futurus” (Go, spotless book and take repose when you will be under his [the Count of Derby—i. e. Henry Bolingbroke’s] keeping).²⁵ Gower leaves his vision not simply within the voice of his poetry, but in the care of a real political leader, to whom he rededicates his poem and in whom, he trusts, the future may, through good rule, be at peace—at peace both within itself, but also with France, now that Richard, the would-be emperor, is gone. Henry IV is the new king—God grant us grace.

Bibliography Barber, Richard W. The Black Prince. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1978. Reprint 2003. Barber, Richard W. Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine: A Biography of the Black Prince. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000. Gower, John. English Works: Confessio Amantis. Vols. 2 and 3 of The Works of John Gower. Edited by G. C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon, 1899 – 1902. Gower, John. French Works: Mirour de l’Omme. Vol. 1 of The Works of John Gower. Edited by G. C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon, 1899 – 1902. Gower, John. John Gower, Confessio Amantis. Edited by Russell Peck. 3 vols. 1st and 2nd eds. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003 – 2013. Gower, John. Latin Works: Vox Clamantis. Vol. 4 of The Works of John Gower. Edited by G. C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon, 1899 – 1902. Gower, John. Mirour de l’Omme. Translated by William Burton Wilson. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992. Larkin, Peter. Richard Coer de Lyon. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015. Minnis, A. J. “‘Moral Gower’ and Medieval Literary Theory.” In Gower’s “Confessio Amantis”: Responses and Reassessments, edited by A. J. Minnis, 50 – 78. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983. New York Pierpont Morgan Manuscript 126. Folio 143v. Peck, Russell A. “Patriarchy, Family, and Law in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” In Studies in the Age of Gower: A Festschrift in Honour of Robert Yeager, edited by Susannah Chewning, 59 – 78. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Peck, Russell A. “Social Conscience and the Poets.” In Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages: Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, edited by Francis X. Newman, 113 – 48. Medieval & Renaissance

 See the Explicit at the end of the Lancastrian Recension of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.

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Texts & Studies 39. Binghampton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986. Saul, Nigel. Richard II. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Stone, Charles Russell. “‘Moral’ Gower and the Rejection of Alexander.” In From Tyrant to Philosopher King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern History, 141 – 63. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013. Tait, James. “Richard II.” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 16. 2nd ed. Edited by Sidney Lee, 1031 – 44. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Wagner, John A. Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.

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Chapter 12 Richard Coer de Lyon and Invented Identities The fourteenth-century poems King Richard and Richard Coer de Lyon represent two families of “a poem” focused upon the crusading career of Richard I, king of England from 1189 to 1199.¹ The poems exist in seven manuscripts and two printings, but no text is the source for another. Scholars classify these texts into two versions, a and b. The b text (King Richard), presumed earlier, is shorter and more historical, a crusading poem that presents Richard as England’s representative hero and king. The a text (Richard Coer de Lyon), longer and affiliated to the romance, contains fictional interpolations. This text substitutes a demon mother for Eleanor of Aquitaine, describes Richard putting his arm down a lion’s throat to rip out its heart (thus his name), cannibalizing Saracen flesh, and then creating a sadistic dinner for his opponents. From its earliest version in the Auchinleck manuscript, which contains the b version, to its latest printed version in 1528, the poem was continuously re-written. Its hybrid longevity suggests more than the two-hundred-year appeal of a swashbuckling poem about a king of England who in actuality spent almost no time in his country, devoting himself, instead, to crusading and to Aquitaine, which his mother Eleanor had brought with her when she married Henry II. As Helen Cooper has argued in her learned study of the English romance, while Middle English romance does offer a register of popular tastes, it also offers a register of the ways in which writers employed the motifs of romance to explore issues of contemporary concern over time. The romance is not static, nor are the many versions of a single romance to be discounted as simply evidence of textual corruption. In its versions, a romance may suggest what is topical in one part of England or in one period of time, offering invaluable perspectives upon social or political affinities outside the official chronicler’s scope.²

 See Richard Coer de Lyon, ed. Peter Larkin (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015). For King Richard, the b text, see an edition and the digitized manuscript at https://auchinleck.nls.uk/. For the texts of both versions, see Der Mittelenglische Versroman über Richard Löwenherz, ed. Karl Brunner (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1913). My thanks to Theresa Coletti and Sarah Stanbury for their very productive comments upon this essay.  See Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-013

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Both groups of the Middle English Richard I poems are suggestive of the ways in which medieval authors used history or historical figures. Jon Finlayson has argued that the two families of the Richard I poems represent two genres, history and romance, a distinction he roots in the “presumed authorial conception of the material and the audience perception of the result.” Finlayson maintains that the b version is, in fact, not a chivalric romance but the “chanson de geste of Richard.”³ Marissa Libbon has read the earliest of the Richard poems, the b group King Richard, extant in the Auchinleck manuscript (ca. 1330 – 1340), by assimilating it to French historical poems that describe the deeds of French heroes. Drawing upon the opening lines of the poem that recall the deeds of Roland, Oliver, Alexander, Charlemagne, and Hector, Libbon suggests that the poem’s earliest author sought to displace French kings and heroes with the English hero King Richard in order to create a history around Richard I’s participation in the Third Crusade that served to express the values of an English nation.⁴ To this end, a King Richard in a fifteenth-century collection of biographies of English kings beginning with William the Conqueror is presented as history in a volume whose contents comprise the “making of Albion.” This manuscript, part of the Arundel collection, contains other works relating to English history, and Richard follows a prose account of Henry II.⁵ In contrast, Richard Coer de Lyon, though it begins with the same list of heroes as King Richard, signals its author’s different intent by dispensing with history on line 44 to describe Henry II’s infatuation with and marriage to a beautiful lady who turns out to be a demon. The story of Richard’s demon mother is the first of several fantastical elements in a poem that employs the language of crusading history to explore the intertwined and contemporary issues of chivalry and heroic kingship. The poem does offer an image of Richard I as courageous, audacious, and strategic, but also as embodying a quality of violence far different from versions in the b grouping.⁶

 John Finlayson, “Richard, Coer de Lyon: Romance, History or Something in Between?,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 156 – 80 at 158 and 179.  Marissa Libbon, “The Invention of King Richard,” in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. Susanna Fein (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 127– 38.  Arundel Manuscripts, London, College of Arms MS HDN 58, fols. 1r, 252r–75v. See also Catalogue of the Arundel Manuscripts in the Library of the College of Arms (1829) (not published). My thanks to Dr. Lynsey Darby, Archivist at the College of Arms, for making the manuscript and the Catalogue available to me on short notice.  Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the poem refer to Larkin’s edition of Richard Coer de Lyon. For a translation see Richard Coeur de Lion, ed. and trans. Katherine H. Terrell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2019).

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In their uses of history both King Richard and Richard Coer de Lyon evince the complications and ambiguities of a multivalent conversation about the identity of the nation and of its heroes that belongs to the fourteenth century, to the reign of Edward III when the poems as we know them were written. From Edward I’s wars against the Welsh and the Scots through the reign of his grandson, Edward III, England saw the creation of a military society that, as Jonathan Sumption points out, had not existed since the twelfth century.⁷ Suzanne Yeager has linked the Crusader rhetoric and the anti-French stance in Richard Coer de Lyon with propaganda related to the Hundred Years War and, as Thorlac Turville-Petre has argued, to Edward’s need to recruit an army for his claim to the French crown.⁸ Both Suzanne Akbari and Geraldine Heng have focused upon the a version’s insistence on Richard’s outsize appetite for vengeance and Saracen flesh as revealing a medieval orientalist perspective that defines difference in terms of religion and physical appearance and thus privileges and sanctifies what is Western and Christian.⁹ Heng, in particular, sees Richard’s cannibalism as excusing or expunging what she defines as a long-lasting cultural trauma occasioned by the incidents of cannibalism of the Crusader armies during the First Crusade.¹⁰ However, as Katherine H. Terrell has pointed out, while contemporary chroniclers did record the cannibalism, it is less clear how important or traumatic this incident was over time or to the poem.¹¹ Susan Crane’s point that the “far from exemplary” behavior of Richard works against a presumption of laudatory nationalistic rhetoric and Marcel Elias’s reading of the poem as questioning the chivalric enterprise underline the ways in which the poems we call King Richard and Richard Coer de Lyon do not provide

 Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 63.  Suzanne M. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 48 – 49; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290 – 1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 115 – 23. See also Diane Speed, “The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance,” in Readings in Medieval Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 135 – 57.  Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100 – 1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 114, 157, 158, and 160; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) 63 – 114; Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).  Heng, Empire of Magic, 25 – 26.  See Terrell, Richard Coeur de Lion, 17– 19; for texts see 227– 44.

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the grounds for a unitary understanding of either authorial intent or audience reception.¹² In this essay I depart from more generally situated readings of Richard Coer de Lyon and advance an argument for the poem’s local and historical relevance. I argue that it does not intend to preserve Crusader history but offers evidence of an intelligent use of a history partly associated with Richard I that was reconstituted in the perspectives, the incipient nationalism, and the racialized rhetoric of violent retribution against the Welsh and the Scots belonging to the reign of Edward I. These perspectives were re-formulated by his grandson, Edward III in his wars against the Scots and the French. The families of the Richard poem evince not a single pronouncement upon England or English chivalry, but a conversation about both. The conversation has its origins in the earlier reign of Edward I, who presented himself in a heroic mold as a crusader against those enemies, external and internal, who threatened his image and that of the England he sought to create. The conversation begun in Edward I’s reign continued in the reign of Edward III, whose approbation of the carefully composed image of his grandfather coincided with his own interest in image-making, especially when he disabused himself of the control of Mortimer and began to create his own myths of kingship and nation.¹³ While the author of Richard Coer de Lyon drew upon contemporary accounts of the First and Third Crusades and of the reign of Richard I, rather than offering an unqualified validation of crusading ideology or a paean to chivalric violence, the poem engages with issues that are less pertinent to Richard I than to the shadow the history of Edward I’s unempathetic vengeance cast on an England increasingly oriented by principles where such violence might not always serve the best interests of the nation.¹⁴ By re-directing the conversation about this provocative poem to the issues, traumas, and shifting perspectives of the early fourteenth century, we are able to recognize that the two families of the Richard poem offer a picture of the interactive uses of history by vernacular poets. Where the b version seems a

 Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 106; Marcel Elias, “Re-writing Chivalric Encounters: Cultural Anxieties and Social Critique in the Fourteenth Century,” in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Medieval Romance, a Tribute to Helen Cooper, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), 49 – 68.  For Edward III as image-maker, see W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 101– 2.  See Lynn Staley, “Merchandizing Peace,” in The Hundred Years War and European Literary History, ed. Daniel Davies and R. D. Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

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straightforward and rousing depiction of English valor and Richard’s military leadership, the later a version constructs a picture of kingship that provokes questions about heroism, authority, and violence that gather increasing force in the coming centuries as the voices of merchant wealth and of civic prosperity and responsibility gained power. In the a version the poet weaves signs associated with Edward I’s kingship into what is a fictionalized account of Richard I, creating a record that foregrounds issues relating to the justification of violence relevant to the reign of Edward I that remained important during the reign of Edward III.¹⁵ Here, I focus on two of those fictionalized incidents, the story of Richard and the lion and Richard’s cannibalism, relating them to the strategic myth-making that Edward I promoted, which in the poem is transferred to an invented past. The two incidents of violence that I discuss, composed perhaps in the first third of the fourteenth century, or the early years of the reign of Edward III, suggest a re-invented “history” of holy war and subjugation that could be used either to proclaim nationalistic violence or to foreground the relationship between violence stripped of empathy and barbarism or between heroism and ethical awareness. All three kings—Richard I, Edward I, and Edward III—were myth-makers, image-makers, propagandists, intent on myths of self and nation that could be justified by “history.” The Richard poems mark at least two moments in that venture.

Lionheart The lion, starved pet of the German king who sends the lion into Richard’s cell, where he rips the heart out of its body through its throat, is a fiction, the stuff of cartoon super-heroes become medieval knights. In his Topographia Hibernica (1186 – 1187) Gerald of Wales first likens Richard’s passionate and ferocious nature to the lion. In his poem about the Third Crusade, Estoire de la Guerre Sainte (ca. 1194– 99), Ambroise provides Richard, the noble king, with his epithet, Lionheart, “Le preuz reis, le quor de lion,” as the king surveys the hosts surrounding Acre and forms a plan to take it.¹⁶ The versions of this epithet in the Richard poems suggest two ways of presenting the hero-king.

 In addition to those incidents that I discuss, Edward I enjoyed his own difficult relationships with both French and German rulers. See Michael Prestwich, Edward I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 376 – 400.  Geraldus Cambrensis, Topographica Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner, vol 5. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 196; Ambroise, The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte, ed. and trans. Ma-

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Where the b version does not use the term Lionheart nor offer a story about a lion, the a version of Richard Coer de Lyon offers a fictional account of Richard’s naming that foregrounds his bloodthirsty desire for vengeance.¹⁷ Returning from a foray into the Holy Land, Richard and his companions cross into Germany and are imprisoned for suspected spying by the king. The king’s son, Wardrewe comes to their cell to see Richard and proposes an exchange of blows to which Richard agrees. Enraged by Wardrewe’s powerful ear-clout, Richard, despite the prince’s courteous behavior afterwards, gets up early the next day and cheats by waxing his hands so he can land an even stronger blow. Richard hits Wardrewe in the jaw, breaks it, and kills the prince. Shortly thereafter, the king’s daughter comes to see Richard, falls in love with him, and moves him into her chamber. Wanting retribution for the death of his son and the bedding of his daughter and seeking to avoid the law against the execution of a king (“it is no lawe, / A kyng to hange and to drawe” [lines 999 – 1000]), the sorrowing German king sends his hungry lion into Richard’s prison cell. The night before his contest with the lion, Richard asks the princess for forty white silk scarves, which she supplies. He wraps them around his arm, thrusts his arm down the lion’s throat, rips out its heart and marches into the king’s hall with the “herte, al so warme,” presses out the blood, dips the heart in the salt cellar and eats it “Wythouten bred” (lines 1100 – 109). The incident described in Richard Coer de Lyon has all the drama that male rage, a doting princess-lover, a threatening lion, and a shockingly gory ending, where Richard and not the lion is dripping with blood as he gorges on raw heart, can supply. The scene inserted into a b version of King Richard (MS London, College of Arms HDN 58, fols. 254– 55) contains another account of Richard killing the lion. This version emphasizes Richard’s strategy, for he kills the lion by strangling it with the scarves, then stabs it and slits it open with a knife also supplied by the princess. He takes the heart out but does not eat it in front of the king. Instead, he is found alive in his cell with the dead lion beside him. In the margin of the

rianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber, vol. 1 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003), line 2306. For Richard and his reputation, see John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1– 23.  A fragment of the b text, St. Andrews University Library MS PR 2065 R.4 (fragments: S R.4 fols. 1ra–2vb) does contain Richard’s description of the duplicitous Greek emperor, “in deed lion, in thought leopard” (S R.4. fol. 1va), which was a common expression and used both of Richard I and Edward I. (For the line, see the Auchinleck Manuscript, https://auchinleck.nls.uk/ mss/richard.html, line 461.) For the relation of the fragment to the Auchinleck manuscript, see G. V. Smithers, “Two Newly Discovered Fragments from the Auchinleck Manuscript,” Medium Aevum 18 (1949): 1– 11.

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manuscript, someone has written “Cor de Lyon.”¹⁸ In this account, the author substitutes a slightly more realistic fight for a super-human act of blood and rage, describing a carefully worked out contest between an angry lion with sharp claws and a knight who has covertly both protected and armed himself. Once ransomed, Richard takes the princess and leaves. A colored initial, signaling a new section, comes after the line “And lefte the kyng with his mayne all” (fol. 255r). The historic Richard, however lion-like he was credited with being, was also credited with heroism, military strategy, courtesy, and wisdom, as well as with giving his English nation a heavy tax load to fight his wars; his repute long outlasted him, and his arms, the three lions passant became those of England. Where the scene of the lion’s death in the b version offers a strategy for killing a lion, the scene of the lion’s evisceration in the a version of the poem follows the brutal death of Wardrewe with a fantastic conquest of a rampant lion. This scene is, moreover, an intimate scene, not a triumphant one; the gutted lion with its warm heart in Richard’s hand is hardly fit for a royal banner, nor is the picture of Richard dipping the heart in the king’s saltcellar and eating it “Wythouten bred” (Richard Coer de Lyon, lines 1105 – 15). This is a scene of subjugation and humiliation, where what is inmost is displayed and consumed with arrogance. Though the scene in the b version tones down that in the a and presents a less barbaric Richard, neither has any basis in history. They do, however, suggest ways in which the image of Richard could be retrofitted to suit more current needs. Richard I did not conquer lions, but Edward I, who was compared both favorably and unfavorably to Richard, did: the four lions of the Kingdom of Gwynedd, of the princely house of Aberffrw, who were blazoned on the flag of Llywelyn the Great and his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and the lion rampant who

 For a transcription of the passage see Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon, 3 and 244– 46. Roger Sherman Loomis (“Richard Coeur de Lion and the Pas Saladin in Medieval Art,” PMLA 30 [1915]: 509 – 28) argued that this episode was depicted in the decorative arts: in two tiles, which may or may not be depictions of Richard, from the late thirteenth century, and in one of the bosses in the cloister of Norwich Cathedral in which Richard holds a dagger over the lion. The architectural image seems to capture the scene in the manuscripts in the b version, in College of Arms MS HDN 58. Akbari (“The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coer de Lyon,” in Reading Medieval Culture, ed. Robert Stein and Sandra Prior [Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005], 198 – 227 at 208) reads this scene as mirroring the Eucharist. Nicola McDonald argues that these eating scenes translate the earlier metaphoric descriptions of Richard into a coherent plot; see “Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coer de Lyon,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 124– 50.

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rode the royal banner of Scotland.¹⁹ Edward celebrated his bloody conquests of both kingdoms with acts of intimate subjugation wherein the symbols of both kingdoms were transformed to signs of Edward’s and England’s public triumph. Edward celebrated his victory over the Welsh by appropriating the courts, residences, abbeys, and insignia symbolic of the Gwynedd dynasty for his own purposes. In parading the most precious religious relic in Gwynedd, the Y Groes Naid, which contained a fragment of the true cross, through London in May 1285, he displayed the end of the house of Gwynedd and the annexation of the kingdom to his own.²⁰ In Scotland, to signify his victory after the English invasion of 1296, Edward had the enthronement stone removed from Scone and transported to London, where he had it enclosed in the Coronation Chair, commissioned for the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.²¹ The chair itself, as Marie Louise Sauerberg has described it, was extensively gilded, made to look as though it were gold. Its back was dominated by an enthroned figure whose slippers rest on the back of a lion, and the legs of the chair are mounted on standing lions. The lions gesture to earlier lions, the lion under the king’s seat in Matthew Paris’s Lives of the Offas or the sleeping lions under Eleanor of Castile’s feet at her tomb in Westminster Abbey.²² The standing lions, whose might upholds the crowned king, also evoke the arms of England inherited from the banner of Richard I.²³ But what of recumbent lions depicted as footrests to royalty? The stone signifying Scottish regality, like the Welsh

 Gillingham, Richard I, 8 – 9. See Thomas Wright, The Political Songs of England, from the Reign of John to that of Edward II (London: Camden Society, 1839), 128, for a poem in praise of Edward’s accession in 1272 which compares the young Edward to Richard I. For the banner of Wales, or the arms of Llewellyn, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_flags; for the banner of Scotland, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Banner_of_Scotland.  R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change in Wales 1063 – 1415 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 355 – 56 and Prestwich, Edward I, 203 – 4. For the official language of appropriation, see Thomas Rymer and Robert Sanderson, Foedera, Conventiones, Literae, et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica Inter Reges Angliae, et Alios Quosvis, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Farnborough, UK: Gregg Press, 1967), ii, 247.  Prestwich, Edward I, 474.  Marie Louise Sauerberg, “The Polychromy of the Coronation Chair,” in The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone: History, Archaeology and Conservation, ed. Warwick Rodwell (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013), 77– 104; Kathryn A. Smith, “St. Edward’s Chair in the Queen Mary Psalter,” British Library Journal, 2017, article 10, 1– 18.  “The Song of Lewes,” commemorating Simon de Montfort’s victory in the Second Barons’ War in 1264, refers to Edward, then Prince Edward, as lion-like in his pride and leopard-like in his duplicity. See Wright, Political Songs, 72– 121, for Prince Edward, see lines 417– 36. See also Prestwich, Edward I, 24.

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cross, Edward re-purposed into signs of his own domination. These lions lay at his feet or under his seat.

Conquest Edward’s dominance was not always symbolic. The punishments he exacted upon those he perceived as traitors in Wales and Scotland were, as Michael Prestwich has indicated, horrific. Prestwich notes only one case from 1238 as a precedent for the judgments handed down to Dafydd, Llewelyn’s brother who continued the war after Llewelyn’s death, and to William Wallace, the Scottish leader during the first Scottish War: the traitor was to be dragged, hanged, beheaded, disemboweled, and quartered. For Dafydd, Edward called a parliament at Shrewsbury, Michaelmas 1283, where Dafydd was condemned and sentenced; William Wallace was tried before judges in Westminster in 1305, then dragged to Smithfield, where he was executed as Dafyyd had been.²⁴ Edward also made sure there would be no heirs to raise a standard against him. Llewelyn’s daughter and Dafydd’s daughters were separated and moved to English convents to live out their lives. Dafydd’s two young sons were put into civil captivity in Bristol; the elder died in 1287, but the younger lived at least to 1327, from 1305 kept in a wooden cage at night. Edward also moved against women. Unable to capture Robert Bruce, who rose against Edward in 1306 and continued in the fight for Scotland’s status as an independent kingdom until 1327 when Edward III renounced all rights to Scotland, Edward I captured Bruce’s sister and Isabel of Fife, the countess of Buchan, who had sided with Bruce against the English, and confined them to cages for four years, then to convents. They were finally exchanged for English prisoners around 1315.²⁵ Edward’s ferocity was a part of his legend in England.²⁶ As a young man he was praised for his warlike nature both at home against Simon de Montfort and

 Prestwich, Edward I, 202– 3 and 502– 3; Henry Richards Luard, ed., Bartholomaei de Cotton Historia Anglicana, A.D. 449 – 1298 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), 164; T. Hog, Nicholas Trevet Annales Sex Regum Angliae (London: S & J Bentley, Wilson, and Fly, 1845), 307; William Stubbs, Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II: Annales Londonienses and Annales Paulini, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1:90 – 91, 139 – 42; Rymer and Sanderson, Foedera, 1:ii, 1:247.  Prestwich, Edward I, 503 and 508 – 9.  See the collection of poems and songs on the reign of Edward I in Wright, Political Songs, especially at 128, 130, 160, 163, 179, and 175. Specific references are cited by page number in the text.

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his baronial alliance and abroad on Crusade. “The Song on the Scottish War” describes England’s enemies (France, Wales, and Scotland) as faithless, asking God to protect the English as He protected the Hebrew people. The poet juxtaposes Edward’s nobility, rationality, and bounty to the fraud, treachery, bestiality, and disobedience of the Scots, who are “rightly” reduced to slavery. Edward’s righteous wrath thus excises the disease of treachery, and his laws bring order to disordered kingdoms. “The Song on the Execution of Sir Simon Fraser,” composed probably in or just after 1306, gleefully details the deaths of William Wallace, then of Sir Simon Fraser, like Wallace drawn, hanged, and quartered. The poet anticipates a similar justice for Robert Bruce, who eluded the English and lived to become Robert I of Scotland, dying in 1329. The chronicle accounts of Edward’s war against Welsh and Scots are similarly pitiless. Peter Langtoft’s popular verse Chronicle, which included 370 lines on the reign of Edward I, was twice redacted to extend it into the early fourteenth century.²⁷ Later, in 1338, Robert Mannyng translated and adapted the Chronicle from French to a Middle English version. The Chronicle contains accusations against both the Welsh and the Scots of treason, as well as a number of rude and gleeful poems against the Scots. Mannyng is scornful of the Scots, the Welsh, and the Jews (expelled in 1292), compares the Welsh to lions subdued by Edward, and details without empathy the punishments to Llewelyn’s and Dafydd’s families, as well as to William Wallace.²⁸ The Brut presents Edward as the worthiest of kings, victorious over his enemies.²⁹ These enemies—especially the Welsh and the Scots—receive the punishments they deserve for treachery, and the author is careful to outline the exact and legal nature of this treachery. The Brut includes the deaths of Llewelyn, Dafydd, William Wallace, and Sir Simon Fraser, noting that Wallace’s quarters, which, like the heads or body parts of all traitors, were dispersed to various cities and hung publicly, in

 Thomas Wright, ed., The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2:220, 236 – 48, 258. For extended discussions of Langtoft and of political songs during and about Edward’s reign, see David Matthews, Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England 1250 – 1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 52– 80; Andrew Galloway, “The Borderlands of Satire: Linked, Opposed, and Exchanged Political Poetry during the Scottish and English Wars of the Early Fourteenth Century,” in The AngloScottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300 – 1600, ed. Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15 – 32.  Idelle Sullens, Robert Mannyng of Brunne: The Chronicle, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 153 (Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University Press, 1996), lines 5682– 890; 8039 – 68.  Friedrich W Brie, ed., The Brut: The Chronicles of England, EETS o.s. 131 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1906), 179 – 205.

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order that the Scots should “have in mind” the dangers of rising against their lord. That neither the Welsh nor the Scots gave credence to English law and legal systems, nor considered Edward their lord, is, for Edward, beside the point. After the account of Edward’s death, the Brut sums up his achievements with an account of Merlin’s earlier prophecy for this as yet unborn English king. Merlin prophesies that Edward will be a king of extraordinary mercy and sternness, a dragon who would “oppen his mouþe toward Walys” and make it quake, who would “sette his on foot in Wyk” and conquer Berwick, and who should “make Ryuer rynne in bloode and wiþ brayn.” The prophecy concludes “þat þis dragoun shulde ben holde þe best body of al þe world … ffor þe gode Kyng Edward was þe worthiest knyght of al þe worlde in his tyme.”³⁰ What Gruffud ab yr Ynad Coch mourns in his “Lament for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd”—the lost lord “like a lion,” the destroyed court, the devastated land and its households, the end of an age, is a quiet murmur under the loud official rhetoric of subjugation and “pacification.”³¹ The Welsh elegies for Llywelyn, which elide the divisions in Wales itself and the Welshmen who sided with Edward against Llywelyn’s assertions of rule in the name of a unified Wales, present Edward as the destroyer of both noble king and noble land, repository of the heritage of the Britons and thus of Arthur. Officially, however, Edward had quelled the barbarians. Where Archbishop John Peckham chastised Edward for his violence in Wales, it was the desecration of church property he critiqued, not the dismemberment of the kingdom.³² The kingdom itself Peckham wishes brought into conformity, as he specifies in his letter to the bishop of St. Asaph’s in 1284.³³ Peckham begins with the desire to encourage peace and make the Welsh one with the English, stating that the Welsh have fantasies of being heirs to Brutus, seeing themselves as Trojan fugitives, worshipers of Diana who founded the isle of Britain. He then expatiates on the dire state of the church in Wales, the illiterate priests, the people needing instruction in doctrine. He calls for a missionary effort by inviting Franciscans and Dominicans to teach, preach, and administer sacraments, which would, of course, cut off parishes

 Brie, The Brut, 203 – 4. For the Welsh as England’s “internal others,” see Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 44– 46.  Joseph P. Clancy, trans., The Earliest Welsh Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1970), 171– 73. For other laments for this lion-like lord, see 167, 168, 169 – 70, and 171– 73.  See Charles Trice Martin, ed., Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham, 3 vols (London: Longman et al., 1882– 1885), 2:731– 35. See also Rymer and Sanderson, Foedera, 2:276, for Edward’s letter agreeing to restitute the church for the damages incurred by the Welsh war.  Martin, Registrum, 2:741– 42.

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from their parish priests. In a letter to Edward in 1284, Peckham advises Edward that since the people of Wales are “trop sauvages e malicius,” they should be commanded to live in towns and their children sent to England to learn “clergie e maniere,” for the clerks of the country know neither letters nor law.³⁴ Peckham’s two charges against the Welsh of savagery and malice echo those by European authors against the Scots. As The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago (Book five of the twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi or Codex Calixtinus) says of the Navarrese, “This is a barbarous nation … full of all kinds of malice, and of black (or dark) color …. In malice they resemble Getae and the Saracens …. It is usually told that they descend from the race of the Scots because they resemble them in their habits and general countenance.”³⁵

Barbarism The English narrative of the conquests of Wales and Scotland depended upon a longstanding charge of barbarism linked to the rhetoric of savagery and malice, which, when directed at a sovereign, became treachery or treason. This is the language of retributive justice, of vengeance promoted as justice, that Susanna A. Throop links to the rhetoric of the crusades.³⁶ As both R. R. Davies and Simon Meecham-Jones have argued, Edward insisted upon a narrative to justify his actions, and the official record of Edward’s relations with both Welsh and Scots leaders bears testimony to his concern with legality and precedent.³⁷ The chronicle records likewise depict Edward as a figure for law and justice. The treachery of both peoples is concomitant with savagery and malice, the refusal to honor feudal bonds and the inability to understand structural signifiers of social values. That these bonds and signifiers were part of an English lexicon did not matter, and it seems significant that Edward conceived of his Welsh Wars as, like a crusade, sanctified. As Michael Prestwich notes, Edward ordered armbands blaz-

 Martin, Registrum, 3:776 – 78.  William Melczer, trans., The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela (New York: Italica Press, 1993), 94– 95.  Susanna Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095 – 1216 (London: Routledge, 2016), especially 10 – 15.  Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change, 115 – 38; Simon Meecham-Jones, “Erasure of Wales in Medieval Culture,” in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Roth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 27– 55. For the official record, see Rymer and Sanderson, Foedera, 2:69, 2:88 – 89, 2:189 – 90, 2:199, 2:247, 2:969, 2:971, and 2:1013.

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oned with the Cross of St. George for his infantry, underlining the “holy character” which Archbishop Peckham’s excommunication of the Welsh gave to the war.³⁸ The dismemberment and scattering of body parts of Welsh and Scottish leaders—like that of Ganelon in the Song of Roland—figure their crimes against the unity of the body politic, for which the king was the sign. The scenes of cannibalism in Richard Coer de Lyon, which describe the culinary separation of body parts, seem designed to elicit a conversation of particular resonance for a fourteenth-century audience about King Richard’s right to exact this sort of punishment upon an opponent. The first scene expands upon accounts of the siege of Acre, where Richard relieves and reinforces a Christian army that besieged the city and almost starved to death in the process.³⁹ The author of Richard Coer de Lyon blends fact and fiction in re-shaping what is a complicated record of shifting alliances among Greeks, French, Germans, and English. From a heroic account of Richard’s triumphant arrival at Acre, the bishop of Pisa’s account of the suffering of the Christian army, and Richard’s energetic and strategic efforts to revive the battle, the poet shapes and burnishes factual accounts to highlight Richard, the English hero. During the preparations, Richard becomes ill (Ambroise, lines 4921– 81), but he has himself carried to the battle, where he shoots bolts against the Turks and continues to direct the battle. Here, the a version diverges from the historical record and takes a turn towards fiction. This first fictional instance of cannibalism slyly inserts a different sort of brutality into a poem whose battles are brutal, but no more so than those in The Song of Roland or Bevis of Hampton. The intrusion of cannibalism into a battle that is, in part, vengeance for the protracted suffering of the Crusader troops heightens the bombast of the English army and projects a Richard whose rhetoric matches his ferocity in battle. When Richard becomes sick, he cannot leave his pavilion (Richard, lines 3027– 30) and feels that only a meal of pork will cure him. Of course, there is no pork in a Muslim land, but one old soldier tells the cook to substitute a “Sarezyn, yonge and fat” (Richard, line 3088). There follows a recipe and a dish so tasty that Richard eats lustily and revives, arms, and fights with his ax in his hand (line 3140). After the battle, Richard asks for more of the “swyn,” insisting on the head. Forced to admit what he has done, the cook brings out the head of a Saracen, and the king sees the swarthy face, the black beard, the white teeth, and the grinning lips of a human being and  Prestwich, Edward I, 199 – 200.  Finlayson’s formal or generic distinction between the b and a versions of the poem as historic poem and romance suggests the shifting relation between the two versions of the story. See Finlayson, “Richard Coer de Lyon,” 161.

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only, by English standards, a metaphoric swine (Richard, lines 3198 – 226). Richard is first astonished, then bombastic, declaring that the Christians will never starve while there is plenty of good Saracen flesh. With its trickery, boisterous hilarity, casual equation of pigs and Saracens (who, of course, do not eat pork), and male bravado, the scene plays out as a rowdy depiction of English manliness, especially in relation to the French, whom the poet feminizes throughout the poem. The scene’s casual disdain for social taboos, which it shares with Richard’s earlier killing of Wardrewe and the lion, has less to do with histories of Richard I than with accounts of Edward I, the other English Crusader king, who did not hesitate to eviscerate or to display in death those “swine-like” barbarians with whom England shared an island.⁴⁰ Moreover, this scene seems designed to speak to an audience with a recent historic memory of Edward’s ferocious and racialized vengeance and an audience that knew England’s wars were not over, as the poems of Laurence Minot (1333 – 1352) make all too clear. In the second scene of cannibalism (Richard, lines 3347– 562), Richard does not stumble into cannibalism; it is pre-meditated, strategic, and deliberately cruel. The poet describes Saladin (who was not there) as negotiating for safe passage for the 60,000 persons trapped in Acre, offering not only gold but the true cross in exchange. Richard appears to agree to the terms, but he has also seized a number of highly ranked Saracens, including the sons of some of the princes. For these, “oure chyldren,” the Sultan offers further treasure. Richard rejects the gold but invites the Saracen ambassadors “for my love” to stay and dine, after which he will send back a message to their lord. Richard then orders his marshal to find the most high-ranking prisoners, behead them, and place the heads upon individual platters, each head, stripped of beard, hair, and lips, boiled and labeled with the proper name on the forehead. Richard appears courteous to his guests, seats them, and awaits their reactions when the heads of friends and sons are set before them. Richard eats; his guests are more than appalled: The messaungerys were servyd soo, Evere an hed betwyxe twoo. In the forehed wreten hys name; Therof they had all grame! What they were whenne they seyen, The teres ran out of here eyen; And whenne they the lettre redde, To be slayn ful sore they dredde. (lines 3461– 68)

 See “Song on the Scottish War,” in Wright, Political Songs, 160.

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The Saracens are naturally appalled and afraid, but line 3466 adds sorrow to the poem, grief for friends and sons beheaded, defaced, boiled, and served upon a king’s table. Richard sends them home with a message that the Crusader army cannot be starved out as long as there are Saracens to eat, “Ther is no flesch so norysshaunt, / Unto an Ynglyssche Crysten man …. As is the flessh of a Saryzyne!” (lines 3548 – 49, 3552). While the cannibalism in the poem may seem to explore the disturbing reports of Crusader starvation and consequent cannibalism during the First Crusade, by focusing upon Richard’s intentional cruelty, the poet elides the history of the starvation scenes of the First Crusade, and uses the revolting feast as the occasion for the intentional ravaging and humiliation of an enemy in a parodic banquet.⁴¹ The messengers return in mourning, recounting to Saladin the details of the “banquet,” and the names of the sons whose heads lay upon platters. They describe Richard as a mad lion; their description recalls the Richard who broke into the German king’s court bearing and devouring the bloody heart of a lion. To its fourteenth-century hearers the scene might have recalled other accounts of barbarism—Mandeville’s descriptions of cannibals in faraway and barbaric lands or the Saracens in the Sultan of Babylon who drink animal blood before battling with the Christians, their animalistic appetites designating them as barbaric. In “The Battle of the Standard” (ca. 1154) Aelred of Rievaulx describes the Scots as cutting their food with unwashed knives previously used to slice open victims, mingled blood of human and beast running out of their mouths as they ate.⁴² This scene of horror and grief culminates in Richard’s slaughter of the population of Acre, a massacre endorsed by an angel who calls out, “Seygnyours, tues, tues, / Spares hem nought—behedith these!” (lines 3749 – 50). The validating angel is a feature of chansons de geste and fictional; the massacre was real.⁴³

 On this incident, see the background in Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon, 6 – 9. For some of the reports, see Terrell, Richard Couer de Lion, 227– 32. Heng links the heads on platters to John the Baptist and the entire incident to medieval anti-Judaism (Empire of Magic, 74– 78). However, the poet describes the scene as less triumphant or affirming of Christian belief as gruesome and inhumane. Moreover, if the heads on platters signify John the Baptist, Richard could only be Herod.  Iain Macleod Higgins, The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011), 22; Alan Lupack, The Sultan of Babylon, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), lines 1007– 10. See Galloway, “The Borderlands of Satire,” 19.  For the angel, see Larkin, Richard Coer de Lyon, 223. For the massacre and contemporary reaction to it, see Gillingham, Richard I, 167– 71, who notes that “almost without exception contemporary or near-contemporary Christian authors regarded it as the natural consequence of

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The author of Richard Coer de Lyon inserts cannibalism as part of a coherent sequence of fictional actions into a poetic account of the deeds of Richard I; in so doing he foregrounds Richard’s vengeance and sense of justice. I emphasize here not the brutality—battles were and are brutal—but the intent to subjugate and humiliate an enemy who can thereby only be less than human. The two incidents of cannibalism describe Richard as moving from the accidental to the intentional and strategic desire to enact vengeance upon those he perceives have broken faith with him. Because the Saracens “nyste where the croys was become” (line 3732), the cross they pledged to return in exchange for the citizens of Acre, Richard says, “Siththen it is soo, / I wot well what I have to doo” (lines 3733 – 34). He pays back the Sultan because he attempted to “blere myn yghe” (line 3736). Just so did Edward I pay back the “treacheries” of Dafydd and William Wallace; so did he destroy families lest they rise against him in another generation. Edward I was a man of strategy, a law maker, an administrator, a fierce defender of the rights of the Crown, a determined military leader, a relentless believer in the justice of his own causes, and a king quick to react to slights or perceived slights against the king’s person.⁴⁴ The memory of the ferocity of Edward I, the “Hammer of the Scots,” lasted well into the eighteenth century when his tomb was opened and his body and its trappings carefully examined.⁴⁵ John Rous, the fifteenth-century antiquarian, whose Historia Regum Angliae was published in 1745, describes Edward, commonly called “Kyng Edward with the long shankes,” as much better built and more imposing than his father, Henry III. Rous focuses upon Edward as a conqueror—upon his wars with Wales and Scotland, his capture of the coronation stone of Scotland and of the holy cross of Wales, and of his expulsion of the Jews. That his grandson Edward III should scrupulously observe his anniversary is not surprising, considering the weaknesses of his father, Edward II, and his own decision to claim the throne of France through his mother Isabella and so begin the Hundred Years’ War. That beginning is satirized in the northern French poem, The Vows of the Heron, written in the 1340s, but supposedly describing vows of escalating violence against the French made by the nobility be-

Saladin’s failure to abide by the terms agreed.” The poet inflates the dead from about 2,600 to 60,000. See Finlayson, Richard Couer de Lyon, 174.  Here, I epitomize Prestwich’s Edward I.  See Joseph Ayloffe, An Account of the Body of King Edward the First, as It Appeared on Opening His Tomb in the Year 1774. Read at the Society of Antiquaries May 12, 1774. Printed in London, 1775.

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fore Edward III in 1338.⁴⁶ Matthew Strickland has linked The Vows of the Heron to the earlier Feast of the Swan (1306), at which Edward I knighted his son, Edward II, and declared his brutal intentions before his foray into Scotland to avenge himself on Robert Bruce.⁴⁷ Strickland argues that the Scottish War against Bruce of 1306 – 1307 with its hard-eyed reprisals against noble men and women that continued for another decade served as a watershed for the political violence against real and perceived enemies that continued to escalate during the 1320s. This strategic violence also characterized Edward III’s own wars against the Scots, which he then carried over to his wars in France.⁴⁸ The rhetorical violence of The Vows of the Heron displays a deliberate disregard for decency. Its grotesquerie is heightened by the courtly background at which it “occurs,” with minstrels playing, ladies dancing, and lords and ladies flirting with one another, as Edward III’s knights supposedly goad him into war with France. As the frenzy of outrageous vowing on the heron (scorned for its “cowardice”) escalates, one courtier vows to precede the king’s progress through France with fire, to spare no one opposed to King Edward, neither church nor altar, woman or infant, parent or friend. The courtly ladies dance and fan the flames of emotion, leaving the final terrible vow to Queen Philippa, who vows to prevent the child moving in her body from issuing forth, killing it if she must, unless the king brings her to France.⁴⁹ References to the brutalities of

 On the play between fiction and fact and the likelihood that the poem critiques “militaristic posturing,” see Denise Baker, “Introduction” to Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 9; in the same volume, see essays by Norris J. Lacy, “Warmongering in Verse: Les Voeux du Heron” (17– 26) and Patricia DeMarco, “Inscribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron” (27– 54). For a study of the effect of the war’s violence on English thought, see John M. Bowers, “Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature,” also in Baker, Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War, 91– 126; see also B. J. Whiting, “The Vows of the Heron,” Speculum 20 (1945): 261– 78, who first argued that the poem satirizes Edward’s war.  Matthew Strickland, “Treason, Feud, and the Growth of State Violence: Edward I and the ‘War of the Earl of Carrick’,” in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, ca. 1150 – 1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, Ann Kettle, and Len Scales (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 84– 113.  For an analysis of the Hundred Years’ War as a consequence of England’s and France’s irreconcilable differences in Scotland and of Edward III’s battle strategy and brutality as honed in Scotland, see Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327 – 1360 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000, especially 74– 77. Sumption, The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle, 65 – 66 and 181, likewise suggests that both Edwards learned fighting techniques from their wars in Scotland.  “The Vows of the Heron,” in Thomas Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History (London: Longman, Brown, Longman, and Roberts, 1859 – 1861), 20 and 23 – 24.

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England’s war on French soil would be repeated by Hoccleve in the last section of the Regiment of Princes as he reminds his prince of the devastations of that same war, “What cornes waastid and doun trode and shent! / How many a wyf and mayde hath be bylayn.”⁵⁰ Hoccleve seeks to awaken Henry to empathy by reminding him of the violence war brings to daily life, to a world of farms, wives, and children, far beyond his royal ken.⁵¹

Conclusions Richard Coer de Lyon complicates the fourteenth-century narrative of English chivalry. Edward III sought to construct an image of English chivalric kingship that built upon the victories of Edward I, whom John of London had compared to Richard I, a roaring lion who subdued islands.⁵² In the early 1330s, Edward III, in emulation of these two Crusader kings, toyed with joining Philip VI on Crusade, and, throughout the 1330s and 1340s, he sponsored and participated in a number of tournaments, underlining both his own achievements and those of his friends.⁵³ With the foundation of the Order of the Garter in 1348, coming after the military victories over the French and the Scots from 1345 to 1347, Edward established a legacy celebrated in a steady stream of royal propaganda that climaxed in Thomas Bradwardine’s, “Sermo Epinicius,” after the victories at Crécy in August and Neville’s Cross in October of 1346. In it Bradwardine celebrates the English as triumphant because of their virtue and justice, unlike the French and the Scots, fighting with God on their side.⁵⁴ However, the picture of heroism or kingship that emerges from Richard Coer de Lyon emphasizes a sin-

 Charles R. Blyth, ed., Thomas Hoccleve: Regiment of Princes (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), lines 5336 – 67. See also Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 130 – 32.  These are questions William of Pagula directed at Edward III in 1331, asking him why his royal purveyors stripped the poor of their sustenance to feed the greedy court. See Staley, Island Garden, 137– 41.  Stubbs, Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, 2:15.  See C. J. Tyerman, “Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land,” EHR 100 (1985): 25 – 52. On tournaments, see Ormrod, Edward III, 141– 44.  Heiko A. Oberman and James Weisheipl, “The ‘Sermo Epinicius’ Ascribed to Thomas Bradwardine (1346),” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 25 (1958): 295 – 329. See also Antonia Gransden, “Propaganda in English Medieval Historiography,” Journal of Medieval History 1 (1975): 363 – 82; and Ormrod, Edward III, 282.

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gle-minded focus upon might, strategy, and justice at the expense of ambiguity, empathy, and mercy. Like other fourteenth-century poems such as Octavian and Perceval, it explores chivalry within the framework of romance fiction, which allows for questions rather than answers. Like Octavian and Perceval, Richard Coer de Lyon seems to glorify fighting while presenting a hero who lacks empathy for others.⁵⁵ Just as Richard has no capacity to understand the sorrow of others, Florent in Octavian contrasts to his adoptive father Clement, a butcher in Paris. The nobility, whom Florent admires, are well-dressed and -mannered, warlike, extravagant, and deeply conscious of the signs of noble blood and the demands of knighthood, but they are without empathy. On the other hand, Clement rescues and takes in an unwanted child, nurtures that child within his family, and sheds tears of sorrow at the prospect of losing Florent to the fighting life. Where Florent, by blood noble, longs for knighthood and armor and denies his love for his adoptive father when reunited to his natural (who had consigned his wife and infant children to the fire, commuted to exile), the poet presents Clement’s identity as fluid and expansive. In one scene he dresses as a pilgrim, in another as a Parisian burgess; in another he adopts Saracen clothing (and language) in order to steal a horse to meet Florent’s needs. The story of Clement is one segment of a romance of lost and found noble identities, but the city of Paris and its tradesmen that occupy this segment look towards a future where the concerns of merchant and gentry families, the families whose own fluidity turns them into the collectors and audiences of these insular romances, will be far more important than noble identities and concerns.⁵⁶ Perceval also explores the relationship be Like Richard, Octavian was popular from its composition in French in the early fourteenth century until a printed edition in the fifteenth century. The poem was translated into English, Italian, German, Danish, Dutch, Icelandic, and Polish. The earliest French version was copied by an Anglo-Norman at the beginning of the fourteenth century; the poem itself was probably composed near to the date of the manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 100). There are two English-language versions, one from Yorkshire the other from London or Essex. See Frances McSparran, Octovian, EETS o.s. 289 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Octovian Imperator (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations refer to the northern version, Lincoln, Dean and Chapter Library MS 91 (Four Middle English Romances, ed. Harriet Hudson [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996]) and will be cited by line number. I discuss this poem in “Merchandizing Peace,” forthcoming. For Perceval, see Mary Flowers Braswell, ed., Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).  See Lynn Staley, “Chaucer and Merchant Narratives,” in Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 97– 139. Sarah McNamer’s Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) explores compassion and affect in relation to gender in ways that point up the dis-

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tween knighthood and empathy. Perceval, the only son of an Arthurian knight, is the comic figure in this poem. His mother removes to the “wilderness” of Wales after her husband is killed in a tournament and does not teach Perceval about his background nor nurture him in noble ways. His adventures on the way to knighthood are both funny and provocative: because he is strong, he can kill, but because he has had no “nurture,” he is without feelings for either friends or foes. Nor does he understand the consequences of his actions. The poet employs the slapstick of Perceval’s unknowingness to present a knight who can fight, but who has no ethical calculus. The focus on empathy in these early fourteenth-century romances is striking because it serves as a marker of male status.⁵⁷ Octavian, Perceval, and Richard are defined by their noble blood; their manifest chivalric identities seem designed to exclude the feelings of the Saracen fathers whose sons’ heads lie before them, their names engraved in their foreheads. In fact, the rough humor of the poems, which turns Clement into a buffoon, the half-burned body of the Red Knight Perceval first kills into a slapstick incident, and the Saracen fathers into Richard’s stooges, points up the insufficiencies of heroes who lack empathy. The poets who composed the Richard poems employed the sanctified and racialized violence of the crusades and the heroic figure of a king of England as a means of exploring a heroic legacy continued in the deeds of their own late thirteenth-century king, who had been on crusade in 1270 and planned throughout his reign, and even in 1307, his final year, to take up the cross for a second time. The two versions of this poem offer us ways of thinking about the uses of history by insular authors. The history of the crusades is indeed a history of violence and serves the authors of Richard as a means of celebrating a particular nationalistic

tinction between compassion and empathy. I mean here to focus upon empathy, which was not a word in the Middle Ages, but was nonetheless described. See Karl F. Morrison and Rudulph M. Bell, Studies on Medieval Empathies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013). See also my essay, “Maidstone’s Psalms and the King’s Speech,” in The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation, ed. Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 255 – 70, where I discuss Anne’s advice to King Richard, which encourages, not his compassion, but his empathy for the citizens of London.  On this aspect of Richard Coer de Lyon, see Katherine H. Terrell, “Cannibalism, Crusading and Conquest: From the First Crusade to Richard Coer de Lyon,” in Of Man Eating Men: Medieval and Early Modern Cannibalism, ed. Chris Doyle, Christa Tuczay, and Thomas Ballhausen (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, forthcoming). Patricia DeMarco has discussed the concept of affect and the control of the emotions in relation to differences between “others” and Christians in late medieval literature; see “Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem,” in Medieval Affect, Feeling and Emotion, ed. Glenn D. Burger and Holly Crocker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 47– 69.

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vision identified with the figure of Richard the Lionheart or, in the case of the a version, of scrutinizing violence in relation to Christian heroism and chivalry, particularly the justifications for acts of individual violence against enemies. That the two readings are not necessarily mutually exclusive is apparent from the long history of the popularity of the poem’s a version, including the 1509 and 1528 printings by Wynken de Worde.⁵⁸ With their translations of loosely historic subject matter, insular romances such as Richard can serve as registers for shifting social and cultural views about knighthood, kingship, and nation and can also serve multiple audiences in different ways. The history that serves as a foundation for what are sometimes fabulous events can provide precedent for contemporary events or pretext for an exploration of contemporary anxieties or issues. The political violence of Edward I’s reign was directed against enemies of the Crown defined as traitors and as racially distinct inhabitants of a nation Edward identified with himself, but the romances of the period suggest a more complex reading of the tensions that characterized the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The poems I have mentioned here suggest an unease with, or a recognition of, the shifting social dynamics occasioned by an increasingly prominent merchant class. These poems appealed to a world whose priorities were not uniformly those of the noble warrior. Moreover, they slyly question the very definition of barbarism, used to justify violent reprisal.⁵⁹ Is the barbarian the one whose clothing, food choices, and manners are different, or is the barbarian the one who drips with lion’s blood, the one who boils the heads of sons and serves them to their fathers, the one who puts noble women and royal children in cages, or the one who threatens to slice up the infants of France? That question threads its way through Crusade literature, travel literature, and the literature of war and is answered differently and sometimes ambiguously by those who travel for adventure, merchandising, or war. Richard Coer de Lyon is a crucial, ambiguous, and multi-vocal text in that conversation.

 Kynge Rycharde Cuer du Lyon (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509). Retrieved from https:// search.proquest.com/docview/2240914766?accountid=10207. The 1509 edition is dedicated to Margaret Beaufort, “the kynges moder.”  This is a subject Thomas Hahn has explored for years. See, for example, “New Worlds,” in The Routledge Medieval Encyclopedia Online (2018) and “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 1– 37. Marisa Libbon’s Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021) appeared too late for me to incorporate it. On the many “Richards” available to English readers and writers, see pp. 15 – 60; on Richard as a “memory” for Edward III, see pp. 107– 38.

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Bibliography Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coer de Lyon.” In Reading Medieval Culture, edited by Robert Stein and Sandra Prior, 198 – 227. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100 – 1450. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Ambroise. The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte. Edited and translated by Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber. 2 vols. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003. Arundel Manuscripts. London, College of Arms, MS HDN 58, fols. 1r, 252r–75v. The Auchinleck Manuscript. https://auchinleck.nls.uk/. Ayloffe, Joseph. An Account of the Body of King Edward the First, as It Appeared on Opening His Tomb in the Year 1774. Read at the Society of Antiquaries May 12, 1774. Printed in London, 1775. Baker, Denise N., ed. Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Blyth, Charles R., ed. Thomas Hoccleve: Regiment of Princes. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. Bowers, John M. “Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, edited by Denise N. Baker, 91 – 126. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Braswell, Mary Flowers, ed. Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. Brie, Friedrich W., ed. The Brut: The Chronicles of England. 2 vols. EETS o.s. 131. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1906. Brunner, Karl, ed. Der Mittelenglische Versroman über Richard Löwenherz. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1913. Cambrensis, Geraldus. Topographica Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica. Edited by J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner. 8 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Catalogue of the Arundel Manuscripts in the Library of the College of Arms. Edited by Henry Howard and William Henry Black. London: S. R. Bentley, 1829. Clancy, Joseph P., trans. The Earliest Welsh Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1970. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Crane, Susan. Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Davies, R. R., Conquest, Coexistence, and Change in Wales 1063 – 1415. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. DeMarco, Patricia. “Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem.” In Medieval Affect, Feeling and Emotion, edited by Glenn D. Burger and Holly Crocker, 47 – 69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. DeMarco, Patricia. “Inscribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and

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English Cultures, edited by Denise N. Baker, 27 – 54. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Elias, Marcel. “Re-writing Chivalric Encounters: Cultural Anxieties and Social Critique in the Fourteenth Century.” In Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Medieval Romance, a Tribute to Helen Cooper, edited by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan Leitch, and Corinne Saunders, 49 – 68. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Finlayson, John. “Richard, Coer de Lyon: Romance, History or Something in Between?” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 156 – 80. Galloway, Andrew. “The Borderlands of Satire: Linked, Opposed, and Exchanged Political Poetry during the Scottish and English Wars of the Early Fourteenth Century.” In The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300 – 1600, edited by Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell, 15 – 32. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gillingham, John. Richard I. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Gransden, Antonia. “Propaganda in English Medieval Historiography.” Journal of Medieval History 1 (1975): 363 – 82. Hahn, Thomas. “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 1 – 37. Hahn, Thomas. “New Worlds.” In The Routledge Medieval Encyclopedia Online. 2018. Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Higgins, Iain Macleod. The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011. Hog, T., ed. Nicholas Trevet Annales Sex Regum Angliae. London: S & J. Bentley, Wilson, and Fly, 1845. Hudson, Harriet, ed. Four Middle English Romances. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996. Ingham, Patricia Clare. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Kynge Rycharde Cuer du Lyon. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. Lacy, Norris J. “Warmongering in Verse: Les Voeux du Heron.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, edited by Denise N. Baker, 17 – 26. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Larkin, Peter, ed. Richard Coer de Lyon. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015. Libbon, Marisa. Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Libbon, Marissa. “The Invention of King Richard.” In The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, edited by Susanna Fein, 127 – 38. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2016. Loomis, Roger Sherman. “Richard Coeur de Lion and the Pas Saladin in Medieval Art.” PMLA 30 (1915): 509 – 28. Luard, Henry Richards, ed. Bartholomaei de Cotton Historia Anglicana, A.D. 449 – 1298. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859.

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Lupack, Alan. The Sultan of Babylon. In Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, edited by Alan Lupack, 1 – 104. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990. Martin, Charles Trice, ed. Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham. 3 vols. London: Longman et al., 1882 – 1885. Matthews, David. Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England 1250 – 1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. McDonald, Nicola. “Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coer de Lyon.” In Pulp Fictions of Medieval England, edited by Nicola McDonald, 124 – 50. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. McSparran, Frances, ed. Octovian. EETS o.s. 289. London: Oxford University Press, 1986. McSparran, Frances, ed. Octovian Imperator. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979. Meecham-Jones, Simon. “Erasure of Wales in Medieval Culture.” In Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, edited by Roth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, 27 – 55. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Melczer, William, trans. The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela. New York: Italica Press, 1993. Morrison, Karl F. and Rudulph M. Bell. Studies on Medieval Empathies. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013. Oberman, Heiko A. and James Weisheipl. “The ‘Sermo Epinicius’ Ascribed to Thomas Bradwardine (1346).” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 25 (1958): 295 – 329. Ormrod, W. Mark. Edward III. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Prestwich, Michael. Edward I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Rogers, Clifford J. War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327 – 1360. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2000. Rymer, Thomas and Robert Sanderson, eds. Foedera, Conventiones, Literae, et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica Inter Reges Angliae, et Alios Quosvis. 7 vols. 1745. 3rd ed. Farnborough, UK: Gregg Press, 1967. Sauerberg, Marie Louise. “The Polychromy of the Coronation Chair.” In The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone: History, Archaeology and Conservation, edited by Warwick Rodwell, 77 – 104. Westminster Abbey Occasional Papers, series 3, no. 2. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013. Smith, Kathryn A. “St. Edward’s Chair in the Queen Mary Psalter.” British Library Journal, 2017, article 10, 1 – 18. Smithers, G. V. “Two Newly Discovered Fragments from the Auchinleck Manuscript.” Medium Aevum 18 (1949): 1 – 11. Speed, Diane. “The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance.” In Readings in Medieval Romance, edited by Carol M. Meale, 135 – 57. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Staley, Lynn. Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Staley, Lynn. The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012.

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Staley, Lynn. “Maidstone’s Psalms and the King’s Speech.” In The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation, edited by Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan, 255 – 70. Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2017. Staley, Lynn. “Merchandizing Peace.” In The Hundred Years War and European Literary History, edited by Daniel Davies and R. D. Perry. Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming. Strickland, Matthew. “Treason, Feud, and the Growth of State Violence: Edward I and the ‘War of the Earl of Carrick’.” In War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, ca. 1150 – 1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, edited by Chris Given-Wilson, Ann Kettle, and Len Scales, 84 – 113. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2008. Stubbs, William. Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II: Annales Londonienses and Annales Paulini. 1882 and 1883. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Sullens, Idelle, ed. Robert Mannyng of Brunne: The Chronicle. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 153. Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University Press, 1996. Sumption, Jonathan. The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Terrell, Katherine H. “Cannibalism, Crusading and Conquest: From the First Crusade to Richard Coer de Lyon.” In Of Man Eating Men: Medieval and Early Modern Cannibalism, edited by Chris Doyle, Christa Tuczay, and Thomas Ballhausen. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, forthcoming. Terrell, Katherine H., ed. and trans. Richard Coeur de Lion. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2019. Throop, Susanna A. Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095 – 1216. London: Routledge, 2016. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290 – 1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Tyerman, C. J. “Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land.” EHR 100 (1985): 25 – 52. Whiting, B. J. “The Vows of the Heron.” Speculum 20 (1945): 261 – 78. Wright, Thomas, ed. The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft. 2 vols. Rolls Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Wright, Thomas, ed. Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History: Composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III. London: Longman, Brown, Longman, and Roberts, 1859 – 1861. Wright, Thomas, ed. The Political Songs of England, from the Reign of John to that of Edward II. London: Camden Society, John Bowyer Nichols and Son, 1839. Yeager, Suzanne M. Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Sarah Stanbury

Chapter 13 The Crow’s “Cokkow!”: Bird Debates and Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” opens in an Edenic home filled with song. Song also propels the tale toward its catastrophic ending. While Phebus, the god of music, is away from home, his wife has a tryst with her lover. His pet crow, watching from its cage, witnesses this act. On Phebus’s return, the crow sings, “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” Phebus’s first response is shock, not at the what the song means, but at how it sounds: “What, bryd” quod Phebus. “What song syngestow? Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge To heere thy voys? Allas, what song is this?” (9.244– 47)

In this lament, in which variants of “song” and “synge” appear no less than four times, Phebus hears “Cokkow!” as a musically impoverished song—the song of a cuckoo—that recalls what it is not, which is the song of a nightingale.¹ Earlier, in his originary, unfallen household, the crow imitated or surpassed the song of this other bird, singing “lyk a nyghtyngale” (9.294) or even sweeter than a nightingale by “an hondred thousand deel” (9.137). After singing “Cokkow,” though, the crow never sings again. Once Phebus realizes he has been made a cuckold, he murders his wife, breaks his musical instruments, strips the crow of song and whiteness, and flings it out the door. When readers have commented on the crow’s “Cokkow!” it is almost always to note the pun on cuckold. As readers since Skeat have claimed, for Phebus’s crow to say “Cokkow” is to deliver a sly yet brutal pun: you are “cokkow,”

I thank Theresa Coletti, Lynn Staley, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Christine Coch, and Sarah Luria for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.  That “Cokkow!” is the song of a cuckoo, and not a rooster or some other bird, is indicated by a birdcall in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls: “The goos, the cokkow, and the doke also / So cryede, ‘Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek’ hye / That thourgh myne eres the noyse wente tho” (498 – 500): Geese say kek! Cuckoo’s say kokkow! Ducks say quek. All Chaucer citations are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-014

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you have been made a cuckold.² While no longer in use in English today, the pun had a long life, from the Latin comedies of Plautus (ca. 254– 184 BCE) to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.³ In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, the song of the cuckoo is a “word of fear” for married men:⁴ The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo!: O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear!

The linguistic association between cuckoos and cuckolds, it is generally believed, emerged from the female cuckoo’s practice of nest parasitism—of laying her egg in the nest of another, much smaller bird. The cuckoo chick, outsizing its non-cuckoo nest mates as it grows, pushes them out of the nest, commandeering the mother bird’s full attentions for itself. It was also believed that the chick, before fledging, might eat the songbird that raised it.⁵ In Plautus, the cuckoo is the  See, for instance, the note in the Riverside Chaucer; Donald C. Baker, The Manciple’s Tale, Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 2, part 10 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 114; Arthur Glowka, “Chaucer’s Bird Sounds,” University of South Florida Language Quarterly 21 (1983): 15 – 17; and Lesley Kordecki, “Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism,” in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Carolynn Van Dyke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 249 – 60 at 255. Kordecki notes the “overburdened semiotics of the cuckoo” in that the cuckoo/cuckold analogy makes little zoological sense: the female cuckoo does not betray her mate but rather the host of the nest in which she deposits her egg.  Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “cokewold” (cuckold), speculates the pun may derive from Old French “cucuault”; see Kordecki, “Chaucer’s Cuckoo,” 255. It would seem to have far earlier roots, as suggested by its use in Plautus’s The Comedy of Asses, ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo, Loeb Classical Library 60 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 244– 45, line 934: Artemona—“Cano capite te cuculum uxor ex lustris rapit” (When your head is grey your dear wife has to drag you, the cuckoo, from a brothel”).  William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 5.2.972– 76; the pun is implied in Robert Greene, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592): “When the Cuckoulds querister beganne to bewray [expose] Aprill Gentlemen with his neuer changed note,” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Cuckold,” sense 3.  For etymology see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “cuckold.” In The Complaint of Nature, trans. Douglas Moffat (Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press, 1972), 2.184– 85, Alain de Lille refers to the cuckoo’s nest usurpation: “The hedge-sparrow, putting aside the role of stepmother, with the maternal breast of devotion adopted as its child the alien offspring of the cuckoo.” The meaning of “curuca” (or “curruca”), which Moffat translates as hedge-sparrow, is uncertain; in his translation of The Plaint of Nature, James Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 92, offers meadow pipit. Sheridan, Plaint, 93n, also notes that in some manuscripts of Juvenal 6.275, “curruca” is the word for a cuckolded husband. On cuckoo symbolism see esp. Beryl

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errant husband, whereas in later use the cuckoo becomes the spouse of a faithless wife. This essay argues that while the crow’s “cuckoo” in the “Manciple’s Tale” hints at what Phebus has just become—a cuckold—the meaning of his “cuckoo” reaches capaciously beyond the pun to resonate with bird debate songs popular among writers and composers directly or tangentially part of Chaucer’s circle.⁶ In these avian quarrels, often staged between a cuckoo and a nightingale, the cuckoo plays the contrarian, as in the Parliament of Fowls, sneering at the romantic fabulations of courtly love. Yet while love is the ostensible subject of debate, in many songs love covers for other concerns: musical and poetic form as well as the possibility that words, either in poetry or song, can actually convey truth.⁷ In the “Manciple’s Tale,” a fable that returns repeatedly to language—the slippery, class-based implications of words, the risks of telling the truth—the crow’s “Cokkow,” I suggest, is a stunning theatrical performance, richly palimpsested, that repeats a social and courtly meme, puns on the instability of lan-

Rowland, Birds with Human Souls (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 38 – 41; see also Kordecki, “Chaucer’s Cuckoo.” For the etymology of cuckoo in French, Latin, and Old and Middle English in relation to the thirteenth-century summer canon, “Sumer is i-cumen in,” see Marguerite-Marie Dubois, “Le Rondeau du Coucou,” in La ronde des saisons, ed. Leo Carruthers (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), 15 – 21. Dubois (16), notes an alternative explanation by Alain Rey, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 1 (Paris: Robert, 1992), 509, that the insult “cuckoo” originated in the association of “coq” (rooster) with “hue” from “huer” (to insult). In Old English the cuckoo (“geac”) was often associated with both spring and sorrow (Dubois, “Rondeau,”16).  Studies of the tale’s sources often point to the Ovidian fable of Phebus, his wife Coronis (who only gets called “wyf” in Chaucer’s version of the fable), and the tattling bird. It was a wellknown story, retold in the Ovide Moralisé, in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Machaut. See Edward Wheatley, ed., The Manciple’s Tale, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002– 2005), 749 – 73; see also Jamie C. Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow: The Manciple’s Tale and Ovidian Mythography,” The Chaucer Review 4 (2004): 355 – 75; Richard Hazelton, “The Manciple’s Tale: Parody and Critique,” JEGP 62, no. 1 (1963): 1– 31; Eve Salisbury, “Murdering Fiction: The Case of the Manciple’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003): 309 – 16; and William Cadbury, “The Manipulation of Sources and the Meaning of the Manciple’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 43 (1964): 538 – 48.  Some of these songs are briefly discussed by Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 47. For French debate poems as sources for the Parliament of Fowls, see Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 194; and James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 219 – 27.

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guage, and lobs an attack on the courtly good life of song, poetry, and pleasure.⁸ When Phebus’s crow sings “Cokkow” in the “Manciple’s Tale,” his birdsong mimicry brings the cuckoo, and popular cuckoo debate poems, directly onto the Chaucerian stage. “Cokkow,” sung by a crow, can even be heard as a joke. Yet as a joke, “Cokkow” is a dark one. “Cokkow!” is a bravado speech act not only signaling the end of the verse Canterbury Tales, but also making that end happen. While the crow’s triple “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” may seem to be a clear announcement of the wife’s extra-marital tryst, Phebus doesn’t actually hear it that way. Rather, he hears it as a sad song. His pet bird used to sing “so myrily” that it made his heart rejoice. To Phebus’s question, “‘Allas, what song is this?’” the bird resorts to language, though first remarking that his song has hinted at the truth: “‘I synge nat amys’” (9.248). Among Chaucer and his English and French contemporaries, the cuckoo/cuckold association is often veiled in hints that are far less explicit than in either Plautus or Shakespeare, with many references to cuckoos drawing on a different set of associations altogether. Indeed, while the word “cuckold” appears widely in Middle English, it is found rarely, if at all, in association with the cuckoo. The word “cuckold,” first recorded in English in the Owl and Nightingale (ca. 1250 – 1300),⁹ appears in the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”: “Leue brother Osewold, / Who hath no wyf, he is no cokewold” (1.3151– 52), as well as in the Pardoner’s Prologue (6.382). And while “Cuckoo!” may also be a “word of fear” in fourteenth-century French and English texts, deciphering the precise threat or unpleasantness lodged in the call is often part of the puzzle—and the comedy. In the parodic La Messe des Oiseaus (1300 – 1340) by the Hainaut poet Jean de Condé, a French love vision on which Chaucer may have drawn for the Parliament of Fowls,¹⁰ a skeptical

 On language as palimpsested in “chords” of cultural associations, see George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 172.  See the Oxford English Dictionary. For a reading of The Owl and the Nightingale as a celebration of the “unmediated and spontaneous nature” of English vernacular, see Thomas Hahn, “Early Middle English,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61– 91 at 77.  For Chaucer’s possible familiarity with poems of Jean de Condé, see Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121. Jean de Condé (b. 1275 – 1280, d. 1345), was a poet in the court of Guillaume I, Count of Hainaut, and part of a literary entourage with close ties to English court life. Chaucer’s wife Philippa was the daughter of Sir Gilles de Roet, a Hainauter who accompanied Philippa of Hainaut to London to marry Edward III. Hainauters were a robust presence in English royal court circles for much of the fourteenth century. For a discussion of La Messe, see Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176 – 78.

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cuckoo calls out “Tout cuku!” as it is chased by avian Venus-worshippers away from a bird parliament. Barry Windeatt translates the phrase as “You’re all cuckolds!” “Tout”—that is, all you believers in Love—are “cuku”: you are all likely to be cuckolds.¹¹ Clearly “cuku!” is an insult: the cuckoo’s parting shot, “Tout cuku!” carries “tel laidure,” such ugliness, that the birds gathered to adore Venus drive the cuckoo away to hide in a hollow tree. Why “tout cuku!” is so ugly, though, is left ambiguous. The cuckoo never actually calls them cuckolds. In her subsequent explanation for the birds’ enraged reaction, Venus points to the cuckoo’s practice of nest parasitism. The cuckoo “is bad by his very nature” (“de malvaise nature,” line 381), Venus says, because of his mother’s practice of laying her egg in the nest of another bird.¹² Due to its evil lineage, Venus continues, the cuckoo can be used as a cautionary example of evil talkers (“des mesdisans,” line 401), traitors (“des trahitours,” line 401), and those who tell harmful jokes (“bourdes de vous a grever,” line 403). Perhaps the harmful joke is “Cuckold!” but it could also be much broader: You are all like me—that is, bad in your very nature—or, you are an enemy to Love. If the cuckoo is saying “Cuckold!” it is such a sly or crude joke that Venus can only hint at it. In Chaucer’s writings, cuckoos comment on love or its failures, but with the exception of the “Manciple’s Tale,” do not explicitly call out cuckolded husbands. Hints of the cuckoo’s practice of brood parasitism appear in the Parliament of Fowls, where a merlin calls the cuckoo a murderer: “Thow mortherere [murderer] of the heysoge [sparrow] on the braunche / That broughte the forth, thow reufullest glotoun!” (lines 612– 13)—with “glotoun” suggesting both villain and glutton: villain for infiltrating the sparrow’s nest; glutton, perhaps, for eating its surrogate mother. A listing of birds in Nature’s garden earlier in the text even calls the cuckoo unnatural, “the cukkow ever unkynde” (line 358): “unkynde” as a Valentine’s Day contrarian, outlaw in Nature’s garden as a violator of what are assumed to be natural principles of reproduction. In the “Knight’s Tale,” instead of a heraldic falcon, the statue of Venus carries a cuckoo on her arm (1.1930), an ambiguous signifier for the outcome of her games of love—perhaps a gesture to the possibility of

 Jean de Condé, La Messe des oiseaux et Le dit des Jacobins et des Fremeneurs, ed. Jacques Ribard (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 22, lines 307– 12: “Deseure iaus vint volant atant, / Durement de l’eile batant: ‘Tout cuku, fait il, tout cuku!’ / Il en fist maint cuer irascu / De ce k’il lor dist tel laidure; / Si en commença grant murmure”; trans. B. A. Windeatt, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 107: “He came flying over them then beating his wings furiously. ‘Cuckoo! Cuckolds!’ he cried, ‘You’re all cuckolds! Cuckoos!’ He infuriated many a lover’s heart by flinging such an insult at them, and a great murmuring went up.”  Windeatt, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, 107– 8.

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betrayal, or perhaps an ironic commentary on the dark side of romance. Elsewhere in the tale Theseus muses that Emily knows no more about Palamon and Arcite’s obsession with her, “this hoote fare” (1.1809), than a cuckoo or a hare knows, “than woot a cokkow or an hare” (1.1810), a surprising pairing in that rabbits are often symbols of lust—that is, of “hoote fare.”¹³ In many manuscripts, however, the line appears as “than woot a cokkow of an hare,” an analogy that makes more sense in terms of the reputations of both cuckoos and rabbits: Emily knows less about it (this passionate behavior) than a cuckoo knows about a hare.¹⁴ Like the cuckoo—that is, like one who decries love and knows little about erotic desire —Emily knows nothing about the “hoote fare” of her two suitors.

Cuckoos and Nightingales When Phebus hears the crow call out “Cokkow!” and asks, “What song syngestow?” his question gestures immediately to the complaint lodged most often in late medieval texts against cuckoos: their song. As Elizabeth Eva Leach notes in her study of birdsong mimicry and allusion in medieval music, “The cuckoo’s song was a byword for repetitiveness and tedium, the cuckoo a frequently used symbol of the boring singer.”¹⁵ The cuckoo is invariably the negative songster, its voice a dismal foil to the nightingale’s harmonics. What gives the cuckoo’s song its unique character lies in its repetitive, two-note call. A fundamental difference between the song of the cuckoo and of the nightingale—both common migratory European birds whose songs herald the arrival of spring—lies in vocal variation, a distinctive sonic contrast that likely accounts for the regularity of their appearances in medieval commentaries on music and in debate poetry. The nightingale varies its song, whereas the cuckoo, “proverbially monotonous,”¹⁶ only repeats the same two notes. It may be the regularity and simplicity of its call, a perfect minor third, that inspired its use in later automata, most notably the cuckoo

 See Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971), 65, 89.  Riverside has “or.” For manuscript variants see Riverside Chaucer, Textual Notes, 1123, line 1810.  Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 39n. My discussion of birdsong in late medieval music is deeply indebted to Leach’s study.  Leach, Sung Birds, 126. The cuckoo’s call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ZbXoJKPU0; the nightingale’s call: https://freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/17185/.

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clock.¹⁷ In late medieval commentaries on music, the cuckoo, even while a sign of spring, often appears as a figure of monody and of bad poetry, its repetitive, two-note “cuckoo” dramatically outclassed by the nightingale’s warbling melodic sequences. Discussing the geometry and harmonics of celestial music, Nicholas Oresme (1320 – 1382) draws on the cuckoo analogy to critique singers who don’t vary their sounds: “In the palace of the gods, the most delightful jester should dance with the Muses, and while strumming a spherical cither, appear in full view of Apollo,” while “a singer who is unable to vary musical sounds, which are infinitely variable, would no longer be thought best, but [would be taken for] a cuckoo.” His repetitive song in this cosmic court would “produce disgust.”¹⁸ Similarly, in John Lydgate’s “Churl and the Bird,” the cuckoo’s song is a sign of its musical impoverishment: “Whan gentil briddis make most melodie, / The cookkow syngen can but o lay.”¹⁹ The cuckoo can only sing one song. The archly parodic Trois Savoir, a fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman poem that was Lydgate’s apparent source for the “Churl and Bird,” applies the cuckoo analogy to newly popular polyphony: “And he who writes a book for a little cuckoo [cocuel] expends so much ink and skin, because, when he has taught him everything, having taken great pain and effort to teach him how to do organum well, how to sing below [the chant] and [how to] discant, if I know the cuckoo well, he will still never sing more than ‘cuckoo’ [‘cocku’].”²⁰ The cuckoo, perhaps

 The first description of a cuckoo clock dates from the early seventeenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century cuckoo clocks were being widely manufactured in Bavaria. In most cuckoo clocks the melodic “cuckoo” is produced by a tiny bellows, likely modeled on church organs. See Jimmy Stamp, “Past, Present, and Future of the Cuckoo Clock,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 17, 2003, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-past-present-and-futureof-the-cuckoo-clock-65073025/. A mechanical rooster still crows the hour on Bern’s Zytglogge, built in the early fifteenth century.  “Ymo placet nobis quod in deorum palatio cum suis Musis tripudiet spericamque pulsans citharam appareat in conspectu Apollonis gratissima ioculatrix. . . . Nonne talis uniformitas gignit fastidium? . . . Nec esset reputatus cantor optimus sed cuculus, qui non posset modulos musicos variare qui sunt variabiles in infinitum.” Nicole Oresme, Nicole Oresme and Kinematics of Circular Motion: Tractatus de Commensurabilitate vel Incommensibilitate Motuum Celi, ed. and trans. Edward Grant (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 316 – 17. See also Leach, Sung Birds, 126.  Cited in Lenora Wolfgang, “‘Out of the Frenssch’: Lydgate’s Source of The Churl and the Bird,” English Language Notes 32 (1995): 10 – 22 at 17. See also Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human, 47.  Trois Savoirs, lines 215 – 66, cited in Wolfgang, “‘Out of the Frenssch’,” 17; trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 99. E si despent mout enke e peel Qe livre escrit au cocuel;

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a churl, lacks special knowledge of the latest in musical fashion, the privilege of social elites. The key musical feature of the cuckoo’s song: it doesn’t vary. The cuckoo also stands for musical failure or impoverishment in the virelai, “En ce gracieux temps joli,” a satirical nightingale/cuckoo competition composed by the Franco-Flemish Jacob de Senleches (active between 1381 and 1395). The nightingale’s warbling “oci, oci” contrasts melodically with the cuckoo’s “cocu,” which consists of one descending third. Senleches invokes birdsong to attack his musical competitors: he (Senleches) sings like a nightingale, they— that is, the “cocus”—“know only one little chanson.”²¹ This feature of the cuckoo’s song—its unvarying, repetitive two-note “cuckoo”—is clearly a part of what makes the crow a sudden outlier in Phebus’s musical home. More important, though, is the fact that its tedious song marks the cuckoo as an enemy of love and of love poetry in general. In debate songs popular among late fourteenth-century English and French writers and composers of the “arts subtilior”—the “more subtle art” of complex polyphonic song—a cuckoo, often opposing a nightingale, plays a stock character distinguished by its dark attitudes toward love and fatality. The nightingale’s warbling and varying “ocy ocy” speaks for courtly arts; the cuckoo, who only repeats a two-note “cuckoo,” contends that love and love poetry are folly. When the birds chase away the cuckoo in Jean de Condé’s bird mass, they are defending their religion of Love as well as their own music; it is in the midst of a splendid dawn mass, led by the nightingale with all the birds joining in the Kyrie, that the nightingale, “greatly displeased,” orders the cuckoo to “leave off singing.”²² Competition over musical form even structures the harmonics of “Par maintes foys,” an immensely popular virelai by Jean Vaillant (active in Paris between 1360 and 1390), in which a nightingale, crying “oci, oci” (“kill, kill,”), condemns

Kar, quant l’avera tot apris, Grant peine e grant travaille mis Por faire le bien organer, Chaunter desouz e deschaunter, Si le cocuel ai bien conu, Ja ne dirra plus de “cocku.”  Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 1380 – 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 55.  “Vousist u non, le chanter laist, / Car li autre oisiel l’en cachierent / Et durement le manechierent; / Si s’en fuï tous estourdis,” Jean de Condé, La Messe des oiseaux, lines 144– 47: “Whether he liked it or not, the cuckoo had to leave off singing, for the other birds chased after him and threatened him fiercely, so that he fled away in terror,” trans. Windeatt, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, 105.

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the cuckoo for multiple sins, among them musical envy (“par envie).”²³ In the refrain, the nightingale’s “oci, oci” alternates with the cuckoo’s “Fi de li, fi de li.”²⁴ Leach (139) describes this song as the “quintessential representative of discantus, or counterpoint.” The cuckoo and the nightingale ostensibly are quarreling about love, with the nightingale a devotee and the cuckoo an envious, naysaying outsider in the court of Love. At the same time, the virelai suggests a

 Leach, Sung Birds, 128n, argues that the Jean Vaillant of “Par maintes foys” is likely the Jehan Vaillant whose other musical attributions include four songs that appear only in the Pennsylvania Chansonnier, a manuscript that also contains poems ascribed to Ch, whom Wimsatt has argued could possibly be identified as Chaucer; see the Introduction to his Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch” (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982; revised ed. 2009). For a recording of “Par maintes fois” by TENET vocal artists: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=4bVtyC1Odjg.  For text and recording of Vaillant’s song see Ars Magis Subtiliter: Secular Music of the Fourteenth Century, Ensemble PAN (San Francisco: New Albion Records, 1989). See also Leach, Sung Birds, 130. The refrain: Par maintes foys avoy recoillie Du rosignol la douce melodie. Mais ne s’i vuelt le cucu acorder, Ains vuelt chanter contre ly par envie Cucu cucu cucu toute sa vie. Car il vuelt bien a son chant descourder, Et pourtant dit le reusignol et crie: “Je vos comant qu’on le tue et ocie, Tue tue tue tue oci oci Oci oci oci oci oci oci Fi de li, fi de li, fi de li, fi Oci oci oci oci oci Oci oci oci oci fi fi Fi du cucu qui d’amors vuelt parler.” (How many times I have enjoyed the sweet tune of the nightingale. But the cuckoo never wants to sing in tune with it But for envy wants to sing against her, “Cuckoo, cuckoo cuckoo,” all his life, For he really wants to bring discord to her song. And yet the nightingale cries out and says, “I command you to kill and slay him, kill, kill, kill, kill, slay, slay, Slay slay, slay slay, slay slay, Fie on him, fie on him, fie, slay, slay, Slay, slay, slay, slay, slay, Slay, slay, slay, slay, fie, fie, Fie upon the cuckoo who tries to speak of love.”)

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competition over musical form as well as subject matter: polyphony over monody; courtly love poetry—the nightingale’s “douce melodie”—versus worldly social critique. Interestingly, as in the “Manciple’s Tale,” the cuckoo’s song is also a triple voicing, “cucu, cucu, cucu,” in Vaillant’s song notably drowned out by the nightingale’s insistent “Oci!” or kill, from the old French “occire,” to kill or slay. In the third verse the songbirds (minus the cuckoo) sing together, crying out, “Kill, beat if the cuckoo grinds brown bran; / he is caught …. Let him be put to death.”²⁵ The cuckoo’s song is not just unfortunate, but even world-altering in a threestanza ballade by Eustace Deschamps. The cuckoo’s song chills the springtime, inspiring a dark meditation on instability and mutability. Chaucer may have known this ballade; Deschamps, who praises Chaucer elsewhere as “Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier,” was one of a number of writers in England and across the channel who shared with Chaucer “fraught literary friendships,” as Ardis Butterfield puts it.²⁶ In Deschamps’s cuckoo ballade, the narrator rises in bed on the first of May to make his salutation to love. The song of the cuckoo, however, drowns out all other birdsong: Mais d’oysel nul n’oy chanson ne glay, Fors seulement que le chant du cucu. (But I didn’t hear a single song or cry of any bird, But only the song of the cuckoo.)²⁷

 “Tués, batés se cucu pile bis son / Il est pris pris . . . Or soit mis mort.” Ensemble PAN.  Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 185. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 242, 251, argues that while there is little clear evidence of Deschamps’s influence on Chaucer, he was familiar with some of Chaucer’s writing, especially as evidenced by his ballade to Chaucer. David Wallace, “Chaucer and Deschamps: Translation and the Hundred Years War,” in The Medieval Translator / Traduire au Moyen Age,” ed. Rosalynn Voaden, René Tixier, Teresa Sanchez Roura, and Jenny Rebecca Rytting, vol. 8 of The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 186, hears Deschamps’s ballade to Chaucer as archly ironic, as does Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 143 – 51. For a recent counter argument see Laura Kendrick, “Deschamps’ Ballade Praising Chaucer and Its Impact,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes / Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 215 – 33; for other readings of the ballade as straightforward in its homage, see, for instance, Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 248 – 51; and Elizaveta Strakhov, “Tending to One’s Garden: Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer Reconsidered,” Medium Aevum 85, no. 2 (2016): 236 – 58 at 253n for a list of positive readings of the ballade.  Ballade no. 476, lines 7– 8. My thanks to Laura Kendrick for help with this ballade. For text and discussion see Jean-Patrice Boudet and Hélène Millet, Eustache Deschamps en son temps (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), 222– 24. While the editors claim that the cuckoo is a sign of ill omen because of the bird’s association with infidelity in that the female lays her

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“Le chant du cucu,” the final phrase in each of the ballade’s three stanzas, not only overwhelms other birdsong, but also turns spring into winter. A potent emotional catalyst, song even transforms the world as the narrator perceives it. The weather is sweet, “ce douls temps,” the narrator tells us in the first stanza, but the song of the cuckoo turns it to “Yver le malostru” (line 14), wretched winter. The narrator’s mood shifts from joy to shock, “me pris forment a esbahir” (line 9), then irritation, “et de son chant durement me courçay” (line 10.) In the third and last stanza the season is no longer true, “le temps n’est plus vray,” in a lament to the fallen world heard in the song of the cuckoo. At the end of the ballade, Pity speaks to the narrator, offering only a glacial comfort. This is the way of the world, she says. Nothing is at it should be these days.

eggs in the nest of other birds, the ballade itself never gives that explanation. Since the ballade has received little critical attention, I include text and English translation (mine) here: En ce douls temps c’om se doit resjoir, Qui commence le premier jour de may, Et que l’en doit ses amours conjoir Et de son cuer oster dueil et esmay, Soudainement en mon lit m’esveillay, Car a Amours vouls render mon salu; Mais d’oysel nul n’oy chanson ne glay, Fors seulement que le chant du cucu.

In this sweet time of rejoicing, Which begins on the first of May, When lovers must come together And pluck uneasiness from their hearts, Suddenly I awoke in my bed Because I wanted to make my salutation to Love; But I didn’t hear a single song or cry of any bird, But only the song of the cuckoo.

Adonc me pris forment a esbahir, Et de son chant durement me courçay Qu’en lieu d’amer me rouvoit a hair:

Then I started to be greatly amazed And fiercely irritated by that song For instead of urging me to love, it urged me to hate: From the top of a balcony I looked over the fields But I didn’t see any greenery or irises; The season seemed to be wretched winter, I heard neither joy, pleasure, nor sweetness But only the song of the cuckoo.

A un auvant sur les champs regarday, Mais je ne vy ne verdure ne glay; Le temps sembloit Yver le malostru, Joie, deduit ne doulceur n’escoutay, Fors seulement que le chant du cucu. Mais pour mon dueil un pou aneantir Me dist Pitez: Ne laisse a ester gay; L’en voit souvent son contraire avenir. Amours default, ne le temps n’est plus vray, Esté est froiz, Yver chaut; je ne sçay Dont sont ores tel contraire venu, Car l’en oit poy rossignol, papegay, Fors seulement que le chant du cucu.

But to lighten my sorrow a little Pity said to me: “Don’t stop being joyful; One often sees the contrary happening. Love fails, the weather is not what it should be, Summer is cold, winter hot; I don’t know where such reversals came from nowadays, For you rarely hear the nightingale or parrot, But only the song of the cuckoo.”

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The Boke of Cupide The cuckoo/nightingale debate with the closest ties to Chaucer is Sir John Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide, an avian quarrel about love, poetry, and truth. The Boke of Cupide iterates many of the themes that appear in the bird ballades and virelais: a nightingale, arch defender of love, is challenged by a cuckoo, who sees in love only delusion and folly. In the Boke, the debate about love, however, occasions meditation not on musical skill or style, but rather on poetic language and even on poetic truth. While the Boke of Cupide is the title given to Clanvowe’s text in most manuscripts, the dream vision is also known as the Cuckoo and the Nightingale. ²⁸ Well-known to Chaucerians, Clanvowe is often mentioned as the first in a long line of Chaucer imitators, whose Boke echoes passages from Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and the “Knight’s Tale.”²⁹ While there has been some disagreement about the identity of the particular Clanvowe to whom the Boke is attributed in a colophon in one of the major manuscripts, most readers now believe Clanvowe to refer to Sir John Clanvowe, London writer, member of Chaucer’s circle of associates, and Chamber Knight to Richard II.³⁰ Yet debts may have gone both ways. Chaucer may also have responded to Clanvowe. Lee Patterson and John Bowers have speculated that in revising the F-Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer borrowed language from

 The earliest manuscripts title the poem the Boke of Cupide. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is first used in Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer; see V. J. Scattergood, “The Authorship of the Boke of Cupide,” Anglia 82 (1964): 137– 49 at 137n1.  See, for instance, V. J. Scattergood, The Works of Sir John Clanvowe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1965), 9 and 12; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 59 and 72– 82; Andrew Galloway, “The Common Voice in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism, ed. Richard Kaeuper (Boston: Brill, 2013), 243 – 86; Dana Symons, “Introduction” to The Boke of Cupide in Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/symons-chaucerian-dream-visions-and-complaints-bokeof-cupide-introduction.  Sir John Clanvowe appears in records with Lewis Clifford, Richard Sturry, Thomas Latimer, William Nevill, John Montague, and John Cheyne, men with whom Chaucer is also closely associated; see Scattergood, Works of Sir John Clanvowe, 9. Clanvowe was a witness in Cecily Chaumpaigne’s release of Chaucer for “raptus,” see “Close Rolls, Richard II: May 1380,” in Calendar of Close Rolls, Richard II: Volume 1, 1377 – 1381, ed. H. C. Maxwell Lyte (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914), 374– 81 at 374, also at https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-close-rolls/ric2/ vol1/pp374– 381; see also Scattergood, “Authorship,” 144n; Symons, “Introduction”; and Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 160.

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the Boke of Cupide’s god of Love.³¹ Edgar Laird has also proposed that Chaucer borrowed from Clanvowe for Theseus’s “god of Love” speech in the Knight’s Tale —and that the god of Love was in some ways a “collaborative creation.”³² The crow’s “Cokkow” in the “Manciple’s Tale” may also be such a collaborative move or even deliberate echo.³³ Based on chronology, it seems likely that Chaucer wrote his tale after Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide. Clanvowe died in 1391, Chaucer in 1400. The Boke of Cupide has been dated to between 1386 and 1390.³⁴ Most scholars have placed the “Manciple’s Tale” between 1388 and 1399, late in Chaucer’s career.³⁵ That is, while the crow’s “Cokkow!” as an avian signifier resonates broadly with nightingale/cuckoo debate songs, such as those by Senleches and Vaillant, it may echo, even more directly, a naysaying cuckoo from within Chaucer’s own circle of writers. It is worth a brief recapitulation of Clanvowe’s Boke, which has numerous suggestive parallels to the “Manciple’s Tale”: an intrusive, opinionated narrator; talking birds; and a violent expulsion of the bird, as truth-teller, toward the end. In some of the manuscripts, the Boke also may contain a reference to the cuckoo/ cuckold pun. The skeptical cuckoo warns a love-worshipping nightingale that she risks getting called by the cuckoo’s name:³⁶

 See Edgar Laird, “Chaucer, Clanvowe, and Cupid,” Chaucer Review 44 (2010): 344– 50 at 350.  Laird, “Chaucer, Clanvowe, and Cupid,” 350. Leach, Sung Birds, 245, calls the Boke a “prequel” to the Parliament of Fowls.  For one of the few suggestions that the “Manciple’s Tale” could be responding to the Boke, see Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 21.  On the basis of borrowings from the Knight’s Tale, the Parliament of Fowls, and possible borrowings from the F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, Scattergood, “Authorship,” 149, offers speculative termini for Clanvowe’s text at 1386 (earliest date) and 1391 (latest), when Clanvowe died. More recently John Bowers dates the poem to 1389—after the Merciless Parliament and before Clanvowe’s self-imposed exile in 1390: “Three Readings of The Knight’s Tale: Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 2 (2004): 279 – 307 at 281.  For a review of the dating see Baker, “Manciple’s Tale,” 11– 14. Scholars have variously dated the Manciple’s Tale from very early to very late. Based on the tale’s structure and tone, Baker argues for a late date, and within that period (1388 – 1399) “probably somewhat later than earlier” (13). See also Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 384.  Clanvowe citations are from Scattergood, Works. MS Selden B 25 has “haten” [hated] instead of “hoten” [called]; see Scattergood, Works, 48n. Scattergood, Works, 10, suggests Condé’s Messe was a source for Clanvowe; see also David Chamberlain, “Clanvowe’s Cuckoo,” in New Readings of Late Medieval Love Poems, ed. David Chamberlain (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 41– 66 at 52.

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[Cuckoo:] “And therfor, nyghtyngale, holde the nye [stay near] For leve [believe] me wel, for al thy lovde crie, Yf thou be fer or longe fro thi make [mate], Thou shalt be as other that be forsake, And then shalt thou hoten [be called] as do I.” [Nightingale:] “ffye!” quoth she, “on thi name and on the. The god of love ne let the neuere ythe [prosper]!” (lines 181– 87)

If the nightingale happens to be away from her beloved, the cuckoo says, she might find herself called the same thing that he, the cuckoo, is called—which is presumably cuckold. The nightingale’s response: Shame [“ffye”] on your name! Shame on you! The dream vision opens with the narrator telling a story of how one night he lay awake, musing on how the song of the nightingale is preferable to that of the cuckoo. Listening to the dawn chorus, he falls asleep and hears “that sory bridde, the lewede cukkowe” (line 90). After cursing the cuckoo, which he hears as an ugly interruption and sonic defacement of a beautiful May morning, the narrator immediately hears a nightingale singing in the next bush. It was a wonder, he says, that he could suddenly understand bird language. That language takes the form of a debate about love. The nightingale tells the cuckoo to get lost; his songs are so “elynge” (line 115)—tedious or sad. The cuckoo replies, What? My song is “trewe and pleyn” (line 118), even though I can’t break it as you do—with “break” a clear reference to melody—and everybody can understand me. You, nightingale, have a “nyse, queynte”—cunning, deceptive—cry, which is “ocy” (lines 123 – 24).³⁷ A quarrel then follows: the nightingale wishes death (“ocy! ocy!”) on anyone who doesn’t want to serve Love. Love, she says, is the source of all goodness and honor. The cuckoo counters that lovers are troubled and often live in sorrow. Love is irrational, willful, and blind. Finally comes the exchange that leads to the nightingale’s curse, “Fie on your name and you!” after the cuckoo has hinted that lovers risk being cuckolded. Weeping, the nightingale calls for help from the God of Love: “Now, god of love, thou helpe me in summe wise, / That I may on this cukkow ben awreke [avenged]” (lines 214– 15)—at which point the narrator enters the fray, hurling a stone at the cuckoo, who flies off calling, “Farewel, Farewel, papyngay [parrot]” (line 222).

 Scattergood’s glossary translates “nyse” as “foolish,” and “queynte” as “strange.”

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The stakes in this avian quarrel, as suggested by its increasing levels of violence, clearly go beyond positions one takes on Love. We may well ask why Clanvowe’s nightingale cares what the cuckoo says—and cares so much that, like Vaillant’s nightingale, who wants the cuckoo slain, slain, slain, she wishes death on love-deniers. The real subject of Boke of Cupide, according to Lee Patterson, is the language of the court: who can speak, and how, in courtly circles.³⁸ Verbal dexterity and facility, the skills of the nightingale, are cultivated arts of courtliness, with complexity rather than plain speaking a sign of finesse. Perhaps that is why the cuckoo’s final insult, as he flies off, is to call the nightingale “papyngay.” Parrots, like nightingales, are conventional choristers of love; at the beginning of the Romance of the Rose, the narrator equates nightingales and parrots with the joyful amorousness of springtime. Silent when it’s cold out, they have to sing when spring comes: “It is then that the nightingale is constrained to sing and make his noise; that both parrot and lark enjoy themselves and take their pleasure; and that young men must become gay and amorous in the sweet, lovely weather.”³⁹ Yet in labeling the nightingale a parrot, Clanvowe’s cuckoo may also be calling her a language falsifier in that parrots, skillful avian mimics, can utter words and phrases without understanding what they are saying. The nightingale’s “queynte” cry, the cuckoo points out, is an utterance nobody can understand. The same word, “queynt,” is used by Thomas Usk, contemporary of both Chaucer and Clanvowe, to describe the language and subject matter of the courtier: Love teaches Love’s servants “to endyten letters of rethorike in queynt understondinges”—artfully ambiguous, allegorical, and mannered.⁴⁰ The cuckoo’s song, in marked contrast, voices the dangers of truth-telling in a courtly world regulated by manners and artifice. As Patterson puts it, “The nightingale song of the courtier is constantly accompanied by the raucous tones of the cuckoo” in a “counterpoint” that captures the “doubleness at the very heart of courtliness.”⁴¹ The quarrel over truth is as much about the way a story is told as it is about its accuracy or facticity. Both cuckoo and nightingale, in fact, claim they are the truth-tellers. The Boke’s courtly humor, as Lynn Staley observes in Languages of Power, lies in attending to the language

 Lee Patterson, “Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe,” in Culture and History 1350 – 1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 7– 41.  Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1971), 32, lines 74– 75.  Cited in Patterson, “Court Politics,” 13.  Patterson, “Court Politics,” 28. How—or even if—one tells the truth at court is a recurring theme in court poetry (19).

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of the debate, “which echoes the cuckoo in truth and the nightingale in metaphor.”⁴² Clanvowe’s cuckoo, with his simple two-note song—what Andrew Galloway calls “the voice of the cuckoo”—lays claims on truth, asserting his song is “trewe and pleyn” (line 118) in a counter to the deceptions of love and romance.⁴³ The nightingale, with her complex and varied vocalizations, stakes out her own claims, arguing that truth is inseparable from courtly practice and language: when one becomes Love’s servant, one burns in “worschipful desire” and in “trouthe” (line 194). The “winner” of the debate in Clanvowe’s poem is of course the nightingale, weepy balladeer of love, favorite of the dreamer. Most readers of the Boke, however, are far more skeptical than the narrator, hearing in the nightingale’s overthe-top, even murderous defense of Love various expressions of blind extremism —or courtly fashion—with the cuckoo, reviled by both the nightingale and the narrator, as the voice of measured skepticism.⁴⁴ Indeed, the poem’s form should have the reader on guard from the outset, since a common narrative stance for the dreamer/protagonist in dream visions is credulous simplicity. In a final move toward the irresolution characteristic of medieval debate poems, the Boke ends with the nightingale convening a Valentine’s Day bird parliament to adjudicate the quarrel, and then flying off to sing in a hawthorn, at which point the narrator wakes up. Who wins? Similar tongue-in-cheek, ironic play may be present in Vaillant’s song, where the accusation against the cuckoo, whose only crime is to bring discord, is met by violence, the polyphonic repetition of “Oci!” or slay. Courtly and musical fashion, brilliantly vocalized in the nightingale’s avian death commands, brook no contrarians. Deschamps’s ballade, “Fors seulement que le chant du cucu,” may be equally tongue in cheek as a parodic love vision whose comic target is Deschamps himself—that is, the satirist or political critic, in the stance of a cuckoo, seeing winter where others would choose to see only spring.⁴⁵ It is worth noting that the penultimate line

 Staley, Languages of Power, 20.  Galloway, “Common Voice,” 286.  Reading Clanvowe’s dream vision in conjunction with The Two Ways, a penitential treatise also attributed to Clanvowe, Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 183, argues that Clanvowe’s cuckoo, the “corrective voice of the Wycliffite ‘trewe man’,” lodges a coded Lollard critique of orthodox church excesses; Leach, Sung Birds, 242– 50, also addresses the Boke’s Lollard subtext; Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human, 47, argues that the cuckoo’s song in the Boke is “part of a playful critique of romantic love”; Symons, “Introduction,” reads the Boke as a debate about the “validity of the vernacular,” with the cuckoo the voice of “pleyn” English.  Leach, Sung Birds, 243n, also notes the parallel between this ballade and Clanvowe’s Boke, arguing that “Deschamps’s chief concern—for him a typical and important one—is with the problem of aging in a world that favors a poetics of jeunesse.” Deschamps compares himself

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linking the nightingale with the parrot, “for you hardly hear the nightingale, parrot / But only the song of the cuckoo,” recalls the cuckoo’s parting insult, “farewel, farewel papyngay,” in Clanvowe.⁴⁶ Both poems equate nightingales with parrots, birds associated not only with love but also with courtly language; in both a spring-loving narrator hears the cuckoo, interrupting May romance, as utterly unwelcome.

The Crow’s “Cokkow!” If we hear the “Manciple’s Tale” in conversation with these other cuckoo voicings, such as Clanvowe’s straightforward, tell-it-like-it-is cuckoo—how might that help us hear what the sly, “cokkow”-singing crow of the “Manciple’s Tale” is saying when he tells on Phebus’s wife? In the “Manciple’s Tale” the crow, singing “cokkow,” reports what he sees in a song that is notably true and plain, even if telling Phebus about his wife’s liaison results in his own banishment. Truth-telling birds in both the Book of Cupid and the “Manciple’s Tale” are expelled, Clanvowe’s from a bosky spring dreamland, Chaucer’s from its cage and also from Phebus’s house. As readers have recognized, lexical truth is a repeated concern of the “Manciple’s Tale,” with truth-telling and its risks brilliantly encoded in the cuckoo call and the bird’s fate.⁴⁷ Christopher Cannon has even argued that the tale belongs to a “language group” in the Canterbury Tales that also includes the “Friar’s Tale” and the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”⁴⁸ In an aside on linguistic relativity, the Manciple, citing Plato’s dictum that the “word moot nede accorde with the dede” (9.208), notes that the only real difference between a faithless “lady” and a faithless “wench” is terminology. Similarly, a “tyrant” and a “thief” differ chiefly by the forces they can muster; one gets called a captain, and the other an outlaw. That is, due to the vagaries of linguistic nuance and class-based spin, word and deed do not necessarily accord.

to a cuckoo in ballade 916, where he’s told by a hunchback that he sings like a cuckoo: “Tu chantes comme li cucus / Qui s’estonne et gaste son plet” (You sing like the cuckoo [a political satirist?] / Who stuns itself and undermines its own argument), that is, who gets no results by hammering away at its own point. I thank Laura Kendrick for bringing this ballade to my attention.  For parrots in Chaucer, see Symons’ note to line 222 of The Boke of Cupide.  See, for instance, Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow,” 369.  Christopher Cannon, “The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honor of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 24– 50.

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The cuckoo’s song—“true and plain,” as the Boke of Cupide says—is invariable, however, and hence a phonemic alternative to lexical instability: the cuckoo always says cuckoo. When the nightingale in the Boke of Cupide says “fie on your name and you,” she points to a unique feature of cuckoo identity. In English as well as French the word for the bird’s name is synonymous with its song, a fact that may partly account for the cuckoo’s association with truth-telling: the bird is called a cuckoo; what the bird says is also cuckoo, in a curious bridge between naming and speaking.⁴⁹ The overlap between the cuckoo’s song and its name is noted as a sign of self-absorption in the Ayenbite of Inwit: “Þe yelpere is þe cockou þet ne kan naȝt zinge bote of him-zelue.”⁵⁰ In English it is rare, in fact, to find an animal voicing that is identical with that animal’s name. We can see this clearly in the record of “La noyse de oysealx naturelment” in the Nominale sive verbale, a French/English lexicon from ca. 1350 that was likely influenced by Bibbesworth’s Tretiz: Egle gerreie Grue groule Cyne recifle Columbe gerit Owe iangle Estournel iargonne Iarce agrule Ane iarule Cok chaunte Alowe chaunte Gelyne patile Gelyn chaleyse

Erne crieth Crane gret Swan tissith Dowe croukyth Goos crekith Sterlyng spekyth Gandre gagoluth Doke qwekyth Coc crowith Larke syngyth Henne cakelyth Henne clokkyth

 For Chaucer’s use of animal sounds to explore relationships between words and their referents, see Michael J. Warren, “‘Kek Kek’: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 109 – 32, esp. 123; Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 240 – 41; for medieval grammarians on distinctions between rational and non-rational sounds, see Leach, Sung Birds, 24– 54, and 249 for the cuckoo’s “monologic authority” as a bird whose single song says its name. On animals and onomatopoetic sounds, see Carolyn Van Dyke, “Understanding Hawk-Latin: Animal Language and Universal Rhetoric,” in Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, ed. Alison Langdon (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 133 – 52 at 139.  Don Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 23 (1866; rpr. 1965), rev. ed. Pamela Gradon, EETC o.s. 278 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; vol. 2), 2:22, line 8.

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The eagle cries. The dove croaks. The starling speaks. The duck quacks. The cock crows. The cuckoo doesn’t appear on this list, but if it did, it would be saying cuckoo.⁵¹ Heard in dialogue with Clanvowe and cuckoo song debates, the crow’s “cokkow,” a foundational and truth-telling speech act, offers a preamble to the foreclosure of poetry, which ensues as a dark catastrophe. After killing his wife, Phebus destroys his musical instruments. He also strips his crow of its white feathers and singing voice, and throws him out of the door. The tale ends with one more recapitulative shut-down, the mother’s exhaustive, forty-four-line warning about the risks of careless speaking (or on telling the truth), a harangue that ends, “Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe” (9.362), the tale’s final line. “Cokkow!” itself institutes a return to vocal and animal authenticity where word and deed accord. The crow, now black as crows are, can also no longer “countrefete” human speech, but can only say what crows say. The crow becomes a crow. For the Canterbury Tales as a whole, the crow’s fatal “Cokkow!” even precipitates the end of song and poetry altogether. Immediately following the “Manciple’s Tale,” the Parson delivers a long, penitential sermon in prose on the seven deadly sins. Before he begins, the Parson makes it clear that he is not about to tell a fable—that is, not about to follow in the Manciple’s storytelling, heroic-couplet footsteps: “Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me” (10.31), repudiating all fabulous stories in general, and especially the fable that the pilgrims have just heard. Song and poetry, for the Canterbury Tales, are over and done. Yet in “Cokkow!” it may be also possible to hear not just an echo, but also a sly riposte to Clanvowe’s truth-telling bird. In Chaucer’s final avian utterance— and final moment of song in the Canterbury Tales—avian identity slips apart. Even as the crow utters a one-word statement of observational fact, his act of mimicry challenges the veracity of his utterance. Cuckoos may say cuckoo; crows, however, do not. In mimicking another bird’s song, Phebus’s pet crow is hardly practicing linguistic transparency. However “true and plain” the song of the cuckoo appears in medieval bird debates, Phebus doesn’t understand it. Furthermore, “Cokkow” is not identical with the bird’s name (crow) but a ventriloquized voicing—and the crow’s act of imitation even an uncanny echo of the biological cuckoo’s own stealth camouflage in its practice of nest parasitism. Indeed, the crow’s “Cokkow, Cokkow, Cokkow” may be the only comic moment

 For the text of the Nominale, see W. W. Skeat, “Nominale sive Verbale,” Transactions of the Philological Society 25, no. 3 (1906): 1– 26 at 25, lines 836 – 47. The verb “to cuckoo” first appears in English in the seventeenth century.

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in a tale that is remarkable for its lack of humor. This is to say that the crow’s “Cokkow!” may challenge Clanvowe in a ventriloquized echo that ironically undermines the “truth” of its own utterance—and in doing so, may even leave a small space for song at the end of the Canterbury Tales. After all, however musically impoverished, the crow’s “cuckoo!” is nonetheless a song, at least as Phebus hears it. It is only when the crow demonstrates what has gone on in Phebus’s bedroom “by sadde tokeness and by wordes bolde” (9.258)—confirmatory proofs and confident words—that Phebus turns to violence, inflamed by the murderous work of the spoken word. Music, in contrast to speech, is central to the Edenic world of the fable’s beginnings—and indeed, among Chaucer’s main alterations to the Ovidian fable is a heightened emphasis on music.⁵² The tale begins in a world of melodic harmony: Phebus’s singing is so melodious, we hear at the very beginning of the tale, that it surpasses the singing of Amphion, legendary founder of Thebes. At the end of the tale music is supplanted, at least in the words of the mother, by articulate language—“Mind your tongue!”—with the cuckoo’s dark, two-note truth-telling supplanting the rich ambiguities of polyphonic song. I suggest, however, that we hear in “Cokkow!” a musical trace— not only “truth” as often figured in metaphoric cuckoo language, but hybrid song, ambiguous and affective. “Cuckoo!” is an extraordinary diversionary performance. In “Cokkow” we can hear a cagey defense of song, sung in response to the mother warning her son to mind his tongue, and also sung in dialogue with a rich cuckoo song tradition. When someone calls me cuckoo, I probably won’t take it well. To call someone cuckoo today is to call them crazy, a recent meaning but one that clearly has early roots.⁵³ When cuckoos appear in writings by Chaucer and his contemporaries, they are invariably called foolish, boring, or despicable. But to be called cuckoo, as a singer, may be to receive a sly honorific. A crow singing “Cokkow” articulates the possibilities of ambiguity and affect in song, a trace that remains in a creation fable that looks back nostalgically to an originary world of music.

 See Sarah Stanbury, “Household Song in the Manciple’s Tale,” in Household Knowledges in Late Medieval England and France, ed. Glenn Burger and Rory Critten (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2019), 128 – 53. Britton Harwood notes that Chaucer pays more attention than do his sources to Phebus’s music, and presents the crow’s color change as less important than destruction of its song: “Language and the Real: Chaucer’s Manciple,” Chaucer Review 6 (1972): 268 – 79 at 269 – 70. Birdsong in general carries the power to move the emotions in Chaucer’s poetry; see Angela Jane Weisl, “‘In Briddes Wise’: Chaucer’s Avian Poetics,” in Langdon, Animal Languages in the Middle Ages, 113 – 32 at 117.  The OED’s first record for “cuckoo” as an adjective meaning “crazy” is 1923. Uses as a noun for a silly or misguided person date to the sixteenth century.

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David Raybin proposes that through truth-telling, the crow makes a strategic move for escape; to be thrown from its cage is actually to be released into freedom.⁵⁴ To be a crow singing “Cokkow” is perhaps to tell the truth and to sing: song is itself a kind of truth. As the Manciple notes, birds always want to escape from their cages, no matter how sweetly they have been fostered. Cokkow! In the crow’s ventriloquized and punning bird language, truth in poetry is the play of language itself.

Bibliography Alain de Lille. De Planctu Naturae. Translated by Douglas Moffat. Yale Studies in English 36. New York: H. Holt, 1908. Reprint, Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press, 1972. Alan of Lille. Plaint of Nature. Translated by James J. Sheridan. Mediaeval Sources in Translation 26. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Baker, Donald C., ed. The Manciple’s Tale. Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 2, Part 10. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984. Barr, Helen. Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Boudet, Jean-Patrice and Hélène Millet. Eustache Deschamps en son temps. Textes et Documents d’Histoire Médiévale 1. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997. Bowers, John. “Three Readings of The Knight’s Tale: Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 2 (2004): 279 – 307. Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cadbury, William. “The Manipulation of Sources and the Meaning of the Manciple’s Tale.” Philological Quarterly 43 (1964): 538 – 48. Cannon, Christopher. “The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales.” In Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, edited by Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan, 25 – 40. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. Chamberlain, David. “Clanvowe’s Cuckoo.” In New Readings of Late Medieval Love Poems, edited by David Chamberlain, 41 – 66. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. “Close Rolls, Richard II: May 1380.” In Calendar of Close Rolls, Richard II: Volume 1, 1377 – 1381, edited by H. C. Maxwell Lyte, 374 – 81. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-close-rolls/ric2/ vol1/pp374-381. Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

 David Raybin, “The Death of a Silent Woman: Voice and Power in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” JEGP 95 (1996): 19 – 37.

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Don Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt. Edited by Richard Morris. EETS o.s. 23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1866. Rev. ed. by Pamela Gradon. EETS o.s. 278. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Dubois, Marguerite-Marie. “Le Rondeau du Coucou.” In La ronde des saisons: Les saisons dans la littérature et la société anglaises au Moyen âge, edited by Leo Carruthers, 15 – 21. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998. Fumo, Jamie. “Thinking upon the Crow: The Manciple’s Tale and Ovidian Mythography.” The Chaucer Review 4 (2004): 355 – 75. Galloway, Andrew. “The Common Voice in Theory and Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century England.” In Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism, edited by Richard Kaeuper, 243 – 86. Boston: Brill, 2013. Glowka, Arthur. “Chaucer’s Bird Sounds.” University of South Florida Language Quarterly 21 (1983): 15 – 17. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Translated by Charles Dahlberg. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1971. Hahn, Thomas. “Early Middle English.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, 61 – 91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Harwood, Britton. “Language and the Real: Chaucer’s Manciple.” Chaucer Review 6 (1972): 268 – 79. Hazelton, Richard. “The Manciple’s Tale: Parody and Critique.” JEGP 62, no. 1 (1963): 1 – 31. Jean de Condé. La Messe des oiseaux et Le dit des Jacobins et des Fremeneurs. Edited by Jacques Ribard. Geneva: Droz, 1970. Kendrick, Laura. “Deschamps’ Ballade Praising Chaucer and Its Impact.” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes / Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 215 – 33. Kordecki, Lesley. “Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism.” In Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, edited by Carolynn Van Dyke, 249 – 60. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Laird, Edgar. “Chaucer, Clanvowe, and Cupid.” Chaucer Review 44 (2010): 344 – 50. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. Sung Birds, Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Mann, Jill. From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Oresme, Nicole. Nicole Oresme and the Kinematics of Circular Motion: Tractatus de Commensurabilitate vel Incommensibilitate Motuum Celi. Edited and translated by Edward Grant. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Patterson, Lee. “Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe.” In Culture and History 1350 – 1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, edited by David Aers, 7 – 41. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Plautus. Asinarium. Edited and translated by Wolfgang de Melo. Loeb Classical Library 60. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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Raybin, David. “The Death of a Silent Woman: Voice and Power in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale.” JEGP 95 (1996): 19 – 37. Rey, Alain. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. 2 vols. Paris: Robert, 1992. Rowland, Beryl. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. Rowland, Beryl. Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971. Salisbury, Eve. “Murdering Fiction: The Case of the Manciple’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003): 309 – 16. Scattergood, V. J. “The Authorship of the Boke of Cupide.” Anglia 82 (1964): 137 – 49. Scattergood, V. J., ed. The Works of Sir John Clanvowe. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1965. Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labor’s Lost. Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstein. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Skeat, W. W. “Nominale sive Verbale.” Transactions of the Philological Society 25, no. 3 (1906): 1 – 26. Staley, Lynn. Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005. Stamp, Jimmy. “Past, Present, and Future of the Cuckoo Clock.” Smithsonian Magazine, May 17, 2013. Stanbury, Sarah. “Household Song in the Manciple’s Tale.” In Household Knowledges in Late Medieval England and France, edited by Glenn Burger and Rory Critten, 128 – 53. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2019. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Strakhov, Elizaveta. “Tending to One’s Garden: Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer Reconsidered.” Medium Aevum 85, no. 2 (2016): 236 – 58. Strohm, Reinhard. The Rise of European Music, 1380 – 1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Symons, Dana M., ed. The Boke of Cupide, God of Love, or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. In Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/symons-chaucerian-dream-vi sions-and-complaints-boke-of-cupide-introduction. Travis, Peter W. Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Vaillant, Jean. “Par maintes foys.” In Ars Magis Subtiliter: Secular Music of the Fourteenth Century. Ensemble PAN (Project Ars Nova). Translated by Howard B. Garey. San Francisco: New Albion Records, 1989. Van Dyke, Carolyn. “Understanding Hawk-Latin: Animal Language and Universal Rhetoric.” In Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, edited by Alison Langdon, 133 – 52. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Wallace, David. “Chaucer and Deschamps: Translation and the Hundred Years War.” In The Medieval Translator / Traduire au Moyen Age, edited by Rosalynn Voaden, René Tixier, Teresa Sanchez Roura, and Jenny Rebecca Rytting, vol. 8 of The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Warren, Michael J. “‘Kek Kek’: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 109 – 32.

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Weisl, Angela Jane. “‘In Briddes Wise’: Chaucer’s Avian Poetics.” In Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, edited by Alison Langdon, 113 – 32. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Wheatley, Edward., ed. The Manciple’s Tale. In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2. 2 vols. Edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002 – 2005. Wimsatt, James I. Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Wimsatt, James I. Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch.” 1982. Revised ed., Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009. Windeatt, B. A. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982. Wolfgang, Lenora D. “‘Out of the Frenssch’: Lydgate’s Source of The Churl and the Bird.” English Language Notes 32 (1995): 10 – 22. Yamamoto, Dorothy. The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Alan Lupack

Chapter 14 Perceval’s Mare Throughout Arthurian romance, horses are closely related to the knights who ride them. Medieval readers would be keenly aware of this and would attach more significance to a knight’s horse than would a modern reader. Given that fact, it is striking that two potential knights (and only these two in the scope of Arthurian romance) ride into Arthur’s court on a mare. This suggests a link between the texts that is supported by other details in these romances. This link suggests that it is likely that Malory knew and borrowed from a work not previously included among his sources. In Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Darnarde and Sir Agglovale, two brothers of Lamorak, are unhorsed in the tournament at Surluse. Even though they have unhorsed their opponents so that “all four knyghtes and horses fell to the erethe,” Lamorak berates his brothers: “Bretherne, ye ought to be ashamed to faile so of your horsis!”¹ He then asks angrily and rhetorically “What is a knyght but whan he is on horsebacke?’² His question defines the knight proverbially as a chevalier and underscores the importance of a horse to a knight’s reputation.³ The horse and the gear used in controlling a horse are essential to the symbolism of the ceremony in which knighthood is conferred. In the anonymous L’Ordene de chevalerie (The Order of Knighthood), the moral qualities expected of a knight are outlined as Hue of Tabarie explains to his captor Saladin the ceremony by which one is made a knight and the significance of the ritual.⁴ For example, the bath the prospective knight is to take suggests that he “should leave this bath without any wickedness, for knighthood should bathe in honesty, in courtesy, and in goodness” and just as a knight uses spurs to direct a horse, so the gilded spurs of the knighting ceremony suggest that the knight should

 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 1:527.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:528.  On medieval horses in general, see Cynthia Jenéy, “Horses and Equitation,” in Handbook of Medieval Culture: Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, vol. 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 674– 96. For information on the medieval warhorse, the destrier, see specifically 1:688 – 91.  Ordene de Chevalerie, in Raoul de Hodenc, Le Roman des Eles; The Anonymous Ordene de Chevalerie, ed. Keith Busby (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983), 170 – 75. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-015

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love God and always be willing to serve him.⁵ Caxton’s The Boke of the Ordre of Chyualry, a translation of a French translation of Ramón Lull’s Le Libre del Orde de Cauayleria, makes clear the symbolism of a knight’s steed: To a knyght is gyuen an horse / and also a Coursour for to sygnefye noblesse of courage / And by cause that he be wel horsed and hyhe / is by cause he may be sene fro ferre / And that is the sygnefyaunce that he oughte to be made redy to doo al that which behoueth to thordre of chyualrye more / than another man.⁶

Medieval Arthurian romance abounds with references to the significance and the symbolism of a knight’s horse. It is important to the image and status of a knight that he ride the proper mount, a war horse and not a beast of burden or a workhorse. Riding an inappropriate mount is a source of great shame for a knight. And learning about horses and becoming a skilled horseman is essential to success in knightly pursuits and to a knight’s reputation. In Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, which provides an account of how its hero came to be raised by a mermaid or water-fey, Lanzelet is taken to her realm when the vassals of his father King Pant (Ban) rebel against him. The realm is inhabited by ten thousand women and no men, so when Lanzelet wants to learn to use a sword and shield and to hunt and hawk, he must request that mermen be brought in to teach him. It is not until he leaves this land at the age of fifteen that he learns to ride and to joust, but not before some humorous scenes describe Lanzelet’s inexperience: “the youth, not knowing how to hold his reins, just trusted to luck and hung on by the saddlebow! The horse began to rear wildly, because he touched it with his spurs, and the ladies could have sworn that he was sure to crash into many a great tree.”⁷ And to a nobleman Lanzelet meets, his riding appears childish and clownish.⁸ However, once he has some basic training in riding and knightly combat, he soon becomes invincible.

 Ordene de Chevalerie, 171– 72.  William Caxton, The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry. Translated and Printed by William Caxton from a French Version of Ramón Lull’s “Le Libre del Orde de Cauayleria” Together with Adam Loutfut’s Scottish Transcript, EETS o.s. 168, ed. Alfred T. P. Byles (1926; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971), 84.  Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, Lanzelet: A Romance of Lancelot Translated from the Middle High German, trans. Kenneth G. T. Webster, rev. Roger Sherman Loomis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 31.  Von Zatzikhoven, Lanzelet, 33.

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In the Vulgate Lancelot,⁹ the Lady of the Lake prepares Lancelot to enter the world outside her realm and to begin service as a knight by describing the duties and the trappings of knighthood much in the manner of the manuals of chivalry. The horse, she instructs him, “signifies the common people, for the people must likewise bear the knight and attend to his needs.”¹⁰ Just as the knight spurs and guides his horse, so he should guide the people “according to his will and in legitimate subjection.”¹¹ To symbolize the virtues of knighthood that she has outlined, she gives him white arms and clothing and “a large, strong, swift horse of proven speed and daring, and it was pure white as fresh fallen snow.”¹² The appropriateness of horse to rider, even to strange riders, is demonstrated in other romances. The steed of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an obvious example. He is “A grene hors gret and þikke” (line 1:175) and he is, like his master, “ful stif to strayne” (difficult to control; line 1:176).¹³ Another example can be found in the German romance Diu Crône (The Crown) by Heinrich von dem Türlin, in which the mischievous knight who brings a testing tankard to Arthur’s court rides a horse that “looked like a seal in front of the saddle and a dolphin behind. It had a tail of long spines and a mane of fins that hung down to the knee; it was pale gray with round spots the size of a penny. The feet and the legs of the horse down to the hooves were covered with feathers that were arranged like an eagle’s wings and, like them, stretched out from joints with the pull of sinews.”¹⁴ The strangeness of the horse seems appropriate to a knight who was “no taller than a child of six” and who didn’t look like other people: his skin was hidden by scales; his mouth was wide, with thick lips that were covered here and there by a sparse mustache. His icy gray eyes were as large as ostrich eggs and were framed by lashes that extended to two spans in breadth; the nose was short and large, broad at the end and flat in the middle; the hair of his head was like fish fins; his ears protruded high and wide; and the coloring of his face, hands, and whatever else his clothes did not hide was unusual, ranging from light gray to black.¹⁵

 The Vulgate Lancelot: Part I, trans. Samuel N. Rosenburg, in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris J. Lacy, vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1993– 1996), 1– 116.  Vulgate Lancelot, 2:60.  Vulgate Lancelot, 2:60.  Vulgate Lancelot, 2:61.  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed., ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 6.  Heinrich von dem Türlin, The Crown: A Tale of Sir Gawein and King Arthur’s Court, trans. J. W. Thomas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 13– 14.  Von dem Türlin, The Crown, 13.

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Of course, a knight must ride a horse appropriate to his high calling. Even in death a knight is honored by being borne on a warhorse. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, for example, Gawain’s body is carried to Winchester on a courser: Then caught they up the corse with care at their hertes, Carried it on a courser with the king selve; The way unto Winchester they went at the gainest. (lines 4009 – 11)¹⁶

The very sounds of the words for the knight’s body—“corse”—and the warhorse that bears that body—“courser”—reflect the close connection between knight and steed. Riding an inappropriate horse also becomes a punishment, replacing riding in a cart, in the Vulgate Lancelot. In the aftermath of the Knight of the Cart episode, after Gawain, Arthur, Guinevere, and then all the knights of the king’s retinue ride in a cart in honor of Lancelot, “from that moment on, as long as the king was alive, no condemned man was ordered to ride in a cart; instead, each city kept an old nag without a tail or ears, and the one who was to be disgraced would be paraded through the streets on this old nag.”¹⁷ In Lanval, Marie de France’s mastery of significant detail extends to the horse that her eponymous hero rides. When he is first brought to his fairy-lover’s pavilion, his exclusion from the fellowship, rewards, and knightly world of Arthur’s court is reflected in the fact that he accompanies her handmaidens “giving no thought to his horse / who was feeding before him in the meadow” (lines 78 – 79).¹⁸ After the fairy-lover’s reappearance to exonerate Lanval, “When Lanval jumps on his lady’s palfrey as she rides out of court,” a transformation occurs, as Kinoshita and McCracken observe: whereas he has been called a knight or a vassal throughout the tale, “Lanval is suddenly reduced to the status of a ‘young man’ or ‘squire’ (dameiseals) as if, in mounting the lady’s palfrey instead of his own warhorse (destrier, [line] 41), he had relinquished all claim to chevalerie.”¹⁹ It is so essential for a knight to be properly mounted that in Chrétien’s Perceval, Gawain takes seven chargers when he goes to answer the accusation of  The Alliterative Morte Arthure in King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson, rev. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), 131– 261 at 251.  Vulgate Lancelot: Part IV, trans. Roberta Krueger, in Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 3:29.  Marie de France, “Lanval,” in The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 107.  Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken, Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 62.

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Guinganbresil that he had treacherously killed Guinganbresil’s lord.²⁰ After a series of adventures, Gawain sends his attendants and his extra mounts back to his land.²¹ Then Gawain’s sole remaining mount, Gringalet, is stolen from him by a knight he has just healed. The knight, Greoreas, had been punished by Gawain for abducting and raping a maiden. The punishment was humiliating: Gawain forced Greoreas to eat for a month with hounds while his hands were tied behind his back. Thus Greoreas despises Gawain and so steals his steed and forces him to ride a nag. Greoreas’s vengeance on Gawain is emphasized by the extended description of the nag and its trappings: The nag was an ugly beast, with its thin neck, thick head, and wide, floppy ears. All the failings of old age were evident: one lip drooped the length of two fingers below the other, eyes troubled and dim, hooves marked with sores, hard flanks slashed all to pieces by the spurs. The nag was long and thin, with a lean croup and a long spine. The reins and the headpiece of the bridle were made of slender cord; the saddle, far from new, had no covering. He found the stirrups so long and fragile that he dared not settle himself in them.²²

 Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, in The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 339– 449 at 398.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 414.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 425– 26. Cf. the Old French: El ronchin ot molt laide beste: Graisle ot le col, grosse la teste, Longues oreilles et pendans; Et de viellece ot tex les dans, Que l’une levre de le boche De .ii. doie a l’autre ne toche. Les oex ot trobles et oscurs, Les piés crapeus, les costez durs, Toz depechiés a esperons. Li ronchins fu gresles et lons, S’ot maigre crupe et torte esquine. Les resnes et la chevecine Del frain furent d’une cordele; Sans coverture fu la sele, Que piech’a n’avoit esté nueve. Les estriers cors et febles trove. Si que affichier ne s’i ose. (lines 7161– 77) The Old French text is from Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal: Édition critique d’après tous les manuscrits, ed. Keith Busby (Tübingen: Max Niemayer, 1993), 304– 5.

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The evil-tongued maiden who had been following Gawain and delighting in his humiliation says that if only the nag he took from the squire and now rides were a mare, it would please her more because his shame would be worse.²³ When Gawain must fight Greoreas’s nephew, who is now riding Gringalet, he laments his situation: “‘how ill a knight feels when, eager to engage in feats of arms, he finds himself mounted on a nag’.”²⁴ And when he wins back Gringalet in this battle, “his heart felt such joy that never in his entire life had he known more happiness.”²⁵ Bringing together Perceval and Gawain is essential to the theme and the structure of Chrétien’s romance. As Keith Busby has noted in his Critical Guide to Perceval, combining the adventures of Perceval with those of Gawain suggests that “The profane ideal of chivalry needs to be supplemented and completed by spiritual concerns, not destroyed and supplanted.”²⁶ Norris Lacy has demonstrated the prominence of parallel imagery and events in the romance: “the episodes of this work are more intimately related to one another by similarity of form, function, and imagery than in any of Chrétien’s other works. Indeed, the web of analogical relationships in the Perceval is so extensive that the critic’s job is as much one of selection as of analysis.”²⁷ As part of the pattern of parallels that help to determine meaning in the romance, the emphasis on the horses of the two primary knights is revealing. Just as Gawain’s concern for the proper mount helps to define his knightly values and status, so too do Perceval’s mounts help to show his shift from a self-centered youth to a knight who recognizes his obligations to others. When Perceval comes to Arthur’s court riding a hunting horse (“chaceor”), he is concerned only about the immediate gratification of his desire for arms. He rides his horse right into the king’s court and even knocks the cap from Arthur’s head with his horse’s tail, so little understanding does he have of the serv-

 Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 425. Cf. the Old French: “Car fust or li ronchis ive / Qu’a l’esculier tolu avez! / Je le volroie, ce savez, / Por che que plus ariez honte” (lines 7154– 57), in de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval, 304.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 427. Cf. the Old French: ”. . . si mal seoir / Fait sor ronchin a chevalier / Quant il veit d’armes esploitier” (lines 7344– 46), in de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval, 313.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 428. Cf. the Old French: “Ceste aventure li fu bele, / S’en ot tel joie en son corage / C’onques en trestot son eage / Ne fu si liez de tant d’affaire” (lines 7360 – 63), in Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval, 313.  Keith Busby, Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval (Le Conte du Graal), Critical Guides to French Texts 98 (London: Grant and Cutler, 1993), 88.  Norris J. Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 106.

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ice and respect owed to the king. When Arthur tells of the insult done to his court and his queen by the Red Knight, Perceval “did not care a chive for anything the king said or related to him, nor did he care about the queen’s sorrow or her shame”;²⁸ but he insists on being made a knight and given arms. After slaying the Red Knight and being dressed in his armor and mounting his charger (“destrier”)²⁹ with the assistance of a squire, Perceval immediately becomes more generous and more aware of his obligations to others.³⁰ He gives the squire his hunting horse, saying “It is a fine horse, and I give it to you, because I need it no longer.”³¹ He then instructs the squire to bring to Arthur the cup stolen from him by the knight he has slain and to tell the maiden slapped by Kay that he will avenge the insult done to her.³² If the mount on which Perceval rides to Arthur’s court in Chrétien’s romance is not appropriate for a knight who is not engaged in hunting, the one he rides in the Middle English verse romance Sir Perceval of Galles is even less suitable. After seeing knights on horses, though he does not yet know the name of the creatures, Perceval comes upon a group of colts and mares and selects the largest mare to bear him to Arthur’s court. It is only later in the romance that we learn that this mare is the largest because she is pregnant (“bagged with fole,” line 717).³³ Elements of the romance are analogous to ones found in Chrétien’s Perceval, and there has been much discussion of whether or not the author of the English romance based his work on Chrétien’s. In an article in Comparative Literature Studies in 1975, David Fowler compared the two romances and concluded that “Sir Perceval of Galles, contrary to the usual opinion, was written out of an intimate knowledge and appreciation of Le Conte du Graal.”³⁴ Keith Busby supports Fowler’s “contention that the English poet knew” the Conte du Graal. ³⁵ And yet the English romance is clearly a different kind of work with a

 Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 351. Cf. the Old French: “Quanque li rois li dist et conte, / Ne de son dol ne de la hone / La roïne ne li chaut il” (lines 969 – 71), in de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval, 40.  Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval, 49, line 1186.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 354.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 354.  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, 354; cf. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval, 49 – 50.  Sir Perceval of Galles, in Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 26.  David C. Fowler, “Le Conte du Graal and Sir Perceval of Galles,” Comparative Literature Studies 12, no. 1 (1975): 5– 20 at 18.  Keith Busby, “Sir Perceval of Galles, Le Conte du Graal, and La Continuation-Gauvain: The Methods of an English Adaptor,” Études Anglaises 31, no. 2 (1978): 198–202 at 202.

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different purpose and for a different audience. As is often the case with English adaptations of French works, there is a deliberate simplification of the plot and of the verse. There is also a shift in theme. The English romance omits any reference to the Grail; and, as Busby has observed, “not only is the hero’s spiritual progress ignored, but his initiation into knighthood, such an important theme of Chrétien’s work, is hardly even hinted at.”³⁶ In fact, Perceval’s only education in knighthood occurs when he learns that the horse he is riding is called a mare. This becomes a running joke in the text as Perceval thinks all horses are called mares. Caroline Eckhardt has outlined the ways in which Perceval’s misunderstanding of the meaning of “mare” informs much of the comedy of the romance and “acts like a comic refrain through the battle with the Red Knight.”³⁷ Indeed, she sees “the ‘mare’ confusion” as one of the devices used by the poet to maintain comic continuity.³⁸ The author also makes the scene in which Perceval kills the Red Knight a comic tour de force, which depends in part on the way horses are used. Perceval is able to kill the Red Knight with a javelin through his eye because the knight raises his visor the better to see the simpleton, who is clad in goat skins, who rides a pregnant horse, and who calls the knight’s steed a mare. When the knight falls dead, Perceval speaks to him as if he were still alive, and then, believing that the Red Knight would continue the fight if he had his “mare,” Perceval runs after the knight’s horse on foot because his own mare is pregnant and cannot run fast enough (lines 661– 708).³⁹ Perceval’s assumption that all horses are mares is central to the comedy in another instance. In the midst of his climactic battle with the Sultan, he hears the word “steed” for the first time (line 1687) and ponders the name deeply,⁴⁰ in a scene perhaps inspired by Perceval’s contemplation of his beloved when he sees the drops of blood on the snow in Chrétien’s Perceval. ⁴¹ It is clear that the author of Sir Perceval of Galles has, for comic effect, exaggerated a number of elements found in his source. One of the most remarkable of those exaggerations is giving Perceval a singularly inappropriate mount. Not only does the foolish youth ride a mare but a pregnant mare at that. Because of her condition, he is forced to abandon her and pursue the Red Knight’s steed on foot. Surely, his misunderstanding of the meaning of the word

 Keith Busby, “Chrétien de Troyes English’d,” Neophilologus 71 (1987): 596 – 613 at 601.  Caroline D. Eckhardt, “Arthurian Comedy: The Simpleton-Hero in Sir Perceval of Galles,” The Chaucer Review 8, no. 3 (1974): 205 – 20 at 208– 10, 212.  Eckhardt, “Arthurian Comedy,” 217– 18.  Sir Perceval of Galles, 25 – 26.  Sir Perceval of Galles, 52.  Fowler, “Le Conte du Graal and Sir Perceval of Galles,” 17.

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“mare” is a sign of his folly and immaturity; and his riding of a horse so singularly unsuitable for a knight is a memorable trope. The only other medieval English romance to give Perceval a major role is Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. But since Perceval is not the central character of the Morte and not even the most important Grail knight, Malory is not concerned with his enfance; and his arrival at Arthur’s court is far different in tone and purpose from the parallel event in Sir Perceval of Galles. Perceval does not arrive as a foolish, untutored youth. Rather, he comes to court as a squire to Agglovale and is declared to be the son of Pellinore and the brother of both Agglovale and Lamorak, one of the best knights in what Field calls “The Second Book” of Tristram de Lyones, the tale in which this event is narrated. As a young knight, Perceval is ordered by Arthur to take his place “among meane knyghtes.” But a maiden who never spoke a word takes him by the hand and tells him to go with her. She then leads him to the seat to the right of the Siege Perilous.⁴² In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, as in other romances, the importance of a knight’s horse to his identity and reputation is repeatedly demonstrated. Lamorak’s angry question to his brothers, cited above, has several thematic echoes in the text. Early in the Morte, in Malory’s Accolon episode, Arthur fights as the champion of Sir Damas since this is the only way he can avoid dying in Damas’s prison.⁴³ He defeats Accolon, the champion of Damas’s brother Outlake, but ignores the outcome of the trial by combat and awards to Outlake the manor Damas has claimed and all the rights associated with it. This judgment is justified because Damas is “an orgulus knight and full of vylony, and nat worth of prouesse of your dedis.”⁴⁴ Arthur’s judgment decrees that Outlake will hold the manor from Damas and give him each year “a palfrey to ride upon, for that woll becom you bettir to ryde on than uppon a courser.”⁴⁵ The Middle English Dictionary defines a palfrey as “a riding horse (as opposed to a war horse).”⁴⁶ Because of his pride and villainy, his treatment of his brother, and his imprisoning of good knights, Damas is not worthy to ride a warrior’s steed. Later, on the quest for the Grail, when Launcelot is immobilized, he cannot stop another knight from taking his helmet, sword, and horse, those things which define his knighthood. The loss, of course, symbolically implies that in the action of the Grail quest, his knighthood is deficient.⁴⁷ And when seven of Laun-

     

Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:485. Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:109. Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:116. Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:116. The Middle English Dictionary Online, July 2020, s.v. “palefrei” (n.) a. Cf. Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:694– 95.

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celot’s adherents join him and the Archbishop of Canterbury to become holy hermits, the ultimate sign of their leaving worldly and knightly concerns is that “their horses wente where they wolde.”⁴⁸ This is an elaboration of the scene in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, in which, after Launcelot’s death, Ector becomes a hermit so he can pray for Launcelot the rest of his life and does not care whether his horse will remain or run away (lines 3946 – 47).⁴⁹ Malory clearly recognizes the symbolic significance of horses as indicators of knightly status or the lack thereof—a fact demonstrated in one other relevant and revealing use of a horse in the Morte. On the occasion of Arthur’s wedding, Aryes the cowherd brings to court his son Torre, who is not content to labor as Aryes’s twelve other sons are but “allwayes day and night he desyreth of me to be made knight.”⁵⁰ Having promised to grant boons on his wedding day, Arthur knights Torre; and Merlin reveals that he is not the son of Aryes: his father is actually Pellinore and he will prove to be “a good man” since he is of king’s blood.⁵¹ This scene has important thematic implications in the Morte. In an early sign of the feud between the house of Pellinore and the house of Lot, Gawain is angry that Pellinore, who killed his father, is honored and that Torre was the first one knighted—before Gawain himself—at the wedding feast. But my interest is in two particular details of this scene and what they may suggest about Malory’s sources. Torre arrives at Arthur’s court “rydynge uppon a lene mare.”⁵² That he has ridden the mare right into Arthur’s hall and remains mounted until he is about to be knighted is obvious since when Arthur agrees to knight him, he then “alyght of his mare.”⁵³ Much of this account is consistent with Malory’s main source for the episode. In the Merlin Continuation, Tor rides to Arthur’s court “on a poor pack horse” (accompanied by Arès “on a skinny, wretched nag”).⁵⁴ Though twelve of Arès’s thirteen children are content to “work for their living” as their father does,⁵⁵ Tor will not accept the peasant’s life and lot. Instead he desires only to become a knight, a sign to Arthur that he must be noble. Arthur knights him and then Merlin reveals that his true father

 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:935.  Stanzaic Morte Arthur, in King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson, rev. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), 123.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:485.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:79.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:78.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:79.  The Merlin Continuation, trans. Martha Asher, in Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4:225.  The Merlin Continuation, 4:225.

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(i. e., Pellinore) is “a consecrated king” and “one of the best knights to bear arms in this country for a long time.”⁵⁶ So, Torre’s mare in Malory’s account is probably not a detail that he derives from his source.⁵⁷ In fact, the only work in which someone comes to Arthur’s court riding a mare is Sir Perceval of Galles (SPG). It may be that Malory has taken from SPG the tale of an untutored youth, kept unaware of his true status, and transferred it to Torre. Of course, Torre’s mare is lean and not the pregnant mare that Perceval rides; but this is perhaps in keeping with the fact that Aryes is “a poore man.”⁵⁸ And Malory is not writing the kind of comic episode that the author of SPG is. Torre will be knighted by Arthur and soon will set off on a quest; and so it is not appropriate that he be presented as comically as Perceval is in SPG. Another detail supports the contention that Malory knew the English romance and modeled his scene of Torre’s arrival at court after it. When Aryes complains of his son’s reluctance to do manual labor, he says that the young man is “glad for to se batayles and to beholde knyghtes” and that he always desires to be made a knight.⁵⁹ In addition, Aryes complains that Torre always “woll be shotynge or castynge dartes.”⁶⁰ In his notes to “The Tale of King Arthur,” Vinaver comments on Tor’s penchant for knightly activities. He notes that in the French source Aryes says that “his son is unwilling to live ‘a sa maniere,’” and that he

 The Merlin Continuation, 4:226.  The word used for Tor’s mount, “jument,” is defined in Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue Française (10 vols. Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881– 1902) as “bête de somme” and is translated by Martha Asher (the translator of the Merlin Continuation in the Lancelot-Grail, 4:225) as “pack horse.” At some point, the word takes on the meaning of “mare” (cf. Raimo Antilla, Historical and Comparative Linguistics, 2nd rev. ed. [Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989], 134); the Anglo-Norman Dictionary gives two meanings for “jument”: beast of “burden” (def. 1) and “mare” (def. 2) [Anglo-Norman Dictionary, accessed July 2020, s.v. jument (s)]. However, it is worth noting that the word does appear in Middle English (as “jument”). The only meaning of the word found in the Middle English Dictionary is “a beast of burden.” (The citations in the Middle English Dictionary are from the Wycliffite Bible and from the Psalterium Beate Mariae in the Vernon Manuscript; accessed July 2020). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as “A beast of burden, also a beast in general” (s.v. “jument” [n.]). One of the Oxford English Dictionary examples of the use of the word, “Caxton tr. Vitas Patrum (1495),” is: “A yonge damoysell, the whiche bi arte magyk was conuerted in to a Iument or a mare.” This suggests that one cannot rule out the possibility that this meaning would have been known by Malory, but the more natural way to interpret jument in his source is as Asher has.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:78.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:79.  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:79.

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only wants to be a knight.⁶¹ Vinaver suggests that Malory’s additions to this simple statement “reflect a late medieval Englishman’s idea of the occupations of a young nobleman, with the result that ‘shotynge’ becomes one of the attributes of knighthood.”⁶² But this is not an activity attributed to any other of Malory’s knights. It is, however, an activity that is ascribed to Perceval in SPG. Perceval “lernede hym to schote” (line 221) so well that no beast could escape his dart if he determined to kill it.⁶³ And it is because “Of schottynge was the childe slee” (line 689) that he is able to slay the Red Knight by casting his spear “in at the eghe / And oute at the nakke” (lines 691– 92).⁶⁴ P. J. C. Field has observed that Malory’s minor sources are “so minor indeed that they have (naturally) been proposed with distinctly varying degrees of conviction. They mostly resemble the Morte Darthur in isolated details, and the resemblance is often not close enough to exclude the possibility of coincidence …. Nevertheless, the overall pattern of minor sources has a force of its own. It suggests that Malory read beyond his major sources, and supplemented his major sources from his reading, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously, and sometimes even systematically.”⁶⁵ Field added that “It is unlikely that we yet have a full list of Malory’s minor sources.”⁶⁶ Sir Perceval is not discussed in the 2008 study Malory’s Library: The Sources of The Morte Darthur by Ralph Norris or in any other study of Malory’s sources that I know of.⁶⁷ Yet I would suggest that we add Sir Perceval of Galles to the list of minor sources used by Malory, not in his account of Perceval, who, as one of the Grail knights seems immune to depiction as a comic figure or even as a foolish youth. Rather, Malory applies details from SPG to Torre. An interesting claim by Malory can also bolster my assertion that he knew and used SPG. In the Morte, Malory records that after the death of Launcelot, Bors, Ector, Blamour, and Bleoberis go to Holy Land, fight infidels in many battles, and die on Good Friday “for Goddes sake.”⁶⁸ Malory says the French book

 Sir Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 3:1321, note to 100.1– 4.  The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3:1321, note to 100.1– 4.  Sir Perceval of Galles, 13.  Sir Perceval of Galles, 25.  P. J. C. Field, “Malory and Chrétien de Troyes,” in Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 236– 45 at 237.  Field, “Malory and Chrétien de Troyes,” 237.  Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008).  Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:940.

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mentions these facts and that this account is “auctorised”;⁶⁹ but, as Larry Benson points out, “the French books mention no such thing, and Malory’s insistence upon written authority for this passage, as usual, merely conceals his own invention. In no other French or English version do Arthur’s knights leave the hermitage to carry on the chivalric life in this manner.”⁷⁰ While this is true, it is interesting that at the end of Sir Perceval of Galles, after he has restored his mother to her land, Perceval … went into the Holy Londe, Wanne many cites stronge, And there was he slayne, I undirstonde; Thusgatis endis hee. (lines 2281– 84)⁷¹

Of course, in the Morte, Perceval’s fate is enacted before the final events; and even though Perceval is not a Grail knight in the verse romance, Malory may have seen the journey to death in the Holy Land as a fitting end for Bors, one of his Grail knights, and for other kin of Launcelot. One further point that should be made is that Malory would not be the only medieval author to borrow a motif associated with one romance hero and apply it to a different knight. Two works that might be cited as employing this strategy are Tyolet, a twelfth-century lay, and Jaufré, a late twelfth- or early thirteenthcentury Provençal romance. The title character of Tyolet is a youth who, like Chrétien’s Perceval, is brought up in seclusion by his mother after the death of his father. Tyolet has been taught by a fairy to attract animals by whistling, but he has learned nothing of the ways of the world. When he encounters a knight by chance and desires to become a knight himself, his mother does not discourage him but rather gives him armor and advises him to go to Arthur’s court. He even rides his horse into Arthur’s hall, as Chrétien’s Perceval does. Jaufré is clearly influenced by Chrétien’s romances: Yvain has been called “the prétexte of the Occitan work” in which the author “reslants motifs and themes and situations” from the earlier work, even “concluding his romance with a fountain adventure.”⁷² There is also a humorous response to Chrétien’s Perceval in which the hero is greatly at fault for not asking a question about the suffering of the lord of the Grail castle. Jaufré comes to the castle of Brunissen the Beautiful,

 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:940.  Larry Benson, Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 247.  Sir Perceval of Galles, 68.  Tony Hunt, “Texte and Prétexte: Jaufré and Yvain,” in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 125– 41 at 127 and 141.

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the woman with whom he falls in love, and finds her and all the people of her land grieving terribly. In a reversal of the pattern in Perceval, Jaufré asks repeatedly about the grief; but each time, he is attacked, even by his father’s old friend. Ultimately, he learns that the grief is for the lord of the land who has been captured and tormented for seven years; but he gets this information only after his question has earned him beatings and rebuke—the reverse of the rebuke Perceval receives for not asking a question. And so it seems that assigning a motif associated in a source text with one knight to a different knight in a later work is a normal practice and certainly not an argument against borrowing by the later text. The journey of knights to the Holy Land, the throwing of spears, and particularly the arrival of a would-be knight at Arthur’s court riding a mare are striking, unusual, and memorable details, all of which Malory could have gleaned from Sir Perceval of Galles. Thus, this is another English romance that should be added to the list of Malory’s likely sources.

Bibliography Alliterative Morte Arthure. In King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, edited by Larry D. Benson, revised by Edward E. Foster, 131 – 261. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. Antilla, Raimo. Historical and Comparative Linguistics. 2nd rev. ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989. Benson, Larry. Malory’s Morte Darthur. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Busby, Keith. “Chrétien de Troyes English’d.” Neophilologus 71 (1987): 596 – 613. Busby, Keith. Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval (Le Conte du Graal). Critical Guides to French Texts 98. London: Grant and Cutler, 1993. Busby, Keith. “Sir Perceval of Galles, Le Conte du Graal, and La Continuation-Gauvain: The Methods of an English Adaptor.” Études Anglaises 31, no. 2 (1978): 198 – 202. Caxton, William. The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry. Translated and Printed by William Caxton from a French Version of Ramón Lull’s “Le Libre del Orde de Cauayleria” Together with Adam Loutfut’s Scottish Transcript. EETS o.s. 168. Edited by Alfred T. P. Byles. 1926; reprinted New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971. Chrétien de Troyes. Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal: Édition critique d’après tous les manuscrits. Edited by Keith Busby. Tübingen: Max Niemayer, 1993. Chrétien de Troyes. The Story of the Grail. In The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, translated by David Staines, 339 –449. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Eckhardt, Caroline D. “Arthurian Comedy: The Simpleton-Hero in Sir Perceval of Galles.” The Chaucer Review 8, no. 3 (1974): 205– 20. Field, P. J. C. “Malory and Chrétien de Troyes.” In Malory: Texts and Sources, edited by P. J. C. Field, 236 – 45. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998.

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Fowler, David C. “Le Conte du Graal and Sir Perceval of Galles.” Comparative Literature Studies 12, no. 1 (1975): 5– 20. France, Marie de. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. Godefroy, Frederic. Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française: Et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, composé d’après le dépouillement de tous les plus importants documents, manuscrits ou imprimés, qui se trouvent dans les grands bibliothèques de la France et de l’Europe, et dans les principales archives départementales, municipales, hospitalières ou privies. 10 vols. Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881 – 1902. Hodenc, Raoul de. Le Roman des Eles; The Anonymous Ordene de Chevalerie. Edited by Keith Busby. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983. Hunt, Tony. “Texte and Prétexte: Jaufré and Yvain.” In The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, edited by Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, vol. 2, 125 – 41. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Jaufre: An Occitan Arthurian Romance. Translated by Ross G. Arthur. New York: Garland, 1992. Jaufré: Roman Arthurien du XIIIe siècle en vers Provençaux. Edited by Clovis Brunel. 2 vols. Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1943. Jenéy, Cynthia. “Horses and Equitation.” In Handbook of Medieval Culture: Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages, edited by Albrecht Classen, vol. 1, 674 – 96. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Kinoshita, Sharon and Peggy McCracken. Marie de France: A Critical Companion. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Lacy, Norris J. The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art. Leiden: Brill, 1980. Lacy, Norris J., series ed. Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation. 5 vols. New York: Garland, 1993 – 1996. Le Lai de Tyolet. In Les lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: Edition critique de quelques lais bretons, edited by Prudence Mary O’Hara Tobin, 227 – 53. Geneva: Droz, 1976. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur. Edited by P. J. C. Field. 2 vols. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. Malory, Sir Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. Edited by Eugène Vinaver. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. Norris, Ralph. Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Ordene de Chevalerie. In Raoul de Hodenc, Le Roman des Eles; The Anonymous Ordene de Chevalerie, edited by Keith Busby, 170 – 75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Edited by J. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon. 2nd ed. edited by Norman Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Sir Perceval of Galles. In Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, edited by Mary Flowers Braswell. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. Stanzaic Morte Arthur. In King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, edited by Larry D. Benson, revised by Edward E. Foster, 11 – 123. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. Türlin, Heinrich von dem. The Crown: A Tale of Sir Gawein and King Arthur’s Court. Translated by J. W. Thomas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

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Tyolet. In Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Bisclaveret: Four Lais Rendered into English Prose from the French of Marie de France and Others, translated by Jessie Weston, 53 – 78. London: David Nutt, 1900. Zatzikhoven, Ulrich von. Lanzelet: A Romance of Lancelot Translated from the Middle High German. Translated by Kenneth G. T. Webster, revised by Roger Sherman Loomis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.

Misty Schieberle

Chapter 15 Gower’s Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod I wolde go the middel weie And wryte a bok betwen the tweie, Somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore, That of the lasse or of the more Som man mai lyke of that I wryte. Confessio Amantis, Prol., 17– 21¹

Gower’s approach to composing the Confessio Amantis indicates his commitment to striking the right balance between the extreme positions of too much “lust” (enjoyment) or too much “lore” (instruction). Although Chaucer also seeks to balance “sentence and … solaas” in the Canterbury Tales (I.798), Gower’s formulation evokes the Aristotelian mean, a concept critically important to his construction of the Confessio as an advice manual designed to help readers navigate the difficult path between virtue and vice.² In this essay, I outline some of Gower’s key Aristotelian views, trace their legacy, and argue that they influence a unique fifteenth-century adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea. The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod was copied by Anthony Babyngton into a collection that includes lessons in heraldry, hunting terms in French and English, genealogies of English kings, and other arguably educational material.³ The Gowerian  All quotations from Gower are from John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, 3 vols., Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003 – 2004).  On Anglo-French contexts for the Aristotelian mean, which Chaucer engages in Legend of Good Women and Melibee, see Carolyn Collette, “Aristotle, Translation and the Mean: Shaping the Vernacular in Late Medieval Anglo-French Culture,” in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2009), 373 – 85. All quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).  The Bibell is extant only in London, British Library, MS Harley 838, where it appears along with various didactic texts in French and Latin in the same hand (with the exception of two Welsh annals that are later additions). One text contains Babyngton’s signature (fol. 8v), marking him as scribe of the collection but not necessarily translator of the Othea. According to linguistic analysis by James D. Gordon, The Epistle of Othea to Hector: A ‘Lytil Bibell of Knyghthod’ https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-016

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features that I identify lay the groundwork for understanding the Bibell translator’s work as a consciously framed Aristotelian reading of Christine’s Othea shaped by the English literary trends of his day.⁴ The Bibell, produced independently yet contemporaneously with Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea (ca. 1440), is often inaccurately referred to as a poor translation because it differs significantly from Scrope’s largely word-for-word rendering and from the readings contained in authorial manuscripts—that is, copies produced or supervised by Christine herself.⁵ Some differences owe to accidental errors or to the differing contents of source manuscripts, but other departures in the Bibell occur by design. The Bibell uniquely stands apart from both Scrope and Christine in its accretion of additional Aristotelian ideals and, moreover, discourses that Gower initiates that are embraced by fifteenthcentury writers, perhaps most notably Lydgate.⁶ Of course, the Othea itself is founded on broad Aristotelian ideals such as fostering prudence, temperance, and good self-governance and exercising the proper amount of a virtue at the appropriate time. Such topics suit well the mirror for princes in which Othea, Chris-

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942), xlvi–lxiii, the Bibell text was translated ca. 1450 and later copied by Babyngton (b. 1476–d. 1536). Because of the uncertainty, I refer to the Bibell translator as the as-yet unidentified individual responsible for the translation. The title The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod is editorial but derived from the translator’s proem, line 105; all quotations from the Bibell are from Christine de Pizan’s Advice for Princes in Middle English: Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod, ed. Misty Schieberle, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2020) and cited by chapter and line numbers.  I first benefited from Thomas Hahn’s mentorship during a year at the Robbins Library as a graduate fellow, when his insightful and generous feedback on a particularly challenging dissertation chapter helped me articulate the broader value of an individual scribe’s reading and editing of two Chaucerian tales. My own research intersects most with his interests in reading practices: how did medieval people interpret and reinterpret literary works, and what can their readings teach us about medieval textual engagement and authorship? It is in this spirit, and with gratitude for Hahn’s contributions to the field and to my own scholarship, that I offer this essay on medieval English applications of Aristotelian ideals to preexisting texts and how such views culminate in a fifteenth-century translator’s unique reading of Christine’s Othea.  Gordon, Epistle, xliv–xlvi, labels the Bibell as a flawed translation and lists all the “decidedly weak translation[s] . . . on average two or three to a page, enough to indicate that the author had something less than an intimate knowledge of French” (xliv). I challenge this assessment and identify some pitfalls of relying on authorial copies in Misty Schieberle, “The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and the Problem with Authorial Manuscripts,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118 (2019): 100 – 28.  Robert R. Edwards, “Lydgate and the Trace of Gower,” South Atlantic Review 79 (2015): 156 – 70 at 156, refers to Gower as a “deep source” for Lydgate—never cited but critical to the foundations of Lydgate’s sense of ethics, authorship, and the purpose for writing public advice poetry.

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tine’s invented goddess of prudence, advises Hector of Troy; this fictional letter to Hector in turn occasions Christine’s commentary, which addresses further advice to her contemporary aristocratic patrons. It is possible that Christine was familiar with Nicole Oresme’s 1370s translations of Aristotle’s Ethics and Poetics for Charles V, but the Aristotelian content in the Bibell that I am evaluating typically does not have a direct source in the Othea. However, similar content does appear in Gower’s Confessio. In particular, I am interested in the ways that Gower’s deployment of the Aristotelian mean affects literary views of Fortune and fate, and even the Fate Atropos, the classical figure tasked with cutting men’s life threads who became synonymous with Death for medieval authors. Examination of such concepts shows how the Bibell translator adapts his French source to engage with the English tradition of conduct manuals and the standards that Gower sets for reading classical exempla in an Aristotelian mode.⁷ As a result, Gower should be viewed as the forefather of a literary movement that transforms English views of Fortune, fate, and virtue.

Gower’s “Middel Weie” and Personal Responsibility Gower’s prioritization of the “middel weie” not only balances lust and lore in his compositional practices but also structures the main focus of his ethical system. Throughout his lengthy advice in the Confessio, he urges readers to balance social obligations and personal moral decisions—an echo of Aristotle’s notion of charting the mean path between excess and deficiency.⁸ In its ethical implica-

 Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics were well known in England throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and, as Cary Nederman, “Aristotelian Ethics before the Nicomachean Ethics: Alternate Sources of Aristotle’s Concept of Virtue in the Twelfth Century,” Parergon 7 (1989): 55 – 75, has argued, even centuries before, Aristotle’s ethical ideas including the mean were incorporated so firmly into the intellectual fabric of medieval writers that they had become commonplace. On Aristotle’s currency in late medieval England, see, for example, Collette, “Aristotle, Translation and the Mean,” 381– 85; and Stephen H. Rigby, “Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets: Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum as Theodicy of Privilege,” Chaucer Review 46 (2012): 259 – 313.  R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 8, discusses the clarity with which Gower outlines the kind of poetry he has chosen to write; Steele Nowlin, “Narratives of Incest and Incestuous Narrative: Memory, Process, and the Confessio Amantis’s ‘Middel Weie’,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 2 (2005): 217– 44 at 219 – 20, also points out that the epistemological framework of Gower’s project creates

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tions, following the “middel weie” provides some hope for stability, since in Gower’s view, man’s moral choices impact his fortunes. As the oft-cited Prologue lines remind readers, “the man is overal / His oghne cause of wel and wo. / That we fortune clepe so / Out of the man himself it groweth” (Prol., 546 – 49). This concept of Fortune as a metaphor for man’s good or poor decisions is crucial to any text that wishes to motivate readers toward good behavior. But it is only one part of Gower’s repeated interrogation of other commonly invoked external controls over men’s lives. In Book 7, he initially links fate to astronomy only to discount that perspective. He ascribes to natural philosophers and astronomers the belief that “That we fortune clepen so … Al is thurgh constellacion” (7.640, 642), that is, fortune depends on one’s horoscope or astrology; these learned authorities likewise believe that “the stat of realms and of kinges / In time of pes, in time of werre / It is conceived of the sterre” (7.646 – 49). Immediately, he replaces that view with a theological perspective: “Bot the divin seith otherwise, / That if men weren goode and wise / And plesant unto the Godhede, / Thei scholden noght the sterres drede” (7.651– 54). In other words, the stars have less control over the events of a man’s life than an individual’s exercise of actions that are pleasing to God, such as wisdom and goodness.⁹ Gower thus constructs fate and fortune predominantly as external results of man’s internal morality, not as tangible influences on his future.¹⁰ In this framework, vigilant self-governance and the performance of virtues are advantageous protections against misfortune. I do not mean to suggest that Gower fails to acknowledge that man’s power over his future has limits. After all, such limitations are the main point of the “Tale of the Two Coffers” (5.2273 – 390). To respond to knights’ complaints that he has not rewarded them well enough, a king constructs two identical chests, fills one with straw and the other with treasure, and invites his knights to choose one; when the men choose the lesser chest, the clever king declares himself blameless and ascribes their poor reward to their own choice and to Fortune a different sort of negotiation between two extremes—old stories and new readers—that exemplifies Gower’s program of narration and composition.  See Peck’s note in Confessio Amantis, 3:445n: “Theology is a component of sapientia, while astronomy falls under the classification of scientia, a lower kind of knowledge useful for understanding the body, but not capable of overriding theological insights. Thus men scholden noght the sterres drede” (emphasis in the original).  Of course, other works express similar vacillations between proverbial statements about fate going as it must and maxims about the importance of moral action, e. g., Beowulf. Gower and the Beowulf-poet, however, seem more philosophical than the Bibell translator; they work through Boethian position, while the Bibell translator would ignore it in order to serve his own didactic purposes.

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(5.2273 – 390). Since no man possibly could know what the closed chests held, the “Tale of the Two Coffers” emphasizes the illusion of man’s control over his fate and acknowledges the arbitrariness of Fortune. Nevertheless, moments when man cannot control his fate are far outweighed by tales designed to spur readers to moral action, even, I suggest, when Gower’s authoritative narrator Genius deploys a story to lament the hopelessness of fate. Genius claims that the “Tale of Jephthah’s Daughter” in Book 4 against Sloth illustrates that “Mai no man lette that schal falle” (4.1524)—no man can hinder destiny. Yet the narrative and contexts actively undermine this reading. “Jephthah’s Daughter” appears immediately after the “Tale of Rosiphelee,” in which a “wofull womman” (4.1351) chastises a king’s daughter for her idleness and failure to serve Love. The despondent woman in tattered dress rides a lean, galled, and limping horse, and she suffers in service as the stable hand to a company of richly dressed women and their fine horses who ride before her, representing Love’s happier servants. She advises Rosiphelee not to emulate her disobedience in love in order to avoid such a miserable fate, and the princess dutifully vows to amend her ways. Genius generalizes to assert “For as the ladi was chastised, / Riht so the knyht mai ben avised” (4.1456 – 57). Since the conceit of the Confessio is that Genius advises Amans on matters of love (providing Gower a chance to educate his readers in moral and political virtue), Genius’s comment might be simply his reminder to Amans (and to Gower’s male readers) that the lesson is not just for women. However, this notion that the advice to avoid idleness applies equally to knights and ladies is critical to understanding the challenge Gower presents in “Jephthah’s Daughter,” a tale with a plausibly idle knight, even if Genius’s main focus is on love. Although “Jephthah’s Daughter” emphasizes the girl’s chastity as a problematic idleness, Gower is surely aware that her father—here presented as a chivalric duke—typically receives blame for the tale’s tragic conclusion. In the story based on the Old Testament Judges 11, Jephthah promises God that, in exchange for victory in battle, he will sacrifice the first creature he sees on his return home. Unfortunately, his young, beloved, and unmarried daughter rushes out first to greet him, causing much sorrow in the returning hero who eventually sacrifices her. Gower’s maiden requests and receives forty days to lament her chastity and the fact that she will never have children (4.1565 – 71), which exemplifies her idleness, at least according to Genius’s condemnation of women’s misguided hesitance to marry and reproduce that connects this tale to “Rosiphelee” (4.1480 – 501).

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Scholars have tended to read “Rosiphelee” and “Jephthah’s Daughter” together as exhorting women to embrace the valued role of wife and mother,¹¹ but the tales also complicate the notion of unstoppable fate. Rosiphelee, once advised, vows to amend her ways and avoid the woeful lady’s fate, yet Jephthah does nothing to circumvent the cruel sacrifice of his daughter, while his daughter becomes another “wofull maide” and Genius’s exemplar of idleness (4.1593). This interpretation is striking, for as María Bullón-Fernández has shown, medieval treatments of “Jephthah’s Daughter” tended to criticize the father for making a rash promise—particularly since other biblical texts like Leviticus 27 permit someone to redeem a human promised to God through a monetary payment.¹² Additionally, Robert Mannyng’s early fourteenth century Handlyng Synne focuses on Jephthah’s error, including the suggestion that he should have broken his reckless vow instead of keeping it, and by the turn of the century, the Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament (ca. 1400 – 1410) breaks with the biblical account to show Jephthah blaming himself for the tragedy.¹³ Bullón-Fernández also points out that although the Bible is ambiguous about whether Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to death or perhaps to a convent, Gower’s maiden explicitly loses her life, turning the reader’s attention to her fate and her lost time.¹⁴ This increased pathos also heightens the rashness of her father’s passive acceptance of circumstances, and his passivity is the only reason that his daughter cannot avoid her death. Genius may claim within this tale that no one can alter fate, but that is certainly not the fatalistic message offered elsewhere in the Confessio, and especially not in Book 4’s other warnings against Sloth. Jephthah’s being more sensible or taking alternative actions might have prevented a tragedy

 On Jephthah’s daughter, see María Bullón-Fernández, Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 177– 99; Andrew Galloway, “Gower’s Quarrel and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism,” in Calliope’s Classroom Studies in Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Annette Harder, Alasdair A. MacDonald, and G. J. Reinink (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2007), 245 – 68 at 249; and Galloway, “The Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 67– 104.  Leviticus 27:1– 8 permits this redemption, according to David Marcus, Jephthah and His Vow (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1986), 47; cited in Bullón-Fernández, Fathers and Daughters, 192.  Daniel A. Kline, “Jephthah’s Daughter and Chaucer’s Virginia: The Critique of Sacrifice in The Physician’s Tale,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008): 77– 103.  Bullón-Fernández, Fathers and Daughters, 191– 92. Additionally, although Judges 11:37 specifies that she has two months to mourn her virginity before her sentence, Gower’s version gives her only forty days (4.1563).

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with repercussions beyond just his own family. If the daughter’s death figures a loss of productivity or population for her community, as Andrew Galloway and Daniel A. Kline have suggested, then this communal loss is also her father’s fault.¹⁵ When Genius concludes that the daughter died a “wofull maide,” Amans’s response effectively invites the reader to consider the man in the tale: he notes that Genius has spoken of women’s sloth but not men’s, leading Genius to shift gears and turn to male lovers who successfully won their paramours (4.1596 – 614). Yet Amans’s comment equally calls attention to Genius’s failure to apply Rosiphelee’s chastisement to Jephthah. The daughters in the tales may both have refused love thus far, but Jephthah’s own folly and idleness are ultimately to blame for his daughter’s death—and medieval readers would have been prepared to criticize both his vow and his fulfillment of it. The narrative pairing thereby adds to Rosiphelee’s lesson evidence of how a patriarch’s sloth has repercussions far beyond his own person. If fate, like fortune, becomes the effect of a person’s choices, then Book 4 later shows that Amans fails to grasp the lesson—which Genius states repeatedly—that success comes to those who help themselves. One articulation underscores that hard work enables man to receive both honor and pleasure: “Bot who that wole in his degré / Travaile so as it belongeth / It happeth ofte that he fongeth / Worschipe and ese both tuo” (4.2292– 95). Another essentially argues that the man who refuses to put forth effort should have no expectation of achieving anything: “For who that wolde have al his reste / And do no travail at the nede, / it is no resoun that he spede / In loves cause for to winne; / For he which dar nothing beginne, / I not what thing he sholde achieve” (4.2690 – 95). Genius is unambiguous, yet Amans is slow to realize that he might be guilty of idleness. When Genius cautions Amans against Somnolence—sleepiness, or as Peter Nicholson clarifies “a lack of moral alertness”¹⁶—Amans immediately disavows this species of sloth by exclaiming that he would rather be dead than exhibit it. He then shows his belief in the classical Fates’ influence on his life: For whan mi moder was with childe, And I lay in hire wombe clos, I wolde rathere Atropos, Which is goddesse of alle deth, Anon as I hadde eny breth, Me hadde fro mi moder cast. Bot now I am nothing agast,

 Andrew Galloway, “Gower’s Quarrel,” 249; Kline, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” 81– 83.  Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 244.

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I thonke Godd; for Lachesis, Ne Cloto, which hire felawe is, Me schopen no such destiné, Whan thei at mi nativité My weerdes setten as thei wolde; Bot thei me schopen that I scholde Eschuie of slep the truandise, So that I hope in such a wise To love for to ben excused, That I no Sompnolence have used. (4.2754– 70)

Amans cites the fact that Atropos did not end his life early as evidence that the Fates shaped his destiny to exclude Somnolence. One rhetorical effect of the passage may be an appeal to a higher authority that confirms his lack of sin, but another is the depiction of Amans as ultimately passive: belief in the overarching power of destiny negates the power of human choice. His continued defense then offers examples of his amorous “activities”: following his lady’s every command, singing and dancing to please her, and reading Troilus to her (4.2777– 96). This final allusion is almost certainly a joke for Gower’s audience since Amans thinks first of perhaps the most inactive of lovers who, in Chaucer’s account, faints and must be thrust unconscious into his lady’s bed.¹⁷ In fact, Genius will soon mock a Troilus-like lover, who laments that “nou fortune is thus mi fo” (4.3406 – 23 at 3407), much as Chaucer’s Troilus does early in his romance (1.837), confirming Amans’s error. By revealing only idle activities and passivity, Amans shows that he has missed the point of Genius’s lessons entirely. Indeed, Amans imagines himself in the wrong genre: the Confessio is not a traditional romance or classical narrative in which the hero’s flaws are lamented as accidents of fate; it is a conduct manual that asserts that man’s practice of virtues —his actions—can speed his goals and shield him from turns of fortune or fate, even if no one can forestall Atropos forever. These moments—in “Jephthah’s Daughter” and in Amans’s misunderstanding of what it means to be morally alert and active—are important to Gower’s overall argument that man must take responsibility for his fate. They show Gower as the progenitor of a view that develops more fully in fifteenth-century political advice literature: wise, prudent behavior in theory can forestall Fortune. Paul Strohm has identified this as one of the defining elements of work by Lydg-

 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1086 – 99. On this scene, see Jill Mann, “Troilus’ Swoon,” The Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 319 – 35.

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ate, Fortescue, Ashby, and Yorkist poets.¹⁸ Tracing Strohm’s notion back to Gower underscores a small feature that the fourteenth-century poet contributes specifically to discourses of fate: in Amans’s reference to Atropos, we see one of the first examples of the notion that Atropos might end an individual’s life early because of his lack of virtue.¹⁹ Other earlier or contemporary references that I have located thus far merely identify the Fate with death that occurs from other causes, like Troilus’s melodramatic cry for Atropos to prepare his bier after learning Criseyde will be sent to the Greek camp (4.1205 – 11).²⁰ The closest claim similar to Gower’s is Criseyde’s hyperbolic invitation to Atropos to cut her thread if she is false (4.1545 – 46), which is clearly only an empty trope in Chaucer since it does not occur when she forsakes Troilus for the Greek Diomede. The image of Atropos as at least sometimes responding to an individual’s personal errors develops further in John Lydgate’s Troy Book (1412– 1420), a work that has much in common with the Othea’s use of the Trojan saga to impart princely advice.²¹ Lydgate’s Fall of Princes has been recognized as warning readers to guard against Fortune’s blows, but the Troy Book (TB) shows signs of working through similar ideas in its treatment not only of Fortune but also of the Fate Atropos.²² The deaths of Trojan princes occur “Whan Antropos to-brak hir lyves  Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 1– 5, 94– 104.  Aside from the mirrors for princes under discussion, most literary references to Atropos are descriptive and general, without depicting her as a malicious force who intentionally attacks deserving victims: she is simply synonymous with death and eventually comes to all people.  The Assembly of Gods, ed. Jane Chance, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), lines 444– 46, suggests that Atropos exists to chastise any who disobey the gods or despise their laws but then generalizes him (the character is male) as the death that comes to all creatures. Osbern of Bokenham similarly uses Atropos to generally figure death, when he mentions his own age and the hope that Atropos will not cut his fatal thread yet; in Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), lines 244– 48.  It is also clear that Lydgate was aware of the Othea in some form: he invokes her in the Troy Book to aid his project (Prol., 38); citations are by book and number to John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, A.D. 1412 – 1420, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1906 – 1935). In another project, I am reevaluating Lydgate’s use of the Othea because I suspect that he drew on Christine’s work far more than has been recognized.  For an example of this developing view of Fortune, see Lydgate, Troy Book, 2.1– 133. This lament against Fortune for ruining Laomedon turns into a warning for kings to take virtuous action to avoid his fate; a potential implication is that by being virtuous, one can avoid a blow like the one Fortune dealt Laomedon. Lydgate’s view of Fortune is ultimately conflicted, attempting to strike a balance between asserting—as advice texts must—that virtuous actions are efficacious yet acknowledging that Fortune is capricious, malevolent, and indifferent. On this precarious balance, see Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary

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thred” (TB 2.142), and Penthesilea’s death is described in similar terms (TB 4.4277), as if these are unavoidable outcomes. But the image of Atropos shifts palpably in Lydgate’s treatment of Hector and Ulysses. In Andromache’s prophetic dream of Hector’s death as a result of his decision to leave the city and enter battle, Atropos appears weaving Hector’s life thread and showing “þe force of hir felle myȝt,” presumably by cutting it (TB 3.4923 – 25). The implication is that had Hector stayed, Atropos would not have cut his life short. Later, as the work draws to a close, Lydgate warns of Ulysses’s impending death since “Antropos mesured oute & met / His lyues þrede, on the rokke sponne,” and he then exhorts, “Defend þi self, Vlixes, ȝif þou konne! / Shewe þi manhod, & be nat afferde, / And be wel war of þi sonys swerde!” (TB 5.2918 – 22). Even though he knows that Ulysses will not avoid his fate, Lydgate nevertheless suggests that it might be possible to defend oneself through a display of virtuous manhood and forewarned caution.²³

Reading the Othea in English Aristotelian Contexts What I have been suggesting so far is that the concept of virtuous, prudent performance as a method to avoid tragedy becomes a strident feature of English literary discourse that grows out of Gower’s Aristotelian views and matures in fifteenth-century poetry, especially Lydgate’s works. The Bibell, in my estimation, draws on such lofty predecessors to adapt Christine’s aristocratic conduct manual for English audiences and, like Gower, to emphasize how mirrors for princes material is crucially relevant to non-aristocratic readers as well. The Bibell’s original proem provides the clearest sense of the translator’s view of the Othea and his purposes in translating it. Like Gower, who organizes the Confessio around the enumeration and categorization of sins, the translator is intensely interested in ordering and categorizing. The Bibell translator combines this impulse toward organization with Aristotelian thought and constructs and Political Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), especially 153 – 216; and Maura Nolan, “Lydgate’s Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 59 – 92, especially 87– 92. See also Strohm, Politique, 1– 5.  There is another appearance of Atropos, when Lydgate claims that she caused Chaucer’s death because she envied his poetic talents, which seems to be a more traditional portrayal of the figure that allows Lydgate to praise his predecessor (Troy Book, 2.4693 – 99). However, the depiction also betrays Lydgate’s view of the Fate’s agency: he gives her the ability to judge, not simply weave out until a predetermined point.

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a series of three-part systems as “natural” and well-regulated. The resulting proem justifies Christine’s tripartite chapters—which contain poetic texte, prose glose, and prose allegorie—as naturally ordered and implicitly good. He begins with the world’s length, breadth, and depth, but as he moves on to address mankind and social systems, clear Aristotelian resonances reveal themselves: To whom the seyd divine magesté Hathe graunted a synguler prerogative In hym to conteyne liffly soules thre, Vegetatyffe, sensatyve, and intellictive, Whiche thre preserveth here hys bodely lyffe And him comfortyth in all adversité Tyll deth hym striketh with hys mortalité. By vegetative he hath hys groyng bodely, And sensative hym geveth palpabilité, But hys sole intellective makith hym proprely By resoun to discerne all mutabilité And wrong to devyde from ryght by equité. Thus every thyng is in ordre sett by mankynd, Wych schold be byfore and wych behynd. (Prol., 15 – 28)

The three divisions of the soul derive from Aristotle and were also transmitted by Giles of Rome: the vegetative (in the sense of physical growth), sensitive (in the perception of touch), and intellectual.²⁴ In this tripartite system, the intellectual soul sets man apart and allows him to separate right from wrong. This would seem to set mankind above all other creatures, but spatially, the final lines establish that he in fact occupies a “mean” position. In deciding “Wych schold be byfore and wych behynd,” man occupies a middle position, so that even before the translator evokes the Aristotelian mean explicitly, we see the ideal position not

 See Aristotle, De Anima, ed. and trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), 2:3 (pp. 162– 64); Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Harris Rackham (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 1.13.9 – 20 (pp. 23 – 24). This notion of the tripartite soul was also transmitted by Giles of Rome and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, both of whose works were translated by John Trevisa; see The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley (New York: Garland, 1997), 35 – 36; and On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour et al., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:96 – 103. See also Rigby, “Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets,” 270, on the hierarchies of the souls; and Dominik Perler, ed., Transformations of the Soul: Aristotelian Psychology 1250 – 1650, Special Issue Vivarium 46, no. 2 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008), on the evolving tradition of commentaries on Aristotle’s theories of the soul.

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as part of a hierarchy but as a midpoint on the spectrum between two other choices. The Bibell translator shortly after introduces the Aristotelian mean, which he deploys in a unique fashion: he rationalizes his conception of the book as a chivalric manual by applying the Aristotelian mean to the estates system. After outlining the estates of laborers, knights, and clergy, he announces: So unto knyghthod in especiall, As mene estat atweene the other tweyne, I purpose to declare condicioun certeyne, Wyche of verrey ryght owe to be dew To that estat of noble chyvallrye: Th’encres of vertew and vices to eschew. (Prol., 82– 89)²⁵

The translator directs his manual toward knighthood as the middle estate, and he identifies the true condition of knighthood as one that appropriately balances virtues (by increasing them) and vices (by avoiding them). When he further describes his purpose, he is driven to “declare this mater oppynly … pleyn to understondynge / Of every wyght desyrous to stye / The whele of Fortune to the suppreme wonnyng” (Prol., 162– 65). As I have argued elsewhere, these lines show that the Bibell translator clearly was affected by the notion that man can control his own fortune and halt Fortune’s wheel so that he remains on top for as long as possible.²⁶ In these lines we also see a concern with the open and plain language that Maura Nolan identifies as a feature of Gower’s style that influenced Lydgate.²⁷ Additionally, the dominance of Atropos in the Bibell account of Hector’s death is striking and plausibly the result of Gower’s attitudes toward fate, as filtered through fifteenth-century writers like Lydgate.  The Bibell’s reference to the estates—the laborers, knighthood, and clergy—as joined by the “comoun profyght” (Proem, line 39) also evokes one of Gower’s favorite concepts; on which see Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).  Misty Schieberle, Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1380 – 1500 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014), 169 – 91.  Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 226 – 28, focuses on Gower’s plain-speaking, a topic she expanded on in the presentation “Roman Virtue in Gower and Lydgate,” III International Congress of the John Gower Society, Rochester, NY, June 30, 2014. See also Nicholas Watson, “Medieval Translation in Theory,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, To 1550, ed. Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 71– 92 at 85, who argues that Lydgate’s “plain” means “full” or “complete” rather than “clear.” The Bibell’s translator’s usage seems to straddle the two possibilities, as he seems to strive for both clarity and completeness.

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One of the conspicuous features of the Bibell is the translator’s expansion of Christine’s quatrains to seven-line rime royal stanzas. Although he follows Christine’s tripartite chapter structure of poetic texte, prose glose, and prose allegorie (for the latter, using the English equivalent “moralité”), the extra lines he adds to the texte give him space to amplify and interpret Christine’s content. In the treatment of Hector’s death, he inserts Atropos further into the discourses of fortune, fate, and prudence with which he has framed his translation. Atropos only appears once in Christine’s Othea, in chapter 34, to remind readers of death in order to encourage them to live more virtuously and attend to spiritual needs as well as bodily ones: Ayes a toute heure regart A Atropos et a son dart Qui fiert et n’espargne nul ame; Ce te fera penser de l’ame. (Epistre, 34.2– 5) (Always be on the lookout For Atropos and her spear Who strikes and spares not a soul— This will make you think of your soul.)²⁸

The Bibell adapts rather than translates: Take hede alsoe toward Attropos, Whose dolefull dart confoundyth many a knyght. For thee were better be take among thi fooes Then to abyde the sterne stroke of hys myght. To hym perteyneyth the eend of every wyght. He spareth nother hye nor lowe degré. He is full hard; in hym is no pyté. (34.1– 7)

The translator has misinterpreted Atropos’s gender, which also occurs in Scrope’s translation and the Assembly of Gods (ca. 1478 – 1483), perhaps due to the writers’ greater familiarity with the iconographical and literary tradition in which Death is male (and possible ignorance of Atropos’s gender).²⁹ More salient  All citations are from Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. Gabrielle Parussa (Geneva: Droz, 1999) by chapter and line numbers; translations are based on Christine de Pizan, Othea’s Letter to Hector, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Earl Jeffrey Richards (Toronto: Iter Press, 2017), but may contain my alterations as noted: here I have substituted “Who” for “Which” in the third line because I prefer to acknowledge the agency of Atropos, rather than her spear.  Although Atropos is not unknown in English literature, including in the works of John Gower and John Lydgate, where she is correctly gendered female, the more widespread traditions feature Death as male. In iconography, Christine’s female Death is unusual, according to Millard

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to the present discussion, he has emphasized living actively, replacing Christine’s call to think of one’s soul (which he saves to address in his translation of her prose commentary). It is better for a knight to fight than await Death because Death spares “nother hye nor lowe degre.” But that raises the question of how Death approaches the “mene estat,” which in the translator’s system falls into a liminal category that is neither “hye” nor “lowe.” The answer appears in chapters 90 – 92, where the translator openly asserts that Atropos-Death can, indeed ideally must, be thwarted by the performance of virtue. These additional appearances of Atropos are not found in Christine, and they must come from the translator’s attempts to negotiate between his French source and his target English audience and literary context. Chapter 90 implies one cause for Hector’s death: disobedience, a lesson drawn directly from Christine’s original but amplified by Atropos’s presence. Remembre wel alsoe that thou schall dye, Werof the tyme I schew by my wordes certeyn. Atrops schal withdraw hys hand to thou disobey Kyng Priamus, thi fader, wyche schal do hys peyn Thee to require and make turne ageyn Fro the journey dolorous. Werfor, therof bewarre, For to this performed be, deth schal ey thee spare. (90.1– 7)

To demonstrate that the good knight must obey the wise counsel of his friends and family, exemplified here by Hector’s failure to heed Priam’s warning, these lines assert that Atropos will hold back and death will spare Hector until he disobeys and goes into battle.³⁰ Chapter 91 adds another error that leads to Hector’s destruction, but it also contains instructions for avoiding Atropos’s blow: Yet I schal thee tell how thou schalt escape The grett stroke of Atrops, yf it so wyl be. Kepe thin armour cloos, for yf it happ to gape, Thyn unware enemye hath gret aveyle of thee. I warne thee before: thus is it lyke to be.

Meiss, “Atropos-Mors: Observations on a Rare Early Humanist Image,” in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. J. G. Rowe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 151– 59. For English literary examples of a male Death, see Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, VI.699 – 700, 710, etc.; William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), lines 22.96 – 105, etc.; and John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols., EETS e.s., 77, 83, 92 (London: Oxford University Press, 1899 – 1904), lines 24825 – 28.  Middle English Dictionary Online, April 2021, s.v., “to” (prep.), def. 8.

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Thoff thou thinke the reverse, yet take it for no skorne. He never is disceyved that warned is beforne. (91.1– 7)

This “armour” evokes both literal armor and, as the accompanying prose commentary makes clear, a metaphor for man keeping his wits and virtues about him: “Wher it is seyd that the good knyght schold hold hys armour cloos mey morally be understand that mannes soule oweth to kepe hys wyttes hoole and cloos and not wavyng” (91.13 – 15). The additional lines explicitly criticize Hector not only for his actions but also for failing to heed Othea’s advice.³¹ Chapter 92 does not mention Atropos but does explain that Hector put himself in the vulnerable position that created this literal and metaphorical gap in his armor out of his covetous desire to loot the corpse of a king he has just killed. The Bibell’s expanded treatment warns “Yf thou hym despoyle, it schall thee repent” and urges Hector to learn the lore “Of the wey of wysedam … Or thin hurt fall,” echoing the final lines of the chapter 91 texte that emphasize the fact that Hector is being warned beforehand (92.2, 6 – 7; 91.5 – 7). Disobedience, covetousness, and a failure of moral alertness all contribute to Hector’s demise. A quick glance at Christine’s original quatrains shows the extent of the translator’s innovations. Hector, noncier m’esteut ta mort, Dont grant doulour a cuer me mort; Ce sera quant le roy Priant Ne croiras, qui t’ira priant. (Epistre, 90.2– 5) (Hector, I have to predict your death, Because of it great pain gnaws at my heart. This will happen when you will not believe King Priam, who will come and entreat you.) Encor te vueil je faire sage Qu’en bataille n’ayes usage De tes armes toy descouvrir, Car ce fera ta mort ouvrir. (Epistre, 91.2– 5) (Again I want to make you wise So that you do not adopt the habit Of taking off your armor in battle, For that will expose you to death.)

 See Schieberle, Feminized Counsel, 182– 90, on the translator’s added insistence to readers that they must follow Othea’s advice (often because Hector or another exemplar did not).

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For chapter 90, Christine’s Othea first laments the announcement of Hector’s death and notes when it occurs; in chapter 91, she then urges Hector not to expose himself to death’s blow during battle, at best implying Hector’s potential to save himself by heeding her counsel. By contrast, the English stanzas use Atropos’s menacing presence to emphasize the avoidance of death as a real possibility. According to the translator, until Hector disobeys Priam, Atropos’s hand will be suspended immobile, and until he covets the dead king’s arms, he will be able to escape the fatal blow. Therefore, Hector may elude death if he safeguards his armor and virtues. Atropos may spare neither those of “hye nor lowe degré” but s/he apparently would spare those of the “mene estat” of chivalry who consistently heed the manual’s advice. In the Bibell, Fortune, Fate, and Death can be forestalled, at least temporarily. Death will eventually come for everyone, which is why one must care for one’s soul, but, by exercising the same virtues that benefit the soul, one can also prevent misfortune and an “early” demise. Chivalry in the Bibell does not pertain only to those literally of the knightly class: it becomes a metaphor for society.³² Moreover, the Bibell does not address the aristocratic patrons that Christine’s Othea did; if the translator’s proem can be trusted, the likely audience members were lower status groups or gentry with higher aspirations, shown by the translator’s desire to help “every wight”—not princes alone—to halt the wheel of Fortune. The “mene estat” thereby becomes part of a conceit to urge all readers to walk the middle path between excess and deficiency and to live by the virtues that will stop Fortune’s wheel and forestall Atropos’s clippers or javelin. I suggest that, in making such bold claims, the translator pushes Gower’s notion that man is responsible for his own fate as far as it can go. For the Bibell translator, behaving virtuously would seem to guarantee a fortunate outcome—perhaps an unrealistic claim but nevertheless a useful position in a work that sought to motivate readers toward the performance of measured virtues.³³

 The notion of knighthood as metaphor for society is first articulated in the Burgundian court, but it also becomes evident in any mirror for princes that was copied or modified for a wider audience, according to Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977), 71– 81; see also Schieberle, Feminized Counsel, 155 – 57. This turn to chivalry as a social metaphor resembles the framework of Trevisa’s Regiment of Princes, in which the ideal government and ideal household are mirror images of one another. See Rigby, “Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets,” 286 – 300.  Peck, Kingship and Common Profit, 88, establishes that Gower connects fate “directly to the behavior of the will,” that is, to the inward working of man’s mind that determines how he will act.

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Bibliography Aristotle. De Anima. Edited and translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin, 1986. Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics. Edited and translated by Harris Rackham. Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1996. The Assembly of Gods. Edited by Jane Chance. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. Bullón-Fernández, María. Fathers and Daughters in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Authority, Family, State, and Writing. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Christine de Pizan. Christine de Pizan’s Advice for Princes in Middle English: Stephen Scrope’s Epistle of Othea and the Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod. Edited by Misty Schieberle. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2020. Christine de Pizan. Epistre Othea. Edited by Gabrielle Parussa. Geneva: Droz, 1999. Christine de Pizan. Othea’s Letter to Hector. Translated by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Earl Jeffrey Richards. Toronto: Iter Press, 2017. Collette, Carolyn. “Aristotle, Translation and the Mean: Shaping the Vernacular in Late Medieval Anglo-French Culture.” In Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, with Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter, and David Trotter, 373 – 85. York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2009. Edwards, Robert R. “Lydgate and the Trace of Gower.” South Atlantic Review 79 (2015): 156 – 70. Galloway, Andrew. “Gower’s Quarrel and the Origins of Bourgeois Didacticism.” In Calliope’s Classroom Studies in Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Annette Harder, Alasdair A. MacDonald, and G. J. Reinink, 245 – 68. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2007. Galloway, Andrew. “The Literature of 1388 and the Politics of Pity in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” In The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, edited by Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, 67 – 104. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, Gordon, James D., ed. The Epistle of Othea to Hector: A ‘Lytil Bibell of Knyghthod.’ Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Edited by Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway. 3 vols. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003 – 2004. Kipling, Gordon. The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance. The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977. Kline, Daniel A. “Jephthah’s Daughter and Chaucer’s Virginia: The Critique of Sacrifice in The Physician’s Tale.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008): 77 – 103. Langland, William. Piers Plowman: The C-Text. Edited by Derek Pearsall. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Lydgate, John. Lydgate’s Troy Book, A.D. 1412 – 1420. Edited by Henry Bergen. 4 vols. EETS e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1906 – 1935. Lydgate, John. The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. Edited by F. J. Furnivall. 3 vols. EETS e.s. 77, 83, 92. London: Oxford University Press, 1899 – 1904.

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Mann, Jill. “Troilus’ Swoon.” The Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 319 – 35. Marcus, David. Jephthah and His Vow. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1986. Meiss, Millard. “Atropos-Mors: Observations on a Rare Early Humanist Image.” In Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, edited by J. G. Rowe, 151 – 59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. Mortimer, Nigel. John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Nederman, Cary. “Aristotelian Ethics before the Nicomachean Ethics: Alternate Sources of Aristotle’s Concept of Virtue in the Twelfth Century.” Parergon 7 (1989): 55 – 75. Nicholson, Peter. Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Nolan, Maura. John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Nolan, Maura. “Lydgate’s Literary History: Chaucer, Gower, and Canacee.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 59 – 92. Nolan, Maura. “Roman Virtue in Gower and Lydgate.” Oral Presentation. III International Congress of the John Gower Society, Rochester, NY, June 30, 2014. Nowlin, Steele. “Narratives of Incest and Incestuous Narrative: Memory, Process, and the Confessio Amantis’s ‘Middel Weie’.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 2 (2005): 217 – 44. Osbern of Bokenham. Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen. Edited by Mary S. Serjeantson. EETS o.s. 206. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. Peck, Russell. Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Perler, Dominik, ed. Transformations of the Soul: Aristotelian Psychology 1250 – 1650. Special Issue. Vivarium 46, no. 2. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008. Rigby, Stephen H. “Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets: Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum as Theodicy of Privilege.” Chaucer Review 46 (2012): 259 – 313. Schieberle, Misty. Feminized Counsel and the Literature of Advice in England, 1380 – 1500. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014. Schieberle, Misty. “The Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and the Problem with Authorial Manuscripts.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118 (2019): 100 – 128. Strohm, Paul. Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Trevisa, John. The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus. Edited by David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley. New York: Garland, 1997. Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum. Edited by M. C. Seymour et al. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Watson, Nicholas. “Medieval Translation in Theory.” In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1, To 1550, edited by Roger Ellis, 71 – 92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Yeager, R. F. John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990.

Derrick Pitard

Chapter 16 “The Prioress’s Tale” and Vernacular Devotion The Wife of Bath is a scholar. The final section of her Prologue refers explicitly, for instance, to her fifth husband Jankyn’s use of St. Jerome’s Ad Jovinianum as a means of abuse. What’s more, she famously comments on and re-interprets much of Jerome in the first section of her Prologue, including the uses of genitalia, the marriage debt, the biblical injunction to “increase and multiply,” and a re-interpretation of stories about shrews, all of which she uses to illustrate how women need to gain power rather than to give reasons for persecution.¹ She selfconsciously assumes the role of a new Jerome, rewriting his commentary on women and, at least potentially, Jovinian’s heresy that was the original target of Jerome’s commentary. In all of this she deploys the conventions of Latin scholarship—quoting the Bible and commentaries on it, citing both secular and sacred auctores,² deploying legal rhetoric³—yet she frames her argument with personal experience. Thus whatever her tools, the Wife intends to avoid any interpretation of her identity mediated by or subservient to the conventions of elite academic commentary and the men who govern it.⁴ In this paper, I argue that the Prioress should be considered just as powerful a theorist of the vernacular. In Street Smarts and Vernacular Theory, Thomas McLaughlin provides a description of this term: “Vernacular theory … begins in … local concerns and does not generally seek to construct macrosystems of

Note: I would like to thank Emily Steiner, Lisa Lampert, Merrall Price, and the two editors of this volume for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.  Her references are apparent in the glosses to the Ellesmere manuscript, and are noted in the “Explanatory Notes” of The Riverside Chaucer, ed. David Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) on 865 – 72 passim.  Lee Patterson, “‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de La Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58, no. 3 (1983): 656 – 95.  Richard Mccormick Houser, “Alisoun Takes Exception: Medieval Legal Pleading and the Wife of Bath,” The Chaucer Review 48, no. 1 (2013): 66 – 90.  See also on the scholarly nature of the Wife’s use of English: Alcuin Blamires, “The Wife of Bath and Lollardy,” Medium Aevum 58, no. 2 (1989): 224– 42 and William Kamowski, “Chaucer and Wyclif: God’s Miracles against the Clergy’s Magic,” The Chaucer Review 37, no. 1 (2002): 5 – 25. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-017

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explanation.”⁵ McLaughlin builds on Houston Baker’s work on the blues to define a vernacular as “the practices of those who lack cultural power and who speak a critical language grounded in local concerns, not the language spoken by academic knowledge-elites.”⁶ McLaughlin examines modern subcultures including the new age healing movement and advertising to show how members of these groups, while not well-regarded by academic elites, are nevertheless very “canny about some of the institutions and practices they encounter,” though they can be “naïve about others.”⁷ This describes the Prioress well, and as I will show, her canniness is evident in how she uses modes of religious expression. Like the Wife, the Prioress understands very well how men dominate religious practice; this fact perhaps coincides with her apparent affection for romance, in which women often have a dominant role. Yet Chaucer also demonstrates her naïveté about corollaries of her belief: violence, for instance (which though idealized is also often brutal in romances⁸), and her callously cruel bigotry towards Jews. Her beliefs are also dangerous, even if orthodox. For all of this, the Prioress’s use of English remains deeply invested in an attempt to assert her own voice despite the Latinate institutions that seek to repress it. While they both theorize the vernacular, the Wife and the Prioress redeploy clerical religious discourses very differently. The Prioress draws scriptural references not from scholarly texts but from the discourse of ceremonial and devotional religion. She begins with a prayer that translates the first verse from Psalm 8, the opening lines of the Matins prayer in the Little Office of the Virgin:⁹ O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous Is in this large world ysprad—quod she—

 Thomas McLaughlin, Street Smarts and Vernacular Theory: Listening to the Vernacular (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 6.  McLaughlin, Street Smarts and Vernacular Theory, 5 – 6; he refers to Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).  McLaughlin, Street Smarts and Vernacular Theory, 22.  Richard W. Kaeuper, “The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance: Northwestern Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97– 114.  Riverside Chaucer, 914, notes to Prioress’s Prologue. The opening three verses to Psalm 8 are “Domine dominus noster quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra. Quoniam elevata est magnificentia tua super caelos. Ex ore infancium et lactentium perfecisti laudem propter inimicos tuos, ut destruas inimicum et ultorem” (O Lord our lord how marvelous your name is in all the earth, for your magnificence is lifted above the heavens. Out of the mouths of infants and those who nurse you have perfected glory because of your enemies, so that you might destroy your enemies and the one beyond [i. e., Satan]).

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For noght oonly thy laude precious Parfourned is by men of dignitee, But by the mouth of children thy bountee Parfourned is … (VII.455 – 58)

Implicit in this quotation is a key question: who has the authority to praise the Lord? There is more than one way to praise God: “men of dignitee”—the clerks and clerics of the Church—do so, but so do children, the infantes and lactantes mentioned in Psalm 8, and so can she; she is, after all, leading the pilgrims in prayer, as if this were grace before a meal. Megan Murton, the most recent scholar to have taken up an examination of the Prioress’s use of the liturgy, argues that the passage shows how “linguistic inability is no obstacle to praising God.”¹⁰ The Prioress in fact disparages academic learning, as she declares later in her opening prayer: “Lady, thy bountee, thy magnificence, / Thy vertu and thy grete humylitee / Ther may no tonge express in no science” (VII.474– 76). “Science,” academic learning, will not illuminate her with the knowledge that she is seeking, which is to get her “to the lyght … / To gyden us unto thy Sone so deere” (VII.479). She seeks a specifically affective connection to God, and thus does not flirt with a clerical prerogative to interpret scripture. As I will show, the Prioress follows the devotional path laid by Richard Rolle in a number of ways: he too sought an affective attachment to God and distrusted academic conventions while carefully avoiding conflict with the Church hierarchy. There are, then, two key aspects of the Prioress’s vernacularity that frame my discussion. The first is her affection for public modes of piety—not just the liturgy, but also other devotional contexts for the Tale. The second is her awareness that the structures of traditional devotion are controlled by men. Her Prologue and Tale offer both a critique of this domination and examples of how she retains her own devotional identity in its shadow. Within this frame, I examine a previously unnoticed reference, also used by Rolle, that discloses a new thread of images in the Tale. Yet while these references may tie the Tale together in a new way, my reading, as I shall indicate, also indicates a wariness of affective, pietistic worship.

 Megan Murton, “The Prioress’s Prologue: Dante, Liturgy, and Ineffability,” The Chaucer Review 52, no. 3 (2017): 318 – 40 at 337.

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Popular Piety and the Holy Name The Prioress’s affection for the liturgy is evident from the opening lines of her description in the General Prologue, where Geoffrey notes that “Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne, / Entuned in hir nose ful semely” (I.122 – 23). Appearing just prior to the description of her French, the lines imply an unselfconscious foible of personality, or perhaps a quirk which deserves a bit more self-awareness, or an affectation acquired through misunderstanding or ignorance (or, perhaps all of these): singing through the nose was apparently not considered to be seemly, and so Chaucer’s description of her voice seems to be ironic.¹¹ In the light of her Prologue and Tale, however, her singing (pretty or not) signifies her affection for liturgical devotion. I have mentioned the best-known reference to devotional practice in the opening lines of the Prologue, her use of the first lines of Psalm 8, which as Beverly Boyd long ago noted are “the first of three psalms which form the basis of Matins” in the Hours of the Virgin (also called the Little Office of the Virgin) in Primers (or Books of Hours), which by the later fourteenth century had become common in private, lay devotion.¹² The Psalm was also used, as Boyd notes (building on an essay originally published in 1939 by Marie Padgett Hamilton), in the Mass of Holy Innocents, celebrated to mark the day on which Herod slaughtered the Innocents; other lines in this opening stanza also echo this service.¹³ Given the verse’s echoes in the liturgy, the Psalm marks an appropriate invocation for “The Prioress’s Tale”: it will be about the slaughter of another Innocent by vengeful Jews, and—the point directly relevant to this argument—it signifies her affection for forms of religious devotion.¹⁴  Henry Ansgar Kelly, “A Neo-Revisionist Look at Chaucer’s Nuns,” The Chaucer Review 31, no. 2 (1996): 115 – 32 at 127– 28.  Beverly Boyd, Chaucer and the Liturgy (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1967), 67. Roger S. Wieck, The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (London: Sotheby’s, 1988) includes the full contents of a typical Book of Hours in an Appendix. Aside from in this special mass, the Psalm was also used in secular and monastic services once each week; see John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 243.  Marie Padgett Hamilton, “Echoes of Childermas in the Tale of the Prioress,” MLR 34 (1939): 1– 8. Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 290 notes other liturgical echoes in the opening stanza.  The tale’s anti-semitism will be addressed near the end of this article. For full discussions, with bibliography, see Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), chap. 3; and Merrall Llewelyn Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality: Absorbing Antisemitism in Chaucer’s Prioress,” The Chaucer Review 43, no. 2 (2008): 197– 214.

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Its appearance in the Little Office is especially interesting, since the Book of Hours was specifically for private rather than clerically led devotion. This is also the case in a second reference in the opening stanza, one which has not, as far as I know, been previously discussed, the invocation of the Name of Jesus: “O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous / Is in this large world ysprad” (VII.453 – 54). The Prioress refers not to the Lord’s message, or words, but instead directly to “thy name.” The reference is emphasized by her use of the verb “ysprad”: the source for this devotional tradition in the high and later Middle Ages is St. Bernard’s fifteenth sermon on the Song of Songs, which takes as its theme a line from verse 1:3, “Oleum effusum nomen tuum” (Your name is oil poured out); the Prioress’s image of “spreading” provides another common translation for the Latin effusum. ¹⁵ The reference is part of a larger pattern Chaucer lays out in the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale, in which she constantly refers to private rather than public devotional models that are physically and spiritually distinct from the institutionally mandated model of liturgical practice defined by the mass.¹⁶ The most proximate and influential source of devotion to the Holy Name during Chaucer’s life was the Yorkshire hermit, mystic, and guide to anchoresses Richard Rolle, who made use of Bernard’s non-devotional sermons in his work. The worship of the Holy Name appears in a number of his middle and later works, including his Incendium Amoris, the Latin Commentary on the First Verses of the Canticle of Canticles, his English Commentary on the Psalms, and what is probably his last work, the epistle The Form of Living. ¹⁷ After his death, and over the next centuries, the tradition developed its own life out of this work. Copyists

 It has roots earlier than Bernard; see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) 172– 79; and Denis Renevey, “Name above Names: The Devotion to the Name of Jesus from Richard Rolle to Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection I,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England 6 (1999): 103 – 21 at 103 – 5.  Other discussions of the Prioress’s use of private devotional material include Carolyn Collette, “Sense and Sensibility in the Prioress’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 15, no. 2 (1980): 138 – 50; Elizabeth Robertson, “Aspects of Female Piety in the Prioress’s Tale,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 145 – 60; and Felicity Riddy, “‘Women Talking about the Things of God’: A Late Medieval SubCulture,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1150 – 1500, ed. Carol M. Meale, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 104– 27.  I use the chronology established in Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 273 – 79, the most thorough evaluation of his career since Hope Emily Allen in the 1920s. This chronology is also followed by Denis Renevey, who has published much excellent work on Rolle and the devotional tradition of the Holy Name.

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extracted separately circulating texts by Rolle on the Holy Name, notably the Encomium Nominis Jesu, a translation of excerpts from his Latin commentary.¹⁸ One fifteenth-century manifestation of this tradition is the so-called Jesus Psalter, composed most likely by Richard Whytford, monk of Syon and another composer of devotional advice for nuns.¹⁹ Rolle’s Form of Living was addressed to Margaret Kirkeby, an enclosed nun, but by the later fourteenth century, it had been recopied in whole and in excerpts into a number of lay manuscripts. The Prioress’s invocation of the tradition indicates Chaucer’s interest in framing her devotion, then, not just as an individual practice but also as a contemporary trend in female devotion. Chaucer wants to depict her as interested in the possibilities that contemporary fashions in vernacular devotion could offer. What, then, makes this devotional trend so appealing? And why does Chaucer associate his Prioress with it? To answer this, the tradition itself needs some explanation. Rolle’s context in the Form for commending meditation on the Holy Name is a discussion of the third, highest degree of love: “Bot þe soul þat is in þe þrid degre is as a brennynge fyre, and as þe nyghtgalle, þat loueth songe and melody, and failleth [faints] for mykel loue; so þat soul is only conforted in praisynge and louynge of God, and til þe deth cum is syngynge gostly to Ihesu and in Ihesu.”²⁰ The nightingale was an image for both secular and sacred love; it appears, for instance, in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, in the list of birds: “The sparwe, Venus sone; the nyghtyngale, / That clepeth forth the grene leves newe” (351– 52). The nightingale is a harbinger of spring, one of the birds who in Chaucer’s General Prologue “slepen al the nyght with open ye” (I.10). Rolle is not a secular poet, but for a female audience (or, more precise-

 S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, ed., Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, EETS o.s. 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Form 610 – 25. This is in some editions listed as chap. 9. Also see in Carl Horstmann, ed., Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church, and His Followers, 2 vols. (London: Swan Sonnennschein & Co., 1895). 1:106, 86. The Encomium is edited by Horstmann from the Thornton Ms and BL MS Harley 1022; it also appears in MS Bodley 938, a manuscript which contains other excerpts from Rolle’s works, folded into a slightly idiosyncratic version of the Pore Caitif. The only edition of the Latin Comment on the Canticles remains Sister Elizabeth M. Murray, “Richard Rolle’s Comment on the Canticles Edited from MS. Trinity College, Dublin 153” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 1958).  Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 198 – 99. The Jesus Psalter, which was reprinted during the sixteenth century, became, as Knowles describes, “the most popular devotional manual of the English Catholics through the Penal Times”; see Dom David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 3:214.  Ogilvie-Thomson, Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, Form 571– 74. All quotations are from this edition.

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ly, for the contemporary cultural stereotype of a female audience), Rolle like Chaucer takes advantage of familiar images to convey his meaning.²¹ The third degree of Rollean love is laden with images of the pain of desire: fire, music, and sweetness, as the lyric which immediately follows this passage expresses: I stand in stil mournynge of al loueliest lare; His loue-langynge, hit draweth me to my day, The band of swet brennynge, for hit holdeth me ay Fro place and fro playnge, til þat I get hit may, The syght of my swetynge, þat wendeth neuer away. In welth beth our walkynge, withouten noy or nyght; My loue is in lastynge, and longeth to þat syght. (Form 604– 9)

The prayer, not of course a traditional devotion, should be said “when þou couetieste his comynge and thy goynge.” Rolle’s asks the devotee to use the rhetoric of romance—to feel “loue-langynge,” to seek the “sight of my swetynge”—to worship God: the Prioress’s apparent affection for romance visible in her General Prologue description, perhaps in Chaucer’s mind originates in just such rhetoric. Immediately after this lyric Rolle includes the passage that invokes the Name of Jesus as a means to “be wel with God,” signifying that prayer to Jesus’s Name is the way to this highest degree of love: If þou will be wel with God, and haue grace to reul þi lif right, and cum to þe ioy of loue, þis name Iesus, fest [fasten] hit so faste in þe herte þat hit cum neuer out of þi þoght. And when þou spekest to hym, and seist “Ihesu” þrogh custume, hit shal be in þyn ere ioy, in þi mouth hony, and in þyn hert melody, for þe shal þynke ioy to hyre þat name be nempned, swetnesse to spek hit, myrth and songe to thynk hit. (610 – 15)

Rolle explicitly recommends a form of prayer to be said “þrogh custume,” as part of regular devotional practice. The Name will call forth the senses of sweetness and harmony (dulcor and canor) that the lyric expresses. Because it is private, the practice Rolle suggests here is extra-liturgical, and so allows for a metaphorical originality not possible in the rote repetition of verses that the mass or Horae ask of their readers. It is not even in Latin. The practice is a form of vernacular devotion.

 Also see in Margaret Deanesly, ed., The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole (Manchester: The University Press, 1915), 277 (in cap. 42). This is translated into Middle English in Ralph Harvey, ed., The Fire of Love, and The Mending of Life or The Rule of Living (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896), 102.36 (2.12).

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Rolle’s instructions, then, are a form of vernacular theory, an experiment in the way that non-Latin traditions can be used for devotion and the promulgation of religious thought. Rolle was by all accounts the most important enabler of vernacular devotion in later medieval England for a variety of audiences, ranging from the enclosed, to those in the “mixed” life who followed contemplative practices though they were not members of the Church, to—albeit often in interpolated forms—Wycliffites. This is in part because he composed images and devotional practices that were accessible and flexible, such as the three levels of contemplative bliss and the devotion to Holy Name. As Denis Renevey has revealed of Rolle’s discussions of the Holy Name, “the devotion to the Name seems to fulfill different functions, at different levels of the spiritual life …. [T]he Jesus prayer … satisfies all levels of the contemplative life, from purgatio to unio.”²² And, he came more and more to write in a widely accessible language—his last works were in English. Rolle did not articulate a specifically vernacular devotional mode from the start of his career. Instead, he crafted this identity over time, in part because he lived as a religious outsider. He did not enter an established religious order, and in fact at times coupled his advice on devotion with critiques of traditional clerical culture. In an earlier Latin work entitled the Incendium Amoris, for instance, which provides some of the most intimate biographical details of his religious life, Rolle describes how he was offended by university life during his time at Oxford.²³ One might conjecture that this was why he did not join a monastic order in Oxford after he retreated north, a decision that profoundly affected the way in which he constructed his reading, devotional relationships, and audience. He explicitly speaks out against academic discourse and an academic audience in the work’s Prologue: Therefore I offer this book for the consideration not of philosophers, not for the wise men of the world, and not for great theologians deeply invested in infinite questions, but for the ignorant and unlettered who are trying to love God more than to know many things. Let the book be known, then, not for disputation, but for doing and loving. I believe, indeed, that those things that are contained in this cannot be understood by those who are always asking questions and highest in knowledge but lower in love of Christ. Therefore I have not written for them unless they put all things which pertain to this world behind them and forget them, and they only burn to give themselves over to the Creator’s desires.²⁴

 Renevey, “Name above Names,” 112.  Hope Emily Allen, English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 444– 49; Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, 32– 33.  “Istum ergo librum offero intuendum, non philosophis, non mundi saptientibus, non magnis theologicis infinitis quescionibus implicatis, sed rudibus et indoctis, magis Deum diligere

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Academic language equates very specifically with worldly corruption. It encourages the self-gratification that occludes the true goal of learning, which must be to inculcate the desire to know God. Not coincidentally, this non-academic devotional goal is the Prioress’s. Rolle’s argument builds on the immediate context for this section in which he has discussed the wages of sin; just before this, in discussing the sensation of his very physically felt burning ardor for God, he notes that “The needs of the body and desires imprinted with human suffering and the anguish of exile interrupt this ardor.”²⁵ Like the needs of the body, academic discourse distracts the soul from its true desire for Jesus. The treatise departs from academic norms in other ways as well. Margaret Deanesly, for instance, noted long ago in her edition of the Incendium that the text includes direct quotations from two saints, Cuthbert and Maglorius, but “these two saints are the only authorities quoted in the Incendium—an exceptional feature in a mediæval theological treatise” since such writing was usually heavily larded with direct references to the auctors on whom the authority of the Church was grounded.²⁶ The Incendium is in Latin, and written before The Form of Living, but it represents a step towards a developing vernacularity in Rolle’s thought—that is, he is laying the groundwork for a vernacular theory that argues for the particular authority that English might gain in devotional practice. Nicholas Watson identifies the work with a crucial stage in Rolle’s development as a mystic and a writer when he develops a new, distinctive voice and proclaims his own sanctity.²⁷ Soon after completing the Incendium, Rolle began to compose his commentaries on the Psalms and the Song of Songs. Though such commentaries are perhaps the most traditional of academic genres, he used them to develop a nonacademic voice. Hope Emily Allen did not appreciate this combination of rhetoric and genre, describing his Latin commentary on the Canticles as “a diffuse and rambling exposition of the first five half-verses of the Song of Songs.”²⁸ Later

quam multa scire conantibus. Non enim disputando sed agendo scietur, et amando. Arbitror autem ea que hic continentur ab istis questionariis et in omni sciencia summis, sed in amore Christi inferioribus, non posse intellegi. Unde nec eis scribere decreui, nisi postpositis et oblitis cunctis que ad mundum pertinent, solis Conditoris desideriis inardescant mancipari.” Deanesly, The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, 147. This is my translation.  “Necessitas quoque corporalis atque affecciones humanitus impresse, erumpuosique exilii anguscie ardorem ipsum interpolant”; Deanesly, The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, 146.  Deanesly, The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, 47.  Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, 113 – 17.  Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle Hermit of Hampole and Materials for His Biography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1927), 62.

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commentators, however, have found more to appreciate here. Robert Boenig, in the Introduction to his English translation of the Commentary, says that “this is a fairly accurate description, except for the adverse connotations of ‘diverse and rambling,’ for this work is an important treatise on morality and mysticism.”²⁹ Boenig argues that of the four traditional levels of medieval exegesis—the historical, typological, tropological, and anagogical—Rolle’s interpretation focuses especially the anagogical or mystical meaning of texts. And this was for a popular, not an academic, audience: “[m]uch of [Rolle’s] section expounding the clause ‘Oleum effusum nomen tuum,’” Watson notes, “is about the Virgin, the Virgin Birth, and the Holy Name of Jesus—topics accessible to popular devotion that it deals with in a pictorial and decidedly popular way.”³⁰ None of this is to say that Rolle’s work is uninformed by academic discourse or that he did not know his scholastic method or his theology; as Watson shows in Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, the most thorough effort to trace down his sources, he was immensely well read. Rolle’s appeal for women’s devotional was not just a devotion to affective piety, but that this devotional pattern created a possibility for independence from the male clerisy. Chaucer’s General Prologue description implies that she sees herself as a figure from a romance, but perhaps the lesson to take from this here—to the extent that the portrait complements the Tale—is a general affection for vernacular culture.

The Greyn, the Holy Name, and a Female Voice Rolle’s work gives an immediate background to the Prioress’s devotion, yet the liturgical images’ uses originate in more traditional academic commentary. Vernacular devotion might seek independence, but it does not have to usurp the Church’s interpretive authority. The miracle is revealed by a cleric, the abbot to whom the body of the dead clergeon is taken. He first inquires of the child how he continues to sing: “I halse thee, / In vertu of the hooly Trinitee, / Tel me what is thy cause for to synge?” (VII.645 – 47). The child tells him the secret of the miracle—“Wherfore I synge … / In honour of that bisful Mayden free / Til fro my tonge of taken is the greyn”—and the abbot removes the grain:

 Robert Boenig, ed., Richard Rolle: Biblical Commentaries, vol. 92:13 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984), 2; also see the discussion in Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, 147– 50.  Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, 149.

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This hooly monk, this abbot, hym meene I, His tonge out caughte, and took awey the greyn, And he yaf up the goost ful softely. And whan this abbot hadde this wonder seyn, His salte teeris trikled doun as reyn, And gruf he fil al plat upon the grounde. (VII.663 – 65, 670 – 75)

What would cause this male representative of Latinity to succumb to just the sort of affective response so resented by the academics whom Rolle chides? To answer this, we first return to medieval commentary on the Holy Name. Then, we return to show how the Tale belongs to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular devotional texts that translate this commentary into a language accessible to vernacular devotion. The grain has generated a dizzying variety of commentary that seeks to deduce its significance, though commentators since Nicholas Maltman in 1982 have agreed with Merrall Price that “it seems most plausibly a Eucharistic reference.”³¹ This can’t, however, provide a full answer: for if so, why is the grain so explicitly identified with the clergeon’s voice? Voice is crucial to understanding the image and the vernacular authority that the Prioress draws from it. When the Prioress refers to the Holy Name, she says that it “[i]s in this larger world ysprad” (VII.454). As mentioned earlier, this image of “spreading” comes from the biblical verse which Rolle had used to found the devotional tradition: the half-verse from Canticum Canticorum 1:2. In his commentary St. Bernard connects this image directly to the image of the grain. Bernard first uses the verse as an image for salvation; Jesus’s Name is poured out as his salvation will be poured out: “Now it is sent abroad, and what was infused into angels as an intimate secret is spread among men, so that henceforth it could be justly proclaimed from the earth: ‘your name is oil poured forth’.”³² This image of oil is the first key metaphor: Jesus’s Name was enclosed, private, “infusum”; after his death it is “effusum,” a much more figurative term  Sister Nicholas Maltman, “The Divine Granary, or the End of the Prioress’s ‘Greyn’,” The Chaucer Review 17, no. 2 (1982): 163 – 70; Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality,” 209. For a summary of past theories about the greyn’s metaphorical tenor, see Kathleen Oliver, “Singing Bread, Manna, and the Clergeon’s ‘Greyn’,” The Chaucer Review 31, no. 4 (1997): 357– 64 at 357– 58; and Bruce Holsinger, “Pedagogy, Violence, and the Subject of Music: Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and the Ideologies of Song,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 157– 92 at 190.  “Est autem foris missum; et quod angelis ita erat infusum ut esset et privatum, effusum et in homines est, ita ut iam tunc merito clamaretur de terra: Oleum effusum nomen tuum”; Patrologia Latina 183.844D–845 A. A translation for Bernard’s sermon exists in Kilian Walsh, ed., On the Song of Songs, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976). The translations here, however, are my own.

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than “praedicatum,” “preached,” and therefore susceptible to interpretations that tend towards affective rather than lexical or academic connections between speaker and audience. The Prioress’s “O Lord, oure Lord, thy name … / Is in this large world ysprad” in fact paraphrases not just this verse, but also the meaning of this gloss—that his name is “ysprad” throughout “this large world.” Bernard and others use the image to describe preaching. The Glossa Ordinaria’s comment on the verse, for instance, is explicit: “The name of Jesus comes into the world and is immediately preached, ‘oil poured forth’; that is, in the whole world the name of Christ is preached, now the name of Moses is heard among many peoples, which before was enclosed in the very narrow confines of Judea.”³³ Developing the metaphor, Bernard asks, who will carry this oil of salvation? One thing I know: if we find that the porters are Philip and Andrew, we surely shall not be repulsed whenever we ask for oil, whenever we desire to see Jesus. Without delay Philip will tell Andrew; now Andrew and Philip will tell Jesus. And what will Jesus say? Being good Jesus will say thus: “Unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it yields much fruit” (John 12:24). Let the grain die therefore, and let the people’s crop spring up. It is necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and that penance and forgiveness of sin be preached in his name.³⁴

Bernard’s allegorical commentary yokes these images of dissemination: the request for oil, which is “to see Jesus,” and the grain that falls upon the ground to germinate (Bernard says that the seed dies in the process) and yield fruit. Our desire for his voice will be fulfilled in his death. The people who sow the crop signified in John 12:24 are those who kill Christ, who inadvertently sow the grain of Christ’s Word, just as the Jews who kill the clergeon in “The Prior-

 “Nomen Iesu venit in mundum et statim predicatur, Oleum effu[sum], id est in universa terra Christi nomen predicatur, nunc Moysi nomen auditur in gentibus, quod prius Judææ tantum claudebatur angustis”; Biblia Sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria, 6 vols. (Venice: 1603), 3:col. 1819. This is my translation.  “Unum scio, si Philippum et Andream habuerimus ostiarios, repulsam omnino non patimur quicunque oleum petimus, quicunque volumus Jesum videre. Incunctanter Philippus dicet Andreae; Andreas autem et Philippus dicent Jesu. Jesus autem quid? Profecto quod Jesu: ‘Nisi granum frumenti cadens in terram mortuum fuerit, ipsum solum manet; si autem mortuum fuerit, multum fructum affert’ (Joan. xii, 22– 25). Moriatur igitur granum, et surgat gentium seges. Oportet pati Christum, et resurgere a mortuis, et praedicari in nomine eius poenitentiam et remissionem peccatorum . . .”; Patrologia Latina 183.845B – C. This is my translation.

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ess’s Tale” allow the child to sow his message—literally, as he sings from the bottom of the pit, and figuratively, as the story of his miracle spreads.³⁵ Bernard’s description of the dispersal descends through a variety of works in the later Middle Ages to explain how Chaucer could make this accessible to the Prioress. A crucial avenue is, again, through the writings of Rolle. He too comments on this verse, but he does not explore Bernard’s allegorical level of interpretation. Instead, he riffs on the tropological, and in the process shows how this voice of vernacular authority becomes specifically female. Starting his commentary on the verse, he describes Mary: “O singular Virgin, O ineffable mother, that oil is poured out through you, that in the whole earthly orb heals the race of man!”³⁶ From here, through an astonishing series of associations constructed out of questions, metaphorical connections, and allusions to scripture, he moves to Jesus and his name: O admirable mother, tell us, your poor servants, of what sort and how great is your childbirth, to which stars are slaves, whom kings adore, whose salvation angels announce to the world. What is God? Certainly God from God, light from light, and now a man from you, his mother. And what is his name, so great and marvelous, at which every knee of heavenly, earthly, and infernal beings will lead? O marvelous child! … And now, so that he might confound human and diabolical pride, the eternal God is born by a marvelous and deep mystery from a temporal mother; he suffers, dies, so that we might be saved. Therefore, his name that we seek is shown in works. O good Jesus, according to your name thus also your work. For where you saved the damned race of man, there your name is poured out like oil.³⁷

 Walsh, On the Song of Songs, 1:108 in fact translates “gentium” as “of the pagans” to make the allusion to Christ’s executioners more explicit.  “O virgo singularis, O mater ineffabilis, istud per te effusum est oleum, quod in toto orbe terrarum sanat genus humanum!”; Murray, “Richard Rolle’s Comment on the Canticles Edited from MS. Trinity College, Dublin 153,” 38; Boenig, Richard Rolle: Biblical Commentaries, 95. This is Murray’s translation.  “O mater admirabilis, dic nobis, tuis servulis, quale et quantum est tuum puerperium, cui astra deserviunt, quem reges adorant, quem salvatorem mundi angeli annunciant. Numquid deus est? Utique deus de deo, lumen de lumine, et nunc homo de te, sua matre? Et quod eius nomen, tam magnum et mirandum in quo omne genu flectetur celestium terrestrium et infernorum? O mirandum parvulum! . . . Et iam, ut humanum et diabolicam confundat superbiam, eternus deus miro et profundo misterio ex temporali matre nascitur, patitur, moritur ut nos salvemur. Ergo, nomen eius quod querimus in opere demonstratur”; Murray, “Richard Rolle’s Comment on the Canticles Edited from MS. Trinity College, Dublin 153,” 38 – 39; Boenig, Richard Rolle: Biblical Commentaries, 96 – 97.

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Rolle introduces God as an abstraction—“What is God?”—but using the image of Christ’s birth Rolle shows that the Name must be understood not through knowledge but works. The Name moves from light, to levels of being, to Christ’s life, and then in the last sentence, to signify salvation. The Name becomes a metaphor for the identity of God and then the myriad forms of God’s presence on earth. The Word may be spread by voices other than men’s, including the clergeon in his song, before and after his death, and the Prioress herself. If the “name of Christ” was previously only heard in the narrow confines of Judea, now it is heard among many peoples. One can see why this commentary would appeal to female religious. Mary is the source of the oil that has been poured out, the one who gave birth to the Name: “O ineffable mother, that oil is poured out through you.” Rolle continues in this vein, crafting his commentary as if he were a preacher provoking his audience into a passion: “Since poured out oil is called your name for us, give us that oil to taste, to love, to embrace. This oil refreshes us; this oil perfects us; this oil smears us; this oil delights …. This is your name, this is your work! Delectable name, healthful work. Therefore your name is poured out oil.”³⁸ This is not mere lexical explication, but joy in the metaphor itself—precisely the fact of Rolle’s mysticism that garnered him a strong following, but which led Hilton to be wary of his advice to nuns.³⁹ And this image intensifies until he clinches the point, capturing his audience by confirming his allusions to feminine spirituality in the rest of the half-verse: “Your name is oil poured out; therefore maidens loved you very much.”⁴⁰ Commentary on the image of the grain from John 12:24 that Bernard fuses with the image of oil from Canticles 1:3 is picked up by Rolle to describe how the Name is “spread” by those who share it. These metaphors resonate with a myriad of others that describe the ability to gain a voice: the Prioress’s avowal that, though her “konnyng is so wayk,” she, “as a child,” hopes that Mary will guide her song (VII.481, 484, 487); the fact that the clergeon is attending a school; the clergeon’s desire to sing; and the conversation between the Abbot

 Boenig, Richard Rolle: Biblical Commentaries, 97; Murray, “Richard Rolle’s Comment on the Canticles Edited from MS. Trinity College, Dublin 153,” 39: “Cum pro nobis voluisti oleum effusum vocari nomen tuum, da nobis illud oleum ad gustandum, ad amandum, ad amplectum. Hoc oleum nos reficiat; hoc oleum nos perficiat; hoc oleum nos impinguet; hoc oleum delectet. . . . Et hoc est nomen tuum et hoc est opus tuum! Nomen delectabile, opus salubre! Igitur nomen tuum est oleum effusum.”  Renevey, “Name above Names,” esp. 113 – 19.  Murray, “Richard Rolle’s Comment on the Canticles Edited from MS. Trinity College, Dublin 153,” 41.

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and child that reveals the author of the miracle. These images fuse to become layers of meaning at the foundation of theory about how a vernacular voice can spread God’s voice. They lend the clergeon a voice of pre-eminent authority. When Christ died his name became “effusum”; similarly, as Nicholas of Lyra says in commentary on John 12:24, “thus with the death of Christ, by his own humanity, faith is multiplied among people.”⁴¹ The means for the multiplication of faith are not specified; they are mystical, because they derive from having communed with the Divine in the fashion that loaves and fishes were multiplied to create the feast. The Prioress’s identification with the clergeon’s voice betrays her own desire for the power of the grain, that she might also become a figure for an authoritative vernacular. Rolle is not the only avenue for the later medieval dispersal of these images of sowing and preaching. Another develops as the image of the grain from John 12:24 becomes liturgical. It appears in the Commune Sanctorum in the liturgy for a martyr, and taken from there becomes the theme for sermons when this liturgy might be celebrated. “This gospel,” one Wycliffite sermon on the theme begins, “meueþ men by wordis of Crist to martyrdom … and þus it is of Cristus lyȝf, þat lykneþ hym to whete corn.”⁴² A second example, a verse sermon in the Vernon manuscript on this theme, develops the image of Christ as wheat into a fully fledged allegory: Nou wol I preue bi wei of kuynde þat o greyne won al vr wele, whon greyne on grounde was sowe In Marie lond, þat Mylde croft; Þer-in com crist feire and soft Out of heuene, þe heiȝe loft, And greuh in grounde ful lowe. (35 – 40)⁴³

Mary provides the land, becomes the “croft,” in which Christ is sown. The writer develops the metaphor by retelling a life of Christ, including strong condemnations of the Jews:

 “sic mortuo Christo quo ad suum humanitatem, multiplicata est fides in gentibus”; Biblia Sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria, 5:col. 1219.  Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, eds., English Wycliffite Sermons, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983 – 1996), 2:21 (Sermon 59).  I quote from the edition by Carl Horstmann, “Proprium Sanctorum, Zusatz-Homilien des Ms. Vernon fol. CCXV ff. zur nördlichen Sammlung der Dominicalia evangelia,” Archiv (1888): 81– 114, 299 – 321 at 81– 85.

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Atte laste the Jewes stronge Scheren [sheared] vr greyne full lowe on kne— Þis me þinkeþ gret reuþe. Þe Jewes, þat (were) wikked and wrong, Euere þei songen in heore song And callede him false liȝere strong Þat was rote of treuþe. (61– 67)

As in the Prioress’s retelling, Jews sow the grain. The writer plays on the metaphor of bread making, and the Eucharist, throughout the sermon. Christ is “þresschen þer on a tre” (81) to be made into flour and then bread by the Jews: On longe laddres vp þei trede, Þe Jewes þat weore wylde and wode, Berien vre bread aȝeyn þe brede Til al his bac to-brast on blode. Vre Cake on Crois þei knede, Rampned hit harde aȝeyn þe Roode, Þat made vre Meole swetter þen mede. (112– 18)

He is “molded in his oune bloode”—that is, molded into a loaf—on the cross, where he hangs “I-Robed in Red, / In druye blood” (120 – 22). Entering hell is then likened to being baked in an oven. The lance marks him as a baker will cut a pattern onto the top of a loaf to let it break open: Þo [Then] was he marked wiþ a launce, Don in þe ouene—such was heore lawe. he Ros vp at his ordinaunce On Aster-day, whon þe day gon dawe, whon bred of lyf was forþ i-drawe. (125 – 29)

Versions of the allegory appear elsewhere in contemporary vernacular literature. In a poem by William Dunbar, for instance, Mary is figured as she who “baire the gloryus grayne.”⁴⁴ A carol in a sixteenth-century manuscript tells how the ear of wheat “of a mayd spronge” on Christmas day, while later it was “Full sore beten and faste bownd” to be made into bread.⁴⁵ One figurative similarity between

 James Kinsley, ed., The Poems of William Dunbar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 2.72, on page 6.  Richard L. Greene, ed., The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), no. 321. See also the Harley Lyric entitled “A Winter Song,” edited as (for example) Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), no. 9. There is

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“The Prioress’s Tale” and this allegory is that the clergeon becomes a kind of figure for Christ: an innocent, tortured and killed by Jews, whose death is the necessary means for the spread of his Word. The difference, however, is crucial for the Prioress’s narrative. Christ, the grain who died, was spread by his dying to be reborn in the distribution of his word. The grain in the mouth of the clergeon becomes a figure for the authoritative voice of Christ that sings through him. In any case, the image speaks powerfully to the Prioress’s claim for a voice. The analogues show that the image of John 12:24 grew into a rich stream of images for the figure of Christ in the bread of the Eucharist: the grain, as the clergeon says, was put there by Mary, just as her Son whom we eat was put into the world by her. This in turn becomes a figure for nourishment by the Word, a concept particularly powerful, as Elizabeth Robertson has noted, to female mystics.⁴⁶ And in the Prioress’s narrative the image blends with the image of Christ’s name that can be “spread like oil,” another image composed by writers who counseled women. The ultimate sources for these images of dissemination are academic commentators who collate the image of the grain from John 12:24 with the images from the Canticum Canticorum. These images over time flow into a variety of vernacular channels, allowing for less circumscription than commentary such as the Glossa Ordinaria might allow. The Prioress imagines a child, an explicit surrogate for herself, as a vehicle for spreading the Word. Such interpretive flux grows out of images that Rolle develops for private devotion and from dramatic images of Christ as bread, threshed to become digestible. Part of the Tale’s brilliance is to show how a narrative depiction of these images tugs at the reader’s sensibilities, allowing this unexpected response while suppressing an explicitly intellective—that is, academically Latinate—analysis. This defines her vernacular devotion. Yet as we turn to next, her desire is expressed at a cost.

Naïveté In a review of a number of recent books that examine the portrayal of emotion in medieval narratives, Holly Crocker has called for a recuperation of medieval affect studies, arguing that medieval affect “provides artists and audiences a way of developing what was known in the medieval exegetical tradition as ‘the moral

also an allusion to the verse in Pearl: see E. V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 1.31  Robertson, “Aspects of Female Piety in the Prioress’s Tale,” 157.

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sense,’ or the way one should act in the world.”⁴⁷ These moments when a character succumbs to overwhelming emotion demonstrate a character’s “exceptional heroic status”—as when, Crocker explains, Chaucer’s Monk describes how Caesar hid his wounds at his death “for no man sholde seen his privete.”⁴⁸ The Abbot’s dissolution into tears is just such a moment. The Prioress’s description of his “heroic” devotional passion also affirms her use of liturgical metaphors. If the grain represents the Eucharist and the dissemination of Christ’s Word, it also resembles the ecstatic responses to the elevation of the Host at the mass. As Crocker describes, these moments appear in both sacred and secular narratives, and this genre-crossing provides a more productive way to observe the Prioress than as harboring a secret desire to be a romance heroine. Amor vincit omnia does not indicate repressed desire, but a deliberate revision of amor. ⁴⁹ She desires a new identity created from these narrative moments that appear both in affective pietistic and vernacular narratives. Yet Chaucer also seems to demonstrate that the Prioress’s desire, like the Wife’s, embodies a threat. While the Wife of Bath’s theological mettle has been a joy to fictional and non-fictional readers for centuries, starting with the Pardoner, Alcuin Blamires and Michaela Paasche Grudin have shown us that she did imply a threat to orthodox belief.⁵⁰ Nancy Bradley Warren has argued the same of the Prioress, citing ways in which the Prioress lets Mary and the little clergeon in the Tale become teachers.⁵¹ “The Prioress’s Tale” exists in a kind of tension between the conventionality of her depictions and the argument, by definition somewhat unconventional, she makes for a female voice. These theories are underpinned by biblical commentary, as I have shown, but theological commentary does not generate the response she desires. Her vernacular theory of dissemination asks readers to revise a traditional reading through the lens of her vernacular concern. As I have described, the key vernacular concern are the moments of affective revelation that the Prioress takes from Rolle and the liturgy, most notably the  Holly A. Crocker, “Review Essay: Medieval Affects Now,” Exemplaria 29, no. 1 (2017): 82– 98 at 93.  Crocker, “Review Essay,” 93.  John Finlayson, “Chaucer’s Prioress and Amor Vincit Omnia,” Studia Neophilologica 60, no. 2 (1988): 171– 74; and Joseph P. McGowan, “Chaucer’s Prioress: Et Nos Cedamus Amori,” The Chaucer Review 38, no. 2 (2003): 199 – 202, discuss the quotation’s origins and implications.  Blamires, “The Wife of Bath and Lollardy”; Michaela Paasche Grudin, “Credulity and the Rhetoric of Heterodoxy: From Averroes to Chaucer,” The Chaucer Review 35, no. 2 (2000): 204– 22.  Nancy Bradley Warren, “Sacraments, Gender, and Authority in the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale and Pearl.” Christianity and Literature 66, no. 3 (2017): 385 – 403.

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moment at which the Abbot succumbs to the miracle of the grain, and its implication of a naïve ability to spread the word. The problem is that she adheres to affect to the exclusion of all other meaning. This can be seen by a brief comparison to what critics have often taken to be a response to her tale in “The Second Nun’s Tale.” This is not the place for a full examination of parallels between the two tales, but a few connections are pertinent.⁵² The Second Nun starts, for instance, by invoking Mary, a reference (in this case explicit) to a text by St. Bernard (VIII.30), and another examination of a holy name, in this case St. Cecilia’s. The Second Nun enjoys the same genres of vernacular devotional texts. Yet differences are also telling. The discourse of the Second Nun’s Prologue is significantly more academic than the Prioress’s, especially in its analysis of Cecilia’s name. Analysis, not mere devotion, frames this tale. The tale is a saint’s life marked not by an infantile devotion to sound—the sound of the Holy Name, of prayer, of music, of the liturgy, or the sound of one’s own voice—but to wonder (VIII.245, 46, 308) and, as Lisa Lampert has described, “an ideal Christian that is full of understanding and learning, a woman who converts through preaching and teaching until her very last hour.”⁵³ And here, conversion is signaled by moments of affective heroism. The first is brought about when Valerian encounters the “oold man, clad in white clothes cleere” standing next to Urban, at which point he “as deed fil doun for drede” (VIII.204, 201). A second occurs when Maximus witnesses the beheading of Valerian and his brother Tiburce: “and whan he forth the seintes ladde, / Hymself he weep for pitee that he hadde” (370 – 71). To accomplish this, unlike the clergeon, Cecilia actually preaches—even with “hir nekke ycorven” (VIII.533)—rather than giving voice to a metaphor for preaching. Cecile tells Tiburce that knowledge of the threefold God arises from “Memorie, engyn, and intellect also— So in o beynge of divinitee, Thre persones may ther right wel bee.” Tho gane she hym fu bilisly to preche Of Cristes come, and of his peynes teche. (VIII.339 – 43)

If the Prioress relocates her desire to disseminate the word into the figure of the little clergeon and his death, the Second Nun is entirely less subtle. The final rhyme of the stanza echoes the concluding rhyme of “speche” and “teche” of  For a fuller examination of this comparison see Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 134– 42, and Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson, The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 132– 39.  Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 86.

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the Clerk’s description in the General Prologue, a man who has the academic authority for both. Cecilia’s preaching and the affective responses that result indicate the validation of her power in her audience. Both tales exploit pathos as a rhetorical device to define each woman’s voice, but in the Second Nun this voice has an audience. The masses must be managed, as Cecilia states when lecturing Almachius about the foolishness of his idolatry: It is a shame that the peple shal So scorne thee and laughe at thy folye, For communly men woot it wel overal That myghty God is in his heuenes hye. (VIII.505 – 8)

The people become a repository of truth rather than a wayward force to be controlled. Cecile’s audience, including not just these people but her husband Valerian, who asks for proof of her sudden demand for chastity, needs to be convinced. Rather than giving us inert images of good and evil—clergeon and Jew, devotional song and the privy—characters in “The Second Nun’s Tale” can convert. Perhaps no further commentary appears to challenge “The Prioress’s Tale” on the pilgrimage because hers is a conventional story with a conventional depiction of Jews drawn from multiple and no doubt familiar contemporary analogues in both vernacular and Latin literature. The Jews are evil in the way that the child is good: the “serpent Sathanas” has a “waspes nest” in Jewish hearts (VII.558 – 60). The Second Nun, however, challenges the glorification of static naïveté presented by the Prioress. She depicts an audience susceptible to an affective, heroic moment. For the Prioress, an audience remains an abstraction. “Cristene folk”—already Christian—appear only briefly, “to wondre” at the miracle of the singing child (VII.614– 15). The audience for the miracle of the grain is “the abbot with his convent,” not laity (VII.637, 677). She presents a tableau, an image similar to those so popular in the Middle Ages, of Jews—Herod, for instance—with faces twisted, sick with sin, slaughtering innocents. Like the Jews in her Tale, the people are “good to think with,” to hypothesize, and the conflict opened by the pathos in the Tale remains thinner than the Second Nun’s without their narrative conversion. Jewish pain need not be felt, since such characters are simply not granted any existence save as exemplary constructs. The Second Nun eschews such blunt portrayals, picking Romans as enemies: torturers of Christians, to be sure, but not demonically Other. Her tale extends the Prioress’s static narrative moment to become a narrative of conversion, illustrating how pathos can be productive, can lead to salvation. In the end, de-

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spite the Prioress’s desire for a voice that might disseminate the word, the Tale leaves her with a voice that can only, like a child’s, ineffectively parrot a song.

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Index Abelard, Peter 115 academic language 331 academic learning, disparagement of in “The Prioress’ Tale” 325 Acallam na Senórach – background and overview 3, 135 – 39 – context 139 – 43 – oral to written culture, transition 153 – 58 – Patrick as link between pagan past and Christianity 147 – 52 A caueat or warening for commen cursetors … (Harman) – formal analysis of 127 – 33 – multiple editions 121 – 24 – as rogue literature 124 – 27 Accolon (in Morte d’Arthur) 297 Acre, siege and massacre of 243, 251, 252, 253, 254 actor network theory (ANT) 163n11 Adam, in Garden of Eden 170 – 71 “Adam Lay I-bounden” (lyric) 167, 168, 169, 170 Adams, Brandi K. 44 Ad Jovinianum (St. Jerome) 323 adoption, of children 88 adultery, children of 91, 92, 94 adulthood, initiation into 78 The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938 film) 21n1 Aelred of Rievaulx 253 affect studies 339 – 41 Afghanistan, invasion of (2001) 28 – 29 Agglovale (in Morte d’Arthur) 289, 297 Ahern, Sheila 124 Aibelán (angel) 148 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin 61, 241 Alexander the Great 4, 119, 232 – 34. See also Confessio Amantis (Gower) Allen, Hope Emily 331 Alliterative Morte Arthure 72, 292 Almachius (in “Second Nun’s Tale”) 342 Amans (in Confessio Amantis) 226, 231 – 32, 309, 311 – 13 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514210-018

Ambrisco, Alan 63, 69 Ambroise 243 analysis, formal 126, 127 Andromache 314 angels 148, 155, 335 Annals of Tigernach 146 Anthropophagi (in Othello) 120. See also cannibalism anti-heroes, in Robin Hood tradition 179 anti-Semitism 337 – 38, 342 – in “The Prioress’ Tale” 324 anxiety – cultural 121, 123 – over Otherness 120, 126 – over paternity 83, 90 – and textual analysis 127 – 33 Apollonius of Tyre 223, 232, 234, 235 Arabian Peninsula 38, 40 Arabic language 35, 40, 41, 43 Arab peoples 27, 41 Arcite (in “Knight’s Tale”) 270 Aristotelian mean 305, 306, 314 – 20 Aristotle 87, 225 – Ethics 307 – Poetics 307 armor, as metaphor 319, 320 arrows 39, 162, 173, 175, 176 Arthurian romance. See knighthood Aryes (cowherd, Torre’s father) 298, 299 ashes (Ash Wednesday) 218, 218n44 Assembly of Gods 317 astrology 308 astronomy 232 Atropos (in Confessio Amantis) 312, 313 – 14, 317, 318 – 20 Auchinleck manuscript 239, 240 audiences – academic 330, 332 – for The Book of John Mandeville 53, 54, 56, 62 – female 328 – 29, 342 – for Lybeaus Desconus 79

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Index

– for Lytle Bibell of Knyghthood 314, 318, 320 – for Richard I poems 259 – for “Robyn and Gandelyn” 174, 175, 176, 177, 179 – for “Squire’s Tale” 65, 69 – 71 authenticity, historical, in Robin Hood portrayals 43 authorial intent – Richard Coer de Lyon 242 – Richard I poems 240 authority – in Acallam-era Ireland 138, 141, 148, 150, 151 – civil authority 157 – clerical authority 331 – 32, 337 – ecclesiastical authority 51, 86, 91, 95, 136, 158 – household authority 87, 88 – language and authority 207, 210 – the masculine body and the Pardoner 110, 111 – revolt against in Robin Hood 33, 39 – in “Robyn and Gandelyn” 162, 171 – of Saint Patrick 152, 155, 157 – and tomb-inscriptions 215 – vernacular authority 333, 335 Avarice (in Confessio Amantis) 226 Ayenbite of Inwit 282 Azeem (character in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves) 23, 25 – 26, 27 – 28, 33 – 38, 43 Babyngton, Anthony 305 Bacon, Roger 55 Baker, Houston 324 balance. See Aristotelian mean; “middel weie” (Gower) Ballade no. 476, 274 – 75, 280 ballads 5, 21, 161n1 baptism – Cas Corach’s 157 – Erkenwald’s tears 207, 217 – by Saint Patrick 150 – 51 barbarism 250 – 56 bardic poetry 153 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 68

Bathurst, Otto 22 – 23 “The Battle of the Standard” (Aelred of Rievaulx) 253 Baxandall, Michael 127 Becket, Thomas, Saint – martyrdom of 99 – miracles 2, 100 – 101, 116 – 17, 116n57 – and relic culture 109 – stained glass depictions 101 – 7, 103, 104, 105, 106 Bec the Exile 145 – 46 beehive imagery and bee symbolism 67 – 68 Beier, A. L. 124 – 25, 132 Benedict of Peterborough 2, 101, 103 – 4 Benson, C. David 58, 62 Benson, Larry 301 Berke Khan 69 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint 145, 327, 333 – 35, 341 bestiaries 67, 67n57 Bethlehem Hospital 131 Bevis of Hampton 80n8, 251 Bewfiz (Lybeaus) 77 Bibbesworth, Walter of 282 Bible. See Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament; New Testament; Old Testament Bible translations, language used 209 – 11 Biddick, Kathleen 27 Bildhauer, Bettina 31 Binski, Paul 205 biopolitics of lineage 82 – 83 bird debate songs 5, 267, 277 – 79 birds – bird names and songs 282 – larks 279, 282 – merlins 269 – nightingales 272 – 75, 277 – 79 – parrots 279 – sparrows 269 – See also cuckoos birth, natural, in medieval texts 85 Bishop of Durham 103 Black Prince 223, 228 – 29n11, 230 Blamires, Alciun 340 Blancemal le Fée 80 – 82

Index

Blaxploitation films 24 Blessed Virgin Mary. See Virgin Mary blindness 35. See also Eilward of Westoning Bloch, R. Howard 82 – 83 blood – consumption of 253, 259, 298 – pigs’ blood 42 bloodlines and kinship 83, 88, 90, 257, 258 Blount, Nicolas 121 Boenig, Robert 332 Boke of Cupide (Clanvowe) 276 – 81 Book of Hours 326n12 The Book of John Mandeville – background and overview 52 – 53 – conversion schema for Mongols 54 – 55, 57 – 62 – crusades 53 – 54 – depictions of Mongols 2, 55 – 56 – and funerary inscriptions 4, 205 – and Hermogenes’ salvation 215 – 16 – Khan’s court, descriptions of 67 – 68 – Mongols as cultural Others 66 – Mongol wealth and material goods 55 – 56 – translations, and language used 209 – 11, 210n15 – writing as mode of authentication 219 – 20 Book of Leinster 136, 142 Book of the Invasions of Ireland 142 The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry (Caxton) 290, 290n6 Bors (Grail knight) 300, 301 boundaries and border discourse. See Acallam na Senórach bow and arrow 38 – 39 Bowers, John 276 Boyd, Beverly 326 Bracton, Henry 84, 86, 93 – 95, 93n45 Bradwardine, Thomas 256 Brann, Ross 25 bread, and Eucharist 338 – 40 Brega, kingdom of 144, 146 – 47 Brega, Plain of 146 – 47 broadsides 126

349

Bruce, Robert 247, 248, 255 The Brut 248, 249 Brutus 249 bulles (seals on documents) 110 Bullón-Fernández, MarÍa 310 Busby, Keith 294, 295 – 96 Bush, George W. 28 – 30, 28n19 Butterfield, Ardis 274 Bynum, Caroline 113 Byzantine Christians 54, 55, 58 Caílte 136, 139 – 40, 143 – 44, 146, 148 – 49, 151 – 53, 155 – 57 Cáma 139 Cambyuskan 67, 73 cannibalism 120, 241, 243, 251 – 54. See also Anthropophagi (in Othello) Cannon, Christopher 281 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) – birdsong in 283 – 84 – Fragment VI 109 – “Friar’s Tale” 183, 281 – Harry Bailey, host 111, 116, 117 – “Knight’s Tale” 186 – 87, 269 – 70, 277 – language groups in 281 – “Man of Law’s Tale” 64 – “Miller’s Tale” 268 – “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” 2 81 – Otherness, perceived, acceptance of 64 – Pardoner’s Prologue 268 – “Pardoner’s Tale” 1 07 – 12 – “Physician’s Tale” 1 09 – “Prioress’s Tale” 6 4 – “Second Nun’s Tale” 3 41 – 42 – “Shipman’s Tale” 1 86 – “Squire’s Tale” 6 3 – 71 – see also Chaucer, Geoffrey; “Manciple’s Tale” (Chaucer); “Prioress’s Tale” (Chaucer) Canticles 331, 336. See also Song of Songs (Old Testament) Canticum Canticorum 333, 339 carols, male and female-voiced 190 – 97, 199, 199 – 200n47 Carroll, William 131 Cas Corach 139

350

Index

castration. See also Eilward of Westoning – and holiness 115 – linked with decapitation 109 – 10 – miracles of healing 114 – in “Pardoner’s Tale” 1 08 – 10 Cathal Crobhdearg Ua Conchobair 137 Cato 233 Caughey, John 170 Caxton, William 290 Cecilia, Saint 341 – 42 Chaganti, Seeta 212 – 13 chansons de geste 240, 253 Charlemagne 70, 240 Chartier, Alain 190 chastity 309, 342 Chaucer, Geoffrey – “Complaint Unto Pity” 1 88 – crusades romances 65 – 66 – Findern Manuscript readers’ familiarity with 189 – The Legend of Good Women 276 – 77 – Parliament of Fowls (“Parlement of Fowles”) 187, 189, 267, 269, 328 – 29 – recovery romances 65 – 66, 69 – 71 – Troilus and Criseyde 185 The Chaucer Bibliographies 12, 16 Chaucer studies 12 – 13 Cheapside tournament (1331) 71 – 72 chevaliers. See knighthood Child, F. J. 161 Chinggis Khan – approach to Christianity 70 – in The Book of John Mandeville 57 – 58, 61 – 62 – in “Squire’s Tale” 6 3 – 64, 69 Chism, Christine 206 chivalric manuals 316 chivalric romance 63, 83, 240 chivalry 5, 81, 256, 257, 259, 294, 320 Chrétien de Troyes 292 – 93, 301 Christian global order and universality – in The Book of John Mandeville 53 – 55 – and Crusades 73 – and genocide 50, 52, 65 – 66 – in “Squire’s Tale” 6 3 – and tomb writing 206 – See also Latin Christendom

Christian identity, crisis of 135 Christine de Pizan 5 – 6, 305 – 7 – quatrains, as poetic style 317, 319 – tripartite organization 315 Chronicle (Langtoft) 248 “Churl and the Bird” (Lydgate) 271 cinematic depictions. See Robin Hood Cistercians 144 – 45, 146 civic prosperity and power 243 civil law 86, 92 Clanvowe, Sir John 5, 276 Classical Irish 142 Clement (in Octavian) 257 clerical religious discourse 324. See also “Prioress’ Tale” (Chaucer) Codex Calixtinus 250 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 165 – 66, 169 Coleman, Joyce 185 colonialism 32 Columbus, Christopher 119, 120 comedy, exaggeration, and wordplay inn Perceval 296 – 97 Commentary on the First Verses of the Canticle of Canticles (Rolle) 327 Commune Sanctorum, liturgy for a martyr 337 community – Christian 218, 219 – limits of 3, 163, 165, 175 – 76 complaint lyrics, as genre 188 – 89 complaints (love songs) 188 – 89, 193, 196, 199 “Complaint Unto Pity” (Chaucer) 188 concubinage 88 – 89, 91, 92, 94 Confessio Amantis (Gower) – Book 2 226 – Book 3 225 – 31 – Book 5 231 – Book 7 225, 232 – 34 – Book 8 235 – Monster of Time 225 – 26 – overview and background 4, 5, 223 – 26, 305, 307 – 14 – time, linear, elision of 224 – 25 Connaught, kingdom of 137, 139, 143, 154, 156, 157 Constantinople 208

Index

contact zone, Middle East, in Robin Hood tradition 44 conversion – conversion schema in The Book of Sir John Mandeville 54 – 55, 57 – 62 – and cultural erasure 50, 65 – to Islam 51 – of Mongols 64, 72, 73 – by Saint Patrick 149 – in “Second Nun’s Tale” 3 41 Cooper, Helen 239 Coote, Lesley 167, 168 Costner, Kevin 31, 33 counterfeit crank 122 counterpoint, and bird debates 272 – 74, 279 courtesy, knightly virtue 289 courtliness – courtly culture 82, 255, 268, 272, 274, 279, 280 – courtly language 279, 280, 281 – courtly love 184, 190, 194, 196, 267 Crane, Susan 241 “crank,” etymology of word 122 criminality 130 Critical Guide to Perceval (Busby) 294 critical race theory and studies 12, 119n1 Crocker, Holly 339 – 40 Cronica Tripartita 4, 234 The Crown (Türlin) 291 crows. See bird debate songs crucifixion 208, 211 crusades – and cannibalism 241, 252 – 53 – as context for Robin Hood 21 – 22, 24, 33, 38 – 39 – crusades romances and Chaucer 65 – 66 – crusading ideology and chivalric violence 242 – King Richard and Third Crusade 240 – and Mongol conversion 51 – 52, 55 – and racialized violence 258 – and trope of Christendom as enslaved woman 72 – and U.S. rhetoric following 9/11 attack 29 – 30 crypt, Becket’s bones 102, 106

351

Cúchulainn 137, 140, 141 cuckoldry – and castration 113 – in “The Manciple’s Tale” 2 65 – 69, 277 – 78 Cuckoo and the Nightingale, dream vision 276. See also Boke of Cupide (Clanvowe) cuckoos – cuckoo clocks 270 – 71, 271n17 – nesting habits and parasitism 266 – 67, 269, 283 – pun on cuckold 265 – 69, 277 – 78 – songs 270 – 75, 281 – 85 – truth-telling 282 – 85 cultural erasure 2, 44, 50, 64 – 66, 214 – 19 cultural fantasy 69, 135 A Cultural History of Race 12 cultural memory 206, 215 cultural trauma 241 Curteis, Alice 95 Cuthbert 331 Dafydd 247, 248, 254 Damas (in Morte d’Arthur) 297 Dame Ragnelle 80, 81, 82, 96 damnation 113. See also salvation, imagery concerning Danter, John 127 Darnarde (in Morte d’Arthur) 289 Davies, R. R. 250 Deanesly, Margaret 331 death – and Fate Atropos 307, 313, 314, 317 – in the greenwood 175 – 78 – Jephthah’s daughter 310 – 11 – late medieval death culture 205n1 – in Lityl Bibell of Knyghthod 317 – 18 – in Othea 317 – 18, 320 – in Robin Hood tradition 41 – 42 debate poems 190 – 92 debate songs 272, 277 – 79 decapitation, linked with castration 109 – 10 deception and identity, counterfeit cranks 122, 123, 130 de Condé, Jean 268 – 69, 272

352

Index

deer 162, 172 – 73, 177 Defective Version, The Book of John Mandeville 53 De Generatione Animalium (Aristotle) 87 De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (Bracton) 84, 93 – 95 demon mother, in Richard Coer de Lyon 239, 240 demons 151 De Proprietatibus Rerum (Bartholomaeus Anglicus) 68 Derbyshire 187, 189, 191, 199 Deschamps, Eustace 274 – 75, 274 – 75n27, 280 Deuteronomy (Old Testament) 113 devotional models – female 328 – 32 – popular and private, contrasted 326 – 27 De Worde, Wynken 259 Diarmait mac Cerbaill 136, 139, 140, 157 Dimarco, Vincent J. 69 Dindimus 231 Dindsenchas 140, 142, 143 Dinshaw, Carolyn 108 Diogenes 227 – 28 disabled people 120, 121 dissimulation. See Jennings, Nicholas Diu Crône (Türlin) 291 Dominicans 55 Dooley, Ann 140 – 41, 143, 144, 150 Douglas, Mary 96 Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922 film) 21n1 dragon-women 77, 156 dream vision – The Cuckoo and the Nightingale 276 – 78, 280 – Eilward’s 102 Drogheda, monastery of 144 duels – Gandelyn/Wrennock 174 – 78 – judicial 174 Duffy, Eamon 217 Dunbar, William 338 Easter sepulchers 217 – 18 Echna (Connaught’s daughter)

156, 157

Eckhardt, Caroline 296 ecological spaces. See greenwood ecology, green contrasted with grey 165 – 66, 169, 169n32 ecomedievalism. See “Robyn and Gandelyn” Ector (knight in Morte Darthur) 298, 300 Edward I, 5, 242 – 43, 245 – 46, 247 – 50 – Feast of the Swan 255 – Hammer of the Scots 254 – and racialized vengeance 252 Edward II, 254, 255 Edward III, 5, 71, 242 – 43, 254 – English chivalric kingship 256 Edward the Confessor 246 Egerton, Taron 22 – 23, 31 Eilbricht (sheltered Eilard of Westoning) 101 Eilward of Westoning – and case of Thomas of Eldersfield 115 – 16 – imprisonment and wounding 99 – 101 – miraculous healing 101 – stained glass depictions 101 – 7, 103, 104, 105, 106 Eleanor of Aquitaine 239 Eleanor of Castile 246 Elias, Marcel 241 – 42 emasculation 99. See also castration embodiment 21, 27, 232 Emily (in “Knight’s Tale”) 270 empathy in romances 257 – 58 “En ce gracieux temps joli” (Senleches) 272 Encomium Nominis Jesu 328 Englishness 26, 27, 35n32, 36, 40, 120 Envy (in Confessio Amantis) 226 Eochaid Fáebarderg 154 epilepsy 3, 121 – 22 Epistle of Othea (Scrope) 306 Epistre Othea (Christine de Pizan) 6, 305 Epstein, Steven A. 90 erasure, cultural 2, 44, 50, 64 – 66, 214 – 19 Erkenwald. See Saint Erkenwald estates system and Aristotelian mean 315 Estoire de la Guerre Sainte (Ambroise) 243

Index

ethics – in classical education 233, 307 – in green and grey ecology 166 Ethics (Aristotle) 307 Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville) 84, 86, 87 – 89 Eucharist 333, 338 – 40 eunuchs 114 – 15. See also castration Evans, Ruth 215 exegesis, four traditional levels 332 Exemplaria (“Reconceiving Chaucer” issue) 13 – 14 eyesight 101. See also Eilward of Westoning Fair Unknown (Lybeaus) 77 fairy underworld 80 – 82 falling sickness (epilepsy) 121 – 22 Fall of Princes (Lydgate) 313 falsehood, fact, and fiction 3, 124, 130 family and marriage, categories and definitions – in Bracton 93 – 95 – in Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville) 87 – 91 – in Summa on Marriage 91 – 92 fate and personal responsibility 307 – 14 Fate Atropos 307 Fates’ influence on lives 311 – 12 fatherhood. See paternity fatherhood and patriarchy, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis 223 – 24 Feast of the Swan 255 female voices and vernacular theory 340 Fenian Cycle 136 – 37, 140, 141 – 42 fiannaíocht 140, 142, 149 Field, P.J.C. 297, 300 film depictions. See Robin Hood Findern Manuscript – background and overview 3 – 4, 183 – 85 – carol lyrics 192 – 97 – debate poems 190 – 92 – lyrics in context 187 – 90, 197 – 201 – readers’ familiarity with Chaucer 189 – responsive reading practices 187 – 88, 189 – 90 – social reading practices 183, 185 – 87 – song lyrics, transition to 200

353

Finlayson, Jon 240 Fionn mac Cumaill 136 – 37, 140, 143 – 44, 149 – 50 First Crusade 135, 253 Florent (in Octavian) 257 foreignness. See Otherness; outsider perspectives forest. See greenwood forest law 172, 175 The Form of Living (Rolle) 327 – 28, 331 Fort of Glas 143 – 44 Fortune and fate 307 – 9, 313 – 14, 320 – hopelessness of 309 – 12 Fouke le Fitz Waryn 162 Fowler, David 295 Foxx, Jamie 22 Fradenberg, Aranye (Louise O.) 13 Fragmentation and Redemption (Bynum) 113 France – and clerical reform 145 – Hundred Years’ War 223, 230, 254 – marriage and biopolitics 82 – poetry 190 – The Vows of the Heron 254 – 55 Franciscans 55, 61 Fraser, Sir Simon 248 Freeman, Morgan 23 “Friar’s Tale” (Chaucer) 183, 281 Friar Tuck 36, 43 Friedman, Jamie 49 Fumerton, Patricia 126, 131 – 32 funerary inscriptions – background and overview 205 – 7 – Christian universality, disruption of 214 – 19 – Hermogenes, in The Book of John Mandeville 208 – 11, 210n15 – Saint Erkenwald 208, 211 – 14 – and salvation 214 – 15 – tomb-writing 207 – 14 – trilingual inscription of Hermogenes 208 – 11 Gaíne mac Lugach 149 – 50 Galloway, Andrew 280, 311 Gandelyn. See “Robyn and Gandelyn”

354

Index

Ganelon (in Song of Roland) 251 Gawain 292 – 94, 298 – and Dame Ragnelle 80 – reunion with Lybeaus 77 – 78 gender – of Atropos 317 – female voices and vernacular theory 340 – Lybeaus’ mother 91, 96 – male/female-voiced carols 195, 198 – 99 – See also family and marriage, categories and definitions; masculinity genitals – and castration 99, 100, 101, 102, 114, 115 – and reproduction 90 Genius (narrator in Confessio Amantis) 309, 311, 312 genocide and Christian world order 50, 52 gentry, and reading practices 187, 189 – 91, 193, 199 Geoffrey of Monmouth 135, 158 Gerald of Aurillac 114 Gerald of Wales 135, 243 Germany 244 A Gest of Robyn Hode 172 Giles of Rome 315 Given-Wilson, Chris 95 Glossa Ordinaria 334, 339 Gluttony (in Confessio Amantis) 226 gold 151, 212, 215, 219, 252 Golden Horde (Mongols) 69 Gower, John – background and overview 4, 5 – 6, 305 – 7 – fate and personal responsibility 307 – 14 – Gower’s middle path in translations of Othea 314 – 20 – Mirour de l’Omme 235 – See also Confessio Amantis (Gower) Grady, Frank 205, 218 grain, in “Prioress’ Tale” 3 32 – 34, 336 – 37 Great Khan 57, 61 Greek language 210 Green, D. H. 186 Greenblatt, Stephen 125 Greene, Richard L. 198

greenwood – green contrasted with grey ecology 165 – 66, 169, 169n32 – greenwood space as setting 163 – 64 – Matter of the Greenwood 166 – natural space/human space intersections 169 Greoreas 293 – 94 grey ecology 165 – 66, 169, 171, 176 – 77 Griffith, William 127 Gringalet 293 – 94 Gromer Somer Joure 81, 82 Grudin, Michaela Paasche 340 Gruffud ab yr Ynad Coch 249 Guard, Timothy 71 – 72 Guerrero, Ed 24 Guinevere 292 Guinganbresil 293 Gulf War 26 – 27 Guy of Gisborne 22, 34 Guy of Gisborne (and Robin Hood) 176, 177 Gwynedd dynasty 245 – 46 Gyngelayne (Lybeaus) 78, 96 Hagia Sophia 207, 209n8 Hahn, Thomas – bibliographical and editorial work 16 – career path 9 – 17 – collaborative work 16 – on “Friar’s Tale” (Chaucer) 183 – mentorship by 306n4 – on Otherness in medieval era 119 – Robin Hood studies 14 – 15, 164, 165, 179 – scholarship, range of 1, 6 – 7, 10 – 11 – theory and method in medieval studies 13 – 14 – on xenography 213 Halaon (Mongol commander) 57, 58 Hamilton, Marie Padgett 326 Handlyng Synne (Mannyng) 310 Hanna, Ralph 53 hares (rabbits) 270 Harman, Thomas – accounts of Nicholas Jennings 3

Index

– A caueat or warening for commen cursetors . . ., 121 – 24 – Caveat, formal analysis of 127 – 33 – Caveat as rogue literature 124 – 27 Harris, Anne 107 Haught, Leah 1 – 2 Hebrew language 209, 210, 211 Hector of Troy 307, 314, 320 Heng, Geraldine 49, 135, 241 Henry II, 147, 239, 240 heraldry 305. See also patrilineage Hermes Trismegistus. See Hermogenes Hermogenes 4, 205, 206, 207 – 8 – as Christ figure 218 – and salvation 215 – 16 Herod 342 heroism 38, 43, 44, 156, 243, 245, 256 heteronormativity – legal framework 85 – in Robin Hood tradition 41 Higgins, Iain MacLeod 53 Historia (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 135 Historia Regum Angliae (Rous) 254 History of the Passion and Miracles of St. Thomas 2, 101 Hoccleve 256 holiness 112 – 13, 115, 216 Holy Land 33, 50, 55, 58, 61, 66, 73, 100, 300 – 302 Holy Name of Jesus 327 – 28, 330, 341 – medieval commentary on 332 – 34 – translation to vernacular 334 – 39 horoscopes 308 horses, symbolism of for knights 289 – 94, 297 – 98 Huber, Emily Rebekah 3 Hue of Tabarie 289 Hugh de Lacy 137, 147 humor. See comedy Hundred Years’ War 223, 230, 254 hunting in the greenwood 172 – 73 Hyams, Paul 116 identity – African 25 – Anglo-American – Christian 135

26

355

– English 5, 26, 27, 35n32, 36, 40, 120 – gender and the Pardoner 110, 113 – Jewish 218n42 – lower-class 126, 132 – Muslim/Black 28 – as outlaw 44 – and paternity 83, 89, 91 – white 22 idleness 121, 309 – 11 Igraine (Arthur’s mother) 83 Ilkhans of Persia 50 illegitimacy – of Alexander the Great 223 – categories of in De Legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae 93 – 95 – categories of in Etymologiae 88 – 91 – categories of in Summa on Marriage 91 – 92 – legal aspects 84 – 87 – natural contrasted with spurious 85 – 86 – patrilineage and property rights 83 – 84 – and wedlock 89, 93 images, and text, in rogue literature 130 – 32 imprisoned women at Cheapside tournament 71 – 72 Incendium Amoris (Rolle) 327, 330, 331 incest, children of 85, 94, 149 inclusion, paradigm of 44, 88 inheritance and patrilineage 83 – 84 inscriptions and tomb-writing 205, 207 – 14 interactive reading. See Findern Manuscript intercultural exchange 12 International Society for Robin Hood Studies 14 Iraq 26 – 30 Ireland – Hiberno-Roman relations 146 – Irish church 142 – 43, 142 – 43n23, 145 – Irish nationalism 140 – Norman invasion 140, 142, 149 – from pagan past to Christianity 147 – 52 – settlement of 153 – 54 Irish language – Classical Irish 142 – Old Irish 142, 153 Isabel of Fife 247

356

Index

Isidore of Seville 84, 85, 86, 87 – 91 Islam – coded as inferior to white Christianity – conflated with Blackness 26, 36 – conversion to 58, 59, 70, 72 – and Crusades 29, 30 – and medieval technology 39 – and wars in Middle East 32 Islamophobia 22, 28 Ivanhoe (Scott) 21n1

25

James Compostela, Saint 115 Jaufré 301 – 2 Jennings, Nicholas 3, 121 – 27 – woodcut 128 – 30, 129 Jephthah 309 – 12 Jerome, Saint 323 Jerusalem 2, 35, 50, 52, 55 Jesuits 120 Jesus, Name of, invocation of 327 – 28 Jesus Psalter 328 Jewishness – contrasted with Mongols 58, 73 – Jewish identity, of judge in Hermogenes tradition 218 – in “Prioress’ Tale” 3 34 – 35 – sowing grain in “Prioress’ Tale” 3 37 – 38 Joan of Acre 216 John (New Testament) 334 – 35, 336, 337, 339 John de Courcy 137 John of London 256 John of Montecorvino 51 John of Plano Carpini 50 Johnson, Valerie B. 3 John the Baptist 109 jokes. See comedy Jost, Jean 178 The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 12 Judaism. See Jewishness Judges (Old Testament) 309 justice and revenge 164, 166, 169 – 70 – Gandelyn’s reaction to Robyn’s death 173 – 75, 177 – 78 – in the greenwood 179 – retributive justice 250

Kaeuper, Richard 178, 183 Karras, Ruth Mazo 86 King Arthur. See knighthood; Lybeaus Desconus; Morte Darthur (Malory) King David (Old Testament) 235 King John 137 King Körgüz 51 The King of Tars 64, 65, 71 King Richard (b text) 239, 240 – depiction of history 242 – 43 – Lionheart incident 244 – 45 – and national identity 241 King Richard II, 233 – 34 kingship 4, 149, 223, 235, 240, 243, 256 Kinoshita, Sharon 292 kinship systems 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86 – 87, 91 – 92 Kirkeby, Margaret 328 Kline, Daniel A. 311 Knapp, James A. 3, 12 Knight, Stephen 24 – 25, 25n9, 161, 167, 168, 170, 173 knighthood – ceremony of knighthood 289 – 90 – and Death 317 – 18 – horses and symbolism of 289 – 94, 297 – 98 Knight of the Cart episode 292 “Knight’s Tale” (Chaucer) 186 – 87, 269 – 70, 277 Kohanski, Tamarah 58, 62 Koopmans, Rachel 101 – 2 Krug, Rebecca 185 Kublai (Chebysa) Khan 58 La Belle Dame sans Mercy (Chartier) 190 – 97 Lacy, Norris 294 Lady of Synadoun 96 Lady of the Lake 291 Laird, Edgar 277 Lamant (La Belle Dame sans Merci) 190 – 96, 199 “Lament for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd” 2 49 La Messe des Oiseaus (de Condé) 268 – 69 Lamorak (in Morte d’Arthur) 289, 297 Lampert, Lisa 341

Index

Lancelot (Vulgate) 291, 292 Langtoft, Peter 248 Langton, Stephen 109 language – academic language 331 – Arabic 35, 40, 41, 43 – and authority 207, 210 – of Bible translations 209 – 11 – Classical Irish 142 – courtly 279 – Greek 210 – Hebrew 209, 210, 211 – Irish 142, 153 – 54 – Latin 84, 85, 87, 101, 111, 209 – 10, 327 – legal terminology 79 – linguistic instability 207, 267, 274, 282 – Middle Irish 142, 153 – misunderstandings, comic effect 292 – 97 – Old English 112, 122, 133, 214 – Old French 77, 81 – Old Irish 142, 153 – vernacular use of 323 – 25 Languages of Power (Staley) 279 – 80 Lanval (Marie de France) 292 Lanzelet (Ulrich von Zatzikhoven) 290 Laqueur, Thomas 89 – 90 larks 279, 282 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 119, 120 Latin Christendom 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60 – 62, 64 – 67. See also Christian global order and universality Latin language 84, 85, 87, 101, 111, 209 – 10, 327 Launcelot (in Morte d’Arthur) 297 – 98 law – canon contrasted with secular 92 – 93 – civil law 86, 92 – common law 224 – legal precedent 79, 86, 88, 91, 164, 247, 250 – Roman 85, 88, 90 Leach, Elizabeth Eva 270, 273, 273n23, 273n24 Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of the Taking of Ireland) 142, 153 – 54 Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow) 142

357

Le Conte du Graal 295 Lee, Spike 40 Leech, Mary 82 legal terminology 79 The Legend of Good Women (Chaucer) 276 – 77 legitimacy. See illegitimacy Leicester, H. Marshall 13 Le Libre del Orde de Cauayleria 290 Lerer, Seth 13 Letter of Alexander to Aristotle 16 Leviticus (Old Testament) 113, 310 Lia Fáil 140 Libbon, Marissa 240 Liber Sancti Jacobi 250 Li Biaus Descouneüs 77, 80, 83 liminality 141n16, 157 linguistic change 206, 208 Lionheart incident. See Richard I literacy 185, 215 Little John figures 2, 22, 36 Little Office of the Virgin (Matins prayer) 324 – 25, 326 – 27 liturgy – for a martyr, Commune Sanctorum 337 – Prioress’ use of in Canterbury Tales 325 – 26 Lives of the Offas (Paris) 246 Llull, Ramón (Raymond) 55, 290 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd 245, 247 Llywelyn the Great 245, 247, 248 loathly lady tales 81 – 82 Lomuto, Sierra 49, 56, 71 – 72 London, England – display of relics 246 – Nicholas Jennings 123, 128, 130, 132 L’Ordene de chevalerie 289 love, courtly 184, 190, 194, 196, 267 love debates 191 – 97 love lyrics 183, 184 – 85, 184n4 Love’s Labor’s Lost (Shakespeare) 266 lunettes 102 Lupack, Alan 5, 14 Lybeaus Desconus – contrasted with French versions 77, 80 – 81

358

Index

– family relationships, etymologies and definitions 87 – 95 – legal language and legitimacy 82 – 84 – Lybeaus’ mother’s outsider status 80 – 82, 95 – 97 – Lybeaus’ name changes, significance of 77 – 78, 81, 96 – Lybeaus’ status as illegitimate 77 – 79 – overview and background 2, 77 – 80 – rejection of Lybeaus’ mother 78 – 80 Lydgate, John 5, 271, 306, 313 – 14 lyrics, outcast. See Findern Manuscript Lytle Bibell of Knyghthod 5 – 6, 305 – 6, 314 – 20 MacKillop, James 141 Maddox, Donald 81 magical Negro 40 Maglorius, Saint 331 Maid Marian, in Robin Hood stories 34, 37 – 38n39, 38, 41 Malachy of Armagh, Saint 145 male rage in Richard Coer de Lyon 244 Malo, Robyn 216 Malory, Sir Thomas 5, 297 – 98 – sources used 298 – 302 Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Norris) 300 Maltman, Nicholas 333 Mamluk, in “Squire’s Tale” 6 9, 71 “Manciple’s Tale” (Chaucer) – background and overview 5, 265 – 70 – Boke of Cupide (Clanvowe) 276 – 81, 282 – cuckoo’s song 270 – 75, 281 – 85 – nightingale’s song 272 – 75 Mandeville, John. See The Book of John Mandeville Mandeville’s Travels 119, 120. See also The Book of John Mandeville Mangu Khan 58 Mannyng, Robert 248, 310 “Man of Law’s Tale” (Chaucer) 64, 73 Marco Polo 61 mares. See horses, symbolism of for knights Marian, Maid, in Robin Hood stories 34, 37 – 38n39, 38, 41 Marie de France 292

marriage 82, 85, 87 – 89, 91 – 92, 94, 96 Martone, Eric 33 martyrdom 100, 337 Marvin, William Perry 172 Mary, Mother of Jesus. See Virgin Mary masculinity – in buddy films 24 – and eunuchry 99, 103, 108, 111 – white masculinity 32 Mass of Holy Innocents 326 mater, etymology and definition 87, 96 Matins prayer (Little Office of the Virgin) 324 – 25, 326 – 27 Matter of the Greenwood 166. See also greenwood Maximus (in “Second Nun’s Tale”) 341 McCracken, Peggy 90 – 91, 292 McLaughlin, Thomas 323 – 24 McShane, Kara L. 4 Medieval House, University of Rochester 9 – 10 medievalism 15, 21, 31 medieval studies – theory and method 13 – 14 – value as scholarly field 15 Meecham-Jones, Simon 250 Mellifont Abbey 144 – 46 Mendelsohn, Ben 30 merchant wealth 243, 259 Merlin 83 – 84, 249, 298 Merlin Continuation 298 – 99 merlins (birds) 269 Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament 310 METS (Middle English Text Series) 10 Meyer, Kuno 141 “middel weie” (Gower) 307 – 14 Middle East 22, 27, 32, 43, 44 – conflict in, and Robin Hood 22, 26 – 27 Middle English Dictionary 211 Middle English romance. See Richard I Middle Irish 142, 153 Middleton, Henry 127 “Miller’s Tale” (Chaucer) 268 Minot, Laurence 252 miracles – Becket 2, 100, 101, 102, 106 – 8, 116

Index

– healing of castration 114 – miracle windows 101, 106 – 7 Miracles (William of Canterbury) 2, 101 Mirour de l’Omme (Gower) 235 monasteries 142, 156 monastic life 145 Mongols – as allies of Christianity 73 – as assimilable, and politics of assimilation 54, 63 – assimilation and genocide 69 – 70 – brass horse’s arrival 65, 67 – 68, 69 – 70 – and Christian missionary efforts 50 – 51, 55 – contrasted with Muslims and Jews 49 – 50, 55 – 57, 59 – 60 – court culture and Greco-Roman myth 65 – as cultural Others 65 – 66 – material objects and veneration of the cross 60 – medieval representations of 2 – in Middle English literature 49 – 52 – treatment in “Squire’s Tale” 6 3 – 71 – wealth and material goods 55 – 56 Monster of Time, in Confessio Amantis 225 – 26 monsters of imagination 119, 166, 169 Montagu, William 71 Montaigne 120 Moors 35, 40, 120 moral alertness 311, 319 Mordred 84 Morgan le Fay 84 Morgause 84 Morte Darthur (Malory) 5, 297 – 98 Mortimer 242 mothers – demon mothers 240 – Lybeaus’ mother’s outsider status 80 – 82, 95, 97 – see also Virgin Mary; illegitimacy multiculturalism 23, 25 Murton, Megan 325 music – ballads 5, 21, 161n1 – carols, male and female-voiced 190 – 97, 199, 199 – 200n47

359

– complaints (love songs) 188 – 89, 193, 196, 199 – debate songs 272, 277 – 79 – harmonics 270, 272 – love lyrics 183, 184 – 85, 184n4 – musical notation 187 Muslims – contrasted with Mongols 58, 73 – and technology 70 mutilation. See Eilward of Westoning myth-making 243 Nagy, Joseph Falaky 142 Nakley, Susan 71 Name of Jesus, invocation of 327 – 28. See also Holy Name of Jesus names – of children, and paternity 92, 173n41 – place-names 3, 136, 139 – renaming of Lybeaus 77 – 78, 81, 96 – in Robin Hood tradition 162 nationalism – English 5, 242 – Irish 140 natural birth, in medieval texts 85 natural space/human space intersections. See greenwood Nature 169, 178 Nebuchadnezzar 224 Nectanabus 223, 224 – 25, 231, 232 – 33 Nestorians 55, 61 nest parasitism (cuckoos) 266 – 67, 269, 283 New Chaucer Society 12 – 13 New Historicist criticism 125, 126, 127 New Testament – John 334 – 35, 336, 337, 339 Nicholas of Lyra 337 Nicholson, Peter 311 – 12 nightingales 272 – 75, 277 – 79 Nissé, Ruth 214 Noah’s descendants 57 Nolan, Maura 315 Nominale sive verbale 282 Norako, Leila K. 2 Norman invasion of Ireland 136 – 37, 140, 142, 146, 149, 158

360

Index

Norris, Ralph 300 nostalgia 2, 44, 70, 152, 157 “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (Chaucer)

281

oaths 34, 173 – 74, 174n44 Octavian 257 Odoric of Pordenone 50, 59, 62 Ohlgren, Thomas 161, 167, 168, 170, 173 oil, image of 333 – 34, 336 Oisín 136, 139, 140, 157 Old English 112, 122, 214 Old French 77, 81 Old Irish 142, 153 – 54 Old Testament – Deuteronomy 113 – Judges 309 – King David 235 – Leviticus 113, 310 – Noah’s descendants 57 – Psalms 324 – 25, 326, 331 – Song of Songs 327, 331 ollaves, in ancient Ireland 157 – 58 On the Laws and Customs of England (Bracton) 84, 93 – 95 oral to written culture, transition 153 – 58 The Order of Knighthood 289 Order of the Garter 256 Oresme, Nicholas (Nicole) 271, 307 Orientalism 27 Origen 115 Othea, goddess of Prudence 306 – 7 Othello (Shakespeare) 120 Otherness – acceptance of, in Chaucer 64 – medieval concept of 119 – 21 – Outsider status in Fenian Cycle 137 – See also Findern Manuscript otherworld 81, 139, 156 outcast lyrics. See Findern Manuscript Outlake (in Morte d’Arthur) 297 outlaw tradition. See revenge and justice; Robin Hood tradition Outremer 52, 61, 69, 73 outsider perspectives – Azeem 27, 38n40 – greenwood in Robin Hood tradition 166

– John character in Robin Hood tradition 42 – Lybeaus’s mother 80, 82, 84 Ovid 267n6, 284 Owl and Nightingale 268 Oxford Bibliographies Online 16 Palamon (in “Knight’s Tale”) 270 pamphlets, Thomas Harman’s 123 – 27, 132 Pardoner’s Prologue (Chaucer) 268 “Pardoner’s Tale” (Chaucer) 107 – 12 Paris, France 257, 272 Paris, Matthew 246 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer) (“Parlement of Fowles”) 187, 189, 267, 269, 328 – 29 “Par maintes foys” (Vaillant) 272, 273n23, 273n24 parrots 279 Parsons, Geraldine 143 participatory reading 183, 185 – 87 passagia generalia 51 – 52 Paston, John, III, 189, 193 pater, etymology and definition 87 paternity 4, 77 – 78, 80, 83, 90 – and property rights 83 – 84 patriarchal privilege and legitimacy 90 – 91 Patricians 138, 144, 145, 147, 151, 152, 156 Patrick, Saint 135 – 36, 139 – 40, 143, 146, 150 – 51, 153, 155 – 57 – link between pagan past and Christianity 147 – 52 patrilineage 78, 83, 90, 96 Patterson, Lee 276, 279 Pax Mongolica 50 Payn (priest) 100 Pearl/Gawain poet 16 Peasants’ Revolt 223 Peck, Russell A. 4, 9, 10 Peckham, Archbishop John 249 – 50, 251 Pellinore (in Morte d’Arthur) 297, 298 Penthesilea (in Troy Book) 314 Perceval (Chrétien) 257 – 58, 292 – 94, 295 – 96 Persian Gulf War 26 – 27 Phebus (in “Manciple’s Tale”) 265, 267, 268, 270, 281, 283 – 84 Philip VI, 256

Index

“Physician’s Tale” (Chaucer) 109 piety, public 325 pigs 252 – pigs’ blood 42 pilgrimages. See also Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) – Eilward’s promise 100 The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago 250 pirates 229 – 30 Pitard, Derrick 6 place-names 3, 136, 139. See also toponymy Plautus 266, 267, 268 poaching in the greenwood 172 – 73, 175 Poetics (Aristotle) 307 polyphony 271, 274 poverty and the vagrant poor 125 – 26, 131 – 32 precedent, legal 79, 86, 88, 91, 164, 247, 250 Prester John, Land of 55, 61, 62 Prestwich, Michael 247, 250 – 51 Price, Merrall Llewellyn 2, 333 Pride (in Confessio Amantis) 226 princess, in King Richard stories 244 – 45 “Prioress’s Tale” (Chaucer) – and the female voice 332 – 39 – popular piety and the Holy Name 326 – 32 – and religious difference 6, 64 – and threat to orthodox beliefs 339 – 43 – and vernacular theory 323 – 25 prisoners – of Edward I, 247 – ordered beheaded by Richard 252 – in Robin Hood stories 39 property rights and kinship systems 83 – 84 prophecy 208 Protestantism 121 Psalms (Old Testament) 324 – 25, 326, 331 public reading practices 183, 185 – 87 public theater 121 puns and wordplay 111 – 13, 265 – 69, 277 – 78, 296 – 97

361

quatrains, poetic style in Christine de Pizan 317, 319 Queen Philippa 255 rabbits (hares) 270 race and racialization – critical race theory 119, 119n1 – and Mongols 49, 69, 73 – race studies 12, 16 – racial discourse 28, 44, 119n1 – in Robin Hood 1, 22, 35, 44 – tokenism 2, 32n28 rage – Black rage 42 – male rage 244 – 45 – and social unrest U.S. 132 Ragnelle, Dame 80, 81, 82, 96 Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh 23 Raleigh, Sir Walter 119 Ramey, Lynn 43 rape – and Alexander 231 – and miracle of St. Gerald of Aurillac 114 Raybin, David 285 Raymond of Penyafort 84, 86, 91 – 93 reading practices, social 183, 185 – 87 “Reconceiving Chaucer” (Exemplaria special issue) 13 – 14 recovery romances 65 – 66, 68 – 71 Red Knight 295, 296 Reformation 121 Regiment of Princes (Hoccleve) 256 relics – bodily relics 215, 216, 217 – relic culture 108 – 9 – relic discourse 216 Repertory of the Court of Aldermen 124 reproduction. See birth, natural, in medieval texts; illegitimacy; mothers resurrection 217 – 18 Reveney, Denis 330 revenge – after September 11 attacks 28 – Gandelyn’s reaction to Robyn’s death 173 – 75, 177 – 79 – greenwood as space for 169 – 70 – and justice 164, 166

362

Index

– Richard Lionheart 244 Reynolds, Kevin 22 – 23 rhizomatic nature of Robin Hood tradition 162, 163n11, 166 Riccoldo da Monte Croce 50, 55 Richard Coer de Lyon (a text) 4 – 5, 239, 240 – cannibalism 251, 254 – and chivalry 256 – 58 – chivalry and violence 259 – depiction of history 243 – Lionheart incident 244 – male rage 244 – and national identity 241 Richard I – background and overview 5, 239 – 42 – barbarism of Wales and Scotland 250 – 56 – cannibalism 251 – 54 – conquests of Edward I, 247 – 50 – Lionheart incident 243 – 47 – transition from French heroes to English 240 Richard II (Shakespeare) 234n23 Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Watson) 332 Risden, E. L. 30 Ritson, Joseph 161 Robbins, Rossell Hope 184 Robert I (Robert Bruce) 248 Robertson, Elizabeth 339 Robin Hood (2018 film) 1 – 2, 22 – 23, 24, 26, 28 Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne 176, 177 Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales 14 Robin Hood and the Potter 172 Robin Hood and Will Scarlet 162 Robin Hood ballads 21n2 Robin Hood in Popular Culture 15 Robin Hood Prince of Thieves (1991 film) 1 – 2, 22 – 23, 24 – 25, 26 – 27, 33 – 38 “The Robin Hood Project” (University of Rochester) 14 – 15 Robin Hood studies 14 – 15 Robin Hood tradition – and buddy films 24, 37 – 38

– cinematic depictions, power and significance of 31 – 32 – and clerical associations 167 – 68n27 – cultural differences and social justice 22 – and racial stereotypes 22 – 23, 25 – 26, 27 – 28, 31 – 38, 40 – 44 – “Robyn and Gandelyn” 1 61 – 65, 178 – 80 – transgression/play contrasted in 164 – 65 “Robyn and Gandelyn” – and ecological spaces 165 – 70 – Gandelyn/Wrennok duel 174 – 78 – greenwood and outlaw tradition 170 – 78 – greenwood space as setting 163 – 64 – justice and revenge 173 – 75, 177 – 78 – overview of story 3, 162 – and Robin Hood tradition 161 – 65, 178 – 80 Roe, Harry 140 – 41 Rogers, Cynthia A. 3 – 4 rogue literature 124 – 27 – use of text and images 130 – 32 Roland 70, 240 – Song of Roland 250, 251 Rolle, Richard 6, 325, 327 – 32, 335 – 37 romance, chivalric 63, 83, 240 Romance of the Rose 279 Roman law 85, 88, 90 Roos, Richard 190 – 92 Rossell Hope Robbins Library 10, 14 roundels 102 Rous, John 254 Roxane (wife of Alexander) 234 Saddam Hussein 30 Saint Erkenwald – background and overview 4, 205, 207 – and salvation 217 – 18 – and tomb-writing 211 – 14 – writing as mode of authentication 219 – 20 saints. See Becket, Thomas, Saint; martyrdom; miracles; Patrick, Saint; relics Saladin (in Richard) 252, 253, 289 Salisbury, Eve 2 salvation, imagery concerning 333 – 34

Index

Saracens – cannibalism practiced on 251 – 53 – as figure in medieval romances 66, 69 – in Robin Hood tradition 35, 40 Sarum rite 218 – 19 Sauerberg, Marie Louise 246 scarves, in King Richard stories 244 Schieberle, Misty 5 – 6 Schildgen, Brenda Deen 65 Schubert, Lisa 36 Schwyzer, Phillip 211 – 12, 216, 217 Scone (source of enthronement stone) 246 Scotland – barbarism 250 – 56 – history 246 – 48 Scottish War (1306 – 1307) 255 Scrope, Stephen 6, 306, 317 “Second Nun’s Tale” (Chaucer) 6, 341 – 42 Senleches, Jacob de 272 September 11 attacks, World Trade Center 28 “Sermo Epinicius” (Bradwardine) 256 Shakespeare, William 120, 266 – Richard II, 234n23 Sheriff of Nottingham 30, 36, 36n34, 37, 40, 41, 41n43, 42 “Shipman’s Tale” (Chaucer) 186 shroud, burial, in “Robyn and Gandelyn” 1 62, 170 sickness, feigned 122 Silanus 233 Simon de Montfort 247 – 48 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 291 Sir Isumbras 66 Sir Perceval of Galles 5, 295, 296 – 97, 299, 300 Sjoestedt, Mary-Louise 141 slavery – children born to slaves 85, 87, 90 – Scots reduced to 248 Sloane MS 2593 (“Robyn and Gandelyn”) 166, 167 – 69 Sloth (in Confessio Amantis) 226, 309, 310, 311 Smith, D. Vance 209, 213 social reading practices 183, 185 – 87 social taboos 252

363

social unrest 21st century U.S. 132 – 33 Solubrethach (angel) 148 Somnolence (in Confessio Amantis) 311, 312 Song of Roland 250, 251 Song of Songs (Old Testament) 327, 331 “The Song on the Execution of Sir Simon Fraser” 2 48 “The Song on the Scottish War” 2 48 sparrows 269 springtime, cuckoo as symbol of 270, 271, 274, 275, 279, 281, 328 “spurious” illegitimacy 89 – 91, 92 – 93, 93 – 95. See also illegitimacy spurious mother. See Lybeaus Desconus spurium 89, 91 “Squire’s Tale” (Chaucer) – and global Christian world order 63 – overview 2, 63 – treatment of Mongols 63 – 71 Staley, Lynn 5, 279 – 80 Stanbury, Sarah 5 Stanzaic Morte Arthur 298 Steel, Karl 115 stigma, social 80, 85, 89, 95 Stock, Brian 215 storyworld. See Robin Hood tradition St. Paul’s Cathedral 207, 211 Street Smarts and Vernacular Theory (McLaughlin) 323 – 24 Strickland, Matthew 255 Strohm, Paul 312 – 13 subcultures and vernacular 323 – 24 Sultan of Babylon 55, 60 Sultan of Babylon (Mandeville) 253 Summa on Marriage (Raymond of Penyafort) 91 – 93 Sumption, Jonathan 241 Surluse, tournament 289 symbolism – Christian 207, 214 – of horses, for knights 289 – 94, 297 – 98 Syria 27, 39, 51 taboos, social 252 Tab-Tengri (shaman)

58

364

Index

Táin bó Cúailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley) 136, 137 “The Tale of Alexander and the Pirate,” 227, 229 “The Tale of Diogenes and Alexander,” 227 – 29 “Tale of Florent” (Gower) 81 The Tale of Gamelyn 162, 163, 165, 179 “Tale of Jephthah’s Daughter” (Gower) 309 – 12 “Tale of Nectanabus” 2 23, 224 – 25, 231 – 33 “Tale of Rosiphelee” 3 09 – 11 “Tale of Telaphus and Teucer” 2 31 “Tale of the Two Coffers” (Gower) 308 – 9 Tara – Feast of 140 – Hill of 147 taxes, for Crusades and wars 30, 245 Taylor, Andrew 167 – 68 Taylor, Jamie 175 TEAMS Middle English Text Series (METS) 10 technology, in Robin Hood 36 Telegonus (in Confessio Amantis) 224 temporal shimmer 138, 138n10, 143, 146 Temür Lenk 51, 70 Terrell, Katherine H. 241 testicles 101, 108, 111, 113, 115 – 16, 117, 176 – 77. See also castration text and image, in rogue literature 130 – 32 Thaise (Apollonius’ daughter) 235 theater, public 121 Theodor de Bry 120 theology 11, 232 Theseus 270, 277 Third Crusade 240, 242, 243 Thomas of Canterbury. See Becket, Thomas, Saint Thomas of Eldersfield 115 – 16 Throop, Susanna A. 250 Tiburce (in “Second Nun’s Tale”) 341 time, linear, elision of – in Acallam na Senórach 143 – 47 – in Confessio Amantis (Gower) 224 – 25 – in “Squire’s Tale” 6 9 – 71 tokenism 2, 32n28

tombs and tomb-writing 205, 207 – 14 Topographia Hibernica (Gerald of Wales) 243 toponymy 137 – 39, 140, 143 Torre (in Morte d’Arthur) 298 – 99 tournaments 256 transformation – of Lady of Synadoun 77 – of Lanval 292 – of Loathly Ladies 82 – of Robin Hood 38 translation 6, 23, 190, 209, 290, 306, 317 trauma, cultural 241 travel literature 259 treachery 248, 250 Tretiz (Bibbesworth) 282 trial by ordeal 100, 174 Trinity Cathedral 101 – 7 Tripartite Chronicle (Gower) 223 tripartite organization in Christine de Pizan 315 Tristram de Lyones 297 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer) 185, 312, 313 Trois Savoir 271 Troy, destruction of 233 Troy Book (Lydgate) 313 truth – Alexander the Great’s search for 233 – 34 – and bird debates 279 – truth-telling and birdsong 281, 282 – 85 Tuatha Dé Dannan 138, 139, 143 – 44, 153 – 54, 156 Tully (Cicero) 233 Turks 33, 51, 120, 251 Türlin, Heinrich von dem 291 Turville-Petre, Thorlac 241 Tyolet 301 Ulrich von Zatzikhoven 290 Ulster Cycle 137, 140, 141 Ulysses 224, 233, 314 universality. See Christian global order and universality University of Rochester 9 – 10 Urban II, Pope 55n22, 341 Usk, Thomas 279

Index

Uther Pendragon Utley, Francis Lee

83 198

vagrancy laws 125 Vaillant, Jean 272 – 73, 279, 280 Valentine’s Day 189, 269, 280 Valerian 341, 342 vaunt (poetical) 177 – 78 vengeance. See revenge Venus 269 vernacular authority, female 335 vernacular devotion 329 – 30 vernacular theory 323 – 25, 330 – and female voice 340 – 42 vernacular voice spreading God’s voice 337 vernicle 109 Vinaver, Eugène 299 – 300 violence in romances 324 virginity 109, 310n14 Virgin Mary 335 – 36 – and allegory of grain and bread 338 – 39 virility. See masculinity virtue – in Epistle of Othea 306 – and vice 305, 316 – virtues of knighthood 291, 318 – 20 virtuous heathens 11, 16, 205, 220 vows 173 The Vows of the Heron 254 – 55 Vox Clamantis (Gower) 4, 223, 234 Vulgate Lancelot 291, 292 Wales – barbarism 250 – 56 – history 248 – 50 Wallace, David 13 Wallace, William 247, 248, 254 Wardrewe (Richard Coer de Lyon) 244 War on Terror 30 Warren, Nancy Bradley 340 Watson, Nicholas 331, 332 “Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle” 8 0, 81 weddings – Arthur 298 – Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle 80, 81, 96

365

Wertheimer, Laura 85, 92 Westminster Abbey 246 Whatley, George 206 wheat, image of Christ as 337 – 38 Whitaker, Cord J. 36, 49, 138 White, John 120 white masculinity 32 white mediocrity 43 white nationalism 22 whiteness 2, 26, 40, 41, 80 white privilege 2, 23, 43, 44 white savior moment, in Robin Hood 41 white supremacy 2 wholeness 109, 113, 116, 117 Whytford, Richard 328 Wife of Bath 323, 340 William of Canterbury 2, 101 William of Malmesbury 115 – 16 William of Rubruck 50, 61, 62 Williams, Mark 158 William the Conqueror 240 Windeatt, Barry 269 windows, miracle 101, 106 – 7 wisdom, Aristotle’s instruction of Alexander 232 women, enslaved and paraded, Cheapside tournament 71 – 72 Woodbridge, Linda 125 woodcuts 3, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130 – 31 woods. See greenwood Woolf, Rosemary 112 wordplay and puns 111 – 13, 233, 265 – 69, 277 – 78, 296 – 97 Wrennok of Donne 162, 174 – 78 Wulfstan 115 – 16 Wyatt, Thomas 192n30 Wycliffites 330, 337 xenophobia

32, 35

Yahya (Little John character in Robin Hood) 22 – 23, 26, 31, 39 – 41, 43 Yeager, Suzanne 241 Y Groes Naid 246 Young, Helen 43 – 44