The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance 0859917959, 9780859917957

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance

Carol F. Heffernan

D. S. BREWER

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance

The idea of the Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance, and this new study reveals much about its use and significance, setting the literature in its historical context and thereby offering fresh new readings of a number of texts. The author begins by looking at Chaucer’s and Gower’s treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law, demonstrating that Chaucer’s addition of a pattern of mercantile details highlights the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which the heroine is placed; she goes on to show how Chaucer’s portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women, read against parallel texts, especially in Boccaccio, reveal them to be loci of medieval orientalism. She then examines Chaucer’s inventive handling of details taken from Eastern sources and analogues in the Squire’s Tale, showing how Chaucer shapes them into the western form of interlace. The author concludes by looking at two romances, Floris and Blauncheflur and Le Bone Florence of Rome; she argues that elements in Floris of sibling incest are legitimised into a quest for the beloved, and demonstrates that Le Bone Florence is related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity. Professor CAROL F. HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department of English, Rutgers University.

Studies in Medieval Romance ISSN 1479–9308

Series Editors Roger Dalrymple Corinne Saunders

This series aims to provide a forum for critical studies of the medieval romance, a genre that plays a crucial role in literary history, reflects medieval secular concerns, and raises complex questions regarding medieval reading and writing, social structures, human relationships, and the psyche. The scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages into the Renaissance period, and although its main focus is on English literature, comparative studies are welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr Roger Dalrymple, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, OX2 6LE Dr Corinne Saunders, Department of English, University of Durham, Hallgarth House, 77 Hallgarth Street, Durham, DH1 3AY Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance

CAROL F. HEFFERNAN

D. S. BREWER

© Carol F. Heffernan 2003 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2003 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 0 85991 795 9

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk

A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Heffernan, Carol Falvo. The Orient in Chaucer and medieval romance / Carol F. Heffernan. p. cm. – (Studies in medieval romance, ISSN 1479–9308) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–85991–795–9 (alk. paper) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 – Knowledge – Orient. 2. English literature – Oriental influences. 3. Romances – History and criticism. 4. Middle East – In literature. 5. Orientalism in literature. 6. Orient – In literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR1933.O75H44 2003 821'.1 – dc21 2003007763

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Contents Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introduction: Romance and the Orient

1

2

Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2, and Gower’s Tale of Constance

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3

Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido

45

4

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure

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5

A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur

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6

Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East

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Conclusion

125

Afterword

131

Bibliography

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Index

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For Tom, Jeff, and Mom and in memory of Leo J. Falvo

Illustrations Plate 1 Mosaics from the façade of the Sala della Fontana, Zisa Castle, Palermo, Sicily. 12th century. The work of Arab artisans. By permission of the Superintendent of the Historical, Artistic and Iconographical Treasures of Palermo, Sicily.

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Plate 2 The Morgan Casket. One of the most accomplished Islamic works of art in ivory. Sicily or southern Italy, 11th–12th century. By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.241).

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Acknowledgments From where does the idea for a book come? This one may have begun with a handshake with Lillian Herlands Hornstein who first kindled my interest in medieval romance literature. Or perhaps the origin is my maternal grandmother who was born in Altamura, a small farm village outside the city of Bari, a port on the east coast of southern Italy. In the early Middle Ages Bari had been an Islamic emirate, something which made perfect sense to me when I first learned of it: one afternoon many years ago I heard my grandmother and some of her lady paesane from Altamura chanting lullabies together about wolves that snatched lambs in the night. The old songs sounded, in their up-and-down-the-scale wailing, more Arabic than Barese, the dialect of Italian that my grandmother spoke. Whatever its origins, this book about East and West could not have been completed without the encouragement of my colleagues at the Newark campus of Rutgers University: Ann C. Watts and John Demaray, who listened to me talk about various parts of the book as it was in progress; Gabriel Miller, former Chairman of the English Department, and Steven J. Diner, Provost and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, both of whom supported the sabbatical award that helped me bring the book to completion; and the reference librarians at the John Cotton Dana Library of Rutgers University who arranged interlibrary loans for me over a period of several years. For their interest and stimulation I also wish to thank my students in recent courses on Chaucer and on Middle English Romance Literature, especially Angela Del Casale, Jennifer Arena, Carmine Simmons, Azer Kemaloglu, Frank Nascimento, Paul Rossetti, and Roseanne Alvarez. For an invitation to speak at the 1995 Modern Language Association convention in Chicago at a session on European Courtly Literature and the Orient, I am grateful to Zacharias Thundy. My paper, “The Medieval Tale of Florence and the East,” was subsequently published in an issue of South Asian Review (vol. 29 [1995], 1–10) which he guest-edited. An expanded, revised version of that article became chapter six of this book. I also wish to thank the editors of The Chaucer Review, especially Robert Worth Frank, for inviting me to present a paper in a session sponsored by that journal at the 31st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo. It was published as “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: The Poetics of Interlace or the ‘well of English undefiled’ ” (Chaucer Review 32 [1997], 32–45) and later enlarged to become chapter four. Thanks are due for permission to print revised versions of these two articles. Early drafts of sections of chapters one, two, three, and five began as talks for the Graduate English Program at Rutgers-Newark, various sessions at several International Congresses on Medieval Studies in Western ix

Acknowledgments Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium on the Crusades at the University of the South (in 2001). For these opportunities and for helpful comments and criticism I thank Rachel Hadas, Thomas Bestul, Maldwyn Mills, and Susan Ridyard. For help with textual problems I am grateful to W. H. Kelliher, Department of Manuscripts, the British Library; I. C. Cunningham, Keeper of Manuscripts, National Library of Scotland; and Jayne S. Ringrose, UnderLibrarian, Department of Manuscripts & University Archives, Cambridge University Library. I am fortunate to have had access to the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, particularly the Rare Book Collection and the Oriental Division. The librarians of the Photo Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Umberto Spigo, Director of the Aeolian Museum, Lipari Island, Sicily, and G. Davi of the Museum of Islam, Zisa Castle, Palermo, Sicily were all generous in answering my queries about medieval Islamic art. Any work on the Orient in the English Middle Ages must acknowledge a debt to the fundamental work accomplished by Dorothee Metlitzski in The Matter of Araby in Medieval England. I am indebted to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director of Boydell & Brewer, and to Corinne J. Saunders and Roger Dalrymple, general editors of the series, Studies in Medieval Romance, for their interest in this book. Special thanks are also due to Pru Harrison, Vanda Andrews, and Michael Webb for their careful attention to the numerous details of book production. To Thomas Farel Heffernan, my husband, Geoffrey Farel Heffernan, my son, and Mary Falvo, my mother, I owe debts for sustaining encouragement and love that reach far beyond this project.

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Introduction: Romance and the Orient

1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient

T

HIS study focuses on a genre and a place – “romance” and the “Orient” – as they are exemplified in late medieval English literature, especially in Chaucer. Nineteenth-century scholars, pointing to Arabic and Middle Eastern sources and analogues for many medieval romances, virtually suggested that the romance form emerged from the meeting of Saracen and crusader.1 With all of medieval reality to draw on, romance writers were fascinated enough by the Orient, which crusaders, pilgrims, and traders had opened up to them, to turn it into literature. It is a fact of literary history that the evolution of the romance genre in Europe followed these East-West contacts. Within the last decade, there has been an upswing in publication by Postcolonial theorists on the intersection of West and East and the depiction of the Orient in the western imagination.2 Inspired by such work are several recent and challenging articles by medievalists who have looked for the presence of something like modern instances of Orientalism which they have found in portrayals of the Orient in medieval texts.3 This study does not press anything like a continuous argument for medieval orientalism of a Postcolonial stamp, though a connecting purpose of the six chapters of this book is to show how the Orient and the people in it are represented in late medieval romance. The study does,

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The views of such representative nineteenth-century scholars of romance literature as Huet, Wallensköld, and Mussafia descend from the eighteenth-century medievalist and first historian of English poetry, Thomas Warton (1728–90). He wrote in an essay at the beginning of The History of English Poetry entitled, “Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe”: “It is an established maxim of modern criticism that the fictions of Arabian imagination were communicated to the western world by means of the Crusades” (Warton, I, i). Despite Maria Rosa Menocal’s 1987 book, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, the relationship of the literature and culture of the medieval Arabic world to that of western medieval literature remains a large and poorly mapped problem. A few examples of this emerging postcolonial research include the following: The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Gyan Prakesh, “Orientalism Now”; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics; Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic; Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period.” See especially Sheila Delany, “Geographies of Desire: Orientalism in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women” and The Naked Text: Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’; Kathryn Lynch, “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales”; and Susan Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.”

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance however, discuss distinct instances of orientalism, as, for example, in chapter 3, concerning Chaucer’s depictions of Cleopatra and Dido. My thesis is that there is remarkable oriental influence discernible in medieval romances, enough, in fact, to call for a reconsideration of the textual exchanges as well as other cultural interactions linking English (and European) romance literature of the Middle Ages and the Orient. This examination of romances centers on several of those written in Middle English: “high” romances by Geoffrey Chaucer such as the Man of Law’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale and his two legends of Cleopatra and of Dido as well as “lower,” anonymous examples of the romance genre, Le Bone Florence of Rome and Floris and Blauncheflur. Aside from Floris and Blauncheflur which is a thirteenth-century work, all the romances are late – Chaucer’s dating from the fourteenth century and Le Bone Florence of Rome, the fifteenth century. The presence, however, of Floris and Blauncheflur in two late medieval manuscripts (the Auchinleck [1330–40] and Egerton 2862 [ca. 1400]) attests to the wide audience that the thirteenth-century romance continued to have in the later Middle Ages. Other Middle English romances could have been chosen, but all of these offer clear opportunities to study portraits of the Orient or uses of the oriental in fairly representative narratives displaying intrinsic literary merit. Moreover, several of these works – The Legend of Good Women, The Squire’s Tale, and Le Bone Florence of Rome – are under-represented in the critical literature. Even Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and the romance of Floris and Blauncheflur are more appreciated than written about. The term “Orient” is understood, as it was in the Middle Ages, to refer to North Africa and the Near and Middle East. Sources and analogues are a concern of this study, but it focuses equally on other aspects of the literary and cultural interchange between Islamic East and Christian West made visible in romance texts. These include settings in the Orient, portrayals of Christian-Saracen relationships, indications (usually tonal) of the way the West perceived Islam, and even suggestions of medieval orientalism. A related and relevant concern of this study is to show wherever possible that the subject matter and other narrative elements of Arabic tales were transmitted to the Western literary tradition by the Moslems through Arabic Spain and Sicily and through cultural contacts that accompanied East-West encounters along pilgrimage routes, in arenas of trade in the Mediterranean and the Levant, and during centuries of Crusading wars. These historical realities created intersection points for cultural exchanges between East and West that reveal themselves in the details of texts as well as in exchanges of texts themselves. A clear fact of textual-historical relations, as Lee Patterson puts it, is that “the historically real cannot exist apart from the textuality by which it is made known” (Patterson, 63). The literary historian operates in a world of textuality that cannot evade enclosing the economic, political, and social realities that constitute real history. The plague, referred to by Boccaccio in the introduction to The Decameron as the occasion for the escape to the countryside by his aristocratic characters who tell stories, is the same plague known to have been 2

Introduction: Romance and the Orient carried to Europe by rats on Genoese ships that sailed between Italy and the Orient. Paul Zumthor put the matter another way when he spoke of the text as a “word act” (“un acte de parole”) that “situates itself among more or less institutionalized acts” (“se situe parmi d’autres actes, plus ou moins institutionnalisés” [Zumthor, 8]).4 The study which follows is an effort to examine the impact of textual-historical encounters on some of the best Chaucerian and anonymous English medieval romances, works that reached a wide circle of readers in their day, as these narratives, written in the vernacular, were the rough equivalent of today’s popular novels. Long before the Age of Discovery directed Europe’s attention westward across the Atlantic, European engagement with the Orient during the Middle Ages was complex – politically, economically, socially, and philosophically. Such multi-layered involvement could not fail to leave its imprint on medieval romance, a genre that, like the modern novel, gives its audience a comprehensive view of how society conducts life. Through the referentiality of its representations and its playing out of beliefs that have meaning for its authors and audiences, romance is the medieval genre that places itself most fully in its time. A new literary genre emerged in France shortly after the Second Crusade. Borrowing subjects from the legends of classical antiquity and the chivalric realm of King Arthur and his knights, French writers produced verse narratives about love and the pursuit of adventure known as “romances.” Romances were written in French, the vernacular, not Latin, and were intended to entertain. The new genre was imitated in all the medieval European vernaculars, including English. All Middle English narratives, written after 1100, dealing with aristocratic personae and involving combat and/or love are called “romances.” A typical definition is that of Helaine Newstead 4

This perception of the text shaped Zumthor’s sense of his role as medievalist: Aucun concept n’échappe ainsi à l’absolue nécessité de spécification historique. . . . Ma tâche, comme médiéviste, sera de ré-historiser un ensemble concept élaboré “en théorie,” c’est-à-dire par dés-historisation des faits . . . à valoriser fortement (au point d’en faire l’élément axia celle-ci) – un certain nombre de facteurs tenant aux conditions réelles de production de textes à analyser. (Zumthor, 8–9) [No concept thus escapes the absolute necessity of historical specificity. . . . My task, as a medievalist, will be to re-historicize a group concept elaborated “in theory,” that is to say, by de-historicization of facts . . . to valorize strongly (to the point of making it itself the axis element) – a certain number of factors contiguous to the real conditions of production of the texts to be analyzed. (my translation)] Zumthor here draws on the thinking of the postmodern semiotician, Julia Kristeva, whose view of intertextuality was exceedingly broad and abstract: society as a whole is to be thought of as the text, so that a text’s participation within the discursive space of a culture may be as significant as its relationship to prior texts (Kristeva, “Problèmes de la structuration,” 312). Kristeva’s privileging of cultural space over textual artifacts reflected, in fact, a predispostion against the analysis of putative sources (Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, 60). As a Chaucer scholar and medievalist I do not share the hostility of the twentieth-century semiotician’s work to the study of a text’s relationship to its supposed sources and analogues. This book considers a work’s relation to prior texts a legitimate concern and, where useful, that dimension of textual interrelationships is included.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance in the revised Wells Manual: “The medieval romance is a narrative about knightly prowess and adventure, in verse or prose, intended primarily for the entertainment of a listening audience” (Newstead, 11). Correct as it is, the definition does not suggest how large and varied the genre is nor how enduring, for it lasted into the sixteenth century and beyond. The Middle English romances are commonly grouped according to theme and origin, as, for example, “English and Germanic Legends,” “Arthurian Legends,” “Charlemagne Legends,” “Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends,” etc. Neither the definition above nor these thematic groupings indicate the extent to which political, social, religious, and aristocratic assumptions figure in the romance genre. Nor would this definition and these groupings suggest the characteristic of romance that Georges Duby and Daniel Eisenberg point out, namely, that a large part of the audience of romance was the young, socially unsettled, still in search of patterns of conduct on which to base their lives (Duby, 835–46; Eisenberg, 89–90, 93–97). Romance is the medieval genre in which love, courtship, and marriage, are often at issue. Chaucer first uses the term “romance” in his earliest narrative poem, The Book of the Duchess, in attributing the story of Ceyx and Alcioun to “a book,/ A romaunce” (47–48), probably to recall his French sources, Guillaume de Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoreuse and the Ovid moralisé as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses.5 “Romance” as used here refers to works written in French but also a written source that is not primarily historical. When Pandarus, in Troilus and Criseyde, a work written near the end of Chaucer’s career, finds his niece reading with her ladies, Criseyde tells her uncle, “This romaunce is of Thebes that we rede” (100). Her description of the events correspond with the French Roman de Thèbes, again indicating Chaucer’s association of the term with secular narratives written in French. Despite Criseyde’s speaking of a vernacular text, her snobby uncle goes on to talk about the Latin Thebiad, an epic in twelve books. The only time the romance genre is named in The Canterbury Tales occurs in Sir Thopas, a tale that is one of two told by the pilgrim Chaucer himself. It specifically links itself with “romances” (847, 897). Thopas’s calling for “romances that been roiales” (847) about popes and cardinals along with “romances of prys” (897) that the narrator specifies as the tales of Horn, Ypotis, Bevis, Guy, Lybeaus Desconus, and Pleyndamour suggest an interest in including pious romances along with adventures of chivalry and love. The pious mode, however, does not have much impact on Sir Thopas which tells “of bataille and of chivalry,/ And of ladyes love-drury” (894–95). After this introductory chapter, the next chapter (Chapter 2) studies one of the romances of the Canterbury Tales, the Man of Law’s Tale, which treats the legend of Constance. Some attention is given to two analogues of this tale as told by John Gower, Chaucer’s close friend, and by Giovanni Boccaccio, 5

All references in my text to Chaucer’s work refer to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed.

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Introduction: Romance and the Orient many of whose works Chaucer had read. These romances provide not merely an opportunity to view the theme of marriage between Christian and Saracen but, more importantly, the intersection of faith and commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean. Chaucer makes the two intersect when his lawyer pilgrim credits a merchant as the source of his tale. The idea that the Syrian merchant found in the tale is very likely a Christian, probably an Italian trader living in Syria, offers a new perspective on the tale’s mercantile dimension. In Chapter 3 an examination of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women shows that the poet ostensibly praises two North African (and therefore “Oriental”) queens, Cleopatra and Dido, as models of true love, while in fact representing them as models of sexual excess. The tales may thus be seen as loci of medieval orientalism, a subject of increasing interest in recent scholarship. This chapter is pivotal to further consideration of issues of gender and sexuality in subsequent chapters, especially 5 and 6. The fourth chapter examines Chaucer’s long fragment of a romance, the Squire’s Tale. This incomplete Canterbury tale led nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars interested in origins to hunt down sources and analogues in Persian and Byzantine tales as well as in travel literature written by Marco Polo and John Mandeville. But Chaucer’s structure in this tale is European even though its content is Oriental; it is a type of poetry of interlace found in medieval French romance literature and also, according to John Leyerle, in Beowulf (Leyerle, 147). The resemblances between western poetry of interlace and oriental frame structure are just that – resemblances – not indications of intentional intermingling of western and eastern aesthetics by the poet Chaucer. Chapter 5, “A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur” questions the assumption, common in most literary criticism about the romance, that this tale is “ideal” in its portrait of the romantic bringing together of the Saracen, Floris, and the Christian, Blauncheflur. Chapter 6 places the popular Middle English romance, Le Bone Florence of Rome, told in numerous versions in medieval French verse and Spanish prose, within the context of its oriental analogues, especially those found in the Thousand and One Nights. This expanded consideration of the oriental analogues, merely cited in passing in the notes and bibliography to my critical edition of Florence, gains added importance in relationship to the other romances examined in this study. The study concludes that contact with strangers is a powerful engine for change in literature: not just sources and analogues with their plots and themes, images and motifs, but a whole other culture opened up when East met West and it intrigued writers of imaginative literature just as did the writings of Eastern scientists and philosophers. Arabs were respected for their learning in philosophy and the sciences and were regarded as the mediators of Greek and Byzantine traditions. Arabic medicine, as represented by the writing of such physicians as Rhazes (865–923), Haly Abbas (d. 994), and Avicenna (980–1037), transmitted by Byzantine compilers and translated into Latin by Constantine the African and Gerard of Cremona, became part of the education 5

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance of university-trained European doctors of medicine. It is said of Chaucer’s physician pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales, the Doctor of Phisik, that “Wel knew he the olde Esculapius,/And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus,/Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen,/Serapion, Razis, and Avycen,/Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn” (General Prologue, 429–33). Suggestions of the influence of Arabic scientific thought are even evident in medieval imaginative literature, as, for example, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Book of the Duchess.6 At the outset of this exploration of the uses of the Orient in romance narratives, some fundamental matters pertaining to the interchange between Islamic East and Christian West should be addressed, namely, the Crusades, Pilgrimage, and Trade. What follows will supply relevant history establishing the East-West connection that is essential contextualization for the subsequent chapters of this book.

Crusades Contemporaries regarded the crusades as holy wars of Christianity against the infidel who possessed the Holy Sepulcher of Christ. From 637 until the end of the First Crusade in 1100, Jerusalem remained in the hands of Mohammedan rulers. The Latin church in Jerusalem had been tolerated for centuries by Arab conquerors, but the capture of Jerusalem by the Turks in 1071 from the Arabs of Egypt changed everything. The lives of Christians became difficult; their plight proved a clarion call to the Christian West and became the immediate cause of the holy war. At the western end of the Mediterranean, more than a hundred years before the First Crusade, wars were already being fought by Christians to reclaim land taken by Mohammedans: at the instigation of Pope Benedict VIII, the Pisans conquered Arab Sardinia in 1016; with the blessings of Pope Alexander II, the Normans fought the Arabs from 1060–1090 before reclaiming Sicily for Christendom; and in Spain, as early as 970, the war against the Moors of the Omayyad caliphate was underway. Thus, not only was Jerusalem a meeting place for two civilizations during the Crusades, but East and West already had hostile as well as cultural engagements in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. The First Crusade was Pope Urban II’s answer to the appeals of Michael VII of Constantinople and of Alexius Comnenus, the Byzantine Emperor, for military troops to fight various hostile invaders against Eastern Christianity, especially the Seljuk Turks who were occupying Asia Minor. The Church transformed their appeal for military support into a holy war to regain Jerusalem and the rule of the Holy Land. The Pope’s ambitions coincided with the economic interests of Italian cities in the eastern Mediterranean and those of the younger sons of noble households eager to carve fortunes in the East, two 6

See Heffernan, The Melancholy Muse, 38–94.

6

Introduction: Romance and the Orient factors that helped secure the success of the First Crusade. Urban II’s sermon at Clermont made August 1096 the date of departure for crusaders to leave for their meeting in Constantinople. Brought together there were the interests of younger sons (like Bohemond of Taranto, son of Robert Guiscard, Baldwin of Lorraine, and Raymond of Provence) and Italian merchants from the West, on the one hand, and the condition of Eastern Christians in the Mohammedan East, on the other. Nicea, in Asia Minor, was captured in 1097; Antioch, defended during a siege in 1098; and Jerusalem, captured by the crusaders in 1099. Most returned to the West, but several commanders remained: Bohemund and the Italian Normans at Antioch; Baldwin and the Lorrainers at Jerusalem, and Raymond of Toulouse and the Provençals in Tripoli. The First Crusade, preached on French soil in Clermont, had been a mostly French enterprise. The loss of Edessa, which fell to the Moslems in 1144, provoked the Second Crusade. In 1153 Ascalon fell to the Christians and in the 1160s a series of campaigns penetrated into Egypt as far as Cairo. Victory over Saladin at Montgesard in 1177 made westerners feel they had divine support. Then came Saladin’s invasion of 1187. He moved through Tiberius, seized the relic of the True Cross at the Horns of Hattin, and captured Jerusalem on October 20, 1187, after two weeks of fighting. Jerusalem was lost again after just 88 years of Christian occupation. It is said that the shock of the news caused the death of Pope Urban III. His successor, Gregory VIII, in the encyclical, Audita tremendi, made an appeal for a new crusade. Its center was to be Acre, the capture of which would lead the way to retaking Jerusalem. Political dissension among the crusaders, however, contributed to the failure of the Third Crusade, which ended with a truce between Saladin and the Christians (that allowed them to hold the coast from Tyre to Jaffa) and with Richard I’s departure from Acre in October 1192. By August 1198, the new Pope, Innocent III, issued a new crusade encyclical that brought about the Fourth Crusade of 1202–1204. This Crusade made Egypt, now the center of Mohammedan power and trade, the object of attack. The goal of the crusade for numerous complex reasons became diverted to Constantinople. The crusaders stormed the city and in May, Baldwin of Flanders became the first Latin emperor of Constantinople. The doge of Venice was rewarded with more than a quarter of the Eastern empire. The Fourth Crusade had fallen out of papal hands into those with a commercial agenda. The Fifth Crusade (1218–24) was the last to be started by Innocent III. Again, Egypt was the goal of attack, and the crusade would start with Damietta, an Egyptian city on the eastern delta of the Nile. The capture of Damietta in 1220 was at first a success, but the crusaders lost their advantage when the river flooded in August and the Moslems broke the dykes, causing the crusaders to be trapped. They left Egypt on August 30th. The Fifth Crusade ended in failure and was to be followed in 1228–29 by the Sixth, the first and only Crusade not to have the papal blessing. It was led by Frederick II, who married the heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and who made the goal of his crusade Jerusalem, not 7

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Egypt. By the time he set out for the East, Frederick had incurred the wrath of Pope Gregory IX, who cursed the enterprise (presumably because Frederick delayed getting underway for so long). Through negotiations with the sultan of Egypt, Frederick, nonetheless, entered Jerusalem in triumph on 17 March and the city remained in Christian hands for fifteen years thereafter. Frederick had learned, like his Sicilian predecessors, how to make treaties in the East; thus, the Sixth Crusade, more secular than “holy,” was accomplished by diplomacy rather than military might. The treaty of Frederick with Malik-al-Kamil (d. 1238), the sultan of Egypt, ended in 1244 and political dissension led to the loss of Jerusalem once again. The loss of Jerusalem in 1244 produced the Seventh Crusade, preached by Innocent IV in the council of Lyons in 1245. St. Louis took up the crusade, mediating between the Pope and the schismatic Frederick II, against whom the Pope preached a crusade promising absolution and remission of sins to all who joined. Louis’s mother, Blanche of Castile, on learning that her son had taken the cross is said to have mourned as much as if she had seen him lying dead, and well she might have expected to. The Crusades, ever since the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, were increasingly associated with failure (Weiss, 2). By mid-May 1250, St. Louis reached Acre and spent four years in the Holy Land unable to secure the kingdom of Jerusalem. Dissension precipitated the fall of Christians in Jerusalem: a commercial conflict grew in the Levant between Venice and Genoa, which led to the loss of Constantinople by the Latins in 1261, and other losses followed that (Caesarea and Arsuf fell in 1265; Antioch, in 1268). The crusaders returned home to Europe in 1270 in defeat which could not be mitigated, not even by the private Crusade of Prince Edward of England to the Holy Land in spring 1271. He attempted to deal with the Mongolian powers which had arisen as a new political force in the area, especially Egypt, and made forays into Acre, all to no effect. When he returned to England in 1271, he was the last of the western crusaders. Though isolated enterprises arose, there was no large scale crusade mounted after 1272. The fall of Acre in May 1291, the last bastion of Christian Outremer, brought to an end the 200–year Christian domination of Syria and Palestine. The news of the loss of the Holy Land reached Pope Nicholas IV in August 1291, prompting the encyclical Dirum amaritudinis calicem of 13 August, 1291. Sylvia Schein calls this “the first papal acknowledgement of the news from the East” (Schein, 74). Christopher Tyerman observes that “the 1330s was possibly the last decade in which the Holy Land and its Mamluk conquerors could be regarded in the West as the primary military target for an eastern expedition” and notes that “until the late 1330s veterans of Christian Syria, from the days before its loss in 1291, still haunted the courts of Europe” (Tyerman, 229). England, though never as involved in the Crusades as France, was, nevertheless, touched by this long 500–year experience. Many of the place names in Chaucer’s works bear the imprint of the crusades: Alisaundre, in Egypt, Lyeys, in southwest Turkey (against which Pierre de Lusignan campaigned in 8

Introduction: Romance and the Orient 1367), Palatye, a city in Anatolia (associated with the Seljuk Turks), Belmarye, in present-day Morocco (in Chaucer’s time ruled by Berbers) – were all places in which Chaucer’s pilgrim Knight had campaigned. Surrye (Syria) in southwest Asia Minor is named at the beginning of the Man of Law’s Tale. A relic of the True Cross from the Holy Land, the cross of Bromholm, found in Norfolk, is mentioned by Chaucer in the Reeve’s Tale (4286), one of the fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales. The oldest pub in England, The Old Trip to Jerusalem (Nottingham), built in 1189, goes back to the Third Crusade, as does the possibly apocryphal account about Richard I directing the theater of war at Acre from his sickbed (Tyerman, 5). Among crusaders on the Second Crusade were English aristocrats such as Hervey of Glanvil, Simon of Dover, and Saher of Achelle as well as merchants and burgesses with enough money to afford the journey like Andrew of London, Roger of Cornhill, Godric of Finchale and the Viels of Southampton (Tyerman, 11). After the loss of Edessa, Englishmen joined Louis VII of France, among them, Roger of Mowbray, Philip of Gloucester and Bishop Roger Clinton of Chester. As part of his penance for the murder of the archbishop, Thomas Becket, King Henry pledged to the papal legates at Avranches in 1172 to go on a crusade. The Third Crusade was the first in which English participation was of major importance. After the disaster at Hattin in 1187 and the issue by Pope Gregory VIII of the papal bull, Audita Tremendi, both the kings of France and England took the cross, that is to say, they became crucesignati (those who promised to fight the enemies of the church in the Holy Land and elsewhere and who had church approval to do so). In just two months in the spring of 1188, three thousand Anglo-Normans and Welshmen became crucesignati (Tyerman, 66). Financing these crusade expeditions was costly; in 1189–90, Richard I’s preparations cost him 20,000 pounds, approximately 70% of his annual income (Tyerman, 188). In the 1330s, ten years or so before the birth of Geoffrey Chaucer, the West entered the last decade in which the Mamluk conquerors of the Holy Land were the target of crusaders. Personal crusades, however, continued until much later as, for example, that of Sir John Clanvowe – courtier, soldier, author of the the religious treatise, The Two Ways – to Tunis.7 This was a Genoese-sponsored attack on the Moslems, led by Louis II, which attracted many wealthy English knights and squires like Clanvowe. Crusading Romances. Numerous Middle English romances of the second rank concern military confrontation between Saracens and Christians. These tales are essentially propagandistic and draw mainly on French models of which they are translations or adaptations, and many are about Charlemagne’s campaign against the Moors of Spain. The struggle of southern Europe to shake off the Moslem invader is reflected in the epics of France and the 7

See The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. V. J. Scattergood.

9

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance romances of Spain and Italy as well as of England. The Saracen makes his appearance in the earliest of the extant chansons de geste, the Chanson of Roland.8 The oldest and best of the seven surviving manuscripts of the Chanson de Roland has “some claim to be considered an English poem in its own right,” for the Oxford manuscript of the poem was written in England in the twelfth century (Spearing, 1). It contains a version of the poem dating from 1100. The basic situation of the Chanson de Roland continues in the treatment of the Roland in the other medieval European vernaculars for four centuries: a Saracen king comes from the South or the East to invade Christendom and it (represented by Paris) is defended by Charlemagne and his knights. This is the so-called Matter of France. The Roland poems are about a popular hero placed in the context of the war between two religious systems. Repeatedly in these poems the French try to convert the infidel voluntarily or by force of arms. Their efforts are often aided by the Moslem’s frustration at the impotence of his own gods. The subject of the conversion of the infidel is a popular theme in the English Charlemagne romances that appears to develop out of the underlying assumption of all Middle English crusading romances: the Christian faith is superior to that of the infidels just as Christian knights are superior to Saracen warriors. In one of the Middle English Charlemagne romances containing the Saracen knight, Otuel, who miraculously becomes a convert to Christianity, the pagan hero – before his conversion – threatens Charles in his role as a messenger of King Garcy of Moslem Spain: And otuel gan to carpe yvylle To syre charlemayne, And sayde, “Garcy sent me the tylle, And sayde, that he wyl thy body spylle, ffor the wynnyng off Spayne. By-leue on his god mahoun, Iubiter, & syre platoun!” (Otuel and Roland, 115–21)

The story of Otinel, as the Saracen knight is called in French, concerning an episode between two of Charlemagne’s expeditions into Spain, originated in France about 1200 and the extant Middle English versions are Otuel and Otuel and Roland. Sent to summon Charles to surrender to the Saracen king, Garcy, Otuel challenges Charles’s court, duels with Roland, is miraculously converted and pledges to marry Charles’s daughter after the war is over. Another Saracen knight, also ultimately converted, who appears in a Middle English Charlemagne romance is Ferumbras. The Middle English Sir Ferumbras, in MS. Ashmole 33 (end of 14th century), is a translation of the French verse Fierebras and the Sowdone of Babylone, another important 8

A useful study of the French chanson de geste is Norman Daniel’s Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chanson de Geste.

10

Introduction: Romance and the Orient English Charlemagne Firumbras romance, is a translation of the French Balan. In the Sowdone of Babylone, after Ferumbras is overcome by Charles’s knight, Oliver, the Saracen knight asks to be christened, his own gods having proved false: His bare guttis men myght see; The blode faste down ranne, “Hoo, Olyvere, I yelde me to the, And here I become thy man. I am so hurte, I may not stonde, I put me alle in thy grace. My goddis ben false by water and londe. (Sowdone of Babylone, 1351–57)

Even though Saracens eventually manage to overtake Oliver and Roland (who goes to Oliver’s aid), Ferumbras continues to abjure his gods and is baptized as Floreyn by Bishop Turpin just as soon as his wounds are healed. None other than Charles of France himself had been so overcome with pity for this Saracen knight that he had the wounded Ferumbras tended in his own tent by a surgeon. Throughout the romance, Ferumbras is depicted as a powerful knight who subscribes to an honorable code. When, for example, the Saracen discovers that the Christian knight he has knocked to the ground in a battle in Rome is the Pope, he does not kill: “Shame it were to me certayne/ To sle the in this bataile” (567–68). Along with these romances about Saracen knights who convert to Christianity may be considered another English Charlemagne romance, The Sege off Melayne, which stresses the superiority of Christian knights, especially Charles of France. Maldwyn Mills has said of this crusading romance that it is “in the heroic manner . . .” and “in its subject-matter looks back to an earlier mode of heroic literature” (Mills, ix). Though Charles is the main Christian hero – . . . charles of Fraunce, þe heghe kinge of alle, þat ofte sythes made hethyn men for to falle, þat styffely satte one stede (The Sege off Melayne, 4–6)

Charles’s chief adviser, Bishop Turpin, is himself portrayed as an exemplary Christian warrior who is ready to lead his armed clerics in the march against Milan, even before the barons of the king. The romance centers on the capture of Milan by the Saracen, Arabas, and the appeal to Charles for aid by Alantyne, ruler of Milan. Archbishop Turpin is a main player in the romance. The Christian knights are inspired by Turpin’s leadership to accomplish great feats of courage (1415–26), but archbishop or not, Turpin can sound a little like Saracens disappointed in their gods when the fight goes against them. After Roland returns defeated from an encounter with the Saracens, Archbishop Turpin complains to the Virgin Mary: 11

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance A! Mary mylde, whare was thi myght, þat þou lete thi men thus to dede be dighte, þat wighte & worthy were? Art þou noghte halden of myghtis most, Full Conceyuede of þe holy goste? (The Sege off Melayne, 547–51)

There are numerous chansons de geste in which Saracens are shown doing violence to images of their gods after learning of the defeat of their forces. One such scene appears in the Middle English romance, The King of Tars, wherein a sultan, disappointed that his prayers have gone unanswered, proceeds to break the heads and limbs of statues of Jupiter, Apollo, Tervagaunt, and Mahoun (646–57). Though Archbishop Turpin’s rage stops at a verbal outburst punctuated by his throwing down his staff and miter (542–3), the characterization of his behavior – suggesting that of the stock frustrated Saracens found in so many crusading romances – is puzzling. Far from troubled by the portrait, the early scholar of Middle English tail-rhyme romances, Trounce, found it to be “the finest piece of characterization in Middle English literature, with the exception of Chaucer’s best, and, possibly, of Gawayne in Gawayne and the Grene Knyght” (Trounce, 1. 100–01). Ultimately Archbishop Turpin leads the French army to rescue the city of Milan, but the incomplete romance breaks off just as reinforcements for the battle arrive. Out of the early years of the thirteenth century and the Third Crusade came a hero created to hold his own beside Charlemagne and King Arthur: Richard the Lion-Heart. The crusading king, Richard I of England, was not English but a French duke whose English holdings conferred upon him the title of king. The deeds of Richard during the Crusade, real as well as fictional, are put at the center of the historical romance, Richard Coeur de Lion, which is one of the most militant about the Christian war against the Saracen infidel. The focal point of this Middle English romance is the powerful characterization of Richard and his taking of Acre: Richard took leue, and leep on stede, And prycked out of þat ferred. He rod aboute þe clos dyke Toward Acres, sykrlyke, Tyl he come to þe hospytale. Of seynt John, as j ffynde in tale. Þere leet he py
te hys pauyloun, And arerede hys Mate-Gryffoun, þat was a tree-castel fful ffyn To assaute wiþ many Sarazyn, þat he my
t into Acres seen; He hadde þryttene schpj fful of been. (Richard Coeur de Lion, 2891–2902) 12

Introduction: Romance and the Orient It was from “Mate-Gryffoun,” the name of a siege tower from which Richard conducted operations, that Acre was bombarded with stones. The romance contains several descriptions of the use of “Greek fire” (invented by the Byzantines and adopted in the West), medieval incendiary devices that were hurled at the enemy and exploded on impact (Hebron, 23). The Saracens are said to fear him as “the deuell of hell/That was come them to quell” (2677–78). A highpoint of the romance is Richard’s capture of Acre which had fallen to Saladin in July 1187 and Richard’s slaughter of 2,700 of Saladin’s men when the Saracen fails to pay for their ransom (Richard Coeur de Lion, 3230–756). As in numerous grisly accounts from the Crusades (such as is found, for example, in the French Chanson d’Antioch),9 Richard cures his fever, while Christian forces are besieging Acre and Saladin is approaching from ten miles away, by eating roast Saracen. Later, Richard serves ambassadors from Saladin roast Saracen heads “al hoot” (Richard Coeur de Lion, 3512) for dinner when they arrive to negotiate a truce. King Richard-as-cannibal does not come off so well to the modern reader. Even the narrator of the heroic romance notes the king’s cold blue eyes watching the Saracen warriors wailing and grieving over friends and relatives whose cooked and labelled heads are presented as a feast on Richard’s table. Furthermore, the king is described as eating with gusto as the Saracens sit dumbfounded and nudge one another, whispering that Richard must be the devil’s brother (3469–85). His desire to negotiate from a position of strength is presented in a light so grotesque as to be impossible to finesse away. The horror of Richard’s cannibalism is commented on by the Saracen messenger who reports to Saladin that Richard means to “go fforth/ To wynne est, west, souþ and norþ,/ And eete oure chyldren and vs” (3667–69). The cannibalism is a significant part of what makes the king demonic to his opponents. The romance never successfully reconciles the brutality of Richard’s actions with his role as heroic Christian king. While it is noticed by the narrator of the romance, it is never criticized. A literary scholar of English medieval romance literature comments, “The heathens are no longer seen as human beings, but as personifications of all that is unchristian. . . . Their massacre is an act of Christian duty . . .” (Mehl, 245). That, however, does not seem altogether sufficient, for the king’s cook, certainly a Christian, who earlier in the romance helps cure the king’s fever, is shown to be clearly astonished that Richard is not horrified nor angry when he discovers that he has been served Saracen instead of the pork he requested. The king’s delight, moreover, with the meat’s taste and his decision to keep his troops from hunger by using Saracen corpses for food is met with evident shock. English hero or not, Richard’s barbarity as cannibal king exceeds that of the infidel and is the primary reason for his several times being associated with the devil. Even before the episodes of cannibalism, the demonic link is

9

See Chanson d’Antioch, Chant v.

13

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance made in the romance by the German king who attempted to murder Richard by setting a hungry lion on him. When Richard, having slain the lion, takes out its heart and eats it before the eyes of the astonished king, the German king is heard to say, “I wis, as J understonde can,/ þis is a deuyl and no man” (1111–12). The circumstances surrounding Richard’s birth, as depicted in the romance, also seem designed to shed some light on the matter of his devilish barbarity. Early in the narrative, his mother is presented as supernatural and unable to bear seeing the host at mass. The Queen, named Cassodorien – mother of Richard as well as of his brother, John, and a sister – is one day prevented from leaving the church by order of her husband, King Henry, when the host is elevated at the altar. She flies up through the roof of the church carrying off her daughter and son, John (whom she drops), and is never seen again.10 The intent of Richard Coeur de Lion was to show Christian triumph over the Saracens being accomplished by an heroic English king. Though the English may be bound to the French as part of a European Christian coalition pledged to fight the Saracen infidel, from the very opening prologue of Richard Coeur de Lion, the romance is concerned with separating English language and identity from the French. Romance accounts of the deeds of Roland, Oliver, Alexander, King Arthur, Achilles, Hector, and other heroes, we are told, ‘men maken newe” in English translations because not one in a hundred men know French anymore (10–25). When the Saracens are finally defeated near the end of the romance and throw open the gates to let the crusaders ride in to set the Christian banner on the walls of the city they have won, the flag is clearly named that of Richard of England (5824–27), a hero greater than Alexander, Charlemagne, Arthur, Sir Gawain, Hector, Aneas, and numerous other heroes from history and legend (6727–34). As has been pointed out by Wells, “In view of the probable French original, of importance is the English view exhibited in the careful presentation of the French King and the King of Champagne as cowards and takers of bribes, and in the author’s deliberate lengthy utterance (3821–37) damning the French as a nation of braggarts and cowards and covetous rascals” (Wells, 153). The popularity of Richard Coeur de Lion is attested to by its having survived in seven different manuscripts.11 This popularity is striking as the romance

10 The legend of Cassodorien and her strange revulsion at the holy sacrament and her magical disap-

pearance through the church roof has its origins in a legend about King Richard’s ancestor, Fulk of Anjou, who (according to the legend) married a woman of unknown origin who, like Richard’s mother in the romance, is unable to sit through the eucharistic part of the mass. She, also detained, is said to have taken flight through the church roof, carrying off her children. While the romance’s incorporation of the legend of Richard’s ancestor, Fulk of Anjou, recognizes the king’s Angevin ancestors, it suppresses his actual mother, Eleanor of Acquitaine. 11 MSS Auchinleck (1330–1340; fragments), Egerton 2862 (end of 14th century; 44 leaves), British Museum Additional 31042 (15th century; 6380 verses), Harley 4690 (15th century; fragment of 1608 verses), Douce 228 (a fragment; late 15th century), College of Arms 58 (H D N 58; 1400–1450), and Caius College Cambridge 175 (1350–1400; 3568 couplets).

14

Introduction: Romance and the Orient makes an English hero of a king who spoke little English and was hardly in England at all. While the extant manuscripts date to shortly after the Hundred Years War, the romance was probably translated from the French during the reign of Edward I. Not all bloody confrontations between Saracens and Christians in Middle English romances, however, occur because of ideology; in the King of Tars, for instance, one of the Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda legends, the Saracen Sultan of Dammas who invades Tarsus and massacres many Christians does so solely because he has sued for the hand of the daughter of the King of Tarsus and been rejected. Most conflicts between Christians and Saracens are, however, presented in medieval English romances as associated with the Crusades. They are fought in the territories that the legendary English hero, Beves of Hampton, disguised as a pilgrim, names when he is asked, “Palmer, þou comst fro ferre:/Whar is pes and whar is werre?” (2257–58). Beves replies, “Sire, ich come from Iurisalem Fro Nazare & fro Bedlem, Emavns castel & Synaie; Ynde, Erop and Asie, Egippte, Grese and Babiloine, Tars, Sesile and sesaoine, In Fris, in Sodeine & in Tire, In Aufrik and in mani empire, Ac al is pes þar ichaue went, Saue in þe lond of Dabilent. . . .”

(Beues of Hamtoun, 2261–70)

The question about peace and war reveals a preoccupation with the Crusades in the Middle Ages. The extensive travels of Beves result from his being sold out of England as a slave. The Saracen was not merely the infidel enemy in battle but the trader in goods, some of which were Christian slaves. At the beginning of Beves of Hamtoun, Beves’s mother, after marrying the murderer of her husband (Guy of Southampton) sells Beves to a Saracen. It is said of her knights that they, Þe child hii chepeden to sale, Marchaundes þai fonde ferli fale And solde þat child for mechel au
te And to þe Sarasins him be-tau
te. (505–08)

Beves is “þe cristene kni
t,” a warrior of God. Much of this long romance is taken up with the hero’s victories against the heathens and includes the abduction followed by the conversion to the Christian faith of his Saracen love-interest, Josiane. It is to get Josiane’s husband, the Saracen king, Yvor, out of the way so that Beves can take her home with him, that he pretends to Yvor that he has visited many countries and met everywhere with peace, except in the realm of Dabilent. Beves reports that the king of Dabilent is 15

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance oppressed by his enemies because Yvor’s brother is that king and Beves knows that Yvor will depart at once to help his brother. Thus the way to Josiane is made clear. The popularity of Sir Beues as a romance about the exploits of a popular English hero is attested to by the survival of the English romance in six manuscripts, the oldest of which – the Auchinleck MS – has 4620 verses. Chaucer appears to have modelled the meter of one of the Canterbury Tales, Sir Thopas, on the opening 474 verses of Sir Beues which are in tail-rhyme strophes (aabaab or aabcbc). Beves is throughout presented as a devout Christian knight and champion of the faith. Early in the tale, for instance, after the evil mother of the hero has her old husband murdered and her son, Beves, sold into slavery, he refuses to become a heathen and believe in Apolyn for King Ermin of Armenia who receives Beves from Saracen slave-traders. Shortly thereafter, when Ermin’s daughter, Josiane, falls in love with Beves, he only reciprocates her affection after she agrees to adopt the Christian faith: “. . . ich will ri
t now to mede Min false godes al for-sake And cristendom for þe loue take!” (1194–96)

Numerous obstacles complicate the union of Beves and Josiane, not the least of which is her marriage to Yvor and, well before that, the hero’s seven-year imprisonment by one of her other Saracen suitors (Brademond) after Beves kills a Saracen priest in Damascus where a sacrifice had just been made to the god Mahoun by a large group of pagan worshippers. The matter-of-fact tone of the narrator’s description of this massacre suggests that he views Beves as merely doing the work of a crusader knight: For him wente sire Beuoun, Til com to Dames toun; Aboute þe time of middai Out of a mameri a sai Sarasins come gret foisoun, Þat hadde anoured here Mahoun. Beues of is palfrei ali
te And ran to her mameri ful ri
te And slou
here prest, þat þer was in, And rew here godes in þe fen And lou
hem alle þer to scorn. (1347–57)

The Saracen presence in these popular medieval English romances reflects a real historical threat and sometimes reminds us, at a lower level, of the religious passion – and bigotry – of the European West. The Crusades failed in accomplishing the aim of occupation of the East by the Christian West, but its cultural effects were profound. By bringing the West into contact with something different from itself and by enlarging geographical horizons, the Crusades expanded the vision of Western Europe. A concomitant of the 16

Introduction: Romance and the Orient Crusades was the growth of Christian missions which directly affected the study of Oriental languages. Raymond Lull, in 1311, prevailed upon the Council of Vienne to open six schools of Oriental languages in Europe. This helped, in part, to insure that not only the oral but also the written transmission of new Eastern literary texts to Europe from the East would find an audience, though such was not Lull’s immediate intention.

Pilgrimage Crusading and pilgrimage had a way of meeting. War and pilgrimage were, indeed, associated features of crusading.12 In a kind of inversion, pilgrimages could turn into mini-crusades, as, for instance, when European pilgrims to the Holy Land would be called upon to bear arms in the defence of Christian settlements in the East that came under attack from Moslems (Riley-Smith, 79). It is unclear whether those who travelled under the leadership of Sigurd of Norway through England, France, Spain, and on into Acre during 1107 were pilgrims or crusaders; in Spain, they fought the Moors and, in Acre, they assisted Baldwin I in taking the city of Sidon (Riley-Smith, 90). The lines between crusading and pilgrimage crossed in the order of the Knights Templar, who, though technically not crusaders, were devoted to the holy war and had their origins in a religious community dedicated to the defense of the pilgrim roads to Jerusalem. Their founder, Hugh of Payns, himself led a crusade in 1128 that unsuccessfully attacked Damascus. The pilgrim’s interest in Jerusalem was the sites associated with the life of Christ and mentioned in the Gospels: Constantius’s basilica near Golgotha, the rock of the Ascension in Gethsemane, the church of the Holy Sepulcher (which by the fifth century contained the chalice of the Last Supper), and the church on Mount Sion (which in the sixth century housed the crown of thorns and the lance that pierced Christ’s side [Barber, 16]). St. Jerome in particular considered it an act of faith for a man to pray where Christ walked and suffered and where the relics of his life were still to be found. Pilgrimages were sometimes conceived as the means to insure an answer to particular prayers, as in the opening of the French and Spanish versions of Floris and Blaunchefleur, where a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostela is undertaken to insure the pregnancy of the Christian woman who becomes the mother of Blaunchefleur. The medieval church adopted the custom of pilgrimage from the ancient church and associated the journeys with the expiation of sins and pardon for wrong. Pilgrimage became an act of obedience for a penitent who, according to medieval books of penance (Poenitentialia) was

12 It was the “goal of Jerusalem that made the crusade a pilgrimage,” Jonathan Riley-Smith reminds

us (7).

17

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance bound by a bishop or priest to undertake a pilgrimage to offer his prayers at the tombs of saints or particular churches. By the eleventh century indulgences attached themselves to pilgrimages whereby remission of part of the penance imposed in confession could be obtained by visiting certain pilgrimage sites. Among the earliest of the English pilgrims was the AngloSaxon bishop Willibald who reached Jerusalem in 724 after travels through Naples, Syracuse, Ephesus, Asia Minor, and Damascus. As the number of pilgrims making pilgrimages in the Middle Ages grew, fraternities arose to serve their needs, like the order of St. John that ran a hospital in Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta, other orders such as the Knights Templar, mentioned earlier, and many others established to assist pilgrims in Acre, Cyprus, Rhodes, as well as other places in the East. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land created a constant flow of international travellers: eastern and western Christians all worshipped at the same sites and Moslems too visited their holy shrines in Jerusalem (though Mecca ultimately became the site of greatest significance for pilgrims of Islamic faith, as all Moslems are required to visit Mecca at least once in their lifetime). When the crusader states fell in 1291, making Jerusalem difficult of access, pilgrimages to Rome, Santiago, Canterbury, and other holy places became more popular. It is estimated that 200,000 to 500,000 pilgrims a year travelled the route to Santiago (Ohler, 187). John Mandeville’s Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages, recounts in its first part the pilgrimage routes from Europe to Palestine. “All good Christians,” Mandeville writes, need to make the “holy viage” to “chacen out alle the mysbeleuyng men” (Mandeville’s Travels, 2). Before he begins “To teche . . . the weye out of Englond,” Mandeville explains his motives for writing his book: And for als moche as it is longe tyme passed that ther was no generalle passage ne vyage ouer the see, and many men desiren for to here speke of the Holy Lond and han thereof gret solace and comfort, I John Maundevylle knyght, alle be it I be not worthi, that was born in Englond in the town of Seynt Albones, and passed the see in the yeer of oure lord Ihesu Crist m.ccc. and xxii. in the day of Seynt Michelle; and hiderto haue ben long tyme ouer the see and haue seyn and gon thorgh manye dyuerse londes and many prouynces and kyngdomes and iles; and haue passed thorghout Turkye, Ermonye the Litylle and the Grete, thorgh Tartarye, Percye, Surrye, Arabye, Egypt the High and the Lowe, thorgh Lybye, Caldee, and a gret partie of Ethiope, thorgh Amazoyne, Inde the Lasse and the More a gret partie, and thorghout many othere iles that ben abouten Inde where dwellen many dyuerse folk and of dyuerse maneres and lawes and of dyuerse schappes of men; of whiche londes and iles I schalle speke more pleynly hereafter. And I schalle devise you sum partie of thinges that there ben, whan tyme schalle ben after it may best come to my mynde, and specyally for hem that wille and are in purpos for to visite the holy citee of Ierusalem and the holy places that are theraboute. And I schalle telle the weye that thei schulle holden thider, for I haue often tymes passed and ryden that way with gode companye of many lordes, God be thonked. (Travels, 3) 18

Introduction: Romance and the Orient Thus, Mandeville’s book was conceived of primarily as a guide to the Holy Land for pilgrims planning to visit the important pilgrimage sites there. Mandeville claims to have seen the spear that pierced Christ’s side with his own eyes and to have examined the crown of thorns at Constantinople (Travels, 10, 139). He discusses Egypt (a major attraction for pilgrims taking the southern route to go up through Sinai), Syria, as well as the customs and manners of the Saracens. He claims first-hand knowledge of Mamluk Egypt, for he says he gave long service at the sultan’s court in Babylon, the seat of Saracen rule. Moreover, he recounts that the sultan “would have married me full highly to a great prince’s daughter, if I would have forsaken my law and my belief” (Travels, 24). Besides Babylon, Mandeville identifies Mecca and Carthage (“that Dydo that was Eneas wif founded, the whiche Eneas was of the cyte of Troye and after was kyng of Itaylle” (Travels, 30). In chapter 8, he describes a shorter pilgrimage route that leads by sea from Italy with stopovers in Sicily, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Babylon. Like the pilgrims Chaucer speaks of in the Canterbury Tales who are stirred in springtime “to seken straunge strondes” and “ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes” (General Prologue, 13, 14), John Mandeville, from the very outset of his Travels, is clearly curious about the “many dyuerse londes” that he travelled through and about the “many dyuerse folk” and “dyuerse maneres and lawes and . . . dyuerse schappes of men” that he encountered (see quotation above). Moreover, by the end of his travels, Mandeville’s sense of cultural diversity appears to have moved toward something like religious toleration: “alle be it that there ben many dyuerse lawes in the world, yet I trowe that God loueth alweys hem that louen Him and seruen Him mekely in trouth” (Travels, 214).

Trade Aziz Atiya asserts, “the birth of the economic revolution of the Middle Ages took place, not in the static agrarian feudal society of Western Europe, but rather in the dynamism of trade and industry inherent in most of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean” (Atiya, 162). The Byzantine Empire had in Constantinople a metropolis which in the high Middle Ages was a meeting place for land and sea routes of the Far, Middle, and Near East as well as a crossroads for Northern and Western Europe. On sale in the markets of Constantinople were slaves from Asia, Africa, and the Slavic countries; porcelain from China; spices and jewels from India; ivory and ebony from Africa; cotton and grain from Egypt; and furs from Russia.13 Trade in the

13 In a Plenary Lecture delivered by the art historian, John Osborne, at the 36th International

Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Osborne argued that artistic evidence

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Islamic world was another powerful commercial force in the East. The deserts of Islamic civilization stretching in the south from the Sahara and Nubian deserts of North Africa to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and Persia and in the north from the Volga to eastern Turkestan were bordered by the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caspian waterways on one side and by the Indian Ocean on the other. The main trade routes by sea went from Alexandria to Tunisia to Sicily and Spain or by way of Sardinia and the Balearic islands through the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, Seville, and Lisbon. Land routes linked Cairo, Tunis, Morocco, Ghana and the Niger. There were also sea routes to Syria and caravan routes to Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo and Baghdad. Moslem international trade was facilitated by abundant gold and silver money and the development of a credit system (Lewis, Nomads, 37). “Trade with the world of black Africa, where gold, slaves, and ivory were exchanged for salt and a variety of trinkets and trade goods,” in particular, produced a favorable balance of trade for Islamic merchants (Lewis, 39). Arab ascendancy in the world of commerce was undisputed until the advent of the Normans in Italy during the second half of the eleventh century (Atiya, 169). The arrival of the Normans in southern Italy together with the reopening of the route to the East by the First Crusaders gave birth to an East-West, Moslem-Christian interchange in the Mediterranean which changed the course of medieval commerce. As a consequence of the Crusades “merchants from Europe,” Atiya observes, “accompanied the various expeditions or followed in their steps and opened up fresh markets in every newly conquered seaport in the Levant” (Atiya, 170). Among Campanian ports, Amalfi had the geographical advantage of being the closest to the Islamic world and to the main east-west sea routes. By the eleventh century Amalfitans had well-established trading with the Arabs. Prices were generally quoted in tari, the local term for Fatimid quarter-dinars, suggesting the importance of trade with the East. In the twelfth century Amalfitan trading colonies were found all over southern Italy. Venetian trade in the Eastern Mediterranean as early as the eleventh century included expensive commodities such as spices from Egypt, silk fabric from Byzantium as well as industrial raw materials needed in the manufacture of Italian glass. The treasury of San Marco contains several tenth-century Fatimid objects, rock-crystal ewers and censers of ornate metalwork (Amalfi was even better positioned than Venice to import such items).

suggests that along with silks imported to Rome from Byzantium came some of their painters (Osborne, May 4, 2001). As early as the third quarter of the ninth century, Eastern influence is seen in Roman murals, such as those found in the Church of San Clemente. These are essentially “Byzantine,” resembling murals being painted in Constantinople at the same time. Roman painting in this period, Osborne maintained, is as Byzantine as that produced at the center of this art in the eastern Mediterranean. It is not the art of Latin Europe represented by Rome and the Carolingian Empire.

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Introduction: Romance and the Orient Besides luxury trade items, there was less glamorous Venetian trading in foodstuffs. Cheese, for example, was an essential source of protein in the diet of travellers, by sea and land (mariners on long-distance voyages, in particular), the poor who almost never ate meat, and the higher ranks of society with a taste for high-quality cheeses imported from farflung places in the eastern Mediterranean (Tucci, 103–45). Coinage tells the story of Venice’s eastern trade with the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, for the money used to transact trade was in the coinage of both traditions: “genuine Islamic coins” and “ ‘saracenate bezants,’ gold coins minted by the crusader kings of Jerusalem” (Stahl, 129). The survival of documents relevant to the business records of Domenico Gradenigo (1185?–1266?) help reconstruct aspects of the life of a representative Venetian merchant nobleman. Members of the thirteenth-century Gradenigo family had extensive real estate within the Rialto and participated in commercial ventures. The Gradenigo of San Giovanni Confessore took part in the crusading ventures of the early thirteenth century. They also took part in commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean; in 1168 Guidoto Gradenigo was “repaid 704 perperi auri veteres pensantes from seven commercial contracts in Constantinople” (Robbert, 29). On the Fourth Crusade in 1202–3, one of the Gradenigo, named Giovanni, served as captain of a galley at Zara and Constantinople. Yet another member of the family, Jacopo Gradenigo, was a counselor to the podestà of Constantinople (in 1205 and in 1207) and held the fief of Gallipoli. Jacopo died in the Crusade of Damietta in August, 1222. Domenico first appears in the records in August 1205, after the Fourth Crusade’s conquest of Constantinople. He is described as undertaking a journey to Alexandria, Egypt on behalf of the wife of Jacoba Mocenigo of Murano who invested “50 lib. den. ven.” (libra denariorum venetialium, equal to 240 Venetian denari coins) to be repaid by Easter 1206 (Robbert, 29). Before the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus, ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Venetians in the empire and the confiscation of their property on March 12, 1171. It is frequently maintained that capitalistic greed and a desire for revenge led Venetians to take the cross on the Fourth Crusade which led to the 1204 conquest of Constantinople. Scholars have long argued that the events of 1171 explain the conquest of Constantinople. Venetians in 1171 had reason to fear their interests would never be secure if Byzantium survived (Ostrogorsky, 413; Vasilliev, 2. 453). Between 1205 and 1213, Domenico Gradenigo made six voyages on business into the Eastern Mediterranean. Later in 1218, 1222, and 1223 he travelled to Constantinople to make various investments. As European trade prospered, trading leagues like the League of Milan, the Hanseatic League, and the Flemish Hansa of London were established, but all of them depended on Venice and Genoa for Eastern commodities. These cities had a virtual monopoly in the Mediterranean with Venice concentrating on Syria and Egypt and Genoa dealing with North Africa and the Black Sea 21

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance colonies of Caffa and Tana. European trade with the East flourished through the fifteenth century, despite the loss of Latin Jerusalem in 1291–92. The rise of Europe as a commercial force in the mid-to-late Middle Ages is referred to as “the romance of medieval commerce” by Aziz Atiya, an idea pertinent to the next chapter (Atiya, 162).

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Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean

2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2, and Gower’s Tale of Constance

T

HE impact of continual and steadily increasing interaction between East and West that occurred during the Middle Ages through travel – whether it be to pilgrimage sites, to the battlefields of Crusades, or to centers of trade – is reflected in the romance literature of the time. This chapter examines Chaucer’s treatment of the legend of Constance, as told in the Canterbury Tales by the Man of Law, and its analogues in Gower and Boccaccio. Though told as a pious romance by the lawyer-narrator, characters and setting combine frequently to produce curious intersections of mercantilism and faith which reflect the historical reality of the Eastern Mediterranean of the Middle Ages, a factor as well in Chaucer’s analogues, but a less pervasive one. My focus on the mercantile dimension of the three narratives, a subject that has received only slight attention, allows a consideration of the differing responses to and representations of the Eastern Islamic world by their three authors. The recent consideration of the Man of Law’s tale and merchants by David Wallace in chapter 7 of his magisterial study, Chaucerian Polity, is concerned with merchants in fourteenth-century England; I am interested in the merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean depicted in Chaucer’s tale (Wallace, 187–90). An unexpected by-product of my examination is the discovery of a greater intertextual connection between Chaucer’s romance and Boccaccio’s tale than has been previously recognized. The tale of Constance, told by both Chaucer and Gower, and its distant analogue about Gostanza, in Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2, belong to that large group of hagiographical romances about female piety and suffering that emphasize the virtues of patience and fortitude. Among the Canterbury Tales the tale of Patient Griselda, told by the pilgrim Clerk, also belongs to this category of romance along with such other Middle English romances as Emare, Le Bone Florence of Rome, and the King of Tars. It is generally thought that Chaucer knew Gower’s version of Constance’s legend; other romances about beleaguered heroines in Middle English written in the latter half of the four23

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance teenth century (like the romance of Emare and the King of Tars) may have been known to Chaucer as well. The presence of two romances about pathetic heroines in the Canterbury Tales suggests that Chaucer was catering to contemporary taste for such romances. Indeed, the late medieval, post-Chaucer Le Bone Florence of Rome attests to the enduring public interest in romances about unfortunate heroines. George Keiser has even speculated that Chaucer’s “composition of the Legend of Good Women may have been inspired in part by a desire to explore the pathetic mode . . .” (Keiser, 123). In the basic Constance story there is an innocent Christian maiden who flees from an unnatural father or who is banished by him. After arriving at a distant and foreign land where she marries its ruler, she falls victim to false accusation, usually of having borne a monstrous child, and again suffers banishment, this time along with her child or children. The plot involves other trials, mostly attacks on her chastity by would-be seducers, all of which she evades through prayer and divine intervention. In the end the heroine is always reunited with her husband and sometimes her father as well. Romances about saintly heroines had enormous appeal in their own day but have tended to be passed over by modern readers. Even Chaucer scholars have written less about his religious narratives than about those that deal with themes of love and chivalry or are found among the comic fabliaux. The publication of Chaucer’s Religious Tales (Benson and Robertson, eds.), a collection of essays ranging over such critical issues as genre, pathos, Christian prayer, and spiritual heroism has done much to redress the imbalance. Also significant in redirecting attention to these tales is V. A. Kolve’s lengthy study of The Man of Law’s Tale in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (chapter 7) in which Kolve argues that Chaucer was attracted to the legend of Constance “because it not only concerned a chapter in the history of his own nation’s conversion to Christianity, but constituted part of an even larger true history – the spreading of the faith” (Kolve, 299). His exhaustive examination of the iconography of the Ship of the Church takes as its points of departure the facts that the image of the boat floating upon water in this tale is both memorable and powerful and that Chaucer’s geography “is episodic in the extreme, moving restlessly from Rome to Syria, Syria to Northumbria, Northumbria to the coast of Spain, Spain to Rome, Rome to England, England to Rome” (Kolve, 316). Kolve’s observations are important, and not merely for his argument that Chaucer transforms these concrete images into something like an allegory of personal and global salvation; for the principal way Chaucer’s version of the Constance story is unlike Gower’s is that it begins with merchants (whose activities in Rome are detailed in three stanzas invented by Chaucer [Man of Law’s Tale, lines 134–54]). Though she stresses Chaucer’s concern with the tale as pious legend, Helen Cooper seems to be responding to its mercantile dimension when she observes about the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale that the lawyer “seems to think of story material as a limited commodity, which Chaucer has already exhausted,” the replenishment for which “he is reliant . . . on a merchant” 24

Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 124). One might add that the words spoken here by the lawyer contain a pun on “thrifty” which suggests the profit motive: “I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn/That Chaucer. . . . Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan” (46–49).1 The tale, if he had one, could be “thrifty” in the moral sense of “worthy of being recalled to mind” or simply “worthwhile,” “profitable” in the competitive sense of making him the winning pilgrim who gets his meal paid for by the others. There are still other suggestions of the mercantile in the Introduction, such as the comparison of lost time and lost goods (25–29), and the use of the proverbial expression, “Beheste is dette” (41), which may remind the reader of the lawyer’s right to plead cases of debt in the Court of Common Pleas.2 Debt is a business difficulty which Chaucer himself probably had in mind; Thomas Pynchebek, on whom the Man of Law may be modelled, had the poet arrested for debt on June 4, 1388: Ricardus . . . Precepimus tibi . . . quod capias Johannem Wodhere . . . et Galfridum Chauucer esquier ubicumque inventi fuerint in balliva tua et eos salvos custodias . . . Teste Pynchebek apud Westmonasteruem iiii die Junii Anno regni nostri undecimo.3

If the fact of Chaucer’s problem with debt is added to an interesting idea recently put forth by Peter Beidler the result is a partial explanation of the vexing praise of wealth in the section of the Introduction known as the Prologue. Alfred David was among the first critics to complain about it, finding the praise of wealth contradictory in view of Custance’s material deprivation (David, 127). In a 1995 article, Beidler has argued that the Prologue is the unrevised text actually read to a group of merchants by Chaucer in his own persona for the specific purpose of earning a fee (a variation on his Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse. [Beidler, 1–15]). Chaucer, according to this argument, praises the wealthy to ingratiate himself with those from whom he wishes patronage: “Chaucer praises the wealthy as happy, prudent, noble folks who have won in the game of commerce” (Beidler, 7). Wealth is the cure for poverty (perhaps Chaucer’s). The speculation is intriguing, particularly if one also recalls that besides having first-hand money difficulties Chaucer also had ease of access to the merchant community. He was a Customs Officer who had risen to be Controller of Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Hides in London (1374) and Controller of Petty Customs (1382).4 1 2

3

4

The word “thrifty” is repeated in the Epilogue to the tale at line 1165. Patricia Eberle’s explanatory notes in Benson’s edition of Chaucer attribute the comparison to Seneca the Younger and observe the proverb’s appropriateness in the light of the Sergeant of Law’s “exclusive right” to plead such cases (Benson, 855). J. M. Manly pointed out the similarities between the Man of Law and Thomas Pynchebek, who had been a Serjeant-at-Law and had served as Justice in Assize between 1376 and 1388, in which year he issued the writ for Chaucer’s arrest (Some New Light on Chaucer). While Beidler’s article puts the emphasis on the mercantile in an interesting way, it does not, however, provide an answer to David’s complaint about the Prologue’s praise of wealth being a

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Manuscript evidence also seems to invite us to think about Chaucer’s addition of the mercantile dimension to his version of the Constance tale. Though it is not the case in the Ellesmere sequence, Fragment II is most usually followed by the Squire’s Tale, with its setting in the Mongol East, and the Merchant’s Tale. The Man of Law’s Epilogue (or Endlink) suggests that the Shipman’s Tale, with its workaholic merchant husband married to the funloving, unfaithful wife, would follow and probably be told by the Wife of Bath.5 The Epilogue appears in 35 manuscripts and is omitted from 22, “including the Hengwrt, the Ellesmere, and all those with the ‘Ellesmere’ arrangement” (Benson, 862). The Epilogue, with its echo of “thrifty tale” (1165) from line 46 of the Introduction, may well have been composed at the same time. I propose that the addition of a pattern of mercantile details by Chaucer into his telling of the tale invites a consideration of these related religious narratives with particular attention to the commercial context of the Mediterranean world in which the heroine is placed. It is helpful to recall that in Chaucer’s tale, The account of merchants, returning to Syria from Rome, about the beauty and goodness of Custance, daughter of the Emperor of Rome, causes the Sultan of Syria to want to marry her, sight unseen. A follower of Mohammed, he is baptized a Christian in order to make marriage possible. The Pope agrees to Custance’s marriage to the Sultan because the conversion of Moslems will enlarge the kingdom of Christianity. The Sultan’s mother, deeply grieved by her son’s conversion, has him murdered and Custance cast adrift on the seas. She drifts to the shores of Northumbria where, after a series of complex events, she marries the pagan king, Alla, whom she converts to Christianity. Angry at her son, Alla’s mother, Donegild, plots to have Custance and her new infant son committed to the sea. Eventually they drift to the Mediterranean and arrive back to Rome where a reunion of Alla, Custance, and their son, Maurice, occurs as does a reunion with the Emperor of Rome, Custance’s father.

Both the length and enormous detail of Chaucer’s romance suggest a background in history but the narrative is only vaguely based on historical figures. The most prominent lived in the sixth century A.D. The Emperor (who in

5

contradiction in terms of Custance except to conclude that Chaucer never revised or cancelled a supposed poetry-reading piece. In “The Development of the Wife of Bath,” Robert A. Pratt argues that Chaucer’s “Epilogue originally introduced the Wife of Bath; and that she originally told the tale of adultery now assigned to the Shipman” (46). He had earlier made a similar point in “The Order of the Canterbury Tales”: “The Endlink serves perfectly . . . to introduce the narrative of the merchant’s wife and the monk, that is, the Shipman’s Tale. . . . Scholars have long recognized the ‘Shipman’s Tale’ was originally written for a woman, the Wife of Bath . . .” (1154). See also William W. Lawrence’s “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale.” He argues that the original teller of the Shipman’s Tale was a woman – probably the Wife of Bath – and that the discrepancy in pronouns was not corrected when Chaucer transferred the tale to the shipman.

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Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean Chaucer’s source, Nicholas Trivet’s Chronicle, is called Thiberie Constantin) is based on Tiberius II, who was not a ruler of Rome but of Constantinople, to which the Empire’s capital had moved. Tiberius II was followed to the throne by Maurice of Cappadocia in 582 A.D., but Maurice was not a grandson as in Chaucer’s romance; he was the husband of his daughter who was named “Constantina.” Constantina was not the wife of Alla of Northumbria. * Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Gower wrote in the century and a half before the Latin West moved out into the new world in a period of discovery which began with Columbus and the other great Western European mariners. During this period and in the centuries immediately preceding, the Islamic world and the Latin West developed a complex relationship. At a time when Moslem and Byzantine power approached its height in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Europe was in turmoil. During the ninth and tenth centuries, England, for example, endured several Danish invasions alternating with Anglo-Saxon kings, while, at the same time, Moslems and Byzantines competed over southern Italy. Ultimately both England and southern Italy ended up under Norman rule: William of Normandy conquered England in 1066 and the Guiscard family ruled southern Italy by the mid-eleventh century. Amid such political turmoil improvements in agrarian technology were occurring at the same time and were producing surpluses that stimulated urban life and revived trade. Coincidentally invasions ceased, travel became easier, and commerce extended to non-European countries. Crusades to the Holy Land and the reconquest of Spain from the Moslems were part of these global changes. In the course of the Crusades the Latin West conquered most of Moslem Iberia, opened the Straits of Gibraltar to northern European trade, and gained the upper hand in the world of Mediterranean shipping. From the year 1000 onwards, Moslem fleets had blocked maritime trade between the Mediterranean and the north Atlantic waters by way of the Straits of Gibraltar, but in Italy during the same period, Venice, Amalfi, and Naples had extensive commercial ties with Byzantium and Moslem Mediterranean seaports, including those in Sicily (Lewis, The Nomads, 27–47, 113–37). Italians had been engaged as traders on the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard before the Crusades and, although the Latin East had been isolated in the twelfth century, western merchants from Italian ports had established privileges there. They had rights of entry and exit from certain ports as well as property which included administrative buildings, quarters, and public baths. Such privileges became especially important after the last quarter of the twelfth century when the spice trade routes from India and the Far East began to by-pass Egypt and enter Syria. That by the 1190s Venetians had a bajulus Venetorum in tota Syria in Acre, the Pisans and Genoans two consuls for Syria in residence there, and that by 1248 Pisans consolidated power in one 27

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance consul communis Pisanorum Accon et totus Syriae are facts indicating that these western states enjoyed commercial advantages in the East of great significance (Riley-Smith, 190).6 As more and more Latin settlers with trade interests were integrated into the commercial life of the Moslem East and Byzantium, “the histories of east Mediterranean trade and east Mediterranean settlement and crusading became virtually indistinguishable” (Riley-Smith, 187). Syria is named in the very first line of the Man of Law’s Tale. Chaucer’s concreteness about the place stands out in a tale where he has called attention to the absence in his source of a place name in the concluding attempted rape scene and has dropped the name of Bishop Lucius of Bangor (which Gower includes) from an earlier episode. In Gower’s version the merchants (characterized early on as being from “Barbarie” [599])7 are converted by Constance and so must have been pagan; there is nothing, however, to suggest Chaucer’s merchants need be pagan. The merchants in the Man of Law’s Tale are specifically said from the very outset of his tale to travel from Syria – no talk of conversion here. Instead they have been going about their business in Rome and just happen to share their news about Custance’s excellence to the Sultan on their return home. A rather impulsive sort, the Sultan converts on his own in order to marry her (sight unseen). Chaucer’s merchants could easily be among those western Christians who live in Syria engaging in East-West trade. Venetians, in particular, would be very likely. Four or five years before the First Crusade, the commercial treaty Venice made with Alexius, the Emperor of Constantinople, expressly mentioned Laodicea, on the coast of Syria, as well as Antioch and the principal seaports of Asia Minor. By the end of the First Crusade, Venetians had built a church in honor of their patron, Saint Mark, in the crusaders’ settlement in Syria (F. C. Hodgson, The Early History of Venice, 241–42). It has, moreover, been observed that while Venice did not play an active part in the early crusades, her trading vessels were “constantly sailing to and from Syrian ports” and frequently carrying pilgrims to the Holy Land besides “the usual merchandise” (F. C. Hodgson, 241). Commercial concerns of the West in the East might be said to have posed a greater danger to Christendom than did the Moslems. The crusade against the Moors in the first decade of the fourteenth century by the kings of Castile and Aragon, for example, impeded the passage to the East, and, as a consequence, crusading became stalemated there despite authorizations for preaching and grants of money (Riley-Smith, 221). The attempted rape at the end of the Constance story is in Gower firmly placed in “Spaigne” (1088) under the 6

7

It is unsurprising, therefore, that in a recent lecture, Jaroslav Folda should have spoken of Western training as discernible in the paintings of Acre of the 1250s, possibly the work of Venetian painters who were crusaders (Folda, April 6, 2001). See his important study, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187. The study of painting in the lands of the Crusaders has deepened with the discovery of Christian painting in the Islamic East like the frescoes of Mar Musa in the Syrian hinterland, unconquered by Crusaders in a place that was not ruled by Christians. See the study by Erica Dodd, The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi. All quotations from Gower’s Tale of Constance are taken from Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (108–36). Line references are noted parenthetically within the body of the text.

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Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean castle walls of a “hethen Amirall” (1090), precisely this arena of religious-economic conflict. Chaucer, on the other hand, in his version of the episode, while speaking of “an hethen castel” (904) and implying that Custance’s attacker, the lord’s steward, is a Moorish convert who has abjured the Christian faith (“A theef, that hadde reneyed our creance” [915]), prefers not to get any more specific. In fact, in introducing the scene at the castle, he calls attention to the omission (“Of which the name in my text noght I fynde” [905]). John of Gaunt’s marriage to Costanza (Constance), heiress of Castile and Leon, in 1371, might have necessitated that Chaucer be careful about the feelings of his patron’s wife, particularly if one were to assume an early rather than a late date of composition for The Man of Law’s Tale.8 Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2 and Gower’s Tale of Constance are analogues – while the English tales are very close, Boccaccio’s is more distant. All have Italian settings that reach into the Moslem world. In the light of the growing long-term commercial ties between the Latin West, especially Italy, and the nearby Islamic world which began in the early Middle Ages and reached their height during the lifetimes of Chaucer, Gower, and Boccaccio, readers should be, perhaps, less surprised than they have been by the presence of merchants in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. At the very outset of his tale, Chaucer’s lawyer describes the rich chapmen from Syria as “sadde” (135) – the same word Shakespeare reserves for his merchant, Antonio, who opens The Merchant of Venice with the familiar anxious sigh of the businessman, “I know not why I am so sad” (I, i, 1). None of the basic student editions of the Canterbury Tales, however, translates “sadde” in Chaucer as Shakespeare does. The Riverside Chaucer glosses the word as “trustworthy;” so does Robert A. Pratt’s 1974 edition of the tales (The Tales of Canterbury, 114). John Fisher offers “serious” in his gloss to the line (The Complete Poetry and Prose, 85). Still, in the light of the Prologue’s discussion of poverty, which culminates in merchants who are rich, it seems that other overtones of the word sadde may be involved. If not exactly the anxiety of Shakespeare’s Antonio is at work, a lingering suggestion of Old English saed, meaning “sated,” “full,” can be felt here. It would be like Chaucer to play with the ironies created in the paradox of the satiety of rich merchants and their fear, nonetheless, of poverty. The rich, clear-headed merchant of Chaucer’s comic Shipman’s Tale – a tale involved in the vexed 8

It has been suggested that the tale is an early work composed independently of the other Canterbury Tales (W. W. Skeat, ed. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, III, 382; W. P. Ker, Essays on Medieval Literature, 96–7; G. H. Cowling, “A Note on Chaucer’s Stanza,” 317; Nevill Coghill and Christopher Tolkien, eds. The Man of Law’s Tale, 41). Cowling, who thought it might have been written in 1372 as a compliment to John of Gaunt’s wife, Constanza of Castile, hedged his bets, however: “Possibly it was begun early, left unfinished, and completed for The Canterbury Tales.” Most scholars assume a date of composition around 1390. The first full argument for a later date appeared in John S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works, 172–88. Robert Lewis has argued that Chaucer worked simultaneously on his translation of Pope Innocent III’s De miseria and the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale during the period 1390 to 1395 (De miseria condicionis humane, ed. and trans. Robert E. Lewis, 16–31).

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance manuscript debates surrounding the Epilogue to the Man of Law’s tale9 – has no doubt about how intimately his identity is linked with money: “But o’thyng is ye knowe it wel ynough,/ Of chapmen, that hir monie is hir plogh,/ We may creaunce whil we have a name” (1477–80). Might not the Man of Law’s puzzling discourse on the fearfulness of poverty in the Prologue to his tale, beginning, “O hateful harm, condicion of poverte” (99), arise out of the same sort of business anxieties? The apostrophe to Poverty leads up to “riche marchauntz” (122) who, after all, toil to avoid it. Though none of the three tales to be examined make explicit or extended use, thematic or otherwise, of this commercial setting, implicit in the Chaucerian tale is surely the idea that the travels of Custance, compared to those of the Syrian merchants and possibly even to the pilgrimage of the Man of Law (as well as of other Canterbury pilgrims), yield spiritual, not material profits, both for herself and for those whose inner lives she affects. Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale immediately enters the mercantile world of the Mediterranean where profits depend on travel, and travel takes time. The urban world of this tale is one in which the Moslem city is not merely serving as a market center for itself and other cities of the Islamic world but emerging as a source of goods for the world beyond its borders, to which it is linked by maritime and terrestrial routes. Merchants, we are told in the Prologue to the tale, gain their riches by travel on land and sea: “Ye seken lond and see for yowre wynnynges” (127). Also in this Prologue, the lawyer gives the source of his tale as one of those “fadres of tidynges/And tales” (129–30), a merchant transmitter of stories who had been away on business travels for several years: I were right now of tales desolaat, Nere that a marchant, goon is many a yeere, Me taughte a tale, whiche that ye shal heere. (131–33)

Even the Man of Law’s Tale proper opens with a description of a group of merchants in Syria. They export spices and luxurious satin and gold fabrics to faraway places: In Surrye whilom dwelte a compaignye Of chapmen riche, and therto sadde and trewe, That wyde-where senten hir spicerye, Clothes of gold, and satyns riche of hewe. (133–36)

The lawyer tells us their goods were so appealing that everyone wanted to trade with them: “Hir chaffare was so thrifty and so newe/That every wight hath deyntee to chaffare/With hem, and eek to sellen hem hire ware” (138–40). It was, therefore, probably more for business than for pleasure that 9

It is likely that the Epilogue was originally intended to introduce what is now known as The Shipman’s Tale. The unidentified speaker who interrupts the Parson speaks of a joly body, words which are used as well at line 1613 of The Shipman’s Tale where they suggest a female narrator, probably the Wife of Bath. Cf. note 5 above.

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Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean this company of merchants travelled from Syria to Rome where they stayed long enough to hear reports of the extraordinary qualities of the daughter of the Emperor of Rome. Indeed, the accounts are said to have come over and over again for days: Sojourned han thise merchantz in that toun, A certein tyme, as fil to hire plesance. And so bifel that th’excellent renoun Of the Emperoures doghter, dame Custance, Reported was, with every circunstance, Unto this Surryen marchantz in swiche wyse, Fro day to day, as I shal yow devyse. (148–54)

The lawyer stresses time; merchants are gone “many a yeere” to buy and sell their wares. As a consequence, they are rich not merely in rare spices and fabrics but in stories, for they live in places long enough to speak with people and learn their languages and traditional tales. The bags of merchants bulge with their winnings not merely in terms of the gamble of trade, which the lawyer likens to the risky business of dice-throwing – “Youre bagges been nat feld with ambes as/But with sys cynk, that renneth for youre chaunce” (124–25) – but also in terms of collections of stories. This turns out to be a happy circumstance for the Man of Law, who thus has a chance to be a “winner” himself as a result of learning a tale drawn from one such merchant’s bag of winnings. As the host, Harry Bailly, reminds him in the Introduction, the lawyer has entered into a competition for a prize to be awarded to the best tale-teller: Telle us a tale anon, as forward is. Ye been submytted, thurgh youre free assent, To stonden in this cas at my juggement. (34–6)

The merchants from Syria who pass on the tale to the Man of Law are clearly calculating businessmen who are in the habit of verifying their information. They make a point of seeing Custance with their own eyes. But mostly the merchants tend to their business affairs in Rome: Thise marchantz han doon fraught hir shippes newe, And whan they han this blisful mayden sayn, Hoom to Surrye been they went ful fayn, And doon hir nedes as they han doon yoore, And lyven in wele. . . . (171–75)

The Sultan of Syria, we are told, was on good terms with these merchants and was in the habit of visiting them, when they returned from their travels, to learn news of farflung places – a reminder of the importance of merchants to the medieval world as transmitters and communicators at a time when few had access to the world beyond their immediate surroundings: 31

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Now fil it that thise marchantz stode in grace Of hym that was the Sowdan of Surrye; For whan they came from any strange place, He wolde, of his benigne curteisye, Make hem good chiere, and bisily espye Tidynges of sondry regnes, for to leere The wondres that they myghte seen or heere. (176–82)

The account of the exceptional qualities of Custance qualified as the “big news” from Rome (“Amonges othere thynges specially,/ Thise marchantz han hym toold of dame Custance” [183–84]) and inflames the Sultan to know her. Here there is a reversal of western categories – normally it is the East that is associated with the marvelous. In a recent article, Kathryn Lynch takes a view of commerce in the tale more metaphoric than historic. The East is to be seen broadly “as a symbolic location” associated with “extreme openness” that has an economic valence extending to verbal exchange. Against this is juxtaposed the western, “binary quality” of the lawyer’s tale with its emphasis on the conflict between “opposing religious ‘laws’ ” (Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy,” 410).10 Religious difference between Christian Rome and Moslem Syria is addressed directly by Chaucer in the matter of the Sultan’s desire for marriage; he has the lawyer-narrator directly say that it will ultimately cause his death: “he for love sholde han his deeth, allas!” (193). The advisors of the Sultan point out the “diversitee” (220) between Christian and Moslem law as an insurmountable impediment to marriage: Thanne saw they therinne swich difficultee By wey of reson, for to speke al playn, By cause that ther was swich diversitee Bitwene hir bothe lawes, that they sayn They trowe that no “Cristen prince wolde fayn Wedden his child under oure lawe sweete That us was taught by Mahoun, our prophete.” (218–24)

The solution in the tale is the conversion to Christianity of the Moslem sultan and all the members of his court by international arrangement that is negotiated by the Pope himself. The narrator sympathizes with Custance for, among other things, having to travel to the pagan world:

10 From this contrast between Eastern openness and western narrowness emerges what she considers

Chaucer’s main concern: “to use cultural difference as a way of talking about large issues of freedom and constraint in storytelling” (Lynch, 410). Cf. Schibanoff who, on the other hand, argues for “the unique congruity” that Chaucer establishes between Syrians and Romans (78). (I suggest that the most probable explanation for the perceived congruity is factual: the Syrian merchants mentioned at the beginning of the tale are probably Italian traders living in Syria). Schildgen, however, sees “rigid lines. . . between Islam and Christianity” (49).

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Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean Allas, what wonder is it thogh she wepte, That shal be sent to strange nacioun Fro freendes that so tendrely hire kepte. (267–69)

Speaking for herself, Custance reveals how upset she is about entering a non-Christian realm: “Allas, unto the Barbre nacioun I moste anoon, syn that it is youre wille; But Crist, that starf for our redempcioun So yeve me grace his heestes to fulfille!” (281–84)

Christian-Moslem tensions are further displayed in the words of the mother of the sultan who wishes to become a convert. Calling the lords of the Moslem court before her, she declares, “Lordes,” quod she, “ye knowen everichon, How that my sone in point is for to lete The hooly lawes of our Alkaron, Yeven by Goddes message Makomete. But oon avow to grete God I heete, The lyf shal rather out of my body sterte Or Makometes lawe out of myn herte!” (330–36)

She proposes that they all feign conversion to Christianity and get even at the feast she arranges for the marriage celebration. All Christians attending are slain except Custance, who is set out to sea in a rudderless boat and told to learn how to sail back to Italy. She, in fact, ends up travelling as much as any merchant who spends years gathering goods in farflung places for trade. Custance floats in the Mediterranean for several years: Yere and dayes fleet this creature Thurghout the Sea of Greece unto the Strayte Of Marrok, as it was hir aventure. (463–65)

Finally driven out into the Atlantic Ocean, she is pushed northward to the far reaches of England: She dryveth forth into our occian Thurghout oure wilde see, til atte laste Under an hoold that nempnen I ne kan, Fer in Northhumberlond the wawe hire caste (505–08)

The narrator underscores language difference along with geographical shifts from place to place; Custance’s language – probably vulgar Latin – is different from the language of the “constable of the castel” (512) who discovers her when she is finally swept ashore: “In hir langage mercy she bisoghte/. . . . A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche” (516–19). But the great33

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance est difference is in faith. The constable, his wife, and all the other inhabitants of Northumberland are pagan, all Christians having been conquered by Saracen pirates travelling along the English coast: In al that lond no Cristen dorste route; Alle Cristen folk been fled fro that contree Thurgh payens, that conquereden al aboute The plages of the north, by land and see. To Walys fledde the Cristyanytee Of olde Britons dwellynge in this ile. (540–45)

These pagans may well refer to Vikings who sailed freely along Atlantic shores in the tenth century (Lewis, Nomads, 47). Chaucer, thus, would be suggesting a time-frame in the very early Middle Ages at this point in the tale; whereas, the opening with its merchants trading between Syria and Rome must suggest the Mediterranean of the later Middle Ages. Custance eventually accomplishes the conversion of the constable and his wife and even King Alla of Northumberland when a slanderous accuser of Custance is struck blind and a miraculous voice is heard to say, “Thou hast desclaundred, giltelees,/ The doghter of holy chirche. . . .” (673–74). Marriage to the king follows, as do the evil machinations of a mother-in-law which cause Custance and her son by Alla to be cast out to sea in a rudderless boat – Custance’s second such experience. Once again Custance travels great distances over long stretches of time. “Fyve yeer and moore” (902) she floats in the open seas: Forth gooth hir ship thurghout the narwe mouth Of Jubaltare and Septe, dryvynge ay Somtyme west, and somtyme north and south, And somtyme est, ful many a wery day. (946–49)

The specificity about the exact length of time spent in travel may recall Harry Bailly’s concern with time in his words to the pilgrims in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale. It is only the second day of the journey and the pilgrims have already been wasting time and have delayed getting underway their travels to the shrine in Canterbury. Time wasted on the road to salvation “wol nat come agayn” (29). It is, Harry admonishes the pilgrims, more valuable “than gold in cofre” (26); whereas, “Los of catel may recovered be” (27), time, idled away, is lost forever. The host juxtaposes time to material things and judges time more valuable. Linking it to the process of getting to Canterbury, Harry views time as part of the realm of the spirit and the pilgrims, within this frame of thinking, seem to be getting nowhere. Custance’s travels, by comparison, are productive: she makes converts in both those travels which have been planned, like the trip to Syria to marry the Sultan, and those that were unplanned, like the trip in the rudderless boat which brings her to Northumberland. Even the second experience travelling in a rudderless boat brings her providentially to a series of important reunions. As she drifts, as it 34

Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean were, aimlessly, another traveller by sea happens to encounter Custance’s boat and helps accomplish a return to Rome, reunion with her husband Alla (who has found his own penitential route to Rome) and also with her father, the Emperor of Rome, who leaves his throne to Custance’s son, Mauricius, whose crowning as Emperor is “Maad by the Pope” (1122). Repeating again the mercantile pun from the Introduction, Harry Bailly, in the Epilogue, calls the lawyer’s tale “a thrifty tale for the nones” (1165) and thus ends on a seemingly curious note this tale about the suffering of a pious woman and the working out of Providence. Though it has been suggested that Chaucer may have written this tale as an independent piece, certain intertextual considerations, namely the poet’s use of Innocent III’s De miseria and Nicolas of Lynn’s Kalendarium, have led most recent scholars, including Helen Cooper, to accept 1390 as the date of composition (Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 125).11 It is of interest, however, that Cooper points to two details as a possible link with Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2: its opening on the theme of poverty as well as the parallel between Boccaccio’s Gostanza’s speaking “latino” and Custance’s “Latyn corrupt” (519; Cooper, 128). These details could conceivably have been known to Chaucer much earlier than 1390, as Boccaccio began work on his Decameron in 1348 and finished it in 1353, early enough for Chaucer to have become acquainted with the work in his travels to Italy during 1372 or 1378. Be that as it may, what is of interest in this presumably distant analogue is how much Boccaccio’s depiction of the medieval Mediterranean world resembles Chaucer’s. But unlike Chaucer’s Custance, who is the daughter of the Emperor of Rome, Boccaccio’s Gostanza belongs to southern Italy, a factor which intensifies the Islamic presence in the tale. Though Gostanza herself is not rich or highborn, southern Italy was both prominent and prosperous in antiquity, and as early as the ninth and tenth centuries Byzantium, the Islamic world, and the Latin West intersected there. The island home of Boccaccio’s Gostanza is Lipari, off the northeast coast of Sicily. In the early Middle Ages that island was geographically near powerful eastern powers: the Fatimid Caliphate of North Africa, the Byzantine Empire, and the Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, but most obviously, the city of Palermo, capital of Moslem Sicily. The Arab remains of Palermo are rich. One of the most magnificent Arab-Norman buildings in the world is found in Palermo: Zisa Castle. Its name derives from Arabic (‘al-aziz = noble, splendid) but the building itself was erected during the reign of Guglielmo I (1154–1166). Placed within the royal park, Genoard, it opened on to a garden with a pool fed by an underground water source which flowed from a marble, canal-like conduit system in the first floor Sala della Fontana (Fountain Room). The Islamic style of the mosaics found on the walls of this room (see Plate 1) are

11 See R. E. Lewis’s review of the scholarly positions in his edition of De miseria, 16–31, and see

note 8 above.

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Plate 1. Mosaics from the façade of the Sala della Fontana, Zisa Castle, Palermo, Sicily. 12th century. The work of Arab artisans.

Plate 2. The Morgan Casket. One of the most accomplished Islamic works of art in ivory. Sicily or southern Italy, 11th–12th century.

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance so striking that it is unsurprising that well into the nineteenth century La Zisa was thought to be Arabic (Caconia and Noto, 29). According to a Sicilian legend, an emir built three palaces, one for each of his three daughters: one is La Zisa, another is La Cuba, but there is no trace of a third. Also, one of the most accomplished works of medieval Islamic art in ivory is thought to be Sicilian, the so-called “Morgan casket,” carved in the eleventh or twelfth century (see Plate 2). Recent archaeological excavations at Lipari castle, on the island off the northeast coast of Sicily, named in Boccaccio’s tale, are beginning to turn up ceramic bowls like many from medieval Syria on view in the Islamic collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fifteenth-century bowl decorated in cobalt blue recently unearthed at the site in Lipari appears to be a local work modelled on Islamic ceramics found in twelfth-century Tunisia (another place named in Boccaccio’s tale; Lesnes, 44, figure III, 1). Despite the destruction and death which came with Arab raids during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, the relationship of southern Italy with the Islamic world of the Mediterranean gradually brought increased prosperity (Kreutz, 20). Archibald Lewis observes that in the late tenth century few Islamic traders in the west “went north of Sicily or Naples or traded beyond Tortosa, Saragossa, Toledo, or Lisbon” (Lewis, Nomads, 36), a fact which suggests the Chaucerian picture with merchants moving between Syria and Rome depicts a somewhat later medieval scene than that in Boccaccio’s tale. Important items of trade during this early period were wool and hides from the Maghreb and specialty textiles: “silks woven in Persia, Khorasan, Syria, Al-Andalus, and Sicily, the cottons from northern Iraq, Persia, and Khorasan, and the linens and brocades made in Egypt” (Lewis, Nomads, 38), the sort of textiles that suggest the crafts Gostanza engages in with the Saracen women artisans whom she joins in the first half of Boccaccio’s tale, as we shall shortly see. There is varied evidence that shows traders from Amalfi circulating in the Moslem Mediterranean as early as the tenth century; surely evidence of a longstanding Amalfitan presence is their eleventh-century hostel founded in Moslem Palestine (Lewis, Nomads, 83). In terms of Gostanza’s home on the island of Lipari in Decameron 5, 2, it is of particular interest that “a Byzantine source reported that when the Arabs, moving across Sicily, threatened the island of Lipari, Amalfitans sailed there” (Kreutz, 81). Besides the urban centers in Italy where trade was active like Amalfi and, of course, Venice and Naples (which were, perhaps, more Byzantine in character than Western European), other Italian towns were growing increasingly important in commercial life (Rome and Milan, for example). The emphasis on the importance of money in Decameron 5, 2 arises out of the mercantile ethos of the medieval Mediterranean world. Even though Gostanza and Martuccio are obviously in love, Gostanza’s father, when asked for her hand in marriage, tells Martuccio that he is rejected because of his poverty. For his part, Martuccio decides to leave Lipari and not return until he has made his fortune as a pirate, robbing those who are weak:

38

Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean . . . il qual rispose lui esser povero, e per ciò non volergliele dare. Martuccio, sdegnato di vedersi per povertà rifiutare, con certi suoi amici e parenti giuro di mai in Lipari non tornare se non ricco; e quindi partitosi, corseggiando, cominciò a costeggiare la Barberia, rubando ciascuno che menò poteva di lui. (455–56)12 [. . . he replied that Martuccio was poor and would not let him have her. Martuccio was enraged to find himself refused on account of poverty, and swore with certain of his relatives and friends never to return to Lipari unless he were rich. He went away and coasted the shores of Barbary as a pirate robbing everyone weaker than himself. (318)]13

Evidently very greedy, Martuccio and his men keep robbing even after they had amassed great wealth. As a result, they end up imprisoned after a Saracen attack: Ma non bastandogli d’essere egli e’ suoi compagni in brieve tempo devenuti ricchissimi, mentre che di trasricchire cercavano avvenne che da certi legni di saracini, dopo lunga difesa, co’ suoi compagni fu preso e rubato, e di lor la maggior parte da’ saracini mazzerati e isfondolato il legno, esso, menato a Tunisi, fu messo in prigione e in lunga miseria guardato. (456) [But it was not enough for himself and his companions that they had become very rich in a short time; they wanted to be extremely rich and so it happened that after a long battle certain Saracen ships captured and robbed him and his companions, most of whom were massacred by the Saracens. The ship was sunk, and Martuccio was taken to Tunis. . . . (318)]

By the year 1000 Tunisia was an Arabic-speaking center of the Islamic world (Lewis, Nomads, 29). Arab incursions into southern Italy began as early as the 820s. It has been observed that “the Annales Regni Francorum tell of pirates in the year 820 seizing merchant ships en route from Sardinia to the Italian mainland. Although those particular pirates may or may not have been Moslem, Arabs undoubtedly were among those taking advantage of the anarchic maritime situation in this period” ( Kreutz, 25). Boccaccio’s depiction of Gostanza’s treatment when her boat washes up on the shores of Susa suggests a world wherein Christians and Moslems have learned to live side by side. The Saracen who finds Gostanza speaks Latin to her, recognizing that she is a Christian from her manner of dress: . . . all’abito conosciutala che cristiana era, parlando latino la domandò come fosse che ella quivi in quella barca cosi soletta fosse arrivata. (457) [She realised from the girl’s clothes that she was a Christian, and asked her in Italian how it happened that she arrived there all alone in the boat. (319)] 12 All quotations from the Italian tale refer to Tutte Le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Branca,

vol. 4 (Decameron). Pages cited are indicated parenthetically. 13 The English translation is by Richard Aldington. Parenthetical page references refer to his The

Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance The Saracen woman takes Gostanza to the home of another Saracen woman who, together with others, works at Moslem handicrafts which Gostanza comes to master along with their language: . . . e poi per la mano nella sua casa ne la menò, nella quale ella con alquante altre femine dimorava senza alcun uomo, e tutte di diverse cose lavoravano di lor mano, di seta, di palma, di cuoio diversi lavori faccendo . . . . di tempo, mostrandogliele esse, il lor linguaggio apparò. (458–59) [. . . led by the hand into her house, where she lived with several other women but no men, and where they all worked at handicrafts, some in silk, some in palm and some in leather . . . in a very short time she learned their language from them. (320)]

Perhaps the most striking sign of how much the distance between Italy and the Islamic world has shrunk in the world of Decameron 5, 2 is that Gostanza’s lover, Martuccio Gomito, a Christian from Italy, knowledgeable about the ways and language of the “barbaresco” (459), is able to advise the King of Tunis about how to defend his land against incursion from rival Saracen forces from Granada. This leads ultimately to the mutual rediscovery of Gostanza and Martuccio, who end up “winners,” each of them given gifts as a prelude to marriage and being wished an entrepreneurial prosperous wind (“prospero vento,” 462) to carry them back to their island homeland in Lipari. The concluding expression about the prosperous wind creates an interesting echo placed beside the host’s comment about the lawyer’s “thrifty” tale at the end of the Man of Law’s Tale. This echoing between the two conclusions together with the parallel concerns with poverty voiced at the beginning of the two tales, as well as the relevance to the medieval Mediterranean of the picture of women at work on handicrafts for East-West trade in Boccaccio’s tale, suggest that this “analogue” of the Man of Law’s Tale may well be one with which Chaucer was acquainted. Derek Pearsall believes that it would have been in Bernabo Visconti’s libraries that Chaucer might have had his first opportunity to have a long stretch of time (at best, six weeks) with the writings of Boccaccio (Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 108). The mission to Italy that took Chaucer to Milan occurred in 1378. Chaucer started work on the Canterbury Tales around 1387, some nine years later. Nine years is a long time to retain verbal details, but assuming Chaucer had time subsequently to reread Boccaccio and refresh his memory, it may not be too far-fetched to point to the play of Chaucer’s “thrifty” against Boccaccio’s “prospero” as one reason among others to think the English poet knew the Italian analogue. If so, this may even add further weight to the speculation shared by some scholars that the Man of Law’s Epilogue represents an early stage in the composition of the Tales (Benson, 862). More generally, Chaucer’s handling of the Constance legend reminds us that the romances the poet wrote in the last decade of the fourteenth century were written by a court poet who was also in constant contact with the city life of London. Furthermore, it 40

Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean seems likely that besides having knowledge of the French literary tradition the English poet was acquainted with the Italian writers of the trecento, notably Boccaccio. Chaucer developed an international style which broke away from the popular romances of the English thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.14 In Gower’s Tale of Constance we also encounter the interaction of Latin West with Islamic Mediterranean, but the encounters in Gower’s tale are more intimate – perhaps to a fault. While his Constance, for example, is given a father who, as in Chaucer, appears to be an emperor – his name is “Tiberie Constantin” (a Byzantine ruler) and we are told “The Sceptre hadde forto rihte” (589) – Gower suggests that he is in God’s service, “A worthi kniht in Cristes lawe” (588). Perhaps he is a crusader. Gower’s Constance, like Chaucer’s, achieves conversions to Christianity, but God and profit are shown to be more hand-in-glove: Gower’s Constance manages to achieve conversions while actually trading with merchants, “the greteste of Barbarie” (599). Apparently without intending to, Gower makes conversion achieved by his Constance the result of a fine mix of Christianity and commerce: Of hem which usen marchandie, Sche hath converted, as thei come To hire upon a time in Rome, To schewen such thing as their broghte. Whiche worthili of hem sche boghte, And over that in such a wise Sche hath hem with hire wordes wise Of Cristes feith so full enformed That thei therto ben all conformed, So that baptesme thei receiven And all here false goddes weyven. (600–10)

Even though Gower says Constance accomplishes these conversions because she “was ful of feith” (598), by showing her engaging in commerce, as Chaucer’s heroine does not, Gower makes his Constance seem worldly. And he does so without irony. This Constance is less “unwemmed” (flawless, proper) than Chaucer’s, whom R. A. Shoaf calls “the ideal sign or marker or medium . . . for merchants . . . and for lawyers” (Shoaf, “Unwemmed Custance,” 287). Gower’s tale provides a rare exception to the literary convention that romance characters are never shown as “involved in the world of commerce” (Eberle, 165). We see here a reflection of what Shoaf, discussing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, described as the fourteenth century’s reconciliation of “Christian traditions” and “contemporary economic realities” (Shoaf, Green Girdle, 3). When Chaucer’s merchants return to Syria and chat with the Sultan they talk in rather general terms about Custance’s virtues (and nothing is said about 14 These were written in the tail-rhyme stanza and four-stress couplet mocked by Chaucer in the Tale

of Sir Thopas. See A. McI. Trounce, “The English Tail-Rhyme Romances”.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance their having been converted to Christianity by her). Moreover, the decision to become a convert by Chaucer’s Sultan is made to seem a desperate maneuver by a man obsessed by the desire to marry a woman whom he hasn’t even seen but about whom he has heard marvelous things which inflame his passions. While Chaucer indicates that elaborate negotiations (which include even the Pope) are needed to facilitate the conversion of the Sultan, Gower focuses exclusively on Constance, the religious crusader, sent out with two cardinals as part of a personal entourage. (The Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the head of a convent, is only accompanied by priests.) Gower makes the conversion of the Sultan in the land of Barbarie seem the mission that Constance was born for. In Chaucer the conversion seems the accidental achievement of garrulous merchants, probably Venetian Christians living in Syria.15 The greater emphasis on the missionary zeal of Gower’s heroine as compared to Chaucer’s Custance may be necessitated by the former’s need to make his Constance a magnet for the “clos Envie” (684) of the Sultan’s mother – envy being the sin illustrated by the Tale of Constance within the frame of the Confessio Amantis – and by the importance of giving Constance enough strength to balance out a Saracen mother-in-law from hell. (She is called “This olde fend, this Sarazine” [705].) Gower also gives more emphasis than does Chaucer to the presence of the ecclesiastical power structure in the matter of the conversion of the second pagan husband, Elda, who decides to marry Constance after she is vindicated in her ordeals in the pagan north: Ther cam a Bisschop out of Wales Fro Bangor and Lucie he hihte, Which thurgh the grace of god almihte The king with many an other mo Hath cristned, . . . (904–08)

Chaucer drops Bishop Lucius’s name entirely. Gower’s Constance is all in all much more a “take charge” heroine. Her handling of the attempted rape, in a scene which occurs near the end of the tale, is a feat of ingenuity (as well as of prayer); by comparison, Custance in Chaucer’s parallel episode seems reduced to fisticuffs. In Gower, Constance’s boat blows eastward to Islamic Spain where a “hethen Amirall” (1090) and his steward (with the Byzantine-sounding name of Thelous) see her from their castle wall. When the steward comes to her at night threatening sexual assault, Constance, with ready pluck, requests that he check first that there is no one outside who might see them. She appears to be pretending something between resignation to her fate and compliance: Sche sih ther was no other weie, And seide he scholde hire wel comforte, 15 Cf. David Wallace, however, who sees Chaucer’s tale as joining other works like “Piers Plowman

attempting to find their way between theological systematizing and mercantile wealth” (182).

42

Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean That he ferst loke out ate porte, That noman were nyh the stede, Which myhte knowe what thei dede, And thanne he mai do what he wolde. (1112–17)

The steward is delighted: “He was riht glad that sche so tolde,/And to the porte anon he ferde” (1118–19). When he is blown overboard, the result seems nearly as much a reward for Constance’s cleverness as the answer to a prayer (indeed, “Sche preide god” [1120] too). Gower’s Constance never had to lift a finger against her attacker, but no favorable wind helps Chaucer’s Custance. There is just “strugglyng wel and myghtily” before “The theif fil over bord” (921–22). It may be that for Gower there was nothing inappropriate about a saintly woman converting merchants while doing business with them. And equally it may be for Chaucer there was every likelihood that even a wealthy lawyer or merchant could appreciate the virtues of someone like Custance. The tale which the Man of Law learned from a merchant is, as it were, a merchant’s tale. The difference between the poets comes in their art. With his gifts of wit, irony, and mirth, Chaucer could make the juxtaposition of opposites come alive. In the Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale there is unmistakable satire in the paradox of a lawyer who praises material wealth going on to tell a tale about the treasures of spiritual poverty. Presented as an admirer of improving, didactic literature, he tells a tale centered on a heroine who is repeatedly called “hooly.” She is the “doghter of hooly chirche” (675), a “hooly mayde” (692) with “hooly entente” (867) who practices “hooly werkes” (980) and “hooly almus-dede” (1156). Still, by the tale’s end, when the host stretches in his stirrups and judges the profitable tale to be “thrifty,” there lingers a hint of satire around that word for any reader who has responded to the contrast between the mercantile ethos of the world in which Custance moves and her religious piety. Furthermore, when in the Epilogue the host replies to the Parson’s rebuke for swearing with, “I smelle a Lollere in the wynd” (1173), the reference to Lollards couldn’t be more appropriate in light of the tale which has just been concluded. Lollardy was a reform movement which responded to what John Wycliffe saw as a clash between the increasingly worldly aims of the church hierarchy and rulers of the state and the humble religious ideals found among parish priests like the parson and self-sacrificing laity like Custance. If it is surprising to find suggestions of a dichotomy between elitist secularism and popular piety in Chaucer’s hagiographical romance, it may be equally surprising to discover that in his Legend of Good Women, a collection of tales about pagan women (“good,” because true in loving, though not Christian like Custance), there are two famous queens whose “oriental” sensuality ironically undercuts their claim to virtue, as we shall see in the next chapter. Before concluding this chapter, however, it should be observed that the Man of Law mentions this most recent work of Chaucer’s in the Introduction to his tale of Custance, referring to it as 43

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance The Seintes Legende of Cupide. Why has Chaucer made the Man of Law name it? Perhaps, to help characterize him as “snobby,” someone who wanted to show himself off as up on all the latest court poetry, a kind of writing about which only a few of the other pilgrims could have knowledge, but also to signal to all those who did know the Legend of Good Women that they should expect to hear the lawyer tell a certain kind of tale – a legend – about a noble woman. John Lydgate, a follower of Chaucer in the next generation of poets, described Chaucer’s reason for writing the Legend this way: This poete wrot at request of the queene, A legende of parfit hoolynesse Off Goode Women to finde out nynteen That did excelle in bountee and fayrnesse, But for his labour and his bisynesse Was inportable his wittes to encumbre In al this world to fynde so greet a nombre. (Fall of Princes, Prologue to Book I, 330–36)

Chaucer, as court poet, had been charged by the queen herself to write a kind of martyrology of Cupid’s saints. Within the frame of the Canterbury Tales we have a pilgrim lawyer attempting to oblige Harry Bailly with a tale; he chooses a saint’s legend about Dame Custance, the embodiment of faith, purity, and patience. In many ways his presentation of the Constance legend is appropriate to a cupidinous lawyer, one of many Canterbury pilgrims with an interest in money. While his preliminary words on the evils of poverty appear to be at odds with the pious tale they precede, the conflict is no more than that between the monk’s vow of stability and his love of riding expensive horses or the friar’s vow of poverty and his cultivations of society ladies (“worthy wommen of the toun,” General Prologue, 217).

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Cleopatra and Dido

3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido

C

HAUCER’S portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women reflect another side of the Orient: here we find not the rich trading landscape of the Man of Law’s Tale, but the locale of secret pleasures and sexual excess. This chapter discusses the legends of these two oriental queens whose claim to sainthood, even in terms of the religion of Cupid, is ambiguous. Unlike The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, those long versified romances that he had already written, Chaucer makes the Legend a collection of short narratives on the order of the Canterbury Tales (which he wrote after the Legend). According to the Prologue, the reason for brevity is the many stories the narrator has to tell: “For whoso shal so many a storye telle,/Sey shortly, or he shal to longe dwelle” (F 576–77). The ten stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra (eleven, if Alceste is counted) ostensibly offer a defense of the merits of women presented by the poet-narrator, Chaucer, in the fiction of this work, to make amends for his portrait of the unfaithful Criseyde. A playful disclaimer in Book 5 of the Troilus seems to anticipate a collection of lives about “goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves,/ That weren trewe in lovyng al hire lyves” (F 484–85): Bysechyng every lady bright of hewe, And every gentil womman, what she be, That, al be that Criseyde was untrewe, That for that gilt ye be nat wroth with me. Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se; And gladlier I wol write, if yow lest, Penelopees trouthe and good Alceste. (5. 1772–78)

Chaucer’s collection of exemplary pagan women is later, in the Canterbury Tales, referred to as “the Seintes Legende of Cupide” (Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, 61). The lawyer’s title underscores an important point: the pagan women of the collected tales are true followers of the god of Love, not the Christian God of the saints whose lives are gathered in the famous 45

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea. Had there not been so many tales of martyrs to Cupid’s religion to tell, the poet-narrator presumably could have made any one of them into a full-blown “pious” romance, if he wanted to. As in nearly all courtly romances, the pagan women of the legends, true in loving, are aristocrats betrayed by men who are royal and from a warrior class. Also, the legends, like many romances, are aimed at a female audience, at least if we assume that Cupid’s imposition of the writing of this palinode on the poet-narrator, Chaucer, reflects the female reaction to Troilus and Criseyde at court and, if we believe that Chaucer did, indeed, present the Legend of Good Women to Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia, at one of the royal residences “at Eltham or at Sheene” (F 497).1 Not all the romances concerned with the problems of love are as long as the Troilus (8,239 lines); Sir Orfeo, for example, is only 601 lines long, about the length of the Prologue (F 579 lines; G 545 lines) or somewhat longer than The Legend of Dido (443 lines). Earthly not heavenly love is to be celebrated. In the Prologue, the best known part of the Legend of Good Women, we encounter the idealized lady dressed in green and white whom the god of Love identifies to the narrator as Alceste of Thrace, she who sacrificed her life for her husband, Admetus: She that for hire housbonde chees to dye, And eke to goon to helle, rather than he, And Ercules rescowed hire, parde, And broght hir out of helle agayn to blys. (513–16)

Not only do the facts of Alceste’s life fit the hagiographical mold imposed on Chaucer by Cupid, but they make of her an analogue of Christ in Cupid’s religion of love. It is, therefore, appropriate that Alceste be associated with the daisy or marguerite that so closely follows the sun, closing its petals at night and opening them in the morning. Drawing on the French courtly tradition of paying tribute to one’s lady as the fragile marguerite, Chaucer stresses the flower’s connection to the sun: And whan that hit ys eve, I renne blyve, As sone as evere the sonne gynneth weste, To seen this flour, how it wol go to reste, For fere of nyght, so hateth she derknesse. Hire chere is pleynly sprad in the brightnesse Of the sonne, for ther yt wol unclose. (60–65)

While the brightness of the daisy, so intimately associated with the sun, is an appropriate emblem for the sacrificial wifely love of Admetus, what are we to make of the pagan women whose lives follow in the legends themselves? The legends are ostensibly intended to defend the merits of women, but here we

1

On the characteristics of romances written for female patrons see Ferrante, “Whose Voice? The Influence of Women Patrons on Courtly Romances,” 3–18.

46

Cleopatra and Dido encounter women whose claim to being considered worthy of praise is less unambiguous than Alceste’s (i.e., Medea murdered her children, Cleopatra was cruel, greedy, and promiscuous). It is difficult to take the defense at face value when the contrast between the life of Alceste and some of the others is so striking. Cleopatra and Dido, North African queens from Egypt and Carthage (modern-day Libya) respectively, are two of the most famous. Chaucer subverts their praise by focusing on sexual excess as the dominant quality in both portraits of female desire and suffering. Despite their being figures from antiquity with strong ties to Roman history and legend, the medieval west would have, to some degree, found it easy to associate them with Islam and western perceptions of the special lubricity of Moslems which had been taking shape ever since the First Crusade of the eleventh century. Roger Bacon, for example, thought Islam evolved out of pre-existing paganism which made it the lex venera.2 Latin writers believed Mohammed was successful in destroying the Church in Africa by authorized sexual license (Southern, 31). Moreover, Latin Christians, who believed in indissoluble monogamy, were especially critical of polygamous Islamic marriage. Still another subject of attack during the Middle Ages was Islam’s perceived encouragement of unnatural intercourse between people of the same or opposite sex.3 Such historically real cultural attitudes bear witness to a medieval orientalism which recent scholarship has begun to locate in Chaucer. More than twenty years ago, the literary critic and cultural historian, Edward Said, proposed in his well-known book, Orientalism, a three-fold classification of the term: the first type is the academic study of the place known as the Orient; the second type recognizes a distinction between “oriental” and “occidental” as imaginative styles; and the third, “modern orientalism,” Said argues, developed in the eighteenth century as a tool for Western control of the East – that is, orientalism as a branch of postEnlightenment Colonialism (Said, 1–2). It is the second type that is useful here, the Orient as an imaginary category of difference against which the Occident can define itself. Of this second mode, imaginative orientalism, Said observes that “certain associations with the East not quite ignorant, not quite informed always seem to have gathered around the notion of an Orient” (Said, 2

3

Baconis Operis Majoris Pars Septima seu Morales Philosophia. Post F. Delorme OFM critice instruixit et edidit E. Massa (Zuerich, 1953), 4.1.111.5 and I.VI. Cited by Daniel, Islam and the West, 145. On this subject Peter of Poitiers warns his Cluniac abbot in a letter, “Do not let the chapter that is there (i.e. in the headings sent to Peter the Venerable as material) de uxoribus turpiter abutendis scandalise you in any way, for it truly appears like this in the Qur’an, and, as I heard for certain in Spain, both from Peter of Toledo, whose colleague I was in translating, and from Robert, now archdeacon of Pamplona, all the Muslims do this freely, as if by Muhammad’s command.” The reference is to Peter of Poitiers’s Capitula ad domnium Petrum abbatem in the Toletano-Cluniac corpus. The heading reads quod insuper rem Sodomicam atque turpissimam docuerit, praecipiens in Alchorano suo, et velut ex persona, Dei, si loquens: “O viri. . . . This is cited by Daniel, Islam and the West, 141 and n. 17, p. 356.

47

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance 55–56). In this category orientalism is viewed as “a style of thought” which had an effect on how Latin Christian Europe saw, internalized, and created images of the Orient. This orientalism acted as a kind of lens through which the world of the East was seen by the world of the West. Kathryn Lynch has found Chaucerian orientalism in “the centrality of the Oriental motif to the Squire’s Tale” – the romance discussed in the following chapter – which she argues “wraps itself in an aura of exotic alterity” in a sense that she relates to Said’s examination of modern orientalism (Lynch, “East Meets West,” 530–51). Though Said’s Orientalism includes the academic study of the Orient, it is primarily concerned with contrasting styles of imaginative thought – East/West difference – and especially the West’s perception of Eastern difference as inferior (Said, 31–110). Sheila Delany has also located orientalism in Chaucer, specifically in the Legend of Good Women. She has proposed that besides “the woman as Other” there is “another target than woman” in this work: “the foreigner” from the Orient (Delany, “Geographies of Desire,” 2–3 and her The Naked Text, 64–65). Racial and gender difference in the text, she argues, allows the European reader to come to terms ultimately with the dangerous unruly element deep within himself. My readings of the legends of the two oriental queens against parallel texts, especially in Boccaccio, benefit from the attention she has given to the existence of a medieval orientalism. Western perception of the sensual indulgence of the Orient coincided with the tradition of anti-feminism that descended from antiquity to the Middle Ages. A central charge of medieval anti-feminist clerical writing was that woman’s nature was inherently sensual. Robert Brunne’s manual of moral instruction, Handlyng Synne, warned that even a chaste man alone with a woman would fall into lechery (Brunne, 240). Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, proud of being “al Venerien” (609) and having “a coltes tooth” (602), is particularly annoyed at old clerics who argue that women are incapable of chastity: The clerk, whan he is oold and may noght do Of Venus werkes worth his old sho, Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage. That women kan nat kepe hir mariage. (Prologue, WB, 707–10)

Even the conventional medieval view of human embryology reinforced antifeminist attitudes; it was believed that life is produced when the spirit of the male imposes order on the chaos of the matter that is woman. Drawing on Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas writes that generative energy “is based on the (vital) spirit in the semen which is frothy, as is attested by its whiteness. In which spirit, moreover, there is a certain heat derived from the power of the heavenly bodies, by virtue of which the inferior bodies also act towards the production of the species. . . .”4 4

Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, Part One, Q 118, A1, Rep.3. For fuller discussion see Heffernan, The Phoenix at the Fountain, Chapter 3, “The Conception Sequence”, 68–81.

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Cleopatra and Dido

Cleopatra According to the Legend of Good Women, the rule of Egipt (581) passed to Cleopatra after the death of her father (Ptolemy Auletes [d. 51 B.C.]). As a North African, she would have been considered “oriental” by Chaucer and his contemporaries; they viewed peoples from the Near and Middle East together with those from North Africa as being from the “Orient.” But she, perhaps, as an Egyptian had greater claim to being called oriental – at least, in the common sense of the term – than other “oriental” women from the Legend, such as Thisbe of Babylon or even Dido of Carthage. Until the time of Ptolemy I, who reigned from about 311–285 B.C., Egypt was considered part of Asia (Magoun, 116). It was Ptolemy I who designated the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the dividing line between the continents of Africa and Asia. Ever since, Egypt has been considered part of Northeast Africa. The life of Cleopatra, the first figure in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, famously illustrates the dangers of sexual excess, particularly to those lovers who came under her spell. Though Cleopatra appears in such classical sources as Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, Florus’s Epitome of Roman History, and Horace’s Epodes, among others, Chaucer probably drew on the accounts in the Speculum Historiale, by the thirteenthcentury Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais, and Boccaccio’s mid-fourteenth century work, Concerning Famous Women.5 Both Pauline Aiken and William K. Wimsatt, Jr. point to the same passage from Vincent as one of Chaucer’s likely sources: Hereafter when the lustful Anthony was corrupted by love of Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, he forsook the sister of Augustus, joined himself in marriage to Cleopatra, and declared war on Augustus. But Augustus at the first signs of revolt moved from Brundisium to Epirus with three hundred ships. Anthony occupied the Greek coast, but when the battle started, the fleet of Augustus began to throw Anthony’s ships into confusion. Cleopatra the queen immediately took flight in her ship with golden stern and purple sails, and Anthony followed her. Augustus pursued closely. Seeing this, Anthony took his life with his own hand. The queen threw herself at the feet of Augustus and appealed to him, but, being spurned, despaired. When she realized that she was going to be displayed as a trophy, she took advantage of an inattentive guard, and in the odorous mausoleum lay down next to her Anthony, held serpents against her body, and lapsed into death.6 5

6

Plutarch, Life of Caesar in Lives, 7, Loeb Classical Library, 99, 48.3–49; Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, 6.19, 307; Florus, Epitome of Roman History, 2, Loeb Classical Library, 231, 13.56–60, 14.4–5, 21.1–3, 8–12; Horace, Epodes, Loeb Classical Library, 33, 9.11–16; Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, 7.53; Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris, 344–57 [Latin and Italian translation] and English translation in Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, 192–97. The Latin text as found in the Strassburg edition of 1473 is as follows: “Porro cum esset lascivius anthonius correptiues amore cleopatre egipti regine. repudiata augusti sorore ipsam sibi

49

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Vincent’s version is a summary of the account in Florus’s Epitome of Roman History, once thought to be the direct source for Chaucer’s Legend because it contains the detail of the purple sail of Cleopatra’s ship and, like Chaucer’s version, has Antony stab himself immediately after the defeat at Actium (instead of delaying a year before a death in Alexandria). Vincent’s abridgement contains all the details needed for Chaucer’s legend: the representation of Octavia as Antony’s wife; the purple sail of Cleopatra’s ship; the repudiation of Octavia and the declaration of war; the earlier date of Antony’s suicide; the spice-filled shrine; the use of serpents for Cleopatra’s suicide; and, most especially, the unsuccessful attempt by Cleopatra to seduce Augustus, leading directly to her suicide (according to Vincent, to avoid being exhibited in Rome as a trophy rather than out of love for Antony – a matter discussed at greater length by Boccaccio). It is highly likely that the more derisive account of Cleopatra in Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women (De Mulieribus Claris) was also known to Chaucer. A strikingly harsh chapter on Cleopatra describes her as “almost the prostitute of Oriental kings” and begins by stating, “She gained glory for almost nothing else than her beauty, while on the other hand she became known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty and lustfulness.”7 Her ancestry is traced back to Ptolemy, King of Macedonia (making this Queen of Egypt a Greek princess); she is said, because of political ambition, to have poisoned the fifteen-year-old brother to whom she had been incestuously married; she is described as having drawn “Caesar, the conqueror of the world, into lustfulness” who rewarded her with the kingdom of Egypt.8 Later in his account Boccaccio explains how she uses sexual wiles to gain parts of the kingdoms of Syria and Arabia from Antony, her new lover after the death of Caesar, who begins his adulterous relationship with her by agreeing to kill her sister, Arsinoe. Boccaccio’s tone may owe some of its harshness to attitudes shaped towards what was known in his day as “the domestic enemy,”

7

8

cleopatram matrimonio copulavit. et augusto bellum indixit. sed augustus apud prima novorum motuum signa. cum tricentis navibus a brundusio in epyrum transmeavit. Anthonius vero occupaverat atticum litus. sed ubi ventum est ad prelium et augusti classis cepit anthonii navigium turbare. cleopatra regina cum aurea puppe veloque purpureo prima fugere cepit. et ilico insecutus est eam anthonius. instare vestigus augustus. Quod cernens anthonius propria se manu interemit. regina vero ad pedes augusti provoluta temptavit oculos ejus sed spreta ab eo desperavit. Que ubi se triumpho servari cognovit et incauciorem nacta custodiam. in mausoleum odoribus refertum juxta suum se collocavit anthonium. Deinde admotia sibi serpentibus morte sopita est.” The passage is the subject of two authoritative articles: W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer’s Cleopatra and Croesus,’ and Pauline Aiken, “Chaucer’s Legend of Cleopatra and the Speculum Historiale.” Its rather difficult Latin is translated somewhat differently by Alastair Minnis, The Shorter Poems, 354–55. Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 192; “quasi scortum orientalium regum facta,” and “nulla fere, nisi hac et oris formositate vere claritatis nota, refulsit, cum e contrario avaritia crudelitate atque luxuria omni mundo conspicua facta sit,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 348 and 344. Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 198; “accessit et auspicata sibi regnum si in suam lasciviam domitorem orbis contraheret,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 346.

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Cleopatra and Dido Eastern slaves used as servants in great merchant and noble households. During the fourteenth century they were brought from Africa and the Black Sea to northern and central Italy (Origo, 321–66). In an age when poison was a common weapon, slaves were frequently charged with administering poisons to their masters. Court records indicate that they were also sometimes thought to be guilty of theft, assault, attempted murder, and rape. Masters were often fearful of household slaves. A woman from Naples writes to her son that her domestic slave threatens her but she cannot get rid of her lest she malign the reputation of his sister with her malicious gossip: “She pays no more heed to me than if I were the slave and she the lady, and she threatens to harm us all, so that Lisandra [her daughter] and I are afraid of her. . . . I must first get Lisandra out of the house because of her [Cateruccia’s] evil tongue.”9 Women were at times suspicious of young, pretty slaves. Origo cites a letter from the Archives of Francesco Datini, a merchant from Prato, written to him by a friend, Aglio degli Agli: “I had a very good [slave] but, for her misfortune, she became pregnant and had a boy child – and since the father could not be found, I took it and sent it out to nurse. But Monna Lucia was seized with jealousy, and said it was mine; and though I told her it was only mine as a calf belongs to the man who owns the cow, she still will not believe me, whether I swear or coax . . .” (Origo, 344). Fathers worried about their sons being attracted to household slaves. The advice comes from one gentleman slave-owner, “Let them keep instead an old woman or old man, or a boy to cook for them – so that by your kindness, my son and yours may not be destroyed.”10 In short, many of the charges brought against Eastern slaves in fourteenth-century Italy are the same ones levelled at the Eastern Queen, Cleopatra. Particular emphasis, in both cases, is given to their sexual wiles. If Delany is correct about the high concentration of sexual innuendo in Chaucer’s much admired alliterative amplification of Vincent’s brief entry about Actium (with the poet’s turbulent meeting of ships, movement of trumpets, guns, stones, and men an extended metaphor for copulation), it is likely that the vitriolic tone of Boccaccio’s account of Cleopatra helped shape the direction Chaucer may have taken in his expansion of Vincent.11 Delany’s argument for an erotic reading of Chaucer’s Actium passage, especially her assertion that the peas poured on the ship’s deck suggest seminal fluid, gains support in T. W. Ross’s Chaucer’s Bawdy, which notes that the word cuppe in Chaucer must mean “vagina” (Bawdy arranges words alphabetically as in a dictionary). Thus the lines, He bryngeth the cuppe and biddeth hem be blythe; He poureth pesen upon the haches slidere (647–48)

9 A letter from Alessandra Strozzi quoted by Origo, 343. 10 A letter from Ser Lapo Mazzei, undated, quoted by Origo, 344. 11 W. H. Schofield, “The Sea-battle in Chaucer’s “Legend of Cleopatra,” 139–52 and N. F. Blake,

“Chaucer and the Alliterative Romances,” 163–9. But see Delany, “Logic of Obscenity”, 192.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance become a reference to sexual congress, not merely a description of pouring peas upon the deck of a warship to make it slippery against being boarded by the enemy. Ultimately Boccaccio shows Cleopatra’s greed for power is so great that she asks Antony for the entire Roman Empire, as if it were his to give, and when all is lost after the defeat of Actium, “Cleopatra tried in vain with her old wiles to make young Octavian desire her, as she had done with Caesar and Antony.”12 Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century portrait is hostile throughout and contains many of the unflattering details that are contained in the classical tradition. Boccaccio’s version claims that the Egyptian queen made the Roman general “effeminate.”13 Though the Cleopatra of Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women becomes the “wife” of Antony, as she is in Chaucer’s Legend, the marriage seems the last gesture in a long life of debauchery: To bring covetous Cleopatra to his embraces, effeminate Antony gave her, as she approached, the captive king [of Armenia] in all his regalia, as well as all the booty. The greedy woman, happy at the gifts, embraced the ardent man so seductively that he made her his wife with great love, after repudiating Octavia, the sister of Octavian Caesar.14

In Sheila Delany’s discussion of Chaucer’s Legend of Cleopatra as a prime instance of medieval Orientalism, Antony’s defeat at Actium becomes exemplary of “the debilitating or depoliticizing effect of foreigners, Orientals . . . their ability to distract a hero from his (in this case explicitly colonial) mission, generally through sensual erotic pleasures” (Delany, The Naked Text, 174). She sees the “story of Cleopatra” as “the other side of the coin to the romantic exoticism represented in the Squire’s Tale. The Orient is no longer a realm of fantasy fulfilled, but one of hope and ambition undone, for the Chaucerian version is a cautionary tale if ever there was one” (Delany, The Naked Text, 174). However true that may be, Chaucer actually gives less emphasis to sexual excess and sensuous voluptuousness than Boccaccio. Chaucer passes up, for example, the opportunity to give the details of the revelry which attended Cleopatra’s marriage to Antony: The weddynge and the feste to devyse, To me, that have ytake swich empryse 12 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 196; “cum Cleopatra ingenio veteri in vanum

tentasset, uti iam dudum Cesarem et Antonium illexerat in concupiscentiam suam, sic et iuvenem Octavianum illicere,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 354. 13 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 194; “effeminatus,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 350. 14 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 194; ‘avidam in suos amplexus provocaret, effeminatus venienti captivum regem cum omni regio ornatu atque preda deiecit in gremium. Quo leta munere cupidissima mulier adeo blande flagrantem complexa est, ut, repudiata Octavia, Octaviani Cesaris sorore, illam totis affectibus sibi uxorem iungeret,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 350.

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Cleopatra and Dido Of so many a story for to make, It were to longe, lest that I shulde slake Of thyng that bereth more effect and charge; For men may overlade a ship or barge. And forthy to th’effect thanne wol I skyppe, And al the remenaunt, I wol lete it slippe. (616–23)

Boccaccio, on the other hand, launches into a lengthy account of the revelry which makes vividly concrete Cleopatra’s lack of mesure. He uses to particular effect the story, borrowed from Pliny’s Natural History (9. 58. 119–21), about Cleopatra’s dissolving a fabulously valuable large pearl in vinegar and drinking it: As Antony gluttonously stuffed himself continuously with delicacies, he asked what magnificent thing could be added to the daily banquets, as if he wanted to make his dinners for Cleopatra more splendid. The lewd woman answered that, if he wanted, she could have a dinner costing more than one hundred thousand sesterces. Antony thought that this could not be done; nevertheless, wishing to see and devour, he asked her to try it. Lucius Plautus was called to be the judge. The next day, when the food did not exceed the customary, and when Antony was already ridiculing her promises, Cleopatra ordered her servants to bring the second course. According to the instructions they had received beforehand, they brought in only a goblet of strong vinegar. Cleopatra immediately took a pearl of great value which she wore as an ornament on one of her ears, according to the custom of Oriental women, dissolved it in the vinegar, and then drank it. As she was taking an equally valuable pearl from her other ear to repeat what she had done, Lucius Plautus immediately declared that Antony had lost, and so, the queen having won, the second pearl was preserved.15

Chaucer instead concentrates on Cleopatra’s treatment of her dead lover’s corpse as a prime instance of the queen’s excess. She places Antony’s embalmed body in an opulent shrine made of rubies and other precious stones: [Cleopatra] made hire subtyl werkmen make a shryne Of alle rubyes and the stones fyne In al Egypte, that she coude espie, 15 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 194–95; “cum magnificis assidue

saginaretur ingluviosus homo epulis, in verba venit, quasi Cleopatre convivia extollere vellet, quid magnificentie cotidianis cenis posset apponi. Cui respondit lasciva mulier se cena una centies, si velit, sextertium alosumpturam. Quod cum minime fieri posse arbitraretur Antonius, tamen videndi avidus atque ligurriendi, fecere periculum, sumpto Lucio Planco iudicis loco. Que postero die dum non excessisset eduliorum consuetudinem et iam sponsionem Antonius, iussit Cleopatra ministra ut secundam mensam afferrent illico. Qui premoniti nil aliud quam vas unum aceti acerrimi attulere. Ipsa autem confestim ex altera aurium unionem inexcogitati pretii, quem, ornamenti loco, orientalium more, gestabat, summens, aceto dissolvit et liquefactum absorbuit; et cum ad alium, quem altera in auricula eque carum gerebat, iam manus apponeret, illud idem factura, extemplo Lucius Plancus victum esse Antonium protulit; et sic secundus servatus est, victrice regina,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 353.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance And putte ful the shryne of spicerye, And let the cors enbaume, and forth she fette That dede cors, and in the shryne it shette. (672–77)

Her own suicide is included in this excess since Chaucer does not give her just an asp or two, but a pit dug next to Antony’s shrine which is heaped with “alle the serpentes that she myghte have” (677). There Cleopatra enters naked to be stung to death: Among the serpents in the pit she sterte, And there she ches to have hire buryinge. Anon the nadderes gonne hire for to stynge. (697–99)

The manner of death is as grisly as that of any martyred saint; indeed, D. D. Griffith has pointed out that snake pits commonly appear in medieval hagiographical literature (Griffith, 401). But Cleopatra’s naked body keeps the emphasis on the sensual and anticipates the eroticism of Renaissance portraits of Cleopatra’s death wherein she is painted naked with serpents used as sensual accents coiled on her arm or applied to a breast.16 There seems to be a good deal of irony in her death speech at this point in the Legend when she refers to her ‘Unreprovable . . . wyfhod” and declares that there ‘Was nevere unto hir love a trewer quene” (691, 695). Seeming to catch the need for clarification at this point, Cleopatra adds, “I mene yow, Antonius” (684). Chaucer, in fact, does not make grief over Antony’s death the motive for Cleopatra’s suicide, for her first response to her husband’s suicide is to try to arrange a peace accord with Octavian: “His wif, that coude of Cesar have no grace,/ To Egipt is fled for drede and for destresse” (663–64). These lines, with Octavian’s sexual indifference to Cleopatra suggested in the words “no grace,” recall her attempt at the seduction of Octavian as found in both Vincent of Beauvais and Boccaccio. In choosing the Legend of Cleopatra as the first to be told, the god of Love demonstrates his own lack of understanding of Alceste’s request for portraits of women which offset Chaucer’s earlier unflattering portraits of women such as the inconstant Criseyde who Cleopatra far surpasses in faithlessness. In this, Chaucer’s portrait of Cleopatra partakes of that same medieval view of her sexual excess seen in Boccaccio’s Of Famous Women, Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale, and, of course, Dante’s Divine Comedy, wherein Cleopatra is found in the circle of hell reserved for the lustful who subject reason to desire. There she is seen by the poet in the company of other pagan women renowned for sexual excess: Semiramis, Dido, and Helen of Troy. As the wailing ghosts of these women are seen beaten by black winds, Virgil explains to Dante who they are,

16 Kolve, “From Cleopatra to Alceste;” see figures 1–4.

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Cleopatra and Dido “La prima di color di cui novelle tu vuo’ sapir,” mi disse quelli allotta, “fu imperadrice di molti favelle A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta, che libito fe licito in sua legge, per torre il biasmo in che erra condotta. Ell’ è Semiramis, di cui si legge che succedette a Nino a fu sua sposa: tenne la terra che ‘l Soldan corregge. L’altra e colei che s’ancise amorosa, e ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo; poi è Cleopatràs lussuriosa. Elena vedi, per cui tanto reo tempo si volse, . . .” (Inferno, v, 52–65 [50]) [The first of these of whom you wish to know” he said to me then, “was empress of many tongues. She was so given to lechery that she made lust licit in her law, to take away the blame she had incurred. She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus and had been his wife: she held the land which the Sultan rules. The next is she who slew herself for love and broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus; next is wanton Cleopatra. See Helen, for whom so many years of ill revolved; . . .” (Inferno, 51)

It is notable that in Chaucer’s legend 82 lines are concerned with the baleful effects of the love of Antony and Cleopatra; whereas, only 44 lines introduce the lovers and discuss their love. The only positive thing Chaucer can say of Cleopatra in introducing her is to comment rather tritely and unconvincingly that “she was fayr as is the rose of May” (613), applying to the sultry Egyptian queen a simile of the sort usually reserved for medieval ideals of womanhood like Emelye. The conventional metaphor for a courtly lady is so unsuitable that the following line adds ironically, “to make shortly is the beste” (614), and, indeed, the narrator adds nothing further to his introduction of her. Though they die for love, these saints of Cupid – very different kinds of martyrs from those typically found in medieval legendaries – their love is presented as “pathological.” Chaucer implies that Antony’s suicide is an act of despair committed by a man who has lost everything – reputation, honor, respect – with the defeat at Actium which was precipitated by love for Cleopatra: And whan that Antony saw that aventure, “Allas,” quod he, “the day that I was born! My worshipe in this day thus have I lorn.” And for despeyr out of his wit he sterte, And rof hymself anon thourghout the herte. (657–61)

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Antony, driven mad for love, becomes a suicide – the act of a man who has lost his “wit.” Within this frame of events, it is apparent that Octavian, the opponent of Antony and Cleopatra, overthrows this couple that so challenges the Roman Empire at a point in time shortly before the birth of Christ and the flowering of Rome under the peace of Augustus. This historical moment, offering two ideals of behavior, contributes to the humorous irony of the narrator’s reminding us that the infamous love story of the lascivious pair “is storyal soth, it is no fable” (702). Octavian’s position within the events recounted in the Legend of Cleopatra gives weight to the orientalism of the tale as understood in terms of a comment Edward Said made about orientalism in seventeenth-century literature: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said, 3). The Chaucerian tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, then, becomes a cautionary tale about the dangerous oriental bent in all of us.

Dido Dido, like Cleopatra, was an African queen who threatened to get in the way of a Roman and his imperial destiny. Her name, “Dido” (“the refugee”), is better known than Elissa, her earlier name. As Elissa, she led refugees from Tyre to Carthage, the ancient Phoenician colonial city on the northeast coast of Africa, which she founded about 850 B.C. Located near the modern city of Tunis, the North African city of Carthage is used by Chaucer to define Dido’s orientalness as well as her queenship. In the Legend of Good Women, Carthage is referred to as a “cite” (1049, 1051), a “toun” (1016), as well as the “noble toun of Cartage” (1008). The nearby region of Libya is called the “contre of Cartage” in the House of Fame (224) which refers to Carthage as a “faire toun” (432), much as in the Legend. When Aeneas seeks harbor in what Chaucer calls the “haven” (LGW, 963), the poet may have in mind the ancient harbor of Cothon, and the “temple,” which is the meeting place of Aeneas and Dido, mentioned at lines 1024, 1036, 1052, 1270, and specifically called the “mayster temple” (“main temple”) at line 1016, is probably meant to indicate the famous temple of Tanit, palladium of Carthage (Magoun, 113). As queen of this wealthy North African city, Dido lives in opulent splendor. She has a “royal paleys” (1096) surrounded by vast wooded countryside full of game and lions known as the “reyne of Libie” (992) – Dido’s realm: Libya, centering on Carthage. Immediately outside the palace is a stylish courtyard (“court,” 1194) and within there are ballrooms (“daunsynge chaumberes ful of paramentes,” 1106) and suites of rooms (Aeneas’s is mentioned at 1111). For Chaucer, Africa (“Afrike”) is virtually synonymous with Carthage or Libya. For example, in Boece 2, pr. 6, l. 71, “men of Affryke” are Carthaginians taken prisoner during the First Punic War.17 17 This usage reflects the original application of the ethnic name “Afer” to the people of Carthage or

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Cleopatra and Dido As a North African, then, Dido, like Cleopatra, would have been thought of as “oriental.” Boccaccio considered Dido African, not merely in terms of the geography of Carthage but even with respect to her Phoenician origins. Thus he writes of Dido, at the beginning of Chapter 40 in Concerning Famous Women, Dido, who early in her life was called Elissa, was both founder and the queen of Carthage. . . . To start rather far back, the peoples of Phoenicia, famous for their industry, as is well known, came from almost the farthest part of Egypt to the shores of Syria, and there they built many famous cities, of which Agenor, famous in our times as well as in his, was king. It is believed that the glorious line of Dido descends from him.18

Boccaccio then launches into the tale of Dido’s conflict with her brother, Pygmalion, and her flight from Phoenicia. In this version of the Dido story, which comes not from his secular writing but rather from his late prose work in Latin, Boccaccio focuses on a portrait of Dido as Phoenician exile and founder of Carthage. Not only is the Virgilian tradition of the erotic love affair between the Trojan Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage excluded, but Boccaccio depicts her as a chaste widow who devises an elaborate scheme whereby she evades an unwanted marriage as she casts herself into a fire declaring her devotion to her dead husband, Sychaeus. Whatever habits of thinking from Roman antiquity that might be referred to as “orientalism” that might have been inherited by Boccaccio from Virgil are displaced, in this work, on to the king of Musicani. Boccaccio has him ask the elders of Carthage for permission to marry Dido not merely because of her beauty, virtue, and chastity, but because “the people of Africa are greatly inclined towards sensuality.”19 About the relationship of Chaucer’s Legend of Dido to this portrait by Boccaccio, Marilyn Desmond asserts, in her study of the Dido tradition, “Although Chaucer almost certainly used Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris in his adaption of the legends of good women, he nowhere shows an awareness of the non-Virgilian Dido who never meets Aeneas and who died to preserve her status as a ‘chaste widow,’ so thoroughly embraced by Boccaccio in his Latin works” (Desmond, 161). For the Legend of Dido Chaucer’s guides are Virgil and Ovid:

Libya. “Afrike” eventually came to refer to the whole continent of Africa as in the House of Fame, 1339. 18 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 86; “Dido, cui prius Elyssa nomen, Cartaginis eque conditrix et regina fuit. . . . Et ut altius in suam gloriam aliquantisper assumman, Phenices, ut satis vulgatum est, populi industria preclarissimi, ab extrema fere Egypti plaga in syrium venientes litus, plurimas et pleclaras ibidem condidere urbes. Quibus inter alios rex fuit Agenor, nostro, nedum suo, evo prefulgidus fama, a quo genus Didonis inclitum manasse creditum est,” De Mulieribus, Branca, 168. 19 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, p. 88; “cum in libidinem pronissimi homines Affri sint,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 172.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan, Be to thy name! and I shal as I can, Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn, How Eneas to Dido was forsworn. In thyn Eneyde and Naso wol I take The tenor, and the grete effectes make. (924–29)

Chaucer’s emphasis on the falseness of Aeneas as a lover and the passion of Dido, together with her feelings of shame, are traceable to Ovid’s Heroides, VII, the Epistle of Dido to Aeneas. For details about Aeneas Chaucer goes to the first four books of the Aeneid.20 In the Legend of Dido we see Aeneas from the point of view of Dido – “The queen saugh” (1061) – so that Chaucer may interpret the process of her falling in love. Aeneas appears to Dido “lyk a knight,” “suffisaunt of persone and of myght,” “lyk to been a verray gentil man,” and he is “formed wel of braunes and of bones” (1066–71). Finally, the narrator announces that Aeneas must have appeared to the queen to have been a chip off the old block, his mother, Venus: “For after Venus, hadde he swich fayrnesse/That no man myghte be half so fayre, I gesse.” (1073–74). This is a somewhat different presentation of the motivation Chaucer gives in the House of Fame where there is the divine manipulation of Venus – She made Eneas so in grace Of Dido, quene of that contree, That, shortly for to tellen, she Becam hys love, and let him doo Al that weddynge longeth too (240–44)

acting in combination with a woman’s bad judgement in falling for a good-looking foreigner: “Loo, how a woman doth amys/To love him that unknowen ys!” (269–70). Chaucer’s Legend gives emphasis to the sensual disposition of Dido, “This fresshe lady” (1035), this queen “So yong, so lusty, with hire eyen glade” (1038), living in the epicurean splendor of her Carthaginian court, so that it may be understood how such a woman can be brought down by sexual desire. It is what makes her “sely Dido”: . . . ther gan to breden swich a fyr That sely Dido hath now swich desyr With Eneas, hire newe gest, to dele, That she hath lost hire hewe and ek hire hele. (1156–59)

20 Edgar F. Shannon was the first to argue in detail that Chaucer manipulated the Virgilian narrative

to extol Dido and blame Aeneas, blending the factual details of the Aeneid with the spirit of Ovid’s seventh letter in the Heroides. (Shannon, 196–208).

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Cleopatra and Dido Robbed of health and hue and as pale as lovesick Arcite moaning for Emelye, Dido suffers the torments of the sleepless lover: This noble queene unto hire reste wente. She siketh sore, and gan hyreself turmente; She waketh, walweth, maketh many a breyd, As don these lovers, as I have herd seyd. (1164–67)

This portrait of the dangers of sexual excess is one of the ways in which Chaucer does follow Virgil, who speaks of Dido’s love for Aeneas as pathological in Book 4 of the Aeneid (300–01). Virgil’s position owes something to his conflation of Dido with his historical contemporary, Cleopatra, who offered such a threat to Roman dominance, particularly in the events leading to Antony’s defeat at Actium. But in Chaucer all of this appears to be softenend by the fullness of heart with which Dido responds to Aeneas’s narration of his flight from Troy (940–45), abbreviated as it is from Virgil’s account in Books 2 and 3 of the Aeneid. The verses describing her response – “Anon hire herte hath pite of his wo,/ And with that pite love com in also” (1078–79) – is remarkably close to a line generally thought to be Chaucer’s favorite, “Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte,” which he uses in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (503) as well as in four other places (the Knight’s Tale, 1761; the Merchant’s Tale, 1986; the Squire’s Tale, 479; and the Man of Law’s Tale, 660). If, however, one looks at the various contexts in which this line appears in Chaucer’s works, overtones of irony are always present and, with only one exception (the Man of Law’s Tale), the line is used in conjunction with ideas about the pain and suffering of love. In the Knight’s Tale, for example, the line refers to the compassion of Duke Theseus who takes no action against Palamon, escaped from prison, nor against Arcite, banished from Thebes, when he discovers them fighting in his forest. He realizes these men, covered with bloody wounds, are rivals in love whose god they serve. There is more than warm objectivity – irony, perhaps – in the duke’s comment, “Se how they blede! Be they noght wel arrayed?/ Thus hath hir lord, the god of love, ypayed/Hir wages and hir fees for hir servys!” (1801–03). In the Merchant’s Tale, the line is spoken of May, who after a night of lovemaking with her old husband, January, has decided to have mercy on the lovesick squire, Damian. Again, there may be more than a little irony about her pity and her decision to love the poor squire, “Though he namoore hadde than his sherte” (1985), since Chaucer insinuates that the young wife has not enjoyed her husband’s amorous attentions: the merchant says he cannot relate whether May thought January’s lovemaking “Paradys or helle” (1964) because he might anger the fastidious in his audience! In the Squire’s Tale, the line is the opening verse of the mournful lady falcon’s account of her unhappy love story to Canacee, the daughter of a Mongol king who is able to understand the language of birds because of a magic ring – a fanciful, even slightly amusing, situation which does not lend itself to high tragedy. In the Man of Law’s Tale, the line describes the compassion of King 59

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Alla at the very moment he devises a plan to test a knight who has accused Custance, the heroine of the pious romance, of murdering her friend, Hermengyld, with a knife. The false accuser is asked to swear on the Gospels; as soon as he does, he is struck dead by a mysterious hand while a voice rises out of the crowd, in Cecil B. DeMille cinematic-style, accusing him of slandering an innocent woman. Finally, in the Prologue (F) to the Legend of Good Women, the line is spoken by the God of Love to describe the lady who gave the poet, Chaucer, such light penance for having written so unkindly of Criseyde: that is, to spend the greater part of the remainder of his life writing tales about women true in loving. In the Legend of Dido, Chaucer seems to demonstrate that the same compassion that makes the queen sympathize with the trials through which Aeneas passed after the Fall of Troy is also the compassion that makes her the target of seduction when, later in the tale, Aeneas declares his love in the cave. There, while a storm rages outside, Aeneas plays on her sympathy, promising to be true “as a fals lovere so wel can” (1236). And she is completely taken in: That sely Dido rewede on his peyne, And tok hym for husbonde and becom his wyf. (1237–38)

A natural inclination toward sensuality combined with a compassionate heart take Dido to her pathetic end; Aeneas, once his “hote ernest is al overblowe” (1287), deserts her to conquer Italy. For the conclusion of the Legend of Dido Chaucer translates the opening of the elegiac seventh epistle of the Heroides, which Dido presumably wrote before falling on Aeneas’s sword: “Ryght so,” quod she, “as that the white swan Ayens his deth begynnyth for to synge, Right so to yow make I my compleynynge. Not that I trowe to geten yow ageyn, For wel I wot that it is al in veyn, Syn that the goddes been contraire to me. But syn my name is lost thourgh yow,” quod she, “I may wel lese on yow a word or letter, Al be it that I shal ben nevere the better; For thilke wynd hath blowe awey youre fey.” (1355–65)

As in Ovid, Dido realizes that her appeal is useless: she is throwing her words away just as she has lost her reputation through Aeneas. The narrative closes with two lines advising that the reader who wishes to read the whole letter go find it in Ovid. An explicit follows immediately afterwards: Explicit Legenda Didonis martiris, Cartaginis Regine. While the concluding letter may be interpreted as a presentation of evidence of Dido as a true lover, the perfunctory tone of the advice to read the fuller account in Ovid together with the brief explicit noting Dido’s martyrdom suggest that Chaucer is too mature to suffer the fools of love gladly anymore. At this stage of his career he is ready to go beyond the courts of love; he is ready for the infinite variety of the 60

Cleopatra and Dido Canterbury Tales and the broader audience for which it was written. Lisa Kiser observes of it that “the eleven lines of Dido’s letter end her legend with solemnity and grace” (Kiser, 145); John Fyler believes that Chaucer has taken Dido’s side “wholeheartedly,” pointing to Chaucer’s abandoned Dido, pregnant (1323) like Ovid’s heroine, not merely, as in Virgil, wishing for pregnancy (Book 4, 328–29).21 Taking a somewhat idiosyncratic position, Florence Percival views Chaucer’s Dido as “a sentimental and pathetic figure . . . Eneas’s dupe” whose plight is “portrayed as the inevitable consequence of her own feminine gullibility and susceptibility” (Percival, 248). To the extent that one can gauge tone in works so brief as the legends, Percival’s position seems to me the closest to capturing Chaucer’s attitude toward his subject. Chaucer’s verse is subtler, more nuanced, than Boccaccio’s prose; hence, the greater uncertainty about his real intentions and the possibility of the presence of irony. When Boccaccio compiled Of Famous Women he called the work pious in his Preface even though all the subjects were pagan not Christian.22 Pagan women deserved special notice for achievement, he believed, since they reached their goals without Christian illumination. Moreover, since they accomplished difficult deeds despite being women, “almost all of whom are endowed with tenderness, frail bodies, and sluggish minds,” Boccaccio thought they deserved to be praised as famous men had been praised by ancient authors and by his contemporary, Petrarch.23 His misogyny is palpable. There will not be merely accounts of Penelope, Lucretia, and Sulpicia, chaste matrons all, but also “very strong but destructive characters” like Medea, Flora, and Sempronia who gained fame through deeds which were not virtuous.24 Boccaccio promises his reader that he has been rigorous and thorough, pulling “back the reins a bit from evil” as well as restoring “what seems to be missing from the disgrace of certain women’s loveliness.”25 With Chaucer there are even questions about whether he threw the whole project up: Are some of the manuscripts of the Legend lost? Did he stop writing legends out of boredom with the whole enterprise of praising women true in loving? Chaucer’s collection of legends is not just a compilation of stories in praise of pagan women; it is a palinode, a poetic recantation, according to Chaucer’s rhetorical construct, for having drawn such an unfavorable portrait of Criseyde that he must in this new poetic work specifically praise women true in loving all their lives. However, after the portrait of the

21 Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 112. Cp. Frank, 77. 22 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, xxxix; “pio,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 28. 23 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, Guarino, xxxvii; “[mulieres] quibus fere omnibus a

natura rerum mollities insita et corpus debile ac tardum ingenium datum est,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 24. 24 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, xxxvii; “pernitiosum forte fuit ingenium,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 24. 25 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, xxxviii; “inde ignavos habenis ab infaustis paululum retraxisse, sed id restaurasse quod quarundam turpitudinibus venustatis opusculo demptum videtur,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 26.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance tragic plight of the true wife, Alceste, the other tales about suffering heroines are treated with a constantly alternating tone: now sympathetic, now cynical, now flip, now bored, and so on. Chaucer’s view is that of a more- or less-sympathetic medieval male who sees the female’s limitations and finds no remedy for misfortune in love except greater exercise of both will and reason – difficult for humankind, in general, for women, especially, and most particularly for women from the Orient like Cleopatra and Dido, doomed by blood to be inclined to sexual excess. In the fragment of the romance found in the Canterbury Tales known as the Squire’s Tale, the subject of the next chapter, there is an account of a forlorn lady abandoned by a heartless male, but they are both birds, a fact which gives the pathetic a comic edge; furthermore, the story of the unhappy affair is subordinated to the unfinished tale of the exotic marvels of the Mongol East which the Crusader Knight’s young son is engaged in telling.

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Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure

4 Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure

I

F there is orientalism to consider in the Squire’s Tale, it is different from that examined in the preceding chapter. Here we find the more conventional “academic” sort, for this tale is remarkable for its wide variety of Eastern sources and analogues. The elements of these – motifs, details of plot and setting, etc. – may be thought of as “content,” though the striking feature of this romance is its form, a matter that throws light on the romance’s westernness. While the content of the unfinished Squire’s Tale may be oriental, its structure appears to be European, a type of poetry of interlace found in medieval French romance literature and even the English epic, Beowulf. It could be said that the interlaced form of romance with which Chaucer experiments relates to Eastern frame narratives (albeit at some distance), but it is impossible to be conclusive about this.

Oriental Content or “Academic” Orientalism Compared to the voluminous studies of many other Canterbury tales, the critical notice taken of the tale told by the squire is relatively slight. A study which has helped renew interest in the squire’s fragmentary tale is Jennifer R. Goodman’s 1983 article, “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Rise of Chivalry” (Goodman, 127–36). Her essay offers a genial appreciation of the tale, arguing that it resembles other late Middle English romances like Partonope of Blois, Valentine and Orson, and Generides, all characterized by an interest in exotic Oriental detail, complex plots involving numerous characters, magic blended with realism, and family plots (some, Generides and Huon of Bordeaux, for example, that even provide instances of averted incest, a subject that has engaged recent scholars).1 Goodman’s article begins by 1

Lillian Hornstein grouped these romances with those she labelled “composites of courtly romance.” See Hornstein, “Composites of Courtly Romance,” 147–58. On the subject of incest in romance literature, John Fyler has argued that the theme is linked to such common features of the genre as “questions of identity, complicated by disguise or ignorance; distinctions between self and other” and, most important, for his focus on romance’s preoccupation with incest, “the reluctance of romance narrative to reach its ending” (“Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale,”

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance reminding us that once there was significant interest and taste for such works. Milton, it will be recalled, expresses regret at the incomplete state of the Squire’s Tale by referring to Chaucer without naming him, as if his summary of the tale would be sufficient to place it in the mind of any reader of lines 109–20 of Il Penseroso: Or call up him that left half told The story of Cambuskan bold, Of Camball, and of Algarsife, And who had Canace to wife, That own’d the virtuous Ring and Glass, And of the wondrous Horse of Brass, On which the Tartar King did ride; And if aught else great Bards beside In sage and solemn tunes have sung, Of Tourneys and of Trophies hung, Of Forests, and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear.2

Goodman’s stress on motifs the tale shares with other late medieval English romances contrasts with past scholarship, much of which has concerned itself with the romance’s Orientalness. Eminent scholars of the nineteenth century and of the first forty years of the twentieth century sought Oriental sources and analogues for such details as the magical gifts (i.e., the ring, mirror, and horse of brass), the characters named by Milton, and the setting as if mining for diamonds. The accumulated weight of their findings gave emphasis to the extent of the tale’s eastern sources and analogues among Persian, Arabic, and Byzantine texts. A. W. Pollard wrote in the introduction to his 1899 edition of the Squire’s Tale that Chaucer seems “to have read or heard several Eastern tales, and to have formed the ambitious project of combining them into a single story, which would have required many thousand lines for its proper development” (Pollard, vii). Skeat was convinced of Chaucer’s indebtedness to Marco Polo’s Travels for his conception of the setting of Cambyuskan’s Mongol Empire, a view which Manly rejected, subscribing instead to the view that Chaucer had access to romances about Genghis Khan: “I can hardly resist the conviction that Chaucer found all his characters named and his scene laid in the source – written or oral – from which he derived his plot.”3 H. S. V. Jones

2

3

2). More recently, Elizabeth Scala has written about how the story of incest goes untold in the Squire’s Tale (“Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables,” 15–39). Il Penseroso in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, 74–5. The last five lines of this passage appear to refer broadly to other poets (“great Bards beside”) who have also written of such things (“aught else”) as worthy to be summoned. Milton probably had Spenser in mind: certainly the forests of the Faerie Queene qualify as full of “enchantments drear/Where more is meant than meets the ear.” Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 3. 471–73; Manly, “Marco Polo and the Squire’s Tale,” 349.

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Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure argued that Arabic and derivative Old French tales belonging to the Cléomadès Cycle, especially the version by Adenès le Rois and, to a lesser degree, the Méliacin, by Girard d’Amiens, offered parallels to Chaucer’s tale, most especially the model for the magical horse.4 The tale of the flying horse from the Arabian Nights as summarized by Jones for his section on the Squire’s Tale in Bryan and Dempster is remarkably close to both thirteenthcentury French romances.5 The provenance of the Cléomadès story which provided a model for Chaucer does, then, appear to be Arabic. Written at the request of Blanche of Castile, the king of France’s sister, and, after 1275, widow of Ferdinand of Cerda, infanta of Castile, the Romance of Cléomadès by Adenès le Rois with its tale of the enchanted horse is thought to have been based on a Spanish version of the Arabic tale (presumed to be the source of Méliacin as well).6 The similarities between the Arabic tale and the Cléomadès are striking. As in the Arabic version, three kings make a visit to another king’s court on a day of feasting and arrive bearing gifts. In Cléomadès, the feasting celebrates the birthday of Marcadigas, son of Caldus, King of Sardinia, who is the father of Cléomadès and three beautiful daughters. The gifts of the three kings are remarkably like those in the Arabic tale: a golden hen and three golden chickens that walk and sing; a man of gold who blows a horn at the approach of treason; and an ebony horse controlled by pins. The French romance also contains the request of the three kings to marry the beautiful daughters. The two daughters of Marcadigas given to the handsome kings are content, but the third, whose lot it is to be given to the ugly king, Crompart, asks for the intervention of her brother, Cléomadès. Like the brother in the Arabic tale, Cléomadès is confounded by the gift of the mechanical horse. After mounting it, his inability to handle the control pins causes him to ascend and travel far until he is finally able to descend, at which point he lands on the palace of the beautiful princess, Claremondine. Again, as in the Arabic version, an angry father threatens the intruder who saves himself only by mounting the mechanical horse and flying into the sky from whence he came. In Cléomadès, the prince finally lands in Seville. After a time, he returns for the lady he longs for and rejoins her only to have her snatched away, as in the Arabic tale, by the ugly suitor who finds her unattended outside the city while her lover is making travel plans. The ugly Crompart whisks her away on the flying horse and the remainder of the French romance is taken up with Cléomadès’s adventures in regaining the beautiful Claremondine whom he eventually takes back to Seville. The plot of Méliacin is very close to Cléomadès, the major difference being that it is set in Asia, not Spain. The main features that Chaucer has borrowed from the Cléomadès 4

5 6

Jones, “The Cléomadès and Related Folk-Tales,” 557–98; “Some Observations upon the Squire’s Tale,” 346–59; “The Cléomadès, the Méliacin, and the Arabian Tale of the Enchanted Horse,” 221–43. See Appendix. Hasselt’s Introduction to Li Roumans de Cléomadès by Adenès le Rois, vol. 1, xv–xvi, xix, xxi, xxvii.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance seem to include the details of the operation of the horse by means of pins, the occasion of a royal birthday feast, and the gift that has the power to reveal treason (a magic mirror in the Squire’s Tale; a golden man in Cléomadès). Notable among the many differences are that instead of three kings bringing three gifts to the three daughters of the king of Seville, Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale has one knight with four gifts for the Tartar king and his one daughter and that the Cléomadès has no episode like that of Canacee and the falcon in Chaucer’s romance. That bit of the Squire’s Tale has an analogue found in yet another oriental tale. Haldeen Braddy points to the tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, translated by Burton for his edition of the Arabian Nights, as the source of the episode of the peregrine falcon lamenting its desertion by a male companion – that is to say, whatever earlier version of this tale Chaucer could have known (Braddy, “The Oriental Origin,” 11–19). Though the tale in the Arabian Nights collection may have been too late to be the one Chaucer used, Braddy locates several similar extant stories among very early oriental tales concerning talking bird couples, the male of which is faithless as in, for example, the Persian tale collection known as Touti-Nameh which contains a tale wherein a princess, having seen a male peacock desert his female partner when lightning strikes their nest, decides never to marry. In the tale translated from the Arabian Nights, Princess Dunya is turned against marriage because of a dream in which she has seen the loyal action of a female pigeon who risks her life to free her male partner from a snare repaid by his abandonment when she is snagged by a fowler’s trap. The human male suitor, Taj al-Muluk, whose female beloved has rejected marriage because of her dream, devises a stratagem to cure her disdain of the male sex: he sets up a series of paintings in the lady’s garden which reveals that the reason the male pigeon failed to rescue the female caught in the snare is that he had been snatched up in the claws of a huge bird of prey before he could return to free his mate. Braddy effectively makes the link between Chaucer’s falcon episode and this oriental analogue by pointing out that the episode in the Squire’s Tale begins when Canacee awakens the ladies to accompany her for a walk in her garden after her sleep has been disturbed by a vision. This dream opens the episode in which the princess gets a lesson about men and their attraction to newefangelnesse from the talking falcon who has been abandoned by her mate. In a subsequent article, Braddy further suggests that the Canacee-falcon episode might have been intended as a frame for a series of short related narratives along the lines of the so-called “box within a box” story common in Persian and Arabic tales wherein there is a principal story followed by numerous intercalary incidents. These might have been, in the incomplete Squire’s Tale, the three episodes named but not recounted involving 1. Cambyuskan, 2. Algarsif and Theodora, and 3. Cambalo and Canacee. Had the squire not been cut off by the franklin, other developments in the plot presumably would have illustrated Canacee’s misfortune in having acquired a faithless lover (Braddy, “The Genre,” 279–90). As Braddy reminds us, “it 66

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure seems perfectly clear that the fable of birds was to carry over to the affairs of Canacee, because what occasioned the dream leading to the discovery of the hawk was the magic mirror” that possessed the power to reveal to any lady bright (137) the future tresoun (139) of any false new love (Braddy, “The Genre,” 281). As late as 1977, Dorothee Metlitzski adds to these eastern analogues a Byzantine epic, Digenes Akritas, which, like the squire’s tale, is a romance about a family; the tale seems also to offer a connection to the falcon episode: Digenes encounters a woman abandoned by a faithless lover (Metlitzki, 144–52). Basilius Digenes Akritas was a Byzantine national hero of the tenth century. His story is told in six extant manuscripts written in medieval Greek of the eleventh century found in libraries from Northern Turkey to Greece, Italy and Spain. While Digenes Akritas is generally unknown to even serious students of English literature, Kimon Friar – translator of Kazantzakis’s modern Greek, The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel – says, “Every Greek has heard of it!”7 A broad overview of the medieval epic makes clear why Metlitzski called it a romance about a family. The major character of the first part of the story is an Arab emir who is the father of Digenis. On a raid in Byzantine Cappadocia, the emir captures a highborn Greek young woman. After being defeated by her brother in combat, the emir decides to be baptized, to marry the woman, and move to the Byzantine side of the border. Digenis is born of the Arab father and Greek mother and, like his father, grows up to steal himself a Greek bride from a Byzantine castle. He leads the life of a border guard of land located in the east of the Byzantine Empire. After building a palace by the Euphrates, Digenis dies young. Chaucer’s romance also concerns members of a family: Cambyuskan and his Queen Elpheta, their two sons Algarsif and Cambalo, and their daughter Canacee. They live further east, however, than the Byzantine family. The detail about the abandoned woman that Metlitzski points to as parallel to the falcon episode of the Squire’s Tale is the subject of Book 5 of Digenis Akritas, a work in 8 books. In other words, the book about the deserted bride is a significant episode just as is the Canacee-falcon portion of the Squire’s Tale as we have it (though, if Chaucer’s squire had been left alone to tell a tale as long or longer than that of his father, the knight, the Canacee-falcon episode might look much less significant). In the medieval Greek epic, Digenis, who comes upon the wailing maiden abandoned by her unfaithful lover, also becomes the catalyst for bringing the cruel knight to repentance and to reunion with the girl. In Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, the falcon found by Canacee – the daughter, not the son of a king – is also reunited with her false lover, not by the princess who found her, but by her brother, Cambalus:

7

Quoted by Denison Hull in the Preface to his translation of Digenes Akritas, x.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance . . . this faucon gat hir love ageyn Repentant, as the storie telleth us, By mediacion of Cambalus, The kynges sone. . . . (654–67)

Even if most of the findings of scholarship are correct about the many disparate elements of oriental tales that Chaucer appears to have combined in the Squire’s Tale, the resulting composite romance still can be said to be Chaucer’s own. So far, no one tale has ever been found that contains all the parts that Chaucer brought together for the squire. Interestingly, the most recent major article concerning the Squire’s Tale returns to this venerable line of stressing the romance’s Oriental affinities. Not primarily concerned with narrative form but with the theme of “love, power, and the negotiation of a settlement in the prolonged war between the sexes” (found in Fragments IV and V of the Canterbury Tales), Kathryn Lynch argues, however, that both the squire and the franklin associate “female sexual power” with “the exotic East” (Lynch, East Meets West, 530, 531). This connection, I think, is made more emphatically in the legends of Dido and of Cleopatra where, though Chaucer also writes short texts – one slightly longer, the other somewhat shorter than the Squire’s Tale, there can be no mistaking his intentions. Within the gendered and cultural context which concerns her Lynch finds the primary focus of the squire’s tale to be “its Orientalism,” exploring not only the responses of past scholars to the tale and the thinking of Edward Said on the nature of western views of the Orient, but the clever female raconteur of the frame element of the Arabian Nights Entertainment as well to make her point (Lynch, East Meets West, 531). Some of these matters, particularly the power of the storytelling Shahrazad, bear on the late Middle English romance of Le Bone Florence of Rome, the subject of chapter 6, and will be taken up there.

Interlace as European In turning to what may be seen as western, European, perhaps even English, about the Squire’s Tale – its structure as an interlaced romance, three sections of Part Two of the tale will be particularly important to my analysis: the playful description of the kiss (lines 347–52) which has bothered some critics, the passage about the knotte (lines 401–08), presumably a reference to the main idea of the tale which the falcon episode illustrates, and the bit of signposting that concludes the secunda pars (lines 661–70). At the outset, I would like to recall the lines that Edmund Spenser wrote about the Squire’s Tale in Book Four of the Faerie Queene. Here he attempts to complete one of the threads thrown out and then dropped in the fragmentary tale. Spenser’s continuation concerns the battle of three brothers with Cambell to win the hand of his sister, Canacee. In stanza 31 of Book IV, Canto ii, of the Faerie Queene, a squire is sent to see who is approaching and returns with the news that “Two of the prowest Knights in Faery lond,” Cambell and 68

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure Triamond, are at hand. In the stanza that follows Chaucer is proclaimed in no uncertain terms as a poet of epic stature who is English: Though now their acts be nowhere to be found, As that renowned Poet them compyled, With warlike numbers and Heroicke sound, Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.8

(4. 2. 32)

To see the most striking western feature of The Squire’s Tale it is necessary to pull away from the close examination of individual details of plot, proper names, and matters of general atmosphere to gain enough distance to view the romance’s overall structure, incomplete though it is. We have first, 346 lines concluding, “Explicit prima pars,” organized around a royal birthday feast held at court for a king who has ruled for twenty years. His family – two sons, a wife, and daughter – is briefly introduced. After the feast’s third course, he calls for his minstrels to entertain, when suddenly a knight bursts on the scene with four marvelous gifts from “the kyng of Arabe and of Inde” (The Squire’s Tale, 110): a steed of brass that can fly and a sword which no armor can withstand, capable of healing the wounds it inflicts (for the king); and a mirror wherein one can see future adversity, in particular, the falseness of lovers, and a ring enabling its wearer to understand and speak the language of birds (for the king’s daughter). The sword and mirror are immediately placed for safe keeping in the castle tower, the ring is given to Canacee to wear, and, after refreshing himself, the emissary knight is given considerable space to explain to king Cambyuskan how the operation of various mechanical pins causes the brass horse to ascend, descend, or disappear. Having sent the horse’s bridle to join the other gifts placed in the tower, Cambyuskan and his court return to feasting until the wee hours of the morning. Part One is followed by lines 347–670, stretching from “Sequitur pars secunda” to “Explicit secunda pars.” This second part opens with a great splash: an open-mouthed French kiss that is at once playful and vulgar, The norice of digestion, the sleep, Gan on hem wynke and bad hem taken keep That muchel drynke and labour wolde han reste; And with a galpyng mouth hem alle he keste, And seyde that it was tyme to lye adoun, For blood was in hys domynacioun. (347–52)

8

Citations to Spenser’s verse refer to The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt. The editors do not number lines of verse for the Faerie Queene; divisions refer to book, canto, and stanza.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance The break in tone and decorum has bothered some critics.9 It seems to me, however, an eminently medieval intrusion. The bold stroke of Sleep’s open mouth is reminiscent of the open beaks of birds and heads of serpents that interrupt the intertwining coils of countless Celtic and Anglo-Saxon designs in manuscript illuminations, decorative stone, and metalwork, some of which even appear in devotional contexts like the familiar illuminations of The Book of Kells. More important, this passage, so ostentatiously calling attention to itself at the start of Part Two, doubles back, in the manner of many European medieval romance plots, on the central thread of the action of the immediately preceding section (the feasting of Part One), tying up loose ends to create a knot, so to speak. (We shall shortly return to this matter of “a knot.”) In the concluding three lines of the first movement of the tale, the narrator had taken leave of Cambyuskan and his lords who continue feasting “in lust and jolitee” for a long stretch of time – “Til wel ny the day began to sprynge” (346). The revellers are no sooner left to sleep it off at the end of Part One, than the king’s daughter takes center stage, just fifteen lines into Part Two. Here, as well, a threading back to the preceding unit may be seen to occur. In Part One the narrator had declined to describe her beauty – “But for to telle yow al hir beautee,/ It lyth not in my tonge, n’yn my konnyng” (34–5) – focusing attention instead on her father the king who is described at length, . . . he was hardy, wys, and riche, And pitous and just, alwey yliche; Sooth of his word, benigne, and honurable; Of his corage as any centre stable, Yong, fressh, and strong, in armes desirous As any bacheler of al his hous. A fair persone he was and fortunat, And kept alwey so wel roial estat That ther was nowher swich another man. (19–27)

We should, nonetheless, not be surprised that the king’s youngest child becomes the focal point of Part Two; the narrator has prepared us. The king may have worn the crown for twenty years, the birthday feast may be his, but when the magical gifts are presented in Part One, two out of four go to Canacee. Furthermore, when the gift-bearing knight, once he has removed his armor and taken refreshment, is taken to king Cambyuskan, he is described as dividing his attention between father and daughter, This noble kyng is set upon his trone. This strange knyght is fet to hym ful soone, And on the daunce he gooth with Canacee. (275–77)

9

See, for example, Miller, “Chaucer’s Rhetorical Rendition of Mind,” 220 and Stillwell, “Chaucer in Tartary,” 179–80.

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Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure The allegorical figure of Sleep, having kissed the king and all his lords at the start of Part Two, causes them to “sleep it off” while the thread back to Canacee of Part One is pulled out to reassert and develop itself as the second twist of the tale. Canacee has had the good sense to try to get a decent night’s sleep, She was ful mesurable, as wommen be; For of hir fader hadde she take leve To goon to reste soone after it was eve. (362–64)

She has gone to bed so excited, however, about her magical ring and mirror that she has a dream that causes her to awaken before dawn and rouse her maid and ten or so other ladies of the court before taking a morning walk. As soon as she hears birds singing, the ring works its magic and she realizes that she can understand their language. It has taken the narrator fully 54 lines to double back to catch the Canacee thread and thus break off from the male world of kings and knights in Part One to enter the female world of Canacee and her ladies in Part Two. By way of apology for having taken so long and before introducing the episode of the peregrine falcon, the narrator makes a statement about overlong approaches to the “knotte” of a tale. Presumably the knotte refers to the main idea of the tale which the falcon episode is about to illustrate: The knotte why every tale is toold, If it be taried til that lust be coold, Of him that han it after herkned yoore, The savour passeth ever lenger the moore For fulsomnesse of his prolixitee; And by the same resoun, thynketh me, I sholde to the knotte condescende And maken her walkyng soone an ende. (401–08)

The passage does several things at once. It apologizes for taking so long in twisting from thread one – king and knights – back to thread two – Canacee, it alerts the reader to the importance of the falcon’s complaint about to get underway, and it draws attention to the narrative technique of romance interlace, conspicuous for complexity and length, by using the term “knotte.” The Middle English word contains the sense of a “tie” or “link” which derives ultimately from the Old Germanic verb knutton meaning knit. In interlace technique at its best an intertwining of the parts fastens them together in a manner which secures some form of meaningful unity. The falcon’s lament about her faithless lover ends with Canacee taking the bird home to heal it with medicinal herbs, and the narrator finally moves into “Incipit pars tercia.” After only two lines, Apollo whirleth up his chaar so hye Til that the god Mercurius hous, the slye – (671–72) 71

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance the Squire is cut off by the franklin’s, “In feith, Squire, thow hast thee wel yquit.” The romance is prematurely and permanently ended. We have, nonetheless, enough to identify the overall design of the romance’s structure; we even know where the squire was heading before the franklin stopped him because of the bit of signposting that concludes the secunda pars: First wol I telle yow of Cambyuskan, That in his tyme many a citee wan; And after wol I speke of Algarsif, How that he wan Theodora to his wif, For whom ful ofte in greet peril he was Ne hadde he ben holpen by the steede of bras; And after wol I speke of Cambalo, That fought in lystes with the bretheren two For Canacee er that he myghte hire wynne. And ther I lefte I wol ayeyn bigynne. (661–70)

The squire was consciously, even, perhaps, self-consciously, trying his hand at an interlaced romance, planning to return to characters named earlier and never given a part to play (Algarsif and Cambalo) or intending to pick up a thread of action which had been temporarily dropped, that of Cambyuskan. He had been left asleep at the conclusion of Part One; however, since he had initially been described as still “in armes desirous” (23), he would understandably be active enough to have his victories in battle recounted somewhere in the course of the squire’s tale. The franklin correctly observed of the squire that he had acquitted himself “gentilly,” for he was employing a narrative form associated with the world of chivalry. In her book, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, which painstakingly demonstrates how the tales have their own distinct individual features yet gain in meaning by the reader’s examining interrelationships between tales, Helen Cooper makes the following observation: “There is also one mediaeval genre that operates on a structural pattern closer to the interweaving of plot and sub-plot. This is the interlaced romance, where the simultaneous adventures of various heroes are followed by pursuing each for a section of narrative and returning to him later” (Cooper, Structure, 71). Further on, in the course of her book, she does classify the Squire’s Tale as such a romance.10 The notion of interlace structure was used first to describe the complexity of thirteenth-century French prose romances, most especially those of the Arthurian cycle (i.e., L’Estorie del Graal, L’Estoire de Merlin, La Queste del Saint Graal, La Mort le Roi Artu). The term was later applied to some Middle English romances of the fourteenth century, Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte

10 Donald Baker points out in his variorum edition of the tale, “the only Chaucer scholar, as far as I

am aware, to see SqT as (a bad) interlaced romance is Cooper . . . who is more concerned with adapting the idea of interlace structure to the themes of CT as a whole.” See Baker’s edition of The Squire’s Tale, 58.

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Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure D’Arthur, and finally Spenser’s sixteenth-century Faerie Queene. Speaking for many a student who has become exasperated by the plethora of characters and episodes woven into the fabric of the Faerie Queene, C. S. Lewis observed, “Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths. At every point the question ‘How did we get here?’ arises” (Lewis, The Discarded Image, 194). John Leyerle, in an attempt to account for the rapid shifts in subject and time in the early medieval epic, Beowulf, argued that the Old English poem was composed in an interlace structure by analogy to eighth-century interlace decoration of Anglo-Saxon art from the English North and Midlands which had reached a highpoint of complexity at the time of the epic’s composition. In a way which brings to mind the squire’s passage about the audience’s imagined impatience with tales that take too long getting to the knotte, Leyerle defines interlace structure in Anglo-Saxon art as being . . . made when the bands are turned back on themselves to form knots or breaks that interrupt, so to speak, the linear flow of the bands. (Leyerle, 147)

He is here referring to the serpentine coils of Anglo-Saxon decorative art; nonetheless, it may be said of Beowulf that, like such art – constantly recoiling on itself – linear in design with clear beginning, middle, and end is what Beowulf is not. Similarly, Eugéne Vinaver likened the ribbons of Romanesque art, also without clear beginnings or ends, to the centerless constructions of thirteenth-century French romance writers. An echo of the squire’s passage about getting to the “knot” of the matter and the delays of prolix narratives is heard again in Vinaver’s reference to Wilhelm Worringer’s description of the intertwined patterns of the gothic as being “brought together as in a chequer of knotting and plaiting.”11 The falcon episode in Part Two of the Squire’s Tale is fully female and thus contrasts sharply with the maleness of Part One. Here, if anywhere, Chaucer had an opportunity to create meaning and hence give the interlace structure a functional purpose. As has been well observed of interlace at its best, “We digress, or seem to, and then come back, not to precisely what we left but something we understand differently because of what we have seen” (Tuve, 363). The difference between men and women and their interdependence might have been developed in the unfinished Squire’s Tale. The falcon episode, as we have it, represents a company of women – Canacee, her elderly maid, and other ladies of the court – providing a circle of compassion for the suffering of a lady falcon who, deserted by a false tercelet that has taken up with a kite, has made herself faint with bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. While the peregrine falcon prepares to begin her story of seduction and abandonment, Canacee weeps “as she to water wolde” (496), illustrating the familiar Chaucerian principle which is stated in this tale at line 479, “pitee renneth soone in gentil herte.” At the conclusion of the 131-line account, the 11 Cited in Vinaver, The Rise of Romance, 77, n. 2 (Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, 54).

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance feeling of compassion has expanded to include all the attendant women: “Greet was the sorwe for the haukes harm/ That Canacee and alle hir wommen made” (632–33). The bird is taken home to court, placed in a velvet-lined box, and ministered to by Canacee with bandages, salves, and herbs. Then with an abruptness utterly typical of interlace, the narrator drops the thread and weaves back to pick up an earlier one. The female world is done with, Thus lete I Canacee hir hauk kepyng (651)

and the speaker re-enters that of men, . . . hennesforth I wol proces holde To speken of aventures and of batailles. (658–59)

To the squire-narrator the male world of chivalry is more full of marvels than the one we have just left. Even though it was provided with a woman who could understand the language of birds and speak it, too, and a bird had been shown to have had a human experience with love and loss, all that seems to pale for this narrator beside the account he is about to embark on: To speken of aventures and of batailles That nevere yet was herd so grete mervailles. (659–60)

And when the further weaving of the plot does cause him to return to the female world, he announces that it will be to explain how the unfaithful tercelet repented and returned to the lady falcon and how this was accomplished through the agency of a man who had already been introduced in the preceding male world of Part One: . . . Cambalus, The kynges sone, of which I yow tolde. (656–57)

This forecast, of course, begins the section of plans that go unrealized in the fragmentary tale. Besides hearing about him, more will be said, we are told, about Cambyuskan and Cambalus’s brother and how he won his wife. We learn this from the passage of signposting quoted earlier in this chapter (p. 72). It is that passage which also contains the infamous lines generally interpreted to mean that while Cambalus’s brother will be shown winning Theodora, the later development of the marvelous chivalric thread will contain an account of the incestuous winning of Canacee by her brother, Cambalus. And probably that is what the following lines mean: And after wol I speke of Cambalo, That fought in lystes with the bretheren two For Canacee er that he myghte hire wynne. (667–69)

The subject of incest is indisputably more sensational than the linguistic 74

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure phenomenon of being able to converse with birds in bird language. Whether incest here should be seen or not as a sign of Chaucer’s association of the sexually deviant with the East, sexual perversion being an element of western perception of the East, according to Edward Said’s familiar study, Orientalism, Spenser takes pains to remove it in the Faerie Queene.12 In Spenser’s continuation of the chivalric thread Chaucer left dangling, a woman healer is added to the scene of battle where Cambel fights the brothers. Her skill must surpass what Chaucer’s Canacee can offer the peregrine falcon, for she carries a cup containing a medicine said to be potent enough to make everything come out right: Nepenthe is a drinck of souerayne grace Deuized by the Gods for to asswage Harts grief, and bitter gall away to chace, Which stirs vp anguish and contentious rage: In stead thereof sweet peace and quiet age It doth establish in the troubled mynd. . . . (4. 3. 43)

She extends the cup to wounded Cambel and her brothers with the result that all wounds are healed – both physical and spiritual. Even incest is averted: Triamond marries Canacee and Cambel gets the lady healer whose name suggests more than a little mirroring, And Cambel took Cambina to his fere.

(4. 3. 52)

Chaucer, it seems to me, is not parodying interlaced romance in the Squire’s Tale; nor am I convinced, though some scholars argue the case, that he means to satirize the squire as a poetaster.13 Rather, it appears that the poet Chaucer, sometime in the course of a writing career which explored every variety of narrative form, tried his hand at interlaced romance. He very quickly discovered interlace was not his forte. His two great successes, after all, among his romances, the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, are not structured that way. Trying to account for why the poet left the Squire’s Tale incomplete, Furnivall long ago had this to say: The completion of the Squire’s Tale would have taxt Chaucer’s utmost power even when he was at his best. The subject is one into which he could have imported little humanity. The Continuation would have been a constant strain on his invention and fancy. The work wouldn’t have repaid the effort, and so the Poet turned it up . . . (John Lane’s Continuation, Part 1, xii)

The squire-narrator, however, is created as a storyteller whose intention was to go on undaunted with his tale, fashioning it in a courtly form that was à

12 Said, Orientalism; see especially pp. 31–110 on exotic alterity. 13 Robert Miller, for example, thinks the tale’s “artistic infelicities . . . are Chaucer’s means of repre-

senting dramatically the as-yet-unstructured mind of the narrator,” 221.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance la mode. We have his outline at the end of Part Two as proof. The squire is doing his performance “straight.” He is trying hard to get it right and keeps at it. I believe his text is one Chaucer himself began seriously and then dropped, recognizing his talents in the romance genre to rest elsewhere. The reason Chaucer stopped writing was practical; the reason he gave this little experiment to the squire is also practical – comparable to Joyce’s giving an old villanelle written in his youth to Stephen Dedalus (Joyce, 223–24). The effect achieved by having the franklin cut the squire off may be satirical. Chaucer, however, is also allowing himself a private little joke on an implausible other poetic self. Unlike the squire and happily for us, Chaucer’s English voice found another key in which to sing. If Chaucer had bothered to make the time in which to complete his Squire’s Tale, as he doubtless could have, the finished tale would have been so long as to cause most readers of The Canterbury Tales to avoid it. Thus, Chaucer would have accomplished causing the tale to go unread for a reason opposite the one for which we know it to go mostly unread today: the tale would be complete (instead of incomplete). Indeed, among readers of The Canterbury Tales to be found in the general reading public there is little patience for even a superb romance of the length of The Knight’s Tale. High among the reasons admirers of the Knight’s Tale give for praising the romance is Chaucer’s having given the tale a strong philosophical dimension. Viewed against more typical Middle English romances of the day, the tale told by the noble knight, with its concern for issues of fortune, fate, providence, love, and the human condition, is something of an original. These concerns and the way Arcite’s rivalry with his sworn brother, Palamon, is fit within them, move the romance to the edge of tragedy, especially when Arcite’s death becomes the necessary door, opening on to the union of Palamon with Emelye. If – to adapt an idea of Furnivall’s mentioned above – the Knight’s Tale may be said to offer Chaucer the opportunity that the Squire’s Tale did not, to “import . . . humanity,” that is not accomplished through realistic characterization; rather, the long philosophical passages having to do with Boethian themes of fortune, fate, love, and providence give the poet a chance to express his deep understanding of the sadness in life. It is in this sense that Chaucerian humanity can be said to enter the Knight’s Tale. The tale expresses philosophical ideas poetically. Compare Arcite’s use of the metaphor of the drunk mouse which embodies his own blindness to the way to find true happiness, for example, with a more pedestrian expression of man’s blindness contained in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. First, we have the passage in the tale, We faren as he that dronke is as a mous. A dronken man woot wel he hath an hous, But he noot which the righte wey is thider, And to a dronke man the wey is slider. And certes, in this world so faren we; We seken faste after felicitee, But we goon wrong ful often trewely. (Knight’s Tale, 1261–67) 76

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure Place beside it, the following lines in which Lady Philosophy addresses Boethius: The corage alwey reherceth and seketh the sovereyne good, al be it so that it be with a dyrkyd memorie; but he not by whiche path, ryght as a dronke man not nat by whiche path he may retourne hom to his hous. (Boece, III. prose 2. 83–8)

As to overall structure in the Knight’s Tale, the main lines of the tale are handled in a chronological order even when the narration is complex. Chaucer did not use the convoluted patterns of interlace, though he does digress from the main narration from time to time to fill in an account from the past or to describe events which run parallel to a portion of the unfolding narration. In Chaucer’s other great romance, Troilus and Criseyde, tragedy also combines with romance. The movement of the love story through Books I and II towards the heights of consummation and suffisaunce in love at the midpoint (Book III) is followed by a sharp decline in the final two books which move through separation, disenchantment, and death. The shapely rise and fall of the five-book structure follows Troilus’s inward experience of “wo to wele, and after out of joie.” Again, Chaucer wrote a highly focused tale structured in an uncluttered, direct, linear fashion. Moreover, he endowed the three central characters – Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus – with strongly defined features allowing them dramatic potential that is felt whenever they are given dialogue to speak. This is much less the case with Palamon, Emelye, and Arcite. Chaucer’s two major romances, then, are linear in design and part of their originality may be seen to derive from the introduction of the tragic into the genre. Any experiment within a romance form popular in Chaucer’s day resulting in intentional parody by Chaucer was not to play itself out in the romance of interlace. That was destined to occur in Italy of the sixteenth century in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and in England of the nineteenth century once Byron shook off the dark mantle of Manfred (1817) to don the lighter cloak of Don Juan (1823). As with Byron’s Don Juan, when Chaucer has parodied a form the fact is unmistakable: Sire Thopas wax a doghty swayn; Whit was his face as payndemayn, His lippes rede as rose; His rode is lyk scarlet in grayn, And I yow telle in good certayn, He hadde a semely nose. (Sir Thopas, 724–29)

In The Tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer trots out all the cliches of popular tail-rhyme romances and then his merry joke is over. When the Host interrupts, it is unquestionably time, for all the stylistic tricks have been nimbly displayed. No more is needed. Such is not the case when the franklin cuts the Squire’s Tale off. One final question should be asked about the romance of interlace and the 77

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Squire’s Tale in view of the long history of searching for its sources and analogues in the Orient: has such structure been found to be a feature, say, of the tales in the Arabian Nights? The first interpretive study of the whole work in English, Mia Gerhardt’s The Art of Storytelling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights, has much to say about European interest in the work, but does not raise the issue of interlace structure. A more recent book by David Pinault, however, Storytelling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, seems to concern itself with the subject without using the term “interlace.” Instead he writes about something he calls “thematic patterning” which he defines as “the distribution of recurrent concepts and moralistic motifs among the various incidents and frames of a story” (Pinault, 22). His analysis of The City of Brass in chapter 4 of the book suggests that interlace might be a factor here as minor episodes are demonstrated to reinforce the theme of the major narrative in this tale. From the point of view of the romance of interlace as found in the western tradition, however, what appears to be missing is the disappearance and reappearance of characters that weave or interlace through a number of episodes. Instead, in the eastern technique of frames, episodes seem to open and definitively close even as they reinforce a major theme. In the course of his article, “The Genre of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,” Haldeen Braddy, in arguing that Chaucer was following an Oriental mode and that it was, therefore, reasonable to assume that the Canacee-falcon episode was to be an oriental framing device to contain a series of other “intercalated” episodes, differentiates between two different types of Oriental framing tales. One type, illustrated by the Arabian Nights, he said, “opens with a situation returned to by the narrator as often as tributary incidents are finished” (Braddy, “The Genre,” 283). Braddy presumably takes the individual tales told by Scheherazade each night in order to save herself from execution as the “tributary incidents” and the “situation returned to by the narrator,” the scene in the bedroom where Scheherazade recounts her stories to the Eastern king who distrusts all women. The other type of frame tale, according to Braddy, “begins with a principal story for the frame and is followed by several intercalary incidents before the framing tale is resumed and closed” (Braddy, “The Genre,” 283). Braddy’s example for this second type of Oriental framing tale is the Persian Thousand and One Days. Here the principal story is that of Princess Farruknaz who refuses to marry because of a dream that revealed to her the faithlessness of men. The intercalary incidents are the thousand and one stories of faithful lovers told to her by a nurse who is determined to restore her sense of trust. The Thousand and One Days concludes with the Princess’s acceptance of a suitor. It would seem that this moment constitutes the return to the principal story, now altered by what has intervened. Interestingly, the storytelling did not bring about the change in the Princess. That was caused by paintings on a wall that told a story which reversed that in the Princess’s original dream that had convinced her never to trust men. Braddy surmised that the Oriental atmosphere and motifs of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale would have inclined the poet to structure his tale in an Oriental way; thus, he regarded the 78

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure Canacee-falcon episode as the principal story of what he thought would become – if the Squire had finished his tale – Braddy’s “second type” of Oriental framing tale (after the style illustrated by the Persian Thousand and One Days). The most recent scholarly argument bringing Chaucer and the Oriental frame tale tradition together is Katherine Slater Gittes’s Framing the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative.14 She argues that the Canterbury Tales as well as other medieval European framed collections of tales (such as the Disciplina Clericalis, the Decameron, and the Confessio Amantis) derive their form from a frame tradition that originated and developed in Asia. This is the way she describes the structure of the eighth-century Indian-Arabic work known as the Panchatantra: Besides the Arabic outer framing story, each book of the Panchatantra has an Indian boxing tale of its own. The outer framing story (level A) encloses the entire work; the boxing tale of each individual book (level B) encloses tales (level C) that can enclose still other tales (Level D). (Gittes, Framing, 10)

The result can be three or more levels of narration all going on at the same time, clearly a complex situation; nonetheless, the “outer framing story does not interfere with the collection of tales, and each of the five books of the Panchatantra can exist as a complete narrative” (Gittes, Framing, 14). However the Oriental framing device is described, it is clear that the structure can have variations and some examples are more intricate or more successful as narratives than others. Furthermore, different scholars view the matter of Oriental frame tales differently. Braddy, for example, took the view of the Arabian Nights that there were “tributary incidents” (the tales), each of which, when finished, returned to the Scheherazade frame. This work of the first type of the two types of Oriental framing tales which he distinguished had no related intercalary episodes (as did his type two). I, however, in studying Eastern versions of the chaste wife story, analogues to Le Bone Florence of Rome (discussed in chapter six), found that their appearance in the Thousand and One Nights was thematically significant to the frame story about King Shahrayar’s misogny and that they were also linked to surrounding tales concerned with ideas about justice – civil and domestic. In other words, the chaste wife stories contained in the Thousand and One Nights seem to me to function in the meaningful way of intercalary episodes, the sort that Braddy found only in his type two. How accurately to describe what the classical Oriental framed tale is and what variations there may be of such a tale is no easy matter. The same holds true for medieval Western tales structured as interlaced romances. At their

14 The book is an extension of her PMLA article, “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame

Tradition.”

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance best both Oriental and western structures are capable of producing subtle narrative counterpoint reflecting sophisticated artistry. What looks like “Western” romance narrative of interlace to one reader could look like the Oriental framed tale to another (i.e., myself and Haldeen Braddy viewing the form of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale). Whatever literary scholars call such early complex narratives, many of which have long histories in oral transmission – the Thousand and One Nights, for instance – both Eastern frame narratives and western interlace narratives at their best do what Rosemond Tuve said was accomplished by true interlaced romances: One must distinguish entrelacement from the mere practice, ubiquitous in narrative, of taking one character through a series of actions, then deserting him temporarily – often with the object of introducing suspense – while another character is given primary attention, then returning to the first and so on . . . But events connected by entrelacement are not juxtaposed; they are interlaced, and when we get back to our first character he is not where we left him as we finished his episode but in the psychological state or condition of meaningfulness to which he has been pulled by the events occurring in following episodes written about someone else. . . . (Tuve, 362–63)

This idea can be applied equally to the pilgrim Chaucer (and some of the other pilgrims who made the journey to Canterbury with him) and to King Shahrayar. The great narrative art of both the western and eastern traditions achieves a complete and satisfying resolution of the issues – some of which may be psychological – that have arisen in the course of a tale. As for the pilgrim squire, he is left for all eternity at the point where he was just getting started. If Haldeen Braddy is correct in his speculation that had the franklin not interrupted the squire, a series of box-within-box stories would have been told to fit within the frame story of the peregrine falcon’s complaint, then The Squire’s Tale could be said to stop at precisely the point where an eastern narrative structure might have been expected to start. In that case, the rupture in storytelling might suggest that the fledgling poet, trained in the western tradition, is not up to coping with eastern difference – an idea almost too tidy to entertain. On the other hand, if I am correct in seeing the incomplete tale as structured from the very start of Part One as western interlaced romance until it stops after just two lines of Part Three, then the squire can be seen for what he is: a young European poet and knight-in-the-making asserting his western self in the world of the East which he has imagined. Finally, let us indulge in a hypothetical question: that is, if, within the fiction of The Canterbury Tales, we were to imagine that it was the Crusader Knight, with his extensive travel in the East, who passed on to his son and travelling companion a complex eastern frame-story that he had heard in the Orient which the squire would then retell as The Squire’s Tale, how would the squire handle the problem of imitating the tale’s structure? I suggest that the young squire-poet (as well as his father, the Knight, and imagined source) would express the complexity of 80

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure the eastern frame structure by drawing on his knowledge of the most complicated narrative structure with which he was already familiar: the interlaced structure of medieval French romances so popular at court. That, I submit, is what the poet Chaucer did with whatever oriental tales he read or heard and then combined into The Squire’s Tale.

Appendix: The Tale of the Flying Horse Jones summarizes the tale of the flying horse as it appears in the Breslau Arabic Text edited by Habicht and Fleischer, a version he considered the best and fullest. The Arabic tale appears in Lane’s 1927 translation of the Thousand and One Nights (Pickwick) as “The Story of the Magic Horse,” 523–40, but, as these are some differences in detail, I quote Jones’s summary from Bryan and Dempster’s Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by permission of the University of Chicago Press: On a feast day a king of Persia, who was a great lover of philosophy and geometry, is visited by an Indian, a Greek and a Persian. The Indian presents the king with an image of a man with a golden trumpet. Should a spy enter the city, the man will immediately blow his trumpet and the spy will fall dead. The Greek’s gift is a silver basin in the middle of which sits a golden peacock surrounded by twenty-four young ones; at the passing of each hour, the mother-bird marks the time of day by pecking one of its young and at the end of each month it shows a moon in its mouth. The Persian, in turn, offers an ebony horse adorned with gold and precious stones and furnished with splendid harness; in a day by flying through the air it will carry its rider a year’s journey. The king tests the virtues of the presents and is so pleased with them that he promises to grant any request that his visitors might make. Taking him at his word, they ask for his three daughters in marriage. The youngest of the three daughters of the king is deeply distressed because the Persian, to whom she has been promised, is as ugly as she is beautiful. Her brother, siding with her, remonstrates with his father and insists that the gift of the ugly suitor be tested. He will mount the horse himself. The ugly suitor, resenting this opposition to his marriage, acquaints the Persian prince only with the pin that causes the horse to ascend, purposely omitting to teach him how to come down. When, after a long flight, the Persian prince succeeds in mastering the horse, he descends on the roof of the palace of a foreign king whose daughter, a princess of marvelous beauty, he finds sleeping in a room close by. She mistakes him at first for the suitor to whom she had been promised, but is soon disabused when the king her father, rushing into her room, demands angrily what the stranger is doing there. The prince of Persia rejoins that he will confront on his horse the whole army of the king, but once mounted he loses no time in making away, to the great consternation of the assembled host. At home again, he cannot control his longing to revisit his princess, and on this trip she is glad to return with him that he might make her his bride. Unfortunately, he leaves his 81

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance beloved unprotected outside the city in order to have proper arrangements made for her reception by his father. In his absence the ugly suitor, representing himself as the prince’s messenger, persuades her to mount the horse with him and takes her off to China. The king of that country rescues her but promptly takes over the role of the importunate and unwelcome suitor. She now feigns madness for her self-protection and when her lover, after a long journey, has discovered her whereabouts, he is admitted to her presence disguised as a physician. While pretending to exorcise a demon from the magic horse in order to make permanent the cure of the princess, he once more transports her to his native land, where he makes her his bride and lives with her happily ever after. (H. S. V. Jones, “the Squire’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, 364–65)

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West

5 A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur

A

CCORDING to Haldeen Braddy, Chaucer left the Squire’s Tale iincomplete because he discovered that the Arabic analogue, Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, belonged to a cycle of romances that included an incest motif.1 Chaucer, he argued, “as a man . . . would not tolerate the idea of incest, because as a poet he certainly speaks against it in the Pardoner’s Tale: ‘Lo, how that dronken Looth, unkyndely,/ Lay by his doghtres two, unwityngly;/ So dronke he was he nyste what he wroghte’ (485–87)” (Braddy, “Genre,” 289). The Middle English romance of Floris and Blauncheflur is an obvious place to study the oriental theme in medieval romance but a surprising place in which to discover a question of incest, particularly in the light of the long history of viewing this romance as a portrait of idyllic young love. What prompts the question is the absence in all of the extant English manuscripts of that part of the tale relevant to the birth of the heroine, Blauncheflur, for a reader of the English romance is immediately introduced to the romantic relationship which arises between a Spanish Saracen prince and the daughter of a Christian slave, raised as if brother and sister, while at the same time the mother of the young girl is presented without a husband or a past. In the absence of any explanation of Blauncheflur’s parentage, it is natural enough for the reader to wonder if Blauncheflur might have been fathered by her mother’s master, the Saracen King of Spain. This chapter will consider the question of sibling incest, previously unnoticed in Floris and Blauncheflur, and discuss its relationship to the romance’s symmetrical structures and repetitions as well as to the theme of East and West.

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Braddy, “Genre,” 287–88. The analogue is part of a series of stories about the household of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman, his two sons, Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan, and his daughter, Nuz hat al-Zaman. The cycle includes sibling incest, as Princess Nuz hat al-Zaman marries her brother Sharrkan.

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A Question of Incest The main lines of the action of Floris and Blauncheflur, composed around 1250, concern the difficult love that springs up between Floris, the Moslem son of the King of Spain, and Blauncheflur, a daughter born to a captive Christian slave in Floris’s household. In an effort to avert the growing romance between the two young children, Floris’s parents send their son away and sell Blauncheflur to merchants who, in turn, sell her to a Babylonian potentate who installs her in a harem. Returned to Spain, Floris is told that Blauncheflur is dead. He threatens suicide, and at this his parents relent and give their son all that he needs to set out in search of his lost love. His quest involves the bribery of porters, an adventure in a Babylonian tower containing harem women, threats of execution for sleeping with one of them (Blauncheflur), a magic ring, and ultimately, reunion. For the most part, scholars have been inclined to see the tale as an idyllic love story set in the exotic East. Wells set the direction of future scholarship in 1916 by writing that “The tale is not of passion, but of tender, gentle, devoted love” (Wells, I. 146). Lillian Hornstein’s 1967 updating of the Manual’s assessment of this romance concurs, “The tale is not of combat, nor of passion, but of an idyllic love” (Hornstein, “Floris and Blauncheflur,” 1. 146). Dorothy Metlitzski places the romance within an East-West, Christian-Moslem context and stresses the nobility of a love that unites warring cultures (Metlitzski, 250). The wind of change may have appeared with Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s self-styled “darker reading” of the romance in which she suggests that “the fact that Blauncheflur is a slave is essential to the poem” which she views as anything but “idyllic” (Kelly, 102). This feminist reading of the romance focuses on the use of women in the Middle Ages as barter in the maintenance of social order.2 Had Wells in 1916 been more self-conscious about his own observation, “The piece rests on the charming presentation of the essential need of the children for each other: love is all in all; there is nothing without the loved one,” he might have seen something at least as dark as obsession (Wells, 1. 141). I will try to shed light on yet another area of darkness in this romance. All four of the extant English manuscripts of Floris and Blauncheflur are missing the beginning of the romance, as has been noted repeatedly in the scholarship.3 This is a matter of consequence for it leaves the identity of 2

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On incest and woman as barter, see Levi-Strauss, “The Family,” 278 and also see chapter 3 in Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, which discusses incest in the Man of Law’s Tale within the context of medieval mechanisms of marriage and the exchange of women. 861 lines of the romance appear in the Auchinleck manuscript, “now unanimously assigned to the period 1330–40” (introduction to The Auchinleck Manuscript, Pearsall and Cunningham, vi.) The romance appears in the middle of the manuscript, being item 19 as it now is, item xxvi in the original numbering. It is on ff. 100–4 where its first line is, “I ne kan telle you nocht/ Hou richeliche the sadel was wrout,” corresponding to line 385 in the Hausknecht critical edition. Before this a whole

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West Blauncheflur’s father unclear. Is he the deceased husband (found only in other European versions of the tale) of the Christian slave who is Blauncheflur’s mother or is he her captor, the Spanish, Saracen king, Floris’s father? Could an incest motif have been part of the missing opening and suppressed much as Chaucer in the Man of Law’s Tale calls attention to incest only to turn away from treating it? The English text’s silencing or suppression of the subject of incest, its structural symmetry, most notably the virtual identity of the lover’s names, and even meaning can be illuminated, I would suggest, by reconsidering the love story as an instance of the double, commonly linked in literature (and psychoanalysis) with incest. I would also suggest that possibly incestuous young lovers are allowed to reunite by the end of Floris and Blauncheflur because their union suggests something about the antinomies which the romance presents: East/West, Christian/Moslem, etc. A central pivot of the plot’s action involves the strenuous objections Floris’s parents have to the romantic attachment between their son, the Saracen prince, and Blauncheflur, the daughter of a Christian slave. While the differences of faith and social class alone provide more than enough for the gathering is missing, presumably containing the beginning of the romance. The preceding work is The Seven Sages of Rome, whose ending is missing. A slightly earlier manuscript (ca. 1300), MS. Cambridge University Library Gg. 4. 27. 2. contains 824 lines. Gg. 4. 27. 2. is a single quire of 14 leaves, formerly MS. Gg. 4. 27. 1. The whole contents were edited by J. R. Lumby for EETS, but the original order of works in the MS. was not made plain. The contents are Floris and Blauncheflour, beginning imperfectly from the point where Floriz departs in search of his beloved: “Heo tok for a wel fair þing”; King Horn, 6r–13r; and Assumpcion de Nostre Dame, 13v–14, ending as a fragment with “A sonde me cam while er from heuene.” The quire is imperfect in the sense that it comes from a much larger MS. The earliest English manuscript of Floris and Blauncheflur is Cotton Vitellius D. 3 (before 1300) which contains 210 lines in their entirety and fragments of 240 lines more which run from ff. 6–8 verso. The romance “begins with a few fragments telling how the merchants sell Blancheflour to the “Admiral” of Babylon; and how Floryres comes home and finds her gone, and sets out in search of her” (Ward, 1, 716). Cotton MS Vitellius D. 3, a volume of 26 folios, is one of the many volumes that was badly charred in a fire at the bindery during the last century. The greatest number of lines (1083) appears in MS Egerton 2862 which dates to ca. 1400. It is described in Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum, 238–40. The manuscript comprises 148 folios. The text of Floris and Blauncheflur that occurs on ff. 98–111 is imperfect at the beginning, owing to loss of leaves. It begins “Ne thurst men neuer in londe/After feirer children fonde” (f. 98) and ends, “Home he went with royal array/ And was crownyd within a short day” (f. 111), as quoted in Catalogue of Additions, 239. The manuscript is misbound at the point where Floris begins so that the preceding poem, Sir Degarre, survives only in a truncated form of 161 lines. Lillian Herlands Hornstein, in her section on Miscellaneous Romances in the 1967 revision of Wells Manual writes, “The beginning of the story is lost in all the English manuscripts” and proceeds with her summary of Floris and Blauncheflur, citing only what is in the English versions. Sometimes, almost offhandedly, the French romance is turned to for what is missing in the English, as in Edmund Reiss’s essay on the Middle English romance, “It may, finally, be significant that Blancheflour’s mother, who raises the two children, was a Christian. As is related in the French – the beginning of the story is lacking in all the English manuscripts – she was captured while on a pilgrimage” (“Symbolic Detail in Medieval Narrative: Floris and Blauncheflour,” 349). Piero Boitani, on the other hand, like Hornstein, limits his discussion of the romance to what is found in the Middle English version alone, starting his summary of the romance from the same point as Hornstein, “. . . it concerns two youngsters, the son of a Saracen King and the daughter of a Christian lady prisoner, who grow up together and fall in love. To avoid a union between the two, the King sends Floris away and sells Blauncheflour to some oriental merchants . . .” (Boitani, 52).

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Saracen king and queen to oppose, incest, if it were involved, would appear to add yet another obstacle. About this, the English text is silent, and none of the literary critics and scholars who have considered the romance raise incest as an issue. To my knowledge, no one has considered the identity of Blauncheflur’s father as a problem, even though there is the innkeeper’s tantalizing observation made about Floris (who is by the middle of the romance making inquiries about the whereabouts of Blauncheflur, sold into slavery by his parents): “Þu art hire ilich of alle þinge,/ Boþ of semblaunt and of murninge,/ Of fairnesse and of muchelhede,/ Bute, þu ert a man and he4 a maide” (lines 445–48). His willingness to help is made to seem to come from a desire to aid a brother in search of his sister. Long ago (in 1911), Oliver Johnston noted the matter of the resemblance of the young lovers in a discussion of the twelfth-century Old French Floire and Blaunceflor, but appears to be taking pains to find other explanations: “. . . Floire and Blancheflor are not only born at the same time and place and live in the same home, but they also resemble each other: Car en un biau jor furent ne Et en une nuit engendre (I, 21–22) El vous resamble en moie foi: Bien poez estre d’un eage; Si vous ressamble du viage. (I, 1084–86)

This resemblance motif is doubtless a folk tradition growing out of the resemblance between the names of the hero and the heroine. Their names being similar it was easy for the popular mind to imagine a corresponding resemblance in age, personal appearance, and other matters pertaining to their lives” (Johnston, “The Origin of the Legend of Floire and Blanchefleur,” 130–31). The possibility of their being half brother and sister is completely ignored. In a recent article on the sexuality of the boy heroes of two medieval French romances, Floire et Blancheflor and Floris et Lyriope, Jane Gilbert does raise the incest question. Early in her essay she remarks on how Floris and Blancheflor “grow up inseparable and also . . . strangely physically similar” (Gilbert, 41). Further on, she points to the episode, in the section of the Old French romance where Floire is travelling from place to place in search of Blancheflor who has been sold to merchants by Floire’s parents, wherein Licoris, the wife of one of his hosts, notices Floire’s resemblance to Blancheflor (at lines 1541–48). Gilbert comments, “Licoris ‘sees’ a brother and sister: this relationship, in her eyes, best explains the combination of physical resemblance and close affection which links the child Floire to the maiden Blancheflor” (Gilbert, 46). Gilbert herself, however, while specifi4

“He” is the pronoun for both the third person feminine and masculine singular in Hausknecht’s edition of this Southeast Midlands romance. Throughout this essay, references to the Middle English romance refer to the Hausknecht edition.

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West cally asserting that “the attachment of twin ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ seems incestuous” goes on finally to turn away from incest, concluding that “This disruption . . . occurs only at the edge of consciousness: it could not be said to be in the text, rather it occurs within the perceptions and memory of the audience. It exists, at most, only tangentially and marginally” (Gilbert, 49–50). Though discounted, incest is at least spoken of. To be sure, early on in the Old French text known as the “version aristocratique” the poet makes clear that Floire’s father is a pagan king and Blancheflor’s a Christian count or earl: Flores ses amis que vous di, uns rois paiiens l’engenui, et Blanceflor que tant ama uns cuens crestiiens l’engenra.5

(13–16)

A fairly literal translation would be: “Floire was engendered by a pagan king, as I have already said, and Blancheflor, whom he [Floire] loved so much, was engendered by a Christian count.” Nothing could be more straightforward; the Old French effectively removes any possibility of literal sibling incest. With three markers for the masculine gender (the -s ending in the article, the noun, and the adjective) a clearer indicator for Blancheflor’s father than “uns cuens crestiien” could not be constructed. Cuens is used just as it is in the thirteenth-century work, Chanson de Florence de Rome, where mention is made of “Li quens Joffrois de Pise et Gautier d’Ipolie” (line 2349, “The counts Geoffrey of Pisa and Gautier of Ipolie” [La Chanson De Florence de Rome, Florence De Rome, 2. 97]). Even so, especially to a native English speaker in bilingual fourteenth-century England, listening to a read text, the word cuens might seem to refer to the mother rather than the father as the word cuens in the Old French text could be understood as “queen” rather than “count.” In the nominative masculine case, Old French conte, comte (count or earl) is rendered cuens, quans, both words deriving from the Latin word for “companion:” comes (accusative, comitem [Dictionnaire de l’ançien français ]). In view of the intimate connections which grew between Old French and Middle English after the Norman Conquest of 1066, it is of particular interest to observe the resemblances of form and sound as well as differences (opposites, really) of meaning that occur between the Old French word used to refer to Blancheflor’s Christian father: cuens, and the Middle English word for “woman” or “lowborn woman”: quene (also earlier, cwene, later, quene), on 5

Parenthetical references to the version aristocratique of the Old French poem are cited from Le Conte de Floire Et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc LeClanche which is based on his dissertation (Lille, 1980). In The Romance of Floire and Blanchefleur, Merton J. Hubert translates into English poetically, “A paynim king engendered/Her father Floire, as I have said; While Blanchefleur, she whom Floire adored,/Was fathered by a Christian lord” (16–18). Double-checking verifies Hubert’s translation, “Her father Floire.” Later quotations from the version populaire refer to the text included in Floire et Blanceflor: Poèmes Du XIIIe Siècle, ed. M. Edélstand Du Méril.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance the one hand, and the Middle English for “queen”: quen(e), on the other. These derive from Old English cwene and cw«n respectively. Blancheflor’s mother, a duchess, when wife to the Christian Duke of Orleans, and a slave, after being captured by the Moslem King of Spain, is both highborn and lowly. The form of Middle English quene which derives from the Old English weak feminine cwene is particularly intriguing as its etymology links the Germanic and Mediterranean worlds. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word quene used to mean “woman,” sometimes in disparagement, has a reconstructed Old Teutonic form, *kwenan, the stem of which appears in Greek gunŠ, meaning “woman.” All of which is to say that when the Old French poet means to clearly indicate that Blancheflor, whom Floire loved, was engendered by a Christian count, “Uns cuens crestiiens,” hovering in the linguistic background are ambiguities suggesting the captive Christian noble woman who was taken into slavery and later gave birth to Blancheflor. Blancheflor’s mother (as well as her father) is invoked by the line that names her parentage. Obviously one clear reason why the four English manuscripts “silence” the issue of incest is that we have lost the leaves that contain the beginning of the romance in the four different manuscripts which contain it. Even when the condition of the Cotton manuscript is chalked up to the vagaries of historical misfortune because it was badly charred in a fire at the end of the nineteenth century, we are still left with the very odd fact that in each of three other different manuscripts containing the romance (whether it appears in the middle of the manuscript, as in the Auchinleck, or at the beginning, as in the Cambridge, or two thirds of the way through, as in the Egerton) there is always a gathering missing, or a quire which is imperfect, or leaves that have been misbound just where we would expect to find the beginning of the Middle English romance. While it is possible that if the missing gathering were found; the quire, perfect; the leaves bound correctly, we would discover that they had all been copied from a common source in which the beginning was lost or otherwise missing, it is more likely that the Middle English romance would be found to have been even less successful than the Old French version in ruling out the possibility of literal incest by specifying the identity of Blauncheflur’s father at the beginning of the text lost to us. It seems entirely reasonable for a reader of the romance to wonder if Blauncheflur’s mother might have suffered rape, a common enough fate of captive women during times of war, and if the text leaves the subject unspoken. The possibility of rape by the enemy being the fate of captive queens has gone unexpressed in literature before. For instance, the fate of an enslaved Andromache is poignantly imagined by Hector in Book 6 of Homer’s Iliad, but as the Trojan hero says farewell to his wife, among the humiliations he pictures in his mind’s eye, rape is not one of the articulated sufferings at the moment of parting:

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West “. . . I am not so much distressed by the thought of what the Trojans will suffer, or Hecabe herself, or King Priam, or all my gallant brothers whom the enemy will fling down in the dust, as by the thought of you, dragged off in tears by some Achaean man-at-arms to slavery. I see you there in Argos, toiling, for some other woman at the loom, or carrying water from an alien well, a helpless drudge with no will of her own. ‘There goes the wife of Hector,’ they will say when they see your tears.” (The Iliad, trans. Rieu, 6. 129)

Homer leaves the most painful and the most powerful imagined thought unspoken. (Aeschylus, on the other hand, makes clear in Agamemnon, that Hector’s sister, the princess, Cassandra, became Agamemnon’s slave and plaything). Likewise in Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play, Tamburlaine, which contains the spectacle of Bajazeth, the captured Emperor of the Turks, caged on stage with his wife, Zabina, the captive Emperor laments the actual – not imagined – fate of his Queen but does not directly mention rape: “You see my wife, my Queene, and Emperesse, Brought up and propped by the hand of fame, Queen of fifteene contributory Queens, Now throwen to roomes of blacke abjection, Smear’d with blots of basest drudgery, And villainess [slave] to shame, disdain, and misery.” (Tamburlaine, Part 1, 5. 1. 264–69)

Both husband and wife run against the walls of their cage and brain themselves rather than endure slavery at the hands of the enemy. David Brion Davis comments, “in the Mediterranean world, as in Asia and Africa, human bondage was accepted throughout an entire society. Even when defined as chattels and cruelly treated, slaves were looked upon as a normal class within the body politic” (Davis, 45). The sexual abuse of slaves is taken for granted by a notable figure in ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Oedipus – not one to leave sexual secrets hidden. He poses a telling question in the well known conversation near the end of Oedipus the King that occurs between the old herdsman who years before had carried the infant Oedipus to die on Cithaeron’s slopes and is reluctant to speak; the “helpful” messenger, who is eager to explain that he himself took the infant Oedipus from the hands of the old herdsman to raise as his foster child, and is eager to speak; and the questioning King who is determined to discover if he did, indeed, kill his father and marry his mother and is forcing the ugly matter to a head. Right after Oedipus gets the herdsman to admit that the child he gave away long ago to the messenger was a child of Laius, Oedipus asks, “A slave? Or born in wedlock?” (Oedipus the King, l. 1169). Oedipus simply assumes that some of Laius’s children are illegitimate, born of slave women, and, therefore, slaves themselves, though born of a royal king. About the progeny of master and female slaves during the Middle 89

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Ages, Davis observes, “the offspring of master and female slave . . . were lodged in astonishing numbers in the foundling hospitals. . .” (Davis, 55–56). During the centuries-long struggle of Christians and Moslems, both sides enslaved prisoners of the opposing religion. Christians had particular cause to be concerned for women taken prisoner and turned into slaves; Islamic law permitted them to become concubines (Daniel, Islam, 163). As early as the ninth century, the question of sexual violence against women is addressed in a pontifical ruling which specifically states that women who are raped do not have to do penance for fornication: “Si quis per vim violaverit mulierem aut in hoste aut in quocumque locum et illa noluit consentire non cogatur ea penitere, quia fornicavit” (“If anyone has violated a woman forcibly either in warfare or in any other place, and she has refused consent, let it not be required that she do penance because she has fornicated”).6 In her recent book on rape in medieval English literature, Corinne Saunders uses Floris and Blancheflur to make the point that “The outsider, and particularly the pagan, distanced from the mores of the chivalric world is . . . associated with overt sexual attack” (Saunders, 206). She has in mind, however, not the fate of Blancheflur’s mother, who is a Christian slave, but that of her daughter, sold by the Saracen King of Spain to merchants who sell her, in turn, to the Emir of Babylon, who places her in his harem – all because she is beloved by Floris, the king’s Moslem son. It is noteworthy that when Boccaccio retells the popular romance about Floris and Blauncheflur in 1338 as an ambitious five-book prose narrative, the Filocolo, he invents a bit of dialogue for the future mother of “Biancifiore” in which she pleads with the Arab captors who have just slaughtered her husband (and other fellow pilgrims) that they respect the chastity of the captive women: “E poi che Iddio e voi mi negate la morte, quella cosa che io più disidero, io m’apparecchio di venire in quelle parti ove piacer vi fia; ma caramente raccomando in prima me e le mie compagne e ‘l nostro onore nelle vostre braccia, pregandovi, per la gentile anima che guida i vostri membri, che come di care sorelle il serviate e non consentiate che di quello che le misere anime de’ nostri mariti, rinchiuse ne’ mortali corpi, si contentarono, sciolte da essi si possano ramaricare.” (Filocolo, 110) [“And since God and you both refuse me death, the thing I most desire, I shall prepare myself to go where ever it may please you. But first I sincerely commend myself and my companions and our honor into your hands, and beg you by the gentle spirit that guides your limbs, that you preserve our honor like that of your dear sisters, and do not let it happen that what the poor souls of our husbands could be confident of while they were in their mortal

6

MS Cod. Vat. 1349, Capitula Judiciorum VIII, Synodus Romana XXIII, 225–26. Cited by Saunders, 102.

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West bodies they should now have to grieve for when they are released from their bodies.” (Il Filocolo, trans. Cheney, 37)]

In Boccaccio’s late medieval version, Biancifiore’s mother, given the name Giulia Topazia, had been barren for six years and the pilgrimage had been undertaken by her and her husband, Lelio, in gratitude to the saint who appeared to him in a vision assuring him that his wife would conceive their child. In this narrative the mother dies immediately after giving birth to Biancifiore in captivity. Boccaccio, however, scarcely comments on the resemblance of the young lovers in his version of the old romance. Once, immediately after their birth, King Felix is said to look at them for a long time and notice their beauty and their resemblance to one another (Book 1, sec. 44) and also, much later in this lengthy work, when Florio’s love quest is well underway, a woman named Sisife is described as trying to remember where she had seen him before (Book 4, sec. 76). After long consideration she is said to remember Biancifiore, whom she realized he much resembled. That’s all and barely noticeable in the long, novel-like version of the medieval Italian author. On the other hand, Boccaccio is emphatic about the father of Biancifiore. When King Felix disapproves of Florio’s choice of beloved on the grounds of class difference a long argument breaks out between father and son. At one point Florio states flatly: “quegli che ingiustamente il suo padre valoroso, resistente con picciola schiera alla vostra moltitudine di gente, uccideste, il quale forse no fu di minor qualità che voi siate” (Filocolo, 142; “You are the one who wrongly killed her heroic father as he fought your multitude with his tiny band. Perhaps he was of no lesser rank than you” [Il Filocolo, trans. Cheney, 60]). Nonetheless, shortly before the son makes this defense of Biancifiore’s station, the father had made a remark which may suggest that there is something more at stake in his objections: “ma non consideri tu di cui tu ti sei innamorato, e per cui tu così faticosa passione sostieni? e ciò è d’una serva nata nelle nostre case. . . . Io non ti potrei mai tanto sopra questo dire quanto io disidero” (Filocolo, 141; “but don’t you realize whom you have fallen in love with, and for whom you are experiencing so troublesome a passion? Namely a maidservant born in our household. . . . I could never tell you all that I want to in this matter” [Il Filocolo, trans. Cheney, 59]). The king’s last remark could imply that there is something that he must leave unsaid about his objections to the romance, not merely that he is overflowing with unexpressed ideas about unequal alliances. It is not known what version of the romance Boccaccio worked from, but the tale of the unfortunate young lovers, well known in both the northern and southern parts of the Italian peninsula, was even part of an oral tradition (Cheney, “Introduction,” xi). Boccaccio may also have been acquainted with the Old French and Middle English versions. Returning to the matter of the problematical love that springs up between young Floris and Blauncheflur, it may be significant that John Stevens is troubled by the sexual overtones of the French romance. He writes “of the 91

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance precocious sexuality” which makes the attraction between the two young people in the French romance “distasteful” and cites the following passage: Ensamle lisent et aprendent a la joie d’amor entendent. Quant il repairent de l’école li iens baise l’autre et acole. (239–42) [Together they read and learn and give their attention to the joy of love. When they come out of school, they kiss and cuddle one another. (Stevens, 45)]

This would be much more distasteful if he thought the two children were half brother and half sister. He says nothing, however, about incestuous overtones and, as for the English version, aligns himself with those who find it idyllic: “we see that the English author has managed to retain the innocent charm of their attachment” (Stevens, 45). In some ways, it does not matter whether or not we are told who the biological father is in the English romance, for even if the possibility of literal incest is eliminated, the story still has significant incestuous overtones. If we removed the possibility that the Saracen king might have fathered Blauncheflur, the incest taboo in Floris’s attraction to Blauncheflur would, nonetheless, seem an issue in the romantic relationship for a medieval audience as Floris and Blauncheflur have been raised as brother and sister by the same woman – the Christian slave who is Blauncheflur’s mother. The first four lines of the English romance as it has come down to us are: Ne thurst men never in londe After feirer children fonde Þe cristen woman fedde hem þoo, Ful wel she lovyd hem boþ twoo.

Floris and Blauncheflur are described as if spiritual brother and sister, and for the Middle Ages that would be enough to make the romantic relationship incestuous. From the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 up until the fourteenth century, the rules against incest applied not only to relationships of blood but also to relationships of affinity as well as of spirituality (Donavin, 9). That meant, for example, that one could not marry an aunt’s former husband, for he would be considered an uncle by affinity; nor could one marry the son of a godmother. He would be considered a spiritual brother. Two children raised by the same woman – the biological mother of one and the Christian slave of the parents of the other – are made to seem like spiritual siblings by the literary text. (Technically, however, the fact that Floris, a Moslem, is not baptized, means that in a true sense, according to Canon Law, he could not be Blancheflur’s “spiritual” brother.) The best known romance which suppresses the subject of incest is, of course, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, the analogues of which begin with 92

Incest, the Double, and East meets West Custance on foreign shores, having fled the sexual advances of an incestuous father. Chaucer, however, makes the reason for Custance’s travel to distant shores an arranged marriage with a Sultan who has heard of Custance’s beauty, at once legitimizing the desire for Custance and removing it to the Islamic East. The Man of Law, it will be recalled, tells his sanitized version of the Custance story in the Canterbury Tales after an Introduction that catalogs Chaucer’s career of writing stories “Of olde tyme” (Introd. to the Man of Law’s Tale, 50) and specifically compliments his discretion in avoiding the subject of incest: But certeinly no word ne writeth he Of thilke wikke ensample of Canacee, That loved hir owene brother synfully – Of swiche cursed stories I sey fy! – Or ellis of Tyro Apollonius, How that the cursed kyng Antiochus Birafte his doghter of hir maydenhede, That is so horrible a tale to rede, Whan he hir threw upon the pavement. (Intro to the Man of Law’s Tale, 77–85)

If there is an irony in the Man of Law’s telling a tale based on analogues containing incest, that irony is compounded by the fact that, later in the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrim Squire tells a tale about a heroine named Canacee who, it appears from his summary of his narrative intentions, is the object of the incestuous desires of a brother: “And after wo I speke of Cambalo,/That fought in lystes with the bretheren two/For Canacee er he myghte hire wynne.” (Squire’s Tale, 667–69).7 The incest taboo does, in fact, appear in numerous medieval English romances where incest either occurs or is miraculously averted. Among these are Sir Generides, Huon of Burdeux, Sir Degare, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and Apollonius of Tyre, which Gower includes in his Confessio Amantis in Book VIII. At the center of Apollonius of Tyre is the incest riddle which is made a suitor test for anyone aspiring to marry the daughter of the king of Antioch. The riddle embodies the distortions created in society by incest; as told by Gower, the enigmatic question is, “With felonie I am upbore, I ete and have it noght forbore Mi modres fleissh, whos housbounde Mi fader forto seche I fonde, 7

Two stimulating discussions of incest in connection with Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale are John Fyler’s “Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale,” and Elizabeth Scala’s “Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables.” Cf. Elizabeth Archibald’s observation that “Sibling incest seems to have been regarded as considerably less heinous than parent-child incest; it is usually a sub-plot rather than a central theme . . .” (Incest and the Medieval Imagination, 192).

93

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Which is the Sone ek of my wif. Hierof I am inquisitif; And who that can mi tale save, Al quyt he shal my doghter have; Of his ansuere and if he faile, He shal be ded withoute faile.” (Confessio Amantis, VIII, 405–14)

The speaker of the riddle is the incestuous father who wants to keep the daughter for himself and to destroy all suitors. To answer the riddle incorrectly is to die. While the English text of Floris and Blauncheflur is silent about the circumstances regarding Blauncheflur’s birth, the modern Greek and sixteenth-century Spanish romances as well as the Old French poetic texts and the fourteenth-century Italian Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore are not. M. Edélstand Du Méril, an editor of the thirteenth-century French Floire et Blanceflor, observes that in the Greek version the motivation for making a pilgrimage at the start of the tale was to secure the pregnancy of Blancheflur’s mother; he refers to “le pèlerinage que son père et sa mère entreprennent pour obtenir du Ciel un enfant” (Introduction, Floire et Blanceflor, lxxiv). A similar purpose underlies the pilgrimage taken in the Spanish Flores y Blancaflor which both Lumby, in his introduction to the Middle English edition8 and George Ellis in a headnote to his retelling of the tale indicate “is noticed” as having been published in 1512 in Alcalá (Ellis, 453). Lumby and Ellis both provide full summaries of the Spanish romance. The closest I have been able to come to this “noticed” original Spanish romance is a photostat made in 1923 of an early printed text owned by the British Library (ca. 1520).9 As this text is in prose, it is not the 1512 Spanish romance referred to, as that was said to be metrical. In her recent book on the continental versions of the romance, Patricia Grieve flatly states, “One piece of the puzzle of Spanish printed texts is still missing: the 1512 Alcalá edition” (Grieve, 21). Both Ellis and Lumby, who refers to it as “the poem” (Introduction, Floriz and Blauncheflur, p. ix), had access to this lost text in the mid-1800s. The early sixteenth-century Spanish prose text which I read mostly accords with the Lumby-Ellis summaries. In the beginning of the Spanish romance, La historia de los enamorados flores y blancaflor, the nephew of a western emperor, Prince Perse, marries Topase, a daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and a niece of the Duke of Milan. Unhappy at being childless, they try to produce the pregnancy of Topase by praying to saints and employing holy relics, but all to no avail. Finally they take the advice of a pious Spaniard and seek the assistance of St. James of Compostella whose intercession is said never to have met with a refusal. Prince Perse made a vow that if the object of his prayer could be 8 9

King Horn with Fragments of Floriz and Blauncheflur and of the Assumption of Our Lady, ed. J. Rawson Lumby, ix. This volume was later re-edited by George McKnight for EETS in 1901. La historia de los enamorados flores y blancaflor (ca. 1520), Modern Language Association of America, Collection of Photographic Facsimiles, no. 3 (New York, 1923).

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West accomplished he would undertake a pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine. The following night an angel appears in a dream to promise that the couple’s wishes would be gratified but also to foretell future calamities. Nothing further is said about Topase’s pregnancy until she is taken in slavery to Spain. According to the Ellis summary, after the Spanish Moslem king ambushes the pilgrims, the body of Topase’s husband is described as falling dead atop that of his wife who becomes covered with his blood. The detail is absent from the 1520 prose version account which I read. It merely indicates that after determining that the husband and wife were Christians, the Saracens kill the husband “cruelly” but spare the wife as a “gift” to their Moslem king because “men naturally respond to the appealing qualities of women”: Fueron interrogados per un capitan si eran christiano o no. Y micer Persio y Topacia por no negar la fe de riposto dixeron que sí que ellos eran christianos, pero que no eran de aquella tierra que eran de Roma vassallos del emperador, pero yuan en romeria a Santiago. E luego el capitan muy cruelmente mando matar a micer Persio sin ninguna piedad y como las calidades delas mugeres naturalmente son apla
igles y amigables alos hombres viendo que Topacia era tan gentil y tan noble criatura con consentimiento de su compania delibero de no la matarimas por hazer un presente al rey Felice su señor. (Fol. vii [italics mine]) r

Only after Topase is made a gift to Felice by his guards does the king make a gift of Topase to his wife. Thus, it is only after the abduction is part of the past and a certain amount of time has elapsed, wherein the queen and captive Christian woman become mistress and maid and even develop a kind of friendship, that mention is ever made of Topase’s pregnancy and then by a possibly puzzled wife of Felice: Un día entre los otros estando las dos burlando y jugando, conoscio la reyna que Topacia era preñada, y dixo le, “Hermana mia parece me que estas preñada también como yo.” (fol. viiiv) [One day while the two were joking and playing among the others, the queen realized that Topacia was pregnant and said to her, “My dear sister, it appears to me that you are pregnant also as I am.” (my translation)]

Shortly thereafter the queen gives birth to Flores and, on the same day, Topase has Blancaflor. The only suggestion given in the Spanish prose version that Topase might be pregnant before the ambush is that she is described as finding the pilgrimage, made during hot weather, arduous because she was very delicate: “muy delicada” (fol. viv). However, since the text reads “era muy delicada” – the past of “ser” (to be) signifying a permanent condition – the delicacy of the duchess must refer to her general fragility rather than pregnancy (always temporary!). This Spanish version which does not mention explicitly who Blancaflor’s father was, as the French does, might be closer to a version of the romance in which literal sibling incest was an issue. I would 95

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance suggest that literal incest was eliminated from later stories such as the Old French and Middle English versions. However, while the Old French may try to eliminate incest (“uns cuens crestiiens”) and the Middle English rules it out willy-nilly by virtue of missing the relevant opening section concerning Blauncheflur’s birth, they do not succeed in eliminating the incestuous overtones of the relationship. The Old French and Middle English versions, viewed this way, appear to attempt to eradicate, however unsuccessfully, the incest theme of an original story much as does the Man of Law’s Tale. Even with literal incest removed, a kind of incest is still suggested. Focusing attention on a hitherto neglected Spanish chronicle containing the love story, Patricia Grieve argues that it “represents a more primitive version than does the aristocratic French” (Grieve, 19). She has called this version the Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor. Two of her strongest arguments for this position are: (1) that the chronicle version fits into a category of historiography that occupied itself with accounts of the fall of Spain to the Saracens in 711, and (2) that it appears in a relatively early manuscript – late fourteenth or early fifteenth century (Grieve 22, 27). What interested me, after locating and reading the obscure Gomez Perez edition of the chronicle version which Grieve brings to light, was to discover that the circumstances of Blancheflor’s birth are dealt with less ambiguously in the chronicle than in the sixteenth-century Spanish romance. In the chronicle version, the duchess is explicitly said to be pregnant by her husband, the count. When he dies before they can keep their promise to make a pilgrimage, she makes the journey with her father, the duke (as in the Old French “version aristocratique”): . . . en aquel tiempo que el rey Fines entro sobre mar por yr correr tierra de cristianos, asi como lo ha contado la estoria, acaescio asy que en tierra de Francia, que un conde e su muger, que era fija de un duque, prometieran de venir en romeria a Santiago de Galizia. Entretanto ovo de morir el conde e ella finco preñada del, asy que ono de rogar al duque, su padre, que la levare a Santiago por conplir el voto que avia prometido. (Chronicle of “Flores y Blancaflor,” f. 5 vb [p. 36]) [. . . in that time when King Fines went to sea to travel to the land of the Christians, as the story told, it happened that at the same time in France a count and his wife, who was a duke’s daughter, promised to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Galizia. Meanwhile the count died and his wife was left pregnant by him, so that it fell to the duke, her father, to accompany her to Santiago to fulfill the vow she had promised. (my translation)]

In this prose chronicle version her name is Berta and the battle with King Fines leads to her father’s death, not that of her husband (who is the relative killed in the Spanish romance). Because she tells the Spanish king that she is a nobleman’s daughter, he makes a gift of her to his wife: no intermediate soldiers who pass her along to their leader (“E quando esto oyo el rey Finis, plogole mucho porque era fijadalgo, ca le rogara su muger la reyna por tal cativa,” p. 36; “And when Fines heard this, he was moved, because she was a 96

Incest, the Double, and East meets West nobleman’s daughter and his wife the queen pleaded on behalf of the captive” [my translation]). M. Paulin Paris thought the sixteenth-century Spanish romance text was originally of much greater antiquity and supposed that the earliest French version was drawn from the Spanish original.10 Laura Hibbard judged the question of the relative ages and relationships of the French and Spanish versions to be complex and unsettled (Hibbard, 189). Patricia Grieve’s recent contention that the chronicle version of the Spanish romance is more primitive than the French “version aristocratique” seems to add weight to Paris’s position. I suspect, however, that there is a yet undiscovered Spanish text even older than the chronicle version on which the sixteenth-century Spanish romance is based – one which, like the romance, does not state who Blancheflur’s father was and in which sibling incest occurs. There are two French versions of the romance composed in the late twelfth century: the “version aristocratique,” spoken of earlier in this chapter, and the “version populaire.”11 While in both versions Blauncheflur’s mother is captured from a group of pilgrims bound for St. James of Compostella, in neither romance is the motivation for her pilgrimage said to be the desire for pregnancy. In the “version aristocratique,” the woman completes the pilgrimage not with her husband but with her father, after the death of her husband, who has left her pregnant (“Por son mari qui mors estoit/ De qui remese encainte estoit,” lines 97–98). In the “version populaire,” the woman makes the journey with her husband to whom she is newly wedded and is identified as someone who as yet has no children but is already pregnant: D’Olenois tint la duschiez Novelment fu mariez; Moillier avoit a son talant, Mais n’avoit encor nul enfant: Mais la duschoise estoit encanite (version pop. [begins on p. 125], lines 53–56)

In the anonymous medieval Italian Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, it is made immediately clear in stanzas two and three that Biancifiore’s mother gets pregnant by her husband as an answer to a prayer: Un cavalier di Roma anticamente prese per moglie una gentil pulzella, e era molto richissimo e posente d’oro e d’argento e di molte castella; ma non poteva aver figluol niente da quella rosa fresca e tenerella:

10 He published the French text in Le Romancers François. 11 The “version populaire” is printed by Du Méril on pages 125ff. of his edition of Floire et

Blancheflor.

97

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance a santo Iacopo promese andare, se la moglie potese in gravidare. Dentro in Roma sì fe la promisione; stando nel palazzo de la milizia: la donna ingravidò quella stagione, e tutta gente n’ avea gran letizia: poi preson la scarsella e lo bordone per andare a l’apostol di Galizia: e ‘l nome del baron ni conteragio, se m’ascoltate, ch’andava in viagio.12 [A knight from Rome who married late in life took as a wife a gentle young girl and was very rich and had gold and silver and many castles; but he could not have any children from that fresh and tender rose: to saint James he promised to go if his wife could become pregnant. Within Rome itself the promise was made; while they were standing in the palace of the militia: the lady became pregnant that very summer, and all the people were joyful: then they took the moneybag and the pilgrim’s staff to go to the patron saint of Galizia: and the name of the baron I will not tell, if you listen to me, who went on the pilgrimage. (my translation)]

After Topatia is captured by Saracens while on the pilgrimage to Galicia, there is no plea to respect the chastity of a captive woman as in Boccaccio’s Filocolo. The movement from the battlefield where the husband is killed to the wife’s being made a gift to the Saracen’s wife is swift and terse – accomplished in just four short stanzas. Moreover, there is no scene as in Boccaccio’s romance in which the Saracen holds the newborns, Fiorio and Biancifiore, and notices their resemblance.13 Besides the absence of clarification about the identity of Blauncheflur’s father in the English manuscripts, there is also the omission of any account of how Blauncheflur’s mother came to be a slave in Floris’s household. According to the Spanish, French, and Italian versions, Galicia was in a state

12 Il Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, 2. 65–67. The translations into English of this romance are

mine. 13 There is, however, in the Cantare a brief scene in which a female innkeeper remarks on their

resemblance shortly after the grown-up Fiorio arrives at the inn in the second half of the Cantare where he is searching for Biancifiore: “la sera giunse in una albergheria,/e inmantenente che s’ è dismontato,/dice la dona de l’albergatore;/ ’miser, voi somigliate a Biancifiore” (Crescini, ed., 170; “the next night in an inn/ and as soon as he had gotten off his horse,/ the wife of the innkeeper said/ sir, you look just like Biancifiore”).

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West of disturbance and had been so for some time under Mohammedan power; attempting to take revenge on Galician attempts to end infidel control, Felix, the Saracen king and father of Floris, attacked the pilgrims and murdered the husband of Topase and took her captive.14 When the English tale opens, all these events are absent. At the start of the romance the reader simply reads about the captive Christian woman caring for both the Saracen queen’s son, Floris, and her own daughter, Blauncheflur, born into slavery.

The Double I would suggest that the incestuous overtones of the Middle English romance are legitimized by their being transformed into a quest for the beloved who may be understood as a literary double. Speaking of the double in his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud observes, “the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego” and cites Otto Rank’s idea that the double was “ ‘an energetic denial of the power of death’ ” (Freud, “The Uncanny,” 235). Freud goes on to expand Rank’s thought by commenting, “probably the ‘immortal soul’ was the first double of the body” which would make of doubling for Freud “a preservation against extinction” (Freud, “The Uncanny,” 235). The intensity of the bond Floris feels for Blauncheflur is not unlike that expressed by the speaker of Shelley’s Epipsychidion for the “soul out of my soul” who he wishes were his actual twin sister: Would we two had been twins of the same mother! Or, that the name my heart lent to another Could be a sister’s bond for her and thee, Blending two beams of one eternity! Yet were one lawful and the other true, These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due, How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me! I am not thine: I am a part of thee. (Shelley, 275)

This same passionate sense of oneness in twoness, a sense of virtual identity, is what Floris tries to convey to his parents when he awakens from fainting after being told that his beloved Blauncheflur is dead: “
if þat deþ were ideld ari
t, We sholde be ded boþe in ore ni
t; For in one day ibore we were. Mid ri
te wee scholden deie ifer. Deþ,” he sede, “ful of envie, And ful of alle tricherie, 14 The name for Blauncheflur’s mother given in the Spanish text is strikingly close to that given her

by Boccaccio in the Filocolo (Giulia Topazia) and by the Cantare (Topatia). She is nameless in the Middle English version.

99

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Þu me hast my lef binome: To bitraie þat folk hit is þi wone. He wolde libbe and þu noldest, And fain wolde i die and þu noldest. Whider me wolde þat þu were, Neltu no wi
t come þere, Oþer me wolde þat þu ne come, Þer þu wilt come ilome. ... ... After deþ clepe no more i nille, Ac mi selve aslen ich wille.” (283–306)

Such passages as these serve to indicate that the beloved is one of the forms the double in literature may take.15 Simply viewed, the use of the double in literature is a way of presenting the inner life of a character (and, perhaps, unconsciously that of the author). As suggested by the late Romantic passage by Shelley, the incest theme may attach itself to that of the double. That linkage is found in such obvious nineteenth-century examples as Poe’s Ligeia, where the narrator is married to the mysterious woman of unknown origin with whom he lives in a relationship of wife/sister, and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights where Cathy and Heathcliff – like Ligeia, of mysterious origin – live under one roof as loosely adopted brother and sister who share an intense sense of kinship (the immemorial line being Cathy’s “I am Heathcliff!”). Literary criticism of the Freudian persuasion has shown the themes of doubling and incest to be explicit in some works of modern literature and the linked themes have recently been explored in the medieval Welsh Mabinogi.16 The affinity between Floris and Blauncheflur seems to have had its inception at birth; the aformentioned speech by Floris speaks of their having been born on the same day. Most of the duality of this romance centers on characters, though it is reflected as well in certain narrative details and in symmetry of structure. Floris’s need to be near Blauncheflur reveals itself early. When, at age seven, Floris is told by his father that it is time to begin his education, he refuses to learn without his companion: “Ne shal not Blancheflour lerne wiþ me? Ne can y no
t to scole goon Wiþout Blancheflour,” he saide þan, “Ne can y in no scole syng ne rede Wiþout Blancheflour,” he seide. (18–22) 15 Instances in modern literature of the double as the beloved are examined in chapter 7 (pp. 130–60)

of C. F. Keppler’s The Literature of the Second Self. Among more Freudian studies of the double in literature are such works as John T. Irwin’s Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge and Robert Rogers’s A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature. Such works draw heavily on Freud’s “The Uncanny” and his “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” 16 See Irwin and Rogers for an application of Freud to modern literature, and for medieval see Andrew Welsh, “Doubling and Incest in the Mabinogi,” 344–62.

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West Apparently regarding this as a minor show of will, the king permits Blauncheflur to learn with Floris: “She shal lerne for þy love.” (24). Within a short space of time, however, parental opposition to the relationship of the two hardens. Their opposition is never actually explained in terms of religious or class difference; it simply is. The king comes to see his son’s love as dangerous: Þe king understod þe grete amoure Bytwene his son and Blanchefloure, And þou
t, when þey were of age, Þat her love wolde no
t swage, Nor he my
t no
t her love wiþdrawe, When Florys shuld wyfe after þe lawe. Þe king to the queene seide þoo And tolde hur of his woo, Of his þou
t and of his care, How it wolde of Floryes fare. (35–44)

So troubled is the king that he threatens to have Blauncheflur killed – twice. At the first suggestion, the conciliatory queen advises instead that their son be sent away to visit her sister in “þe londe of Mountargis” (66). But then Floris pines conspicuously for Blauncheflur: Yf eny man to him speke, Love is on his hert steke, Love is at his hert roote; Þat noþing is so soote, Galyngale ne lycorys Is not so soote, as hur love is, Ne nothing ne non other. (115–21)

Such extreme behaviour elicits an extreme reaction from the king. He wants Blauncheflur decapitated: “Fro þe body þe heved shal goo” (141). The queen prefers that she be sold to merchants, “Þer ben chapmen ryche ywys,/ Marchaudes of Babylon ful ryche,/ Þat wol hur bye blethelyche” (146–48). The out-of-proportion nature of all the feelings expressed about this relationship makes it one that goes beyond the ordinary attraction of male for female in some effort to achieve that wholeness of being described in Aristophanes’s fable about the two halves of the Androgynos that seek one another out to re-form the whole that was severed by the gods. The relationship goes beyond yet is included in the idea illustrated by the famous fable in Plato’s Symposium. The necessary unity of the two characters has been seen by Edmund Reiss to be reflected in the numerous floral references throughout the romance, and he argues that with “this pervasive floral detail goes an emphasis on the colors red and white, as though if Blauncheflur is to be seen as the white flower, Floris is to be seen as the red” (Reiss, 341). He observes that Floris finds his way back to Blauncheflur by following the red light given 101

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance off by a carbuncle. He points to numerous instances of red and white appearing together “like the lovers themselves” (Reiss, 342). Piero Boitani comments on the “correspondences and repetitions” that occur in the structure such as Floris’s “three times” receiving information about his lost love and each time in “similar circumstances” and the “two crises”: the return of Floris to discover the false tomb of Blauncheflur and the scene in Babylon where each offers his life for the other (Boitani, 53). To this may be added Veldhoen’s observation, Three times Floris receives information and guidance on the road: first from a landlady (lines 428–39), then from the men of Babylon, the ‘talk of the town’ (lines 465–76), and finally again from a landlord, another member of that life-sustaining and rest-providing guild (lines 527–36). Then he is three times passed on into other hands. . . . (Veldhoen, 61)

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that when Floris sets out in pursuit of Blauncheflur from whom he has been separated, she represents what C. F. Keppler considers the essence of the double, “the mystery of a contradiction, of simultaneous distinction and identity” (Keppler, 1).17 The most obvious differences are that Floris is male, Moslem, and a prince, while Blauncheflur is female, Christian, a slave, and, at the beginning of Floris’s search, also a harem concubine. The darkest reading of their point of identity is that they could be half brother and half sister, a matter mostly suppressed in the text. The violence of Floris’s father’s threats to kill Blauncheflur rather than allow the romance of his son to continue would seem to provide, in Freudian terms, an unusually strong example of rivalry between father and son that breaks out when “a boy’s earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones – his mother and his sister” (Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 17). If literal incest were what is being pictured and Blauncheflur were really a half sister, the jealous father would be seen as reacting to what Freud described as “the earliest sexual excitations of the youthful human beings” which ‘are invariably of an incestuous character” ( Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 124). If, on the other hand, incest is not literal but we are dealing with incestuous overtones merely, then the father’s rage must be seen as directed against his son’s having found a love object that allows him to successfully deflect mother love on to “an outside object,” that is, on to an object that does not conflict with “the barrier that exists against incest” (Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 16). Both father figures – Floris’s father and the Babylonian emir – are obstacles in the lovers’ desire for reunion. The King of Spain threatens to cut off the maiden’s head, while the emir tries to steal her “maidenhead.” The lovers do not go back to Spain until Floris’s threatening father is dead. Viewing the duality in yet another way, that is, from a Jungian perspective, it is readily seen that, at a deeper level, 17 See also Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature.

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West Blauncheflur, as the female that the male, Floris, must embrace to become whole, is the archetype known as the anima that figures forth in the visible world of this text the inward, unseen feminine aspect of the male psyche, integration with which means health and unity. Here, then, in the realm of the unconscious, the difference and identity of the beloved as double meet.

East and West The quest to reclaim the lost beloved which occupies the second half of the romance, it has been shown, has parallels among Arabic tales, first located by Gédéon Huet, in which a young man who goes to seek his beloved finds her in a harem (Huet, 348–59). Among those Huet cites are the tale of Ibn-al-Djouzi, the fabric merchant conveyed into the harem in a fabric box who wins the favorite slave of the sultan’s wife18 and that of the young moneylender, in “The History of the Moneylender of Baghdad,” who falls in love with the slave girl in charge of the harem’s accounts (he enters the harem disguised as a woman after ingratiating himself with both a porter and a eunuch). To those tales found by Huet may be added an as yet unnoticed and interesting analogue contained in the new translation of The Arabian Nights based on the Muhsin Mahdi edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript.19 It is “The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar.”20 The would-be lover of the slave girl is different, “other,” in being a Prince as well as Persian, while the beloved is a slave in a harem and not Persian; indeed, it is she who asks if he is a Persian when they first meet in the shop of a druggist. The tale contains no apparent structural symmetry nor does it hint at incest or suggest the profoundly felt sense of identity between the Persian prince and the slave girl that would be necessary if they were instances of the double. The basis of the attraction is fundamental lust and the desire for sensual pleasure. In this tale, a druggist who has many clients among the women of the harem, where he is treated as a familiar figure, and his good friend, Nur al-Din Ali, a prince of Persia, enter the harem of Caliph Harun

18 In the Haddawy translation of the Tales of the Arabian Nights this appears as “The Steward’s Tale:

The Young Man from Baghdad and Lady Zubaida’s Maid” (pp. 228–38). In this tale a maid buys fabric for her lady from a young merchant with whom she falls in love. He returns her feelings. She finds a pretext to return to the fabric shop and the young merchant then realizes that she loves him as much as he does her. They arrange to have him smuggled into the palace harem past the eunuch guards in a fabric box, a minor detail that may be an analogue for the basket of flowers that gets Floris into the harem of the Emir of Babylon. The tale ends happily with the lady arranging for the fabric merchant to marry her maid to whom she gives enough money to buy a house outside the palace. 19 Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (New York, 1990) is based on the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript of Alf Layla wa-Layla. 20 “The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar” in The Arabian Nights, trans. Haddawy, 295–344. Quotations from this tale refer to this edition and references appear within parentheses in the body of this chapter.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Al-Rashid in disguise and led by a maid21 who is the confidante of the sought woman, the caliph’s favorite slave, Shams al-Nahar. The young woman became smitten with the young man when she saw him one afternoon in the druggist’s shop. As the druggist was a respected and trusted man with access to the caliph’s palace, she boldly invites them to seek her out. This is presented as sudden love at first sight. The man is instantly overcome: “When Ali ibn-Bakkar saw her, he was beside himself with confusion, and his face flushed and turned pale, and as he tried to get up and go, in deference to her, he almost swooned” (296). The young Persian prince’s desire only increases when he next sees her in the exotic setting of the harem, for the slave girl, a connoisseur of sensual delight fans his passion with flirtation, music, sung verse, and elegant food. This sudden love quickly culminates in a mutuality that leads the narrator to exclaim, “never before have I seen a sun embrace a moon” (303). The suffering of the young lovers begins just as suddenly when it is announced that the caliph will arrive for his favorite slave. The young man has a narrow escape and for the rest of the tale both he and the slave girl suffer all the swooning, weeping, and other pains of separation familiar from Floris and Blauncheflur. In the Arabic tale the separated lovers feed desire by writing love letters and quoting erotic poetry. Thus, while young, in love, and separated like Floris and Blauncheflur, they are altogether more sensually expert. After reading a letter sent to him by the slave girl, the prince, Ali Ibn-Bakkar, replies, assuring the slave girl, The more I contemplated its [her letter’s] words and understood their meaning, the more I enjoyed what I read, and the more I read and reread what with unequaled art it expressed, the more relief I felt. (317)

The Persian prince’s letter closes with a quotation from an Arabic poem about desire and longing. While Floris and Blancheflur are also young lovers of different classes and backgrounds who suffer separation, weep and swoon, and ultimately must also cope with the dangers of meeting and embracing within the precincts of an oriental harem, their relationship is presented as long – having begun in infancy – and untouched by sensuality until they are reunited and make love for the first time in Babylon. Young love is dangerous in both tales but finally things work out happily in the English tale, while in the Arabic the slave girl and the young man both die. Ali Ibn-Bakkar wastes away from unrequited love in a distant city, listening to a plaintiff song in verse as does Shams al-Nahar in a parallel but separate scene in the harem. Besides the central motif of the young man who seeks out the beloved in the harem, this early Arabic tale offers several more incidental parallels to Floris and Blauncheflur. There is the rich description of a room in the harem

21 The maid has her analogue in the figure of Claris in Floris and Blancheflur.

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Incest, the Double, and East meets West which not only offers a parallel to the rooms in the Tower of Maidens in Floris and Blauncheflur but even picks up the detail of white and red roses: When she opened the door, we found ourselves in a room covered with a silk carpet, under a dome that rested on a hundred pillars, at the base of each of which stood a bird or a beast dipped in gold. We sat and began to admire the carpet, which, with its gold ground and patterns of white and red roses, repeated the colors and patterns of the dome. In the room, resting on tables, there were more than a hundred trays of crystal and gold, set with all kinds of jewels. . . . The garden looked as if it had the same carpet for a floor cover. There the water flowed from a large pond to a smaller one surrounded by sweet basil, lilies, and narcissus in pots of inlaid gold. (298)

The description is that of a room in the harem of which the slave girl is already an active, knowledgeable member. It has an adjoining garden. There are other chambers occupied by other harem women; some overlook the Tigris River (also named in Floris and Blauncheflur) rather than the garden (307). All of this is overseen by a large retinue of eunuchs. The Tower of Maidens in Floris and Blauncheflur is full of women in separate chambers guarded by eunuchs, but all of these women are apparently virgins waiting their turn to be called upon to become the Babylonian emir’s wife of one year’s duration. Overall, the harem in the Middle English poem is less a scene of sensual delight than a stronghold for protected property. The tower itself is fortress-like: And in þe bur
amidde ri
t Þer stant a riche tur ipi
t. An hundred teise hit is heie, Who so bihalt hit fer and neie; An hundred teise hit is wid And imaked wiþ muchel prid, Of lym and of marbleston: In þe world nis swich tur non. Þat morter is imaked so wel, Ne mai hit breke ire ne stel. (629–38)

Within are forty-two rooms occupied by maidens of “parage” (666) – whether indigenous or from enemies is unclear – who are guarded by eunuchs (“er ben serjauns in þe stage,/Þat serve þe maidenes of parage,/Ac ne mot þer non ben inne,/Þat in his breche bere þe ginne,/No er bi daie ne bi ni
t/Bute he also capun be di
t.” [665–670]). There is also a security guard – the porter with whom Floris ingratiates himself – who watches the entries and exits. It is this porter who smuggles Floris into the harem in a basket of flowers. The only part of the harem in the English romance that compares in lushness to that of the aforementioned description from the tale in the Arabian Nights is the Babylonian emir’s garden with the magic well (that can test whether a prospective “wife” is pure or not) and Tree of Love that casts a flower on the 105

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance chosen maid through the emir’s power of enchantment. The garden is full of the song of birds, precious stones, wells and streams whose source is Paradise: Þerinne is merie fo
eles song, Me mi
te libbe hem evre among. And a welle þer springe þinne, Þat is wro
t wiþ muchel ginne. Ihc mai seggen iwis, Þe stremes come fram paradis. Þe gravel is of precious stone, And of vertu is evrech one (691–98)

In the end, impressed by the lovers’ willingness to die for one another, the emir spares the lives of Floris and Blauncheflur, who marry and go to Spain to rule, while he settles for marriage to Claris and presumably mends his wicked ways. Thus, the quest for the beloved ends happily though without overt evidence that the romance’s author has much conscious psychological insight into the implications of the narrative action (either for the characters or for himself). If my reading of the romance as an instance of the double in literature (perhaps an incestuous double) has validity, it would seem that Floris and Blauncheflur has managed to win popular appeal even as it takes the reader down long, dark, badly lit corridors. The discovery of the possibility of incest in the relationship between the Saracen prince and the daughter of a household slave forces the reader to consider whether an incestuous dimension in the love story makes it any less the “idyllic” tale of traditional criticism. In life, as opposed to literature, the answer would be emphatically yes. The literary maneuver, however, of the quest for the beloved of the tale, so physically like the lover in appearance as to be his double, provides a way of transforming incest – whether understood as literal in the text or merely as implied overtone – into the provider of an acceptable love object. As slave and Christian, Blauncheflur is sufficiently “other” from the Moslem prince who is her lover to become Floris’s love object, distinct enough from his biological mother who is royal and also Moslem to be an appropriately adult choice. That Blauncheflur might be, as well, an illegitimate half sister is sufficiently suppressed by the Middle English text to permit the reader to interpret physical resemblance as an abstract literary and/or psychological sign of harmonious union. In terms of the conclusion in the Cambridge and Auchinleck manuscripts of the Middle English romance, “union” also entails a conversion of the Saracen lover to Christianity. After news reaches Floris that his father has died in Spain, he decides to return home with his wife, Blauncheflur, but not until he becomes a Christian (in the Auchinleck version) or, at least, has his return made the occasion of a benediction at the end of the narrative (in the Cambridge version). The union between Floris and Blauncheflur thus radiates into the political, religious realm of the medieval world divided by the Crusades into warring East and West. So powerful is this dimension of the 106

Incest, the Double, and East meets West legendary romance that a little known fifteenth-century Spanish manuscript containing a chronicle history of Spain (the Estoria de España: Primera crónica general) incorporates a prose version of the romance of Floris and Blauncheflur into its account of the occupation of southern Spain by Moorish kings.22

22 Madrid. Bibilioteca Nacional, 7583 (olim T-233), Estoria de España; Primera crónica general,

207 ff. This historicized version of Flores y Blancaflor, to which Patricia Grieve has drawn new attention, is followed by the tale of Berta, said to be the daughter of Flores and Blancaflor, named after Blancaflor’s mother (given this name in the Spanish chronicle version). Berta becomes the wife of Pepin and mother of Charlemagne, Christian crusader against the infidels extraordinaire. (The manuscript’s chronicle version of Flores y Blancaflor is transcribed by Jose Gomez Perez in “Leyendas medievales españolas del ciclo carolingio,” Annuario de Filologia (Maracaibo) 2–3 (1963–64), 35–94.) Though Elizabeth Archibald’s latest book, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, does not discuss Floris and Blancheflur, it is of interest, in connection with Berta’s becoming the mother of Charlemagne, that Archibald points out that “incest with a sister was inserted into the legends of two of the most famous and admired kings in medieval literature, Charlemagne and Arthur” (199). Is Charlemagne’s incest an inheritance from an earlier generation?

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East

6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East

I

T is of primary interest that the Middle English romance, Le Bone Florence iof Rome, like other closely allied western versions of the so-called “chaste wife tale,” is related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity. Of secondary interest within the context of the romance’s relationship to the East is the presence of Constantinople; it is from that eastern city that Florence’s unwelcome suitor, “Syr Garcy,” comes early in the story. Finally, it is notable in comparing Le Bone Florence of Rome to its oriental analogues that there is a motif shared by the eastern and western treatments of the story, namely that of justice and the specific form of justice that would have been known to medieval thinkers as piety.

Constantinople In the first half of the romance, a war is fought by Roman “kny
tys” on behalf of an “emperowre” of Rome whose daughter, Florence, a Christian, refused the marriage proposal of “Syr Garcy” of Constantinople – not for reasons of orthodoxy because he was a heathen like the Sultan who is the suitor of Chaucer’s Custance, but quite simply because he was old and unattractive. Dieter Mehl is correct in his observation that “we are not even told in so many words whether the old Garcy is a Christian or not and there is certainly no crusading spirit” in the tale (Mehl, 140–41). Even though war breaks out over Florence’s refusal of Garcy, it is not one of the familiar wars of religion. This is interesting since the impressions of Constantinople that Le Bone Florence’s original audience had would have encouraged the romance’s author to turn almost automatically to religious conflict for at least some of his material. In a nutshell, those impressions derive from this view of history: for some time there had been tension between the Eastern and Western Roman empires, and the tension continued into the early Middle Ages. One cause for strain was the power the Italians had gained over the trade in Byzantine waters by the eleventh century. The Comnenian emperors had given Italian merchants commercial concessions over customs-charges as well as other economic advantages in exchange for Italian (especially Venetian) political and naval 108

Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East help against Byzantium’s enemies. By the end of the twelfth century Italian merchants enjoyed more commercial power than local Byzantine traders. Another cause of growing hostility between Rome and Constantinople was the crusades. The First Crusade preached by Pope Urban attacked Moslem princes along the road to Jerusalem, provoking them to unite against the Emperor of Constantinople – exactly the result Alexius Comnenus feared. The appearance of the crusaders worked against the aims of Constantinople in other ways as well. The emperor had been content to leave Palestine in the hands of the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt with whom Byzantium enjoyed excellent relations; the crusading armies, convinced that they were doing God’s work, considered Constantinople’s attitude impious. Westerners, furthermore, could not comprehend the city’s tolerance of Moslem religious practices, tolerance which would extend to having a mosque built in Constantinople for visiting Moslem merchants and ambassadors (Runciman, 21). Worst of all, Bohemond the Norman, described as “the cleverest and most unscrupulous Crusader leader,” wanted the city of Antioch to be the center of his Mediterranean dominion in the East. Antioch was the very city “which the emperor longed to restore to his empire” (Runciman, 18). From the point of view of Rome, the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 restored the Greeks to the unity of Western Christendom. In January 1205, Innocent III proclaimed that through God’s grace the Greek church of Constantinople had come back to the obedience of the Apostolic See “now that the Empire of Constantinople has been transferred to the Latins” (Nicol, 173). Le Bone Florence of Rome explains the events igniting war between Rome and Constantinople by introducing the conventional Troy material of chronicle and romance and placing Florence’s story in the midst of this long perspective. It is rather circuitous, but the logic is that Trojans founded great cities: Andromache built Antioch, Antenor Jerusalem, Helemytes Africa, and, most important, Aeneas founded Rome; putting Florence’s personal drama in the framework of this political history gives heightened importance to what is happening to her: Rome is almost destroyed in the war in the romance, and Florence is almost destroyed by her adversities. Rome is a symbol of Florence and Constantinople a symbol of all that threatens her. This identification of heroine and city is reinforced by the fact that, in the fourteenth century, an abridged version of the tale of Florence appeared in the Gesta Romanorum, the core of which began as stories derived from Roman history.1 The narrator of the Middle English romance suggests that he had consulted more than one version of the tale (line 84) and states (in lines 2174–75) that “Pope Symonde” wrote the account in “þe cronykyls of Rome,” very likely a reference to the Gesta.2 Not surprisingly it is unclear where we are in time when war breaks 1 2

The Latin Gesta Romanorum has been edited by Hermann Oesterley (Berlin, 1872) and there is an English translation by Charles Swan, rev. and ed. E. A. Baker (London, 1905). All citations to the text of the Middle English romance of Le Bone Florence of Rome in this chapter refer to my edition in the Old and Middle English Text Series (Manchester University Press,

109

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance out between Rome and Constantinople in the first half of Le Bone Florence of Rome; we are somewhere between the antique and medieval worlds. Constantinople was the capital of the eastern Roman empire from 330 to 1453 and of the Ottoman empire since 1453. The timeline of Le Bone Florence of Rome is probably before 1453. The unique manuscript in which the romance appears (MS Cambridge Ff. 2.38) provides the endpoint, since it can be dated to between 1475 and 1500.3 The opening Troy material is brought to a close by the introduction of the Eastern emperor who, in the romance, threatens the city founded by Aeneas: . . . Rome, The chefe cyte of crystendome, Then was there none hyt lyke. Vnto þe tyme þat þe emperowre Syr Garcy Werryd on hyt, and herkenyth why, That many a oon sore can syke; Of Costantyne þe nobull was he, A doghtyar knyght þar not be In batell for to stryke. (16–24)

There is a sidelight on western impressions of the east in the route that Syr Garcy’s marriage brokers take to Rome. It is as vague as the timeline in the poem, and the place names at first glance are not easy to identify. At times the geography seems fanciful, which would be a commentary on the exotic character of things eastern, but rightly interpreted the place names may well be plausible and logical, which would suggest that the itinerary is not only realistic but familiar – just the opposite of exotic. Garcy’s emissaries seem to be taking ship to a seaport named Awtrement (or Autrement – certainly a French town) and proceeding through Poland and Champagne in northern France on to Rome. This is about the most grotesque itinerary imaginable. There is an Autremencourt (from the German, Ostremund) in the department of Aisne in northern France, and the Roman name for Chartres was Autricum, but neither of these places was a seaport or anywhere near a logical route from Constantinople. If we read “They passed þorow Pole and Chawmpayn” (line 148) as indicating that the party passed through Poland and northern France, we can only attribute the route to the poet’s caprice or ignorance. If, however, we are willing to credit some rather plausible corruptions in spelling, we can vindicate the poet’s sound geographical sense: the party took ship from Constanti-

3

1976). Of the Gesta Romanorum, whose edifying stories were often used by preachers in need of exempla for sermons, the famous translator of The Thousand and One Nights, Richard Burton, observed: “after five hundred years, the life, the manners and customs of the classical Romans lapse into the knightly and chivalrous, the Christian and ecclesiastical developments of medieval Europe” (From Richard Burton’s “Terminal Essay” [pp. 59–230] on the origins of the Nights in A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights [Benares, 1885–86], 8. 73). The same visible jumble of classical and medieval folklore and pseudo-history found in the Gesta appears in related and derivative medieval narratives. Heffernan, “Introduction” to Le Bone Florence of Rome, 40–41.

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East nople to Awrement (Otranto), proceeded through Pole (Apulia) and Chawmpayn (Campania) to Rome. In other words, under the leadership of Italian-born Acwrye (who would very likely be aware that Otranto was a hospitable port), they took the most direct route to Rome possible. The city of Constantinople was not arbitrarily chosen by the romance’s author. It is a natural choice shedding light on fears western Europe had of the “Orient.”

The Chaste Wife East and West: Primacy and Influence Before going further, it may be useful to recall the main events of the Middle English romance: Garcy, the old king of Constantinople, moved by tales of Florence’s beauty, decides to sue for her hand in marriage. After consulting with his barons and Florence, his daughter, King Otes of Rome rejects the offer made by Garcy’s emissaries. The returning messengers are full of news about glorious Rome and beautiful Florence. Angry at his rejection, Garcy declares war on Rome and sets sail with an army. Battle begins despite Florence’s last-minute offer to marry Garcy in order to save the lives of Roman knights. Mylys and Emere, sons of the King of Hungary, come to King Otes’s assistance. Florence and Emere fall in love and are betrothed. While Emere is engaged in war in Constantinople, his brother, Mylys – to whose care Florence is entrusted – tries to seize Florence for himself. So begins a series of assaults on her virtue and fantastic rescues culminating in her arrival at a convent where she is received by nuns. After healing all of her persecutors who come to her with various afflictions, Florence is reunited with her husband, Emere.

There were hundreds of stories about suffering maidens in legend and medieval romance, but the version to which Florence gave her name is distinguished from other romances about victimized women, such as Emare and Chaucer’s Custance and Griselda, by two characteristics: first, the heroine’s main persecutor is always a rejected brother-in-law and second, the tale ends with her healing the illnesses of all her persecutors who go to her and confess their crimes. The tale of Florence appears in eastern as well as in western medieval tale collections, but it is only in the western tales that the heroine’s husband is a man of high rank (emperor or king) and there is an episode in which the heroine imprisons her brother-in-law after he attempts to assault her virtue. Shortly after a group of gifted eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Orientalists and linguists, among them, the Frenchman, Antoine Galland, and the Englishmen, John Payne, Jonathan Scott, and Richard Burton, translated various Arabic manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights into their native languages for an eager European reading audience, and more than a hundred years after Sir William Jones compiled his still useful grammar of Sanskrit, two German medieval scholars, Adolf Mussafia 111

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance and A. Wallensköld – the latter, a student of the eminent French medievalist, Gaston Paris – wrote lengthy, independent studies of this large class of medieval narratives, popular in both the East and the West and numbering in the hundreds. It came to be known as “Le conte de la femme chaste convoitée par son beau-frère;”4 the Middle English romance, Le Bone Florence, belongs to this group. Working separately, Mussafia and Wallensköld argued independently for the priority of the eastern versions of the tale about the innocent wife falsely accused of adultery by her rejected brother-in-law. Not everyone agreed; three scholars wrote counter-arguments.5 But that Mussafia and Wallensköld stirred the scholarly waters of their day there can be no doubt and their scholarly concerns remind us that some of the German nineteenth-century philologists and folklorists were among the first scholars to raise multicultural questions about medieval texts. While in the natural sciences, especially medicine, historians have actively explored lines of transmission East to West through translations of Greek and Arabic treatises into Latin by such pivotal translators as Constantine the African and Gerard of Cremona (Heffernan, The Melancholy Muse, 17–18), the evidence for influence and transmission in the area of arts and letters, especially lowbrow, popular literature, like the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is not so well studied or understood. The case of the medieval tale of Florence of Rome is an interesting case in point. There are seven manuscript versions of the story of Florence – one in English, five in French, and one in Spanish.6 The heroine of the tale of Florence gives her name to a whole group of related European stories classed as the “Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends” by Lillian H. Hornstein, and the tale is the longest of the western narratives in Wallensköld’s classification of “le conte de la femme chaste.”7 Wallensköld maintained that the western versions of the tale of Florence were derived from narratives found in 4 5

6

7

Mussafia, “Uber eine Italienische Metrische Darstellung der Crescentia Saga,” 589–692 and A. Wallensköld, “Le Conte de La Femme Chaste convoitée par son Beau-frère,” 1–172. Grundtvig, Nielsen, and Olrik, eds. Gamle Folkeviser, 1. 195, 3. 782, 4. 730; S. Stefanovic, “Die Crescentia-Florence Sage,” 461–557; Karl, “Florence de Rome et la Vie de Deux Saints de Hongrie,” 163–80. There are two manuscripts which present the chanson of Florence de Rome in its entirety: MS Nouv. acquis franç. 4192 of the Bibliothèque Nationale, belonging to the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century, and a late thirteenth-century manuscript owned by the d’Arcy Hutton estate. There is also a badly mutilated fragment of the chanson, Lansdowne 362, ff. 75–7, 77 of the British Library. Besides these three manuscripts, there are four other redactions of the story about Florence of Rome: an early fourteenth-century Dit de Flourence de Rome in quatrains of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Notre Dame 198); MS 24384 of the fond français of the Bibliothèque Nationale which contains a long fifteenth-century version of Florence de Rome in alexandrines; a Spanish prose version, based on a late fourteenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Escorial; and the fifteenth-century unique Middle English version, MS Cambridge Ff. 2.38. As for printed texts, apart from my edition of the Middle English Le Bone Florence of Rome, other critical editions include Dit de Flourence de Rome, ed. Achille Jubinal; Florence de Rome: Chanson D’Aventure du Premier Quart du 13e Siècle, ed. A. Wallensköld; “Cuento Muy Famoso del Enperador Ottas de Roma,” ed. Amador de los Ríos. Lillian H. Hornstein, “Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends,” 1. 278.

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East three extant Oriental tale collections – the Touti-Nameh, the Thousand and One Nights, and the Thousand and One Days – the lost antecedent of which is an ancient Sanskrit text (Wallensköld, “Le Conte de la Femme Chaste,” 9–21). The eastern version in the Touti-Nameh, or Parrot Book, was composed by Nakhchabi about 1306. There was an older Touti-Nameh (probably of the twelfth century) which Nakhchabi modernized which was itself a somewhat altered translation of an ancient Sanskrit storybook now imperfectly represented by the Soukasaptati or the Seventy Tales of a Parrot, a work that contains most of Nakhchabi’s tales. This fact alone is a strong argument in favor of an Oriental source; to my knowledge the relationship of the Touti-Nameh to the Soukasaptati has never been challenged. Wallensköld’s comparison of the western and eastern versions of the tale of Florence was entirely limited to a consideration of the plot which he analyzed as containing nine principal incidents: (1) the wooing of the heroine by her brother-in-law, (2) the heroine’s rejection of him and his accusation of adultery, (3) her condemnation, (4) her exile, (5) refuge in a household where she is accused of murdering the child of her protector by a rejected, revengeful, and murderous suitor, (6) the second exile, (7) her being sold to a ship’s captain by the debtor she releases from the gallows, (8) her escape after a storm wrecks the ship, (9) her reputation as a healer draws all her afflicted persecutors together. Since in all the western versions the heroine’s husband is a king or emperor and they all include the imprisonment of the brother-in-law in a tower, Wallensköld concluded that the western branches developed from a common European version which contained these two alterations of the ancient eastern story. He considered the various versions of the Gesta Romanorum and the Florence subgroup, all retaining the four persecutors of the ancient eastern versions, the most closely related to them and believed them to be representatives of a literary rather than oral tradition. The absence of two persecutors (the thief rescued from the gallows and the ship’s captain) in the Miracle of the Virgin, Crescentia, and Hildegard subgroups led Wallensköld to conclude that they were products of the oral transmission of the primitive western source wherein episodes had been dropped. The Latin Miracle of the Virgin, while omitting the debtor and ship’s captain, retains possible evidence of the captain (the sea voyage). Wallensköld, therefore, advanced the notion that the oral versions of the primitive western source ended finally in a written text which was probably some version of the Latin Miracle.8 In 1865, Adolf Mussafia also argued for the priority of the Oriental versions of the story, and, like Wallensköld, he concentrated on the episodes 8

An English version of the Miracle of the Virgin is anthologized by Boyd,The English Miracles of the Virgin, 64–67 and the famous French poetic version of the Latin Miracle produced by Gautier de Coinci sometime before 1222 appears as “De l’Emperirix qui Garda Sa Chastée par Moult Temptacions” in Nouveau Recueil de Fabliaux et Contes Inédits, 2. 1–128. The Tale of “Crescentia” appears in Die Kaiserchronik, ed. Edward Schroder, 289–314 and that of “Hildegard” in Deutsche Sagen, ed. Brüder Grimm, 2. 83–5.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance of the plot. Mussafia was convinced that the eastern stories were introduced into the West in the form found in the story of Crescentia in the Kaiserchronik and the various redactions of the Miracle of the Virgin. Since in these versions episodes involving the debtor and the ship’s captain are missing, he hypothesized that a second importation from the East produced the longer western versions with four persecutors. Though he agreed with the theory of eastern origins, Wallensköld largely discredited Mussafia’s view by observing that the western versions contain an episode absent in all the Oriental tales: “le beau-frère, à la suite de ses premiers efforts pour seduire l’héroine est enfermé dans un lieu solitaire” (Wallensköld, ed., Florence de Rome, 2. 107–08). It is unlikely that two waves of influence could have triggered the same innovation in the European versions. Wallensköld maintained that the richest form of the story, in terms of logically combined episodes, was found among the Persian and Arabic versions and that the longer western versions of the tale of Florence derived from them.9 Besides the reasons he advanced, there is, as I argued in the introduction to my edition of one of the seven Florence manuscripts, the Middle English, Le Bone Florence of Rome, evidence of their close relationship in the emphasis they all place on the idea of justice, a matter to which I shall return later (Heffernan, ed., Le Bone Florence, 12–16). A considerable stumbling block in the argument for the priority of the Oriental versions of the tale, however, is the lateness of the extant eastern manuscripts containing the tale of the chaste wife – the earliest dates to the fourteenth century.10 Until earlier manuscripts containing the tale appear, 9

Three scholars argued for European origins. Svend Grundtvig regarded le conte de la femme chaste convoitée par son beau-frère as closely related to stories which actually fall within the more general cycle of tales about innocent persecuted women. He concluded that the Danish ballad Ravengaard og Memering represented the oldest version of the Florence story. The Scandinavian ballad, however, is actually related to the English Sir Aldingar (Grundtvig, Nielson, and Olrik, Gamle Folkeviser, 1. 195; 3. 782; 4. 730). S. Stefanovic also defended the idea of Germanic origins (S. Stefanovic, “Die Crescentia-Florence Sage,” 461–557). According to him, the episode of the brother-in-law’s treachery has its prototype in the Old English poem, The Wife’s Complaint, and argued that the story, having long existed as a popular legend, gave birth to the legend of Hildegard. By a combination of the story with others in which the heroine is accused of murdering an infant by a rejected suitor (notably the tale of the incestuous father), a new story was produced with two persecutors. Crescentia represents the oldest version of this stage. The Miracle of the Virgin, which in its typical form involves only two persecutors, was seen by Stefanovic as a later development of the Crescentia story, resulting from the cult of the Virgin. As for the versions represented by the Gesta Romanorum and the Florence subgroup, he regarded them as later amplifications, influenced by the Oriental versions. If the Old English poem – the crux of Stefanovic’s theory – contained the characteristic details of the first episode and the scene of reconciliation which typify the conte de la femme chaste convoitée par son beau-frère, it would be easier to accept its seniority. The last theory which supported European origins was that of Louis Karl. He attributed the appearance of Hungary in the European divisions of the story – the Gesta, the Florence subgroup, and the Miracle – to the influence of St. Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231). Karl pointed out that the basic outlines of the saint’s life were similar to the pattern of Florence’s persecution, exile, saintliness, and fame as a healer (“Florence de Rome,” 163–80). None of the versions dating before the second quarter of the thirteenth century, however, mentions Hungary. 10 The earliest extant version, the Persian Touti-Nameh (1330) of Nakhchabi derives from a portion of an earlier Touti-Nameh which was a twelfth-century translation of a Sanskrit original. There is a Turkish version of the primitive Touti-Nameh dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century in

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East Wallensköld’s argument for transmission East to West occurring in the eleventh-century cannot be conclusive because it rests, in the end, on what is anterior and lost. There is a need for vigorous pursuit of manuscripts of such texts as the Tuti-Nameh, the Thousand and One Nights, and the Thousand and One Days and for an exchange of scholarship between eastern and western scholars. Until such discoveries are made and until critical editions and translations are available, scholarship is stuck with a problem as impossible of solution as that of the proverbial chicken and egg.

Transmission: Where and When While we may have gone as far as we can with arguments about origins until earlier manuscripts lend weight to speculation about the priority of eastern versions, there are fruitful questions that can be explored about what we have: (1) Where and when could the transmission of the tale of the chaste wife occur? – for whether East influenced West, or vice versa, meet they did; (2) What does the tale mean for the East? For the West? It is well known that the Arabs, seated in North Africa for some time, made their way into Spain about the beginning of the eighth century. Here – if anywhere, an early eastern tale was going to enter the West – transmission could have occured. And, indeed, one of the extant tales of Florence is a fifteenth-century Spanish prose version, the manuscript of which is about as old as most of the extant eastern manuscripts containing the tale of the chaste wife (“Cuento Muy Famoso” in Historia Crítica de la Literatura Española, 5. 391–468). A prerequisite for the transmission of tales is that the language of origin be understood by the borrower. A passage from Du Cange indicates that some Spaniards actively learned Arabic after the Moorish invasions. Because the passage is so apt and also so unfamiliar, I quote it in full: The same thing that the anonymous writer whom I praised above says about the Latin language spoken barbarically in our Gaul before the times of Charlemagne is by Alvarus affirmed of Spain after the invasion of the Saracens: there, following the neglect of sacred scriptures and their commentaries, the Christians who survived devoted themselves to expounding the books of the Arabs and Chaldaeans and were notable for their refined erudition and outstanding for their eloquence in Arabic, but ignorant of the beauties of the ecclesiastical writings and the rivers of paradise flowing from them, and, in fact, contemptuous of them. They did not know their own law and paid no attention to their own language, Latin, so that out of the whole society of believers in Christ there could scarcely be found one in a thousand men who could correctly write the salutation of a letter to his brother while at the same time there could be found a numberless which the tale is called the “Tale of Merhuma” (In Tuti-Nameh, ed. George Rosen, 1. 89–108; Xavier Marmier, ed. and trans., Contes Populaires de differents Pays, 165–77).

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance horde who could learnedly explain the formalities of Chaldaean words. This certainly abundantly confirms what we said above. . . . We have, however, from all this sufficiently demonstrated how many Arabic words were one after the other introduced into Spain.11

Certainly within the context of troubadour poetry, many scholars are convinced that there was interaction between Romance and Arabic cultures, especially in northern Spain and Provence. Sixty years ago, for example, the Spanish Arabist, Julian Ribera, pointed out that the root of troubadour, “trobar,” is a derivative of Arabic taraba, meaning “to sing” (Menocal, xi). And when, in 1948, Samuel Stern discovered lyric poems in a Romance vernacular – Mozarabic – some scholars thought they expressed something like courtly love (Stern, 204–30). More recently, Michael Sells has pointed to courtly love as a feature of the poetry of Ibn ZaydÃn (d. 1070), an Andalusian poet, born in Córdoba. A lyric which Sells translates from the Arabic certainly contains the familiar features of that medieval love called “courtly”: amorous longing, fear of death, sorrow, weight loss, insomnia, sighing, changed aspect, etc.: In desiring you, I play my destiny away, in loving you I worship. Wishings of passion, save me! At my back is death’s shade. Keep the oath that I, by God, won’t be the one to betray. Console a mournful lover, sorrow thinned away, His nights sickness, sighs, worry, and care. Love wasted him and he became too thin to see. He became, for desires, the prey. From him, all eyes were pulled away. (Sells, 128–29) 11 Charles du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinatis, vol. 1, Praefatio, 32, 31.

The Latin reads: “Quod vero supra laudatus Scriptor anonymus de Galliae nostrae in Lingua Latina barbarie ante Caroli M. tempora, idem de Hispania post Saracenorum irruptionem testatur Alvarus: ubi neglectis et posthabitis Scripturis Sanctis earumque sacris interpretibus, quotquot supererant Christiani, Arabum Chaldaeorumque libris evolvendis incumbebant, gentilitia eruditione praeclari, Arabico eloquio sublimati, Ecclesiasticam pulchritudinem ignorantes, et Ecclesiae flumina de Paradiso manantia, quasi vilissima contemnentia, legem suam nesciebant, et linguam propriam non advertebant Latini, ita ut ex omni christi Collegio VIX inveniretur unus in milleno hominum genere, qui salutatorias fratri posset rationaliter dirigere literas, cum reperitentur absque numero multiplices turboe, qui erudite Chaldaicas verborum explicarent pompas. Quod quidem abunde firmat . . . supra diximus. Sed et inde satis arguimus unde tot voces Arabicae in Hispanam, subinde sese intulerunt.”

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East Though textual evidence of vernacular love poetry in a Romance language tied to Arabic tradition is compelling and there is much circumstantial evidence for the Arabic origins of courtly love, or, at least, cross-cultural influence, scholars are by no means unanimous in the belief that there is a significant Arabic background behind the troubadours of southern France. A typical reluctant acceptance is this tempered comment by Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “the romantic poetic tradition of the troubadours seems to have depended directly on the somewhat prior corresponding tradition of Islamicate Spain; but this went back ultimately to older Hellenistic traditions, long since partly echoed in Latin, and seems to have received its immediate forms from local romance tendencies common to Spain and Gaul” (Hodgson, 363). Moslem Spain reached its zenith in A.D. 929 when the Arab-Syrian dynasty of the Umayyads made its seat in Córdoba and dominated all of North Africa, Granada, and Seville (Daniel-Rops, 2. 235).

One Thousand and One Nights It seems to me that the One Thousand and One Nights might have contained the lost primitive Indian version of the chaste wife story which Wallensköld maintained had spawned all the oriental versions of the narrative from which he traces the descent to, first, the occidental versions found in the Gesta Romanorum and the closely related French, English, and Spanish tales of Florence, and, latterly, to those of the Miracle of the Virgin from which derive similarly simplified stories of Crescentia and Hildegarde. The earliest records of the existence of the likely first stage of the One Thousand and One Nights date to the same period as the height of Moorish power in Spain: the first known references to the work are found in the writings of tenth-century historians. J. von Hammer Purgstall drew attention to a passage from Mas’udi’s Golden Meadows, written in A.D. 943, which deals briefly with the Arabian Nights. He mentions stories current among old Arabs which he compares with “the books which have reached us in translations from Persian, Indian, and Greek, such as the book of Hezar Afsane, a title which, translated from Persian into Arabic, means ‘the thousand tales’ ” (Goeje, 26. 883). Von Hammer also drew attention to al-Fihrist (A.D. 987) which mentions Hazar Afsane and sums up the plot of the frame story, so familiar from the Thousand and One Nights: The ancient Persians were the first to invent tales and make books of them, and some of their tales were put in the mouths of animals. The Ashghanians, or third dynasty of Persian kings, and after them the Sasanians, had a special part in the development of this literature, which found Arabic translators, and was taken up by accomplished Arabic literati, who edited and imitated it. The earliest book of the kind was the Hezar afsane or Thousand Tales, which had the following origin. A certain Persian king was accustomed to kill his wives on the morning after the consummation of the marriage. But 117

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance once he married a clever princess called Sharazad, who spent the marriage night in telling a story which in the morning reached a point so interesting that the king spared her, and asked next night for a sequel. This went on for a thousand nights. (Goeje)

If this tenth-century, lost Persian collection was the forerunner of the Arabian Nights, and a version of the unspecified primitive Indian source, lost in the mists of time that Wallensköld supposes, might it have contained not just the recognizable frame of the Arabian Nights with which we are familiar, but the chaste wife story as well of which there are three versions in the Thousand and One Nights? The possibility is certainly held out by the resolution of the situation in the frame story as we have it in the Conclusion to the Arabian Nights Entertainments that Richard Burton translates as follows: “O King of the Age, these are thy children and I crave that thou release me from the doom of death as a dole to these infants; for, an thou kill me, they will become motherless and will find none among women to rear them as they should be reared.” When the king heard this, he wept and straining the boys to his bosom said, “By Allah, O Shahrazad, I pardoned thee before the coming of these children, for that I found thee chaste, pure, ingenuous, and pious!” (Burton, 8. 51)

It takes Shahrazad three years of daily storytelling and her having given birth to the King’s three sons, before she succeeds in renewing his trust in women. She represents, in the frame of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, the wise, pious woman who stands as a foil to the frivolous, unfaithful wives of the king and his brother. In other words, she is like the type of “the chaste wife” who, appearing in an enframed story, fits thematically, like Shahrazad, “by contrast” into the frame situation of Shahrayar who has lost his faith in women. Comparison of the various extant manuscripts reveals a similar frame story in all, but considerable variation in the stories enframed and their order of appearance.12 It might be useful here to summarize the frame situation. The first wife of Shahrayar was found in bed with a black slave; not only has his wife betrayed him, but the same thing happens to his brother, King Shahzeman. Later on, when the two kings make a voyage, they have an experience which inverts the 12 Of the editions I have been able to consult, “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” is not found in

the editions by Galland, Scott, “Breslau text,” “Calcutta text,” Haddawy but is found in vol. 3 Trebutien, “Bulacq text,” Lane (The Thousand and One Nights, 3 vols.), “Mac. text,” vol. 5 Payne, vol. 5 Burton; “The Adventures of the Cauzee, his Wife” is not found in Galland, “Breslau text,” Habicht, “Mac. text,” “Calcutta text,” Lane, Trebutien, “Bulacq text,” Payne, Burton, Haddawy but is found in vol. 6 Scott; “The Tale of the Pious Woman Accused of Lewdness” is not found in Galland, Scott, Trebutien, “Bulacq text,” Lane, Habicht, “Mac. text,” “Calcutta text,” Haddawy but is found in vol. 1 Burton, vol. 2 Payne. The recent translation by Haddawy is based on the text of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi (Alf Layla wa Layla [Leiden, 1984]).

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East opening events of the frame: they have intercourse with a young woman whom a powerful Jinny believes to be carefully locked up (whereas, earlier in the frame, the wives of the two brother kings managed illicit affairs despite the tight security of the royal palace). King Shahrayar, since his betrayal, devotes his nights to “one night stands” with local virgins who are executed in the morning as insurance against his ever being betrayed by a woman again. Finally, the only virgin left is the daughter of the king’s executioner who volunteers herself as a means of restoring the king’s faith and of protecting the lives of the women of the realm. She accomplishes this feat by telling stories so enthralling that they keep the king on the edge of his bed, so to speak. By leaving her tale unfinished each night, she manages to stay alive the next night so as to allow the king to hear the story’s continuation. This device goes on for three years, until the king’s trust in womankind is restored. The story type of the “femme chaste convoitée pour son beau-frère” would certainly have thematic relevance in a collection of eastern tales so framed, and it is tantalizing to think that if the frame story existed as early as the ninth century, so might have the eastern versions of the chaste wife story. It may, indeed, have been contained in a lost primitive Indian collection from which all eastern versions of this tale derived, as Wallensköld theorized. As for transmission, it might well have travelled into Arabic Spain as early as the beginning of the tenth century and from there to other parts of the West. Wallensköld’s hypothesis that the longer western versions of the tale of the chaste wife – the various versions of the Gesta Romanorum and the Florence subgroup, all retaining the four persecutors of the eastern versions – together with the Miracle of the Virgin subgroup, among the shorter versions, are most closely related to the oriental versions is, I think, correct. Besides the reasons the German scholar advanced, there is evidence of their close relationship in the very heavy stress they all place on the idea of justice – an emphasis not found in the Hildegard and Crescentia subgroup. Some of what follows repeats and considerably expands ideas first put forth in the introduction to my edition of the Middle English romance of Le Bone Florence of Rome (Heffernan, ed., 12–16).

Justice-Piety Motif Not only is there the implicit justice of the concluding vindication episode in the eastern versions, together with explicit references to the justice of Allah, but there are also reinforcing details related to the idea of justice: (1) all of them contain a scene in which the brother-in-law falsely charges the heroine with adultery and brings her before a court of law; (2) the husband in the three versions of the story contained in the Thousand and One Nights is actually, by profession, a judge. He does not act judicially as judge or prosecutor in the story, but, in “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife,” the husband is characterized as a pious man (Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation, 4. 206–09). In 119

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance fact, in this tale he leaves his wife in order to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There is evidence in the placement of the tale within The Thousand and One Nights, as we know it, that the idea of piety had civil and domestic ramifications for the East. In R. F. Burton’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights, the tales that precede “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” are two, both told on the 464th night: “Iskandar Zu Al-Karnayn and a Certain Tribe of Poor Folk” and “The Righteousness of King Anushirwan.”13 In the first, Iskandar comes to a poor town where folk own nothing and dig their graves against the doors of their homes for, as their king tells Iskandar, “They may be the prospective of our eye-glances; so we may look on them and ever renew talk and thought of death, neither forget the world to come . . .” (4. 203). The king then shows Ishkandar two skulls, one belonging to a tyrant now abiding in fire, the other, that of a just king who Allah lodged in his garden. The king asks Iskandar which sort he is and sends him on his way. Following this tale, on the same night, the second, about King Anushirwan is told. Again, there is a just king. He feigns illness and tells his people the leaches have prescribed as cure a mud brick cast off from some ruin. When the people go out to search for one and return, unable to find a brick as there are no ruins in the realm, the king is content because “the affairs of the reign are best-conditioned and its ordinance is excellent” (4. 205). After these two tales, comes the 465th night on which the tale of “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” is recounted. But before the tale begins, there is a lead-in which links it to the previous tale of the Just King; Shahrazad says to the King of the frame, “Religion dependeth on the King, the King on the troops, the troops on the treasury, the treasury on the populousness of the country, and its prosperity on the justice (emphasis mine) done to the lieges.” (4. 206)

She concludes by saying of subjects that “they love not a tyrant and cease not to offer up successive prayers against him, so that the King hath no ease of his kingdom and the vicissitudes of fortune speedily bring him to destruction. And they tell a tale concerning ‘The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife’ ” (4. 206). Following the telling of this tale, told on the 466th night, comes that of “The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child,” a tale about a woman who no sooner gives birth to a son, after being swept ashore following a shipwreck, than a sailor attempts to rape her and throws her baby into the sea (4. 209–12). She gets justice from Allah, however. Immediately after she prays, Allah sends a sea monster to devour the sailor, and her son is miraculously restored to her by sailors who have rescued him. The tale concludes with verse beginning,

13 Burton, 4. 203–05; 4. 205. References to these texts as well as to “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious

Wife” and “The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child” will appear within parentheses in the body of my chapter.

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East How many boons conceals the Deity, Eluding human sight in mystery:/ How many graces come on heels of stresses, and fill the burning heart with jubilee. (4. 212)

In the context of the hypothetical Sanskrit origin of the chaste wife tale, it is of interest that Mia Gerhardt, who wrote the first full-length literary study of the Thousand and One Nights, points out that, while the few pious tales contained in the collection seem to have Jewish sources, none has been found for the tale about the Jewish judge and his pious wife; moreover, in its appearance as the Story of Repsima in the Thousand and One Days, she observes that “it also occurs without any Jewish connotations.”14 This eastern version of the chaste wife tale, however, is notable for underscoring the justice motif: Repsima is taken before a court by her brother-in-law, Revendeh; when, later in the tale, she is falsely charged with having murdered the child of one of her rescuers and he decides to exile her from his home rather than having her killed, Repsima extolls his sense of justice at great length (Petis de la Croix, 2. 221); and finally, she is made queen of the region she floats to after a shipwreck and it is said that “She selected viziers as upright as they were enlightened, and she took particular care to render justice . . .” (2. 230). The anonymous author of Le Bone Florence of Rome likewise lays particular emphasis on the idea of God’s justice, which punishes the wicked and preserves the faithful. This is particularly evident in the miracles by means of which God intervenes to save the heroine. In referring to his source, the poet says at one point: The boke seyþ God þat vs boght Many myrakyls for hur he wroght Many a oon and thyckfolde. (871–73)

The story reaches a climax when all four men who have injured Florence are stricken with disease and come to the monastery where she lives to be healed. Their public confession of their attempts to assault Florence is still another manifestation of the justice of God, and the realistic description of their painful symptoms (2020 ff.) stresses the contrast between reward and punishment. The poem concludes with the idea that God always metes out justice appropriately to the good and the wicked: For y schulde men and women als Them bethynke or þey be false Hyt makyth so fowle an ende Be hyt neuyr so slylye caste
yt hyt schamy þe maystyr at þe laste In what londe þat euyr þey lende In meene be the iiij fekyll

14 See also J. Perles, “Rabbinische Agadas in 1001 Nacht,” 123–24.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance That harmed feyre Florence so mykyll The trewest that men kende. (2176–84)

There are similar passages in the Spanish and French versions. The section of the French chanson which begins with the rubric, Piété de Florence, makes clear that Florence’s piété consists in giving each man his due. There is a certain justice in the balance of the action in which Florence heals only after having elicited a confession from each of her persecutors who express remorse for their past wrongs. The connection between piety and justice, as we shall see in a moment, is consistent with the medieval church’s classification of piety as a part of justice. Like the Florence subgroup, the Gesta Romanorum contains a justice motif. In a “Moral” appended to the conclusion of tale 249 of the Latin Gesta (“De Octaviano Qui Super Omnia Uxorem Dilexit”) an allegorical equation is set up – the emperor = Jesus Christ = Judge: The Emperor is our master Jesus Christ. The Empress is the soul which was entrusted to his brother, Mankind. But alas the Flesh so strongly enticed the soul to sin that it could not rest. What was to be done? Obviously to incarcerate the Flesh by way of penance. But Holy Church recounts to us reports that our emperor is to come out of the Holy Land on the day of Judgement. . . .15

Evidence of the justice motif in the versions of the Miracle is slighter, perhaps because the narrative is so brief. It is particularly noteworthy that in Etienne de Bourbon’s collection of exempla the story appears under the heading, “Pietas.” The Greek term for pietas is eusebeia and was used by the Greek philosophers, especially Plato, and by the Greek Fathers of the Church in the sense of respect for the gods (or God) and one’s parents (Plato, 2. 497. 615c: Clement of Rome, 1. 8 [ch. 11], 1. 13 [ch. 32]). Among the Roman authors, Vergil and Cicero stand out for the frequency of use of the noun, pietas, or the adjective, pius. Vergil used the noun twenty-two times in the Aeneid where it almost invariably has the sense of the Greek eusebeia. Cicero formulated a definition of the word which embraced the main traditions of the term and made them comprehensive and more specific: “This is pietas: to fulfill one’s duty and conscientious service towards our own flesh and blood and those having the interests of our country at heart.”16 In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Cicero, explained pietas more fully as a specific form of the virtue of justice: Cicero classifies piety as a part of justice. . . . What makes any virtue to be specific is that its relationship to its objective is based on some specific 15 Translated from Gesta Romanorum, ed. Hermann Oesterly, 652. 16 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. The words are quoted by Aquinas from the De

Inventione Rhetorica in his discussion of “Virtues of Justice in the Human Community” (vol. 41), trans. T. C. O’Brien, II–ii, Q. 101, Art. I.

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Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East moral value in the objective. Since honouring a debt towards someone else is a function of justice generally, a specific kind of justice arises wherever there is a specific basis for indebtedness to any person. This is the case in regard to anyone who, in the natural course of things, is a source of our life and its development . . . piety is the response towards those sources. . . . (Aquinas, II–ii, Q. 101, art. III)

In short, justice requires that one give every person what is due him. This is probably the sense in which the thirteenth-century Dominican, Etienne de Bourbon, understood the term as he used it in his collection of exempla. It is no accident, in the light of these findings about the justice motif, that Chaucer selected the Man of Law as narrator of the tale of Custance. Though Custance does not belong to the tale type of the Chaste Wife, she is one of Florence’s literary sisters. Before telling his tale about the working of Divine Justice, the lawyer surveys Chaucer’s extant works in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale. The survey makes clear that one of Chaucer’s appeals to the Man of Law as a storyteller is that he is moral: the poet’s Legend of Good Women is about ladies true in loving and Chaucer, unlike Gower, did not write about incest. The lawyer’s Custance has not merely the physical beauty of Florence but mature moral seriousness: In hire is heigh beautee, withoute pride, Yowthe, withoute grenehede or folye; To all hire werkes vertu is hir gyde; Humblesse hath slayn in hire al tirannye. She is mirour of alle curteisye; Hir herte is verray chambre of hoolynesse, Hir hand, ministre of fredom for almesse. (Man of Law’s Tale, 162–68)

The lawyer’s Tale of Custance, like Le Bone Florence of Rome, is about female faithfulness and its reward. The learned clerk’s Tale of Patient Griselda (another literary sister of Florence) demonstrates that the domestic virtue of loving faithfulness embodied in the Griselda permutation of this tale type has public consequences. In her husband’s absence, the obedient, long-suffering wife proves to be an excellent ruler: . . . when that the cas required it, The commune profit koude she redresse. Ther nas discord, rancour, ne hevynesse In al that land, that she ne koude apese, And wisely brynge hem alle in reste and ese. (Clerk’s Tale, 430–34)

Her nature, furthermore, reaches into the commonweal in another way; namely, through her husband. As I have argued in another place, Griselda’s passivity contains potent, catalytic force enabling her “to transform Walter’s 123

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance nature on a domestic level, and this, in turn, benefits the political sphere” (Heffernan, “Tyranny and Commune Profit,” 335–36). A central problem of the Clerk’s Tale is “how to make Walter, the lord and tyrant, more like Griselda, the commoner and genius of commune profit” (Heffernan, 332). That Walter has the potential to change is made evident at the beginning of the tale, when he is said to meet his subjects with “pitee,” a quality that Chaucer (Canterbury Tales, I, 465–70) considered essential in a ruler. The citizens have come to urge him to marry and thus assure smoothe succession of lordship. The domestic-public linkage here recalls how the placement of “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” within The Thousand and One Nights serves to emphasize the civil and domestic ramifications of piety. Chaucer was fully aware of the contemporary appeal of hagiographical romances about wronged, beleaguered heroines. Not only did the popularity of the type continue well into the sixteenth century in English romance literature, but similar tales appear in the other vernacular romance literatures of medieval and Renaissance Europe as well as in eastern tale collections such as The Thousand and One Nights and The Thousand and One Days.

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Conclusion

Conclusion

T

HE appearance of the Orient in medieval English romance – as exotic setting (in the Squire’s Tale), as new territory for trade and conversion (in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Gower’s Tale of Constance), as realm of sensuality (in Chaucer’s legends of Dido and Cleopatra and possibly even in Floris and Blauncheflur), and, indeed, as the source and conduit of tales themselves (in Le Bone Florence of Rome and some elements of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale) – suggests that contact with strangers can become a powerful motor for change in literature. The very rise of romance as a new genre in medieval France, placed as it is in time after the East-West encounter of the Second Crusade, is itself the most potent example of this. The appearance of the ancient Greek novel is another.

The Question of the Ancient Greek Novel and the Arabs What part, if any, may have been played by the ancient Greek novel in the development of medieval romance literature remains problematic. Did the earlier affect the latter genre? It is striking that the ancient Greek novel also arose after the West encountered the East. The form appeared in the Hellenistic Period which began with Alexander’s conquest of the Orient and ended when the last Hellenistic state – Egypt – was swallowed by the Roman Empire. This new type of prose literature was produced in Greek-speaking countries of the eastern Mediterranean by writers actually not Greek, but North African or Near Eastern – people from such places as Pergamon, Antioch, or Alexandria (Wolff, 2; Hägg, xi). Heliodorus (A.D. 220–250), author of the Æthiopica (An Ethiopian Tale), is a prime instance of this orientalizing period of Greek culture. The last lines of his novel describe him as a Phoenician from Emesa who was a priest of Helios, the chief Ethiopian diety: Thus endeth the Aethiopian historie of Theagenes and Cariclia, the authour where of is Heliodorus of Emesos a citie in Phoenicia, sonne of Theodosius, which fetched his petigree from the Sunne.1

1

An Æthiopian History Written in Greek by Heliodorus, Englished by Thomas Underdowne, Anno 1587, Book X, p. 290.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance To my knowledge there is no evidence of Arabic translations of ancient Greek novels such as the Æthiopica or the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus (3rd century A.D.), not even in medieval Sicily, where one might expect to find them since, in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Sicily had large populations of both Arabs and Greeks. Longus’s four-book pastoral romance about two orphaned shepherds who discover erotic longing and Heliodorus’s ten-book picaresque adventure about the white daughter of the black king and queen of Ethiopia do not become known in the Latin West until the early modern period. Modern scholarship, however, draws a distinction between ancient long prose novels like those by Longus and Heliodorus which have “a stable literary form” and a work like the History of Apollonius of Tyre, shaped with oral and folk elements (Swain, 6). As a Latin romance of the fifth or sixth century, Historia Apollonii regis Tyri is believed to be a revision of a third-century original, presumed Greek.2 Almost every manuscript of this work, familiar all over medieval Europe, represents a separate version, not one of which is Arabic. It was first translated into English in England in the tenth or eleventh centuries and is retold by Gower in the fourteenth century in his Confessio Amantis. One is tempted to speculate as to whether or not the so-called novels of ancient Greece would have affected Europe earlier had they been translated into Arabic and then from Arabic into Latin along with scientific works in the translation centers of Toledo, Sicily, and Salerno. As it is, works like the episodic Æthiopica do not become influential in Europe until the Renaissance (Achity, 367). After being translated into Latin and English in the sixteenth century, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica became one of the models for Sidney’s Arcadia.3 Apart from the literature of antiquity, one wonders how even a medieval Greek work such as the Digenes Akritas might have come to the attention of Chaucer, if, indeed, Metlitzski is right about this epic being an analogue of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. Could the poet manage the Greek or would he have

2

3

See Alexander Riese, ed., Historia Appollonii regis Tyri and History of Apollonius of Tyre, ed. Kortekas. Kortekas makes a convincing argument for a Greek original being composed in Syria some time in the late second or early third century A.D. See also the discussion of sources and analogues by Archibald in Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations, 27–44. The Renaissance translations are Heliodori, Æthiopicae Historiae Libri decem, trans. S. Warschewiczki (Basel, 1552) and An Aethiopian Historie, trans. T. Underdowne (London, 1569 (?)). See Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 333–35. There is some doubt about the date of the first edition of Underdowne’s translation of Heliodorus’s novel; 1569 and 1577 are both possible. The latter coincides with the time when Sidney is thought to have begun composing the Arcadia. According to the Stationer’s Register, Transcript I. 388, Francis Coldocke had a license to publish in 1569, but the “Atenae Oxonienses, I. 431–32, indicates that Underdowne’s translation was printed by Francis Coldocke in 1577. Sidney’s Arcadia took several years to complete and its restructuring as the New Arcadia was underway when the poet died in 1586 with only two and a half books of five completed. The 1587 edition of Underdowne appeared too late for Sidney to have seen.

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Conclusion needed to have access to an English or French translation? (There was none). Chaucer’s Middle English translation of Boethius’s sixth-century Latin work, The Consolation of Philosophy, was probably more reliant on a medieval French translation than it was on the original Latin text.

Greek, Arab, and European Science There were other worlds of learning apart from the realms of imagination that moved westward. The recognition of extensive cultural contact between the Islamic Middle East and Christian West calls for a closer examination of the intertextual connections between Eastern and Western literature of the Middle Ages, particularly in those European countries where Arabs had an early presence – not just southern France and Spain but also southern Italy and Sicily. It is clear that real historical contact with the Moslem world opened up to the West the discovery that the Arabs possessed a sophistication and richness of learning that surpassed anything in the Latin West. But when centers of translation grew up in such places as Toledo, Sicily, and Salerno, translators concentrated on the useful knowledge of science, philosophy, and medicine, not belles lettres. In all but the latter field, therefore, the Arabs are recognized as mediators of Greek and Byzantine learning; almost nothing is known about any possible relation that might exist between Arabian tales and classical Greek novels. The debt of medieval Islamic civilization to ancient Greece in philosophy and science has long been recognized. Translations of ancient Greek texts into Arabic transmitted Hellenistic thought to Islamic philosophers and scientists. These Arabic works, translated into Latin, conveyed this body of authorities to the Christian West. Arabic medicine, as represented by such physicians as Rhazes (865–923), Haly Abbas (d. 994) and Avicenna (980–1037), develops out of the Byzantine compilers in whose work the thinking of the celebrated Greek physicians, Hippocrates and Galen, survived. By the second half of the ninth century, nearly all Galen’s works had been translated into Arabic. “It could not be otherwise,” as Manfred Ullmann comments, “for, since the third century, Galen’s medicine had been completely dominant in the east of the Hellenistic world” (Ullmann, 10). The innovations of Arabic medicine, in turn, become part of the literature of the Christian West through translations of Arabic into Latin in the late Middle Ages by such translators as Constantine the African and Gerard of Cremona. Constantine the African (A.D. 1010–1087) translated the most important Arabic medical writings that had appeared by the eleventh century. As a member of the Benedictine community of Monte Cassino, translating Greco-Arabic writings from Arabic into Latin, Constantine’s work over a period of fifteen years makes him the major transmitter of Arabic medicine to the West. He did not, however, translate the most famous work of the most influential Arabic physician, Avicenna’s Canon (Qanun). A magisterial work 127

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance of five volumes, it was translated by Gerard of Cremona into Latin in 1187 at Toledo.4 By the mid-thirteenth century, it had assumed an important place in western medicine. The Canon was retranslated from Arabic into Latin by Andrea Alpago (d. 1522) in the early modern period, by which time the work had long been prominent as a textbook of medicine in European universities. He was among the medical authorities known to Chaucer’s physician pilgrim who had been university-educated and, therefore, a rarity among medieval practitioners: a Doctour of Physik, Wel knew he the olde Esculapius, And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus, Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen, Serapion, Razis, and Avycen, . . . (General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, lines 429–32)

The medical writing on melancholy, for instance, in western literature of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance owes a great debt to Avicenna whose thinking on the subject is ultimately Galenic, as can be seen from the following representative passage: Unnatural melancholy . . . is like something burned down to ashes. . . . But melancholy that is overflowing is another one that is ashes of bile and its conflagration. And it is bitter; between it and red bile that we recognize to have been burned, there is this difference, that it is red bile into which these ashes have been mixed. But this adds up to nothing but ashes separated by themselves whose thin properties have been refined. Another case is that of the ashes of phlegm and what was burned off from it. And if the phlegm was very thin and watery its ashes will be salty, and if not will be drawn to [acredinem] or [ponticitatem?]. Another kind is the ashes of blood and what is burned off from it, and this is sharp, and verges on a bit of sweetness.5

Galen’s medicine had been based upon the humoral pathology of classical Greece and Rome.

4

5

Avicenna, Liber Canonis De Medicinis, trans. Gerardo Carmonensi postea uero aba Andrea Alpago and Liber Canonis De Medicinis, trans. Andreas Alpagus are owned by the New York Academy of Medicine. Avicenna, Liber Canonis, trans. Gerardo Carmonensi postea uero aba Andrea Alpago, 1. 1. 4. cap. 1. 14: “Melancholia uero non naturalis, . . . est ad modum adustionis & cineereitatis. . . . Melancholia aute quae est superflues, alia est quae est cinis cholerae, & adustionis eius: & ipsa est amara inter quam tamen & choleram rubeam qum adustam uo camus, existit differentia, quod ill est cholera rubea, cui cinis hic fuit admistus: haec uero non est nisi cinis per se separatus, cuius subtile fuit resolutum. Alia est quae cinis phlegmatis, & quod de eo adustum fuit: & si phlegma ualde subtile & aquosum fuerit, eius cinis erit salsus: & sinon, trahit ad acredinem aut ponticitatem. Alia est quae est cinis sanguinis, & haec quidum est salsa, ad paucum trahens dulcedinem.” For more on the subject of melancholy in medicine and literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance see my The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine.

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Conclusion

Petrus Alfonsi: Science and Storytelling One of the most important translators who transmitted Arabic science to the Latin West was the twelfth-century teacher-writer, Petrus Alfonsi, an emigrant from Moslem Spain who brought Arabic texts with him to Aragon, England, and France. In 1116, Alfonsi translated and adapted a series of astronomical tables from Al-Khwarizmi’s Zij Al-Sindhind from Arabic into Latin.6 This work combined Ptolemaic and Hindu elements and was the best known work of Sindhin astronomy. Alfonsi’s translation into Latin introduced a new concept of planetary motion to western astronomy (Tolan, 55). A convert to Christianity from Judaism, Alfonsi’s attitude toward astrology, the predictive aspect of astronomy, was quite different from that of Ghazzali; Alfonsi considered astrology part of God’s grand design and defended it against its detractors. He believed that stars were ordained by God to influence the terrestrial world. Alfonsi had particular influence in England: his translation of Al-Khwarizmi’s Zij al-Sindhind was reworked by Adelard of Bath, apparently with Alfonsi’s help, and Walcher, Prior of Malvern, learned from Alfonsi, who was his teacher, how to predict solar and lunar eclipses. Alfonsi’s collection of moral fables, the Disciplina clericalis, reveals yet another facet of Petrus Alfonsi, that of philosopher.7 Preachers in the Latin West mined the work for exempla to be used in sermons, while writers of imaginative literature – Boccaccio, especially – often indifferent to Alfonsi’s didactic purpose, used the collection as a rich source of tales from which to borrow. The Disciplina thus became yet another conduit for transmitting stories from the East to the West. In the Disciplina clericalis 34 stories are recounted by parents or teachers through conversations with students who are given some opportunity to answer back. The work is heavily laden with proverbs. A work of ethical philosophy, its sources trace back to the wisdom literature of India, Egypt, and the Fertile Crescent as well as to certain story cycles such as the Kalila wa Dimna (Kalilah and Dimnah, in English), a sort of handbook for princes which instructs through fables. Etienne de Bourbon, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, whose collection of exempla is mentioned in the previous chapter, is one of those preachers, along with his friend, Jacques de Vitry, who borrowed stories from the Disciplina for use in sermons. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in one of the tales the poet tells himself, the Tale of Melibee, it is

6

7

Petrus Alfonsi’s Tabulae Astronomicae may be read in Otto Neugebauer, ed., in The Astronomical Tables of al-Khwarizmi, Translated with Commentaries of the Latin Version, ed. Suter. This work contains Alfonsi’s Latin version of the Zij and English translation. It also contains an English translation of Adelard of Bath’s version, edited by Suter. Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina Clericalis I: Lateinischer Text, eds. Hilka and Soderhjelm. This work is translated by Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller as The Scholar’s Guide. See also Disciplina Clericalis, ed. and trans. Hermes.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance the aphoristic content rather than the fables of the Disciplina for which Chaucer the pilgrim names Petrus Alfonsus. The Melibee is “a moral tale vertuous” (line 940) in prose with which the poet obliges Harry Bailly, who has cut off Chaucer’s preceding rhyming doggerel romance of Sir Thopas. Now certain not to win the fictional competition of tale-telling, Chaucer moves from romance to this work of advice on right living – his “litel tretys” (line 956). The Tale of Melibee cites two proverbs attributed to Alfonsi: “Piers Alfonce seith, ‘Whoso that dooth to thee oother good or harm, haste thee not to quiten it, for in this wise thy freend wole abyde and thyn enemy shal the lenger lyve in drede.’ ” (1053 ff.) “And Peter Alfonce seith, ‘Make no felawshipe with thyne olde enemys, for if thou do hem bountee, they wol perverten it into wikkednesse.’ ” (1189ff.)8

Boccaccio, on the other hand, mines the Disciplina for its stories. Alfonsi’s Fable 14, for instance, becomes the fourth tale told on the seventh day of storytelling in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Not only is Boccaccio indifferent to the didactic intent of the Spaniard’s work, but he subverts the point of the tale about the cuckolded husband locked out of his home by the adulterous wife (whom he had imprisoned in the house). Boccaccio makes the wife the victim instead of the husband who is characterized as both jealous and alcoholic.

8

See Disciplina Clericalis 25.15 (ex. 24) and D.C. 4.4 in Petrus Alphonsus, Disciplina clericalis, ed. Hilka and Soderhjelm, Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae 38. 4–5 (1911) and their Disciplina Clericalis III: Franzosische Versarbeitungen, Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae, 49.4 (1922).

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Afterword

Afterword

S

PENSER replaces Chaucer as the exemplary practitioner of the romance genre for the sixteenth century in England. By this time European chivalry was in decline and Protestant England felt a sense of separation from the Catholic Mediterranean world, a world whose commercial dominance had become destabilized by western overseas exploration and expansion. Though Spenser admired his great English predecessor and borrowed from his Squire’s Tale, a chief literary source in the Faerie Queene comes from the Mediterranean: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). Ariosto’s poem has three primary centers of interest: the siege of Paris and the final defeat of the Saracen army, the madness of Orlando, and the loves of Bradamante and Ruggiero. Through the influence of Ariosto’s work the Orient makes an occasional appearance in Spenser’s romance – for example, in Books Four (the Legend of Friendship) and Five (the Legend of Justice).1 Spenser’s Aemylia, in the episode of the Cave of Lust (Book 4, Canto 7) is modelled on the Saracen woman, Isabella, in the robbers cave of Book 12 of Orlando Furioso. We find in these parallel episodes the depiction of the male Saracen as sexual threat, familiar from medieval romance. In Spenser, Aemylia is captured by the “accursed Carle of hellish kind,/ The shame of men, and plague of womankind” (Book 4, Canto 7, stanza 18) when she goes to keep a clandestine rendezvous with her beloved squire of low degree. Aemylia’s father, a Lord, would not agree to her choice of beloved, and so she had planned to run away with her squire in secret. Unfortunately, she is found and intercepted by the evil captor and carried off to the Cave of Lust where she is attended by an old woman of whom Aemylia says: For euer when he burnt in lustful fire, She in my stead supplide his bestiall desire. (4. 7. 19)

By this deception, she is able to remain virginal. Ariosto’s Isabella, the fifteen-year-old Saracen girl of the cave, is also attended by an old woman. Isabella has been snatched away from the friend of her Christian beloved, Zerbino, by robbers while she was on her way, accompanied and ostensibly protected by his friend, to meet Zerbino in secret. Soon after the Siege of Paris 1

This is unsurprising. As C. S. Lewis observed long ago in The Allegory of Love, “The English poet follows the Italian as closely as Virgil followed Homer” and Spenser’s source for innumerable episodes “stares us in the face the moment we open our Ariosto” (305). Moreover, he pointed out the fact that “below the surface fantasy” of Orlando Furioso is “the theme of the chanson de geste, the ‘old world’s debate’ of cross and crescent” (309).

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance and after fighting two Saracen knights (one from Algeria, the other, from the Sudan), Orlando continues his quest to find his beloved Angelica; he follows a light that leads him instead to Isabella, captive in the robbers’ cave. Likewise, the Pollente episode of Book 5, Canto 2 of the Faerie Queene has a source in Ariosto: specifically, the complicated tale of the wooing of Isabella – whose beloved Zerbino has died – by Rodomonte, the Saracen King of Algiers, a tale which develops through Cantos 29, 31, and 35 of Orlando Furioso. Loyal to her dead lover, Zerbino, Isabella finds Rodomonte’s attention unwelcome and tricks him into killing her. She makes him a gift of a magic ointment that will make him invincible and demonstrates its power by anointing herself and offering her neck to the King’s sword. When the Saracen king cuts her neck with his sword, Isabella is decapitated. King Rodomonte then erects a tomb to Isabella’s memory near his castle by a river over which there is a treacherous bridge without rails. Rodomonte fights all knights who intrude and hangs the armor of the defeated upon Isabella’s tomb. Orlando, Flordelis, and Brandimart all approach the perilous passage and manage to escape alive. In the case of the latter, however, who gets stuck in the mud, the Saracen’s Lady intercedes on behalf of the Christian knight. Finally, in Canto 35, the King of Algiers, Rodomonte, is defeated by the Amazonian Christian heroine, Bradamante. Spenser simplifies the episode in his adaptation: the number of conflicts is reduced from three to one, that of Sir Artegall; the motivation of the Saracen, Pollente, is made simple robbery – Ouer his Bridge, albee he rich or poore, But he him makes his passage-penny pay Else he doth hold him backe or beat away (5. 2. 6)

and the Saracen woman who came to the aid of the endangered Christian knight, Brandimart, in Ariosto, is transformed into Lady Munera, Pollente’s daughter of the rich coffers with her “golden hands and siluer feete” (5. 2. 10). The effect is to shift emphasis to the moral basis of Spenser’s allegory of Justice. Artegall deals fiercely with the tyrannical Pollente and his corrupt daughter, for the tyranny of oppression must be met by the force of Justice. Pollente’s bleeding head and Munera’s hands and feet are hung up as a lesson to tyrants.2 In terms of an oriental thread running between Spenser and Ariosto, it should be added that the female heroine, Britomart, at the center of Book 3 of the Faerie Queene (the Legend of Chastity), is a figure of epic proportions who recalls not only Ariosto’s Christian heroine, Bradamante, upon whom she is modelled, but also his Saracen heroine, Marfisa, against whom Bradamante is set. Marfisa has great physical endurance and her magical

2

See Heberle, “Pagans and Saracens in The Faerie Queene,” who argues that “pagan and saracen characters . . . represent not only hellish and ethical and psychological foes but also the Roman Catholic Church” (83). He finds this especially the case in Book 5, the book of Justice.

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Afterword armor keeps her from feeling fear or receiving injury. She has vowed not to remove her armor until she has defeated three kings, among them, Charlemagne. Spenser’s Britomart is likewise strong but as a womanly embodiment of unwavering ideal love, rational and free. Spenser continually emphasizes her boldness and courage: she goes on her quest for her lover, Artegall, “with stedfast courage and stout hardiment” (3. 1. 19), she moves through the House of Busirane “with bold steps” (3. 2. 50) and with “courage proud” (3. 12. 1–2). By the seventeenth century, the romance genre appeared to have become obsolete despite the effort of seventeenth-century Spenserians to continue writing chivalrous romances. Ralph Kneveth wrote A Supplement to the Faery Queene and Samuel Shephard produced The Fairy King; however, neither romance was ever published. Milton planned an Arthurian epic, but never wrote it. The genre never really died but was dispersed or incorporated into other kinds of writing taking different forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – travel literature and drama, most especially. Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoueries of the English Nation, made by Sea or ouerland to the Remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeres (1589, 1598–1600) can be thought of as an early modern substitute for the chivalrous aventure of medieval romance.3 Hakluyt’s compilation spans a period of time from the days of King Arthur to the Spanish Armada and contains one hundred lengthy prose narratives by many writers who together create a magisterial record of English overseas travel. Some of the tales of travel are to the Ottoman Orient. Hakluyt includes an account of the voyage of the Susan of London to Constantinople, for instance, to bring William Harborne to Turkey as the first English Ambassador (1582–88). This narrative contains a description of Harborne’s reception at the Turkish Court which has as much attention to detail as might be found in a romance: These Bassas entertained us as followeth. First, they brought us into a hall, there to stand on one side, and our Ambassadour and gentlemen on the other side, who sate them downe on a bench couered with carpets, the Ambassadour in the midst. On his left hande sate our gentlemen, and on his right hand, the Turkes, next to the doore where their master goeth in and out: the common sort of Turkes stayed in the Courtyard, not suffered to come neere us. When our Ambassadour had sitten halfe an houre, the Bassas (who sate by themselues in an inner small roome) sent for him; to whom the Ambassadour and his gentlemen went: they all kissed his hand, and presently returned (the Ambassadour onely excepted, who stayed there, and a Turks chaus with him) with the Ambassadour and gentlemen went in also

3

Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations appeared first in 1589, then in a three-volume edition which appeared in 1598–1600. A good recent general anthology of early modern English traveller’s tales is Parker’s Early Modern Tales of Orient.

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance so many of our men as there were presents to carry in, but these neither kissed his hand, nor tarried. (Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 2. 169)4

The narrative includes not merely observations of diplomatic ceremony and manners but also of Moslem temples of worship, one, in particular, built out of a former Christian church: . . . I went to visit the church of Santa Sophia, which was the chiefe church when it was the Christians, and now is the chiefe see and church of primacie of this Turke present: before I entred I was willed to put off my shoes, to the end I should not prophane their church, I being a Christian. The pillers on bothe sides of the church are very costly and rich, their pulpets seemely and handsome, two are common to preach in, the third reserued onely for their Paschall. The ground is couered with mats, and the walles hanged with tapistry. They also haue Lamps also in their churches, one, in the middle of the church, of exceeding greatnesse; and another in another part of the church of cleane golde, or double gilded, full as bigge as a barrel. Round about the church there is a gallery builded upon rich and stately pillers. (Hakluyt, 2. 169)

Both of the passages above reflect the Pre-Empire Englishman’s reaction to a Moslem culture – older, wealthier, and very different from his own. While there may be a hint of European superiority, the English gentleman is mindful of his manners as he tests the waters for trading prospects. Harborne was responsible for the delicate negotiations that eventually led to the formation of the Turkey Company. By 1595, the commercial exchanges between England and the Turkish Orient had advanced considerably. The progress can be seen in Richard Wragge’s account of what followed upon the delivery of a gift by the Queen’s Ambassador (by that time, Edward Barton) to Sultan Murad Khan, Emperor of Turkey: The ambassador thus betwixt two stood at the doore being led in, either of them taking an arme, kissed his hand, and so backward with his face to the Turke they brought him nigh unto the dore againe, where he stood untill they had likewise done so with all the rest of his gentlemen. Which ended, the ambassador, according as it is the custome when any present is deliuered, made his three demaunds, such as he thought most expedient for her maiesties honor, and the peaceable traffique of our nation into his dominions: whereunto he answered in one word, Nolo, which is, in Turkish, as much as, it shal be done. . . . As to our ambassador, he granted all his demands and gave order that his daily allowance for his house, of mony, flesh, wood, and haie, should be augmented with halfe as much more as it had bene before. (Hakluyt, 2. 306)

The English position in the Turkish Orient had improved considerably from that point in the mid-1580s, when William Harborne wrote to Richard Forster, 4

The text used is in the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library.

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Afterword appointed first English Consul at Tripoli in Syria, “you are wisely to proceede considering both French and Venetian will haue an enuious eye on you: whome, if they perceiue wise and well aduised, they will feare to offer you any iniurie. But if they shall perceiue any insufficiencie in you, they will not omitte any occasion to harme you” (Hakluyt, 2. 172). By Richard Wragge’s time, the English can hold their own even with the Venetian traders. The Principal Navigations attest to early modern England’s continued interest in foreign places and peoples, not just the trans-Atlantic New World but the familiar old crusading world of the Near and Middle East, especially the commercial world of the eastern Mediterranean. The incorporation of Constantinople into Muslim Turkey in 1453 assured that Europeans would have to maintain an interest in the “Turkish Orient.” Hakluyt’s narratives set fire to many imaginations – Christopher Marlowe’s among them, as can be seen in the words of his dying Tamburlaine. Near the end of Tamburlaine, Part 2 (1590), the Scythian conqueror asks his sons for a map and then speaks: Here I began to march towards Persea, Along Armenia and the Caspian sea, And thence into Bythynia, when I tooke The Turke and his great Empress prisoners, Thence marcht I into Egypt and Arabia, And here, not far from Alexandria, Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet, Being distant lesse than ful a hundred leagues, I meant to cut a channell to them both, That men might quickly sail to India. From thence to Nubia near Borno Lake, And so along the Ethiopian sea, Cutting the Tropic line of Capricorne, I conquered all, as far as Zansibar. (2 Tamburlaine, 5. 3. 126–39)

Among Marlowe’s sources for his play about the Mongolian emperor Timur (1336–1405) was the atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1584), of Ortelius, whose maps of Asia and Africa provided the playwright with geographic inspiration and mellifluous place names. Marlowe was intoxicated by the exotic charms of eastern cities like Samarkand, Baghdad, and Babylon: “ ‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles? Usumcasane and Theridamas, Is it not passing brave to be a king, ‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ ” (1 Tamburlaine, 2. 5. 50–54)

His chief source was a chapter in Fortescue’s Foreste (1571), an English translation of Pedro Mexia’s Spanish life of Timur (published in Seville in 135

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance 1543) and later translated into Italian, French, and English. Marlowe may also have been acquainted with the Latin account of Petrus Perondinus, Magni Tamerlanis Scytharum Imperatoris Vita (1553). Marlowe makes it easy for us to recognize that this Mongol conqueror came from an eastern culture that was far more advanced than any in the medieval West of his day. He creates a Tamburlaine full of romantic yearning: “Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous Architecture of the world: And measure every wandering planets course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And alwaies moving as the restless Spheares, Wils us to weare our selves, and never rest, Untill we reach the ripest fruit of all” (1 Tamburlaine, 2. 7. 21–7)

Tamburlaine soliloquizes about the nature of beauty like a poet: “What is beauty, saith my sufferings then?” (1 Tamburlaine, 5. 1. 160). He does not, however, distinguish between the beauty of Zenocrate and the blood of war, which is to him, As great a grace and majesty . . . As if a chaire of gold enamiled, Enchac’d with Diamondes, Saphyres, Rubies And fairest pearle of welthie India. (2 Tamburlaine, 3. 2. 118–21)

Another popular play on an eastern theme of the English Renaissance stage came from a ruder pen, that of Thomas Preston: A Lamentable Tragedie Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth, Containing The Life of Cambises, King of Percia. Entered for publication in the Stationers’ Register in 1569, the play won lasting favor. Numerous other plays about Oriental potentates, especially the Turkish, attest to English interest in the distant East but they were not as successful (i.e., The first part of the tragicall raigne of Selimus [1594], William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Darius [1603], Fulke Greville’s Mustapha [1608]). The Elizabethan stage’s most enduring representations of the exotic oriental Other are found, of course, in Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. Othello, at the beginning of the play to which the Moor gives his name, is a frank and honest soldier, dedicated to a code of conduct; however, abused because of his color. The first we hear of his marriage to Desdemona is that the two of them together make the beast with two backs: the black ram and the white ewe. It is with this degraded and bestial image of the Moor’s lovemaking with his wife that a hate-filled Iago attempts to incite Roderigo to move against Othello: Even now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise; 136

Afterword Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you. (Othello, 1. 1. 88–91)

Iago’s description is a passionate and extreme distortion of what shortly turns out to be the general perception of the other local Venetians – among them, Brabantio, Desdemona’s father – that is, that Desdemona’s marriage to the “lascivious” Moor is unnatural and perplexing. The idea of the sensual nature of the Moor is continuous with views about the excesses of the East encountered in earlier romance literature. By the end of the play, Othello himself, so maddened by the manipulations of Iago that he is driven to murder his wife, concludes that he must be the embodiment of the uncivilized and disordered – a Turk – whom it was an act of wantonness in Desdemona to marry.5 In the last scene of the play he tells Lodovico that he threw away a pearl “richer than all his tribe” (5. 2. 348) and asks him to write down the story of how in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus. (5. 2. 362–5)

Othello thus comes to see in himself the Turk he once punished. Feeling his own crime is greater than that of the other traducer, Othello produces a hidden dagger and kills himself. Shakespeare’s poetry throughout Othello draws on the complexities of the cultural encounters in the eastern Mediterranean which extended from the Middle Ages into the playwright’s day. Another of Shakespeare’s soldiers is met in Antony, the Roman general of Antony and Cleopatra. As early as Act 1, scene 1, he is presented as a martial hero fallen from grace to become, in the words of the play’s opening: . . . the bellows and the fan, To cool a gypsy’s lust. (1. 1. 8–9)

The play’s first half concerns itself with Antony’s effort to free himself from captivity to Egypt’s Queen, Cleopatra, and thus move from Egypt and its excesses to Rome and his public responsibilities there. From the outset of the play, Shakespeare shows Egypt to contain contradictory elements – vitality, but also corruption. On the one hand, there is the fertility of Egypt implied in the sexual fantasies of Cleopatra’s maid, Charmian, revealed to the soothsayer:

5

On Othello’s racial difference and sensuality, see Traversi, 129–33, 140–42 and Ania Loomba, chapter 4 (“Othello and the Racial Question”).

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The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance Charmian. Let me be married to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all. Let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage. Find me to marry me with Octavius Caesar, and companion me with my mistress. . . . ... how many boys and wenches must I have? Soothsayer. If every of your wishes had a womb, And [fertile] every wish, a million. (1. 2. 25–39)

But on the other, there is the frustration which accompanies extravagant desire in Egypt. This is embodied in the impotence of the eunuch Alexas who is not only present from the scene’s beginning but is the first person to be spoken of in the first line: Lord Alexas, sweet Alexas, most any thing Alexas, almost absolute Alexas, where’s the soothsayer that you prais’d so to th’ Queen? (1. 2. 1–4)

The Antony met later in this scene may be resolved – “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,/Or lose myself in dotage” (1. 2. 120–21); however, Cleopatra, as described by Enobarbus, is an irresistible magnetic work of art: . . . her own person It beggar’d all description: she did lie In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue – O’er-picturing Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature. (2. 2. 197–201)

This proves to be as true for the audience as for Antony. It is no wonder that Robert Frank, in explaining what may disappoint in Chaucer’s Cleopatra, writes, “Shakespeare’s seductive creation glides wantonly between Chaucer’s page and our reading of it, and, glancing at her, we can see only that Chaucer has denied her charms and made a failure of what we know can be a triumph” (Frank, 37). By Act 2, scene 3, despite a marriage to Caesar’s sister, Octavia, Antony’s attraction to Cleopatra fatally seals his fate: I will to Egypt: And though I make this marriage for my peace, I’ the east my pleasure lies. (2. 3. 38–40)

After Antony’s first defeat at sea, he begins to count the cost, “. . . we have kiss’d away/Kingdoms and provinces” (3. 9. 7–8). When defeat is final by Act 4, scene 12, Antony blames the magical charms of the Eastern queen: “O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm” (line 25) who “Like a right gipsy, hath at fast and loose/Beguil’d me” (lines 28–29). Antony’s talk of charms recalls Brabantio’s speculations about the enchantments and potions that Othello must have used to win the love of his daughter, Desdemona. 138

Afterword A notable reappearance of the Orient in an English romance narrative is Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia (1759). Eastern tales had become enormously popular in Europe with the publication of Galland’s French translation of the Arabian Nights (1704), the first printed text of the tales to appear in the West. Johnson, though, was known not to be fond of fiction that sprang from what he called the “wild strain of imagination” (The Rambler, No. 4, Saturday, March 31, 1750; Johnson, 68). The choice of oriental setting appears to be ironic. When the Prince of Abissinia is first mentioned, he is said to have grown weary of the Happy Valley where, the sons and daughters of Abissinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to delight. (Rasselas; Johnson, 610)

Rasselas has grown restless in the realization that, as he says, “I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted” (Johnson, 611). Eager to escape the confines of the Abysinnian palace, he seeks the help of the designer of the complex engines which irrigate the palace gardens and operate the fans that cool its apartments. Here Johnson seems to be toying with a cliche of oriental tales: the harem garden. Rasselas requests that the mechanical wizard create wings for flight with which the prince might flee. Suggesting the flying ebony horse of the Arabic analogue of Adenès le Roi’s Cléomadès but less successful, the inventor’s design meets an Icarus-like end: In a year the wings were finished, and, on a morning appointed, the maker furnished for flight on a little promontory: he waved his pinions a while to gather air, then leaped from his stand, and in an instant dropped into the lake. His wings, which were no use in the air, sustained him in the water, and the prince drew him to land, half dead with terrour and vexation. (Rasselas; Johnson, 620)

The intellectual play of Rasselas was not lost on Boswell. In 1759, he observed that “This tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery” was like Voltaire’s great satire, Candide, and wrote in his great biography: “I have heard Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after the other that there was no time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other” (Boswell, 2. 16–17). * Nearly four hundred years earlier, Chaucer had created his own satire on popular romances in the Tale of Sir Thopas. Like Christopher Marlowe, who declared that his new play about Tamburlaine moved beyond the “jyggyng vaines of riming mother wits/And such conceits as clownage keepes in pay” 139

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance (1 Tamburlaine, Prologue, 1–2) – Marlowe’s assessment of the poetic talents of some of his fellow playwrights – Chaucer was confident that his achievements in the writing of romance narratives outstripped those of his contemporaries. He could with impunity, therefore, give the pilgrim Chaucer a romance so awful to tell on the way to Canterbury that even the critical acumen of the Host would be sufficient to judge its merit: “Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!” (Sir Thopas, 929). The pilgrim Chaucer imitated the diction, rhyme, and meter of the tail-rhyme romances of his day and specifically referred to Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Lybeaus Desconus, Horn Child, and Ypotys (Sir Thopas, 897–900). His appeal for attention, Yet listeth, lordes, to my tale Murier than the nightyngale, For now I wol yow rowne How sir Thopas . . . (Sir Thopas, 833–36)

echoes that found in one of the romances on the popular subject of the encounter between Islam and Christianity, Bevis of Hampton – Lordinges, herkneth to my tale, Is merier than the nightingale, That y schel singe; Of a knight ich wol yow roune . . . (The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun, 1–4)

Chaucer also parodies the figure of the huge, threatening Saracen knight, a commonplace in Middle English romance: Til that ther cam a greet geaunt, His name was sire Olifaunt, A perilous man of dede. He seyde, “Child, by Termagaunt! But if thou prike out of myn haunt, Anon I sle thy steede With mace.” (Sir Thopas, 807–13)

The poet’s comic Sir Elephant (Olifaunt) is modelled on Sir Amourant in Guy of Warwick and Sir Thopas’s swearing on Termagaunt, a supposed god of the Saracens, is also paralleled in Guy and in Lybeaus Desconus.6 When some of the more threatening aspects of the East-West encounter along with the romances that depicted them could be parodied so broadly, it was a sure sign that the subject and its appearance in romance had entered a period of transi-

6

Guy of Warwick, stanza 98, line 1; and stanza 121, line 2; stanza 126, line 7; Lybeaus Desconus, line 1301. On Islam and idolatry, particularly its reflection in medieval poetry, see Daniel, Islam and the West, 338.

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Afterword tion. While there was a continuity of interest in oriental themes, they began to appear more in other literary genres – i.e., travel literature, drama, and eventually the early modern novel. Interest in romance literature as it was known in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance was in decline and transforming itself into something else.

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Index Thousand and One Nights, 117–19, 124; transmission, 115–17 Braddy, Haldeen, 66–67, 78–80 Byron: Don Juan, 77; Manfred 77 Byzantine Empire, 19

Acre: the fall of (in 1291), 8 Adenès Le Rois: Cléomadès, 65–66 Admetus, 46 Aiken, Pauline, 49 Alceste of Thrace, 46 Alexander II (Pope), 6 Alighieri, Dante: Divine Comedy, 54 D’Amiens, Girard, 65 Annales Regni Francorum, 39 Anne of Bohemia, 46 Apollonius of Tyre. See Gower; incest; History of Apollonius of Tyre Arabian Nights, 65, 66, 103. See The Thousand and One Nights Arabic medicine, 127–28 Archbishop Turpin, 11 Archibald, Elizabeth, 93n, 107n Ariosto: Orlando Furioso, 77, 131–33 Arsinoe, 50 Atiya, Aziz, 19, 22 Audita tremendi. See Gregory VIII Avicenna, 5, 127 Bacon, Roger, 47 Balan, 11 Baldwin of Flanders, 7 Baldwin of Lorraine, 7 Beidler, Peter, 25 Benedict VIII, 6 Beowulf, 63 Beues of Hamtoun, 15, 16, 140 Bishop Willibald, 18 Blanche of Castile, 8, 65 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron 5, 2: 23, 29, 35–40; Filocolo, 90–91, 98, 99n; De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), 49, 49n, Cleopatra in, 50–54, Dido in, 57, 61 Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy: Chaucer’s translation (Boece), 76–77, 127 Bohemond of Taranto, 7 Le Bone Florence of Rome, 2, 5, 23, 68, 79; the chaste wife (east and west), 111–15; Constantinople in, 108–11; justice and piety, 119–23; The

Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, 94, 97, 99n Carthage, 47, 56 Cassodorien, Queen, 14, the legend of 14n Chanson d’Antioch, 13 Chanson de Florence de Rome, 87 chanson de geste, 12 Chanson of Roland, 10 Charlemagne romances, 10–11 Chaucer, Geoffrey: imprint of crusades on place names, 8–9, employment in civil service, 25; The Book of the Duchess, 4, 6; House of Fame, 56; The Legend of Good Women, 2, 5, 24, 43–44, 45, 48, 59; Cleopatra in, 49–56, Dido in, 56–62; The Seintes Legende of Cupide, 44, 45; Troilus and Criseyde, 4, 6, 45, 46, 77; The Canterbury Tales, 4, 6; The Clerk’s Tale, 123–24; The General Prologue, 19, 44; the Doctor of Phisik, 6, 128; The Knight’s Tale, 59, 76–77; The Man of Law’s Tale, 2, 4, 24–27, 29, 30–35, 59, 123, Syria in 3–33, 42; The Man of Law’s Epilogue, 26, 30, 40–41; Introduction, 34, 43–44, 45; See incest; Tale of Melibee, 129–30; The Merchant’s Tale, 26, 59; The Shipman’s Tale, 26, 29; The Squire’s Tale, 2, 5, 26, 59, 62, 63–82; the franklin interrupts, 72; See incest; Sir Thopas, 4, 139; tail-rhyme in, 77, 140 church of the Holy Sepulcher, 17 Clanvowe, Sir John: The Two Ways, 9 Cleopatra, 5, 45, 47, 138; in classical sources, 49–50; in The Inferno, 54–55 See Chaucer, Legend of Good Women; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

157

Index Comnenus, Alexius (Byzantine emperor), 6 Comnenus, Manuel (Byzantine emperor), 21 Constance: tale of 23–24. See Gower Constantine the African, 5, 127 Constantinople, 8, 19; conquest of 21. See Le Bone Florence of Rome Constantius’s basilica (Golgotha), 17 Cooper, Helen, 24, 72 Council of Lyons (1245), 8 Council of Vienne, 17 courtly love, 116 Crónica de Flore y Blancaflor, 96–97 Crusade of Damietta, 21 Crusades, 6–9 crusading romances, 9–16 La Cuba, 38 Datini, Francesco, 51 David, Alfred, 25 Decameron. See Boccaccio Delany, Sheila, 48, 52 De miseria. See Innocent III De Mulieribus Claris. See Boccaccio Dido, 5, 44, 47; the name, 56. See Chaucer, Legend of Good Women; Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris Digenes Akritas, 67, 126 Dirum amaritudinis calicem. See Nicholas IV The double, 99; and the incest theme, 100; in Floris and Blauncheflur, 100–3 Duby, Georges, 4 Egypt, 47 Eisenberg, Daniel, 4 Emare, 23–24 Ferdinand of Cerda, 65 Ferrante, Joan, 46n Fierebras, 10 The Fifth Crusade, 7 Filocolo. See Boccaccio The First Crusade, 6 Fisher, John, 29 Flemish Hansa of London, 21 Floire and Blaunceflor, 86, 92, 97; incestuous overtones in, 92 Floris and Blauncheflur, 2, 5; the garden in, 105–06; pilgrimage in, 17; tower of maidens in, 105. See incest, the double Floris et Lyriope, 86 Florus: Epitome of Roman History, 50

158

The Fourth Crusade, 7, 21 Fourth Lateran Council, 92 Frank, Robert, 138 Frederick II, 7–8 Freud, Sigmund, 99, 102 Friar, Kimon, 67 Fyler, John, 61 Galen, 128 Generides, 63 Gerard of Cremona, 5 Gerhardt, Mia, 78 Gesta Romanorum, 109, 122 Gilbert, Jane, 86 Gittes, Katherine Slater, 79 Goodman, Jennifer R., 63 Gower, John: Apollonius of Tyre, 93–94; Tale of Constance, 29, 41–43 Gradeningo, Domenico, 21 Gradenigo, Giovanni, 21 Gradenigo, Guidoto, 21 Gradenigo, Jacopo, 21 The Gradenigo of San Giovanni Confessore, 21 Gregory VII (Pope), 7, 9; Audita tremendi, 7, 9 Gregory IX (Pope), 8 Grieve, Patricia, 96 Guglielmo I (King of Sicily), 35 Guiscard, Robert, 7 Guy of Warwick, 140, 140n Hakluyt, Richard: The Principal Navigations, 133–35, 133n, 134n Haly Abbas, 5, 127 Hanseatic League, 21 Hattin: disaster at (in 1187), 9 Hazar Afsane, 117–18 Heliodorus Æthiopica, 125–26, 126n La Historia de los enamorados Flores y Blancaflor, 94–96. See incest History of Apollonius of Tyre, 126 The History of the Moneylender of Baghdad, 103. See The Thousand and One Nights (The Steward’s Tale) Homer: The Iliad, 88–89 Hornstein, Lillian, 84 Hugh of Payns, 17 Huon of Bordeaux, 63 Ibn ZaydÃn, 116 indulgences, 18 incest, 74–75, 83; in Apollonius of Tyre, 93–94; in Flores y Blancaaflor, 95–96;

Index in Floris and Blauncheflur, 84–88, 91–92; in Mabinogi, 100; in Man of Law’s Tale, 85, 92–93; in medieval English romances, 93; in The Squire’s Tale, 93. See the double Innocent III, 7, 109; De miseria, 35 Innocent IV (Pope), 8 Islam: western perceptions of 47 Jerome, Saint, 17 The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife. See The Thousand and One Nights Johnston, Oliver, 86 Jones, H. S. V., 64–65, 65n Kalila wa Dimna, 129 Kamil, Malik al-, 8 Kazantzakis: The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel, 67 Keiser, George, 24 Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, 84 The King of Tars, 12, 23–24 The Knights of Malta, 18 The Knights Templar, 17 Kolve, V. A., 24 Legenda Aurea, 46 Lewis, C. S., 73 Leyerle, John, 73 Libya, 47, 56 Lipari, 35, 38 Lollards, 43 Longus: Daphnis and Chloe, 126 Louis, Saint, 8 Louis VII (of France), 9 Lull, Raymond, 17 Lybeaus Desconus, 140, 140n Lydgate, John: The Fall of Princes, 44 Lynch, Kathryn, 48, 68 Mabinogi. See incest Machaut: Dit de la fonteinne amoreuse Mandeville, John, 5, 18; Travels, 18–19 marguerite, 46 Marlowe, Christopher: Tamburlaine, 89; the orient in, 135–36 Mate-Gryssoun, 13 Mecca, 19 medieval orientalism, 5, 52. See orientalism Mehl, Dieter, 13 Méliacin, 65–66 Metlitzski, Dorothee, 67, 84, 126 Michael VII (of Constantinople), 6

Middle English tail-rhyme romances, 12, Chaucer satirizes, 139–41 Mills, Maldwyn, 11 Milton, John: Il Penseroso, 64 Mocenigo, Jacoba (of Murano), 21 Morgan casket, 38, Plate 2 (p. 37) Mussafia, Adolf, 113–14 Newstead, Helaine, 3 Nicholas IV (Pope): Dirum amaritudinis calicem, 8 Nicolas of Lynn, 35 Normans: in southern Italy, 20 The Order of St. John, 18 Orient, 45; the term, 2, 49 “oriental,” 49, 56, 57 oriental frame structure, 5, 78–80 orientalism, 47–48; in Chaucer, 48, in The Squire’s Tale, 63–68. See Edward Said; medieval orientalism Origo, Iris, 51 Otuel, 10 Otuel and Roland, 10 Ovid, 57–58, 60; Heroides, 58, 60; Metamorphoses, 4 Ovid moralisé, 4 Panchatantra, 79 Patterson, Lee, 2 Patient Griselda: tale of, 23. See Clerk’s Tale Partonope of Blois, 63 Pearsall, Derek, 40 Petrus Alfonsi: Disciplina clericalis, 129; in Chaucer, 129–30; in Boccaccio, 130 Pilgrimage, 17–19 Pinault, David, 78 Pliny: Natural History, 53 Poenitentialia, 17–18 poetry of interlace, 5, 63; in Beowulf, 73; as European (in The Squire’s Tale), 68–81; in thirteenth-century French prose romances, 72–73 Pollard, A. W., 64 Polo, Marco, 5; Travels, 64 Pratt, Robert A., 29 Prince Edward of England: crusade to the Holy Land (1271), 8 Ptolemy I, 49 Ptolemy Auletes, 49 Pynchebek, Thomas, 25 rape, 88–90

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Index Raymond of Provence, 7 Rhazes, 5, 127 Richard I (of England), 9 Richard the Lion-Heart, 12 Richard Coeur de Lion, 12–15; cannibalism in, 13 rock of the Ascension (Gethsemane), 17 Roman de Thèbes, 4 romance, 3; definition, 3–4; Chaucer’s use of the term, 4 Said, Edward: Orientalism, 47–48 Sala della Fontana, 35, Plate 1 (p. 36) Saladin, 7, 13 San Marco: treasury of, 20 saracenate bezants, 21 Saunders, Corinne, 90 Schein, Sylvia, 8 The Second Crusade, 3, 7; English aristocrats in, 9 The Sege off Melayne, 11 The Seventh Crusade, 8 Shakespeare, William: Antony and Cleopatra, 137–38; The Merchant of Venice, 29; Othello, 136–37 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Epipsychidion, 99 Shoaf, R. A., 41 The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child. See The Thousand and One Nights Sidney, Sir Philip: Arcadia, 126 Sigurd of Norway, 17 Sir Ferumbras, 10 Sir Orfeo, 46 The Sixth Crusade, 7–8 Sophocles: Oedipus the King, 89 Sowdone of Babylone, 10, 11 Spearing, A. C., 10 Speculum Historiale. See Vincent of Beauvais Spenser, Edmund, 131; The Faerie Queene, 68–69; influence of Ariosto, 131–32; the orient in, 131–32 Stevens, John, 91 The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahari. See The Thousand and One Nights The Story of Repsima. See The Thousand and One Days Syria. See Trade; Chaucer: Man of Law’s Tale

160

Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya. See The Thousand and One Nights Tale of Constance. See Gower The Tale of the Flying Horse. See The Thousand and One Nights Termagaunt, 140 The Third Crusade, 7, 9, 12 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 48 Thomas Becket, Saint, 9 The Thousand and One Days, 78, 79, 124; The Story of Repsima, 121 The Thousand and One Nights, 5, 79, 80; The City of Brass, 78; The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife, 119–20, 124; The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child, 120–21; The Steward’s Tale, 103 n18; The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl shams al-Nahar, 103–05, 103 n20; Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, 66; The Tale of the Flying Horse, 81–82. See Le Bone Florence of Rome Trade, 19–22; in the Islamic world, 19–20; Venetians in Eastern Mediterranean trade, 20–21, 27, in Syrian trade, 27–28 Travels. See Mandeville, Marco Polo Trounce, A. McI., 12 Tunisia, 38 Tuve, Rosemond, 80 Tyerman, Christopher, 8 Urban II (Pope), 6; sermon at Clermont, 7 Urban III (Pope), 7 Valentine and Orson, 63 Vinaver, Eugene, 73 Vincent of Beauvais: Speculum Historiale, 49–50 Virgil: The Aeneid, 57–59 Wallace, David, 23 Wallensköld, A., 112–15 Wells, John Edwin, 14 William of Normandy, 27 Wimsatt, William K., 49 Worringer, Wilhelm, 73 Wycliffe, John, 43 Zisa Castle, 35 Zumthor, Paul, 3