Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred

MEDIEVAL CROSSOVER

The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2011

The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and publications resulting from it.

PREVIOUS TITLES IN THIS SERIES:

Paul Strohm

Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (2005)

Ulrich Horst, O.P.

The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006)

Rosamond McKitterick

Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006)

Jonathan Riley-Smith

Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2009)

A. C. Spearing

Medieval Autographies: The I of the Text (2012)

 MEDIEVAL CROSSOVER 

Reading the Secular against the Sacred

   BARBARA NEWMAN   

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2013 by University of Notre Dame

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newman, Barbara, 1953–

Medieval crossover : reading the secular against the sacred / Barbara Newman.

pages    cm. — (The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-268-03611-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-03611-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism.    2. Secularism in literature.    3. Holy, The, in literature.    I. Title.

PN671.N49     2013

809'.02—dc23

2013000468

ISBN 9780268161408

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Jack shall have Jill;

Nought shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again,

And all shall be well.

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii.461–64

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the perfect secular comedy. It ends with a few marriages, resolves the absurd twists of its plot, and lets everyone live happily ever after. The supernatural is present, as it must be in every fully imagined world—but the fairies are not angels, and Puck is no devil. Rather, he is the mischievous sprite who declaims these lines as complication bends its merry course toward resolution. Such a comedy is inconceivable in the Middle Ages. Though all shall be well is a celebrated medieval refrain, it occurs in a wholly different context where the agent of restoration is—not Puck. The reason that purely secular comedy (or tragedy) cannot exist in a medieval frame of reference is simple, but this kind of simplicity can be so obvious as to elude our sight. Sacred and secular coexist in our world, after all, just as they did in the Middle Ages. But for us, the secular is the normative, unmarked default category, while the sacred is the marked, asymmetrical Other. In the Middle Ages it was the reverse.

In American culture, sacred music and gospel are niche markets within the wide world of music, which is presumed secular unless stated otherwise. The same holds true of spirituality and Christian fiction as publishers’ categories. So thoroughly has secularism become our default that even the religious speak of giving God a place in their lives, as if he were lucky to get a slice of the pie. This way of thinking would again have been impossible in a medieval context. By saying this I do not wish to revive the old cliché about an Age of Faith, for levels of faith varied then as they do now, if less openly.¹ What I mean is rather that the sacred was the inclusive whole in which the secular had to establish a niche. That is why the profane appears so ubiquitously in the mode of parody: gargoyles on cathedral roofs, obscene marginalia in books of hours, marital squabbles on misericords, lecherous monks in fabliaux, foxes preaching to hens in beast epics, and so forth. Despite generations of wishful thinking by scholars, little if any of this is transgressive, any more than the shelves of spiritual self-help books at Barnes & Noble are subversive of capitalism. For to parody the sacred is emphatically to engage with it, not to create an autonomous secular sphere. The sacred might be viewed with skeptical, profane, or jaded eyes, but it was still the sacred.

In many ways, the Middle Ages needed the classical world in order to imagine a secular one. Only a pre-Christian worldview, complete in itself, might compete—if not on equal terms, then at least on its own footing—with the sacred world bounded by Creation and Doom. But even so, the sacred tended to reemerge at the very least as a framing device. Medieval chroniclers could fit all of classical history within a narrative framed by the six biblical ages, just as allegorists could accommodate any number of pagan deities in their Christian mythographies. Dante’s Commedia encloses a capacious secular sphere, both ancient and modern, within the sacred without remainder. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which for most of its gorgeous length is humanistic, classical, and pagan, ends with a jarring Christian turn, just as the Knight’s Tale ends with Boethian providence, the Canterbury Tales as a whole with the Parson, and the poet’s career with the Retractions. Even Boccaccio’s Decameron, the closest thing to a secular comic masterpiece that the Middle Ages produced, begins with the Black Death and ends with Griselda, whose allegorical purport was obligingly spelled out by Petrarch. But if A Midsummer Night’s Dream still classicizes, it is in name only, for there is little of the Athenian about Shakespeare’s befuddled lovers. What sets Renaissance humanism apart from medieval humanism is neither a love of the classical nor a penchant to mock the holy, for both had been alive and well for centuries. It is rather the imagining of a secular realm that could, but did not necessarily, engage in any way with the sacred.

This book is about the terms of engagement between sacred and secular before the early modern shift. It interprets the secular as always already in dialogue with the sacred, and it probes that dialogue’s many modes. For convenience I refer to this dialectical relationship as crossover by analogy with contemporary works that combine distinct genres, such as the graphic novel and the rock opera. In those genres an elite art form (literary fiction, opera) melds seamlessly with a popular one (comic books, rock music). Without pushing the comparison too far, such modern forms furnish analogies for medieval hybrid genres like the motet, the hagiographic romance, and the literature of la mystique courtoise, or courtly mysticism. This is not to say that the modern distinction of elite vs. popular maps onto the same categories in the Middle Ages, much less those of sacred and secular. Yet crossing the boundary between them creates a similar sense of novelty and excitement, of being where the action is, that attracts avant-garde audiences while provoking a few sniffs of disapproval from conservatives. Crossover is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms. In chapter 1 I sketch a few of the principles that shape their interaction: the sic et non principle, or hermeneutics of both/and; the principle of double judgment, governed by the paradox of felix culpa; the confluence of pagan matiere and Christian sen in some Arthurian romances; and the rule of convergent idealism (everything that rises must converge) in hagiographic romance. Examples are supplied by a wide range of texts, including Amis and Amiloun, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Czech Life of St. Catherine, Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius, Sir Gowther, and episodes from the Prose Lancelot. The four chapters that follow analyze case studies in greater depth.

In chapter 2 I continue my exploration of romance, concentrating on the technique of double coding: the propensity of certain texts to enable both sacred and secular readings, rewarding a hermeneutic strategy of double judgment. The chapter deals with selected Lancelot-Grail romances, from Chrétien de Troyes’ Knight of the Cart (or Lancelot, 1170s) through Perlesvaus (ca. 1200–1210) and The Quest of the Holy Grail (ca. 1225) to the ending of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1470). Another form of double coding in these texts, probably more visible to the modern than the medieval reader, sets the plot motifs of Arthurian romance, derived ultimately from pagan mythology and folklore, against their intended meanings, which characteristically fuse Christian and secular elements.

Chapter 3, The Literary Traditions of Marguerite Porete, treats the conversion of secular literary forms—the love lyric and the inescapably profane Romance of the Rose—to the purposes of divine love. It aims to illumine Marguerite’s Mirror of Simple Souls (ca. 1290–1306) by examining her literary milieu, which was rife with sacred love songs composed by and for beguines, as well as clerical efforts to adapt, interpolate, or compete with the Rose in order to promote a love quite different from that sought by Amant. This chapter breaks new ground by reading the Mirror against the background not of heresy, mysticism, or women’s writing, but of French vernacular theology.

Chapter 4 investigates parody of the sacred. Since the high genres of medieval literature (courtly romance, hagiography, love lyric, hymnody, devotional prose) all display strong idealizing tendencies, the low genres (satire, fabliau, beast epic, dramatic farce) achieve much of their counter-idealizing effect by parodying the tropes and conventions of those modes. Because parody may be the relationship we understand most easily, I have chosen some out-of-the-way material to illustrate the very different forms it could take. Le lai d’Ignaure (ca. 1200), a macabre short romance, obliquely mocks women’s eucharistic devotion, while the satirical Dispute between God and His Mother (1450) skewers Marian piety and a great deal more. More disturbingly, The Passion of the Jews of Prague (1389) adapts a form of political satire—the Latin Gospel parody—to celebrate a pogrom, thus profoundly challenging our sense of parody as a comic or subversive mode.

The Grail and the Rose, as icons of sacred and secular love in medieval literature, are the yin and yang of this study. In the classic Taoist symbol, a spot of dark yin balances the bright realm of yang and vice versa. Similarly, chapter 2 asks what the advent of the Grail does to the predominantly secular world of Arthurian romance, and chapter 3 asks how the Rose can be accommodated in the sacred world of beguine writing. After the interlude of chapter 4, my last chapter asks how a writer equally devoted to chivalry, piety, and fin’amor tried to integrate the Grail knights’ quest for purity with Amant’s quest for sexual love. It examines parallel works by the same author, René of Anjou (d. 1480), to study the convergence of sacred and secular on both textual and iconographic planes. This royal connoisseur commissioned princely illustrations for his two allegories, both built around the fashionable conceit of the externalized heart. René’s spiritual allegory, The Mortification of Vain Pleasure, is gendered female, starring the Soul and the Virtues, while his secular, erotic allegory, The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart, is gendered male, with the knight Cuer and his squire Désir Ardent as the protagonists. Surprisingly, however, both texts bring their protagonists to exactly the same point in the end. Because The Love-Smitten Heart populates the allegorical landscape of The Quest of the Holy Grail with characters from The Romance of the Rose, it enables us to pick up the threads of those texts once more and follow them to an unlikely yet satisfying convergence.

Hoping that students of both French and English literature will find their way to this book, I have supplied original texts as well as translations for all passages I cite. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. Without attempting rhyme, I have tried at least to replicate the octosyllabic meter of medieval French verse. In the case of Chrétien de Troyes, I have used Ruth Harwood Cline’s remarkable poetic versions; her sprightly couplets imitate the form and tone of the originals to the extent that an English version can. Biblical verses are translated directly from the Latin Vulgate, though I have tried where possible to stay close to the wording of the Revised Standard Version. At the end of this volume I append a new edition and translation of The Dispute between God and His Mother, along with an annotated translation of The Passion of the Jews of Prague. (Eva Steinová’s critical edition of the latter text is under copyright; an older edition is available in good libraries.) I hope that teachers and students will find it useful to have these rarities now readily at hand.

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND THANK ALL THOSE who have contributed to the formation of this book. I am grateful, first, to the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame for their invitation to deliver the 2011 Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies. Without them, this book would never have been written. I must also thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for an impossibly generous grant, which not only provided a research leave but also supported the Mellon Symposium on Medieval Subjectivity, held at Northwestern University in July 2011. I thank all the participants in that symposium, students and faculty alike, for their extraordinarily helpful feedback. My colleagues in medieval studies at Northwestern, as well as our tireless interlibrary loan team, have created an ideal climate for this project. I am grateful to the Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library, St. Louis University, for letting me consult a microfilm of La Desputoison de Dieu et de sa mère.

A portion of chapter 3 appeared in an earlier form as "The Mirror and the Rose: Marguerite Porete’s Encounter with the Dieu d’Amours," in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 105–23. Part of chapter 4 was published as "The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody," in Church History 81 (March 2012): 1–26. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint this material.

Sean Field, Richard Kieckhefer, Zan Kocher, Robert Lerner, and Lori Walters have thoroughly vetted my chapter on Marguerite Porete. A portion of that chapter was also presented as the annual Morimichi Watanabe lecture of the American Cusanus Society in May 2012. I am especially grateful to Sean Field, Zan Kocher, and John Van Engen for sharing their unpublished work on Marguerite, and to Lori Walters for allowing me to see her work on The Romance of the Rose and Chrétien de Troyes. William Paden Jr. has once again given me the benefit of his expertise in Old and Middle French philology, and Judith Davis has reviewed my account of The Dispute between God and His Mother. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Eva Steinová, and two anonymous readers offered excellent advice on The Passion of the Jews of Prague. Eva Steinová graciously allowed me to base my translation on her new critical edition of the Latin text, which she prepared as a 2010 M.A. thesis at Masaryk University in Brno. A comparatist must always turn gratefully to the help of specialists, so I am especially glad to have found the perfect press readers in Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner and Sylvia Huot, who were generous with both enthusiasm and detailed critiques. I am deeply indebted to their own work on Chrétien and the Rose, respectively; this book would be much the poorer without their advice. Ann Delgehausen, my copyeditor, has been a tireless advocate for perplexed readers.

To my students, also, I offer thanks: to my undergraduates over the years for demanding a course on Christian and Pagan in Medieval Literature; to Jesse Njus for her knowledge of French and Italian Passion plays, Joshua Byron Smith for his wise cautions about Celtic literature, Lewis Wallace for his pathbreaking work on St. Ontcommer, and Steven Rozenski for discovering St. Merlin. My husband, Richard Kieckhefer, has been, as always, the most generous, patient, and stimulating of conversation partners. To our cats I promise extra treats, with warm thanks for their rhetorical aid: Felicitas, Hyperbole, and the peerless Oxymoron, muse of this volume.

1. Steven Justice, Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles? Representations 103 (2008): 1–29.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.   The Triumph of Venus. Florentine desco da parto (birth salver), ca. 1390–1420. Ascribed to Francesco di Michele. Paris, Louvre.

Figure 2.   St. Ontcommer (aka St. Wilgefortis). Hours of Mary of Burgundy, ca. 1475. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 1857, fol. 125v.

Figure 3.   The Soul laments the sins of her heart. Jean Colombe, Le Mortifiement de vaine plaisance. Cologny-Geneva, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Codex 144, fol. 3v.

Figure 4.   Peasant woman carrying grain to the mill. Jean Colombe, Le Mortifiement de vaine plaisance. Cologny-Geneva, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Codex 144, fol. 39.

Figure 5.   The Soul delivers her heart to the Virtues. Jean le Tavernier, Le Mortifiement de vaine plaisance, ca. 1457. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, ms. 10308, fol. 64.

Figure 6.   The heart crucified by the Virtues. Jean le Tavernier, Le Mortifiement de vaine plaisance, ca. 1457. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, ms. 10308, fol. 76.

Figure 7.   The Virtues return the crucified heart to the Soul. Jean Colombe, Le Mortifiement de vaine plaisance. Cologny-Geneva, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Codex 144, fol. 65.

Figure 8.   Mary of Burgundy at prayer. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, ca. 1475. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 1857, fol. 14v.

Figure 9.   The God of Love delivers the poet’s heart to Ardent Desire. Barthélemy van Eyck, Le Livre du Cuer d’amours espris, late 1460s. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 2597, fol. 2.

Figure 10.   Cuer is challenged by a Black Knight at the River of Tears. Barthélemy van Eyck, Le Livre du Cuer d’amours espris, late 1460s. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 2597, fol. 18v.

Figure 11.   The cottage of Dame Melancholy. Barthélemy van Eyck, Le Livre du Cuer d’amours espris, late 1460s. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 2597, fol. 17.

Figure 12.   King Death. Barthélemy van Eyck, Book of Hours of René of Anjou, ca. 1442. London, British Library, ms. Egerton 1070, fol. 53.

CHAPTER 1

THEORIZING CROSSOVER

Principles and Case Studies

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

THE RELATIONSHIP OF SACRED AND SECULAR IN MEDIEVAL literature is not a new problem. But it is one that urgently needs to be reconceptualized, for the last frontal assault on that topic dominated the field for thirty years until, after long and furious debates, scholars turned away in sheer exhaustion. So a quick review of the state of the question, first in English, then in French studies, will clear the ground for our inquiry.

Few ideologies have divided medievalists so bitterly as the critical movement called exegetics, or simply Robertsonianism after its founder, D.W. Robertson Jr.¹ In a series of influential articles and in his 1962 colossus, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, the Princeton medievalist took deadly aim at humanistic scholarship on Chaucer and other canonical works treating the myth of courtly love: Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, the works of Chrétien de Troyes, the Romance of the Rose.² According to Robertson, these and all medieval secular texts do no more and no less than what Scripture does, as Augustine had explained in De doctrina christiana.³ They promote charity and condemn cupidity, striving with all the means at their disposal—direct exhortation, allegory, irony—to turn human affections away from carnal desires toward the love of God. Robertson’s arsenal was the Patrologia Latina, which furnished him with a correct interpretive code for the countless symbols that humanistic readers, in their naïveté, misread by taking them at face value. He also drew on the sister discourses of mythography and iconography, but had little interest in later medieval exegesis—or in the florilegia from which clerics usually acquired their patristic learning.⁴

The debate between exegetical critics and their foes, led by the Yale Chaucerian E. Talbot Donaldson,⁵ raged from the 1950s through the 1970s and did not truly end until 1987, when Lee Patterson characterized exegetics as a root-and-branch, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners attack on liberal humanism, even as he set out to formulate the principles of a new historicism that would amend its faults.⁶ (It was Patterson who belatedly coined the term exegetics; Robertson preferred to call himself an allegorist or simply a historical critic.)⁷ Although it is decades since anyone seriously professed a Robertsonian line, this ghost of Criticism Past still haunts the conversation.⁸ In a bracingly polemical essay in 2009, Steven Justice maintained that Robertson left the field better than he found it, because he infuriated it into a bout of defensive learning …, not because he either persuaded it to agree or provoked it to disagree intelligently.⁹ Though Robertson used his conservative, ideologically static Middle Ages as a club to bash modernity, Justice argues that he anticipated the leftist historicism of Foucault, for both worked from a breathtakingly relativist and constructivist model of historical culture.¹⁰ Patterson made a similar point when he traced the intellectual roots of exegetics to nineteenth-century Geistesgeschichte.¹¹ Whether they incline to the right or the left, such critical programs share the notion of an airtight period subjectivity. Robertson’s medieval mind, like the Hegelian Zeitgeist or the Foucauldian episteme, totalizes the mentality and cultural production of a past era so fully that it can neither account for real diversity within that past nor explain how the past became the present.¹²

With respect to the question of sacred and secular, fruitful theorizing in English departments effectively shut down in the wake of Robertsonianism. Battle-weary medievalists left exegetics behind to follow the linguistic turn, the materialist turn, and the feminist and queer turns, though such excellent scholars as Robert Kaske, Judson Boyce Allen, and Alastair Minnis continued to study the influence of Latin preaching and theology on vernacular writings. Meanwhile a vast corpus of Middle English and (a fortiori) Anglo-Norman religious literature languished unread in manuscripts and volumes of the Early English Text Society. But with the religious turn of the past two decades, these writings have sparked a new interest in the study of vernacular theology, a movement spearheaded by Nicholas Watson.¹³ This prolific critical school looks at devotional, catechetical, and pastoral writings for what they can tell us about such topics as heresy and dissent, lay literacy, language hierarchies and translation practices, gender, interiority, and the history of the book, as well as theology itself. A decade ago, two valuable essay collections—The Vernacular Spirit and The Vulgar Tongue—approached these issues in a pan-European context.¹⁴ Both focused on the vernacular as an emergent medium for religious teaching and expression. This book aims to advance that project, but takes crossover rather than vernacularity as its starting point.

French medievalism remained largely untouched by exegetics, though Robertson found a kindred spirit in the allegorical critic Jacques Ribard. In recent years the study of French vernacular theology has been vigorously taken up by Geneviève Hasenohr, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, and Yelena Masur-Matusevich, to name just a few. For the late Middle Ages, the towering figure of Jean Gerson commands the most attention. But the phenomenon of crossover first emerged in late twelfth-century Paris and northern France, so French literature boasts the oldest, largest, and most varied corpus of crossover texts, ably explored by Daniel Poirion and Sylvia Huot, among others. In the introduction to her important 2009 anthology, The Church and Vernacular Literature in Medieval France, Dorothea Kullmann writes that the old binaries of clerical and lay, sacred and profane, Latin and vernacular cultures are no longer tenable, yet the alternative model of a cultural continuum seems too simplistic. Vernacular genres like biblical paraphrase, motets, devotional songs, hagiography, miracles of the Virgin, beguine poetry, and Grail romance, as well as Latin treatises that cite French popular songs, testify to an intense, dynamic concern with bridging the divide between clerics and their lay patrons and audiences. But there remains an edgy, experimental quality to many of these works: All these authors seem well aware that they are somehow crossing borders, combining material from different areas, negating genre conventions or adopting genres for different purposes. They clearly mean to achieve particular effects by making unusual choices.¹⁵ As a growing horde of Parisian-trained clerics fanned out into secular and ecclesiastical courts, or faced a future with shaky prospects of employment, they had every reason to innovate while trying to reconcile the requirements of [their] ecclesiastical status and … learned aspirations with the more practical or frivolous interests of lay patrons, or else with those patrons’ pastoral care.¹⁶ The same clerical dilemma affected Anglo-Norman clerks in the entourage of Henry II.¹⁷ Later, with the rise of Oxford and Cambridge and the expansion of English court bureaucracies, the phenomenon became widespread in England and spurred a comparable surge in literary production.¹⁸

Closely related to the rise of crossover is a phenomenon that has been more fully explored in French scholarship—the conspicuous twelfth-century taste for paradox and coincidentia oppositorum. Painting with a broad brush, historian Constance Bouchard maintains that twelfth-century thought in many spheres, from conflict resolution to the ideology of gender, was characterized by a discourse of opposites, which she traces to a fascination with dialectical reasoning on the one hand, Gospel paradox on the other. Rather than attempting to resolve contradictions, she asserts, twelfth-century thinkers were perfectly willing to have two opposing things be true at the same time, as we can see in works ranging from Abelard’s Sic et Non to Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot) to Andreas Capellanus’s De amore.¹⁹ Catherine Brown and Sarah Kay have produced subtle literary studies in the same vein. In Contrary Things, Brown argues that discord, obscurity, and contradiction were valued in the Middle Ages as teaching tools and spurs to thought—understandably in a culture that sharpened its wits by constant engagement with that thorniest, most contradictory of texts, the Bible. Students today may be distressed by medieval authors’ ceaseless assertion of opposites, such as Andreas’s claims in Books I and III of De amore that the love of women is at once the source of all virtue and a damnable folly. Yet Brown asserts that if we wish to confront medieval alterity, we can do so nowhere more fruitfully than in "these puzzling places between affirmation and negation, between either/or and both-and.²⁰ Much of her work develops what I would call a hermeneutics of both/and, a mode of reading that, pedagogically and philosophically speaking, tries to have its cake and eat it.²¹ This book will pursue a related project on a different front. Sarah Kay likewise perceives that courtly texts exhibit a particular pleasure in contradiction. Love in romances, for example, is both sensual and spiritual, normative and transgressive, secret and known, and in this ambivalence it mimics the paradoxical character of religious texts, where loss is gain, death is the key to life, the lowly are exalted."²²

Both Bouchard and Brown cite Jean de Meun’s famous passage on contraries, which interrupts the pornographic climax of the Romance of the Rose:

Aussi va des contraires choses,

Les unes sont des autres gloses;

Et qui l’une en vuet defenir,

De l’autre li doit sovenir,

Ou ja par nulle entencion

N’i metra diffinicion;

Car qui des deus n’a connoissance

Ja n’i metera difference,

Sanz quoi ne puet venir en place

Diffinicion que l’en face.²³

———

So it goes with contrary things:

They are glosses of each other,

And whoever wants to define one

Must bear the other one in mind,

Or never, by any effort,

Will any definition stand.

For no one who does not know both

Can tell the difference between them,

Without which no definition

Can ever carry conviction.

The contrary things in this case are the Lover’s coupling with his Rose and the metaphor in which he cloaks it: a pilgrim reaches his shrine and venerates the relics he has sought. So, more specifically, the two contraries are two kinds of body parts: the bones of dead saints and the genitals of live seducers. Much earlier in the poem, the Lover had taken offense at Reason’s use of obscenity. Reason replied (in lines shocking enough to be excluded from many manuscripts) that things are what they are, regardless of names, so one might just as well call balls relics, relics balls:

Et quant por reliques m’oïsses

Coilles nommer, le mot preïsses

Por si bel, et tant le prisasses,

Que partout coilles aorasses

Et les baisasses en eglises

En or et en argent assises.²⁴

———

And when you had heard me name balls

As relics, you would take that word

To be so fair, and prize it so,

That everywhere you’d worship balls

And venerate them in churches,

Arrayed in gold and silver shrines.

In a hilarious reductio ad absurdum, the Lover does just that. More broadly, of course, the two contraries are the sacred and the profane. Without his euphemistic metaphor of shrines and relics, which on the Lover’s own terms precludes obscenity, the climactic rape/seduction would be far less obscene—but also less funny. Here the secular appropriates the sacred through parody, so their discourse of opposites is essential to Jean de Meun’s effect. But I do not wish to present the relationship of sacred and secular as always involving opposition or contrary things. The problematics of crossover and paradox overlap; they do not coincide.

This book suggests an overarching, comparative framework to discuss the interplay of sacred and profane in (primarily) French and English texts, though it lays no claim to a totalizing paradigm. In calling the sacred a default category, I do not mean to say it is always the dominant one, much less a univocal discourse such as Robertson imagined. Exegetical critics liked to cite the patristic metaphor of wheat and chaff, in which the literal sense of a text is merely a husk to be stripped away, exposing the sweet kernel of allegorical meaning.²⁵ I prefer a more symmetrical model: sometimes the sacred and the secular flow together like oil and water, layered but stubbornly distinct. At other times they merge like water and wine, an image dear to mystical writers, producing a blend that may or may not be inebriating.

A HERMENEUTICS OF BOTH/AND

My method has been inductive, starting with case studies rather than theories, but in this introductory chapter I will formulate some of the principles I have learned from them. In God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, I introduced the concept of imaginative theology, defining it as the pursuit of serious religious and theological thought through the techniques of imaginative literature, especially vision, dialogue, and personification.²⁶ That concept allows for the very significant role that I believe the imagination, both literary and pictorial, played in the development as well as the expression of religious thought. I would describe three of the texts discussed here—The Quest of the Holy Grail, The Mirror of Simple Souls, and The Mortification of Vain Pleasure—as works of imaginative theology. But the concept also has its converse, which I explore further in this book.

Living in a place as culturally saturated with religion as medieval Europe, dominated both intellectually and institutionally by the Church, could not fail to color the imaginations not just of the devout, but also of ordinary Christians, or even those who were not pious at all. That does not mean, however, that every allusion to the sacred needs to be assessed at its full theological weight. So, following the lead of Catherine Brown and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, I will articulate a principle of both/and: when sacred and secular meanings both present themselves in a text, yet cannot be harmoniously reconciled, it is not always necessary to choose between them. Speaking of Chrétien de Troyes and his continuators, Bruckner observes that romance eschews the restrictions of either/or and claims the non-Aristotelian logic of and/both…. [O]pposing terms remain present, equally valid, as they interact in a potentially creative tension that neither dismisses nor suppresses either one but forces us to deal with the paradoxical combination of both.²⁷ If we wanted to give this rule a medieval name, we could call it the "sic et non principle." Sometimes incompatible meanings simply collide—though the apparent necessity to choose between them may have been meant as a conscious device to provoke discussion, like the conflicting authorities in Abelard’s textbook Sic et Non, the disputing voices in the Old Occitan partimen, and the demandes d’amour that punctuate love stories.²⁸ Wherever such an ambiguity has spawned a notorious crux in critical debate, we may suspect this principle at work.

As a far-reaching cultural practice, the sic et non principle can be exemplified in visual and musical art as well as in texts. This in fact was the premise of a 2006 exhibition, Secular Sacred, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The essays in its catalogue argue that just as there is no clear dividing line between sacred and secular medieval texts, neither can such a boundary be established between objects.²⁹ A fine example of their mutual interpenetration is the beautifully painted Florentine tray (ca. 1390–1420) recently ascribed to Francesco di Michele (Figure 1). In this Triumph of Venus we see the crowned, naked goddess, her blonde tresses tumbling over her shoulders, in a golden mandorla like the one that surrounds the Virgin Mary at her Assumption. Winged like an angel, Venus extends her hands in a gesture of self-display or self-offering. Golden rays stream outward from all parts of her body, but especially from her vulva, to dazzle the eyes of six fully clothed, kneeling lovers, who appear to be worshipping her. Inscriptions identify them as Achilles, Tristan, Lancelot, Samson, Paris, and Troilus—one biblical, three classical, and two medieval, a sign of inclusiveness. They kneel in a lush garden; a tree laden with ripe fruit stands directly beneath the goddess. On either side of her hovers an angel, again reminiscent of the Assumption—or perhaps they are Cupids, for one holds a bow and the other an arrow. On further scrutiny, however, they have most unangelic—some would say demonic—claws in place of feet. For that matter, the wings of the goddess are black, not a promising color.

Figure 1. The Triumph of Venus. Florentine desco da parto (birth salver), ca. 1390–1420. Ascribed to Francesco di Michele. Paris, Louvre.

This design immediately suggests two opposed interpretive possibilities.³⁰ Does it exalt sexual love by boldly assimilating Venus generosa to the Queen of Heaven? In that case it would be analogous to a celebrated stanza from the Carmina burana. A lover hails his beloved as if she were the Virgin, only to end on a quite different note:

Ave, formossisima, gemma pretiosa,

ave, decus virginum, virgo gloriosa,

ave, lumen luminum, ave, mundi rosa,

Blanziflor et Helena, Venus generosa!³¹

———

Hail, most beautiful, precious jewel!

Hail, pride of virgins, glorious virgin!

Hail, light of lights, hail, rose of the world,

Blanchefleur and Helen, generous Venus!³²

Conversely, does the design verge on blasphemy, using its sacred parody to showcase the concupiscence and folly of the deluded lovers? Certainly it would be right at home among the plates in A Preface to Chaucer, which serve to reveal the Christian iconography underlying images that purportedly glorify carnal love. A latter-day Robertsonian might point to the goddess’s inky wings, the rapacious talons of her attending angels, and the six male gazes fixed on her pudenda to make precisely this point. He would not be altogether wrong; it would be dishonest to ignore these elements.

Nevertheless, the object’s historical context makes it unlikely that this was the primary meaning intended,³³ for the tray is a desco da parto, or birth salver. Gifts of this kind were purchased or commissioned by Tuscan husbands for their wives to celebrate a successful childbirth—a custom that began around 1370, in the post-plague generation, when fertility was vitally important not only for the family, but for the body politic.³⁴ Such objects were cherished, often customized (if not specially commissioned) with a family crest on the reverse. Protected with a cloth, they would be used to carry wine, gifts, and sweetmeats to the new mother during her lying-in. Children often inherited and treasured the deschi given to their mothers when they were born. In that context, it would be an ungracious father indeed who commissioned such a precious object for such an auspicious occasion merely to drive home a moral that shamed his own love as well as the fruitfulness of his wife.³⁵ So the meaning of the tray seems to be a case of both/and. Venus is truly exalted, sexual love and fertility rightly celebrated; yet too great an adoration of the goddess poses a spiritual danger. As Alcuin Blamires puts it, a certain transcendental solemnity coexists with humor, making the tone of the object, as with so many medieval texts about love, wonderfully difficult to gauge.³⁶

For a textual analogue we might turn to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, where Chauntecleer quotes the antifeminist maxim, mulier est hominis confusio (woman is man’s ruin), and translates it for his wife as Womman is mannes joye and al his blis (vv. 3,164–66). If we ask the rather silly question—which version does Chauntecleer really believe?—the answer would have to be both: he loves his Pertelote and fethers her twenty times before dawn, yet (wisely, as it happens) distrusts her advice about laxatives. Asking the same question of the Nun’s Priest or of Chaucer himself would be even sillier. In this case, the misogynist Latin tag and its pro-feminine vernacular translation collide in outright contradiction. The priest (or swaggering cock) will have his little joke at the expense of women, but the soothing version that Pertelote and a substantial part of Chaucer’s audience understood takes the sting out of it. Yet whichever side one chooses to privilege, there is always an e contra. Ambivalence is itself a key part of the meaning that must not be exegeted away.

A similar aesthetic of inclusiveness, of both/and, governs the musical genre of motets—the crossover genre par excellence. A motet is a polyphonic song with two to four voices, most often three. The lowest voice is the tenor, or cantus firmus, a brief phrase of Latin plainchant, sung slowly and repeatedly to accompany the higher parts. The middle and upper voices (called motetus and triplum, or treble) sing longer melodies, usually in French though sometimes in Latin. Motets are textually as well as musically polyphonic, or, to use Bakhtin’s term, heteroglossic. Like characters in a play, each speaking in his or her distinctive register and style, the parts interact without losing their autonomy; no single voice is privileged. For example, the motetus may sing a chanson courtoise, lamenting the pangs of unrequited love, while the triplum sings a contrasting pastourelle (seduction song about a shepherdess), a reverdie (spring song in praise of love), a prayer to the Virgin, or a chanson de mal-mariée (song of an unhappy wife longing for her lover). Meanwhile the tenor intones hodie or libera me or gaudete—some phrase chosen from anywhere in the vast repertoire of chant. For the trained clerical singers who composed and performed these pieces, the tenor melody evoked the longer text from which it came, with all the biblical and liturgical resonance of a given feast. Since either or both of the upper parts might be contrafacts—new texts set to preexisting tunes—they too could spur aural reminiscence.³⁷ Motets thus afforded an intricate, sophisticated pleasure for professional musicians, steeped in sacred and vernacular song. But they could also be performed at court festivals, university functions, or taverns where clerics went to unwind. One must assume, Sylvia Huot writes, that the motet, a blend of High Style courtly lyric, Low Style popular lyric, and sacred music, was at home in various settings, some more decorous than others.³⁸ Although it might seem difficult to hear all its artfully blended, simultaneous lines at once, this problem did not seem to trouble contemporaries, any more than it did in the case of polyphonic church music.³⁹

As an example of the divergent interpretations such a piece might provoke, Huot cites the trilingual motet Aucuns vont souvent/Amor, qui cor vulnerat / Kyrie eleison.⁴⁰ The text of the Latin motetus, Amor, qui cor vulnerat, condemns amorous desire: a love generated by carnalis affectio can virtually never (numquam … vel raro) be without sin, for the more we love transient things, the less we love God. So this text exhorts charity and denounces cupidity. Meanwhile the triplum sings Aucuns vont souvent, a courtly lyric, which maintains that all honor, courtesy, and virtue stem from the love of one’s amie, if that love is humble and free of falsehood. Those who attack love do so only par leur envie, because they are envious. The tenor, Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy), is among the most familiar liturgical phrases. If a listener favored the motetus, the piece for him would be a strictly moral one, with the triplum illustrating the self-deception of lovers and the tenor praying for their conversion. But another hearer might privilege the triplum. In that case the sour moralist’s sermon would betray his envy, and the tenor’s petition might mean: stop being so hard on faithful lovers! In yet another possibility, the triplum and the motetus converge from different angles on the same message: both voices condemn greedy, dishonest love, the first from a courtly perspective, the second from a spiritual one. Kyrie eleison might then be a prayer that all lovers would prove sincere and humble. So, like the painted Triumph of Venus or Chauntecleer’s mismatched text and translation, the motet lets its audience choose between meanings—and, just as different listeners might choose different ones, so might the same listener hearing different performances. What these three examples do on a small scale, a capacious work like the Romance of