Chaucer to Spenser:

A C ritical R eader
 Blackwell Critical Readers in Literature

Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader

Edited by Derek Pearsall

British Literature 1640-1789: A Critical Reader

Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader

Edited by Karen L. Kilcup

Romanticism: A Critical Reader

Edited by Duncan Wu

Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader

Edited by Angela Leighton
Chaucer to Spenser
A Critical Reader

Edited by
Derek Pearsall
 Copyright © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
Editorial introduction, selection, and apparatus copyright © Derek Pearsall 1999

First published 1999

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Chaucer to Spenser— a critical reader/edited by Derek Pearsall,
p. cm.— (Blackwell critical readers in literature)
Companion vol. to: Chaucer to Spenser— an anthology.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-6 3 1-19 9 3 6 -5 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0 -6 3 1-19 9 3 7 -3 (alk. paper)
1. English literature— Middle English, 1100-1500— History and criticism. 2. English
literature— Early modern, 1500-1700— History and criticism.
I. Pearsall, Derek Albert. II. Series.
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 Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Preface x
Acknowledgments xvii

1 The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Orthodox Late Medieval

Representations and The Humanity of Christ: Representations in
Wycliffite Texts and Piers Plowman 1
D avid A ers

2 The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions 42

Mary C arruthers

3 Eunuch Hermeneutics 65
C arolyn D inshaw

4 Misogyny and Economic Person in Skelton, Langland, and

Chaucer 107
E lizabeth Fowler

5 At the Table of the Great: More’s Self-Fashioning and

Self-Cancellation 133
S tephen G reenblvtt

6 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 162

Roland G reene
vi Contents
7 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 187
J ill Mann

8 William Langland’s “Kynde Name”: Authorial Signature and

Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England 206
A nne M iddleton

9 Historical Criticism and the Claims of Humanism 246

L ee P atterson

10 “Abject odious”: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s

Testament o f Cresseid 280
F elicity Riddy

11 Prison, Writing, Absence: Representing the Subject in the

English Poems of Charles d’Orléans 297
A. C. S pearing

12 False Fables and Historical Truth 312

P aul S trohm

Index 319
 Contributors

David Aers, James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, taught

previously at the University of East Anglia. Books: Chaucer, luingland and the
Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980); Community, Gender and Indivi­
dual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (London: Roudedge, 1988); (with
Lynn Staley) The Powers o f the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval
English Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Faith, Ethics and the
Church in Late Medieval Writing (Cambridge: Brewer, forthcoming).

Mary Carruthers is Professor of English at New York University. Books:

The Book o f Memory: A Study o f Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge University
Press, 1990); The Craft o f Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making o f Images,
400-1200 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Carolyn Dinshaw, now Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and
Sexuality at New York University, taught for many years at Berkeley. Books:
Chaucers Sexual Poetics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Getting Medieval:
Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (Series Q, Duke University Press,
1999).

Elizabeth Fowler is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. Book:

The Human Figure in Words: The Arguments o f Person in Chaucer, lEngland, Skelton,
and Spenser (forthcoming).

Stephen Greenblatt, Harry Levin Professor of Literature at Harvard, was

previously at Berkeley. Books: Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shake­
speare (University’ of Chicago Press, 1980); Shakespearian Negotiations: The
viii Contributors
Circulation o f Social Finery in Renaissance England\ New Historicism, No. 4
(University of California Press, 1988); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modem
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder o f the
New World (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Roland Greene is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the

University of Oregon, having previously taught at Harvard. Books: Post-
Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations o f the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton Uni­
versity Press, 1991); Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial
Americas (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Jill Mann is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, having

previously held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cam­
bridge. Books: Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature o f Social Classes
in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 1968);
(with Piero Boitani) The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Geoffrey Chaucer (New Feminist Readings) (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1990).

Anne Middleton is Professor of English at Berkeley. A major recent pub­

lication is “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute
of 1388,” in Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (eds.), Written Work:
Langland, Labor, and Authorship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp.
208-317.

Lee Patterson is Professor of English at Yale, having previously taught at

Johns Hopkins and Duke. Books: Negotiating the Past: The Historical Under­
standing o f Medieval Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); (ed.),
Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain 1380—1530 (University of California
Press, 1990); Chaucer and the Subject o f History (University of Wisconsin Press,
1991).

Felicity Riddy is Professor of English, attached to the Centre for Medieval

Studies, at the University of York. Book: Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1987); Domesticity and Urban Culture in Luite-Medieval England (forthcoming).

A. C. Spearing is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia,

having previously taught at Cambridge. Books: The Gawain-Poet: A Critical
Study (Cambridge University Press, 1970); Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge
University Press, 1976); Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge
University Press, 1985); Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University
Press, 1987); The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: look in g and Listening in Medieval
Ij)ve-Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
 Contributors IX

P aul Strohm is the Tolkien Professor of English at Oxford, having pre­

viously taught at Indiana University. Books: Social Chaucer {Harvard University
Press, 1989); Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination o f Fourteenth-Century Texts
(Princeton University Press, 1992); England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the
Language o f Legitimation (Yale University Press, 1998).
 Preface

In this volume I have tried to collect together representative examples of the

best recent critical writing, in the form of both independent essays and
chapters from books, on the authors and texts included in my Chaucer to
Spenser: An Anthology o f Writings in English 1375-1575 (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1999). The volume is intended to act as a companion for students
using that anthology, though of course not all the authors and texts included
there are talked about by these critics, nor is everything that they talk about,
by any means, represented in the anthology. The volume will thus provide an
introduction to some of the major themes and preoccupations, backgrounds
and influences, of writing in English between 1375 and 1575, as well as
examples of strategies of reading and criticism to go along with the texts.
Concentration is on the most important critical writing of the last 15 or 20
years, that which has had the greatest impact on scholars and readers. I have
not deliberately sought out representative examples of the writing of each
“school” of criticism, though, equally, none has been deliberately neglected. It
does seem to me that critical approaches that have won strong and intelligent
adherents, who write well and with detailed reference to the text, are always
worth attending to, and should certainly be drawn to the attention of
students. My own judgment of what is “best,” “strongest,” “most intelligent,”
will of course always be open to question, but I doubt whether a choice based
on the citation index would be preferable. Essays that present a strong
reading of an individual text have been favored, but I have tried also to
include some pieces that range more widely into theoretical issues or that
provide specially valuable kinds of contextual knowledge. Apart from those
essays that will be recognized as classics of their kind, and those authors who
will be recognized as leading influences, there are also one or two essays by
 Preface XI

scholars who are at an earlier stage of their career. I have included them
because they serve the purposes and meet the standards of the volume, but I
must say it also gives me particular pleasure to include them, and to have
represented some of the vigor and originality in the study of the subject that
is happily so evident among younger scholars.
There would have been a number of possible ways of organizing such a
collection of essays: alphabetically, by author; chronologically, by date of
composition; and chronologically by date of composition of the works in
the Anthology to which they serve as companion. There are problems with the
latter form of chronological arrangement, in that the essays often cover a
range of subjects or are frankly theoretical and not text-based. So, a compro­
mise solution has been to have the contents of the volume arranged alpha­
betically by author, while in this brief preface I shall follow the chronology of
the twenty years during which these pieces of critical writing have appeared.
The first is from 1979, Mary Carruthers’s now-classic article on “The Wife
of Bath and the Painting of Lions.” It is not what a modern feminist would
call feminist, but it is an important early document in the development of a
feminist reading of medieval English literature. It does not end in a vindica­
tion of the feminist cause - it suggests indeed that the conclusion of the
Wife’s Prologue is not the reassertion of the realities of gender-power but the
reconciliation of the desire for love with the desire for independence in a
“trewe manage” - but it holds true to its promise to read the poem from the
point of view of a woman. In doing so, Carruthers shows how the gap opens
spontaneously between the economic realities of the wife’s existence and the
almost-comic exaggerations of the anti-feminist tracts and deportment books
—which are all there were in the way of an official theory of wifehood.
Carruthers can even allow the Wife of Bath a little holiday from her own
hard-won pragmatism in the fantasy of the Tale. Through the scrupulously
scholarly manner of her examination of the realities of the Wife’s economic
background and the textual realities of clerical misogyny, Carruthers broke a
long tradition of unthinking patronizing reading of the Wife’s “character.”
Carruthers’s essay was followed in the next year, 1980, by Stephen Green-
blatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which is commonly regarded as the founding-
work of the New Historicism. This is a form of literary and cultural analysis, a
set of reading strategies, which attempts to relate literature and history not by
seeing literature as a “reflection” of history, nor history as a “context” for
literature, but by trying to understand how literature is embedded in history,
how it participates in the larger networks of meaning of which author and
event are equally part, and indeed how history itself is a form of “text.” As a
specific manifestation of this, Greenblatt addresses a particular phenomenon
that he perceives in sixteenth-century writing - “an increased self-conscious­
ness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process”
(ibid, p. 2). In the portion of the first chapter selected for inclusion here, he
xii Preface
analyses More’s particular kind of self-fashioning, “that complex, self-con­
scious, theatrical accommodation to the world which we recognize as a
characteristic mode of modern individuality” (below, p. 140). Greenblatt
sees this awareness of an intense inner consciousness as something that
tormented More, and something that he recognized to have some importance
in the growth of Protestantism. In Utopia, therefore, he excluded it —“destruc­
tion of the individual as a private and self-regarding entity is a positive goal in
Utopia” (p. 143) - though there may be cross-currents within the work.
The idea of the individual, and of the relation of the private individual to
the public world, is an important theme too in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
and Jill Mann’s essay on “Price and Value” in that poem shows clearly how it
participates in the “long and subtle commerce between the internal and the
external” (p. 200). What she is particularly concerned to demonstrate here is
the ubiquitous presence of a mercantile or commercial vocabulary in a poem
dealing with questions of “worth” conventionally thought to be transcenden­
tal and ideal, impervious to the values of the market or the “real” world of
bargain and compromise. Mann’s essay has the special value, in the present
volume, of acting as an introduction to the Aristotelian and medieval analysis
of the nature of exchange value, which has been important in redefining
many central points at issue in medieval writing. She shows how the poet
employs these ideas of value, plays with them, dissolves and re-forms them,
and tempts us with the suggestion that there is indeed no value but that which
resides in the valuer (iWhat’s aught but as “tis valued?” as Troilus says on
another occasion). Mann ends, though, by finding a guarantor of value in the
notion of “truth” to which both the chivalric and the mercantile ethic
subscribe.
Lee Patterson’s book, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding o f
Medieval Literature, marked an important moment in the development of
medieval studies. Consisting chiefly of reprints of Patterson’s earlier essays,
it was prefixed by two new chapters, massively researched and relentlessly
theoretical, in which, in order to position his argument for a historical reading
of medieval literature, Patterson challenged both the old “historical criticism”
of D. W. Robertson (what Patterson calls “Exegetics’ ) and the “New
Historicism.” The second of these chapters is included here as being the
most strenuous attempt yet to argue for the necessarily historical under­
standing of medieval literature. Few medieval texts are mentioned, but in
the ten years since the book was published there have been few who have not
been influenced by or had to engage with Patterson’s arguments. He points
out that the appeal to history and historical understanding provides no
objective norm of judgment, no interpretative court of appeal, that can be
used to validate a reading. The past can only be reconstructed on the basis of
an interpretation of its texts that is visibly grounded in a theory’ of history,
and Patterson analyses the attempts of Marxism and New Historicism to
 Preface xiii
provide such a grounding. Above all, Patterson warns his readers of what is at
stake: “the past we reconstruct’, he insists, “will shape the future we must
live” (p. 249). It is not possible to be an objective or non-political reader; the
appeal to “the text” does not work; “if you do not have an explicit politics -
an ideology' - then one will certainly have you” (p. 267). Patterson’s stirring
call to arms has not been kindly received by some, but his final remarks,
about the difficulty of negotiating between the “present-as-subject” and the
“past-as-object” (p. 268), set out the terms in which most debate about
interpretation has necessarily been staged in recent years.
It is difficult to choose a single chapter from Carolyn Dinshaw’s provo­
cative and influential book, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (which came out in the
same year and from the same press as Patterson’s extraordinarily different
book), that will represent fully her complex argument, but the chapter on the
Pardoner, “Eunuch Hermeneutics,” has many claims. The book as a whole is
devoted to an analysis of how Chaucer represents women as used by men -
oppressed, stripped, domesticated, “translated” - in order to maintain the
hegemony of patriarchal culture and the discourses that it sponsors. The
Pardoner is different: if he is represented as a eunuch, real or figurative, then
he lacks both the maleness that would make him significant in a patriarchal
world and also the femaleness that would make him significantly “other” in
that culture. Being neither, he threatens the stability of gender identification
and even the very possibility of meaningful discourse, for, as Dinshaw insists,
and argues at length, “The breakdown of interpretive stability and determin­
ate gender are of a piece” (p. 83). In support of this opinion, Dinshaw draws
suggestively on the discourses of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and semio­
tics, offering the instability and unreliability of language as the first premise in
an argument that adumbrates the development of “queer” reading.
Anne Middleton’s essay on Piers Plowman is the most searching examination
we have had so far of Langland’s textual strategies of “self-naming” in his
poem - why it is that he draws attention so insistently yet enigmatically to
himself. As she points out, questions of authorial identity, however under­
stood, have always been central to readers of the poem. She shows how
Langland’s cryptic “signatures” in the poem are a way of drawing attention to
the changing role of the author in a “public” poem, the greater emphasis on
his individuality and at the same time the greater uneasiness about his
immersion in public affairs. She traces how the “signatures” develop from
being merely ways of invoking an authorial presence to being pivotal man­
euvers at moments of crisis, where the truth of the poem is newly grounded
in biographical and poetic self-awareness - where the anagrammatic signature
“accompanies a disclosure or renegotiation of the literary terms of the work”
(P- 222).
The “representation of the subject” is the subject of a very different kind
of essay by A. C. Spearing on the English love-poems of Charles of Orleans.
XIV Preface
Charles’s English poems are placed in the context of other late medieval
English explorations of subjectivity, and Spearing emphasizes how intima­
tions of personal identity are frequently conveyed through perception of the
fragmentation of the self, the self as alienated. Imprisonment provided a
particularly acute experience of this alienation. Spearing analyses the process
by which the writing of love-poetry becomes more and more the writing of
absence, less and less close to imagined speech, creating in the end a
“textuality drained of presence” (p. 306) in which Charles discovers that
absence and writing are inseparable.
Paul Strohm is one of the most subtle and teasing exponents of a particular
version of the New Historicism. His aim, in his study of late medieval English
culture and history, is to recognize always that literary texts that are fictional
are not necessarily untrue, and that the value of historical documents is not
necessarily in the claim they make to be historically accurate. Both may
equally give access to the dynamic forces at work in shaping history. He
does not go so far as to claim that all texts are equally the products of
textualization, and he acknowledges their capacity to have a greater or lesser
claim to non-fictionality, but he considers that all have the right to “respectful
interrogation,” which is what he accords them. Strohm gives a crisp and
appealing account of his approach in the brief Introduction to his collection
of essays called Hochon’s Arrow, and I have taken the unusual step of including
it here instead of one of the essays, in which he addresses questions perhaps
too particular for the purposes of the present volume. The Introduction is
however so richly suggestive of the powers and pleasures of his method that I
think it is bound to tempt readers to the book and further to the more recent
England's Empty Throne (1998).
Elizabeth Fowler’s essay shows how the raucous misogyny of Skelton’s
poem “works to legitimize a critique of the money economy” (p. 107). She
thus restores the poem, so easily regarded, and dismissed, as an exercise in
genre realism and an outburst of personal disgust, to the economic and
political discourse of which it is part. Like Chaucer and Langland, Skelton
finds much that is threatening in an economy based on money, and is
nostalgic for a time when relationships were ordered on safer and more
traditional lines, and in ways that left men more indisputably in charge.
Fowler shows the allegorical logic through which women are thus identified
by clerical antifeminism with the fluidity of exchange and equivalence, and in
the process she offers some suggestive ideas about the construction of
“person” and the role of personification allegory in the representation of
agency. The importance of Chaucer and Langland to someone writing over a
hundred years later is fully evident in this “funeral of residual forms” (p. 128).
“Surely there is nothing obvious about the relevance of colonial events to
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry,” says Roland Greene, disarmingly, in his “colo­
nialist” reading of three poems by Wyatt. But skepticism gives way to
 Preface XV

excitement, if not consent, as one reads his daringly conceived analysis, which
is included here for its own merits as well as for the brilliance with which it
demonstrates the importance of a particular modern approach to earlier
literature. One wonders about the impact of the Americas on these early
modern writers (it is very evident later on, for instance in The Tempest), and
since love-poems can always be read as metaphors for other kinds of
experience, it does not seem impossible that the discourse of discovery' and
conquest may be filtering through into them. The “colonialist” reading of
Wyatt may strain credulity, but it provides clear understanding of an import­
ant approach to Petrarchan love-poetry, and an example of how it may
intersect unexpectedly with other discourses.
The extracts from the book by David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers o f
the Holy, are from the first two chapters, in which Aers offers a reading of late
medieval affective devotion to the humanity of Christ, not as it relates to the
“universals” of incarnation theology but as it relates to the particulars of
historical circumstances, political and economic as well as spiritual. To accept
“the humanity of Christ” as a given, he argues, as something that everyone
understands the meaning of, is to accept, or be co-opted by, the terms in
which a particular culture mediates itself to us. Aers, who has been for some
years one of the most forceful advocates of a historical reading of literature,
one that recognizes the embeddedness of a text in the social and economic
structures of its time, considers this an inadequate form of historicism.
Instead, he examines devotional and religious texts by Richard Rolle, Nicho­
las Love, and other writers, which are usually exempted from historical
investigation, to show how devotion to the humanity of Christ is the product
of a particular set of historically derived and historically driven ideas and
practices. In the course of this examination, Aers addresses some issues of
key importance to the understanding of late medieval spirituality, including
those raised in the important book by Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy
Fast. Aers proceeds from this, in chapter 2, to a study of writers, often
considered unorthodox or labeled heretical - Wyciif, the Lollards, Piers Plow­
man - who were interested in other aspects of Christ’s humanity, including his
humanity as a social and political being, in which his ministry is bound up
with “contingent particularities of human power, authority, justice and self-
legitimating ideologies” (p. 19). The discussion of Piers Plowman has to be
omitted, for reasons of space, but enough is here of Aers’s engaged, passion­
ate, and forceful writing to compel the attention of readers of Nicholas Love,
William Thorpe, and Margery Kempe, as well as Langland and Julian of
Norwich, and enable them to look back on these writers, too, from the later
vantage-point of the Protestant Reformation.
Finally, Felicity Riddy, in her essay on the Testament o f Cresseid, reads against
the grain of the traditional “humanist” interpretation of Henryson’s poem -
as presented, for instance, by Douglas Gray, the recipient of the volume in
XVI Preface
which her essay appears - and sees in it, not a parable of redemptive
suffering, but rather an episode in the making of masculine identity. Her
model is Kristeva: women must be made “abject,” in fact they must embrace
abjection, if masculine identity is to be made whole. “What is obscurely at
stake in the story of the much-loved woman who is cast out is the very
making of masculinity” (p. 291). Riddy makes a powerful case, and brings to
bear upon her argument concerning the presentation of masculine and
feminine identity in the poem a striking parallel that she finds in a pair of
pictures from the fifteenth century. One of the admirable qualities of her
essay is that she does not conclude her analysis of the poem by erecting
warning signs around it - “Hateful Discourse. Keep Away. Do Not Read” -
but rather opens up the poem to fresh reading and to the examination of the
self-contradictions and self-reflexivities that lie within patriarchal discourse.
With the permission of the authors, I have made abbreviations in the
reprinting of a few of these texts, for the sake of economy in the volume as a
whole. Such omissions, if brief, are marked by ellipses within square brackets,
if longer, by the insertion of linking passages. Also within square brackets are
the insertions I have added to clarify references to works forthcoming that
have now come forth, or, in the case of chapters from a book, to other parts
of the book.
 Acknowledgm ents

I should like to thank all the scholars who have responded so generously to my
request for permission to have their writings reprinted in the present volume,
and thank likewise the publishers who have given their permissions. I want also
to give particular thanks to Katharine Horsley, a graduate student in the
Department of English at Harvard, who has helped me a great deal in the
work of putting this volume together.
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permis­
sion to reproduce copyright material:

Aers, David and Staley, Lynn, The Powers o f the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender
in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1996), pp. 15-76. Copyright 1996 by the Pennsylvania
State University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
Carruthers, Mary, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions.” Reprinted
by permission of the Modern Language Association of America from
Publications o f the Modem Language Association o f America, 94. Copyright 1979.
Dinshaw, Carolyn, “Eunuch Hermeneutics,” in Chaucer's Sexual Politics.
© 1990. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.
Fowler, Elizabeth, “Misogyny and Economic Person in Skelton, Langland,
and Chaucer,” in Spenser Studies, 10. Copyright 1992 by the AMS Press Inc.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance S elf Fashioning: From Alore to Shakespeare.
Reproduced by permission of the University of Chicago Press.
Greene, Roland, “The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings.” From
Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays in Early Tudor Texts and Contexts. Copy­
right 1994 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with
permission of the University of Illinois Press.
2 David Aers
domains addressed in this and the next two chapters recent studies by Sarah
Beckwith, Miri Rubin, and Peter McNiven have shown particularly well just
how thoroughly, and complexly, Christian sacraments, doctrine, and icono­
graphy were enmeshed in the deployment and daily legitimations of power, as
well as in resistances to that power.4 It did not take the English Reformation
and Tudor state to make what the church classified as ‘heresy’ into ‘sedition’
and ‘sedition’ into ‘heresy.’5
The starting point here is the familiar transformation in the representation
of Christ from the late eleventh century. It is usually described in terms such
as those found in Richard Kieckhefer’s study of fourteenth-century piety:

Throughout the high and late Middle Ages there was increasing attention and
devotion to the humanity o f Jesus, particularly to those moments in his life that
aroused sentiments o f love and compassion: his infancy and his passion. With
major stimulus from the writing o f Bernard o f Clairvaux, and with strong
support from Francis o f Assisi, the humanity o f Jesus became central in
medieval spirituality'.6

This offers a good summary of the transformation, one that has been
exceptionally well documented by numerous scholars in diverse disciplines
of research.7 In art, for example, James Marrow traces how from the twelfth
to the sixteenth century ‘Christ’s humanity and passion became focal points
of the new piety,’ the aim being ‘to approach the Divine through intimate
knowledge and empathie experience of Christ’s humanity and the human
ordeal of His passion.’8 Likewise, in studying late medieval religious lyrics,
Rosemary Woolf showed how in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the
‘dominant theme’ became the visualization of ‘Christ in His humanity,’
represented through the Passion and infancy. This, she noted, was a ‘com­
pletely new’ focus in Christian devotion, one ‘quite alien’ to earlier forms of
Christian engagements with Christ and the doctrine of the Incarnation. In the
latter she found no focus on the Christ child and ‘no intense stress upon the
suffering of Christ,’ whereas in the lyrics of the later Middle Ages, meditation
on the Passion becomes ‘a devotional exercise complete in itself,’ while ‘the
figure of Christ is isolated from the historical sequence of the Passion.’ She
describes the lyrics as representations of ‘Christ in His humanity’,’ and
exemplifies their focus on ‘details of the number of Christ’s wounds, the
wrenching off of His skin with His clothes, the pulling of his arms to reach
the holes already bored in the wood, the violent dropping of the Cross in its
socket, and the mourning of the Blessed Virgin.’9 It is, as Sarah Beckwith
notes, ‘a commonplace of late medieval histories of spirituality that the late
Middle Ages witness a new and extraordinary focus on the passion of
Christ.’10 The humiliated, tortured, whipped, nailed-down, pierced, dying
but life-giving body of Christ, the very body literally present in the eucharist
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 3
- this body became the dominant icon of the late medieval church and the
devotion it cultivated and authorized. This is the body at the heart of the
‘commonplace’ on which this part of our book is a meditation. That bleeding,
dying body had, as Miri Rubin recently demonstrated, come to be identified
‘as the essence of Christ’s humanity.’11
So successful was this identification that it set down deep roots and
survived the supersession of the culture in which it was made. It became so
dominant that it was reproduced in modern scholarship - reproduced rather
than approached as a topic for interrogation. This convention has already
been illustrated in the quotations from Richard Kieckhefer, James Marrow,
and Rosemary Woolf. Without any qualifying analysis, the commonplace at
issue is described as ‘devotion to the humanity of Jesus’ (Kieckhefer),
‘empathie experience of Christ’s humanity’ (Marrow) and ‘Christ in His
humanity’ (Woolf). It has been described by Robert Frank as ‘a complete
incarnational poetic’ that made Christ ‘unmistakably human,’ ‘a human fig­
ure.’12 Such descriptions and the perceptual framework to which they belong
may seem inevitable in a scholarship that is committedly historical, a respons­
ible reflection of dominant iconography and ideas in the earlier culture, a
veritable sign that the modern writer has successfully avoided the solipsistic
sin of ‘presentism’ and all traces of ‘anachronism.’ And yet this form of
historicism may become an impediment to critical reflection on late medieval
figurations of Christ, an impediment that will necessarily affect our attempts
to understand the devotion to which such figurations belonged and their
relations to contemporary sources of power. How could this happen? It
could happen very easily and in a very unostentatious manner, as the
consequence of an admirable enough historical commitment. The attempt
to reproduce the terms of the past culture of discourse, including the terms in
which Christ was imaged, can very easily naturalize that discourse, so famil­
iarize it as to make it seem inevitable. In this way a historically contingent
constitution of the ‘humanity’ of Christ becomes ‘the humanity of Christ,’ the
humanity of Christ that, at last, was grasped for that which it was, is and shall
be, grasped from the late eleventh-century onward. The contingent acts,
performances, and doctrinal shifts that made the dominant late medieval
representation of Christ’s humanity dominant as well as those contingent
acts, performances, and ideas that may, perhaps, have been in some kind of
opposition to the dominant are occluded. So, ironically enough, the historical
ambition to describe in its own terms the ‘commonplace’ well summarized by
Sarah Beckwith comes to bestow an unhistorical ontological solidity on what
was a historically contingent version of Christ’s humanity. Such is the way of all
reifications: to occlude their own constitution in specific networks of power
and contingent historical forces, to turn processes and complex (sometimes
contradictory) effects into essence, verbs into nouns. In my view the histor­
ian’s task is not to reproduce such reifications, whether they became
4 David Aers
dominant in a medieval or in a twentieth-century culture, not to collude with
them in their self-representations. On the contrary, the task is to understand
the processes and forces at work in their formation, in their achievement of
dominance, in their naturalization and in their appearance of inevitability, of
transcendent essentiality.13 So here I shall seek to step back from the frame­
work assumed by the dominant late medieval tradition and its forceful
imagery, aiming to make this ‘incarnational poetic,’ its version of Incarnation
and Christ’s humanity topics for critical historical reflection. What did it
mean, after all, to cultivate a version of the Incarnation in which, as Miri
Rubin has shown, ‘Christ’s wounds were hailed as the essence of Christ’s
humanity?’14
Before offering some answers to this question, a question that threads
through this and the next two chapters, it may be helpful to recall some
examples of the dominant representations of Christ’s humanity in late med­
ieval culture. Such recollections can be brief because the relevant materials
have been well exemplified by numerous historians, including those already
referred to in this chapter;1 their role here is as a reference point. A
characteristic example of the composition of Christ’s humanity through an
almost exclusive focus on passion and crucifixion can be taken from the
immensely influential work of Richard Rolle:16

A, Lord þi sorwe, why were it not my deth? Now þei lede þe forthe nakyd os a
worm, þe turmentoures abowtyn þe, and armede knyjtes; þe prees o f þe peple
was wonderly strong, þei hurled þe and haryed þe so schamefully, þei spurned
þe with here feet, os þou hadde been a dogge. I se in my soule how reufully
þou gost: þi body is so blody, so rowed and so bledderyd; þi crowne is so kene,
pat sytteth on þi hed; þi heere mevyth with þe wynde, clemyd with þe blood; þi
lovely face so wan and so bolnyd with bofetynge and with betynge, with
spyttynge, with spowtynge; þe blood ran þerewith, þat grysyth in my sy3t; so
lothly and so wlatsome þe Jues han þe mad, þat a mysel art þou lyckere þan a
clene man. Þe cros is so hevy, so hye and so stark, þat þei hangyd on þi bare
bac trossyd so harde.
A, Lord, þe gronyng þat pou made, so sore and so harde it sat to þe bon. Þi
body is so seek, so febyl and so wery, what with gret fastynge before þat þou
were take, and al ny3t wooke withowten ony reste, with betynge, with bofe­
tynge so fer ovurtake, þat al stowpynge þou gost, and grym is þi chere. be
flesch, þere þe cros sytteth, is al rowed; þe bleynes and þe bledderys are wanne
and bloo; þe peyne o f þat byrden sytteth þe so sore, þat iche foot þat þou gost
it styngyth to þin herte.

As we find so copiously illustrated in James Marrow’s discussion of northern

European art, here we meet the stress on physical vulnerability, humiliation,
and details of parts of the body under torture (the hair clotted with blood and
blowing in the wind is typical, as is the swollen face, bare back and pulverized
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 5
body). The mode is of course encapsulated in that great storehouse of late
medieval devotion, the Meditationes littae Christi and we can see how it was
conventionally used in this early fourteenth-century English meditation:

Whan he to caluarye mounte was bro3t,

Beholde what werkmen þere wykkedly wro3t:
Some dyggen, sum deluyn, sum erþe oute kast,
Some pycchen þe cros yn þe erþe fast;
On euery syde sum laddres vpp sette,
Sum renne aftyr hamers, some nayles fette;
Some dyspoyle hym oute dyspetusly,
Hys cloþys cleuyn on hys swete body;
Þey rente hem o f as þey were wode:
Hys body a3en ran alie on blode.
A! with what sorrow hys modyr was fedde.
Whan she say hym so naked and alie bled!
Fyrþer more, þan gan she to seche,
And say þat þey had left hym no breche.
She ran þan þurgh hem, and hastyly hyde,
And with here kercheues hys hepys she wryde.17

The clothes clinging to the body through dried blood, then being violendy
stripped off, the mother’s haste to cover his naked “hepys,” the manic
energies of the “werkmen” applied to the minute particulars of their job -
the accumulation of such details is sustained at great length as we read of the
body being beaten up, tortured, pierced, stretched, and pulled about on the
cross. This is the context in which a cult of Christ’s wounds emerged. Indeed,
so marked is the fixation of the body of Jesus that even when it is dead we
find Mary kissing an arm, embracing it to her breast and seeking to prevent its
burial, or to be buried with it, putting the dead head in her lap, gazing at the
way, “hyt was ybroke, / Prykket, and broysed wyþ many a stroke,” shaved,
rent with thorns and all red with blood.18 The text thus directs the méditant
to go over, once more, the bodily mutilation and pain she or he has just
imagined, now identifying with the mother holding the dead body. This is the
tradition favored by those who compiled the urban plays produced by late
medieval guildsmen, brilliandy presented in York in the plays for the Shear­
men and the Pinners. A long, powerful sequence enacting the Crucifixion
concentrates on minute physical particulars in the torturing and killing of
Jesus, while the cycle as a whole certainly lays most stress on the sequences
centered on Christ’s birth and his Passion.19
This tradition is exemplified in the “Privity of the Passion,” one of the
English renderings of the passion sequence from the Meditationes ]^tae
Christi.20 The laconic statement of Christ’s scourging in the Gospels (Mat­
thew 27:26, Mark 15:15, John 19:1; cf. Luke 23:22) becomes the following:
6 David A ers
Thene þey dispoylede owre lorde dispitousely withowttene any pete & made
hym nakyde, & bande hys handis by-hynde hyme and feste hym till a pelere; &
bett hym withe scharpe knotty schourges, a longe whyle. And as some doctours
says, one euery knott was a scharpe hok o f Iryne, þat with euery stroke þey rofe
his tendyr flesche. He stode naked be-fore theme a faire 3onge mane schame-
full in schapp, and speciouse in bewte passande all erthely mene: he sufferde
þis harde paynefull betyng o f these wikkede mene in his tendireste flesche &
clenneste__ He es betyne and betyne agayne, blester appone blester, and
wonde appone wonde, to bothe þe beters & þe be-holders were wery. (203)

This elaboration of physical details (from the design of the scourges to the
exhaustion of the beaters) is a constant feature of the work as it concentrates
on figuring forth a lacerated body and eliciting affective responses in the
reader. After describing the Crucifixion’s violent abuse of the body in familiar
details the text comments:

And whene he was thus sprede o-brode one þe crosse more straite þan any
parchemyne-skyne es sprede one þe harowe, so þat mene myghte tel all þe
blyssede bones o f his body: thane rane fro hym one euery syde stremes o f
blode owt o f his blessede wondes.(206)

Such details, so familiar in verbal and visual performances, are crucial to the
dominant version of Christ’s humanity and its intense concentration on
Passion and Crucifixion, on a tortured, suffering sacrifice out of whose
“stremes of blode” comes humanity’s salvation. True enough, this tradition
also bestows much attention on Christ’s infancy, as Kieckhefer and many
others have observed.21 And yet here too what Leo Steinberg called “the
humanation of God’ was repeatedly defined in terms of his Passion, Cruci­
fixion and death, with a marked focus on the child’s blood-shedding at his
circumcision, both prefiguring the Crucifixion and demonstrating his
“humanity.”22
What kind of imitation might this dominant model encourage among the
devout? Addressing this will constitute a major part of this chapter and, by
implication, the next, but here I shall give a couple of examples in late
medieval English. In a rendering of Jacques de Vitry’s life of the holy
woman, Mary d’Oignies, so important to Margery Kempe, we encounter
one characteristic response.23 Here we read how Mary had such profound
spiritual awareness that “alie flesely delyte was to hir vnsauery.” So much so,
apparendy, that when sickness forced her to eat a litde flesh and drink a litde
wine her revulsion was so great at this “abomynacyone” that

she punyshed hir-selfe and hadde no rest in spirite, vnto she hadde made
a-seth, wonderly turmentynge hir fleshe for þos delytes before, siche as was.
For with feruour o f spirite she, loþinge hir fleshe, cutte awey grete gobettis and
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 7
for shame hidde hem in þe erþe— And whan hir body shudde be washen after
she was deed, wymmen fonde þe places o f woundes, and hadde mykele
maruaile; but þey þat knew hir confessyone [i.e. the author], wiste what it
was (I. 7, 139-40)

The model of Christ and his humanity, the model for as literal, as fleshy an
imitation as possible, is made almost exclusively out of the Passion and
Crucifixion as we have seen it represented in the later Middle Ages. We
find a similar oudook in the English version of “Cristyne þe meruelous” who
chose to enter, so we read, hot ovens:

hoote - brennynge ouenes, redy to bake brede in: and she was turmented wiþ
brennynges and heet as oon o f vs, so þat sche cryed hidously for angwysche;
neþeles, whan she come oute, þere was no soor nor hurt seen outwarde in hir
body. And when she hadde no fourneys nor ouenes, thanne she keste hirselfe
in to houge fyres and grete in mennes houses, or allonly putte in hir feet and
handys, and helde hem þere so longe, vnto, but if hit hadde be myrakelle o f
god, þey myghte be brente to askes. Also oþer-while she wente into cauderons,
fulle o f hoot-boylynge wadr, to þe breste or ellis to þe lendys___Also she
wente to þe galous and hengyd hir-selfe vp wib a gnare [= noose] amonge
honged þeues, and þere she henge a daye or to.24

We can see how the dominant model of Christ’s humanity encourages quite
specific forms of imitation. They seem characterized by the freely chosen
infliction of bodily pain, miraculously sustained by God so that the holy person
can go on and on performing such activities, reiterations that themselves
confirm and sacrilize the model that informs them. But these performances
take us, of course, into areas of medieval devotion explored by Caroline
Bynum, and given that some of her main theses are considered below I will,
for the moment, leave these devout imitations of the late medieval Christ.
Given this version of Christ’s humanity, so centered on Christ’s bloody
sacrifice, it can be no surprise that it was systemically reproduced, and hence
decisively reinforced, at the heart of the eucharist, with its official and
ferociously enforced dogma of transubstantiation. As Eamon Duffy remarks
in his lovingly idealized and charmingly depoliticized account of late medieval
religion:

Christ himself, immolated on the altar o f the cross, became present on the altar
o f the parish church, body and soul and divinity, and his blood flowed once
again, to nourish and renew Church and world. As kneeling congregations
raised their eyes to see the Host held high above the priest’s head at the sacring,
they were transported to Calvary itself.25

Christ’s humanity, the eucharist, and the dogma of transubstantiation were

inextricably bound together, performed by the priest not only on every altar
8 David Aers
but in processions through towns and villages, celebrated in the iconography
of churches, books of hours, paintings, innumerable exempla and particularly
focused upon at the festival of Corpus Christi.26 This doctrinal, iconographie,
and social history has been extensively described in Miri Rubin’s Corpus
Christi while in her recent Christ's Body Sarah Beckwith explores, with great
subtlety, the complex political, psychological, and social forces shaping, and
shaped by, this symbol, so central in late medieval culture and the formation
of identities.27 I do not intend to go over the work they have done on the
eucharist, the feast of Corpus Christi, and the Host as a site of conflict in
which ideological boundaries, inclusions, and exclusions, were struggled over,
established, and struggled over. AU I do here is recollect the standard
representation of Christ’s humanity in the eucharist of the late medieval
church, recollection that, once more, will serve as a reference point in ensuing
discussion.
Nicholas Love’s Mirror o f the Blessed Life ofJesus Christy an English version of
the Meditationes Vitae Christe, was an immensely popular work throughout the
fifteenth century.28 As Michael Sargent notes in the introduction to his
critical edition of the Mirror, Love suppressed “a good deal of the Meditationes
Vitae Christi,” choosing to substitute material “directed toward the theological
concerns of his own day,” concerns that were explicitly and very emphatically
part of the church’s “campaign against Lollardy” led by Archbishop Arun­
del.29 He approved Love’s work and saw it as part of the “confutation of
heretics or lollards [ad... heriticorum siue lollardorum confutacionem],” a
perception, as Sargent stresses, shared by its author.30 From this important
and characteristic work of late medieval English orthodoxy I shall take an
example of the habitual construction of Christ’s humanity in the eucharist.
This comes from the “Treatise on the Sacrament,” which was part of Love’s
conception of his Mirror, as Sargent demonstrates, and was always attached to
it (liii-lviii). Love recounts how a woman in Rome used to offer St Gregory'
loaves of bread “whereof was made goddes body.” One day, on hearing the
words “þe body of oure lorde Jesu criste kepe þe in to euerlastyng life” she
burst out laughing, in “dissolute lawhtere.” Being asked why she laughed she
replies, “by cause þat þou clepedest goddus body þe brede þat I made wiþ
myn handes.” The priest prays for the woman’s “misbyleue” and at once
finds the real presence of Christ’s humanity demonstrated: “he fonde þe
sacrament turnede in to þe likenes of a fynger in flesh & blode,” enough to
turn the woman “in to þe trewe byleue” (232-3). In John Mirk’s version of
this familiar exemplary tale, “þe ost turnet into raw flessch bledyng” which
the priest “toke and schowet þis woman.” At once she recognizes in the raw,
bleeding flesh the identity’ of God in his humanity: “now I beleue þat þou art
Crist.” The same version of Christ’s humanity' is affirmed when a priest sees
“þe blod drop doun from þe ost fast into þe chalice” and some doubting
clerks see his “fyngurys blody and blod rane of Cristis body into þe chalis.”
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 9
They at once bless the priest “þat has þis grace þus to handul Cristis body”
and become “good men and perfyte alway aftyr in þe beleue.”32 The domin­
ant version of representing Christ’s humanity in the late medieval church is
thus confirmed by the eucharist even as the latter is confirmed by the
presence of this “humanity.” Love’s collection of eucharistie miracles are
designed to encourage “wirchipyng of þat sacrament” and include “opune
prefe” of its power. Indeed, so overwhelming is the “auctorite” of his
“merueiles & myracles” that nobody could speak against their force unless
“he be worse þan a Jewe or a payneme”; that is, worse than the excluded,
scapegoated others against which orthodoxy constituted itself.33
Nor should we overlook the stupendous utilities the presence of Christ’s
human body, whether as dismembered infant or wounded adult, brought the
faithful in the present world. Let us recall some of these as they were so
frequendy reiterated:

als ofte as a man or a woman cometh into þe chirch to here masse, God 3eueþ
hym seuen 3eftis; and þo ben þes: That day hym schal wonte no bodely fode;
idul speche þat day is forçeuen hym; his idul ly3t oþes ben fo^eton; he schal
not þat day lese his si3th; he schal not þat day dey no sodeyne deth; and as
longe as þe masse lesteþ he schal not wax olde; and his angele telleþ eche paas
þat he goþ to þe chirch in gret worschip to hym.34

Mirk’s itemization of the utilities that flow from seeing the transubstantiated
Host, Christ’s body, are utterly conventional.35 John Lydgate’s poetry bears
witness to this, confirming Mirk’s list but characteristically enlarging it even
further. Not only will it work trVs to susteyne in bodyly gladnesse,” but it pays
attention to the particular needs of our worldly occupations and needs. For
example:

Masse herde aforne, the wynde ys nat contrary

To Maryneres that day in theyr saylyng,
And all thyng that ys necessary',
God sent to porayle that day to theyr fedyng;
Women also that goon on trauaylyng,
Folk well expert haue thereof founde a prefe,
That herde masse in the mornyn^
Were delyueryd and felt no myschefe.36

In such ways the dominant version of Christ’s humanity, bodily present in the
eucharist, brings markedly worldly benefits that enmesh it in the material
particularities and hopes of the faithful. Not that its powers are confined to
this world, of course: Lydgate observes that each mass “ys egall to Crystes
passion” in helping “sowlys out of purgatory,” a belief that underpinned the
whole apparatus of masses for the dead so prominent in the late medieval
10 David A ers
church and in social relations.37 There can be no doubt that Eamon Duffy is
right to maintain, along with all modern historians of the subject, that
“preoccupation with the moment of Christ’s death, and with his sufferings”
dominated late medieval orthodoxy and the devotion it fostered and was
fostered by, extending to conventional grants of “enormous indulgences (up
to 32,755 years of pardon) for those who devoutly repeated before the image
[of Christ suffering] five Paters, five Aves, and a Creed.”38
Perhaps the materials we have been considering can be read in ways that
may return theological formulations, iconography, and received terminology
to the contingent historical processes from which they emerged. Asking what
it meant to cultivate a version of the Incarnation in which “Christ’s wounds
were hailed as the essence of Christ’s humanity” can perhaps best be
answered by identifying reiterated performances in regulative but thoroughly
contingent networks of customs, institutions, and social powers. Certainly
scholars have given reasons for the distinctive turn in Christianity that led to
the discovery of this “humanity” of Christ over a thousand years after his
death. It has been explained as a response to Anselmian soteriology (stressing
the death of Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice to a dishonored feudal ruler
whom no fallen human could appease) and as a part of a general shift in
Western European economies and cultures that entailed an increasing interest
in the natural world, in human embodiment, particularities of human emotion
and the “individual.” Such a shift, we learn, encouraged the “humanization”
of the Pantocrator who had ruled from the Cross in sublime power and
apparent impassibility.39 Plausible as such accounts of early medieval cultural
transformation may be, their effects in the present field of study may be less
than helpful. These macrohistorical narratives tend to take for granted the
term which is here the explanandum, the “humanity” of Christ. Encouraging us
to assume that we know what it is, in all its familiarity, they suggest that what
we need is an account of macrohistorical changes that made its emergence
natural, inevitable. This effect has been strengthened by a tendency to
reproduce Christ’s “humanity” as it is found in the discourses of late medieval
culture, as I have noted, thus congealing and naturalizing the very reifications
that need to be broken down into the actions, performative networks, and
social struggles they occlude.
The work that needs doing here has been well exemplified in recent books
by Sarah Beckwith and Miri Rubin, books that have greatly helped my own
inquiries.40 But here I turn to another historian whose work has certainly
neither naturalized nor rendered comfortably familiar late medieval repre­
sentations of Christ’s “humanity”: Caroline Bynum. I select her work for a
number of reasons. It centers on figurations of Christ’s humanity; it is
immensely influential, outside as well as within medieval studies; it is docu­
mented with most unusual abundance; it strives for a hermeneutic that
respects the “otherness” of the past even as it seeks to avoid what Bynum
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 11

calls “presentism”; and yet, especially important to my own concerns, it has

addressed issues sidelined in scholarship on this topic.41 Bynum has, that is,
explored late medieval devotion to Christ with unprecedented attention to
the constitutions of gender, sexual differentiations, and human bodies in that
culture. The fascinating work she published in the 1980s involved a major
shift in historical paradigms. This shift enabled the study of power where that
had seemed irrelevant in the received scholarship on “Corpus Christi,” on
Christ’s body and his humanity. Whatever the force of Kathleen Biddick’s
critique of Bynum’s work, and however critical the ensuing comments in this
chapter, I cannot imagine anyone now writing on the topics I address without
owing a great deal to Caroline Bynum.42 Her work, an always searching,
profound companion, has certainly stimulated and guided my own explora­
tions.
Both Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Fragmentation and Redemption concentrate
on the devotion and ascetism of women, “female imagery,” the “female
body,” and the relations of women’s religious practices to the “body” and
“humanity” of Christ.43 Bynum is “fully aware that most of the women” she
selects for study are “exceptional,” and yet she maintains that she is “explain­
ing the women by their context and the context by the women” (H F 7).
Through their devotional experience she believes she can disclose the “reli­
gious experience” of “medieval people,” can gain access to those she calls
“Pious folk in the later Middle Ages.”44 And she will gain it, we recall, within
a paradigm that will generate research not undertaken by traditional accounts
of “the humanity of Christ,” research into its relations to forms of power and
gender mediated through the symbolism of Christ’s body.
Yet, despite the admirable innovations in her paradigms of inquiry, it turns
out that Bynum’s attention to gender, bodies, and Christ remains, at one
decisive point, within the conventional historical approach I have illustrated.
She habitually identifies conventional representations of the tortured body of
Jesus (exemplified earlier in this chapter) with “Christ’s humanity.”45 As she
follows the attempts of certain women to imitate the dominant figuration of
“Christ’s suffering humanity,” Bynum maintains that the “self-inflicted suf­
fering” through which they “were becoming more wonderfully and horribly
the body on the cross” comprised “a profound expression of the doctrine
of the Incarnation: the doctrine that Christ, by becoming human, saves all
that the human being is.”46 Furthermore, it is within the familiar framework
of this identification that she develops a major thesis: that imitating the
dominant figuration of Christ empowered women, especially, one supposes,
the women on whose ascetic practices she concentrates. For, so the argument
goes, as Christ’s suffering humanity saved the world so suffering women,
subjected by their culture in numerous ways, became the most powerful
representatives of the powerless, bleeding, suffering but salvi fie Christ.
I shall present some objections to this thesis, to its allegedly historical
12 David Aers
underpinnings and to its assumptions about the political implications of the
way Christ’s humanity was predominantly figured through the wounded,
bleeding, and nurturing body on the cross, shall also, in this and the next
two chapters, consider some late medieval sources occluded by Bynum’s
work but relevant to the inquiries she has initiated.
I will begin my consideration of Bynum’s treatment of “Christ’s humanity”
by recollecting her arguments about food. These arguments are foundational
ones in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, directly pertinent to its version of Christ’s
humanity and its interpretations of medieval materials. She maintains that
food was “particularly a woman-controlled resource,” and that “To prepare
food is to control food.” In fact, she asserts, “by means of food women
controlled themselves and their world.”47 Summing up her claims, she writes,
“In short, women had many ways of manipulating and controlling self and
environment through food-related behavior, for food formed the context and
shape of women’s world” (H F 208). Bynum’s position characteristically
dissolves the realities and consequences of the political and social organiza­
tions of the means and modes of production, including the production of
food. At all social levels these organizations were under the control of men: in
villages, in towns, in ecclesiastical corporations, in castles and courts.48 What
women prepared in kitchens (and what men working in employers’ kitchens
prepared) was itself the product of systems of production, extraction of
resources and distribution determined by struggles between conflicting social
groups with conflicting economic and political interests. Bynum’s claims that
to prepare food is to control food and that to cook food is to control the
environment and world one lives in fails to acknowledge how the kitchen, its
resources, and the work done there existed within networks of power, chains
of command, and financial resources dominated by men. She fails to see that
in these social contexts “power” and “control” in cooking is contained,
structured, and ordered within institutions, customs, and ideologies under
male domination, structures and forces that remain when the direct employer
happened to be a woman. There can be no adequate understanding of social
relations in kitchens and around the preparation of food if we abstract these
from the social networks and sources of power within which they exist and
have their being. What Bynum calls “women’s world” was never an auto-
, • 49
nomous domain.
From her assertion that food was a concern of women rather than men she
argues that this made food a religious symbol of more importance to women
than to men. Not only did women prepare food but, Bynum argues, “They
fed others with their own bodies, which, as milk or oil, became food” (H F
114). So while, as we shall see, she emphasizes that women’s “imitation of the
cross” included physical practices that made them into “the macerated body
of the Savior, the bleeding meat they often saw in eucharistie visions,”
women’s bodies were always already food, always already, therefore, an
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 13
imitation of Christ in his “humanity.” She traces “medieval assumptions” that
“associated female and flesh and the body of God” (FR 215): “Women’s
bodies, in the acts of lactation and of giving birth, were analogous both to
ordinary food and to the body of Christ, as it died on the cross and gave birth
to salvation” (H F 30). Or, in another typical formulation: “Since Christ’s
body was a body that nursed the hungry, both men and women naturally
assimilated the ordinary female body to it” (H F 272). This is a very strong
claim about how “men and women naturally” viewed “the ordinary female
body” and whether it could withstand exposure to a wide range of medieval
writings and close attention to the culture’s misogyny seems doubtful to
me,50 although I do not address the issue here.
Bynum herself has no such doubts and stresses that “women” gained
“power” through this constitution of their bodies in medieval discourses
and the corresponding convergence with Christ’s humanity.51 She provides
copious exemplification of the convergence through images of Christ’s
wounds as a breast “exuding wine or blood into chalices or even into hungry
mouths,” reiterating that “identifying woman with flesh and Christ’s flesh
with the female” was “widespread in the culture .” 52 As Christ’s “own flesh
did womanly things, it bled food and gave birth to new life,” so “women”
allegedly found that “their flesh could do what his could do: bleed, feed, die
and give life to others” (FR 215, 222). In such ways Christ became “female”
and “women” thus always nearer than men could ever be to a “literal, bodily
imitatio Christi,” nearer to God and his “humanity” than the men who ruled
church and world. Whereas men had to cross-dress, as it were, women were
already “there,” “naturally.” Thus, so the argument goes, were women
empowered in and through the dominant forms in which Christ’s humanity
was represented. And the empowerment was, apparently, extremely substan­
tial. It enabled “women” to gain “control” over “their bodies and their
world,” “to gain power and to give meaning” through which they “controlled
and manipulated their environment.” 53 Through their “food practices” and
related identification with the humanity of Christ as it was figured forth in the
late medieval church, women “controlled their religious circumstances as well
as their domestic ones,” finding here a way of “controlling those in authority”
(H F 237, 243). To gain control over patriarchal forces, institutions, and
“those in authority” (presumably in ecclesiastic, political, legal, militar)', and
domestic authority) must, indeed, have been a monumental subversion of
traditional structures of power and their diverse legitimations.54 And, irony
of ironies, it was apparently one sponsored by the church, its male rulers,
and admiring confessors who wrote the vitae on which Bynum draws so
heavily.
But what exactly was the imitation of Christ that the dominant figuration
of Christ’s humanity shaped? The focus of the imitatio Christi practiced by the
women Bynum studies was the Passion and Crucifixion as represented in the
14 David Aers
conventional materials illustrated earlier in this chapter. Their attempt was to
achieve, if that is the right word, “a fusion with Christ’s agony on the cross”
{HF 211-12). Bynum’s treasury of such imitations seems endless, as one of
her own summaries of her central materials nicely suggests:

Deliberate and systematic physical punishment was part of the daily routine for
many religious women__ Alda of Siena, for example... whipped herself
with chains, wore a crown of thorns__ Dorothy of Montau put herself
through a pantomime of the Crucifixion that involved praying with her arms
extended in the form of a cross and later, in imitation of Christ’s burial, lying
prostrate with the entire weight of her body supported only by toes, nose, and
forehead. Jane Mary of Maillé stuck a thorn into her head in remembrance of
Christ’s crown of thorns. Reading the lives of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century
women saints greatly expands one’s knowledge of Latin synonyms for whip,
thong, flail, chain, etc. Ascetic practices commonly reported in these vitae
include wearing hair shirts, binding the flesh tightly with twisted ropes, rubbing
lice into self-inflicted wounds... thrusting nettles into one’s breasts — Rolling
in broken glass, jumping into ovens, hanging from a gibbet... lacerating their
bodies until the blood flows, with all kinds of whips. {HF 209-10)

Following the same models of imitatio Christi, Angela of Foligno drank water
that “came from washing the sores of lepers,” exulting when one of the scabs
stuck in her throat, and Catherine of Genoa ate scabs and burned herself {HF
144—5, 182). Catherine of Siena told her biographer, the Dominican Ray­
mond of Capua, that she had drunk the pus from the putrefying breast of a
dying woman. She commented: “Never in my life have I tasted any food and
drink sweeter or more exquisite [than this pus]” {HF 171-2). As for her
marriage with Christ, Catherine saw this as enacted, “with the ring of Christ’s
foreskin, given in the Circumcision and accompanied by pain and the shed­
ding of blood,” her distinctive image of putting on Christ {HF 175). Bynum
acknowledges that Catherine of Siena “abhorred her own flesh,” and yet
because of this saw the body as uniting her to God’s “humanity,” a “human­
ity” symbolized by the cut-off foreskin, a union “by suffering” {HF 175).
Catherine herself wrote, “we must attach ourselves to the breast of the
crucified Christ__ For it is Christ’s humanity that suffered. .. and, without
suffering, we cannot nourish ourselves with this milk” {HF 176). Not
surprisingly, Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia provides many similar examples,
such as Eustochia of Messini wearing a pig-skin undergarment to gouge out
her flesh, whipping herself, melting candlewax over her head, burning her
face, and using ropes “to stretch her arms in the form of a cross.” 56 All these
practices allegedly exemplify what Bynum describes as “a profound expres­
sion of the doctrine of the Incarnation” {HF 294), a culturally normative, if
exuberant, understanding of the dominant figuration of Christ’s humanity.
This, then, is the combination of model and imitation that empowered the
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 15
subordinate, that subverted the logic and religion of a patriarchal and pro­
foundly mysoginistdc culture.
I confess that I remain unconvinced by Bynum’s “empowerment” thesis,
and unconvinced by her interpretation of the conventional representations of
Christ from which this chapter set out, at least insofar as that interpretation
relates to power in late medieval society. And perhaps she herself may yet
come to be equally unconvinced, for in an essay first published in 1989 she
made the following observation in relation to “women’s mysticism as a form
of female empowerment”:

This argument must also recognize that the clergy themselves encouraged such
female behavior both because female asceticism, eucharistie devotion and
mystical trances brought women more closely under the supervision of spiritual
directors and because women’s visions functioned for males, too__ More­
over, theologians and prelates found women’s experiential piety useful in the
thirteenth-century fight against heresy ... against Cathar dualism. (FR 195)

However, this important comment is still not allowed to move from the
margins to the center of her inquiries, not allowed to unravel her own
“empowerment” thesis. Yet in my view it should actually guide our attempts
to understand the constitution of the humanity and the body of the late
medieval Christ. Taken seriously, brought in from the margins, it will lead us
to networks of force that are very relevant to our inquiries.
Basic to the shift in perspective here will be the acknowledgment that the
dominant figurations of Christ’s body, including its alleged “feminization,” were
made dominant, constituted as dominant, maintained as dominant. So we will now
approach the appearance of Christ’s body in the late medieval church with
the understanding that human bodies are produced within specific discursive
regimes with specific technologies of power. Denise Riley has observed, “The
body’ is not, for all its corporeality, an originating point nor yet a terminus; it
is a result or an effect.” It only “becomes visible as a body,” she argues,
“under some particular gaze - including that of politics.” 57 As Foucault’s
study of surveillance and punishment exemplified:

the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an
immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to
carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment
of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with
its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested
with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitu­
tion as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection
(in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated
and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body
and a subjected body.58
16 David Aers
It seems to me that such reflections as those of Riley and Foucault on “the
body,” production, and power are an immense help in carrying out the task of
breaking down the reifications, past and present, discussed earlier in this
chapter. They encourage us not to collude in any fetishization of categories
such as “the body” or “the humanity of Christ,” but to explore the processes,
performative acts, and powers in and through which they became fixed,
normative, seemingly inevitable. So we will be both encouraged and enabled
to ask whether “feminizing” the tortured body of Christ as material, for
instance, may not actually reinforce some basic premises and fantasies in
traditional patriarchal constitutions of “women.” This in turn will lead us to
ask whether particular late medieval “feminizations” of Christ may not
contribute to the divinization of maternity as the essence of “woman .” 59
This would hardly be the subversive and challenging innovation Bynum and
others have seen in these “feminizations.”
In pursuing these critical inquiries it is necessary' to bear in mind that
pleasures and desires, including pleasures that are viewed as transgressive,
even “delicious groveling” {HF 290), may be produced by current relations of
power as a move in the perpetuation of those relations of power. As Foucault
remarked in an interview with the editors of Q uel Corps in 1975, “power is
strong... because, as we are beginning to realise, it produces effects at the
level of desire .”60 This insight, part of Foucault’s critique of “the repressive
hypothesis,”61 should be particularly fruitful here. It suggests that the prac­
tices and symbols celebrated by Bynum as subverting the logic of patriarchy
need to be explored as possibly being among the very effects of the ec­
clesiastical and normative powers that she thinks were being circumvented by
making “women” the body on the Cross, and the body on the Cross
“feminine.” The abjections that she explicates as subversive might be better
viewed, to put the issue starkly, as themselves a product of modes of piety’
designed to make their practitioners objects of control - albeit, perhaps,
sometimes, or often, ecstatic ones. Judith Buder’s critical analysis of Kriste-
va’s “body politics” identifies the issues I have in mind here. She argues that
“Kristeva fails to understand the paternal mechanisms by which affectivity
itself is generated,” while the very vocabulary’ of affect renders the relevant
and productive paternal law invisible /*62 Indeed, this vocabulary, together
with Kristeva’s theories about “a pre-paternal causality,” the disruptive
potential of the semiotic and maternity, are now seen “as a paternal causality
under the guise of a natural or distinctively maternal causality’.” Butler
observes that “whereas Kristeva posits a maternal body prior to discourse
that exerts its own causal force in the structure of drives, Foucault would
doubtless argue that the discursive production of the maternal body as
prediscursive is a tactic in the self-amplification and concealment of those
specific power relations by which the trope of the maternal body is pro­
duced.”6^ This observation certainly encourages a far more critical and
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 17
cautious use both of Kristeva and Bynum than are found in some recent
attempts to argue for the subversive and empowering forces of late medieval
devotion centered on imitations of the dominant figuration of Christ’s body
and humanity.

[Aers goes on to point out how the Christ of the gospels displayed his
“humanity” in many ways other than having a body capable of being tortured
- eating in company, helping people, conversing with his disciples - and asks
whether there is any late medieval writing that concentrates on these aspects
of the “humanity” of Christ. He begins his chapter 2 thus:]

The Humanity o f Christ: II.

Representations in W ycliffite Texts
and P iers Plowm an
D a v i d A ers

C hapter 2 of T h e P owers of the H oly

But, as Austyn notiþ heere, pis maystir made his cros as a chayer, and tanate hangynge on pe
eras, fo r he hatipydelnese.
English Wycliffite Sermons, “In Die Parasceues”1

That on pe friday foluynge fo r mankyndes sake

lusted in Iherusalem, a ioye to vs alie.
Piers Plowman, B version, 18.162-32

In the first part of this chapter I consider how Christ’s humanity was
represented in Lollard or Wycliffite Christianity .3 Reflection on this opposi­
tional tradition can contribute to understanding the figurations of Christ in
the orthodox religion of the period and reminds us that these were not
inevitable, not uncontested, not politically neutral and not part of a homo­
geneous “traditional religion” in a homogeneous world .4 Lollards can exem­
plify some of the ways in which late medieval culture came to include
conflicts over what constituted appropriate forms of Christian discipleship,
over access to the Scriptures, over hermeneutic authority, over many aspects
of ecclesiastical organization, including its economic and political power, over
18 David A ers
the legitimate sources of religious authority and over such fundamental
symbols of Christian unity and salvation as the body of Christ, including
the form and effects of its presence in the eucharist.3 The figuration of Christ
in his humanity, together with the call to practice imitation of that figuration,
was as important to Lollard Christianity as to orthodoxy. But, as we shall see,
the constitution of that humanity was markedly different.
Before addressing some examples of Christ’s humanity in early Wycliffite
writings in English it seems appropriate to give a brief indication of the
master’s own approach toward the end of his life. He stressed that “Christ,
our God, head of the universal church, was during the time of this pilgrimage,
the poorest man .”6 Christ’s humanity was not only a model of poverty, but of
pacifism, of freedom from attachment to place (however sacred), of a
thoroughly mobile preaching ministry that involved a commitment to chal­
lenge established authorities - as befits the greatest of prophets, Wyclif
remarked.7 Once upon a time the friars had grasped the implications of the
Gospels’ figuration of Christ but that was a long time ago and today the
mendicant orders would be sadly unrecognizable to their founders.8 In
Langland’s terms, evangelical charity was once found “in a freres frokke”
but that was “fern and fele yeer in Fraunceis tyme; / In þat secte siþþe to
selde haþ he ben knowe” (15.230-2). Both Wyclif and Langland recall and, in
different ways, relate to their own circumstances earlier struggles between
radical Franciscans and the hierarchical church over the constitution of the
model of evangelical perfection together with its implications for contem­
porary pursuits of holiness. The struggles in question culminated in Pope
John XXII ruling that the renunciation of dominion and lordship was
irrelevant to the pursuit of evangelical perfection. The church’s lordship
and worldly power could not possibly be a problem for Christians.9 Wyclif
found this ruling, and the realities it sanctified, a sign that not Christ but
Antichrist was now lord of the church, a perspective that shares more than a
little with the representation of the church’s situation at the end of Piers
Plowman .10
Wyclif thus sponsored an imitatio Christi that depended on having read the
Gospels in a manner that extricated them from their conventional medita­
tions, ones so influentially turned into English by Nicholas Love. 11 The
imitation of Christ was to involve social engagement, an attempt by laity as
well as clerics to reform not only the inner self but the church, through
mobile preaching, through teaching and through making the Scriptures
accessible to all in the vernacular. Such an imitation of Christ would encour­
age challenges to the authority and power of the church in many domains:
legal, political, economic, military, and theological. In W yclifs own case these
included a clearly articulated policy of ecclesiastical disendowment to force
the church toward forms of life in accord with the version of Christ’s
humanity Wyclif found in his readings of the Gospels .12 A Wycliffite imita-
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 19
don of Christ would have encouraged energetic agency, both individual and
collective, agency that would have revolutionized the organizations of power
in the church and transformed the sources and forms of authority.
Not that he forgot the conclusion of Christ’s earthly pilgrimage. He
maintained that if Christ were to visit W yclif’s world as an unknown priest
to preach and practice as he had done during his earthly life, he would be
excommunicated by the Roman curia and unless he recanted the truth he
taught he would be condemned and burned as a heretic and blasphemer. This
is certain, he writes, because we can see how Christians who show a spark of
Christ’s discourse and seek to imitate his way are persecuted by the modern
church . 13 So W yclif’s representation of Christ’s humanity does not negate the
Crucifixion nor occlude his suffering. What it does do is refuse to split these
off from Christ’s prophetic ministry, its transgressions of existing powers and
its political, communitarian dimensions. It becomes very difficult to abstract
cross and suffering from contingent particularities of human power, author­
ity, justice, and self-legitimating ideologies. The imperative “to perform an
imitatio Christi, to become what Wyclif termed a Christicola, a dweller in Christ
in whom Christ himself is to be found” might well lead to persecution under
the present church .14 The preacher “was not to govern people but to direct
by word and deed into the ways of love” and his activities might well lead to
suffering, including death like Christ’s . 15 Such suffering would involve sacri­
fice, representative sacrifice of the self for the community, for the “salvation
of the kingdom as a populus DeiT If this happens, the situation recapitulates
that in which the Old Testament prophets were stoned; and stoned by the
same “Ecclesia hereticorum .” 16 Suffering, pain, and death are certainly not
the aims at all. The aims are the reformation of England, “reformatio regni et
ecclesiae,” one that in W yclif’s view depended on Caesar, on the lay ruling
classes and, particularly, the monarch .17 Such a rhetoric of suffering, and an
enactment of the fate it anticipates, has virtually nothing in common with the
self-tortures, individualistic abjections, and bodily imitations of a “feminized”
Christ that Caroline Bynum has illustrated, imitations considered in the
previous chapter. Indeed, in that context it is worth nothing that Wyclif
does not characterize either this suffering or Christ, its model, with images
and stereotypes of the “feminine.”
W yclif’s opposition to the dogma of transubstantiation in his last years is
well known and it is only recalled here to round off this brief consideration of
his representation of Christ’s humanity. He maintained Christ’s real presence
in the eucharist but not in the literal and bodily manner affirmed and so
vividly illustrated by the orthodox, as exemplified in the previous chapter.
Christ’s real presence was in spiritual power; his body present figuratively;
and the reception of Christ spiritual, in faith. The priest’s words did not
annihilate the substance of bread or the substance of wine any more than they
produced the actual body that was tortured, bled, and died on the cross, the
20 David Aers
body produced by the orthodox church .18 W yclif’s position was thoroughly
Augusdnian .19 But however Augustinian such views they could not be heard
with sympathy in the late medieval church, as the burning of Sawtry and
Badby would soon show .20 This was because the orthodox version of Christ’s
body, so literally and so efficaciously present after the priest’s words of
consecration, had become invested with immense power, immense utilities,
and had also become a stupendous guarantor of ecclesiastical and clerical
power, in just the ways Sarah Beckwith has recently described.21 As Gordon
Leff remarked many years ago, W yclif’s theology of the eucharist had
“directly ecclesiological consequences”:

By locating the change to the host in the spiritual coming of Christ, rather than
the physical disappearances of the bread, the role of the priest was correspond­
ingly altered. Where previously his words of consecration had made the bread
and wine into Christ’s body, these now became the occasion, the efficacious
sign (as he called it), of Christ’s hidden presence.22

Nor was the priest’s role, and the church’s role, merely “altered.” As the
defenders of the orthodox version of the humanity of Christ and its presence
in the eucharistie sacrifice understood, within the lines of a Wycliffite
approach the priest’s role could come to seem irrelevant, a role that could
certainly be taken by devout laypeople, men and women. They could discern
the potential effects of the shape they saw stalking onto their domains, the
doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, men and women, effects soon to be
detected among East Anglian laypeople: “every man and every woman beyng
in good lyf oute of synne is as good prest and hath as muche poar of God in
al thynges as ony prest ordred, be he pope or bisshop.” So Hawisia Moone of
Loddon maintained, a view supported by many other Norfolk and Suffolk
people forced to abjure and do public penance, including public floggings, in
that particular purge which saw the burning of William White, William
Waddon, and Hugh Pye in Norwich, in 1428.“3
People like these, finding much to commend, follow, and develop in
W yclif’s teaching, tended to represent Christ’s humanity and its imitation in
ways similar to those just ascribed to Wyclif .24 They aimed at radical trans­
formation of a wide range of Christian practices and doctrines, from the
eucharist to marriage, from pilgrimages to the nature of the priesthood, from
the place of Scripture to the current mandatory penitential systems, from the
role of images to the range of activities open to women. In this multifaceted
challenge to the most powerful and wealthy institution in Europe it is hardly
surprising that their vision of Christ should focus on his prophetic ministry
and lifestyle or that they should have had no interest in isolating the tortured
bleeding/nurturing body of Christ produced by the late medieval church as
the central object of devotion. In their paradigm, like W yclif’s, imitation of
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 21

Christ would not concentrate on this body or entail self-inflicted sufferings. If

violent suffering came to Wycliffite Christians, it was to be the result of
confronting powerful human organizations with teachings and practices
Lollards found entailed by the representations of Christ in the Gospels, but
which their orthodox opponents found subversive, anarchic, and demonic .25
They had, it seems, recaptured what a modern Catholic theologian calls “the
dangerous and subversive memory of Jesus .”26
How this “dangerous and subversive memory of Jesus” could work in early
fifteenth-century England can be exemplified by considering the Lollard
account of William Thorpe’s interrogation by Archbishop Arundel in 1407.27
Near the opening of the testimony Thorpe aligns “Cristis gospel” with the term
“freedom.” He goes on to argue that the cause of the Incarnation is to be
understood in relation to this term: “for which fredom Crist bicam man and
schedde oute his hert blood” (25). For Thorpe to mean freedom from sin
would be conventional enough. Any yet while this meaning may doubdess
be assumed it turns out not to be the one that concerns Thorpe. Nor does he
choose, here or later, to concentrate his imagistic or analytic attentions on the
shedding of blood he mentions here. Where then does he go with Christ’s
humanity? And what model for the imitatio Christi does he compose?
The “fredom” for which Christ became human is here part of a model of
Christ centered on the mobile and prophetic preacher committed to bringing
the “gospel,” and its “fredom,” to all people (25, 44-7, 49, 59). The model is
not the twisted, pulverized, tortured, bleeding body that had become the
dominant version of Christ’s humanity in late medieval devotion. Nor,
consequently, does it sponsor a call to imagine and dwell on such a body.
Still less, it follows, was it a summons to identify with this figure, whether in
the immensely influential forms cultivated in the Meditationes Vitae Christi (just
about to become a major vernacular text in the church’s attempt to eliminate
Lollardy), or in the more embodied forms celebrated by Caroline Bynum in
Holy Feast and Holy Fast.
The model and its imitation is exemplified in the account of Thorpe’s
activity in Shrewsbury, the place of his arrest. The archbishop charges Thorpe
with having “troublid þe comounte of Schrovesbirie” with his teaching (44—5;
see also 43). Thorpe does not seek to deny this accusation. On the contrary,
he claims to have been pursuing an imitatio Christi. He reminds his superior
how “alie þe comountee of þe citee of Ierusalem was troublid wiþ þe
techynge of Cristis owne persone.” In the divine humanity, Thorpe emphas­
izes, is found, “þe moost prudente prechour þat evere was or schal be” (45).
As for the trouble in the church, so memorably related later in the testimony
(52), Thorpe evokes his model: “al þe synagoge of Nazareth was so moved
a3 ens Crist, and so fulfillid wiþ wraþþe towardis him for his prechinge þat
þe men of þe synagoge rison vp, and þei þresten Crist out of her citee, and
þei ledden him vp unto þe hei3 þe of a mounteyne for to have þrowen
22 David Aers
him doun þere heedlyngis” (45). The model invoked here comes from Luke’s
gospel. It recounts how Jesus read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah,
choosing these words: “The spirit of the Lord is on me, for he has anointed
me to bring the good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty
to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year
of favour from the Lord.” Jesus then tells those present that the text is now
being fulfilled. But he accompanies this proclamation of emancipation with
disturbing warnings and memories: “no prophet is ever accepted in his own
country”; nor could Elijah and Elisha save all those suffering (Luke 4:16-27).
Here all become “enraged” and take him out of the town, “intending to
throw him off the cliff” (Luke 4:28—9). The model is of a prophetic preacher
bringing a gospel of freedom to captives, a gospel of healing; but also a gospel
that will incense those whose form of life seems threatened by such a
proclamation. And those threatened may be not only the leaders of the
established religious institutions but those Arundel describes as “þe bailies
and þe comouns” of Shrewsbury who, so he tells Thorpe, want the trouble­
some preacher executed (43). It is important to notice that while imitating
this model of Christ’s humanity may lead to physical violation and execution
it will only do so contingently. That is, the purpose and focus of the imitation
does not make bodily suffering the goal. On the contrary, just as Christ in
this instance escaped those who wished to kill him (Luke 4:30) so Lollards
were notoriously prepared to do what they could to escape the church’s
punitive aims. Their model taught them that imitating Christ meant a pro­
phetic, vernacular, and mobile proclamation of the gospel and its “fredom”:
persecution and, finally, violent death might be the outcome but the tortured,
suffering body was not the icon shaping the project.
The memory of the troublesome Christ, let alone an imitation modeled on
such a figure, was hardly prominent in orthodox devotion and the archbishop
is unimpressed with Thorpe’s typology. For him the issue is clear: Thorpe
preaches without episcopal licence and assumes a calling that sidelines
ecclesiastic authority: “3 e doon wiþouten autorité of any bischop. For 3 e
presumen þat þe Lord haþ chosen 30U oonli for to preche as feiþful dissciplis
and special suers of Crist” (45). Thorpe’s response is that his priestly office
gives him an especially sharp obligation to follow the “ensaumple of his
[Christ’s] moost holi lyuyage,” which means “to preche bisili; frelv and treuli
þe word of God” (45). As for the “autorité” here, Thorpe maintains it is in
the gospels, “Goddis word” (46). The archbishop treats this as grossly
irrelevant: “Lewed losel!... I sent þe neuere to preche” (46). He and his
subordinate not only hold different understandings of “autorité.” They also
assume different models, different images of Christ’s humanity and, it fol­
lows, of what would constitute imitating Christ in the contemporary world.
Thorpe’s relationship to the sources of his model in the gospels was plainly
mediated by his chosen teacher, “maistir loon Wiclef,” a teacher Thorpe
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 23
describes as “þe moost vertuous and goodlich wise man þat I herde of
owhere eiþer knew” (40-1). Time and again he returns to Christ’s humanity
as the model for his own troublesome and oppositional practices, “in pre-
chinge and in techinge” (50), a model that sidelines the role of the priest as
bestower of the sacraments, especially of the eucharist (49-52, 69-71).
Indeed, as this teaching should lead people “inward,” lead them to close
off their “outward wittis” and their habitual attention to “vtward seeing and
heeringe,” so he emphasizes that Thomas’s concentration on the holes made
by nails driven into Christ’s body and by the lance in his side was a symptom
of lack of faith rather than an orientation encouraged by Christ (59; see John
20:24—9): “siþ Crist blessiþ hem þat seen him neuere bodili and have bileued
feiþfulli into him, it sufficiþ þane to alie men þoruz heerynge and knowinge
of Goddis worde, and in doinge þeraftir, for to bileuen into God þou3 þei
see3 en neuere ymage maad wiþ mannes hond” (59; see also 79). The church’s
Christ, Thorpe maintains, is a version of his humanity which works “to make
men þralle” whereas, he reiterates, Christ’s Incarnation and death was “to
make man fre,” a freedom that includes freedom from many ecclesiastic
“obseruaunces and ordynaunces” that are not found in “þe lyvynge ne þe
techinge of Crist” (85).
Thorpe’s views on the eucharist are interrogated (52-6). Like Wyclif,
Thorpe turns to Saint Augustine to explain his understanding of the real
presence and the role of faith in the reception of Christ (54).28 The body of
Christ produced by the church is thus negated and with that its power and
authority. Again, the words ascribed to Arundel jusdy reflect the hierarchy’s
perceptions and treatment of the issues here: “I purpose to make þee to obeie
þe to þe determynacioun of holi chirche” (55).29 For Lollards such a purpose
showed that what passed for truth and knowledge was an effect of the power
they sought to resist. The representation of Christ’s humanity was enmeshed
in what Sarah Beckwith has analyzed as the mobilizations of “symbolic
meanings in the service of power.” 30
At this point it seems worth asking what a Wycliffite sermon on Good
Friday would do. Here, if anywhere, we might expect a convergence with
orthodox representations of Christ’s humanity and with orthodox devotional
forms around the Cross. In the Wycliffite sermon cycles so superbly edited by
Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon we find a sermon for the day on which
“men shulen speke of Cristis passioun, and se in what forme he sufferide.” 31
And yet, even here, no such convergence emerges. This seems surprising
enough to invite a brief account of how the writer treats the Passion and
Crucifixion in John 18 and 19. The mode of proceeding is typified by the
reading of Christ’s arrest. John’s text, the preacher notes, teaches us that
“Crist louyde not for to fi3 te” and this becomes an “ensaumple” directed
against the contemporary church which, while claiming to be Christ’s mys­
tical body organizes, legitimizes, and glorifies a range of wars (173—4). Yet
24 David A ers
Christ’s own nonviolence, the writer observes, involved an active and sus­
tained opposition to established power, one that showed exemplary “hard-
ynesse” (175). Even when it comes to the gospel’s brief account of the
scourging and crowning with thorns, and even though the day is Good
Friday, the sermon offers absolutely no focus on Christ’s body, none of the
traditional late medieval elaborations of the scene and its violence (179).
Instead of these, it examines the nature of Pilate’s injustice and moves on to
consider Christ’s trial as a trial for “heresye” (180). The Passion and Cruci­
fixion thus figure forth the constitution of “heresye” in late medieval England
and its persecution not only by church, by “bischops,” but also by the secular
powers Wyclif had hoped to involve in his projects of reformation, “seculer
iugis” (181). The writer addresses the way pope and cardinals “brennen men
as heretikes” for refusing to obey ecclesiastical laws that are human inven­
tions “not groundide on Goddis lawe” (181). In this way meditation on Good
Friday, Passion and Cross sustain both the model of Christ’s humanity we
have identified as Wycliffite and also its imitations in contemporary commun­
ities. To the very end of his life, on the Cross itself, Christ continues his
prophetic, teaching, and preaching ministry: “J>is maystir made his cros a
chayer, and tau3 te hangynge on þe cros” (183). 2 This striking and strangely
revealing image is then followed by the writer turning the seven last sayings of
Christ into a sermon on the seven sins which includes critical observations on
aspects of the modem church (183—4). Even when he comes to the blood
and water flowing from Christ’s pierced side, such a major focus in late
medieval devotion, the preacher offers none of the familiar images of breast
or milk or womb or vulva, no hints of “feminization” of Christ’s body, no
depictions of nurturing blood flowing into open mouths or chalices —in fact
none of the commonplace figurations addressed in chapter 1. He finds it
sufficient to comment that the blood and water miraculously flowing from
the dead Christ “bitokeneþ ful biggyng of man, and ful waysshyng of his
synne” (186). This sharp contrast with dominant late medieval traditions of
devotion continues in the sermon’s treatment of the deposition. Instead of
the Virgin Mary lamenting, swooning, and clinging to the dead body we read
reflections on the need to defend Christ’s teaching against orthodox priests,
the successors of priests who killed Christ, and the need for the help of
secular powers to help in this defence (186).33
Given this approach to Christ’s humanity on Good Friday itself, and given
Wycliffite opposition to the dogma of transubstantiation and its battery of
supporting eucharist miracles, it is not surprising that a Lollard sermon for
Corpus Christi day will stand in sharp opposition to conventional ones.34 But
because the eucharist was a crucial place for the production and reinforce­
ment of the orthodox figuration of Christ’s humanity, I mention it here, ven 7
briefly. As in W yclif’s thought about the eucharist, Saint Augustine’s homily
on John 6 is a guide and the writer explicidy invokes this (248).3:5 The real
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 25
presence is “goostly,” the reception of Christ “spiritual” and enabled by
“good loue” and faith - “and herfore seiþ Austyn ‘Bileue wel, and þou hast
etyn.’ ” The priest’s words neither annihilate any substance nor introduce
Christ’s humanity in the “bodily” manner orthodoxy maintained, “necke and
bac, hed and foot,” a manner vividly illustrated by John Mirk, Nicholas Love,
and many others, as we noted in chapter 1 . Christ’s presence is real and
sacramental, “sacramentaliche Goddis body,” so that if the Host happens to
be eaten by the mouse, the mouse “etiþ not Cristis body, al 3 if he ete þis
sacrament, for þe mous fayliþ gosdy witt to chewe in hym þis bileue” (247-8).
This is all extremely close to Augustine’s insistence that the sacrament is for
one who eats “within, not without; who eateth in his heart, not who presses
with his teeth .” 36 Yet however Augustinian the approach may be in the
sermons I have discussed or in the vision of Thorpe, or Wyclif, it is not
hard to see how an orthodox late medieval Christian might feel that Wycliffite
Christians not only subverted “þe sacramentis seven,” together with the
divinely sanctioned and exclusive mediations for the “graunt^ng of grace,”
but that “Cristis bitter passioun, 3 e sette not at an hawe .”37 Yet however
understandable, this judgment involved not only a misrecognition of Wyclif­
fite understanding of Christ’s death and their forms of devotion. It also
involved a misrecognition of just why Wycliffite approaches to Christ’s
Passion should seem so impious. For their revisions here contributed to a
perception that central aspects of contemporary doctrine, ritual, and icono­
graphy were not, as the church maintained, transcendentally warranted but
the thoroughly contingent productions of identifiable human agents whose
reiterated performances were both the effects and guarantors of powers
whose beneficiaries they were. The vernacular propagation of a gospel that
included such perceptions could hardly be welcomed by the church.
Conflicts over the representation of Christ’s humanity and the appropriate
focus on the Passion, Crucifixion, and earthly body of Christ were issues of
very immediate experience in late medieval England. A couple of examples
from Susan Brigden’s work on London and the reformation conveys some­
thing of this:

Crosses were everywhere in Tudor London as a remembrance of Christ’s

sacrifice, but Lollards despised such reminders. Why should the cross be
worshipped, asked George Browne, when it was but “a hurt and pain unto
our Saviour Christ in the time of his passion?” As the crucifix was carried to
the Lollard Thomas Blake as he lay on his death-bed, Joan Baker protested to
their parish priest in St Maty Magdalen Milk Street that “the crucifix was not to
give confidence nor trust in but as a false god.”38

Joan Baker and George Brown uttered these views in the early sixteenth
century but we can now see out of what a long tradition they spoke, a
tradition that had challenged orthodox figurations of Christ’s humanity and
26 David Aers
the devotions centered on them, identifying the dominant symbols of the
holy as productions of human power that lacked the divine foundations it
claimed. In her book Christ’s Body Sarah Beckwith includes a chapter on
“crucifixion piety,” during which she considers the trial of the Wycliffite peer,
Sir John Oldcastle in 1413, before Archbishop Arundel. She quotes a Lollard
account of Sir John’s response to one of his clerical interrogators who was
demanding if he would “worship. . . the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”: Sir
John “spread his arms abroad” and replied, “this is a very cross.”39 Out of
context, the gesture itself could be taken as yet another orthodox “imitatio”
of the officially produced body of Christ: perhaps like Eustochia of Messini
using ropes “to stretch her arms in the form of a cross”; or perhaps like
Margery Kempe’s, in Jerusalem:

whan þei cam vp on-to þe Mownt of Caluarye, she fel down þat sche mygth
not stondyn ne knelyn but walwyd & wrestyd wyth hir body, spredying hir
armys a-brode, & cryed wyth a lowde voys.40

But Margery is being helped by friars, as befits one whose approach to the
body of Christ whether in the liturgy, in visions, or in the eucharist confirms
official doctrine and iconography. However often she was interrogated her
orthodoxy was always vindicated - hence her charming encounter with
Archbishop Arundel, in which “her dalyawns contynuyd tyl sterrys apperyd
in þe fyrmament,” an encounter utterly different to Oldcastle’s.41 As for
Oldcastle, Beckwith quotes the following: “being asked what honour he
would do to the image of Christ on that Cross, he expressly replied that he
would only do it the honour to clean it and put it in good custody.”42
Oldcastle’s reply involves a striking rejection of the dominant production
of the body of Christ and the devotion organized around it. His subversion
was recognized as such, with the full consequences.
We can find a similar understanding, though often expressed more fiercely,
in the surviving ecclesiastical records of those Norfolk women and men
rounded up by the church in 1428-31.43 Here are some characteristic views:

... no more reverence oweth be do unto the ymages of the crosse than oweth
be doon to the galwes whiche men be hanged on. (148)

... the signe of the crosse is the signe of Antecrist, and no more worship ne
reverence oweth be do to the crosse than oweth be do to the galwes whiche
men be hanged on. (154)

... every' suche crosse is the signe and the tokene of Antecrist. (166)

To these people the cross itself had become “the signe” of institutional
power: the language they used was an attempt to disenchant (in their terms)
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 27
the cross, presenting it once more as the mark of actually existing power, “the
galwes.” Nor were they always satisfied with talk. In the record of John
Burrell, servant (“famulus”) to Thomas Moone of Loddon in a household
devoted to Lollardy, we find that as he and Edmund Archer were walking to
Loddon, at vespers, they saw a certain old cross placed near the gate of
Loddon Hall. John Burrell struck through it (“percudebat”) with a “fagot-
hook” he had been carrying (76).44 In an action related both to this and to
Oldcastle’s gesture at his trial, Margery Baxter of Martham supported her
argument against the orthodox use of images, including crucifixes, by stretch­
ing out her arms and saying, “this is the true cross of Christ, and you ought
and can see and adore that cross every day in your own house” (44). Little
could bring home more sharply what was at stake (all too literally) in late
medieval figurations of the body of Christ. As Sarah Beckwith demonstrates,
“images such as Christ’s wounds were not simply subject to an intensely
affective devotion of private religion - they were also symbols of political
power.”45 This was certainly the understanding of Wycliffites, one seemingly
shared in many ways by the church hierarchy in its attempt to exterminate
Lollardy and pertinacious Lollards. The humanity of Christ that these people
sought to imitate was particularly threatening because it called women and
men to develop collective forms of resistance to the powers of the church,
resistance to the institutionally guaranteed body of Christ, which in turn
guaranteed the sanctity of the institution’s power. Contrary to oft-repeated
modern assertions, it was not a model of Christ and holiness which fostered
an individualism and privatization of piety in opposition to communitarian
practices and aspirations.46 Persecution and the need to go “underground”
will always tend to isolate an endangered group from communities in which
the majority of people either support the established powers or, if they do not
positively support them, restrict their opposition to private or occasional acts
of noncooperation and resistance. Nevertheless, as Anne Hudson has shown,
Lollards strongly opposed religious forms that necessarily set people apart
from their fellow Christians involved in the daily practices on which the
preservation of their communities depended, practices that had traditionally
been classified as “lay,” as worldly or secular. This will to integrate Chris­
tianity in the daily life and daily groupings of the working community can be
seen in the traces of Lollard practices found in the records edited by Norman
Tanner as Norwich Heresy Trials*1 There we find early fifteenth-century Nor­
folk women and men organizing the study of the Scriptures and their forms
of devotion within their homes, trade networks, and villages, striving to
develop communities of worship, resources (material and spiritual), and
human solidarity in which orthodox boundaries between laity and clergy,
secular and sacred spaces, secular and sacred people, secular (vernacular)
and sacred (Latin) language were dissolved. The Lollard “school” and the
Lollard preacher/minister belonged within the “lay” community. From this
28 David A ers
perspective the urgency of the Lollards’ radical reformation of the sacraments,
the priesthood, and the place of women in Christianity becomes perfecdy
cogent. Their challenge to the patriarchal structures sanctified by the male
elites who ruled the church, ones reinforced even in standing arrangements
for divine worship, is especially noteworthy given current claims for the
allegedly “subversive” nature of the practices described by Caroline Bynum,
which we considered in chapter 1. In the contexts of such current scholarship
it seems reasonable to note that the project to dissolve the sacralized hierarchy
of the church, of divisions between priesthood and laity, women and men, did
not come from any “feminization” of Christ’s humanity, nor from the
dominant figuration of Christ’s humanity and the conventional affective
languages of suffering, abjection, and pathos. This will be no cause for
surprise once we have acknowledged that the conventional, suffering body,
together with its “imitation” was one of the effects of power, of an identifiable
historical power. The resources for a collective, radical challenge to this power
lay elsewhere. This the Wycliffites of late medieval England knew.

And so did the author of Piers Plowman. The dominant representations of

Christ’s humanity, together with the imitatio Christi these figurations spon­
sored, were not set aside only by Wycliffites. They were also set aside in this
great and profoundly Christocentric poem. Argumentative, politically
engaged, inconsistendy but pervasively reformist, it generated some extre­
mely radical positions on the church and its authority while remaining within
the framework of orthodoxy as this was constituted in the period between the
coming of the Black Death and the burning of John Badby.48 I shall now
examine the ways in which Langland represents Christ’s humanity, establish
what a Langlandian imitatio Christi might entail and —bearing in mind the
devotional, doctrinal, and cultural contexts followed in this and chapter 1 —
address the political and theological implications of his choices. I especially
want to suggest just why this poet should have found the dominant repres­
entations of Christ’s humanity incompatible with his own Christian project
and what his choices may tell us about the figuration of Christ in late
medieval English culture.

[Aers proceeds to an account of Piers Plowman, showing how fully Langland’s

Christ is portrayed as a man speaking to men about the conduct of their lives,
and not a man of sorrows. The chapter concludes with this paragraph:]

This perspective helps us remember, once more, that representations of

Christ are made in determinate contexts, contexts that are ecclesiastic, polit­
ical, and economic. It helps us remember that representations of Christ hold
political consequences, offering as they do vital models for the imitatio Christi
to which all Christians are, in some sense, committed. From a particular
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 29
model of Christ’s life and teaching flowed implications which were theolog­
ical and political, theoretical and practical, ethical and sacramental, individual
and collective. The great diversity of models within Christian traditions meant
that choices were made in establishing the model of Christ’s humanity that
dominated late medieval piety. The fact that the dominant model was not
favored by Lollards or by Piers Plowman needs to be studied within the
framework suggested here: one that seeks to return reifications, past or
present, to the social and cultural processes they represent and occlude;
one that encourages analysis that does not stop at the description of icono-
graphical changes but encourages us to address the political, ecclesiastical,
and ethical dimensions of such a choice against the dominant forms; one that
can contribute to the understanding of the historical relations between gender
and power in the so-called feminization of Jesus even as it illuminates the
reasons why groups of radically critical, reformist women and men should
have rejected such “feminization” of Christ’s humanity in their own culture.

[Chapter 3 follows, with reflections on the representation of the humanity of

Christ in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation o f Divine I^ove.]

N otes

Chapter 1. The Powers o f the Holy

1 Quotations from the Bible are from The Jerusalem Bible unless particularities of
the vulgate text seem relevant: then I use Biblia Sacra and the Douai-Rheims
English translation as cited in our bibliography.
2 Bynum (1987), 274; hereafter cited in text as HFy followed by page number.
3 Coleman (1981a), 232, 244.
4 Beckwith (1993); Rubin (1991); McNiven (1987); see also Aston (1994) and
Justice (1994b), ch. 4.
5 Aston (1984), ch. 1; McNiven (1987); Aers (1994c).
6 Kieckhefer (1984), 90. For examples of early opposition, see Camille (1992),
212.
7 Consult Beckwith (1993); Belting (1990); Bynum (1982), 16-19, 129-46, 151-4;
Bynum (1987); Kieckhefer (1984), ch. 4; Lane (1984); Macy (1984), 41, 86-93;
Marrow (1979); Ringbom (1965); Rubin (1991); Schiller (1972); L. Steinberg
(1984); Woolf (1968), ch. 2.
8 Marrow (1979), 204, 1, 8, 44; see also his examples on 109-10, 53.
9 Woolf (1968), 24-5, 26, 184-5, 231.
10 Beckwith (1993), ch. 1.
11 Rubin (1991), 303; see esp. 302-16, but chs. 3-5 passim.
12 Frank (1990), 41, 44, 43; see similarly G. Gibson (1989), 14, and passim.
13 The ideas about reification here owe much to Marxist traditions, especially Marx
(1970), ch. 1, sect. 4 and Lukács (1971). Especially influential has been their
30 David Aers
rethinking and application in Buder (1990); also relevant are Buder (1993) and
Brennan (1993).
14 Rubin (1991), 303; see also Rubin (1994), 113-14; also Dugmore (1958), 62, 78;
and Bynum (1991), 129-34; contrast the late scholastic treatment especially
represented by Gabriel Biel in Oberman (1963), ch. 8, sects. 1 and 2.
15 Besides work cited in note 7, see also Bennett (1982); Gillespie, (1987); and
Pezzini (1990).
16 Rolle (1963), 21. On Rolle’s work, see Watson (1991).
17 Meditations (1985), lines 609-24; see lines 425-706. See also Marrow (1979), 53,
95, 109-10, and Lane (1984).
18 Meditations (1985), lines 901-62.
19 Beadle (1982); see Shearmen, lines 310-32, and Pinners, lines 157-252; on
Nicholas Love, see Salter (1974), 52-3 and chs. 4 and 5. On the “greatest
emphasis” on nativity and passion, see Beadle and King (1988), 98; for even
more marked emphasis on this direction in the Towneley (Wakefield) cycle, see
Lepow (1990), 97. Some contrasts with the Chester cycle are argued for by
Ashley (1978) and Travis (1982), ch. 5 :1 remain unpersuaded by these arguments
and their theological claims. I cannot pursue this unpersuasion here, but hope to
explain it in the future.
20 Horstmann (1895-6), vol. 1, 198-218: page references in my text are to this
edition; on the work in relation to Nicholas Love, see Salter (1974), 103.
21 Kieckhefer (1984), 90.
22 Steinberg (1984), esp. 10ff., 28ff., 65ff., 82ff., 107-8; Sinanoglou (1973); Lepow
(1990) , 80-3, 87. For Caroline Bynum’s criticism of Steinberg, see Bynum
(1991) , ch. 3; she does not, however, contradict Steinberg’s discussion of the
area I have outlined here.
23 The edition used here is Horstmann (1885): the life of Mary' of Oignies is on
134—86, quoted here from 139-40; the Latin text is in Acta Sanctorum ivnii, vol. 5
of 25, 547-72; here see book 1, sect. 22. There is a modern English translation
by Margot King Qacques de Vitry 1994).
24 Horstmann (1885), 122-3.
25 Duffy (1992), 91; see ch. 3, “The Mass.” On Duffy’s idealizations and his
systematic occlusions of political powers in late medieval religion, see Aers
(1994c). For a nice contrast with Duffy’s pious image, compare William Thor­
pe’s experience in early fifteenth-century Shrewsbury (Thorpe [1993], 52).
26 See esp. Rubin (1991); Beckwith (1993); Lane (1984); and Sinanoglou (1973). For
oppositional potentials completely occluded by Duffy, see, for example, Aston
(1994); Justice (1994), ch. 4; and James (1983).
27 Rubin (1991; 1992); Beckwith (1993; 1992; and 1986). Much that Duffy’s
approach conceals is discussed in the works of Aston, Justice, Rubin, and
Beckwith; see also McNiven (1987).
28 Nicholas Love’s Mirror is read in the critical edition by Sargent (1992); still
invaluable is Salter (1974); see also Beckwith (1993), 63-70, and Hudson
(1988), 437-40.
29 Quotations here from Love (1992) xxix and xliv: see xxviii-xxxv and xliv-
lviii.
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 31
30 Sargent’s translation of the memorandum is on lxv, the Latin on 7; see the
numerous annotations “contra lollardos,” exemplified by Sargent, for example,
on xlvii, xlviii, xlix.
31 Erbe (1905), 173; on this sermon, see Rubin (1991), 222-4. On Mirk and
Lollardy, see Fletcher (1987).
32 Erbe (1905), 170-1.
33 Here we are on ground admirably explored in Rubin (1991) and Beckwith
(1993). On the virulent anti-Judaism of orthodox eucharist materials, see Biddick
(1993), 401-12, and Beckwith (1992); a typical example of this aspect can be
found in Erbe (1905), 251-2.
34 Erbe (1905), 169-70.
35 For examples of this commonplace, see Simmons (1879), 131-2, 367-73; and
Duffy (1992), 100-1.
36 Lydgate (1911), 1:87-115; quotations here from line 622 and lines 633-40.
37 See Lydgate (1911), p. 114, lines 641-8; on the apparatus in question, see LeGoff
(1984); Rubin (1991), 153; Duffy (1992), 142-3 and chs. 9-10.
38 Duffy (1992), 241-2, 239; here, see 234—56.
39 Influential works here include Southern (1953); Chenu (1968); Morris (1972;
1980); Murray (1978); Bynum (1982), 82-109; Benson and Constable (1982);
Stock (1983; 1990). Of especial interest to the present project is Moore
(1987).
40 Rubin (1991) and Beckwith (1993).
41 Bynum (1982); HF\ Bynum (1991; referred to in text as FR followed by page
number); for the history of the resurrected body, promised in FR, see Bynum
(1995), a work of wonderful, astounding erudition in the genre of intellectual
history, but not much interested in the specificities of historical institutions, and
the politics of theological discourses.
42 Biddick (1993).
43 The phrases in quotation marks are chapter titles in FR and represent Bynum’s
major concerns.
44 See seriatim-. FR 182, 184, 185, and HF 300. The term “medieval people” is
frequent in these pages and elsewhere: it is used as a homogenizing term often
contrasted with the equally homogenizing “modem people” {HF 300) or “mod­
ern sensibilities” {FR 182).
45 This identification pervades Bynum’s work, but see, for example, HF 294, 246,
252, 263, 264, 274.
46 Quotations here, seriatim, HF 26, 296, and 294 (italics in original).
47 HF 189, 191, 193; see chs. 3-6.
48 The kind of work that needs to be consulted as a corrective to Bynum’s
approach to this subject can be exemplified by the following: Bennett (1987;
1992); Dyer (1989); Hanawalt (1986a); Hilton (1975; esp. chs. 1-3); Hilton
(1985a), chs. 15-20; Howell (1986); Swanson (1989).
49 Bynum’s homogenization of “women” has been rightly criticized by Biddick
(1993), 391-6.
50 For examples of Bynum’s own awareness of medieval misogyny, see HF 22-3,
86, 261-3; FR 195, 200-5; also her earlier work, Bynum (1982), 14—16, 143-4,
32 David Aers
244—6. Bynum’s later work should be set alongside Dronke’s excellent but all too
brief comments on some of the Montaillou women persecuted by the inquisition
and Marguerite Porete in the final chapter of Dronke (1984).
51 See, for example, HF 208, 275; FR 195. To the sources for studying medical
discourses cited by Bynum should now be added the invaluable work of Cadden
(1993).
52 The quotation is from FR 206; see also 205-22, and HF 268-78, ch. 9 and plates
4,12, 18, 19, 25-30. Biddick (1993) includes important criticism of Bynum’s use
of visual materials.
53 Quotations from HF 189, 208, 218; see also 220-2 and chs. 6-7.
54 For an interesting example of a medievalist seeking to fuse Bynum’s materials
and account of empowerment with work by Kristeva, Clément, and Cixous, see
Lochrie (1991b), 3, 33-46, and Lochrie (1991a), 128-39; also Petroff (1991),
92-4, 105-8, 111-13; and Finke (1992), ch. 3, esp. 94-5.
55 See FR 195; she is very clear on the strengthening of patriarchal authority in
Bynum (1982), 15-19, 31, and ch. 4.
56 Bell (1985), 143.
57 Riley (1988), 102 and 106. This study seems a particularly good corrective to
Bynum’s rather uncritical deployment of the term “women.”
58 Foucault (1979), 25—6; in my view there are aspects of Foucault’s treatment of
power, production, and the body in Disàpline and Punish (and elsewhere) that are
not at all incompatible with attempts to explore these relationships within
Marxist traditions, particularly from the Frankfurt School.
59 Especially relevant here is the critical commentar)' on Kristeva’s work in Butler
(1990), 88-91; also Biddick (1993), 397^101.
60 Foucault (1980), 59; see similarly Butler (1990), 90.
61 See Foucault (1981) and Butler (1990), ch. 3; for a characteristically independent
and lively attempt to deploy both Foucault and Freud, see Dollimore (1991), chs.
8, 11, 12, 14 and the comments on this at 105-6, 175-90.
62 Butler (1990), 91; contrast the use of Kristeva in Lochrie (1991a; 1991b).
63 Butler (1990), 90—2; see also her comments on “the law’s uncanny capacity to
produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will - out of fidelity - defeat
themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to
reiterate the law of their genesis.”

Chapter 2: The Powers o f the Holy

1 Hudson and Gradon (1988-90), 3:183; references to this volume hereafter in my
text.
2 Piers Plowman: B version (Langland 1988); references to passus and lines hereafter
in my text. When reference is made to C version, edition is Piers Plowman: the C-
text (Langland 1979).
3 On the term lollard, see Scase (1989), 125-60, and Hudson (1988), 2-3; reasons
for using the terms “Wycliffite” and “Lollard” as synonyms given in Hudson
(1988), 2-4.
4 For a monumental and recent attempt to defend such a picture of “traditional
religion in England,” see Duffy (1992); on this attempt, see Aers (1994c) and on
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 33
the ideological tradition to which it belongs Aers (1988a); relevant to the issues
here is Patterson (1987), part 1.
5 The relevant literature here is formidable, but see particularly the following:
Aston (1984; 1993); Beckwith (1993), chs. 1-3; Cameron (1984), ch. 6; Hudson
(1988); Ladurie (1978); Leff (1967); McNiven (1987); Moore (1987); Rubin
(1991), ch. 5; Thomson (1965).
6 “Christus, Deus noster, caput universalis ecclesiae, fuit pro tempore huius
peregracionis homo pauperimus,” Opera Minora (Wyclif 1913), 19. See too De
Ecclesia (Wyclif 1886), 169-80, 187-90; Dialogus Sive Speculum Ecclesie Militantis
(Wyclif 1876), 11-16, 35—6, 68-9, 83-4; Tractatus de hlasphemia (Wyclif 1893), 69.
For a stimulating attempt to think again about the relations between Wyclif’s
teaching and the English rising of 1381, see Hudson (1988), 66-70; and, from
very different perspectives, Justice (1994), ch. 2.
7 See, sequentially, Wyclif (1887), 277-8, 266-8; Wyclif (1876), 42-3, 59; Wyclif
(1913), 76-7; Wyclif (1876), 56-8; and Wyclif (1893), 196-8. On Christ as
prophet, for example, see Sermo 3 in Sermones (Wyclif 1888), 1:18-19.
8 See, for example, Wyclif (1893), chs. 14-15, and note the use of FitzRalph
invoking Saint Francis against modern friars on 232-8.
9 For a summary of this controversy and the pope’s attack in the 1320s, see Aers
(1988a), 22-5, and notes 14-16 on 186.
10 On the modem church as being under the rule of Antichrist, see exemplification
in Leff (1967), 2:536-41; Piers Plowman, 20.53-379 (with which compare Wyclif
(1887), 258). On Langland’s representation of the church and apocalypticism,
see Aers (1980), chs. 2 and 3; Emmerson (1994), which includes important
comments on Kerby-Fulton (1990), which attempts to sideline the specificities
of post-Black Death England, of Wycliffism, and of much in Piers Plowman in
order to assimilate it to ajoachite apocalypticism.
11 Nicholas Love explicitly presents the Mirror as a substitute for the Gospels, one
allegedly more “pleyne” and more suitable “to común vndirstondyng” of “sym-
ple creatures,” the laity not fit for the “saddle mete of grete clargye,” whose
monopoly of direct access to the Gospels must be preserved; see Love (1992),
10. On the Wakefield cycle of plays and Love treating Christ’s ministry “almost
perfunctorily,” see Lepow (1990), 97. For comments on Wyclif’s Christ, see
Justice (1994b), 83, 85, and 101.
12 Wyclif’s insistence on disendowment of the church is pervasive and one of the
earlier strands in his development of radical reformist positions: see, for ex­
ample, De Ecclesia (Wyclif 1886), chs. 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16; De hlasphemia (Wyclif
1893), 32-6, 81-4, and ch. 17 (esp. 267-9), Dialogus (Wyclif 1876), ch. 36; see
Leff (1967), 2:541-3.
13 Wyclif (1893), 62; see also 72 and Wyclif (1876), 22. On this whole topic, see
Wilks (1994).
14 Wilks (1994), 53: this paragraph draws heavily on Lynn Staley’s perceptions of
the relevance of Wilks’s essay to our own project.
15 Wilks (1994), 53-7 (quotation from 53, 56, 57).
16 Wilks (1994), 59, 56.
17 Wilks (1994), 61; see Aers (1980), ch. 2.
34 David Aers
18 For examples of Wyclif’s teaching on the eucharist in his later years, see Wyclif
(1893), 20-31; (1876), 54; (1888), 2:453-63 (a sermon on Corpus Christi day);
good accounts of this teaching can be found in Leff (1967), 2:549-57 and in
Hudson (1988), 281-3.
19 For Augustine on John 6, see his Homilies on the Gospel o f John {InJoannis Evangelium
Tractatus), tractate 24—7, English translation in Augustine (1986). This work
is explicitly used by Wyclif in the sermon cited in note 18 (Wyclif 1888,
2:456).
20 On the burning of William Sawtry and John Badby, see McNiven (1987).
21 Beckwith (1993); also Zika (1988).
22 Leff (1967), 2:557; see also Rubin (1991), 325-^6 and McNiven (1987), 23-9,
38-40.
23 See the text edited by N. P. Tanner, 142; similar examples are on 49, 52, 60-1,
67, 81, 140, 147, 163, 166, 179; see Hudson (1988), 276, 325-7. On the role of
women in Lollardy, see esp. Cross (1978) and Aston (1984), ch. 2. For the city to
which these East Anglian Lollards were summoned, see Tanner (1984). For a
rather different but not contradictory approach to these Norfolk and Suffolk
Lollards, see Justice (1994b).
24 English Works of Wyclif (Matthew 1902), 451 and 377; similarly, 368-72, 376-82.
25 For characteristic orthodox response to Lollardy, in the vernacular, see Hoccle-
ve’s poem to Oldcastle, Hocdeve (1970), 8-24; see Hudson (1988), ch. 9. On the
place of the Gospels, see Matthew (1880), 371, 381-2.
26 Tracy (1981), 427.
27 The Testimony of William Thorpe is cited here in the text from Anne Hudson’s
edition as listed under Thorpe (1993). There is some discussion of Thorpe’s
“play” and his “imitatio” of Christ in Kendall (1986), 61-3.
28 See Hudson’s citations of Augustine on 118, n. 1,008 (Thorpe 1993); see also
note 19 above.
29 For an excellent account of the processes of such making, see McNiven (1987);
also Catto (1985b).
30 Beckwith (1993), 115, and Rubin (1991), 319-34; see similarly in William
Taylor’s Paul’s Cross sermon of 1406, edited with Thorpe’s testimony by
Hudson, in W. Taylor (1993), 5-13, 18-19.
31 Hudson (1988-90), 3:172-87, page references in my text.
32 Wendy Scase, examining the complex history of the term lollard, quotes from “a
tract on biblical translation” in which “Christ on the cross was ‘Þe most blessed
loller þat euer was or euer schal be... for our synnes lollynge on þe rode tree’ ”
(Scase 1989, 154). For the preacher of the Good Friday sermon I am discussing
here, “lollynge” would not convey a sufficiently active, focused teaching and
control, a control he finds in Christ even on the Cross. There is much in
common here with Saint John’s representations of the Passion and Crucifixion;
see Ashton (1991), ch. 13.
33 For characteristic representation of the Virgin Mary here, see Meditations (1875),
25-6, 29-30.
34 See Hudson (1988—9) 3: 247-8; and for a good example of conventional
orthodox materials here, Erbe (1905), 222—4.
 The Humanity o f Christ and Piers Plowman 35
35 For Augustine on John 6 , see note 19; the quotation below from “Austyn” is
from tractate 26.1, p. 168.
36 Augustine (1986), 26.12, 172.
37 Friar Daw’s Reply in Heyworth (1968), lines 95-8; on this text, Hudson (1988)
188-90.
38 Brigden (1989), 95.
39 Beckwith (1993), ch. 3; on Oldcasde, 70-6; quotation here is on 72.
40 See, respectively, Bell (1985), 143, and Meech and Allen (1940), 6 8 ; see similarly
70 and 140.
41 Meech and Allen (1940), 37; see Aers (1988a) 108-16; Beckwith (1993), ch. 4;
Staley (1994).
42 Beckwith (1993), 72; see also the Ely group discussed in Hudson (1988), 142 and
n. 152.
43 N. P. Tanner (1977), references to this edition of the record of these proceedings
follow in my own text.
44 Asked by John Wardon’s son why he had struck the cross with the fagothook,
John Burrell replied that even if he’d struck it more fiercely and with a sharper
weapon, that cross would never bleed (N. P. Tanner 1977, 76). He seems to be
contrasting his action with the church’s punishment of the living images of God
(for example, see Margery Baxter in N. P. Tanner 1977, 44). At the same time he
is suggesting that the church has, in effect, produced such devotional images to
reify and control the humanity of Christ through the Cross as institutional icon,
a reification his action symbolically undoes.
45 Beckwith (1993), 75.
46 Invaluable here is Anne Hudson’s “Lollard Society” in Hudson (1988), ch. 3; for
corrections to clichés about the Protestant invention of and practice of “indivi­
dualism,” see Collinson (1982).
47 N. P. Tanner (1977); on the courtbook Tanner edits, see Hudson, (1988), 33-6.
48 For editions of Piers Plowman used here, see note 2. On the reformist politics of
Piers Plowman, and their elusive, shifting relations to a shifting orthodoxy that was
in a process of making, see Hudson (1988), 398-408; Gradon (1980); Aers
(1990); Middleton (1990); Justice (1994b).

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Wilks, M. 1994. “Wyclif and the Great Persecution.” In Prophecy and Eschatology, edited
by M. Wilks, 39-64. Oxford: Blackwell.
Woolf, R. 1968. English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Zika, C. 1988. “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages in Fifteenth-Century Germany.”
Past and Present 118: 25-64.
 2
The W ife o f Bath and the Painting
o f Lions
M a r y C arruth ers

In her prologue, the Wife of Bath refers to the Aesopian fable of the painting
of the lion: the lion complains of a picture showing a man killing a lion and
suggests that if a lion had painted it the result would have been different. Just
so, says Alisoun, if women told tales of marital woe to match those of the
authorities represented in Jankyn’s book, they would show “of men more
wikkednesse / Than al the merk of Adam may redresse.” 1 The moral of the
fable expresses an aspect of that general concern with the relationship of
“auctoritee” to “experience” which she announces in the first sentence of her
prologue. Alisoun has often been characterized as attempting to do away with
authority altogether, as setting up a heterodox doctrine of marriage based on
female supremacy to replace the traditional medieval view, sanctioned by the
church fathers and by common law, that wives should be humble, obedient,
and submissive to their husbands in all things. But the Wife’s understanding
of the uses of “auctoritee” is more complex than this analysis allows. Alisoun
does not deny authority when authority is true; she tells us straight off that
authority and experience agree on the great lesson “of wo that is in manage.”
She does insist, however, that authority make itself accountable to the realities
of experience. The fable of painting the lion teaches that the “truth” of any
picture often has more to do with the prejudices and predilections of the
painter than with the “reality” of the subject and that truthful art (and
morality) must take account of this complexly mutual relationship. In her
prologue, the Wife describes her own progress toward building a “trewe”
marriage out of her experience and personality and uses her experience as an
ironic corrective both for the pronouncements of those clerics and other
authorities at whom she pokes fun in her prologue and for the idealistic
romancing in which she engages in her tale.
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 43
This paper first describes Alisoun’s practical economic experience as a
wealthy west-country clothier endowed with the property of her deceased
spouses and then indicates how she uses this experience to counter and
correct the ideal of subordinate wifehood painted by the “auctoritee” of
clerical writers like Jerome and of deportment-book authors like LaTour-
Landry and the ménagier de Paris, who stressed the goal of “gentilesse” prized
by the wealthy bourgeoisie. Alisoun triumphandy shows in her prologue that
economic “maistrye” not only brings her the independence and freedom to
love that the proscriptions of “auctoritee” deny her but enables her to create
finally a mutually nourished marital bond truer than any envisioned by the
traditionalists. Then, having demonstrated the undeniable virtues of experi­
ence, Alisoun treats herself in her tale to a controlled flight of comic fantasy
in the idealists’ mode, demonstrating through parody, the literary instrument
with which she typically corrects authority, her shrewd understanding of both
the delights and the limitations of lion painting.

“Experience” is the first and most significant word in the Wife’s prologue.
Though obviously referring to the events of her personal life - to her five
husbands, her cloth making, her love of travel - the word also includes a
larger context, the experience of her whole social class, the bourgeoisie
engaged in trade. It is in terms of this greater experience that we must
understand what Alisoun means by “maistrye” 2 and what her claim to marital
sovereignty rooted in “maistrye” would have meant to her peers.
Because property is the basis of that claim, the nature and legal standing of
Alisoun’s property are crucial considerations in understanding her prologue
and tale. As a cloth maker in the west of England at this time, she was
engaged in the most lucrative trade possible. By the late fourteenth century,
the English wool trade had become as much a trade in finished cloth as it was
in the raw wool itself,3 and the cloth-making industry had entered the export
markets, in addition to supplying domestic needs. There is every reason to
believe that Alisoun’s cloth making, which “passed hem of Ypres and of
Gaunt” (GP, 1. 450), was big business. Manly thought that Chaucer was
belittling the Wife in likening her skills to those of the great Flemish cloth
makers, but Chaucer’s enthusiastic appraisal of her professional worth is no
overstatement. The English cloth makers, thanks to protective legislation,
were able to underprice their European competitors, to the point of con­
tributing to a severe depression in Flanders, and thus to surpass the Flemish
product in quantity as well as in quality .5
The Wife is not a weaver but a capitalist clothier,6 one of those persons who
oversaw the whole process of cloth manufacture - buying the wool, contract­
ing the labor of the various artisans involved in manufacture, and sending
bales of finished broadcloths off to Bristol and London for export. Women
wool merchants and clothiers are common enough in the records of this
44 Mary Carruthers
period. They were usually widows, carrying on after their husbands’ deaths,
and some of them were very wealthy indeed.7 The term “cloth maker” refers
to that person, the clothier, who manufactures cloth .8 And to be a cloth
manufacturer in the west of England in Chaucer’s day was to be engaged in
the trade in the manner I have just described, as its capitalist entrepreneur.
As early as the thirteenth century, English cloth manufacture was evolving
from an urban-based, guild-monopolized trade to a rural-based “domestic”
industry, in which the clothier owned the material of manufacture throughout
the stages of production .9 In this shift from urban to rural lies the significance
of Alisoun’s dwelling “biside Bathe.” Bath itself was an insignificant town
throughout the Middle Ages, but the surrounding countryside of the Avon
valley was an area of vigorous cloth production, whose clothiers took
advantage of their proximity on the one hand to the wool-growing areas of
the Cotswolds and Mendip Hills and on the other hand to the major port of
Bristol.10 Alisoun is no modest artisan. Her extensive travels at home and
abroad are appropriate to her business as well as to her pleasure, and though
she is provincial she comes from the richest of provinces.
In addition to the wealth she has garnered from wool, a good deal of
property, including (most likely) the cloth business itself, has come to her
from her husbands. Her legal tide to this property is clear; she herself says
that she gave it freely to Jankyn when she married him, and one cannot give
what one does not own. Her claim is fully confirmed by the legal habits of her
community'. The customs of the bourgeoisie, customs that had the effect of
law, gave propertied married women rights that were denied them by both
the common law (which affected the rights of women whose property was
held in manorial fiefs) and the canon law. Among the burgesses, married
women retained the ownership and control of their property and could enter
into contracts in their own names, their husbands having neither legal liability
nor power of consent in such matters:

The common law was the custom of the King’s Court, and an outgrowth of
feudal conditions which applied particularly to the larger landowners; for the
upper classes of society’ its rules were no doubt appropriate, but it is only in the
local customs of numerous cities, towns, and villages that we can see how
different the life of the ordinary people was. In these customs, for example, we
find that the position of the married woman was very different from that which
the common law assigned her, the complete merging of her personality being
obviously out of harmony with bourgeois habits. Local customs frequently
keep the woman’s property free from her husband’s control, accord her liberty
of contract (which was denied at common law), and even allow her to trade
separately upon her own account.11

When custom conflicted with common law, the Court of Common Pleas
tended to rule in favor of the custom . 12
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 45
We can thus reasonably suppose that the Wife did indeed own in fee
simple all the property her husbands had given to her and that she was
accustomed to trade in her own name whether she was married or not. It was
common for husbands to leave property to their wives without entail or other
encumbrance and for the widow to be made executor.13 From earliest times,
the widow of a landed man had the right of dower, an automatic portion of
her deceased husband’s property.14 By the fourteenth century, the dower was
being replaced by jointure, property settled on the wife by the husband,
usually as a condition of the marriage contract but sometimes at a later point
in the marriage.15 Alisoun is obviously aware of the importance of jointures
and other property gifts:

I wolde no lenger in the bed abide

If that I felte his arm over my side,
Til he hadde maad his raunson unto me;
Thanne wolde I suffre him do his nicetee.16

This bald exchange may strike us as cynical, vulgar, and immoral, but we must
remember that by the standards common to her class Alisoun’s behavior is
simply shrewd business. And since we may assume from her account that she
was far too good a business woman to marry a man whose property was
encumbered with children or other undesirable heirs, she has amassed a great
deal of land and fee by the time we encounter her on the road to Canterbury.
It is within the context of her class and station that Alisoun makes her
correction of traditional marriage teaching and teachers, including Jerome.
The Wife’s attitude toward her clerkly opponents should not be judged as
primly as it often has been. She is not bitterly attacking them, for why should
she attack a body of material so clearly removed (as the fathers themselves
admit) from the lives of common wedded folk? She is not setting up a heresy,
a counter-religion. To argue this is not only to disregard common pastoral
doctrine and the customs of her class but to distort her own expressed
intention and the tone of her debate.17 “Myn entente,” she says, “nis but
for to pleye” (WBP, 1. 198). She does not deny the celibate ideal its due; she
merely points out its lack of domestic economy. A good wife should be
thrifty, and only an imprudent household would set its board exclusively with
gold and silver dishes (as Jerome himself said, echoing Paul).
A master of parody, Alisoun turns Jerome’s words back on themselves, to
his presumed discomfiture and to our delight. Jerome is one of those figures
who open themselves up to such treatment, for the most intemperate of
antifeminist Christian satirists is a man best known in his private life for the
circle of women disciples he collected, whose education he encouraged in a
series of notably eloquent letters. It is the Roman period of Jerome’s life, the
period of Paula, Marcella, Eustochium, and the unfortunate Blesilla, that the
46 Mary Carruthers
Wife remembers especially about him, as her epithet for him, “a clerk at
Rome,” indicates. And Alisoun is as exegetically skilled, as polemically
successful, as Jerome would have wished any of his women friends to be;
she has simply taken him at his word (“I do not condemn even octogamy”) 18
and remarried all those times. Jerome was, moreover, a man so brilliandy
vituperative that he constandy embarrassed himself. The Adversus Jovinianum
got him into a great deal of trouble at the time it was written, so much so that
his friend Pammachius withdrew from circulation and destroyed as many
copies of the treatise as he could lay his hands on.19 Jerome approved of this
action, which he called “prudent and friendly” in the letter of defense that he
wrote to Pammachius.20 The record of this controversy was not lost in the
Middle Ages. In taking on Jerome as she does, Alisoun is not engaging in new
sport but is making a rich joke at the expense of a notoriously ill-tempered
saint’s most notoriously ill-tempered work. The fate of Jankyn’s book is the
final turn of this excellent jest. For in burning the book that contains so much
of the Adversus Jovinianum, Alisoun is simply consigning yet another copy of
the treatise to the fate that Pammachius and Jerome himself ordered for it
when it first appeared.
But Alisoun’s most amusing darts are not necessarily her most important,
for her primary attack in both the prologue and the tale is directed at a body
of marital lore held commonly by her own class and articulated most fully in
the deportment books written to foster “gentilesse.” These books were
designed to teach young girls how to be good wives, and the books that
have survived21 tend to stress wifely goodness more than wifely skills. They
purport to be concerned with devotional instruction and morality, but as
moral works they are curiously self-contradictory. Their morality tends to be
“gentility,” manners and deportment only, and demonstrates a single-minded
concern with domestic propriety. Yet they pretend also that social reward is
unrelated to economic power, especially for women. They emphasize “genti­
lesse,” “honour,” “worship,” and “prow,” but in senses more appropriate to
the Franklin, even to the Merchant, than to the Knight. It is this fuzzy
“morality” of the deportment-book writer that especially exercises the Wife
in her early experiences with husbands and in her tale.
The two best-known deportment books are both French, and both were
composed in the last thirty years of the fourteenth century, The Book o f the
Knight o f I^aTour-Iuwdry (Caxton’s translation of the original French work) and
Ije Ménagier de Paris, which has been translated as The Goodman o f P a rish The
Knight of LaTour-Landry writes a beginning reading book for his young
daughters, all of whom he expects will marry soon. The ménagier is instructing
his young wife, aged fifteen:

for your honour and love, and not for my service (for to me belongs but the
common service, or less) since I had pity and loving compassion on you who
 The IYrtfe o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 47
for so long have had neither father nor mother, nor any of your kinswomen
near you to whom you might turn for counsel in your private needs. (Goodman,
p. 43)

Even though one of these writers is a gendeman and the other a burgess,
their instructions are remarkably similar. And their books, like all such books
for children, reflect more what the writers think marriage ought to be than
what it is. In these works the husband is a father-god, all-knowing, all-
powerful, generally benevolent, despotic; the child-wife’s only task is to
keep his honor and estate by practicing absolute obedience. They exemplify
biased lion painting at its worst. Yet sometimes they have their practical side.
The ménagier has useful chapters on such matters as falconry, equine diseases,
gardening, cooking, overseeing servants, and getting rid of household pests
like fleas and flies. The knight’s treatise lacks these lessons simply because he
is writing for unmarried daughters rather than for a young bride who must
cope immediately with the affairs of a large and unwieldy household, for the
letters of the Paston women make clear that their daily responsibilities were
just as burdensome as those of merchants’ wives.
A wife acted as her husband’s business partner and had to assume full
responsibility for the conduct of his affairs when he was away, as medieval
husbands with means often were. The ménagier and the knight are both
particularly concerned that young girls understand a wife’s obligation to care
for her husband’s honor and estate: to this end she must be patient, obedient,
and dutiful, especially in company, and she must not gossip or reprimand him
publicly. The appearance of matrimonial unity was as important as the
appearance of corporate unity is today, and for the same reasons. To teach
this, the ménagier tells a tale that is revealing of the moral assumptions of his
book. A merchant’s wife ran off with a young man who promptly deserted her,
and she was then forced by poverty into prostitution. Rumors of her fall
reached the community where her husband lived. To dispel them, he dis­
patched her two brothers to fetch her home, decorated his house, and received
her with great public display. He thus saved his wife’s honor, says the ménagier;
because it “touched the honor of himself and his children” (pp. 184—6). The
merchant was wise because in keeping his wife he kept his own estate.
A good wife is a wife who can keep her husband’s good. She was
frequendy required to act for him in a legal capacity. Thus we hear of
Margaret Paston holding a manor court while her husband was in London
tending his legal affairs (Davis, Vol. I, Nos. 188, 189 (July-Aug. 1465]). That
formidable royal aristocrat, Lady Isabel Berkeley, while in London trying to
keep herself out of the Tower, wrote to her husband:

Sur your matter speedeth and doth right well, save my daughter costeth great
good; At the reverence of God send money or els I must lay my horse to
48 Mary Carruíhers
pledge and come horn on my feet: keep well all about you till I come home, and
trete not without mee, And then all thinge shall bee well.23

With such discretionary power located in the wife, it was evidendy essential
that she be taught to respect her husband’s social and economic estate as her
own. And without such power, I would add, such injunctions would not be
so important.
If the deportment books were content to teach that social behavior was
simply a practical area of domestic economy, wifely “gentilesse” would get
little quarrel from Alisoun. But they are not, of course, because their authors
confuse manners and morals in a way that takes their writing into the realm of
genteel fantasy. One of their morals is that among women virtue alone will be
rewarded with success, a lesson that could not be further from the fact of
most medieval marriages. LaTour-Landry begins his treatise with a tale of the
king of England come to seek a wife among the three daughters of the king of
Denmark. The eldest was lovely but coquettish, the middle one bold of
speech, and the youngest meek, well-mannered, and ugly. The king took
the youngest because she was “ferme in her estate, behaving, and of good
maners” (LaTour-Landry, p. 17). His choice was against the advice of his
friends, who warned him, significantly, that he would “lose worship” if he did
not choose the oldest, the heiress. It is a pretty tale, but it must be contrasted
with the words of Stephen Scrope, writing around 1440: “For very need I was
fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by
possibility.”24 This is the same Scrope who, at 50 and “disfigured in my
person [by illness].. .whilst I live” (Gairdner, I, 154), was considered a fine
match for 20-year-old Elizabeth Paston.25 The sale by parents of the rights to
marry their children was a common practice among both gentry and bour­
geoisie in the later Middle Ages.26
In view of such discrepancies between medieval theory and medieval
practice, one must be careful about accepting the deportment books as
authorities on what was actually anticipated in a medieval marriage. These
books have much the same quality as modern books on dating etiquette for
teenagers, which offer advice we truly know to be honored more in the
breach than in the observance. Occasionally, the writers themselves will
admit the impracticality of what they appear to be counseling. At the end
of his retelling of the Griselda story’, the ménagier comments:

And I, that have set the tale here merely to lesson you, have not set it here to
apply to you, nor because I would have such obedience from you, for I am not
worthy thereof, and also I am no marquis nor have I taken in you a shepher­
dess, and I am not so foolish, so overweening nor of so small sense that I know
not well that ’tis not for me to assault nor to assay vou thus, nor in like
manner— And excuse me if the story telleth of cruelty’ too great (to mv mind)
and above reason, (p. 137)
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 49
There can be no doubt that the Wife’s behavior, especially in her first
marriages, is almost everything the deportment-book writers say it should not
be. But not quite, for they would have had to approve, though perhaps
grudgingly, her mastery of the practical aspects of domestic economy and
public “honour.” She has chaperones and witnesses (however compromised),
and though she chides her husbands “spitously,” there is no evidence that she
does so in public. I rather hope that those ten-pound kerchiefs of hers are out
of date,27 for it is more in keeping with the Wife’s evident economy to save
and mend good stuff than to be constandy buying the latest fashions. Her
“gites” are of scarlet, the choicest material.28 And, as she says, there are no
moths or mites in her wardrobes.29
The practical bourgeois wife clearly contradicted the idealized image of the
subservient wife held up as a model by “gentility” and by the church. Yet the
wit Alisoun directs at traditional marriage lore, coming as it does from the rich
experience of her class, should not horrify her audience (though they may take
exception to some of it) because they would recognize the common truth of
what she is saying. Take for instance her ridicule of clerical teaching concern­
ing the remarriage of widows. In fact, a rich widow was considered to be a
match equal to, or more desirable than, a match with a virgin of property. A
wealthy widow was considered a real find, even for a family as landed as
the Pastons. Edmund Paston writes: “Herí’ is lately fallyn a wydow in Woor-
stede whyche was wyff to on Book, a worstede marchaunt, and worth a m li
[thousand pounds]” (Davis, Vol. I, No. 398 [probably after 1480]). The sole
considerations are money and the inheritance rights of issue from previous
marriages. Thus Agnes Paston insisted that Scrope reveal in full before any
betrothal was arranged “if he were maried [to Elizabeth Paston] and fortuned
to have children, if tho children schuld enheryte his lond or his dowtír þe
wheche is maried” (Davis, Vol. I, No. 446). And Edmund Paston reassures his
family concerning the widow with the thousand pounds that she “has but ij
chylderm whyche shalbe at þe dedys charge.”30 Nobody mentions the slight­
est reservation about the morality of marrying widows. Nor do we find such a
lack of concern only among the practical Pastons. The Knight of LaTour-
Landry praises the piety of widows who do not remarry7, but it is clear that his
expectations for his own daughters are quite different:
But, my faire doughters, take hereby a good ensaumple, that yef be fortune ye
fall into a good marriage, and afterwards God take youre husbondes from you,
wedde you not aven vnauisely for vain plesaunce, but werkithe bi the counsaile
of youre true frendes, (pp. 156-7)

And the ménagier, who is a very7moral man indeed, clearly expects his young
wife to marry again upon his death (pp. 42, 109).
As Alisoun knows from experience, the true fruits of marriage are
described neither in Jerome nor in the deportment books but are set in the
50 Mary Carrutbers
marriage bed. Its important spoils for her are neither children nor sensual
gratification but independence.31 Marriage is the key to survival, and that is
what Alisoun seeks and finds. Her parents married her off when she was 12,
an early enough age to suggest either notable greed or straitened financial
circumstances on their part. The extent to which parents who were set on a
marriage would go in order to break the will of a reluctant daughter is
chillingly attested by the experience of Elizabeth Paston when her mother
had bound her to the dreadful Scrope:

sche hath son Esterne [this letter was written 29 June] þe most p^rt be betyn
onys in þe weke or twyes, and som tyme tywes on o day, and hir hed broken in
to or thre places. (Davis, Vol. II, No. 446)

After such treatment poor Elizabeth gave in and agreed to “rewle hire to hym
as sche awte to do” even though “his persone is symple,” though for other
reasons the marriage finally fell through. It is difficult to imagine Alisoun’s
experience with husbands one through three as any better than the melan­
choly misalliances contemplated in the pages of the Paston letters. The lesson
that Alisoun has learned is obvious: marriage is contracted for money, and
the acquisition of money is equivalent to the attainment of honor, respect,
and independence. She alternately chides and flatters her old husbands into
allowing her to walk about the town in her good clothes, but her freedom is
hard earned:

And therefore every man this tale I telle:

Winne whoso may, for al is for to selle;
With empty hand men may no hawkes lure.
For winning wolde I al his lust endure,
And make me a feined appetit -
And yit in bacon hadde I nevere délit.
(WBP, II. 419-24)

The root of marital “maistrye” is economic control. The husband deserves

control of the wife because he controls the estate; this is a fundamental lesson
in the deportment books. As the tnénagier says, a wife should behave according
to her husband’s desires for he “ought to be and is sovereign and can increase
and diminish all” (p. 112). The logic is clear: sovereignty is the power of the
purse. This is not a spiritual doctrine but a property doctrine, based on the
facts of a mercantile economy. Similarly, Alisoun realizes that sovereignty7 is
synonymous with economic control:

They hadde me yiven hir land and hir trésor;

Me needed nat do lenger diligence
To winne hir love or doon hem reverence.
(WBP, II. 210-12)
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 51
Her logic is neither unique nor shocking. For why did the king of England
reward the youngest of Denmark’s daughters with his rich person? For the
reverence she did him, of course. Alisoun carries the lesson to its conclusion;
once reverence is rewarded, the need for it is past.
Why Alisoun married her fourth husband is unclear from her prologue, but
we may assume it had something to do with “ricchesse,” since Jankyn is the
only exception she makes to this rule. Number four occupies her primarily as
an occasion for remembering number five and her prime - the dances, carols,
and entertainments that her money and her husband’s absence on business
allowed her to enjoy:

Therefore I made my visitaciouns

To vigilies and to processiouns,
To preching eek, and to thise pilgrimages,
To playes of miracles and to mariages.
(WBP, II. 561-4)

A major part of her motive for desiring to hear sundry tales, to see and to be
seen at these public occasions, was surely business, her own thriving cloth
trade and her husband’s as well. Yet it is clear that, by this point in her career,
pleasure —even love —is a motive she is also free to entertain.
Alisoun is no simple acquisitive machine. Chaucer’s brilliant stroke is to
give her a streak of romance that blossoms in direct proportion to her
accumulated wealth. Husband number four calls forth her fine lyricism
“Upon my youthe and on my jolitee” (WBP, 1. 476). Her happiness at
this stage in her life, however, can have little to do with the quality of that
fourth marriage, which was as battle-ridden and woeful as any of the first
three. What has changed for her is the degree of her financial independence.
She waxes lyrical at this point in her life because she can now afford to; she has
bought the freedom to “daunce to an harpe smale, / And singe, ywis, as any
nightingale, / Whan I hadde dronke a draughte of sweete win” (WBP, II.
463-5). The moral of this experience is not hard to draw: independence of
spirit blooms with economic independence, the freedom to give freely.
The full flower of Alisoun’s awakened heart is her gift to Jankyn of the
“maistrye” of her property. She gives freely, consciously, as a token of perfect
love, a sign of pure faith, a pledge of true “gentilesse.” It is the extravagant
gift of an extravagant sentiment, of “love and no richesse,” and it promptly
gets her into the worst trouble of her woeful life. For her gesture does not
inspire a corresponding generosity in him. Instead he proceeds to rob her of
her independence and her will. Her one romantic excursion ends in a deaf­
ness symbolic of her failure to heed her own lesson: “With empty hand men
may no hawkes lure.” It is a lesson she will not forget again.
Jankyn provides the Wife her most painful encounter with traditional
authority, and the terms of her ultimate success in her marriage to him
52 Mary Carruthers
express the full complexity of the truth of her experience. Jankyn believes in
“auctoritee,” being too young to know that “maistrye” derives not from
an arbitrary schema, however ancient, but from that skill and knowledge
which are acquired through experience and are respectful of the real
intricacies of local custom and personality. He is not an eccentric; he is
merely a very young man who has suddenly been given control of the entire
estate of a formidable older wife and who feels understandably inadequate to
the task.
Alisoun tells us that Jankyn “somtime was a clerk of Oxenforde, / And
hadde laft scole and wente at hoom to boorde / With my gossib, dwelling in
oure town” (WBP, II. 533-5). All that these lines indicate is that Jankyn is a
local youth who had gone to university for a time (thus acquiring the tide of
clerk) and had left school to come home and get along in the world by means
of his best assets, his legs. Fortunately, his landlady’s best friend was a
wealthy woman with an excellent record of oudasdng husbands. It is unlikely
that Jankyn, who had left Oxford before he was twenty, had completed any
sort of degree, nor should we assume that he had any intendon of doing so.
The tide “clerk” implies nothing about the seriousness of his clerical voca­
tion, student tonsure being a rite performed more often by the barber than by
the bishop.33 The names of married clerks and married masters occur
regularly in Oxford records of the late fourteenth century, and their presence
suggests strongly that secular influences were commonplace in certain facul­
ties of the university, particularly in the arts, but also in medicine and, to some
extent, in civil law.34 The university was often the route of advancement for
young men of Jankyn’s class, who spent a few years in the arts curriculum
preparing for careers without orders. The early registry books of Merton,
Exeter, and New colleges reveal the names of many students who came to
Oxford during the late fourteenth century, stayed for three or four years
without taking a degree, and then left their studies for worldly pursuits.33
Jankyn’s closest analogue is not the scholarly Clerk, but Nicholas; they are
equally, and in the same ways, “hende.”36
Jankyn, through his wife’s indulgence, has been elevated to the status of a
wealthy burgess. Such a responsibility presumably weighs heavy on the
shoulders of so young a man, so recently discovered following the bier
(probably for money) of a town notable.3 And with all the cowardice and
callousness of his years, Jankyn takes refuge in old authorities to proscribe the
behavior of his wife by reading to her every night from his “book of wikked
wives.” He is behaving not like a medieval cleric but like an inexperienced
medieval husband, for the book is Jankyn’s version of a deportment book,
with the conventional age relationships of husband and wife hilariously,
outrageously, reversed.38
Jankyn is all “auctoritee” and no “experience,” and such a combination is
dangerous, as Alisoun discovers from his behavior. She learns more than this
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 53
simple lesson, however. For in sentimentally relinquishing her estate to
Jankyn, she gave away the basis on which she was able to make the gift in
the first place, and her consciousness of the real importance of property to
love is the complex truth that this final experience with Jankyn brings to her.
She realizes fully the foolishness of her momentary indulgence. That was a
“quainte fantasye,” most untypical of her class. And I think that it is within
the context of her misgiven gift that we should read her efforts to explain her
aberrant heart:

I folwed ay my inclinacioun
By vertu of my constellacioun;
That made me I coude nought withdrawe
My chambre of Venus from a good felawe.

I loved nevere by no discrecioun,

But evere folwede myn appetit,
Al were he short or long or blak or whit;
I took no keep, so that he liked me,
How poore he was, ne eek of what degree.
(WBP, II. 621—4, 628-32)

The last line quoted, plus her earlier word “discrecioun,” provides the social
context in which we should understand her excuses. The Wife is indeed
grabbing at motives in these lines, but not out of an attack of ecclesiastical
scruples. Her action in marrying the penniless Jankyn would have seemed the
height of stupidity to all members of her class, and it is her sense of her
extreme folly in the eyes of her neighbors, and in her own eyes as she looks
back on the experience, that produces her self-apology. “Allas, alias, that
evere love was sinne!”39 not only in the view of Jerome but in the light of all
the practical wisdom of her class.
And then to compound the folly by giving her money away! Here no
excuse will serve, and she attempts none:

What sholde I save but at the monthes ende

This joly clerk Janekin that was so hende
Hath wedded me with greet solempnitee,
And to him yaf I al the land and fee
That evere was me yiven therbifore -
But afterward repented me ful sore:
He nolde suffre no thing of my list.
(WBP, II. 633-9)

Her last line is not the petulant comment of a spoiled child but the moment
of truth for a generous master whose free gift has been abused by an ignorant
54 Mary Carruthers
apprentice. Love and economics have a proper relationship for women as
well as for men; they are not unrelated concepts, whatever the writers of
romances (and deportment books) may pretend. Ignorance of that lesson
invites a destructive sentimentality that breeds marital tyranny. Alisoun
realizes simply that, without the sovereignty over herself that “richesse” has
brought her, she loses her freedom to love. “Sovereinetee,” “maistrye,”
“fredorn,” “richesse,” and “love” are brought together as aspects of one
whole truth at the end of her prologue.
And so the master resumes her “maistrye.” As she takes back her property,
she assumes the household sovereignty that her property right gives her:

And whan that I hadde geten unto me

By maistrye al the sovereinetee,
And that he saide, “My owene trewe wif,
Do as thee lust the terme of al thy lif,
Keep thyn honour, and keep eek myn estât,”
After that day we hadde nevere debat.
God help me so, I was to him as kinde
As any wif from Denmark unto Inde,
And also trewe, and so was he to me.
(WBP, II. 823-31)

She is true to Jankyn, keeping her honor and his estate, because good
business decrees that she be so - and because she has learned to join business
with her heart.
The Wife’s tale should be understood in the context of her prologue rather
than as a wishful alternative to it, for the story’s utopian simplicity of thought
is severely qualified by the teller. Critics are apt to take its sentimental
idealism at face value, but I think that this is an error, for though the Wife
has been capable of sentimentality, she knows too much now to indulge
herself in it seriously again, even in a tale. Instead, she reveals her own fine
comic understanding both of the delights of lion painting and of its essential
untruthfulness. Her tale gives full rein to the ideals of sentiment but never lets
us forget that they exist exclusively “In th’olde dayes of the King Arthour”
(WBT, I. 1). It is her contribution to the exemplary stories of the deportment
books, for it is surely their ethos that the Wife has especially in mind.
The tale teaches “proper” marriage relationships. Only, of course, it is an
exemplum that turns the ideas of the male deportment-book writers upside
down - and, viewed from that angle, they seem comic indeed. The ménagier,
articulating the sentiments of men of his class, states that the husband ought
to be, and is, sovereign because he can increase and diminish all. On the
contrary, Alisoun demonstrates, the wife ought to be sovereign because it is
she who can increase and diminish all, through her magical powers. Her tale
is strongly akin to the deportment-book stories in both method and sub­
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 55
stance; it is askew only in gender. It shares with them the voice of the all-wise
older counselor, the aristocratic milieu, the concern with virtue (that of the
younger person being counseled especially), the emphasis on gentility, the
showpiece exemplum against gossip,40 and the digressive, informal manner of
storytelling. The chief difference between them, besides the obvious one of
sex roles, lies in intention. The deportment-book writers do not often seem
aware of the problems of truth that are inherent in the exemplary genre, the
painting of lions and hunters, but Alisoun clearly is. The result is a significant
difference in tone. The one is solemn and hortatory, the other not so. The
Wife of Bath’s tale is funny. That is a crucial point to remember.
The double sense of what constitutes gentility that we see in the instruc­
tions of the deportment-book writers is the Wife’s starting point and the
fulcrum of her jest.41 The old hag and the rapist-knight understand “genti-
lesse” in different ways. She sees it only as an inner, moral quality, and he
defines it solely in terms of birth and class. The hag expresses the deportment
books’ idealized view of “gentilesse” and the knight a practical, class-based
version. The knight believes that gentlemen can do whatever they want to
anybody - except marry penniless old hags - without losing their “genti­
lesse.” His class consciousness is much in evidence. “Allas,” he cries, “that
any of my nacioun / Sholde evere so foule disparaged be” (WBT, II. 212-13),
and he objects that the hag is “comen of so lowe a kinde” (WBT, I. 245). He
is simply articulating the practical marriage standards of gentlefolk: one can
marry up or across but never down, certainly not without a great deal of
money to offset the match.
This is not the way genteel people ought to argue, however, and the old
hag will have none of such reasoning. She takes up the young criminal’s
objections in their proper order, treating the most serious at greatest length.
And that, of course, is “gentilesse,” which she takes to mean innate moral
worth. Her teaching on the subject could come straight out of a deportment
book, particularly from a tale such as the one about Denmark’s daughters:
“Heer may ye see wel how that genterye / Is nat annexed to possessioun—
For gentilesse cometh fro God alione” (WBT, II. 290-1, 306).
The next most important subject is money, and again the hag takes the
genteel position: “The hye God, on whom that we bileve, / In wilful poverte
chees to live his lif ” (WBT, II. 322-3). This is also a deportment-book lesson,
exemplified in the tale of poor Griselda in the ménagiet*s book. But though
Griselda was rewarded for her poverty with a princely hand, the real-life
chance of any poor and lowly girl being so advanced for her morals alone was
inconceivably small. Age and looks are the last items on the hag’s agenda, as
well they should be, for in the light of true virtue only an idiot (or an
imperfect human being) would care about such attributes. But the old hag
is kind in the end. As she tells her browbeaten bridegroom: “sin I knowe your
délit, / I shal fulfille youre worldly appetit” (WBT, II. 361-2).
56 Maty Carruthers
The story of the magical hag and the rapist, though it has superficial
analogies to Alisoun’s experience with Jankyn, also has crucial differences.
Economic power is banished from the tale and replaced by fairy magic. But
the relationship of economics to love is a real one, as Alisoun has proved in
her prologue “with muchel care and wo.” In the tale, however, the hag’s
magic turns her into a gendeman’s dream at the mere casting up of a curtain.
She rewards the youth’s pledge to let her “chese and governe as me lest” by
honoring his pleasure, just as every good deportment-book heroine should.
The hag is a benign despot, who smiles over the wallowings of ordinary
mortals in a world in which she knows all the answers and controls all the
options. And, as in all deportment books, the benignity of her despotism
requires the absolute subservience of her mate.
The hag’s intelligence is limited in ways that Alisoun’s is not. Her magic
serves as a blind for her, relieving her of the need to test her propositions in
“experience.” She argues positions that Alisoun has long rejected, especially
when she denies any importance to “possessioun.” The obtuseness bred by
her insulation from experience parallels the knight’s moral stupidity. Herein
lies a major difference between the Wife’s lion and the lions portrayed by the
writers of deportment books. The Wife’s tale is not just a piece of special
pleading. Its real seriousness lies precisely in its refusal to succumb to the
blandishments of “th’olde dayes of the King Arthour.”
It is an easy temptation to sentimentalize the Wife for telling the tale she
chooses. That she does so instead of relating the cruder “Shipman’s Tale,”
however, is Chaucer’s respectful gift to the acuteness of her intelligence, not
to the pathos of her emotions. Having mastered through “tribulación” the
harsh economics of marriage, Alisoun sought the reward of her demonstrated
skills in a sentimental attachment to Jankyn and discovered that marital bliss
is really based on economic power after all. The shrewdness that this
experience taught her does not desert her in her tale. Rather, painting her
own lion becomes an occasion for her to reveal the sentimentality7, the
romance, involved in any idealistic painting.
The Wife does not identify herself with the lion she paints, the old hag.
The hag argues deportment-book virtues, and her magic is certainly showy.
But, as Alisoun knows, the truly magical element of the tale is not the hag’s
transformation, not the bliss issued in by the husband’s submission to his
wife’s tyranny, but the “parfit joye” of their marriage even though she is old
and come of low kindred. Unlike Alisoun, magical hags do not thrive “biside
Bathe.” And thriving Alisoun is, for though one critic sees her as a figure of
“aged lust” dancing “over the grave,”42 the fiftyish Wife is hardly a candidate
for a tombstone. Alisoun herself states, in a fine housewifely metaphor, that
the flour of her beauty is gone and only the bran is left - yet Our Lord
refreshed many a man with barley bread. To see the Wife as the ugly old
crone of her tale, devastated by the loss of youthful bloom, is to sentimental­
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 57
ize her well beyond the bounds of the text. Her portraitist describes her as
fair of face, and there is no reason to doubt him.
Practicality and shrewdness are surely not enough to get Alisoun into
heaven, as she immediately tells us, but neither should they condemn her
to hell. Purgatory is the state she is most familiar with from the trials of her
marriages; yet we know from Dante that purgatory is characterized by
kindness and hope as well as by pain. The Wife’s cheerful acceptance of a
lowly place in the Lord’s vineyard invigorates and infuriates those pilgrims
who attempt to answer her and who, in pointing to her self-confessed
shortcomings, manage not to disarm the strength of her practical concord
with her world and time but to reveal the weakness of their own under­
standing. For lion painting is dangerous sport, apt to redound badly upon the
artist unless she is conscious of the underlying game, and that knowledge
Alisoun shares with very few of her fellow pilgrims.

N otes

1 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, II. 701-2; hereafter cited in the text as WBP. All
textual references to the Canterbury Talesy cited parenthetically by abbreviation, are
to E. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer's Poetry, 2nd edn. (New York: Ronald, 1975).
2 The MED glosses of “maistrye,” “maister,” and “maistress(e)” make it clear that
in Middle English “mastery” connotes skill and the authority or control deriving
from superior ability, rather than the idea of simple dominance devoid of merit or
skill.
3 Eileen Power states that in 1310-11 English wool exports totaled 35,509 sacks,
virtually all of raw wool, whereas in 1447—8, exports totaled 21,079 sacks, of
which 13,425 were cloth {The Wool Trade in English Medieval History [London:
Oxford University Press, 1941], p. 37). A chart showing the growth in cloth
exports in relation to those of raw wool for the period 1350-1540 indicates that in
the last decade of the fourteenth century cloth and wool exports were equal for
the first time (E. M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, 2nd edn. [London:
Methuen, 1967]).
4 J. M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (New York: Holt, 1926), p. 229.
5 Carus-Wilson, pp. 239-62, esp. pp. 259-60. See also Power, Wool Trade, p. 101;
May McKisack, England in the Fourteenth Century (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1959), pp. 356-7; and T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 315-16. It is worth noting that
by the time of Richard II royal cloth purchases were virtually all from English
clothiers dealing in English cloth, though in the reign of Edward II such
purchases had been mainly of foreign-manufactured cloth. Flemish cloth, which
dominated early in the century, disappeared almost completely from the royal
accounts by the 1330s (Carus-Wilson, p. 242, n. 3).
6 Carus-Wilson, p. 262. See also Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 67.
58 Mary Carruthers
1 Carus-Wilson, pp. 92-4. See also Power, Medieval Women, pp. 56-7, and Sylvia
Thrupp, The Merchant Class o f Medieval London (1948; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 169-74.
8 MED, s.v. “Cloth,” def. 8(a). Manly believed that the Wife was a weaver, a
member of a guild of weavers in the suburb of St Michael’sjuxta Bathon “biside
Bathe.” But Chaucer does not say that she is a weaver, let alone a guild member.
Alisoun’s trade follows a newer organizational pattern than the one of which
Manly was apparendy thinking. A cloth maker is a manufacturer of cloths, the
person responsible for the production of broadcloths or half-cloths, those units
of regulated size in which woolen material was produced and sold. The organi­
zation of the industry in the west counties at this time placed that responsibility
in the hands of the clothier, not of the artisans who performed the various tasks
leading to the final product. While it is true that the phrase “maken cloth” can be
used in a restricted sense (as in Piers Plowman, B.v.215—16 and B.vi.13-14) to
refer, respectively, to the activities of weaving and spinning, Langland specifies
in these lines exactly which cloth-making activity he intends. When the phrase is
used without such qualifiers, it refers to the general manufacture of cloth, as
Chaucer makes clear by his reference to “hem of Ypres and of Gaunt,” the
Flemish manufacturer-merchant-exporters whom the Wife and her peers have
now surpassed. See, in addition to the citations in MED and OED, s.v. “Cloth-
maker,” the usages quoted by E. Lipson, A History of the Woollen and Worsted
Industries (London: Black, 1921), pp. 44, 112, and by Thrupp, p. 272; and the
remarks of Kenneth G. Ponting, The Woollen Industry of South-West England (Bath:
Adams and Dart, 1971), pp. 19-20.
9 E. Lipson points out that the clothier-entrepreneur is a figure distinctive to the
west-country cloth trade (A Short History of Wool and Its Manufacture [Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1953], pp. 68—73). Carus-Wilson argues that a rudimentary’
capitalist entrepreneurial system was a feature of English cloth production from
at least the early thirteenth century, even in the cloth towns of the north and
east, which were then the center of manufacture (pp. 211-38). See also E. Miller,
“The Fortunes of the English Textile Industry in the Thirteenth Century,”
Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 18 (1965—6), 64—82, and Ponting, pp. 7-20.
10 Carus-Wilson, pp. 4—9, and Power, Wool Trade, p. 47. The factors that led to the
change from urban-to rural-dominated cloth manufacture in England are ex­
amined in Miller and in Carus-Wilson (pp. 183—210). On Bristol as a fourteenth-
century port, preeminent in the wool trade at mid-century, third behind London
and Southampton at its end, see J. W. Sherborne, The Port of Bristol in the Middle
Ages (Bristol: Historical Association, 1965), pp. 9-11. Ponting suggests that in
the late fourteenth century much west-country’ cloth was shipped from London,
Bristol never regaining the domination it had enjoyed earlier (pp. 15-16).
11 Theodore F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common I m w , 5th edn. (London:
Butterworth, 1956), p. 313. On the trading rights of married women see Mary’
Bateson, Borough Customs, Selden Society Publications, XVIII (London: Selden
Society’, 1904), pp. 227-8. A representative entry’ is the following from Torksey,
dated 1345: “Item dicunt quod mulier mercatrix respondebit cuicunque et debet
responderi sine viro suo et potest amittere et recuperare.” Accounts of these
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 59
rights are given in A. Abram, “Women Traders in Medieval London,” Economic
Journal, 26 (1916), 276-85, and in Power, Medieval Women, pp. 53-9. Margery'
Kempe describes her ventures in the brewing and milling trades, undertaken
with her own money and against her husband’s wishes (S. B. Meech, ed., The
Book o f Margery Kempe, Early English Text Society, OS 212 [London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1940], pp. 9-10). On the property rights of bourgeois married
women, see Mary Bateson, Borough Customs, Selden Society Publications, XXI
(London: Selden Society, 1906), pp. 102-8. In 1327, the mayor and bailiffs of
Oxford wrote to the mayor and bailiffs of London for their confirmation of a
judgment that recognized a wife’s right “to give and sell to whom she will” of her
own property. In 1419 a London customal states, “ne le baroun ne poet my
deviser les tenements de droit de sa femme, ne lez tenements queux le baroun et
sa femme ount joynetement purchacés.” John Kempe exacts a promise from his
wife, Margery, to pay off all his debts before he will agree to a vow of connubial
chastity; this incident strongly suggests that he had no right to use her property
as he chose {Book, pp. 24—5).
12 In one interesting case from 1389, the Court of Common Pleas bowed to local
custom in ruling that a husband was not liable for the debts of his wife incurred
during her trading (Plucknett, pp. 313-14). On the respect of common law for
local custom, see N. Neilson, “Custom and the Common Law in Kent,” Harvard
Law Review, 38 (1924), 482-98.
13 See H. S. Bennett, The Pastons and Their England (1922; rpt. Cambridge: Cam­
bridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 59. See also Fifty Earliest English Wills, ed. F. J.
Fumivall, Early English Text Society, OS 78 (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1882), esp. the following, from a codicil to the will of Stephen Thomas of Lee
(1417): “Morf wryt y nough[t] vnto vow, bot þe holy trinite kepe yow now, dene
and trusty wyf... wer-for I pray 30W, as my trust es hely in 30W, ou*r allé» oþen?
creatures, þat this last will be fulfyllet, and all oden? that I ordeynd atte home, for
all þe loue þat eu^rwas betwen man and woman” (pp. 40-1).
14 Plucknett, pp. 566-8. See also Cecile S. Margulies, “The Marriages and the
Wealth of the Wife of Bath,” Mediaeval Studies, 24 (1962), 210-16. Unfortunately,
Margulies confined her argument to dower right under the common and canon
law only and overlooked the crucial area of town and village customary laws. A
similar argument (and error) was made by Thomas A. Reisner in “The Wife of
Bath’s Dower: A Legal Interpretation,” Modem Philology, 71 (1973—4), 301-2.
15 Plucknett, pp. 568, 586. The importance of jointure to a woman’s security in all
classes may be judged by Margaret Paston’s continuing efforts to marry her
daughters or, failing that, to introduce them into worthy households; “for I wuld
be right glad,” she writes of one of them, “and she myght be proferrid be mariage
or be servycc so þat it myght be to her<? wurchep and prafight.” (Norman Davis,
ed., Poston letters and Papers, Vol. I [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], No. 186
[30 June 1465]). The Pastons belong to a different class of the newly rich than
does Alisoun, for their wealth was in manorial land rather than in trade. Agnes
married William Paston I (1378—1444) in 1420 and died in 1478; Margaret
married John Paston I (1421-66) in 1440 and died in 1484. Though one must
evidendy exercise caution in using the Paston letters as evidence of the customs
60 Mary Carruthers
and opinions that prevailed more than seventy years earlier, there is no reason to
dispense entirely with the rich picture of marriage they furnish, provided that
their contents can be corroborated by evidence contemporary with Chaucer. For
the reader’s convenience I have provided the dates of probable composition
assigned by Davis to each of the letters I quote. A recent analysis of some of the
Paston material is Ann Haskell’s “The Paston Women on Marriage in Fifteenth-
Century England,” Viator; 4 (1973), 459-71.
16 WBP, II. 415-18. The OED, s.v. “Ransom,” indicates that the word during this
period always carried the meaning of a money or a property fine, except in the
specific context of Christ’s ransom (his life) for the redemption of humankind.
Chaucer uses the word six times; once in the Parson’s Tale to mean Christ’s
sacrifice and elsewhere to mean a monetary fine, as it does in each of its four
occurrences in the Knight’s Tale and as it does here in the Wife’s prologue.
Alisoun exacts a fine from her husbands for their freedom of access to her
body.
17 Recent criticism has at last rescued the Wife from charges of religious heresy in
regard to her frank admission of pleasure in married sex. Among medieval
pastoral theologians a majority opinion held that pleasure in married sex was
at worst a venial sin, and a minority even considered that it was no sin at all; the
canonists believed that it was possible to contract a valid marriage from the
motive of fulfilling sexual desire as long as no effort was made to prevent
conception. This theological background has been examined most recently by
Henry A. Kelly in Love and Marriage in the Age of Chancer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 245-61. See also E. T. Donaldson, “Medieval Poetry
and Medieval Sin,” Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 164-74.
On the orthodoxy of the Wife’s theology, see Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the
Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 248-51.
18 Indeed Jerome did “not condemn even octogamy” twice in his writings: Adversus
fovinianum, I, 15 (Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina [hereafter, PL\, ed. J. P.
Migne [Paris: 1844—64], XXIII, 234) and Epistola XL I'dI I seu liber apologeticus ad
Pammachium, pro libris contra Jovinianum, Ch. ix (PL, XXII, 499).
19 On the controversy during which Jerome was nearly condemned for heresy
because of what he appeared to be saying about marriage in the Adversus
Jovinianum, see the biography by Jean Steinmann, St. Jerome, trans. R. Matthews
(London: Chapman, 1959), pp. 216-27. Anne Kernan refers to this controversy
in relation to the Wife of Bath (“The Archwife and the Eunuch,” EIJ-I, 41
[1974], 1-25). See also the remarks of E. T. Donaldson, “Designing a Camel,”
Tennessee Studies in Literature, 22 (1977), 1—16.
20 Epistola XLLX ad Pammachium, Ch. ii {PL, XXII, 511).
21 Eileen Power details the sources of this material {Medieval People, 8th edn.
[London: Methuen, 1946], p. 184). An example in English verse is “How the
Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” in The Babees Book, ed. F. J. Fumivall, Early
English Text Society, OS 32 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1868), pp. 36-47.
22 The Book of the Knight of LaTour-I^andry, ed. Thomas Wright, Early English Text
Society, OS 33 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906). All my references to this
work are to this edition. Le Ménagier de Paris, ed. J. Pichón (Paris: Société des
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 61
Bibliophiles Français, 1846). All references are to the English language version,
The Goodman o f Pans, trans. Eileen Power (New York: Harcourt, 1928).
23 Sir John Maclean, ed.John Smyth’s Lives o f the Berkeleys, II (Gloucester: Bristol and
Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 1833), pp. 62-3. Lady Isabel was the
eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Mowbray; the letter was written in 1447.
24 James Gairdner, ed., The Poston Letters (1904; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), 1,155.
The quotation is from a letter of Scrope, part of a collection in the British
Museum relating to Sir John Fastolf, Scrope’s stepfather and Paston’s bene­
factor.
25 The arrangements are described by Elizabeth Clere, Agnes Paston’s niece
(Davis, Vol. II, No. 446 [no later than 29 June 1449]). Cf. Agnes’s own thoughts
on the subject, written to her son John with a warning for haste, because “S?r
Herry Ynglows is ryjth besy a-bowt Schrowpe for? on of his do3thter?s” (Davis,
Vol. I, No. 18 [no later than 1449]).
26 Scrope himself had been bartered shockingly by his stepfather; see Gairdner,
Vol. II, No. 97. On the practice of selling marriage rights, see Bennett, pp. 28-9;
it is condemned in Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W’. Skeat (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1886), C.xi.256—7: “for thei 3eueth here children / For couetise of catel
and conynge chapmen.”
27 Manly says they are old-fashioned (p. 230). D. E. Wretlind has argued, however,
that hats with large kerchiefs were making a comeback at Queen Anne’s court
(‘The Wife of Bath’s Hat,” Modem Language Notes, 63 [1948], 381-2), but
Howard points out that large hats were the contemporary rural fashion (p.
105, n. 32).
28 OED, s.v. “Scarlet,” and see Carus-Wilson, p. 218, n. 4; scarlet may often have
been dyed red, but the word at this time was a technical term for a type of fine
cloth of any color.
29 LaTour-Landry would have approved: “a good woman shulde arraie her after
her husbandes pusaunce and hers, in suche wise as it might endure and be
meinteyned” (p. 67).
30 Davis, Vol. I, No. 398. Ecclesiastical easiness concerning the remarriage of
widows is attested by a letter of the late fourteenth century from Roger
Kegworthe, a London draper, to Robert Hallum, one of the most distinguished
churchmen and canonists of the period. Kegworthe asks Hallum to help him
arrange a marriage with an eligible widow, “de bone conversacioun et poet ore
bien expendre par an quarrant marcz,” who is being actively courted also by the
Marshall of the Hall of the Archbishop of Canterbury (M. D. Legge, ed., Anglo-
Norman Letters and Petitions, Anglo-Norman Text Society, III [Oxford: Blackwell,
1941], pp. 118-19).
31 Two commonly held assumptions about the Wife of Bath deserve comment,
because they have crept into the realm of “facts” about her without a shred of
evidence to support either one. The first is that she is childless, the second that
she is “oversexed”; indeed the first has led to the second, for, being childless (so
the argument runs), she has no right to any sexual encounter, and therefore any
sex is “oversex” for her. But we do not know whether or not the Wife has
children; we know only that she does not say so. There is no reason to attribute
62 Mary Carruthers
any significance to her silence. Chaucer’s concern is wifehood, not motherhood.
Wifehood and motherhood were not linked concepts at this time, as they are
today, for wives had little to do with the nurture of their children (see, e.g.,
Bennett, pp. 71-86). The books of deportment, while covering every conceiva­
ble concern of wifehood, never mention the bearing or nurturing of children.
The “problem” of the Wife of Bath’s children is of exacdy the same sort as the
most famous of literary nonproblems: “How many children had Lady Mac­
beth?” and it deserves to be consigned to the wastebasket of critical inquiry for
the same reasons. It is simply not a question we can legitimately ask of this text,
because the text provides us with no basis for an answer.
32 Twenty was a common age for marrying. Margery Kempe was twenty “or
sumdele mor” when she married (Book, p. 6); the daughter in the Reeve’s Tale
is twenty; Elizabeth Paston (born ca. 1429) was nearly twenty when her mother
began to bargain in earnest for her marriage. The ménagiefs wife, however, was
only fifteen when he wrote his treatise for her, and Thrupp says that the
daughters of London merchants in this period usually married at about seven­
teen (p. 196).
33 Charles E. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford (1924; rpt. New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1968), I, pp. 151-2. Mallet suggests that university under­
graduates could be as young as 14; in 1386, however, Oxford petitioned to have
the minimum age raised to 16 (J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at
Cambridge (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974], p. 72, n. 2). The arts course
leading to the bachelor’s degree took at least four years to complete, but many
students took longer. See representative careers cataloged in A. B. Emden, A
Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to 1500 (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1957-9), passim.
34 The title “magister” was used for a master of arts or a doctor in another faculty’
or - grudgingly, especially at Oxford - for a bachelor of arts (Emden, I, xv-xvi).
By my rough count in the Register; there were at least a dozen married arts
masters at Oxford in the last half of the fourteenth century; there were married
physicians and a few married bachelors of civil law who also held Oxford
degrees. Edmund Stonor reported, ca. 1380, that his nephew was studying
grammar in the establishment of a married master at Oxford (“magister et ejus
uxor”) (Charles L. Kingsford, ed., The Stonor letters and Papers [London: Camden
Society, 1919], I, 21 [Camden Society’ Publications, 3rd ser., vols. 29-30]).
35 The conclusion that many who entered Oxford did so without expecting to
pursue clerical careers is supported from a number of sources. A count based on
Emden’s Register of students and masters between 1350 and 1410 reveals a steady
30 percent who did not proceed to orders; this percentage is undoubtedly too
low, since most of the sparse records containing information about the subse­
quent careers of Oxford graduates are ecclesiastical. As Emden observes, “Even
more elusive, of course, are the many hundreds of Oxford clerks who never
qualified for a degree at all, and who passed from Oxford into secular as well as
into clerical employment. The exceptionally full records of New College point to
the conclusion that at all times during the medieval period the number of
undergraduates who never proceeded to any degree was large” (I, xviii). Sylvia
 The Wife o f Bath and the Painting o f Lions 63
Thrupp points out that London merchants of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries were ambitious to achieve educational polish through university train­
ing (pp. 159-61). The paternal concern of Clement Paston (d. 1419) is typical: a
“good pleyn husband” himself (according to a fifteenth-century biographical
account; see Davis, I, xll-xlii), he sent his son William (b. 1378) to university,
thereby starting his family’s fortunate rise, and succeeding generations of Pas-
tons followed his example. One of Richard FitzRalph’s charges against the friars
(made in a sermon of 1357) was that “very many of the common people” feared
that the friars at Oxford were taking advantage of youthful students and pressing
them too soon into orders; see Mallet, I, 75, n. 2, which also refers to a university
ordinance of 1358 forbidding the friars from admitting students under 18. The
concern of the common people in 1357 is echoed a century later by Margaret
Paston, who cautions her son Walter, a clerk at Oxford, “that he benot to hasty
of takyng of orderes þat schuld bynd hym till þat he be of xxiiij yere of agee or
more__ I will loue hym better? to be a good secular? man þan to be a lewit
prest” (Davis, Vol. I, No. 220 [probably 18 Jan. 1473]).
36 The pun on “hende” is noted by E. T. Donaldson in “Idiom of Popular Poetry
in the Miller’s Tale,” Speaking of Chaucer, p. 17.
37 The custom of paying mourners to ensure a good turnout at one’s funeral is
amply attested in contemporary wills. Alisoun may not have wasted money on a
fancy tomb, but both her honor and her estate would have required a decent
funeral for her husband.
38 Alisoun calls the book a “book of wikked wives,” but this is yet another instance
of Chaucer’s standard joke, wherein books of good behavior are perceived to be
books of wicked behavior, because they are more often crowded with examples
of the awful ends of evil-doers than with the rewards of the just. The classic
examples are the Man of Law’s remarks on Gower and the exchange between
Alcestis, the God of Love, and the poet in the Prologue to the Legend o f Good
Women. Robert A. Pratt has demonstrated the accessibility at Oxford of the
sources of Jankyn’s book; one would expect an inexperienced young man whose
head is still full of the university to draw on just such bookish stuff in seeking to
counsel his wife (“Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves,” Annuale Mediaevale, 3
[1962], 5-27).
39 WBP, I. 620. Francis L. Utley reminds us that the Wife’s use of the word “love”
in this proverb “must not be shrugged aside as mere ignorance or bias”; indeed it
makes the proverb in her mouth a complex and ironic statement different in
meaning and emphasis from the traditional sentiment, attributed by medieval
preachers to the laity, that “lechery is no sin” (“Chaucer’s Way with a Proverb:
‘Allas! alias! that evere love was synne,’ ” North Carolina Folklore, 21 [1973],
98-104).
40 Both the ménagier and the Knight of LaTour-Landry’ tell versions of the same
cautionary story about gossip, a story as intriguing in its own way as that of
Midas’s ears. “Wol ye heere the tale?” A squire tells his wife that he has laid two
eggs, enjoins her to secrecy, and by the time the tale has made its way back to his
ears, he is supposed to have laid a whole basketful {I^aTour-lMndty, pp. 96-7, and
Goodman, pp. 182-3).
64 Mary Carruthers
41 An interesting analysis of class consciousness in the Wife’s tale has been made by
Dorothy Colmer in “Character and Class in the Wife of Bath’s Tale ” Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, 72 (1973), 329-39.
42 B. F. Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: State Univ. of New York
Press, 1964), p. 127.
 3
Eunuch Hermeneutics
C a r o l y n D in s h a w

Very early in her Prologue, just as she is warming to her theme, the Wife of
Bath is interrupted by the Pardoner. He initially bristles at her images of
“tribulación in mariage” (3:173), but after she orders him to hear her out, he
in fact urges her to teach him the tricks of her trade. It might seem that there
couldn’t be a more unlikely pair: the Wife, flamboyantly arrayed and ostenta­
tiously heterosexual, “carping” and in good fellowship with the company, and
the Pardoner, that defective man, who makes the “gentils” cry out even
before he begins his tale. But characters are never only coincidentally brought
together in Chaucer’s works, and similarities between these two become
apparent even on the surface level of apparel: once again, we find that
clothing is an important index of broader significance in Chaucer’s poetics.
The Pardoner is as clothes-conscious as is the Wife of Bath in her intention­
ally alluring “h o s e n ...o f fyn scarlet reed” (1: 456): wearing no hood, with
only a cap, “Hym thoughte he rood al of the newe jet” (1:682). If, as I have
suggested, the Wife of Bath is an incarnation of the seductive letter of the
text, we might ask what hermeneutic significance this Pardoner, styled à la
mode, carries. What would we find if those clothes were stripped?
Not a female body, beautiful and fertile, needing protection from the gaze
of the uninitiated, as in the traditional image of the allegorical text we’ve seen
in writers from Macrobius to Richard of Bury. But underneath those clothes
we might not find a whole male body either. The narrator of the General
Prologue apparently does not know what the Pardoner is: “I trowe he were a
geldyng or a mare” (1:691) is his notorious speculation.1 Clear and straight­
forward gender categories of masculine and feminine - categories, as I have
suggested throughout this book, fundamental to the social discourse of the
Canterbury pilgrimage - apparently do not apply.
66 Carolyn Dinshatv
The patriarchal hermeneutic I have been describing - the passage of a
woman between men and her stripping, reclothing, marriage, and domestica­
tion - is a heterosexual hermeneutic as well; it has as a goal the increase and
multiplication of a univocal truth.2 But the Pardoner, that sexually peculiar
figure, problematizes all these terms and procedures. For one thing, he does
not allow himself to be stripped and revealed, as it were: he won’t allow
himself to be known, won’t reveal his intentions, his meaning, his truth. He
expends much energy on keeping a veil on, on keeping himself screened from
the gaze of others. He attempts to create a screen, first of all, via the self-
conscious style of his clothes, a screening the narrator senses. The Pardoner
is the only pilgrim in the General Prologue whose own sartorial intentions -
his will to dress —are reported by the narrator: “Hym thoughte he rood al of
the newe jet.” Some critics have suggested, further, that the Pardoner’s
insistent profession of his own avarice works to screen a sin or condition
judged to be more heinous. Robert Burlin, for example, supposes that the
Pardoner obscures his sexual peculiarity from his audience’s view with
his “cynical revelations” of greed, while Lee Patterson suggests that “the
very excess of the Pardoner’s revelations” itself hides him from his hearers.3
In that busy process of screening, the Pardoner might be seen to pick up
roles offered by others around him, as critics have pointed out again and
again: he seems in fact to play at homosexual display as the Summoner
joins him in his love song, “Com hider, love, to me” (1:672); he plays at
heterosexuality, imagining stepping into the place the Wife of Bath delineates
for husbands; he advertises the kind of corruption the “gentils” seem to
expect from pardoners, boasting of loose tricks with “wenches” in every
town after those “gentils” have insisted they won’t listen to any “ribaudye”
(6:324).
By keeping that veil on, the Pardoner generates the desire to know —“I
trowe. . . , ” imagines the narrator - and then plays off it, indeed appearing to
satisfy it excessively.4 But no one really knows what the Pardoner is, neither
the narrator nor later interpreters of his performance; his clothes do not
necessarily promise a beautiful, fecund, normal, or even identifiable body
beneath.^ Put in hermeneutic terms, the Pardoner’s clothed body suggests
that the existence of the letter of the text does not at all ensure the existence
of a spirit, a truth beneath it. In fact, the Pardoner opens out another -
unnerving - possible hermeneutic significance of the image of the body
swaddled in veils: there is perhaps nothing underneath those cloaks of repres­
entation. There might be nothing but veils and letters covering a fundamental
absence, a radical lack of meaning or truth.6
The Pardoner is, after all, a “geldyng or a mare”; he is identified, that is, in
terms of an absence of something: either male sexual organs (he is a gelding, a
castrated horse) or masculine gender identification (he is a mare, a female
horse). The context rendering this identification significant is, of course,
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 67
patriarchal, heterosexual, fundamentally androcentric; the Pardoner can be
distinctly identified in terms of such lack because masculinity - located in
these attributes - defines identity' and power in the culture. As we’ve seen in
the Man o f L aw’s Tale, the crucial distinction in patriarchal culture between
man and woman is really between man and not-man; if the Pardoner is a
eunuch, as the widely accepted critical gloss of “geldyng” goes, he is a man
who, significandy, is not a man (he is a not-man); but if he is an effeminate
male, as a gloss of “mare” has it, he is womanish but not a woman (a not-
woman or, better, a not-not-man).8 If he is neither man nor not-man, his
identity is constituted by a negation of, or alienation from, the Same and the
Other in androcentric culture.
Further, if the Pardoner is taken to be an effeminate homosexual, as
another gloss of “mare” goes, he is, in the normative terms of patriarchal,
heterosexual culture, a man who puts himself in the “feminine” position in
homosexual intercourse.9 He would thus bodily enact what I have suggested
(in chapter 5) the Clerk and Chaucer imaginatively do: as men who put
themselves in the woman’s place, they see things from the woman’s point
of view. For those male figures, such a “feminine” position yields opportu­
nity, a valorization of what is devalued in patriarchal culture, a speaking of
and for what is silenced; but for the Pardoner, such a position yields not
opportunity but torment. In his lacking being he reifies the disturbing
suggestion that there is no guarantee of meaning, realizes the unsettling
possibility that there is no fullness and plenitude of signification underneath
the wraps of the letter. If, as we’ve seen in the Clerk's Tale, a “feminine”
poetic strategy provides a positive, fruitful alternative to oppressive, power-
asymmetrical patriarchal discourse, the Pardoner’s strategy, I suggest, would
threaten an end to reading and telling tales altogether.
The Pardoner is defined by absence - he’s a not-man or not even that -
and it is in this fundamental sense that I shall take him to be a eunuch, a
figurative one if not in fact a literal one as well. His sense of his own lack
informs his social behavior, his interactions with others; his incompleteness,
moreover, informs the very thematics and narrative strategies of his Tale.
Most tellingly, it represents his view of the nature of language itself. As we
shall see, it is not only modern theorists who analyze language as radically
fragmentary7: medieval thinkers too were preoccupied with a sense of the
fundamental incompleteness of human language. The Pardoner enunciates a
strategy of using language in a postlapsarian world, cut off from primary7
wholeness and unity: he acts according to what I call a hermeneutics of the
partial, or, for short, eunuch hermeneutics.11' The hermeneutic I have ident­
ified as heterosexual discards the surface of the text, the letter and its wanton
seductions, for the uncovered truth, but the eunuch suggests that the passage
between the letter and any sentence within is not so smooth, is not guaran­
teed. Indeed, the Pardoner disrupts altogether the hierarchy of values placed
68 Carolyn Dinshaw
on the letter and the spirit. His hermeneutic is motivated in fact by a
fundamental refusal to know; it is informed, I shall suggest, by a logic of
fetishism.
As we shall see, the Pardoner surrounds himself with objects - relics;
sealed documents; even words, regarded as objects - which he substitutes for
his own lacking wholeness. But these objects, used thus as fetishes, are
themselves fragments and can’t properly fill the lack that hollows the Pardo­
ner’s being. Robert P. Miller has demonstrated that eunuchry was used in the
Christian exegetical tradition as a powerful figure for the spiritual condition
of radical wanting, radical desire, that is cupiditas. I propose to analyze
eunuchry as a figure as well but shall concentrate on its psychological valence:
the substitute objects the Pardoner adopts can’t convert his bottomless
cupiditas into caritas, a state of oneness, plenitude, fullness.11 Nevertheless,
even though the Pardoner knows that his relics, documents, words are
defective substitutes —they are fakes, and he tells us so - he holds on to
the fetishistic belief that they can make him whole, part of the body of
pilgrims, and of the larger body of Christians. If we express this in terms of
the problematics of interpretation, we can say that the eunuch’s hermeneutics
proceeds by double affirmations, double truths, the incompatible positions of
recognition and disavowal, knowledge and belief.
Chaucer’s initial juxtaposition of the Pardoner with the Wife of Bath in the
interruption in her Prologue introduces a perspective utterly outside patri­
archal discourse and suggests a potential unsettling of its hermeneutic enter­
prise altogether. The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale further problematize the
assumptions and procedures of that patriarchal project. As we’ve seen, the
relative stability, significance, and value of the letter and the spirit, on the one
hand, and the culture’s construction of gender, its establishment of unambigu­
ous gender distinctions and hierarchy, and its prohibition of transgressive
sexual relations, on the other, are interdependent. The Wife of Bath, speaking
as an incarnation of literality, carnality, and femininity from within a patri­
archal paradigm, dreams of a renovation of oppressive patriarchal discourse:
she dreams of an ideal relationship between wife and husband, text and gloss,
letter and spirit. But that dream of recuperation, as she and the Clerk show, is
idealistic indeed; the discourse, as they know it, depends on a turning away
from the body and experience of woman, and thus the Wife’s dream remains
a dream. The Pardoner in his person deepens this critique of patriarchal,
androcentric discourse; he in fact shows the inadequacy of the very categories
- masculine/feminine, letter/spirit, literal/figurative - by which it proceeds.
He confounds the idea of an easy passage between clothes and the body, the
surface and the meaning, the letter and the spirit, and deconstructs the neat,
reassuring discovery procedures of interpretation we have seen figured
among the Canterbury pilgrims. He is a paradoxical figure of wilv cvnicism
and plangent desire, as we’ll see, and his performance threatens to derail (so
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 69
to speak) this pilgrimage to Truth, “compounding” as it does verity with
falsehood, “fais” with “soth” {House o f Famey 1,029).
But the Pardoner does not, in fact, end the pilgrimage. Instead, his
performance urges his audience to think further, in ways entirely outside
established social categories. I shall suggest at last that Chaucer, through the
Pardoner - that figure utterly different from the other men and women, that
figure entirely out of their bounds, that figure of fundamental, radical absence
- leads his listeners to contemplate another being entirely out of their
bounds: this one, however, of absolute Presence.

Richard of Bury provides an image for the heterosexual reading act, but he
nonetheless associates reading with eunuchs as well. As I’ve said, he images
reading as a seduction by the wanton letter of the text, a penetration to the
naked body of woman. But he also — and somewhat contradictorily -
emphasizes, with Saint Paul, that the reader must leave behind the carnality
of the text to get to its spirit; thus he suggests elsewhere in the Philobiblon that
the end of reading is, finally, beyond the sexual. He commends Origen as an
exemplary reader, one who was not distracted by any improper lusts of the
flesh; and he cites the eunuch mentioned by Saint Paul in the Acts as an
example to all those who would learn to read properly: reading the Scriptures
without understanding, the eunuch asked Philip to guide him; Philip
“preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8:35), and the eunuch was baptized.12 To
pursue this association of eunuchry with spiritual understanding beyond these
citations in Richard of Bury, we need only think of Abelard, perhaps the most
famous of medieval castrad. Abelard built his career as a Christian philo­
sopher upon his castration. He writes in the Historia calamitatum that in order
to gain spiritual understanding - to read properly - it was necessary that he
not only cease reading as he had been with Heloise (a literally heterosexual
use of reading); more important, it was necessary that he be castrated -
although he admits that this was not among the remedia amoris he would have
chosen - so that he would be freed for the work of the true philosopher.13
From this point of view, the eunuch - untempted by, and discontinuous in,
the flesh - is the perfect reader.14
But Chaucer’s Pardoner —a eunuch figuratively, if not literally too - is
hardly the perfect, “spiritual” reader. He is preoccupied by, chained to the
flesh, never rising out of it to reach the spirit. It is no coincidence that the
Pardoner follows the Physician in telling his tale; the Physician is the pilgrim
most concerned with the body - he is professionally dependent upon it. The
tale the Physician tells, the story of Appius and Virginia, is taken from the
Roman de la rose, and its narrative position there is significant: the story is told
70 Carolyn Dinshaw
by Raison after her account of Saturn’s castration. Raison’s point is that
justice was lost when Jupiter castrated his father; castration, in the Rose, marks
the loss of the Golden Age, the loss of an ideal.15 And it does, I argue, in
fragment 6 of the Canterbury Tales as well (and in the modern psychoanalytic
version of the myth of loss and wished-for reconciliation, as we shall see).
The Pardoner follows the Physician’s redaction of this tale as if to explain the
sordid world of the Physician's Tale-, it’s an unjust world, a world cut off from
natural justice, natural love —a castrated world.
Harry Bailly’s significandy garbled oath in calling for a tale to follow the
Physician’s (“By corpus bones!” [6:314]) is a response to both the Physician’s
occupation and the sense of the corporal that surrounds the Pardoner. That
sense of the corporal is reflected in the focus on the body in the Pardoner’s
portrait, Prologue, and Tale —a focus that might more properly be said to be a
focus on fragments of the body. If the narrator’s first guess of “geldyng” is
indeed literally correct, the Pardoner’s body is itself the first on the list of
these fragments. The pieces of information the narrator gives in the General
Prologue - thin hair, glaring eyes, high voice, beardlessness - suggest a
medieval stereotype of the eunuch, either congenital or castrated. But as
Monica McAlpine argues, the category of eunuchry was conflated or con­
fused sometimes in medieval representations with other categories of effemi­
nacy and homosexuality,16 which could be themselves associated with genital
defects as well: there is an Aristotelian tradition of viewing homosexuality, for
example, as the result of a natural defect. As John Boswell has suggested,
the Physical Problems, attributed to Aristode, speculated on the cause of
“passive” male sexual behavior as a congenital defect, a genital blockage,
found in the case of eunuchs too; Aquinas, significandy following Aristotelian
thinking about the conception of females, considered homosexuality to
result from “a defect in nature” in a man.17 The narrator’s latter guess of
“mare” could itself thus indicate a physically fragmented, defective body; in a
remarkable treatise that discusses gender confusion by using an example
of horses and mules, the great eleventh-century Arabic medical writer
Rhazes (ar-Ràzï) suggests that homosexuality, the “hidden illness,” was
produced by a predominance of female sperm over male sperm in conception
and resulted in effeminacy and paltry genitals. Avicenna differed - Gerard of
Cremona translated the comprehensive works of both Rhazes and Avicenna
- but Rhazes’ older Christian contemporary, Qustâ ibn-Lugâ, agreed.18 The
point, I think, is that such sex and gender associations seem fluid and variable
in a variety of related and influential traditions in the later Middle Ages. And
what is clear and crucial for the Pardoner is the perception that something is
missing: as I see it, an enormous lack - an unquenchable cupiditas, repeatedly
expressed in the Prologue as “I w o l.. . I w o l... I wol” and as a disjunct sexual
identity - constitutes the Pardoner’s being as essentially defective, lacking,
fragmented.
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 71
Such a fragmented being, suggests Jacques Lacan, the modern theorist of
the corps morcelé, “usually manifests itself in [images] w hen. .. analysis encoun­
ters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then
appears in the form of disjointed limbs.”19 Indeed, body parts move gro­
tesquely, almost surrealistically, through the Prologue and Tale. “Myne handes
and my tonge goon so yerne/That it is joye to se my bisynesse” (398-9; my
emphasis); “Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke” (395; my
emphasis). “The shorte throte, the tendre mouth” (517) are the loci of
gluttony; the “womb, belly, stinking cod” are sites of sin. “Oure blissed
Lordes” body (474) is tom, by swearing, into “herte,” “nayles,” “blood,”
and “armes” (651-4). Tongues, noses, gullets freely animate the Pardoner’s
sermon. The Old Man in the exemplum wails that he is nothing but “flesh,
and blood, and skyn” (732); his “bones” await their final rest.
But relics are perhaps the things that we remember the best about the
Pardoner - even though, as Kellogg has shown, they are not conventional
characteristics of abusive pardoners.20 Relics are holy fragments - scraps and
chips of saints - and it is wholly appropriate that the Pardoner claims to have
many. He has “a gobet of the seyl / That Seint Peter hadde” (1:696-7), a jar of
“pigges bones,” a “sholder-boon/Which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep”
(6:350-1), a “miteyn” (in the shape of a hand), and a “pilwe-beer” (supposed
to be Our Lady’s veil). I want to consider the nature of relics - those sacred
fragments - for a moment here.21 The Pardoner’s relics are not the most
fragmentary of medieval relics on record: the relics that would seem to be
paradigms of the fragmentary are splinters of the True Cross (“the croys which
that Seint Eleyne fond” [951], by which the Host swears in response to the
Pardoner). Pilgrims, according to several sources from the early and the high
Middle Ages, kissed the Cross and surreptitiously carried the splinters away in
their teeth.22 Other holy monuments, such as tombs and gilded shrines, were
broken into bits by pilgrims eager to bring back tokens. Body parts, however,
were the medieval relics valued most highly: heads, arms, fingers of saints were
severed and boxed in jeweled reliquaries. The efficacy of the whole body of
the saint was powerful in these parts, these fragments: synecdochically, “in the
divided body grace survives undivided.”23 Interestingly, partition - dismem­
berment —of saints’ bodies was not allowed originally by the early church, but
the great demand for relics made more relics necessary: by the eighth century,
relics had come to be regarded as requirements for the consecration of a
church; and private collectors, from the very early years of Christianity, were
greedy for them. In the face of this demand, dismemberment was eventually
allowed. (Fortunately, the saints themselves approved of dismemberment, as
the storyTof Saint Mammas attests: a finger of that saint detached itself of its
own accord when a priest came to the body to collect relics.)24
But it was the very’ practice of fragmentation that led to widespread frauds.
Once the bodies were divided into pieces and translated from one church to
72 Carolyn Dinshaw
another, it was impossible to verify their authenticity.25 And the fragments
proliferated: if all claims were to be believed, there were, by the twelfth
century, at least three heads of John the Baptist, innumerable arms and
fingers of various saints, five or six foreskins of Christ.26 Despite growing
concern in the late Middle Ages about “multiple” relics - Guibert of
Nogent’s arguments about the absurdity of some claims to authenticity,
very unusual in the twelfth century, began to be echoed by fifteenth-century
pilgrims - the cult of relics in itself was not questioned. In Mandeville's Travels
(ca. 1357), for example, the history of John the Baptist’s head is carefully
recounted (the head was first enclosed in a wall of a church in Sebaste, then
translated to Constantinople, where the “hynder partye” remains; the “for-
partie” is in Rome, the jaws and platter in Genoa) but then called into
question by the claim that the whole head might in fact be at Amiens. But
the hesitancy this competing claim provokes is overwhelmed by devotion:

And summen seyn that the heed of seynt John is at Amyas in Picardye. And
other men seyn that it is the heed of seynt John the bysshop; I wot nere, but
god knoweth. But in what wyse that men worschipen it the blessed seynt John
holt him apayd.27

Indeed, there is more than a suggestion that competing claims to the same
body part could be believed. A plurality' of bodies seems to have been not
only plausible but preferable to a single one in the case of the Blessed Virgin:
Our Lady of Coutances was a different entity from Our Lady of Bayeux;
some worshippers preferred the former, some the latter.28 And in the case of
Christ’s foreskins, the multiplicity' was perhaps even cultivated, as an index of
virility, “humanation,” as Leo Steinberg would call it.29
But the Pardoner’s scraps and chips of saints substitute for his lack of
virility. As free-floating body parts, they are both reifications of his own
fragmentariness and substitutes for his own masculine lack. He doesn’t
increase and multiply literally or spiritually, as R. P. Miller stresses. But he
uses the proliferating relics as the means by which he causes unnatural
increase and multiplication: his relics, he claims, will make grain and catde
multiply; he increases the number of believers (even though “that is nat my
principal entente” [432]); and he makes his income grow outrageously.
His other artifacts, those sealed documents from Rome, are just as closely
associated with his own masculine lack. I will get to the pardons’ more
complicated psychological value later; but already we can see the substitution
he has made. We are told in the General Prologue that he carries his pardons
in his lap: “His walet, biforn hym in his lappe, / Bretful of pardoun comen
from Rome al hoot” (1:686-7). As rolled-up parchments with seals dangling
from them, the Pardoner’s documents and bulls, placed conspicuously in his
bulging “male” (6:920), present an iconographie substitute for his own
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 73
lacking masculinity. He emphatically declares that these bulls validate his
body, make it legitimate and unquestionable. Exhibitionistically he brags:

my bulles shewe I, alie and some.

Oure lige lordes seel on my patente,
That shewe I first, my body to warente.
(336-8)

Written documents and relics both function as masculine substitutes for the
Pardoner. And historically, they were sometimes assimilated to one another:
in the early Middle Ages, a book such as the Lindisfarne Gospels was
considered a relic and a shrine, because of its association with Saint Cuthbert.
Documents were kept along with relics in early treasure stores, and relics, to
insure their authenticity, were sometimes sealed with bulls.30
Fragmentary and partial themselves, relics and documents also function for
the Pardoner as “partial objects,” to adapt a psychoanalytic idea to my
purposes here. A “partial object” is an object used by the subject in the
attempt to fill the lack brought into being by the loss of an original ideal, an
original wholeness and plenitude.31 In the psychoanalytic story - a reworking
of a myth of original loss and the desire for restitution, a myth that informs
the Christian analysis of human history as well - the loss of an ideal, a loss of
fullness, plenitude, is always associated with castration: the original fullness of
continuity with the mother is lost as the child, first perceiving physical
differentiation from the mother, fears for the integrity of its own body.
With the father’s interruption of the mother-child union (his interdiction
of incest), the child perceives sexual difference and, specifically, the mother’s
lack of a penis. According to the Freudian story of the male castration
complex, when the boy perceives the mother’s lack - and the lacks of
other females around him - he fears his own castration. “If a woman ha[s]
been castrated, then his own possession of a penis [is] in danger”: this threat
of castration puts an end to the boy’s Oedipus complex, as he (ideally)
detaches himself from the mother and submits to the father.32 Lacan,
reinterpreting Freud, argues that the child not only fears his own castration
upon recognition of physical differentiation; he is castrated, at this moment,
precisely because he is cut off from primary non differentiation, primary
identification with the mother. This castration - the father’s interdiction and
the imposition of the law - through a kind of deferred action gives meaning
to all prior divisions, in particular the méconnaissance that according to Lacan
constitutes subjectivity in the mirror stage. In this sense, everyone is
castrated, male and female alike; everyone is separated from the realm of
primary union and continuity and is subjectively constituted by division. “It
is, therefore, the assumption of castration which creates the lack through
which desire is instituted”: law and language, symbolic forms associated with
74 Carolyn Dinshaiv
the father, are imposed in the castrated realm of difference; the distance
opened up by the entrance of the father creates the distinction between
subjects and objects, signifiers and signifieds, and creates as well the poss­
ibility of gender distinction.33 And, as Anthony Wilden explains, “The partial
object conveys the lack which created the desire for unity from which the
movement toward identification springs - since identification is itself
dependent upon the discovery of difference, itself a kind of absence.”34
Such a definition of the subject and its relation to symbolic forms and
cultural institutions is androcentric, as many commentators and critics
acknowledge.35 The mother is understood to be lacking, to be incomplete;
as Sarah Kofman reads Freud, his vision “endows woman with an incomplete
sexuality and. .. overwhelms her power in favor of the man.”36 And even
more clearly in Lacan, the absence of the mother, opening “the lack through
which desire is instituted,” is made culturally crucial: it constitutes subjectivity
and conditions the subject’s access to law and language. Moreover, the
putative experience of the male child is universalized into a normative
description of human development. Lacan maintains that “it is in the mother
- for both ^irls and boys - that what is called the castration complex is
instituted.”3 “What marks the father is his possession of the phallus,” which
becomes “the mark of sexual difference, that is, difference from the mother,”
as Margaret Homans summarizes Lacan. Yet, Homans continues,

it is only for the son, and not for the daughter, that the entry of the phallus
marks a difference between the mother and the self.

Homans points, further, to Lacan’s “disingenuous confusion of trope and

material condition,” a confusion of the phallus as trope and as biological
condition, and concludes that his psycholinguistic theory of development
“depends on the literal difference between sex organs.” Thus

while Lacanian language assumes the lack of the phallus, it is only those who
can lack it - those who might once have had it, as sons believe their fathers
have - who are privileged to substitute for it symbolic language; daughters lack
this lack.38

Even as Lacan insists that the entry into the Symbolic entails equally an
exposure of the phallus as fraud, he is “implicated in the phallocentrism he
describe[s],” as Jacqueline Rose acknowledges.39
But such a myth of development is not only a difficult one for women, as
feminist theorists have thus argued; it is a difficult view of all human
experience. Time and again Lacan’s commentators stress “the difficulty
inherent in subjectivity itself,” the high cost of having the phallus, the painful
fact of being itself as an effect of division. Kristeva, for example, remarks that
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 75
the sadness of young children just prior to their acquisition of language has
often been observed; this is when they must renounce forever the maternal
paradise in which every demand is immediately gratified. The child must
abandon its mother and be abandoned by her in order to be accepted by the
father and begin talking.40

I suggest that the lacking Pardoner demonstrates the pain that must attend
the subject’s development when it is seen to proceed along these lines, when
it is seen to depend on a necessary absence - the necessary loss of plenitude
initially associated with the mother’s body and a definition of the woman as
lack. To quote Eagleton’s simple articulation of Lacanian life: “We are
severed from the mother’s body: after the Oedipus crisis, we will never
again be able to attain this precious object, even though we will spend all
of our lives hunting for it.”41 Although such a description of castrated
existence is not universal or natural, it does accurately account for the cultural
construction of gender and the gendering of culture in Western patriarchal
society. This renders it useful in describing the Pardoner; and the Pardoner,
in turn, helps us to interpret and, finally, suggest a revision of this cultural
myth.
In this view, then, an ideal plenitude is lost, and because of the loss of that
ideal, the castrated subject forever seeks reunion, forever seeks the realm of
original fullness. The Pardoner’s being is hollowed by desire; cut off, he
obsessively desires wholeness, and wholeness is what he repeatedly claims his
relics will deliver: he promises his rustic audiences again and again that their
cows, calves, sheep will be made “hool” (357, 359) and that they themselves,
through his pardons, will remain a part of the body of Christians. He
comments to the pilgrims that “Paraventure ther may fallen oon or two /
Doun of his hors and breke his nekke atwo” (935-6), but, he claims, he is
“suffisant” to the task of making that broken body whole again. But the
castrated subject, in this view, must be content with substitutes only partially
sufficient. The Pardoner’s relics cannot really produce that desired integrity,
and he knows it. Written documents, as partial objects, fill the Pardoner’s
“male” (1:694; 6:920), though deceiving no one: the narrator remarks that
something vital is lacking. The fundamental insufficiency of the Pardoner’s
partial objects is violendy exposed by the Host’s outburst at the end, as we
shall see in a moment. These substitutes by their very nature signify the loss of
an ideal, in fact, and therefore signify castration, even as they are - because they
are - accepted as substitutes for lost wholeness. Every time the Pardoner
attempts to repair his lack - with relics or documents or words - he points to
it. This is the crucial paradox of the Pardoner’s partial objects: they both
represent lack and substitute for wholeness; they signify absence even as they
suggest presence. The Pardoner is a figure of paradox, both a wily decon­
structor of binary oppositions (such as gender and hermeneutics are built on)
76 Carolyn Dinshaw
and a figure of plaintive desire; and as we’ll see in more detail later, these two
notions of the Pardoner derive from the uncanny nature of his substitutions.
That these relics carry gender value is fully apparent to Harry Bailly, who
wishes, at the end of the tale, that he could make the ultimate relic for the
Pardoner’s collection out of the Pardoner’s “codions” (“balls”). The Host
recognizes, that is, the substitutions the Pardoner has made:

I wolde I hadde thy codions in myn hond

In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!
(952-5)

But the Host seems himself caught up by the paradox of the Pardoner’s
partial objects. Does the Pardoner indeed have the “codions” to be cut off?
The Host may not know, any better than the others do, whether the relics, as
it were, signify castration or suggest plenitude. “I wolde I hadde” suggests
primarily that the Host doesn’t have the bads in hand but wishes he did, but
secondardy it suggests that he doesn’t because he ca n t they don’t exist.
Harry’s response to the Pardoner’s invitation to “kiss the relikes every-
chon” is startling in its vehemence. That final moment between the two
pilgrims - the one lacking “naught” of “manhod” (1:756), the other having
“lytid of manhode” (as the Middle English Secreta Secretorum says of eunuchs) -
is highly charged with sexual repugnance.42 Perhaps, sensing something of
the Pardoner’s lack, the Host fears for his own manhood.43 But whether or
not this moment specificady enacts a Freudian scene, Harry’s response
powerfudy corroborates the associations I have been pointing to here. In
its association of relics and bads, it refers to another medieval discussion
wherein relics, bads, and writing are ad brought together in a discussion of
castration. In the Roman de la rose - the text commonly acknowledged to
contain, in Faus Semblant, a central source for the characterization of the
Pardoner - redes, testicles, and language are brought together in a vivid
treatment of the myth of the loss of an ideal as castration. How testicles,
redes, and language are particularly impdeated in this Joss in the Rose, and
how they gain their gender significance in the translatio from the Rose into the
Canterbury Tales, shad now be my concern.

II

In the Roman de la rose, Raison’s narration of the story of Saturn’s castration —

the event she identifies as the moment at which the Golden Age, the original
ideal community, was lost - has led to a discussion of her use of language.44
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 11
Amant quibbles with Raison’s free naming of “coilles” in her narration. “Balls
are not of good repute in the mouth of a courteous lady,” he protests,
perhaps referring to dirty sex as well as to dirty language.5 Her language
goes against Amors’ “clean speech commandment,” as John Fleming has put
it.46 If such things as balls must be mentioned, Amant insists, Raison should
at least use a gloss. The word is dirty, he clearly implies, because the thing is
dirty.
Raison counters by protesting that neither word nor thing is dirty. Both
word and thing are good, and she can name a thing which is good - made by
God - openly and by its own name. Her words are the proper names of
things; they are perfectly adequate to, share in the propre of, the things they
name. Amant protests further that even if God made the things, he still didn’t
make the words, which are unspeakably nasty. But Raison goes on to declare
that God could have made the words at the time of Creation; instead, he
deputized her to do it at her leisure. Her comments trace language to the time
before the Fall and assert the widespread view (which I have discussed in
relation to “Adam Scriveyn” and the Clerk’s Tale) that in the original language
spoken by Adam words partake of, share in, the nature of the things they
signify.
Raison then goes on to say that if she had called “reliques” “coilles” and
“coilles” “reliques,” Amant would’ve objected that “reliques” is a base word.
Clearly, she implies, “reliques” is a good word because “reliques” are holy
things. But even in Raison’s suggestion that she could have named “reliques”
“coilles” and vice versa, there is an implication of the arbitrariness of signs:
the original relation between word and thing, between signans and signatum,
was, in fact, arbitrary. She could have named the things anything. And her
comments on “custom” that follow (“Acoutumance est trop poissanz” [Rose,
V. 7107]) support this point: names are set by custom, by convention.
I have discussed the Christian story of the Fall in relation to the fall of
language and to “Adam Scriveyn,” and have there suggested gender values
and associations; here I want to discuss medieval theories of language for a
moment in terms not of a single myth of the Fall but of two distinct and
contradictory positions concerning language (assumed to be postlapsarian):
the one naturalistic, the other conventional. The issue of the naturalness or
conventionality of the relationship between word and thing —signifier and
signified - had been debated since Plato’s Craty/us, and both positions are
found in medieval writers on language. Medieval writers explicitly adopted
Hermogenes’ position, asserting that the sign’s relation to the signified is
determined by convention, but at the same time, their linguistic and analytical
habits imply a belief in the natural fitness of signs to things. Socrates, too, of
course, had it both ways: he judged that there is a natural resemblance
between word and thing, but he acknowledged the conventional establish­
ment of meaning as well. This dichotomous or ambivalent position, R.
78 Carolyn Dinshaw
Howard Bloch has suggested, can be seen in writers from the late Latin
grammarians (Varro, Priscian) to writers of the high Middle Ages (Abelard,
John of Salisbury).47 Such ambivalence may be very clearly seen in Augustine,
whose discussions of sign theory proved fundamental throughout the entire
Middle Ages and whose thought informs this passage in the Roman de la rose.48
Augustine accepts the anti-Cratylistic notion that the relation between
signans and signatum is conventionally established. Very7clearly (even simplist-
ically, as some critics have suggested)49 in the De doctrina he explains:

the single sign beta means a letter among the Greeks but a vegetable among the
Latins. When I say lege, a Greek understands one thing by these two syllables, a
Latin understands another. Therefore just as all of these significations move
men’s minds in accordance with the consent of their societies, and because
their consent varies, they move them differently, nor do men agree upon them
because of an innate value, but they have a value because they are agreed
upon. 50

Verbal signs do not have innate referential values. Augustine suggests to

Adeodatus in De magistro that one can’t even know that a word is a sign until
one knows what it means:51 the decision to attend to it as a sign is set by
convention, as is its meaning. Language is a social phenomenon and there
cannot be, according to this position, any constitutive similarity between
thing and sign.
Nevertheless, there is in Augustine’s writing a deep strain of belief in the
natural relation of words and their referents. De dialectica includes a chapter on
the origins of words: Augustine argues there against the Stoics’ claim that all
words can be traced to their natural origins, but he endorses and practices
etymological analysis of many words, tracing them back to find an essential,
constitutive similarity between sound and thing.52 Origins of words are
essential to his argumentation in De civitate Der. the names of the founders
of the two cities express the whole plan of human history.33 His fascination
with the infant’s process of learning language in the Confessiones (1:6,8)
suggests a profound desire for verbal signs rooted in the physical, in the
body, a language understood by all humans (and associated most closely with
babies and women, as I mentioned in chapter 5, in reference to Dante’s De
vulgari eloquentia). Even though he is always careful to distinguish natural signs
from conventional signs and to put language in the latter category, he
expresses a definite linguistic nostalgia, a desire for a language in which
word and thing are one again.
This nostalgia is a symptom of his desire to escape from the problems that
the conventionality of language poses —the problems of language’s unrelia­
bility, what we have seen, from another point of view, to be language’s
fallenness, its “femininity,” its slipper}7and mediate nature. Language, estab­
lished by convention, is radically inadequate. Augustine’s De magistro is an
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 79
extended treatise on the limitations of verbal signs. The conventions that link
signans to signatum can be changed, disregarded, broken. Words are capable
only of reminding, not teaching, says Augustine to Adeodatus; they are able
to point to the truth but do not possess it. And consequendy, all kinds of slips
are possible between the speaker, his language, and his audience.54
Theologically speaking, the problem of language’s defectiveness was
solved by the Incarnation. As God took on humanity in a Word made
flesh, so can human language express divinity; language is redeemed.55 The
Incarnation restores humankind to God, the word to the Word: the con­
tinuity of language and being, disrupted at the Fall, is reestablished. Never­
theless, the problem of language’s defectiveness, exemplified most
profoundly by its inability to express the divine, remained. We have already
seen incorrigible, wayward language in particular in “Adam Scriveyn” and
Troilus and Criseyde and have discussed the problematics of recuperative yet
disseminative translatio in the Clerk s Tale. Augustine begins the Confessiones by
lamenting the poverty of language and asserting the ultimate ineffability of
God, and he ends the De trinitate similarly - even though it is in this latter
treatise that he delineates the mimetic relation of the inner word of the mind
to the Word.36
So human language was seen, by many medieval thinkers, to be essentially
partial. This is why Raison’s narration of castration leads to a discussion of
language and relics: “coilles,” “reliques,” “paroles,” they’re all fragments. A
sign itself, Augustine sees, is accurate but is by definition only a partial
representation of the thing it signifies. The word we speak is only a fragment
of what we think {De magistro 14.46). And that inner word is only a partial
representation of the Word {De trinitate 15.10-11). Words are, physically,
fragments, one giving way to another in the construction of a whole message
{Confessiones 4.11). And there is always something left over, unexpressed:
language always lags behind the mind {De catechi^andis rudibus 2.3).57 Augus­
tine’s awareness of linguistic inadequacy, even as he formulated the idea of a
redeemed rhetoric, reflects, as Bloch puts it, an “anguished ambiguity pro­
voked by a deep split between what medieval writers knew about verbal signs
and what they desired to believe about them.”58
Many late-medieval fears about language’s instability and unreliability
centered on the use of language by self-seeking preachers, especially friars.
Faus Semblant, false preacher and sometime friar of the Rose, gathers under
his cloak of hypocrisy contradictory theories and anxieties about the use and
misuse of language and is the focus of hermeneutic disruption in the poem, as
I shall argue in a moment. The Pardoner, with his “hauteyn speche” (330),
literally or figuratively missing “codions,” and fake relics, inherits the place of
disruptive possibility from his literary forebear; he, too, is a false preacher.
Thirteenth-and fourteenth-century treatises on preaching emphasize, on
the one hand, that preaching is mandated by Christ: it is both necessary and
80 Carolyn Dinskaiv
possible with a “redeemed rhetoric” such as Augustine describes, a rhetoric
based on the “unity of substance” in the Word, as Robert of Basevom puts it
in his Forma praedicandi (1322). Christ preached and ordered his followers to
preach; indeed, in so doing, he was following a tradition of preaching that
dated from the Creation, when, as Robert writes, God first preached to
Adam. Preaching is thus linked to unfallen language.59 Humbert of Romans,
in his mid-thirteenth-century treatise on preaching, also uses images that
associate preaching with Creation.60
But on the other hand, language was understood to be partial and frag­
mentary; abuses of language in preaching were perceived as not only possible
but rampant. The widespread uneasiness about false preaching had as its
ultimate preoccupation the defective, shifting relationship of the spoken
word to the Word. The Rose is deeply concerned with the antimendicant
controversy (in which a major issue was the friars’ assumption of the duty of
preaching), as is Rutebeuf, from whose “Complaint de Guillaume” Jean de
Meun derived the name for his hypocritical friar.61 Wycliffe, a century later,
charged again and again that false preachers —abusive friars —had obfuscated
the true Word.62 Wycliffe’s literalism was extreme and unorthodox, but
protests against friars who “redefined” or altogether discarded the Word to
serve their own ends in sermons were rife: Chaucer’s Summoner paints a
perfect portrait of the “glosying” friar; Richard FitzRalph, Archbishop of
Armagh in the mid-fourteenth century, exclaims against friars who complain
of his insistence on textual proof.63 Such charges against preaching friars as
hypocrites point direcdy to a deep split between the speaker’s intention, his
spoken word, and the Word.64
False preachers thus represent not just a threat to language; they represent
what such medieval thinkers saw as a truth about language - in fact, langu­
age’s “double truth.” Language was understood to be at best a fragment, and
— like “coilles” and “reliques” — could be cut off altogether from the
Significator. Yet people necessarily believed in it with a faith that partook
of nostalgia; they affirmed by speaking and listening that the spoken word
could adequately express the inner word, and the inner word, the Word. Faus
Semblant, false preacher, focuses linguistic and hermeneutic uneasiness in the
Roman de la rose, and is the means, I suggest, by which it gains the particular
gender value it has in the Pardoner’s performance.
Faus Semblant is generally thought to be one of the most significant
sources for Chaucer’s characterization of his Pardoner. Critics cite the use
of public confession as the crucial similarity between the two; the sins Faus
Semblant reveals, “hypocrisy and self-interest,” according to Germaine
Dempster, are “exacdy those of the Pardoner.” Echoes of particular lines
can be heard in the latter’s speech, as Dean S. Fansler demonstrates; and the
movement from Faus Semblant to the Pardoner is seen by P. M. Kean to
proceed by an increase in naturalistic representation.63 But what I think
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 81

centrally important to the determination of the Pardoner’s significance is

Faus Semblants peculiar embodiment of a particular threat to language and
all hermeneutic enterprises - an embodiment that is variably gendered and
variously clothed.
At all points Faus Semblant claims that he is a hypocrite, a fraud. All
anyone can know for certain about him is that he is not what he seems:

Mes en quel que leu que je viegne

ne conment que je m’i contiegne,
nule riens fors barat n’i chaz;
ne plus que dam Tiberz li chaz
n’entent qu’a soriz et a raz,
n’entent je a riens fors a baraz.
Ne ja certes par mon habit
ne savrez o quex genz j’abit;
non ferez vos voir aus paroles,
ja tant n’ierent simples ne moles.
(Rose, w . 11035—44)

But what herberwe that ever I take,

Or what semblant that evere I make,
I mene but gile, and folowe that;
For right no mo than Gibbe oure cat,

Ne entende I but to bigilyng.

Ne no wight may by my clothing
Wife with what folk is my dwellyng,
Ne by my wordis yit, parde,
So softe and so plesaunt they be.
(Romaunt, 06201-10)

He is one of the Antichrist’s gang, as he baldly puts it, and there is no

correspondence between their garments and their true selves:

il font un argument au monde

ou conclusion a honteuse:
cist a robe religieuse,
donques est il religieus.
Cist argumenz est touz fieus,
il ne vaut pas un coustel troine:
la robe ne fet pas le moine.
(Rose, w . 11022-8)

They make the world an argument

That [hath] a foul conclusioun.
“I have a robe of religioun,
82 Carolyn Dinsbaw
Thanne am I all religious.”
This argument is all roignous;
It is not worth a croked brere.
Abit ne makith neither monk ne frere.
(Romaunt, C:6186-92)

In fact, he makes many changes of clothes; he dresses in the habit of a knight,

monk, prelate, canon, clerk, priest, disciple, master, lord of the manor,
forester, prince or page (Rose, w . 11157—68; Romaunt, C:6327-34) - yet
none gives a clue as to what is underneath. Like the Pardoner, he is never
stripped bare, and he incarnates the uneasy posibility that interpretation is
impossible. It is not simply that allegorical reading in malo of Faus Semblant’s
surface might always be necessary (he is “blanche dehors, dedenz nercie”
[Rose, V. 11983]; “Ryght blak withynne and whit withoute” [Romaunt, C:7333]);
more fundamentally, the only constant about him is that he is not what he
seems. It may be, then, that, as I’ve already suggested in regard to the
Pardoner, there is no relation between surface and body, letter and spirit.
“Mes de religion sanz faille / j’en lés le grain et pregn la paille. / ... je n’en
quier sanz plus que l’abit” (Rose, w . 11185-8) (“But to what ordre that I am
sworn, / I take the strawe, and lete the corn. / .../ I axe nomore but her abit”
[Romaunt, Q6353-6]): Faus Semblant in fact suggests here that there is
nothing underneath those clothes but a consuming fraud; like the Pardoner,
he is constituted by an absence within.
And, like the Pardoner, Faus Semblant has an essentially uncertain gender
- sometimes he’s a man, sometimes a woman:

Autre eure vest robe de fame,

or sui damoisele, or sui dame;
autre eure sui religieuse,
or sui rendue, or sui prieuse,
or sui nonnain, or abbeesse.
(Rose, w . 11177-81)

Somtyme a wommans cloth take I;

Now am I a mayde, now lady.
Somtyme I am religious;
Now lyk an anker in an hous.
Somtyme am I prioresse,
And now a nonne, and now abbesse.
(Romaunt, G6345-50)

The principles of fraud and hermeneutic breakdown that Faus Semblant

personifies are significandy multi-gendered, significandy sexually indetermi­
nate. If one medieval idea of language - the sense of the signifier’s oneness
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 83
with its signified - associates it with prelapsarian times, a time of mythically
perfect (hetero)sexual relations, gendered and uncorrupted, the other idea -
referring to its arbitrariness, fragmentariness, and consequent potential for
disruption - cuts it off from such perfect sexuality or even clearly defined
gender. The breakdown of interpretive stability and determinate gender are of
a piece, as it were; and the Pardoner, false preacher, of an unidentifiable
sexuality, is Faus Semblants descendant in every way.

I ll

The Pardoner both exposes and is caught in this apparent double truth of
language. He uses language as he does his relics and his documents, as a
partial object, as a substitute for his literally or figuratively absent genitals and
for what that absence represents: a lost Golden Age, a lost realm in which
there is no differentiation between self and other, signifier and signified - the
realm of the Word. His partial objects are flawed; they are inadequate
substitutes, and this is apparent to all, including himself. He does not try to
hide this, either: in fact, he tells the pilgrims again and again that his relics are
fakes; he insists that his words and his intentions are discrepant; he admits
that Christ’s, not his, pardon “is best.” Yet he adopts these partial objects in
the knowledge of their flawedness, in the knowledge of their insufficiency.
The psycho-logic of knowingly accepting such faulty substitutes is succincdy
expressed by Octave Mannoni: “Je sais bien, mais quand m êm e. . . ” (“I know,
but even s o ... ”). This is the logic of the eunuch - a radical unknowing -
informing the hermeneutics of the partial.66
Mannoni, following Freud, is here discussing the fetish. Freud writes that
the fetish “is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little
boy once believed in, an d. .. does not want to give up.”67 The fetish allows
the child to retain the idea of the maternal phallus even after he has perceived
sexual difference; it allows him to believe he remains in the realm of non­
differentiation and plenitude (his mother and he are not separate) even after
he knows that she doesn’t have an organ like his, even after mother and child
are cut off from each other by the interruption of the father. But it is clear
that such a substitute is inevitably inadequate; the child knows the mother is
separate and other, and anxiously tries to fill that unfillable emptiness. The
fetish is precisely what I’ve been calling a partial object: it admits the fact of
castration even as it refuses to admit it. Thus the fetish is constituted of
contrary ideas, of “two mutually incompatible assertions”: the mother has her
penis and she has been castrated; the child is united with the mother and is cut
off from her.68 The fetish thus confounds simple reading, univalent meaning:
hardly a simple substitute - neither Ersat^ nor non E rsafy as Derrida in Glas
shows - the object is a sign of absence and a suggestion of presence.69 As
84 Carolyn Dinshaw
such, it deconstructs hermeneutic gestures such as I’ve been describing
throughout this book. The eunuch’s hermeneutics paradoxically consists of
a denial of knowledge: the fetishist maintains a “conceptual fiction,” a fiction
of nondifferentiation and plenitude, in the face of “perceptual knowledge.”70
“I know, but even s o ... the fetish is the first model of all repudiations of
reality.71 Thus the medieval theorists of language know, but hold on to the
belief otherwise, about the inadequacy of language. Just as the fetishist knows
that a foot is just a foot - but even s o ...
From the fetishist’s point of view, moreover, that foot —even as it is
disavowed - is an embodiment of lost wholeness. From an analytical per­
spective, the fetish is a figure, a trope, something that represents what has been
lost —the organ, plenitude - even as it represents lack itself. The fetishist,
from this latter point of view, has an inadequately figurative understanding:
he refuses to recognize that he is dealing with a trope, a figure; he takes it
literally, as that lost body part that completes, guarantees wholeness. We have
seen literal reading to be linked in the Pauline tradition to the carnal and the
feminine and to be devalued in relation to the figurative; in the psychoanalytic
scheme it is also linked to the body and the feminine (although the terms
have different meanings in this instance), and, importandy, it is also devalued:
inadequately figurative reading is a delusion.
The Pardoner, using his partial objects as substitute masculinity, is a
fetishist; both conflicted disavowal and misreading of the literal for the
figurative are evident in his performance. There is unfillable absence within
him, and he uses his verbal arts, documents, relics as substitutes: they are
admissions, signs of his lack even as they guard against his acknowledgment
of it. He knows that they’re only partial, that they’re fakes, frauds, but even so he
uses them - aggressively, desperately - in the belief that they can make him
whole, somehow part of the body of pilgrims. This conflicted psyche can be
seen represented in the narrative of his tale, a sample sermon. The world of
the Tale, as we shall see, is an Old Testament one, punitive and unredeemed;
the “riotoures thre” are dispatched by “Deeth” in a terrifyingly immediate
judgment of their sin. Yet the “olde man,” embodying mutually incompatible
assertions, has - along with a knowledge of this implacable “Deeth” - a belief
in redemption, “even so.” But if the riotors fetishistically fail to distinguish
figurative language - the result of that failure being lethal - the old man’s
ability to read allegory leaves him, as well, without access to fullness.72
The tavern world of the rioters is the world of the Law. Most of the
Pardoner’s exempla are drawn from the Old Testament, and he seems in fact
to prefer the Old Testament to the New in setting the scene: “Witnesse on
Mathew; but in special / Of sweryng seith the hooly Jeremve” (634—5).
Christ’s Redemption is duly acknowledged, but humankind’s original corrup­
tion and consequent damnation - imposed by an angry God the Father at the
Fall - vividly endure in the Pardoner’s rhetoric:
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 85
O glotonye, ful of cursednesse!
O cause first of oure confusion!
O original of oure dampnacioun,
Til Crist hadde boght us with his blood agayn!
Lo, how deere, shortly for to sayn,
Aboght was thilke cursed vileynye!
Corrupt was al this world for glotonye.
(498-504)

“Heighe Goddes heestes” (640), the tables of the Law, govern, and sin is
inexorably punished: its wages is death. “Death,” in fact, presides over “this
contree”; he has slain “al the peple” (676) and will inevitably prevail over
those who seek to slay him. In the emotional economy of the tale, this
ineluctable Death is the same force as the Father, “verray God, that is
omnipotent.” When, then, the Pardoner assigns the three rioters - three
stumbling, swearing drunks - to overcome Death, it becomes clear that, to
his mind, redemption from the Law, from this forbidding “verray God,” is
impossible. “Deeth shal be deed!” the rioters yell, “al dronken in this rage”
(710, 705): the three inebriated ruffians are incapable - obviously, lugu­
briously - of this salvific mission.
Indulging in all the sins of which the Pardoner says he is himself guilty, the
three rioters are a representation of the Pardoner’s belief in the impossibility
of redemption and atonement. The deadly consequences of their literal­
mindedness represent one part of the eunuch’s logic, the Pardoner’s know­
ledge that a foot is just a foot, so to speak - his knowledge that the fetish
cannot bring atonement. Misreading or bad reading in fact is the motivation
of the Tale's plot. The rioters’ informant at the tavern, the “boy” who is
dropped from the tale once he has served his narrative function, speaks
allegorically of the demise of the rioters’ “old felawe” (672). He creates a
spear-wielding personification of death itself:

Ther cam a privée theef men clepeth Deeth,

That in this contree al the peple sleeth,
And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo,
And wente his wey withouten wordes mo.

Me thynketh that it were necessarie

For to be war of swich an adversarie.
(675-82)

The tavern keeper concurs, speculating about “his habitacioun” in a “greet

village” (687-9). The three, of course, take this talk literally and set out to find
and do away with the thief Death. Their failure to recognize figurative
discourse is the narrative equivalent of the fetishist’s failure to acknowledge
86 Carolyn Dinshaw
that the fetish is a figure. And this failure proves terminal: they are annihilated
as a result of it. When directed to and presented with their death in the form
of florins, they can’t read it right; and they don’t suspect that the radix on
which the bushel sits might be cupiditas, either.
But if the Pardoner figures his knowledge (“I know”) of the futility of the
fetish in the three rioters, he figures a more complex self-understanding in the
“olde man” whom they accost in the search for Death. He is, first of all, an
incarnation of the Pardoner’s anguished knowledge of his fragmentariness:
“Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!” (732). The old man wails
for some redemption from his defective and dying corpse; and he expresses
this desire not in terms of atonement with the Father but of reunion with his
“leeve mooder”:73

Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf,

And on the ground, which is my moodres gate,
I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late,
And seye “Leeve mooder, leet me in!”
(728-31)

Between the old man and his “leeve mooder,” that lost ideal realm of unity
and plenitude, stands “Goddes wille.” To be “at reste” in the “ground” with
his mother would provide a return to nondifferentiation, a reunion of subject
and object, a redemption from the torments of age and separation. Even
though he knows of Christ’s atonement for the loss of original plenitude - he
tells the rioters of it - he remains unredeemed by him “that boghte agayn
mankynde” (766): he walks continually “lyk a restelees kaityf’ (728). The old
man has an image and a belief in fullness and plenitude - “Deeth” to him is
reunion, not separation, and he states that he has not been reunited with his
mother “y e F - but the way to this plenitude is not through the Father:
“Goddes wille” blocks it.
The “olde man” can certainly understand allegory; he replies immediately
and knowingly to the rioters, interpreting their query about “thilke traytour
Deeth” by sending them along to find “hym” under a tree. But such
hermeneutic ability gets the old man no closer to achieving his own despe­
rately articulated goal of reunion in death: “Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my
ly f’ (727). He recognizes the allegorical as allegorical - he recognizes, in the
terms of my analysis, the figurativity of the fetish - but is left without any
access to fullness and plenitude, separated from his “leeve mooder.” Instead
he wanders, neither dead nor really living. Neither literal nor figurative has,
finally, any redeeming value.
The characters thus enact the Pardoner’s own understanding of the fetish­
ist, stuck between knowledge and desire for wholeness. The form of the
Pardoner's Tale itself - a sermon with narrative exemplum - further
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 87
demonstrates the psychological stagnation of the fetishist, caught between
incompatible affirmations. The exemplum is unnecessary to the logical
argument of the sermon; it doesn’t develop or complicate a point but merely
demonstrates it. Radix malorum est cupiditas", the three rioters are greedy and
unscrupulous, and evil befalls them. The wages of sin is death: they set out to
find death, and they find it. The plot is nothing but the rigorous working out
of what is announced at the outset: how the rioters find death remains to be
seen, but that they will find it is certain.75 The tale itself is, from this
standpoint, superfluous - we already know the outcome - and thus it is no
coincidence that “superfluytee abhomynable” - drinking, gambling, cursing -
(471; cf. 528) motivates the whole sermon. Yet despite the tale’s excessive
status there is nothing left over, nothing left behind. The clever reification of
the radix malorum into “under a tree” is a function of the tale’s essentially
resolved form: everyone and everything is consumed in the turns of the
narrative, either dying or fading out, going “thider as I have to go” (749), as
the old man says.
So the Pardoner believes in plenitude as fact while knowing it is a fiction,
and he successfully plays on that belief held by the members of his audiences
as well. Cynical fraud and true believer at once, the Pardoner is a great success
as a swindler - his promises of wholeness make him richer by far than any
parish priest - precisely because he truly believes in his own false relics.76
And he knows the pilgrims desire wholeness: when he interrupts the Wife of
Bath to claim that he was about to wed a wife, when he later proclaims in his
Prologue that he wants a jolly wench in every town, he is not simply trying to
enter into the heterosexual world of the pilgrims; he is cannily playing on
their desire to believe in integrity of the body - their desire to believe in the
integrity of his body and the integrity of their own pilgrim body. He’s
exploiting their fetishistic ability to admit his oddity even while they refuse
the practical consequences of their admission. They know (that he’s sexually
weird), but even so (even so, they demand a “moral thyng” from him). Their
desire for an edifying tale is well described by this fetishistic logic: even out of
the mouth of a ribald figure they insist that it will be a “moral thyng.”
Fetishism is, finally, a conservative behavior: it allows one to maintain a
conviction of plenitude even in the face of loss and dislocation. The Pardoner
is fixed between knowledge of his fragmentation and belief that he can be
made whole; knowledge of Death, God’s Law, and judgment, and belief in
the possibility of reunion and redemption; knowledge that his pardons are
fraudulent and belief that they can restore him to an original unity. In its
“stuck” quality, this mechanism of disavowal is similar to the cyclical mechan­
ism, as Augustine analyzes it, of sinning that leads to despair that leads to
further sinning.77 Despair is finally cataclysmically destructive, however,
while the Pardoner will continue to “g o . . . as I have to go,” neither destroying
himself nor finding redemption.
88 Carolyn Dinshaw
The Pardoner’s coup de grace —or, better, coupure de grâce —at the end of the
tale is the final gesture of the fetishist among his peers: “I have relikes and
pardoun in my male / As faire as any man in Engelond” (920-1), he boasts to
the pilgrims. In other words: “I know that they’re phony substitutes (but even
so, I believe they’re ‘as fair’ as any other man’s). And yo u know that they’re
frauds (but even so, you want to believe in the grace of absolution). So step
right up and kiss them.” The Host’s reaction to this offer —the expression of
his desire to castrate the Pardoner - is fierce; he catches the fetishist in the act:
“I wolde I hadde thy codions in myn hond / In stide of relikes or of
seintuarie” (952-3). And if that reaction is undermined by uncertainty, as I
suggested above, the kiss of peace and reconciliation that follows, itself a
loaded gesture in this overheated context, is also characteristically undecid-
able. It is hardly a clear restoration of the idea of community and friendship
that has been devastated in the narrative of the three rioters. Who is recon­
ciled to whom or what? Is the Pardoner, not-man, not-woman, welcomed into
the “brotherhood” of the laughing pilgrims, as has been suggested by critics?
Or is the Host, apparently all-man, no-woman, reconciled instead to his own
castration, to the reality of life according to the Pardoner?78 The Knight’s
intervention, cutting off this fetishistic performance, returns the company to
the beginning: “And, as we diden, lat us laughe and pleye,” he exhorts them.
As before in fragment 1 (856), they again “ryden forth hir weye.”

IV

The Pardoner is stuck, his fetishes keeping him fixed in place, and it seems he
has led the pilgrimage nowhere. But after the Pardoner’s performance noth­
ing on this pilgrimage, I would argue, can be quite the same again. The
performance has poignantly and furiously exposed the cost of patriarchal
discourse. I have argued throughout this book that Chaucer suggests andro-
centrism takes its toll on men as well as on women, limits the idea of the
“masculine” as well as of the “feminine.” As I suggested in reference to the
Wife of Bath in particular, misogyny —the constraint of women’s subjectivity,
autonomous desire, signifying power —finally deprives men of their own self­
understanding too. Turning away from woman limits all human experience,
and, in particular, limits that subset of experience that has concerned me most
in this book, literary activity. The Pardoner’s conflicted performance demon­
strates the pain for all humans that results from the essential move under­
writing patriarchal discourse as I’ve analyzed it, the move to define woman as
lacking, as incomplete, as a no-thing, and to make (her) absence the necessary
condition of language and culture.
The Pardoner lays bare the presuppositions of patriarchal discourse: he
exposes not only the asymmetry of its binary oppositions - he is identified in
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 89
terms of a lack of masculinity, which determines his position as at best
marginal - but he provides as well a perspective on the logic of the Same
on which that discourse operates. He is neither the Same nor the Other,
neither man nor not-man; that ideological structure is not universal or
natural, as it strives to appear - his partial objects don’t obey that binary
and exclusive logic either.
The Pardoner thus destabilizes the project, calls into question the possibil­
ity of making morally redeeming tales or interpreting tales in Christian,
spiritual terms. If “fables and swich wrecchednesse,” to quote another critic
of fiction-making, depend on a clear distinction between what is literally true
and what is false, what could have happened and what could not have
happened, if fables depend on a hermeneutic structure of binary oppositions
(surface and nucleus, letter and spirit, clothes and body) that is homologous
to the structure of gender oppositions, then the eunuch, outside these
structures, suggests that some other literary activity with some other founda­
tion is necessary. The Pardoner suggests the necessity of something beyond a
model of interpretation that depends on a binary turning away from the
literal, the carnal, the feminine and toward the figurative, the spirit, the
masculine. He suggests the necessity of moving beyond a model of herme­
neutics that proceeds by the anxious covering, uncovering, and recovering of
the body of meaning - anxious in its desire to prove that there is a body
underneath, that there is a meaning of all those words; anxious in its desire to
domesticate that body, to legitimate that meaning. With his unclassifiable
body beyond gender as we know it in androcentric culture, he suggests the
possibility of a poetics based not on such mediations as gender and language
but, perhaps, on something unmediated. And that, for Chaucer, would be a
poetics based on the incarnate Word, on the body of Christ, which is itself an
embodied word; it would be a poetics founded on the body of Christ who is
God, in whom there is no lack, no division, no separation, no difference. This
would be a poetics of presence, not absence, in which, finally, all difference
would be obviated.
This is perhaps the direction in which Chaucer’s poetics finally turned,
away from a poetics that engages with the fallible, mediate letter of human
language and the gendered human body. The other preacher on the road to
Canterbury', the Parson, in a gesture that closes the narrative, rejects the
whole tale-telling project and all the categories by which it proceeds: he
eschews all engagement with the letter for its own sake - all fable, all rhythm
and rhyme (“I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre, / Ne, God woot, rym
holde I but litel bettre” [10:43-4]) - and he will not “glose,” either (10:45). He
cares only to deliver a full sentence; his goal is “Jerusalem celestial,” and the
proper poetics on the “viage” - the literary' approach that will show the way -
proceeds by an unequivocal acceptance of the flawlessly in carnate Christ and
a belief in His ability to guarantee the expression of “moralitee and vertuous
90 Carolyn Dinshaw
mateere” (10:51, 49, 38). This is a negating, totalizing stroke, to be sure, as is
the gesture of retraction that follows the Parson in almost all the manuscripts
that contain the complete Parson's Tale. I take the voice of the Retractions, the
voice of “the makere of this book,” to be Chaucer’s, without deliberate
impersonation, and I take it to enunciate a final literary intention. But even
as the Parson and Chaucer reject and attempt to take back what is problematic
- and what has proved to be most enduring - in Chaucer’s texts, these last
gestures can be read as not only attempting a total closure (such as we have
seen to be associated with the masculine) but as opening out an alternative
possibility, too (something associated with the feminine in Chaucer’s texts). As
I read them, they open out a profound linguistic and literary possibility, even a
challenge: to make and increase and multiply in a language guaranteed by the
“precious blood” (10:1090) of a body constituted by no division, no lack.79
The Retractions appear to have preceded the final silence of the poet; this
language of presence - the language of the divine - is not, after all, a language
of this world.80 But the Pardoner urges his audience to think about the
possibility of linguistic presence even as the pilgrimage wends forth its way
on earth. Constituted by absence, he sets his listeners to thinking about
absolute Presence, about radical Being in which there is no lack and in
which all difference and division are obviated. So completely unlike the
others around him, so far outside the categories by which they operate that
he isn’t even their Other, the Pardoner, not-man, not-woman, is the unlikely
but best pilgrim for this task on the road to Canterbury; for in the ideal
Christian society too, according to Saint Paul, “non est masculus neque
femina” (Galatians 3:28).

N otes

1 I take “trowe” here in its most common Middle English usage as denoting a
speculation, a guess. See the Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “trow” 3.b: ‘To believe
or suppose (a thing or person) to be (so and so)”; and A Chaucer Glossary, ed.
Norman Davis et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), s.v. “trowe(n)” 1: “Believe;
think, judge.” C. David Benson comments:

This word most commonly indicates speculation, but even if we take it in its
less usual meaning of certainty, is this the assertion of the same narrator who
agrees with the Monk’s idea of cloistered duty and find the murderous Ship-
man a good fellow? Certainly the phrase “I trowe” qualifies what is to follow
to some degree. (“Chaucer’s Pardoner: His Sexualitv and Modem Critics,”
Mediaevalia 8 [1985 for 1982]: 339)

We can’t read “trowe” here too easily and ironically; Benson stresses the uncer­
tainty of any knowledge of the Pardoner’s sexual makeup. Moreover, he suggests
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 91
that recent critical emphasis on the Pardoner’s sexuality is a modem distortion:
“The real perversion of this pilgrim is not sexual but moral” (p. 346). While I
agree with Benson that the Pardoner’s portrait confounds any sure knowledge of
his sexuality, I would argue that the issue of sexuality was in fact central to
medieval audiences of this text: as James A. Brundage has recendy stated, sexual
practices, from the late twelfth century on, were “taken as indicators of doctrinal
orthodoxy,” so that sexual deviance implied spiritual deviance (Law, Sex, and
Christian Society in Medieval Europe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987],
pp. 256-324, esp. 313-14]). Indeed, the moral cannot be opposed to the sexual,
but is deeply implicated in it.
2 For a discussion of the “obligatory heterosexuality” in the exchange model of
society (and the implied ban on homosexual relations, even though the society is
“homosocial” - i.e. constituted by bonds between men), see Gayle Rubin, “The
Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an
Anthropology of Women, ed. R. R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1975) , pp. 179-80; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Craig
Owens, “Oudaws: Gay Men in Feminism,” in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine
and Paul Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 219-32.
3 Robert B. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1977), p. 170; Lee W. Patterson, “Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature
and the Pardoner,” Medievalia et Humanística, n.s. 7 (1976): 153-73, esp. p. 163. H.
Marshall Leicester, J r., in The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the ‘Canter­
bury Tales” (Berkeley and Los Angetes.: University of California Press, 1990), also
stresses the Pardoner’s hiding his intentions from others. Leicester’s reading of
the Pardoner as an embodiment of lack has much in common with mine; and his
contrast of “the feminine” in the Wife of Bath and in the Pardoner runs parallel to
my contrast, below, of the Clerk (and Chaucer) and the Pardoner as they occupy
the “feminine” position.
4 For a discussion of the hermeneutic provocations of retaining such a veil, see D.
A. Miller, “The Administrator’s Black Veil: A Response toj. Hillis Miller,” ADE
Bulletin 88 (1987): 49-53.
5 For an account of the Pardoner’s literary reception from medieval to modern
times, see Betsy Bowden, Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 77-173. “About the
Pardoner,” she writes, “critics have almost always agreed to disagree” (p. 79).
6 R. Howard Bloch, in “Silence and Holes: The Roman de Silence and the Art of the
Trouvère” (in Images of Power Medieval History/Discourse/Literature, ed. Stephen G.
Nichols and Kevin Brownlee, YFS1Q [1986]: 81-99), reads Macrobius in precisely
this way.[...]
7 The narrator’s perception of lack is what Donald R. Howard stresses in his
reading of the line, “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare”; see his The Idea of the
“Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1976) , p. 343. Howard seeks to restore the sense of the Pardoner’s inexplicably
strange presence among the pilgrims but accepts, nonetheless, Curry’s determina­
tion that the Pardoner is a eunuch (see n. 8 below and the excellent critical
92 Carolyn Dinshaw
analysis of critical analyses of the Pardoner in Monica McAJpine’s “The Pardo­
ner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters,” PMLA 95 [1980]: 8-22).
8 The gloss of “geldyng” as “eunuch” is attested by both the Middle English Dictionary
and the Oxford English Dictionary. The wide acceptance of eunuchry as the descrip­
tion of the Pardoner’s condition derives ultimately from “The Secret of Chaucer’s
Pardoner,” W. C. Curry’s ground-breaking article {JEGP18 [1919]: 593-606; later
appearing in his Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, rev. edn. [New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1960], pp. 54—90). Curry was the first to bring the inference of eunuchry
under critical scrutiny, attempting to provide evidence from classical and medieval
scientific discourse. Curry’s particular interpretation of this evidence - his con­
clusion that the Pardoner is a congenital eunuch, a eunuchus ex nativitate, rather than
a castrated one - has come under attack: see Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the
General Prologue to the ‘Canterbury Tales” (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 274-6;
Beryl Rowland, “Chaucer’s Idea of the Pardoner,” ChauR 14 (1979): 140-54;
McAlpine, ‘The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters”; and Benson,
“Chaucer’s Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modem Critics.” Curry bases his diag­
nosis on his own interpretation of the Pardoner’s character and not on the
medieval physiognomists (according to whom all eunuchs look alike). And his
medieval evidence is not, as Benson points out, as compelling or conclusive as is
often assumed by modern critics. Still, the reading of the equine figure “geldyng”
as “eunuch,” either congenital or castrated, is supported by physical details in the
General Prologue; as McAlpine concedes, Chaucer does evoke the medieval
stereotype of the eunuch in details of the Pardoner’s portrait. Robert P. Miller
has provided the scriptural background that supports the diagnosis eunuchus (see
his classic article, “Chaucer’s Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner’s
Tale,” Speculum 30 [1955]: 180-99); Chaucer’s detailing of the Pardoner’s physical
condition, Lee Patterson argues, renders it meaningful both in the realm of
science and of religious symbol (“Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature
and the Pardoner”). As I hope to demonstrate, eunuchry as a figure has a
powerful psychological value in the Prologue and Tale.
“Mare” is defined in the MED (s.v. “mere,” n.(l) 2.e) as figuratively denoting
“a bad woman, a slut”; attestations include Handlyng Synne and the Castle of
Perseverance. Sexually wayward femininity can thus be evoked by this term. The
gloss of “mare” as “effeminate male” is not attested by the MED or OED but is a
likely reading of this equine figure in context of a description of a male; such a
gloss was suggested by Curry (“The Secret of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” p. 58) and has
been reiterated by McAlpine:

“Mare” must be a term commonly used in Chaucer’s day to designate a

male person who, though not necessarily sterile or impotent, exhibits
physical traits suggestive of femaleness, visible characteristics ... that were
thought to have broad effects on the psyche and on character. (“The
Pardoner’s Homosexuality,” p. 11)

See also Benson, who seems to accept the reading of “mare” as “effeminate in
some way” (“Chaucer’s Pardoner,” p. 339).
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 93
Other analyses of the Pardoner’s sexuality - that he is a “testicular pseudo-
hermaphrodite of the feminine type” (Beryl Rowland, “Animal Imagery and the
Pardoner’s Abnormality,” Neophilologus 48 [1964]: 56-60), or a combination
pervert, e.g. “a manic depressive with traces of anal eroticism, and a pervert
with a tendency toward alcoholism” (Eric W. Stockton, “The Deadliest Sin in
the Pardoner’s Tale’’ Tennessee Studies in Literature 6 [1961]: 47) —seem far more
specific and certain than is warranted by the portrait and performance of the
character.
9 McAlpine argues at length for the possibility of reading “mare” as “a possibly
homosexual male,” suggesting that “certain types of feminized behavior and
appearance in males were sometimes interpreted as evidence of homosexuality”
(“The Pardoner’s Sexuality,” p. 12). Citing a variety of medieval examples, she
bases her discussion on the apparent conflation of sexual categories - effemi­
nacy, homosexuality, eunuchry, hermaphroditism, impotence —in common
medieval understanding. I shall treat this apparent conflation in more detail in
n. 16 below. McAlpine mentions the anachronism of the term “homosexual” in
this context (p. 11), but she retains it nonetheless to refer not just to sexual acts
but to sexual and moral identity. For a thorough and clear discussion of
appropriate terminology for older literatures, see John Boswell, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), pp. 43—6: Boswell distinguishes between “homosexuality” (referring to
the “general phenomenon of same-sex eroticism”) and “gay” (referring to
“persons who are conscious of erotic inclination toward their own gender as a
distinguishing characteristic”). I shall use the more general term; my point about
the Pardoner’s character is not as specific as that he is “gay.”
10 I wish to acknowledge a general indebtedness in the development of my idea of
eunuch hermeneutics to R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986).
11 See Robert P. Miller, “Chaucer’s Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the
Pardoner’s Tale.” Augustine’s analyses of spiritual conditions are powerful
psychological analyses as well, as Donald R. Howard comments in his discussion
of the Pardoner in his Idea of the “Canterbury Tales," pp. 355—6. Janet Adelman, in
“ That We May Leere Som Wit’ ” (in Twentieth-Century Interpretations o f the Par­
doner, ed. Dewey R. Faulkner [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973],
pp. 96-106), discusses aesthetic implications of cupiditas, seeing in the Tale’s use
of parody and analogy a pattern of false substitution.
12 About the eunuch in the Acts, Richard remarks:

Solus amor libri totum sibi vindicaverat domicilium castitatis, quo dis­
ponente mox fidei ianuam meruit introire.

[Love of his book alone had wholly engrossed this domicile of chastity,
under whose guidance he soon deserved to enter the gate of faith.] (The
Philobiblon of Richard Bury, ed. and trans. Ernest C. Thomas [London:
Kegan, Paul, Trench and Co., 1888], ch. 15, sec. 203 [pp. 121, 231])
94 Carolyn Dinshaw
See also Philobiblon, ch. 15, sec. 193 (pp. 115, 227) for citation of Origen.
13 J. T. Muckle, ed., “Abelard’s Letter of Consolation to a Friend,” Mediaeval Studies
12 (1950): esp. 182. See letter 4, from Abelard to Heloise, for remarks
regarding Origen (Muckle, ed., Mediaeval Studies 15 [1953]: 89-90). R. Howard
Bloch’s discussion in Etymologies and Genealogies: A Uteraty Anthropology o f the
French Middle Ages ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983], “Philosophy
and the Family: Abelard,” pp. 141-9) suggests ways in which castration informs
Abelard’s theological formulations and his radical break from philosophical
tradition.
14 Abelard’s castration was not voluntary, of course, however salutary he later
found it. He notes that Origen acted impetuously and was worthy of blame:

Culpam tamen non modicam Origines [j/í] incurrit dum per poenam
corporis remedium culpae quaerit, zelum quippe dei habens, sed non
secundam scientiam, homicidii incurrit reatum, inferendo sibi manum.

[Yet Origen is seriously to be blamed because he sought a remedy for

blame in punishment of his body. True, he has zeal for God, but an ill-
informed zeal, and the charge of homicide can be proved against him for
his self-mutilation.] (Letter 4 [Mediaeval Studies, p. 90; trans. Betty Radice,
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (New York: Penguin, 1974), p. 149])

Similarly, John of Salisbury, one of Abelard’s students in Paris, commends

Origen for his zeal but remarks on his lack of good sense (Polycraticus 8.6 [in
PL 199: 724D-25D]). For summary discussion of medieval attitudes toward
castration, see John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the
Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University' Press,
1966), pp. 95, 247. The idea that self-castration was blameworthy was current
throughout the Middle Ages; voluntary self-castration was not approved of even
by the early church: opposing Gnostic opinion regarding self-castration, the
Council of Nicea (ad 325) enunciated the belief that nature should not be
mutilated. Aquinas summed up medieval opinion when he stressed that God
intended, through nature, that the human body be integral in all its members
(Summa theologica 2a.2ae.65 [“De mutilatione membrorum”] [Opera omnia (Parma,
1852-73; rpt. New York: Musurgia, 1948), 3:244—5]). Nature (w. 17022-9) and
Genius (w. 20007-52) in the Roman de la rose (ed. Félix Lecoy, CFMA 98 [Paris:
Honoré Champion, 1970]) similarly stress the natural integrity of the body.
Richard of Bur)’ does, it is true, acknowledge that Origen’s self-castration was
a “hasty remedy,” “nec naturae tamen consentaneum nec virtuti” (“repugnant
alike to nature and to virtue,” in Thomas’s emphatic translation) but ends the
chapter with his vigorous commendation of the New Testament castrato; the
metaphoric charge of Richard’s discourse is most important here (.Philobiblon, ch.
15, sec. 203).
15 See Raison, in Ije Roman de la rose, w . 5505-628; Genius also explicitly connects
castration to the loss of the Golden Age (w. 20007-52). For a detailed analysis
of the Golden Age in reference to these passages in the Roman de la Rose -
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 95
divergent from the one I shall propose here - see John V. Fleming, Reason and the
Lover (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 97-135.
16 McAlpine briefly documents the conflation of sexual categories in the Middle
Ages, citing among other writings a thirteenth-century fabliau by Gautier le Leu,
“La Veuve,” in which impotence, eunuchry, homosexuality, and heresy are
equated (“The Pardoner’s Homosexuality,” p. 12). “La Veuve,” Charles Musca­
tine has argued, may have influenced Chaucer’s characterization of the Wife of
Bath; see “The Wife of Bath and Gautier’s ‘La Veuve,’ ” in Romance Studies in
Memory o f Edward Billings Ham, ed. U. T. Holmes, California State College
Publications 2 (Hayward, Calif.: 1967), pp. 109-14.
17 Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 53. See [Aristotle],
Problems 4.24—6 (trans. E. S. Forster, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed.
Jonathan Barnes [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], pp. 1,356-
7). Boswell goes on to mention Caelius Aurelianus (fifth-century translator of
Soranus), who himself cites Parmenides’ On Nature, in considering homo­
sexuality to be the result of a birth defect. Caelius Aurelianus mentions others
{multi sectarum principes) as well who considered homosexuality an inherited
disease; see On Chronic Diseases, ed. and trans. I. E. Drabkin (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 900-5. Aurelianus’s works were apparently not
important in the development of medieval medical thought, but Aquinas’s
certainly were. I have already discussed Aquinas on the conception of females
in my Introduction (see p. 19 and n. 47); Aquinas’s position on homosexuality in
the Summa theologica, the repository of orthodox Christian sentiment for centuries
to come, is acutely analyzed by Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality, pp. 318-30. Aquinas’s discussion is of particular interest here:
homosexuality might be quite “natural” to a given individual because of a
“defect of nature in him”:

Ita igitur contingit quod id quod est contra naturam hominis vel quantum
ad rationem, vel quantum ad corporis conservationem, fiat huic homini
connaturale propter aliquam corruptionem naturae in eo existentem.

[Thus it may happen that something which is against human nature, in

regard either to reason or to the preservation of the body, may become
natural to a particular man, owing to some defect of nature in him.]
{Summa theologica 2a.31.7; trans. Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality, p. 326)

Females, too, are produced by “defective” circumstances - Aquinas follows

Aristotle here - and, as I noted in the Introduction, this leads the scholastic
philosopher into a difficulty regarding the morality and goodness of the condi­
tion of femaleness (“Utrum mulier debuerit produci in prima rerum produc­
tione” [Summa theologica la.92.1]). Boswell argues that, in Aquinas, “neither
homosexuality' nor femaleness can be shown to be ‘immoral’ simply because it
does not represent the primar}' intent of ‘nature,’ and both are in fact ‘natural’ to
the individuals in question” (p. 327). Aquinas condemns homosexuality' as
96 Carolyn Dinshaw
“unnatural,” Boswell contends, in “a concession to popular sentiment and
parlance” rather than in a theological proof (p. 328). For more on the “unna­
tural” in medieval discussions of homosexuality,” see Vern L. Bullough, “The
Sin against Nature and Homosexuality,” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church,
ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books,
1982), pp. 55-71; and James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in
Medieval Europe (see n. 1 above).
18 For a discussion and translation of Rhazes’ treatise, see Franz Rosenthal, “Ar-
RâzT on the Hidden Illness,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 45-60. For
a general treatment of Rhazes in the context of Islamic medicine, see Manfred
Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1978). Helen
Rodnite Lemay mentions Rhazes in her general discussions of human sexuality
in the medical writings of the medieval West; see “William of Saliceto on Human
Sexuality,” I'Sator 12 (1981): 165-81; and “Human Sexuality in Twelfth-through
Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings,” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church,
pp. 187-205.
19 Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as
revealed in psychoanalytic experience,” in his Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 4.
20 Alfred L. Kellogg, “Chaucer’s Satire of the Pardoner,” in his Chaucer; Langland,
Arthur Essays in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ.
Press, 1972), pp. 212-44.
21 I have found Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion
(London: Faber, 1975), especially useful - well documented and lively - on
the subject of relics. Other interesting, general treatments I have used include
Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Origines du culte des martyrs, 2d edn., rev. (Brussels:
Société des Bollandistes, 1933); P. Séjourné, “Reliques,” in Dictionnaire de théologie
catholique (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1937), 13:2311-75; and Peter Brown,
The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1981). In the brief discussion that follows, I have cited sources
from the early through the late Middle Ages; veneration of relics varied through
the age, but the essential theological idea of relics remained fairly constant.
Sumption suggests that the early church’s defenses of relics are echoed “in every’
major apologist of the Middle Ages” (Pilgrimage, p. 23).
22 See A. Frowlow, lut Relique de la vrai croix: recherches sur le développement d'un culte,
Archives de l’orient chrétien, no. 7 (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines,
1961), pp. 60-1, 161-5.
23 Theodoret of Cyrus, Graecarum affectionum curatio 8; quoted in Sumption, Pilgrim­
age, p. 28. See also Victricius of Rouen {De laude sanctorum 10-11 [PL 20:454B]),
who speaks of saints’ bodies, wherein all fragments are “totius vinculo aetern­
itatis astricti” - “linked by a bond to the whole stretch of eternity” in Brown’s
elegant translation; see Brown’s discussion of Victricius, in The Cult of the Saints,
pp. 78-9.
24 Sumption, Pilgrimage, p. 28.
25 Guibert of Nogent traces corruption and fraudulent claims to the practice of
dismemberment and translation:
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 97
Quod totum contentionis malum inde sumit originem quod sancti non
permittuntur habere debitae et immutabilis sepulturae quietem.

[All the evil of contention [over relics] originates in the fact that the saints
are not permitted the repose of a proper and immutable burial place.]
(Gesta Dei per Francos 1.5 [PE, 156:695A])

See Sumption’s discussion of Guibert in Pilgrimage, pp. 27, 42-4.

26 Guibert of Nogent, in De pignoribus sanctorum 1.3.2 (PL 156-.624D), points to the
competing claims of Constantinople and Angeli to the head of the Baptist, and
remarks: “Quid ergo magis ridiculum super tanto homine praedicetur, quam si
biceps esse ab utrisque dicatur?” (“What, therefore, is more ridiculous than to
suppose that this great man had two heads?”). See Delehaye for a specific history
of the head (Les Origines du culte des martyrs, pp. 82-3); Sumption summarizes the
history of Christ’s foreskin (Pilgrimage, p. 46).
27 Mandeville’s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, from BM Ms. Cotton Titus C. XVI, EETS
o.s 153 (London: Kegan Paul, 1919 for 1916), p. 71.
28 Sumption, Pilgrimage, pp. 50-1.
29 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modem Oblivion (New
York: Pantheon, 1983). For a recent study of Chaucerian comedy that uses
Steinberg’s analysis of Christ’s private parts (“Goddes pryvetee”), see Laura
Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the ‘'Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 5-19.
30 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written RecordEngland, 1066—1307 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), p. 126. See also Delehaye, Les Origines du culte
des martyrs.
31 My idea of a “partial object” here is different from Melanie Klein’s “part-object.”
Klein establishes that in early infancy “all the baby knows or experiences is a
breast (a ‘part-object’) and that it takes time and development for the baby to
become aware of the mother in her completeness (‘whole-object’)” (Harry
Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction [New York: International
Universities Press, 1961], p. 226). The “part-object,” to the infant, is not partial;
it is a whole-object to the baby and is partial only in the adult’s eyes. In my
adaptation of the term, the partialness of the object, from the subject’s point of
view, is important: the object is a substitute for a formerly known whole and is
recognized to be defective in relation to that lost whole. [... ]
32 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-6), 21:153.
See also Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” in Standard Edition,
19:173-9.
33 C’est donc plutôt l’assomption de la castration qui crée le manque dont
s’institue le désir. Le désir est désir de désir, désir de l’Autre, avons-nous
dit, soit soumis à la Loi.

[It is, therefore, the assumption of castration which creates the lack through
which desire is instituted. Desire is the desire for desire, the desire of the
98 Carolyn Dinshaw
Other and it is subject to the Law.) (Lacan, “Du Trieb de Freud et du désir du
psychanalyste,” in Écrits [Paris: Seuil, 1966], p. 852; trans. David Macey, in
Jacques Lacan, by Anika Lemaire [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977])

I was pointed to this passage by Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and
Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1986), p. 8. See also David Carroll, The Subject in Question: The Language of
Theory and the Strategies of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), for fine
discussion of the implications of castration in literary texts.
34 Anthony Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,” in Speech and Language
in Psychoanalysis, by Jacques Lacan, trans, with notes and commentary by
Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), p. 163 [— ]
35 lam indebted to Margaret Homans’s discussion of Lacan’s androcentrism in her
Bearing the Word, pp. 1-39. I’ve also found useful Jacqueline Rose’s remarks in
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques I Mean and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and
Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 27-57.
Two works have proved most helpful on Freud’s androcentrism: Sarah Kofman,
The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985); and Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman,
trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).
36 Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman, p. 82.
37 Anthony Wilden quotes Lacan from the seminar of April-June 1958, “Les
formations de l’inconscient,” in his commentary in Speech and Language in Psycho­
analysis, pp. 187-8.
38 Homans, Bearing the 1FW, pp. 8-9. Homans extends the implications of Nancy
Chodorow’s feminist revision of Freud to Lacanian theory (see Chodorow, The
Reproduction o f Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender [Berkeley and Los
Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978]).
39 “Necessary symbolisation and the privileged status of the phallus appear as
interdependent in the structuring and securing (never secure) of human sub­
jectivity” (Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 56).
40 Julia Kristeva’s remarks are from her In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and
Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), p.
41. See also Jacqueline Rose’s comments on the difficulty of subjectivity’,
Feminine Sexuality, esp. pp. 40-1.
41 Terry Eagleton, Uterary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1983), p. 168.
42 The Gouemaunce of Prynces, trans. James Yonge, in Three Prose Versions of the ‘Secreta
Secretorum,” ed. Robert Steele, EETS e.s. 74 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and
Triibner, 1898), p. 231; cited by Curry’, “The Secret of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” pp.
57-8.
43 This Freudian reading may seem less fanciful when we recall the Host’s rueful
remarks (following the Melibee) about his own fearsome, threatening wife, Good-
elief:
Whan she comth hoom she rampeth in my face,
And crieth, “False coward, wrek thy wyfl
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 99
By corpus bones, I wol have thy knyf,
And thou shalt have my distaf and go spynneV'
Fro day to nyght right thus she wol bigynne.
“Allas,” she seith, “that evere I was shape
To wedden a milksop, or a coward ape,
That wol been overlad with every wight!”

I woot wel she wol do me slee som day

Som neighebor, and thanne go my way;
For I am perilous with knyf in honde,
Al be it that I dar nat hire withstonde,
For she is byg in armes, by my feith.
(7:1904—21, emphasis mine)

We recall the epithets for male members in the Legend o f Good Women; if Good-
elief has wished that she had the Host’s “knyf,” the Host ferociously strikes out
at the lacking Pardoner, desiring to reassert, reinscribe the latter’s utter differ­
ence from him.
44 See Le Roman de la rose, w . 6898—7200.
45 Si ne vos tiegn pas a cortaise
quant ci m’avez coilles nomees,
qui ne sunt pas bien renomees
en bouche a cortaise pucele.
(Ibid., w . 6898-6901)

Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 138, also makes this point. Le Roman de la rose
will hereafter be cited, as Rose, in the text.
46 Fleming, Reason and the Lover, p. 101. Fleming has written the most recent
analysis of this scene in his chapter 3, “Words and Things.” He identifies
Augustine as the most important influence here (the “super-text,” to use his
term), as I also do; but our conclusions are somewhat different. My discussion
coincides more closely with that of R. Howard Bloch, in Etymologies and Genea-
hgies, pp. 137-41.
47 Bloch, in Etymologies and Genealogies, pp. 44—53.
48 My analysis of Augustine is indebted to Marcia Colish’s discussion of Augusti­
ne’s lifelong engagement with the problematic of language and of his develop­
ment of a “redeemed rhetoric.” See The Mirror o f Language: A Study in the Medieval
Theory o f Knowledge, 2nd edn. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 7-54.
Colish posits that an understanding of the Incarnation was critical in Augustine’s
intellectual movement toward Christianity. See also Bloch, Etymologies and Genea­
logies, pp. 47-8, and Vance, Mervelous Signals, pp. 256—64.
49 See, for example, R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” in Augustine: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (New York: Doubleday Anchor,
1972), p. 78.
50 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 2.24; trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., under the title
On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), pp. 60-1.
100 Carolyn Dinshaw
et beta uno eodemque sono apud Graecos litterae, apud Latinos holeris
nomen est; et cum dico “lege,” in his duabus syllabis aliud Graecus, aliud
Latinus intellegit - sicut ergo hae omnes significationes pro suae cuiusque
societatis consensione animos mouent et, quia diuersa consensio est, diuerse
mouent, nec ideo consenserunt in eas homines, quia iam ualebant ad sig­
nificationem, sed ideo ualent, quia consenserunt in eas... (Augustine,
De doctrina christiana 2.24, ed. J. Martin, CC 32 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1962],
pp. 59-60)

51 Augustine, De magistro 11.36, ed. K.-D. Daur, CC 29 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970),

p. 194.
52 De dialectica is a work whose authorship has been disputed but one which has
been taken by its most recent translator and by Fleming as genuinely Augusti-
nian; see the Introduction to De dialectica, ed. Jan Pinborg, trans, (with introduc­
tion and notes) B. Darrell Jackson (Boston: D. Reidel, 1975). Augustine begins
chapter 6 by suggesting that a word’s origin may indeed be a matter of
indifference, as long as its meaning is understood; he suggests that the pursuit
of the origin of words is a potentially endless task, dependent on the researcher’s
own ingenuity; and some words’ origins can’t ever be accounted for. But he
asserts, in the same chapter, that there are many cases of natural resemblance
between word and referent: the impressions made on the senses by the sounds
of such words as lene and asperitas are in harmony (concordarenf) with the impres­
sions made by the referents themselves. Further on, Augustine specifically
discusses the vis of words - the affective power of words - suggesting that the
sensible qualities of words convey a meaning that is in accord with the referent
itself. Sound and referent - physical property of word and physical property of
thing - are linked: the word shares the natural property of the thing.
53 Bloch makes this observation (Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 36) and cites Augus­
tine:

Sicut autem Cain, quod interpretatur possessio, terrenae conditor duitatis,

et filius eius, in cuius nomine condita est, Enoch, quod interpretatur
dedicatio, indicat istam duitatem et initium et finem habere terrenum,
ubi nihil speratur amplius, quam in hoc saeculo cerni potest: ita Seth quod
interpretatur resurrectio, cum sit generationum seorsus commemoratarum
pater, quid de filio eius sacra haec historia dicat, intuendum est.

[Now as Cain, signifying possession, the founder of the earthly city, and
his son Enoch, meaning dedication, in whose name it was founded,
indicate that this city is earthly both in its beginning and in its end - a
city in which nothing more is hoped for than can be seen in this world -
so Seth, meaning resurrection, and being the father of generations regis­
tered apart from the others, we must consider what this sacred history
says of his son.] {De civitate Dei 15:17, CC 47 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1955], p.
480; trans. M. Dods, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitnev J.
Oates [New York: Random House, 1948], 2:300)
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 101

54 Augustine, De magistro 13:43.

55 Colish, The Mirror of Language, pp. 7-54.
56 See Augustine, Confessiones 1.4, and De trinitate 11, 15, ed. W. J. Mountain, CC50
(Tumhout: Brepols, 1968), for the explication of the relationship between word
and Word. And note his final protestation of the ineffability of God and the
shortcomings of language:

Sapiens quidam cum de te loqueretur in libro suo qui ecclesiasticus

proprio nomine iam uocatur: Multa, inquit, dicimus et non peruenimus, et
consummatio sermonum uniuersa est ipse. Cum ergo peruenerimus ad te, cessa­
bunt multa ista quae dicimus et non peruenimus, et manebis unus omnia in
omnibus....

[When the wise man spake of Thee in his book, which is now called by the
special name of Ecclesiasticus, “We speak,” he said, “much, and yet come
short; and in sum of words, He is all.” When, therefore, we shall have
come to Thee, these very’ many things that we speak, and yet come short,
will cease; and Thou, as One, wilt remain “all in all.”] {De trinitate 15.28,
pp. 533-5; trans. A. W. Hadden, rev. W. G. T. Shedd, in Basic W'ritings of
Saint Augustine, 2:878)

57 Augustine, De catechi^andis rudibus, ed. I. B. Bauer, CC46 (Turnhout: Brepols,

1969), pp. 122-3.
58 Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 44.
59 Deus enim, post hominem institutum praedicavit, nomen praedicationis
extendendo, dicens Adae, Gen. 2: In quocumque die comederis ex eo, morte
morieris. Haec enim fuit prima persuasio de qua in Scriptura legimus__ Et
tandem Ipse, corpus humanum et animam in unitate suppositi assumens,
veniens praedicavit etiam idem thema quod praeco suus prius praedica­
verat, ut habetur Matth. 4.

[After creating man, God preached (if we extend the word ‘preaching’),
saying to Adam (Gen. 2:17): For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt
die the death. This was the first persuasion of which we read in Scrip­
ture__ And at last He Himself, taking on a human soul and body in the
unity of substance, came preaching the same theme which his precursor
had preached before, as is seen in Matt. 4:17.] (Robert of Basevorn, Forma
praedicandi 6 [in Artes praedicandi, ed. Th.-M. Charland, O. P., Publications
de l’Institut d’Etudes Médiévales d’Ottawa (Ottawa, 1936), pp. 243—4];
trans. Leopold Krul, OSB, in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. James J.
Murphy [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971], pp.
126-7)

See also Thomas Waleys, De modo componendi sermones cum documentis 1, in Artes
praedicandi, pp. 329-41. I have benefited from the surveys of sermon rhetoric in
James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St.
102 Carolyn Dinshaw
Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press,
1974), pp. 269-355; Etienne Gilson, “Michel Menot et la technique du sermon
médiéval,” in his Les Idées et les lettres, 2nd edn. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955), pp. 93—154;
and Margaret Jennings, CSJ, “The Ars componendi sermones of Ranulph Higden,” in
Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice o f Medieval Rhetoric, ed. J. J.
Murphy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 112-26.

60 ... si non esset praedicatio, per quam verbum Dei seminatur, totus
mundus esset sterilis, et sine fructu.

[Without preaching, which scatters the word of God like seed, the world
would be sterile and produce no fruit.] (Humbert of Romans, De eruditione
praedicatorum 1.3 [ed. J. J. Berthier (Rome: A. Befani, 1889), p. 377];
translation under the tide Treatise on Preaching by the Dominican Students,
Province of Saint Joseph, ed. Walter M. Cordon [Westminster, Md.:
Newman Press, 1951], p. 5)

61 For the major attack on the friars in the mid-thirteenth century, see William of
Saint-Amour (“mestre Guillaume de Saint Amour,” whom Faus Semblant dis­
cusses as antagonist in Le Roman de la rose, w . 11453-94), De periculis novissimorum
temporum (1255). William, a secular master embroUed in the controversy at the
University of Paris with the friars, represented the friars as (among other things)
false prophets, pseudo-apostoli, and pseudo-praedicatorer, see De periculis, esp. chs. 2
and 3 (ed. Max Bierbaum, Bettelorden und Weltgeistlichkeit an der Universitat Paris,
Fran^iskanische Studien 2 [1920]: 1-36). Bierbaum prints selections (the Prologue
and chs. 1-3, 5, 8, 11—12); the whole is printed in Opera omnia (Constance
[actually Paris]: Alitophdos, 1632). See notes in Lecoy, Rose 2:281-90, and
Dahlberg, The Romance of the Rose, pp. 395-8. A schematic chronology of events
surrounding William is provided by P. Glorieux, “Le conflit de 1252-1257 à la
lumière du Mémoire de Guillaume de Saint-Amour,” Recherches de théologie ancienne
et médiévale 24 (1957): 364—72. For Rutebeufs mid-century antimendicant poems,
in particular, the “Complainte de Guillaume,” in which the personified Faus
Semblant appears, see Oeuvres complètes, ed. Edmond Faral and J ulia Bastin (Paris:
Picard, 1959), 1:238-335, esp. 256-66.
62 This accusation is a fundamental one in Wycliffe’s continual antifraternal
polemic. For examples in English, see his vernacular version of his Latin De
officio pastorali (c. 1377):

thus ther ben many causis that letten goddis word to renne__The
fourthe cause is bringing in of false freris bi many cuntreys; for, as it is
seid bifore, thei letten trewe preching to renne and maken curatis bi many
weyes to leeue this moost worthy offiss. First they robben hem many
weyes and maken hem bisy for to lyue, for they deprauen hem to ther
parischens bi floriyshid wordis that they bringen yn; and no drede they
shapen ther sermouns by dyuysiouns and othere iapis that they maken
moost píese the puple. And thus they erren in bileue and maken the puple
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 103
to trowe to hem that sermouns been nought but in ther foorme. (Ch. 26,
in The English Works o f Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. F. D. Matthew, EETS,
n.v. [London, Triibner, 1880], pp. 445-6)

Another example is sermon 111, on the Feast of the Seven Brethren:

Thes wordis of Crist ben scorned of gramariens and devynes. Gramariens

and filosophris seien, that Crist knewe not his gendris; and bastard
dyvynes seien algatis that thes wordis of Crist ben false, and so no wordis
of Crist bynden, but to the witt that gloseris tellen. But here we seien to
thes trowauntis that thei blaiberen thus for defaute of witt. Leeve we thes
hérédités as foolis, and seie we sum witt that God hath yovon us. {Select
English Works of John Wyclif ed. Thomas Arnold [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1869], 1:375-6)

See G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts

of the Period, c. 1350-1450 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), for a discussion
of fraternal preaching; and Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1961], pp. 56-109, for literal and allegorical uses of Scripture in
sermons. Dom David Knowles, in The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1957), 2: 61-73, 90-115, provides a good discussion of
mendicant orders and their critics.
63 Arnold Williams cites a sermon by FitzRalph (B.M. MS. Lansdowne 393, fol.
108r) in which FitzRalph remarks that “when he challenged the friars to produce
one scriptural text commanding poverty or proving that Christ ever begged
voluntarily or spontaneously, they complained that he respected only the text of
Scripture, not the the gloss”; see Williams, “Chaucer and the Friars,” Speculum 28
(1953): 511.
64 Even some friars themselves admitted that they preached sometimes “with
hatred in their hearts,” not with the curitas that is the proper significator of all
language: see Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, p. 77.
65 See Germaine Dempster, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” in Sources and Analogues of
Chaucer's “Canterbury Talesf ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New
York: Humanities Press, 1958), p. 409; Dean S. Fansler, Chaucer and the “Roman
de la Rose" (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1914), pp. 162-6 (discussing
Chaucer’s use of Faus Semblant in the creation of both the Friar and the
Pardoner); and P. M. Kean, Chaucer and the Making o f English Poetry (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 2:96-109. See also Patterson, “Chaucerian
Confession,” for the problematics of literary confession in both Faus Semblant
and Pardoner.
66 O. Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 9-33.
67 Freud, “Fetishism,” pp. 152-3.
68 Ibid., p. 157. [...]
69 Sarah Kofman, in The Enigma of Woman (pp. 86-7), quotes Derrida’s Glas on the
undecidable nature of the fetish: it may be possible, writes Derrida, “to recon­
struct from Freud’s generalization a ‘concept’ of fetish that can no longer be
104 Carolyn Dinshaw
contained within the traditional opposition Ersatvtfnon Ersats^ or even within
opposition at all.” See Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and
Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
70 Bloch, Scandal P- 119. D. W. Winnicott, in “Transitional Objects and Transi­
tional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession” (InternationalJournal
o f Psycho-Analysis 34 [1953]: 95-6), contrasts the fetish with the transitional object
in order to emphasize the abnormality of the fetishist. The fetish, based as it is
on a “delusion of a maternal phallus,” is not a normal phenomenon, whereas the
transitional object, based on illusion (an area “between primary creativity’ and
objective reality based on reality testing”), is healthy and universal. Phyllis
Greenacre, in “The Fetish and the Transitional Object” (Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child 24 [1969]: 144—65), also stresses the fetishist’s arrested development.
71 Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire, p. 12.
72 Among the many recent critics who have discussed narrative elements of the Tale
as representations or projections of the Pardoner himself, see H. Marshall
Leicester, Jr., “ ‘Synne Horrible’: The Pardoner’s Exegesis of His Tale, and
Chaucer’s,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Contexts, 700-1600, ed. Mary J.
Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 25-
50; Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1976), pp. 193-204; Patterson, “Chaucerian Confession” (see n. 3 above), pp.
166-7; and Howard, The Idea o f the "Canterbury Tales” (see n. 7 above), pp. 357-63.
My sense of the patriarchal atmosphere of the Tale is empirically confirmed by
Betsy Bowden in Chaucer Aloud (see n. 5 above), who notes that among her group
of male and female performers (oral interpreters) of the Pardoner’s Prologue and
Tale, women consistently avoided the Old Man scene and “produced decidedly
less distinctive performances,” several even skipping over the whole Tale (p. 151).
73 Lee Patterson, in “Childishness and Authorship in the Canterbury Tales,” a paper
presented at the Twentieth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western
Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1985, discussed the Old Man
in these terms; earlier, in “Chaucerian Confession,” p. 166, he analyzed the Old
Man as “a figure who accurately reflects [the Pardoner’s] own irreducible contra­
dictions.”
74 Bloch analyzes the psychologically and socially conservative functions of the
fabliaux in similar terms in his Scandal of the Fabliaux, speaking, for example, of
“their apparent gratuity and their essentially resolved form” (p. 126).
75 Leigh Hunt’s 1846 plot summary emphasizes this static quality of the exemplum:

Three drunken ruffians, madly believing Death to be an embodied person,

go out to kill him. They meet him in the shape of an old man, who tells
them where Death is to be found; and they find him accordingly. (Stories in
i erse [London: George Routledge, 1855], p. 264; cited in Bowden, Chaucer
Aloud; p. 133)

76 “Nous voyons déjà qu’il y a plusieurs manières de croire et de ne pas croire”

(“We have already seen that there are several ways to believe and not to believe”)
(Mannoni, Clefs pour Timaginaire, p. 24). The swindler believes, in a certain
 Eunuch Hermeneutics 105
fashion, in his admittedly false inventions, using the fetishist’s belief “even so.”
Belief is the key to the creation of illusion or of the successful swindle - and as
Mannoni suggests, it is the swindler’s own belief that makes the job work. “II n’y
a pas de doute, on le voit, que la Verleugnung suffit pour créer le magique”
(“Clearly, there is no doubt that disavowal is enough to create magic”) (p. 29).
77 See Augustine, Contra Julianum Pelagianum (PL 44:787): “Ita concupiscentia
camis... et peccatum est... et poena peccati... et causa peccati” (“Thus con­
cupiscence of the flesh ... is at once sin ... and punishment of sin ... and cause
of sin”) (Latin quoted in Alfred L. Kellogg, “An Augustinian Interpretation of
Chaucer’s Pardoner,” in his Chaucer, Langland, Arthur; pp. 245-68). See also
Howard, The Idea o f the 'Canterbury Tales, ” pp. 355—7.
78 Nicolas James Perella, in The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretive History of Kiss
Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1969), pp. 124-57, esp. 130-1, describes the late-medieval
romance motif of kiss of peace on the mouth that is an “establishment of
something approaching brotherhood or, at the very least, membership in the
group or clan” (p. 130). Chaucer critics disagree widely as to the “reconciliation”
effected; Burlin doubts that one has indeed occurred (Chaucerian Fiction, p. 175).
79 A language of presence, a language of the female body, has been theorized by
various feminist theorists seeking to find alternatives to the dominant figurative,
symbolic, masculine language based on absence. Lacan, as I’ve discussed above,
derives the origin of symbolization from lack, the lack of the mother’s body;
thus language presupposes and proceeds from the absence of the object. But if
absence and separation - from the mother’s body, in the first place - are not so
complete as Lacanian theory purports, language might be informed by presence,
not absence, might somehow partake of the things signified; representation
might not necessarily mean absence, as Homans suggests, following and extend­
ing Nancy Chodorow’s revision of Freud into a “revisionary myth of women
and language” (Bearing the Uyord, pp. 1—39). Julia Kristeva has suggested a poetic
language which she calls the “semiotic,” closely linked to the mother’s body and
consisting of gesture, body language, and prerepresentational sounds (see, e.g.,
“From One Identity to an Other,” in her Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to
Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and
Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], pp. 124—47).
Luce Irigaray, in “When Our Lips Speak Together” (in This Sex Which Is Not One,
trans. Catherine Porter [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985], pp. 205-18)
and Hélène Cixous, in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (in New French Feminisms, ed.
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron [New York: Schocken, 1981], pp. 245-
64), both oppose women’s literal, bodily experience to the figurative discourse of
Western patriarchy.
There are compelling arguments to be made against such a language of the
body, or the semiotic, or l'écritureféminine, which Ann Rosalind Jones summarizes
well: the theories

have been criticized as idealist and essentialist, bound up in the very'

system they claim to undermine; they have been attacked as theoretically
106 Carolyn Dinshaw
fuzzy and as fatal to constructive political action. (“Writing the Body:
Toward an Understanding of l'Ecriture féminine,” in The New Feminist
Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter [New York: Pantheon, 1985], p. 367)

But Jones acknowledges, too, that the power of such theories lies in their radical
critique of phallocentrism in all its forms and in their capacity to open up new
ways of thinking after “phallocentric delusion” has been discovered (pp. 366,
374-5).
It may seem contradictory that the language associated with the mother’s
body in psychoanalysis is finally linked in my argument to the language of the
Christian Father and Son. Judson Boyce Allen has suggested, indeed, a revision
of Lacanian theory in regard to another eunuch, Abelard, so that the fullness of
the Imaginary is located in the Father; see Allen, “Exemplum as Autobiography:
Abelard’s Complaints and Lacan” (paper delivered at the International Congress
on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May
1985). The Christian trinitarian schema is, of course, characterized in patriarchal
terms, and the redemptive scheme of history may be seen to be based, as
Kristeva suggests, on masculine Oedipal desires; see her In the Beginning Was
Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987). Surely these patriarchal terms of the Christian scheme
were deeply meaningful in the personal devotion and powerful in the socio­
political organization of the later Middle Ages. But they were also open to
revision: “the use of explicit and elaborate maternal imagery to describe God
and Christ” flowered in the later Middle Ages, as Caroline Walker Bynum has
found, and gender associations could indeed shift; see her Jesus as Mother Studies
in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1982), pp. 110-69, esp. p. 112. I suggest here that the concept
of God as absolute presence finally obviates division and distinctions, by which
gender and the hermeneutic processes that are based on those power-asymme­
trical categories are constituted.
80 On the deathbed scenario Thomas Gasgoigne reports and its relation to the
Retractions, see Douglas Wurtele, “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” I Sator
11 (1980): 335-59. Wurtele argues that lines 1081—4 and 1090(b)-2 were
originally meant for the Parson’s concluding address; lines 1085-90(a), the
retractions proper, should be read separately “as a later interpolation by, or at
the behest of, Chaucer himself’ (p. 342). This multiplication of voices seems
unnecessary to me, despite Wurtele’s careful argumentation; I read the voice of
the Retractions as many critics - Donald Howard, for example, in his Idea of the
“Canterbury Tales" (p. 387) - do: Chaucer the unimpersonated poet breaks the
fictional frame of the Tales and reflects on the Parson's Tale (the “litel tretvs” that
has just concluded) and on all of his works.
 4
M isogyny and E conom ic Person in
Skelton, Langland, and Chaucer
E liza b e t h F o w l e r

John Skelton’s raucous “Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge” (ca. 1517—21)1 is

like an architect’s folly in which the ginger-bread of misogyny overwhelms a
barely recognizable structure of economic ideas. Though it has always been
viewed as a piece of exuberant but realistic description, I would like to show
that the poem brings together several learned discursive traditions (all far
from “realistic” in mode) through a complex of careful allusion. “The
Tunnyng” works with the materials of the poetic canon to open up the
materials of canon law: the subset of legal texts which grew up around
early economic questions and doctrines is the object of the satire’s sharpest
points. By a sophisticated use of what we would now call literary character,
Skelton savages the character constructed by early economic texts: that of
economic person. In the service of this project, Skelton draws on Langland
and Chaucer in ways that have not been recognized.2 In “The Tunnyng” we
see Skelton breaking down the machinery of personification, the dominant
medieval form of characterization, as if it were an anachronism to be cleared
away before the English lyric took a Petrarchan, personal, psalm-like shape
and began its reign over later Tudor letters.
It is a curious fact that Skelton’s critics have been distracted by the
extravagance of his misogyny and have neglected the poem’s economic
argument. If we cannot see (as most critics of the poem have not seen)
misogyny as ideological discourse, we ignore its specific historical content and
cannot discover how it works. For example, it can combine with other
arguments to articulate what would not be as persuasive or natural were it
not attached to the more familiar rhetoric of misogyny. In “The Tunnyng,”
misogyny works to legitimize a critique of the money economy. Critical
writing on Skelton’s work abundantly demonstrates that though the significa-
108 Elizabeth Fowler
tion of gender alters with social facts over time, readers are deceived by the
apparently intractable presence of misogyny in the history of English culture.
To render its workings more legible, it must be remembered that the cultural
function of misogyny is necessarily disrupted as the meaning of gender
changes.
Though Skelton’s reputation has varied precipitously in the centuries since
his death, critics have been unanimous on the particular merits of “The
Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge.” In persistent celebration of the poem’s
visual qualities, such terms as “realism” have been over-worked by nearly five
centuries of readers. Historically minded scholars3 have routinely ignored the
poem because it lacks reference to the courtly and ecclesiastical themes
emphasized by Skelton’s biographers. Instead, the poem concerns an alewife
and her female clientele. An early eighteenth-century editor calls the poem “a
just and natural Description of those merry Wassail Dayes.”4 In 1844, The
Quarterly Review compares the poem to a painting:

It is a low picture of the lowest life - Dutch in its grotesque minuteness: yet,
even in the description of the fat hostess herself, and one or two other
passages, we know not that we can justly make any stronger animadversion
than that they are very Swiftish. But it will further show how little (of course
excepting cant words) the genuine vulgar tongue and, we may add perhaps,
vulgar life is altered since the time of Henry VIII. Take the general concourse
of her female customers to Elynour Rummin, uncontrolled by any temperance
societies.5

Here, as elsewhere, the assertion of Skelton’s pictorialism stands as evidence

of the poem’s social realism. In 1936, G. S. Fraser argues that “Skelton’s
figures are... portraits, not caricatures. Eleanor Rumming, regrettably, exists
----Every detail... adds to her reality.”6 C. S. Lewis complains that the poem
is too close to life: it is “disorder in life rendered by disorder in art.”7
Stanley Fish continues this tradition, deriving the poem’s social “realism”
from the poem’s “visual” technique. He elaborately identifies the poem with
painting:

The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming is a picture, a verbal painting - and designedly

nothing more--- To read the poem is to see a canvas prepared before (or
through) your very eyes--- Indeed the sophist Hermogenes might be describ­
ing Eleanor Rumming when he writes “An ecphrasis is an account in detail,
visible as they say, bringing before one’s eyes what is to be shown__The
virtues of the ecphrasis are clearness and visibility; for the style must... operate
to bring about seeing.”8

Yet the poem is merely vivid, and demonstrates little ecphrastic rhetorical
technique. In fact, painting that can be described as “a mood piece,” or in
 Misogyny and Economic Person 109
which “no space on [the] canvas remains unfilled” with visual detail (254)
does not appear in England until much after the 1520s: the contemporary
visual arts tradition is heavily symbolic and moral. These metaphors, while
they allow Fish to bring out the experimentalism of the poem, lead him away
from the poem’s primary formal instruments and its overriding tone of
disgust and enthusiastic opprobrium. Feminists and other readers who are
struck by the poem’s virulence, rather than impressed by its aesthetic detach­
ment, may be relieved when Fish concedes that the poem contains “one value
judgment.” It is, however, an aberrant couplet designed to prove the rule of
the poem’s moral and philosophical neutrality:

As the “pryckemedenty” rises from her seat, the poet steps forward to make
the one value judgment in the poem,
She was not halfe so wyse,
As she was pevysshe nyse, [588-89]
and dispatches the offender with a couplet:
We supposed, I wys,
That she rose to pys. [594—95]
By including himself in the scene (“We”), he serves notice to his characters and
his readers that no moral or philosophical considerations will be allowed to
disturb the surface (there is after all nothing else) of his tableau. (252)

The metaphor of the painting works to convey the idea (through the word
“surface”) of a form with no content, no meaning, and “no moral or
philosophical considerations.” In conjunction with this assertion, Fish does
not hesitate to conclude, in line with his predecessors, that the result is a kind
of documentary social history: “Skelton has done nothing more nor less than
portray in words the chaos and confusion of a sixteenth-century ‘still,’ ” (254).
Approving the “visual ‘realism’ so many critics have noted,” Fish claims:
“One doesn’t think about the poem, one only takes it in” (255). In this essay I
hope to establish a stronger connection between descriptions of the poem as
artifact and as social history. As this connection is fleshed out, the poem
appears as a “disturbed surface,” full of the “moral or philosophical con­
siderations” Fish has banished from it.
“The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge” is vivid, yet not primarily visual; its
descriptive mode relies on incongruous juxtaposition. The prologue-like
portrait of Elynour, for example, is impossible to imagine visually unless,
like the Italian painter Arcimboldo (to whom the epithet “realist” is seldom
attached), we can picture a body made up of roast pig’s ear, rope, a sack, egg
whites, a jetty, buckles, a trowel-like tool, and a crane:

Her face all bowsv,

Comely crynklyd,
Woundersly wrynklyd,
110 Elizabeth Fowler
Lyke a rost pygges eare,
Brystled with here---
Her skynne lose and slacke,
Greuyned lyke a sacke...
Jawed lyke a jetty;...
The bones of her huckels
Lyke as they were with buckels
Togyder made fast.
Her youth is farre past;
Foted lyke a plane,
Legged lyke a crane...
(17-21, 31-2, 38, 45-50)

This poetry is brilliandy evocative, but its mode is not “visual realism.” If I
were to seek an analogy from the visual arts, it would serve the poem better to
call to mind the paintings of Skelton’s contemporary Hieronymus Bosch or
the grotesques of late medieval manuscript illustration. Yet “The Tunnyng”
makes no reference to painting; Skelton’s instruments are a series of carefully
referenced poetic techniques. This passage is an anti-blazon, and stands in the
scurrilous and ingenious ranks of such poems as Marot’s “Du laid Tetin”
(1535). But while Marot narrowly concentrates on the breast, producing a
grotesque, Skelton careens across Elynour’s body, top to bottom and up
again, framing each part in a different diction. The connections between her
parts are so loose that she is in the process of falling quite apart: her hips have
to be fastened together by buckles. Her nose is continually leaking egg whites.
Her body appears to exude, even to manufacture, an odd assortment of
commodities.
The introduction of Elynour, then, is hardly the document of visual
realism it has been taken for. Nor is the poem a picture in a more complex
and social sense: it does not document social history (the “vulgar life”) in any
direct, visual way. The wealth of incidental detail about ale-making and
commercial exchange is, upon closer inspection, of little value to a historical
anthropologist or a social historian. Instead, our glimpse of “real” life is as
ragged and constructivist as our picture of Elynour’s body. All the social
history that can be gleaned from this poem is that at the beginning of the
sixteenth century there were such things as egg whites and buckles; that
accusations about quality and morality were made against alewives and their
customers; and (more tenuously) that “in kind” commercial exchanges were
made as well as monetary' ones. As for a picture of brewing:

Than Elynour taketh

The mashe bolle, and shaketh
The hennes donge awaye,
And skommeth it into a tray
 Misogyny and Economic Person 111
Where as the yeest is,
With her maungy fystds.
And sometyme she biennes
The donge of her hennes
And the ale togyder,
And sayth, “Gossyp, come hyder,
This ale shal be thycker,
And floure the more quycker;
For I may tell you,
I learned it of a Jewe,
Whan I began to brewe,
And I have found it trew.”
(195-210)

What we learn about the process of brewing is that hen’s dung is dropped
into the mashfat, separated from it in the mashbowl, skimmed into a tray with
the yeast, and judiciously blended into the ale. While the status of this
reportage as an accusation may be “representative” in a narrow sense (fre­
quent charges as to the quality’ of their product were brought against brewers
in this period), when we take it as information about brewing - the tunning -
we are clearly in the territory not of realistic documentation of “vulgar life,”
but of parody. In fact, the results of this parodie “brewing” suggest that the
parody may be not only of brewing, but of something larger than the ale
business, and perhaps even more pervasive, though that is hard to imagine in
sixteenth-century’ England. These lines begin to suggest what is more expli­
citly dramatized in the course of “The Tunnyng”: that the poem’s concerns
are economic. The process of Elynour’s “brewing” produces thicker ale and
quicker flour (plus a younger and sexier countenance, 213-22): a set of
usurious effects Elynour tells us she learned from a Jew. After brief descrip­
tions of Elynour and the brewing process, as above, the bulk of the poem -
some four hundred lines - is devoted to the portrayal of sales. For now, let it
suffice to say that the poem abjures visual realism, and in fact uses more of
the resources of allegory than Skelton’s critics have suspected. Critical
emphasis on realism - as well as a delight in Skelton’s pungency - has led
to a neglect of the poem’s allusive structures, its sources, and its intertextual
claims.
The most important allusion Skelton makes is through the curious organ­
ization of “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge” into sections called
“passus:” the use of this designation in an English poem comes from the
well-known example of Langland’s late fourteenth-century Piers Plowman.;
The allegorical story of the personification Mede the maiden dominates the
first section of Langland’s poem. Mede - the Middle English word for wages,
compensation, and bribe - stands for a kind of surplus value, a conceptual
tool that allows Langland to analyze the exchange of services for money.10
112 Elizabeth Fowler
The problem of containing Mede’s promiscuity allegorically illustrates the
rewards and difficulties the crown faces in its attempts to regulate the money
economy. In Piers Plowman, the plot of commerce combines with conven­
tional language describing female sexuality, and furnishes Skelton with the
form of “Elynour Rummynge”: a commercial plot waged under cover of the
topic of the incontinence of women. Skelton inherits this combined discourse
from Langland, and from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. “The Tunnyng” calls on
the General Prologue’s description of the Wife of Bath (which he cites in
lines 71-2), the Wife’s Prologue, and the Shipman’s Tale.
The analogy between female sexuality and commerce structures both “The
Tunnyng” and Piers Plowman more bitterly than it does the Shipman’s Tale.
While Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale is far from affectionate about its topic, it is
satirical by means of a plot extended logically into absurdity: a sharp sexual
joke on the bourgeois milieu of the merchant class. The main object of
Langland’s satire is an aristocratic woman brought to the king’s courts where,
despite the command of the king, Conscience refuses to marry her. “The
Tunnyng” takes aim at women of an opposite social stratum altogether, but
like Langland, though more strongly, Skelton proposes that women cannot
be redeemed. In this sense Langland’s reluctant conclusion becomes Skel­
ton’s starting place. Mede per se is not immoral, according to the character
Theology; she is the legitimate daughter of Amendes. In sharp contrast, the
immorality of the women of “The Tunnyng” is all too transparent, too
unequivocally displayed. More often than not, that immorality is the female
body itself:
There came an old rybybe;
She halted of a kybe,
And had broken her shyn
At the threshold comyng in,
And fell so wvde open
That one might se her token.
The devyll thereon be wroken!
(492-8)

The anti feminist historical tradition gives a theological context for Skel­
ton’s attitude, beginning with the fall of mankind through Eve’s sin. Such a
view of history provoked Chaucer to the arguments of the Wife of Bath’s
Prologue, and the scholar Christine of Pizan to elaborate rebuttals of the
arguments of the Roman de la Rose. The primary cultural function of clerical
antifeminism in the late Middle Ages is perhaps curiously not so much the
oppression of women (though it is effective at that) but the consolidation of
an estate of men who live without legitimate sexual ties to women. Like the
poem, antifeminism is a discourse about women designed for men. In “The
Tunnyng” all the figures are female, and the speaker and the implied audience
 Misogyny and Economic Person 113
emphatically male. The colophon purports to invite women to listen to the
poem, but it “addresses” them in the third person and in Ladn (a language
reserved nearly entirely for men); moreover, it proposes not to reform them,
but to record their deeds:

Omnes feminas, que vel nimis bibule sunt, vel que sordida labe squaloris, aut qua spurca
feditatis macula, aut verbosa loquacitate notantur, poeta invitat ad audiendum hunc libellum,
<& c

Ebria, squalida, sordida femina, prodiga verbis,

Huc currat, properet, veniat! Sua gesta libellus
Iste volutabit: Pean sua plectra sonando
Materiam risus cantabit carmine rauco.

Finis

Quod Skelton Lauréat

[All women who are either very fond of drinking, or who bear the dirty stain of
filth, or who have the sordid blemish of squalor, or who are marked out by
garrulous loquacity, the poet invites to listen to this little satire. Drunken, filthy,
sordid, gossiping woman, let her run here, let her hasten, let her come; this little
satire wül willingly record her deeds: ApoUo, sounding his lyre, wiU sing the
theme of laughter in a hoarse song. (tr. Scattergood 452)]

In these last lines Skelton authorizes the poem with the Latin of a cleric and a
humanist, placing his work firmly in the tradition of antifeminism engaged by
the Wife of Bath.11
“The Tunnyng” is part of a last gasp of clerical antifeminism insofar as the
genre’s importance in England coincides with the dominance of that vast
multinational corporation, the medieval church. After the Reformation, there
were fewer motives for the English church’s production of such systematic
propaganda against women and their charms: priests who practiced cohabita­
tion, as Skelton did, were urged to marry rather than to repudiate their sexual
partners.12 In its capacity as a powerful social tool, antifeminist rhetoric
became less relevant to the English church’s need to police its clergy. As
this occured, “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge” became less intelligible
as satire. While not unopposed by clerical defenses of women and commerce,
censures of women and economicaUy produced value are a prominent feature
of the tradition Skelton invokes. When the renunciation of women lost its
privileged status as a clerical imperative during the reformation of the English
church, the analogy upon which the “Tunnyng” rests became obscured.
When this linked discourse makes its way into the poem, it makes a
particular contention about how the feminine is related to economic value.
114 Elizabeth Fowler
This ideological particularity, or spin, is embedded in the formal design of the
poem, a structure which is best understood, I think, by contrasting “The
Tunnyng” with the sources it acclaims. At the risk of misrepresenting the two
lesser-known poems (“The Tunnyng” and Piers Plowman) by fastening on
descriptive moments - set-pieces, really - in what are deeply narrative
structures, let me compare the three passages that introduce Chaucer’s
Alice, Skelton’s Elynour, and Langland’s Mede. Here is part of the General
Prologue’s portrait of the Wife of Bath:

In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon

That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon;
And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she
That she was out of alie charitee.
Hir coverchiefs ful fyne were of ground;
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed ...
(449-56)13

Skelton’s prologue-like description of Elynour asks to be measured against

Chaucer’s lines. Elynour’s headdress is equally imperious:

And yet I dare saye

She thynketh her selfe gaye
Upon the holy daye,
Whan she doth her aray,
And gyrdeth in her gytes
Stytched and pranked with pletes;
Her kyrtell Brystowe red,
With clothes upon her hed
That wey a sowe of led,
Wrythen in wonder wyse
After the Sarasyns gyse...
(64-74)

It is a comparison at the level of character; the Wife of Bath and Elynour share
a boisterous self-assertion and a pretension that is, at the root, economic. The
Wife alone has a subtle psychological life, developed in her prologue, that can
provoke sympathy in the reader; Elynour’s fabliau-like energy and thinness
produce an enjoyable revulsion, and allow Skelton to draw her as a grotesque.
On the other extreme, Langland’s dreamer, a surrogate for the reader, feels
fascination and fear at the introduction of Mede:

I loked on my left half as the Lady [Holy Church] me taughte,

And was war of a womman wonderliche yclothed -
 Misogyny and Economic Person 115
Purfiled with pelure, the pureste on erthe,
Ycorouned with a coroune, the Kyng hath noon bettre.
Fetisliche hire fyngres were fretted with gold wyr,
And thereon rede rubies as rede as any gleede [glowing coal],
And diamaundes of derrest pris and double manere saphires,
Orientals and ewages envenymes to destroye.
Hire robe was fill riche, of reed scarlet engreyned,
With ribanes of reed gold and of riche stones.
Hire array me ravysshed, swich richesse saugh I nevere.
(B.II.7-17)14

The introduction of Mede is an unmistakable example of personification

allegory, one that Holy Church proceeds to interpret for the dreamer. While
the portrait of Elynour is less iconic and her role is less theologically derived,
nevertheless she is given no more internal, “subjective” experience than a
personification allegory. She is not, as a Chaucerian pilgrim is, more or less
individuated by realistic details. She does not represent individual personality.
In the Wife of Bath, Chaucer evokes the peculiar social powers of a
bourgeois widow in late medieval England,15 a person who was able to act
economically on behalf of her own wealth and often allowed to conduct a
business. The Wife’s industriousness and financial independence are accom­
panied by a spirited sexual assertiveness; Elynour is married, nonetheless she
too can act direcdy in the economy through her position as an alewife and
boasts of her sexuality*. In both characterizations, occupation, or position in
the economic world, is stressed as a key to sexual behavior. The vicissitudes
of the Wife of Bath’s relations with her husbands depend upon the history of
her economic power; Elynour’s happy sexual relations are attributed to her
ale-making in a bald piece of advertisement:

“Drinke now whyle it is new;

And ye may it broke,
It shall make you loke
Yonger than ye be
Yeres two or thre,
For ye may prove it by me.”
“Behold,” she sayd, “and se
How bright I am of ble!
Ich am not cast away,
That can my husband say
Whan we kys and play
In lust and in lykyng.”
(211- 22)

Here as elsewhere the poem subordinates the characterization of Elynour to

the topic of the sale of the brew. The sale, the plot of the poem, provides a frame
116 Elizabeth Fowler
or a context within which character takes its meaning: I have already quoted the
anti-blazon which expresses Elynour’s body in what one might call “commod­
ity form.” Skelton veers away from the Chaucerian dramatic monologue (best
exemplified in the Wife of Bath), mixing the Wife’s rowdiness with the more
brittle and plot-manipulated characterization of a narrative like the Shipman’s
Tale. There Chaucer combines the double theme of sexuality and money in a
quite different way, one which is epitomized in the pun on “taillynge” that
closes the tale.16 In both “The Tunnyng” and the Shipman’s Tale, as well as in
Langland’s personification allegory, plot controls characterization.
Despite its feint at portraiture in the allusion to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,
“The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge” is organized entirely by a simple and
highly repetitious plot. The women appear serially, and each makes an
exchange of some commodity for ale. This series of transactions is the
spine of the poem. Just as in the exchange each commodity undergoes a
metamorphosis into ale, in the same way the women are reduced to beastly,
squalid things —bodies unadulterated by spirit or mind. As they fill with ale,
they empty of humanity. Incontinence is the theme throughout. There is no
“tunning” of ale into tuns or barrels in this poem; the ale is poured into
human receptacles and its paradoxical function is to evacuate them. Like
Chaucer’s Alice, the Alice of “The Tunnyng” boasts of pilgrimages, but she
strikes a less noble posture:

Than thydder came dronken Ales

And she was full of tales,
Of tydynges in Wales,
And of Saynte James in Gales,
And of the Portyngales;

She spake thus in her snout,

Snevelyng in her nose,
As though she had the pose.
“Lo, here is an olde typpet,
And ye wyll gyve me a syppet
Of your stale ale,
God sende you good sale!”
And, as she was drynkynge,
She fvll in a wynkynge
With a barlyhood;
She pyst where she stood.
Than began she to wepe,
And forthwith fell on slepe.
(351-5, 363-75)

If the characters enter the poem as Chaucerian (on the model of the Wife
of Bath), contact with commercial exchange transforms them into iconic,
 Misogyny and Economic Person 117
allegorical vice figures, closer to Langland’s Deadly Sins than they are even to
the automated creatures of the Shipman’s Tale. They become the emptied,
conscience-less figures familiar in allegory: devoid of interior life and the
capacity for interntional cognition, they are formally related to Langland’s
more elegant Mede.
The transformation of character into the plot of commercial exchange is
epitomized in the fate of the words Elynour’s husband uses for her in bed. In
the course of the advertisement for her special recipe, cited above, she
declares her husband’s appreciation of her:

“Behold,” she sayd, “and se

How bright I am of ble!
Ich am not cast away,
That can my husband say,
Whan we kys and play
In lust and in lvkyng.
He calleth me his whytyng,
His mullyng and his mytyng,
His nobbes and his conny,
His swetyng and his honny,
With, ‘Bas my prety bonny,
Thou art worth good and monny’
This make I my falyre fonny,
Tyll that he dreme and dronny;
For, after all our sport,
Than wyll he rout and snort;
Than swetely togither we ly,
As two pygges in a sty.”
(222-34)

The rhyme group that makes up her husband’s declaration consists of a series
of epithets for Elynour - conny, honny, and monny - that are repeated after
only nine intervening lines, in which the author disclaims the scene. Suddenly
her customers come running with payments they wish to exchange for ale:

In stede of coyne and monny

Some brynge her a conny,
And some a pot with honny...
(244-6)

The epic list of commodities, just beginning in these lines, is generated out of
the body, out of the characterization, of Elynour.
The poem, then, is a mix of Chaucerian and Langlandian forms. Like the
Wife of Bath and the other Canterbury pilgrims, named according to their
professions, Elynour is an alewife, a social type. She is a rebuttal to the Wife
118 Elisabeth Fowler
of Bath’s prosecution of antifeminism, taking a role in the same controversy,
the discourse of misogyny. Her character embodies the same double valence
(the commercial and the feminine), a metaphorical relation further elaborated
by Skelton into a plot. In Puttenham’s terms, then, the poem has an allegor­
ical structure: “this manner of inuersion extending to whole and large
speaches, it maketh the figure allégorie to be called a long and perpetuali
Métaphore.”17 The metaphorical relation ale draws between the incontinence
of women and the incontinence of money is extended into narrative, becom­
ing the form of the poem.18 In fact, were Elynour named “The Banker of
Whitbread” or “The Brewster of Angels” the poem would be classed with
Skelton’s “Bowge of Courte” as a fair example of personification allegory.
However, following neither Chaucer nor Langland, Elynour acquires a “real”
name, one that could have belonged to an alewife, and in fact did.
In 1946 John Harvey found a reference to an “Alianora Romyng” (the
spelling seems like a further pun) in the Court Rolls of the Manor of
Pachenesham in County Surrey:

The Ale-Taster’s presentment at the Court held on August 18, 1525 (Surrey
County Muniments, S.C.6/15), runs, in translation: -
“Robert a Dene Ale-Taster there comes and being sworn presents that
Richard Godman and John Nele Thomas Snellyng and John Romyng are
common brewers of ale and also keep common hostelry and in the same sell
divers victuals at excessive price, therefore are they in mercy Also he presents
that Alianora Romyng (fine 2d.) is a common Tippellar19 of ale and sells at
excessive price by small measures, therefore she is in mercy.”2"

Despite the fact that the language of the records describes the short-changing
of customers, the formula “with outen mesur” classes the crime as incon­
tinence, as if false-bottomed cups were somehow gluttonous. It is precisely
the stupefying effect of greed that permeates Skelton’s poem. Avarice seems
grandiosely contagious in the poem, finding its source in each woman, in all
women, and somehow at the same time arising out of the brewing and the
marketing of the ale itself.
While Alianora Romyng apparently lived, her name is almost too good to
be true. Whether or not Skelton knew of her (and there is nothing to suggest
he did not), the effect of her existence is partly to take the edge off the
poem’s allegorical aspect, distinguishing it further from the brittle, ratified
upe of allegory that poets such as Stephen Hawes were writing. At the same
time, using the name of an infamous alewife would allow Skelton to draw
more directly on a traditional animosity to brewsters that is as much evid­
enced in verse as it is documented by the criminal rolls. As to the latter, the
trespass recorded here is against the legal notion of just price; the poem
makes the same accusation in terms of the dilution and adulteration of the ale
(with dung), and the implied worth of Elvnour’s haul of commodities. Price is
 Misogyny and Economic Person 119
not merely excessive in the poem, it is arbitrary: whatever the customer can
pay, and then some.
The number of wicked alewives, tapsters, tipplers, and tavern hostesses
who appear in verse and drama (leaving aside sermons) suggests that such
women formed an image larger than life, one emblematic of financial corrup­
tion. In Piers Plowman, Rose the regrater21 brews and sells ale deceitfully,
according to the confession of her husband, none other than the deadly sin
Couetyse (B-text V.215-23; C-text VI.225-33). Among her marvelous num­
ber of false starts, Margery Kempe takes up brewing under the aegis of the
same sin:

Sche wold not be war be onys chastysyng ne be content wyth the goodys that
God had sent hire, as hir husbond was, but euyr desyryd mor & mor. And than,
for pure coveytyse & for to maynten hir pride, sche gan to brewyn & was on of
the grettest brewers in the town.22

In the Harrowing of Hell episode of the Chester cycle of mystery plays

(XVII), Christ allows the devil to keep one soul - that of a brewster. Acted
by the cooks’ guild, and probably also “Tapsters, Hostlers, Inkeapers,” the
play ends with an alewife scene thought to date from early in the sixteenth
century.23 Satan welcomes the alewife Mulier as a “dere daughter,” and the
second demon promises to wed her, marking the importance of her gender.
Like Elynour’s, Mulier’s offenses include dilution, but are primarily char­
acterized as financial infractions:

Of kannes I kept no trewe measure.

My cuppes I sould at my pleasure,
deceavinge manye a creature,
thoe my ale were nought.
(289-92)

Tavernes, tapsters of this cittye

shalbe promoted here with mee
for breakinge statutes of this contrye,
hurtinge the commonwealth,
with all typpers-tappers that are cunninge,
mispendinge much malt, bruynge so thinne,
sellinge smale cuppes money to wynne,
agaynst all trueth to deale.
(301-8)24

The effects of her greed are not so much personal but national; such false
business dealings hurt the commonwealth and find promotion in hell. Sha­
kespeare’s Mistress Quickly suggests the persistence of the bad reputation of
120 Elizabeth Fowler
alewives, a disrepute epitomized by Celia’s words in A s You Like It: “Besides,
the oath of [a] lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster; they are both
the confirmer of false reckonings.”25
Ethnic animosities often hover about the discussion of ale, which is a
staple of the English diet and thus often appears as a reference to national,
class, or ethnic character. In Dunbar’s poem “The Dregy of Dunbar Maid to
King James the Fowrth being in Strivilling” ale appears as the rations of the
“hell” that is the countryside: the court drinks wine in “paradise.” Andrew
Boorde’s Dyetaiy o f Helth (1542) portrays ale as an ingredient of ethnic
character:

Iche cham a Cornyshe man, al[e] che can brew;

It wyll make one to kacke, also to spew;
It is dycke and smoky, and also it is dyn;
It is lvke wash, as pygges had wrestled dryn.
( 122)

Cornwal is a pore and very barren countrey of al maner thing, except Tyn and
Fysshe... there ale is starke nought, lokinge whyte & thycke, as pygges had
wrasteled in it,
smoky and ropye,
and neuer a good sope,
in moste places it is worse and worse,
pitie it is them to curse;
for wagginge of a straw
they wyl go to law,
and al not worth a hawe,
playinge so the dawe.
( 123)26

Boorde lapses into Skeltonics here, in a passage that is more closely related to
‘T he Tunnyng” than any other extant text. Skelton’s poem has an ethnic and
national register as well, though it is muted in comparison with such poems as
his “Agaynst the Scottes,” “Against Dundas” or “Chorus de Dys contra
Gallos.” One of the tales that drunken Alice brings to the other gossips of
“The Tunnyng” (351-62) refers to the Evil May Day riot of 1517, in which
Italian, French, and Flemish merchants and diplomats were assaulted in the
City of London by a mob of possibly two thousand apprentices who blamed
foreigners for the economic recession.”
The topic of ale and the figure of the alewife both, then, present us with a
poem about economics. How does “The Tunnyng” work this out? The poem
opens with the portrait of Elynour as a pastiche of objects, but moves quickly
into an account, almost an accounting-ledger, of her sales by customer and
proceeds. In the course of seven passus a queue of women brings a wild
 Misogyny and Economic Person 12 1

assortment of commodities to Elynour as payment in kind for ale: the poem

is a long list of many repetitions of the same commercial exchange. In the
logic of the poem, ale is at first merely one in a series of commodities of
which equal exchanges are made, but with repetition it is elevated to being the
one commodity which stands as the fate and measure of all the rest. It is the
symbol of conversion into value of any thing, and the one solvent of all value
as well. “In stede of coyne and monny,” according to the Tertius Passus:

Some brynge her a conny,

And some a pot with honny,
Some a salt, and some a spone,
Some their hose, some their shone;
Some ranne a good trot
With a skellet or a pot;
Some fyll theyr pot full
Of good Lemster woll.
(244-52)

In these lines, not only is Elynour’s character reduced to commodity form (as
we have seen, the first commodities in the list are affectionate names for
Elynour her husband uses in bed), but money itself is reduced to being just
another commodity; it has given over its privileged status to ale. Not only
such household items as spoons and skillets, but things that belong specific­
ally to the characters’ husbands are offered up, and as the ale progressively
dissolves the drinkers’ ties to the traditional social fabric, one brings her
wedding ring.
In a mock-heroic process of elevation, Skelton’s ale achieves the status of
the economic “universal or general equivalent,” the one commodity which is
selected to be the marker of value in all others. According to the economic
historians, the rise of a general equivalent accompanies the commercialization
of an economy and the process of its saturation with money. As if undoing
the process that Marx describes in the “Fetishism of Commodities” section
of Capital\ Skelton projects the behavior of commodities back on the human
agents of commodity exchange. According to Marx, in a market economy
commodities appear to act as (what I would call) personifications of the social
relations of the human agents involved: “To [the producers], their own social
action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers
instead of being ruled by them.”28 But in “The Tunnyng” women begin to act
as if they are personifications of behavior associated with commodities. They
become as adulterated, incontinent, bestial, and filthy as Elynour’s ale is
described as being. The depreciation of the value of the “typpet,” the “brasse
pan,” or the bacon, when each is turned into ale, is made known to us
through the actions of its former owner, who embodies that depreciation in
our eyes.
122 Elizabeth Fowler
Maude Ruggy thyther skypped:
She was ugly hypped,
And ugly thycke-lypped
Like an onyon syded,
Lyke tan ledder hyded.
She had her so guyded
Betwene the cup and the wall,
That she was therewithall
Into a palsey fall;
With that her hed shaked
And her handes quaked.
(467-77)

In came another dant,

With a gose and a gant.
She had a wyde wesant;
She was nothynge plesant;
Necked lyke an olyfant;
It was a bullyfant,
A gredy cormerant.
(515-21)

Than sterte forth a fysgygge

And she brought a bore pygge.
The fleshe thereof was ranke,
And her brethe strongely stanke,
Yet, or she went, she dranke,
And gat her great thanke
Of Elynour for her ware,
That she thyder bare
To pay for her share.
(538-46)

The women have an automatic quality, an inhuman lack of moral intent.

Significandy, like their goods, they appear fully estranged from their social
context. The commodities appear apart from the process of labor that
produced them and the normal uses to which they are put. The women
arrive shorn of kinship, of occupational status, and of membership in
associations and social hierarchies. In Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale the husband
is promised a usurious sexual profit from his (unwitting) loan of his wife to
the monk, and the queer behavior of money is enacted by the wife: it can be
used and not used up but increased. Similarly, in the Skelton poem the
women act out ale-like behavior. Their social existence is dissolved along
with their humanity, and above all, they are emptied of their productive
capacity, becoming merely dissolute, depreciated, consumed. If ale is the
 Misogyny and Economic Person 123
general equivalent, it reduces all things to its meaningless self, its empty
signification. Infinitely desirable, it is infinitely perishable as well.
The corruption of the market and the corruption of women act as evidence
for each other: swindling, inflation, and compulsiveness are summed up in
what the poem says is the fleshly incontinence of money.

We supposed, iwys,
That she rose to pys;
But the very grounde
Was for to compound
With Elynour in the spence,
To paye for her expence.
(594-9)

More famously, of course, Langland’s poem also deplores the money eco­
nomy’s power to corrupt. While it too describes a crisis in the determination
of value, Piers Plowman locates the crisis in the provision of services rather
than the consumption of products, and offers graft and bribery as the primary
model of corruption. In Skelton’s poem the locus of crisis is the unstable
value of the commodity7 and of money: the depreciation and adulteration of
their value; the opportunity for injustice in exchange; and female agency with
respect to the corruption of value.
Both Skelton and Langland rely on their double subject in a fundamental
way: in each the sexual is constituted in economic terms, and the economic is
construed in sexual terms. While the economic plot has been neglected by
critics describing Elynour Rummynge, Mede’s critics have caught the eco­
nomic satire, but tended to neglect the marriage plot and the sophisticated
use of gender Langland makes. Mede, an allegorical personification, is the
type of an aggregate of human behavior, what the social, economic body does
rather than the individual body. The feminine gender is particularly useful to
Langland, because he needs a figure that will analyze agency, that will help
differentiate between the intending subject and the performer of the intended
act. Within the doctrine of “unity7of person” in marriage, early modern law
was capable of making a distinction between principal and agent by gender, as
not only in criminal law but in law regulating business transactions and
contracts, women could in certain cases be considered not intentional centers
of subjectivity7or authority, but rather potentially authorized agents for their
husbands.29
By placing Mede within an allegory of a set of legal questions, Langland
uses her sexuality to illustrate the need for her marriage, and thus the need for
royal control of the money economy. In his judicial role, the king proposes to
marry Mede to the (male) privy councillor Conscience, who would rectify her
status as an agent without a principal by fixing her intentions authoritatively.
124 Elizabeth Fowler
As an example of agency unanchored by subjective experience and intention,
Mede represents the idea of the feminine as an opportunity for corruption.
The logic of Langland’s argument depends on the fact that the relation of
female sexuality to marriage was elaborately worked out by theology and law,
whereas the problem of money’s pervasive effect on late fourteenth-century
social structure was a newer and more difficult problem to wrap language
around. Mede represents a version of economic surplus value which becomes
increasingly powerful and visible as a social force in a commercialized money
economy. When it is personified, this surplus is analytically separated from
price or wage level and so can be acted upon decisively - in this instance, by
Conscience and Reson. While a theory of gender provides Langland with a
conceptual tool, it does not provide an instrument of policy that will help to
determine just price and excess profit in practice: there are no women he can
banish from the polity in order to insure that financial transactions do not
generate surplus value and inequity.
Allegorical personification in Mede’s case reinforces a view of women as
the opportunity for corruption, but when we turn back to the characteriza­
tion of Elynour we find that a notion of the feminine as the very locus of
corruption coincides with the flattening of personification into social carica­
ture. A less allegorical figure is one we hold more responsible for her actions.
Elynour Rummynge does not stand for the agency of the economy; she is
herself an agent in the economy depicted. Like the other women of the poem,
she is an origin and agent of corruption. The characters share this agency with
ale, which seems to be powerfully vicious in itself. More than merely the
opportunity for the vicious acts of the women, it seems to provoke corrup­
tion actively. Paradoxically, these ideas coincide with a conception of value as
located in commodities. There is a net loss of value when the customers bring
their solid pots and pans to Elynour and exchange them for slippery,
vanishing ale. Accordingly, it is not surprising that, in the scene of Skelton’s
poem, labor is invisible. The customers are extracted from their roles in
productive labor, and Elynour’s work is portrayed as being as passive and
corrupting as the fall of the hen dung into the vat.
Conversely, Langland’s emphasis on value as “personal,” subject to con­
science, and understood by means of personification, coincides with a labor-
oriented representation of value. The Mede episode seems to provoke pangs
of personal guilt in the dreamer, who worries about his own wages in the
succeeding Passus V of the C-text; Piers Plowman’s search for truth begins
with the episode known as the plowing of the half-acre, a utopian laboring
community brought to ruin by shirkers. If the poem offers a final decision
about what a socially determined just wage (“mede”) would be, it is measured
in Passus V by the unit of the dreamer’s bodily stomach, his “womb”: not a
product, not services, not appetite, not social position, but need. In the
remainder of the poem Langland abandons his valiant attempt to link labor
 Misogyny and Economic Person 125
and value, and turns to a more mystical, orthodox, and less economic view of
the world. Yet the well-circulated manuscripts of Piers Plowman may have
made an important contribution to consciousness of the socially constructed
theoretical basis of labor and wages: Langland’s lifetime witnessed changes
that brought that basis into question. In the late Middle Ages the value of
labor became increasingly less “naturalized” because of the accumulated
losses of the plague, which were greater among laborers than in the land-
holding classes. The repeated enactments of the Statutes of Labourers as well
as the 1381 revolt bear witness to an alteration of the value of labor in
English society. The increase in the mobility of workers, the spiritual move­
ments for voluntary poverty,30 the invention of clocks31 - all such things
make the determination of wages less inevitable and natural, less reasonably
based on a worker’s birth and station.
The value of labor is a question that vexes the whole of Piers Plowman. But
the similarity between the concepts of wage and price was little recognized in
early economic thought. Work is commodified and takes on a value in money
when compensation is commuted to money; thus wages are a species of price
in the service economy with which Langland surrounds Mede. No theory
claiming that labor is the primary locus of the production of value appears as
early as the fourteenth, or even the sixteenth century; in fact, not before the
eighteenth century is such a claim clearly articulated. The early theorists go
only so far as to imply that labor can be part of the cost of producing a
commodity, and to allow in certain cases that such cost contributes in a
somewhat mysterious way to price or at least to the right to profit. In “The
Tunnyng,” as we have seen, the priority Piers Plowman accords to labor is
transferred to bodily decay and corruption: moreover, here the very type of
the body, as in so much antifeminism, is female. This notion is part of a larger
theological tradition surrounding the figure of Eve, a tradition that associates
women in particular with the flesh - the beastly, corrupt, and sexual aspect of
human nature. In Genesis, the two different kinds of labor (agricultural and
child-bearing) that define the human condition are punishments that find
their origin in Eve’s sin. Rather than resuming Langland’s trial of labor as an
approach to the analysis of value, Skelton sets consumption at the heart of his
inquiry.
“The Tunnyng” proceeds by negatives. Economic value is corrupt, fleshly,
and feminine, and is set apart from the ideal values implicit negatively in the
satire. The character of character in “The Tunnyng” is vicious, and yet it
clearly inhabits a usually virtuous role: that of the agent of commercial
exchange. Thus character in the poem is a representation of economic
person, drawn from and against the discourse of early economic thought.
For Skelton, economic person is not the independent, choosing male agent,
whose autonomy, continence, and volition are protected as if with a shield by
the invisible hand of the market. In effect, the poem’s characters dramatize
126 Elizabeth Fowler
Aristotle’s concept of passive or effeminate incontinence {Magna Moralia
1.33), equating the involuntary, the nonlaboring, the feminine, and consump­
tion. As a form of character the representation of economic person is not a
metaphor or an allegory, and it is more than the individualized type of a trade.
The poem constructs a notion of an aggregate class: all the characters in the
poem are women, and all occupy the same standpoint in the network of the
economy as agents in economic transactions. Their situation standardizes
the characters, defining them in a common denomination. According to the
poem, the confrontation with commercial value has transformative power
over the representation of person. The process of evaluation in economic
terms, the very process that is enacted in commercial exchange, transforms
character into a compulsive plot; alienates personal agency to a corrupt social,
economic form; and creates an inhuman, sterile object out of a fertile subject.
When later thinkers fashion a discipline out of the study of the market, the
epistemological veil between a buyer or seller and what is happening “in the
market” becomes the assurance that the greater workings of the market are
socially just, insofar as the freedom of choice of individual buyers and sellers
is preserved. Skelton dramatizes the corruption of choice and free agency by
the commodity of money itself. The concept of false consciousness elabor­
ated by Marxist thought — just one step from Aristotle’s involuntary and
incontinent actors - is nearly present here, portrayed in the drunkenness of
the women. They are inebriates of the agency of money, possessed by an
agency which has contaminated their own. It is value that is the agent in this
confrontation between the idea of person and the theory of economic value;
value corrupts the moral capacities of the person, and makes what the
economic canon would offer as its paradigmatic subject —the farmer or the
shoemaker negotiating for each other’s wares - into the depreciated object of
the workings of money itself. Whereas in the Shipman’s Tale the wife
becomes a kind of productive commodity, in “The Tunnyng” Elynour and
her customers become consumed, decayed commodities, used up by the
economy and thrown away by the poet like putrefying corpses.
In these corpses women are invited to see themselves: it is precisely
misogyny, the “carmen raucum,” that is the poem’s vehicle. This has made
the poem both more and less accessible - taken in itself, misogyny has not
ceased to be provocative. The trouble with such a poem for feminists is that
its misogyny is so bald and virulent that at first pass we are not left with
anything intelligent to say about it. It is merely shocking, or exaggerated and
witty' enough to amuse us. What is the meaning - both historically and for us
- of antifeminism in “The Tunnyng”? The old answer, “realism,” no longer
rings true. Over time, misogyny has managed to obscure Skelton’s economic
satire because the feminine has come to function differently than it does in
clerical antifeminism. Despite the importance of women in retail trades and
as consumers, when the “market” later appeared as the topos of economic
 Misogyny and Economic Person \21
disciplinary thought, the agent was not female, the story of the corrupt
feminine origins of labor was discursively marginalized, and Skelton’s tirade
against the monetary measurement of value in the mechanism of exchange
was taken at “surface” value: not as a threat to moral agency and to the body
politic, but as a picture of vicious woman. During the modern period the
market itself increasingly represented public life, and the feminine became its
domesticated, private opposite. In unpacking some of the social history
embedded in “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge,” I hope to have raised
questions about the claim of realism: to show that “pictures” of the world
which have looked utterly natural for centuries reveal complicated ideological
assertions about gender, agency, person, and value - assertions that do not
passively reflect their culture but attempt to alter the fundamental tenets of its
organization.
John Skelton has not fit neatly into poetry survey courses because his
poems do not hold the prosodic and generic shapes that would make them
obvious comparisons for the poems of the Scots poets32 and the late
Chaucerians on the one hand, or those of the innovators of Tottel’s Miscellany
on the other. C.S. Lewis wrote of him that “He has no real predecessors and
no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an
unmistakable individual, a man we have met.”33 This sells Skelton’s writing
short. In a sense, Skelton-the-narrator has seduced his critics into margin­
alizing his poetry under the sway of the peculiarity of his “personality.” Fish’s
appraisal of “The Tunnyng” is too typical of the topos that has dominated
Skelton criticism: a picture in which Skelton, a rather loud-mouthed, smart,
perhaps politically brave man views the world as a kind of clever existential
photographer, exploring the formalities of language. This persona is familiar
to us as the corporally absent, mentally present, male voyeur of “The
Tunnyng.” His partial view led Fish to flatten the texture of the poem -
topic, tone, social details - because that texture is contradictory and incom­
patible with the idea of the poet as an auteur, masterminding the poem.34 I
hope my attempts to bring out the poem’s contradictions reveal it as a more
profoundly inventive and culturally engaged text than can be understood
from the epistemological standpoint of Skelton’s misogynist narrator, a
character in which Fish is too willing to be confined. Greg Walker’s recent
book has contributed to the demise of that paradigmatic character, by
showing that Skelton’s pretensions to being at the center of court life were
merely that; this has robbed the poems of some of their promise as sources of
intricate political allusion.35 What is left is a body of work more curious than
ever, full of peculiar versification, surreal voicing, and a more grandiose
bitterness. Perhaps we are faced with a less riddling, more specific and
complete poetry than earlier generations read.
“The Tunnyng” does not effect the subtle probing of sexual politics that
Chaucer accomplishes in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, nor does it
128 Elizabeth Fowler
stand up to the sophisticated legal critique of Langland’s plot. Using frag­
ments of Langlandian and Chaucerian representations of person within the
specially concentrated acid of satire, Skelton manages nonetheless to create a
mode of characterization that can argue powerfully about the effect of
commercial life on social agency. Yet here I have formulated my point too
neutrally, for social agency has a violent, gendered charge throughout his
work. To brilliant effect, Skelton takes advantage of his model of the
imperfect female subject, and of the less-human characters of birds, in
poems such as “Ware the Hauke,” “Phyllyp Sparowe,” and “Speke Parott.”
Skelton is experimental about the representation of person in such poems
pardy because the material allows him to be: these poems are about women,
children, and animals - partial subjects, lacking full intentional capacity. His
poetic personae are not the nightingale or the lark but the Phoenix-out-of­
ashes (in the riddle of “Ware the Hauke” 239-45); the ventriloquist Parrot
who speaks in gobbets and macaronics; and the lad dressed in rags, Collyn
Clout. In these poems, the liberation of voice from its earlier, conventional
poetic embodiments accomplishes all the schizophrenia that is promised by
the narrative fever of “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge.”
Skelton’s work precedes the formation of a new dominant poetic form of
person in the devotional and Petrarchan sonnets of the 1580s and 90s. It was
not Wyatt or Sidney (or, alas, an economist) who discovered something
useful in Skelton, but the more narrative imagination of Spenser, who
found Skelton’s negative logic suited his own indirection and obsession
with experimentation and the forms of person. Skelton’s achievement lies
in his profound curiosity about the question of person, and his new, technical
approach to the representation of person in letters. He is a poet of bricolage', it
is as if we watch him dismantling full-blown personification allegory in order
to see what he can do with pieces of it. In moments like the confrontation of
economic person with the question of value, dramatized in “The Tunnyng of
Elynour Rummynge,” Skelton leaves the old cast of medieval characters lying
dead around the stage. If the poem is an architectural folly, we can call it a
chantry, erected at the site of the funeral of residual forms. It is left to Wyatt
and Surrey to take up the task left incomplete by Chaucer: the rearranging of
personification into persona; it is left to Spenser to reanimate personification
as a partial object in a heterogeneous body politic, one that Skelton’s
representations of person made possible.

N otes

I would like to express my indebtedness to Charles Donahue, Jr., Roland Greene,

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Cyrus R.K. Patell, Derek Pearsall, Katherine Rowe, John
Scattergood, William Sherman, A. C. Spearing, and J. B. Trapp.
 Misogyny and Economic Person 129
1 John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, Conn.
Yale University Press, 1983), 449. The lineatdon in this essay follows Scattergood.
2 This essay examines the register of poetic reference in “The Tunnyng;” in a
forthcoming piece I draw out Skelton’s allusions to the legal and economic
tradition and the poem’s specific critique of economic person. The present
argument is part of a larger work in progress concerning the representation of
person in English legal and poetic texts of the early modern period. [Forth­
coming as The Human Figure in Words: The Arguments of Person in Chaucer, Langland,
Skelton and Spenser. Ed.]
3 Richard Halpern draws an analogy between Skelton’s poetics and the Marxist
theory of the economic mode called primitive accumulation, though he does not
comment on “The Tunnyng,” in The Poetics o f Primitive Accumulation: English
Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991). Arthur Kinney provides a list of generic sources and analogus for
“The Tunnyng” in John Skelton: Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 168-87.
4 In Anthony S. G. Edwards, ed. Skelton: The Critical Heritage (London: Roudedge
& Kegan Paul, 1981), 74.
5 Edwards, 111.
6 Edwards, 190.
7 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Clar­
endon, 1954), 139.
8 John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965, rpt.
Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press/Archon, 1976), 251-5: subsequent references
appear parenthetically in the text.
9 Two earlier poems imitate the passus of Piers Plowman: Richard the Redeles and The
Wars of Alexander.
10 Perhaps a pun on the word “meed” suggested the primary conceit of “The
Tunnyng” to Skelton.
11 Regarding antifeminist writing in the vernacular and in Latin see, e.g., Benson’s
Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 864; R. Howard Bloch,
Medieval Misogyny and the Invention o f Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991); John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature
(Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1979); Robert A. Pratt, “Jankyn’s Book of
Wikked Wyves: Medieval Antimatrimonial Propaganda in the Universities,”
Annuale Medievale 3 (1962): 5-27; Francis L. Utley, The Crooked Rib (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1944); Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M.
Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes ofMarriage: Misogamous Literaturefrom Juvenal
to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); and Linda
Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Woman­
kind, 1540-1620 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
12 See, e.g., Henry Lea, History o f Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (London:
Watts and Company, 1932); Roman Cholij, Clerical Celibacy in East and West
(Leominster, Herefordshire: Fowler Wright Books, 1988).
13 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
130 Elizabeth Fowler
14 The lesion of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition o f the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1984).
15 See Maty Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” PMLA 94
(1979): 209-22.
16 At the end of “The Tunnyng,” Skelton suggests by his emphasis on accounting
and the “tayle” or tally that he may have Chaucer in mind again:

Suche were there menny

That had not a penny,
But, whan they shoulde walke,
Were fayne with a chalke
To score on the balke,
Or score on the tayle.
God gyve it yll hayle,
For my fyngers ytche.
I have wrytten so mytche
Of this mad mummynge
Of Elynour Rummynge.
Thus endeth the gest
Of this worthy fest.
(611-23)

17 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie [1589] facsimile (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 1970), 197.
18 Cf. R. Howard Bloch, commenting on Tertullian’s misogyny in “Medieval
Misogyny” (Representations 20, Fall 1987, 13): “The affinity' between gold, the
product of excess labor, ‘the arts,’ and women constitutes an economic nexus
taken as a given; their natures, by definition inessential and antinatural, attract
each other because they partake coevally in a scandalous excess that offends.”
19 I do not have the original text, which is presumably in Latin, but R. E. Latham’s
Revised Medieval Latin Word-List: From British and Irish Sources (London: Oxford
University Press, 1989) contains the following entry:

tip/ulator 1391, 1553, -lator 1539, -pilator 1603, ‘tippler’, retailer of ale
and wine; +tirpillatrix, ale-wife 1547; domus-ulatoria, ale-house 1661;
-lo 1371, -ulo 1507, to ‘tipple’, keep an ale-house.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tippler” as “a retailer of ale and other
intoxicating liquor; a tapster; a tavern-keeper. Obs.” It lists this 1478 entry in the
records of the borough of Nottingham: “Fines pro licentia merchandizandi
Alicia Bult, tipler, iiij d.”
20 “Eleanor Rumming,” Times Uterary Supplement 26 October 1946: 521.
21 Regraters, forestallers, and engrossers were universally condemned from the
Middle Ages through the sixteenth century. They are “middlemen” (figured as
female here), though not in the obvious sense: J.E.T. Rogers, in his History of
Agriculture and Prices in England: 1259—1793, Vol. IV (London: Oxford Universin’
 Misogyny and Economic Person 131
Press, 1882), did not find that prices varied with quantity (i.e. there was no
difference between “wholesale” and “retail” price). Buyers who bought goods
for resale in the same market (regraters), who secured commodities in advance
of market arrival (forestallers), or who bought up the entire supply of one
commodity in order to corner a market (engrossers), produced illegitimate
profits at the expense of the consumer.
22 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S. B. Meech, Early English Text Society O. S. 212
(London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 9-10. Characters silendy regularized.
23 The Breviary of Robert Rogers (d. 1595): see The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and
Documents, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1983), 200, 265, 45-7.
24 The Chester Mystery Cycle: Volume 1, Text, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills,
Early English Text Society S. S. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).
25 III. iv. 30-2 in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1974).
26 Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regiment or A Dyetary o f Helth, [1542] ed. F. J.
Fumivall, Early English Text Society E.S. Vol. X (London: EETS, 1870).
27 See Scattergood’s note to lines 355-62 (451) and The Calendar o f State Papers:
Foreign and Domestic, Henry 17/7, Vol. II, Part II, 1031.
28 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [1867] trans. Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, Vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967),
79.
29 For example, see two cases from the Year Books of Edward IV in J. H. Baker
and S. F. C. Milsom, Sources of English Legal History: Private Law to 1750 (London:
Butterworths, 1986), 98-100; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of
England [1765-69], Vol. I, facsimile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979), 430-3 on unity of person in marriage; Frederick Pollock and Frederick
William Maidand, The History of English Law: Before the Time of Edward I [1895], 2nd
edn., Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 482-5; but see also,
e.g., Carruthers (above n. 15) who emphasizes how much room there is for
woman’s volition in actual economic and legal practice. I discuss Langland’s
model of agency relations in a forthcoming essay on Mede’s marriage litigation.
[See “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the conditions of contract in Piers
Plowman,” Speculum, 70 (1995): 760-92. Ed.]
30 See Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), on the relation between economic
change and the growth of religious mendicancy and voluntary poverty.
31 See Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
32 Though “The Tunnyng” is (and should be) taught next to Dunbar’s “The Tretis
of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the W'edo,” Skelton’s poem is clearly related to the
genre of the gossip or alewife dialogue: see The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James
Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 260-1 for bibliography.
33 Lewis, 143. But see the assessment of the ways in which Skelton extends
Chaucer in A. C. Spearing’s Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985) 224—77.
132 Elizabeth Fowler
34 Cf. Spearing, 242:

Stanley Fish has claimed that “the locus of a Skelton poem is the
narrator’s mind; and since the drama is internal, it will reveal itself to a
reading which attends to the psychology of the speaker and proceeds
from there to a consideration of scene, which moves, in short, from the
internal to the external.” [29-30] It seems to me, though, that the
structure of a Skelton poem is combinatory rather than organic, and
that the persona is one means among others of bringing together the
various elements of which it is made up. To think of Parott, above all, as
possessing a unitary' “mind” or “psychology” is to obscure Skelton’s
purpose.

35 Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
 5
A t the Table o f the G reat: M ore’s
Self-Fashioning and Self-
Cancellation
S teph en G reen blatt

[In the first section of the chapter, Greenblatt introduces More’s story of
Wolsey’s dinner-table, and the gross competition in flattery7 that More was
obliged to participate in, much to his later ironic amusement. Greenblatt
develops this theme - of individuals both immersed in and estranged from
the world they inhabit - in an analysis of Holbein’s painting of ‘The Ambas­
sadors.’]

More did not simply judge this world; he participated in it as an actor among
the rest —if the theatrical metaphor expresses his inner sense of alienation
and his observation of the behavior of the great, it also expresses his own
mode of engagement in society. That mode began early; in a well-known
passage of his U fe o f More, William Roper recalls that as a boy in Cardinal
Morton’s household More distinguished himself by his extemporaneous
performances: “Though he was young of years, yet would he at Christmas-
tide suddenly sometimes step in among the players, and never studying for
the matter, make a part of his own there presendy among them, which made
the lookers-on more sport than all the players beside.”1 This youthful talent
is, as Roper understood, brilliandy evocadve in its manifestation of dazzling
rhetorical facility and its striking anticipation of the later career, a career in
which More was at once enmeshed in a larger drama and yet never the mere
reciter of lines anyone else had written. Yet somewhere behind Roper’s
words, in our mind if not in his, lies More’s own comment on the danger
of such playing in the king’s games: “For they that sometimes step up and
play with them, when they cannot play their parts, they disorder the play and
do themself no good.” More was always aware of the tension that underlay
the seemingly effortless performance, and the mingling of this tension with
134 Stephen Greenblatt
his evident delight makes his self-consciousness as a player both compelling
and elusive.
Certainly some of More’s most fervent admirers were mystified and even
embarrassed by his participation in what he calls the “stage plays” of the
great, embarrassed particularly by his own professed theatricality. Thus when
Nicholas Harpsfield in his Marian biography - hagiography rather - of More
retells the anecdote of the dinner party at Cardinal Wolsey’s, he is clearly
uncomfortable at the part More cast for himself in his own version, the part
of a willing but somewhat second-rate flatterer. After quoting More’s
account, Harpsfield hastens to repair what he evidently perceives as cracks
in the saint’s image:

In this vainglorious pageant of my Lord Cardinal, though, as it appeareth, Sir

Thomas More was in a manner forced, contrary to his sober and well-known
modest nature, to play a part to accommodate himself somewhat to the players
in this foolish, fond stage play, yet I doubt nothing, if his answer were certainly
known, he played no other part than might beseem his grave, modest person,
and kept himself within reasonable bounds, and yielded none other than
competent praise. For in very deed the oration was not to be dispraised or
disliked. But, as we began to say, whether it were for that, as it is not unlikely,
that Sir Thomas More would not magnify all the Cardinal’s doings and sayings
above the stars... or for some other causes, he never entirely and from the
heart loved him.2

In three sentences, More’s complex irony, his self-conscious playing in the

cardinal’s pageant, vanishes: first he is forced, against his modest nature, to
play a part, then the part is none other than that same modest nature, then the
part entirely vanishes in the simple expression of just and reasonable praise,
finally even this praise dissolves, and More emerges as a resolute plain-
speaker who incurs the cardinal’s secret dislike by refusing to flatter him.
Harpsfield’s embarrassment is comical, but it is not merely squeamish: it
reflects, in its own way, the peculiar ambivalence that we have already
encountered in More’s response to the world, ambivalence signaled by the
variety of meanings that attach to his use of the theatrical metaphor. More’s
mode of being is, after all, genuinely perplexing and uncomfortable, the more
so in the context of early sixteenth-century England, where it represents
something quite exceptional. For his life seems nothing less than this: the
invention of a disturbingly unfamiliar form of consciousness, tense, ironic,
witty, poised between engagement and detachment, and above all, fully aware
of its own status as an invention. These elements may be perceived in the
lives of others who preceded him, but scattered, isolated; in More, they are
self-consciously integrated and set in motion both in literary discourse and in
the actual social world. Indeed, a distinction between text and lived reality
such as may be implied by the close of the preceding sentence is precisely
 A t the Table o f the Great 135
abrogated by More’s mode of existence. For one consequence of life lived as
histrionic improvisation is that the category of the real merges with that of
the fictive; the historical More is a narrative fiction. To make a part of one’s
own, to live one’s life as a character thrust into a play, constandy renewing
oneself extemporaneously and forever aware of one’s own unreality - such
was More’s condition, such, one might say, his project. Small wonder that
Harpsfield felt uncomfortable!
What is haunting about such a project is the perpetual self-reflexiveness it
demands, and, with this self-reflexiveness, perpetual self-estrangement. More
is committed to asking himself at all times “What would ‘More’ say about
this?” and to ask such a question implies the possibility of other identities
unfulfilled by the particular role that he is in the act of projecting. From this,
the peculiar shadows that hover about him throughout his career, not only
the shadow of the designing consciousness manipulating the mask but the
shadow of other selves, crouched in the darkness. Occasionally a shaft of
light catches one of these for an instant, as when More tells Margaret that,
had it not been for his family, he would long ago have shut himself in a
narrow cell, or when he writes about his distracting engagements in the letter
to Peter Giles that prefaces Utopia'.

I am constandy engaged in legal business, either pleading or hearing, either

giving an award as arbiter or deciding a case as judge. I pay a visit of courtesy to
one man and go on business to another. I devote almost the whole day in
public to other men’s affairs and the remainder to my own. I leave to myself,
that is to learning, nothing at all.
When I have returned home, I must talk with my wife, chat with my
children, and confer with my servants. All this activity I count as business
when it must be done - and it must be unless you want to be a stranger in your
own home.3

There is always, it seems, a “real” self - humanistic scholar or monk -

buried or neglected, and More’s nature is such that one suspects that, had he
pursued wholeheartedly one of these other identities, he would have con­
tinued to feel the same way. For there is behind these shadowy selves still
another, darker shadow: the dream of a cancellation of identity itself, an end
to all improvisation, an escape from narrative. The dream, as I shall argue, is
played out in Utopia, and its consequence is that More’s life, and not simply
his public life in the law court or the royal administration but his private life
in his household or among his friends, seems composed\ made up. If we may
believe Roper, this quality extended even to his choice of a wife: More, the
story goes, loved the second daughter of Master Colt, but when he consid­
ered that the elder daughter would be shamed by being passed over, he “of a
certain pity framed his fancy towards her, and soon after married her” (199).
A family myth perhaps, but there is ample evidence elsewhere, including
136 Stephen Greenblatt
More’s own eloquent testimony in his letter to Giles, for his willingness to
“frame his fancy.” “Although... because of a certain unique perspicacity in
your make-up you are accustomed to dissent sharply from the crowd,”
Erasmus writes to More in the preface to Praise o f Folly, “at the same time
because of your incredibly affable and easy ways you can play the man of all
hours with all men, and enjoy doing so.” More “is not offended even by
professed clowns,” Erasmus tells Ulrich von Hutten some years later, “as he
adapts himself with marvelous dexterity to the tastes of all; while with ladies
generally and even with his wife, his conversation is made up of humour and
playfulness.”4
This protean adaptability is closely linked to More’s constant recourse in
his writing to the hypothetical situation. This is, to be sure, one of the
characteristic devices of the lawyer and rhetorician, but in its pervasiveness
and intensity it seems much more than a device for More. “Suppose that,”
“what if,” “put the case that,” “picture,” “imagine” — his mind works
brilliandy and, it seems, inevitably in this mode.5 Certainly More’s enemies
were highly aware of his penchant for fictions: “Mr. More hath so long used
his figures of poetry,” writes Tyndale, “that (I suppose) when he erreth most,
he now by the reason of long custom believeth himself that he saith most
true.”6 For Tyndale, poetry is synonymous with lying; it is a term of abuse:
“O poet, without shame!” His one concession to a richer meaning is to allow
that More may have been taken in by his own falsehoods. But for More, as we
have seen, fictions have a far more complex and elusive function. He does
not, it should be stressed, simply exclude Tyndale’s meaning; he has a
powerful sense both of the way men use the “figures of poetry” to lie and
of the way men get entangled in their own fabrications. But then he makes up
a part of his own and plays it alongside the other actors. And if this self-
fashioning is the mark of an alienation that extends to his own life, private as
well as public, it is also, as Erasmus’s tribute makes clear, the source of much
that is delightful, inventive, and energetic in More. The hypothetical situa­
tions and histrionic improvisations are, after all, manifestations of that
brilliant playfulness that issued in Utopia.

Utopia

Utopia offers the profoundest commentary’ on those aspects of More’s life

that we have been discussing; it is at once the perfect expression of his self-
conscious role-playing and an intense meditation upon its limitations. At the
heart of this meditation is the character of Raphael Hythlodaeus and his
relation to the “More” who appears in the work as both presenter (or
recorder) and character. Hythlodaeus, in effect, represents all that More
deliberately excluded from the personality’ he created and played; he is the
 A t the Table o f the Great 137
sign of More’s awareness of his own self-creation, hence his own incomple­
teness.
The poignancy of this sense of incompleteness is heightened by the fact
that More presents himself in Utopia in all of his circumstantial reality. The
“I” of the work is a man tied in a hundred ways to his particular time and
place, to his offices, responsibilities, family and friends. Rarely before had a
work created so successful an illusion of reality; with a few deft strokes
More evokes a whole world of busy men immersed in their careers: Cuthbert
Tunstal, whom the king “has just created Master of the Rolls to everyone’s
immense satisfaction”; the burgomaster of Bruges, “a figure of magni­
ficence”; Georges de Themsecke, provost of Cassel, “a man not only trained
in eloquence but a natural orator”; Peter Giles, “a native of Antwerp, an
honorable man of high position in his home town.” And at the center of this
group is Thomas More, “citizen and sheriff of the famous city of Great
Britain, London,” the king’s “orator” in certain complex negotiations in
the Netherlands. This is a man linked to other men, a man with a well-
defined, widely acknowledged public identity, and that identity is further
substantiated in the flurry of letters and commendations that preface
the work. Erasmus to John Froben, William Budé to Thomas Lupset, Peter
Giles to Jerome Busleyden, John Desmarais of Cassel to Peter Giles,
Busleyden to More, More to Giles - the letters establish More in the midst
of a distinguished community of Northern European humanists, men who
know More personally or by reputation and who discuss his work among
themselves in that special personal spirit one reserves for the books of
friends.7
One notable effect of this circumstantiality is to heighten the realism that
attaches to Hythlodaeus and his account of his travels, a realism that More
and his friends have fun with in their maps, vocabulary, and solemn pedantry.
But there are other effects as well. Into this mutual admiration society of
successful men erupts a figure who does not fit, who steadfastly refuses to fit.
If Hythlodaeus seems real to us, rubbing elbows as he does with well-known
historical personages, he seems, by the same token, the very embodiment of
the stranger, “a man of advanced years, with sunburnt countenance and long
beard and cloak hanging carelessly from his shoulder” (49). And More
deliberately renders this strangeness more striking, even in the midst of his
careful realism, by immediately identifying Hythlodaeus with the fabulous
and imaginary. As Hythlodaeus establishes himself with ever greater power in
the conversation with More and Giles, a process takes place that is the very
opposite of heightened realism. Thomas More, the solid, middle-aged, smil­
ing public man, is, as it were, fictionalized by his relationship to the stranger.
More’s acute sense in his life of being “More,” a made-up figure played as on
a stage, is manifested directly in his becoming just that: Morus, a character in
an imaginary dialogue. And in a moment of quite extraordinary self­
138 Stephen Greenblatt
consciousness and irony, Morus and Hythlodaeus discuss precisely this
process of fictionalizatdon.
The context of this discussion is the debate on the question of state
service. Hythlodaeus flatly rejects Peter Giles’s suggestion that, as an enligh­
tened and eloquent man, he “attach himself to some king.” Nothing, he
objects, could be more frustrating or futile, and to prove his case, he imagines
himself in the council of the French king, arguing for peace where everyone
else is war-mongering, advising the king to amend his own indolence and
arrogance where everyone else is busy puffing them up, warning the king to
adjust his expenses to his revenues where everyone else is counseling him to
pillage his people. ‘T o sum it all up, if I tried to obtrude these and like
ideas on men inclined to the opposite way of thinking, to what deaf
ears should I tell the tale!” (97). Morus is forced to grant Hythlodaeus’s
point, but he counters by arguing that it is mere foolishness to thrust radical
ideas upon individuals who cannot possibly be expected to accept them or
even consider them seriously. There is no room for academic philosophy
with rulers,

but there is another philosophy, more practical for statesmen, which knows its
stage, adapts itself to the play in hand, and performs its role neady and
appropriately. This is the philosophy which you must employ. Otherwise we
have the situation in which a comedy of Plautus is being performed and the
household slaves are making trivial jokes at one another and then you come on
the stage in a philosopher’s attire and recite the passage from the Octavia where
Seneca is disputing with Nero. Would it not have been preferable to take a part
without words than by reciting something inappropriate to make a hodgepodge
of comedy and tragedy? You would have spoiled and upset the actual play by
bringing in irrelevant matter - even if your contribution would have been
superior in itself. Whatever play is being performed, perform it as best you can,
and do not upset it all simply because you think of another which has more
interest. (99)

Hythlodaeus, the fictional character, speaks for directness, for what we

would now call authenticity; Moms, the “real” man, speaks for submission to
fiction, for accommodation to the play at hand. Indeed, Moms tries to reduce
Hythlodaeus’s authenticity itself to a part, in this context a particularly
ridiculous and inappropriate part. To insist upon reciting one’s stiff-necked
and solemn lines regardless of the other characters is to make oneself both
absurd and ineffectual; the man who wishes to contribute to the betterment
of society learns how to adapt himself. Hythlodaeus, in reply, rejects the
implication that he too is merely playing a part and argues that the accom­
modation to fictions {fabulae) Moms counsels is tantamount to the telling of
lies {falsa), corruption all the more dangerous for being cloaked as public
service. Not only will nothing good be accomplished in the public realm, but
 A t the Table o f the Great 139
the would-be virtuous councillor will lose his liberty and become, in effect, an
actor in the prince’s play, a play that is both sinister and insane.
This debate, with its self-conscious recollections of Plato and Seneca, is a
literary set-piece, as Utopia s early readers would have recognized, but it also
represents a real and pressing problem, both in More’s personal life and in his
culture. There are periods in which the relation between intellectuals and
power is redefined, in which the old forms have decayed and new forms have
yet to be developed. The Renaissance was such a period: as intellectuals
emerged from the church into an independent lay status, they had to
reconceive their relation to power and particularly to the increasing power
of the royal courts. For most, not surprisingly, this simply meant an eager,
blind rush into the service of the prince; as Hamlet says of Rosencranz and
Guildenstern, they did make love to this employment. But there was also a
substantial and serious exploration of the implications of such employment,
its responsibilities and dangers, and a few men like Pico della Mirándola and
Erasmus hesitated, resisted, and cautioned. More, at once ambitious and
deeply influenced by both Pico and Erasmus, was, as it were, poised at
the center of these issues. As he wrote book I of Utopia, he was trying
to decide the extent of his commitment to the service of Henry VIII, a
decision which he well knew would shape the course of his life.8 And at stake,
as I have suggested, was not simply his career but his whole sense of himself,
the dialectic between his engagement in the world as a character he had
fashioned for himself and his perception of such role-playing as unreal and
insane.
In the debate that opens Utopia then, More isolates, on the one hand, his
public self and, on the other, all within him that is excluded from this
carefully crafted identity, calls the former Morus and the latter Hythlodaeus
and permits them to fight it out. Gradually, the positions become clearer,
until, in the exchange we have just discussed, the fundamental, irreconcilable
opposition is expressed and the debate nears its climax. And it is at this point
that we hear once again, after a long hiatus, of Utopia and learn, for the first
time, its central innovation: the abolition of private property. What is the
relation between this new theme - Utopian communism - and the extended
argument that has preceded it? J. H. Hexter, the most astute student of the
structure of More’s work, has argued precisely that there is no relation, that
this is one of the points at which we may perceive More stitching together
pieces that he wrote quite independendy and that represent “two different
and separate sets of intention.”9 For Hexter, Hythlodaeus’s praise of Utopian
communism at the close of book I is simply a convenient structural device, a
formal bridge to book II. The eulogy of the Utopian community of all things
does function in this way, but I would suggest that it serves a deeper purpose:
it is, exactly as it appears to be, the climax of book I, a debate not simply over
public service but over one’s whole mode of being.
140 Stephen Greenblatt
Communism is Hythlodaeus’s radical response to the role-playing which
More both argued for and embodied. Against the “philosophy. .. which
knows its stage,” he offers an uncompromising vision of root-and-branch
changes in the structure of society and hence in the structure of the indi­
vidual. Like Marx’s early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, More’s work
propounds communism less as a coherent economic program than as a
weapon against certain tendencies in human nature: selfishness and pride,
to be sure, but also that complex, self-conscious, theatrical accommodation
to the world which we recognize as a characteristic mode of modern indi­
viduality. Utopia then is not only a brilliant attack on the social and economic
injustices of early sixteenth-century England but a work of profound self-
criticism, directed at the identity More had fashioned for himself and that he
would play for increasing amounts of his time, should he accept the proffered
royal appointment. It is not that More turns against himself in self-disgust;
rather he sees his mode of being as a deliberate stratagem against the evils of
his time. And through Hythlodaeus, he permits himself both to question the
effectiveness of the stratagem and to imagine a radical alternative.
The heart of this alternative is an uncompromising rejection of private
property: “It appears to me,” Hythlodaeus states flatly, “that wherever you
have private property and all men measure all things by cash values, there it is
scarcely possible for a commonwealth to have justice or prosperity - unless
you think justice exists where all the best things flow into the hands of the
worst citizens or prosperity prevails where all is divided among very few”
(103). At a stroke, Hythlodaeus dismisses the elaborate ideology of status and
custom that provided a time-honored justification for the unequal distribu­
tions of wealth in society. Indeed he scarcely has to attack this ideology
because no one in the work rises to defend it. When Morus objects to
communism, he does so on the grounds that it impoverishes the common­
wealth and ignores human psychology - “Life cannot be satisfactory where all
things are common” (107) - not that it violates the privileges of the feudal
nobility.10 If the middle-class More cannot rest easy with his own carefully
fashioned social identity, he will not, at the same time, allow an identity to be
given fully formed by an exalted name and title. The pretensions of the social
hierarchy to embody a “natural” moral order are ridiculed in Utopia. There is
no rebuttal even when, at the work’s end, Hythlodaeus carries his version of
contemporary society to its extreme conclusion: “When I consider and turn
over in my mind the state of all commonwealths flourishing anywhere today,
so help me God, I can see nothing else than a kind of conspiracy of the rich,
who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the
commonwealth” (241).
All measures that aim at reform and stop short of a complete abolition of
private property are inadequate: “There is no hope.. . of a cure and a return
to a healthy condition as long as each individual is master of his own
 A t the Table o f the Great 141
property. Nay, while you are intent upon the cure of one part, you make
worse the malady of the other parts. Thus, the healing of the one member
reciprocally breeds the disease of the other as long as nothing can so be added
to one as not to be taken away from another” (105-7). Without the commu­
nal ownership of property, every man is set against every other man, for it is
impossible to possess anything without wresting it somehow from the
possession of another.11 The resulting competitiveness is reflected in the
rancorous debates Hythlodaeus describes; it is as if even ideas were possessed
as private property, each man fiercely defending his own. In such a society,
individuals are isolated, unattached save where their material interests chance
to coincide, while at the same time there is no true independence: all value
depends upon the admiration or envy excited by what is displayed and
consumed. Men become acutely sensitive to all they are permitting others
to see and all that they are concealing within themselves. Even the few
virtuous men who wish to have no part in the competition must develop
the same sensitivity; after all, this is just what Morus counsels Hythlodaeus to
do. By implication then, private ownership of property is causally linked in
Utopia to private ownership of self, what C. B. Macpherson calls “possessive
individualism”,12 to abolish private property is to render such self-conscious
individuality obsolete.
Utopian institutions are cunningly designed to reduce the scope of the ego:
avenues of self-aggrandizement are blocked, individuation is sharply limited.
In a society based on private property, all things are acquired at the expense o f
someone else; the pleasure of possession is, at least in part, the knowledge
that someone else desires and does not possess what you do. In Utopia, pride
of possession and pride of place are obliterated. Clothes “are of one and the
same pattern throughout the island and down the centures” (127); the capes
worn over these clothes are “of one color throughout the island and that the
natural color” (133). Food is divided equally, and meals are taken in common.
The houses, all three stories high, “are set together in a long row, continuous
through the block and faced by a corresponding one” (121); lest anyone
become personally attached to one of these identical buildings, “ever)' ten
years they actually exchange their very homes by lot” (121). Presumably, few
Utopians notice the change.
There is no place in Utopia then for the dazzling extravagance, the
sumptuous waste that fascinated and repelled More; no Wolsey or Henry
VIII could indulge his inexhaustible appetite and swell with the immense
accumulation of possessions. If the king and cardinal seemed larger than life,
it was because they were just that, unnaturally bloated with the labors, the
very lives, of others. In Utopia, occupations that cater to luxury or licentious­
ness are eliminated, so that not only is there an abundance of necessary goods
but no man may be said either to labor in the service of another’s will or
merely to consume the labor of another. Virtually all men work; even’ thirty
142 Stephen Greenblatt
families annually choose an official called a syphogrant, whose “chief and
almost... only function... is to manage and provide that no one sit idle, but
that each apply himself industriously to his trade” (127). The syphogrants
themselves, though legally exempted from work, take no advantage of this
privilege. Occupations are distributed equitably, and the worst tasks —those
that degrade or deaden a person - are performed by slaves. This latter feature
is chilling, but then More has asked himself questions that the writers of such
fantasies almost never ask: who slaughters the meat? who disposes of the
filth? If Utopia is designed to reduce the size of the ego, to eliminate the
possibility of a Henry VIII and to obviate the necessity of a More, it is equally
designed to prevent the existence of a class of laborers reduced to the
condition of animals. The syphogrants provide that no one sit idle, but
they also provide that no citizen be “wearied like a beast of burden with
constant toil from early morning till late at night.” Such wretchedness,
observes Hythlodaeus, “is worse than the lot of slaves, and yet it is almost
everywhere the life of workingmen - except for the Utopians” (127).
The Utopian workday of six hours is astonishingly short by the standards
set in Tudor statutes;1 we could argue then that, far from discouraging
individuation, Utopian institutions are designed to permit its greatest possible
flourishing. After all, “the constitution of their commonwealth looks in the
first place to this sole object: that for all the citizens, as far as the public needs
permit, as much time as possible should be withdrawn from the service of the
body and devoted to the freedom and culture of the mind” (135). Such a goal,
unbounded by distinctions of class, caste, or sex, is genuinely radical. But here
we encounter a crucial characteristic of Utopia: the steady constriction of an
initially limidess freedom. The English translation accurately renders the
syntactic movement of the original: “The intervals between the hours of
work, sleep, and food are left to every man’s discretion, not to waste in
revelry or idleness, but to devote the time free from work to some other
occupation according to taste” (127-9). These occupations turn out to be two
in number: attendance at pre-dawn public lectures or, “as is the case with
many minds which do not reach the level for any of the higher intellectual
disciplines,” voluntary continuation of the regular labor. The endless day
prescribed by the Statute of Artificers14 is scarcely longer than that envisaged
here, though one should add that there is, after supper, an hour’s recreation,
in the summer in the gardens, in the winter in the dining halls.
Similarly, the account of Utopian travel begins with almost unlimited
license and ends with almost total restriction. A citizen can go where he
chooses... provided he has a letter from the governor granting him leave to
travel and fixing the date of his return. (For travel within the territory
belonging to his own city, he needs only the consent of his wife and father.)
Wherever he goes, he must continue to practice his trade. These regulations
are not to be taken lightly: “If any person gives himself leave to stray out of
 A t the Table o f the Great 143
his territorial limits and is caught without the governor’s certificate, he is
treated with contempt, brought back as a runaway, and severely punished. A
rash repetition of the offense entails the sentence of slavery” (147).15
The pattern is repeated again and again in Hythlodaeus’s account: free­
doms are heralded, only to shrink in the course of the description. The cause
is not cynicism; rather prohibitions are placed solely on what the Utopians
take to be unnatural behavior. Presumably, it is only from a corrupt point of
view —one tainted by individuality, a thirst for variety and novelty, a convic­
tion that each person possesses his existence as a piece of private property -
that what remains after the unnatural has been weeded out seems hopelessly
thin and limited. The Utopians believe quite otherwise, and they take pains to
reduce sharply the number of points of reference by which men mark
themselves off from each other. Indeed, even the larger units of differentia­
tion within society are obliterated. The uniformity of dress strikes out not
only against vanity but against the elaborate distinctions of rank and occupa­
tion that were reflected (and legally regulated) in Tudor dress. Even so basic a
distinction as city versus country is eliminated; all men and women are trained
in agriculture and spend at least some years farming. A reader of a work like
Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age o f
Philip the Second will appreciate how deep and fundamental are the network of
distinctions that the Utopians thus overturn; he will appreciate too how
radical is More’s vision of national uniformity: “The island contains fifty-
four city-states, all spacious and magnificent, identical in language, traditions,
customs, and laws. They are similar also in layout and everywhere, as far as
the nature of the group permits, similar even in appearance__ The person
who knows one of their cities will know them all” (113-17). More dreams
here of sweeping away the centuries-old accumulation of local and particular
culture, marked seemingly indelibly in all the varieties of dress, speech,
architecture, behavior. And we may perceive this dream - as men have always
perceived it in its recurrent forms through the centuries - in two quite
different ways: on the one hand, as the sweeping away of the clutter of
generations, all that resists improvement and justice, all the stubborn in­
sularity, selfishness, and invidious distinctions that make life unbearable for
the great mass of mankind; on the other hand, as a failure to appreciate the
opacity of social existence, to grasp that men thrive on particularity and
variety, to understand that endless sameness destroys the individual.
But then the destruction of the individual as a private and self-regarding
entity is a positive goal in Utopia; at the least, the ways in which a person
could constitute himself as a being distinct from those around him are
radically reduced. As we have seen, More’s sense of his own distinct identity
is compounded of a highly social role, fashioned from his participation in a
complex set of interlocking corporate bodies - law, parliament, court, city,
church, family —and a secret reserve, a sense of a life elsewhere, unrealized in
144 Stephen Greenhlatt
public performance. Utopia cancels such an identity by eliminating, among
other things, most of the highly particularized corporate categories in which a
man could locate himself and by means of which he could say,“ I am this and
not that” There remain, to be sure, hierarchical distinctions between the sexes
and between the generations - “Wives wait on their husbands, children on
their parents, and generally the younger on their elders” (137) —but even
these are carefully designed to prevent a high degree of particularization.
If, as Hexter has persuasively argued, Utopia is founded on patriarchal
familism,16 it is important to grasp what elements of the early modern family
the Utopians reflect and what elements are noticeably missing. In Utopia,
marriage is the rule, even for priests (thereby eliminating concubinage as a
widespread, if somewhat disreputable, alternative); adultery is punished “by
the strictest form of slavery” and, in the case of a second offense, by death
(191); mothers nurse their own offspring (a practice that even the urgent
counsel of Renaissance physicians could not bring about for the middle and
upper classes);17 families lodge together; husbands discipline their wives,
parents their children. Sectarian religious rites, as distinct from the common
worship of Mithras, take place in the home, and even confession is a family
affair: “Wives fall down at the feet of their husbands, children at the feet of
their parents” (233). For Lawrence Stone, Utopia gives ideal expression to the
“rise of the nuclear family in early modern England” and the decline of other,
competing affective bonds: “Where Plato’s ideal had involved the destruction
of the family, that of More involved the destruction of all other social
units.”18
At the same time, we must remember that the sick are cared for not in the
home but in hospitals; that houses do not reflect the individual identity of the
families that inhabit them; that “though nobody is forbidden to dine at home,
yet no one does it willingly since the practice is considered not decent
\honestum\ and since it is foolish to take the trouble of preparing an inferior
dinner when an excellent and sumptuous one is ready at hand in the hall
nearby” (141). The strictly enforced monogamy and sexual exclusiveness are
not necessarily signs of the emotional intensity of the marriage bond; the
reason that Utopians punish extramarital intercourse so severely, Hythlo-
daeus reports, “is their foreknowledge that, unless persons are carefully
restrained from promiscuous intercourse, few will unite in married love, in
which state a whole life must be spent with one companion and all the
troubles incidental to it must be patiendv borne” (187). And lest such an
explanadon seem to place a high value on sexual pleasure, we are told that the
Utopians classify intercourse, along with defecation and scratching, as an
agreeable but decidedly low form of pleasure:19 “If a person thinks that his
felicity consists in this kind of pleasure, he must admit that he will be in the
greatest happiness if his lot happens to be a life which is spent in perpetual
hunger, thirst, itching, eating, drinking, scratching, and rubbing. Who does
 A t the Table o f the Great 145
not see that such a life is not only disgusting but wretched?” (177). Utopian
marriage then does not strive for a deep affective union between husband
and wife based upon their sexual intimacy; the latter serves the interest of
generation, which in turn serves the general interest of the community rather
than the particular interest of the family. A belief in inherited family char­
acteristics, such as was widespread in the Renaissance and survives to our
own time, would be counter to the Utopian commitment to human malle­
ability and interchangeability, and hence there is no concern for a family
“line” or for the purity of the “blood.” No household may have fewer than
ten or more than sixteen adults: “This limit is easily observed by transferring
those who exceed the number in larger families into those that are under the
prescribed number” (137).
Above all, there is no family inheritance, no transfer of property in
marriage, no sense of the family fortune. For the most part, each child is
brought up “in his father’s craft, for which most have a natural inclination”
(127), but this is merely a practical convenience: “If anyone is attracted to
another occupation, he is transferred by adoption to a family pursuing that
craft for which he has a liking” (127). Without patrimony, there is no need for
planning, no sense of the family’s future across the generations. Such plan­
ning is not an incidental feature of family life in More’s age but, according to
Natalie Davis, one of its central and defining concerns:

Some want merely to pass on the family’s patrimony as intact as possible to

those of the next generation who will stand for the house or its name in the
father’s line. Others want to enhance that patrimony; still others want to create
a patrimony if it does not already exist. And what is being planned for here is
not merely lands, cattle, houses, barns, pensions, rents, offices, work-shops,
looms, masterships, partnerships, and shares, but also occupations or careers
and the marriages of children. These, too, must be desired so as to maintain,
and perhaps increase, the family’s store and reputation/

Not one of these characteristic features survives in Utopia, where family

strategies are entirely subsumed under state strategies. If Utopia is founded
on the institution of the family, that institution bears only partial resemblance
to the actual families of early modern Europe.
More has, in effect, imagined a split in the family as he would have known
it, so as to preserve its disciplinary power while discarding its exclusiveness
and particularity. Children kneel at the feet of their parents, as the adult
More, Chancellor of England, still knelt publicly to receive his father’s
blessing, but the family is not permitted to develop a grasp of its own identity
and property in itself, a sense of the “arrow” of its fortunes in historical
time/1
It is no accident that Hythlodaeus does not give us the name of a single
Utopian except, of course, Utopus himself; it is difficult to think, even in this
146 Stephen Greenblatt
most patriarchal of societies, of the father’s name being passed on as the
property of his heirs, just as it is difficult to think of individual Utopians. The
problem with envisaging such distinct, named individuals is not simply that
More has used the family to eliminate the dense network of corporate bodies
that once differentiated man and then used communism to eliminate the
individuating power of the family, but that he has greatly restricted any sense
of personal inwardness that might have compensated for the effacement of
differences in the social world. Even pleasure, which would seem irreducibly
personal and subjective, is understood by the Utopians to be an entirely
objective phenomenon. To be sure, they profess to value pleasure very
highly: “They seem to lean more than they should,” Hythlodaeus says gravely,
“to the school that espouses pleasure as the object by which to define either
the whole or the chief part of human happiness” (161). But here again, what
at first seems to be a limitless vista turns out to be something less. The
Utopians do not embrace every kind of pleasure, but only “good and decent”
pleasure. Indeed, as in Plato, such virtuous pleasure is all that is held to exist;
other sensations may be perceived as pleasurable, but such perceptions are
illusory. What then of the enjoyment that a person may feel in the course of
unacceptable pursuits? The Utopians are unimpressed by the testimony of the
senses: “The enjoyment does not arise from the nature of the thing itself but
from their own perverse habit. The latter failing makes them take what is
bitter for sweet, just as pregnant women by their vitiated taste suppose pitch
and tallow sweeter than honey. Yet it is impossible for any man’s judgment,
depraved either by disease or by habit, to change the nature of pleasure any
more than that of anything else” (173). There are a limited number of
pleasures then, and these may be ranked hierarchically. Pleasure is something
located outside men; indeed there is scarcely any inside.
With this drastic diminution of self-differentiation and private inwardness,
we approach the heart of More’s strategy’ of imagined self-cancellation in
Utopia, for his engagement in the world involved precisely the maintaining of
a calculated distance between his public persona and his inner self. How else
could he have sat at Wolsey’s table? How could he make his way in a world he
perceived as insane and riddled with vicious injustice? Even in his own family
he kept back a part of himself from all except, perhaps, his daughter
Margaret. His whole identity depended upon the existence of a private
retreat; his silences were filled with unexpressed judgments, inner thoughts.
It is not surprising to find that in the 1520s More quite literally constructed
such a retreat for himself. Not only was his house in Chelsea a place set apart
from the scenes of More’s public life, but, as Roper tells us, “because he was
desirous for godly purpose sometime to be solitary, and sequester himself
from worldly company, a good distance from his mansion house builded he a
place called the New Building, wherein there was a chapel, a library, and a
gallery” (221). Here, alone from morning to evening, More spent his Fridays
 A t the Table o f the Great 147
“in devout prayers and spiritual exercises.” In A Dialogue o f Comfort, Anthony,
More’s spokesman, counsels such a retreat as a weapon against pride:

Let him also choose himself some secret solitary place in his own house, as far
from noise and company as he conveniently can, and thither let him some time
secretly resort alone, imagining himself as one going out of the world even
straight unto the giving up his reckoning unto God of his sinful living. Then let
him there before an altar or some pitiful image of Christ’s bitter passion...
kneel down or fall prostrate as at the feet of almighty' God, verily believing him
to be there invisibly present as without any doubt he is. There let him open his
heart to God, and confess his faults such as he can call to mind, and pray God
forgiveness. (242-3)

There can be little doubt that this is an account of More’s own practice.
Meditative withdrawal or informal confession was not, of course, unique to
More; in the early fifteenth century, we find Saint Bernardino of Siena
exhorting his hearers to retire to some closet and look unto themselves,
and this counsel is frequently repeated.22 As the public, civic world made
increasing claims on men’s lives, so, correspondingly, men turned in upon
themselves, sought privacy, withdrew for privileged moments from urban
pressures.23 This dialectic of engagement and detachment is among those
forces that generated the intense individuality that, since Burckhardt, has
been recognized as one of the legacies of the Renaissance. Burckhardt, to be
sure, viewed such individuality as a largely secular phenomenon, but it now
seems clear that both secular and religious impulses contributed to the same
psychic structure. Thus if More piously urges a frequent retreat to “some
secret solitary place,” so does Montaigne, though his retreat is detached from
explicitly religious content and infused with the spirit of ethical stoicism:

A man that is able may have wives, children, goods, and chiefly health, but not
so tie himself unto them that his felicity depend on them. We should reserve a
storehouse for ourselves, what need soever chance; altogether ours, and wholly
free, wherein we may hoard up and establish our true liberty and principal
retreat and solitariness, wherein we must go alone to ourselves; take our
ordinary’ entertainment, and so privately that no acquaintance or communica­
tion of any strange thing may therein find place: there to discourse, to meditate
and laugh, as, without wife, without children and goods, without train or
servants, that if by any occasion they be lost, it seem not strange to us to
pass it over; we have a mind moving and turning in itself; it may keep itself
company. 24

The word Florio translates as “storehouse” is arrière-boutique, literally a

room behind the shop; the word conjures up a world of negotium, in effect a
world of private property. If Montaigne counsels a retreat from this world, he
is, at the same time, assuming its existence; that is, his sense of self is
148 Stephen Greenblatt
inseparable from his sense of the boutique and all it represents. We are
returned forcefully to More’s insight in Utopia that there is an essential
relationship between private property and private selves. Significantly, in
Utopia, there are no arrière-boutiques because there are no boutiques to begin
with.25 The public realm stretches out into all spaces, physical and psychic.
Withdrawal into a “secret solitary place” within one’s home is rendered quite
literally impossible by the design of the houses: “Every home has not only a
door into the street but a back door into the garden. What is more, folding
doors, easily opened by hand and then closing of themselves, give admission
to anyone. As a result, nothing is private property anywhere” (121). The
original is even more to the point: ita nihil usquam priuati est, “thus nothing is
private anywhere.”
This psychological remodeling provides at least a partial answer to the
charges that Morus had leveled against communism: that men would not
work if they could not keep the products of their labor for themselves or if
they could rely on the labor of others; that, in rimes of want, there would be
continual bloodshed and riot, exacerbated by the inevitable breakdown of the
authority of magistrates or respect for their office - “for how there can be
any place for these among men who are all on the same level I cannot even
conceive” (107). Such arguments assume a selfishness that is canceled by the
Utopian reduction of the self. In place of the anxious striving of the
individual, the Utopians share a powerful sense of relatedness: “The whole
island is like a single family” (140). The close attention to occupations,
resources, defense, and planning for the future that More excludes from
the individual Utopian family is reinstated at the level of the entire commun­
ity. Respect for magistrates (who are called “fathers” [195]) is sustained not
by the unequal distribution of wealth but by each man’s absorption into the
community and indoctrination in its patriarchal values; disorder is checked
not by fines or seizure of property but chiefly by shaming.
In the vast literature on Utopia, the extremely important role of shame
seems to have been neglected, perhaps because readers are struck so power­
fully by the penal institution of slavery. A citizen of Utopia can be enslaved
for committing “heinous crimes,” traveling without leave (second offense),
tempting another to an impure act, insisting too vehemently upon religious
views, and committing adultery. (One may also choose to accompany into
slavery a spouse found guilty' of adultery'.) Certainly by sixteenth-century'
standards - and by our own - this is a remarkably short list of punishable
offenses, and the absence of the death penalty' would have seemed then, as it
does to millions now, a dangerous sign of weakness. Granted that there can
be no crimes against property, there remain the innumerable minor offenses
that, outside Utopia, are adjudicated in court. But in Utopia the whole judicial
system is radically simplified: the legal profession, in which More founded his
public identity, is nonexistent, and there are very few laws. Social control is
 A t the Table o f the Great 149
maintained in large part by the intense communal pressure of honor and
blame:

If anyone should prefer to devote this [free] time to his trade...he is not
hindered; in fact, he is even praised as useful to the commonwealth. (129)

Though nobody is forbidden to dine at home, yet no one does it willingly since
the practice is considered not decent. (141)

[If illness or death prevent a mother from nursing her child, there are many
volunteer wet-nurses,] since everybody praises this kind of pity. (143)

If any person gives himself leave to stray out of his territorial limits and is
caught without the governor’s certificate, he is treated with contempt. (147)

[In the case of premarital intercourse, not only is the couple severely punished,
but] both father and mother of the family in whose house the offense was
committed incur great disgrace as having been neglectful in doing their dudes.
(187)

To great men who have done conspicuous service to their country they set up
in the market place statues to stand as a record of noble exploits and, at the
same dme, to have the glory of forefathers serve their descendents as a spur
and stimulus to virtue. (193)

If the women are anxious to accompany their husbands on militar)' service, not
only do they not forbid them but actually encourage them and incite them by
expressions of praise__ It is the greatest reproach for a husband to return
without his wife or for a son to come back having lost his father. (209-11)

[A person who believes that the soul perishes with the body or that the world is
a mere sport of chance] is tendered no honor, is entrusted with no office, and is
put in charge of no function. He is universally regarded as of a sluggish and low
disposition. (223)

It is above all in their famous use of precious metals and gems that the
Utopians manifest their full reliance on shame as a method of social control.
Out of gold and silver they make chamber pots and other “humble vessels,”
as well as the chains and solid fetters they put on their slaves. Those who bear
“the stigma of disgrace” for some crime have “gold ornaments hanging
around their necks, and, as a last touch, a gold crown binding their temples”
(153). As a result, of course, gold and silver become “a mark of ill fame.”
Similarly, pearls, diamonds, and rubies are used to adorn little children; “when
they have grown somewhat older and perceive that only children use such
toys, they lay them aside, not by any order of their parents, but through their
150 Stephen Greenblatt
own feeling of shame, just as our own children, when they grow up, throw
away their marbles, ratdes, and dolls” (153). This Utopian practice is the
occasion for the memorable story of the Anemolian ambassadors who arrive
in Utopia decked out in their cosdy garments and are assumed by the
common people to be slaves or clowns. After seeing the contempt in
which Utopians hold gold and jewels, the ambassadors are “crestfallen and
for shame put away all the finery with which they had made themselves
haughtily conspicuous” (157). The fantasy must have had a particular
piquancy for More, who was serving at the time as royal ambassador: he
manages, at a stroke, to metamorphose the king into a despised slave and to
devalue the role that he himself had taken in the king’s service.
As the experience of the Anemolian ambassadors suggests, slavery func­
tions not only as a penal and economic institution but as an extreme form of
shaming.26 The slave’s shame is a significant part of his punishment and
serves as well as a deterrent to others. Malefactors are not executed or shut
away from public view but forced to do nasty or demeaning work under the
gaze of all. The public quality of Utopian space renders this gaze inescapable,
for ordinary citizens as well as slaves. Being seen is central to the experience
of shame (and, for that matter, of praise), and thus Utopia is constructed so
that one is always under observation. In the dining halls, the syphogrants and
priests sit in the middle of the first table, “which is the highest place and
which allows them to have the whole company in view” (143). Old and young
are seated together, so that “the grave and reverent behavior of the old may
restrain the younger people from mischievous freedom in word and gesture,
since nothing can be done or said at table which escapes the notice of the old
present on every side” (143). Similarly, at the religious observances, the heads
of the households are seated where they may overlook their families; “every
gesture of everyone abroad is observed by those whose authority and dis­
cipline govern them at home” (235). Those homes, as we have seen, have no
locks on any of the doors, and there are, in addition, no hiding places in the
community at large: “Nowhere is there any license to waste time, nowhere
any pretext to evade work - no wine shop, no alehouse, no brothel anywhere,
no opportunity for corruption, no lurking hole, no secret meeting place. On
the contrary, being under the eyes of all, people are bound either to be
performing the usual labor or to be enjoying their leisure in a fashion not
without decency” (147).
The danger of a social system that depends so heavily upon the constant
surveillance of its members is that there are inevitably moments in which
physical observation simply fails. Since honor is only lost in the disapproving
gaze of others, the absence of the threat of shame would seem to license acts
of robbery and violence.27 The Utopians correct for this problem by incul­
cating a belief in a constant, invisible surveillance. Even if a man should find a
rare moment of privacy in this society where there is nothing but public
 A t the Table o f the Great 151
space, he would be pursued by the sense of being observed and hence by the
threat of shame. For the Utopians believe that the dead “move about among
the living and are witnesses of their words and actions,” and this belief keeps
men “from any secret dishonorable deed” (225). Honor and shame being
social evaluations, they participate, as J. G. Peristiany observes, in “the nature
of social sanctions: the more monolithic the jury, the more trenchant the
judgment.”28 The extension of surveillance to the dead in effect renders the
jury supremely monolithic and always in session.
There is a further problem in an ethos of honor and shame that should be
noted: the inequality of rules. In societies organized around a code of honor,
the code normally applies only to those who are worthy of it. “A single
system of values of honour,” writes Pierre Bourdieu, “establishes two oppos­
ing sets of rules of conduct - on the one hand that which governs relation­
ships between kinsmen and in general all personal relationships that conform
to the same pattern as those between kinsmen; and on the other hand, that
which is valid in one’s relationships with strangers.”29 We may see this double
standard at work in Utopian foreign relations, where behavior is sanctioned
that would be severely punished at home, but within Utopian society the
opposition is collapsed by extending the family to the entire island: all
Utopians (with the exception of slaves) are considered kinsmen and hence
share the same interest in the preservation of honor.
In Utopia then the greatest moral force in men’s lives is respect for public
opinion. Citizens are drawn toward virtue by the prospect of honor, the
highest honor being rewarded to “the very best among the good,” the priests
(229). Conversely, to be exposed to ridicule or disgrace - to be laden with
gold ornaments or to be regarded “as of a sluggish and low disposition” - is
felt to be unbearable; the pressure is enough to ensure a high level of social
conformity'.
In keeping with our general conception of his character and situation, we
may ask ourselves what a culture shaped by the force of shame and honor
might have canceled or effaced in More’s existence. The answer, I think, is guilt,
by which I mean pangs of conscience, the inner conviction of sinfulness, the
anxious awareness of having violated a law or distanced oneself from God.
As we shall see, such feelings are by no means entirely eliminated in Utopia,
but the coercive power of public opinion - the collective judgment of the
community, perceived as an objective, external fact —diminishes the logical
necessity for a mechanism of social control operating within the inner recesses
of an individual consciousness such as More’s own. There are many signs in
More’s life of a powerful sense of guilt and sinfulness, whose most striking
outward manifestations are the hair shirt he secretly wore and the flagellation
he secretly practiced to mortify his flesh. Both of these penitential practices
reflect the structure we have come to expect: a public equability, good humor,
and self-possession concealing private suffering and judgment.
152 Stephen Greenblatt
It would be misleading, I think, to interpret this self-punishment as a
consequence of personal pathology or even exclusively as the attempted
expiation of an insupportable guilt. The practices were widespread in the
period - even Wolsey owned no fewer than three hair shirts, though there is
no evidence that he actually wore any of them31 - and they were conceived as
acts of remembrance and almsgiving as well as expiation. But there can be
little question that More did experience intense and sustained guilt feelings:
quite apart from any deeper psychological roots, his whole mode of life, with
its mingled accommodation and resistance to the world, would have called
such feelings into being, and they would have been confirmed by the religious
ideal of purity that he never eschewed. We may recall that the young More
had translated a letter in which Pico della Mirándola writes that “a perfect
man should abstain, not only from unlawful pleasure, but also from lawful, to
the end that he may altogether wholly have his mind into heavenward and the
more purely intend unto the contemplation of heavenly things.” And in the
U fe of Pico that More translated, it is reported that “he many days (and
namely those days which represent unto us the passion and death that Christ
suffered for our sake) beat and scourged his own flesh in the remembrance of
that great benefit and for cleansing of his old offenses.”32
When, at the end of his life, More prays “To know mine own vility and
wretchedness,” he expresses a lifelong perception of his condition, ritualized
in such practices as self-scourging and the daily recitation of the Seven
Penitential Psalms.33 To these symbolic acknowledgments of guilt, we may
add the longing for confinement that More voiced at the end of his life, and
we may speculate that in 1516, at the turning point in his career, he may have
felt with particular intensity the distance that separated him from the mon­
astic life he had rejected. With its theoretical celebration of pleasure and its
partial displacement of guilt by shame, Utopia was at least in part a response
to this deep current in his life, a dream of relief.
The strong emphasis in Utopia on shame and communal solidarity may
have represented as well More’s response to certain elements he perceived as
dangerous in the religious climate of his time. Protestantism obviously did
not spring up from nowhere in 1517; Luther’s crisis of guilt was symptomatic
of a far broader cultural crisis, as the events of the 1520s and 1530s make
abundantly clear. Again and again we encounter the same pattern: grave
spiritual anxiety, an intense feeling of being in a false or sinful relationship
to God, a despairing sense of the impossibility of redemption despite scru­
pulous ritual observance, suddenly transformed into inner conviction of
salvation through faith in God’s love. Luther’s brilliant exposition of this
pattern became, of course, a model, but only because it spoke so powerfully
to the psychological and spiritual state already in existence.
More’s own spiritual anxieties were contained and consoled by the tenets
and practices of the Catholic church, but by 1516 he may have already seen
 A t the Table o f the Great 153
ample evidence of the condition that would be literally brought home to him
several years later in the figure of his son-in-law, William Roper. According to
Harpsfield, Roper was a Lutheran when he married Margaret More in 1521.
The “fall into heresy” began when a “scruple” of Roper’s conscience was not
assuaged by the outward observances of the faith; his anxiety grew and was
finally laid to rest by the conviction that “faith only did justify,” that “only
belief should be sufficient.”34 Of course, this experience took place some
years after More wrote Utopia\ in 1516 More had almost certainly never heard
of Luther. But it would not have taken a miraculous prescience on More’s
part to be sensitive to those elements that emerged shortly thereafter at the
center of the psychological experience of those who were drawn to Protes­
tantism. And if we may credit More with such sensitivity, we may observe
that in emphasizing shame rather than guilt as a social force, Utopia would
diminish the possibility of that psychological experience by reducing the inner
life and strengthening communal consciousness.
Such reflections may help us to understand how More, who was to become
a staunch persecutor of heresy and an undeviating apologist for Catholic
orthodoxy, could have conceived for Utopia what was, in the early sixteenth
century, a radical policy of religious toleration. The Utopians believe that no
one should suffer for his religion, that everyone should be free to follow the
doctrine of his choice and to attempt to persuade others of the truth of this
doctrine, provided that such attempts remain modest and nonviolent. If this
allows a lassitude of belief beyond that permitted in any Renaissance Euro­
pean state and far beyond More’s own subsequent policy, it is the logical
consequence of a society designed to reduce the scope of the inner life: the
Utopians concern themselves far more with what men do than with what
they believe. In Utopia that which is not manifested in public behavior has
little claim to existence and hence is not the serious concern of the com­
munity.
There are, to be sure, restrictions placed on the policy of toleration - here
too the broad vista turns out to have its bounds - but these restrictions are
attributed to moral rather than dogmatic considerations: the Utopians believe
that he who denies the existence of divine providence and the immortality’ of
the soul will inevitably seek to evade the public laws “or to break them by
violence in order to serve his own private desires” (223). Dogmatism inevit­
ably enters into this conviction, for there can be no empirical basis for such
certainty about the consequences of unbelief, but significandy the dogmatism
is virtually hidden from the Utopians themselves: they see themselves not as
imposing the tenets of a particular religious faith but rather as defending the
public interest against private desires. Characteristically, they defend this
interest not by threats and torture - the standard European treatment - but
by the withdrawal of honor, public office, and the right to argue in the
presence of the common people. In short, the nonbeliever is shamed.
154 Stephen Greenblatt
We may add that Utopia as a whole acts upon its readers precisely through
the ethos of shame; in R. W. Chambers’s well-known formulation, “The
underlying thought of Utopia always is, With nothing save Reason to guide them, the
Utopians do this; and yet we Christian Englishmen, we Christian Europeans.. . f ’35
Each particular feature of Utopian life holds up to scorn a complementary
negative feature in the ordinary world and demonstrates how the abuse of
corruption or distortion could be blocked. Utopian shame opposes the
undesirable development of inwardness through guilt, as its communism
opposes the development of a sense of self-ownership; both are viewed as
traps or nightmares. Marx too, it might be observed, saw guilt and private
ownership as forces imprisoning men, but not before they had liberated men
from other, prior forces; they in turn would have to be destroyed, but they
were necessary, indeed inevitable elements in the process of human emanci­
pation. More does not see history in this way; he wishes, as it were, to stop
modern history before it starts, even as he wishes to cancel his own identity.
Having come this far, we must quickly qualify our last statement, as we
must qualify almost everything we say about More. We must remind our­
selves that “Hythlodaeus” means “Well-learned in nonsense,” that More
deliberately introduces comic and ironic elements that distance his fantasy
from himself and his readers, and that More remains ambivalent about many
of his most intensely felt perceptions. If Utopia is, as I have argued, a work of
profound self-criticism, the expression of a longing for self-cancellation, that
self has remarkable sustaining power. The imagined existence of Utopia may
function as a reproach to a corrupt social order, it may signal the limitations
of the usual accommodation to power and property, it may expose the
process whereby the established order of things lays claim to reality itself
and denies the possibility of alternatives, but Utopia is always an imagined
existence and vulnerable to the doubts and ironies and civilized demurrals of
its creator. The work is, after all, an expression of More’s inner life, the life
that it dreams of engineering out of existence. The more intense and plausible
the dream, the more profound its confirmation of precisely the inner life that
engendered it. And if this confirmation is a maddening tribute to the power
of that vicious existence that Utopia would obliterate if it could, it is at the
same time a pleasing reassurance that the fantasy of self-annihilation may be
indulged in playfully without real loss.
We may recall that More finally decided to accept the royal appointment,
that he had a strong streak of personal ambition and a complex involvement
in the world of competitive enterprise and politic compromise. Significantly,
when in 1516, in a letter to Erasmus, he records a playful daydream about
Utopia, he imagines himself not as a nameless citizen, attending early morn­
ing lectures and plying his useful trade, but as a great prince: “You have no
idea how thrilled I am; I feel so expanded, and I hold my head high. For in my
daydreams I have been marked out by my Utopians to be their king forever; I
 A t the Table o f the Great 155
can see myself now marching along, crowned with a diadem of wheat, very
striking in my Franciscan frock, carrying a handful of wheat as my sacred
scepter, thronged by a distinguished retinue of Amautotians, and, with this
huge entourage, giving audience to foreign ambassadors and sovereigns.”36
The ego that was to have shrunk to nothing has instead swollen, if only in
jest, to heroic size, and we are reminded that far from being effaced by his
creation, More was made famous by it. The fame is no accident, thrust upon
him, as Roper wishes us to believe was the case with all his worldly successes;
More himself conceived the flattering tributes to his genius that accompanied
the text, and he asked Erasmus, to whom he had entrusted his work for
publication, to supply recommendations not only by scholars but especially
by statesmen.37
Moreover, within Utopia itself, and particularly in Utopian religion, there
are important elements that seem to cut across the communal ethos of shame
and honor. Thus we would expect the Utopians, with their prizing of health
and comfort, to treat asceticism with derision, but their spirit of ridicule pulls
up short before the sect called the Buthrescae, who undertake the most
miserable tasks, eschew all sexual activity, abstain from meat, and entirely
reject the pleasures of this life. “The more that these men put themselves in
the position of slaves” - that is, the more they assume the stigmata of shame
- “the more are they honored by all” (227). Hythlodaeus is quite conscious of
the anomaly: “If the [Buthrescae] based upon arguments from reason their
preference of celibacy to matrimony and of a hard life to a comfortable one,
they would laugh them to scorn. Now, however, since they say they are
prompted by religion, they look up to and reverence them” (227).
Shame and honor are not, of course, abrogated here but rather are
reversed. Elsewhere, however, there are signs that a quite different ethos
operates in Utopia alongside the dominant one. Criminals, for example, have
their sentences lightened or remitted only “if they show such repentance as
testifies that they are more sorry for their sin \peccatum] than for their punish­
ment” (191). The distinction shows a surprising concern for an inner state, a
concern evidently based on a theological and intentional, rather than purely
behavioral, conception of crime. Indeed, despite their mastery of techniques
to regulate behavior, the Utopians have little faith in the social basis of
morality; they see to it, Hythlodaeus reports, that their children pay attention
at religious services, lest they “spend in childish foolery the time in which
they ought to be conceiving a religious fear towards the gods, the greatest and
almost the only stimulus to the practice of virtues” (235).
One would have thought that there were stimuli enough - massive,
constant, relentless inducements to virtue - without the addition of “religious
fear,” but the Utopians believe otherwise. Shame is a very important part of
the enforcement of conformity, but it is not trusted to work alone. The full
complement of disciplinary forces may be seen quite clearly in the account of
156 Stephen Greenblatt
priestly admonition: “It is counted a great disgrace for a man to be sum­
moned or rebuked by them as not being of upright life. It is their function to
give advice or admonition, but to check and punish offenders belongs to the
governor and the other civil officials. The priests, however, do exclude from
divine services persons whom they find to be unusually bad. There is almost
no punishment which is more dreaded: they incur very great disgrace and are
tortured by a secret fear of religion” (227-9). The public disgrace of ex-
communication is reinforced by a secret fear which is, in turn, reinforced by
the threat of physical punishment: “Even their bodies will not long go scot-
free. If they do not demonstrate to the priests their speedy repentance, they
are seized and punished by the senate for their impiety” (229). It is here, in
this crushing of impiety, that all the coercive powers of Utopian society -
shame, guilt, and bodily harm - come together. And the form of their union,
in this commonwealth celebrated for its tolerance, is the precise form of the
operation of the Holy Inquisition: excommunication, public shaming, the
attempt to awaken guilt, the grim transfer of the unrepentant sinner from the
religious to the secular arm.38
At a moment like this, we realize how tenuous is the balance of forces in
Utopia - intellectual ambition and self-effacement, Christian humanism and
realpolitik, radicalism and the craving for order, reforming zeal and detached
irony, confidence in human power and misanthropy, expansiveness and the
longing for strict confinement. Utopia does not reconcile these forces, nor
does it organize them into a coherent, overarching opposition, a clear choice.
Rather, it functions as a playground in which a shifting series of apparendy
incompatible impulses can find intense expression without flying apart or
turning violently on each other. Of course, within the work there is a
powerful sense of opposing positions - all discussions of Utopia, including
the present one, invariably acknowledge this feature —but the formal design
and the known details of composition have tended to obscure the fact that
the work’s most vital antinomies are expressed in the same artistic moments.
More’s act of self-fashioning is precisely an act of self-cancellation, just as his
most daringly iconoclastic fantasy expresses his most insistent desire for
absolute order.
More brings together then a near-chaos of conflicting psychological, social,
and religious pressures and fashions them into a vision that seems at once
utterly clear and utterly elusive. I have spoken of the place where this vision
occurs as a playground: More’s term for it is a libellus, a handbook. For the
paradoxical unity of Utopia depends in large part upon the physical existence
of the book, upon the reduction in its printed pages of the conflicting
moments of composition to the timeless uniformity of mechanical reproduc­
tion, upon its effacement of the hand of the author so as to permit his
réintroduction as a fictional character, upon its collapse of the fabulous and
the mimetic into the poker-faced neutrality of movable type. And beyond the
 A t the Table o f the Great 157
physical existence of the book, Utopia depends upon the simple circumstance
- so obvious as to be virtually invisible - that there are not two forms of
language, one referential and the other nonreferendal, one for truth and the
other for fiction. Morus and Hythlodaeus speak the same language; England
and Utopia are present by virtue of a single methodology of representation. If
this circumstance licenses the realistic description of “no-place,” it licenses at
the same time the perception that we encountered with “The Ambassadors,”
namely that the reality’ we assume in our daily existence is also a construction,
as is the identity we deploy in our relations with power.
More felt himself, as I have argued, to be a supremely constructed self, and he
devised his libellus as an exploration of the conditions of this construction and
the possibility of its undoing. But if he imagines the dismantling of the
structure of his identity - the transformation of the family, the abolition of
private property and private space, the displacement of guilt by shame - he
will not, and indeed cannot, finally cancel that identity. For all its anamorphic
strangeness, Utopia is not, as we have just seen, absolutely other, and More’s
undoing of himself is not represented as a chaotic dissemination of the
energies so rigidly structured in his life but rather as a more intense and
monolithic structuring. If Thomas More is not present in this new order, his
very absence is paradoxically a deep expression of his sense of himself, for, as
we have seen, his self-fashioning rests upon his perception of all that it
excludes, all that lies in perpetual darkness, all that is known only as absence.
Our reading of Utopia has shuttled back and forth between the postulate of
More’s self-fashioning and the postulate of his self-cancellation; both are
simultaneously present, but as with Holbein’s painting, interpretation
depends upon one’s position at a given moment in relation to the work. If,
for over four hundred years, criticism has, more often than not, consisted of
attempted seizures of the libellus - for the Church, the British Empire, the
Revolution, or even Liberal Democracy - it is both because Utopia insists that
any interpretation depends upon the reader’s position and because the stakes
seem surprisingly high. The struggle is not merely over an isolated work of
genius but over a whole culture.

[Greenblatt goes on to show how this theatrical and ironically detached More
fared in his later years and in the potemic and later religious writings.]

N otes

1 Noting the similarity of this anecdote to the scripted improvisation in Medwall’s

Fulgens and Lucres, R. W. Chambers remarks that “it looks as if the ‘stepping in
among the players’ had become a popular feature, and, since there was no one like
young More capable of doing it impromptu, the parts of the ‘steppers-in’ had to
158 Stephen Greenhlatt
be written by the dramatist” {Thomas More [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935], p.
62).
2 Nicholas Harpsfield, The Ufe and Death of Sr Thomas Moore, Knight, ed. Elsie
Vaughan Hitchcock (New York: Early English Text Society, 1963), p. 38.
3 Utopia, p. 4. Utopia is cited from The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Vol. 4, ed.
E. Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).]
4 Praise o f Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (New York: Modern Library, 1941),
p. 2; The Epistles of Erasmus, trans. Francis Morgan Nichols, 3 vols. (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1963), 3: 392. “It would be difficult,” Erasmus notes in this
letter, “to find any one more successful in speaking ex tempore, the happiest
thoughts being attended by the happiest language; while a mind that catches
and anticipates all that passes, and a ready memory, having everything as it were in
stock, promptly supply whatever the time, or the occasion, demands” (398).
When More married, according to Erasmus, “he chose a very young girl, a lady
by birth, with her character still unformed, having been always kept in the country
with her parents and sisters, - so that he was all the better able to fashion her
according to his own habits” (395).
5 Indeed, if G. R. Elton is correct, this habit of mind may have contributed to
More’s death: “It seems not unlikely, in the circumstances, that in his conversa­
tion with Riche More for once took the hypothetical manner of argument that
little bit too far, saying something that made it possible to persuade the jury that
treason had in fact been spoken,” Policy and Police (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 1972), pp. 416-17.
On More and Tudor training in the “moral cultivation of ambivalence,” see
Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of
Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), esp. pp. 31-
106.
6 William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More s Dialogue, in The Works of the English
Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith, ed. Thomas Russell, 3 vols. (London:
Ebenezer Palmer, 1831), 2: 15. Cf. p. 196. To which More replies, “And as for my
poetry verily I can little else, and yet not that neither. But it had been good for
Tyndale’s soul and a thousand souls beside that he had meddled but with poetry
instead of holy scripture all the days of his life,” The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer,
ed. L. Schuster, R. Marius, J. Lusardi, and R. J. Schoeck, in Complete Works 8
(1973), p. 176.
7 See Peter R. Allen, “Utopia and European Humanism: The Function of the
Prefatory Letters and Verses,” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963), pp. 91-107.
8 See, more recently, Jerry Mermel, “Preparations for a Politic Life: Sir Thomas
More’s Entry into the King’s Service,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
(1977), pp. 53-66. See likewise David M. Bevington, ‘The Dialogue in Utopia:
Two Sides to the Question,” Studies in Philology 58 (1961), p. 507: “It is central to
an understanding of the dialogue to realize that in 1515-16 More perceived a
dilemma. He gave expression to it in a pattern of two alternatives: Hythlodaeus’s
wariness of all Machiavellianism as an earnest of future ill intent, and persona
More’s cautiously idealistic tendency to seize upon any ray of hope as a basis for
gradual improvement.”
 A t the Table o f the Great 159
9 J. H. Hexter, More's “Utopia": The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1952), p. 28, reiterated in the introduction to the Yale Utopia,
p. xix. For suggestive reflections on the relation of the two parts and on several
of the aspects of More’s work discussed here, see Marin, Utopiques [Louis Marin,
Utopiques:jeux d ’espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973.)], and Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands
and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse” (review
of Marin), Diacritics (1977), pp. 2-21.
10 In this respect Utopia is, as Russell Ames has argued, the work of a “city” man;
there is no spokesman for the aristocracy, and Hythlodaeus’s searing attack on
kings and warriors stands virtually unchallenged (see Ames, Citizen Thomas More
and His Utopia [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949]), but also J. H.
Hexter’s persuasive criticisms (Utopia, pp. liv—lvii).
11 See, in his commendatory letter to Lupset, William Bude’s satiric description of
“the object of legal and civil arts and sciences”: “with spiteful and watchful
cunning a man should behave toward his neighbor, with whom he is joined by
rights of citizenship and sometimes of family, so as always to be taking some­
thing or other away, drawing it away, shaving it away, swearing it away, squeezing
it out, beating it out, scooping it out, twisting it out, shaking it out” (etc.) (7).
12 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory o f Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Alan Macfarlane has argued that as
early as the thirteenth century England was in effect “a capitalist-market econ­
omy without factories.” That is, “there were already a developed market and
mobility of labour, land was treated as a commodity and full private ownership
was established, there was very considerable geographical and social mobility, a
complete distinction between farm and family existed, and rational accounting
and the profit motive were widespread” ( The Origins o f English Individualism: The
Family, Property, and Social Transition [Oxford: Blackwell, 1978], pp. 195-6). Con­
sequently, suggests Macfarlane, “the majority of ordinary people in England
from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists” (163).
13 As Hexter and Surtz note (Utopia, p. 404), the Henrician “Acte concernyng
Artificers & Labourers” specifies labor daybreak to night from mid-September
to mid-March; before 5:00 a.m. to between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. from mid-March
to mid-September.
14 One should note that in Utopia, as in Tudor culture generally, the concern is not
only to ensure a high level of productivity but to avoid idleness, which is thought
to be the nursery of vice and sedition.
15 Slavery remained a statutory punishment in Tudor England; see, for example,
Proclamation 329, “Providing Penalty for Rumors of Military Defeat” (3
Edward VI), in Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations,
2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), 1: 456.
16 Utopia, p. xli.
17 See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 426-32.
18 ‘The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal
Stage,” in The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: Uni­
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 25.
160 Stephen Greenblatt
19 The Utopians divide pleasure between the soul and body, the former being higher.
The pleasures of the body are in turn divided between overall health and the joys
of the senses; again the former are higher. The joys of the senses are in turn
divided between those that possess “a secret but remarkable moving force” (such
as music) and those that derive from the bodily organs; the former are higher. The
pleasures derived from the organs are divided between those generated by renewal
(i.e. eating and drinking) and those generated by discharge; it is in this last and
lowest category that the Utopians place sexual intercourse. It is difficult not to see
this whole scheme as specifically designed to put sexuality in this category.
20 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life
in Early Modern France,” Daedalus 106 (1977): 87.
21 On More’s kneeling, see Roper, p. 221 [William Roper, The Life o f Sir Thomas
More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1962).]; on “the arrow of family fortunes in historical time,” see
Davis, “Ghosts,” p. 92.
22 T. C. Price Zimmermann, “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Rena­
issance,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and
John A. Tedeschi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1971), pp. 123-4.
23 William J. Bouwsma, in “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture”
(unpublished essay), has explored the psychological consequences of urban
development in the Renaissance.
24 The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 3 vols. (London: J. M.
Dent, 1910), 1: 254-5.
25 There is a haunting transformation of the idea of the “shop” near the close of
More’s life. On 12 June 1535, More’s books were taken from him and he was
informed of the Council’s decision to increase the rigor of his confinement.
From that day, according to Thomas Stapleton, “he kept the blinds of his
windows drawn down day and night. His gaoler asked why he acted thus. He
answered: ‘Now that the goods and the implements are taken away, the shop
must be closed’ ” (The Ufe and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, trans. Philip
E. Hallett (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1928), p. 140.
26 See Shlomo Avineri, “War and Slavery in More’s Utopia,” International Review of
Social History 7 (1962), p. 58: “His [the slave’s] is the lot of a moral pariah, and the
condition of slavery has less social than moral significance.”
27 See Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” inj. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour
and Shame: The I 'alues of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), p. 27: Honor “is only irrevocably committed by attitudes expressed
in the presence of witnesses, the representatives of public opinion.”
28 Honor and Shame, p. 9.
29 Honor and Shame, p. 228.
30 For the distinction between guilt and shame, see Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame
and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), and, especially, Paul
Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press,
1967).
31 George Cavendish, The Ufe and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Richard S. Sylvester
and Davis P. Harding (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 166.
 A t the Table o f the Great 161

32 “The Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula,” in The English Works of Sir Thomas
More, ed. W. E. Campbell, 2 vols, (reprint of Rastell’s 1557 edition; London: Eyre
and Spottiswoode, 1931), 1: 379, 356.
33 Thomas More s Prajer Book. A Facsimile Reproduction o f the Annotated Pages, transcrip­
tion and translation by Louis L. Martz and Richard S. Sylvester, Elizabethan
Club Series 4 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 205.
34 Harpsfield, pp. 85—6.
35 Chambers, Thomas More, p. 128.
36 Characteristically, More deflates the fantasy; the letter concludes: “I was going to
continue with this fascinating vision, but the rising Dawn has shattered my
dream - poor me! —and shaken me off my throne and summons me back to the
drudgery of the courts. But at least this thought gives me consolation: real
kingdoms do not last much longer” (St. Thomas More: Selected letters, ed. Elizabeth
Frances Rogers [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961], p. 85).
37 Selected Letters, p. 76: “Some time ago I sent you my Nowhere", I am most anxious
to have it published soon and also that it be handsomely set off with the highest
of recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and
distinguished statesmen.”
38 Still, “impiety” here means not heretical belief (for which, More states explicidy,
the Utopians have no physical punishment) but immoral behavior.
 6
The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and
Openings
R o l a n d G re en e

One critical factor in the European understanding of the Americas - perhaps

the most urgent development for the provision of a common literary' medium
to hold post-Columbian responses to the New World - is the sixteenth-
century, multinational project of renovating Petrarchism for lyric poetry'.
Anyone who studies the colonial period in European—American history or
literature continually runs across historical figures that work in two spheres of
activity, imperialism and Petrarchism, that we now think of as discrete: some
are political figures who turn out to be accomplished Petrarchan poets, such
as the legitimate son of the conqueror of Mexico, Martin Cortés; others are
poets, such as Philip Sidney, who have more extensive international contacts
and ambitions than many literary' scholars take into account.1 Why is the
divided commitment to these particular occupations found so often in this
period? Where personal careers give way to the common enterprises of
circles, classes, and societies —for instance, the movement of a given poem
out of Petrarch’s Can^oniere through translations in several languages and
cultural situations, where it often attracts different political associations —the
mutual incursions of the Petrarchan and colonial projects are still more
evident, though perhaps harder to trace and explain than in the lives of
persons.2
In view of its importance as a cultural transaction, however, Petrarchism
has been treated as scarcely having a real-world political dimension - and still
less, a relevance to contemporaneous events in the New World. Twenty -five
years ago Elizabeth Armstrong’s Ronsard and the Age o f Gold (1968) considered
the intersections of received myths of the Golden Age and the mid-century'
ethnography of the Americas in the works of poets such as Pierre de Ronsard
(1524—85) and Joachim Du Bellay (1522-60). Settling on anticipations of the
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 163
so-called noble savage for its New World element, and refusing to approach
Ronsard’s poetry through Petrarchism, Armstrong’s monograph vitiates both
the Petrarchan and the American factors as though to keep them apart. The
book steps back from issues and questions that would make a connection
manifest: for example, Armstrong declines to treat the import, for both
intellectual history and poetic imagery, of the gold recovered in Mexico and
Peru during the first wave of the sixteenth-century Petrarchan revival.3
Despite some obvious points of entry, the line of her argument runs between
the adjacent histories of colonial exploitation and amatory lyric without
explicitly engaging either, let alone both.
More recently, an issue of Representations assembled around the topic of the
New World exemplifies some current versions of the same critical disengage­
ment.4 In successive essays, Mary7 C. Fuller and Louis Adrian Montrose
propose to describe the workings of endlessly deferred desire and the politics
of gender difference, respectively, in Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie o f the large,
rich, and beautiful Empire o f Guiana (1596).5 Both Fuller and Montrose demon­
strate certain problems that seem to shadow scholars who treat the writing of
European colonialism from the limited view of sixteenth-century English
literature. Perhaps the most common of these, the lack of a deep store of
source material to connect with that of Europe, appears in Montrose’s
awkward attempt to pass off the Discoverie, with its specific history, qualities,
and agenda, as representative of an entire European “discourse of discovery”
he leaves practically uninterrogated. Fuller and Montrose alike react passively
to Ralegh’s own sleight of portraying the Discoverie, anachronistically, as an
originary text about a new site: while Ralegh produces a nearly parodie
version of the sort of account that was more appropriate in 1496 than in
1596, Fuller and Montrose obligingly accept his work as “early [writing] about
America,” part of “an emergent colonialist discourse.”6 More to the immedi­
ate point, both Fuller and Montrose observe in Ralegh’s text - but only
implicitly - something that amounts to a Petrarchan aesthetic and ideological
program. Whether citing instances of “affinity between the discovery and the
blazon” as “two Renaissance rhetorical forms that organize and control their
subjects,” seeking in vain “the material body” at the end of a chain of
signifiers, or characterizing the prototypical Spanish imperialist as a “specular
figure of desiring European Man,” both critics describe that program as
though for the first time instead of giving Petrarchism its due, which would
mean acknowledging it as a widely adopted template in the discourse of
discovery and moving forward from there.
All of these motions make Ralegh’s text seem unique, and perhaps more
important than it is. But when The Discoverie o f Guiana is put back into the
colonial literature to which it belongs as a late instance, and restored to the
decade of Petrarchan lyric writing in English in which it occurs, one sees its
participation in a widely distributed discursive complex. Ralegh’s text insists
164 Roland Greene
on a fully informed commentary, while Fuller’s and Montrose’s essays, like
Armstrong’s monograph, are limited by the consensuses of their moments.
To go further, one might ask what the Petrarchisms in Ralegh’s text would
show as antecedents in earlier entrepreneurial, ethnographic, or historical
writing about the New World; how Petrarchism gets into such writing, and
whether the vitality of Italianate love poetry during one hundred years of
discoveries and colonizations is somehow affiliated with those events; and
finally whether the category of American-oriented writing in which Fuller and
Montrose situate The Discoverie o f Guiana might properly include lyric poems,
and with what implications. If early modern Petrarchism was widely under­
stood as an internationally sanctioned medium for the deliberation of both
kinds of issues —if, in fact, its usages were taken to indicate that sixteenth-
century poets, explorers, and readers knew these as in effect the same issues
of desire, conquest, and exploitation - then imperialist discourse would seem
to emerge through many more openings than recent work on colonial history,
law, and politics has found for it. A text such as Ralegh’s Discoverie o f Guiana
would have, after all, a much broader historical and contemporary context
than even carefully reasoned accounts like those in Representations allow.
On a continental scale, the occurrences of Petrarchan discourse are less
potential than manifest across three generations of early modern lyric writing.
As conceived by the generation of European poets born around 1500,
Petrarchism absorbs the impact of many particular events of the era while
maintaining its own slightly anachronistic character. Following the Mexican
conquest of 1521 and contemporaneous with the intra-European imperialist
wars of the earlier sixteenth century, the Petrarchism of such poets as
Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-36), and their
younger contemporaries Gutierre de Cetina (?1520-57), Louise Labé
(1520-66), and Luis de Camöes (P1524—80), produces a lyric poetry attentive
to the immediate political and cultural applications of unrequited desire -
some of which concern the continuing European experience in knowing and
governing the recently conquered societies in the New World. With weighted
terms, transcultural imprints, and thematic equivocalities, these poets effect­
ively widen the import of love to take in the problems of exploration,
conquest, and rule as exemplary cases; extending what I describe elsewhere
as the Columbian invention of an emotional prototype for the discoverer or
entrepreneur, their work posits attitudes that can be modulated and reas­
sembled in a virtually endless array of texts.8 Moreover, the lyrics fashioned
by these poets, including some of the most influential of the period in their
languages, deliver imperialist questions to a readership that may otherwise
have only a distant relation to the mid-century American enterprises of Spain,
Portugal, and France. The poems I have in mind take their investments in the
Americas directly from the shared concerns of their authors, many of whom
are explorers, diplomats, and administrators, and their audiences - although
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 165
these persons and societies often have been treated by literary history as
though their travels, embassies, and enterprises were matters of inert fact.
The Henrician regime with which this volume is concerned, though lacking
an American policy, witnesses the entry of the contemporaneous, interna­
tional discussion of imperialism into English literature - the beginning of
what will become, by Ralegh’s time, a speculative debate of considerable
urgency. This essay proposes a colonial approach to a first-generation English
Petrarchist poet, Thomas Wyatt. Though Wyatt’s work has been claimed -
and properly so - by the newly revived historical criticism of sixteenth-
century literature, it has largely been seen as political in the courtly sense
alone: in the case of his Petrarchan lyrics, to simplify the consensus only a
little, as either light entertainments or disillusioned reports on the hazards of
the court.9 On the contrary, I would insist that Wyatt’s concerns run well
beyond the stock courtly situations with which criticism has been occupied.
Like many of his contemporaries, Wyatt has at least a speculative interest in
certain transcultural, American-oriented questions that belong to the intellec­
tual and emotional agenda of the period: these properly include such issues as
the moral obligations of entrenched mastery, the costs of submission, and the
practical correlations of race and power. When this interest shows up in his
lyrics in perspectival - not unequivocal —fashion, it may seem to occur only
subjectively or in trace amounts, or to vie with courtly matters for control of
the poems’ historical or topical dimensions. In fact, Wyatt’s consciousness of
America is neither subjective nor all-important. In its sixteenth-century
revivals, Petrarchan lyric writing has the capacity to bring many concerns
together in the compass of a single amatory fiction. The modulations of
personal, national, and ideological accents, after all, are much of what keeps
off redundancy among manifestly similar works by poets such as Wyatt, Du
Bellay, and Garcilaso. Where blanks or openings in the texts seem to mitigate
a strict historical or allegorical relation to colonial events, or where less topical
models intervene, these poems simply operate like lyrics of any time and
place - widening their reach, diversifying their precedents, and inviting the
reader to realize a personal and cultural connection to the text. If such a
poem is “about” colonial experience in some sense, it is no less about other
relevant models. But its colonial aspect can often be the factor that ensures
the lyric’s contemporaneity in a political register; where Henrician and later
audiences recognize it, as they amply did, this topical dimension reinvents
Petrarchism as well, producing a channel through which some of the most
searching and difficult questions of the time engage what was, at least for the
literate classes, a sixteenth-century mass medium.1
Surely there is nothing obvious about the relevance of colonial events to
Thomas Wyatt’s poetry. Where his work accommodates the uncertainties of
contemporary developments in the Americas, it does so in some large part
because Wyatt is attracted to instabilities in all things, social and political as
166 Roland Greene
much as romantic. His lyrics tend to collapse investigations of deceit, illusion,
and powerlessness in multiple settings - between persons, in the court, and in
the geopolitical world - into compact, haunting statements that wobble
because they are so full. In this sense, it is surprising that little has been
said about his late career in connection with the poetry.11 Wyatt was sent by
Henry VIII to the Holy Roman Court in the spring of 1537, mainly with the
purpose of reporting on the incipient alliance of Charles V and Francis I of
France.12 Beginning in 1538, Wyatt participated in the negotiations for
Henry’s proposed marriage with Charles’s niece, the duchess of Milan.
Later that year, Wyatt conveyed Henry’s unsought advice to the emperor
concerning his son Philip of Spain’s chances for succession not only to the
Spanish crown but to the elective “Imperial dignity,” and sent back Charles’s
polite reply: “As touching his Spains, he now, at these Courtes, entendeth to
stablish his son among them, with their oaths, for his successor__ The
Empire [however] he intended not to his son, [but to] his brother, being king
of Romans.”13 An uncommonly curious and talkative ambassador, Wyatt was
even brought before the Inquisition at Toledo on charges of heresy, but let go
with a “most severe admonition” from the emperor that “he ought to be
careful how he spoke.”14 In all of these occupations, Wyatt was in contact
with his exact contemporary Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1504-75), a
Petrarchan poet of considerable distinction who at different times was the
emperor’s envoy to Venice, attended the Council of Trent as imperial legate,
and served as ambassador to Rome. A friend of the prolific Italian poet Pietro
Aretino (1492-1556), whose recent paraphrase of the penitential psalms
(1534) Wyatt had probably begun to use for his own version, Mendoza was
Wyatt’s counterpart, having been dispatched to England in 1537 for the same
marital negotiations that concerned Wyatt.13 The envoy was the great-grand­
son of Iñigo López de Mendoza (1398-1458), the marquis of Santillana, who
in the 1440s had introduced Italianate models into Spanish poetry. Mendoza’s
elder brother Antonio (1491 P-1552) served contemporaneously as the first
viceroy of New Spain, and was near the turbulent start of his fifteen-year
administration in Mexico City while “Don Thomas Wiet” observed the
emperor’s court.16
Moreover, the term of Wyatt’s ambassadorship coincided with a critical
moment in the empire’s relations with its territories in the New World. The
late 1530s and early 1540s saw a more urgent theoretical discussion of cultural
difference and its political and religious consequences, and a greater number
of attempts to fashion policy according to such a discussion, than any time
since Columbus’s discovery. The encomienda system, for instance, which had
been modeled on peninsular Spanish administration and transplanted to the
Caribbean in 1503 as a system of forced Indian labor for the gain of
designated Spanish encomenderos, was under terrific strain in this period as
the question of reciprocal obligations between the Spaniards and the Indians
 The ColoniaI Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 167
of New Spain came into open debate. Among the issues in play were the
accumulating, near-feudal powers of the encomenderos, their harsh treatment
of the Indians whose labor they exploited, and the rising international
challenge to Spanish control of the Indies.17 The system had been initially
modified in 1536 by limiting ownership of any encomienda to two lifetimes.18
In 1537 Pope Paul III issued the bull Sublimis Deusy which agitated the
discussion by asserting the capacity of the Indians for Christian conversion,
their well-founded claims to freedom, and their rights to hold property even
when they remained unconverted.19 At the same time, Fray Bartolomé de Las
Casas was undertaking his closely watched experiment at Tuzutlán in Guate­
mala, in which he proposed to convert the Indians to Christianity and
imperial subjection through strictly peaceful means.20 In this climate of
aggravated legal and moral sensibilities, Antonio de Mendoza and Fray Juan
de Zumárraga established a humanist academy for the Indians of New Spain,
the Colegio de Santiago de Tlaltelolco, and Viceroy Mendoza authorized the
publication of books for Indian readers; the earliest surviving New World
book, Breve y mas compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua mexicana y castellana
(1539), was printed under this initiative in Mexico City.21 In 1539 the
Dominican jurist Francisco de Vitoria delivered his lecture entitled De indis
recenter inventis, which went as far as to undermine not only the emperor’s but
the pope’s authority on matters of Indian dominion.22 Meanwhile, “letter
after letter” came from America over these years - from Mendoza and many
other correspondents - indicting the encomenderos for their abuses of the
emperor’s Indian subjects and recording the shortcomings of the system as it
stood, was modified, and stood again.23 Shortly after the end of Wyatt’s
embassy, the New Laws of 1542-3 - I will discuss them below as a provi­
sional context for the discussion of rights and obligations in the poem “They
fie from me” - represented an opportunity to quell the debate and reform the
system, but instead generated further dissensions and modifications. Placed
where he must have noticed the continuing issues between Old and New
Spain, and often “in such credit with the Emperor that no man is so meet to
fill that room,” Wyatt is probably the first important English participant in
the international convention of rendering a common language for personal
and political matters in the medium of Petrarchism.24 The situation in the
imperial court and abroad, where diplomats and administrators who hap­
pened to be accomplished Italianate poets found themselves conversing over
intractable issues of law and policy, implies a concrete instance, but only one,
of how such a transposition occurred. As a foreign observer of the issues of
Charles’s government, Wyatt was probably less compelled to see these ques­
tions resolved than intrigued by them, obliged to register their assumptions in
his own thinking about the politics of romantic love and courtly aspiration.
Accordingly, these concerns appear around certain lyrics as a loose context
- a scrim through which a set of fresh questions becomes visible even in
168 Roland Greene
familiar poems. “They fle from me,” for example, is such a poem. In it, an
inconstant woman is figured as a prey who becomes a hunter, a conceit that
trades on any number of stylized hunting scenes in the early modern stock of
images.25 Of these, the encounters between imperialist hunters and hunted
indigenes in the literature of discovery are particularly immediate and avail­
able in the 1530s and 1540s. The motif of Europeans chasing Indians or
Indians stalking Europeans - there are literally dozens of relevant instances in
first- and second-generation European texts about the Caribbean, Mexico,
Peru, and Brazil - draws on the authority of classical, Christian, and courtly
hunt scenes, lending them contemporary urgency and receiving cultural
sanction in turn.26 Some texts report approaches followed by flights, some
tell of the reverse: Columbus’s Cuban diary, for example, contains several
paradigmatic descriptions of encounters in which the Indians first approach
his men (“the women [were] kissing their hands and feet, feeling them”), then
suddenly withdraw (“today of the six young men he took. .. the two eldest
ones fled”).27 There is, of course, no single authoritative instance of this
traditional-turned-colonial motif. Early modem poets and readers know it in
various outlets, as a particular of the (mutual but scarcely synchronous)
attractions and resistances felt by Europeans and Americans alike in their
first negotiations. Wyatt’s poem, I maintain, is one more such outlet:

They fle from me / that sometyme did me seke

with naked fote stalking in my chambre
I have sene theim gentili tame and meke
that nowe are wyld and do not remembre
that sometyme they put theimself in daunger
to take bred at my hand & nowe they raunge
besely seking with a continuell chaunge
Thancked be fortune it hath ben othrewise
twenty’ tymes better but ons in speciali
in thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse
when her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall
and she me caught in her armes long & small
therewithall swetely did me kysse
and softely said dere hert howe like you this
It was no dreme I lay brode waking
but all is torned thorough my gentilnes
into a straunge fasshion of forsaking
and I have leve to goo of her goodenes
and she also to vse new fangilnes
but syns that I so kyndely ame served
I would fain knowe what she hath deserved.28

In the several places where the woman-as-deer conceit comes apart and the
speaker’s presumably human experience shows through, the physical descrip-
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 169
dons, the contrast between civilized and barbaric behavior, and the climatic
switch in political roles (the speaker-hunter becoming a “dere hert”) allow a
New World orientation.29 To expand the potential colonial reading of the
poem still further, one might ask: why are we sure “they” are deer? Could
they be Indians? Or to insist on a common mid-century motif, could they be
Indians described as deer? On a journey to Florida in 1565, the English slaver
John Hawkins notes of the Indians the “Colours both red, blacke, yellow, &
russet, very perfect, wherewith they so paint their bodies, and Deere skinnes
which they weare about them, that with water it neither fadeth away, nor
altereth colour.”30 The Jesuit José de Acosta moralizes a similar scene in 1590
when he looks back on the several conquests and admits that “we entered by
the sword without hearing or understanding them, their affairs seemed not to
deserve any credit, but they were like game caught in the wilds and fetched
for our service and desire.”31 Even the pronominal crux, in which “they”
becomes “she” after line 11, can be seen to put the woman’s former
compliance in terms of a conquered population and to restore her individual
agency when she turns loose from his conquest.32 If transcultural encounters
may participate in a received motif such as the Renaissance hunt, one might
speculate that “They fie from me” refers to such episodes at least as much as
it engages the guesswork and anecdotes, largely about Anne Boleyn, that are
often treated as its intersection with history.33
Moreover, the late 1530s and the early 1540s, the era of “They fie from
me,” see a continual discussion by conquistadores, ecclesiastics, and jurists of
the ethnic character and legal and moral rights of the Indians —of who they
are and what they deserve, to paraphrase several documents issued through
the ecclesiastical juntas convened by the emperor in this period. In these
years, during which the New Laws of 1542-3 proscribing the perpetuation of
the encomienda system through inheritance were announced and debated,
many internationally minded Spaniards and others were openly concerned
with the mutual obligations between a colonizing society and a colonized
people, with making “the rights of the Indians. .. as secure as possible.”34
The pareceres elicited by three legislative visits to New Spain between 1532 and
1544 - the second of which, in 1539, is contemporaneous with Wyatt’s
embassy to Charles’s court —are saturated with comment on how the Indians
(called “los naturales”), although given to “novelties” and “infidelity,” should
be “humanly treated.”35 The relación sumaria of the junta of 1544 tells how the
continuing dissolution of the encomienda system through changes in the
inheritance laws has turned the Indians “wild,” encouraging them to kill
Spaniards, while the reestablishment of hereditary encomiendas would ensure
that “the Indians would be better treated.”36 Further, in a continuing symp­
tom of the idealist critique to which the Spanish put their own imperialism in
this period, a widely pitched debate over “service,” with the Indians as
servants but also recipients of Spanish attentions, appears throughout these
170 Roland Greene
texts. For decades the matter of “personal service” rendered to encomen­
deros by Indians had troubled the moral agenda of Spanish imperialism: in
1529, the Consejo Real had recommended to the emperor that encomiendas
be abolished because “it seems that the Indians by all rights. .. are obliged to
personal service no more than other free persons of these kingdoms.”37
Several informants of Wyatt’s era testify that everyone involved, from God
to the emperor to the naturales themselves, is “disserved” by the current
arrangements, that all “deserve” better.38 What emerges in “They fie from
me” as a rhetoric of sentice (“I ... ame served” / “what she hath deserved”)
and a more fundamental questioning of the woman’s nature is rooted in one
of the most important discussions of its time.
None of this is to suggest that Wyatt’s “They fie from me” directly
allegorizes either Columbus’s frustration or the more advanced imperialist
dilemma of the 1530s and 1540s. No single matrix really works for most
poems in the Wyatt corpus, even if this one has achieved a tenuous critical
equilibrium as a fiction of amatory frustration in a courtly setting. Rather, I
mean to argue that the mutuality of colonial and Petrarchan discourses at
mid-century produces texts of each mode that manifestly register the con­
cerns and emphases of the other. In this case, a sizable ecclesiastical and
juridical literature, which records so-called infidelities and ingratitudes com­
mitted against the Europeans, and treats the religious, ethical, and pragmatic
question of what the Indians deserve, comes to bear on the 21 lines of
Wyatt’s lyric: the immediacy and availability’ of this literature allow Wyatt to
accommodate his poem to the stresses of the moment, which makes it no less
Petrarchan but vastly more urgent even as a statement about interpersonal
love. At the same time, poems such as “They fie from me” cannot be
separated from the collective thinking and rethinking of colonial questions
that sweep across many boundaries - national, linguistic, discursive —in mid­
sixteenth-century Europe. Like relacionesy like treatises of many sorts, Pet­
rarchan lyrics are often implicated in the raising and deliberation of issues we
would retrospectively classify as social or political; unlike other contemporary
texts, these poems operate as an apparatus that puts individual readers into
seemingly direct relation with the relevant issues and questions - that brings
them into complicity with the colonial project, and into immediacy with its
ideological matters, and thus disseminates its purposes and contradictions for
a collective consideration. The usual readings of this poem, as treating courtly
deceptions or rehearsing the literary tradition itself, are not wrong. But most
of the interpretations in these reflex modes depend on unexamined assump­
tions about the prevalence of court-oriented questions, or on the dramatiza­
tion of thematic patterns that lift the poem almost entirely out of its
contemporary site.3 Against motions of these sorts, a reading that finds
“They fie from me” in the rhetorical thick of an immediate moral and
political problem, not merely a hazy setting or a tradition, must enter the
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 171
discussion with a certain sufficiency, perhaps even primacy.40 There are many
roughly contemporaneous poems, equally charged with the ideology of their
moments, that avoid mentioning the American enterprise - but cannot lose
their political investment, with its speculative but privileged relation to the
poems’ semantics, only on that account. I think of Camöes’s “Amor é um
fogo que arde sem se ver” (“Love is a fire that bums without being seen”), a
seemingly received list of comparisons for amatory experience, in which two
or three lines break the psychic logic to put the speaker back into history (“it’s
serving the one that conquers, the conqueror / it’s having loyalty for those
that slay us”).41 As the contemporary, topical dimension of such an over­
whelmingly conventional poem can be fugitive, one is obliged to read
probatively, often against the assumed trend of the fiction, often for voices
that answer other voices across national and linguistic borders, across genres
and texts.
“The longe love,” one of these poems that draws in voices from a distance,
revises the landscape of Can^oniere 140 (“Amor, che nel penser mio vive et
regna”) to contain two commonplaces of the European landfalls such as
those of Columbus, Vespucci, and Cabral, namely the harbor and the forest.
The sites are scarcely political in themselves, but become so when put into
relation in this peculiarly compact and expansive poem, which seems to
condense the atmospheres of the early discovery narratives while it rehearses
issues with which contemporary relaciones and debates are concerned. The
earl of Surrey’s equally famous version of 140, which has no colonial over­
tones, involves no such places.42

The longe love that in my thought doeth harbar

and in myn hert doeth kepe his residence
into my face preseth with bold pretence
and therin campeth spreding his baner
She that me lerneth to love & suffire
and will that my trust & lust negligence
be rayned by reason shame & reverence
with his hardines taketh displeasur
Wherewithall vnto the herts forrest he fleith
leving his entreprise with payn & cry
and ther him hideth & not appereth
What may I do when my maister fereth
but in the feld with him to lyve & dye
for goode is the liff ending faithfully.43

In his canon-making anthology of mid-century English lyrics, Richard Tot-

tel’s printing of “The longe love” typically reinforces the poem’s inter­
personal dimension through his gloss: “The louer for shamefastnesse
hideth his desire within his faithfull hart.”44 Read with some attention to
172 Roland Greene
colonial contexts, however, Wyatt’s poem tells a miniature narrative of over-
zealous conquest, like that for which Cortés was notorious, and direcdy
confronts an urgent emotional and ideological problem of this period with
which Las Casas, Vitoria, and other speculative thinkers are concerned: the
need to restrain collective and individual “lust” or “hardines” (which is called
cruelty or inhumanity when it is practiced by the Indians) with “reason shame
& reverence.” The conqueror’s position dissolves in an instant with the
disapproval of the queenly woman, and he becomes an inarticulate figure
running through the forest. But in this instance, the conqueror is not the
speaker but the catalytic emotion of love itself, while the speaker plays the
role of the Indian, or perhaps a personification of the conquered land itself.
The sonnet moves through these changes in a swift, almost disorienting
fashion, until the conqueror’s disappearance at line 11, which presents a
kind of dramatic and political crisis. How can the enterprise continue when
its agents and its idealist principles are in open conflict? How can the Crown
exploit the cupidity of a Cortés or a Pizarro without losing control to them or
abandoning its supposed goals?
This poem’s provisional response, as I see it, is a stunning shift that is
almost always naturalized and underplayed by Wyatt’s critics. The speaker,
who was landed and encamped on at the first, joins the other side. Like a
Moctezuma, he identifies with his cupidinous conqueror and vows to die at
his side. Where the theoretical and practical problem of the present day
delivers the crisis in line 11, however, Wyatt papers it over with an appeal
to something that sounds very much like the ideal of comitatus, an earlier
English notion of reciprocal obligation that is arguably anachronistic in this
poem’s artfully constructed context of sixteenth-century internationalism.4^
A provisional idealism, articulated by the indigene himself, stands in awk­
wardly for “reason shame & reverence”: what do these principles avail in
contemporary imperialism, with its emotions and conflicts that go unantici­
pated in received codes of conduct?
It is as though no one, least of all Wyatt, can answer the present-day
problems posed in the sonnet; instead of answering, he redistributes sen­
tience, agency, and authority away from their objective sites, and chronicles
the amatory-colonial plot in an especially fluid and baffling rendition. Its
fiction worked through, the poem discloses the woman, nominally a mon­
arch, as its least empowered standpoint; her willed ideals are quickly set
aside in favor of the speaker’s “faith” for conqueror over sovereign. The
experiences of conquest and love, Wyatt insists, manifest a moral logic of
their own that will countervail the imposed orders of kings, ladies, and
societies watching from a distance - and yet, affirmed, that logic is certain
to ring hollow. With the final sentence, the speaker is seen to reach for a
justification that will cover an ideological gap without quite fitting over it.
Inasmuch as they rhyme with the preceding line-end only conjecturally and
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 173
hang off the extremity of “The longe love,” the last three syllables alone -
“faithfully” - indict the factitiously idealist conclusion. The latter is portrayed
as the product of an imperialism, inseparably amatory and colonial, that
moves everything it touches. It makes lovers solicitous rather of Love than
of a beloved, and conquered persons faithful more to their conquerors than
to themselves.
Another lyric, less often treated than the two poems I have mentioned so
far, evokes the savagery of the colonial project by maintaining a deliberately
ambiguous application to the two principal standpoints.

What rage is this? What furor of what kind?

What pow’r, what plague doth weary thus my mind?
Within my bones to rankle is assigned
What poison pleasant sweet?

Lo, see mine eyes swell with continual tears

The body still away sleepless it wears.
My food nothing my fainting strength repairs
Nor doth my limbs sustain.

In deep wide wound the deadly stroke doth turn,

To cured scar that never shall return.
Go to, triumph, rejoice thy goodly turn.
Thy friend thou dost oppress.

Oppress thou dost, and hast of him no cure,

Nor yet my plaint no pity can procure.
Fierce tiger fell, hard rock without recure,
Cruel rebel to love!

Once mavst thou love, never be loved again:

So love thou still and not thy love obtain.
So wrathful Love with spites of just disdain
May threat thy cruel heart.46

One notices how quickly the poem makes the neo-Platonic idiolect of the
first line obsolete: it charges directly into the real world of “power,” “plague,”
and “poison” as though to contend that the prevailing intellectual paradigms
have run out of force in this situation. Hence the rhetorical emphasis of the
first clause: “What rage is this?” In fact, the poem probably makes more sense
in view of contemporary history - including the several key terms that drive
Wyatt’s argument - than in the context of Petrarchan emotions and conven­
tions. Certainly it has been little discussed in that context, a prime example of
the sort of lyric that loses visibility because it fits poorly with the consensus
about Wyatt’s largely national interests and courtly values.
174 Roland Greene
At the start, the woman’s arsenal of oppressions against the speaker seems
to put her in the position of European colonist - powerful and victorious,
bearing a steel sword and strange diseases —and him in the role of native
American .47 The first stanza, like many lyrics of the so-called plain style,
conspicuously imitates a natural utterance - here, that of a conquered and
infected subject seeking after the causes of his affliction. Wyatt’s poetic
career, of course, occurs near the midpoint of a century of plagues that the
biohistorian Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., calls “the most spectacular period of
mortality among the American Indians”; that span saw perhaps 14 epidemics
in Mexico and 17 in Peru between 1520 and 1600.48 Shortly before Wyatt’s
embassy, writing in a book that the inquisitive Englishman may well have
read, the Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535), Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo looks back to the Columbian landfalls and observes that of about a
million inhabitants on Hispaniola in 1492, all of whom were conscripted into
repartimientos and encomiendas, “and of those born afterwards, it is believed
that at present there are no more than five hundred persons, children and
adults, who are natives descended from those originals.”49 He claims that in
Panama, in the 16 years after the arrival of Pedradas Dâvila at Darién in 1514,
two million people died “without [the Spaniards’] giving them to understand
the requerimiento that His Catholic Majesty ordered them to observe before
war broke out.” 50 Crosby fills out Oviedo’s account by observing that the
first post-Columbian pandemic “began in 1519 in the Greater Antilles and
swept through Mexico, Central America, and — probably — Peru,” killing
perhaps more native Americans than any later epidemic.51 Of course, as Paul
Slack has shown, there was a regular incidence of plague and other diseases in
Tudor England as well as the Americas, but for this lyric it is exactly the
opening question by a plaintive victim —as though speaking of something
really transcultural and unfamiliar - and the joining of disease to other forms
of oppression that impl^ the American connection, and for that matter give
the complaint its force.52
Plague, it might be argued moreover, is not simply a contemporary event
tossed among sixteenth-century amatory tropes: Petrarchism and contagious
disease are often the results of the same events, and are involved in a shared
repertory of assumptions and constructions by a small cast of contemporary
recorders. One of the most influential historians of the conquest era, Oviedo
had been a friend early in the century of Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) and
Serafino dell’Aquila (1466-1500) in Naples, and was a tireless Italianate poet
himself. To the end of his life, as his intermittently autobiographical Quinqua­
genas attests, Oviedo oriented himself according to the convictions, values,
and dicta of his humanist youth .53 In 1514 he traveled in Davila’s transatlantic
expedition, and in enacting the transit from Italy to Spain to America, Oviedo
anticipated by perhaps ten years a movement of Spaniards that was to have
the most drastic results for political, cultural, and biological exchange. Recent
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 175
historians speculate that the Spanish occupation of Italy between 1510 and
1513, one of the indispensable events leading to the cultivation of sixteenth-
century Hispanic Petrarchism, exposed the future conquistadores of Mexico
and Central America to malaria, with disastrous results for the American
population, especially the coastal Indians in the first quarter of the century.54
Further, in the intensely polemical atmosphere of the 1530s and 1540s,
words such as “plague” and “pestilence” acquire a certain semantic extens­
ibility. This range notably includes a political sense that takes in the Spanish
exploitation of the native population, as in Fray Toribio de Benavente
Motolinia’s account, written in the early 1540s, of the “ten plagues” that
ravaged New Spain during the early colonial period:

This first plague [of measles] was quite similar to that of Egypt, of which one
reads that the waters were wounded and turned to blood, the rivers as much as
the springs and creeks__
The second plague was the many that died in the conquest of New Spain,
especially in Mexico City__
The third plague was a very great famine that followed the conquest of
Mexico, as they could not plant with all the wars —
The fourth plague was the calpixques or farmers and blacks; for after the
land was distributed, the conquistadores put in the repartimientos and towns
that were encomendados to them, servants or negros to cover the tributes and
to comprehend the farming business__
The fifth plague was the great tributes and services that the Indians made.55

Motolinia’s conclusion, popularized by the oidor Alonso de Zorita in his Breve

y sumaria relación de los señores de la Nueva España (written between 1566 and
1570), joins an indictment of the Indians’ forced labor with a description of
their Petrarchan but literal affects and the result for public health: “Suffering
these toils, hungers, colds, wearinesses, heats, winds, sleeping on the ground,
in the wilderness, in the cold and the dew, is thought to bring on pestilences
and infirmities, for with great breakdowns comes pestilence or cámaras
[diarrhea]: the natives have no cure or relief, and die on the fourth or fifth
day, and have death as their only cure and alleviation of their labors, because
as long as they live they are never free of these.” 56
Meanwhile, one of the common characterizations of sixteenth-century
Petrarchism is as an epidemic: probably the most memorable formulation is
Thomas Campion’s sanitary caution, toward the end of a decade of Pet­
rarchan contagion, that “the facilitie and popularme of Rime [out of ‘barbar­
ized Italf] creates as many Poets as a hot sommer flies.” 57 “What rage is
this?” and many other mid-century Petrarchan lyrics that invoke the analogy'
of plague are exploiting something that amounts to an empirical, authorless
trope: the transcultural thinking about love in a certain way, and the social
experience of plague, can be products of the same movements of soldiers,
176 Roland Greene
administrators, and entrepreneurs, sharing a material relation to European
imperialism before they meet again in lyric poetry. The conceit of romantic
love as plague does not appear in the Can^oniere, being largely unimagined by
Petrarch’s program of highly individual experience that seldom acknowledges
its condition as mass culture of any sort. It is, however, a distincdy sixteenth-
century intuition, written across the personal and collective histories of the
generation of Wyatt - for instance, not only in the diagnosis of “What rage is
this?” but in the ambiguous term “disease” in the ballade “That time that
mirth did steer my ship .” 58
The political situation between the lovers in “What rage is this?” is shot
through with inconsistencies. The most evident interruptions in its logic
occur in the final lines of the last three stanzas. In line 12, the implicit analogy
is broken by the speaker’s insistence to the woman: “thy friend thou dost
oppress.” Asserting their old acquaintance beneath the analogy, as no Indian
would, the speaker breaks open the lyric’s terms to disclose a prior situation
or relation —to allow, in other words, that a real-world analogy, including a
borrowed history and a figurative politics of identity, has been imposed on
their relations. The next line moves to restore the political conceit (“oppress
thou dost, and hast of him no cure”), recalling indictments like Motolinia’s
and Zorita’s. But something in the poem’s controlling analogy' has given out,
and what shows through the cracks here and there is an already existing
situation that perhaps seems less political than personal - but that, as a
personal situation, is as coercive and frustrating as the imperialist conceit.
Unrequited love, it seems, admits the complexities of imperialism even when
that analogy has fallen or been set aside. In the fourth stanza the speaker,
infected again, touches a Petrarchan commonplace (“my plaint no pity can
procure”), resorts to what seem some standard-issue amatory metaphors
(“tiger” and “rock”), and then issues his central and most urgent character­
ization: “Cruel rebel to love!” Does a confused speaker scramble the hier­
archy of this relationship, senselessly calling the woman he has worked to cast
as his oppressor, his oppressed? Or does he reveal the politics around, and in
control of, the horizons of the poem to this line, identifying his Petrarchan
notion of “love” as the hegemony against which the woman stands out as
rebel, other, American?
Without quite saying so, the last stanza restages these questions. The
seeming redundancy of the two lines
Once mayst thou love, never be loved again:
So love thou still and not thy love obtain
properly fashions two versions of unrequitedness: that of the subject in
society whose love is never returned, and that of an intersubjective desire
that cannot hold its object. In the first of these lines, the subject is singled out
by the Petrarchan trope that treats temporality' as constitutive of identity’
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 177
(recall Petrarch’s “che son! che fui!” in Canzone 23, where the duration of
love implies the fragmentation of identity). Here, loving “once” in the active
voice set against an impersonal, continual rejection evokes a clash between an
oppressed subject and a structure that enforces his or her frustration. The
next line, however, calls up a continual, perhaps systematic loving with the
design of possessing more than being loved in return, which seems somehow
impersonal and acquisitive compared to the other line’s hypothesis, but is
every way as frustrated. The woman, then, is put in the emotional double
bind that runs across both Petrarchism and imperialism in this period - of
being the oppressor in love and oppressed by love - and if the speaker seems
to know her position well, it is because he occupies it himself, or they inhabit
it together, in mutual relation. The last line poses the dilemma again, in the
delicate oxymoron of her “cruel heart.” One notices, retrospectively, that
the woman became a physical presence only in the sentence that ended with
the name-calling of “cruel rebel” - in other words, where she herself became
a potential victim. For this lyric, “the body” belongs to the oppressed; the
oppressor can be embodied only when the double-edged political situation is
revealed. For this mid-century conception of Petrarchism, versus (for exam­
ple) Petrarch’s own work, it will not do to represent the woman as heartless,
because she must have the longings of an oppressor, and must be able to
register her own oppression. With the discovery of these interchangeable
stand-points for the two persons, the poem’s original questions become more
arresting; what rage is this after all? Is it the speaker’s reaction to going
unloved, or the woman’s response to love’s tyranny over her? What power
wearies the speaker, his own, or the power that triumphs over him? The
conceit of plague proves its force in such highly equivocal readings, where the
diagnostic drift of these questions is genuine and the sheer communicability
of amatory and imperialist “poison” confronts us in every line.
Cetina draws on the same intuition of love as plague in one of the most
striking and elliptical sonnets of this era. His “Amor, ¿qué es ésto?” is a poem
of exile and jealousy, not of the “continuell chaunge” between lovers. But in
announcing that it aims to circumvent present love and its problems, Cetina’s
sonnet, spoken in two voices, corroborates several of the conceits developed
by Wyatt and other contemporaries:

“Amor, ¿qué es ésto?” “Amor.” “Mayor mal siento

Que Amor.” “¿Pues qué es?” “No sé.” “¿Dónde te ofende?”
“En el alma.” “¿Con qué fuego lo enciende?”
“¡Fuego si! ¿Quién lo enciende?” “El pensamiento.
¿Arde?” “Abrasa que parte el sentimiento.”
“¿Cómo de imaginar no te defiende
La causa?” “Nó.” “¿Por qué?” “Porque desciende
Muy alta.” “¿A buscar qué?” “Mi perdimiento.”
178 Roland Greene
“¿Luego no es fuego?” “Nó, que será rabia.”
“¿Huyes del agua?” “Nó.” “¿Cómo?” “Llorando.”
“Descanso es desear.” “Nó.” “¿Es pestilencia?”
“¡Pluguiera á Dios!” “¿Por qué?” “Que á quien me agravia
Se pegara.” “¿Es recelo?” “Recelando
Muero.” “¡Ya sé lo que es!” “¿Qué es pues?” “Ausencia.”59

(“What is this love?” “Love.” “I feel a greater sickness

Than Love.” “But what is it?” “I do not know.” “Where does it hurt?”
“In the soul.” “What fire ignites it?”
“Yes, fire! Who ignites it?” “Thought.
Does it blaze?” “It burns my feelings apart.”
“How does the cause not preserve you
From imagining?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because it descends
From high.” “Looking for what?” “My perdition.”
“So it is not fire?” “No, more like rabies.”
“Do you run from water?” “No.” “How so?” “Weeping.”
“Relief it is to desire.” “No.” “Is it pestilence?”
“Would to God it were!” “Why?” “So that the person offending me
Would be infected.” “Is it suspicion?” “Suspecting
I die.” “Now I know what it is!” “What then?” “Absence.”)

The diagnostic mode of Wyatt’s “What rage is this?” is intensified, as the

speaker’s two voices conduct a more urgent self-interrogation, and actually
name “cause[s]” and diseases: Wyatt’s “rage” and “furor,” for instance, are
transposed from colloquial “rage” to literal “rabies” (both appropriate to
“rabia”) by the question about hydrophobia, and the poem itself is sympto­
matic of the divided feelings mentioned as the result of mental “fire” in line 5.
Where Wyatt’s poem breaks apart the received situation to show its controls
at work —and to imply that his “plague” is highly contagious to the woman,
who has desires of her own - Cetina here maintains a complete separation
(for which “absence” is a kind of standard) between his lovers. The sick voice
wishes his suffering were caused by pestilence, which might broach the
oblivion that surrounds him, and would imply that distance was not an
issue. But the most profound cause of this lyric’s affliction, the clinical
voice decides, is that the woman is absent to the speaker, literally or otherwise
or both; and that this condition occurs in a world of international, transcul­
tural possibilities that sees separation, unrequitedness, and even pestilence as
superficially unlike but cognate elements of the same political order. The
symptoms of the speaker’s disease are coextensive with the political culture
around Cetina’s sonnet; and as in Wyatt’s “What rage is this?” there is no
imaginable cure that can be separated from, let alone opposed to, that plague.
Such a revisionary reading of “What rage is this?,” not to mention the other
poems I have addressed here, forces one to realize that there is much about
such lyrics that we only think we know, through conventional (perhaps even
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 179
unquestioned) habits of observation; and at the same time, that many of these
poems are held in reverence by scholars and readers who cannot be easily
moved to rethink the terms of their investment. In fact, because of the weak
particulars of that investment, our notions of the poems themselves need no
thorough reworking. “The longe love” and the rest have always been con­
cerned with the slippages between personal identity and political power, with
loyalty and betrayal, above all with conquest —of one sort or another —as a
continuing problem for persons and societies. A recent general history’ of the
Tudor period blandly states that “poetry, too, became politicized in the hands
of Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey,” and goes on
to assert that “when Wyatt translated Petrarch, the result was a poetry of
protest.”60 If one accepts this much, there is no reason that such a politics
should be exclusively national, or that the textual and historical evidence of the
poet’s wider interests should be minimized where it qualifies particular poems.
This call for renewal puts nothing indispensable in danger. The few lyrics that
respond principally to courtly, national readings will continue to do so, and
other poems will gain their own contexts. At the least, I believe, Wyatt’s love
poetry and that of his European contemporaries should have the multiple
contexts contributed by each other —their Petrarchisms are hardly as unme­
diated, and their historical settings as vague, as some accounts indicate.61 More
threatening to the present order of sixteenth-century literary studies, however,
is the recognition that the overly familiar history we now apply to these poems
is one we have built ourselves: that having asked too few questions of the
period and the poetic material, we are unable to contest the predictable
interpretations that result. A recent commentary’ on Wyatt’s lyrics by H. A.
Mason that explicitly hypostatizes the poet’s roles - the poems are grouped as
pertaining to “The Lover,” “The Christian,” and “The Courtier” - should
warn of the suspicious convenience between history’ and poetics that has taken
over certain texts and made others too hard to handle.62 (Significantly, the
poems I choose here as having a feasible international or colonial dimension,
except “They fie from me,” are left out of Mason’s arrangement.) Interrogat­
ing the static places in Wyatt’s background, recasting him as diplomat and
entrepreneur as well as courtier, registering the overlapping discourses that go
into his lyrics - in all of these ways we can widen the import of the poems, and
shake them loose from certainties. To do so would not only disclose a larger
Wyatt, but find early modern poetry newly located in its historical world.

N otes

1 Margarita Peña, ed., Flores de varia poesía (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación
Pública, 1987), summarizes the life and literary career of Cortés (1532?—89), the
second Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca (32-4).
180 Roland Greene
2 In my forthcoming book Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial
Americas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ed.], I consider some of
the family, class, and social dimensions of these projects, which fall outside the
scope of the present essay.
3 Elizabeth Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age o f Gold (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 1968), esp. 134-41 and 171-9.
4 Representations 33 (Winter 1991), ed. Stephen Greenblatt. The issue is a tribute to
the late French cultural historian Michel de Certeau.
5 Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,”
ibid., 1—41, and Mary C. Fuller, “Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral
in The Discoverie o f Guiana,” ibid., 42-64.
6 Fuller, “Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold,” 46; and Montrose, “Work of Gender,” 8.
7 Montrose, “Work of Gender,” 13; Fuller, “Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold,” 60; and
Montrose, “Work of Gender,” 30. [... ]
8 My account of Columbus’s first-person construction appears in the first chapter
of Unrequited Conquests.
9 Among the many examples of this perspective on Wyatt’s poetry’ are C. S. Lewis,
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Oxford History of
English Literature 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 222-30; Raymond South-
all, The Courtly Maker. An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964); Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from
Wyatt to Donne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 87-119; A. M.
Kinghorn, The Chorus of History: Uterary-Historical Relations in Renaissance Britain
(London: Blandford Press, 1971), 250-8; Jonathan Kamholtz, “Thomas Wyatt’s
Poetry: The Politics of Love,” Criticism 20 (1978), 349-65; Stephen Greenblatt,
Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chi­
cago Press, 1980), 115-56 (where even “a discussion of Wyatt’s psalms will be
drawn irresistibly from the presentation of the self in the court of God to the
presentation of the self in the court of Henry’ VIII, that is, to the court lyrics”
[116]); A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press, 1985), 278—300; and Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Author­
ship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare, The New
Historicism 9 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University' of California Press, 1990),
23—47. For a general study of the courtly context in early modern literature, see
Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978). Ellen C. Caldwell, “Recent Studies in Sir Thomas
Wyatt (1970-1987)” (English Uterary Renaissance 19 [1989], 226—46), is a useful
survey of the present-day consensus about what matters in Wyatt and his
background.
10 Several recent critics seem to recognize the issues relevant to, if not the
substance of, a colonial interpretation of some of Wyatt’s poems. Besides
Kamholtz’s “Wyatt’s Poetry” The Politics of Love” (cited in preceding note),
see Michael McCanles, “Love and Power in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wvatt,”
Modem language Quarterly 29 (1968), 145— 60, and Barbara L. Estrin, “Becoming
the Other/The Other Becoming in Wvatt’s Poetrv,” ELH 51 (1984), 431—45.
[...]
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 181
11 An incurious but widely shared view is expressed by Kinghorn in The Chorus of
History, “one or two of [Wyatt’s] poems may be linked with his movements in
other countries between 1537 and 1539” (256). He goes on to cite ‘Tagus,
farewell.” Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1964), narrates what is known of Wyatt’s diplomatic
years (“if posterity remembers only the courdy love poet, Wyatt’s contempor­
aries regarded also, and more keenly, the servant of the state, his father’s [Sir
Henry Wyatt’s] heir” [quotation 4, see also 61-70]). Greenblatt acknowledges
the significance of Wyatt’s ambassadorial experience for his poems, especially
the translations, but limits this experience to “French and Italian culture”
(Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 139-56, esp. 145).
12 On the English monitoring of the developing alliance between France and the
Empire, see Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign o f Henry VIll, ed.
John Sherren Brewer, James Gairdner, and Robert Henry Brodie, 21 vols.
(1862-1910; reprint, London: HMSO, 1920 [hereafter cited as LP]), vol. 13
(1538), pt. 2, 380-1 (no. 915); vol. 14 (1539), pt. 1,189-90 (no. 490), 216-18 (no.
561), and 375 (no. 782); and vol. 14 (1539), pt. 2, 184 (no. 524), 228-9 (no. 628),
and 244-6 (no. 675).
13 The records of Wyatt’s involvement with the marriage negotiations are in LI\
vol. 13 (1538), pt. 2, 186-8, 305-6 (no. 786), 379-80 (no. 914), 383-4 (no. 923),
426-7 (no. 993), 450-1 (no. 1054), and 471-2 (no. 1127); vol. 14 (1539), pt. 1,
37-8 (no. 92), 117 (no. 299), 166 (no. 405), and 189-90 (no. 490); and vol. 15
(1540), 367-9 (no. 781). For Henry’s advice to Charles via Wyatt, see LP, vol. 13
(1538), pt. 2, 239-42 (no. 622), and for the reply, 411-16 (no. 974) - the
quotations appear at 412 and 411. On the usage of “the Spains” to refer to
the Spanish nation, see Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1977), 53.
14 LP, vol. 14 (1539), pt. 1, 236 (no. 603). See also the summary of the nuncio
Giovanni Poggio’s letter to the pope’s vice-chancellor Cardinal Alexander Far-
nese: “Watches the actions, or rather the speeches of this English ambassador
and does not weary in soliciting the Inquisitors in his cause, and has good hope
of getting rid of him” (218-19).
15 On Wyatt’s contacts with Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, see LP, vol. 13 (1538),
pt. 2, 136-7 (no. 349), 238 (no. 616), 385-6 (no. 925), and 411-16 (no. 974),
esp. 413 and 415. Erika Spivakovsky, Son o f the Alhambra: Don Diego Hurtado
de Mendoza, 1504-1575 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), is the most
recent biographical account; Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish
Renaissance, 1350 to 1550 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979),
surveys Mendoza’s career as diplomat and humanist in the family context
(199-204).
16 John Rattief calls Wyatt “Don Thomas” in LP, vol. 13 (1538), pt. 2, 390-1 (no.
938). On the career of Antonio de Mendoza, who had been appointed viceroy of
New Spain in April of 1535, see Arthur Scott Aitón, Antonio de Mendoza, First
Viceroy of New Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1927), and J. H.
Elliott, “Spain and America in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” The
Cambridge History of luitin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 8 vols, to date (Cambridge:
182 Roland Greene
Cambridge University Press, 1984-), vol. 1, 293-6. The two Mendoza brothers
were in contact during the period of Wyatt’s ambassadorship, and Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza was manifestly interested in the affairs of New Spain:
see Algunas cartas de Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, escntas 1538—1552, ed. Alberto
Vazquez and R. Selden Rose, Yale Romanic Studies 10 (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1935), 2-5, and Angel Gonzalez Palencia and Eugenio
Mele, l'Ida y obras de Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 2 vols. (Madrid: Instituto de
Valencia de Don Juan, 1941), vol. 1, 77. Wyatt is mentioned at vol. 1, 78;
Mendoza’s friendship with Aretino at vol. 1, 160-77.
17 Lewis Hanke, The Spanish StruggleforJustice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press and London: Oxford University Press, 1949), is
an outmoded but helpful source on the encomienda system. Elliott, “Spain and
America,” describes the struggle in this period over encomiendas, rights, reven­
ues, and geographical claims (287-314).
18 Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain, rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 114—15.
19 The bull is translated into Spanish in Documentos inéditos del siglo XVI para la
historia de Mexico, ed. P[adre] Mariano Cuevas (Mexico City: Talleres del Museo
Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnología, 1914), 84-6, and into English in
Hanke, Spanish Strugglefor Justice, 72-3; it is discussed at length in Hanke’s “Pope
Paul III and the American Indians,” Harvard Theological Review 30 (1937), 65-102.
20 The Tuzudán or Vera Paz experiment is treated in Hanke, Spanish Struggle for
Justice, 77-81. José M. Gallegos Rocafull, Elpensamiento mexicano en los siglos XlAy
XVII (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, 1951), describes the con­
troversies over the rights and capacities of the Indians in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (15-60).
21 Gallegos Rocafull, Pensamiento mexicano, 37—42.
22 On the contexts and results of Vitoria’s relectio, see Anthony Pagden, “Dispos­
sessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate Over
the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in The Languages o f Political Theory
in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 79-98.
23 Elliott, “Spain and America,” 307.
24 On Wyatt’s credit with Charles V, I quote Edmund Bonner’s letter of Oct. 15,
1538, in LP, vol. 13 (1538), pt. 2, 237 (no. 615).
25 On the hunt conceit in this and other poems, see Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical
Imagery, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966),
305—7; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 145—9; and Crewe, Trials of Author­
ship, 38-44. Stanley J. Koziskowski, “Wyatt’s They Flee from Me’ and Church­
yard’s Complaint of Jane Shore” {Notes and Queries n.s. 25 [1978], 416-17),
reasonably suggests that the woman resembles traditional personifications of
Fortune.
26 Anne Lake Prescott, “The Thirsty' Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for
Amoretti 67-70” {Spenser Studies 6 [1985], 33-76), is a particularly useful examina­
tion of some sixteenth-century deer and hunt poems as they relate to biblical and
liturgical models.
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 183
27 Cristóbal Colón, The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-
1493, ed. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman: University of Okla­
homa Press, 1989), 137 and 158. Columbus’s diary was lost sometime in the mid­
sixteenth century, and survives in Las Casas’s transcription; in the same scholar’s
Historia de las Indias, on which Las Casas worked for nearly forty years beginning
in 1527 and which was published only in the nineteenth century; and in
Fernando Columbus’s Historie of his father’s enterprises, which itself survives
only in an Italian translation (1571).
28 Richard Harrier, The Canon o f Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1975), 131-2.
29 See Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonial­
ism in the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact o f the New
World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University' of California Press, 1976), vol. 2, 568—76, reprinted in Greenblatt,
Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modem Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990),
16-39. Here Greenblatt follows the Renaissance convention of the Wild Man,
on which poems such as “They fie from me” depend.
30 Richard Hakluyt, comp., The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffigues and Discoveries
o f the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903—5),
vol. 10, 57.
31 José de Acosta, Historia naturaly moral de las Indias, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman, 2nd
edn. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962), 280.
32 Compare McCanles, “Love and Power,” 153-4.
33 Thomson tells of the relationship with Boleyn and its light contact with Wyatt’s
lyrics (Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background, 18-43).
34 José A. Llaguno, La personalidadjurídica del indioy el III Consilio Provincial Mexicano
(1585) (Mexico City” Editorial Porrúa, 1963), 25. Llaguno summarizes various
documents in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, which are the pareceres or
opinions of particular informants.
35 Ibid., 25.
36 “Relación sumaria de la información que se trajo de la Nueva España a pedi­
mento de la ciudad de México” (1544), in ibid., 156, 157, 158. The original
document is in the Archivo General de Indias.
37 Silvio A. Zavala, I^a encomienda indiana, 2nd edn. (Mexico City: Editorial
Porrúa, 1973), 55. J. H. Elliott in “The Spanish Conquest and Settlement
of America” (Cambridge History o f Latin America, vol. 1, 192-6) summarily
describes the encomienda system between its founding shortly after the Mexican
conquest and its adaptations in the New Laws of 1542-3 and subsequent
revisions. Simpson, Encomienda in New Spain, quotes and paraphrases many
documents of this period that engage the aforementioned terms and issues
(123-44).
38 “Relación sumaria” (1544), in Llaguno, Personalidadjurídica del indio, 155, 156, 158,
25.
39 Compare Anne Ferry, The “Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare,
Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 48: ‘The speaker in Wyatt’s
They flee from me’ remembers ladies *With naked fote stalking within my
184 Roland Greene
chamber,’ evoking an atmosphere of dangerous intrigue conducted with diffi­
culty behind the public rooms and courts of great houses.”
40 Caldwell summarizes several articles that demonstrate the consensus about what
is assumed and what needs demonstration in “They fie from me” (“Recent
Studies in Wyatt,” 236-7). Compare Greenblatt on a poem often treated in the
same manner, “Who so list to hounte”: “There is, in fact, nothing in the poem
that is unequivocally about worldly power and appropriation” (Renaissance Self-
Fashioning, 146).
41 Luís de Camöes, Urica completa, ed. Maria de Lurdes Saraiva, 3 vols. (Lisbon:
Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1980), vol. 2, 83.
42 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1964), 3. Perhaps a line from Surrey’s epitaph on Wyatt rings out here: “A
toung that served in forein realmes his king” (27, 1.17).
43 Harrier, Canon of Wyatt's Poetry, 101.
44 Tottel's Miscellany (1557-1587), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, rev. edn, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University’ Press, 1966), vol. 1, 32.
45 Cf. Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Produc­
tion of Utopian Discourse,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971—1986, 2 vols.,
Theory and History of Literature 48-9 (Minneapolis: University’ of Minnesota
Press, 1988), vol. 2, 92. Jameson observes that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a
text perhaps two generations older than Wyatt’s work, already remarks the
passing of the feudal system that “includes, besides the lord and his family,
and the peasants and artisans who support them, the feudal retinue which
ensures his power.” See Raphael Hythlodaeus’s speech on the connections
between nobles, beggars, and thieves in Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, SJ, and J. H.
Hexter, Yale Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Richard S. Sylvester et al., 15 vols.
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963-), vol. 4, 60-4.
46 Thomas Wyatt, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 150-1. Rebholz presents the poem’s
many variants on 421-2, while Harrier (Canon o f Wyatt's Poetry, 212-13) gives
them interlinearly in his transcription, and calls “What rage is this?” “a remark­
able specimen of a poem in the process of being written” (3). Helen V. Baron,
“Wyatt’s ‘What Rage’ ” (The Ubrary 31 [1976], 188-204), describes the revisions
and supposes a lost original from which Wyatt might have translated; see Beryl
Gray’s reply in the next volume and year of the same journal (379—80).
47 As Baron indicates, the poem once opened with the lines “What rage is this?
what furour of excesse? / what powre what poyson dothe my mynd opresse?”
(“Wyatt’s ‘What Rage,’ ” 190). The word “infect” appeared interlinearly as an
alternative to the first phrase of 1 .2 .
48 Alfred VC. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences
of 1492 (VCestport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 37—8. Charles Gibson, The
Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the I alley of Alexico, 1519—1810
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), gives a chronological table of
epidemics in the Valley of Mexico between 1520 and 1810 (448-51).
49 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia generaly natural de las Indias, ed. Juan Pérez
de Tudela Bueso, 5 vols., Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 117— 21 (Madrid:
 The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings 185
Ediciones Adas, 1959), vol. 1 , 66-7, quoted (in Crosby’s translation) in Colum­
bian Exchange, 45.
50 Oviedo, Historia general’ vol. 3, 353.
51 Crosby, Columbian Exchange, 39.
52 Paul Slack, The Impact o f Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), esp. 53-78.
53 On the Italian background to Oviedo’s career, see Pérez de Tudela’s introduc­
tion to the BAE edition of the Historia general vol. 1, xxxi, and the historian’s
own testimony in the abridgement of the Quinquagenas entitled I^as memorias de
Gonzalo Fernande% de Oviedo, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Aree, 2 vols., North
Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures: Texts, Textual
Studies and Translations 1-2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Depart­
ment of Romance Languages, 1974), vol. 1,76, 200, 254, and vol. 2, 544, 639—40.
[...]
54 New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Discovery and Settlement o f Latin
America to the Early 17th Century, ed. John H. Parry and Robert G. Keith, 5 vols.
(New York: Times Books and Hector and Rose, 1984), vol. 3, 49. Sherburne F.
Cook, “The Incidence and Significance of Disease among the Aztecs and
Related Tribes” {Hispanic American Historical Review 26 [1946], 323), entertains
the same possibility.
55 Fray Toribio de Benavente o Motolinia, Memoriales, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman,
Serie de Historiadores y Cronistas de Indias 2 (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1971), 21-6. Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in
the History of luitin America, defines calpixque as an African slave who served as
foreman over a village of Indians ([Boston: Little, Brown, 1967], 30).
56 Alonso de Zurita [or Zorita], Breve relation de los señores de la Nueva España, in
Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México, ed. Joaquín García Icazbal-
ceta, 5 vols. (1886-92; reprint, Mexico City: Editorial Salvador Chavez Hayhoe,
[1941]), vol. 3, 164; compare Benjamin Keen’s translation, Life and Lxibor in
Ancient Mexico (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 212. In his fine
introduction to Zorita’s career, Keen summarizes the relation between Motoli-
nia’s texts and the Breve relación.
57 Thomas Campion, “Observations in the Art of English Poesie,” Works, ed.
Walter R. Davis (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970), 294.
58 “That time that mirth did steer my ship” appears in Rebholz’s edition {Sir Thomas
Wyatt: Complete Poems, 127-8), but is omitted by Harrier {Canon o f Wyatts Poetry,
38—41) as spurious; the latter editor confidently and typically asserts that the
poem “expresses the resolve of a servant to remain loyal to his lady, whom he
has dared to love above his degree” (41), even though the poem says nothing like
the second clause.
59 Gutierre de Cetina, Obras, ed. Joaquin Hazañas y la Rúa, rev. Margarita Peña
(Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1977), 13.
60 John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 409-10.
Compare 188, where Guy narrates that “Wyatt, [Thomas] Cromwell’s client
who witnessed his beheading, wrote his obituary,” and quotes the first three
lines of “The pillar perished is whereto I leant” without acknowledging
186 Roland Greene
Petrarch’s original, Can^oniere 269, and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the
English Renaissance (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1984), where the ori­
ginal is mentioned (46). In his edition (Sir Thomas Wyatt: Complete Poems, 357-8),
Rebholz acutely summarizes the several leaps on which this interpretation relies.
61 For instance, Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, 300-6.
62 H. A. Mason, ed., Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Uterary Portrait (Bristol: Bristol Classical
Press, 1986).
 7
Price and Value in Sir G awain an d the
G reen K night
J ill M a n n

At the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Green Knight reveals his
complicity in the attempted seduction of Gawain by the lady of the casde (his
wife), and voices his whole-hearted admiration for Gawain’s resistance to it:

“I sende hir to asay þe, and sothly me þynkkez

On þe fautlest freke þat euer on fote 3 ede;
As perle bi þe quite pese is of prys more,
So is Gawayn, in god fayth, bi oþer gay knyjtez.”
(2362-5)1

The pearl is a fitting image for the spodess purity of “the most fauldess of
men.” But this idea remains latent; the quality of the pearl on which the
Green Knight explicidy bases his comparison is not its purity but its value.
“As a pearl is of greater value than a white pea, so is Gawain by comparison
with other fair knights.” The subject of value in general, and Gawain’s value
in particular, is central to the poem. I wish to show first, that the poet posed
himself the questions “what does value consist in? how is value to be
determined?”, and second, that it is against the background of medieval
economic thought, as it developed within the tradition of Aristotelian com­
mentary', that we can best appreciate the intensity, precision, and witty
ingenuity with which the poet conducts his own exploration into the diffi­
culties involved in answering them.
The word “pris” is itself an ideal base from which to launch such an
exploration. Its radical meaning is “price” (from Latin pretium via Old French
pris) - the only meaning it retains in modern English. In the medieval period
it meant “value” or “worth” in a more general, non-monetary sense as well,
188 J ill Mann
and it also had a range of functions now taken over by the later formations
“praise” and “prize.” That is, it denoted the applause or esteem which is
accorded to excellence, “fame, renown or good reputation” (OED 9, 10;
MED 9), and also “preeminence, superiority,” the “prize” of coming first in
an imaginary' contest of excellence (OED 11-13; MED 7-8). In the chivalric
context of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where moral excellence and knighdy
renown are of obvious importance, we are not surprised to find the word
used in all these transferred senses; what is surprising is to find how alive
the poem is to the basic, commercial sense of the word, and how this
awareness of its economic center animates the interrelations between its
other meanings.
It is obvious from the first that the Gawain-poet uses “pris” to denote both
monetary and non-monetary value, and that in doing so he makes the one the
mirror of the other. Material splendor and moral worth share a common
vocabulary, as a glance at the entries for “dear” and “rich” in the Concor­
dance immediately makes clear.*" The description of Gawain’s arming pro­
vides a formal illustration of this paralleling of the material and the moral.
Gawain’s armor and accoutrements glitter with gold (569, 577, 587, 591, 598,
600, 603); the pentangle on his shield is “of pure golde hwez” (620), and his
helmet is crowned with diamonds “o prys” (615). The jewels and precious
metals externalize and communicate his intangible inner worth, the links
between the two being suggested by metaphor and simile:

For ay faythful in fyue and sere fyue svþez

Gawan watz for gode knawen, and as golde pared,
Vovded of vche vylany, wyth vertuez ennoumed. ..
(632-5)

When the poet later says of Gawain that “alie prys and prowes and pured
þewes / Apendes to hys persoun” (912—13), this earlier description of jewels
and precious metals hovers behind the word “pured” like a concealed
metaphor. The “pured þewes” match the “pured gold”; inward “prys” and
outward value are in perfect harmony. And it is not only in being “highly
prized” that gold and knighdy worth are analogous. The evolution of the
“pured” of line 620 into the “pure” of line 634 combines with the surround­
ing emphasis on the demonstration of Gawain’s qualities in action (“watz for
gode knawen,” “watz funden faudez”: 633, 640), to suggest that knighdy
worth, like precious metals, can be subjected to a process of “refining,”
accomplished by the trials of knighdy adventure. This suggested analogy’
gives a punning quality to the Green Knight’s use of the word “assay” -
the process by which the value of precious metals is ascertained - in referring
both to his own challenge to Arthur’s court and to his wife’s temptation of
Gawain:
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 189
... “to assay þe surquidré, 3 if hit soth were
þat rennes of þe grete renoun of þe Rounde Table.”
(2457-8)

“1 sende hir to asay þe..

(2362)

The trial both tests and enhances value. It functions as refining to gold or
polishing to a jewel; the past participles used by the Green Knight of
Gawain’s confession are again pregnant with metaphor:

I halde þe polysed of þat ply3 t, and pured as clene

As þou hadez neuer forfeted syþen þou watz fyrst borne.
‘ (2393-4)

If this were all, however, it would still leave us with a very romantic
conception of “prys” - would leave it, that is, in the glamorous world of
jewels and precious metals, forming a flattering parallel to and appropriate
focus of interest for an aristocratic class secluded and sheltered from the less
dignified aspects of economic life. Yet the very first use of the word “prys” in
the poem reminds us of these aspects in a quite unembarrassed way. The
tapestries adorning the dais on which Guinevere sits are said to be set with
“þe best gemmes / þat my3 t be preued of prys wyth penyes to bye” (78-9).
“Preued,” like “assay,” suggests a process of testing, the expert establishment
of value by a method resembling an ordeal. But the added phrase “wyth
penyes to bye” takes us away from the solitary’, respectful confrontation of
expert and valuable material, and into the world of the market. What
“proves” the value of these jewels is purely and simply the amount of cash
that has to be paid for them.
This early mention of market realities prepares the way for the much
more prominent role to be assumed by the language and practices of the
market later on, in Fitt Three of the poem. The presence of a consistent
strain of mercantile or commercial vocabulary, running throughout the
poem but especially prominent in this Fitt, has been noted several times
before, and has recently had a whole monograph devoted to it.3 By their
bantering use of words like “bargayn,” “chaffare,” “chepe,” and “chevi-
saunce,” Gawain and the lord of the castle turn their daily exchange of
winnings into a mock-barter, in which profit and loss are reckoned up on
each side. This mercantile language can be most succinctly illustrated by the
conversation following Gawain’s proffer of the three kisses in the third and
final exchange:

“Bi Kryst,” quoþ þat oþer kny3 t, “3 e each much sele

In cheuisaunce of þis chaffer, 3 if 3 e hade goud chepez.”
190 J ill Mann
“3 e, o f þe chepe no charg,” quoþ chefly þat oþer,
As is pertly payed þe chepez þat I a3 te.“
(1938-41)

Most critics have linked this mercantile language in one way or another with
Gawain’s failings in his test - as representing his “spiritual penury,” 5 for
example, or as a sign that he is sinking into “consumerism and merchandis­
ing” to such an extent that “he comes to resemble the archetypal shady
dealer.”6 In my view, the mercantile language is not a mere stratagem, a
means of tarring Gawain with the brush of anti-commercial snobbery, but a
subject in its own right; it takes the exchange of winnings out of the world of
party' games and into the real world of barter and bargaining. Within the
playful banter, serious questions about the establishment of market-value can
be raised and reflected on.
The events of Fitt Three are utterly appropriate to the exploration of these
questions. For it is exchange, and not “assay,” that is the crucial process in
determining value. “Assay” can locate a precious metal on a scale of values,
but cannot determine that precious metals will be p er se valuable. Medieval
thought on the questions of price and value was in no doubt that the process
in which value is determined, both relatively and absolutely, is exchange. The
fact that both Gawain’s tests take the form of an exchange (exchange of
winnings, exchange of blows) thus assumes a startling significance. The
reader’s interest is directed not just towards the moral quality of Gawain’s
performance in these exchanges, but also towards what they can tell us about
“prys” and its determination.
Medieval thinkers learned that value is essentially exchange value from
their study of Book V, Chapter 5 of Aristode’s Nicomachaean Ethics. The
Ethics was translated into Latin by Robert Grosseteste in the mid-thirteenth
century,8 and commentaries on the work began to appear almost im­
mediately, continuing unabated until the end of the Middle Ages. The
analyses of Ethics V, 5 in these commentaries constitute the most important
line of development in medieval economic thought.9 Aristotle’s main interest
in this section of the Ethics is not in economic questions p er se, but in
commutative justice, of which justice in exchange is a sub-category; his
discussion is in consequence brief. It is also occasionally obscure, but from
our point of view the meaning of the original text is less important than
the way the medieval commentators interpreted it. Aristotle’s concern is to
show that justice in exchange is not a matter of “tit-for-tat” equivalence
(simple contrapassum), but rather of “proportionate requital” (contrafacere
proportionale). Since men need to exchange objects of different kinds for
their mutual benefit, the kind of exchange which cements the bonds of
human society is not a matter of identical return (a blow for a blow, for
example), but of maintaining a proportionate equivalence between non-identical
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 191
things - Aristode cites shoes and a house. In order to effect a just exchange,
the builder and the shoemaker must be able by some means to establish the
“proportionate equivalence” between the shoes and the house - i.e. their
relative worth - and this means that despite their disparity as objects, they
must be capable of being referred to a common measure of value: “all things
that are exchanged must be somehow comparable.” In practical terms, this
end is achieved by the use of money: “it is for this purpose,” Aristode says,
“that money is introduced, and it becomes in a sense an intermediary; for
it measures all things, and therefore both surplus and deficiency - that is,
how many shoes are equal to a house, or to food.” But money is an index
of value, not its source: the real creator of value is not money, but need.
“All goods must therefore be measured by some one thing__ Now this unit
is in truth need (<chreia), which holds all things together. .. but money was
invented by convention, for the sake of the exchange of need.” What exacdy
Aristode meant by “chreia” is a matter of debate, but its medieval meaning
was fixed by the translators and commentators of the Ethics, who rendered it
variously as “opus,” “necessitas,” or “indigentia” .10 Need makes things
“commensurable” for purposes of exchange - that is, establishes their relative
value.
The medieval commentary tradition developed different aspects of this
theory in turn. Albertus Magnus, whose first commentary on the Ethics
followed hard on the heels of Grosseteste’s translation, introduced a new
element into the explanation of the relative value of shoes and a house by
referring it to the difference in “labour and costs” {in labore et expensis)
expended by the shoemaker and the builder in producing them .11 Later
commentators saw the role of the consumer as more important than the
role of the producer in fixing value, and turned their attention to elucidating
the nature of indigentia}2 The most important advance on this front found
expression in the influential commentary of the fourteenth-century philo­
sopher John Buridan, who answered the potential objection that many
(indeed most) objects exchanged are not “needed” in the sense of being
necessary for basic survival, by glossing indigentia in Stoic terms as any felt lack
or consciousness of insufficiency.13 In this sense, rich men show their “need”
of luxuries simply by their willingness to exchange other goods for them. As
interpreted by Buridan, the term comes very close to the modern English
“demand”; the emphasis is on the subjective desires of the consumer, rather
than the objective utility of the commodity. Medieval canon lawyers
expressed a similarly hard-headed perception of the role of the consumer in
creating value in the maxim “Res valet quantum vendi potest” (“a thing is
worth what it can be sold for”) . 14 Scarcity, whose role was acknowledged in
maxims such as “omne rarum est carum ,” 15 is not enough to create value in
itself; it must be combined with demand - as is well understood by Chaucer’s
Wife of Bath:
192 J ill Mann
Great prees at market maketh deere ware
And to greet cheep is holde at litel prys.
(Wife of Bath’s Prologue 522-3)

Buridan also introduced into general circulation another important refine­

ment of the Aristotelian theory - namely, the explanation that the need in
question is not a merely individual need (otherwise starving men would have
to pay more for bread than well-fed ones), but the generalized demand for a
particular commodity felt by a whole community, considered in the aggre­
gate ;16 the importance of this definition for Gawain will become clear later.
The Aristotelian commentary tradition was quite clear about the fact that
the scale of market-values established by indigentia is completely independent
of other, more idealistic, types of value-hierarchy. Aquinas, borrowing from
St Augustine, pointed out that in economic terms a pearl is more valuable
than a mouse, but in the scale of being the mouse must be rated higher, as
living creatures are superior to insensate minerals.17 In a chivalric romance
such as Gawain, we might expect that value would be established by an appeal
to idealistic hierarchies of just this sort - that the analogous “prys” of the
knight and gold depends on their analogous positions at the top of their
respective ontological categories. But the exchange of winnings sequence
pushes beyond such abstract schematizations, and brings us uncompromis­
ingly up against the recognition that it is in the operations of the market - in
exchange - and not in the tidy classifications of moralists or theologians, that
value is determined.
A closer look at this section of the narrative will illustrate the point. On the
first day of the exchange, Gawain offers a kiss as his “winnings” for the day.
In return the lord produces the mounds of venison he has brought home
from the hunting-field. The lord’s excited demand for an assessment of the
relative worth of the two contributions - “How payez you þis play? Haf I
prys wonnen? / Haue I þryuandely þonk þur3 my craft serued?” (1379-80) -
insists on their commensurability. But how is the lord’s question to be
answered? The market-imagery with which the whole exchange of winnings
is permeated rules out any recourse to idealistic value-hierarchies in ponder­
ing the question; we are not encouraged to answer, for example, that the kiss
is superior to the venison since it is food for the spirit rather than the body -
or that the venison is better than the kiss because it represents a communal
rather than an individual good. We have to turn to other possible means of
defining value, more appropriate to the rules of everyday bargaining.
The wit and ingenuity with which the poet has constructed the exchange of
winnings in such a way as to dramatize this central problem now becomes
clear. In the first place, he has made the disparity between the objects
exchanged far more extreme in nature than Aristode’s comparison of shoes
and a house. The substantial is matched with the insubstantial, the corporeal
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 193
with the incorporeal. Only Buridan’s hypothetical example of the exchange of
verbal thanks for a gift of £10 comes close to it . 18 The poet has also created
an extreme contrast between the methods by which the respective winnings
are acquired: the lord’s hunting spoils are won by dint of long and energetic
physical effort, while Gawain’s kisses are accumulated as he lies comfortably
in bed. Yet this difference is not allowed to determine their worth. When the
question of cost is raised by the lord on the third day (Gawain’s three kisses
represent an impressive profit “j if 3 e hade goud chepez”: 1939) - Gawain
evades the question (“of þe chepe no charg”: 1940). The “labour and costs”
theory of comparative value is invoked only to be serenely (and wisely,
according to the lights of modern economists) dismissed. The question of
value is kept within the confines of the exchange itself.
Turning our attention to the objects themselves, it seems at first that the
venison is obviously the more valuable, since it has what can be called an
“objective” utility, accessible and beneficial to the majority of potential
consumers, while the kiss has only a “subjective” value in the sense that it
is dependent on the attitude of the individual receiver. 19 The value of the
venison appears to be more stable in that it appears to inhere in the object
itself, rather than in the unpredictable responses of the consumer. Moreover,
a kiss does not remain constant through a series of exchanges; when given by
Gawain to the lord it is a very different thing from a kiss offered by a lady to
Gawain. This point is comically and paradoxically emphasized by Gawain’s
scrupulous efforts to reproduce as exacdy as possible the kiss he has received:

He hasppez his fayre hals his armez wythinne,

And kysses hym as comlyly as he couþe awyse...
(1388-9)

The harder Gawain tries, the more it becomes apparent that the value of the
kiss he bestows cannot be intrinsically the same as that of the one he received.
One could say that it has a purely “notional” value, such as is possessed by
paper money; its value is referential, guaranteed by the original it represents as
paper money is guaranteed by gold .2 However, even the value of the original
kiss would have depended on the identity of its bestower, as the lord points
out:

“Hit is god,” quoþ þe godmon, “grant mercy þerfore.

Hit may be such hit is þe better, and 3 e me breue wolde
Where 3 e wan þis ilk wele bi wytte of yorseluen.”
(1392-4)

A kiss from a serving-wench is not as valuable as a kiss from a lady; a kiss

from an ugly woman not as valuable as a kiss from a pretty one; a kiss from a
194 J ill Mann
stranger not as valuable as a kiss from a woman one loves__ 21 But, as
modern economists point out, a distinction between “objective” and “sub­
jective” value is both naive and misleading - and their opinion was shared by
the Gawain-poet. The desiderated commodity and the desiderating consumer
are inseparable elements in the attribution of value; one cannot say that it is
the desire in the consumer that creates desirability in the object, or the
desirability in the object that arouses desire in the consumer. The Gawain-
poet uses the freedom offered by the world of romance to construct an
artificial situation which wittily opposes the two kinds of value - but which
collapses the opposition as soon as it is perceived. For if the kiss has no
“objective” value for the lord (as it might have if passed on by a woman), the
venison has no “subjective” value for Gawain; he cannot eat it, store it, take it
away. Despite its solid substantiality, his “profit” remains purely notional.22
And despite the apparent disadvantages of “subjective” value, illustrated in
the uncertain and elusive worth of the kiss, the exchange of winnings
demonstrates how indispensable is the role of the subjective element. For
even the “objective” utility of the hunting-spoils needs to be realized in
Gawain’s subjective “appreciation” of them. It is here that the connection
between “prys” and “prayse” assumes significance, emerging in the alliterat­
ing cluster of words expressing Gawain’s admiration for the boar killed by the
lord on the second day:

þat oþer kny3 t ful comly comended his dedez,

And praysed hit as gret prys þat he proued hade...
Þenne hondeled þay þe hoge hed, þe hende mon hit praysed,
And let lodly þerat þe lorde for to here.
(1629-30, 1633-4)

The lord’s “prys” is “proued” first in the boar itself, and then in Gawain’s
praise of it; they are the external manifestations of, and testimonies to, the
lord’s worth. Gawain’s praise establishes the value of the lord’s offering,
despite the fact that it is of no objective utility to him. And similarly, the
lord’s admiration for the kisses is sufficient to establish their value as equal
and in his view superior to that of his own offerings. On the third and last day
he proclaims himself vanquished; his “foule fox felle” is “fill pore for to pay
for suche prys þinges/ ... suche þre cosses/so gode” (1945—7). This time it is
his own gift which is redeemed by the function of the exchange that makes it
equal in worth to such treasures.
It is the exchange alone, which makes the different types of “winnings”
commensurable in value, creates a “proportionate equivalence” between
the two - as Gawain implies when on the second day he gives the lord his
two kisses with the comment “Now ar we euen” (1641). It is the exchange
which guarantees the equivalence of the worth attributed to, not inherent in,
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 195
the respective winnings, since it implies a judgement of such equivalence in
the minds of the consenting parties. So far, the exchange conforms impec­
cably to the classic model, on the basis of which the poet must have worked
out his own bizarre demonstration of the magic power of the exchange to
realize a commensurable value in commodities of the most heterogeneous
sort.
Yet the more we see the exchange as the only means by which the relative
value of kisses and venison can be established, the more we become aware
that it diverges from the classical model in one crucial aspect - that is, in the
absence of indigentia as its motivating force. The agreement to exchange is not
instigated by the need of either party (even if we take the term in Buridan’s
extended sense). It could not be, for at the time the bargain is made, neither of
the parties to it knows what the next day’s winnings will be, and is thus not in
a position to calculate the level of his own desire for the objects to be
exchanged. We cannot therefore explain or justify the “proportionate equiva­
lence” of the exchange by reference to the role of indigentia. There are
important strategic reasons behind the creation of this nonrealistic, “pure”
exchange: to remove the unifying force of indigentia revives our sense of the
heterogeneity of the goods which that unifying force can hold on the same
scale, and brings the central problem of defining the nature of value into
focus. The “exchange of winnings” sequence thus equips us with some ideas
- albeit doubtful and conflicting ones - about the different ways of defining
value, and in particular about the double nature of “prys” - subjective and
objective, internal and external. It is these ideas which we are to carry with us
into the rest of the poem.

The question of “prys” looms large in the bedroom conversations between

Gawain and the lady of the castle, where the word itself becomes a weapon in a
duel of wits. It is first used by Gawain in a conventional formula of politeness:
he calls the lady “youre prys” (“your excellence”: 1247). The lady immediately
seizes on the word, and insists that the “prys” is not hers but his:

“In god fayth, Sir Gawayn,” quoþ þe gay lady,

“Þe prys and þe prowes þat plesez al oþer,
If I hit lakked oþer set at ly3t, hit were littel daynté;
Bot hit ar ladyes inno3e þat leuer wer nowþe
Haf þe, hende, in hor holde, as I þe habbe here,
To daly with derely your daynté wordez,
Keuer hem comfort and colen her carez,
Þen much of þe garysoun oþer golde þat þay hauen.
Bot I louue þat ilk lorde þat þe lyfte haldez,
I haf hit holly in my honde þat al desyres,
þut3e grace.”
(1247-58)
196 J ill Mann
The lady’s speech brings to the forefront of the poem the question it is
designed to raise and to answer: what is Gawain’s “prys,” and how is it
established? The lady is aware that exchange measures value, and invents a
hypothetical exchange by which to evaluate the worth of Gawain’s company
(as in the exchange of winnings, the insubstantial - “daynté wordez” - is held
to outweigh in value objects of a more solidly material sort - “garysoun oþer
golde”). The lady also shows herself a good medieval economist in her
consiousness that “prys” is established by indigentia in the sense of “demand”;
the value of Gawain’s company is determined by the simple fact that all women
desire it. As in the exchange of winnings, “prys” is guaranteed by praise - the
connection between the two having already been established by the description
of the enthusiastic response to Gawain’s first arrival at the castle:

... alie prys and prowes and pured þewes

Apendes to hys persoun, and praysed is euer;
Byfore alie men vpon molde his mensk is þe most.
(912-14)

The praise follows on the “prys” (in the sense of “worth”), but it also is the
“prys” (in the sense of “renown”). The lady’s first remarks to Gawain put a
similar emphasis on universal praise as the basis of his reputation:

“For I wene wel, iwysse, Sir Wowen 3 e are,

Þat alie þe worlde worchipez quere-so 3 e ride;
Your honour, your hendelayk is hendely praysed
With lordez, wyth ladyes, with alie þat lyf bere.”
(1226-9)

Gawain’s response to the lady’s flattery is to protest that the honor

bestowed on him by the world in general and the lady in particular reflects
not so much his own intrinsic value, as the honorable worth of the lady (in the
terms used earlier, he protests that it is purely “subjective”). His own merits
are “no match for” their praise, and the exchange is therefore “uneuen”:

“ ... þe daynté þat þay delen, for my disert nys euen,

Hit is þe worchyp of yourself, þat no3 t bot wel connez.”
(1266-7)

The lady rejects this emphatically, asserting that her own experience has
shown that the valued qualities are inherent in the admired object, and not
just in the imagination of the admirer:

“Bi Man ”, quoþ þe menskful, “me þynk hit an oþer;

For u'ere 1 worth al þe wone of wymmen alyue,
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 197
And al þe wele of þe worlde were in my honde,
And I schulde chepen and chose to cheue me a lorde,
For þe costes þat I haf knowen vpon þe, kny3 t, here,
Of bewté and debonerté and blyþe semblaunt,
And þat I haf er herkkened and halde hit here trwee,
Þer schulde no freke vpon folde bifore yow be chosen.”
(1268-75)

She invents another hypothetical market exchange to establish Gawain’s

value - were she in herself worth all the women alive, and the possessor of
all the world’s wealth besides, she could not “barter” herself for a better
husband than him. Gawain repeats his insistence that this high valuation is a
mere subjective whim on her part - while delicately reminding her that so far
as she is concerned, the marital bartering process is over:

“Iwysse, worþy,” quoþ þe wy3 e, “3 e haf waled wel better,

Bot I am proude of þe prys þat 3 e put on me. ..”
(1276-7)

I do not think that this reply reveals Gawain falling prey to the temptation
to value himself at the flatteringly high rate the lady attributes to him, or that
“he finally believes that value is subjective only and takes thus the making of
his life into his own hands.”23 On the contrary, his remark constitutes a
humble acknowledgment that his “prys” is not his to determine; it is for
others to furnish the “proof’ of his value by their praise. But his clear-sighted
insistence on the importance of the subjective response in establishing value
opens up a gap between “prys” as inner worth and “prys” as outer reputation;
he refuses to identify himself with the Gawain who figures in the gossip
picked up by the lady. He needs to do this because the lady is herself opening
up such a gap for her own ends. In the conversations that follow, she projects
his “prys” as a reputation for philandering and ubiquitous gallantries, rather
than a renown for “clannes” and “trawþe” (1512-29). And so far from
resulting from Gawain’s behavior, this reputation is used to determine it: at
the end of the first interview, she doubts whether he is, in fact, Gawain (“Bot
þat 3 e be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde”: 1293), since “So god as Gawayn gaynly
is halden” could not have failed to beg a kiss from her (1297-1301). Gawain’s
insistence that his “prys” has its source in others, not himself, is to a large
extent motivated by his desire to dissociate himself from this false definition
of what constitutes his “worth.”
The problem posed by this scene is thus more complex than the question
of whether Gawain will be able to resist the lady’s demands. It is the problem
of the relative roles played by Gawain’s inward quality and his outward
reputation in defining his “prys.” Modern high-mindedness might incline
to disregard reputation altogether, but the market-imagery of the poem
198 J ill Mann
forestalls this hasty conclusion. Desire is as necessary an element in the
creation of value as desirability; what people think of Gawain, and what
they consider desirable in him, are not irrelevant to his “prys.” If Gawain
were universally scorned and belittled, could he be said to have “prys” at all?
“What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” - as Shakespeare’s Troilus puts it (in a play
which also shows the influence of the Ethics). If gold were universally
scorned, it would be of no value. On the other hand, if there is a generalized
“demand” for skill in “luf-talkyng” and flirtatious gallantries, do not these
qualities become ipso facto valuable? If we argue that Gawain’s “prys” is simply
his inward worth, as he himself defines it, we appear to be insisting on a naive
theory of “objective” value which ignores the realities of the market in favor
of an idealistic belief in inherent worth.
Gawain, however, resists the lady’s suggestions that he adapt his sense of
his own worth in terms of a prevailing demand. He clings desperately to his
own sense of his “prys,” both in the bedroom scenes and also when he is
faced with the guide’s suggestion that he run away from the encounter with
the Green Knight. “If I ran away” he says “I would be a coward” (“I were a
kny3 t kowarde” 2131) - even if no one ever knew about it. It seems that the
irrelevance of reputation to fundamental worth could hardly be more uncom­
promisingly expressed. And the definition of this worth also seems to be
developed in isolation from the rest of the community'; the comments of the
other knights at Gawain’s departure from Arthur’s court suggest that they see
the exploit as folly rather than heroism (674-83). If this were all, we could
conclude that the poet was endorsing Gawain’s faith in his own private,
individual definition of “prys,” in eccentric defiance of market demand —
that outward reputation was being discarded as irrelevant and unimportant.
But matters are not so simple. For what is being defended in this solitary
quest is reputation - the “renoun” or “los” of the Round Table (258, 313; cf.
2457—8), which the Green Knight wished to have substantiated. Gawain’s
acceptance of the Green Knight’s challenge makes it clear that renown is not
merely derivative of prowess; it is an external standard against which the
knight may measure his worth, an outer mold within which knighdy endeavor
may shape itself. A knight’s “prys” is the result of a collaboration between
inward worth and outward renown ;24 his “trawþe” - the integrity7 or “whole­
ness” imaged in the pentangle - commits him to the attempt to keep the two
in matching harmony. The values expressed in the device of the pentangle are
externalized in order that Gawain may match himself to their high standards,
even more than to show that in the past he has done so. Gawain is thus not
only concerned that his reputation should accurately match his inward state
(as with his final confessions), he is also concerned that he should match his
reputation: he is sensitive to any suggestion that he is falling short of it - such
as the lady’s reproach “Bot þat 3 e be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde” (1293), or the
Green Knight’s taunt “þou art not Gawayn.. . þat is so goud halden” (2270).
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 199
This concern for “prys” in both senses explains the complicated shifts in
the redefinitions of the value of the girdle as the poem moves to its close. At
its first appearance, Gawain prizes it very highly as a “juel” (1856). He is
persuaded to think his motives for taking it honorable by his previous
rejection of the “objectively” valuable ring, thus succumbing to the sugges­
tion that subjective value is unimportant. It is only “þe jopardé þat hym
jugged were” (1856) that gives the girdle the value of a “juel” fo r him\ others
have no need of its protection so no one will suffer loss if he takes it. “Need”
raises its head for the first and last time - and paradoxically it motivates the
only unfair exchange in the poem; Gawain takes the girdle knowing that he
will not render it to the lord at the end of the day. Gawain is not to know, of
course, that the girdle is the poem’s most glaring example of “subjective
value” in the sense that its life-saving powers appear to exist entirely in
Gawain’s mind; they are attributed to and not inherent in it. Since the value
of the girdle is subjective, it can shift dramatically when the Green Knight
makes his revelation, and Gawain’s private decision to default on the
exchange of winnings is brought into the public domain. Gawain is first
made conscious of his fault through its externalization; while his inner
conscience acts as its own imaginary “audience” in respect of the exchange
of blows, it is less vigilant in the apparently more frivolous context of the
exchange of winnings. But as soon as he sees himself reflected in the Green
Knight’s gaze, Gawain acknowledges the stain on his inward worth. The
girdle thus becomes the visible sign of his invisible loss of “prys”; he declares
he will wear it as a corrective of “renoun” (2434). For the Green Knight,
however, Gawain’s flaw disappears, paradoxically, as soon as it is externalized
- first, in the nick on his neck, and second, in his frank “confession”:

“I halde it hardily hole, þe harme þat I hade.

Þou art confessed so clene, beknowen of þy mysses,
And hatz þe penaunce apert of þe poynt of myn egge,
I halde þe polysed of þat ply3 t, and pured as clene
As þou hadez neuer forfeted syþen þou watz fyrst borne.”
(2390-4)

These outward manifestations mend the rupture between inner state and
external appearance, make them once again “match” each other. The integrity
of Gawain’s “prys” is recreated - as is confirmed by the symbolic healing of
the nick on his neck during his journey home (“þe hurt watz hole þat he hade
hent in his nek”: 2484). But Gawain’s inner state must then be externalized
once again for the benefit of his fellow-knights, and he uses both the scar and
the girdle as means to this externalization.

“þis is þe token of vntrawþe þat I am tan inne,

And 1 mot nedez hit were wyle I may last;
200 J itt Mann
For mon may hyden his harme, bot vnhap ne may hit,
For þer hit onez is tachched twynne wil hit neuer.”
(2509-12)

The second confession, like the first, recreates a continuum between inner
state and outward reputation; Gawain’s “prys” is redefined for the court. And
so the value attached to the girdle can be altered yet again. The court’s
brilliandy imaginative and tactful reaction empties it of its significance as a
badge of shame: they wear such a girdle as an honor -

For þat watz acorded þe renoun of þe Rounde Table.

(2519)

What Gawain considers “blame” the other knights consider “renoun”; the
discrepancy is not cynical but reflects an awareness of the role of the valuer in
creating value. Gawain’s “prys” is not to be established by himself alone; it is
by the community as a whole that it is to be fixed. And for them, to have only
so small a fault is a state to be desired. As the nick on Gawain’s neck heals, so
the “wounding” significance of the girdle disappears as it is absorbed into the
wholeness of the Round Table. There is no attempt to conceal or to dismiss
Gawain’s one failure, but its significance shifts as it is evaluated by the outside
world. And it is only in this communal context - in the fixing of “prys” as
“renoun” - that Gawain’s value is externalized and stabilized. The end of the
poem reaffirms the importance of renown as the external definition of “prys”
- as the beginning and end of a long and subde commerce between the
internal and the external through which value is not merely recognized but is
realized.

Gawain’s “prys” is idendfied with his “trawþe,” its worth imaged in the “pure
golde hwez” of the pentangle. When he takes the girdle, he “exchanges” for it
his “trawþe.” In the privacy of his own thoughts, he counts the cost a small
one; it is only when the watching gaze of a concealed audience is revealed to
him - when his inner state is mirrored in outward fame - that he takes the
true measure of his “losse” (2507). I should now like to make some more
speculative suggestions about the role of “trawþe” in the exchanges of the
poem.
Truth cannot be the object of exchange, since it is one of the “goods of the
soul” which, Buridan argues, are by nature insusceptible of valuation in terms
of external goods, because they are “ends in themselves” (“fines ipsorum ”) 25
- a definition nicely matched in the self-enclosed impenetrability of the
pentangle. How, then, is its value to be established? Only, I think, by the
negative route taken in its exchange for the girdle - that is, by estimating the
cost of its loss. The method has some similarities with that by which medieval
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 201
commentators argued for the “value” of items such as air and water, which
were not scarce, were not sold for a high price, and yet were of the greatest
value for human existence. The value of such goods, it was said, can be
measured by the value that men would place on them if they lacked them; it
depends on imagining a “demand which might have been .” 26 The Gawain-
poet, we may say, imagines something like a “demand which might have
been” for “trawþe”. The exchange of blows makes it quite clear that had
Gawain abandoned “trawþe” entirely, he would have lost his head. Its
“worth” is thus realized in the preservation of his life.
The explanation usually given for Gawain’s acceptance of the girdle and
surrendering his “trawþe” for so poor a return is that he succumbs to a desire
for life; this interpretation is supported by the Green Knight’s comments at
2367—8. But as a knight, Gawain risks his life daily, against human and
non-human foes. Why should he give way to cowardice in this particular
instance? (The fact that he flinches at the first swing of the axe suggests that
his faith in the girdle has evaporated by the time he confronts the Green
Knight, so that he is proved both to possess and to exercise the courage
necessary for the ordeal.) I would suggest that in this particular instance
Gawain is under pressure not merely from his physical fear —which he can
and does master - but also from an intellectual rebelliousness. That is, he is
driven to take the girdle by his consciousness that the initial agreement is
unfair, and is tempted to equalise the exchange —to match the magic powers of
the Green Knight with his own. For the exchange of blows is unlike the
exchange of winnings in that it involves an exact (rather than a “proportion­
ately equivalent”) return - the return of one blow for another being the
classic example of simple contrapassum in both the Ethics and the medieval
commentaries on it .27 In Gawain, however, the ostensible fairness of the exact
exchange conceals an underlying imbalance: the Green Knight can replace his
head if cut off, but Gawain cannot. That Gawain himself is only too
conscious of this monstrous inequality in the exchange becomes clear when
the Green Knight tauntingly contrasts his own steady endurance of the axe-
blow with Gawain’s flinching, and receives the tight-lipped rejoinder:

“ ... þa3 my hede falle on þe stonez,

I con not hit restore.”
(2282-3)

So that when Gawain takes the girdle, it seems to even up the exchange, to
create the “tit-for-tat” correspondence which the Green Knight infuriatingly
pretends that it represents.
The exchange of blows is thus not only an excellent illustration of simple
contrapassum, but also of Aristode’s argument that simple contrapassum is not
ipso facto just. Aristode himself gives as an example the difference between a
202 J ill Mann
ruler striking one of his subjects (in his official capacity) and a subject striking
his ruler (in an unofficial capacity) —an example which seems to have been
translated into extreme and melodramatic terms by the Gawain-poet, so that
the point is made in the absolute way which only the romance allows.28
Gawain is held to the exchange of blows not because its terms are (as the
Green Knight pretends) just, but because he has agreed to it; as with the
exchange of winnings, the agreement to exchange of itself creates an equival­
ence between the two sides. “Trawþe” takes over the role of need as the
regulator of exchange; it is the matching honesty on both sides that makes the
exchange “euen” (1641). This balancing role of truth creates a contrapassum
which is just, expressed in the Green Knight’s words to Gawain:

Trwe mon trwe restore

þenne þar mon drede no waþe.
(2354-5)

Truth cannot be exchanged for external goods, but it can be exchanged for
itself. Like the kiss, it “returns itself, pays its own debt, and keeps its own
balance.”29 The exchange of winnings lies behind the exchange of blows,
controlling and determining its outcome by an invisible power. To perceive
the shadowy presence of the one behind the other teaches us to perceive yet
another shadow beyond both - the exchange of “trawþe” which fills the
apparendy futile or frivolous bargaining with serious meaning. The “need” in
the exchange is not a need for the goods exchanged; it is a need for “trawþe”,
and “trawþe” alone.
It is therefore in the form, not the content, of the bargain that its
equilibrium is to be found. In the exchange of blows as in the exchange of
winnings, punctiliousness in keeping to the terms of the bargain must be
accompanied by insouciance as to the inequality in their realization. When
Gawain reproaches himself, at the end of the poem, with having abandoned
“larges and lewté þat longez to knyjtez” (2381), he puts his finger on the twin
qualities that the exchange calls for - “lewté” in the scrupulous fulfilment of
exchange, “larges” in the uncalculating nature of the initial agreement. Profit
and loss are to be determined by chance; acceptance of the riskiness of the
enterprise is a condition of the bargain.
Thus if the poet removes the role of need in stimulating exchange, it is to
get nearer to the fundamental realities of mercantile life, not to negate them.
For the merchant sending his argosies to the sea commits himself, like the
knight, to the vagaries of chance, allowing it to determine his final balance of
profit and loss, to make him “even now worth this, / And now worth
nothing.” 30 The line describing the second agreement to exchange winnings
- “Wat chaunce so bytydez hor cheuysaunce to chaunge” (1406) - is a
beautiful embodiment of this overlap between the mercantile and the
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 203
knighdy; the knighdy bravado of the first half of the line informs the
mercantile phraseology of the second, so that we feel both “larges” and
“lewté” in it, and feel them to be characteristic of both classes. The merchant
values “trawþe” as highly as the knight - for him too, his word is his bond.
He too treasures his reputation, as the source of his credit, his “worth.” He
understands as well as the knight does the intangible and elusive nature of
“prys,” and shares a reverence for the gold and jewels which are mysteriously
agreed to possess it, though they minister to no bodily comforts. If the
merchant of the parable is so well able to understand the value of the
“pearl of great price” that he surrenders all he has in order to possess it,
then the real-life merchant will well understand Gawain’s willingness to
sacrifice everything for the sake of the “trawþe” that gives him the value of
a pearl.
This overlay of knighdy and mercantile values suggests that the audience
for which the poem was intended was not an exclusively courtly one - that
the poet was speaking to both classes, and attempting to create an ideal to
which both could aspire. The obvious location for such an audience of
sophisticated and wealthy merchants and knights in the late fourteenth
century is London - and the last twenty years of that century saw indeed
the creation of merchant-knights who in themselves embodied the fusion
adumbrated in the poem. My analysis of the poem may therefore lend literary
support (though not of course proof) to the theory, originally advanced on
historical grounds, that London is the likeliest location for its audience.31 If
the G awain-pott was acquainted with Aristotle’s theory of value and the
medieval commentaries on it - as I believe we must conclude he was -
then it is most probable that he himself was a cleric and a scholar. But if so,
he put his clerkly learning to good use in the imaginative creation of a
romance world which could act as a model for both knights and merchants
and harmonize the potential conflict between them. So far from seeing the
commercial world as contaminating knightly values, he accords it an equal
dignity, and takes its realities as the firm basis on which to build his ideal of
knightly “prys.”

N otes

1 All quotations from the poem are taken from the edition byj. R. R. Tolkien and
E. V. Gordon, revised by Norman Davis (Oxford, 1967).
2 A Concordance to Five Middle English Poems, ed. Barnet Kottler and Alan M. Mark-
man (Pittsburgh, 1966).
3 R. A. Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(Gainesville, Florida, 1984); for earlier discussions of the commercial imagery in
the poem, see note 2 to Shoafs Introduction, p. 81.
204 J ill Mann
4 A full list of words belonging to the linguistic register of trade and commerce is
provided in Shoafs Appendix, pp. 77-80.1 agree with Shoaf (pp. 55-6) that the
word “cost” is drawn into this linguistic field although technically it is a different
word from “cost” meaning “expense” (see MED, s. v. cost, n. [1] and [2]); it
suggests its homonym by a quasi-pun. Cf. also P. B. Taylor, “Commerce and
Comedy in Sir Gawain”, Philological Quarterly 50 (1971) 1-15, at pp. 10-12.
5 Taylor, “Commerce and Comedy”, p. 3.
6 Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle, p. 59.
7 As does the fact that the Gawain-poet seems to have been the first to bring these
two motifs together; see the Introduction to Tolkien and Gordon’s edition, pp.
xix-xx.
8 Grosseteste’s translation exists in a “pure” and a “revised” version, both of
which are edited by René Antoine Gauthier, Ethica Nicomachea. Translatio Roberti
Grosseteste IJncolniensis sive “Uber Ethicorum ”, A. Recensio Pura; B. Recensio Recognita,
Aristoteles Lustinus XXVI. 1-3, fase. 3—4 (Leiden/Brussels, 1972-3).
9 An excellent and scholarly account of this commentary tradition is given in Odd
Langholm, Price and I 'alue in the Aristotelian Tradition (Bergen/Oslo/Tromso,
1979); see Langholm also for further bibliography. Langholm provides in an
appendix the Latin translation of the crucial passage of Ethics V, 5 in Grosse­
teste’s “pure” version, with interlinear variants of revision. My exposition is
based on this composite text; translations are my own.
10 See Langholm, Price and Value, pp. 37-50.
11 Ibid., pp. 61-84.
12 The emphasis on indigentia characterizes the Ethics commentary of Thomas
Aquinas (see Langholm, Price and Value, pp. 85-95); it was Thomas who clarified
another of Aristotle’s obscurities by developing the theory of the “double
measure” of value, in which the true measure, need, is reflected in terms of
money, the practical measure.
13 Langholm, Price and Value, pp. 123-7. Buridan’s contribution to economic theory
is contained in Quaestiones xiv-xvii of his commentary on Ethics Book V
(Quaestiones super Decem Ubros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum); I have con­
sulted the Paris editions of 1513 and 1518 and the Oxford edition of 1637. For
the earlier sources of these four Quaestiones, see Langholm, pp. 107, 118, 125.
The Stoic influence appears in Buridan’s quotation of Seneca’s second letter to
Lucilius {Epistulae Morales II): “Non qui parum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper
est” {Quaestiones V. xv) - one among several Senecan quotations in the Quaes­
tiones.
14 Langholm, Price and I 'alue, pp. 130—1.
15 Ibid., p. 155; cf. pp. 113-17.
16 Ibid., pp. 109, 125; Buridan, Quaestiones V. xvi.
17 Langholm, Price and \ alue, p. 87; cf. Augustine, De Civitate Dei XI. 16.
18 Quaestiones V. xiv; Buridan explains that a rich man would need “honor”, and
would therefore regard £ 10 as a fair exchange for it.
19 A distinction between “objective” and “subjective” value (termed respectively
virtuositas and complacibilitas) is a feature of the value-theory of the Franciscan San
Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444); see Raymond de Roover, San Bernardino of Siena
 Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 205
and Sant ' Antonino o f Florence: The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages
(Boston, Mass., 1967), pp. 16-23; the terms originated with the thirteenth-
century Franciscan Petrus Olivi, of Sérignan in Languedoc (Langholm, Price
and Value, pp. 115, 153-4), but his association with heresy impeded the circula­
tion of his ideas until they were taken over by Bernardino. It is unlikely that
either could be considered a source for the Gawain-poet, but they show that this
line of thinking was a perfecdy possible development within medieval economic
thought.
20 Cf. the notion of “ascribed value” discussed in William J. Courtenay, “The King
and the Leaden Coin: The Economic Background o f‘Sine Qua Non’ Causality,”
Traditio 28 (1972), 185-209.
21 “What is a kiss worth? It depends who has given it” 0. A. Burrow, A Reading of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [London, 1965], p. 88). Burrow contrasts the kiss
with the “solid winnings” represented by the venison, and adds “The kisses are
like merchandise (“cheuicaunce”), their value conditional upon the state of the
market” (ibid., pp. 88-9).
22 Cf. the comments of Thomas D. Hill, “Gawain’s Jesting Lie: Towards an
Interpretation of the Confessional Scene in Gawain and the Green KnightJ Studia
Neophilologica 52 (1980), p. 283.
23 Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle, pp. 40-1, 42; cf. p. 63.
24 Cf. Derek Brewer’s comments in “Honour in Chaucer,” Tradition and Innovation in
Chaucer (London/Basingstoke, 1982), p. 90.
25 Quaestiones V. xv.
26 Langholm, Price and Value, pp. 138-9; the commentators in question belong to
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, so that the Gawain-poct could not
have known them, but he seems to have followed an analogous line of thought.
27 See, for example, Buridan, Quaestiones V. xiv.
28 An interesting hint for such an “impossible exchange” is given in Buridan’s
passing reference to the theory that death is not commensurable with external
goods, “for no one of sane mind would agree for all the money in the world that
his head should be cut off’ (Quaestiones V. xv).
29 Taylor, “Commerce and Comedy,” p. 5.
30 Merchant of Venice, I. i, 35-6.
31 Michael J. Bennett, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Literary Achievement
of the North-West Midlands: The Historical Background,” Journal o f Medieval
History 5 (1979) 63-88; Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Iumcashire
Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 231-5. It
is important to distinguish here between the author (who certainly, as the dialect
of the poem shows, came from the North-West Midlands) and the audience,
Bennett’s case rests on the absence of any local courts important enough to have
exercised literary patronage on the one hand, and on the substantial numbers of
men from Cheshire and Lancashire gathered in London in the king’s sen ice on
the other.
 8
William Langland’s “K ynde N am e”:
Authorial Signature and Social
Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century
England
A n n e M id d l e t o n

A good poem, even if it is signed with afull and well-known name, intends as a work of art
to lose the identity of the author; that is, it means to represent him not actualized, like an eye­
witness testifying in court and held strictly by zealous counsel to the point at issue, butfreed
from his juridical or prose self and taking an ideal or fictitious personality; otherwise his
evidence amounts the less to poetry.
John Crowe Ransom, ‘A Poem Nearly Anonymous, ” in The World’s Body

At certain moments in the history o f literature.. .producing a text —as an ideal goalfor the
writer - is extremely problematical.... The difficultyfo r such writers, asfo r such times, is in
being able to distinguish adequately between the author as a human being (whatever his self-
characterization), the author as a producing writer, and his production. Those moments and
those writers ought to become a more prevalent theme of literary study, for their exemplary
uncertainty, which to them appears abnormal, brings into question otherwise reified, "nor­
mal” notions held about texts.
Edward Said, Beginnings

A Poet N early Anonym ous

Why is the author of Piers Plowman a poet nearly anonymous? William Lang-
land, an older contemporary’ of Chaucer, spent at least two decades making
and revising the first English poem to attain a national readership and
influence while its author lived. Its survival to the present century’ in over
titty manuscripts, none clearly a direct copy of any of the others, implies that
copies of the poem must have numbered in the hundreds by 1400.1 The
 William Langland’s “Kynde Name ” 207
poem was immediately and widely imitated, but those who adopted its
distinctive idiom did not credit Langland with its invention. Rather, the
poem’s fictive hero Piers Plowman, who is rarely present in the narrative
and seldom speaks, was widely taken to be the center and source of authority
for the poet’s powerful innovation, and in contemporary imagination Piers
effectively supplanted the author as a putatively actual historical being, the
origin of a mode of speech and action that abruptly found in his name a
condensed rationale for its own continued articulation.2
While Langland lived, Piers Plowman figured significantly in current dis­
courses of religious and political dissent. He was named as an exemplary, if
hypothetical, person by the rebel forces in the Rising of 1381, and as one of
the actual leaders of the rebellion by some chroniclers of these events. For
over two hundred years it is Piers’s example, not Langland’s, that is repeatedly
adduced to authorize an enduring vernacular literary tradition of cultural
criticism broadly underwritten by Langland’s stylistic example.3 In this same
period, however, Langland himself, in a near-vacuum of external biographical
documentation, virtually vanished from public notice as a known English
author, diminished by the sixteenth century to “that nameless malcontent” to
whom the conservative Puttenham attributed the poem.4 Yet Langland
evidently intended to associate his name irrevocably with his work, for he
signs it in all three of its surviving versions (the A, B, and C texts, represent­
ing three successive states of composition), inscribing these signatures more
fully, deeply, and indelibly in the fabric of the narrative with each revision.
While there is no evidence to suggest that either Langland or his scribes ever
attempted to efface these signatures, they apparently never functioned cultu­
rally as ascriptions. As far as his contemporaries, and those who for two
hundred years continued to appropriate his invention, were concerned, the
only name William Langland ever made for himself in writing was that of his
elusive hero Piers Plowman.
The question that begins this essay is in effect the founding question of all
modern study of this poem.5 If the riddle of authorial identity that occupied
scholars at the turn of this century has since been reframed by more recent
interpreters, its central importance to historical understanding of both the
writer and his cultural moment has not diminished. In this essay I shall argue
that Langland’s elusive identity defines, both for the earliest readers and
imitators of his poem and for modern literary scholars of late medieval
literature and culture, a locus of what Edward Said calls “exemplary uncer­
tainty” that requires both Langland’s interpretive community and our own to
revise their traditional notions of what constitutes the integrity of a text and
the ground and limits of its representative claims. In particular, Langland’s
authorial evanescence, to his contemporaries and to us, invites a reconsidera­
tion of relations between the projected design of the author’s work and the
immanent form of the authorial life, and the ways in which a published
208 Anne Middleton
authorial name attempts to regulate and mediate these problematic connections
and distinctions. Text and context, “external” and “internal” information,
narrative progression and digression, the generic and the specific, the com­
mon and the proper, blur and fail to sustain themselves as useful heuristic
distinctions in stabilizing either Langland’s “authorship question” or ours. In
every one of its many versions from Langland’s lifetime to our own, the
“authorship question” is au fo n d a question about boundaries, about what is
inside and outside the field of interpretation - what is “proper” to the
authorial enterprise as such, and what it has in common with other cultural
work - and what kind of interpretive attention this indeterminacy invites.
As we shall see in detail below, Langland explicidy poses such questions
within the work itself, and it is in precisely those moments when he brings
them sharply into the foreground that he signs his name in the text. For the
fourteenth century, the authorship question posed by Langland’s work opens
to view not only the ambiguous status of vernacular literary authority in this
period, but the moral and political claims of vernacular cultural productivity*
in general to embody “truth.” During the poet’s lifetime, and for the two
following centuries of his work’s greatest influence, these are volatile and
contested questions, which Langland represents in their most culturally
encompassing and historically concrete forms. To specifically literary-histor­
ical hindsight, the precarious fortunes of Langland’s name as author illustrate
some of the uncertainties latent in the enterprise of large-scale vernacular
fiction-making in the latter fourteenth century, the period of its first decisive
articulation in England. This literary era has been seen as one of unsteady
transition from conventions of authorial anonymity* to those of authorial
individuation and self-advertisement; yet these changing literary* procedures
for the representation of authorship, and the rich formal heterogeneity* of the
vernacular literary works in which they* appear, are not isolated or culturally
insulated phenomena. Instabilities in the literary* presentation and reception
of identity may, I suggest, be understood more productively as part of a still
more pervasive late fourteenth-century* “crisis of the proper” concerning
representation itself, a crisis more fundamentally political than literary*. It is
within this broader discursive field that Langland presents the status of his
authorship as a matter of paradigmatic importance: the making of this poem,
the nature of its representative claims, and the elusive social identity of its
author, acquire - with more specificity in each of its revisions - the aspect of
urgent contemporary* political concerns. In the terms offered by John Crowe
Ransom’s formulation of represented authorial identity* (the terms that have
for most of this century implicitly defined the “literary*” or “internal”
approach to the authorship question), it is his “juridical” self that Langland
increasingly brings to the foreground by his disposition of his name in his
work. He calls into question the very possibility of sustaining as an author an
“ideal and fictitious personality” that can remain exempt from answerability
 William Langland’s “Kynde N ame” 209
to a larger contemporary “point at issue” in the depiction of his authorial
enterprise as cultural work.
For twentieth-century interpreters of Langland’s poem, the apparendy
idiosyncratic qualities of the text as a literary production - its heterogeneous
literary form, the affinities of its style - have with remarkable consistency
seemed explicable only by reference to the identity of the author: the course of
inquiry has repeatedly enacted a kind of scholarly ascesis, an ascent from the
unknown to the unknown. Indeed, to the early twentieth-century scholars who
first posed and debated the “authorship question,” the very boundaries of the
literary text were (as for different reasons they still are) at issue: in its initial
version, the questions under most intense dispute were whether the same
writer composed all three surviving versions of the poem, and what circum­
stances conditioned the course of its production as a sequence of revisions.
Since these indeterminacies arose from ambiguous “internal evidence,” they
seemed capable of resolution only by appeal to information that lay outside the
text. Scholars sought decisive “external” documentation, either in the form of
extraliterary biographical records that might corroborate or supply a name
for this elusive writer, or through comparative investigation of analogous
examples of authorial self-presentation in other medieval poems that might
establish the norms within which Langland’s authorial self-disclosures within
the poem might be understood. Both kinds of “external” inquiry were con­
ceived as factual constraints upon interpretation, “historically” grounded
controls of the almost limitless interpretive inferences that are everywhere
tantalizingly invited by the poem itself concerning the actual social identity and
life-circumstances of the author. Biography - a text or tissue of data woven by
inference into knowledge but conceived as distinct in character and truth-value
from a literary record - would in this view stabilize the range of legitimate
inferences that the poetic text can not in itself contain or disclose.
The chief “external” record of authorship cited in these debates seems to
offer all the documentary solidity that turn-of-the-century scholars sought. It
is a Latin note written about 1400 in the Trinity College Dublin manuscript of
the C version of the poem. The earliest surviving manuscript of any version
of the poem, it originated and for some time remained (as did most of the
surviving C texts) in the south-west Midland region of the poet’s own origin,
as determined by dialect evidence. The memoranda among which this Latin
note appears show considerable local knowledge of South Wales border
events and families: there is, in other words, good reason to trust its report
as informed about the matters it records.6 It declares “willielmus. .. de
Langlond” to be the maker of the poem, names Langland’s father as a
member of the gentry who held land of the Despensers in Oxfordshire,
and reveals that Langland, at least as a writer, did not use his father’s
surname. One early inference from this note - that William was illegitimate
- is certainly itself illegitimate: individuals in the fourteenth century might be
210 Anne Middleton
known by more than one surname, a practice I shall have occasion to
examine more closely. Yet both in content and placement, this note is hardly
fully “external” to the poetic text: it is appended to a copy of the poem and
serves as an implicit commentary upon it, at least to the extent that it
acknowledges that there is an indeterminacy to be resolved about the author’s
existence. It is, in other words, at best further testimony to a fourteenth-
century question of authorial identity, rather than a decisive contemporary
answer to it. Moreover, it shows the kind of information that, for this witness,
counts as an answer: the note places the author, not with respect to his
literary productions, place of residence, profession, or institutional situation,
but in relation to family, lineage, and property-holding —relations conspicu­
ously absent from the poem’s “internal” account of the author’s identity. This
strangely precise, as well as rare, “external” record takes on an overdeter­
mined quality as a comment upon Langland’s authorial self-representation.
Derrida’s formulation of the divided and duplicitous motives surrounding the
inscription of the proper name - that it involves on the one hand the
“narcissistic desire to make one’s own ‘proper’ name ‘common,’ to make it
enter and be at one with the body of the mother-tongue; and at the same time
the oedipal desire to preserve one’s proper name, to see it as an analogon of
the name of the father” - could scarcely be more apposite.8
If the turn-of-the-centurv formulation of the “authorship question” has
receded from scholarly and critical agendas, the initial terms for dividing the
labors of inquiry have remained largely undisturbed. “Historical” knowledge
comes from that which is seen as “external” to the poem, “literary” under­
standing is derived “internally” - and they offer two virtually incommensurable
orders of truth. That which went without saying for the writer, the knowledge
internal to his practice, must be reconstructed externally by the modem scholar
of medieval texts, and the secure externality or otherness of the latter’s know­
ledge remains his distinctive property and armature, constraining and legiti­
mating rather than enabling his access to the internality of writerly knowledge,
and guarding his interpretive labors against the cardinal sin of medieval literary
scholarship, “anachronism.” It will be part of my purpose to reframe the classic
form of the “authorship question” by collapsing the division between its
“internal” and “external” aspects, by considering within one field of vision
the documentary' designs of the literary text and the literary strategies of many
contemporary' documents adduced as “external” records.
In some respects, much recent criticism of the poem has anticipated this
move: the old pursuit of the actual historical identity' of the author beyond or
behind the poem has for nearly two generations been regarded as something
of an embarrassment, a largely irrelevant distraction from the more funda­
mental business of interpreting the work “itself,” and its persona, as the
authorial presence is called when conceived as a function of literary design.9
Yet in some of the best recent study of the poem, Langland as the producer
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 211

of the text rather than its product has enacted a return of the repressed. Even
though interpreters no longer seek to define what turn-of-the-century scho­
lars usually termed the “character and opinions” of the writer, his education,
social location, antecedent textual materials, and working methods are often
substantial, if largely submerged, hypotheses that underwrite detailed readings
of the poem: a posited actual historical individual now lurks in what is
commonly described as his “context,” which is now seen as revealed in
certain of the internal procedures of the poem.
Yet if the fourteenth-century writer William Langland reemerges in these
accounts as a kind of back-formation of the intertextualities of his work, his
reappearance has thus far tended to silence rather than invite further ques­
tions about the historical forces that cast enigmatic emphasis upon the
identity and social location of the author, rendering them at once urgendy
important and elusive to the meaning of the poem. What seems at first a
salutary critical decentering of that authorial subject that it had been the goal
of earlier scholarship to discern “in” or “behind” the poem has in practice
been a less than fully enabling interpretive move, because the kinds of
discourses that are thought to constitute and determine both the content
and “author-function” of the work have not thus far differed greatly from
those disclosed by old-fashioned source study. The Langland that emerges
from some of the most learned and thorough recent analyses of his work is,
to be sure, no longer the sublimely impatient and impassioned enthusiast,
scornful of formal niceties and deliberate art, that emerged from earlier
criticism. On the contrary, he is crabbedly learned, a writer steeped in others’
writings, and deriving directly from them, rather than from his worldly
position or experiences, the armature of his individuation. His authorial
design and character is seen as determined “from the outside” by antecedent
texts, but this “external” environment, manifested in a poetic subject who has
incorporated and assimilated its discipline, is defined almost exclusively by
one kind of writing in particular: the canonical regimen of medieval biblical
interpretation. What drives William Langland’s twenty-year labor of com­
position and revision is, in this view, no more and no less than what drives his
reading of the texts he incessantly cites: “Piers Plowman is a poem being
controlled from the outside__ Langland read to discover a description of
himself; as he found it, he wrote it down.” He could locate this discourse, and
intervene in it, only in books: “the picture that emerges is that of a man eking
out his poem slowly, even tediously, while poring over a variety of commen­
taries and preachers’ aids.”10 Yet both the initial impetus and the end of these
labors of authorship remain obscure. If what Langland was composing
through this process of voracious textual appropriation was himself, how
might such a remarkable authorial intent arise from its alleged immediate
sources? How, in other words, might such a relentlessly “external” regimen
be assimilated and given back as the “internal,” as the apparent constituents
212 Anne Middleton
of a subject located in space and time? And even more puzzling, why? What
would prompt a writer steeped in such materials to give them back to his
contemporaries in this expository form as a “description of him self’? And
what kind of reception might he find for such a project?
By aligning the literary forms and social motives for the representation of
individual identity, and the formation and recording of names, in the later
fourteenth century, I propose to set forth the terms within which naming
acquired the standing of a necessary, encompassing, and contested “point at
issue” for Langland and his culture. If the age of Shakespeare discloses, as it
does to Stephen Greenblatt, an essentially theatrical imagination at work in
various ordinary discursive practices, then I suggest that several kinds of
social records not confined to the “literary” in the age of Chaucer and
Langland show people appearing to each other narratively, and improvising
individual and communal identities, not in the unitary rhetorical category of
the role but in the temporal span and generic model of the life.11 To be
intelligible is to have a comprehensively revelatory story, and to signify
historically or literarily —to make a name for oneself - in this age of heraldic
cognizances as well as of literary signatures is, in Huizinga’s happy formula­
tion, to “choose the text for the sermon of one’s life.”12

The Function o f Late Medieval Literary Signature

R. W. Chambers and George Kane have demonstrated that Langland’s

internal signatures resemble in form and techniques those widely used by
other late medieval writers. This comparative literary context, it is suggested,
“explains” Langland’s practice by rendering it “normal”: internal signature
was indeed more pervasive, formally sophisticated, and diverse in vernacular
writings of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries than at any other
time in European literature before or since.13 Yet two problems attend this
demonstration if, as most scholars have done, we stop rather than start our
inquiry7 here. The one, peculiar to Langland, we have noted: if these self­
inscriptions - because widely used at the time and therefore presumably
legible as such - were to be understood as communications and records of
authorship, they were in this instance a conspicuous failure. The other
reframes the first in a more general form: if this practice was “normal” and
widespread in late medieval writing - and indeed confined almost entirely to
this period - what then was its function? What are the norms of literary7
practice and social action and understanding within which it is “normal”? The
question has rarely been posed, because it is widely assumed that we already
know the answer. The strange case of William Langland, however, suggests
that we know less about the literary7and social meaning of this practice than
we thought.
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 213
A good deal of recent discussion of medieval authorial self-representation
has regarded this pervasive internal self-naming as but one aspect of the
broader late medieval “discovery of the individual,” and has considered
literary manifestations of “poetic individuality” as among several kinds of
evidence of new interest in the representative and signifying power of the self.
But as the ensuing account will suggest, the pervasive practice of complex
literary signature in this period is not an illustration of this cultural pheno­
menon but an important grammatical operator in bringing about a broader
cultural transformation; as such, it is a rearguard action, a gesture fraught with
ambivalence and nostalgia, not a sense of discovery or progress. As a means
of deobjectifying the written artifact and restoring to it the authenticating
presence that has been drained from it by the documentary and administrative
culture whose gestures it borrows, it uses the letter to discredit the con­
sequences of a culture of letters, of “writing and hiding myself.”14
It is an almost universal (though almost universally unstated) presupposi­
tion that the purpose of late medieval literary signature is the same as that of
more modern and direct forms of declaration of authorship: it is simply
attributive. Because the signatures in Piers Plowman have been examined chiefly
under the impetus of the “authorship controversy,” this assumption is even
stronger in Langland scholarship than in studies of other late medieval
writers. As attribution, internal signature in general is thought to be an
authorial intervention in the economic functioning of the work in a system
of circulation and reproduction. In this view, the signature is there to satisfy
some “natural” wish of readers to be satisfied about who made this poem,
and it serves as a kind of proprietary declaration of the author’s craft or
“hand” in the work - information that contributes to its cultural worth by
specifying the value added to language by a particular fabricator. In other
words, it is often discussed as if it were a primitive attempt at copyright. By
naming himself, the author is in effect naming his price and attempting to
control in his absence from the means of reproduction transactions in what
he has made - though his audience may of course pay his price in the form of
patronage or prayers for his soul, familiar medieval modes of literary
exchange, rather than in the more modern ones of posthumous fame,
canonical position, or royalties.
Since attribution, by whatever methods, is assumed to be an inextricable
part of our appreciation of the work (a term that is itself at root economic), it
becomes self-evident and unproblematic that an author should wish his name
circulated with his work; how he puts it in circulation is thought to be a
secondary’ consideration of technique or vocabulary rather than meaning. The
various formal techniques of signature characteristic of late medieval writing
then become simply synonymous means, adapted to manuscript culture,
toward the essentially economic end familiar in the age of print. The intern-
ality of a signature - the difference between anagrammatic wordplay in the
214 Anne Middleton
poem and a colophon at the end, for example —does not alter its function but
merely adjusts its tone and placement to the author’s material and social
circumstances: it makes a witty game out of the transaction between author
and public, while securing the “maker’s mark” against casual effacement. By
making his name inextricable from the poetic fabric rather than placing it in a
colophon where it may more easily be omitted in transmission, the poet
defends his reputation against the deepest ravages of Adam Scriveyn, while
he considerately anticipates the interest of later readers in attribution.
Internal signatures in medieval texts, then, are commonly read as having
the same cultural meaning as both a textually separable declaration of author­
ship such as a colophon or a title page in a printed book and the internal
“maker’s mark” in other artistic media such as sculpture, metalwork, or
painting. Yet both modem analogies from the age of print and those drawn
from medieval nonverbal arts (which do not in the same way lend themselves
to copying) are in this case misleading. It is only the social and material
arrangements for mechanical reproduction of the written text that make it
possible to form the ideas of literary property that underwrite this assumption
about medieval motives for internal authorial self-naming.13 In late medieval
literary texts, internal signature regulates, I shall argue, proprieties that are in
the first instance grammatical and ontological rather than economic: it
proclaims and governs the representative claims of the work rather than
the circulation or exchange value of the maker’s “hand.”
The most widely used forms of internal signature in late medieval litera­
ture, however - those that we will find Langland using with developing
complexity and skill as he revises the poem - demand certain ways of reading
and using the text in order to be legible as names at all, and the form and
terms of that legibility alter their meaning. Their function, I propose, is not
attribution but, to use Daniel Poirion’s term for an analogous contemporary
practice, autodefinition\ their referent is not the absent maker but his confected
presence, a living “entente” animated and reproduced in the act of reading.
What the name inscribed in the poetic text proclaims is not the author’s
verbal fabrication, but an ethical fabulation of which he makes himself the
center; the value signified is not that of his craft but that of his life. Although
both modern textual culture and the visual and plastic arts contemporary with
the poem provide, as we have suggested, misleading analogies to this practice,
late medieval culture does furnish at least one closer and more provocative
parallel: the personal badge or cognizance. It is the social function of these
devices that Poirion calls “autodefinition,” and their vogue happens to
coincide closely in time with that of complex internal literary signature.16
W hile neither practice appears to be the immediate inspiration for the other,
the use of this individual heraldry' in fields of meaning traditionally com­
manded by the familial coat of arms helps to define succinctly the cultural
ambivalences we will also find registered in the literary signature.
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 215
In chivalric warfare, “banners and pennons bore hereditary coats of arms,
[while] standards and ensigns displayed personal badges, devises and mottoes,”
and during the later Middle Ages there was an increasing tendency to
substitute the latter for the former in batde.17 Several practical circumstances
of military technology and organization may be cited to account for this
change: the redundancy of the shield that bore the coat of arms after the
advent of plate armor; the clarity and ease of identifying in the heat of action
a simple badge, such as the cockleshell or barbican, in contrast to the
increasing difficulty of making recognizable and accurate representations by
the complicated - and difficult to document - quarterings of the noble
family; the increase in the use of professional soldiers and standing armies
along with hereditary nobility and shorter-term occasional warfare; and
perhaps a concomitant wish by the crown to signify that its military enter­
prises rewarded talent and personal loyalty.18 The devices chosen, originally
the personal “arms of peace” used in the tournament, manifest, as Vale and
many others have noted, “the contemporary taste for allegory” - or, as I
should prefer to call it, self-personification.19 To adopt such an autodefinition
was “to choose a text for the sermon of one’s life.” As an elective sign of the
self, the device “rassemble les actions éparses dans la continuité d’une
intention première”: one’s presence on the field of action is proclaimed by
such a symbol to be a life with a unitary design, a story for which one has
chosen the theme and the ^enre, and which as an exemplary paradigm serves
to unite others around it. These “devices” were brought into currency in
England during Langland’s lifetime under the very highest sponsorship: the
Garter, badge of the order founded by Edward III, and later the White Hart
of Richard II both illustrate the implicit and compacted ideal narrations
around which these symbols organized allegiance - stories of the transforma­
tion of private or occulted referents into public totems of presence and
intention.21
It is not as a possible source of the practice but for their similar mode of
signifying that the personal devices of late medieval heraldry offer a suggest­
ive parallel to the methods and contextual meaning of late medieval literary'
signature. Like these, the anatomized and inwoven name of the author
becomes, within the literary’ situation in which it is displayed, the title or
rubric of a life-as-designed, the sign under which the “menyng” (intent) of the
work is declared and made coextensive with the “intente” of the author
realized in the purposive and exemplary patterns of a compactly represented
life. It is under this modal sign that those who see it are asked in turn to
represent themselves — to interpret their actions, and to offer them for
interpretation. The “given” name of the author is within the work reinvented
as if chosen (or perhaps as if it had chosen him), and his civil or public identity
- what Langland will call his “kynde name” - is made to function as a sort of
diacritical marker of the narrative of which he is the subject, an artificial
21 6 Anne Middleton
memory’ device operating systematically rather than discretely in “pointing”
the text and anchoring its ethical legibility and its social designs upon those
who read it.22 As the signature techniques Langland uses undergo develop­
ment in revision from relatively open to more indirect forms, they also
acquire systematic relations with each other in disclosing the narrative prin­
ciples of the work. In this development the surname —foregrounded as a
subject of wordplay in A but given realized signatory status in B - is pivotal,
permitting the civil circumstances of the authorial project as well as the poetic
subject’s spiritual identity to be assimilated to literary form, to become
narratable; and it is to this move, intimately tied to the formal choices that
enabled the B-C continuation, that I now turn.

Forms and Methods o f Literary Signature

Langland’s internal self-naming takes two main forms, both widely used in
contemporary French and English writings. The first, the “open” or refer­
ential method, requires little discussion - and causes little interpretive con­
troversy; it is familiar in the writings of Chaucer and Gower as well as
Langland. By this device, especially frequent in dream-visions, persons in
the fiction simply address or refer to the first-person narrator or dreamer by
name, or the subject introduces himself (examples from the poem are A-3,
C -l, and C-3; see the appendix). Generally this open referential form is used
by Langland to display the baptismal name of Will alone, but it also aids in the
recognition of more indirect forms of signature, such as the famous anagram
of the surname in Will’s speech to Anima, the creature of many names,
retrospectively summarizing his quest thus far: “I have lyued in londe... my
name is longe wille” (B. 15.152, B-3 in the appendix).
While open referential self-naming may be accompanied by further deictic
marking, more indirect forms virtually require it, and for this purpose there
are several kinds of local signals that an authorial name is to be read in the
discourse. Among the more patent devices, illustrated in the example cited,
are the depiction in the narrated events of social or ceremonial occasions (the
formal introduction of a new character on the scene to other persons present,
formal confession, or juridical testimony) or textual forms (such as the last
will and testament) that require explicit self-naming for their execution as
gestures. In these performative moments the subject’s intent is rendered “for
the record,” and the representation of these acts in narrative thus calls
attention to the constitutive and stabilizing power socially attributed to
written documents as such. A more subtle and mobile device, exploited by
Chaucer as well as more exhaustively by Langland, is locally intensified
allusion to the first-person’s physical characteristics or social circumstances.
Jokes about bodily stature and habit (Chaucer’s doll-like “shap” or “noyous”
 William Langland's “Kynde Name ” 217
weight, Langland’s tall leanness and “long clothes”) are not simply descriptive
specifications, for verisimilitude or “authentication,” but invariably in both
poets’ work coincide with - and, in effect, announce - complex and very
often “signed” accounts of the poetics of the work. The presence of self-
references to physical characteristics, like that of the signatures to which they
usually point, calls redoubled attention to the author’s modal contract with
the user of the text, and evokes as part of that contract both reader’s and
writer’s embodiment in a specific sociohistorical situation. We shall find
Langland using such moments of bodily self-awareness and occulted signa­
ture to translate writerly into readerly self-consciousness.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from these explicit, and explicidy
pointed, open forms of signature are the wittier and more occulted devices
based on anagrammaric methods, in which wordplay upon the name is made
by an anatomy of its parts.23 It is the “occulted” technique of anagram,
Langland’s second main signature method and the basis for his system of
cross-referencing signature mnemonics in the B and C versions of the poem,
that will require our closer attention - as indeed the device itself demands a
peculiar kind of self-conscious attention to be legible, as well as a sustaining
repertory of accompanying conventions, some of them requiring social as
well as textual skills for recognition.
Anagrammatic naming, whether or not it functions as signature, bases not
only its wit but its very legibility on the reader’s consciousness of using partly
extratextual knowledge to decode it. Here Chaucer offers an efficient ex­
ample of how the device works, though not in a signatory function. In the
tragedy of King Peter of Cyprus in the M onk’s Tale, we learn that “the wikked
nest was werker of this nede”; we could only recognize the name of Oliver de
Mauny (OF “mau nT) - to say nothing of the agency of Bertrand du Guesclin,
referred to only by his coat of arms as “the feeld of snow, with th’egle of blak
therinne” - if we already knew, as those in John of Gaunt’s circle would have
known, the names of the key players in this recent example of Fortune’s
treachery.24 This example also illustrates the self-referential, almost self-
congratulatory, air that accompanies an act of anagrammatic understanding.
An anagrammatic signature turns the reader’s attention back upon itself, so
that he is forced not only to acknowledge the dimension of social presence
and extratextual competence involved in his recognition of the name but also
to delight in the several simultaneous kinds of specifically “readerly” mental
acrobatics it demands.
Unlike open referential signatures, those made by occultation require the
reader to reassemble the proper name dispersed among the common terms of
the poem (“I have lyued in lo n d e...m y name is longe wille” [B. 15.152]).
Their power to disclose a name not only resides in but calls attention to the
beholder’s share, as they displace his attention momentarily from the refer­
ential to the formal aspect of words. Occulted signatures induce in the reader
218 Anne Middleton
a momentary high awareness of his operative arts of reading, a perception
that is the counterpart of the bodily self-consciousness that both heralds
authorial self-reference and supports its use in indicating an operative poetics.
By foregrounding for an instant the textual medium itself, forcing one to
notice not only the arts of making and reading such disclosures but also the
shared social space and physical circumstances within which that art is
exercised, they insist on the embodied social dimension of literary processes.
Syllabic anagram, Langland’s second main signature device, shares with his
first, simple vocative naming, the property of audibility: we can hear as well as
see on the page the name, distributed into separate monosyllabic words rather
than as a whole. In this respect anagrammatic naming differs from that other
occulted form of signature widely used in the late Middle Ages, the acrostic,
which anatomizes and redistributes the name by letters rather than by
syllables. Though made on the same dispersive principles, the two signature
forms are differendy legible, and define and regulate quite different inter­
pretive premises, as they also presume different social means of perpetuation
- differences that are crucial for understanding Langland’s choice of signature
techniques and their social significance.
The acrostic signature, depending for its legibility largely on the physical
layout of the page and book, rules the order of the parts in which it appears,
and it can only be seen, not heard.23 It implies, therefore, not only an
authorial commitment to spatial and architectonic form, but access to and
confidence in stable scribal institutions for its transmission. It foregrounds
and celebrates the “writtenness” of writing: in the acrostic the author
becomes entirely and literally a man o f letters. But if the acrostic is an efficient
little Derridean postulate, unambivalendy proclaiming the absence of the
author, the anagrammatic signature pointedly raises and repeatedly worries
the possibility of authorial presence in the work. It implicidy argues the
nonautonomy and non-self-evident character of texts, and proclaims the
perpetual inseparability' of the author’s life from that which he makes, and
from which in some sense he does not —and can not - ever wholly withdraw
his sustaining voice. Anagrammatic naming implies that “menyng” is always’s
someone's meaning; it resides in, and represents, persons and their “intentes.”26
Here Erik Kooper’s typology’ of signatures, making a systematic analogy
between the forms used in painting and literature, is useful. Though he does
not make this specific argument for his analogy', he sees the acrostic as the
literary equivalent of the included self-portrait of the painter: each fore­
grounds and celebrates as such the dominant and basic representative unit
of its respective medium - the alphabet, the painted image —the artifice that
represents the hand of the artificer. The anagrammaric signature, however, is
the literary equivalent of the rebus, or visual pun, and like it, doubles and
foregrounds the number and complexity of the acts required for its decoding.
The rebus represents a thing, a physical object, whose common name is the
 William Langland's “Kynde Name" 219
same as, or sounds like, the proper name of the painter: Kooper gives the
example of Lorenzo Lotto’s signature, in the form of an object called a lotto
held by one of the represented persons in the painting. The anagrammatic
signature likewise demands that we notice the several acts of translation
between representative modes that are required to read the “proper” name
in common objects.
The wit of the anagrammatic signature thus derives from the perpetual
double life of the text, its claim to represent the spoken and audible voice of
someone’s “menyng” as well as visible signs representing the meaning of
things. In this way —whether or not the text is in practice ever actually voice —
it tends to problematize rather than celebrate the written as a means of
stabilizing communicative authority. Broken into syllables that are also intel­
ligible as words in themselves, the anagrammatized name acquired a double
reference, becoming both common and proper at once. Yet its second
reference - its signatory aspect - must be called into play either by deictic
markers drawing attention to its status as a name (as in the third signature of
the B version, “ ‘I have lyued in londe,’ quod I, ‘my name is longe wille’ ”) or
by something already known and brought into play extratextually. For example, in
order to understand the Lond of Longyng as an anagrammatic signature (as I
shall argue it is), we must already know by other means that the author’s
surname is Langland, although in this case, as we shall see, the means have
been made available to us more openly elsewhere in the text.
Both forms of audible signature used by Langland - his open vocative
naming and the anagram of his surname - are made so as to seem to
complement and interact with what the interpreter presumably knows of
the author by social means, whether direct acquaintance or reputation: his
stature, his apparendy clerical habit, and his habits of delay and evasion. In
this respect their effect is much like the open self-naming and comic self­
reference of Chaucer to his rotund “shap” and bookishness. If the solitary
reader happens to lack social intimacy with the writer, these devices never­
theless confect it as one of the operative fictions of the work. Because unlike
acrostics, anagrammatic signatures appear to derive their legibility from a
stable social rather than scribal medium, one normally expects to find them
in writers who in fact have a fairly secure and enduring institutional base of
operations and are known by name and literary reputation over a consider­
able period of rime to their primary audience - particularly court or coterie
poets. Though this is widely assumed to have been Chaucer’s actual situation,
it suggests that the question of Langland’s immediate circle and his following
may require considerable reexamination.
Whatever their implications about his relation to an actual primary audi­
ence, however, Langland’s signature methods also have fundamental con­
sequences for literary mode. They encourage the reader’s sense that the
author’s social, vocal, and even physical presence is also somehow “in” the
220 Anne Middleton
text, that the words on the page represent a person as well as his product, and
that it is his coherence as intelligible actor and the paradigmatic and exemp­
lary form of his life, rather than the formal properties of the work as artifact,
that secure its value to the user. They define a problematic of bodily presence
and biographical integrity into the act of reading and specify the boundaries
of meaning within which signatures are articulated as the literary career, the
life-in-writing, not the single work.
It is this larger, if largely implicit, poetic argument that supports the use of
reference to the “maker’s” bodily shape, a device heavily exploited by Lang-
land and one of the commonest “pointing” conventions to highlight either
kind of audible signature. Signaling the presence of the anagrammatized
name, it invites the reader to reconstruct the proper, to reassemble the
dispersed body of the author, like Osiris, from its syllabically distributed
common parts, exactly as the red and blue letters used by the scribe help
the reader pick out visually the alphabetically distributed acrostic signature.
Stout “Geffrey” as well as “longe wille” uses this pointer repeatedly. The
author “points to” his person — as Chaucer literally does in the famous
Harvard portrait panel - as an image of “myn intente,” using the same
gesture with which in the Ellesmere marginal portrait he points to his text,
and thereby makes a functional equivalence between them.27 The ultimate
referent of the written text, these gestures imply, is the life lived, and
the specific finite body becomes the guarantor of the general truth of the
discourse. Langland’s work declares its own integrity of form through the
systematic interrelations of its several signatures that punctuate the text,
marking out milestones in a trajectory of reading as well as living, rendering
the name and person of the author as a periodically recurring common place for
reflection on what lies “before and behind.” “Pointing” his work with his
own name and presence - his social and legal and physical as well as his
spiritual history - Langland’s signatures function as an artificial memory
device, giving his life-work the usable form of a life remembered.

[In the next section of her essay Middleton describes the simple use of “Wil”
in A, and the hints of a more sophisticated kind of self-naming, and con­
cludes:]

It is already evident in the A version, then, that acts of authorial self­

naming have more than an occasional function as momentary evocations of
actual or fictive social intimacy with an audience. Their self-reflexive and
diacritical importance in the narrative is intensified in the B and C revisions,
while their dependence for legibility as signatures on extratextual knowledge
of the poet’s person is gradually diminished. If in the A-text scene we have
just examined these notations of Will’s bodily “shap” functioned for their
priman’ audience as no more than throwaway moments of self-reference,
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 221

designed initially for the amusement of those of Langland’s contemporary

readers who knew him by sight - much like the Eagle’s disparagement of
“Geffrey’s” unsuitable weight for visionary air travel in the Hous o f Fame —
such lines would nevertheless not have been lost on a reader of the C text
who lacked direct or indirect social familiarity with the author. By this point
in the C narrative the reader would not only identify Will as the name of the
dreamer and maker (he is named both at C.1.5 and earlier in the C version of
the present episode; see C. 10.71, replacing A.9.64), but recognize in Wit
Will’s own distinctive stature, already specified as “longe” (C.5.23-4). A
reader of C would also have been taught by the form of these signature
events to associate something else with moments of self-naming and self­
reference: in the revised and expanded versions of the poem, they are staged
with increasing fullness both to evoke excuses and apologiae of the subject’s
insufficiency, and to exact from him a broad reexamination of his position —
in his quest, in his allotted time on earth, and in the trajectory of the work that
is the poem.
As moments of signature are in revision linked by these additional com­
mon features as events, and begin to refer to each other, they declare their
diacritical force with increasing clarity in each of the two long versions. The
effect of these changes, from moments of signature to a signature-system, is
to convert the increasingly expendable fiction of social intimacy with the
author into a broader kind of enabling knowledge and textual competence as
the ground of the “truth” of the work. The signatures of the B and C versions
are disposed through the work not only (as in A-3) sporadically to foreground
the poetic and intellectual aspirations of Langland’s project, but systematically
to mark and display the critical points of genesis and transformation of that
project, realized as a succession of critical turning points in the author’s life.
The moments of signature become narratively pivotal events that render
biographical and poetic self-awareness synonymous.
Access to the “truth” of the poem (that is, its binding formal principle as
well as its objective) is thus realized narratively, not as vertical ascent in an
epistemological or eschatological order but in the literary form of a chronicle
of a life remembered, disclosing its immanent design in moments of
subjective crisis, each of which is marked by signature. For the reader, the
activity of recognizing the author’s name is thus gradually set in parallel
with the endeavor of following a sustained narration; to those who appre­
hend the applied ethical and subjective importance of the difficult and
abstract questions broached by the poem’s discursive wanderings - and to
them alone - will Langland disclose and explain himself. That is, only to
someone capable o f reading the poem as a narrative with an immanent design - and
not simply, as Robert Crowley evidently considered it, a collection of “goodly
allegories” or local figurative amplifications of scriptural themes - will the
signatures be systematically legible as such at all.28 It is a critical commonplace that
222 Anne Middleton
the poem represents the mode of access to truth as applied, ethical, and
grounded in subjective experience. What the disposition of the authorial
name in his poem discloses, however, is Langland’s progressively deeper
understanding and more fully conscious acceptance - comparable to that of
Augustine - of both the literary and social consequences of developing a
philosophic and spiritual quest in the narrative form of an apparently histor­
ically specific life-story.

[The next section analyses in detail the context of the more elaborate
anagrammatic “signatures” in B (Appendix, II. B-3 and III.2), and con­
cludes:]

In the Lond of Longyng, as in the later anagrammatic signature that points

backward to it, the author’s name accompanies a disclosure and renegotiation
of the literary terms of the work. Will, who was in the early visions situated at
the periphery of the community of the folk as it turns toward its collective
penitential enterprise, an engaged observer who forecasts and mimes in his
own weeping and seeking the canonical motions by which journeying
becomes a penitential labor, here fully introjects this massive social project
as his own - indeed, as himself, he does not so much abandon the field full of
folk as become it, his wanderings now a prophetically significant mimesis of the
story of his people. He marks this development, which enables the B-C
continuation, by making his name signify not only the person but the place in
which this labor is undertaken: a longe ¿aunde is, among other things, the strip
of land a plowman plows.29 As a place-name, his authorial surname has the
surface form of many that were to become fixed and heritable in this century:
it seems to specify the landholding, dwelling, or birthplace that could serve to
distinguish him in written record from a neighbor or relative with the same
baptismal name. Yet the addition that in contemporary usage serves to mark a
socially significant difference here serves to redouble the force of the given
name alone, underscoring its generic power: though formally a proper name
or surname, the “long land” designates what he possesses in common with all
mortals, his unsatisfied desire or will. At once disclosing and occulting his
identity, Will’s enigmatic authorial name is paradoxically both proper and
common, a condensed confession and a device that enables him to go on
“writing and hiding himself.” As inhabitant and heir of the Lond of Longyng
that has so far defined the space of his life, he has, in Augustine’s words,
“become a problem to him self’ - a project of social reclamation and
cultivation in the first person - and his literary signature, with its accompany­
ing moments of intensive self-reference, has become a narrative and critical,
not an attributive, mnemonic.
The ground of this fully signatory’ moment at the midpoint of the two long
versions is not wholly a new invention at the second stage of composition,
 William Langland’s “Kynde N ame” 223
however: it already lay dormant, awaiting cultivation, as early as the A version.
In A the Lond of Longyng, not yet developed as a place of absolute self­
confrontation, appears only as it were in peripheral vision: it lies on the road
not taken in the allegorical landscape Will traverses on his way to the episode
that launches the B continuation. In the third dream of the A version, Dame
Study rudely interrupts her husband Wit’s instruction to pronounce Will
unworthy of such pearls of wisdom: he seeks knowledge, she claims, only
so that he can retail it elsewhere to general applause for his own cleverness
(A.II.5-16). Her accusation is precisely echoed by the “scorn” of her succes­
sor Dame Scripture that precipitates Will’s fall into the Lond of Longyng; on
this earlier occasion, however, Will succeeds in turning aside his accuser’s
wrath. Placated by his protestations of humble devotion to her discipline,
Study at last gives Will the road-directions that will bring him to the house of
Clergy and his wife Scripture - at which happy turn of events he professes
himself, in a compromising simile, “gladdere þanne þe gleman þat gold haþ to
3ifte” (A.II.III).
This “hei3e wey” to Scripture traverses a figurative landscape much like the
one Piers had delineated for the folk who asked his guidance to truth, but
where Piers’s way led through the social discipline of the commandments and
sacraments, Study’s lies through the marked and unmarked hazards of
individual temptations:

And rid forþ bi ricchesse, ac reste þou not þerinne,

For 3if þou couple þe wiþ hym to clergie comist þou neuere;
And ek þe longe launde þat leccherie hatte,
Leue hym on þi left half a large myle or more,
Til þou come to a court, kepe wel þi tunge
Fro lesinges & liþer speche & likerous drinkes.
Þanne shalt þou se sobirte, & simplite o f speche,
Þat iche wi3t be in wille his wyt þe to shewen.
(A.II.l 16-23)

It is this “longe launde þat leccherie hatte” - lying, like the domain of Lady
Meed, “on þi left h alf” - that is developed and populated in the opening
moments of the B-C continuation to produce a more extended trial of Will’s
motives, not only as pilgrim but as maker. The Lond of Longyng, built up on
a slender strip of terrain merely glimpsed by the way in the first version, is in
the long versions resituated in medias res, in several senses: Fortune addresses
her gratifications to the desires and powers characteristic of the middle of life,
and her appeal presents itself both about midway in the poem and midway in
Will’s life’s journey. As the name of the place, and the surname of the person,
from which the long versions begin, it reframes the fundamental narrative
premise of the poem by an act of superimposition: Will’s satiric critique of his
world is now subsumed in a massive historical reclamation of the subject’s
224 Anne Middleton
life in the light of salvation history. It is by proclaiming at this point his full
name that the poetic subject assumes the prophet’s mantle, and his repres­
entative status. He becomes, to adopt a phrase whose contemporary legal
usage will prove resonant in understanding the social significance of this
move, a “son of the people.”

Langland’s “Kynde N am e” and N arrative “Kynde”

If the anagram of Will’s name in his meeting with Anima initiates the final
progression of the poem - a penultimate turning point much like that
experienced by Dante when for the first time in the poem the poet hears
his own name in the first syllables Beatrice addresses to him - then the Lond
of Longyng, to which that later signature alludes narratively, may be under­
stood as Will’s selva oscura, encountered, like Dante’s, nel m e^ p del cammin de
nostra vita (midway in our life’s journey). While Dante’s self-confrontation
initiates his poem, however, Langland’s merely alludes by echo to the begin­
ning of his, proclaiming a second “coming to him self’ halfway through its
and his life’s duration. Overlaying a second narrative order on his first, he not
only associates his poetic enterprise with contemporary civil and religious
discourses of social instruction (a chief preoccupation of A’s three visions),
but, like Dante, now proposes to understand through cosmic vision his own
position in time, developing the deep correspondences between biography
and redemptive history. In both cases self-discovery is revealed as a profound
and self-conscious transformation of literary genre; Will here rediscovers the
resources of “kynde” in his own “kynde name.”
John Burrow has recently invoked just this analog}' to Dante in his analysis
of the episode immediately following the fall into the Lond of Longyng,
namely Will’s encounter in passus 11-12 with Ymaginatif.30 The latter figure
not only integrates into a single vision what had appeared to be the conflict­
ing testimony of nature and scripture, but also pointedly commands Will-
as-maker to justify his apparently dilatory and distracting way of spending his
earthly time and wits: it, too, is a moment of literary as well as eschatological
and moral self-justification. Like Dante’s 33 years on the Good Friday of the
Jubilee Year 1300 on which the poem begins, Will’s age at this critical and
extended self-confrontation halfway through his poem is specified explicitly -
twice, in fact - in the B-text. It is 45 years: the duration of Fortune’s favor in
the Lond of Longyng (B. 11.47), it also measures the time during which
Ymaginatif has followed Will, ceaselessly but unavailingly urging him to
“mvnne on þyn ende” (B. 12.4). These ages are in both poems resonantly
significant numbers: Dante’s is the age of Christ at the crucifixion, and
therefore, in Augustine’s belief, the age of the resurrected perfect body
reunited to its soul; Will’s 45, however, as the traditional boundary between
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 225
juventus, the middle term of life’s three ages, and senectus, marks what ought to
be a turning point from limidess projects to a vision of their end.31 Ymagi-
nadf rebukes Will for spending these years “medling” with “makynges”
instead of with prayers and his psalter. Burrow asks whether this admonitory
vision is meant to be understood as “fact or fiction,” and favors - as I do - a
factual reading in which, however, there is little functional difference between
them. By the process that Judson Allen calls assimilation the truth and integrity
of an individual life-history is wholly absorbed into the functions of a
massively figurative exemplary narrative.32 But Burrow does not consider
the possibility I propose here, that the Lond of Longyng is itself an act of still
more pointed authorial self-reference. Such a view tends, however, to con­
firm both Burrow’s reading of the episode and his understanding of the
general compositional technique it involves as broadly comparable to Dante’s
way of yoking together the literary uses of biographical and cosmic time to
order and articulate narrative time. As Allen says of this method, in his last
published essay, it is the multiple figurative determinants of his story that
“leave [Langland] free to be self-absorbed as he writes.”33 It is, of course, the
same kind of self-absorption that sustains Augustine’s twin projects of
confession and universal history, and for both, the common language of
inventio and dispositio, the terms of composition of both self and world, is
Scripture.
There could be no more decisive mark of this absorption than a signature
that transforms the author’s name into the place-name of his own selva oscura,
the Lond of Longyng. As a signatory device, it is not unparalleled in the
later medieval vernaculars: Antoine de la Sale, too, makes his surname into a
place of exemplary self-discovery, a room or chamber (sallé) of reflection and
speculation in an allegorical castle. But in Langland’s poem this place is
transformed by retrospection: years later, as he has faced all but his final
humiliation, he recalls it to Anima/Liberum Arbitrium, the Creature of
Many Names, in a new light. The “mirour” that once gave back to his
“rauysshed” gaze an image only of his boundless desires is remembered at
last in Anima’s/Liberum Arbitrium’s presence - and thereby rendered for a
reader - as the place where Will first glimpsed Charity “as myself in a
mirour”: in retrospect his humiliation becomes a felix culpa. Ymaginatyf
provides Will with the texts that authorize and render intelligible such a
narrative development: quem diligo, castigo (whom I love I chastise, Apoc.
3:19; Prov. 3:12), and virga tua et baculus tuus, ipsa me consolata sunt (thy
rod and thy staff, they have comforted me, Ps. 22.4; B. 12.10-15). It is,
however, to the extent that this assimilatio in the final revision adduces
contemporary social texts as well as scripture in authorial self-disclosure
that Langland raises troubling questions about the kind of cultural authority’
he claims, as well as the narrative genre he asserts, by the disposition of his
“kynde name.”
226 Anne Middleton

“Kynde Name” as Common Place and Proper Place

In the C version, Langland engraves his name and identity in the text still
more emphatically than in the B text, while at the same time he makes the
referential significance of this act of self-disclosure newly problematic. On
the one hand, in C the primary loci of signature occur much earlier in the
narrative sequence and are conspicuously pointed as such. As we have noted,
minor revisions in C move forward the first unambiguous use of the authorial
given name to the opening moments of this version of the poem: in her first
speech to the dreamer, Holichurche addresses him at once by name (“Wille,
slepestou?” C.1.5). Throughout the C version, the sequence of self-disclo­
sures that echo and elaborate each other to form what we have described as a
mnemonic signature-system is marked more firmly, not only by such revi­
sions as these, and other minor adjustments in already existing signatures, but
by their realigned reference to an entirely new episode of extended authorial
self-justification, introduced into the C text between the first and second
vision. Here, in a waking encounter with Reason and Conscience in London
“in a hôte heruest” (C.5.1-108), Will is now forced to account for more than
the integrity and form of his project as spiritual history: he must now attempt
to justify it as social production.
The C version of Will’s introduction of himself to the Creature of Many
Names is revised to point retrospectively to this new locus of authorial self-
justification. We have noted that the anagram of the full name in B points
back to the Lond of Longyng as the referential center for the B signature-
system, at the midpoint of both the poem and Will’s life. At the same point in
C, Will introduces himself to Anima (in C renamed Liberum Arbitrium) by
his local habitation alone —and that habitation has changed: “Ich haue yleued
in Londone manye longe 3eres.” Yet if the anagrammatic character of the
latter version of this line is less obvious in isolation, it serves just as
economically as its B counterpart to point to the new referential center for
C’s signatures, and to suggest a revised relation between the author’s pro­
fessed worldly habitation and the character of his enterprise.
By changing the locus of Will’s identity and the ground of his work from a
fictive rural place to an actual urban one, Langland in the C version opens the
authorial project to a newly strenuous and circumstantial interrogation, in
which the “point at issue” in justifying the authorial form of living is its
conformity not only to scriptural master narratives but to contemporary
social discourses concerning the grounds of civil identity, particularly as
expressed in recent statutes distinguishing legitimate work, “leel labor,”
from idleness.34 In his fullest portrait to date of “myself in a mirour,” Lang­
land projects the question concerning authorial identity in C into decisively
“juridical” as well as existential terrain, and his authorial “confession” on this
 Wiliam Langland's “Kynde N ame” 227
occasion has two distinct dimensions. It is only after his confession to, and
release by, his inquisitors as civil authorities that Will, knocking his breast,
enacts a confession of sinfulness as part of penitential rectification. By
dividing Will’s enacted self-assimilation to the discourses of authority
between dreaming and waking, civil and spiritual jurisdictions, Langland raises
a troubling larger question about the inevitably apologetic dimension of his
culturally powerful discourse of equivalence between the world and the book.
In its circumstantial fulness, the new episode in C rehearses the entire
repertory of signals that enable the “pointing” of subsequent signatures: it is
here that the reader first hears of Will’s characteristic bodily “shap” (“I am to
long, lef me, lowe to stoupe”), mentioned less directly later in his quest in his
encounter with Thought and Wit, and confronts with more sustained atten­
tion the pretensions to clerical status implicitly proclaimed by Will’s anom­
alous hermit’s habit mentioned in the opening lines of the poem. The “truth”
of these signals, however, which in B furnish forth the materials for a
resonantly enigmatic association of Will with the figure of the prophet-
penitent, becomes in C the topic of rigorous cross-examination. Will’s
recurrent claims to the elective poverty, otium, and learning of the cleric -
and hence the very method of his poetic enterprise, grounded as it is in the
assimilation of the authorial self to scriptural discourse - are exposed by this
encounter as face-saving social rationalizations, apologetic reconstructions of
his anomalous outward poverty and perpetually unsatisfied desire that allow
him to claim exemplary power for the form of his life and work, while
evading the regulation and status definition that could warrant such a defense.
His poetic ambitions for his work - specifically, its aspirations to the
company, readership, and expository methods of the learned and powerful
— are now unmistakably and compromisingly associated with a London
dominated by the pursuit of Lady Meed.
As an event, the “autobiographical” interlude in the C text has the
characteristic form of the other signatory episodes we have examined: a
challenge that suddenly interrupts and deflects the course of Will’s designs,
producing in succession first a rationalization then an access of shame and
confession, and issues in a contrite resolution to embark upon a new course
of both life and work, in a narrative of penitential retrospection that reima­
gines the world under the dispensation of salvation history. Under the dual
pressures of its placement in the poem and the historical specificity of its
realization, however, this episode of authorial self-disclosure reevaluates the
delicate equilibrium between self and world marked out by the signatures of
B. In this chief poetic self-disclosure of the C version, Langland exposes the
instability of his poetic project of biblical imitatio - of rendering narrated or
lived action intelligible by scriptural citation, by reference of the lived to the
already written - by emphasizing, through Will’s wily, detailed, and desperate
application of it to his own case, its inevitably interested character.
228 Anne Middleton
By placing this moment of primary authorial self-disclosure, and the
reference point for the authorial name, early in the poem, and by staging it
as an unsought encounter that befell Will during his youth rather than
midway in his life’s journey, Langland now portrays the access of poetic
self-awareness as the condition for beginning his grand project rather than
the occasion of a massive revision and introjection of a narrative of visionary
“avanture” initially conceived in other terms. Moreover, where the trans­
formed ars poetica of B is extracted from Will as the price of his second
seduction in the poem, in C it becomes a moral - and now also legal -
consequence of his first, the Vision of Lady Meed. Reason and Conscience,
who advise the king regarding Meed’s marriage, are in C promoted for their
good counsel to “cheef chancellor” and “kynges iustice” at the end of the first
dream, and it is in this capacity, as powers who invoke at the literal level civil
rather than spiritual sanctions, that they accost Will in London.
Still young and able-bodied, oblivious not only to the threat of old age but
even to the attractions of power that belong to the middle years, Will at the
beginning of this encounter is largely unconscious of life-designs of any kind;
unreflectively he indulges his bodily appetites and spends his time and wit on
“makings” (compositions) about the “lollares of Londone and lewed
ermytes” among whom he lives. For these productions (made, he insists,
under Reason’s tutelage) he is unpopular with his fellow denizens of Comhill,
but to the view of his interrogators Will’s life is indistinguishable from theirs.
The challenge to Will proposed by this inquest is to establish the terms of his
difference from these contemporaries, while at the same time validating his
capacity to represent them. The enterprise he resolves to begin must be
licensed by Reason and Conscience as “leel labor,” in which the rest of his
life’s work becomes a kind of palinode to the “makings” of his idle youth. Yet
it is the civil suspicions attached to Will’s idleness rather than the dangers to
his salvation in his further deferral of penitential reflection that in C invokes
the corrective attention of the authorities. If at the end of the episode Will
once again manages to pass the test to which he is subjected by refiguring his
identity in the terms offered by his challengers, the social significance of his
reprieve is deeply ambiguous, and the “kynde” with which Will’s “kynde
name” associates him remains suspect, transgressive.
Even more striking than C’s temporal resituating of the primary' authorial
self-disclosure early in the narrative sequence and early in Will’s life is its
changed geographical locus, which exacerbates rather than resolves the
“question of authorship.” The surname - which in B was derived anagram-
matically from longe launde, a rural holding transformed into the figurative
Lond of Longvng, the “kynde” place of unsatisfied desire that is the author’s
sole birthright - is rederived in C as an anagram that embodies as part of his
name his urban habitation, London, a locus of impropriety’ that he is here
accused of having chosen in order to evade the bond between man and his
 William I England’s “Kynde Name ” 229
“kynde” rural place. In the C version of his duplicitous identity, Will is a man
“of* “London and opelond bothe,” enigmatically at once urban and rural. His
laboring “lymes” are both verbal and corporeal, and his inheritance and his
reward both are, and are not, of this world (C.5.43—62).
London now becomes the primary and definitive ground of his identity as
author; if not his own native place, it is nevertheless the birthplace of Will’s
authorial enterprise. As the adopted basis for his name, London is at the
literal or historical level the functional equivalent of the figurative rural Lond
of Longyng: the metropolis is the place in the “real world” that is constituted
by, and draws to itself, the boundless desires of Will and his “kynde” for
reward and legitimacy. Because it appears to be an elective rather than
ancestral ground of identity, Will’s prolonged residence in London attracts
the suspicions of Reason and Conscience concerning his “liflode.” Funda­
mental to this encounter is the assumption, which Will apparently shares with
his interrogators, that London is virtually no one’s “proper” place; whatever
aspects of his identity Will derives from this habitation must be pretensions
or disguises, since the commune’s proper work, its collective “liflode,” is
based in rural production.
This urban encounter is superimposed on, and represented by his in­
quisitors as, a time urgently requiring participation in the rural harvest in
the face of a shortage of laborers. Dense as it is with overtones of the Gospel
parables of the harvest and with apocalyptic urgency, it is, in view of the
subsequent resonance of this scene, its literal historical terms that are par­
ticularly arresting - and it is these that send us into contemporary practices of
naming and pseudonymy for further understanding.3'^ At the historical level,
Will is here taken by Reason and Conscience for a fugitive rural laborer,
indistinguishable from the suspect class of ill-defined idlers and poseurs
among whom he dwells. His precariously asserted (and ultimately redefined)
sense of worth derives, it seems, from the satirist’s righteous indignation, yet,
like Lewte later in the Lond of Longyng, Reason and Conscience here reveal
that under the circumstances it is an insufficiently clear distinction to sustain
either Will’s life or his work. To the eye of the civil authorities, Will’s
“makings” make no significant difference in the good order of the world,
and his professed identity is suspiciously fictive. And just as it is under
Lewte’s later scrutiny, the legitimacy of Will’s clerical self-identification is
also brought under question. Despite these crushing liabilities in his self-
defense, however, his accusers release him - surprisingly under his own
recognizance (“For in my conscience y knowe what Crist wolde y wrouhte”).
Exhorted to lead hereafter “the lyif þat is lowable and leele to thy soule,” and
fervently resolving to “bigynne a tyme / That alie tymes of my tyme to profit
shal turne,” Will goes to church to undertake the penitence that all parties
seem to understand is enjoined upon him by this exchange. Knocking his
breast, he falls asleep, only to dream the next vision of the several that
230 Anne Middleton
comprise the rest of the poem. The visionary duration of Will’s life, the
making of the poem that records it, and a life of penitential self-knowledge
through confession are thereby, as in B, rendered synonymous. Yet the literal
and outward mode of this revised life involves no removal of either habita­
tion or habit. To the eye, he is, and remains, a hermit manqué, living a rule of
one, still to all appearances a fugitive from honest toil, and still subject to all
the suspicions attached to this class: the London layabout slides impercept­
ibly into the prophet without honor in his own country, and for the remain­
der of the poem Will is both deserving and undeserving of the scorn he
increasingly attracts. He has chosen the texts of which his life is a sermon,
and while they are as inescapable as his “kynde name,” they are no less
duplicitous in their range of implication.
The scriptural texts that underwrite Will’s determination of his identity as
habitual penitent, and the prophetic status this confers on his insufficiency
and unlikeliness to represent God’s word, have recently been well studied;
these accounts also tend to focus chiefly on the representative force of the
given name.36 But this author has also acquired for narrative purposes a
complicatedly typifying surname - or as Derrida would insist, that which
functions as a surname - and as a “proper” name it both differs from that of
the poet’s father and associates the represented author with a place teeming
with “improper” labors and identities. What is the significance of this move?
What social texts authorize it, and how do they illuminate the form of the
“kynde name” and its deployment as a memory device? How in fact does a
surname function in late fourteenth-century England?

[In the next section, “Names Proper and Improper: Identities for the
Record,” Middleton describes how the practice of having two names, a
given name and an inherited surname, became established in the fourteenth
century, conferring a civil identity7 upon individuals but also loading them
with new liabilities (e.g. tax). The records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 are
full of evasions and enigmatizations of such names (e.g. “John Nameless” in
the letters of John Ball), as the opportunities for making and remaking
identity through self-naming were recognized.]

Authorship, Im provisation, and the Rhetoric o f Presence

The violence, perceived as well as actual, of 1381, together with considerable

interpretive depth in representing a phenomenon that in their explicit
moral pronouncements upon it both Commons and chroniclers profess to
find an inexplicable and sinister breach in nature, testifies to a “crisis of the
proper” in the latter decades of the fourteenth century. Proper names, like
the proprietary rights they represented and regulated, go into a kind of
 William Langland’s “Kynde Name ” 231
liqueficatdon in these documents. One’s name, in effect, becomes one’s own
convention for an identity that coheres around one’s voluntary acts and oath-
bound confederates, rather than around stability of seisin and lineal status: as
an instrument for claiming rights, its “propriety,” the integrity it proclaims,
is less paternal than personal; the unit it stabilizes and defends is not the
holding but the life, and a community restored to self-presence by con-
stitutively “memorial” acts and rituals. Like Langland’s disposition of his
“kynde” name in his poem, these powerful improvisations mark a profoundly
revised account of the individual’s powers to interpret, and to represent, the
“commune.”
The generation surrounding the two long versions of Piers Plowman is filled
with notable enactments of this proposition - that the operative unit of
thought about identity was the life and community as made through the
enacted reclamation of founding texts. It clearly underlies the efforts of
Margery Kempe to form her life in the image of the holy woman; it is
movingly audible in the testimony of the Lollard Thorpe, who analyzes and
rejects the prospect of his recantation in terms of the social example it would
give to, and the fragmented and illegible life it would compose for, those who
trust him. To renounce the beliefs and practices he shares with the commun­
ity of Lollard adherents that had formed him would be to “slay so many
spiritually that I should never deserve to have grace of God to edify his
church, neither myself nor any other life.”37 He would, in effect, be publish­
ing a false and unedifying fictive self that would remain forever untrust­
worthy as an example to others. Those such as Philip Repingdon who have
recanted have become radically and irreversibly unknowable, not only to
either side but even to themselves, because they would not, in Thorpe’s
revealing phrase, “stretch forth their lives” to be fully known as representat­
ive of the texts that ground them. It is in terms like these, of “stretching
forth a life,” I believe, that we should understand Langland’s internal self­
naming as a sustained formal diacritic in his poem. His increasingly full
depiction of his “making” as a life-consuming and life-defining activity,
perpetually running counter to both ecclesiastical and civil dicta for the
orderly disposition of one’s time and effects, and his formation of his name
as that of a kind of parodie landholding, a heritage of self-formation through
desire - a Lond of Longyng in which there is no secure seisin - become a far
less “literary” and conventional practice when set against the simultaneous
imagination of the rebellion as made by “landless men,” a confederation of
John Namelesses.
The social significance of the identity' Langland disposes with his signature
also takes on a different look in the light of these contemporary develop­
ments. It becomes easier to see how a poem in nearly all respects theolog­
ically orthodox could seem ripe for appropriation by both civil and religious
dissenters. These concurrent social texts not only illuminate certain patterns
232 Anne Middleton
in the reception of the poem, however, but open new approaches to Lan-
gland’s literary intentions, suggesting as they do his full awareness, and
increasing assimilation, of the most destabilizing consequences of his own
authorial self-representation. It would be mistaken to associate his complex
gestures of self-naming, and the concept of the self-authorizing integrity of a
life lived in the image of the total scriptural coherence that underwrites it,
solely with dissent, even though our examples have been drawn chiefly from
such texts; contemporary forms of lay piety that are unmistakably orthodox —
indeed the oudook and practices of the devotio moderna generally - are likewise
predicated upon such an idea. What Langland’s self-reference seems rather to
have in common with these late medieval discourses, both orthodox and
dissenting, is a paradoxical skepticism and anxiety about the established
agencies for textual distribution of authority. It is important to avoid at­
tributing a necessarily “progressive” or revolutionary character to these
phenomena: indeed, those who enacted them saw them rather as restorative
of some simpler and more direcdy mediated form of exemplification and
authority.
Orthodox or dissenting, the contemporary discourses to which Langland’s
practice of self-representation has its closest affinities are based on a rhetoric
of presence, on resistance to the independent intelligibility of texts without
reference to their authorship as actions. These late medieval forms of social
and spiritual piety enact a powerfully nostalgic rearguard action on behalf
of ideas of communal and personal integrity disposed locally and face-
to-face rather than from above or outside. They envision individual and
communal life as so permeated by lived scripture that its integrity is wholly
transparent, as St Francis had insisted, “without a gloss.” Like Langland they
speak on behalf of an ethic based on the lived rather than formalized
deployment of authorizing texts, and propose a renegotiation of traditional
relations between textual fixity and human action. If graven images were
profoundly suspect, those that formed spontaneously in the individual mem­
or}' and imagination steeped in direct assimilation of canonical texts of
scripture and the lives of the saints - metonymies or images of equivalence
that suggested themselves to Margery’ Kempe in daily domestic life - were
fundamentally trustworthy, because their syntax of relation was implicit in a
customary’ grammar of living. Inscribing in his poem a name and equivocal
occupation that loosely allied his improvisatory activities with these, Langland
claims for himself and those who undertake to define their own actions
within this terrain an extremely risky social authority’. That such a move
was fully self-conscious I do not doubt. That it assured that he would as author
join the John Namelesses of his age to the memory of posterity is one of the
profound witticisms of historical process he shows every’ sign of having
accepted with equanimity’.
 William Langland’s “Kynde N ame” 233

Conclusion: Self and World as “Nominalist Texts”

I am, finally, arguing here for a different syntax of relation than has
traditionally been proposed between Langland’s formal practices as a poet
and the social actualities and discourses he is often said to reflect or represent.
Most attempts to account for the felt connection between Langland’s con­
ceptually shifting and disturbing procedures of composition and the con­
temporary “world,” whether of ideas or of social actions, represented by his
poem go no further in characterizing this relation than a richly suggestive
homology - at bottom a kind of fallacy of imitative form. His techniques of
composition, or his processes of thought, are often said to mirror various
discontents with, or break-downs of, medieval didactic authority and the
discursive modes characteristically used to promote it: chaotic times or
discredited languages seem to require the semblance of chaos in their repres­
entation.38
Langland’s increasingly circumstantial self-personification through the
construction and mnemonic disposition of his name in his histoire, in its
problematic relation to his growing absorption of a historically specific
level of social referentiality into the discours of his poem, seems to require a
more exacting understanding than the assertion of a resonant cultural
simile.39 Regarded as a highly self-conscious special case of what Lavinia
Griffiths has called his “nominalist” approach to personification, Langland’s
self-naming contains an implicit argument about the constructive nature of
the social improvisations he both depicts and Actively enacts. As she
describes the capacities of Langland’s technique: “The personification trope
allows for some exploration of an abstraction - and of a person. It also allows
for the exploration of the relationship between experience and the words
used to make sense of it, and of the relationship between words and the
fictions they compose.”40 Langland’s practices in characterizing himself as a
named actor draw extraordinary and somewhat unsettling speculative atten­
tion to the ways in which, in life as in art, making sense of one’s world is a
matter of publishing a powerful fiction, and self-discovery or self-revelation a
process of aligning oneself in relation to the distributive narratives of author­
ity. The border of legitimacy between “making,” making known, making
believe, and making up, is always open to question, and it is at these
boundaries that Langland inscribes his authorial name.
In allowing the contemporary world of social fiction-making, exemplified
by the disposition of the proper name and the evasion of status-determina­
tion, to penetrate the discourse of his poem and to dispose the development
of its narrative action, Langland makes a powerful argument about the nature
of such social practices - an argument substantially different from that of his
contemporary Gower about the same phenomena. Such improvisations of
234 Anne Middleton
identity may be disruptive of stable grammatical referentiality (a point Lang-
land makes repeatedly in his own application of grammatical analogy), but
they are also for this very' reason constitutive of all rhetorical discourse,
including his own. For Langland it is these transgressive interventions that
renew rather than decompose cultural meaning. For Gower and Froissart, the
contemporary arguments-in-action of the 1381 rebels were, in the original
sense of the term, barbarous incursions: invasions of bestial nonsense into
the world of intelligible action. For Langland, as for several of the more
perceptive (if still unremittingly hostile) monastic chroniclers such as Wal-
singham, the threat posed by these acts was precisely that they were intelligible,
all too powerfully so. These writers disapproved of the text being written
before their eyes, but they could read it perfectly well - and therein lay its
power. If Walsingham merely registers the forceful legibility of such impro­
visation, Langland foregrounds its consequences by incorporating this way of
making sense of experience into the narrative order of the poem, and into his
construction of authorial identity. Scriptural assimilatio is in their narratives a
malleable activity, the language of discovery and disclosure of both self and
world, and as a vernacular it is in principle available to all, and limitless. The
contemporary circulation of nomina imponentes and the publication of new
identities sanctioned by the traditional representational syntax and semantics
of scriptural citation are constructive forms of social discourse, arguments in
action. Langland identifies such practices as both the tools of his authorial
trade and the means by which his society may “come to itself.” The terms of
his art become the nature of the community: as “commun craftes” they are as
inescapable in sustaining life as breathing or speaking.
Langland’s alignment with the new pieties of the later Middle Ages is
discernible not merely in his aversion to fixed and stable images and methods
of interpretive mediation, where it has usually been seen, but in a positive
practice implicit in this negative tropism: his equally strong insistence on the
first person as the necessary locus of such mediation - on enactment rather
than image as the center of exemplification. Such principles underlie both
Margery’s project and that of William Thorpe, both the Lollard distrust of
graven images in favor of individual and communal identities that were
thought to recreate those of scripture directly, and the noble sponsorship
of eremitical rather than cenobitic forms of regular observance.41 The model
invoked in every case is the reconstructed self in a reconstituted community.
It is in his acknowledgment of the full implications of the “nominalist
text,” and not in explicit doctrinal or political allegiance, that Langland
declares his deepest affinity with what can only to historical retrospection
appear as reformist or heterodox sentiments and practices, expressed in
forms that had not yet fully precipitated their differences into dissenting
and orthodox aspects. It is in his perpetually inadequate yet obsessively
necessary “making” that he best represents the communally as well as
 William Langland’s “Kynde N ame” 235
individually restorative project of salvation history as the confrontation, at
once shameful and exhilarating, of “myself in a mirour.”

Appendix: Signatures in Piers Plowman

I. Note on verso of last leaf of copy of C version, Trinity College Dublin

MS D.4.1 (c.1400):

Memorandum quod Stacy de Rokayle pater willielmi de Langlond qui stacius

fuit generosus & morabatur in Schiptoun vnder whicwode tenens domini le
Spenser in comitatu Oxoniensi qui predictus willielmus fecit librum qui vocatur
Perys ploughman.

To be remembered: that Stacy [that is, Eustace] de Rokayle [was] the father of
William de Langlond; the which Stacy was born and dwelt in Shipton-under-
Wychwood, holding [land] of the lord Despenser in Oxfordshire; the aforesaid
William made the book that is called Piers Plowman.
George Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence fo r Authorship, 26.

II. Internal signatures recognized by Kane {Evidence). Citations are from:

Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1960);
Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson
(London: Athlone Press, 1975);
Piers Plowman: An Edition o f the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).

A-l) Þanne ran repentaunce and reherside his teme

And made wil to wepe watir wiþ his ei3en.
A.5.43—44; B.5.61-62; C.6.1-2

A-2) banne were marchauntis merye; many wepe for joye,

And 3af wille for his writyng wollene cloþis;
For he copiede þus here clause þei couden hym gret mede.
A.8.42-44; cf. B.7.38-39, C.9.41-42:

Thanne were Marchaunt3 murie; manye wepten for joye

And preiseden Piers þe Plowman þat purchaced þis bulle.
B.7.38-39

A-3) A muchel man, me þouhte, lik to myselue,

Com & callide me be my kynde name.
“What art þou,” quaþ I þo, “þat my name knowist?”
“Þat þou wost wel,” quaþ he, “& no wi3t betere.”
236 Anne Middleton
“W ot ich?” quaþ I; “who art þou?” “þou3t,” seide he þanne.

t>ou3t & I þus þre dayes we 3 eden,

Disputing on dowel day aftir oþer,
Ac er we ywar were wiþ wyt gonne we mete.
He was long & lene, lyk to non oþer,
Was no pride on his apparail ne no pouert noþer,
Sad o f his semblaunt & o f a softe speche,
I durste meue no mater to make hym to iangle,
But as I bad þou3t þo be mene betwene,
To putte forþ som purpos to prouen hise wittes.
Þanne þou3t, in þat tyme, seide þis wordis:
“Where þat dowel, & dobet, & dobest beþ in londe,
Here is wil wolde wyte 3if wit couþe hym teche.”
A .9.61-65, 10 7 -18 ; B.8.70-74, 11 7 -2 9 ; C .10.68-72, 11 2 -2 4

Cf. C:
“That wost þou, Wille,” quod he, “and no wyht bettere.”
C.10.71

B-l) = A -l

B-2) = A-3

B-3) “What is charité?” quod I þo; “a childissh þyng,” he seide:

“Where sholde men fynde swich a trend wiþ so fre an herte?

I haue lyued in londe,” quod I, “my name is longe wille,
And fond I neuere fui charité, bifore ne bihynde.

I sei3 neuere swich a man, so me god helpe,

That he ne wolde aske after his, and ouþerwhile coueite
Thyng þat neded hym no3t and nyme it if he my3te.
Clerkes kenne me þat crist is in alie places
Ac I sei3 hym neuere sooþlv but as myself in a Mirour:
Hie in enigmate, tune facie adfaciem.
And so I trowe trewely, by þat men telleþ o f it,
Charité is no3t chaumpions fight ne chaffare as I trowe.”
B. 15.148, 15 1-5 3 , 15 8 -6 4

Cf. C:
“Charité,” quod y tho, “þat is a thyng forsothe
That maistres commenden moche; where may hit be yfounde?
Ich haue yleued in Londone monye longe 3eres
And tonde y neuere, in faith, as freres hit precheth,
Charité, þat chargeth naught, ne chyt, thow me greue hym.
 William Langland's “Kynde Name 237

For thogh me souhte alie þe sektes of sustume and of brethume,

And fynde hym, but figuratyfly, a ferly me thynketh;
Hie in enigmate, tunc fade ad fadem.”
C. 16.284-88, 293-94

C-l) What the montaigne bymeneth and þe merke dale

And þe feld ful of folk y shal 3 0 U fair shewe.
A louely lady of lere in lynnene yclothed
Cam doun fro þe castel and calde me by name
And sayde, “Wille, slepestou? seestow þis peple,
Hou bisy þei ben aboute þe mase?”
C l. 1-6

Cf. A, B:
Com doun fro þat elyf & callide me faire,
And seide “sone, slepist þou?”
A. 1.4-5; B. 1.4-5

C-2) = A-l, B-l

C-3) “That wost þou, Wille,” quod he, “and no wvht bettere.”
C.10.71; cf. A-3, B-2

III. Anagrams and signatory cross-references:

1) And ek þe longe launde þat leccherie hatte,

Leue hym on þi left half a large myle or more,
A .ll.118-19

2) For I was rauysshed n3 t þere; Fortune me fette

And into þe lond of longynge and loue she me brou3 te
And in a Mirour þat hi3 te middelerþe she made me biholde

Couetise of ei3 es conforted me anoon after

And folwed me fourty wvunter and a fifte moore.
B.Í 1.7-9, 46-47; cf.C.l 1.169-73, 194-95

3) “I am vmaginatif,” quod he; “ydel was I neuere

Thou3 I sitte by myself in siknesse ne in helþe.
I haue folwed þee, in feiþ, þise fyue and fourty wynter,
And manye tymes haue meued þee to mynne on þyn ende,
And how fele fernyeres are faren and so fewe to come.”
B.12.1-5

“Y haue folewed the, in fayth, mo then fourty wynter.”

C.14—3
238 Anne Middleton
4) Thus y awakede, woet god, whan y wonede in Cornehull,
Kytte and y in a cote, yclothed as a lollare,
And lytel ylet by, leueth me for sothe,
Amonges lollares of Londone and lewede ermytes,
For y made of tho men as resoun me tauhte.

“Y am to wayke to worche with sykel or with sythe,

And to long, lef me, lowe to stoupe,
To wurche as a werkeman eny while to duyren.”
“Thenne hastow londes to lyue by,” quod Resoun, “or lynage ryche
That fynde the thy fode? For an ydel man þow semest,”

“When y 3 ong was, many 3 er hennes,

My fader and my frendes foende me to scole,

That laboure þat y lerned beste þerwith lyuen y sholde.

In eadem vocacione in qua vocati estis.
And so y leue yn London and opelond bothe.”
C.5.1-5, 23-27, 35-36, 43-44

N otes

1 A. I. Doyle, “Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman,” in Medieval

English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell ed. Gregory
Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 35-48; John A.
Burrow, “The Audience of Piers Plowman,” Anglia 75 (1957): 373—84, reprinted
with corrections and a new postscript in Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 102-16; Anne Middleton, “The Audience and
Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Poetry and Its Literary Background, ed.
David Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 101-23, 147-54.
2 Anne Hudson, “Epilogue: The Legacy of Piers Plowman,” in A Companion to Piers
Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1988), 251-66, provides a succinct account and bibliography of the
influence and afterlife of the poem. Elizabeth Kirk, “Langland’s Plowman and
the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor,” Yearbook of Langland
Studies 2 (1988): 1-21, explains the social circumstances and literary' traditions
within which Langland’s invention of the plowman took on a volatile new
signifying power in this period. On the appropriation of Piers’s name, see Pamela
Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Proceedings o f the British Academy
66 (1980): 179-205; John N. King, “Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman-.
A Tudor Apocalypse,” Modem Philology 73 (1976): 342-53; and Barbara A. John­
son, “From Piers Plowman to Pilgrim's Progress: The Generic and Exegetical Con­
texts of Bunyan’s ‘Similitude of a Dream’,” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1983.
3 See, in addition to the above, David Lawton, “Lollardy and the ‘Piers Plowman’
Tradition,” Modem language Review 76 (1981): 780-93.
 William Langland’s “Kynde N ame” 239
4 The ideological significance of Puttenham’s attribution should not be overlooked.
As David Norbrook points out, the Arte of English Poesie (1589) spoke for a courtly
definition of the function of literature in society (Poetry and Politics in the English
Renaissance [London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1984], ch. 2). Puttenham’s view
of the poem as fundamentally a sarire, and its author’s literary role and lineage as
comparable to those of “Lucilius, Iuuenall and Persius among the Latines,”
contrasts sharply with the Protestant “prophetic” views of it articulated in the
age of Edward VI, particularly by John Bale and Robert Crowley. Both had taken
an exceptional interest in Piers Plowman and the name and historical situation of its
author, and became for later generations the major sources of information (and
misinformation) about these matters. Bale, seeking for internal clues to the
author’s name, hit upon “Robert Langland,” probably deriving the given name
from a scribal error in the first line of a new passus and a new vision: “Thusyrobed
[y robert] in russet y romed aboute” (B. 8.1); Crowley, the first printer of the
poem, apparently owed his information to Bale. See George Kane, Piers Plowman:
The Evidence fo r Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965), 37—45; and King,
“Tudor Apocalypse.” In his introductory summary of the poem, however, Crow­
ley nevertheless refers to the poetic speaker in much of the Vita as Piers rather
than Will, the name Langland gives to his dreamer-persona.
5 For a brief discussion and full bibliography of the “authorship question,” see
Anne Middleton, “Piers Plowman,” Chapter XVIII of A Manual of Writings in Middle
English 1050-1500, gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Acad­
emy of Arts and Sciences, 1986), 7: 224—7, 2429-31. The two complementary
studies that survey the issues and documents and the literary significance of late
medieval authorial self-disclosure are George Kane, Evidencefor Authorship, and The
Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies (London: H. K. Lewis, 1965).
6 This note appears in full in Appendix I. On this and other external attributions of
authorship, see Kane, Evidencefor Authorship, 26-51. For the most recent argument
about the dialect evidence on the poet’s native place, see M. R. Samuels, “Lan-
gland’s Dialect,” Medium Aevum 54 (1985): 232-47. Malcolm Parkes has recently
determined that the Trinity College Dublin manuscript “must have been made in
the first half of the 1380s” and is thus the earliest surviving manuscript of any
version of the poem (cited in George Kane, “The ‘Z Version’ of Piers Plowman,”
Speculum 60 [1985]: 912).
7 The fortunes of the Despenser family - their spectacular rise and as spectacular
fall in royal favor and power - roughly brackets the poet’s lifetime. The chief
magnate adherents of Edward II in the 1320s, they had consolidated their
standing during the Welsh border wars and continued to prosper under the
reign of Edward III. The family’s already declining political fortunes went into
ultimate eclipse with the accession of their long-standing opponents, the house of
Lancaster, in 1399, and with the lack of male heirs after that date; see Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917— )5: 860-7, s. v. Henry
le Despenser (d. 1406), Hugh le Despenser (d. 1265), Hugh le Despenser the
elder, Earl of Winchester (1262-1326), Hugh le Despenser the younger (d. 1326),
and Thomas le Despenser, Earl of Gloucester (1373-1400). As Paul Strohm has
argued for the post-1400 alteration of the “Chaucer tradition,” it may be that
240 Anne Middleton
the death or decline from social power of Langland’s immediate circle of readers
and kindred intellects - and possibly patrons - by the mid-1380s has as much to
do with the pattern of transmission and reception of the poem as changing
literary fashions per se (“Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrow­
ing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition’,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer A [1982]: 3-32).
8 Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravortv Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), lxxxiv.
9 These two conceptions of the limits of the text tend to correlate closely with two
opposed views of textual criticism, a long-standing debate in medieval literary
studies but articulated anew in this generation chiefly in disputes over Kane and
Donaldson’s landmark editions of Piers Plowman (see Appendix II). The latter
position, in which meaning is a matter of authorial design and reception is a
distinct and separable phenomenon, is associated with Kane and Donaldson’s
radically Lachmannian enterprise of reconstructing the authorial text; the for­
mer, loosely Bedierist, argues both the quixotic nature of this project given
medieval circumstances of textual reproduction, and its errors of principle in the
face of medieval attitudes to authorial “propriety” in the work. See Anne
Hudson, “Middle English,” in Editing Medieval Texts, ed. A. G. Rigg (New
York: Garland, 1977), 42, 44; and Barry Windeatt, ‘The Scribes as Chaucer’s
Early Critics,” Studies in the Age o f Chaucer I (1979): 119-42. While Kane and
Donaldson would probably not dispute the claim that meaning is in part a social
construction, they differ from their critics about how this construction is to be
represented in the edited text and what reconstruction of the text recovers.
This debate has supplanted the “authorship controversy” as the locus of the
most fundamental recent discussion of what counts as historical interpretation
of this poem, or of medieval poems generally. Critics on all sides of this editorial
controversy have lately begun to acknowledge that what is at stake in their
disagreement is ultimately nothing less than the privileging of the subject, as well
as of the “literary,” a central issue of postmodern literary theory; see Lee W.
Patterson, “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-
Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” in Textual Criticism and
Uterary Interpretation, ed. Jerome, J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 55-91; and Kane, “The Text,” in Companion to Piers Plowman, ed.
Alford, 175-200.
10 Judson Allen, “Langland’s Reading and Writing: Detractor and the Pardon Pasus,”
Speculum 59 (1984): 359; John A. Alford, “The Role of the Quotations in Piers
Plowman,” Speculum 52 (1977): 99.
11 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980).
12 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New' York: Doubleday, 1954), 231.
13 R. W. Chambers, “Robert or William Langland?,” ljondon Medieval Studies 1 (1948,
for 1939): 430-62; Kane, Evidence for Authorship and Autobiographical Fallacy. On
the genre-specificity of this practice in medieval vernacular writing - its associa­
tion with romance, as distinct from chanson de geste, lai, and fabliau - see David F.
Huit, Sef-P'u/fiHing Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First ‘Roman de la Rose"
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 30-3.
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 241
14 Rousseau; see Derrida, Of Grammatology, 142. On the pervasive cultural practice
of reappropriating authoritative discourses so as to shift their significance, see
Michel de Certeau, The Practice o f Evetyday Ufe (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), esp. 24-8. This practice, which I have
here (somewhat unsatisfactorily) called borrowing, Certeau calls “wigging” {la
perruque), and he emphasizes that this “art of diversion” does not permanently
alienate anything of value from the ordinary authoritative use of the discourse
but creates —on official time, so to speak - proliferating unofficial meanings. It
is Certeau’s general sense of this appropriation as an “art of diversion” that
informs my understanding of Langland’s signature practices. For an extended
fourteenth-century example that offers a broad analogy to Langland’s “diver­
sion” of the proper, see below, 70-3.
15 See Huit, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, 25-64. Perhaps the most complete and helpful
formal classification of techniques of medieval literary signature to date, com­
paring methods used in the verbal and visual arts, nevertheless implies that each
of these devices has the same attributive purpose; see Erik S. Kooper, “Art and
Signature and the Art of the Signature,” in Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the
Third Congress of the International Courtly Uterature Society, ed. Glyn S. Burgess
(Liverpool: Cairns, 1981), 223-32. Evidence from the visual and plastic arts in
late medieval and early modern Europe, however, suggests that signatures in
these media have at most a publicizing rather than authenticating function.
Contracts for specific commissions by painters or sculptors - for example, of
altarpieces - often specified which parts of the work the master must execute
himself in order to fulfill the terms of payment; see Michael Baxandall, Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972),
3-14, and his The Umewood Sculptors o f Renaissance Germany (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1980), 102-6. Where they were considered significant in
the plastic arts, guarantees of the “maker’s hand” were included in the terms of
production, not merely declared after the fact by the object.
16 Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le prince (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965),
59-67.
17 Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratie Culture in England\ France
and Burgundy at the End o f the Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1981), 97.
18 On these developments, see Vale, War and Chivalry, 95-99, 105, 110, 114, and
147-51; Philippe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du moyen âge: études sur les
armées des rois de France, 1337—1494 (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 675— 6.
19 Vale, p. 97. As both Vale and Poirion observe, the device chosen, as illustrated in
the Italian impresa, which derives from this personal chivalric badge, frequendy
involved nominal wordplay, whether visual, as in a rebus, or the verbal duplicity
of a pun or a common noun enclosed within the proper name; frequendy these
compacted devices alluded cryptically to a renowned incident or theme in its
bearer’s life - an event or sentiment as often amatory as martial. The badge thus
devised made an event known to familiars the sign of the knight’s public identity,
while its cryptic form continued to differentiate the knight’s “friends,” who
would know the story7of the badge, from those to whom it was simply the sign
of the knight and those of his livery. The device thus simultaneously proclaimed
242 Anne Middleton
and occulted identity, evoking in effect two different levels or arts of reading:
one peculiar to the bearer’s adherents, the other defining the common beholder
as outside the circle of privileged interpretation.
The distinction between the arms of war and the arms of peace is set out with
particular clarity in the will of the Black Prince; see F. H. Cripps-Day, A History of
the Tournament in England and France (London, B. Quaritch 1918), 63; Vale, War
and Chivalry, 90, 97.
20 This formulation is Poirion’s (63). As Vale notes, “when badges of the kind
worn in the tournament were adopted in warfare, the distinction between ‘arms
of peace’ and ‘arms of war’ lapsed” (98). In other words, when the “affective
theme” compacted in the personal badge adopted for purposes of exercise and
ceremonial differentiation also supplants the familial coat of arms as the “pub­
lished text” of the knight’s identity’ in battle, an idealized life-story, cryptically
encoded in the device, replaces lineage as the primary referent of the knight’s
self-identification at war, and his followers are now implicitly defined not
necessarily as hereditary adherents of his family, but as those who know and
adopt as their own what the device represents. They are the fit readers of the
published story of his identity.
¿1 The familiar story of the foundation of the Order of the Garter, explicating its
motto boni soit qui mal y pense (may the shame be his who thinks evil of it),
explains how this intimate object came to be elevated by royal fiat from a token
suggesting private duplicity and compromised sexual honor to a publishable
collective symbol of loyalty’ and honor. Although this explanatory anecdote is
first related in the sixteenth century by Polydore Vergil, scholars have recently
argued for its authenticity; see A. G. Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy, a New
Look,” Speculum 63 (1988): 601; and Margaret Galway, “Joan of Kent and the
Order of the Garter,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal 1-2 (1947-50):
13-50. Implicit in this story’ is a radically “nominalistic” notion of the power of
such an adopted symbol: the badge is by design unintelligible to anyone who does
not already know the anecdote of its establishment. The emblematic object has
been shifted from its socially customary legibility and transplanted, “raised,” into
another sphere of meaning by a process that does not so much presuppose as
confect a new bond of social knowledge and intimacy. Authorial signatures
likewise play with this confection of intimacy with the poet, and likewise under­
score the interpreter’s share, as an initiated reader, in completing their meaning.
22 For the term “pointing,” see J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1971), 69-78. Possibly adopted from the vocabulary' of
the physical presentation and ornamentation of a manuscript text, and denoting
as well the rhetorical elaboration of a discourse, the verb “point” in fourteenth-
century’ English seems to have meant, as Burrow analyzes its use, not only “to
describe in detail” but to indicate thereby a virtual scale of narration, the
proprieties of ornamentation and amplitude.
23 I borrow the term “occultation” from a highly self-conscious and mannered
textual interpreter, almost an exact contemporary’ of Langland, John Ergome or
Erghome, who wrote, some time between 1364 and 1373, an extensive Latin
commentary on the so-called Bridlington Prophecies - and may have written the
 William Langland's “Kynde N ame” 243
prophecies themselves as well; see Michael J. Curley, “The Cloak of Anonymity
and the Prophecy o f John of Bridlington,” Modem Philology 11 (1980): 361-9, who
presents the arguments for and against Ergome’s authorship of the prophecies;
and Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy,” 596-613, who argues against the
attribution.
24 Canterbury Tales VII, 2386 and 2383, in The Works o f Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N.
Robinson, 2nd. edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). See Vale on the armorial
display and chivalric rituals observed at the memorial requiem for Bertrand du
Guesclin in the abbey church of St Denis on 7 May 1389, several years after his
death (92).
25 The order of parts in Thomas Usk’s Testament o f Love, which survives only in a
somewhat garbled early printing, could be reconstructed when it was discovered
that the head letters of its sections spelled out an acrostic, margaret of vertw haue
mercy on thin usk; see the edition of this work in The Complete Works of Chaucer, ed.
W. W. Skeat, vol. 7 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897). Robert of Basevom’s
Forma Praedicandi is likewise articulated by sections whose head letters spell his
name; see Th.-M. Charland, Artes Praedicandi: contribution a l'histoire de la rhetorique
au moyen âge (Paris: J. Vrin, 1936), 81. Nicholas Trivet, in his Annales, distributes
an anagrammatic signature over 56 quarto leaves in the section head letters; see
Nicholai Triveti, Annales, ed. Thomas Hog (London: English Historical Society,
1845), xvii. (I owe this reference to Michael J. Curley.)
26 If, as I have argued elsewhere, the ultimate ground of signification is conceived
by Langland to be transcendent - divine “menyng” - it is nevertheless imagined
as sustained by a deity understood in terms of magnified personhood and
intentionality, a God from whom emanates not merely the mathematical har­
mony of the cosmos, but the chief language of mediation between the divine and
human, that of historical process, through which intentionality as well as abstract
design may most reliably be grasped as “read” and “heard.” See “Two Infinites:
Grammatical Metaphor in Piers Plowman,” ELH 39 (1972): 169-88.
27 See Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1976), 13-15, on the Ellesmere and “Hoccleve”
portraits of Chaucer; for the “Harvard” portrait, see the frontispiece to The
Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Robinson. David F. Huit reproduces a similar
portrait of the author of the Roman de la Rose gesturing toward himself with
one hand, like Chaucer in the “Harvard” portrait, while with the other he points
to the book that lies before him on his writing desk; see Self-Fulfilling Prophecies,
% 5, p. 83. [...]
28 For an argument that it is this kind of reading that was largely lost soon after
1400, see my essay “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” 119-20. [...]
29 OED, s.v. “land,” sb., 1.7.
30 “Langland Nel Me^yo del Camming
31 On the age of 33 as the “perfect stature” of the resurrected body, see Augustine
Civ. Dei 22.15, in The City o f God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 1065-6.
32 The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1982), 248-87.
244 Anne Middleton
33 “Langland’s Reading and Writing,” 357.
34 The major points of both Reason’s and Conscience’s inquiry, and the form of
Will’s replies, follow closely the provisions of the Second Statute of Laborers of
1388; see Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810), 2:56—9. The details of this
resemblance warrant separate treatment, which I expect to provide in the near
future. [See now “Acts of vagrancy: The C version ‘Autobiography’ and the
Statute of 1388,” in Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (eds.), Written
Work: ¡England, Ubor, and Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997), pp. 208-317.]
35 The present argument does not deny the structural importance assigned to the
scene by its rich scriptural figuration. The “hote heruest” in which it takes place
glances back at the tillers of the field in the initial vision of the Prologue, and
forward to both the agrarian labors of Piers’s transformed and domesticated
pilgrimage and the final vision of a world of agrarian production, again under
Piers’s governance, under the apocalyptic threat of Antichrist’s ultimate assault.
The plowman’s role as the ideal center of this spiritual enterprise, as Eli2 abeth
Kirk has recendy shown, is, however, by no means a traditional representation
(see “Langland’s Plowman”), and Will’s pretensions to a place within this rich
metaphoric rural economy are similarly ambiguous.
The anomalies of Will’s position are most trenchandy figured in scriptural
parables, not only those that implicidy govern the figurative structure of the
scene, such as the parable of the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16), and those Will
invokes explicidy in his own defense (Matt. 13:44 and Luke 15:10; cf. C.5.94—
100), but those he seems unwittingly to reenact. The most telling of these, the
parable of the dishonest steward (Luke 16:1-13), traditionally one of the most
difficult of the parables to render as ethical or eschatological example, pro­
foundly complicates Will’s self-representation. Commanded to specify by what
craft he means to “betere... þat bylyue the fynden” (improve the lot of those
that provide you with the means to sustain life), Will’s swift disavowal of the
option of manual labor (C.5.23-5) echoes the desperate - and morally proble­
matic - resourcefulness of the dishonest steward discovered squandering his
lord’s property and facing dismissal: to dig I am unable, to beg I am ashamed; “I
am resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may
receive me into their houses” (Luke 16:3-4; cf. C.5.22-9). The sense of his own
social status that forecloses agrarian labor simultaneously opens the route of
creative bookkeeping as a means of rectification, transforming continued chi­
canery into the higher prudence.
36 See Richard K. Emmerson, “The Prophetic, The Apocalyptic, and the Study of
Medieval Literature,” in Poetic Prophecy in Western Uterature, ed. Jan Wojcik and
Raymond-Jean Frontain (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press;
London and Toronto: Associated University’ Presses, 1984), 40-54; Robert
Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse: Learned and Popular Eschatology in
Piers Plowmanf in The Popular IJterature of Medieval England, Tennessee Studies in
Literature 28 (Knoxville: University’ of Tennessee Press, 1985), 194—236. John
M. Bowers, in The Crisis of Will in “Piers Plowman” (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1985), gives an extensive and useful account of the
 William Langland's “Kynde Name ” 245
intersection of the biographical and didactic designs of the narrative, but he
devotes his attention to the given name Will as the locus of enigmatic identity
and does not examine the intertextualities of the authorial surname. [...]
37 Thorpe’s testimony in 1407 before Archbishop Arundel - a text known to More,
Bale, and Foxe - is printed in part by Anne Hudson, Selections from English
Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 29-33, and
in full, in a fitfully modernized English from an early print (Short Title Catalogue
24045), by A. W. Pollard, Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse (London, 1903),
97-174.
38 Among the scholars and critics who have seen Langland’s procedures as a mirror
of his discontents with the formal or social discourses that constitute his artistic
means are Morton W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 34; Charles Muscatine,
Poetry and Crisis in the Age o f Chaucer (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1972), 71—110; Mary Carruthers, The Search for St. Truth (Evanston:
Northwestern University’ Press, 1973), 11, 171-2; Martin, The Field and the Tower,
10-14.
David Aers, in Chaucer, I England, and the Creative Imagination (London and
Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), proposes a more active and inten­
tional relation than these broad homologies between Langland’s methods and
contemporary dissent, but the dynamics of the exchange he proposes are
problematic. It is difficult to see from what source the imagination in such
instances, whether individual or collective, might derive the penetrating freedom
of vision that it counterposes to orthodox or established practices, to understand
by what means it is sustained, from what sources it takes voice, or - as in the
case of Langland - why it is so often rewarded with social approval within the
very discourses to which it is in sentiment opposed. The possible middle term in
such a relation, namely oppositional practices which themselves have a substan­
tial social history and a richly allusive (and elusive) language of word and gesture
that is everywhere parasitic upon, and renewed by, those that nominally support
“official” ideology, requires more examination.
39 Griffiths, Personification, adapts this distinction between story’ and discourse from
Benveniste as discussed by Todorov (8). She suggests that Langland’s techniques
of personification are distinguished by the intensity and diversity of the
exchanges between these two levels of organization: his mercurial willingness
to collapse a nascent event back into the discursive term from which it arose,
and his quickness at the procedure more frequently associated with personifica­
tion-allegory, the generation of expository distinctions from narrative events.
40 Personification, 63.
41 See W. R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later
Medieval England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 27-50; J. Anthony
Tuck, “Carthusian Monks and Lollard Knights: Religious Attitudes at the Court
of Richard II,” in Reconstructing Chaucer. Studies in the Age o f Chaucer, Proceedings, No.
1, 1984, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, Tenn.: The New
Chaucer Society, 1985), 149-61.
 9
Historical Criticism and the Claims
o f Humanism
L ee P a t t e r s o n

The previous chapter has argued that the critical impasse between New
Criticism and Exegetics that continues, in a variety of refigured forms, to
dominate Chaucer criticism finds its source in the ideological struggles of the
nineteenth century. This is a fact that might lead us to conclude that the dead
hand of the past must simply be thrown off, that a new start must be
definitively made. But in revealing the conditioning power of the historical
moment, this account has sought to demonstrate just how inescapably
political criticism always is. To be sure, this is not a recognition that either
literary criticism in general or Medieval Studies in particular finds easy to
make. On the contrary, criticism has habitually understood itself as an activity
engendered simply by its object of study, a form of knowledge brought into
being by the need to know about an entity called literature. But as recent
theory has righdy insisted, literature as a specific object of study is in fact
constituted by the institution of criticism itself, despite the secondary and
dependent posture it assumes.1 There is no inherent, ahistorical essence that
marks one written document as literary and another as nonliterary; literari­
ness, as a special quality possessed by a certain category of writing, is a self-
justifying idea generated by a criticism that seeks to mystify7its own grounding
within social institutions that carry an undeniably political valence. The
refusal of criticism to acknowledge this fact, and its counterclaim that it is
called into being by an object that exists wholly apart from itself, is simply an
effect of its reluctance to reflect upon the political nature of its authority.2
And nowhere is this reluctance more powerfully in force than in a Medieval
Studies heavily endowed with the ostensibly value-free procedures and mat­
erials of objectivist scholarship.
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 247
The emptiness of this claim to objectivity should by now be abundandy
clear. In endowing the observer with an ability to step outside his historical
situation that it must necessarily deny to the object he scrutinizes, objecdvist
methodology is self-condemned to an irresolvable self-contradiction. More­
over, it must ignore the correlative fact that the objects with which the human
sciences deal can never be wholly other from the interpreting self over against
which they stand; on the contrary, they are themselves constituted by means
of the very subjectivity that characterizes the interpreter.3 Rather than a
dangerous intruder that must not be allowed to contaminate the procedures
of historical research, subjectivity is in fact the condition of all understanding:
if texts are to be understood at all they must be capable of being taken up into
consciousness and rendered part of the subject. And as Heidegger long ago
said, in a classic statement worthy of repetition,

If, when one is engaged in a particular kind of interpretation, in the sense of

exact textual interpretation, one likes to appeal to what “stands there,” then
one finds that what “stands there” is in the first instance nothing other than the
obvious undiscussed assumption of the person who does the interpreting.4

We have seen how the power of undiscussed political assumptions is writ

large in the history of Chaucer studies; clearly it is past time for them to
become an acknowledged part of the interpretive activity itself.
The extent to which political values operate even at the microlevel of
historicist methodology - which is, after all, the level at which most literary
scholars lead their professional lives - can be made clear by returning to the
vexed question of anachronism. Since the governing assumption of all
historical criticism is that a text can be understood only in terms of some
larger context, it is often assumed that the task of the literary historian is to
reconstruct that context in all its detail in order to arrive at a valid (i.e.
historically authentic) interpretation. Historical context is thought to function
as a court of interpretive appeal, while interpretations that slight it are
considered - at least within Medieval Studies - to be by definition illegiti­
mate.5 The theoretical assumptions that underwrite these opinions have been
most fully articulated by E. D. Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation, a book that
has been subjected to a series of withering attacks in recent years and yet
whose arguments remain the theoretical lingua franca of historical scholar­
ship. While acknowledging that “the text itse lf... must always be the final
authority,” Hirsch asserts that “the interpreter should make an effort to go
beyond his text whenever possible” in order to collect “extrinsic data” with
which to “verify” his interpretation. It is only by correcting his subjective
understanding of the text by reference to an objective historical context that
the interpreter can avoid “a vicious circularity.”6 But in fact the knowledge we
gain from sources other than the text, however essential to our understand­
248 Ijee Patterson
ing, is no more objective, and therefore of no greater authority, than that
provided by the text itself. The appeal to “history” so commonly made in
current critical discourses of all varieties is necessarily always to a reconstruc­
tion fabricated according to processes of interpretation that are identical to
those applied to the “not-history” of the literary text. Whether we rely upon
previous texts, social and political formations, or a period consciousness, we
are turning not to “extrinsic data,” in the sense of something instandy
apprehensible and self-evidendy meaningful, but rather to a mass of material,
almost all of it textual, that requires interpretation before it can enter into the
process of historical understanding. Indeed, however much we may be
committed to the idea of original meaning, we must finally acknowledge
that, in every way that counts, “original meaning” is indistinguishable from
“meaning to us.” And the reason it is indistinguishable is that the instrument
to which we have recourse in order to draw that distinction - “history ” -
stands itself within the very interpretive process it is being called upon to
judge.
There is, in short, no such thing as an objectively determined, self-evident,
original context that can reveal the original meaning of the text. And a
criticism that conceives of its task as being the construction of such a context
in order to validate interpretation inevitably if implicidy adopts a political
stance vis-à-vis the nature of social reality. For the assumption that history can
provide an objective norm of judgment set over against a subjectively known
text carries with it a correlative assumption about relative degrees of com­
plexity. Since it serves as a privileged norm of objectivity, history' must also be
assigned a clarity' and straightforwardness - even, as we have seen in the case
of Exegetics, a uniformity - that can then function to elicit a corresponding
clarity' from an otherwise enigmatic text. Knowing what history means, we
know what the text means. Established as an interpretive grid, this inevitably
oversimplified history thus serves to stigmatize discordant textual elements as
interpretive errors, modern subjectivities to be put down to a failure of
historical knowledge, what one medievalist has recendy characterized as
“often pleasant but ultimately limiting anachronism [s].” As in the realm of
politics, the effect of this kind of historiographical totalization is to annul
opposition. Not only is the possibility that a text might stand against the
cultural hegemony of its historical moment rendered improbable, but the
historical moment itself (and especially if it is the Middle Ages) is endowed
with a monolithic uniformity that effaces the contradictions and disruptions
that made, and can continue to make, social change possible. In sum, then,
the methodological assumption that historical context can produce interpret­
ive correctness inevitably serves to stigmatize the discordant, the variant, and
the deviant as incorrect - as, in effect, nonexistent. Social incongruities, like
textual discontinuities, are treated as mistakes that arise from error, infrac­
tions that could not (or should not) have happened.
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 249
Rather than conceive of history as a completed product capable of being
examined by a detached observer, the alternative is instead to recognize that
the unfinished nature of the historical process, however disabling to the quest
for methodological correctness, endows the critic’s activity with historical
consequence: the past we reconstruct will shape the future we must live.
Nowhere has this recognition been more acutely sustained than in Marxist
historicism. In a world and a profession that persistently seeks to suppress the
political, Marxist criticism has traditionally been - and remains - the most
tenacious voice to insist upon its inescapability. It is also a voice that has rarely
been heard in Chaucer criticism, or in Medieval Studies generally, where
historicism has assumed a habitually conservative posture.8 In opposition to
the harmonious cultural unities promoted by an idealist Geistesgeschichte - what
Benjamin pungendy called “the phantasmagoria of ‘cultural history,’ in which
the bourgeoisie savors its false consciousness to the last”9 - Marxism defines
history as a continual class struggle impelled forward by the instabilities of its
own contradictions. And instead of the methodologism and empiricism that
foreclose theoretical reflection on the historiographical practice of history,
Marxism diligendy, even relendessly, theorizes the problematic of historical-
textual relations. Whatever limitations may impede its own theoretical pro­
gram, and they are major ones, Marxist thought lays bare essential questions
that all historicist thinking must confront. Moreover, and most important,
Marxism refuses to allow the fascinated gaze of the aesthete or the self­
absorptions of the scholar to evade the gross and painful social inequalities
that make such pleasures possible. “There is no document of civilization which
is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” to cite Benjamin again; “The
mansion of culture is built on dogshit” is Brecht’s bitter version of the same
truth.10 For all these reasons, then, Marxism commands our attention.
But there are difficulties that must be confronted at the outset. Most
centrally at issue is the concept of “totality,” the importance of which was
vigorously proclaimed in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923),
the founding document of Western Marxism:

It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that

constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought,
but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive
supremacy of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which
Marx took over from Hegel and brilliandy transformed into the foundations of
a wholly new science__ Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue
of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society', but above all
because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the hearer of the principle
of revolution in science.11

The revolutionary force of totality derives from its opposition to capitalist

reification. Relendessly commodifying value, capitalism shatters the
250 Lee Patterson
wholeness of life into atomistic particulars, not only fragmenting the indivi­
dual’s lived experience but, more grievously, occluding his understanding.
The knowledge of totality thus provides the necessary counterawareness of
the individual’s place in history, a history understood both synchronically,
as the current social whole, and diachronically, as the unfolding development
of the historical process. In effect, the total is the Real, a knowledge of which
is the sine qua non for revolutionary praxis; as Lukács says, “Only in this
context, which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical
process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to
become knowledge of reality.”12 Moreover, the very concern for a totalized
understanding witnesses to the desire for an authentic totality, an impulse that
however utopianist is nonetheless a necessary precondition for revolutionary
action.
Given its Hegelian heritage, however, it is not surprising that the Marxist
concept of totality suffers from shortcomings similar to those that afflict the
idealist Geistesgeschichte to which it is opposed. For one thing, Marxist totaliza­
tion inevitably subordinates local and contingent actions to the historical
character of the whole; and for another, it endows the critic’s knowledge of
the totality with the capacity to predetermine the historical context that brings
the cultural object into being and that consequendy governs its interpretation.
Indeed, for all its rejection of positivism’s fetishizing of the facts, the priority
of the idea of totality has traditionally directed Marxist hermeneutics toward
interpretive procedures that are similarly preemptive. The text serves not as
the source of the historian’s knowledge but merely as an occasion for its
deployment. The interpreter possesses a knowledge of the Real (apparendy
derived from wholly extratextual sources) with which he will unmask the
evasions and repressions that empower the text; he can say that which the
text must always silence because he already knows that which the text refuses
to (but, from another angle, must inevitably) say.13 Paradoxically but pre­
dictably, then, the historicism of the left comes round to meet that of the
right: history (the Marxist Real, the posidvist context) tyrannizes the text and
constrains its meanings within predetermined limits.
These are serious debilities, and cannot be set aside as simply ungenerous
misinterpretations; indeed, they typically constitute the central topics of
Marxist theorizing itself, which consists largely of efforts to avoid the reduct­
iveness of its own premises by finding the outer limit to which Marxism can
be elaborated and revised without ceasing to be Marxism altogether. By
tracing out this process in two major restatements of Marxist critical thought
- Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Raymond Williams’s Marxism
and IJterature - I hope to illuminate both the powers and limitations of theory
per se when applied to the problem of historical understanding. Specifically, I
wish to argue that historical criticism must abandon the hope of any theoret­
ical foundation and come to rest instead upon its own historically contingent
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 251
moment, and upon convictions that find their final support within experi­
ence. While this may indeed seem a distressingly unstable basis for historical
knowledge, I would ask the reader to reflect upon the possibilities of any
other. Moreover, it is a foundation that is bracketed or set aside only at our
peril. In the last part of this chapter I wish to discuss the innovative
development within Renaissance studies known as the New Historicism, in
part because it offers powerful lessons from which Medieval Studies could
benefit, but in part because it suggests the vulnerabilities that trouble even the
most theoretically aware critical formations when they allow a fear of dog­
matism to subvert their deepest political instincts.

II

The project of The Political Unconscious is to define what Jameson calls a

“totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understanding,”14 and its remarkable
force derives not just from the power and flexibility of Jameson's mind but
from his desire to locate his interpretive activity within the text itself:

Rightly or wrongly, a totalizing criticism has been felt to be transcendent in the

bad sense, or in other words to make appeal, for its interpretive content, to
spheres and levels outside the text proper__ [But] it can be argued that this
type of interpretation, while containing a transcendent moment, foresees that
moment as merely provisionally extrinsic, and requires for its completion a
movement to the point at which that apparendy external content (political
attitudes, ideological materials, juridical categories, the raw materials of history,
the economic processes) is then at length drawn back within the process of
reading, (p. 57; italics in the original)

Jameson is here setting himself in opposition to the kind of upside-down

Platonism typical of certain forms of Marxist literary theory, in which the
epiphenomenal literary text becomes merely an imitation of an imitation of
the Real: first the historical real, then its signification as ideology, and then the
literary text, marked by its historical matrix but unable itself to understand that
history. According to Terry Eagleton, whose Criticism and Ideology espouses this
position, literature has “history as its object” but only “in the last instance,
[and] in ways apparent not to the text but to criticism.”15 Jameson, on the
contrary, wants to make literature itself, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “the
organon of history.” If it is true that history’ produces literature - and, after all,
what else could? - it is also true that literature is capable of understanding the
conditions of its own production. Yet this principle, in the course of Jam e­
son’s articulation of it, becomes progressively more elusive.
Jameson establishes a three-stage process of totalization designed to move
from text to context.16 The first step is to read the text as “a socially symbolic
252 Ijee Patterson
act,” which means to read it as “an ideological act. . . with the function of
inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradic­
tions” (p. 79). In effect, the text is being defined here as a form of false
consciousness, a means for evading the dilemmas of a radically unstable
social existence. Yet this is not where Jameson wants to rest, with the text
as an epiphenomenal instance of a more real history. Hence he insists that
this type of interpretation “is more satisfactorily grasped as the rewriting of
the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting
or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext, it being always
understood that that ‘subtext’ is not immediately present as such, not some
commonsense external reality, nor even the conventional narratives of history
manuals, but rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact” (p. 81).
And Jameson goes on to offer a powerful but finally evasive account of what
he righdy calls the paradox of textual—historical relations:

The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context
in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its
measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation. The whole
paradox of what we have here called the subtext may be summed up in this,
that the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time, brings into
being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a
reaction, (pp. 81-2)

Ontologically the effect of the absent cause of history, the text enjoys a
heuristic function that endows it with an anteriority that signals not causality
itself but simply the illusion - “as though for the first time” - of causality.
Given Jameson’s alertness to the dangers that beset his project, it is all the
more telling that as his argument unfolds the text is not finally able to resist
the totalizing pressures of a Marxist-defined history. This becomes unavoid­
ably clear when he describes how the second and third stages of interpreta­
tion move out from the initial textual analysis into ever-widening horizons.
The second stage locates the text within the binarism of class struggle, which
requires the critic to determine whether the relation of the text to the
hegemonic ideology’ of its historical moment is legitimizing or antagonistic.
And the third stage locates both the text and the discursive formation of
which it is a part on the diachronic axis of universal history as a sequence of
modes of production (a static paradigm that Jameson seeks to enliven by
substituting for its traditional economism the more inclusive notion of
“perpetual cultural revolution” [p. 97]). In effect, both of these analyses are
ways of passing Marxist judgment upon the text, of determining whether it
contributes to the coming of Freedom or to the continued reign of Necessity.
The totalizing presumption that underwrites Jameson’s theoretical project
is, as he puts it with admirable clarity, that “no working model of the
functioning of language, the nature of communication or of the speech act,
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 253
and the dynamics of formal and stylistic change is conceivable which does
not imply a whole philosophy of history” (p. 59). To understand anything
presupposes an understanding of everything. And given the exhaustion of
both Christian Geschichtestheologie and of the liberal progressivism of a heroic
bourgeoisie, the only viable philosophy of history remains Marxism. “My
position here,” Jameson thus states, “is that only Marxism offers a philo­
sophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of
historicism” (p. 19). Only Marxism can provide interpretive categories able to
reveal the coherence of past and present, to make visible the totality; hence it
provides the “ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary
and cultural texts” (p. 75).
It is the word “ultimate” (rather than Jameson’s emphasized semantic) that
raises the crucial issue. The Marxist philosophy of history - as both a
synchronic analysis of class struggle and a diachronic account of the sequence
of modes of production - is not in fact where textual analysis arrives, despite
Jameson’s carefully articulated three stages; on the contrary, it is where it
begins. In reality the lines of interpretive force run from the outside in, from
the largest to the smallest; and this collapse of the three expanding horizons
into one fatally compromises the effort at mediation. The result is a herme­
neutic as relentlessly preemptive as Exegetics, a comparison that Jameson
himself solicits with his respectful invocation of the medieval fourfold
method as an analogue to Marxist interpretation (pp. 29-33). For him the
Marxist hermeneutic is

a vast interpretive allegory' in which a sequence of historical events or texts and

artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more “funda­
mental” narrative, or a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or
figurai content of the first sequence of empirical materials, (p. 28)1

Quite apart from the prescriptive quality of this hermeneutic, the insertion of
individual items (whether “historical events or texts and artifacts”) into the
totality7 inevitably reduces them to simply instances of something far larger
than themselves: this is a historicism that effaces the very object it seeks to
recover. As Clifford Geertz puts it, “Either [man] dissolves, without residue,
into his time and place, a child and a perfect captive of his age, or he becomes
a conscripted soldier in a vast Tolstoian army, engulfed in one or another of
the terrible historical determinisms with which we have been plagued from
Hegel forward.”18
The central, unconditional claim of Marxist thought is, in Marx’s own
famous words, that “the mode of production of material life conditions the
social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the conscious­
ness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary', their social
being that determines their consciousness.”19 In the last analysis, this
254 Ijee Patterson
assertion must be decisive for all modes of thought that wish to designate
themselves as Marxist. Yet the inescapable effect of thus privileging the
material is to devalue the cultural: however finely reticulated the lines of
force, they can ultimately run in only one direction, entailing both the
subordination of the text to a historical context and its reduction to a mere
attestation of the material forces that have brought it into being and shaped
its nature.

Ill

If the root cause of this dilemma is the original and unequal distinction
between material base and cultural superstructure, then a way out can be
found only by its abolition. But then must not dialectical materialism itself be
sacrificed, forcing us back into an idealist Geistesgeschichte that suppresses the
political by ignoring the material conditions of life in .favor of the priority of
consciousness? Contemporary criticism has provided two responses to this
question. One, the cultural materialism defined by Raymond Williams, expli-
cidy affirms its Marxist affiliations, while the other, deriving ultimately from
the discourse analysis of Michel Foucault and exemplified in the work of the
self-designated New Historicists, veers away from Marxism while nonetheless
locating political values at the center of its interpretive practice. What most
powerfully enables these two revisionary movements is their common accept­
ance of the linguistic turn in contemporary' thought. Alert to the gap between
the verbal and the material that traditional Marxism finds itself unable to
negotiate, these critical formations propose analogous but finally significantly
different solutions to the paradox of textual—historical relations.
Williams starts by arguing that certain brands of Marxism wrongly hypo-
stasize the capitalist distinction between mental and physical labor by desig­
nating only physical labor as material, and therefore belonging to the
economic base, with mental labor parasitically perched on that base as a
manipulated superstructure.20 The result of this error is

the projection (alienation) of a whole body of activities which have to be

isolated as “the realm of art and ideas,” as “aesthetics,” as “ideology ,” or, less
flatteringly, as “the superstructure.” None of these can then be grasped as they
are; as real practices, elements of a whole material social process; not a realm or
a world or a superstructure, but many and variable productive practices, with
specific conditions and intentions, (p. 94)

But, he continues, “the problem is different, from the beginning, if we see

language and signification as indissoluble elements of the material social
process itself, involved all the time both in production and reproduction”
(p. 99). Art, and culture in general, are not merely superstructural con­
 Historical Critidsm and the Claims o f Humanism 255
sequences of the material processes by which man makes his world; on the
contrary, they are themselves a form of praxis, a working upon the world in
order to transform it. For Williams material production and the production of
ideology, which includes the production of literature, are related not as base
and superstructure but rather as two forms of cultural activity7p er se. Hence
when he comes to talk about textual-historical relations, he argues that
cultural practices should be seen not simply as reflected, displaced, or even
mediated instances of the determinant social reality but rather as themselves
constituents of that social reality.21 The task of the critic is then not to
compare a single practice with the real in order to understand it, but rather
to use several practices as examples of the real, producing an account that will
gain in persuasive force according to the number of examples he can muster.22
All of this is entirely to the good, not least because it reinstates the literary
text as itself one of the cultural practices that constitutes reality. The gap
between cultural practice and social reality is closed with the recognition that
social reality is in effect constituted by cultural practice. But in what sense is
this position specifically Marxist? Williams’s answer depends upon his use of
two crucial concepts of cultural analysis, ideology and hegemony.23 Ideology,
Williams insists, cannot be adequately understood as simply false conscious­
ness but must rather be defined as “the complicated process within which
men ‘become’ (are) conscious of their interests and their conflicts. The
categorical short-cut to an (abstract) distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’
consciousness [must be] abandoned” (p. 68). Ideology is not merely a
delusive structure of thought that serves to mystify the true nature of social
being either in order to gain economic advantage or to provide a merely
symbolic resolution of real contradictions; rather, it is the means by and
through which man gives meaning to his social world and thereby makes it
available to his practical activity.
As an agency of praxis, the symbolic actions of ideology in effect constitute
culture, a position that brings Williams close to the semiotic conception of
culture defined by functional anthropology that has proved (as we shall
shortly see) so useful to New Historicism."4 But while anthropology offers
a merely descriptive and generally benign account, Williams insists that
culture is organized in terms of inequality. Hence in order to disclose how
a society’s way of being serves the interests of its dominant members, he
supplements ideology with the Gramscian term hegemony.25 While ideology
refers to a systematically articulated complex of beliefs, it ignores the actual
social practices - the lived experience - that comprise the individual life;
indeed, as a mentalistic term, it silendy reinstitutes the base-superstructure
model. Hegemony, on the other hand,

is... not only the articulate upper level of “ideology,” nor are its forms of
control only those ordinarily seen as “manipulation” or “indoctrination.” It is a
256 Ijee Patterson
whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses
and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our
world. It is a lived system of meanings and values - constitutive and constitut­
ing - which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally con­
firming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a
sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very' difficult
for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that
is to say, in the strongest sense a “culture,” but a culture which has also to be
seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes, (p. 110)

Hegemony is thus a far more inclusive concept than ideology: it refers not
just to what people think and believe but to the full spectrum of social
practices in terms of which they live their lives, social practices that articulate
at every' turn social inequality. Nevertheless —and here is the central issue -
Williams wants also to insist that for all its appropriative power, hegemony is
never monolithically all-inclusive. On the contrary, it “does not just passively
exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated,
defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, chal­
lenged by pressures not at all its own. We have then to add to the concept of
hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony,
which are real and persistent elements of practice” (pp. 112-13). Hegemony
may equal culture, but there remains, somehow, a possibility' of standing
outside culture, of being counterhegemonic, of seeking to install an altern­
ative hegemony. Hegemony is lived reality “for most people”; it prescribes a
circle of understanding beyond which “most members of the society” find it
difficult to move. But some apparendy can; these are people who see the way
in which what appears to be simply and self-evidendy the-way-things-are is in
fact hegemonic, a form of dominance that can be imagined as undone and
replaced with an alternative.
But where do these people stand when they come to this understanding?
From what materials do they fashion an alternative? At issue here is a paradox
that is peculiarly intense for Marxism —committed as it is to revolutionary'
action - but that in fact inhabits all efforts to conceptualize historical self­
understanding.26 In Marx’s famous words, “Men make their own history, but
they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circum­
stances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances direcdy encountered,
given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”- As the agent of history,
man is both subject and object, both the creator of and created by history’,
both free and determined. The more densely the web of historical determin­
ants is woven (and Marxism has an interest in weaving it very’ tightly indeed),
the less possible does it become to achieve an extrahistorical perspective that
might allow for the understanding of the totality’. If man is defined his­
torically (“Man is not an abstract being squatting outside the world,” to cite
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 257
Marx again), then by what transcendent means can he pass judgment upon
the history within which he moves and from which he takes his being? Put
more simply, in what consists the knowledge of the Real that allows us to see
hegemony for what it is?
On this point Williams is admirably straightforward:

There is of course the difficulty that domination and subordination, as effec­

tive descriptions of cultural formation, will, by many, be refused; that the
alternative language of co-operative shaping, of common contribution, which
the traditional concept of “culture” so notably expressed, will be found pre­
ferable. In this fundamental choice there is no alternative, from any socialist
position, to recognition and emphasis of the massive historical and immediate
experience of class domination and subordination, in all their different forms.
(p. 112)

There is no alternative: one either recognizes class domination as the central

fact of historical life or one does not. That social inequality is at the center of
all historical formations is the foundational conviction that enables Williams’s
Marxism: in effect, social inequality is the Real, and its truth is not to be
controverted. But what is really at issue here, and what forecloses further
argument, is not so much the fact of social inequality as its intolerability. Its
presence is so overwhelming and so offensive that it forces itself upon
Williams as the a priori condition that determines his critical activity: it is
nonnegotiabie. Williams is not invoking, it must be stressed, a transhistorical,
axiomatic truth by which to enforce agreement on matters of critical meth­
odology, a norm of theoretical correctness intrinsic to historical study; on the
contrary, he is presenting a particular understanding of history that is itself
historically contingent. The bottom line is a political commitment that is
understood not as a transhistorical imperative but as a “massive historical and
immediate experience”2*

IV

Both contemporary7 thought, with its relentless relativizing of value, and the
still-potent objectivism of traditional historicism, have taught us to mistrust
all forms of explicit political commitment, seeing them not as enabling
assumptions but as constraining dogmatisms. But before allowing skepticism
to do its subversive work, we would do well to explore a critical formation
that is both drawn to political ways of thinking and yet sensitive, perhaps
even to the point of paralysis, to the dangers of foundationalism. While the
term New Historicism designates neither a single methodology nor a mono­
lithic critical group, it has nonetheless come to characterize a recognizable
critical orientation shared by a number of scholars working in the
258 Lee Patterson
Renaissance.29 It represents the coalescence of several by no means congru­
ent developments in contemporary critical thought. One is the deconstrucdve
attack upon representation. For deconstruction the paradox of textual—his­
torical relations - the text as at once constituted by and constituting history -
can be resolved by collapsing both elements into textuality. While objectivist
historicism (which would include the traditional Marxism espoused by Jam e­
son) grants priority to history' and so designates the text as dependent, a mere
supplement, the deconstructionist argues that if history admits supplementa­
tion at all - and the fact that it can be known only textually shows that it does
- then it must be incomplete in itself. According to the logic of supplemen-
tarity, history is a secondary entity that suffers from an originary lack, an
absence that writing simultaneously conceals and reveals. As Derrida con­
cludes,

Through this sequence of supplements a necessity is announced: that of an

infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that pro­
duce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thin^ itself, of
immediate presence, of originan’ perception. Immediacy is derived.

Historical being is always deferred: it is not a presence but an effect of presence

created by textuality. There is no hors texte, and in trying to discover the
historically real we enter into a labyrinthine world that not only forecloses
access to history in its original form but calls into question its very existence
as an object of knowledge. Writing absorbs the social context into a textuality
that is wholly alienated from the real, “even if,” as Paul de Man notoriously
said, “these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.”31
For Marxism deconstruction is to be rejected out of hand as an empty
idealism motivated by the irresponsible desire to escape from history.32 But
the New Historicists, unconstrained by Marxist loyalties, are not as willing to
abandon the powerful interpretive techniques made available by deconstruc­
tion; indeed, while deconstruction remains a largely unacknowledged influ­
ence on their writing, it is everywhere in evidence in their often dazzling
interpretive subdety, their ideological skepticism, and their reticence about
the constraints implied by their own social situations and political commit­
ments. It must be insisted, of course, that deconstruction is by no means p erse
apolitical. Derrida has himself forcefully made this point:

[Deconstruction is], at the ver)' least, a way of taking a position, in its work of
analysis, concerning the political and institutional structures that make possible
and govern our practices, our competencies, our performances__Decon-
strucdon is neither a methodological reform that should reassure the organiza­
tion in place nor a flourish of irresponsible and irresponsible-making
destruction, whose most certain effect would be to leave everything as it is
and to consolidate the most immobile forces within the university.33
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 259
It must nonetheless be acknowledged that in its transadantic form decon­
struction has often been reduced to an ahistorical formalism, and its privile­
ging of the sophisticated interpretive maneuvers that support its
hermeneutics of suspicion encourages it in this tendency. But the New
Historicists do not wish “to stand convicted of formalism,” in Terry Eagle-
ton’s threatening phrase, and the focus of their attention remains on what
they might call (albeit with a distinctively non-Marxist accent) the social
text.34
In order to support this attention, they have turned to what functional
anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins have called a
“semiotic concept of culture” as an “interworked system of construable
signs.”35 Culture is “the kingdom of symbolic order,” in Sahlins’s phrase,
and - the crucial point - it is only within and by means of this kingdom that
material interests take shape: “it is culture which constitutes utility” and not
vice versa.36 Far from being that through which the material interests that
organize society are mediated and made visible, i.e. a secondary effect
determined by a materialist base, culture is itself the primary agency of the
social constitution of the real. In the debate between utility and meaning,
Sahlins insists that priority resides with meaning.

The unity of the cultural order is constituted by... meaning. And it is this
meaningful system that defines all functionality; that is, according to the
particular structure and finalities of the cultural order. It follows that no
functional explanation is ever sufficient by itself; for functional value is always
relative to the given cultural scheme__ Material effects depend on their
cultural encompassment__ The practical interest of men in production is
symbolically constituted. The finalities as well as the modalities of production
come from the cultural side: the material means of the cultural organization as
well as the organization of the material means, (pp. 206-7)

Man’s primary activities are not material but symbolic: he is a creature who is
constituted by his own constitution of the symbolic activity that is culture.37
This definition of the priority of the symbolic - of man as a being who
above all makes meaning - underwrites Stephen Greenblatt’s influential
notion of “cultural poesis”: not only must all of culture be read as an act of
symbolic making, but such making is itself the primary category of historical
action. The strength of this notion, like Williams’s cultural materialism, is that
not only does it render so-called literary texts agents of praxis, but it extends
this legitimizing capacity to other texts: by erasing the difference between the
historical and the textual it establishes the critic’s field of interpretation as all-
inclusive. Yet unlike Williams, who insists upon the historical primacy of class
struggle, this enabling is here accomplished by accepting the deconstructive
absorption of the historical by the textual. The symbolic constitutes the real;
in a phrase from Geertz’s Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali
260 Ijee Patterson
that Jonathan Goldberg uses to sum up his own understanding of Jacobean
statecraft, “The real is as imagined as the imaginary.”38 Given that inter­
changeability, what difference between them could there be? If social reality is
inherendy and inescapably theatrical, then the distinction between the real
and the fictive (lege history and text) need not be sustained.
Hence, for example, when in a recent essay Stephen Greenblatt takes as his
example of cultural poesis the Renaissance effort to establish a sharp demar­
cation between the theatrical and the real on the topic of exorcism, we should
hardly be surprised (nor is he) that each is seen as having blended insensibly
and dizzyingly into the other. Not even death is free of the taint of theatri­
cality: “Indeed, there is no more theatrical event in the Renaissance than a
public execution.”39 In short, “the prospect opens to an infinite regress of
disclosure and uncertainty” (p. 337), and Greenblatt cannot push his analysis
beyond “the maddening doubleness implicit in the theatricality of exorcism”
(p. 339). So too, Goldberg’s reading of Jacobean politics establishes as its
final term an aporetic impasse familiar to deconstruction:

Power - the ruler’s, the poet’s - styles itself in denial: the poet points to the
ruler, the ruler to the abstract principles. Denying itself, contradiction defines
the essence of the discourse of power. To voice sovereign power is to enter
into duplicities, now twice removed. How then can the text be read? How is
the truth to be found?... Contradictions govern politics and poetics at once,
(pp. 7,11)

To take a final example, Louis Montrose’s dazzling explication of the con­

junction of gender and politics in A Midsummer Night's Dream reads the play as
finally arriving at an irresolvable contradiction: “the ostensible project of
elaborating Queen Elizabeth’s personal mythology inexorably subverts itself
- generates ironies, contradictions, resistances which undo the royal
magic__ Thus, the structure of Shakespeare’s comedy symbolically neutra­
lizes the forms of royal power to which it ostensibly pays homage.”40 Indeed,
the argumentative structure of New Historicist writing as a whole tends to be
incorporative rather than differentiating, both/and rather than either/or:
neither element of the cultural oppositions that New Historicism so skillfully
analyzes can finally be excluded from or subjugated to the other, but both
remain suspended together in an uneasy solution “in which,” to cite Green­
blatt, “risks and advantages, pressure and protection, are continually renegoti­
ated.”41
By treating cultural history as a text, New Historicism is able to bring to
bear the formidable techniques of interpretation that literary* criticism has
been developing for the past fifty years or so. The result is a series of readings
of great subdetv and power, readings that anatomize the shifting imperatives
and ambitions of Renaissance culture without subjecting them to easy - or
indeed any - resolution: history is finally as undecidable as poetry, as of
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 261
course it must be when read as a poem. Absorbing the historical into the
textual, New Historicism endows it with the irresolution that, for deconstruc­
tion, characterizes textuality p er se. But there is a price to pay for this
absorption. To adopt an interpretive method that assumes that history is
not merely known through but constituted by language is to act as if there are
no acts other than speech acts. But while we can all agree that language
cannot be prised off the world, that whatever nonverbal, nonsymbolic reality'
exists can be known only by means of linguistic mediation, this does not
allow us to abandon the category of the historically real entirely. History is
impelled by consequential and determinative acts of material production:
building cities, making wars, collecting wealth, imposing discipline, seizing
and denying freedom —these are material processes that, while enacted in
terms of and made known by symbolic forms, possess a palpable force and an
intentional purposiveness, however we may finally come to understand them,
that stand against the irresolutions and undecidabilities valued by contem­
porary techniques of interpretation. It is true that the literary historian must
perforce operate within the closed world of textuality, and that he must not
hypostasize a part of his evidence as the historically real. But our experience
also teaches us that the historically real - as economic, political, social, and
material reality7 — does indeed exist, and that action in the world has a
presence and consequentiality that cannot be evaded. To apply the conditions
of our scholarship to life is an almost inevitable transaction, but it in fact
denatures, because it dematerializes, our historical existence. Indeed, the lines
of influence ought really to run the other way, from our lives to our scholar­
ship: in dealing with the textuality by which the historical makes itself known,
we must not merely acknowledge but seek to accommodate, in however
inevitably partial a fashion, something of the palpability and unavoidability of
historical action.
My concern that the skeptical self-cancellations of contemporary textuality
should not subvert the category of the historically real is derived not from
some notion of philosophical correctness: indeed, since the historically real
cannot exist apart from the textuality by which it is made known, deconstruc­
tion is surely right to insist that the priority of neither element can ever finally
be demonstrated. Rather, it is the political consequences entailed by such a
subversion that seem to me particularly persuasive. For in foregrounding the
self-contradictions that haunt historical action, New Historicism discloses a
world strangely drained of dynamism, in which every effort to enact change
issues in a reaffirmation of the status quo, and where the continually rene­
gotiated antagonisms of Renaissance culture are always already inscribed
within a space of stasis. It arrives, in fact, at a paradox: on the one hand
Renaissance culture is an arena of social contradictions engaged in ceaseless
strife, and yet on the other hand, nothing happens. On the one hand,
New Historicism sets itself against the monologic idealism of traditional
262 Ijee Patterson
Geistesgescbicbte, with its insistence upon cultural homogeneity, and yet on the
other ends up presenting a Renaissance as synchronically isolated and poli­
tically uniform as anything we find in Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture*2
The terms with which Greenblatt designates this condition are containment
and subversion: Renaissance discourses contain subversion, in the double
sense that they simultaneously elicit and control it, grant it a space for its
enactment but finally encompass and disarm it.43 Cultural oppositions may
require continual renegotiation, but the results are always the same.
An illuminating instance of this process is offered by Greenblatt in
“Loudun and London,” where he describes how the attempt “to exorcise
the theatricality of exorcism” through execution simply reinstated the
theatrical. But the authorities did not stop there in their attempt to gain
control. Rather, they instituted a public act of confessional guidance, in
which the priestly exorcist would whisper in the ear of the possessed:
“In effect, the theatre of possession and exorcism is made to cede place to
a mute public spectacle and an inaudible, private discourse of spiritual
inferiority” (p. 332). What Greenblatt traces here is an early stage in the
“negotiation of cultural power” by which public display gives way to private
manipulation. The end of this story is not only easy to imagine but has in fact
already been written, in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. There Foucault argues
that in the late eighteenth century the dangers of execution as a display of
power were fully recognized, so that the public enactment of authority
was replaced with the secret, inward manipulation of the subject - a process
that has now reached its fulfillment in the monolithic carcéral society of
the modern world, with its inescapable reproduction of itself within each
individual.
The underwriting presence of Foucault in Greenblatt’s account is sympto­
matic of his pervasive influence throughout New Historicism generally. For
one thing, Foucault’s argument that culture can be best understood through
the analysis of the discursive practices that constitute its reality is another, and
less depoliticized, way to bridge the gap between history and textuality than
the solution offered by deconstruction. And for another, the central, almost
obsessive focus of New Historicist attention is upon Foucault’s own topic -
power — and power understood in a specifically Foucauldian rather than
Marxist way. That is, for Foucault power is not a capacity possessed by one
group in societ}’ that advantageously deploys it against another, as the Marxist
account of class struggle would have it, but rather a capacity that inhabits the
very sinews and nerves of the body politic. To imagine that power is
possessed or controlled by someone would be to imagine a space outside
power, a wholly free and autonomous place from which power issues but
which is itself uncontrolled. But to imagine such a place is to fall prey to the
central cunning by which power enforces itself, that is, to imagine that one is
somehow autonomous, a pure subjectivity’ from which unconditioned actions
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 263
can issue, an individual. As Frank Lentricchia has cogendy argued, for
Foucault power is virtually a metaphysical principle:

In his social theory power tends to occupy the “anonymous” place which
classical treatises in metaphysics reserved for substance: without location,
identity, or boundaries, it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time__ To
put it as Foucault puts it is to suggest that power has no predominant direction,
no predominant point of departure, no predominant point of terminus. Like
the God of theism, it is ubiquitous; unlike God it has no intention.44

And unlike God, its effects are malevolent. Foucault provides the ultimate
fulfillment of a nightmare vision of a world so perfecdy administered
(Adorno), so thoroughly bureaucratized (Weber), that reality itself is consti­
tuted through the insidious, invisible workings of power. “The exercise of
power,” says Foucault, “is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon
possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more
difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless
always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue o f their
acting or being capable o f action.”45 The very entrance upon a field of action
implicates the agent in a web of power relations that predetermines the scope
and direction of his action. Power may presuppose freedom, but it remains
itself the primary term: freedom is simply that which power requires for its
actions, and is thus brought into being in order to provide the necessary
conditions for power’s enactment.
This totalizing vision of an entrapping world organized not primarily but
exclusively by structures of domination and submission, implicit in much
New Historicist work, becomes an explicit source of concern in Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self Fashioning. Greenblatt rather ruefully acknowledges that
although the topic of his book is the creation of the Renaissance self, in
the course of its writing “the human subject itself began to seem remarkably
unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular
society.”46 Similarly, in the struggle between containment and subversion,
containment remains the dominant mode, as in all logic it must since it has
itself summoned up subversion in order to reconfirm, over and over, its
dominance. Given this prescribed dynamic, individual and contingent polit­
ical action is revealed as an illusion: whatever acts may be undertaken, they
are instandy inscribed within already established structures. Hence the New
Historicist refusal to specify authorial intention: the most that Greenblatt will
say about Jacobean theatrical representations of exorcism is that “they do the
state some service,” as of course they inevitably must, since all cultural
activity can serve only to confirm the authority always already in place; at
one point in his essay on A Midsummer Night*s Dream Montrose describes the
play as attempting to assert royalist values that it then unwittingly undoes, but
he later reverses the lines of force by presenting it as an attempt at subversion
264 Ijee Patterson
that is inevitably inscribed within an authoritative ideology.47 More tendent-
iously, for Montrose Spenser’s Shepbeardes Calender, and indeed all Elizabethan
pastoral, serves to legitimize hierarchical power structures by representing
them as benign, a reading that ignores the fact that Spenser clearly intended
his poem as an attack upon specific political practices supported by Eliza­
beth.48 It is quite true that specific and explicit intention can never fully
govern the meaning of a text, that literature serves to constitute cultural
reality in ways it can never fully know and that may run counter to its own
most insistent purposes. But simply to set aside these intentions and purposes
as unworthy of discussion is effectively to silence dissent; and by raising
analysis to a level at which individual actions and motives become submerged
into a totalized vision of a monolithic culture is to beg the question by
adopting a method that can prove only the hypothesis at issue.49 The
Foucauldian vision of a carcéral society is dangerously self-confirming: the
individual disappears because the historian stops looking for him, just as the
nonpolitical yields wholly to a decoding that reveals it to have been political
all along.50 There is no space outside power because power is the only term in
the analyst’s arsenal.
While thus setting itself up as providing a dialogic alternative to the
monologic idealism of traditional historicism, New Historicism finds itself
in danger of falling into an analogous narrowness. The valence has been
reversed but the condition remains the same: where old historicism saw
Renaissance culture as conforming to the norm of Tillyard’s benign Eliza­
bethan World Picture, the New Historicists now see it as organized according to
the malign principle of power. Quite against its explicit intentions, New
Historicism effects a monolithic totalization, suppressing the individual in
favor of the general and the disparate in favor of the homogenous. Similarly,
while New Historicism seeks to promote the power of discourse - “The
Power of Forms,” to use Greenblatt’s tide - it ends up representing discourse
as in fact impotent: language may constitute reality but is itself constrained by
rules and procedures so intricately interwoven into its fabric as to be imper­
vious to investigation and change.
Finally, New Historicist investigation is as relentlessly synchronic as any
Geistesgescbicbte. Sharing the current distrust of diachronic historicism, a dis­
trust impelled by the discrediting of the concept of the origin, the collapse of
the classic model of cause-and-effect causality, and the unpersuasiveness of
evolutionary and teleological claims, New Historicism seeks instead to
achieve what Geertz calls “thick description,” an analysis of the conditions
of cultural production. No longer believing that cultural phenomena can
be usefully explained as effects of anterior causes, New Historicism is
released from the narrow criterion of relevance that constrained older
literary historians. The result is both an enlightening extension of the
range of materials to be brought to bear upon a text - New Historicist
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 265
essays typically begin with an apparently out of the way anecdote or event
in order eventually to show how it too bespeaks the central problematic of
the culture as a whole - and yet a weakening of explanatory force. For if the
New Historicists righdy refuse to reduce the text to an effect of either a
straightforward authorial intention or a determinant social context, they also
decline to specify the ground of comparison - the historically real - that
supports their analyses. Neither the period consciousness of Geistesgeschichte
nor the class struggle of Marxism provides them with adequate explanatory
categories for cultural production, with the result that the critic withdraws
from the task of explanation entirely and settles for the less definitive act of
interpretation. At issue here is the same question raised by Adorno in his
debate with Benjamin over Benjamin’s Passagenarbeit. For Adorno, Benjamin’s
juxtapositioning of disparate cultural elements could yield results only if
grounded in a critical perspective secured by its political commitments.
Otherwise his instances of nineteenth-century culture became images that
simply instantiated contradictions and could not serve as materials for a
historical understanding to be developed through critical analysis.51 At
heart, in other words, the question was - and remains - whether cultural
analysis is possible without an explicit commitment to a specific philosophy
of history, a specific definition of the real. Can history be written without
causality? And if not, is causal explanation possible without a foundational
commitment to some narrative of historical action, be it the fulfillment of the
Spirit, the rise of a heroic bourgeoisie, or the class struggle entailed by social
inequality?
This question presents itself with some urgency for the medievalist because
New Historicism, despite its laudable self-consciousness, in fact operates
largely according to a traditional historiographical scheme that not only sets
the Renaissance over against the Middle Ages but understands the opposition
in terms originally established by nineteenth-century liberal philology. That is,
the crucial heuristic category' for New Historicism remains the individual
versus society, although with the valence of the opposition now reversed. For
Burckhardt, the Renaissance was the time in which man asserted his indi­
viduality, as opposed to the corporatist, collectivist Middle Ages in which
“man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party,
family, or corporation —only through some general category.”'^ For the New
Historicists, on the other hand, the Renaissance is the time when man
discovers that the individuality he is seeking to assert does not in fact exist,
that selfhood is not atemporally given but socially constituted.53 From this
perspective, then, it is the Middle Ages that is the time of heroic individuality
while the Renaissance emerges from feudalism into the reification and
alienation entailed by capitalism.54 Indeed, one might almost be back with
Ruskin, for whom Gothic freedom of expression was destroyed by “the
poison-tree of the Renaissance,” initiating a decline that culminated in the
266 Lee Patterson
monolithic regimentation and pervasive alienation of the nineteenth-century
factory7- the Foucauldian locus of the carcéral society.
My point is not simply that New Historicism is perhaps not so new after
all; indeed, since our entire cultural situation has not moved much beyond the
nineteenth-century opposition of left and right wing, however these may be
variously defined, we can hardly expect our literary criticism to do so either.
The issue is not how to get beyond the opposition - which, if we grant the
inescapability of the political, in practice means how to evade it - but rather
how to locate one’s scholarly work within it in a way consistent with what one
takes one’s political values to be. Hence my point here is that New Histor­
icism (and probably this is an effect of its insistence on its novelty) has in
ways perhaps unbeknownst to itself found itself in a conservative political
posture. At the most basic level, the Foucauldian account of cultural forma­
tion that the New Historicists have adopted, by depoliticizing power, calls
into question the efficacy of local and contingent political action: since all of
life is always already inscribed within and predetermined by structures of
dominance and subordination, the powers-that-be will always be the powers-
that-be. At a more local level, New Historicism typically focuses its attention
not on the subversive and suppressed elements of society but on the dom­
inating structures - and largely without criticism: the court, the aristocracy,
the upwardly mobile. Indeed, in its attentive recreation of the ways in which
Elizabethan and Jacobean monarchs used cultural productions in order to
sustain their dominance it too often displays an uncritical celebration of what
Fernand Braudel once called “that Adelswelt to which [the historian] is secredy
drawn.”55
Given both its explicit polemic against a reactionarily “idealist” old histori­
cism, and its own commitment not only to the priority of the social but to
conceptualizing it in terms of instability and contradiction, the conservative
drift of New Historicism is best understood as an unintended embarrass­
ment. Indeed, this unintentionality shows in vivid terms how a prevailing
ideology can come to dominate even antithetical theoretical formations,
regardless of their sophistication. The late 1970s and 1980s are self-evidently
a time of hegemonic conservatism, in which the privatization of value has
reached new extremes and in which the cult of success has become an explicit
and unashamed justification for the crudest forms of economic and social
injustice. To think that the academy is somehow exempt from this process
would be naive, and yet academic discourse still maintains an objectivist style
that implicitly denies the relevance of the writer’s own social situation to his
work of investigation. My point is not that the New Historicists are grasping
and materialist seekers after fame and fortune who are betraying the noble
values of their humanist discipline; not only can I not exempt myself from
exactly the same charge, since the writing of this book is undertaken within a
system of punishments and rewards that has an unmistakably prescriptive
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 267
force, but phrasing the issue in these terms both invokes a set of indefensible
assumptions and obscures a more central if difficult point. For while we may
agree that it is necessary to stand against the dominant ideology of our times,
it is the immense difficulty of doing so that must be acknowledged. Indeed,
perhaps the lesson that the unintended conservatism of New Historicism
teaches is that if you do not have an explicit politics - an ideology - then one
will certainly have you.
To assume that the social totality prescribes not only the terms of every
local and contingent opposition but the course of their contestation - that the
progressive and the reactionary are two sides of the same repressive coin,
subversion a function of containment - is not only to foreclose the possibility
of political progress but in effect to annul the local and the contingent
entirely. This is a recipe for despair: human beings have no other arena for
action than the here and now, make no decisions that are not local, assert no
values that are not contingent. Our daily lives are the only lives we have: there
is no escaping from the historically specific, and it is in terms of this
specificity that we must decide what work to do and how to do it. Our
scholarly activity, in other words, can never be guided by some impossible
norm of correctness but only by the relation we want to establish to the social
and political formations governing our own historical moment.
These formations are at the moment deeply antipathetic to just the kind of
small-scale, tactical activity that is our most available way of interacting with
the world and participating in its development. It is not just the academic
who has his historical irrelevance forced upon him; it is everybody. The
homogenization of value and the annulment of the individual have reached
extraordinary lengths in contemporary America; the culture industry has
achieved a virtually undisputed dominance over American consciousness;
corporate, military, and institutional interests pursue their goals with little
restraint; and the most vigorous political formation at work in the United
States is a fundamentalist conservatism dedicated to the growth of state
power and the further eradication of difference. But if indeed Foucault’s
dystopic vision of the carcéral society is on the way to fulfillment, then surely
our scholarly task should be to stand against it. There is, for instance, some­
thing scandalous in the fact that the current, virulent attacks on humanism
issue from two diameterical points on the political compass, the religious
right and the theoretical left. How is it that the academic intellectual has come
to conspire in his own demise? Almost twenty years ago Adorno understood
this process with prescient clarity: “The more individuals are really degraded
to functions of the social totality, as it becomes more systematized, the more
will man pure and simple, man as a principle with the attributes of creativity
and absolute domination, be consoled by exaltation of his mind.”56 The
contemporary theoretical effort to subvert the false stability of the ideology
of the subject is best understood not as a simple emancipation from reified
268 ljce Patterson
bourgeois categories but rather as a totalizing intellectualism correlative to the
hegemonic homogenization that characterizes our time. Of course, to pro­
pose the recuperation of humanism will inevitably be seen by many as simply
the reaction of an offended liberalism. But if we cannot return to the
transhistorical bourgeois individual with his dominating ego and self-identical
subjectivity, neither can we afford to dispense with the category of individu­
alism altogether. To deprive the human agent of any purchase upon the social
whole is to signal the end of a politics we desperately need.
But even if the force of these political considerations be granted, what is
their relevance to the problems and procedures of literary historicism? To
begin with, they entail a criticism that insists not only upon the dialectical
nature of its relation to its own time but upon the negativity of that dialectic,
upon adopting an antagonistic stance to the depersonalized, depoliticized,
and tranquilized homogenization accomplished by modern American culture.
Specifically, then, we must be alert at the level of critical method to the
dangers of what the Frankfurt School thinkers called “identity theory,” the
underwriting assumption of those forms of historicism that would reduce
difference and opposition to sameness by collapsing together subject and
object, either through an idealist appropriation of the object world (as in
Geistesgescbicbte) or through a materialist economism (as in Marxism). On the
contrary, our work should seek to preserve and understand threatened
categories of difference, the imperative that Adorno called “the morality of
thought”:

The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor

detached, neither blind nor empty, neither atomistic nor consequential__
Nothing less is asked of the thinker today than that he should be at every
moment both within things and outside them - Miinchhausen pulling himself
out of the bog by his pig-tail becomes the pattern of knowledge which wishes
to be more than either verification or speculation.57

Not the least of these categories of difference, and one with which
medievalists are almost obsessively concerned, is that between the present-
as-subject and the past-as-object. This is not, it must be insisted, a difference
that can be theorized: the otherness of the past, and the demands of recogni­
tion and self-restraint it places upon us, can become the subject of homiletic
urgings but not - as the failure of objectivism and the largely negative
character of hermeneutics show - of theoretical prescriptions.58 In attempting
to understand the past, we inevitably enter into elaborate and endless negotia­
tions, struggles between desire and knowledge that can never be granted
closure. But negotiations can take place only between two equal and inde­
pendent parties, and this fiction - a fiction because the past can never exist
independently of our memory’ of it - must be consciously and painfully
maintained. The paradox involved is again well illuminated by Adorno:
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 269
The preponderant exertion of knowledge is destruction of its usual exertion,
that of using violence against the object. Approaching knowledge of the object
is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is weaving around the object. It
can do this only where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experi­
ence. In places where subjective reason scents subjective contingency, the
primacy of the object is shimmering through - whatever in the object is not
a subjective admixture.59

The contradictions in this passage pile up because historical understanding is

by definition a vacillation between contradictions that must not yield to
closure.
Another antinomy whose irresolution must be respected is, as we have
seen, that between the individual and the totality. In literary-historical terms
this respect presents itself in the form of intention, an interpretive category
that contemporary criticism has largely written off as a vestige of positivism.
To be sure, there are constraints upon intention, and serious ones: writing
comes into being within a socially determined context and by means of a
socially constituted discourse, and it always makes meanings beyond and
often other than those the author intended. Clearly the present is endowed
with a capacity to understand the past in ways that it cannot understand itself:
history takes place behind man’s back as well as in front of his face. But a text
is also a function of specific human intentions, in the sense both of self­
consciously maintained purposes and of impulses that may be incapable of
articulation but nonetheless issue from a historical intentionality, and it is a
large part of our task to understand how these intentions went into its
making. Much of what we come to know about texts was also available to
their makers, albeit in a variety of unfamiliar cognitive forms, and to
empower our critical abilities by devaluing theirs is to initiate an exchange
that will ultimately rebound upon ourselves. To grant the social totality
unfettered sway over the individual, who is then reduced to a helpless
mediator of historical forces that can be fully understood only by the modern
historian, is to invoke an “absolute historicism,” in Gramsci’s phrase, that
entraps us all. Adorno’s famous critique of Benjamin is relevant here:

Before his Medusan glance, man turns into a stage on which an objective
process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin’s philosophy is no less a source of
terror than a promise of happiness.60

Whatever individualism we seek to sustain must, to be sure, insist upon its

historicity7: the idea of the individual arises at certain historical moments and
becomes submerged at others. But it is clearly not an idea dependent simply
upon capitalism (how then can we explain its twelfth-century presence?), and
neither can it be read as simply a function of subjection. The self may be
made, but it is also self-made.
270 Lee Patterson
Finally, a correlative historical category that literary scholars cannot really
do without is that of literature itself. That this is a historical category is beyond
dispute, and that its boundaries, definitions, and purposes change over time is
also true. Contemporary criticism characteristically understands it as an
agency for authoritarian and conservative forces: the canon of literary
works is devised in order to enforce hegemonic interests. But this is not
always true: in the Middle Ages many of the texts we now call literary carved
out for themselves, without the benefit of a theory of the literary, a space of
ideological opposition. It is, moreover, precisely their negative relationship to
the dominant formations of their time that make such texts as, for example,
the Chartrian poems, the Roman de la rose, Piers Plowman, and the Canterbury
Tales such accurate indices of the historical world from which they arise and
upon which they reflect. This is not to say that they are not themselves
conditioned by social forces that remain outside their own articulation, forces
that the historian can recuperate; but it is to argue that they bear a privileged
relation to their historical moment, and that we must respect and rely upon
this privilege. These texts can hardly tell us everything we want or need to
know about the past, but when securely located at the center of our inves­
tigations (as not objects but subjects) they can help us to negotiate an
otherwise enigmatic terrain.

N otes

1 For detailed versions of this argument, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 45-54; Tony Bennett,
Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 14-17, and passim; Terry
Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), pp. 1-53; and for important historical details, Chris Baldick, The
Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848—1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
2 It is important to be clear about exactly what is at issue here. To accuse literary
criticism of political bad faith because of its attempt to naturalize and dehistor-
icize its activity is one thing; to take a further step and stigmatize the concept
literature as per se an instrument of political oppression is an illegitimate other. Of
course it can be, as when it is used to construct a canon that excludes the
dispossessed and the suspect. But this need not be the case, and the development
of the concept of literature in the Middle Ages should properly be seen as a
progressive activity: see, in general, Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London:
Verso Editions, [1984]), pp. 203—4, and Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, pp.
82-92; and for the way in which the recovery’ of classical texts enabled twelfth-
century writers to free writing from a clerical transcendentalism, see chapter 5,
below. [In chapter 5 Patterson discusses the Roman d'Eneas and Erec et Enide. Ed.]
In Marxism and literature, W’illiams cogently describes the unhappy reversal that
has taken place in the use of the concept: “It is in no way surprising that the
specialized concept of ‘literature,’ developed in precise forms of correspondence
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 271
with a particular social class, a particular organization of learning, and the appro­
priate particular technology of print, should now be so often invoked in retro­
spective, nostalgic, or reactionary moods, as a form of opposition to what is
correcdy seen as a new phase of civilization. The situation is historically compar­
able to that invocation of the divine and the sacred, and of divine and sacred
learning, against the new humanist concept of literature, in the difficult and
contested transition from feudal to bourgeois society” (p. 54).
3 Dilthey’s distinction between the objects of the natural and the human sciences is
crucial here: “The human sciences are distinguished from the natural sciences in
that the latter take as their object features which appear to consciousness as
coming from outside, as phenomena, and as given in particulars; for the former,
in contrast, the object appears as coming from within, as a reality, and as a vivid
original whole. It follows therefore that for the natural sciences an ordering of
nature is achieved only through a succession of conclusions by means of linking of
hypotheses. For the human sciences, on the contrary, it follows that the connect­
edness of psychic life is given as an original and general foundation. Nature we
explain, the life of the soul we understand.” Cited by Roy J. Howard, Three Faces of
Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 14—15.
4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 191-2.
5 That such strictures are still very much in force in contemporary Medieval Studies
can be illustrated by reference to the theoretical pronouncements of one of the
most productive of recent historical critics, Alastair Minnis. In his Medieval Theory
o f Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar
Press, 1984), Minnis complains that modem critics have ignored medieval literary
opinions in preference to “concepts from modem literary theory... which have
no historical validity as far as medieval literature is concerned” (p. 1 ); and in a
review of Judson Allen’s The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages ^Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1982) in Speculum 59 (1984), he attacks “ ‘New
Critical’ approaches to medieval literature” for an “often pleasant but ultimately
limiting anachronism” (p. 366). But “facts should not be ignored,” we are chided.
Again, in Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), Minnis
offers his work as proceeding from “a wish for some degree of certainty in literary
interpretation, in a period in which new interpretations, approaches and critical
theories seem to appear almost daily__ lam hoping to demonstrate that histor­
ical criticism can check the drift towards solipsism and channel imaginative energy
into areas of possible interpretation which may be validated by reference to the
ideas, thought-structures and literary traditions available to the author” (p. v).
Anyone who doubts the tenaciousness of positivist modes of thought in con­
temporary Medieval Studies need only be directed to the program of the Chaucer
section at the MLA Convention of 1986: two of the three sections (the equivalent
of six papers) were devoted to the question whether Alison of Bath murdered her
fourth husband. Perhaps the Shakespeare sections can now be persuaded to
investigate the number of Lady Macbeth’s children.
6 E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1967), p. 241. For a general attack upon Hirsch’s position, see Stanley Fish, Is
272 Ijte Patterson
There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980);
and for a more recent discussion of his conception of meaning, see William Ray,
IJterary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1984X pp. 90-103.
7 The phrase is Alastair Minnis’s; see above, n. 5.
8 An early, now almost forgotten work of progressive social criticism is the book
by Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval literature and Its Social Foundations (New
York: Cooper Square, 1971 [1956]); Schlauch, who taught for most of her career
at New York University, emigrated to Poland in the early 1950s. More recent
Marxist criticism is provided by Stephen Knight in his “Chaucer and the
Sociology of Literature,” Studies in the Age o f Chaucer 2 (1980), 15-51, in “Politics
and Chaucer’s Poetry,” in The Radical Reader (Sydney: Wild and Wooley Press,
1982), and, especially, in Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); and by
Sheila Delany in a series of essays, especially those collected in Writing Woman:
W'omen Writers and Women in Literature Medieval to Modem (New York: Schocken
Books, 1983). A less programmatically Marxist but nonetheless politically pro­
gressive criticism is provided by David Aers, Chaucer, England and the Creative
Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). A good index of the lack
of sympathy with which explicitly political criticism is received by medievalists is
provided by the reviews of Aers’s book: see Elton Higgs in Studies in the Age of
Chaucer'S (1981), 121—4, and Barbara Nolan in Speculum 58 (1983), 139-41. Nolan
begins: “This is a book which, despite an occasionally remarkable aperçu, is
severely limited by an anachronistic thesis.”
9 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections, ed. Peter
Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Brooks, 1986), p. 158.
10 Cited by Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University’ Press, 1984),
pp. 36 and 19.
11 Cited by Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Conceptfrom lnkács to
Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 103; italics in the
original. My subsequent discussion of Marxist totalization is indebted to Jay’s
masterful account.
12 George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cam­
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 8 , cited by Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 104; and
see as well the citation from Lukács’s ljenin: A Study of His Thought, trans. Nicholas
Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 18: “For every’ genuine Marxist
there is always a reality’ more real and therefore more important than isolated facts
and tendencies - namely, the reality of the total process, the totality’ of social develop­
ment” (cited p. 122). The revolutionary’ value of the Lukácsian concept of totality'
has been well described by Edward Said, ‘Traveling Theory’,” The World, the Text,
and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University’ Press, 1983), pp. 226—47.
13 Two widely influential books that promote this kind of program are Pierre
Macherey, A Tfmry of IJterary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routle­
dge and Kegan Paul, 1978 [1966]), and Terry’ Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology
(London: New Left Books, 1976). For a brief summary’, see Eagleton’s “Machery
and Marxist Literarv Theory,” Against the Grain (London: New Left Books,
1986), pp. 9-21.
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 273
14 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981), p. 10; all further citations will be included within the text.
15 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 74.
16 In the following discussion I have left out of account Jameson’s other inter­
pretive procedure for protecting the relative autonomy of the text while allowing
the transcoding by which the text can be opened out to the hors texte of history.
This is the application to the text of Greimas’s “semiotic rectangle,” represented
as a grid capable of revealing that which has been suppressed: the presence of
one narrative element will require the absence of another, an absence that
Greimas’s scheme will bring to light. The problem with this scheme is its
vulnerability to the critique leveled at all forms of structuralist analysis. Narratol-
ogy persistendy claims the transhistorical ability to reveal the implicit structure of
all narrative, a claim just as persistendy discredited by the arbitrariness with which
it constitutes the structures that are its object of study. Although it posits a wholly
nonthematic structure capable of being described without the need to enter into
the negotiations of interpretation, structure is in fact recognizable at all only by
virtue of theme. And since structure is determined by meaning, narratology is as
much subject to hermeneutic instability as less scientistic methods.
17 Jameson offers this prescription as an account of the “expressive causality” or
“historicism” rejected by Althusser, but it also well describes his own position.
Significandy, at one point Jameson aligns himself, admittedly gingerly but none­
theless explicidy, with Hirsch’s positivist methodology (p. 75, n. 56).
18 Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of
Man,” The Interpretation o f Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 37.
19 Karl Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, Selected Writings, ed. David
McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 389.
20 Williams (Marxism and Literaturi) argues that the crude distinction between
material processes and acts of consciousness is simply idealism stood on its
head: with this “mechanical materialist reversal of the idealist dualism” (p. 61),
the subject—object problem remains in place, although with the lines of force
now reversed.
21 This argument has also been launched from a Marxist perspective by Robert
Weimann in Structure and Society in Literaty History, Expanded Edition (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984 [1976]): “Labor and art and consciousness
all... are reflections of, and factors in, the never-ending endeavor of men to
understand and control (and to affect by playing, and making images of) the
destiny of their social existence” (p. 1 1 ).
22 Williams produces this account by way of discussing the method of “correspon­
dences” pursued by Walter Benjamin; see pp. 103-5.
23 Williams does offer another answer, whose unpersuasiveness leads me to con­
sign it to a footnote. He insists upon what he calls “the material character of the
production of a cultural order” (p. 93), by which he means both that the work of
consciousness is inescapably social and that it is conducted by physical means.
“ ‘Consciousness and its products’ are always, though in variable forms, parts of
the material social process itself: whether as what Marx called the necessary
element of ‘imagination’ in the labour process; or as the necessary conditions of
274 Ijee Patterson
associated labour, in practical ideas of relationship; or, which is so often and
significantly forgotten, in the real processes - all of them physical and material,
most of them manifestly so - which are masked and idealized as ‘consciousness
and its products’ but which, when seen without illusions, are themselves neces­
sarily social material activities__ Thinking’ and ‘imagining’ are from the begin­
ning social processes (of course including that capacity for ‘internalization’
which is a necessary part of any social process between actual individuals)
and... they become accessible only in unarguably physical and material ways:
in voices, in sounds made by instruments, in penned or printed writing, in
arranged pigments on canvas or plaster, in worked marble or stone” (pp. 61-
2). But this claim is largely unpersuasive. For one thing, to insist upon the social
nature of consciousness is hardly specific to Marxism, but characterizes virtually
all anthropologically oriented understandings of culture. Indeed, the only target
of such a claim is the radically ahistoricist individualism of various forms of
Romantic and post-Romantic thought - including, to be sure, New Criticism.
But it is hard to imagine any historicism worth the name that would attempt to
explain the process of cultural reproduction in terms of an autonomous indi­
vidualism. Second, while the invocation of the physical conditions necessary for
cultural work has a certain force in a world in which access to means of artistic
expression is restricted, this is not in fact the direction in which Williams
chooses to develop his argument. On the contrary, his point is not historical
but theoretical, which renders it both inconsequential in itself (i.e. Williams
himself would not want to claim that it is the physical nature of language that
renders it available to a Marxist analysis) and vulnerable to the charge of vulgar
materialism because it seeks to submerge the acts of consciousness in materiality.
24 In “Ideology’ as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation o f Cultures, Clifford Geertz
argues that an ideological statement is not simply a misconceived understanding
but a rhetorical act that draws “its power from its capacity to grasp, formulate,
and communicate social realities that elude the tempered language of science”
(p. 210). Ideology is symbolic action that functions as a means of giving meaning
to the world. “The agent of his own realization, [man] creates out of his general
capacity’ for the construction of symbolic models the specific capabilities that
define him. Or... it is through the construction of ideologies, schematic images
of social order, that man makes himself for better or worse a political animal”
(p. 218). “The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible
by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive
images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped” (p. 218). For Geertz,
however, ideology’ is a term that should be restricted to the description of
specifically political structures of thought and should not be identified with
culture per sey which includes and subsumes the political instead of (as for
Marxism) being identical with it. As a systematic mode of political symboliza­
tion, an ideology’ typically arises in times of strain when other cultural resources
are unable to deal with the changing events, e.g. the French Revolution. Further­
more, while Geertz insists that the ideological and the scientific are two different
kinds of symbolic representation of political reality, he nonetheless grants to the
scientific a certain cognitive authority’ over the ideological (see pp. 232-3).
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 275
25 On Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and the crucial role of the intellectual in
maintaining its coercive persuasiveness, see Anne Showstock Sassoon, Gramsci's
Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 109—46.
26 The issue of historical self-understanding is most tellingly raised in Marxist
analysis in discussions of the agency of historical change. If the proletariat is
the revolutionary subject, then it must be endowed with the knowledge of
totality that makes revolution possible. Yet it is empirically obvious that this
knowledge is possessed not by the proletariat but by socialist intellectuals.
Therefore, it must be - in Lukács’s notorious term - “imputed” by them to
the proletariat, an act that is historically carried out by the Party, which is
empowered by its possession of correct theory to exercise political leadership
in the name of the proletariat. The historical consequences of this argument
provide a sufficiently vivid commentary.
27 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Selected Writings, p. 300.
28 Williams’s reliance upon experience rather than theory has been criticized by
Eagleton; see the discussion by John Higgins, “Raymond Williams and the
Problem of Ideology,” in Jonathan Arac, ed., Postmodernism and Politics (Minnea­
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 112-22.
29 The central figure in the New Historicism, and its christener, is Stephen Green-
blatt; other prominent practitioners are Louis Adrian Montrose, Jonathan Gold­
berg, Steven Mullaney, Don Wayne, Leonard Tennenhouse, Arthur Marotti, and
Frank Whigham. General comments on the movement are offered by Green-
blatt in his introduction to a collection of essays he edited, The Power o f Forms in
the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 3-6; by Jonathan
Goldberg, “The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay,” ELH 49
(1982), 514—42; by David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 1-17; by Herbert Lindenberger,
‘Toward a New History in Literary Study,” in Richard Brod and Phyllis Franklin,
eds., Profession 84, pp. 16-23; by Louis Montrose, “Renaissance Studies and the
Subject of History,” English Literaiy Renaissance 16 (1986), 5-12; and by Jean E.
Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renais­
sance 16 (1986), 13-43. I have also benefited from an unpublished paper by
Walter Cohen, “Shakespeare and the Politics of Criticism.” It would be quite
wrong to assume that only the self-designated New Historicists are opening up
new initiatives in the historical criticism of the Renaissance; in fact, as I shall
argue, there are alternative kinds of historical and specifically political criticism
being done in Renaissance studies that offer importantly revisionary perspectives
on New Historicism. Scholars one might cite here are the feminists Lisa Jardine,
Madelon Gohlke, and Coppélia Kahn; the Marxists Robert Weimann and Walter
Cohen, the Marxist-influenced Gunther Kress, Robert Hodge, and David Aers
(on whom see the fine review article by Richard Helgerson, Comparative Literature
35 [1983], 362-73), and Jonathan Dollimore, who promotes a Raymond Wil­
liams-inspired cultural materialism; and a group of scholars who continue to
insist on the priority of local intentions and topical circumstances, such as David
Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, and Leah Marcus. One might note that
New Historicist self-presentation occasionally includes a totalizing impulse -
276 Lee Patterson
historicism, c'est nous - that is unhappily consistent with the totalizing Foucauld-
ianism that has so influenced it. This is a quality painfully in evidence, for
instance, in Goldberg’s BLH essay.
30 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 157.
31 Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Blindness and Insight, 2nd
edn. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1971]), p. 165.
32 For a characteristic Marxist dismissal of deconstruction, see Eagleton, Literary
Theory, pp. 144—5. A more generous, and in my view more accurate, political
understanding of deconstruction is offered by Robert Weimann in Structure and
Society in Literary History. Weimann argues, in a way reminiscent of Theodor
Adorno’s meditations on the role of the intellectual in society, that the theoretical
crisis of representation is determined by a social crisis of representativity: far
from being himself a “representative man,” a title Emerson was able to claim for
the poet, “the avant-garde literary intellectual finds himself at... an exorbitant
distance from both the centers of political and economic power and the ordinary
pursuits of the huge majority of the population” (p. 290). The poststructuralist
turn away from history is not simply a desire for escape but rather “the determi­
nation of the individual not to lend his voice to invisible arrangements of mute
power” (p. 291) - in short, an act of negativity consistent with the negativity that
characterizes art from the beginning of high modernism. Put succinctly, Wei­
mann sees “the argument against representation as a deliberate self-destruction
of cultural identity through the preclusion of unwelcome relationships” (p. 292).
33 “The Conflict of Faculties,” cited by Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and
Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 156.
For Derrida’s forceful self-defense on a specific issue - apartheid - see “But,
beyond ... Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon,” Critical Inquiry 13
(1986), 155-70.
34 For Eagleton’s phrase, see Criticism and Ideology, p. 83.
35 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Cul­
ture,” Interpretation of Cultures, p. 14.
36 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), p. viii; further references will be included within the text.
37 On this conception of man as culturally constituted, see Geertz, “The Impact
of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” Interpretation o f Cultures, pp.
33-54.
38 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 136; cited by Jonathan Goldberg, James I
and the Politics of IJterature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p.
33. Goldberg later adds: “Style here, as in Geertz’s Java, is content” (p. 47). The
New Historicist conception of Renaissance culture (and, indeed, all culture) as
essentially theatrical finds one of its sources in Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
39 Stephen Greenblatt, “Loudun and London,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986), 331—2.
40 Louis Montrose, ‘“ Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in
Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983), 84—5.
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 277
41 Greenblatt, “Loudun and London,” p. 343.
42 The term “monologic” is used by Greenblatt to characterize the old historicism
over against which the New Historicism is to be defined; see his Introduction to
The Power o f Forms in the English Renaissance, pp. 3-6.
43 Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subver­
sion,” Glyph 8 (1981), 40-61; in “The Politics of Renaissance Literature,” Gold­
berg has shrewdly noted that “there is in Greenblatt’s work too great a need not
to express the possibility that what he calls containment may not in fact have
been absolute, a need related to the desire of his project to contain all in a
controlling frame” (p. 533). And Goldberg adds, in commenting on Montrose’s
work, “Change needs to be accounted for; the possibility that change can occur
must be read into texts that appear to confirm power, and into the institutions -
court, theatre - that appear to preserve power” (p. 528). It is sometimes difficult
to remember, in reading New Historicist accounts, that the English Renaissance
reached its culmination in 1642 with a revolution.
44 Frank Lentricchia, “Reading Foucault (Punishment, Labor, Resistance): Part
Two,” Raritan 2, 1 (Summer 1982), 50-1.
45 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 220 (my italics).
46 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), p. 256. Greenblatt continues: “Whenever I focused sharply upon a
moment of apparendy autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of
identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free
choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was stricdy delineated by
the social and ideological systems in force.” This is a concern also voiced by the
book’s otherwise enthusiastic reviewers. See, for example, Louis Adrian Mon­
trose, “A Poetics of Renaissance Culture,” Criticism 23 (1981), 349-59; and
Thomas M. Greene, Comparative Literature 34 (1982), 184-6. In his ELH Article,
Goldberg describes the book as offering a “frighteningly totalistic and implicidy
totalitarian vision” (p. 529).
47 Greenblatt, “Loudun and London,” p. 341; Montrose, “ ‘Shaping Fantasies,’ ”
pp. 74, 84-5.
48 Louis Montrose, “ ‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,”
English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980), 153—82; see also “Gifts and Reasons: The
Contexts of Peele’s Araygnement o f Paris,” ELH 47 (1980), 433-61, and ‘“The
perfecte paterne of Poete’: The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender,”
Texas Studies in Language and Literature 21 (1979), 34—67. For the anti-Elizabethan
politics of The Shepheardes Calender, see Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English
Renaissance, pp. 59-90. Norbrook concludes: “In The Shepheardes Calender Spenser
established a political rhetoric that was to remain popular until the Civil War.
The figure of the shepherd poet became associated with the kind of policies
adopted by Leicester and his political heir, the Earl of Essex: a militant foreign
policy and at home a religious policy that was reasonably sympathetic to the
more radical brethren, while not necessarily favouring all radical demands”
(p. 89).
278 Lee Patterson
49 As Norbrook trenchantly points out, “If, as so often in the Renaissance period,
authorial intention has a substantial and under-acknowledged political element,
to ignore the intention is effectively to depoliticize” (Poetry and Politics in the
English Renaissance, p. 8 ).
50 For two instances of this decoding in contemporary Renaissance studies, see
Arthur Marotti, “ ‘Love is not love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the
Social Order,” ELH 49 (1982), 396-428; and Frank Whigham, Ambition and
Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
51 A brief account of the debate is offered by Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of
Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 143-6.
52 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon
Books, 1965), p. 81.
53 In Renaissance Self-Fashioning Greenblatt argues that “there are always selves - a
sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a
structure of bounded desires - and always some sense of deliberate shaping in
the formation and expression of identity__Moreover, there is considerable
empirical evidence that there may well have been less autonomy in self-fashioning
in the sixteenth century than before, that family, state, and religious institutions
impose a more rigid and far-reaching discipline upon their middle-class and
aristocratic subjects__ What is essential is the perception - as old in academic
writing as Burckhardt and Michelet - that there is in the early modem period a
change in the intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that
govern the generation of identities. This change is difficult to characterize in
our usual ways because it is not only complex but resolutely dialectical. If we say
that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must say that
there is the most sustained and relendess assault upon the will; if we say that
there is a new social mobility, we must say that there is a new assertion of power
by both family and state to determine all movement within the society; if we say
that there is a heightened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of
social, theological, and psychological organization, we must say that there is a
new dedication to the imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to
the destruction of alternatives” (pp. 1-2). In Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and
Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), Jonathan Dollimore argues that the Jacobean period saw
the emergence of “a conception of subjectivity legitimately identified in terms of
materialist perspective rather than one of essentialist humanism” (p. 249) - i.e.
subjectivity as a function of the reification of the self entailed by capitalist modes
of production. See also Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the
Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
54 For a lucid description of the Marxist theory of the generation of the sense of
autonomous individuality by capitalism, see István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of
Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), pp. 255-8.
55 Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University’ of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 125. For instances of this attraction, see the works of
Orgel, Goldberg, and Whigham cited above.
 Historical Criticism and the Claims o f Humanism 279
56 Theodor Adorno, “Subject and Object” (1969), in Andrew Arato and Eike
Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books,
1978), p. 500.
57 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 74.
58 For comments on Hans Robert Jauss’s most recent effort to theorize it in terms
of Medieval Studies, see chapter 1 n. 9.
59 Adorno, “Subject and Object,” p. 506. On this passage, see also Jay, Adorno, pp.
73-4. In Minima Moralia Adorno offers a similar account of the difficult reliability
of aesthetic experience: “Anyone who, drawing on the strength of his precise
reaction to a work of art, has ever subjected himself in earnest to its discipline, to
its immanent formal law, the compulsion of its structure, will find that the
objections to the merely subjective quality of his experience vanish like a pitiful
illusion: and every’ step that he takes, by virtue of his highly subjective innerva­
tion, towards the heart of the matter, has incomparably greater force than the
comprehensive and fully backed-up analyses of such things as ‘style,’ whose
claims to scientific status are made at the expense of such experience. This is
doubly true in the era of positivism and the culture industry, where objectivity’ is
calculated by the subjects managing it” (p. 70).
60 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1981), p. 235.
 10
“A bject odious”: Feminine and
Masculine in H enryson’s Testam ent o f
C resseid
F e l ic it y Riddy

In the cathedral museum in Strasbourg there is a late fifteenth-century

painting attributed to an unknown Swabian Master called Les Amants trépassés.
It depicts the dead lovers naked, standing side by side on what looks like a
stone floor which dissolves into an impenetrably black background. Their
bodies are already decomposing; through their emaciated flesh the bones are
visible; the skin on their faces is pulled back so that they are almost grinning
skulls. They wear their winding sheets, and the woman is holding hers back to
expose her withering breasts and her genitals, to which a toad clings. Snakes
coil into, out of, and around the bodies of them both, and flies are feeding on
their flesh. Nevertheless they are not cadavers: they stand upright. The man’s
face has an expression of tormented regret, as if he is weeping fearlessly. He
covers his genitals with his shroud and is turned slightly away from the
woman. She has placed a scrawny hand on his shoulder in a gesture of
dependence or restraint; her stare is bolder than his, less comprehending,
more lost. They are still in some sense a couple, and their suffering, it is
implied, is related to their coupling. The painting is of death as a continuing
process of pain, degradation, and decay; the two are caught forever between
living and being dead. They are revenants, walkers on the boundary;
excluded, abominable, defiled. The horror of the painting lies in the way it
blurs the borders between life and death as well as those between repulsion
and fascination.
The painting obviously draws on the iconography of Adam and Eve,
expelled from the garden, hiding their nakedness in pristine shame. The
posture of the man - one hand over his genitals and the other on his breast
- is identical to that of Adam in Jan van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece of 1432. Van
Eyck’s Adam, though, is not in torment; he and Eve are on the outermost
Swabian Master L es A mants trépassés (late 15th century).
Musée de la Ville de Strasbourg
282 Felicity Riddy
edge, but they are integral to and not excluded from the redemptive scheme
which is the altarpiece’s subject. So the Adam and Eve iconography does not
necessarily produce the desolation of I^es Amants trépassés, and Law does not
have to be understood as only punishing. In Les Amants trépassés something
seems to have happened to the representation of exclusion —to the Adam
and Eve model - to give it its peculiar horror. Perhaps this “something” can
be approached in another way, by trying to understand what the couple are
excluded from. Van Eyck presents a different pairing in his double portrait of
Giovanni and Giovanna Arnolfini, which he painted in 1434.1 In this paint­
ing, which in some ways could not be further from Ijes Amants trépassés, the
merchant and his wife, dressed from head to foot in rich but unshowy
clothing, stand holding hands in their bedchamber, prayer beads hanging
on the wall. Their sanctioned and unlascivious sexuality is represented in their
solid bed with its carving of St Margaret with her dragon, patroness of
childbirth. They are incorporated into the patriarchal institutions of marriage
and the household. Looking at the pair, we can see that the dead lovers are
excluded from all this: from lawfulness, marriage, domesticity, philoprogenit­
ive love. He knows and repents, but she remains even now half outside the
law, displaying her ruined nakedness without shame. And yet these couples
are not disconnected: the guilty lovers’ abjection enables the sanctioned
lovers to hold their gaze steady. The couple in Les Amants trépassés stand
between the viewer and the abyss of total dissolution. They have traversed
into the forbidden; the sanctioned lovers remain within the borders of the
ordered and permissible. The fantasy of social, domestic, and sexual order
which van Eyck has painted - because it is a fantasy despite the realism of his
style - needs those borders to maintain itself in being. There are indications
within the painting of what lies outside and bounds it: carved on one of the
posts of the bench behind the couple’s clasped hands is a grotesque crouch­
ing monster. Moreover the figure of St Margaret reminds us that the bed in
which marital intercourse takes place and in which the children are born is
also where the wife may die in childbirth. The marital bed is, moreover, the
site of the “tame death” of the artes moriendi\ Giovanni Arnolfini must have
hoped to die in a bed like this, turning his face to the wall in the presence of
his confessor and his sorrowing household. Meanwhile order and system
hold sin and death at bay.
Les Amants trépassés, then, are what the Arnolfini double portrait has
excluded. Nevertheless there is more to be said about the iconography of
their abjection, and the painting’s focus on their suffering. The woman has
antecedents in representations of luxuria, the deadly sin of lust who, as Marina
Warner points out, appears in bas-relief at Moissac and elsewhere, naked,
with snakes gnawing at her genitals and breasts and with toads issuing from
her mouth. The law the guilty lovers have transgressed is similarly implied
through the precisely located retribution it exacts. A different parallel is
 Heniyson’s Testament of Cresseid 283
provided by a late fifteenth-century limewood carving, attributed to Gregor
Erhart, of Vanitas, the preacher’s theme that all is vanity .4 This carving is of
three interlinked figures, standing back to back: two of them are a beautiful,
naked young man and woman, while the third is a naked, scrawny old woman
with flaps for breasts, missing teeth, and the same bold and desperate glare as
the woman in Les Amants trépassés. The young man does not need a decrepit
male counterpart because the old woman can apparendy make the point for
both sexes. It is on the female body that the grim law of nature that beauty
passes is most clearly drawn: “all flesh is as grass. . . and the flower thereof
falleth away.” Les Amants trépassés seems to bring these elements together in
an ambivalent over-determination of guilt: the figures incorporate not only
the primal transgression of Adam and Eve, but both luxuria and vanitas as
well, punitively intertwined. The couple are being punished for their lust by
their bodily decay: they represent the sin and death which lurk in the
Arnolfini double portrait.
The relevance of Les Amants trépassés to The Testament o f Cresseid is surely clear
enough. Cresseid the leper is another figure of degradation and horror who is
similarly positioned at the ambivalent coming-together of luxuria and vanitas,
which are constantly intertwined and mistaken for one another in the poem.
What Denton Fox and others have seen as the moral confusion of the narrator
in lines 78—845 - a stanza which combines vanitas's “flour” (78) and luxuria'%
“giglot” (83) - is the product of this ambivalence. When Cresseid finally
disposes of her disgusting leprous body in her testament, consigning it as
waste, ‘‘With wormis and with taidis to be rent” (577-8), Henryson uses an
iconography of decay that locates her with Les Amants trépassés. Nevertheless,
poem and painting also share a wider preoccupation with defilement and
exclusion, and with states of being - leper and standing corpse - that are
neither living nor dead. Throughout the poem Cresseid is an outcast, an
“unworthie outwaill” (129), and the action concerns the processes whereby
she is progressively excluded or excludes herself: socially, morally, spatially,
temporally. She enters the poem as an exile from Troy, and her promised
“retour” (51) or “ganecome” (55) can never take place. She is formally
repudiated by Diomeid and, “désolait” (76) and “maculait” (81), passes “far
out of the toun” (9 5 ) to her father’s house, but once she has become a leper she
cannot stay there either. In the gods’ sentence on Cresseid the sufferings of
leprosy are represented as another version of exclusion, not only because her
repulsive disease means that “Quhair thou cummis, ilk man sail fie the place”
(341), but because she is cut off from her own former beauty and desire:

“Thy greit faimes and all thy bewtie gay,

Thy wantoun blude, and eik thy goldin hair,
Heir I exclude fra the for euermair.”
(313-15)
284 Felicity Riddy
This exclusion is reiterated in, and structures, the complaint Cresseid speaks
in the “hospitali at the tounis end” (382) to which, as a leper, she must be
consigned. The complaint first takes the form of an elaborate and moving
elegy to an unrecoverable past - the past of the “greit fairnes” the gods have
cut her off from —and then develops an increasingly intense focus on the
contrasting degradations of her present. The present is not a stable state; it is
not “the end” (456) although Cresseid calls it that. Rather, it is a process of
“faiding” (461) and “rotting” (464), like the decomposing bodies of ¡jes
Amants trépassés. That is, the vantage-point of retrospection is unfixed; there
is further to go; there is a beyond even leprosy; in the end the narrative itself
will exclude her. Her pessimistic reminder of the processes of time is directed
by Cresseid at the “ladyis fair of Troy and Grece” (452), and is one from
which Troilus is apparently exempt.6 Like the young man in the carving of
Vanitas, the woman does his decomposing for him. She transmogrifies into
unrecognizability; she is “untrew” (602), heterogeneous and changeable,
while he is “trew” (the word is used of him repeatedly at the end of the
poem) and self-consistent.
The Testament o f Cresseid engages, in a way that is quite beyond the reach of
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, with filth and pollution, with what Julia Kris­
teva, in Powers o f Horror, calls the abject. Cresseid uses the word of herself in
the complaint against the gods that has such terrible consequences:

“Quha sail me gyde? Quha sail me now convoy,

Sen I fra Diomeid and nobill Troylus
Am clene excludit, as abject odious?”
( 131- 3)8

In this cry “Quha sail me gyde? Quha sail me now convoy?” can be heard the
voice of the ungoverned woman whom the authorities in late-medieval
society continually attempted to control; husbandless, protectorless, cast
adrift from the structures of male authority' which the poem does not
question, she is Kristeva’s “stray.”9 “Lost” is a word I used of the woman
in Ijes Amants trépassés who clutches the man’s shoulder even as he turns from
her. Henryson’s extraordinary’ feat is to have given her a voice, to imagine
what it is to be “abhominabill” (308).
Kristeva argues that the process of abjection - of loathing and repulsion -
is the means whereby the subject, or “I,” is brought into being. What is
rejected as filth and waste is not so in itself: there is nothing intrinsic to
excrement, menstrual blood, corpses, or lepers to account for the abhorrence
attached to them in many cultures. 10 Kristeva suggests that these things take
on the meanings they do because “Refuse and corpses show me what I
permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement,
this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of
 Heniyson's Testament of Cresseid 285
death .” 11 The abject, loathed and repellent, lurks ambiguously on the borders
of identity, making identity possible, yet constandy threatening its collapse.
The abject is thus “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”; it is
heterogeneous, neither one thing nor another. Kristeva argues that abjection
is the process whereby the infant begins to found an identity separate from
the mother, before the intervention of the father into the mother-child dyad,
before it takes up a position in language and the symbolic order. What is
rejected must be - since there is as yet no separate identity - the maternal, the
feminine. Moreover, Kristeva argues that it is maternal authority which maps
the infant’s body, delineating it as “clean and proper”:

Through frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body as a

territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the
archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean
and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted.12

This mapping defines the distinction between inside and outside, self and
other, subject and object; the “clean and proper body” founds identity, order,
and stability. Her reworking of Freud’s From Totem to Taboo makes it possible
for her to move from the constitution of the subject to the constitution of
society, ranging over a variety of historical periods including the medieval,
and to theorize the ways in which law, morality, and religion also require for
their very being expulsion, repression, and purification. At the end of Powers o f
Horror she speaks of laying bare “under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilisations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by
purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that they seize on in
order to build themselves up and function.” 13 The horror of Les Amants
trépassés is what, I have been arguing, lies under the “cunning, orderly surface”
of the Arnolfini double portrait; by “pushing aside” Cresseid, Troilus’s
identity is constituted within the poem.
Kristeva’s conception of the abject is a good starting-point for a reading of
The Testament o f Cresseid that focuses on Cresseid’s degradation and which aims
to understand why the poem treats Cresseid as cruelly as it does.14 Of all the
outcomes that might have been designed for Chaucer’s Criseyde, this is surely
one of the most horrible. Why was it not possible to imagine an altogether
different kind of story, in which Cresseid marries a Greek, establishes a
household, even has children - the story in terms of which the demure
Giovanna Arnolfini is constructed? To say that Henryson is more misogy-
nistic than Chaucer, as some readers have done, does not answer the question
but simply restates it. One answer must lie in the meanings given to women’s
sexuality in fifteenth-century Scotland and thus to the kinds of narrative it can
generate, and I shall return to this subject later. But the poem’s need to
represent Cresseid as defiling and abominable also seems to emanate from
286 Felicity Riddy
some more private place, from what Kristeva calls the “uncertain spaces of
unstable identity” 15 where masculinity struggles to maintain its equilibrium.
And so Cresseid is made to bear the symbolic weight of the explusion of the
feminine: Troilus’s famous truth, his self-consistency, is a version of the
“clean and proper body” from which hers, first defiled by promiscuity and
then disfigured by leprosy, is abjected. Tracing this in the story means
attending to the poem’s discontinuities and incoherences; it means reading
against the grain of the dominant interpretation of The Testament o f Cresseid as a
“getting-of-wisdom poem .” 16
The vocabulary I have adopted is modern, yet it can also be related to
medieval thinking about sex and gender. Joan Cadden has shown us in great
detail how medieval scientific and medical ideas about sexual difference - a
two-thousand-year conversation conducted almost exclusively by men - not
only assumed but enforced a polarity (which is also a hierarchy) between male
and female.17 In scientific discourses gender as a cultural construction was
not coterminous with biological sex, but was nevertheless polarized in the
same way as sexual difference. Femininity mosdy, although not without
exception, connoted various kinds of “moral and physical weakness” while
masculinity mosdy connoted “moral and physical strength.” 18 These mean­
ings were not arbitrarily assigned; they were believed to be grounded in
nature. It was held that women’s physical make-up made them frailer than
men, morally and physically, so “feminine” could be used in a transferred
sense to characterize, among other things, men who showed the forms of
frailty observable in women, contrary to their own nature, and vice versa.
Cadden sees scientific thought as implicated in a process which she presents
as oppressive:

Natural philosophy and medicine, among the authoritative arbiters of what was
natural, were therefore participants in the construction of the concepts of the
feminine and the masculine, in the enforcement of the duality which they
applied, and in the disapprobation of what was therefore seen as deviant.19

The question that this raises is why it should have been so crucial to medieval
scientific thinking that the categories male and female, and masculine and
feminine, be kept rigorously apart. What would be at risk if sex and gender
differences were to collapse, dissolving male into female and thus making it
impossible to distinguish masculine from feminine? The threat of such a
collapse surely takes us into “the uncertain spaces of unstable identity,” to use
Kristeva’s phrase. From a modern vantage point, it is possible to see that
reinforcing the sex and gender binaries by appeals to nature is a way of
buttressing the “moral and physical strength” of the male, creating and
confirming the masculine identity which seems to be at issue in The Testament
o f Cresseid.
 Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid 287
Douglas Gray, in his sympathetic account of the poem in Robert Henryson,
has provided us with the most thorough and attentive version of the gettdng-
of-wisdom reading. He points to, though does not develop, the importance
of pollution in The Testament o f Cresseid, which he presents as medieval tragedy
in the Senecan mode, citing Dante’s definition of tragedy as in its end “fetid
and horrible.” Nevertheless his reading, I think it is fair to say, is more
concerned with the pity he has made his special subject than with horror.
Gray takes as his point of entry into the poem the analysis of character, and
the liberal-humanist position from which he writes allows him to regard
Cresseid as an agent, with a psychology, and to suggest that she is capable of
moral understanding, choice, and development, even of undergoing “a spiri­
tual change of some kind .”20 This is, as I have already said, now the dominant
reading of the poem: there seems to be general agreement that it shows the
awakening of conscience through suffering. Gray argues, with great sympa­
thy, that Cresseid’s final speech “sets up an ideal of noble love, embodied in
Troilus, which she has totally betrayed .”21 This humanist move, in which
Troilus’s love is implicidy endorsed as a standard against which Cresseid has
failed, ensures that this ideal remains unexamined. It is not only to modern
feminism that his “noble love” may not appear self-evidendy universal: after
all, Chaucer did not represent Troilus’s love as simply noble in Troilus and
Criseydey though that is one of the temporary valuations the poem puts on it.
At the end it is seen as reprehensible, as “blynde lust, the which that may nat
laste” (V. 1824).22 The “ideal of noble love” in Troilus and Criseyde is finally not
located in humans at all. The failure of the affair and Troilus’s cruel death are
held to show the futility of his kind of loving (“Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus
for love!”, V. 1328) and the ineffectuality of his gods (“Lo here, what alie hire
goddes may availle!”, V. 1849). The Testament o f Cresseid,, by contrast, demon­
strates the gods’ terrible power and does not condemn his love for Cresseid.
Her degradation does not contaminate him, nor is he coupled with her as a
guilty lover. The fact that the poem refuses to follow Chaucer’s precedent,
though, shows that the meaning it finds in Troilus is contingent, not uni­
versal, an achievement not a given, and the painfulness of Cresseid’s treat­
ment shows what it costs to achieve. The “ideal of noble love” can be said to
stand in relation to Cresseid as the Arnolfini couple do to the “amants
trépassés.” Cresseid’s abjection borders and maintains Troilus’s truth.
Troilus, in addition to being “trew,” is twice described as “worthie,” a word
that links him with the “worthie wemen” (610) of the final stanza to whom
the whole poem turns out to be addressed.23 Cresseid represents the “fais
deceptioun” (613) which they are exhorted to eschew. The “ideal of noble
love” which Troilus upholds is apparently one of which male readers do not
need to be reminded. Douglas Gray, using his tragic model, defends this
stanza as cathartic: “its wordiness comes as something of an emotional
release” as the narrator in his choric role selects “as in the moralitates of the
288 Felicity Riddy
fables, a single important moral strand from his story for emphasis”, and
brings the poem to “an abrupt and enigmatic conclusion .”24 This account of
the stanza, by so generous and fair-minded a commentator, simply shows up
the problem, since it has to leave out the uncomfortable fact that the poem
ends with the old lie that it is women who are fickle. This old lie is, of course,
one which has been particularly useful for “the cunning, orderly surface of
civilisations,” and Gray is right when he calls it “an important moral strand in
the poem.” It is, after all, one of the views of women that is encoded in the
plot, a plot which, as I have already said, is generated by the meanings given
to female sexuality in fifteenth-century Scodand. The story of Cresseid’s
decline into promiscuity, disease, and death is in essence the same as the
one which Hogarth depicted in the eighteenth century in a series of paintings
known as The Harlot's Progress,25 In this sequence the young woman, Moll
Hackabout, is depicted as initially arriving in London, then deceiving her
elderly lover, then being arrested for prostitution, then committed to Bride­
well, then dying of the pox, and finally in her coffin. There is more than one
way of reading this sequence, as the contemporary responses to it show, but
Ronald Paulson suggests that the “ordinary reader of the Harlot, brought up
on Bunyan, would have read a grim moral narrative in which the Harlot is
jusdy punished.” 26
The plot of the Testament is strikingly similar to this, and can be read in
much the same way. The final stanza in fact offers this kind of reading:

Now, worthie wemen, in this ballet schort,

Maid for your worschip and instructioun,
Of cheritie, I monische and exhort,
Ming not your lufe with fais deceptioun:
Beir in your mvnd this sore conclusioun
Of fair Cresseid...
(610-15)

Such a reading makes the moralist’s assumption - which innumerable

women’s life-histories of course disprove - that once a woman has been
unfaithful, then she will inevitably become promiscuous, contract a venereal
disease, and die. Because the sequence is presented as inevitable it forecloses
the alternative ending I referred to earlier, in which Cresseid might have
ended up married to a Greek. In fact, once the poem is read as exemplary, it is
possible to see that the gods are there to enforce the inevitability of the
sequence and to ensure that no other outcome to the plot is possible.
Moreover they provide an explicit moral causation for events that in the
Hogarth series are left more open. Leprosy is elaborately troped as a judg­
ment on Cresseid, and not a contagion. Medieval medical science believed
that legrosy was transmitted by sexual intercourse, by contact, and by
breath“ - that is, that it was a social disease - but it is crucial to the moral
 Henryson*s Testament of Cresseid 289
structure of this story that Cresseid, isolated, should infect herself. The
harlot’s progress, in which progression is inevitably downwards, must have
been one among several narratives about female sexuality available in the
fifteenth century; its obverse is the story of the harlot’s success which
underlies Dunbar’s Tretis o f the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. The narrative
of ruin lurks in the mid-fifteenth-century advice poem, “Thewis of Gud
Women,” in which young girls are warned that painting the face and keeping
bad company are “giglotrye ,”28 the first step on the path to the loss of all
social identity.
The harlot’s progress is the kind of narrative that was depicted in the
painted glass roundels which survive from late-medieval urban buildings in
the Low Countries, and which were produced in narrative series aimed at
conveying “edifying allegory, ethical instruction or cautionary tale.”29 There is
evidence of a similar taste in English glazing of the period .30 There is no
surviving domestic glass from late-medieval Scodand although it is in the
houses of merchants, including those members of the Dunfermline guild who
traded with Flanders,31 that we might expect to find its use. Various lurid
cautionary tales of female sexual ruin - including that of Cresseid - are used
in The Spectacle o f Lufe, which the Edinburgh notary John Asloan copied into
his manuscript in the early decades of the sixteenth century .32 The narrative
of the harlot’s progress - in the late Middle Ages as in the eighteenth century
- defines urban morality through the figure whose transgressiveness consigns
her to the margins of civil society. Henryson’s version of the harlot’s ruin is
not simply antifeminist but is used to shore up one kind of femininity against
another: the “worthie women” of the final stanza against the “giglot” (83).
We know these worthy women from “Thewis of Gud Women,” in which
young girls are advised to conform themselves to “the best / of women that
are worthyest” (123-4), and told that “Thai suld be chaist and cheritable, /
Worthi women, wyss and abile” (225—6). Kristeva writes that “Abjection,
when all is said and done is the other facet of religious, moral and ideological
codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of
societies.” 33 The moral and ideological codes of the late-medieval Scottish
towns were maintained by men like those “introspective, conservative”
burgesses of Dunfermline whom Elizabeth Torne has neatly characterized,
with their well-designed houses and their subservient wives.34 They certainly
did not have the wealth and sophistication of Giovanni Arnolfini; their
portraits were not painted by court artists, but they did, presumably, send
their sons to school with Robert Henryson. The system and order of their
communities required the exclusion of those whom the authorities deemed
threatening and antisocial, including prostitutes and lepers: “scho was nocht
worthy to remayn in the town” was the judgment passed by one court on a
woman offender,35 and lepers, likewise, were shunned.36 In Cresseid, of
course, promiscuity and disease are conflated, making her doubly abject.
290 Felicity Riddy
If humanist readings of The Testament o f Cresseid fail to acknowledge its
antifeminism, they also overestimate its coherence. For critics to turn the
exemplary narrative of the harlot’s progress into an exemplary narrative of
the birth of conscience requires bringing into play a notion of character that
seems to me anachronistic, as I shall argue later. It also requires the reader to
ignore the fact that there are discontinuities in the narrative itself which blur
the whole issue of Cresseid’s transgression. It might be thought crucial, if
Cresseid has to learn penitence, that the reader should be allowed to know
what crime she has committed. Is it her infidelity, that she did not return to
Troy as she had promised to do, but instead became the mistress of Diomeid?
Is it that after being repudiated by Diomeid she became promiscuous? Is it
that she blamed the gods for what happened to her? Is it that she set too
much store by beauty and luxury? Is it that she imagined she could be
desirable for ever? All these, at some point or other in the poem, are brought
to the fore as things for which she deserves to be punished. Furthermore,
there is a telling hiatus between Cresseid’s reception by Diomeid in lines 43-4
(apparently alluding to the scene in Troilus and Criseyde, V. 15-189) and his
repudiation of her at 71-5, a hiatus that is filled by the stanzas in which the
“narrator” takes up the “uther quair” (61). The old narrative stopped with
Troilus despairing of her return; when the new narrative begins she is already,
like some Jean Rhys heroine, being discarded by a sexually bored Diomeid.
The “betrayal” (the word is Douglas Gray’s) falls into the space between the
two versions. If the poem aims to show Cresseid coming to an awareness of
the wrong she has done to Troilus, then it must surely be a weakness that the
reader is not allowed to know how that wrong came about.
Cresseid herself can be read, not as an individualized moral agent with the
capacity to “develop” in the course of the action,37 but as a voice. Her three
main speeches - her diatribe against the gods, her complaint, and her
testament - are different genres that provide discontinuous subject positions:
the “I” of the moralizing mirror, as it occurs in The Three Dead Kings or The
Buke o f the Howlat, the ubi sunt “I” from the Body and Soul tradition;38 the
testamentary “I” of contemporary wills;39 the “I” of the forsaken woman, as
in Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcitr,40 the “I” of the outcast. Trying to read these
discontinuities as stages in a moral progression may prevent us from seeing
that what humanist criticism takes as given in the discussion of character - its
moral coherence and stability or, in medieval terms, its “truth” - is in fact
what the poem is struggling to bring into being. Moreover this “truth” is
gendered: what the Testament o f Cresseid shows is the struggle to constitute a
stable masculine identity'; its constant risk of dissolution; its relation to
repression, law, and punishment; and above all, its need to exclude the
feminine. Cresseid, who is central to redemptive and exemplary readings of
the poem, is precisely not where the achievement of this is located; rather, she
is what has to be jettisoned both by the narrative and by the poem’s symbolic
 Henryson's Testament of Cresseid 291
codes to achieve it. O f course the poem tells a story, and a very powerful and
moving one. My argument is that the power of the story comes not so much
from the events, but from the way what happens is imagined and engaged
with. What is obscurely at stake in the story of the much-loved woman who is
cast out is the very making of masculinity.
The problem of character is initiated with the “I” of the opening stanza, an
“I” that is explicidy brought into being by the act of writing (“Richt sa it wes
quhen I began to wryte / This tragédie,” 3-4). This “I” cannot be confidendy
identified with a really existing Henryson outside the poem or with anyone
whom we can call “the narrator.” It is not much more than a strategy for
beginning a poem, a strategy that is well established by the late fifteenth
century and for which Henryson had plenty of models in Chaucer, Gower,
and Lydgate. This “I” merges with the “I” of age’s retrospection on youth (as
at the end of Gower’s Confessio Amantis and in Hoccleve’s Regement o f Princes),
and the “I” of February warming himself by the fire (from innumerable
“labours of the months” illustrations), in order to focus on male sexuality.
The oppositions between heat and cold, inside and outside, and youth and
age construct an identity which is corporeal: the body is the place where
masculinity is founded and which it struggles to transcend. The male body is
to be an issue - perhaps the issue - throughout the poem. It is returned to at
the moment of Troilus’s last encounter with Cresseid, when a “spark of lufe”
(512) “kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre,” coding it in terms of medieval
humour theory as youthful, sexual, and male, and refocusing on the opposi­
tion between inside and outside. As Troilus imposes on to the face of the
leprous Cresseid the “idole” (507) in his mind of the “sweit visage and
amorous blenking / Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling” (503—4),
loathing of and desire for the feminine can be seen to collapse into one
another.
If we accept that what looks like a character here and in the opening
stanzas is a means of focusing the reader’s attention, there is no difficulty
when the “narrator” later swithers between moral condemnation of Cresseid
and pity for her misfortune:

0 fair Creisseid, the flour and A per se

Of Troy and Grece, how was thow fortunait
To change in filth all thy feminitie,
And be with fleschelie lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Greikis air and lait,
Sa giglotlike takand thy foull plesance!
1 have pietie thow suld fall sic mischance!
(77-84)

We do not have to ask ourselves how these positions, especially the

contradiction of the last two lines, can be integrated by appealing to some
292 Felicity Riddy
conception of a stable, founding character, nor do we have to explain that the
narrator is a particular kind of person in order to account for this. Rather we
can pay attention to the contradiction and ambivalence in the ways this
language constructs Cresseid: I have already said that she is located at the
intersection of discourses of luxuria and vanitas. The comment “how was
thow fortunait / To change in filth all thy feminitie” (79) is particularly
revealing. We might expect cleanness to change into filth, or femininity
into masculinity; there is a surprising disturbance of the binaries here. The
implication is that femininity is purity, and so an unclean femininity is a
contradiction whose unthinkableness produces the outrage of this line, and
eventually requires the dissolution of Cresseid into the body that is consigned
to rot and the soul that joins Diana in “waist woddis and wellis” (588). What
is left unspoken in line 79, of course, is the fourth term: masculinity. If the
feminine is clean, then the masculine is filthy. The problem that the poem is
wrestling with is not the problem of femininity but a problem within
masculinity: its own uncleanness, which is coded as feminine and rejected
as polluting. The feminine-unclean is expelled, repudiated first by a “lybell of
repudie” (74) or formal bill of divorce, and then by the excessive rigor of the
gods’ parliament. Kristeva says that an “unshakeable adherence to Prohibi­
tion and Law” is necessary in order to thrust aside the abject: “Religion.
Morality. Law. Obviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailingly oppress­
ive, rather more than less; laboriously prevailing, more and more so .”4 This
seems to make sense - if that is the right word —of the judging and punitive
forces ranged against Cresseid.
The “unstabilnes” of which Cresseid accuses herself, and which she con­
trasts with Troilus’s constancy, is the deceptive heterogeneity of the feminine
which lies outside masculine singleness and into which the latter constandy
threatens to slide. When she goes “into the court, commoun” (77) Cresseid is
borderless, dissolved. The Venus of the opening stanza is also multiple: she
is not the same as the Venus of the parliament; Venus in that section is
described as “Richt unstabill and full of variance” (235), while Cynthia has no
color of her own. Against the fascination of the abject, masculinity is fragile.
The male gods represent the symbolic order of prohibition and law, and yet
even in them the boundaries of masculinity are under threat. Saturn, like the
narrator at the beginning of the poem, is an androgynous figure of cold,
androgynous because according to the theory of humours women are colder
than men;42 in winter, according to Gilbert Hay, “all the vertues of mannis
corps and bestis worthis waykare and feblare, as ane aid wyf, bludelas but
naturale hete in hir, is cald and dry, nakit and trembland, gray and gretand,
and all for elde drawand to the poynt of dede .”43 Jupiter, garlanded and
flower-bedecked, is “nureis to all thingis generabili” (171), and the “fair
Phebus” is, similarly, ‘Tender nureis and banischer of nicht” (201). In her
final lament Cresseid herself is made to shore up the rigid dualities of sex and
 Heniyson's Testament of Cresseid 293
gender - “Fy, fais Cresseid; O trew knicht Troylus” (560) - on which
masculine identity rests.
That duality has already been confirmed in the episode to which I have
referred in which Troilus, riding triumphandy back from the batdefield, gives
Cresseid a purse of gold without knowing who she is. She asks one of the
other lepers who “Hes done to us so greit humanitie?” (534), and is told that
it is he. “Humanitie” means “human nature,” but it also means “kindness”
and “generosity” or, as A Dictionary o f the Older Scottish Tongue44 glosses it,
“conduct appropriate to human beings,” which brings together both mean­
ings. “Don humanitie” means “to treat kindly”; it is a performative, like “don
frendshipe” or “don merci.” In giving Cresseid the purse Troilus has done
what human beings do: he has enacted his humanity. His gesture seems to
obliterate difference as it crosses the boundaries between leprous and whole,
between past and present, between man and woman, between prince and
beggar. And yet at the same time it constitutes difference, since in order for
him to do what he does, Cresseid has to be where and what she is. She has to
have been exiled, repudiated, and stricken with disease so that Troilus can lay
claim to the “humanitie” which she attributes to him.
Cresseid’s epitaph is her last exclusion and it leads into the moralizing
detachment of the final stanza. It is famously elliptical:

“Lo, fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troy the toun,

Sumtyme countit the flour of womanheid,
Under this stane, lait Upper, lyis deid.”
(607-9)

Like the couple in Ijes Amants trépassés with whom I began, she is in the grave;
the monument which Troilus is said to have erected is against his own
dissolution as much as it is a memorial to hers. It is etched in “goldin letteris”
(606) with her doubleness, with the ambivalence of vanitas and luxuria\ “flour
of womanheid” and “Upper.” The marble of the tomb contrasts with the
paper of her testament, as if soUdifying that doubleness in stone can some­
how fix its sUpperiness, and halt death as a process of “faiding” and “rotting.”
“Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to
Uve,” says Kristeva: the monument marks the border between the “grave
quhair that scho lay” (605) and the Uving zone where the mascuUne is marked
as human, stable, and “trew.”

N otes

1 The van Eyck double portrait is in the National Gallery, London. Much has been
written on its assumed occasion and the significance of its details. See Erwin
294 Felicity Riddy
Panofsky, “Jan van Eyck’s Amolfini Portrait’, Burlington Magazine, 64 (1934), 117-
27, and, for a recent bibliography, Craig Harbison, “Sexuality and Social Stand­
ing in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait”, Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990),
249-91. I am grateful to my colleagues Amanda Lillie and, especially, Richard
Marks for their helpful advice on art-historical matters.
2 For the “tame death,” see Philippe Ariès, The Hour o f Our Death, trans. Helen
Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1983).
3 See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
(London, 1985), 295—6 and fig. 89, and Michael Camille, “The Image and the
Self,” in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (eds.), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester,
1994), 79-80. I am grateful to Cordelia Beattie for these references and for the
Warner reference in n. 4. See also Meyer Schapiro, The Sculpture of Moissac
(London, 1985), 115 and fig. 131.
4 This carving is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is reproduced in
Warner, Monuments and Maidens, fig. 90. See also Katalog der Sammlung fiir Plastik
und Kunstgewerbe: Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1964), 63, figs. 60 and 61, and
Michael Baxandall, The Umewood Sculptors o f Renaissance Germany (New Haven,
Conn, and London, 1980), 292. Baxandall thinks the sculpture is probably not by
the Augsburg sculptor Erhart, but by an artist working in Passau.
5 In his separate edition of the poem, Denton Fox describes the narrator as
“stupid and passionately involved”; see The Testament of Cresseid, ed. Denton
Fox (London, 1968), 23. All quotations in this essay from The Testament o f Cresseid
are from The Poems of Robert Hentyson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981).
6 Lesley Johnson points out that Cresseid’s leprosy “literally produces the condi­
tions of old age”; see “Whatever Happened to Criseyde? Henryson’s Testament of
Cresseid,” in Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (eds.) Courtly Uterature: Culture and
Context (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1990), 313-21, at 314.
7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York, 1982).
8 Fox (ed.), Poems of Robert Hentyson, n. to 1. 133, points out that “abject” is not
recorded elsewhere in Middle Scots, nor in English until 1534.
9 “The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates
(himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings,
desiring, belonging, or refusing” (Kristeva, Powers o f Horror, 8 ).
10 “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for
the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non­
ego, society threatened by its outside; life by death” (ibid. 71).
11 Ibid. 3.
12 Ibid. 72. For “the seifs clean and proper body,” see p. 71. In his ‘Translator’s
Note,” p. viii, Leon Roudiez explains that he uses the “rather cumbersome ‘one’s
own clean and proper body’ to render the French corps propre
13 Ibid. 210.
14 Critics have long emphasized the poem’s cruelty: see Douglas Duncan, “Henry-
son’s Testament of Cresseid,” Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 128-35; A. C. Spearing,
“Conciseness and The Testament of Cresseid,” in Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 2nd
edn. (London, 1972), 157-94. For a more recent reading which, like mine,
 Henryson's Testament of Cresseid 295
emphasizes “debasement and expulsion,” see David J. Parkinson, “Henryson’s
Scottish Tragedy,” Chaucer Review, 25 (1991), 355-62 (p. 355).
15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 58.
16 Quoted by Edwin D. Craun, “Blaspheming Her ‘Awin God’: Cresseid’s ‘Lamen­
tation’ in Henryson’s Testament”, SP 82 (1985), 25— 41, at 25, from Jennifer
Strauss, ‘To Speak Once More of Cresseid: Henryson’s Testament Reconsidered”,
Scottish Literary Journal’ 4 (1977), 5.
17 Joan Cadden, Meanings o f Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Mediáne, Science and
Culture (Cambridge, 1993), 170.
18 Ibid. 208.
19 Ibid. 226.
20 Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden, 1979), 205.
21 Ibid. 203.
22 Quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer; ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1988).
23 Fox points out that Henryson follows Chaucer, “in whose poem Troilus is repeat­
edly called worthie and worthiest.... Henryson, like Chaucer, opposes the beauty of
Cresseid to the moral worth of Troilus” (The Poems of Robert Henryson, 343).
24 Gray, Robert Henryson, 207.
25 See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols, i: The ‘ Modem Moral Subject" 1697-1732
(Cambridge, 1991). I am indebted to Mark Hallett for the Hogarth parallel and
this reference.
26 Paulson, Hogarth, i. 256.
27 For the medieval belief in the contagiousness of leprosy, see Luke Demaître,
“The Description and Diagnosis of Leprosy by Fourteenth-Century Physicians,”
Bulletin o f the History of Medicine, 59 (1985), 327—44, and Danielle Jacquart and
Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew
Adamson (Oxford, 1988), 185-7. It was also, of course, believed to be a
punishment for sin: see Saul Brody, The Disease o f the Soul: Leproy in Medieval
Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1974). See also Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and his
Northern Heirs (Cambridge, 1977), and Françoise Bériac, Histoire des lepreux aux
Moyen Age: une société d'exclus (Paris, 1988).
28 See “Thewis of Gud Women,” in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on
Morals, ed. R. Girvan, STS, 3rd ser. II (Edinburgh and London, 1939), 11. 92 and
121. Henryson uses “giglotlike” of Cresseid at 1. 83.
29 See Timothy B. Husband, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in the Lowlands,
1480-1560 (New York, 1995), 13. Subjects of surviving roundels include Susanna
and the Elders, and Sorgheloos, “a starchy allegory inveighing against spend­
thriftness” (p. 13). Sorgheloos (Carefree), like the Prodigal Son, leaves home and
squanders all his money but, unlike the Prodigal Son, is not welcomed back by his
father and ends up a destitute outcast. Sorgheloos’s successful counterpart is Dick
Whittington. A version of the Sorgheloos story survives in Hogarth’s The Rake's
Progress. See Husband, The Luminous Image, 88-97; for English examples see pp. 96
and 97. I am grateful to Richard Marks for this reference.
30 See Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England During the Middle Ages (London, 1993),
97-8. Marks comments that “the taste for these roundels appears to have
derived from Flanders” (p. 97).
296 Felicity Riddy
31 See Elizabeth P. D. Torrie, “The Guild in Fifteenth-Century Dunfermline,” in
Michael Lynch, Michael Spearman, and Geoffrey Stell (eds.), The Scottish Medieval
Town (Edinburgh, 1988), 252.
32 “Or how quyte cresseid hir trew luffar troyelus his lang service In luf quhen scho
forsuk him for dyomeid And thare efter went common amang the grekis And
syn deid in gret myssere & pane”: “The Spectacle of Luf,” in The Asloan Manu­
script: A Miscellany in Prose and Terse, ed. W. A. Craigie, 2 vols., STS, 2nd ser. 14
(London and Edinburgh, 1923), 16.
33 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209.
34 Torrie, “The Guild in Fifteenth-Century Dunfermline”, 245-60.
35 Quoted by Elizabeth Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh,
1990), 57 and n., from Early Records of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1317, 1398-1407, ed.
W. C. Dickinson, Scottish Historical Society (Edinburgh, 1957), p. cxxvii. See
also The Acts o f the Parliament of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes (Edin­
burgh, 1844—75), ii. 12: “Item at commoun women be put to the utmast endis of
the toune quhare lest perel of fyre is.” (Act of 1425; one of a series relating to fire
regulations. Common women are the only group, apart from those who work
with straw and other combustible materials, to be singled out.) I am grateful to
Cordelia Beattie for this reference.
36 “Item at na lipirouss folk sit to thig nothir in kirk nor in kirk yarde na in nane
uthir place within the borowis bot at thare awin hospitale ande at the porte of
the toune and uthir placis outewith the borowis” (Act of 1427). See The Acts of the
Parliament of Scotland, ed. Thomson and Innes, ii. 16. I owe this reference to
Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland, 38.
37 See “When is a Character Not a Character? Desdemona, Olivia, Lady Macbeth
and Subjectivity,” in Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of
Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992), 52-79.
38 See Fox (ed.), Poems of Robert Henryson, 371, n. to 11. 416—33.
39 See Julia Boffey, “Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament”, MLQ 53
(1992), 41-56.
40 See Lee W. Patterson, “Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid", PQ, 52
(1973), 696-714, esp. 705-9.
41 Kristeva, Powers o f Horror, 16.
42 See Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 208.
43 The Buke of the Govemaunce o f Princes, in The Prose Works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed.
Jonathan A. Glenn, STS, 4th ser. 21 (Edinburgh, 1993), 101.
44 See A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue from the Twelfth Century to the End of the
Seventeenth, ed. Sir William Craigie and A. J. Aitken (Chicago and London,
1931- ).
 11
Prison, W riting, Absence:
Representing the Subject in the
English Poem s o f Charles d’Orléans
A. C. S p e a r in g

The English poetry of Charles d’Orléans is among the many neglected

achievements of fifteenth-century English literature. Most of what has been
written about the remarkable collection of his poems in MS Harley 682 has
been concerned with their authorship, their relation to Charles’s French
poems, or their relation to Charles’s real life. In 1978 Mary-Jo Am wrote
that “no o n e... has really taken a serious and extended look at Charles’s
English poetry apart from his biography,” and with the exception of her own
work , 1 that remains so today. I think it desirable to separate the poetry from
the biography as far as possible, but if, as I assume here,2 the English poems
are really by Charles, it is hard to make the separation complete. They were
written while he was a prisoner of the English from 1415 to 1440; the French
poet would surely never have become an English poet if this had not been so,
and in many of the poems he writes specifically as a prisoner. His case is
strikingly similar to that of his contemporary, James I of Scotland. Both are
foreign princes who become accomplished poets in the English branch of the
European courtly tradition for which love is poetry’s constitutive theme; both
adapt the clerkliness brought to that tradition by its greatest English expon­
ent, Chaucer, to write not as servants of Cupid’s servants but as lovers
themselves; neither would have been likely to write English poetry at all if
he had not been a long-term Lancastrian prisoner. From the reign of Richard
II to that of Henry VIII the close connection between writing and imprison­
ment is a striking socioliterary phenomenon. Besides Charles and James,
Thomas Usk, George Ashby, Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, and the earl
o f Surrey all write out of their prison experiences, and we would surely not
have the greatest English prose work of the fifteenth century if Thomas
Malory had not been a “knight prisoner.” Imprisonment provided enforced
298 A. C Spearing
leisure in which those of high birth, who might normally have entertained
themselves with hunting or courtly dalliance, were driven to write instead.3 As
Charles put it, “To balade now y haue a fayre leysere; / Alie othir sport is me
biraught as now; / Mártir am y for loue, and prisonere” (11. 1440-2).4
The last line, however, reminds us that in the writing that was its outcome
imprisonment was not simply a reflection of literal experience. Orléans was a
prisoner not for love but for politics, and, in the literary tradition to which his
book and James’s Kingts Quair belong, imprisonment involves an interaction
of literal incarceration with two powerful tropes.5 One is that of the lover as
his lady’s prisoner, found recurrendy through centuries of courtly poetry, and
familiar enough to be the basis of one of the allusive games that Sir Bertilak’s
wife plays with Sir Gawain in her husband’s absence:

Now ar 3 e tan asm! Bot true vus may schape,

I schal bynde yow in your bedde - þat be 3 e trayst.

Bot wolde 3 e, lady louely, þen, leue me grante

And deprece your prysoun and pray hym to ryse,
I wolde bo3 e of þis bed and busk me better.6

The other trope is philosophical and sees imprisonment as the condition of

the unenlightened earthly life. Going back at least to Plato, it was best known
in Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy, itself a text written in literal imprison­
ment. In England it was woven into the courtly tradition by Chaucer, above
all in the Knight’s Tale, in whose fiction literal imprisonment is intensified by
love - “Now is my prisoun worse than biforn” (1. 1224), sighs Arcite on his
release - but is also a figure of “this foule prisoun of this ly f ’ (1. 3061).7
Imagery of imprisonment plays a large part in Charles’s book, and in it
literal and figurative constandy change places.8 His lady’s beauty has taken
him, “maugré alie my might, / For prisoner abidyng day and nyght” (11.
250-1). Later, though, he is confident that eventually her beauty shall shine
“In at the wyndowes of my derkid eyene” and illuminate “the chambir of my
thought” (11. 1608-9), as if his skull were a prison. He assures Displesere and
other hosrile personificadons that “Power haue ye noon, alie haue ye me
prisounde” (1. 737). Absence “holt vndir kay” his pleasure (1. 523); his joy is
held “for prisonere” in a fortress by “Thought and Woo” (11. 949, 947);
“Thought and Woo with ther cursid allyaunce” have detained him “As in the
prison of grevous displesaunce” (11. 1009, 1112). When, much later, he
compares himself to an anchorite “Iclosid. .. with stoon,” whose worst
suffering is “sool alone vpon the wallis stare” (11. 5785, 5793), his imprison­
ment is once more recalled. These and other details do not add up to a
consistent ficrion, nor were the real conditions9 of Charles’s imprisonment
such that he was kept in a darkened cell staring at stone walls; rather, these are
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 299
conventional amplifications of the idea of imprisonment, and objective
correlatives, we may suppose, to his depression and frustration. 10 At times,
though, these real conditions do seem to be reflected in his self-presentation
as prisoner. Though Daunger “hath in hold” (1. 922) Charles’s heart, Good
Hope promises to “outplegge him in short space” (1. 927); yet these hopes of
ransom are never fulfilled, any more than the hopes by which Charles was
tormented in reality. When he petitions Hope to succor his heart in its
poverty, he complains that “Woo of weele hath raught him þe fraunchise,”
so that “he may not his worldly ricches grepe / Which lady is of his hy
entirprise” (11. 893, 897-8). Charles sometimes had difficulty in gaining
access to the resources of his French domains; here “poverty” figures the
lover’s lack of the gladness that possession of his lady would bring him, but
the relation of literal and figurative is so ambiguous that we cannot tell
whether “his worldly ricches” means the lady or whether the “lady” of his
enterprise (the political maneuverings in which Charles was engaged through­
out his captivity’) is the worldly riches to which he cannot gain access.
Similarly, the fear of jealous observation that belongs to the lover’s experi­
ence in courtly fiction is intensified by the literal prisoner’s awareness or
suspicion of being kept under surveillance. “Daunger wacchith day and
nyght” (1. 1794) as an evesedroppere (1. 1796) determined to harm Charles in
any way he can, and this obliges him to conceal his true feelings:

What y now se, hit noyeth me, mafav,

But y for drede my countenaunce forpeyne
As with my mouth to shewe a laughtir gay
When that myn hert as wepith me withinne.
(11. 499-502)

And again, “For y a port of ioy me do restrayne, / And yet they spie how y
lyue in penaunce” ( 11. 535-6), where “they” are all the more sinister for being
unnamed. Literal and figurative, erotic and political, merge and separate and
merge again in a continuous and bewildering dance.
It is not by chance that the connection between writing and imprisonment
in and around the fifteenth century coincides with a striking intensification of
the focus on subjectivity in writing. In English this change occurs later than in
French, where already in the thirteenth century we can recognize a poésie
personnelle that differs from the abstraction of the grand chant courtois in “featur­
ing a self defined by the circumstances and contingencies of real life.” 11 But
the change is not simply a matter of what John Burrow has referred to as “the
real discovery of the individual. .. with the great writers of the Ricardian
period and their successors in the fifteenth century” and as the “increasingly
personal character in Middle English writing from the mid-fourteenth century
onwards.” 12 Subjectivity may be the focus of writing without being very
300 A. C Spearing
“individual” or “personal,” insofar as those terms imply the existence of
unique, stable, and unitary psychic substances. An example from the Knight’s
Tale may clarify this. When Arcite is released from prison and has suffered
from “the loveris maladye / Of Hereos” for “a yeer or two” (11. 1373—4,
1381), first he has a dream and then he looks in a mirror. Both events bring
subjectivity into sharp focus. In the dream, though, he is instructed as to his
future by Mercury, defined by the wings, hat, and “slepy yerde” (1. 1383) that
identify him in classical mythology; that is, he encounters an objective force
outside his own personality. And in the mirror he “saugh his visage al in
another kynde” (1. 1401), an image that seems to reveal a radical instability,
the subject’s capacity to differ from itself. This exploration of subjectivity
does not reveal an individuality or personality peculiar to Arcite; he remains as
indistinguishable from Palamon as he has ever been. At the same time, he
lacks the stable or evolving unity that is usually taken to define the individual.
Something similar is true of many of those first-person narratives of the
following century and a half that take the first person itself as their central
theme. What makes the subject worth representing and brings it into the
textual foreground often seems to be a sense of it as divided, even frag­
mented, alienated from itself and from the way others perceive it. The
writings of Hoccleve and of Margery Kempe are striking early fifteenth-
century examples. And it is easy to imagine how imprisonment might give
an impetus to introspection and thus to a self-consciousness that is strictly
consciousness not of a single and stable self but of a subjectivity divided
between what observes and what is observed, what is concealed and what is
revealed, what is desired (perhaps with hallucinatory force) and what is
permitted. Moreover, imprisonment is likely not just to give leisure and
solitude for writing but to foster a special awareness of the strange relation
that always subsists between the living subject and its written expression: the
imprisoned “I” can address “you” only in writing, yet the subject is absent
from what is written, as absent from the text dispatched beyond the prison as
is the “you” it addresses. I suggest that Charles’s book may usefully be seen in
these terms; but first a reminder of its contents may be helpful.
Burrow, in a brief but important essay, has discussed MS Harley 682 as an
example of “the late medieval sequence” marked by what he calls “bookness,”
a “work in which separable items by a single author.. . are held together in a
fixed order within a single volume” and that depends for its effect on its own
material existence as a book . 13 As such, it stands with Hoccleve’s Series as a
unique phenomenon in fifteenth-century English; indeed, in English it stands
quite alone, until the sonnet sequences of the Elizabethan Age, as a sequence
of poems purporting to recount its subject’s life as a lover} 4 Briefly, Charles’s
book falls into three parts, each with its own introductor)' section. The
opening quire is missing, but its contents can be reconstructed from the
collection of Charles’s French poems to which it runs parallel. In it Charles
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 301
entered Cupid’s service, made his submission to his lady Bewté, received
Cupid’s commandments, and was granted a patent of service. The surviving
text begins with the patent, admitting Charles as Cupid’s servant, command­
ing all lovers to assist him against Cupid’s enemy Daunger, and announcing
that he has left his heart “in morgage” (1. 37). Charles requests Bewté’s heart
in exchange for his own, but Cupid says he must win it “Bi goodly speche and
curteys countenaunce” (1. 141). There follows the sequence of 74 ballades,
nearly all imagined as letters, that make up part 1 of the book. In them Charles
is almost always represented as separated from Bewté, first because he is a
prisoner and then because she dies (as his second wife Bonne really died in
France during his imprisonment), leaving him to mourn her loss.
The introduction to the second part is a dream in which Charles meets
Age, who persuades him that it is time to take an honorable leave of love and
urges him not to trust Fortune. He wakes, presents a petition to Cupid, is
granted a quytaunce (1. 2881), and has his heart restored to him. He retreats to
the castle of No Care, where he offers lovers a Iewbile (1. 3104) or retirement
feast, in this case a banquet of songs. This forms part 2 of the collection, and
in the course of it the parallelism of the English poems with Charles’s French
originals, initially very close, gradually peters out. Another quire is missing,
but the surviving pages contain 1,500 lines of short love poems, chiefly
rondeaux, that lay no claim to tell the story of Charles’s own love but are
simply a miscellany devised to please his guests. He concludes the feast with
some advice to lovers, thus completing his Iewbile and promising, “And so my
Newe Fortune wol folow soon” (11. 4485—6).
This third part is introduced with a second dream. A friend asks Charles to
compose on his behalf a poem lamenting “Fortunes stabilnes” (1. 4660).
Wandering by the seashore, he writes the poem and then falls asleep. His
dream is of a meeting with Venus, who ingeniously overcomes his reluctance
to take a new lady. Now Fortune arrives, and on her wheel Charles sees a lady
whom he first imagines to be the one who died in part 1. Venus points out his
error but encourages him to try to win this new lady as his own. She carries
him to the top of Fortune’s wheel to meet her, but at this point he wakes.
Now, though, among a company of “gentil folkis” playing at “post and piler”
(11. 5203-4), he finds in waking life the lady he saw in his dream. After some
friendly conversation she agrees to receive his approaches. These consist of a
further collection of 37 ballades, interrupted by one longer compleynt. But part
3, the Newe Fortune, scarcely forms a sequence; it is more a miscellany, like
part 2, as though Charles was using up poems not all written for this frame­
work. It ends with a somewhat inconclusive farewell.
Charles’s dreams are plainly presented as marking, and producing, turning
points in his life as a lover and thus in the book made out of that life - the
first his abandonment of love after his lady’s death, the second his return to
love. For my present purpose, what is important is that the dreams change his
302 A. C Spearing
relation to writing. The ballades in the first sequence, especially up to the
point of his lady’s death, are full of references to themselves as written
expressions of his own love. The Iewbile, however, is prefaced with an
apologetic distinction between the past, when as a lover himself he was
familiar with “The speche of loue so fresshely depaynt” (1. 3093), and his
present situation as one who writes only fo r lovers and subject to their
correction: “But where y fayle, y pray yow hertily / That rede my werk and
kan doon bet þan y, / Where as y fayle, ye lust amende hit ay” ( 11. 3085-7).
In the background is Chaucer’s distinction in the prologue to The Legend o f
Good Women between his courtly readers - “lovers that can make of sente-
ment” and thus can compose “fresshe songes” (F 69, 79) inspired by their
own feelings - and his own humbler imitative art. Charles, despite his rank,
temporarily adopts Chaucer’s clerkly role. He addresses “yow .. . That rede”
and notes that because short poems are sweeter “in rundelle y hem write” ( 1.
3119), but, when his form changes from the written ballade to the sung
rondeau and carole, references to the poems’ writtenness also largely dis­
appear. After the second dream, Charles reverts to his former role as lover-
writer and to the written form of the ballade. Having prudendy ascertained
that his new lady can read,15 he begs that she will “graunt me writ to yow” (1.
5313), and her answer is, “Y graunt hit yow, writ on!” (1. 5317). This is what
he does, in a second collection of ballades, once more containing many
references to their own writtenness.
In the remainder of this article (|>art of an ongoing study of subjectivity in
writing from Chaucer to Spenser), I shall examine more closely the relations
between writing and subjectivity in Charles’s book. The whole text is, of
course, a written document; what Burrow calls its “bookness” is heightened
by its many references to itself as written, but what especially interests me is
the question it persistently raises as to the status of “I” in a text so pervaded
with references to its own textuality. Through the chance loss of the opening
quire, the manuscript begins with a representation of a fictional document,
the patent, delivered “on the day of seynt Valentyn þe martere” (1. 53), in
which “The god Cupide and Venus the goddes” (1. 1), the presiding deities of
parts 1 and 3 respectively, proclaim that they admit “the duk that folkis calle /
Of Orlyaunce” (11. 5-6) as their servant. The document soon moves into
Cupid’s first person singular, as it commands all lovers to assist Charles
against Daunger (11. 26, 27) and announces that Charles has left his heart
“in morgage.” This allegory, formally separating the lover and his heart, is the
origin of the representation of subjectivity in part 1 not as single and stable
but rather as a disputed territory whose boundaries shift as the relations of
“I,” Heart, Love, Thought, Hope, Daunger, and other abstractions and
faculties change from moment to moment. The patent, like other legal
documents drawn up under the auspices of a personal ruler, derives its
authority from an “I” named in it but always absent from it. Medieval
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 303
awareness of this connection between writing and absence is indicated by
statements such as John of Salisbury’s that “Littere. . . absentium dicta sine
voce loquuntur” (letters speak without voice the sayings of those absent).17
The document exists precisely because its originator cannot be present in the
circumstances in which his power requires to be exercised; and we may
suppose that Charles, familiar with the problems of exercising authority
over a dukedom from which he was so long absent, was especially aware of
this distinctive quality of letters. In any event, several other parts of the book
also consist of written documents in which the grammatical presence of “I”
tends to call attention to bodily absence. Among them are Charles’s petition
to Cupid for the return of his heart (11. 2716ff.), his letter to Cupid from the
casde of No Care (11. 2982ff.), and the lament about Fortune’s stability
written for his friend (11. 4680ff.). There are also numerous references to
writings not quoted, such as the “letter of treté” (1. 1109) by which Cupid
made an alliance between Charles and his lady, the “writyng fulle notable” ( 1.
2680) from which he says he has learned of Love’s beneficial power, and the
quytaunce (11. 2881, 2910, 2969) written by Love’s secretary Good Trouthe
(11. 2778ff.) and granted him when he leaves Love’s service. But the most
important writings, and those in which the dialectic of presence and absence
operates most interestingly, are the ballades of part 1, where Absence features
as a leading personification. Like many fifteenth-century poems,18 these
purport to be personal letters: each such ballade is situated by the epistolary
form as the expression of a moment in its author’s personal history, while at
the same time, in acknowledging its writtenness, it separates itself from his
actual experience. To examine every reference to writing and absence in these
ballades would take too long, but I will discuss some salient examples.
Cupid tells Charles that, as a “gentille man” (1. 136), he must win his lady’s
heart by gentiles (1. 140), “For to nobles longith sewte of curteys speche, / As
he fynt tyme bi mouth or writyng seche” (11. 145-6). The distinction between
mouth and writyng, corresponding to the legal differentiation between oral and
written testimony (see Fein, p. 39), is crucial in what follows. Cupid with­
draws, and, since Bewté is surrounded by Disdayne and Daunger, Charles
dares not approach her “bimouth”; but Hope finds him “penne and papir” ( 1.
197) and encourages him to write, “For which that y bigan alie this trauayle”
(1. 202). This last line of the introductory narrative thus defines the following
ballades precisely as written fictions of writing. Unlike speech and other
forms of bodily communication, they can elicit no immediate response: the
“you” or “madame” of the ballades is as much an effect of writing as the “I.”
Comparison with the relation of frame to content in the Canterbury Tales may
elucidate the situation. There the effect of the frame is to define the tales as
speech and to represent them as eliciting spoken responses. But as readers of
Chaucer we are always aware that this is a fictional illusion, whereas Charles’s
ballades really are writing, the fiction redoubles their lonely textuality, and the
304 A. C Spearing
experience of reading heightens our awareness of the absence of selves from
the text.
Within the ballade sequence, it is with number 10 that the emphasis on
separation and absence becomes acute. Ballade 9 is an encomium of the lady,
unusual in being represented as speech addressed to “Ye ladies and all fayre,
bothe lowe and hie, / That herith this” (11. 485—6). In its successor, Charles
turns back to the lady, from whom he is now separated, and laments that
speech is useless in conveying his meaning to her: “Hit forto speke as welle,
lo, may y blyn, / For whi bi speche not kan y be the nerre” ( 11. 495-6). The
lady, though, has written to him - “But neuyrtheles y humbly thanke yow ay /
For yowre writyng” ( 11. 507-8) - and her letter has brought him comfort, but
“Absence doth me war” (1. 516). Absence is a theme of the next two ballades
also. In ballade 11, Charles is “fer” (1. 519) from the lady, but his heart
remains with her. He has Woe and Distress for company and daily seeks
comfort from Pleasure, “which Absence holt vndir kay, / That y ne may now
stroke yowre sidis pleyne” (11. 523-4). We may speculate that the lack of
intimate human contact that was likely to be a condition even of a noble’s
imprisonment, and the shifting of communication from speech to writing,
was what led to a sense of the absence of the self: the absence of the lovers
from each other is reflected in the very condition of writing, in which neither
“I” nor “you” is truly present except as a grammatical cipher. The longing to
“stroke yowre sidis pleyne” is a mere fantasy; in Absence’s realm, the desire
for physical presence and physical contact becomes all the stronger and is
evoked in words precisely because it cannot exist in reality. Ballade 12 begins,
“Syn that y absent am thus from yow fare” (1. 553) and goes on to express
further wishful fantasies of bodily contact: he urges the lady “A mollyng swete
loue-cosse to wisshe in me” ( 1. 558) and writes of how at night “oft y thynke,
and neuer the ner, / That y in armes haue yow, my lady” (11. 563-4). A later
example of how the most vividly sensuous evocations of bodily contact
convey hallucinatory wishes, always reminding us of the absence of what is
evoked, occurs in ballade 41, where Charles writes that he would forgive
Fortune her enmity, if only she would grant “That y myght wrappe within
myn armes soft / The fayrist born in liche to my menyng” (i.e. in accordance
with my thought) (11. 1462-3). In writing, bodily contact is always a fantasy,y
and yo w are always missing; and this is writing that declares itself as such.
From ballade 19 we learn that the lady has sent Charles “comaundement /
A balad for to make” (11. 763-4); its text is what we are reading. Its refrain
states that “bi the mowth y lever had yow told” his grief (1. 769 etc.) The pain
he suffers “syn that y am absent” ( 1. 774) is doubled by the need “to write” ( 1.
775), because he would rather communicate “bi the mowth.” Thus the
ballade’s material (the poet’s suffering) derives from the very absence that
causes it to exist, and the poet’s absence from the lady makes it necessary for
him to convey his suffering in a form from which he is himself absent, the
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 305
“rewdisshe bel” (1. 786) that he dispatches to her and away from himself:
absence, pain, and writing are inextricably linked together. Ballade 20 con­
tinues to make explicit the text’s material textuality; its envoy begins, “What
nede y more my papir spende or enke?” (1. 820).19 And ballade 21 fore­
grounds writing in an especially striking way, for it is devoted to praise of the
originator of writing itself, him “That first did fynde the wayes of writyng” (1.
825). Thanks to this invention, when lovers lack “tyme nor metyng” (1. 828)
to speak to their ladies, they can “endite and sende as in writyng” ( 1. 832) an
account of their sufferings. If the lover can write (1. 834) his sorrows, his lady
can rede (1. 838) them and be moved by pity; and Charles has found that
nothing will ease his grieving heart until “he haue send or made sum endityng”
( 1. 847) to his lady. The envoy, though, is a prayer that she “May vndirstonde
as bi my mouth telyng” (1. 855) what he has suffered. The ambiguity of as
makes it uncertain whether this is a wish that she may understand the writing
as if it were speech or that eventually she may understand by speech - or
kisses, equally delivered by mouth - what writing has failed to convey because
it lacks the fullness of bodily presence. Either case involves the recurrent
opposition between writing and mouth, textuality and orality.
Ballade 30 refers to a letter in which the lady wrot ( 1. 1283) to Charles to put
aside his grief and promised that she would seek means to visit him. The
refrain is “In trust that y shalle se yow hastily” (1. 1283 etc.), and this
passionately expressed poem repeatedly contrasts the written promise with
the sight, which is always promised, never present. This is one of a series of
ballades that emphasize the lady’s continuing absence, despite tantalizing
tokens and promises of presence and sight. Yet though Charles never sees
her, his verse letters may: “Syn y ne may as se yow, neuyrtheles / My writyng
shalle, so Ihesu ben his gide” (11. 1374-5). Recurrent variants on the “Go,
little book” topos underline this separation between the poet and what he
writes, while emphasizing the materiality of the written text - “O goo, thou
derke, fordullid, rude myture” (1. 1406). Y is repeated again and again in the
ballades, yet it is only a written j that can see the lady.
Ballade 47 begins dramatically by welcoming “fresshe tidyngis” (1. 1659)
and asking whether the lady has changed from her who, “when last we partid
compané,” said, “Tredyng my foot, and that so pratily, / ‘Teys yow to whom
y loue am and no moo!’ ” (11. 1663-6). The last line is the refrain; and, as
usual, the vivid recollection of presence and bodily contact instandy reminds
us of the mere textuality of its expression, for the envoy runs:

I writen haue within myn hert trewly,

As for lesyng to kepe it where y go,
This refrayt, which y loue right hertily:
“Teys yow to whom y loue am and no mo!”
(11. 1685-8)
306 A. C Spearing
The lady’s spoken words become the written refrain of the ballade, presented
precisely as a refrain and as written, not on the page but in the heart. What
we have before us, though, is not the heart but the page, a mere text, in
which the living words die even as they gain permanence. In ballade 49, too,
writing is used as a metaphor: “As in writyng y putt haue my wisshis, / And
that even in the depist of my thought” (11. 1718-19). They avail him little, yet
he will not sell them at any price, for fear that “therm ther were mysdemyng
oft / Thorugh false conspire of sum vnhappy wight” (11. 1724—5). Like the
writing in his thought, that on the page is liable to misinterpretation; what is
written and then read by others passes beyond the writer’s control. This
whole poem, like several others, is darkened by the fear of conspiratorial
mysdemyng.
The refrain of ballade 52 is “For whoo that absent is, is woobigoon” ( 1.
1819 etc.), and ballade 54, an unusually long one of 55 lines, is another poem
of absence. It urges the lady to keep remembrance of Charles “Within yowre
thought enclosid pratily” (1. 1874) and does so through fear that she may
have forgotten “this absent payne in which y dry” (1. 1896). He has had no
writyng (1. 1900) to reassure him; yet he promises to do his best “Yow forto
píese and this with Absence fight” (1. 1909). She knows “Whi that y absent
am” (1. 1914) - though the reason is never made explicit to us, and it is just
this vagueness that makes possible the sequence’s fusion of courtly allegory
with literal imprisonment - and all that he needs for comfort is certainty of
her love. But such certainty is never available, even when fixed in writing, for
absence is not a contingent but a necessary feature of textuality.
In ballade 55 news comes of the lady’s sickness, and in ballade 57 of her
death. Now absence is redoubled and made permanent; not just the text but
the world is deprived of the lady. And this in turn intensifies the absence of
Charles himself, as we focus on a textuality drained of presence. The refrain
of ballade 58 (the first with no French equivalent) is “For without hir of
nought now lyue y here” ( 1. 2033 etc.): his heart too should have died; he is
“an outcast creature” ( 1. 2040), living to no purpose. That is what the refrain
means on its first occurrence, but as the poem proceeds it acquires new
meaning. “Me thynkith right as a syphir now y serue, / That nombre makith
and is him silf noon” (11. 2042-3). “It seems to me that I now function exacdy
like a zero, creating a number without being one itself.”20 Zero is nothing
except in combination with other numbers, and the lady’s death reveals the
emptiness of the “I” of writing: it is no more than a vacant position. But
“That nombre makith and is him self noon” surely has another sense, too:
Charles “makes number” in the sense of composing verses that obey the rules
of myture (1. 1406),21 but he is not himself what he writes. “Of nought now
lyue y here”: I live here, in this writing, as nothing.
From here on, writing and absence lose their thematic importance; the
sequence becomes concerned with finding means of adjusting to life without
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 307
the lady. Without sentimentalizing the book’s relation to Charles’s real life, we
may suppose that, with the lady’s death, he needs to try to forget the reality
she once possessed (there really had been a Bonne outside his writing) and
the contrasting textuality in which he is now inescapably imprisoned. If he
succeeds, writing can become his whole world and thus can become invisible,
nowhere because everywhere. The refrain of ballade 60 is “O wofulle
wrecche, O wrecche, lesse onys thi speche!” (1. 2089 etc.): his wish is to
dissolve from voice into text, to be no more than the nothing, the cipher, that
is the “I” of writing. But already Charles as author is making preparations for
the renewal of love in part 3 of his book. Ballade 61, which has a French
original, describes a game of chess in which Fortune assisted Daunger to
capture Charles’s lady; thus he is defeated, says the refrain, ‘W ithout so be y
make a lady newe” (1. 2118 etc.). Ballade 62, existing only in English, takes off
from this refrain, beginning, “Shulde y me make a lady newe? Fy, fy!” (1.
2141). But the very repudiation of the idea seems to give it substance: he
would rather die than do so, “Nas she selfe same y chees to my lady” (1.
2143) - exactly what he will imagine in his second dream - and though his
first lady lived “Right as the fenyx lyveth withouten ayre” (1. 2148 etc.), still,
“clerkys seyne, / Of this fenyx ther cometh an othir blyue” (11. 2149-50).
The speculation and the poem are brought to an end with “Lef of, my
penne!” (1. 2167), implying, “If I don’t stop writing, I may write myself
into acceptance of a second love.” In the subtext, I suspect, lies the traditional
identification of pen with phallus, with the desire to write now seen as a mere
surrogate for the sexual desire, personified by Venus, that overrides the
permanent idealization of a specific object.
In the rondeaux of part 2 there are occasional references to writing, but the
stories they tell do not place most of them as written documents motivated
by the separation of lovers, and thus they do not produce the link between
writing and absence that characterizes part 1. When Charles agrees to write
the ballade on Fortune for his friend, the materiality of writing is stressed
once more: he takes “enke and papir” ( 1. 4664) and then, having mused, “gan
my papir sprede / And wrote right thus, if so ye list to rede” (11. 4677—8).
Here a further parallel with The Kingis Q uair suggests itself; there James
describes how, having decided to write “Sum new thing,” “I set me doun,
/ And furthwithall my pen in hand I tuke / And maid a [cros], and thus
begouth my buke” (11. 89-91). As Burrow notes, the only manuscript has an
actual cross where the editor supplies the word crosy and, even though this
manuscript is not autograph, “this has the effect of momentarily collapsing
the distinction between the ‘buke’ whose origins James describes as a past
event and the present copy - as if the reader were confronted with the very
cross that James himself drew at the head of the first page” (“The Poet and
the Book,” p. 241). Similarly, though MS Harley 682 is also not an autograph
manuscript, a reader would at this point be made intensely aware of its
308 A. C Spearing
“bookness and writtenness” and might enter into the illusion of reading the
very words written by Charles with “enke and papir.”
After Charles’s second dream, as we have seen, “my lady newe” (1. 5241)
cheerfully agrees to enter into correspondence with him. Soon after this, as
night falls, they part; the lady is eager to see him again, but he seems oddly
reluctant to fix a date with her:

“But may ye not abide here to tomorow?”

“A, madame, no. Fare wel, seynt Iohne to borow!”
“Bi holy God, y trowe bet that ye may
Ellis come and se vs, lo, sum othir day?”

“Madame, a trouthe, y thanke yowre ladiship:

It may me happe to se yow here this weke.”
(11. 5334-9)

Despite all he says about his quaking heart, this sounds remarkably like a
brush-off. Kissing her good-bye, he exclaims, “Now, welcome sorow!” (1.
5332), and it is as though he really does welcome their separation because it
provides an excuse for writing and sorow to write about. The whole transition
to the final sequence of ballades is strange. He goes on to explain that he had
a sleepless night trying to decide whether “To speke or writ when next y came
hir to” (1. 5344); he decides that “for fere of forgetyng, / Bi mouth y wolde
my mater to hir telle” (1. 5347); and yet what follows is a further series of
written communications, full of references to “þis scripture” and “this
meture” (11. 5600-2) and what “y kan write or sayne” (1. 5503), questions
as to “What may y more yow write, at wordis fewe?” (1. 5836), and injunc­
tions to “Go, dul complaynt, my lady þis report” (1. 5791 etc.).
My impression is slighdy different from that suggested by Am, for whom
the love affair in part 3 “seems to be conducted under the banner of Venus
alone, who clearly represents physical love unadorned by courtly trappings.
The persona seems to be playing a game of love all by himself, unaided in his
amorous idealism by either the God of Love or his chosen lady__ his case of
‘love’s malady’ is incurable” (“Poetic Form,” p. 26). I rather gain the sense
that Charles, whether as fictional lover or as actual poet (and I am not sure
that the distinction can now be clearly made) has become habituated to
absence and writing as the only medium for love.22 He sets out the situation
with striking clarity toward the end of part 3:

Presence of yow hit causith my comfort.

And so my payne when sight of yow y mysse;
And syn so is y may not yow resort,
This write y yow, myn owen dere hertis blisse.
(11. 6395-8)
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 309
What may y doon, now levyng yowre presence,
But drawe me sool my silven to complayne,
In waylyng so þe tyme of yowre absence,
Which is to me, God wot, most grevous payne?
(U. 6512-15)

The clarity, it might be said, is too great: once it is seen so plainly that
absence is necessary to provide the occasion and subject matter for courdy
poetry, then (somewhat as when we read Derrida for the second time) the
loss of the “metaphysics of presence” becomes less shocking and the affir­
mation of “grevous payne” less convincing. For whatever reason, part 3 of
Charles’s book, containing only half as many ballades as part 1, is not only
less moving but less carefully executed than parts 1 and 2. The book as a
whole, hovering between drama and miscellany and exploring with beautiful
precision some emotional consequences of the fact that even love poetry is
made out of words, and that its “I” and “you” mark not the presence but the
absence of human subjects, remains an achievement that deserves far more
attention than it has received.

N otes

I am indebted to Lisa Samuels for her assistance with this article.

1 “The English Poetry of Charles of Orleans,” Dutch Quarterly Review, 8 (1978):
108—21 (110); “Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning in the English Poems of
Charles of Orleans,” Philological Quarterly, 69 (1990): 13-29. These are the two
most penetrating accounts of Charles’s English book known to me, and I owe
them a considerable debt.
2 Briefly, I find it hard to suppose that a collection of poems whose idiom often
betrays the nonnative writer, and the ordinatio of which in MS Harley 682 closely
resembles that in Charles’s personal copy of his French poems (MS BN fr.
25458), is by anyone other than Charles himself. For discussion, see Robert Steele
and Mabel Day, eds., The English Poems of Charles of Orleans, EETS, OS, 215, 220,
reprinted with supplement (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), introduc­
tion; John Fox, “Charles d’Orléans, poète anglais?” Romania, 86 (1965): 433-62;
Cecily Clark, “Charles d’Orléans: Some English Perspectives,” Medium Ævum, 40
(1971): 254-61.
3 Cf. Julia Boffey, “Chaucerian Prisoners: The Context of The Kingis QuairT in
Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London:
King’s College, 1991), pp. 84-102 (p. 99). For comparison of James and Charles
as prisoner-poets, see Diane R. Marks, “Poems from Prison: James I of Scotland
and Charles of Orleans,” Fifteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1989): 245-58.
4 I quote from Steele and Day, but with modern punctuation and capitalization.
Where allegory is concerned, capitalization of abstract nouns is bound to be
somewhat arbitrary. I refer to the “I” of writing in MS Harley 682 as “Charles” for
310 A. C Spearing
convenience, not intending to imply any unstated view as to the reladon of that
“I” to the Charles d’Orléans who composed the book.
5 For a valuable account of this tradition, see Boffey.
6 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm
Andrew and Ronald Waldron (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 11. 1210-11,
1218-20. Another example, specifically comparing figurative and literal prisons,
occurs in Caxton’s translation of The Book o f the Knight of the Tower; ed. M. Y.
Offord, EETS, SS, 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 27: the
Knight, “spekyng of prysoners” with a lady his father wanted him to marry,
tells her “I wold wel and had leuer be youre prysoner than ony others / & I
thenke that youre pryson shold not be so hard ne cruell / as is the pryson of
englissh men.”
7 Chaucer is quoted from The Riverside Chaucer; 3rd edn., ed. Larry D. Benson
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
8 For surveys of this element in Charles’s French poetry, see Alice Planche, Charles
d'Orléans ou la recherche d ’un langage (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1975), pp. 233ff.,
and David A. Fein, Charles d'Orléans (Boston: Twayne, 1983), pp. 24ff. For
perceptive brief comments on the “rapport entre les images de l’allégorie et la
vie du prince” (relation between the allegorical images and the prince’s life), see
Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le prince: L ’Evolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de
Machaut à Charles d ’Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965),
pp. 285-6 (p. 285).
9 For which see the documentation in biographies such as Enid McLeod, Charles of
Orleans: Prince and Poet (New York: Viking, 1970).
10 Similarly, in the Knight’s Tale, no realistic consistency need be sought between
Palamon’s “fettres on his shynes” (1. 1279) and his freedom to stroll “in a
chambre an heigh” (1. 1065) and thus to watch Emelye through the window.
11 Michel Zink, “Time and Representation of the Self in Thirteenth-Century
French Poetry,” Poetics Today, 5 (1984): 611-27 (612).
12 Mediet>al Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background, 1100-
1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 40; see also Burrow’s “The
Poet as Petitioner,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 3 (1981): 61-75.
13 “The Poet and the Book,” in Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature, ed.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988), pp. 230-45 (p.
230). The term bookness had been used of the Canterbury Tales by Donald R.
Howard, The Idea of the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976), pp. 63ff.
14 Earlier instances exist in other languages: see the genre of “erotic pseudo-
autobiography” identified by G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny, “Guillaume de
Machaut’s Erotic ‘Autobiography’: Precedents for the Form of the Voir-Dit,”
in Studies in Medieval IJterature and Languages in Memory of Frederick Whitehead, ed. W.
Rothwell et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 133-52.
15 Her answer to his “Kan ye not rede?” is transcribed by Steele and Day as “yes so
so” (1. 5311). Charles’s idiosyncratic use of so makes it hard to tell whether this is
an enthusiastic “Yes, so, so!” or an early instance of so-so in the sense of
“indifferendy,” recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary from a century later.
 The English Poems o f Charles d'Orléans 311
16 A preliminary survey, “The Poetic Subject from Chaucer to Spenser,” from
which I repeat a few sentences here, will appear in the proceedings of the
Seventh Citadel Conference on Language and Literature (1991).
17 Metalogicon, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), p. 32, cited by M.
T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066—1307 (London: Edward
Arnold, 1979), p. 202 n. 1. John of Salisbury' was drawing on an earlier definition
in Isidore’s Etymologiae.
18 John Norton-Smith refers to “the vast number of amatory' verse epistles which
was to be written in England in the fifteenth century” (“Chaucer’s Epistolary
Style,” in Essays on Style and Language: Unguistic and Critical Approaches to Literaiy
Style, ed. Roger Fowler [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], pp. 157-65
[p. 159]. Some examples are collected in Secular Lyrics o f the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), where
Robbins notes that “the vogue of epistles reached its height in the fifteenth
century” (p. 286).
19 Cf. the corresponding line in ballade 26: “What nede y spende more enke or
parchement?” (1. 1000).
20 James similarly defines himself as zero in The Kingis Quair (ed. John Norton-
Smith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], 1. 194). A recent exposition of Lacan’s
thought remarks that “desire functions much as a zero unit in the numerical
chain - its place is both constitutive and empty'” Qacqueline Rose, in Jacques
Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose [New York:
Norton, 1982], p. 32). That seems to be much what James and Charles mean
when they present themselves as embodiments of desire.
21 See OED, s.v. “number,” sb., sense 17.
22 There are no English precedents for Charles’s book, but he might have found a
French precedent in Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit, a far more intricate
narrative that also includes love letters in verse. Of this Sylvia Huot has written:
“What Guillaume discovers is that writing does not reenact or enable love-
making but, rather, replaces it entirely— as love and eroticism are transposed
into the language of poetry', poetic activity comes to replace sexual activity—
writing, precisely because of its detachment from the empirical world, affords
the opportunity for an idealization of love: the written text has the peculiar
property of mediating between the lovers while at the same time shielding them
one from the other” {From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and
Lyrical Narrative Poetry [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987], pp. 285-6). I
suggest that some similar discovery may take place in the course of Charles’s
book. Also possibly known to Charles was Froissart’s Espinette amoureuse, another
“erotic pseudo-autobiography,” influenced by the Voir Dit (see Gybbon-Mony-
penny), which includes a dream of Venus.
 12
False Fables and Historical Truth
P a u l Stroh m

“Funny, sometimes, how things that aren’t true are more true than the truth. ”
After Dark, My Sweet (1990)

The paradox of the lie that might as well be true must interest anyone who
seeks to understand texts in history or the historical influence of texts. For,
stricdy speaking, most texts - and not just a few celebrated forgeries or
esoteric examples - must be regarded as untrue. Were we to shun texts that
rely upon devices of narradve rearrangement, interested selection of detail,
and spurious self-authorization, we would have to discard most of the written
record. Yet, in other senses, the most blatantly made-up texts cannot help but
reveal truth. Fabulists and romancers conceive episodes within imaginary
structures or value systems their audiences embrace as true, and lies accepted
as a basis for actions gain retrospective truthfulness through their influence
on events. Whether announcing themselves as fictional or relying on an array
of strategies to conceal their fictionalization, invented texts cannot fail to
disclose the marks of their own historicity.
The texts to be considered in this study were mainly written in English, in
and about London and Westminster, in the last two decades of the fourteenth
century7. Some treat actual characters, mainly in order to fictionalize them.
Others treat actual characters who seem quite ready to collaborate in their
own fictionalization. Some present invented characters within networks of
representation extensively penetrated by real events. Some present
documentable events (like the burning of Lambeth Palace in 1381) as if
they were seasonal pageants or scripted performances, and others present
scripted pageants (like Richard’s reconciliation with the city of London) as if
 False Fables and Flistorical Truth 313
they manifested spontaneous feelings. In fact, we must finally remain impar­
tial as to whether some events most carefully rendered and broadly accepted
as fact (such as Queen Philippa’s intercession for the burghers of Calais)
happened at all. Yet all are finally composed within history - if not within a
sense of what did happen, at least within a sense of what might have
happened, of what could be imagined, of what commonly held interpretative
structures permitted a late fourteenth-century audience to believe.
The texts themselves remain extremely divergent in their claims about
truthfulness. Included are frankly invented fables of the poets, as well as
chronicle narratives that assert considerable authority for their ordering and
interpretation of actual events. Likewise included are other texts - such as
statutes, parliamentary petitions, and legal pleas - that have been accorded
unusual evidentiary value as a result of their pragmatic character or linkage
with institutional practice. The distinctive claims of each text and the parti­
cular responses it solicits will, of course, be carefully noted. All will, however,
be treated alike in one sense: less as records of events than as interpretations
of events, inevitably reliant to one degree or another upon invention, upon
fictional devices. A text’s fictionality may derive from acts of commission (its
imputation, for example, of motive) or omission (by what it evades or
excludes); its fictionality may involve its utopianism, or, in the case of certain
Lancastrian narratives, a willful and zestful plunge into sheer disinformation.
Insisting on fictionality as a common characteristic of the texts under
consideration, I insist equally that fictionality should not be considered an
embarrassment to a text’s ultimate historicity. Composed within history,
fictions offer irreplaceable historical evidence in their own right. Yet, for all
their value as historical evidence, the fabrications of litigants and chroniclers
and petitioners and poets will (in the fashion of certain crafty gatekeepers in
folktales) refuse to yield their information unless tactfully approached. One
element of tact is to be aware of the kinds of evidence they are, and are not,
suited to divulge. Although these texts are valuable for the study of history,
we must always remember to ask: the history of what? Only rarely can we
expect them to tell us “what happened,” or to contribute materially to our
factual base. They offer crucial testimony on other, though no less historical,
matters: on contemporary perception, ideology, belief, and - above all - on
the imaginative structures within which fourteenth-century participants acted
and assumed that their actions would be understood.
Consider the revealing moment when the chronicler Thomas Walsingham
complains that the villeins (“villani”) of St Albans have been misled by a
legend that King Offa granted them their land. He argues that in 1381 certain
rebels instigated the St Albans tenants to rise up and to seek liberties by
means of long-standing lies, by false fables (“per falsas fabulas”) persuading
those younger than themselves to believe they once enjoyed liberties and
privileges granted by King Offa and since unjusdy removed by the abbots
314 Paul Strohm
and monks of the abbey (Gesta Abbatum, 365). So vivid were these persua­
sions that they assumed in the villeins’ minds the tangible status of a textual
figment, a belief that their liberties were inscribed in an ancient charter with
one capital of gold and another of azure (“quamdam chartam antiquam
reposcerent de libertatibus villanorum, cujus litterae capitales fuerunt, de
auro una, altera de azorio,” 308) - a charter thought to be in the possession
of the abbey, the return of which became one of the villeins’ demands.
Walsingham is stirred to an energetic demonstration of the untruth of the
villeins’ claims. He seeks to show, historically, that the town of St Albans was
founded long after Offa’s reign, and that by basing their claims on merciful
intercessions (“suffragia”) of Offa, who actually never laid eyes on the place
(“qui villam Sancti Albani nunquam vidit,” 366), the villeins have vainly
fabricated lies. He is no doubt correct. But the legend of Offa’s bequest
brisdes with historicity in a number of other respects. It reveals the villeins’
respect for writing and written documents, and the contemporary function
of writing as an instrument of power. It helps to explain why the rebels of
1381 sought emancipatory documents and also why they tried to bum
restrictive ones. It reveals the essentially reasonable, and especially the con­
servative, nature of the rebel demands; for all the millennial talk, they
essentially wanted tide to work their land without excessive obligations or
dues. It demonstrates the mutual reliance of laborers and monks on ideas of
traditional land tenure, with the respective parties differing only on the
particular tradition in question and the evidence required to sustain it. It
suggests the enduring power of an ideology of benign kingship, latent but
always available for use, as when briefly harnessed by the young Richard II
when he instated himself as champion of the hapless rebels of 1381 at the
climactic Smithfield meeting. It reveals the anticlericalism of the English
populace, corroborated by the beheading of Archbishop Sudbury at the
hands of the London rebels.
Like all texts, Walsingham’s account of the Offa legend lies open to
divergent readings. The villeins’ credulousness provokes Walsingham to
exasperation, even in the recital; it also contains elements of thwarted
aspiration that must inspire sympathy. Either way, false or true, the legend
of Offa’s bequest possesses exceptional power. This power is historically
rather than fancifully derived, because its assumptions about land tenure and
literacy and benign kingship reveal the contemporary structures of practical
knowledge and anticipation and belief within which the legend was formed
and within which it spurred people to collective action. As I will say more
than once in the course of this study, a text can be powerful without being
true.
Fictive invention and suppression and distortion are normal properties of
textual exposition, but we do everything we can to deny the fact. One reason
past generations of academics maintained distinctions between “the literary,”
 False Fables and Historical Truth 315
with its reliance on invention, and “the historical,” with its adherence to fact,
is the reassuring implication of such clearly bounded categories that fictional
elements of a text can be segregated and controlled. Despite such earnest
definitional efforts, fictive elements teem within historical narratives, trial
depositions and indictments, coroner’s rolls, and other officially sanctioned
accounts. So, too, in the texts to be considered here. Admittedly, each text
presents an issue of authorship, or element of narrative zest, or revelation of
textual process that I have found attractive in its own right. But, in matters of
fictionality and historical truth, I regard my texts as representative of the
genres within which they occur - as exemplifying that inevitable and inextric­
able intertwinement of “fais and soth compouned” that Chaucer wryly
describes in his House o f Fame (11. 2088-109).
At the center of my inquiry is the text itself, with the cryptic and para­
doxical information it both offers and withholds. And the text is character­
istically viewed within a larger field or “environment” of previous and
contemporary texts, visual representations, pageants, social dramas, and
political acts. This environment naturally includes texts commonly identified
as “sources,” though they are likely to be somewhat displaced from the
central positions in which we have customarily instated them. Knowledge
of a text’s larger environment permits us to understand its social function in a
way that source study never could. As I explain in more detail in my third and
fourth chapters, this environment is the field of shared knowledge that allows
an author to write in the confidence of being understood. It is, in other
words, the guarantee of intelligibility that makes sense of a text as a commun­
icative and social act.
An environment embraces not just words and textual conventions, but also
schemes or structuring ideas functioning at an intermediate level of general­
ization. Factional loyalty and the role of a good servant in Hochon’s case, the
idea of queenly intercession in Anne’s case, and a good many more: notions
of communitas in the actions and accounts of the 1381 rising, the goal of civil
order in the attack on livery and maintenance in 1388, the centrality of divine
unction in the selection of a king in Henry’s 1399 accession, the sanctioned
rights of the baron as head of the medieval household. These structuring ideas
may be labeled “ideological,” and I occasionally do so, but only in a supple
and deliberately migratory sense of the term. For I take “ideology” not as a
set of inherendy false and deliberately distortive beliefs, but more neutrally as
the entire set of socially imagined ideas by which people explain their lives
and places in a material order. Consequendy, I regard ideological elements as
unbound to any one political system - as unfixed, free-floating, and open to
appropriation and use by contending centers of social power. Thus, we see
both London merchants and Essex tenants struggling for designation as the
“true commons,” with the London merchant leaders coming out on top and
achieving knighthood in the process while the rebels are stigmatized as
316 Paul Strohm
uncouth beasts; we see both Nicholas Brembre and John Northampton
struggling for possession of the idea of “common profit,” with Brembre
the temporary and Northampton the longer-term winner. Although I occa­
sionally attribute an ideological thrust to an idea or structure, my real interest
passes quickly to what I regard as the more important questions: who
inscribed it in textual form and why, who appropriated it and to what effect,
who laid claim to it by wielding it in a convincing way?
This emphasis on the contingency of texts, their reliance on a material
reality beyond their own bounds, is my rejoinder to those notions of tex-
tuality that would view language and text as all there is, as our sole point of
access to past events and their understanding. Texts do, indeed, regulate our
access to the past, and especially to the crucially valuable terms of past self­
understanding, of historical events as understood by their participants. This is
why texts must be so respectfully interrogated - not just teased and mollified
and cajoled, but above all attentively observed with respect for the way they
create meaning and the status of the meaning they create. But the observer of
texts cannot fail to note their ups and downs, their surprising changes of
fortune, their varied and unpredictable uses. These vicissitudes register the
presence of centers of authority beyond textual bounds, the ultimate reliance
of the text upon those contending processes that determine reception and
circulation, interpretation and application. This is why, after six chapters that
may be read mainly as celebrations of textual versatility and power, I conclude
this book with a cautionary chapter in which a brilliant act of textual self­
creation is shown to be subject to revision and eventual effacement through
the operations of political agency beyond textual control.
Believing that texts are subject to external manipulation and use, I have
little allegiance to the idea of text and context as conventionally applied. My
quarrel is not, to be sure, with “context” in its etymological sense, which I
take to embrace everything that is “together with” the text, without particular
specification of centrality or order of importance. The effect of much con­
textual criticism is, however, potentially misleading in its tendency to
enthrone the text at the center of a surrounding field of contributory and
client-like texts and events. This scheme, in other words, instates the text in a
position of near-imperial privilege, its resonance enriched by cargoes of
meaning from its tributaries, which it in turn dignifies by elevating their
inchoate impulses to a new level of significance. Chaucerians have every
reason to understand this divide of text and context, for we have exploited it
thoroughly in our author’s interest. We have, after all, relendessly hypostat-
ized the masterworks of contemporaries like Langland and Gower, interna­
tional masters like Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut, and Boccaccio, and
even events to which Chaucer dimly alludes like the rising of 1381, arraying
them around his text in essentially static and subservient roles. Needless to
say, devotees of Boccaccio and the rest have considered themselves fully
 False Fables and Historical Truth 317
entitled to ignore this particular prioritization and to reconfigure textual
systems around their favored authors as well. The question here is not who
should be at the center, but process of centralization itself I am proposing a
belated Copernican, or even post-Copernican, revolution in our thinking
about textuality, in which a Ptolemaic view of the favored text as the stable
center of an ordered system gives way to an acknowledgment of a text as just
one component of a less prioritized array, one that might itself stand nowhere
near the center of any recognized textual universe.
My view of textuality has posed some organizational issues. An essay that
begins with a text runs the risk of demoting all that follows to the role of
explanatory context; an essay that ends with one runs the closely related risk
of suggesting that the text is outcome, with everything preceding it existing
merely to prepare the way. I have followed no single rule in these essays.
Some, like “Treason in the Household,” retrace my own investigatory path,
while others, like “Queens as Intercessors,” rearrange my conclusions for
more convenient access. My general practice, though, is to seek an organiza­
tion that returns my primary texts to the larger environment within which
they were produced and their uses determined. This means that my essays
usually begin and end in history, moving through a field of writings and
events to the moment of the text’s production, and then moving back out to
the larger field that determined its disposition or use. This procedure certainly
involves some deferrals and may place some burdens on my reader. It is,
however, an element of the point I mean to make: that we need not consider
historical events simply as “background” but may regard them as part of a
large and unruly matrix within which new texts are constandy produced and
received.
I have tried to go back to the written record in a fresh frame of mind, and
“history” for me is more likely to refer to contemporaneous documents, and
events and pressures registered in those documents, than to twentieth-cen­
tury narrative histories and surveys. This practice has the advantage of
avoiding the multiplication of received errors. An example might be the
case of Henry IV’s “proclamation” of his kingship, a document mentioned
by most recent writers on his accession, for which I searched in vain for
months before realizing that it did not exist, save in a host of nineteenth-and
twentieth-century references derived from a fanciful nineteenth-century edi­
torial invention. These comments are naturally not meant to understate my
debt to the superb works of synthesis and analysis that have helped me to
orient myself within this field - some of which appear in my notes and some
not —by such landmark figures as T. F. Tout and J. G. Bellamy, and by such
distinguished contemporaries as R. B. Dobson and Nigel Saul and Anthony
Tuck. But I raise this matter in order to note a more particular obligation or -
I should say - stimulus. The reexamination of texts in history has recently
been advanced by a new generation of feminist historians, and my fifth and
318 Paul Strohm
sixth chapters rely heavily on their work. I am particularly indebted in this
regard to recent studies by Judith Bennett and Martha Howell.
Reconstruction of a textual environment exposes its practitioner to many
new materials, and hence to surprises. None of these essays has ended up
exacdy where I thought it would. I began the essay on revelry as a discussion
of the carnivalesque, but it ended as an inquiry into the production of
oppositional action within a dominant system. I expected the discussion of
Chaucer’s Purse to reveal Chaucer’s total reliance on a larger environment
of dynastic theory, but ended by discovering evidences of his authorial intent.
I intended for the essay on queens to show that female intercession served
the interests of patriarchy, but became aware in the course of my research
that any such structure can be captured and redirected from within.
My allegiance is, in short, less to a particular set of conclusions than to a
continuing inquiry. This inquiry' recognizes our reliance on the written record
for what we can know of the past and seeks to approach texts with an
appropriate mixture of skepticism and respect. It views texts not as finalized
“sources” but as argumentative and interpretative documents in their own
right, as historical contestants and as objects of contestation. Above all, it
treats texts warily but without unnecessary ceremony, discarding outworn
categorizations - like “literary” versus “nonliterary” or “fictional” versus
“historical” - that might foreclose conversation among texts or between
texts and events. It discovers in this conversation a rich cacophony of voices
where monovocality had seemed to prevail, and it seeks to listen attentively,
not only to the more strident but to some so slighdy audible as to stand at the
very edge of silence.
 Index

Abelard, Peter, 69, 78, 94, 106 Arn, Mary-Jo, 297, 308-9
Abram, A., 59 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of
Acosta, José de, 169 Canterbury, 8, 21-3, 26, 245
Adams, Robert, 244 Ashby, George, 297
Adelman, Janet, 93 Ashley, Kathleen, 30
Adorno, Theodore, 263, 265, 267-9, Ashton, J., 34
276, 279 Asloan, John, 289
Aers, David, vii, xv, 1-41, 245, 272, 275 Aston, Margaret, 29, 30, 33, 34
Aitón, Arthur Scott, 181 Augustine, St (of Hippo), 23-5, 78-9, 93,
Albertus Magnus, 191 99-101, 105, 192, 222, 224, 225, 243
Alda of Siena, 14 Aurelianus, Caelius, 95
Alford, John A., 240 Avicenna, 70
Allen, Judson Boyce, 106, 225, 240, 271 Avineri, Shlomo, 160
Allen, Peter R., 158
Althusser, Louis, 273 Badby,John, 20
Altman, Joel, 158 Baker, Joan, of London, 25
Ames, Russell, 159 Baldick, Chris, 270
Angela of Foligno, 14 Bale, John, 239, 245
Anne, queen of Richard II, 315 Ball, John, Letters of, 230
Aquinas, St Thomas, 70, 94—5, 192, 204 Baron, Helen V., 184
Archer, Edmund, of Loddon, 27 Basevorn, Robert of, 80, 101, 243
Arcimboldo (Italian painter), 109 Bateson, Mar}', 58, 59
Aretino, Pietro, 166, 182 Baxandall, Michael, 241, 294
Ariès, Philippe, 294 Baxter, Margery, of Martham, 27, 35
Aristode, 70, 95, 126, 187, 203; Beadle, Richard, 30
Nicomachean Ethics, 190-2, 198, 201—2, Beckwith, Sarah, 2, 3, 8, 10, 20, 23, 26,
204 27, 29-31, 33-5
Armstrong, Elizabeth, 162-3 Bell, Rudolph, 14, 32
320 Index
Bellamy, J. G., 317 Brewer, Derek, 205
Belting, H., 29 Brigden, Susan, 25
Benjamin, Walter, 249,251,265, 269,273 Brody, Saul, 295
Bennett, H. S., 59,61,62 Brown, George, of London, 25
Bennett, J. A. W., 62 Brown, Peter (historian), 96
Bennett, Judith M., 30,31,318 Brundage, James A., 91, 96
Bennett, Michael J., 205 Buck-Morss, Susan, 278
Bennett, Tony, 270 Bude, William, 159
Benson, C. David, 90, 92 Bullough, Vera L., 96
Benson, L. D., 129 Bunyan, John, 288
Benson, Robert, 31 Burckhardt, Jakob, 147, 265, 278
Benveniste, Emile, 245 Buridan, John, 191, 193, 195, 200, 204,
Bériac, Françoise, 295 205
Berkeley, Lady Isabel, 47-8, 61 Burlin, Robert, 66, 105
Bernard of Clairvaux, St, 2 Burrell, John, of Loddon, 27, 35
Bernardino of Siena, St, 147, 204, 205 Burrow, J. A, 205, 224, 225, 238, 242,
Bevington, David M., 158 299, 300, 302, 307, 310
Bible, 84—5, 229; Acts, 69; Corinthians, Butler, Judith, 16, 30, 32
1; Galatians, 90; Genesis, 125; John, 5, Bynum, Caroline Walker, xv, 1, 7, 10-17,
23-4; Luke, 5, 22, 244; Mark, 5; 21, 28, 29-32, 106
Matthew, 1,5, 244; Proverbs, 225;
Psalms, 152, 225; Revelation Cabral, Pedro Alvarez, 171
(Apocalypse), 225 Cadden, Joan, 286, 296
Biddick, Kathleen, 11, 31, 32 Caldwell, Ellen C , 180, 184
Biel, Gabriel, 30 Cameron, E., 33
Blackstone, William, 131 Camille, Michael, 29, 294
Blake, Thomas, of London, 25 Camoes, Luis de, 164, 171
Bloch, R. Howard, 77-8, 91, 93, 94, Campion, Thomas, 175
99-101, 104, 129, 130 Carroll, David, 98
Bloomfield, Morton W., 245 Carruthers, Mary, vii, xi, 42-64,130,131,
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 316 245
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 298 Carus-Wilson, E. M., 57, 58, 61
Boffey, Julia, 296, 309-10 Catherine of Genoa, 14
Boleyn, Anne, 169 Catherine of Siena, 14
Bonner, Edmund, Bishop of London, 182 Catto, Jeremy, 34
Boorde, Andrew, Dietary of Health, 120 Cavendish, George, 160
Bosch, Hieronymus, 110 Caxton, W'illiam, Book of the Knight of the
Boswell, John, 70, 93, 95, 96 Tower, 310
Bourdieu, Pierre, 151 Certeau, Michel de, 180, 241
Bouwsma, William J., 160 Cetina, Gutierre de, 177-8
Bowden, Betsy, 91, 104 Chambers, R. W., 154, 157-8, 212
Bowden, Muriel, 92 Charles V, Emperor, 166, 167, 169, 182
Bowers, John M., 244—5 Charles of Orleans, xiii-xiv, 297-311
Braudel, Fernand, 143, 266 Chaucer, Geoffrey, xiv, 65, 67, 90, 107,
Brecht, Bertholt, 249 206, 216-17, 219-20, 246, 247, 271,
Brembre, Nicholas, 316 291, 316; Chaucer portraits, 220, 243;
Brennan, T., 30 Adam Scriveyn, 77, 79; Anelida and
 Index 321
Arate, 290; Canterbury Tales, 65, 68, 70, Culler, Jonathan, 276
112, 270, 303-4; Clerk’s Tale, 67, 77, Curley, Michael J., 243
79, 91; Complaint to his Purse, 318; Curry, Walter Clyde, 91-2, 98
General Prologue, 65, 66, 70, 72, 112,
114; House of Fame, 69, 221, 315; Dante Alighieri, 57, 224, 225, 287; De
Knight’s Tale, 60, 298, 300, 310; vulgari eloquentia, 78
Legend of Good Women, 63, 99, 302; Man David, Alfred, 104
of Law’s Introduction and Tale, 63, Dávila, Pedradas, 174
67; Melibee, 98-9; Monk’s Tale, 217; Davis, Natalie Zemon, 145
Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, xiii, Davis, Norman, 59-60, 63
65—106; Parson’s Prologue and Tale, Day, Mabel, 309
60, 89-90, 106; Physician’s Tale, Delany, Sheila, 272
69-70; Reeve’s Tale, 62; Retractions, Delehaye, Hippolyte, 96, 97
90, 106; Romaunt of the Rose, 81-2; Demaître, Luke, 295
Shipman’s Tale, 56, 112, 116-17, 122, Dempster, Germaine, 80
126; Summoner’s Tale, 80; Troilus and Derrida, Jacques, 83, 103—4, 210, 218,
Criseyde, xii, 79, 284, 287, 290, 295; 230, 241, 258, 276, 309
Wife of Bath, Prologue and Tale, xi, Despenser family, 209, 239-40
42-64, 65, 66, 68, 88, 91, 112, 114, Dilthey, Wilhelm, 271
116-17, 127, 191-2; Wife of Bath’s Dinshaw, Carolyn, vii, xiii, 65—106
Tale, 54-6 Dobson, R. B., 317
Chenu, M. D., 31 Dollimore, Jonathan, 32, 275, 278
Chester Plays, 119 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 60, 63, 240
Chodorow, Nancy, 98, 105 Dorothy of Montau, 14
Cholij, Roman, 129 Doyle, A. I., 238
Cixous, Hélène, 32, 105 Dronke, Peter, 32
Clanchy, M. T., 97 Du Bellay, Joachim, 162, 165
Clark, Cecily, 309 Duffy, Eamon, 7, 10, 30-2
Cohen, Walter, 275 Dugmore, C. W., 30
Coleman, Janet, 1 Dunbar, William, “The Dregy of
Colish, Marcia, 99, 101 Dunbar,” 120; Two Married Women,
Colmer, Dorothy, 64 131,289
Colón, Cristóbal, 183 Duncan, Douglas, 294
Columbus, Christopher, 166-8,170,171, Dyer, Chris, 31
183
Columbus, Fernando, 183 Eagleton, Terry, 75, 251, 259, 270, 272
Constable, Giles, 31 Edward II, 57, 239
Contamine, Philippe, 241 Edward III, 215, 239
Cook, Sherburne F., 185 Elliott, J. H., 181, 183
Cortés, Martín, 162, 172 Elton, G. R., 158
Courtenay, William T., 205 Emden, A. B., 62
Craun, Edwin D., 295 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 276
Crewe, Jonathan, 180 Emmerson, Richard K., 33, 244
Cripps-Day, F. H., 242 Erasmus, 139, 154; Praise of Folly, 136,
Crosby, Alfred W., 174 158
Cross, M. Claire, 34 Ergome (Erghome), John, 242-3
Crowley, Robert, 221, 239 Erhart, Gregor, 283, 294
322 Index
Estrin, Barbara L., 180 Gohlke, Madelon, 275
Eustochia of Messini, 14, 26 Goldberg, Jonathan, 260, 275-7
Ewan, Elizabeth, 296 Gower, John, 216, 233—4, 316; Confessio
Amantis, 291
Fansler, Dean S., 80 Gradon, Pamela, 23, 35, 238
Farnese, Cardinal Alexander, 181 Gramsci, Antonio, 269, 275
Fein, David A., 303, 310 Gray, Douglas, xv, 287, 288, 290
Ferry, Anne, 183-4 Greenacre, Phyllis, 104
Finke, Laurie, 32 Greenblatt, Stephen, vii, xi-xii, 133-61,
Fish, Stanley, 108-9, 127, 271-2 180-4, 212, 259, 260, 262-4, 275, 277,
FitzRalph, Richard, 63, 80, 103 278
Fleming, John V., 77, 95, 99, 100 Greene, Roland, viii, xiv—xv, 162-86
Fletcher, Alan, 31 Greene, Thomas M., 277
Florio, John, 147 Greimas, A. J., 273
Foucault, Michel, 15-16, 32, 254, 262^1, Griffiths, Lavinia, 233, 245
266, 267, 276 Grosseteste, Robert, 190-1, 204
Fowler, Elizabeth, vii, xiv, 107-32 Guesclin, Bertrand du, 217, 243
Fox, Denton, 283, 294, 295 Guntrip, Harry, 97
Fox, John, 309 Guy, John, 185-6
Foxe, John, 245 Gybbon-Monypenny, G. B., 310, 311
Francis I, King of France, 166
Francis of Assisi, St, 2, 232 Hakluyt, Richard, 183
Frank, Robert W , 3 Hallum, Robert, canonist, of London, 61
Fraser, G. S., 108 Halpern, Richard, 129
Freud, Sigmund, 32, 73, 74, 83, 97, 105, Hanawalt, Barbara, 31
285 Hanke, Lewis, 182
Friar Daw’s Reply, 35 Harbison, Craig, 294
Froissart, Jean, 234; L ’Espinette Harpsfield, Nicholas, Ufe of More, 134—5,
Amoureuse, 311 153
Frowlow, A., 96 Harrier, Richard, 183-5
Fuller, Mary C , 163-4 Harvey, John, 118
Haskell, Ann, 60
Galway, Margaret, 242 Hawes, Stephen, 118
Garcilaso de la Vega, 164—5 Hawkins, John, 169
Garter, Order of the, 242 Hay, Gilbert, 292
Gascoigne, Thomas, 106 Heidegger, Martin, 247
Gautier le Leu, 95 Helgerson, Richard, 275
Gawain and the Green Knight, xii, 187-205, Henry IV, 315, 317
298 Henry VIII, 139, 141-2, 166
Geertz, Clifford, 253, 259-60, 264, 274, Henryson, Robert, Testament of Cresseid,
276 xv-xvi, 281-96
Gerard of Cremona, 70 Hermogenes, 77
Gibson, Charles, 184 HexterJ. H., 139, 144
Gibson, Gayle, 29 Higgins, John, 275
Gillespie, Vincent, 30 Higgs, Elton, 272
Gilson, Etienne, 102 Hill, Thomas D., 205
Glorieux, Pierre, 102 Hilton, R. H., 31
 Index 323
Hirsch, E. D., 247, 271-3 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 105-6
Hoccleve, Thomas, 300; Regement of Jones, W. R., 245
Princes, 291; Series, 300; To Oldcastle, 34 Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Divine
Hodge, Robert, 275 Love, X V , 29
Hogarth, William, 288, 295 Justice, Steven, viii, 29, 30, 33, 35
Holbein, Hans, The Ambassadors, 133,157
Holland, Richard, The Buke o f the Howlat, Kahn, Coppélia, 275
290 Kamholtz, Jonathan, 180
Homans, Margaret, 74, 98 Kane, George, 212, 239, 240
Horstmann, Carl, 30 Kean, P. M., 80
Howard, Donald R., 60, 91, 93,104, 106, Keen, Benjamin, 185
243, 310 Kegworthe, Roger, draper, of London,
Howard, Jean E., 275 61
Howard, RoyJ., 271 Kellogg, Alfred L., 71
Howell, Martha C , 31, 318 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 60
Howlat, The Buke o f the see Holland, Kempe, Margery, xv, 6, 26, 59, 62, 119,
Richard 231, 232, 234, 300
Hudson, Anne, 23,27,30, 32-5,238,240 Kendall, R. D., 34
Huizinga, Johan, 212 Kendrick, Laura, 97
Huit, David F., 240, 241, 243 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, viii, 33
Humbert of Romans, 80, 102 Kernan, Anne, 60
Hunt, Leigh, 104 Kieckhefer, Richard, 2, 3, 6, 29
Huot, Sylvia, 311 King, John N., 238, 239
Huppé, B. F., 64 King, Pamela, 30
Husband, Timothy B., 295 Kinghom, A. M., 180, 181
Kinney, Arthur, 129
Irigaray, Luce, 98, 105 Kirk, Elizabeth, 238, 244
Klein, Melanie, 97
Jacquart, Danielle, 295 Knight, Stephen, 272
James I, King of Scodand, The King is Knowles, Dom David, 103
Quair, 297, 298, 307, 309, 311 Kofman, Sarah, 74, 98, 103—4
James, Mervyn, 30 Kooper, Erik S., 218-19, 241
Jameson, Fredric, 159, 184, 250—4, 258, Koziskowski, Stanley J., 182
273 Kress, Gunther, 275
Jane Maty of Maillé, 14 Kristeva, Julia, xvi, 16-17, 32, 74-5, 98,
Jardine, Lisa, 275 105, 106, 284-6, 289, 292^1
Jauss, Hans Robert, 279
Javitch, Daniel, 180 Labé, Louis, 164
Jay, Martin, 272, 279 Lacan, Jacques, 71, 73, 74, 96-8, 105,
Jennings, Margaret, 102 106,311
Jerome, St, Adversus Jovinianum, 43, 45-6, Ladurie, Le Roy, 33
49, 53, 60 Lane, B. G., 29, 30
John XXII, Pope, 18 Langholm, Odd, 201, 204
John of Gaunt, 217 Langland, William, xiv, 18, 107, 116-18,
John of Salisbury, 78, 94, 303, 311 128, 316; Piers Plowman, xiii, xv, 17,
Johnson, Barbara A., 238 28-9, 35, 58, 61, 111-12, 119, 122-5,
Johnson, Lesley, 294 114, 206-45, 270
324 Index
Las Casas, Fray Bartolomé de, 167, 172, Malory, Sir Thomas, 297
183 Man, Paul de, 258
UTour-Landry, The Book of the Knight of, Mandeville’s Travels, 12
43,46-9,60-1,63 Manly, John Matthews, 43, 61
Lawton, David, 238 Mann, Jill, viii, xii, 187-205
lMy Folks' Mass Book, 31 Mannorti, Octave, 83, 104—5
Lea, Henry, 129 Marcus, Leah, 275
Leff, Gordon, 33, 34 Margulies, Cecile S., 59
Le Goff, Jacques, 31, 131 Marin, Louis, 159
Leicester, H. Marshall, 91, 104 Marks, Diane, 309
Lemay, Helen Rudnite, 96 Marks, Richard, 295
Lentricchia, Frank, 263 Markus, R. A., 99
Lepow, L., 30, 33 Marot, Clément, 110
Lewis, C S., 108, 127, 180 Marottd, Arthur, 275, 278
Lindenberger, Herbert, 275 Marrow, James, 2—4, 29, 30
Lindisfarne Gospels, 73 Martin, Priscilla, 245
Lipson, E., 58 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, xii-xiii, 29-30,
Little, Lester K., 131 32, 121, 140, 154, 249, 251-9, 262,
Llaguno, José A., 183 265, 268, 272-6, 278
Lloyd, T. H., 57 Mason, H. A., 179
Lochrie, Karma, 32 Meditationes vitae Christi, 5, 8, 21; see also
Lollards and Lollardy, xv, 8, 17-29, 31, Love, Nicholas
32—4 Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord, 5, 34
London, city of, 228-30 Medwall, Henry, Fulgens and Lucres, 157
Lotto, Lorenzo, 219 Ménagier de Paris, Le, 43, 46-50, 55, 62-3
Love, Nicholas, Mirror of the Blessed Ufe of Mendoza, Antonio de, 166-7, 181-2
Jesus Christ, xv, 8, 18, 25, 30, 33 Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de, 166, 181-2
Lukács, Georg, 29-30, 249-50, 272, 275 Mendoza, Inigo López de, 166
Luther, Martin, 152 Mermel, Jerry, 158
Lydgate, John, 9, 291 Mészáros, István, 278
Lynd, Helen Merrell, 160 Meun, Jean de, 80, 316; see also Roman de
la Rose
McAlpine, Monica, 70, 92-3, 95 Michelet, Jules, 278
McCarties, Michael, 180, 183 Middleton, Anne, viii, xiii, 35, 206—45
Macfarlane, Alan, 159 Miller, D. A., 91
Machaut, Guillaume de, 316; Voir Dit, Miller, E., 58
311 Miller, Robert P., 68, 72, 92
Macherey, Pierre, 272 Minnis, Alastair, 271-2
McKisack, May, 57 Mirk, John, Festial, 8-9, 25, 31
McLeod, Enid, 310 Montaigne, Michel, 147-8
McNiven, Peter, 2, 30, 33—4 Montrose, Louis A., 163—4, 260, 263,
Macpherson, C. B., 141 275, 277
Macrobius, 65, 91 Moone, Hawisia, of Loddon, 20
Macy, G., 29 Moone, Thomas, of Loddon, 27
Maitland, F. W., 131 Moore, R. L, 31, 33
Makowski, Elizabeth M., 129 More, Sir Thomas, xii, 133—61, 245, 297;
Mailer, Charles E., 62-3 Dialogue o f Comfort, 147; Ufe of John
 Index 325
Picus, 152, 161; Utopia, xii, 135-61, Paston, 47, 59, 63; Paston family, 47,
184 59-60, 63; Walter Paston, 63
Mömer, Magnus, 185 Patterson, Annabel, 275
Morris, C , 31 Patterson, Lee, viii, xii-xiii, 33, 66, 92,
Morton, John, Cardinal, 133 103—4, 240, 246-79, 296
Motolinía, Fray Toribio de Benavente, Paul, St, 69
175, 176 Paul III, Pope, 167
Mowbray, Sir Thomas, 61 Paulson, Ronald, 288
Muckle, J. T., 94 Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 207, 230, 234,
Mullaney, Steven, 275 312-16
Murphy, James J., 101-2 Perella, Nicolas James, 105
Murray, Alexander, 31 Peristiany, J. G., 151
Muscatine, Charles, 95, 245 Peter, John, 129
Peterson, Douglas L., 180
Nader, Helen, 181 Petrarch and Petrarchan love-poetry, xv,
Neilson, N., 59 162-5, 170, 173-7, 179
new historicism, xi-xv, 3, 11, 257—70, Petroff, E. A , 32
275-9 Pezzini, D., 30
Nogent, Guibert de, 96-7 Philippa, queen of Edward III, 313
Nolan, Barbara, 272 Pico della Mirándola, 139, 152
Noonan, John T., 94 Pinborg, Jan, 100
Norbrook, David, 186, 239, 275, 277 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 160
Northampton, John of, 316 Pizan, Chrisdne de, 112
Norton-Smith, John, 311 Pizarro, Francisco, 172
Planche, Alice, 310
Oberman, Heiko, 30 Plato, 139, 144, 146; Cratylus, 11
Oldcasde, Sir John, 26, 27 Plucknett, Theodore F. T., 58-9
Olivi, Petrus, 205 Poggio, Giovanni, 181
Orgel, Stephen, 276, 278 Poirion, Daniel, 214, 241-2, 310
Origen, 69, 94 Pollard, A. W., 245
Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernandez de, 174 Pollock, Frederick, 131
Owens, Craig, 91 Ponring, Kenneth G., 58
Owst, G. R., 103 Porete, Margaret, 32
Oxford, university of, 52, 62, 63 Power, Eileen, 57-60
Pratt, Robert A., 63, 129
Pagden, Anthony, 182 Prescott, Anne Lake, 182
painting and decoration (analogies with Priscian, 78
literary texts), 4, 6, 8, 13, 110, Privity of the Passion, The, 5-6
218-19, 241, 281-5, 288-9, 291, Puttenham, George, 118, 207, 239
293 Pye, Hugh, of Norwich, 20
Panofsky, Erwin, 293—4
Parkes, Malcolm B., 239 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 163-5
Parkinson, David J., 294—5 Ransom, John Crowe, 206, 208
Parmenides, 95 Ratdef, John, 181
Paston Letters, 50, 59-61; Clement Ray, William, 272
Paston, 63; Edmund Paston, 49; Raymond of Capua, 14
Elizabeth Paston, 48, 50, 62; Margaret Rebholz, R. A., 184-6
326 Index
Reisner, Thomas A., 59 Scrope, Stephen, 48, 50, 61
Repingdon, Philip, 231 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 91
Rhazes (Arabic medical writer), 70, 96 Séjourné, P., 96
Richard II, 57, 215,312, 314 Seneca, and the Senecan mode, 139, 204,
Richard of Bury, Philobiblon, 69, 93-4 287
Richard the Redeles, 129 Serafino dell’Aquila, 174
Richards, Peter, 295 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 181
Ricoeur, Paul, 160 Shakespeare, William, 271; As You Uke
Riddy, Felicity, viii, xv-xvi, 281-96 It, 120; Hamlet, 139; Henry IV, 119;
Rigg, A. G, 242-3 Merchant of Venice, 205; Midsummer
Riley, Denise, 15-16, 32 Night’s Dream, 260, 263-4; The Tempest,
Ringbom, Sixten, 29 xv; Troilus and Cressida, 198
Robbins, Rossell Hope, 311 Sherborne, J. W., 58
Robertson, D. W., xii Shoaf, R. A., 203-5
Rocafull, José M. Gallegos, 182 Sidney, Sir Philip, 128, 162
Rogers, J. E. T., 130-1 Simpson, Lesley Byrd, 182-3
Rolle, Richard, xv, 4 Sinanoglou, L., 30
Roman de la Rose, Le, 69-70, 76-83, 94, Sinfield, Alan, 296
99, 102, 112, 270 Skelton, John, xiv, 107-32, 179; Colin
Ronsard, Pierre de, 162-3 Clout, 128; Elinor Rumming, 107-32;
Roover, Raymond de, 204—5 Philip Sparrow, 128; Speak Parrot, 128;
Roper, Margaret (More), 146, 153 Ware the Hawk, 128
Roper, William, Ufe of More, 133, 135, Slack, Paul, 174
146-7, 153, 155, 160 Socrates, 77
Rose, Jacqueline, 74, 98, 311 Southall, Raymond, 180
Rosenthal, Franz, 96 Southern, Richard, 31
Rowland, Beryl, 92-3 Spearing, A. C., viii, xiii-xiv, 131-2, 180,
Rubin, Gayle, 91 186, 294, 297-311
Rubin, Miri, 2-4, 8, 10, 29-31, 33-4 Spenser, Edmund, 128; Shepheardes
Ruskin, John, 265—6 Calender, 264, 277
Rutebeuf, 80, 102 Spivakovsky, Erika, 181
Staley, Lynn, vii, xv, 35
Sahlins, Marshall, 259 Statutes of Labourers, 244
Said, Edward, 206, 207, 272 Steele, Robert, 309
Saint-Amour, William of, 102 Steinberg, Leo, 6, 29, 72
Salter, Elizabeth, 30 Steinmann, Jean, 60
Samuels, M. R., 239 Stock, Brian, 31
Sannazaro, Jacopo, 174 Stockton, Eric W., 93
Sargent, Michael, 8, 30-1 Stone, Lawrence, 144
Sassoon, Anne Showstock, 275 Stonor, Edmund, 62
Saul, Nigel, 317 Strauss, Jennifer, 295
Sawtry, William, 20 Strohm, Paul, ix, xiv, 239—40, 312-18
Scase, Wendy, 32, 34 Sudbury’, Simon, Archbishop of
Scattergood, John, 131 Canterbury’, 314
Schapiro, Meyer, 294 Sumption, Jonathan, 96—7
Scheller, G., 29 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 128, 171,
Schlauch, Margaret, 272 179, 184, 297
 Index 327
Surtz, E., 159 Waddon, William, of Norwich, 20
Swanson, Robert, 31 Wakefield fTowneley) Plays, 30, 33
Waleys, Thomas, 101
Tanner, Norman P., 27, 34—5 Walker, Greg, 127
Taylor, P. B., 204-5 Walsingham, Thomas, 234; Gesta
Taylor, William, 34 Abbatum, 313-14
Tennenhouse, Leonard, 275 Warner, Marina, 282, 294
Theodoret of Cyrus, 96 Wars of Alexander, The, 129
Thomas, Stephen, of Lee, 59 Watson, Nicholas, 30
Thomasset, Claude, 295 Wayne, Don E., 275, 278
Thomson, J. A. F., 33 Weber, Max, 263
Thomson, Patricia, 181, 183 Weimann, Robert, 273, 275-6
Thorpe, William, xv, 21-3, 25, 30, 231, Whigham, Frank, 275, 278
234 White, William, of Norwich, 20
Three Dead Kings, The, 290 Wilden, Anthony, 74
Thrupp, Sylvia, 58, 62-3 Wilks, M., 33
Tillyard, E. M. W., 262, 264 Williams, Arnold, 103
Todorov, Tzvetan, 245 Williams, Raymond, 250, 254-7, 259,
Torrie, Elizabeth P. D., 289 270-1, 273-5
Tottel, Richard, Miscellany, 127, 171 Wilson, Katharina M., 129
Tout, T. F, 317 Windeatt, Barry, 240
Tracy, D., 34 Winnicott, D. W., 104
Travis, Peter, 30 Wolsey, Cardinal, 133-4, 141, 146, 152
Trivet, Nicholas, 243 Woodbridge, Linda, 129
Tuck,J. Anthony, 245, 317 Woolf, Rosemary, 2, 3, 29
Tudela, Pérez de, 185 Wretlind, D. E., 61
Tuve, Rosemond, 182 Wurtele, Douglas, 106
Tyndale, William, 136, 158 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, xiv-xv, 128, 162-86,
297
Ullmann, Manfred, 96 Wyclif (Wycliffe), John, xv, 17-29, 33-4,
Usk, Thomas, 297; Testament o f Ijove, 243 80, 102-3; Wycliffite sermons, 17;
Udey, Francis Lee, 63, 129 Wycliffite sermon on Good Friday,
23-5, 34
Vale, Malcolm, 215, 241-3
Vance, Eugene, 99 York Plays, 5
Van Eyck, Jan, 281-2, 285, 287, 289,
293^4 Zavala, Silvio A., 183
Varro, M., 78 Zika, C , 34
Vergil, Polydore, 242 Zimmermann, T. C. Price, 160
Vespucci, Amerigo, 171 Zink, Michel, 310
Victricius of Rouen, 96 Zorita, Alonso de, 175—6
Vitoria, Francisco de, 167, 172 Zumárraga, Fray Juan de, 167
Vitry, Jacques de, 6-7
This is a collection of previously published essays on late medieval and early modern
literature, designed to act as a companion to Chaucer lo Spenser: An Anthology oj Writings in
English /3 7 5 -/5 7 5 , edited by Derek Pearsall (1999). The object of that anthology is to
provide representation of a variety of kinds of prose and verse, including some not
traditionally regarded as canonically “literary,' and also to trespass beyond the boundaries of
the conventional medieval/early modern divide.

This volume of essays will provide some of the critical backing for those decisions about the
canon and about periodization, and also give evidence of the vigor of opinion and debate in
the field in general. Most of the essays are from the last twenty years, and some are very recent,
though space is also found for some earlier classics. The collection pays particular attention to
those critics who have had the most powerful recent impact on our reading of the texts of the
period: they are selected for their excellence and importance, whether in themselves or as
representatives of an influential critical approach, and not for their adherence to any one
school of interpretation. They will provide a companion to the texts in the anthology, a
commentary and counterpoint to the views expressed in the editor’s headnotes and
explanatory notes, and a perspective on the best that has been thought and said about the
writing of these two extraordinary centuries of creativity, consolidation, and seed-sowing.

D e re k P earsall
The editor is Gurney Professor of English at Harvard University and was Professor and Co-
Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, 1965-85. His
numerous publications include Chaucer to Spenser: A n Anthology (1999) and The Life of
Geoffrey Chaucer (1992), both available from Blackwell. He is also the author of John
Lydgate (1970), Old English and Middle English Poetry (1977), The Canterbury Tales: A
Critical Study (1985), and An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Langland (1990).

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