Companion
to Medieval English Literature
Some
themes, motifs and conventions
Michael Murphy
and
James Clawson
Conal and Gavin Publishing
Brooklyn, New York
© Copyright Michael Murphy 2004
The material in this web-book may be freely
downloaded by students, teachers and general readers for private or pedagogical use.
We will be pleased if such persons notify us by
e-mail that they have used it. We will
also be grateful to readers who point out any errors, big or small to E-mail
address:
Introduction
This book consists of slightly over 100 entries on some of the more
important forms and conventions of Old and Middle English literature,
especially as they are encountered in college
classes and seminars. It is a
"Guide," "Companion" or "Handbook" that aims to
provide in alphabetical order a short commentary on each item. It is devoted
largely to fact and received opinion, rather than to individualistic
interpretation. In addition, the entries
try to list the recurrences of a given topos in the literature as fully
as is consistent with good scholarship and the size of the book. With most entries there is also be a very
brief bibliography of scholarly work — generally no more than two or three to
any one entry.
Ernst Curtius's now classic study, European Literature and the Latin
Middle Ages, became a landmark in
medieval studies because it demonstrated forcefully and persuasively the
importance of an understanding of literary convention for the literature with
which it deals. As the title of his work indicates, Curtius
dealt preponderantly with Latin and the vernaculars of continental Europe, and
only incidentally with English literature.
This Companion is not intended as a competition with the
international and monumental scholarship of Curtius, but rather as a modest
supplement. It concentrates on English
without, we hope, being parochial, for it is evident that many of the themes or
conventions treated here are borrowed from Latin and from Continental vernaculars. The focus, however, is English.
Length and Comprehensiveness of Treatment The web version of the Companion or Handbook
is intended as a pre-print run. In print version the Companion will be small
enough to be owned by students and scholars, and to be leafed through or
referred to at leisure, not a heavy tome
or multi‑volume treatment to be consulted only in the library. At least two large collections have been
published in recent years: one is a Lexikon of the Middle Ages in German from
Artemis Verlag that involves all aspects of medieval life, but also features
sections on Old and Middle English that are heavily weighted towards individual
works and authors, and categories such as "Monitory Works" -- matters
we do not deal with. There is also now the large multi‑volume
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, in English, again planned in quite a
different way, and not directed exclusively toward literary interests. These volumes have much longer entries on
some of the items in this book but nothing at all on most. This is largly true
also of the one-volume Medieval England: An Encyclopedia (Garland,
1998).
The length of an entry in this Handbook is not the measure of its
importance. The Ubi Sunt motif is
perhaps of no more importance than, say, Aubade or Boast or Kenning. But it seemed meaningless without examples,
some of which cannot easily be
shortened. A small anthology with translations seemed in order, even though
this makes this entry a good deal longer than most others. Similarly an entry like Beginnings and Endings deserves a treatment of article,
chapter or book length. We have had to settle for something more like a
list of ways of beginning and ending
medieval poems, not a treatment of the
rhetorical problems.
We hope we have found a median
between the meaninglessly brief and the dauntingly long entry.
Criteria
for Inclusion
There
are no entries for authors, individual works, or most characters, or for categories like Devotional Writings,
Satire, Lyric. Such information would have
made this book inordinately long, and in any case is readily available
elsewhere in Lacy's one-volume Arthurian Encyclopedia, or his shorter Handbook;
Moorman's small Arthurian Dictionary, Spence's Dictionary, or a
multi-volume publication like Wells's Manual (old or new) and other
works of that sort. We have, however, decided to include a few of the major
characters who occur in the literature and who can be said to owe much of their
presentation to convention:
1. classical figures like Aristotle, Alexander and Virgil about whom medieval literary legends were common,
stories that portray them very differently from the way we usually think of
them.
2. biblical figures like Cain, Herod, or
Pilate about whom various legends were current in the Middle Ages that are no
longer well-known.
The
aim has been to omit purely folkloristic motifs, though this is
sometimes a difficult choice. The preferred guide in such cases has
been pedagogical experience. There is not much problem about deciding to
exclude whole entries for Youth, Reared in forest; Fidelity, tests of; Scullion, aristocratic Hero serves as; Hero, Magnanimity of, — entries of the kind
one finds in the Motif Indexes of Stith Thompson, Aarne, and Bordman, although
references to these occur in some
individual entries on other topics. The Fair Unknown, for example, is sometimes
an aristocratic hero who serves as a scullion, and Perceval is certainly a
youth raised in a forest; such conventional narrative motifs do not have full
entries but may be mentioned in passing in the course of a separate item about
something else. But a topic such as Rash
Promise seems to deserve a full entry, for, while it is common in folklore,
it figures frequently enough in literature to warrant inclusion in the more
general category of literary convention.
We have, we hope, managed to abide by our own criterion, though we
realize that we have not tried to provide a rigorous definition of it. Possibly a fully comprehensive treatment of
medieval literary convention would include some, perhaps many, entries of this
kind. For the type of work we contemplate it seems most
reasonable to exclude them as separate entries, though, as we have said, some of them may figure in other
entries. We hope that informed criticism
of the book would help to settle this matter.
We
have also decided to omit most references to theological doctrine. First, because Handbooks of Christian
Theology are readily available; secondly, the sometimes subtle and arcane
distinctions in matters of divinity involved are best left to these and to
large Dictionnaires and Lexikons which have space for experts to deal
thoroughly with such matters.
Indeed the religious conventions that occur with
some frequency in medieval English literature are often less a matter of
theological dogma than of pious popular belief, and derive either from
apocryphal writings or from pious speculation and elaboration on genuine
biblical texts. The Harrowing of Hell,
for example, on which there is an entry here , was a very popular theme in
medieval literature and iconography; but has no basis in the New Testament. Legends of Cain, the Earthly
Paradise, Judas, Pilate, which are also treated here, have fragile bases in
scripture. Like stories of Joseph of Arimathea
and the Grail, they are really built on pious, even superstitious,
belief, though the writers who propagated the stories were not necessarily
ignorant people. These motifs are here
because they recur with some frequency in the literature of medieval England,
and it is helpful to have a short reference guide to them.
Similarly,
notions that surfaced in the Dance of Death, Memento Mori, and Contemptus
Mundi, though they were certainly congenial to the ascetic aspect of Christianity,
are essentially reminders of mortality in the interests of morality ‑‑
not an exclusively Christian concern.
Such notions were not really strangers to the pagan Roman world. Thus the purely religious motifs left on our
list are few: Felix Culpa (The Fortunate Fall), Pater Noster (Our
Father), and a few others.
This
book is meant as a first attempt. If
enough people find it useful, reasonable criticism of current entries and
sensible suggestions for other entries could be considered for a second
edition, which might be a continuous affair on the web.
All
unsigned entries are by Michael Murphy; the others are signed by their named
writers.
The
brief bibliographical references at the end of many entries are expanded to
full bibliographical information at the end of the Companion.
An
asterisk * in an article means that
there is a separate entry on the asterisked topic.
Michael
Murphy
Table
of abbreviations:
ME
= Middle English
OE = Old
English;
MED
= Middle English Dictionary
OED
= Oxford English Dictionary
MS
= manuscript; MSS =.manuscripts
s.v.
= sub verbo, i.e. see under that word (in a dictionary)
C
= Century, as in 14C = 14th century
c.
= circa = around: c. 1185 = around the year 1185
ff.
= following, as in 23 ff = page 23 and
following, or line 23 and following.
*
= see the separate entry on that topic
TABLE OF CONTENTS
[Click the following links to take you to the
appropriate section]
CYCLE PLAYS (See
Mystery Plays)
DANCE OF DEATH (Danse
Macabre)
DEADLY SINS (See SEVEN)
DOUZEPERS or
DOUSEPERIS (TWELVE PEERS)
ENDINGS (See
Beginnings)
^ Return to Top of Table of Contents
FORTUNE (See Wheel
of)
FOX (See REYNARD)
HOLIDAYS (See Feasts
& Fasts)
HORTUS CONCLUSUS (See
Gardens)
^ Return to Top of Table of Contents
LAI (See Breton Lay)
LAMENT (See
Planctus)
MATTERS, THREE
(See also Britain,
England, France, Greece.)
MEMENTO MORI (See Dance
of Death)
MIRACLE PLAY (See Mystery Play)
MODESTY (See
Humility)
^ Return to Top of Table of Contents
PHYSIOLOGUS (See
Bestiary)
QUADRIVIUM (See
Liberal Arts)
STEWARD (See
Seneschal)
TRIVIUM (see Liberal Arts)
TROY (See Greece & Rome,
Matter of)
^ Return to Top of Table of Contents
VICES & VIRTUES (see
Psychomachia)
WORTHIES (See Nine
Worthies)
^ Return to Top of Table of Contents
ALEXANDER
During the Middle Ages the name of Alexander the Great was at least as
familiar as the names of the most popular saints. Stories about him, most of them more
legendary than historical, circulated widely in Europe and the Near East. In these tales his birth and parentage, like
those of many another hero, were presented as unusual and mysterious; and
astonishing youthful feats further
presaged his future greatness. His father, for example, was not Philip of
Macedon, but an Egyptian magician‑king who seduced Philip's wife by a
ruse, and the future conqueror's birth was accompanied by prodigious
phenomena. As a youth he tamed the
ferocious horse Bucephalus to prove himself the rightful successor of
Philip. Some of the incidents in the
romantic legends approach those of science fiction: his journey to the ocean
floor in a submarine, and his ascent into the skies on the back of a
griffin. (The latter proved especially
popular with medieval illustrators).
Alexander's popularity was already established in England during the OE
period. There were versions in both
Latin and OE of a spurious letter from Alexander to Aristotle, now known as The
Wonders of the East, which purported to describe his campaigns and
adventures in India. In the later
medieval period, romances with Alexander as the hero were very numerous in
English and other vernaculars. The English ones include Alisaundre,
Alexander and Dindimus, Buik of Alexander.
Two of the better ones Kyng
Alisaunder and the Wars of Alexander were both printed by Caxton and
have had recent editions. Also, a book of counsel, the Secreta Secretorum, allegedly written by
Aristotle at Alexander's request, enjoyed widespread popularity in both Latin
and vernacular versions. This inspired
other manuals of instruction for rulers such as Hoccleve's Regement of Princes.
While Alexander was widely admired, especially for this generosity,
valor and magnanimity, he was equally widely criticized for wanton war making
and overweening pride. He was one of
the Nine Worthies ; * but he was
also portrayed as the deserving victim of Lady Fortune and her Wheel (See Wheel of Fortune *) . The romancers tend to glorify
him; but Orosius, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Lydgate, and Gower are among his most vigorous critics.
Two major medieval sources for the Alexander legend were Vincent of
Beauvais's Speculum Historiale, Bk. 5, and Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon,
Bk. 3, chaps. 27‑30.
D. Childress
______________________________________
Cary
; Matthews; Turville-Petre: Anthology.
ALLEGORY
Allegory means in Greek to speak otherwise, in
Latin alieniloquium. Dante, in the
tradition of early Christian biblical commentators, said allegory was
polysemous, referring in particular to the four kinds of meaning he felt
allegory had: literal, metaphorical /allegorical, moral and anagogical. So allegory means a narrative which says
something other than its surface or obvious meaning. It needs to be
interpreted. It is a kind of extended metaphor. Typology * which sees in an Old
Testament event or person a foreshadowing of the New, is a kind of allegory.
Late-Roman practice had tended to see the pagan
gods as personifications of human values rather than as actual beings: Cronos
swallowing his children, for example, was explained away metaphorically. The Psychomachia* of Prudentius, a Christian poet of the
late Roman period (late 3C / early 4C), is the first extended Christian
allegory that we know of. In it the
personified virtues do battle with their opposite vices, and prevail. It allegorizes in an openly Christian way the
struggle within the human soul, and perhaps within the crumbling Roman Empire,
between right and wrong. Other influential allegorical writings of this period
were Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (5C) cited notably in
Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls; and Martianus Capella’s Marriage of
Philology and Mercury (early 5C), a marriage of intellect and love
of letters, a book that initiated the idea of the seven liberal arts .*
The 12C saw heavy
allegorizations of Ovid. The French Roman de la Rose, perhaps the most immensely influential of
secular medieval works, an work by
Guillaume de Lorris was the first extended allegory of love in the form of a
dream vision and in a vernacular language.
This was finished by Jean de Meung in a totally different tone, both
more learned and more coarse than Guillaume’s vision, and influenced by the
independent Latin allegories of Bernard Sylvestris and Alain de Lille. Chaucer
was very influenced by the Roman and an unfinished translation
has been attributed to him . The Roman
was as readily alluded to in the vernacular literary world as Virgil and Ovid,
and was a cornucopia from which later poets borrowed freely.
The greatest and most profoundly Christian
medieval allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which includes
elements of previous epics and allegories, including dream vision and a
visit to the underworld. In
medieval English the two outstanding allegories are Piers Plowman in
which Piers a ploughman sets out on a pilgrimage to find DoWell, DoBet and
DoBest and comes across Lady Lucre, Glutton and a host of such others. Pearl, a complaint * poem, is a partial allegory where the pearl
represents the narrator’s lost child. Later notable examples in English are
Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, all
written in the interests of Christian doctrine.
J. Clawson
_______________________
Barney;
Quilligan.
ALLITERATION
Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound
at the beginning of several words in a sentence or line :
Landscape‑lover,
lord of language ...
Thou that singest wheat
and woodland,
tilth
and vineyard, hive and horse and herd.
(To
Virgil)
Alliteration, used here by Tennyson in his tribute
to Virgil, and in our own time by presidential speech writers and journalists
for special effects, is fundamental to the line of all Old English verse and to
some very important Middle English verse. (See Alliterative Revival *). Alliteration is what holds the two half‑lines
of the poetic line together in Old English.
waes gehwaeðer oðrum
Lifigende lað.
Licsar gebad
Atol aglaeca.
Him on eaxla wearð
Syndolh Sweotol.
Seonowe onsprungon,
Burston banlocan.
Beowulfe wearð
Guðhreð gyfeðe.
Scolde Grendel ðonan
Feorhseoc fleon under fenhleoðu ...
(Beowulf, 814‑820)
Was each to the other
loathsome while
living. Body‑pain endured
the dreadful monster: on
his shoulder appeared
a wound enormous. Sinews sprung apart,
bonelocks burst. To Beowulf was
battle‑victory
given. Grendel had thence
to flee lifesick under his fencovering. (Literal translation)
The rule
is that two stressed syllables in the first half‑line in Old English
alliterate with the first stressed
syllable in the second half line. It is
this alliteration that holds the line together even when the syntax demands the
period in mid line that the modern editor supplies. In the 19C Edward Sievers figured out that there were five
basic types of alliterating half‑ line in OE, and his scansions, easily consulted in most
anthologies of OE poetry, are still generally held to be valid. (See, e.g., Bright or Pope). Any vowel
alliterates with any other vowel. Each
of the combinations 'sp', 'sc', 'st' alliterates only with itself. There is
no rhyme.
A somewhat looser alliteration is also very
prominent in some Old English prose, particularly in the writing of Aelfric :
Of
God : He hylt mid his mihte heofonas ond eorðan
and ealle gesceafa buton geswince
He holds with his might the heavens and earth and all creation without effort
Of
St Cuthbert: [he] sang his gebedu, on saelicre yðe standende
oð ðone swyran
he sang his prayers, in the sea-like wave standing up to his neck
And
here is Wulfstan on the state England c. 1000 a.d. :
ac
waes here and hungor,
bryne and blodgyte
on gewelhwylcum ende, oft and gelome;
but
there was invasion & hunger,
burning and bloodletting
in every corner, oft and again
and
us stalu and cwalu, stric
ond steorfa, orfcwealm and uncoðu, hol and hete, ...
&
to us there was theft & killing, strife and plague, cattle pest and disease, slander and hate
This feature has, as we remarked, continued in the prose of modern
times, particularly in speeches, which are in many ways like the homilies of
Aelfric and Wulfstan. It is clearly
natural to the Germanic part of our
language. Alliteration, surviving the
Norman Conquest which brought the Latinate and Romance habit of riming in
verse, burst out in the Middle English
of the 14C in what we think of as the Alliterative Revival * . But
alliteration has never again become the organizing feature of our verse since
Chaucer ensured the conquest by the continental forms: counted syllables and rhymed lines,
which were not features of Germanic verse.
_____________________
Cassidy and Ringler; Pope.
ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL
A term applied to the flowering of alliterative
verse in the West and Northwest Midlands of England in the later fourteenth
century, roughly contemporary with Chaucer who, however, preferred accentual
and rhymed verse. This flowering is
called a revival because the standard form of verse in Anglo‑Saxon times
was the alliterative line, where two words in the first half of the line
generally alliterated with one in the second half. With the Norman Conquest,
however, and the consequent strengthening of the continental influence in
England, that aspect of English verse almost disappeared. At least, little or
no post‑ Conquest OE verse has survived in MS. It is surmised that the indigenous verse,
much of which was transmitted orally anyway, could not have entirely
disappeared, but probably survived among the common people and even in the
homes of the gentry in those parts of the country more remote from London and
continental influences, such as the West and Northwest Midlands. The "revival" of the native
tradition in such a rich outpouring of verse in the fourteenth century is
generally held to be a proof of this.
This view is disputed by Turville‑Petre
who proposes that "the fourteenth‑century poets did not inherit a
tradition of 'correct' verse miraculously preserved, but instead they
consciously ‑‑and by gradual stages‑‑remodeled a
written tradition of alliterative composition
that led back only by rather tortuous routes to Old English verse"
(p.17).
The verse form of the later period is much
changed from the strict alliterative patterning of "classic" OE
poetry such as that found in Beowulf. Some of the later poems, moreover, are
divided into "stanzas":
four lines each in Purity and Patience, twelve lines each in Pearl and of varying length in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight.
In addition there is rhyme that marks the end of
each stanza in this last poem,
..................................................
Thus in peril and pain and plights
full hard
By country cares this knight till Christmas
eve rides
Alone
The knight well that tide time
To Mary made his moan Virgin Mary
That she him
rede to ride would guide
And wisse him to some wone direct him ... dwelling
Pearl is rhymed throughout as well as having a very
elaborate Stanza Linking *
pattern. The
Destruction of Troy and Piers Plowman are
more like Old English verse in that the line, not the stanza or quatrain, is the largest regular formal pattern, though
the versification is not the “classic” OE form.. The subject matter of the
poems of the Alliterative Revival ranges through a variety of genres we can
categorize loosely: romance (Sir Gawain & the Green Knight),
romance-epic (Alliterative Morte Arthure), moral teaching (Patience, Purity), allegory,
complaint , encyclopedic social comment and religious exhortation (Piers Plowman), versified
"history" (Wars of Alexander
Destruction of Troy).
Among the other alliterative poems not mentioned
so far are the Debate *
poems : The Parlement of the Three Ages, and Wynnoure
and Wastoure.
___________
Turville‑Petre
ANGLO‑SAXON CHRONICLE
The Anglo‑Saxon Chronicle is not a single
chronicle, but a number of different related annals, i.e. entries in a book recording
the events of every year. There are seven surviving MSS that can be called
Anglo‑Saxon chronicles. Some
clearly derive from an earlier chronicle which was copied, and then the copies
dispersed to be continued in different places. This similarity is especially
noticeable in the entries down to the year 891 in the reign of King Alfred who
is often associated with inaugurating or revivifying it.
The earliest entry in any chronicle is for the
year 60 B.C. and the latest — in the
Peterborough Chronicle — is 1154 A.D..
Even though the recording of
events of early centuries occurred long after, the chronicle-writing itself
does extend over about three hundred years, from 9C to 12C, and thus displays
the English language from Early West Saxon to Early Middle English. Hence it is
of considerable interest to linguists.
It is of equal interest to historians, for it constitutes, with Bede's History, the major source of information on the events
of the Anglo Saxon period. It is of less
interest to literary critics or literary historians because the chronicle or
annals form is so limited, frequently
not extending beyond a few lines for a given entry, and is, over time, the product of a great many people. Occasionally,
however, a personality does break through the restrictions of the form, and an
extended piece of narrative of some force is the result. Perhaps the most famous among the earlier
ones is the annal for the year 755, reproduced in most anthologies of Old
English, a rousing story of lust, political vengeance, violence, and fierce
loyalty.
Many of the most stirring entries involve the
events of the reign of King Alfred of
The language of these later entries is generally characterized as early Middle English.
ARISTOTLE
Aristotle remains one of the two or three
preeminent philosophers of the Western world. His works became widely known in the
universities of
Twenty
bookes clad in black or red
Of
Aristotle and his philosophy
It
is just because of his reputation for great
wisdom that he acquired a quite different reputation in popular circles in the
Middle Ages: as a "senex amans" * , an old man seized by love or
sexual desire. This story seems to begin with Henri D'Andeli's French
Lai d'Aristote or Jacques de Vitry's Latin version in Sermones
Vulgares, both of the mid 13C. But from then to at least the 16C, one
incident is frequently narrated, adverted to, and illustrated. It relates how Aristotle warned his pupil
Alexander that he was too much in the toils of his wife (or mistress) and had
become uxorious; he should get back to
serious political and martial pursuits.
Angry, the woman (variously named) determined to show her feminine power
and humiliate Aristotle at the same time.
As the old philosopher was sitting studying at his usual window, she
came by, clothed only in a seductive smile and a revealing negligee. Smitten,
the old man proposed a sexual encounter to which she agreed on condition. The
bargain was struck for a later assignation.
Forewarned by the confident seductress, Alexander and the rest of the
court watched from hiding the whole
proceeding as Aristotle later submitted to the condition that she had imposed:
she bridled, saddled , mounted him, and
rode him across the garden, literally making an ass of him.
The moral of the story, drawn by fast‑recovering
Aristotle himself, is this: even old men who are great philosophers can be turned
into sots and thralls of lust. Or, as
Joyce's Stephen Dedalus put it:
"Even the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a
light of love." (Ulysses, Circe: 15: 11‑12). The name
of the woman varies in various versions of the story: Phyllis, Candacis,
Silarin, Persones, Campaspe, Amor,
A very similar story is told about Virgil,
* the great poet (and magician).
Indeed, in one French fabliau, Aristotle is the one in the predicament usually
reserved for Virgil. Artists took
delight in depicting both situations well into Renaissance times.
A copy of Hans Baldung Grien’s rendering of the
Aristotle /Phyllis scene can be found on
the web at
http://www.arscomica.com/aristotle.html
Aristotle and Virgil were examples from the
classical world, of the power of women over men , as the oft‑cited Adam,
Samson, David, and Solomon were from the biblical world. In Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight the hero mentions all these biblical names in
his outburst after he realizes that he has been tricked by Sir Bercilak's wife
(2412 ff). John Gower's Confessio
Amantis brings together the classical
and biblical.
And there me thought I might see
The
king David with Bersabee,
Bathsheba
And
Solomon was noght without
Passende
an hundred in a rout
Surpassing
Of
wives and of concubines .........
With
Dalida, Samson I knew .........
Delilah
I saw there Aristotle also
Whom
that the queen of Greec so
Hath
bridled that in thilk time
that time
She
made him such a syllogime syllogism
That
he forgot all his logique.
There
was no art of his practique
Through
which it might be excluded
That
he ne was fully concluded
To
love, and did his obeisance. submission
And
eke Virgil of acquaintance ....
Bk 8,
689 ff
A
convenient illustration is in Kolve, 248, a
diptych ivory: Aristotle teaching Alexander, and Phillis riding
Aristotle.. For brief comment and iconography see his p. 247 and n. 50.
__________________
Mâle; Springer;
Sarton; Kolve, Chaucer.
ARMING THE HERO
Narrative passages that describe the preparation
of the warrior for battle were already conventional in Homer. There are a number of such elaborate
descriptions in the Iliad (Books 3, 11, 16, 19). The arms, especially the shield, given to Aeneas by his mother Venus are
similarly described in the Aeneid
(Book 8).
The
convention continues in medieval literatures:
Beowulf, 1441 ff;
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (a.d.
1130’s), the arming of Arthur at Badon; Chretien’s Eric and Enide (late
12C); another full‑scale
description of the arming of Arthur in Alliterative Morte Arthure, (ll. 900 ff)
and, perhaps best known of all, the arming of Gawain in Sir Gawain & Green Knight (II, 4‑7
and IV, 1‑2).
In the latter the elaborate explanation of the
significance of the pentangle (II, 6‑7) illustrates the degree to which
the ritual of preparing a warrior for
battle had become Christianized. St.
Paul had urged the Christian man to "put on the armor of God", which included the breastplate
of justice, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the
spirit (Ephesians VI).
Ramon Lull (13 C) and later writers of chivalric
manuals developed this Pauline metaphor into an elaborate system where each
piece of the knight's equipment signified some virtue. The manual writers are generally concerned,
however, with the ceremonies of arming a new, young knight. After the 13C these
ceremonies became highly elaborate and sacralized, a long way removed from the
simple ceremony mentioned by Tacitus in Germania XIII. The knight‑candidate, for example, took
a ritual bath, was ceremoniously
dressed, and kept vigil in the church where he was later belted and spurred in
a religious rite.
The arming trope is persistent enough in the
English romances to be parodied by Chaucer in Sir Thopas, where he
burlesques the use of the
topos in such
romances as Libaeus Desconus, Guy of
__________________________________
Bryan and Dempster; Ackerman;
D. Brewer, “Arming”.
a knight has spent a night of lovemaking with a lady who is not
his wife. The dawn, whose arrival is
announced by the Watchman ( often a dependent or friend of the knight),
interrupts their pleasure or the knight's post‑coital sleep. The lovers
(more often the lady alone) rebuke dawn and Watchman alike. They are, however,
obliged to yield to reality, and they part, often exchanging blessings and
promises of fidelity.
The aube is not a common form in ME, though there is
some evidence that there was a popular English tradition of dawn meetings or
partings, and Hatto has shown clearly that songs of such meetings or partings
are universal. But the only medieval
English author who exhibits the form fully is Chaucer, who has a long,
elaborate and passionate aube / alba in Troilus III, 1415‑70,
and a briefer one in III, 1695‑1712.
He also uses the tradition for comic purposes in the Reeves Tale, A 4236‑47. See also Gower's version of Ovid's Amores
I, 13, in Confessio Amantis, IV,
3188‑3295. The famous parting
scene in Romeo and Juliet III, v, 1‑64, and Donne's "Busy Old
Fool" belong to the alba tradition, though they probably
owe more to Ovid than to any medieval tradition, popular or aristocratic.
Ovid's lover says to Aurora, goddess of dawn:
But
if you held in your arms the form of the mortal you wanted
Then
you would cry: "Run slowly, slowly,
horses of night.”
Marlowe's Faustus recalls the second line of
this in his last despairing speech whose irony becomes even more bitter for the
reader who knows the dawn song from which it comes. For such readers Philip
Larkin’s modern poem “Aubade” gives a different additional irony to the word.
____________________________
Hatto; Kaske; Saville.
AUREATE LANGUAGE
"Aureate" means literally
"gilded". Applied to poetry it
means a conscious effort to produce an effect by the use of collocations of
words striking for their unusualness and splendor. They are generally florid, learned, latinate,
polysyllabic, though what exactly
constitutes an "aureate" word in English will be in dispute among readers and
scholars. Still there is little doubt
about what is aureate when such words
are used heavily in a short space. A
stanza from William Dunbar's poem Ane Ballat of Our Lady in praise of the Virgin Mary will
illustrate. (Spelling of original
lightly modernized):
|
Hail, stern supern,
hail in etern In Godis sight to shine; Lucern in derne for to discern Be glory and grace divine; Hodiern, modern, sempitern Angelicall regine: Our tern infern for to dispern Help, royalest rosine. Ave Maria, gracia plena. Hale, fresh flower feminine. Yerne us gubern, virgin matern, Of ruth both root and ryne. |
Hail heavenly star, hail for ever In God’s sight to shine; Lantern in the dark to see ( show ?) By glory and grace divine; Today, now and forever Angelical queen: Our infernal gloom to disperse Help, most royal rose. Hail Mary, full of grace. Hail, fresh flower feminine. Earnestly guide us, virgin mother, Root and bark of mercy (ruth) |
|
|
The poem goes on in this fashion for 84 lines,
a display of linguistic virtuosity as striking as his very different flytings*
which, by contrast, use vernacular words,
often coarse, in a similar controlled torrent, but for abuse not praise.
The other major Scottish poets of the
late Middle Ages, Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas, were also occasional and
distinguished practitioners of aureate poetry.
They were all better poets than the man who
probably influenced them most in the practice of enriching the language, the
Englishman Lydgate, a self‑pronounced
disciple of Chaucer, the master they all admired for the "aureate colours
of rhetoric" with which he "enlumined" our "rude
language". Lydgate assiduously
practiced "enameling" and "enlumining" the language in
poems like Balade at the reverence of Our Lady or Ave,
Jesse virgula, where the desire is
clearly to load every rift with ore of a
purely lexical kind. The poetic garment
becomes stiff with gold thread and verbal gems. Though most of Lydgate's poetry
is not of high quality, there are large quantities of it, and one scholar has
credited him with introducing over 800 new words to the English vocabulary.
John Metham, a minor poet of the generation after Lydgate, accurately (though
not altogether critically) described the effect of some of Lydgate's efforts:
His books endited with terms of rhetoric
And half changed Latin, with conceits fantastic
English‑speaking authors in the late
Middle Ages (and indeed in the early Renaissance) seemed inordinately conscious
of the "rudeness" of their native tongue, especially when compared
with Latin. Hence the adulation of
Chaucer by his contemporaries and immediate successors as the flower of rhetoricians who helped to elevate the
status of English as a language fit for high purposes. In The Golden Targe,
for example,
fair o’ergilt our speech that imperfite
Stood ere
your golden pens shope to write (started to)
This isle was bare and desolate
Of rhetoric or lusty fresh endite (writing)
As late as the end of the 16C many people felt
that English needed enriching; others felt that many of the enriching
neologisms were nothing more than "inkhorn terms," i.e. words to be
found only in an inkbottle. Shakespeare
's Holofernes in Loves Labors Lost and Jonson's Crispinus in The Poetaster mock the aureating inkhornists.
Though aureation is particularly noticeable in
poems to Our Lady the Virgin Mary (see Saupe),
______________
Saupe
AVALON
The fabulous island first mentioned by Geoffrey
of Monmouth, where Arthur's sword Caliburn was forged, and where Arthur was
taken after his final battle, "for the healing of his wounds" (Historia, IX, 4
XII, 2). Geoffrey elsewhere describes
this "isle of apples" ruled by Morgan le Fay who has the power to
heal Arthur's wounds ("Vita Merlini'. The relevant part is translated in
Continental writers sometimes equated Avalon
with
ALMA, pp. 64 ff, 92; Chambers.
BALLAD
A short rhymed narrative poem in stanza form,
which was probably originally sung. The form is widely diffused all over
The ballad wastes little time on introductions
or conclusions but tends to start "in medias res" or in "the
fifth act", and to move swiftly to a denouement.
The
king sits in
Drinking
the blood red wine:
"Oh
where will I get a good sailor
To
sail this ship of mine?"
This opening of Sir Patrick Spens
illustrates the typical stanza form and a fairly typical opening to a
ballad. The form is generally written as
a quatrain with rimes for 2nd and 4th lines, which also have 3 stresses; lines 1 and 3 have four stresses. This
quatrain could also be written out as a long couplet.
As for the opening matter: Which king is it? Why is he in
Another opening:
There
was a wife at Ussher's Well,
And
a wealthy wife was she.
She
had three stout and stalwart sons,
And
sent them oe'r the sea.
Was she a widow? Why is her wealth mentioned? Why did she send the three sons o'er the
sea? If one needs authorial answers to
these questions one probably does not enjoy ballads. First of all, they do not have an
author, and they allow, if they do not invite, endless speculation of the kind
shown by our questions. They deal suddenly, briefly and impersonally with an
incident, generally just one: violent, erotic, preternatural, tragic,
heroic ‑‑ one or all of these. They are sometimes lurid,
occasionally comic, rarely religious.
Having come to the point very quickly, the
ballad often moves from scene to scene rapidly without connectives, movie‑fashion,
expecting the audience to follow. Sometimes the opposite occurs: there is a very deliberate slow build‑up
of tension in ballads that have had (for this reason?) a particular appeal to
modern taste, like Edward and Lord Randall, which proceed by what
is called "incremental repetition":
a little information is added with each
repetition. The Maid Freed from the Gallows is another well‑known
ballad that proceeds by incremental repetition. All three are composed totally
of dialogue.
Tam Lin is an exceptionally long ballad, with 42 stanzas.
The form does not vary much and the syntax is
always fairly simple: co‑ordinate
clauses rather than subordinate clauses except perhaps for the frequent
"When ....". Hyperbole is
common, but its opposite, understatement is not unusual.
Rarely is the language striking in a
"poetic" sense; it does not
strive for individuality and "creativity" of metaphor or simile because the matter and
the manner are traditional and communal; not communal in the sense that a
ballad was composed by a committee of the whole, but in the sense that
excessive individuality, striking "creative" change by the narrator would be discouraged
by an audience. The power comes from the
strong story line, the steady rhythm, the speed, the frequent and pared down
dialogue which provides the most
dramatic form of narrative. The narrator
does not interject a personal point of view.
The ballads as we have them seem to have
flourished in the later middle ages and even more in the sixteenth or
seventeenth centuries, but there is little actual proof that they were around
in medieval times. This absence of proof is perhaps not surprising since the
ballad was essentially a folk medium, transmitted by song and word of mouth
rather than by writing; it was the property of each transmitter, who could
change it as far as the community needed or would allow.
It was inevitable that ballads should evolve and
change to reflect the interests of the folk at any given time rather than a distant past. American forms of originally
British ballads show how stories or words get adapted to a new time or
environment. In
She
sent them away to some northern land
For
to learn their grammaree
How did they die?
a sickness came to that land,
And swept those babes away
Since by definition any version of a ballad is
an authentic one, any change is
legitimate, and is not a "corruption". As these quotations show, however, that does
not, mean that it is an improvement.
______________
Child;
Bronson.
BEAST FABLE / BEAST EPIC
The beast fable, a genre that goes back to
Aesop, is a story involving talking animals
who portray human vices, virtues, weaknesses, etc. The form was used mostly to satirize or to
point a moral. It is still widely used in cartoon form, though mostly with the
intention of entertaining.
When the fable grew into a series of tales about
the same character or set of characters, the Beast Epic was the result. The
most popular medieval Beast Epic was the Roman de Renard which featured
Reynard the Fox* . It had extensive
versions in French, Flemish and German.
Although some of the stories were clearly known in
See also Bestiary.
BEASTS OF
A theme that recurs with
some frequency in Anglo Saxon poetry‑‑at least 13 times in 9
different poems. It features the raven, the eagle and the
wolf, either hovering or lurking sinisterly before the battle, assured of a
good meal on the men fated to die, or else eagerly ripping the corpses after
the slaughter. Though all three do not
appear in every instance, no others are ever mentioned, and the grouping is
almost formulaic in battle scenes. Apparently they also appear in early Welsh
poetry, but always after the battle and never in groups. The passage from the Battle of Brunanburh is typical of the
Anglo-Saxon convention:
Letan
him behindan hrae bryttian
saluwigpadan þone sweartan hraefn
hyrnednebban ond þone haesewapadan
earn
aeftir hwit, aeses brucan
graedigne
guðhafoc and þaet graege deor
wulf
on wealde. (60‑65)
They left behind them to enjoy the corpses
the black‑feathered, sharp‑beaked raven,
that greedy warhawk, the white‑tailed,
darkbodied eagle, and the greycoated wolf of
the forest.
The theme occurs also in the following
poems: Beowulf, 3024‑7. Elene,
27‑30, 52‑3, 110‑114. Exodus, 162‑7. Finnsburgh, 5‑7, 34‑5. Genesis
A, 1983‑5. Judith, 204‑12,
294‑6. Maldon, 106‑7.
________________
Magoun; Bonjour.
BEGGING POEM
A minor genre where the poet asks for money or
promotion to alleviate his poverty.
Medieval poets could not hope to make a living from selling their work
but, like Chaucer and Lydgate, relied on a salary from a regular job or on
patrons, or both. Chaucer's Complaint
to his Purse is a witty begging poem in which he parodies the conventional
phrases of the lover's complaint* to portray the distress of poverty rather
than the pangs of despised love:
You
be my life, you be mine heart’s steer (rudder)
Queen
of comfort and of good company
The poem, directed to Henry IV, seems to have
had the desired effect, for Chaucer's pension was renewed. There is no
information about the effect of that other fine English begging poem, The
Owl and the Nightingale, in which
the author pleads his case for ecclesiastical preferment with a unique comic
charm.
There are begging poems in Latin by the Archpoet
of Cologne (fl. 1160), in French by Chaucer's
contemporaries Froissart, Deschamps and Machaut, and in English by Hoccleve,
Lydgate, and Dunbar. The last named wrote at least 15 poems of
"petition", some of them a great deal less tactful than Chaucer's
elegant complaint.
________________________________________________
Hammond, pp. 66‑68, 149,174 (for Hoccleve
and Lydgate); F. Robinson, p. 865 for the French poems ;
Riverside, 1088. Brown‑Robbins, p.768, and Supplement s.v.
"money".
BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
This entry will not attempt to provide critical
theory for the rhetorical devices used by medieval poets to begin and end their
work; nor does it pretend to be anything like exhaustive.. It will merely set
out, for easy reference, some of the most common conventions for such
beginnings and endings in Old and Middle English.
Beginnings‑‑Old
English 1. In OE the most common formula for beginning a
poem , or major section of a poem, is the Gefraegn formula: ic gefraegn, we gefrunon = I / We have heard. This formula, according to Klaeber, points to
a preliterary stage of poetry "when the poems lived on the lips of the
singers and oral transmission was the only possible source of
information." Such formulas are
used "to introduce poems or sections of poems (Beowulf 1, 837, 2694, 2752); to point out some sort
of progress in the narrative (Beowulf
74, 433, 766,
2172, 2480, 2484,
2773); to call attention to the
greatness of a person, object or action
(Beowulf 38, 70, 575, 582, 1027, 1196‑7, 1965,
2685, 2837)." (Klaeber, xlvi
‑ xlvii and ci).
See also the openings of Exodus,
Andreas, Juliana, Daniel.
Beginnings‑‑Middle English In Middle English there are a number of both
verbal and thematic formulas and structural conventions:
Verbal Formula
a. A
sizeable number of narratives begin with the word Whilom = Once upon a
time. See e.g the opening of Chaucer's Knights
Tale: “Whilom, as olde stories tellen us ...”, and the Pardoners
Tale proper: “In Flanders whilom was a company ...”. Others often begin with the word
"Lordings" or "Listeneth, lordings" which means something like "Listen,
ladies and gentlemen", as in the Pardoner’s Prologue that precedes
his tale: “Lordings,” quod he, “in churches when I preach ...”. Many begin with
"When", like
the famous opening line of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales: "Whan that April with
his shoures soote". (See Robbins,
s.vv.).
b. Many
verse romances begin with an Invocation to God or the Virgin Mary for help to
the narrator to tell his tale.(See Humility Formula). This presumably is a medieval version of the
classical call to the muses. (Of course,
the body of the narrative might begin with When, Whilom, or Lordings).
Now great glorious God through grace of Himself
And the precious prayer of his pris mother
Shield us from shamesdeeds and sinful works ....
And wisse me to warp out some word at this time
That neither void be nor vain..... (Allit Morte A,
1-10)
A call for silence and attentive listening often
accompanies the Invocation:
Hearken me hendely and hold you still
And I shall tell you a tale .... (Allit MA
, 14-15)
c. The
Pastourelle often begins with some version of the phrase "As I went out
this ender day."
Thematic Beginnings:
1. Brutus‑Brut
Legend
* / Troy Legend * : Several works begin with a reference to the
beginning of Britain by the eponymous Brutus, grandson or great grandson of
Aeneas: Wace’s Roman de Brut and its English derivative La3amon’s Brut; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Winner and Waster. (See Silverman,1965).
2. Dream
Vision * : A number of poems, some of them well‑known,
begin with the narrator falling asleep;
the poem is the account of his dream:
Piers Plowman, by Langland;
three of Chaucer's poems: Parliament
of Fowls, Book of the Duchess, House of Fame. In his Legend of Good
Women it takes him about 100 lines before he falls asleep. (And see #4).
3.
Chaucer is fond of deriving the inspiration for his dreams and poems from
his reading.
See his Legend of Good Women; Book of the
Duchess; Parliament of Fowls.
4. Spring/Summer opening (Reverdie):: The Canterbury Tales; Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes
a deliberate imitation of the CT.
Henryson’s Testament does a variation of the Spring opening where
his “Lent” does not brings the sweeth breath of Zephyrus; instead the “blasts bitterly / From Pole
arctic come whistiling.” Piers Plowman, a dream vision, begins “in a summer season when soft
was the sun.” which is echoed by Winner and Waster whose narrator, after
a prologue, also lies down by a stream
“By a bank of a burn , bright was the
sun.” Parlement of Three Ages begins “In the month of May when mirths
been fele (many) /And the season of summer when soft
be the weathers.”
(See the helpful note to opening lines of the CT
in Riverside Chaucer).
5. Humility
Formula * See separate entry.
Endings ‑‑Old English
It is hard to generalize about the endings of
Old English poems since a sizeable number of them are fragments.
endings -- Middle English
a. As ME
Romances often begin with an Invocation, they frequently end with a similar
Benediction, wishing a blessing on the narrator or the audience or both.
b. Some poems end as they began: Avowing of
Arthur; Pearl; Sir Gawain & the Green Knight; Parliament
of the Three Ages, Quatrefoil of Love,
Patience, Sir Octavian.
c.
Request for Correction: Troilus
and Criseyde 1856 ff., possibly in
imitation of Boccaccio at end of Genealogy of the Gods. But see Humility Formula entry.
d.
Retraction or Palinode. The most
famous Retraction is, of course, that which appears at the end of the Parsons
Tale in the Canterbury Tales. The end of Troilus and Criseyde is
similar.
e. Brut
Legend‑‑ Alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Gawain & Green Knight. (See
Thematic Beginnings)
_______
Bartlett
BESTIARY
The beast fable is moralized narrative; the
bestiary is moralized "science". All the world declares the work of
God's hands. The natural world is a kind
of Bible in which God's truth can be read through the infinite variety of His
creation. Hence, the medieval interest
in beasts, domestic and exotic, was often not what we would think of as natural
history or science, but a natural curiosity and love of marvels mixed with the
need to justify this curiosity or use it
for the greater glory of God. It is hard
to know just how much the writers and readers of bestiaries believed in what
they wrote, for it was often very strange, and was sometimes demonstrably
wrong. But perhaps it did not occur to them to question the "truth"
of the science; it was the truth of the
moral that mattered. Readers of Lives of
the Saints may not have believed wholeheartedly all the unlikely stories to be
found in those collections. But one could still be edified by the story of the
(literally) incredible courage of the martyrs, and be encouraged to put up with
one's own lesser sufferings in the name of God. The details of the habits of
animals in the bestiary may lend themselves somewhat more to credibility than
some of the sufferings of martyrs, for, while we know what men were like in all
ages, we do not know what all animals are like in all countries, and some of
them are strange enough in truth. The swallows do come back to Capistrano; it
is not a pious fable.
In OE there are some bestiary poems taken from
the Latin Physiologus, a bestiary widely popular throughout the
early medieval western world. The OE
poems are on the Panther, the Whale and the Partridge. They are, of
course, moralized.
Here is a typical Bestiary entry from a late
medieval bestiary:
The Pelican is a bird that lives in the solitude
of the River Nile in Egypt from which it gets its name, the Greek name for
Egypt being 'Canopos'. The Pelican is
devoted to its children, but when these grow up, they flap their wings in their
parents' face. But the parents strike
back and kill them. After three days the
mother pierces her breast and side, and lies across her young, pouring out her
blood over them, which revives them.
Similarly Our Lord Jesus Christ, the creator of
all things, makes us from nothing, but we strike him in the face by regarding
created things rather than their creator.
That is why he mounted the cross and had his side pierced from which
flowed blood and water to save us from death and to give us eternal life.
For an illustrated and translated bestiary see
the fine web page
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/translat/8v.hti
See also Beast Fables
__________________
White, T H
BOAST (OE
noun: gilp ; verb: gilpan; ME nouns: bost, 3elp; ME verbs: bosten, 3elpen).
The boast generally refers to actions or
achievements in the past or to present proficiencies
such as strength or knowledge. The vow
* refers to the future. The terms vow and boast are
sometimes used interchangeably in casual commentary, partly because the vow, as
recorded in the literature can be extremely boastful.
Like the vow,*
the boast represents something that was at first more than a mere
convention.
On the one hand, a warrior's recitation of his
past achievements established his credentials for
a given task. On the other hand, it served to remind him that he had something to
live up to.
Similarly boasts about noble ancestry such as those in The Battle of Maldon 216‑223, or in The Alliterative
Morte Arthure , 1691 ff and 2595 ff.,
serve to remind everyone of the
warriors' obligation to emulate the deeds of those ancestors of whom they are
proud. Boasting about ancestry is,
however, rebuked by the more sober authors of less heroic or chivalric
literature. Boethius, Dante, and Chaucer,
for example, take the more thoughtful and Christian point of view that a man's
ancestry adds nothing to his worth, and that it is idle to boast of something
for which one is not responsible.
__________
Murphy, Vows, Boasts
BOB
and WHEEL
This metrical device is best defined by a couple
of illustrations, taken here from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The first two (dotted) lines and the one
immediately following represent an indeterminate number of long lines of
alliterative verse. The very short line
of generally no more than two words is the bob, and the short rhymed and
alliterating quatrain is the wheel:
..................................................................................
..................................................................................
Blithe brought was them drink, and they to bed yeden went
with light
Sir
Gawain lies and sleeps
Full
still and soft all night.
The
lord that his crafts keeps
his
promises
Full
early he was dight.
(1684-9)
was
dressed
.........................................................................
.........................................................................
But he defended him so fair that no fault seemed,
Ne
none evil on neither half, neither they wisten they experienced
but
bliss
They
laughed and layked long. played, flirted ?
At
last she gan him kiss
Her
leave fair gan she fong
take
And
went her way y-wis.
(1552-8)
indeed
The device,
frequent, as here, at the end of
sections of otherwise unrhymed alliterative verse, is also called “tail rhyme” and there is a whole category of Tail
Rhyme Romances written in this way
. Unlike SGGK, many of them are
of poor quality ; the metrical demands of the bob and wheel often take
precedence over sense, and the result is sometimes difficult to translate, even
in SGGK. Chaucer famously parodied the trope in Sir Thopas where
the relentless jog trot rhythm and cliched or meaningless bobs draw from Harry
Baily the withering critical comment:
this “drasty riming is not worth a turd.”
BRETON HOPE
A legend of the continental and insular Britons
that Arthur was not dead, but would return when his wounds had been healed in
Avalon .* The legend was current well
before Geoffrey of Monmouth, but began its literary career in his Historia, Bk. XI, and his Vita
Merlini in both of which he hinted strongly that Arthur's wounds could be
healed. Repeated with reservations by
Wace in his Roman de Brut, with enthusiasm and additions in La3amon’s
version of Wace, the "Hope" was derided by William of Newburgh (c.
1197) and about the same time by Giraldus Cambrensis who pointed to the
"discovery" of Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury * in his own day. The legend was widely known
in continental Europe, and, belief in it seems to have persisted in England
into the 19C., perhaps because it was mentioned though not endorsed at the end
of Malory’s Morte Darthur, or because Tennyson mentions it at the end of
the Passing of Arthur section of the Idylls (lines 191-2, 425-432,449-51)
. Indeed, according to Leslie
Alcock, who has researched the possible site of Camelot at Cadbury, the Breton
Hope was far from dead in 20C England.
BRETON
LAY
Breton Lays are short stories in verse believed
to derive from Celtic sources in Brittany similar to those which influenced the
longer Arthurian romances.*
Both combine the themes of ennobled love with a sense of
adventure. The stories also often
incorporate supernatural elements associated with Celtic legend. Unlike many romances, however, lais
are typically short narratives which contain little superfluous detail that
does not contribute to a single plot.
The typical lay does not have digressions or subplots; rather it relies on a direct vivid telling
of the story. Lais were
traditionally sung to a musical accompaniment in
an oral tradition kept active by Breton
performers in the courts of France and Norman England.
In the twelfth century, Marie de France, a
Norman poet writing in French in England, wrote a collection of lais
which she attributed to Breton sources.
In her collection the lay often presents a dilemma which tests the
lovers’ fidelity to each other, the whole enhanced by magical fairy‑tale
devices. The adulterous element is a common
motif in these narratives, sometimes presented as a dilemma of “old husband
versus young lover.” (See Senex Amans).
The
Breton Lay was imitated by English authors although these vernacular
narratives never developed into a substantial body of literature apart from
romance. Aside from the twelve lays of
Marie de France there are twenty‑two in French, but only nine extant in
English. Probably the earliest Breton
Lay in Anglo‑Norman is Robert Biket’s Lai du Cor, (The Lay of the
Horn) (c. 1150). The English examples, appearing mainly in the
fourteenth century, are: Sir Landeval, Chestre’s Sir Launfal, Lay le Freine,
Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, Sir Gowther, The Erle of
Tolous, Emare, and Chaucer’s
Franklin’s Tale.
The Franklin’s Tale, which Chaucer’s he
calls a Breton lay, has no known predecessor among the Breton Lays; and it is commonly held that he got the story
from Boccaccio’s Filocolo, but he
clearly knew the Breton genre:
These olde gentle
Bretons in their days
Of diverse aventurs maden lays,
Rhymd in their first Breton tongue;
Which lay s with their instruments they sung,
Or els readen them for their pleasance,
Prologue
to Franklin’s Tale
There is now a
convenient edition of Middle English Breton Lays by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (See also
entry for Brittany)
J.
Clawson
BRITAIN, MATTER OF
Matiere de Bretagne was Jan Bodel’s 12C
term for the lais and romances dealing with (Great) Britain and Brittany
(little Britain), especially the Arthurian romances. From the appearance in the 1230's of Geoffrey
of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, and the French and
English “chronicles” by Wace and La3amon that derived from it, the matter of
Britain / Brittany grew to enormous proportions, producing some of the most
celebrated imaginative literature of the Middle Ages in various languages.
Distinguished practitioners in French poetry were Marie de France (see Breton
Lay) and Chretien de Troyes; in prose
the authors of the enormous French prose romances that came after Chretien’s
comparatively short tales; in German Hartmann von Ave’s Erec and Iwein;
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal; Gottfried von Strasbourg’s Tristan
and Isolde which takes place in the Celtic lands of Ireland, Cornwall and
Brittany; in Welsh The Mabinogion; the
English Alliterative and Stanzaic Morte; Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, and, at the end of the medieval period, Morte D’Arthur, Malory’s great English version of the huge
French prose romances.
D. Childress
Brittany or “Little”
Britain, or “Armorica” is the peninsular
region of north‑west France inhabited by the Bretons some of whose Celtic
ancestors appear to have fled from Devon, Cornwall, and Wales when (Great) Britain, that is, the island of
Britannia, was being pressured by Anglo‑Saxon invaders in the fifth
century.
The legends of Arthur of
Britain, including that of the Round Table* according to Wace’s Roman de
Brut, were probably kept alive in the oral tradition the Bretons brought with them when they emigrated from
Great Britain. The magical forest of Broceliande is also in Brittany though
Wace found it less than magical. From
Brittany the Arthurian legend probably spread to other parts of Europe, especially
throughout the rest of France. The
Breton Lays * of
Marie de France, several of which deal with elements of the Matter of Britain
* are thought to have originated with the Breton minstrels or
“jongleurs”. Arthur holds court in
Brittany in Chretien’s Cliges and in Wolfram’s Parzifal, and
Brittany figures prominently in the Tristan of Gottfried and of Thomas,
especially at the end.
BRUTUS / BRUT
The eponymous founder of
Britain, according to Nennius (c. 8C ) and Geoffrey of Monmouth whose History
(c.1135) greatly elaborated on Nennius. According to Nennius the Brutus from
whom the island derived its name was alternatively (a) a Roman consul who
conquered a Britain already inhabited by descendants of Aeneas's son (chaps. 7
& 10) (b) the son of Hisicon (Istio) and the brother of Romanus, the
founder of the Latin race (chap 17) (c) the son of Hisicon, who is himself
the great‑great‑grandson of Aeneas (chap 18) (d) the son of
Ascanius, and so the grandson of Aeneas.
He was expelled from Italy for accidental parricide, and eventually made
his way to the island later named for him, Britain. (chap.
10).
It is this last version
that Geoffrey developed and embroidered. Among other changes from Nennius, he
made Brutus the great grandson of Aeneas and says the island was called Albion
before it was renamed. Many English chronicles and romances after Geoffrey
began with a version of the Brut story:
among the earliest and best known are Wace's Roman de Brut (1155)
and La3amon's Brut (1190‑1200). Consequently, the "Brut" was
sometimes used as a generic term for any chronicle beginning with this
story. In the 14 C and 15C it was
attached especially to a genre of chronicle in French, an English version of
which was published by Caxton in 1480.
The whole collection of such chronicles deriving ultimately from
Geoffrey is referred to, rather quaintly, as "The Common Brut". The Brut legend was almost universally accepted
in England until the end of the 16C, and even had its defenders in the 18 C.
_______
T.D. Kendrick.
CAEDMON
The first English poet
known by name. Our knowledge of him comes from Bede's Ecclesiastical History
(Book 4, Chap. 24) which recounts the story of this simple cowherd. Unable to
join in the festivities with his fellows because of his inability to sing, he
received the gift of poetry in his sleep from a divine messenger. The nine‑line song that he promptly
composed under this inspiration is reproduced
in most anthologies of Old English.
After he joined the
monastic life he composed many more songs, Bede says, all of them pious and
most of them based on the Scriptures that the literate read or recited to him.
Hence the poems in the Junius MSS, especially
Genesis and Exodus and Christ and Satan were referred to
by scholars as "Caedmonian".
It is not now believed that Caedmon composed all of the poems once attributed to him. Indeed there is some doubt if he was a real
person, since similar stories of a simple illiterate receiving the gift of
poetry in an equally striking way appear in different cultures.
CAIN` (Caym, Kaym)
Rabbinical and early
Christian commentators on the biblical story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4) provided
many of the non‑biblical details of the medieval legend of Cain, parts of
which appear in English as early as the OE Genesis and Beowulf.
There are Cain plays in
the ME Chester, Hegge, Towneley and York cycles. Other references, brief and lengthy, to Cain
and his kin are ubiquitous in medieval English writing. Cain, the sinner and outlaw, rather than
Abel, the "type"
of Christ (see Typology) is, almost inevitably, the figure
who captures the attention and imagination of secular and religious writer
alike.
The following are the
chief features of the legend as they appear in medieval English writing.
(References are very selective):
1. For the murder of his brother Abel, Cain was
condemned by God to a lifetime of wandering, in exile from the company of men,
and living often among beasts: OE Genesis, 1013‑35; Beowulf,
104 ff and 1258 ff; the York
Sacrificium, 86ff; the Chester Creation.
Cain was also, however,
the founder of the first city (Gen. IV, 7) regarded by St. Augustine as the
type of the Earthly City. (City of God, Bk.15).
2. The giants and
monsters of the earth were "Cain's kin", the result of a union
between the "daughters of men", presumed to be Cainite women, and
"the sons of God" (Gen. 4 & 6).
Though the biblical Genesis and the Beowulf poet (1087‑93) both say that all these
giants were destroyed by the Flood, this does not seem to have affected the
association of Cain with later giants in medieval legend: OE Genesis,
1245 ff; Beowulf, 104, 114, 1087‑93,
1258 ff; Ywain and Gawain, 243 ff; Paradise Lost, XI, 573 ff,
esp. 642 and 687‑8.
3. Presumably by
extension of (2) the morally "deformed" were also Cain's kin: Piers Plowman A, 135‑172, Havelok,
2044‑46. Wycliffe rings the
changes on the term "Cain's castles" to indicate friaries: ( See,
e.g. Index to his English Works).
According to their enemies, the initials of the names of the four orders
of friars spelled CAIM or KAIM (Carmelites, Augustinians, Jacobins i.e. Dominicans,
Minorites i.e. Franciscans). See MED.
Saracens in French
Chansons de Geste have Cain for their ancestor.
4. The principal sins associated with Cain are
envy, anger, false tithing, despair and, of course, manslaughter.
5. Cain murdered Abel with the jawbone (of an
ass): Towneley Mactacio, 323‑4;
Cursor Mundi, 11073‑4;
Hegge Cain and Abel, 149; Hamlet,
V, I, 85. Many early illustrations, however, show the murder weapon as a rock or a club.
6. The "mark of Cain" was a trembling
of the head or body, or sometimes a horn on the head: Prose Adam and Eve
in Horstmann's Legenden (1878), p. 224; the Cornish Creation.
7. The murder of Abel took place near
Damascus: I Henry VI, I, iii, 39‑40.
8. Cain shares with Judas * the reputation of having a red or yellow
beard: Merry Wives of Windsor, I, iv, 23.
9. Cain was begotten at a time of the year when
copulation was forbidden: Piers
Plowman B, IX, 120 .
10. Satan was Cain's father.
For web images see: http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/art/g/ghiberti/paradiso/3kilabel.jpg
or
http://clipart.christiansunite.com/Bible_Characters_Clipart/Cain_and_Abel_Clipart/
_____________________
Emerson; Peltolta;
Patterson.
CATALOGUE
The literary catalogue
is a rhetorical device as old as Homer and as modern as Joyce or Fitzgerald.
One of the most famous of such lists is the catalogue of ships in the Iliad . The lists of Gatsby's guests in The Great
Gatsby, and the recurring catalogues in Joyce's Ulysses are familiar
to modern readers. Indeed a catalogue of
catalogues in English literature from earliest times would be very lengthy.
W.H. Auden even makes an appreciation of such lists one of the four
indispensable qualifications for the critic of poetry.
Used as a mere
conventional device of amplification the trope can be a trial for the reader;
skillfully employed it can produce true poetry of the kind familiar from the
resounding catalogues in Shakespeare and Milton.
Nicholas Howe makes a
distinction between the list and the catalogue, a distinction he finds
useful in his extensive treatment of
catalogue poems in Old English, and he treats only poems that are
catalogues rather than have catalogues, including Menologium, Fates
of the Apostles, Gifts of Men, Fortunes of Men, Precepts and Maxims I
& II; Widsið and Deor.
The catalogue, by which
we mean mostly a list, was very frequently used in later medieval literature,
especially within longer poems, and Chaucer was as fond of it as any. His work
will be cited here as the primary example, partly because he is best known,
partly because his use of the technique illustrates most of the stages between the drily conventional and the
splendidly successful. He has, for
example, lists of trees, birds, authors, and ‑‑‑ something he
was especially fond of — martyrs or traitors to love. His lists of trees
in Parliament of Fowls (176 ff)
and the Knights Tale (A 2921‑3), derived probably from the Roman
de la Rose and ultimately from the classics, hardly rise above dutiful
imitation. The same can be said for his lists of animals and birds in Parliament (182 ff and 344 ff).
His lists of unlucky or
unfaithful lovers in the Man of Law's Introduction (B1, 61 ff), the House of Fame (397 ff), and Parliament
(283‑292) are also conventional enough, but the list in the ballade in
the Legend of Good Women has real charm.
The LGW itself is, of course, an extended version of the
catalogue topos, in the tradition of Ovid's Heroides and Boccaccio's De
Claribus Mulieribus. The list of
faithful wives and chaste maidens in Dorigen's complaint in the Franklins
Tale (F 1379 ff) is so diffuse as to lead one to believe that, in the
context, Chaucer is using it with slyly
comic intent. Openly comic and very skillful is Jankyn's list of wicked wives
and their victims in the Wife of Bath's Tale (D. 715 ff).
But Chaucer also pokes
fun at himself and the trope in Sir
Thomas. As L.H. Loomis puts it: "Sir Thopas, a whimsical mea
culpa, parodies the convention with no fewer than seven lists -- of
physical attributes, of pastimes, of spices , birds, food, arms, and heroes of
romance.” (S&A, p.550). The
particularly wooden use of the convention that he was burlesquing is well
illustrated in The Squire of Low Degree with its recurring catalogues of
birds, trees, heroes, wines and even bedroom furnishings. Chaucer’s catalogue of Chanticleer’s physical
beauties in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
may also be making fun of the catalogue of head-to-foot features of
beautiful female body as illustrated by the rhetorician Geoffrey de Vinsauf in Poetria
Nova.
___________________________
Hoffman; Curtius; Index
s.v. “Catalogues”; Robinson, Riverside: notes to Parlement; Howe; Gass.
COKAYNE (COCKAIGNE)
A land of plenty ,
delight and total laziness. The name occurs in a medieval doggerel poem which
shows a land inhabited by monks and nuns who make merry with each other
sexually, where the monastery fabric is made of pies, sugar cakes and puddings,
birds drop from the air already cooked, water is used only for landscape
gardening and washing, the rivers flow
with milk and honey, oil and wine. To
get there one has to wade in hog's dung up to the neck for seven years.
The poem is both a
coarse satire on the monastic life and a crude parody of the Earthly
Paradise.* The modern
American hobo song The Big Rock Candy
Mountain provides an amusing and instructive parallel and a confirmation of
the inadequacy of our human imagination when it comes to dealing with heaven or
Elysium.
______________________________________
Robbins; translations in
the Norton and Oxford anthologies of English Literature; Pleij.
COMITATUS
The Latin word used by Tacitus
and retained by scholars to refer to the special band of retainers gathered
around a chief in early Germanic society, and to the mutual bond between chief
and retainer. Tacitus describes the
institution succinctly: "Lads attach themselves to men of mature strength
and of long approved valor....These followers vie with each other as to who
shall rank first with his chief, the chiefs as to who shall have the most
numerous and the bravest followers. It is an honor as well as a source of
strength to be thus always surrounded by a large body of picked youths.... When
they go into battle, it is a disgrace for the chief to be surpassed in valor, a
disgrace for his followers not to equal the valor of the chief. And it is an infamy and a reproach for life to
have survived the chief, and return from the field. To defend, to protect him,
to ascribe one's own brave deeds to his renown, is the height of loyalty. The chief fights for victory, his vassals for
their chief.... Men look to the liberality of their chief for their warhorse
and their bloodstained and victorious lance." (Germania, 13‑14. Church and Brodribb
translation). However, there have
been legitimate questions about the propriety of using the authority of Tacitus for
actions and attitudes that belong to people and places far distant in time and
place from his Germania, and doubts of the accuracy of his statements
about that place and its customs.
Until recently The Battle of Maldon (especially 185 to
end) was generally felt to be the locus classicus
in OE literature illustrating the accuracy of Tacitus's account and the
longevity of the heroic Germanic ideal. This presumably applies even if, as some critics contend, the account of the
battle is largely fictional rather than historical. However, Rosemary Woolf asserts forcefully
that the "obligation" to die with one's lord in a battle encounter is unknown in OE writing
before Maldon. Beowulf, for
example, survives the battle in which Hygelac dies, and Wiglaf survives Beowulf
with honor. Woolf surmises that the
author of Maldon may have got the idea from the Old Icelandic Bjarkamal
— many Vikings had settled in England by 991 — or from reading
Tacitus. Others object that Bjarkamal
may be from the 12C or that Livy's account of Horatius at the bridge is a
possible classical source. This
"obligation" is not at all the same as the well‑attested
obligation to be loyal to and avenge one's lord, even if this involved certain
death. This feature is familiar from the
Finn, Heathobard, and Wiglaf episodes of Beowulf and in the Anglo‑Saxon
Chronicle for the year 755.
As late as the 15C Alliterative
Morte, the king specifically says he
is going to face the monster alone,
And the king keenly
commanded his knights
For to bide with their
blonks and boun no further horses & go
“For I will seek this
saint by myself [al]one...” saint = giant (a joke) 935-7
Nevertheless, Sir Kay
shows considerable trepidation about their honor when the king has been wounded by the giant:
Then Sir Kayous the
keen unto the king starts
Said: “Alas we are
lorn. My lord is confounded
Overfallen with a
fiend. Us is foul happened by a devil
We mun be forfeited in
faith and flemed forever. ” & banished
1152-5
The king has not been
killed, as Kay feared, and their reputations do not suffer.
The importance of the
concept of mutual loyalty between lord and
comitatus is pointed up by the frequency of terms for both in OE poetry.
Retainers are gesiþ(as), rinc(as), ðegn(as),
(ge)dryht, ðeod; duguþ, werod, haeleþ, etc. (Many more terms are listed in
Klaeber's Beowulf, p. 270.). The
lord is called dryhten (head of
the dryht); þeoden (head of the
ðeod), beaggyfa (ring giver), eorla hleo (head or covering of
warriors), helm maþþumgyfa (helmet/chief of treasure-givers),
etc. Moreover, the vocabulary and some of the concepts of this heroic ideal are
retained by AS Christian poets. In Genesis
B, for example, Satan is the rebellious member of God's comitatus,
who establishes a comitatus of his own.
In Andreas the apostles are referred to as haeleþ, þegnas,
rincas, etc., just as if they were Germanic warriors. God is weroda
dryhten, duguþa wealdend, (ruler/leader of an army, lord of hosts),
aeþelinga helm (helmet/head of nobles) like a king or chief.
The difficult situation
of a man cut off, for whatever reason, from his lord and comitatus is a
favorite theme with OE poets. See, for example, the laments of the scop* in Deor, and of the narrator of The Wanderer,
and the fate predicted by Wiglaf for the members of Beowulf's comitatus
who deserted him in his hour of need (Beowulf, 2884‑2891). The terms for such men are also
numerous: wineleas (friendless),
wraecca (wretch, outcast), angenga (alone-goer,solitary) freondleas
(friendless), ealdorleas (which means both lordless and lifeless).
______________
D. Whitelock, chap. 2;
Cherniss, chaps. 2, 3, 5; Woolf, " Obligation”.
COMPLAINT (PLANCTUS)
A widespread mode in both
secular and religious varieties, both with music and without. The complaint of
Christ (Planctus Christi), especially popular from the 12C onwards, is often
based on the "Improperia" (Reproaches) of the Good Friday service, in
which Christ laments the ingratitude of mankind: "My people, what have I
done to thee, or in what have I grieved thee? Answer me. Because
I brought thee out of the land of Egypt, thou hast prepared a cross for thy
savior" etc. This planctus is dramatized in the crucifixion
plays of the cycles, notably those of Wakefield and York, and is also well
represented in lyric form. A well‑known
English lyric planctus of this kind is the Quia Amore Langueo, a
powerful if flawed poem, combining elements of the "Improperia" and
the Song of Songs, and in which Christ, the Hound of Heaven, pursues his
beloved or spouse (the erring sinner) who seeks to flee Him.
Some of the earliest
complaints are uttered not by Christ but by His mother as she stands at the
foot of the cross watching her Son die. These are the Planctus Mariae,
many of which are in Latin, and which occur in both lyric and dramatic form, in
monologue and dialogue. Once again, an English dramatization can be found in
the Wakefield (Towneley) crucifixion play. The English lyric versions are very
numerous. There are other complaints by Mary where in Christ's infancy she
laments his future fate which she already knows. (See Taylor,
p. 612, note.)
The secular Complaint
includes the lover's lament of unrequited or betrayed love or the lament for
the death of a beloved or of
a ruler (parodied by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale)
or even laments for one’s colleagues as in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makars.
There are also complaints about poverty, the fear of unemployment (see Scop*)
or lack of promotion (see
Begging Poem *); and there is the ever present
Complaint Against the Times. The lover's
complaint hardly needs illustration, and ranges from the anonymous simple lyric
to Chaucer's sophisticated verses To His Lady and Complaint Unto Pity. Two
financial complaints of very different kinds are The Owl and the Nightingale
and Chaucer's Complaint to his Purse.
The Complaint Against the Times can be represented again in Chaucer's
minor poetry in Lak of Stedfastness as well as in Alain de Lille's De
Planctu Naturae which so deeply influenced the satirist Jean de Meung and,
of course, Chaucer himself.
________________________
Taylor; Karl Young,
especially chap 16; Brown‑Robbins,
svv "BVM, Laments of,"
"Appeal", "Complaint".
CONTEMPTUS MUNDI (Contempt of the World)
A pervasive medieval
attitude based on the notion that this world is not only temporary, but that
its goods and pleasures are seductive, leading the soul away from God, its true
good both here and hereafter. The Consolations of Boethius simply
strengthened, from a philosophical point of view, the theological attitude on
the subject expressed by the early Fathers, especially Augustine and Jerome.
Commentary on the
Contemptus Mundi nearly always involved a gloss on the sentences in I John 2:
15‑17: "Love not the world, nor the things which are in the
world....For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the
concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life. And the world passeth away and
the concupiscence thereof, but he that doth the will of God abideth
forever." A classic commentary is
to be found in Augustine's Confessions (especially IV, 6‑10 and X,
30‑40), one of the first and probably the most influential in a long line
of what became a whole genre of writing.
But perhaps the central medieval statement of the idea was in Pope
Innocent III's De Contemptu Mundi
(c. 1200), more accurately called De Miseria Humanae Conditionis,
which Chaucer says that he translated in a version now lost.
Contemptus Mundi meant
at least detachment from all the goods of this world, an active spiritual
effort not to put one's trust in princes or in riches or in pleasure of any
kind. Its more ascetic application, as in Innocent and many of those who
followed him, involved an active rejection of the world's goods both physical
and intellectual. This ascetic aspect was represented at its best by St.
Francis of Assisi and his love of Lady Poverty, but it had in it more than a
little Manicheanism and anti intellectualism, elements already present in the
passages mentioned above
from Augustine who distrusted his own pleasure even in color and
music.
COURTLY LOVE
Courtly love is a much-disputed term
that refers to a philosophy or
religion of love popularized by the
medieval French troubadours. The term,
however, was not coined until the nineteenth century by the French critic
Gaston Paris for a literary fusion of chivalry and love, two prominent themes
in medieval literature patronized by aristocrats, resulting in a literary
convention which has had a long history. Whether or not it was ever an
actual code of behavior has been hotly
disputed, as such behavior would certainly have often come in conflict with
other important social conventions and religious convictions. The code held that love of a man for a woman
was not a brief madness, as the ancients inclined to think, but an ennobling
passion that gave a man grace and every other worthwhile virtue, and even
increased his military prowess. However,
the male blessed or stricken by Love, eats and sleeps very little and his
obsession sometimes leads to temporary madness.
So the ancients were not altogether wrong. (See Lovers Pains *).
Love strikes where He
wills (He is a god). But since
aristocrats did not marry for Love but as family or national politics dictated,
it followed that the passion of love was sometimes adulterous. According to Andreas Capellanus it was
necessarily so: real love and marriage
are incompatible. Partly as a result,
love that ceases to be secret ceases to be.
As a literary
convention, the concept of “courtly
love” had wide‑ranging influence
on the themes of narrative and lyric
poetry in medieval literature. In his study of the literary expression of
the convention, The Allegory of Love, (now much disputed), C. S. Lewis
stated that medieval poets writing in the courtly tradition, consciously
attempted to displace medieval Christianity’s judgement of passionate human
love as directly associated with the Fall,
and replace it with a religion of love that set itself up in opposition
to Church teaching. But at least one
other scholar finds the literature of courtly love expressing only secular
versions of religious teaching:
The ideal of reasonable
love for a woman based in a love of virtue is a Christian extension of the
classical ideal of friendship which owes its inspiration in part to the De
Amicitia of Cicero and in part to Christian charity
(D.W.
Robertson, Preface, 457).
Provençal
troubadours popularized the particular
sentiment of love called fin’ amors,
which we refer to as courtly
love. The fin’amors sentiment of
the lyrics and narratives flourished in the sophisticated courts in the north,
especially at Poitiers in France where Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter
Marie de Champagne resided in the late twelfth century. It was with the
patronage of Marie de Champagne that Andreas Capellanus wrote De Amore --
The Art of Courtly Love (c. 1185), a document which purports to codify for
the aristocracy (and literary posterity)
the precepts of this “honorable” style of amorous behavior.
Extracts from a
translation of De Amore, including the famous Commandments of Love, can
be found on the web at
http://icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/andreas/de_amore.html
Marie was also the literary
patron of Chrétien de Troyes whose Arthurian romances dealt in a central way with love, notably
in the portrayal of adulterous love in
Chrétien’s Lancelot (2nd
half of 12C). These literary vehicles for the courtly literary tradition were
immensely influential because they joined the sentiment of fin’amors
with epic spirit of adventure. Two
of the great legends of the Middle Ages have at their core the matter of
adulterous love:(1) the Lancelot and
Guinevere story beginning with Chretien’s Lancelot: the Knight of the Cart
and culminating in
Malory’s Morte
Darthur; and (2) the Tristan and Isolde story especially as
contained in the version by Gottfried von Strasbourg (c. 1210).
In the older heroic
ideal the individual man exerted
himself, generally in a military fashion, for the good of the tribe or nation,
and not primarily for his own satisfaction and certainly not for his love of a
woman. The new set of set of values focused on the hero beset with the problems
of love without altogether abandoning
concern with military prowess. This
literature reflected a new set of social values clearly influenced by women; in
this courtly love ethic the female
beloved was placed above the lover in a position analogous to the feudal
relationship between lord and vassal
Works such as Guillaume
de Lorris’s part of the Roman de la Rose (c. 1235 º)
adapted the theme of courtly love to allegory*, a genre which had traditionally
been didactic and religious. The Roman, the first part by Guillaume,
the larger part by Jean de Meung, enjoyed a large readership and became one of
the primary texts from which the literary treatment of the themes and motifs of
courtly literature was passed to other vernaculars through translation,
including a large fragment attributed to
Chaucer (Romaunt of the Rose).
His own great poem Troilus and Criseyde is his
contribution to the courtly romance tradition.
An “anti‑courtly love” treatment of that theme is displayed in
Henryson’s sequel, The Testament of Cresseid (late 1400’s).
Again, at the very end
of the Middle Ages (c. 1470) comes Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, the most
famous English rendition of the whole Arthurian story, incorporating the love
of Lancelot and Guinevere derived from French Romances and the English Stanzaic
Morte. Malory makes it very clear that it is the adulterous love between
Lancelot and Guinevere that causes the breakup of the fellowhip of the Round
Table, which is to him the great tragedy.
J.
Clawson
CYCLE PLAYS (See Mystery Plays)
DANCE OF DEATH (DANSE MACABRE).
The literature and art of
the later Middle Ages, particularly in the 15C, were more than ordinarily
obsessed with the subject of death. No doubt, the recurrent outbreaks of
bubonic plague, especially the memory of the Black Death of the 1340's, had
much to do with the deep concern about sudden and final dissolution. The Dance
of Death is one powerful and unforgettable expression of this haunting fear.
About 1424 the cloisters
of the Church of the Innocents in Paris were covered with a series of
illustrations depicting the Coming of Death to a representative selection of
medieval people. Death, a skeleton or mummy, was seen leading away pope,
emperor, lady, merchant, peasant, etc. The pictures were accompanied by verses
later translated into English by John Lydgate in whose poem the following
characters have a sort of dialogue with Death: squire, abbott, merchant, good monk (a
Carthusian), man of law, bad monk,
juror, minstrel, magician, parson, laborer, child, hermit. Lydgate thought of “Machabre” as a person, a
“doctor” who draws a moral at the end.
Thereafter, similar
series of pictures, with or without verses, were painted on the walls of
English and European churches and convents, including the wall of the north
cloister of the old St. Paul's church in London where the painting was known as
the Dance of Paul's. After the advent of printing, the Dance appeared in many
woodblock illustrations, most strikingly in the 16C work of Holbein, who died
of the plague in 1543.
Holbein’s illustrations
can be seen on the Web at: http://www.godecookery.com/macabre/holdod/holdod.htm
The lifted leg of the Mors
and the grin on its face express eagerness and glee in dragging the victim off;
by contrast, in many paintings the understandable reluctance of the living is
shown in their almost complete lack of movement. The original artist probably
meant to suggest no
more than the coming of death to each individual, but since he had to reproduce
Death in each panel that showed a different type in society, the end result was a series of pairs that,
together with the leer and half‑leap of the skeleton, suggested a
grotesque dance. Lygate’s Death refers regularly to his “dance.” The irony of pairing the prancing Death with
the almost immobile living is, if obvious, nevertheless potent, and some later
15C versions of the Dance do show men and women actually dancing together, with
Death in attendance ready to strike, or living people dancing with skeletons to
the music of drums or pipes.
A related pictorial
theme is that of the Three Dead and the Three Living (Trois Morts et Trois
Vifs) in which three young and generally fashionable people come face to face
with three dead ones whose message is: “Such as we are shall you be.” See e.g. Henryson’s Thre Deid Pollis
(Three Deathsheads).
Another literary version of the theme
occurs in the Vado Mori poems, some as
early as the 13 C. Here each stanza
begins (and sometimes ends) with the phrase vado mori (I go to
die). The first stanza of an English
rendering goes as follows (spelling somewhat modernized):
|
I wend to death -- knight
stith in stour Through fight in field I
won the flower; No fights me taught the
death to quelle; I wend to death, sooth I
you tell. |
I go to death, a knight strong in battle. Through
fight in field I won the prize No
fights taught me to conquer Death. I go to
Death, the truth I tell (Index, 1387) |
The Timor Mortis
(Fear of Death) poems of Dunbar and Lydgate, and a host of others, perpetuate
the theme in their own way.
The Dance and the
Vado Mori have obvious if limited, dramatic or mimetic possibilities,
and there is evidence that both were performed in church or elsewhere. The play of Everyman, however, while
it does not fit neatly into either category, takes the idea to full dramatic
power.
Early spellings and
rhymes, both English and French, make it clear that "macabre" was
pronounced "macabray".
A full if not exhaustive
list of examples of the Dance of Death and artistic versions of the Trois Morts
et Trois Vifs can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/ppollefeys/dance.htm___
_________________
Hammond; Kurtz, Pearsall: Anthology.
DAWN SONG See
v
DEADLY SINS (See SEVEN)
DEBATE, DIALOGUE
A literary form probably
as old as literature itself: examples
can be found from
ancient Egypt and India, in Greek and Latin, and even in the
Bible (Job).
The DEBATE / DIALOGUE
was especially popular in the later Middle Ages, in many languages and in many
kinds of verse that we often classify in other genres. It is possible, for example,
to see the Flyting * as a form of debate . It is certainly a verbal exchange between two personages,
real or imaginary, but openly hostile.
The verbal conflicts between the Pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales; the exchanges between the narrator and his daughter in Pearl
or the many conversations in
Piers Plowman might also be thought of as
debates. But the term is generally
reserved for whole poems or discrete sections of poems which are formally set
up as debates or dialogues.
These were particularly
commonly in medieval Latin and French, and deal with many topics sacred and
profane, profound and frivolous. The
most influential dialogue / debate for the Middle ages was probably Boethius’s Consolations
of Philosophy, a dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy that dealt
with the most basic of difficulties: the problem of evil that overcomes even
good men. There are debates between God and man, soul and body (particularly
common), between old and young, female lover and male lover, Christ and Mary,
vices and virtues, water and wine, and so on.
The best-known examples
in Middle English are probably The Owl and the Nightingale; The Parliament of the Three Ages (Youth,
Middle Age, Old Age), Winner and Waster (the thrifty and the
extravagant), and the debate among the birds at the end of the Parliament of
Fowls (the "seed fowl, the
worm-fowl, the water fowl, and the fowls of ravine"). In two of these poems the protagonists are
birds and there are a number of other such avian debates. It is to be noticed also that the debate in Parliament
of Fowls can be classified as a Demande D'Amour * ; the Owl and
Nightingale is a Begging Poem * as well as a debate; Winner and Waster is a Complaint * and
also a Dream Vision as is the Parliament
of Three Ages.
In some debates there is
a judge or referee of sorts (Owl & N.; Parliament of Fowls); in
others, it is for the reader to decide.
__________
Utley; Conlee.
DE CASIBUS ILLUSTRIUM
VIRORUM
(The Fall of Great Men)
A theme popular in the
MA and later, and intimately related to the Wheel of Fortune, *
Ubi Sunt* and similar notions. In fact, it might be said that all of these
are aspects of the Contemptus Mundi *
attitude . De Casibus
Illustrium Virorum is the title of a
book by Boccaccio, a collection of tales largely devoted to the fall of men in
high place from power or virtue. Boccaccio's book was written to
demonstrate to princes the virtues of
moderation and humility by pointing out the results of excessive pride and
ambition in other princes who fell from power or grace. The idea is, of course, older than Boccaccio;
the most obvious predecessors were Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, and the Romance of the Rose,
especially ll. 5921‑6900.
In medieval English the
literary progeny of these earlier works are Chaucer's Monk’s Tale, which equates the fall of
great men with tragedy, and Lydgate's Fall of Princes. The latter, rather
more polite than its indirect source (Boccaccio) was written at the command of
Duke Humphrey, who could, it appears, have benefitted from its lessons.
DEMANDE D'AMOUR
A question of the
conundrum variety about a problem of love. According to Andreas Capellanus such
questions were propounded on occasion to a "court" of ladies at
Poitiers, headed by Marie, Countess of Champagne and her mother, Eleanor of
Aquitaine. At any rate , this game found its way into
literature. A series of thirteen such puzzling questions can be found, for
example, in Boccaccio's
Filocolo, where Fiammetta is the "judge".
In ME the best examples
are probably in Chaucer. At the end of Part I of the Knight’s Tale the narrator asks his audience: "Who
hath the worse, Arcite or Palamon?"
One is in prison but can see Emily every day through the bars; the other
is free but cannot see or speak to her. In the Wife of Bath's Tale the demandes
are put to the young knight in the tale: first he is asked what women most
desire, then, at the end of the tale the old hag asks him if he will have her
foul, old and faithful, or young, fair and doubtful. At the end of the Franklin’s
Tale the narrator asks his audience who was the most generous character in
his story: the knight who insisted that his wife fulfill her rash promise at
whatever cost, the squire who excused
her from that promise, or the magician who excused the squire from payment for
his services? In Boccaccio's version of this tale in the Filocolo Fiammetta
decides that the husband is the most generous.
Dunbar’s alliterative
poem The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo ( The Treatise of
the Two Married Women and the Widow) seems to mock the tradition: a question by a widow to two wives about
their marriages leads to three remarkably coarse disquisitions on married love
from the female viewpoint. The poem ends
with this demande (the spelling of the Middle Scots has been
modernized):
Of these three wanton wives that I have written here
Which would you waill to your wife if you should wed
one? (choose)
The phrase demande
d'amour is occasionally applied to the interior monologue of a lover in
romance, where he or she inwardly debates the likelihood of a return of love by
the beloved.
_____________
Amy Kelly; Parry.
DOUZEPERS or
DOUSEPERIS (TWELVE PEERS)
The word is from the
French phrase "Les douze pers," the twelve peers of Charlemagne's household,
the best and bravest in his kingdom. The names of the members of this select
group vary considerably in different sources, and there are at least twenty.
The invariable ones seem to be Roland (Orlando), Oliver, Ogier the Dane, and
Ganelon* who was the traitor. Others are
Otuel, Ferumbras, or Fierabras, and Nayme(s) of Bavaria. The term occurs in ME
even in the singular and applied to other knights of renown, mostly
nameless. In the Alliterative Morte
Arthure, for example, it is used fairly frequently to refer to Arthur's
knights and others as a convenient alliterating element in the phrase
"dukes and douzepers."
DRAGON (L. draco, OE draca, hence
early ME "fire drake")
Dragons are known in
many cultures widely separated in time and space, but especially in the East,
where they are sometimes venerated. In the West, by contrast, they seem to be
always objects of terror. The term
"dragon" is used in the English bible and in Western literatures to
indicate various kinds of vaguely designated monster: in the Book of Daniel,
for example, and in the legends of Greece, particularly those of Hercules and
the Hydra, Perseus and Jason, where they serve, as in medieval literature, to
give opportunity to heroes to show their mettle. There is also, of course, the
biblical dragon of the Apocalypse (Revelations), chap 12, which has many
heads, like the Hydra, and is called "the serpent". It belches forth a flood of water (vv. 15‑16)
rather than fire to kill the woman. It is, of course, a symbol of moral
depravity, and figures as such as late as Spenser and Milton.
The most notable of the
few dragons in Medieval English literature is unquestionably the dragon in Beowulf which like the other great dragon
of northern myth, Fafnir, guards a treasure rather than capturing or devouring
maidens like some of the dragons in oriental or Mediterranean legend.
Draca sceal on
hlaewe It is the nature of the
dragon to sit in a barrow
Frod, fraetwum
wlanc Old and glorying in its
treasures.
(Maxims II, l.26)
Beowulf's dragon also
spouts fire, like some other northern dragons.
It has been suggested ‑‑ by Baring‑Gould, for example ‑‑
that the flame‑throwing quality of the dragon is really the expression of
a memory of some appalling invasion that involved fiery devastation, a notion interestingly
developed in a modern novel, Eaters of Darkness. A dragon figures in
Arthur’s dream in the Alliterative Morte, and couple of dragons lurk
under a castle in Snowdonia in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings
of Britain.
The dragon-slayer of
medieval story was sometimes the heroic or chivalric warrior like Beowulf or
Tristan, Sir Guy of Warwick or Bevis, but was sometimes (in hagiographical
stories) saintly or even female rather than secular and manly. St. George, perhaps the most famous of dragon‑slayers,
manages to combine the holy and the heroic, like his later literary incarnation,
Redcross, in The Faerie Queene. Holy maidens like St. Martha and St.
Margaret make do with sanctity alone.
While the term
"dragon" covers a wide variety of monsters whose shape is never
exactly specified, in general and from early times dragons were depicted as
having elongated, rather serpentine bodies (OE wyrm, worm) often with
scales, wings, talons, horns, and forked tongue. In a wall painting in one
English church such a dragon takes the place of the usual serpent as the
tempter of Eve.
_____________
Klaeber, pp.xxi - xxiii
and 208-215
DREAM VISION POEMS
There was a good deal of
interest in dream theory in the Middle Ages, and considerable difference of opinion
about the origin and relevance of dreams: some
held that dreams were generally inconsequential, others that they were
often of considerable significance.
Those of the "significant" school had biblical support from
both testaments e.g. Pharaoh's dream of
the fat cows and lean cows and Joseph's interpretation (Gen. 41) and many
others in the O.T.; and in the NT e.g.
the other Joseph's dreams that assured him that Mary his wife was pregnant with Christ through divine
intervention (Matt. 1:20, 2:13‑20). They also had Macrobius's famous Commentary
on the Dream of Scipio which distinguished between 5 different kinds of
dream, 3 of them significant ("visio, somnium, and oraculum") and 2
insignificant ("insomnium" and " visum" or
"phantasma"). The first 3 were felt to be prophetic in one way or
another by Macrobius; the other 2 either simply carried on the worries or
desires of the day, or were formed of disconnected and fragmentary images
(phantasma) supposedly the result of indigestion. These last two, of least interest to the
philosopher, might be of more interest to the psychologist and poet.
Chaucer has several
dream vision poems, in most of which he has some discussion of dream
theory: The Book of the Duchess (which
mentions both Macrobius and the OT Joseph, 280-4), The House of Fame, The
Legend of Good Women, The Parliament of Fowls, especially the opening of House of Fame on the causes and
significance of dreams. The argument of Chanticleer with Pertelote about the
value of his dream in The Nun's Priest's Tale illustrates the common
medieval disagreements.
Though Chaucer seems to
have known Macrobius, he was also part of a poetic dream
vision tradition and did not
require direct knowledge of Macrobius or dream theory in order to write dream
poems. The most influential sources of this tradition for medieval poets were
Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose,
a French poem of the early 13 cent. Chaucer had translated both of these in
whole or in part. The Romance set
the tradition for a host of French poems dealing mostly with erotic love,
notably by Machaut and Froissart. It may also have influenced English poems as
different as Langland's Piers Plowman and the anonymous Pearl, although
there is possibly a native English alliterative dream tradition that dated back
to the OE Dream of the Rood. Winner and Waster and The Parlement
of the Three Ages, which are both Dream Visions and Debates,* may be
indebted to both traditions.
In the dream poems the narrator tells us that he fell asleep,
frequently outdoors as a rule, and dreamed the substance of his poem. Often he does not figure in this dream
himself, but is merely a spectator of the scenes he describes, but notably in Chaucer's
Book of the Duchess, and House of Fame, and
Langland's Piers Plowman the dreamer is a very active, and sometimes
deliberately comic protagonist. In the Pearl
he is a deeply hurt man who needs to be talked and persuaded out of his grief
in a debate that is also indebted to Boethius’s Consolation.
________________
Winny; Windeatt.
EARTHLY PARADISE
This myth is universal
and timeless, and ranges in its western manifestations from the Garden of Eden
to The Big Rock Candy Mountain. For Western vernacular literature the
sources lie mainly in the Bible and in the Greek and Roman classics. Genesis provides a picture of a fruitful Eden
irrigated by four rivers one of which flows through a land rich in gold and
precious stones. But there are far more lush descriptions of paradisal places
and ideal landscapes in Homer and Hesiod, in Virgil's pastoral poetry and
Claudian's epithalamia. Early Christian theologians and poets borrowed from such classical
sources to flesh out the rather sparse descriptions of Eden in Genesis. Some of them clearly believed in the
continued existence of an Earthly Paradise, and there was a good deal of
speculation about its geographical location.
By the time of
Tertullian (died 220 A.D.) the features of the EP were rather well set, and the
medieval tradition adds little. In the EP trees, flowers and fruit abound
perpetually, the air is always warm and fragrant, fountains plash and murmuring
streams flow pleasantly through the land, sometimes over beds of precious
stones. There is no pain, disease or want, neither anger nor war, no night, no
death. To these features, equally appropriate to Elysium or Paradise, Christian
writers added the four rivers mentioned in Genesis the first three of which
were often associated with the Nile, the Ganges and the Tigris. Also added were
the Trees of Life and of Knowledge from Genesis, and often jeweled walls
and palaces similar to those in the Apocalypse (Revelations). The O.T. figures,
Enoch and Elijah, who had not tasted death, were permanent residents.
For medieval writers the
EP is always in the East, at the other side of a huge ocean or desert,
frequently at the top of a mountain, and guarded by a wall of flame. It is
somewhere beyond the land of Prester John, according to Mandeville’s Travels,
and medieval maps often show its location somewhere in or near India or China.
The EP tradition helped to form the secular love gardens of medieval poetry
which, in turn, influenced the form of the enchanted false paradises and blissful
bowers of the Renaissance.
Descriptions of the EP
are many, though most of the full portrayals do not occur in the more
"literary" works of the period.
The OE Phoenix,
however, provides a rather full description along typical lines. Here is a small extract:
Ne maeg ðaer ren
ne snaw Nor may there rain , nor snow
ne forstes fnæst ne fyres blæst Nor the bite of frost, nor fire’s blast
ne haegles
hryre, ne hrymes dryre Nor fall of hail, nor
descent of rime (frost)
ne sunnan hætu ne sincaldu Nor heat of the sun, nor constant cold
ne wearm weder ne winterscur Nor torrid weather, nor winter shower
wihte gewyrdan Molest one
For ME see Mandeville's
Travels, (which also includes a false paradise), and The Land of Cokayne whose coarse
parody testifies to the familiarity of the legend (see Cokayne *).
See also Dante's Purgatorio,
28 and the Romance of the Rose
19,975 ff. Milton's Paradise Lost,
Bk. IV is indebted to the classical and EP traditions.
See also
_______________
Patch, Other World;
Giammatti; Stith Thompson F111, F.
756.2.
ENDINGS (See BEGINNINGS)
ENGLAND, THE MATTER OF
The Matter of England
refers to a group of medieval romances which take as their subject matter the
legendary folk‑heroes of pre‑Conquest England. Some of these are directly derived,
ironically, from French originals, all of them composed before the year 1300,
and most written before those romances in Middle English dealing with either
the Matter of Britain (v. Britain) or the Matter of France (v. France).
The earliest Matter of
England romance, King Horn (c. 1250), is a much shortened version of an
Anglo‑Norman poem (c. 1170)
and tells the story of a prince who is
forced from his country by invaders, but returns to claim his throne and
possessions, a version of the “exile and return” type of folktale which is a
prominent motif among the Matter of England
poems.
The concentrated
narrative style of the English version with its abrupt narrative shifts and
sparse detail, invites comparison to the Breton Lays * and to ballads.* Indeed, a ballad version of Horn and
Rymenhild is found in Francis Child’s late nineteenth‑century
collection: The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads.
Havelok the Dane employs the same type of “exile and return”
motif as King Horn: the young
Prince Havelok escapes death in Denmark at the hands of Godard, his father’s
trusted councilor, who arranges with the fisherman Grim to have the child
drowned so that he can rule the country himself. Grim recognizes Havelok as royalty and
escapes to England with his family and the young prince, who lives as a working
man. There the English princess Goldborough, who has suffered an ordeal similar
to that of Havelok, is forced to marry the “working man”. Eventually Havelok
returns to Denmark and regains his kingdom and retakes England for
Goldborough. They live happily ever
after.
Havelok is a version of earlier
narratives: the Estoire des engles (c. 1150) by Geoffry Gaimar and Lai d’havelok in Old French. There is nothing courtly about the English Havelok
the Dane; in fact it reflects its popular folk influence quite noticeably
in the opening address to “goodmen, wives and maidens” and in the minstrel’s
request for a cup of good ale. The
heroes are Grim the fisherman and his hardworking sons and other men of low
rank with popular and simple names. The
names of the kind of fish they catch are mentioned as if the audience would be
familiar with them. Similarly designed for a popular audience are the
recitation of the kinds of games enjoyed
by people at the fair ; the vivid description of Havelok looking for a job as a
cook’s assistant; the frank enjoyment of the details of the brutal punishment
meted out to aristocratic villains, and the fact that the royal hero remembers
all his plebeian helpers generously at the end.
Along with the English
heroes Horn, Havelok, and the heroes of Sir Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick are a number of
anti‑establishment heroes of the Robin Hood kind. Athelston and Gamelyn are two
romances which depict resistance to absolutism and oppressive authority.
Gamelyn is declared an outlaw by a sheriff and flees to the forest to escape,
and hence this story is numbered among the “romances of the greenwood,” ‑‑ like Sherwood Forest.
Whether in short rhymed
couplets or long alliterative rhymed couplets or in tail‑rhyme stanzas,
the verse in many of these romances ranges from undistinguished to bad.
J.
Clawson
ENVOY/ENVOI A stanza that ends a
ballade. It is generally addressed to a
prince or other patron, and repeats the refrain from the poem proper.
Envoys of the French and more usual kind can be found in Chaucer's
Ballades: "Womanly Noblesse: A Balade that Chaucer Made," "Fortune", "Truth: Balade de Bon
Conseyl," "Lak of
Stedfastnesse" which has an envoy to King Richard, and "Complaint to
his Purse."
The pieces entitled :"L'Envoy a Scogan" and "L'Envoy a
Bukton" are not envoys in the regular sense. They are whole poems, with their own envoy, and
are more properly verse epistles.
EXEMPLUM
The exemplum (pl.
exempla) is literally an "example", a story told to illustrate
a point. It was, and remains, a favorite device of preachers and other
teachers, for as Chaucer's Pardoner said: “Lewed people loven tales old”
(Simple people love old stories). Astute public speaker that he was, he knew
that illustrative anecdotes lingered in the minds of his hearers more readily
than dry exhortation. His own tale is largely a long exemplum to
illustrate the text Radix malorum est cupiditas‑‑“Greed is
the root of all evil.” Even the more sermonical part of the tale is dotted with
shorter exempla. The Nuns
Priests Tale, another Chaucerian rhetorical tour de force is, at its simplest
level, an extended exemplum (as the Priest himself says) about
recklessness, negligence and trust in flattery. Chanticleer's talk to his wife
is filled with brief exempla.
Chaucer cleverly puts
both of these tales in the mouths of professional preachers, for the use of exempla
in preaching had a long and venerable tradition. It has rightly been pointed
out,
for example, that the
parables of Christ are excellent exempla, and among the early Fathers
of the Church Gregory
the Great had employed such stories in his sermons and Dialogues.
But the great age of the
exemplum was the period from the 13 C to the 15 C. The new orders of preaching friars used the
exemplum extensively and successfully as a means of reaching congregations of
unlettered people. The friars drew their narratives from personal experience,
from the great fund of biblical and classical narrative, from the lives of the
saints and the legends of the Virgin Mary, and from the large body of popular
fable. The preachers' use of tales in their sermons increased the desire for
collections of such stories, and the collections in turn satisfied the
preachers' need for varied material. Anthologies of exempla designed
especially for preachers were produced, often organized by topics. And though
Lives of the Saints were nothing new, Jacobus de Voragine's 13C Legenda
Aurea (Golden Legend )*
was one of the great
medieval storehouses of tales about Christ and His saints. John Bromyard’s Summa Praedicantium is
a collection intended directly for the use of preachers. The Gesta Romanorum, which has very little
to do with the Romans, is the great collection of moralized secular tales from
the period.
Unfortunately, some
preachers brought a sensible preaching practice into disrepute by narrating tales
which were patently absurd or even offensively ribald. Both orthodox Church Councils and reformers
like Wycliffe vigorously condemned such preachers as purveyors of scandalous
tales rather than expounders of God's word.
One can understand therefore, why the "gentils" of the
Canterbury pilgrimage immediately suspected that the sinister‑looking
Pardoner was going to tell one of the more offensive of such stories. Chaucer's
dramatic skill is shown at its most adroit when he has that sleazy man
disappoint their expectations so splendidly.
_____________________________________________________
Jacobus de Voragine;
Gesta Romanorum; Jones and
Keller; Scanlon.
FABLIAU
A
"fabliau" is a short merry tale, generally about people in
absurd and amusing circumstances, often naughty sexual predicaments. The stories often involve a man, his
unfaithful wife and a cleric who is the wife's lover. They are frequently crude
and scatological, but never pornographic or perverted.
Such tales were very
popular in France (hence the French term "fabliau", pl "fabliaux"), and in Italy (many of the tales in
Boccaccio's Decameron are fabliaux).
But very few survive in England, Dame Sirith being
one of the few acknowledged fabliaux outside of Chaucer. At least some of those in Furrow’s collection
of 15C comic tales would qualify also. A
reading of some of the French stories in a translation like that by R. Hellman
and R. O'Gorman, will demonstrate that Chaucer has raised this kind of yarn‑telling
to an art that most of these French stories do not attain or even aspire
to. His characters have local
habitations, names (often pretty distinctive names like Damian, Absalom), personalities (they
talk in quite distinctive ways, like the students with northern accents in The
Reeve's Tale), and quite elaborate plots.
In most simple
fabliaux names rarely matter and the plot goes thus:
"There was this man who lived with his wife in a town, and there
was this priest ..." Characters are indistinguishable from each other
shortly after one has read a few fabliaux. By contrast the characters in The
Miller's Tale :
Absalom, Alison, John and Nicholas, are
very memorable , and the plot is deliciously intricate and drawn out to an
absurd and unnecessary complexity which is part of the joke. In fact, The Miller's Tale is
one of the great short stories in the English language.
The Miller's Tale,
like the tale of the Knight which precedes it,
is about two young fellows who are after the same girl. But there is no exotic locale here and no
aristocratic milieu; that kind of thing is for Romance, as in the Knight's
tale. In the fabliau we have a small
English university town, where students lodge in the houses of
townspeople. The girl in question is no
reluctant damsel, but the young, pretty and discontented wife of the old
carpenter in whose house Nicholas the student or "clerk" lodges. The love talking is more country than
courtly, the only battle is an uproarious exchange of hot air and hot
plowshare, and the cheeks kissed are not on the face. The Miller's Tale provokes another great
Chaucerian fabliau, the Reeve's Tale, where a miller is the butt of the same
kind of humor.
Chaucer himself realized
that some people of his own day might take exception to the
"frank" treatment of adulterous sex in the fabliaux, so he
invites readers of delicate sensibility who do not "list (wish) to
hear" ribald tales, to "turn over the leaf and choose another
tale" of a different kind, for he
does have some pious and moral tales. Another little excuse and warning: it is
only a joke, he says, and one "should not make earnest of game," a
warning often neglected by solemn critics.
At the end of The Miller's Tale Chaucer tells us that the
audience of pilgrims laughed heartily; this includes the "gentils"
and the clerics, implying that his apology was not really necessary!
Chaucer's other fabliaux
are the tales of the Cook (unfinished), Merchant, Shipman, Manciple and Summoner (and some
would add the Friar), though many of these would fit in other categories as
well. They range from the rollicking
farce of the tales of the Miller and Reeve through the cool smoothness of paid
and arranged adultery in the Shipman's tale, to the distinct unpleasantness of
the powerful Tale of the Merchant which has a plot somewhat like that of the
Miller, but with a totally different tone.
A good deal of ink has
been spilled from the time of Bedier onwards (1890) about the authorship and
audience of the fabliaux. Rather like
the ballads, the French fabliaux were generally anonymous and rather impersonal
in tone, and their topic often love (or lust) and revenge, but never in a
tragic way, always comic. Bedier felt
(with reservations) that the source and audience of the fabliaux was "bourgeois";
Nykrog (1957) set out to show that they were often courtly in origin and that
they ridiculed the lower classes, lay and clerical alike. There is every reason to believe that all
classes enjoyed them.